What Does the Bible Say About Purgatory?
00:00:00.000 | Purgatory is the topic today.
00:00:06.280 | We briefly touched on purgatory in three past APJs in Episode 1150, 1162, and 1290, but
00:00:14.440 | nothing at length.
00:00:15.440 | And that changes today with a question from Sydney, who lives in the beautiful state of
00:00:19.680 | Arizona, along with me.
00:00:21.400 | Hi, Pastor John.
00:00:22.640 | I know that some older Christians believed in a secondary refinement or purgatory, purging
00:00:28.240 | of the soul after death and before heaven.
00:00:31.200 | C.S.
00:00:32.200 | Lewis once rhetorically wrote, "Our souls demand purgatory, don't they?"
00:00:37.440 | He explained that Christians should want purgatory as a sort of self-cleaning up before we're
00:00:41.080 | ready to enter into the eternal presence of God.
00:00:44.200 | He said this in his book, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, page 108.
00:00:49.280 | Coming from Lewis, purgatory seems like a humble, preparatory step before we enter eternity.
00:00:55.000 | Biblically speaking, 1 Corinthians 3, 10-15 is the most common biblical proof for it.
00:00:59.640 | There we read that "each one's work will become manifest, for the day will disclose it, because
00:01:04.120 | it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done."
00:01:09.240 | That's verse 13.
00:01:10.440 | "And if anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, although he himself will be saved,
00:01:16.240 | but only as through fire."
00:01:18.000 | That's verse 15.
00:01:19.560 | But does the Bible confirm purgatory?
00:01:23.360 | This is really interesting that this question would come just now, because I am listening
00:01:28.080 | to Lewis's book, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, at this very moment.
00:01:33.880 | It's on my phone.
00:01:35.920 | So I'm sort of primed.
00:01:39.240 | As much as I love C.S. Lewis and stand in awe of his gifts of logic and poetic vision
00:01:50.280 | and his capacities to express things in vivid, concrete, inimitable, analogical ways, nevertheless,
00:02:02.480 | his position and his reasoning on purgatory miss the mark.
00:02:09.680 | He says flat out in Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, page 108, quote—I'll give you
00:02:14.960 | a longer quote than was given to us.
00:02:18.000 | "I believe in purgatory.
00:02:20.800 | Our souls demand purgatory, don't they?
00:02:25.480 | Would it not break the heart if God said to us, 'It's true, my son, that your breath
00:02:33.360 | smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here'"—meaning
00:02:42.320 | heaven—"and no one will upbraid you with these things nor draw away from you.
00:02:48.880 | Enter into the joy.
00:02:51.000 | Should we not reply, 'With submission, sir, if there's no objection, I'd rather be
00:02:57.840 | cleansed first.'
00:03:01.160 | It may hurt, you know.
00:03:04.400 | Even so, sir."
00:03:05.400 | End quote.
00:03:06.400 | It's good writing.
00:03:07.400 | I love it.
00:03:08.400 | I love it.
00:03:09.400 | It's dead wrong, man.
00:03:10.400 | I love it.
00:03:11.400 | No, it's not quite dead wrong.
00:03:12.400 | I'll try to explain.
00:03:13.400 | Now, what's typical of Lewis here, as most places, is that he rarely quotes Scripture.
00:03:25.280 | If you've read Lewis—I've read almost all of Lewis—you don't go to C.S. Lewis
00:03:30.020 | to watch serious biblical exposition in the making.
00:03:34.080 | You don't.
00:03:35.080 | No doubt he knows his Bible.
00:03:36.960 | Goodness gracious.
00:03:38.120 | He can quote his Greek New Testament probably better than I can.
00:03:41.640 | He's probably got parts of it memorized, and his theology is generally true.
00:03:46.280 | He's not a heretic, but if he had tried to support this belief with Scripture, he
00:03:54.080 | would have been hard put to do it.
00:03:57.240 | Now before I go into particular texts that make purgatory, I think, untenable biblically,
00:04:06.320 | let's define it the way the Roman Catholic Church does, because they're the ones who
00:04:10.720 | promote this doctrine, and let's see whether Lewis's argument stands on its own terms.
00:04:20.320 | So here's what the Catholic Church, the catechism of the Catholic Church, says in defining purgatory.
00:04:26.880 | Quote, "All who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified,
00:04:34.360 | are indeed assured of their eternal salvation, but after death they undergo purification
00:04:41.640 | so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.
00:04:47.320 | The church gives the name purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is
00:04:53.840 | entirely different from the punishment of the damned."
00:04:59.240 | So that's all from the catechism of the Catholic Church.
00:05:04.040 | There is no doubt that we must be purified completely without sin in order to enter the
00:05:12.920 | very presence of God in our final state.
00:05:18.600 | Otherwise we'd be incinerated, and God would be defiled and dishonored.
00:05:24.280 | None of us believe that is going to happen, so we're all in agreement about that.
00:05:28.360 | That's not going to happen.
00:05:29.480 | Nobody's going into the very presence of God with any stain or inner sin left.
00:05:36.440 | But here's the assumption that Lewis and the Catholic Church bring to the situation.
00:05:42.680 | Their assumption is that it requires another process beyond the process of this life to
00:05:51.240 | get abiding sin out of our lives.
00:05:55.400 | Now why would they assume that?
00:05:58.040 | Because we had a relatively long process of purification or sanctification in this life
00:06:05.160 | by the Holy Spirit, and it did not perfect us.
00:06:10.280 | We realize it's going to take a divine stroke or word of purification by the hand of God
00:06:20.520 | or the Word of God the way Jesus purified people instantaneously with a word in order
00:06:28.440 | to finish this purifying work.
00:06:32.680 | Why would we not rather assume that God does it first progressively in this life and then
00:06:41.160 | at the end finishes it instantaneously?
00:06:46.280 | But enough with our human reasoning.
00:06:49.000 | Let's go to the Bible.
00:06:50.360 | The Roman Catholic Church includes some books in their Bible, the Apocrypha—it's called
00:06:58.680 | the Apocrypha—which Protestants don't have in our Bible.
00:07:04.600 | One of those books is 2 Maccabees, and in chapter 12, verses 42 to 45, there is this
00:07:10.840 | sentence, "Therefore Judas Maccabeus made atonement for the dead, that they might be
00:07:18.920 | delivered from their sin."
00:07:22.760 | Now from that statement, the Catholic Church infers that not only should you pray for the
00:07:29.320 | dead, but the dead have sins from which they must be delivered, which leads them to postulate
00:07:39.640 | purgatory.
00:07:41.920 | Now Sidney in his question points out that if you're going to go after any New Testament
00:07:47.760 | text at all to support purgatory, the one you would go to most is 1 Corinthians 3, 13
00:07:55.880 | to 14, and I'll quote it again to show how inapplicable it is to purgatory.
00:08:02.480 | "Each one's work," so each Christian's work, "will become manifest, for the day
00:08:11.080 | will disclose it."
00:08:12.240 | So this is the judgment day in which we are going to be shown to be true or false, and
00:08:18.920 | our works are going to be shown to be stubble or valuable.
00:08:24.240 | "Because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each
00:08:30.040 | one has done.
00:08:31.920 | If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward.
00:08:40.720 | If anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved,
00:08:47.280 | but only as through fire."
00:08:50.120 | Now in that text, there's no hint of passing through an extended period of time with the
00:08:58.720 | aim of cleansing us from our own impurities.
00:09:03.640 | This is a picture of a single one-time event where our works from this life are shown to
00:09:11.400 | be either stubble, for which there's no reward, or precious stones, for which there
00:09:17.880 | will be a reward.
00:09:19.280 | There's no foundation here for purgatory in a text like this.
00:09:24.920 | On the contrary, several texts point in the opposite direction about what happens when
00:09:32.200 | we die as Christians.
00:09:34.280 | Here's what Paul says in Philippians 1:23, "My desire is to depart"—that's die—"and
00:09:42.000 | be with Christ, for that is far better."
00:09:46.000 | So the picture is death and an immediate, joyful fellowship with Jesus.
00:09:53.880 | Same thing confirmed in 2 Corinthians 5, 6-9, only it's even clearer.
00:10:00.120 | He says, "We are always of good courage.
00:10:03.840 | We know that while we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord.
00:10:11.620 | We would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.
00:10:19.680 | So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him."
00:10:25.960 | I don't know how it could be much clearer than to say, "Away from the body is at home
00:10:33.760 | with the Lord."
00:10:35.600 | That's our immediate hope, not any intervening purgatory between being away from the body
00:10:42.520 | and being at home with the Lord.
00:10:44.920 | But to be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord, which Paul says is far better.
00:10:53.560 | So let me go back and suggest why what C.S. Lewis imagined between the dirty saint and
00:11:02.120 | God happening at the pearly gates—this discussion they had—would, in fact, never happen.
00:11:08.440 | Now, you recall, Lewis pictures God saying, "It's true, my son, that your breath smells,
00:11:17.840 | your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here, and no one will upbraid
00:11:25.600 | you with these things, nor draw away from you, so enter into the joy."
00:11:32.720 | Now, if that were to happen, the saint surely would indeed say, "Yes, Lord, nothing impure
00:11:44.440 | shall enter your presence."
00:11:47.440 | Would you now then, in great mercy, complete the purchase of your son, namely my cleansing,
00:11:56.640 | and simply say the word, be clean, the way your son did?
00:12:04.600 | When the apostle Paul pictured the resurrection of all the imperfect saints in 1 Corinthians
00:12:12.560 | 15, he said, "Behold, I tell you a mystery.
00:12:17.400 | We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an
00:12:24.520 | eye at the last trumpet, for the trumpet will sound, and the dead in Christ will be raised
00:12:30.480 | imperishable, and we shall be changed."
00:12:35.280 | Now that instantaneous change of our bodies at the resurrection is a better, more biblical
00:12:44.280 | picture of what happens to the imperfect soul at death.
00:12:50.480 | In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, God says to us, just like Jesus said to the leper
00:12:57.920 | in Luke 5:13, "Be clean," and immediately his leprosy left him.
00:13:06.240 | That will happen physically at the resurrection, and for those who die before the resurrection,
00:13:13.120 | it happens spiritually at death.
00:13:16.200 | Glorious.
00:13:17.480 | There is a metamorphosis to be had before we can enjoy eternity forever, and it happens
00:13:22.240 | in the blink of a camera flash.
00:13:24.080 | We will see Christ and become like Him in the same moment.
00:13:26.520 | Beautiful.
00:13:27.520 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:13:28.520 | Thank you for joining us today.
00:13:29.760 | You can ask a question of your own, search our growing archive, or subscribe to the podcast.
00:13:34.840 | All that can be done at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:13:41.720 | Well you don't have to be a Christian to see the destructive power of pornography on the
00:13:45.680 | human brain.
00:13:47.120 | You don't have to be a Christian to discern the difference between love and lust.
00:13:51.640 | You certainly don't have to be a Christian to know that adultery destroys marriages.
00:13:56.080 | But you must be a Christian to see the battle for sexual purity within its fullest reality.
00:14:02.040 | So how do we battle lust like Christians?
00:14:04.080 | And how does sexuality find its ultimate purpose and right place in our lives?
00:14:08.840 | Next time we will take a look at the key to it all.
00:14:11.360 | The key to it all.
00:14:12.360 | That's no overstatement.
00:14:13.360 | The key to it all.
00:14:15.080 | Don't miss it.
00:14:16.080 | I'm your host Tony Reinke, and we'll see you on Wednesday.
00:14:18.200 | Thanks for listening.
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