Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, June 17, 2022
Early on in the Torah we find “land” referring to all that God has made unless it is modified, for example, the “land of Egypt.” Later the “land” without reference is more likely to refer to Israel as originally given to the Hebrews by Yahweh, “The Land” as though it has capital letters. It’s almost a proper name.

“He’s no longer in the land of the living,” we say with great solemnity as we pronounce that our friend has fallen asleep on the sofa.
It’s a phrase we use fairly commonly, either to mean prosaically, “they’re dead”—which is actually uncommon because we prefer cleaner euphemisms that hide the reality entirely—or to refer to someone who is asleep.
We get that idiom of death and sleep being related from the Bible, though it plays the other way around in the Old Testament, with the dead being referred to as asleep. Like all idioms it hints at more than it shows, because only a culture with a profound ungirding belief in the resurrection of the dead would refer to the dead as sleeping.
We also get the phrase the “land of the living” from the Bible. I count 15 Old Testament occurrences of the word land (אֶ֫רֶץ) with the word living or alive (חַי). Which is not that surprising, the Authorised Version, which most of us know as the KJV, has had an incredibly large impact on the English language over the last 400 years.
Here’s the kicker, I’m not convinced the phrase “land of the living” means the same thing in Hebrew as we take it to mean in English.
Which is always a thought worth exploring. In fact, as those 15 references cross five different books of the Bible it’s possible that they don’t all use the term the same way, but we should always assume that those written later would be very aware of how the term was used in earlier parts of the Bible.
Why am I not convinced?
Hebrew has plenty of ways to say ‘alive,’ without the poetic flourish about the land added in. Which on its own we could dismiss as poetic language, especially in the Psalms, that is then picked up by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. We could, but we shouldn’t. The Bible’s authors are often poetic and use the heights of rhetoric available to them to express the heart of God in beautiful language, and every flourish has purpose and meaning. There are no spare words.
So, what does it mean? My contention is that the land of the living is the New Jerusalem, and that it is us who live in the land of the dying.
We will need to nuance this a little along the way, but the first thing that should clue us in is the use of the word land. A very common word in the Old Testament, from the first sentence onwards (literally: from the head God created the sky and the land), and a word that as the story develops seems to change meaning.
Early on in the Torah we find ‘land’ referring to all that God has made unless it is modified, for example, the ‘land of Egypt.’ Later the ‘land’ without reference is more likely to refer to Israel as originally given to the Hebrews by Yahweh, “The Land” as though it has capital letters. It’s almost a proper name.
So, we have it modified by ‘living,’ where is this place? The place of the dead in the Old Testament is never referred to as a ‘land,’ which is of course because it’s under the ground. It’s the grave, even if ‘Abraham’s bosom,’ while the part of it for the righteous dead is not specifically unpleasant, even that is a place of waiting.
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If your faith is in your good deeds, the idea that being a “good person” is enough to get you into heaven, than that faith is worthless. It has no power, nor worth, to gain you entrance into the celestial kingdom. True saving faith will show itself in the obedience the redeemed give to the revealed testimony of the Lord found in the Scriptures. 

After a little break due to some sickness on my account we are back at it with our Thursday looks at the Larger Catechism. We’ve gone from considering Church membership and the advantages of the body of Christ for the believer to now contemplating some of the aspects of the work of the Lord in our redemption. The first thing we are going to look at is the way God grants forgiveness of sins to the believer. Yet, as we will discover, justification is about a lot more than merely the slate being made clean, because what was wrong with us in our depravity cannot be reduced to the fact we broke some commandments. The totality of our sinfulness should never either be undersold or ignored when it comes to the salvation we have received wholly by the grace of our Heavenly Father.
In today’s help (and next week’s) we’ll explore more about how justification particularly sets the stage for all the other benefits which come from our union with Christ. Here’s todays Q/A’s:
Q. 70: What is justification?
A. Justification is an act of God’s free grace unto sinners, in which he pardons all their sins, accepts and accounts their persons righteous in his sight; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but only for the perfect obedience and full satisfaction of Christ, by God imputed to them, and received by faith alone.
Q. 71: How is justification an act of God’s free grace?
A. Although Christ, by his obedience and death, did make a proper, real, and full satisfaction to God’s justice in the behalf of them that are justified; yet in as much as God accepts the satisfaction from a surety, which he might have demanded of them, and did provide this surety, his own only Son, imputing his righteousness to them, and requiring nothing of them for their justification but faith, which also is his gift, their justification is to them of free grace.
As with their Shorter Catechism counterparts these questions make abundantly clear that justification is in every way an act that God performs, not a cooperating effort between the deity and the sinner. As Paul says if it was not of grace, then it would be of works. (Rom. 11:6). Grace by definition is freely offered and provided. (Eph. 2:8-10). The freeness of the act has its genesis in the reality that God at no point was required either by justice or fairness or any other type of attribute to relieve us of our condemnation due to us because of sin.
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There is something extremely comforting about knowing that God is our father. This relationship has been planned since before the foundation of the world. We have been adopted as sons and daughters into the family of the Triune God through the Son in the Spirit.

Certain statements grab our imagination. For me, J.I. Packer’s assertion about the doctrine of adoption has provoked much thoughtful reflection. He wrote that adoption ‘is the highest privilege the gospel offers: higher even than justification.’[1]It is an amazing truth that when considered for an extended period should humble us and cause rejoicing in the relationship that we now have with the Triune God.
Yet, the striking reality is that while this blessing of our salvation is immense, the language of adoption is unique to Paul and only appears five time in his writings (Rom 8:15, 23; 9:4; Gal 4:5; Eph 1:5). Even while the language of God’s fatherhood and the sonship of particular people (i.e. Adam and David) and the nation of Israel, the concept of adoption never shows up in the Old Testament, and Paul only uses the language when he is writing to a church in a city under direct rule of Roman law.[2] Thus, what we see is that Paul reflects on what God has done in Christ and uses adoption as understood in Roman law as a metaphor for this reality.
Even while the language of adoption is used sparingly in the Bible, the importance of this doctrine is profound. Nevertheless, when we look at many standard treatments of Christian theology (i.e. Turretin, Bavinck, Berkhof, etc.) the doctrine of adoption is underdeveloped and/or subsumed into justification. However, in recent years there have been various studies which are starting to reclaim the doctrine of adoption. I want to argue that we cannot fully appreciate the nature of this doctrine unless we consider it in a Trinitarian perspective. In this I follow Herman Bavinck who stated:
The thinking mind situates the doctrine of the Trinity squarely amid the full-orbed life of nature and humanity. A Christian’s confession is not an island in the ocean but a high mountaintop from which the whole creation can be surveyed. And it is the task of Christian theologians to present clearly the connectedness of God’s revelation with, and its significance for, all of life. The Christian mind remains unsatisfied until all of existence is referred back to the triune God, and until the confession of God’s Trinity functions at the center of our thought and life.[3]
We have been adopted by the Father through the Son, by the Spirit into the family of God as sons and daughters, not by nature but by grace. It seems that examining the doctrine of adoption in its Trinitarian contours will only aid us in our grasping “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ” (Eph 3:18).
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