There is a great book authored by Paul W. Powell titled, If the Dead Could Speak. It immediately caught my attention when I saw it on the bookshelf in my church library. The title caught my attention because I knew exactly where the author was going.
This article is not intended to be a review of the book, but reading it did bring forth a serious problem facing the church today. The problem existed in 1994 when the book was published, and has grown significantly since then. The problem is that more and more people are becoming disillusioned by false religions.
Satan is hard at work, knowing his time is growing shorter by the day to bring as many souls to hell with him as possible. And he does so by deceiving people into following false religions; anything other than the truth and light—our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In the twenty-five years since I was born in 1989, I have watched my generation become polluted with every kind of lie imaginable about what happens when the soul leaves the body.
My mother was saved and raised in a Baptist church. She taught me at a very young age that heaven is not attainable through our own actions, but by repentance and faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When I would be introduced to some other concept of how we end-up in heaven (or hell), I was able to dismiss it because the truth was instilled in me by the time I was able to read.
Unfortunately, many children are left to their own devices or worse, led into these false religions by the guiding hands of their own parents (who are deceived). This is a real tragedy, which brings me back to Powell’s book.
The mother of a girl in my high school class believed heavily in spiritism and wasted countless amounts of her husband’s hard earned money attempting to contact her dead relatives through a psychic medium. Her goal in attempting to contact her deceased loved ones was to find out about the afterlife and what to expect when her time on earth was up.
Saved Christians who study their Bibles know exactly what to expect when we take our last breath, but there are countless people across the world today who either don’t know what we know, or they do know and simply refuse to believe it. Jesus painted a very clear picture of what we can expect after we die in Luke 16 with the story of the rich man and Lazarus. If the dead could speak, they would say Jesus was not kidding!
But somehow, if every soul in the torment of Hades were able to share their agony and express their regret for rejecting God’s gift of salvation on Nightline or 20/20, many viewers would still deny the existence of hell or that a loving God (if they believe in God at all) would send them there.
That makes our job of spreading the truth more difficult, yes, but no less important. Until we ourselves pass away into the arms of the Lord or we hear that glorious call from Jesus to “Come up hither,” we must continue the good fight and spread the truth of God’s love as Satan ups his game in these last days.
For the folks who may not have all the answers to combat the enemy, his minions and the ridiculous religious paths to hell that they have created over the years, Powell’s, If the Dead Could Speak is a great resource. I highly recommend it.
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