Why Nobody Wants to Hear What We Believe About Death (p4)

Last week we took a hard look at death in the Ancient Near East. And it was rough.

We saw that the afterlife in the ANE wasn't paradise.[1] It was a dark, dusty underworld where everyone ended up together — good people, bad people, rich and poor — eating clay forever with no way out. We saw that the dead didn't leave but lingered as spirits that needed constant ritual management or they'd turn dangerous. We saw that the gods were unpredictable and possibly furious at you right now for reasons you'd never know. We saw that grief itself was so culturally uncontainable that certain traditions turned it into actual demons. And we saw that the whole system — from the gods down to the grave — functioned as the cosmic operating system for imperial power.[1]

But here's the mistake that's easy to make when looking at ANE views on death.

We can look at it as an isolated belief. A weird ancient opinion about what happens after you die… and miss the bigger picture entirely.

Death in the ANE was never just about death. It was part of a complete story. And if we have any hope of answering what the “State of the dead” doctrine has to say to the secular, post-church world of today, that story is the thing we need to understand.

So here goes… (Warning: This is a much longer read than the other blogs… but this is where it all comes together so hang in there!)

The gods of the ANE didn't like humans. In the Atrahasis Epic (one of the most important creation texts of the ancient world) humans were created because the gods were tired of doing their own labor and needed someone to take over. You were made to work. Your existence was a convenience. A solution to a divine problem.

This doesn't mean the gods had no positive role; they were the ones you turned to for justice, a good harvest, or a little personal protection. But even so, the whole relationship was basically a high-stakes transaction. Since humans were seen as the labor force created just to keep the gods from having to do chores, your value was tied to how well you kept the machinery running. It turned religion into a state of constant, anxious maintenance, where your personal suffering didn't matter half as much as whether you were keeping the divine boss happy.

In this story, human beings were essentially divine expenditures. Useful while alive and productive, worthless once worn out. And when you died, this story didn't pause. There was no moment of cosmic recognition where the universe suddenly noticed that you had suffered and decided to reward you for it. The meaningless existence simply continued into the afterlife. There, you became a shadow, a shade, a diminished version of yourself, eating dust in the dark forever. 

In some traditions, children who died young didn't get a pass. They became demons. Doomed to spend eternity in torment, finding relief only in the brief moments they could externalize that torment by afflicting the living.

In others, brides who died before their wedding didn't get to rest. They returned as hostile spirits, haunting households, driven by an eternal unfulfilled longing for the life that was taken from them.

And the living surrounded by all of this were left to manage it. Rituals for the dead. Offerings to hostile spirits. Prayers to gods who might be angry for reasons they couldn't identify. Religion in this world was not a relationship. It was a management system. A way of keeping the cosmic machinery from destroying you.

And when you add all of it together: cruel gods, expendable humans, death as extended suffering, grief as supernatural threat, no justice in the afterlife, no meaning in the grave, it all reduces to one basic proposition.

Humans don't matter.

Your existence doesn't matter. Your cries don't register. Your suffering is noise. Your love is a liability. An eternity of conscious but meaningless death is not a tragedy. It's the final confirmation that you never really mattered to begin with.

This is the story the Hebrew nation was born into.

Abraham came from an idolatrous family who believed the same myths. He didn’t have a Bible. He didn’t have an Adventist Book Centre with devotionals about God’s love. Abraham had faint oral traditions about YHWH, I’m sure, but they would have been mixed in and muddled by the stories of many other gods roaming ancient Mesopotamia. And as Israel grew into a nation, it was surrounded by ANE neighbours who told their story of cruel gods and expendable humans.

And then God sent Israel prophets. And the prophets said, “no.”

Not just "no" to one feature of the ANE story. “No” to the whole thing. From top to bottom.

Moses, the most revered of all the prophets, sat down to write the book of Genesis. And from the very beginning God reveals to him a story in direct contradiction to the ANE cosmology of his day. In Genesis, there is only one God. And he is not like the other gods.

He doesn't need us to serve him. He made us because he wanted to. He made us in his own image — tzelem Elohim — which means that every human being is imbued with cosmic significance. Not just the gods. Humans too! We were all royalty. We were all image bearers of the divine. We all mattered.

And this… this is where the Hebrew view of death becomes genuinely revolutionary.

Because if humans are made in the image of a God of love and given inherent dignity, if your existence actually matters from the beginning, then death cannot simply erase that. The God that made you meaningful doesn't suddenly become indifferent when you die.

So although the Hebrew Scriptures still speak of Sheol as the realm of the dead, they refuse the Ancient Near Eastern picture of the dead continuing as conscious, diminished shadows sustained by ritual care. Instead, death is portrayed as silence, stillness, and rest. The suffering stops. The striving stops. The managing and the fear and the ritual obligations, none of it is required. They are held by the God who made them.

But here's the part that absolutely rocks me. Moses never writes about heaven. In fact, early Hebraic theology didn't come along and begin telling ANE people they would go to a happy heavenly place in death. It simply said that in death, we all go to sheol — the grave — a place of stillness. A place of rest. No suffering. No torment. No management required. Just rest.

Why does this matter? Because what made the biblical view of death beautiful in its ANE context was not resurrection or an elaborate afterlife theology (those are different doctrines that came later). What made the biblical view of death a daring, radical, almost ludicrous proposition in the ANE was that in death, humans got to rest. And that meant something extraordinary in a world where the gods made mankind as slave labor and treated them as expendable transactions. It meant that humans mattered. In life and in death.[2]

In short, the biblical view of death was tied to the biblical view of life and viewed as a full story it becomes clear that God’s revelation contradicted the entire ANE worldview. In YHWH’s story, humans matter.

Dead children don't become demons in the Hebrew story. They rest.

Dead brides don't return as hostile spirits driven by unfulfilled longing. They are at peace.

The dead in general do not suffer in some wretched underworld where they eat dust and clay forever. Their pain has ended.

But notice, this is not simply a claim about death. It’s a claim about life. About humans. It dares to scream “we matter, we have dignity, in life and in death we are imbued with cosmic significance.”

In other words, the Hebrew worldview didn't just challenge the ANE view of death. It challenged the entire story that surrounded death. The story about who God is. The story about who humans are. The story about whether any of it means anything.

And what it said in defiance of everything the ancient world believed was this:

You matter.

This was the real contribution of Hebrew thinking to the world it emerged in. Not merely "beware of ghosts." But "you matter."

What about today?

We are no longer in the ANE. The myths of cruel gods, demons and ghosts that need managing, and death as an eternity of eating dust and clay — these are not things people believe in our secular western context. The etemmu is not secularisms lived anxiety. The "Prayer to an Unknown God" is not modernity’s operating system.

Yes, during the 1800s there was a brief overlap. Spiritualism swept through the West. Some of those ancient ANE anxieties flickered back to life — the interactive dead, the séances, the mediums, the belief that the dead were still conscious and reachable. And in that moment, the traditional Adventist teaching on the state of the dead was as relevant as it had been in its original ANE context. It spoke directly to what people were actually afraid of. It answered the question they were actually asking.

But that moment passed.[3]

Today we live in a world that looks very different. A world where postmodernism has made "the truth about death" a non-starter (because truth doesnt even exist). A world where death is no longer primarily a religious conversation but a technological, secular, commercial one: grief tech, VR simulations, digital resurrection, longevity research, transhumanism. A world where occult themes are aesthetic, where spiritualism is entertainment, where the dominant frameworks for understanding death are evolution, atheism, and an incoherent self-defined spirituality full of cliché’s and platitudes with no systematic or social framework attached to it.

In this metamodern, secular, post-church, tired-of-religion, relativistic, hyper-tech world… what does the biblical doctrine of death have to say?

This is the main point I’ve been working toward through this whole series.

The modern story really isn’t so different from the ancient story. And once we see that, what the doctrine of death (not resurrection or afterlife, but death itself) has something overwhelmingly radical to say.

Here’s what I mean:

We no longer believe in pitiless gods. But in his 1995 book River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life world renowned atheist Richard Dawkins wrote the phrase that would become the cry of nihilism, "the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference".

The post to metamodern world may not stake its claims on Dawkins modernist story as much as Dawkins himself did, but theres no mistake that this view has become a dominant cultural framework. A universe that produced us without intending to. A universe that will outlast us without noticing. A universe that has no category for human suffering because it has no category for meaning at all. Not indifferent gods. An indifferent universe. That is modernity’s cosmology.[4]

We no longer believe humans were accidentally made by gods at war with each other. But we believe humans arrived by accident through an undirected process of evolution that did not intend for us to be here. We were not planned. We were not wanted. We are a biological event in an apathetic cosmos.

We no longer believe the dead go to an underworld to spend eternity as shadows eating dust. But we believe that someday the universe will die a cold, dark, thermodynamic death and any memory that we were ever here will be completely erased. Future civilisations will arise and have no idea we existed. Our pain, our poetry, our stories, our suffering — all of it swallowed by a silence that never knew we were even here.

The ANE story was a story of human meaninglessness. And at its deepest philosophical level, the story of secular modernity is the same.

Different features. Same conclusion. At the end of the day, in a universe that doesn't know you're here and won't notice when you're gone — humans just really don't matter.[5]

And to both stories — the ancient and the modern — the biblical mind speaks with prophetic protest.

It doesn't argue with the ancient story on ancient terms. And it doesn't argue with the modern story on modern terms. It simply tells a different story. A story that is not compatible with either. A story that refuses the premise.

The premise that humans are expendable. That existence is accidental. That the universe is indifferent. That death confirms the meaninglessness of what came before it.

The biblical prophet says: “no.” And it begins with a God who made us on purpose. Who made us in his image. Who made us whole — every part of us real and valued and his. Who made a world that was “good and very good”. Who made us for life. Who made us as royalty, to care for, to rule, to serve, to love. Who made us not to be erased neither as shadowy ghosts, nor as meaningless matter dissolving back into a universe that never knew our name, but as unique conscious beings made for eternity, for harmony, for love, for a relational existence that reflects the character of the God who invented relationship in the first place.

This is what the doctrine of the state of the dead ought to say to our secular western world today.

Not warnings about ghosts it doesn't believe in.

Not anti-spiritualism rhetoric that lands flat.

Not proof texts designed to win an argument that nobody is having.

But an invitation. Into a story that says you matter. That your existence is imbued with profound significance. That the moment you came into being something magical, unheard of, entirely unique took place in the cosmos. That your birth is a radical event. That your life is unspeakably significant. And that all of this matters so much that death itself is not enough to erase it.

That is present truth for a secular world.

That is the doctrine of death speaking to the anxiety of today.

Part 5 is next.

And in it, we're going to get practical. What does it actually look like to share this with someone who has never heard it? What frameworks do we need? What language do we use?

That's also what my upcoming workshop is all about.

Details and registration coming very soon. Watch this space.

And in the meantime — one question:

When you compare the ANE story of human meaninglessness with the story secular modernity tells about the universe — do you think they're really as different as they appear? And how does the biblical doctrine of death speak into both of them?

Drop your thoughts in the comments.
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FOOTNOTES
1. Describing the ANE cosmological framework as cruel and indifferent is not the same as saying ANE cultures were irredeemably evil or without value. These were sophisticated, extraordinary civilisations. They gave us the world's first written literature (the Epic of Gilgamesh), the first codified legal systems (the Code of Hammurabi), foundational advances in mathematics, astronomy, agriculture, and architecture, and rich traditions of art, music, and poetry. Many ordinary people within these cultures experienced genuine love, community, and moral seriousness despite the cosmological framework they inhabited. What I am critiquing is not the people but the story — the dominant cosmological narrative about the nature of gods, humans, and death that shaped the ancient world. And my point is simply this: the Hebrew story emerged as a direct protest to that narrative. Not to the people who held it, but to the story itself.

2. Job 19:25-27 does hint at resurrection hope, suggesting the idea was not entirely foreign to early Hebrew thought — and possibly even to the broader ANE world Job inhabited. But it remains a brief, barely-articulated cry in the middle of overwhelming suffering rather than a developed theological claim. What is telling is that across the entire Torah — the five foundational books of Moses — resurrection is simply not a featured idea. It doesn't become more explicit or central until roughly a thousand years later, in texts like Isaiah 26:19 and most fully in Daniel 12:2. My point is not that resurrection was absent from Hebrew thought but that it was not yet the central offering. What the doctrine of death primarily gave the ANE world in its earliest form was something simpler and equally radical — the dignity of rest.

3. It is worth noting that Ellen White does warn that in the final events of earth's history, the deceptive manifestation of the dead will return with far greater force than anything the 1800s spiritualist movement produced. In The Great Controversy she writes that Satan "will come personating Jesus Christ" and that "the spirits of devils" will appear "in the form of beloved friends or relatives" to deceive the living (The Great Controversy, pp. 552, 560). This is not something to dismiss. I take it seriously. The classical Adventist framework for the state of the dead — that the dead are unconscious and cannot communicate with the living — will be as urgently relevant in that final moment as it was in the ANE and in the 1800s. My argument in this series is not that we should abandon this perspective. It is that in the context of secular mission today — reaching people who have no framework for spiritualism, who don't believe in ghosts, and whose anxieties about death are shaped by grief technology, evolutionary materialism, and existential meaninglessness — we need more than the anti-spiritualism angle alone. We need the full picture of what the doctrine of death actually says about God, about human dignity, and about the meaning of existence. Expanding our approach is not the same as abandoning it. It is recovering the depth of what we already have.

4. While I’ve framed secularism as having a specific “cosmology,” it’s important to clarify that secularism is not a monolith. It has no single “golden thread” or unified dogma; it is a sprawling, complex cultural phenomenon. My intent here is not to suggest that secularism can be reduced to a single, neat philosophy, but to highlight that we are currently navigating a widely documented “meaning crisis.” This crisis is driven by the fact that many of the dominant, loosely held ontologies—the cultural frameworks we breathe in every day—have largely abandoned the idea that humans were created with inherent, objective purpose, leaving a vacuum where questions of "why we are here" no longer have a shared, satisfying answer.