For the living are conscious that they will
die; but as for the dead, they are conscious of nothing at all, neither do they
anymore have wages, because the remembrance of them has been forgotten. Also,
their love and their hate and their jealousy have already perished, and they
have no portion anymore to time indefinite in anything that has to be done
under the sun . . . All that your hand finds to do, do with your very power,
for there is no work nor devising nor knowledge nor wisdom in She'ol, the place
to which you are going. (Eccl 9:5-6, 10 New World Translation)
In Response
to Douglas V. Pond on Biblical and LDS Anthropology and Eschatology I
interact with various arguments by Douglas Pond, a Seventh Day Adventist, and
the state of the dead, particularly the SDA belief in "soul sleep"
(something other groups hold to, albeit in the more extreme form ["soul
death"], including Jehovah's Witnesses and Christadelphians).
Not many LDS
have interacted with such a doctrine as most of our critics believe in a
conscious intermediate state. Notwithstanding, Joseph Fielding Smith Jr.
briefly interacted with the common appeal to Eccl 9:5-6, 10:
The spirits do not “sleep” between death and
the resurrection. There is a doctrine prevalent among some sects that would
have us believe all spirits rest “as a child falls exhausted into bed at night.”
The words quoted from Ecclesiastes 9:5, 6, 10 are misinterpreted and are not
opposed to the teaching of Peter [from 1 Pet 3:18-20; 4:6]. The sixth verse
makes it clear that the writer is referring to this life only. The dead are forgotten by whom? The living. The
writer of Ecclesiastes was not considering the resurrection, or a future life,
but was discoursing on the present life. True, there is no learning in the grave, but the spirit, which is eternal,
never dies, and is released from the mortal body at death to enter the spirit
world preparatory to a future resurrection of the body. “. . . neither have
they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun,” (Ecc. 9:6) because it is impossible for them to
take worldly goods with them. We are quick to forget the dead, and the writer
of Ecclesiastes has so declared. Joseph Fielding Smith Jr. Religious Truths Defined: A Comparison of Religious Faiths with the Restored
Gospel [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1959], 299, comment in square bracket added
for clarification)
