Secrets from Beyond The Grave

temporary, so the death of the body will be found to be . . . The early Christians adopted the word koimeterion (which was used by the Greeks of a rest-house for strangers) for the place of interment of the bodies of their departed; thence the English word cemetery , "the sleeping place," is derived.6 The Jewish commentary, the Midrash, teaches: The word sleep is used to describe the body at rest, awaiting the resurrection while the soul is conscious in the afterlife (Mid. Gen. 549).7 The Jewish historian Josephus reported about a group of men who lived in Qumran, a village near the Dead Sea. According to him, the Essenes believed in the immortality of the soul. For their doctrine is this: That bodies are corruptible, and that the matter they are made of is not permanent; but that the souls are immortal, and continue for ever.8 Other early fathers spoke about the consciences of the soul after death: We affirm that the souls of the wicked, being endowed with sensation even after death, are punished, and that those of the good being delivered from punishment spend a blessed existence.9 --Justin Martyr There is a very popular belief among those in the Roman Catholic Church that is defined as purgatory . The Catholic Fact Book gives the reader a definition of purgatory: Purgatory is held to be a place or condition of temporal punishment for those who, having died, are in venial sin or have not satisfied God's justice for mortal sins already forgiven. . . . The doctrine of purgatory is a teaching . . . that may be defined as an intermediate place or state after death where souls who die in God's Grace make atonement, or satisfaction, for past sins and thereby become fit for heaven. This satisfaction is in the form of temporary punishment which afflicts the soul until demands of God's justice are fully met.10 This teaching identifies two types of sins: mortal sins, which will damn the soul, and venial sins, which will not damn the soul but will confine the person to purgatory. It is very clear the doctrine of any form of purgatory is not found in either the Old or New Testaments, but it gradually emerged as a Roman Catholic Church teaching due to a question of what happens to a believer baptized in water who willfully sins after conversion and dies. At the Council of Trent in 1547 and 1563, purgatory became an official doctrine. Below is a quote explaining the purpose for purgatory: If any one saith, that, after the grace of Justification has been received, to every penitent sinner the guilt is remitted, and the debt of eternal punishment is blotted out in such wise, that there remains not any debt of temporal punishment to be discharged either in this world, or in the next in Purgatory, before the entrance to the kingdom of heaven can be opened (to him); let him be anathema.11 Below is the Council of Trent's twenty-fifth-session decree on purgatory in 1563: Whereas the Catholic Church, instructed by the Holy Ghost, has, from the sacred writings and the ancient tradition of the Fathers, taught, in sacred councils, and very recently in this ecumenical Synod, that there is a Purgatory, and that the souls there detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, but principally by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar.12 The Dictionary of the Christian Church explains that the leaders in the early church from The Purgatory Belief