By Tin-chee Lo, August 6, 2018
Many people say that the death of a person is like “the snuff of a candle,” suggesting an annihilation of life into nothingness. But the Bible rejects this philosophical viewpoint. Christian believes that after death, the body begins to decay, but the soul continues to exist uninterrupted until the day of resurrection when the soul, being in union with the resurrected body, will face the Great Judgment. The righteous are ushered into the “New Heaven and the New Earth” and they will be with the Lord forever. The wicked are sent to the “Lake of Fire” and they are tormented without end. This is our macro understanding of human destiny. The period from death to resurrection is what theologians called “the intermediate state” (Ref. 1). We can’t find detailed and direct information about this state-of-being from the Bible, but it doesn’t mean that we are totally ignorant about it. We can get a glimpse of it from several Bible verses.
Paul in Philippians 1 :23 says, “I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far.”
“To depart” refers to the death of the flesh and the entrance into this “intermediate state.” “I desire” means Paul’s yearning for something. What is this thing? It is “with Christ.” Here we see the continuity of the existence of the soul. Paul believes that the soul without the body turns out to be a state of “better by far.” This “better by far” means a conscious, meaningful existence, not a kind of comatose state of “soul-sleeping” until the resurrection. From all of Paul’s letters, he learned that he was passionate about knowing Christ. Although he knew Christ and was with Christ when he was alive on earth, he would know him far better and have a closer relationship with Him after his death. This is the meaning implied by “better by far.”
Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:6-8 says, “Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. We live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.”
“At home in the body” refers to the times when Paul was living in this world. The verb “prefer” signifies a desire or longing. “Away from the body” indicates the possibility of the soul in the absence of the body. “At home with the Lord” means that the soul after the death of the body continues to exist and recognize the presence of the Lord by his side. “Being confident” shows that death is not a horrible thing, because it has no power to separate the soul from the Lord. Paul believed he would be all the more with the Lord and have the blessed hope of resurrection.
Apart from Paul, Apostle John in Revelation 6:9-10 testifies as saying, “When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, ‘How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?’”
The souls of these slain people will certainly not be in a mode of sleep, because they could scream out loud, “Lord, how long will it wait?” Their sense of justice has not disappeared or diminished because of their martyrdom.
Concerning the Intermediate State, the Bible uses many terms to describe it: Heaven, Paradise, Hell, Prison, Hades, Sheol. Now we have gained some basic understanding of the “intermediate state”, but this does not mean that there are free from difficulties. Consider two Bible passages:
• In response to the repentant theft, Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Like 23:43).
• Peter said, “For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit,
through whom also he went and preached to the spirits in prison (1 Peter 3:18-19).”
From the context, we are quite sure that Jesus went to preach to the lost souls in prison after His death but before His resurrection. But the verb “preached” doesn’t mean “evangelized” but “proclaimed” (Ref. 2, 3). Jesus went to the land of the dead (prison) and proclaimed as a herald the news of victory over Satan’s schemes set all along to frustrate God’s plan of salvation—that is the words of proclamation uttered by Jesus on the cross before He died: “It is done!”.
Since Jesus went to paradise immediately after his death, how could he also go to the prison right away? One possible explanation: There is a beautiful and blissful room in the prison, called paradise, so Jesus could go to the paradise and to the prison at the same time.
After the resurrection of Jesus, however, the paradise was moved out from the prison to a place called heaven. So today when the people who believe in the Lord die, their souls are immediately ushered into heaven to be with the Lord. When their bodies will later be resurrected, their souls, clothed with the glorious resurrected bodies, will be led into the New Heaven and New Earth, forever and ever with the Lord in eternity.
The idea of “paradise relocation” may sound a bit weird, but Bible scholar, Hebrew and Greek expert, Gleason Archer, seems to agree with this idea (Ref. 3); he believes that the purpose of Jesus’ going to prison after His death is to release those who died in faith in the Old Testament time, and then at the first Easter, these faithful souls of O.T. will be moved out into heaven. It implies that all the people of the Old Testament era went to what Peter called the prison (same as the Hebrew’s Sheol or the Greek’s Hades), regardless whether they are good or evil.
In the midst of excruciating pain, Jesus on the cross shouted out, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). The Father was silent, because Jesus, in the night before, had already received the answer when He prayed in the garden of Gethsemane.
This “forsakenness” is by no means to say that Jesus had lost his divine nature during this critical moment, or loss of His status as a Person in the Trinity. He is always God, always divine. Otherwise, how could He bear our sins if He had ceased to be God at that critical moment when we desperately needed Him to be God the most?
Therefore, “abandonment” means that during that time, the Holy Father, who has always been in harmony and in perfect unity with His Son, could no longer stand on the same position of His Son because Jesus, the Son of God, had become sin by bearing the iniquities of mankind. But the relationship between the Holy Father and the Son has never been broken (Ref. 4)
The author of this article believes that “paradise relocation” is an unnecessary interpretive method to reconcile apparent conflict between two scriptural passages. Jesus is forever God without interruption, and one of God’s attributes is omnipresence. Because of that, He could well be in paradise and in the underworld at the same time.
While Jesus’ body remained in the grave until His bodily resurrection on the third day, Jesus’ soul went to the realm of the dead to proclaim victory. Furthermore, the revelation of the Bible is progressive; in the Old Testament era, the concept of heaven and hell wasn’t clear, all they knew was when a person died, they all went to Sheol (what Peter called, prison), regardless whether they were righteousness or wicked or not. In the Old Testament time, when the righteous man Jacob saw his youngest son Benjamin was forced to leave home with his brothers for Egypt, Jacob grieved deeply and said to his sons, “…If harm comes to this boy on the journey you are taking, you will bring my gray head down to the grave in sorrow (Genesis 16:19-31).”
When it comes to the New Testament time, we see that the righteous and the wicked, after they die, go to different places as we are confirmed in one of Jesus’ parables: the rich man (the unrighteous) was in hell in torment while the beggar Lazarus (the righteous) was in Abraham’s side in comfort.
To Christians, death is not the wages we must paid for our sins because Christ had already paid in full for our sins on the cross. Death is a source of blessing. The “last enemy” had already been defeated by Christ’s resurrection. Therefore, our most dreaded opponent—death—has become for us the servant who opens the door to heavenly bliss. Death for the Christian is therefore not the end but a glorious new beginning. For this, we may take comfort and rejoice.
Hoekema wrote (Ref. 1, p.274), “The Bible teaches that believers will go to heaven when they die. That they will be happy during the intermediate state between death and resurrection is clearly taught in the Scripture. But their happiness will be provisional and incomplete. For the completion of the happiness they await the resurrection of the body and the new earth which God will create as the culmination of His redemptive work.”
References:
- “The Bible and the Future” by Anthony A. Hoekema; pages 92-108.
- “The top 100 questions” by Richard Bewes; page 273.
- “Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties” by Gleason L. Archer; page 423.
- “Now, That’s a Good Question!” by R.C. Sproul; pages 50-51.
