The following question comes to us via Facebook Live, Emily Rose typed this in: "I was wondering
how you answer Christian denominations who believe that humans still fall into a sleep-like
state when they die until judgement happens at the end of time, instead of each person
immediately going to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory upon death."
Okay, first of all, I noticed that Emily Rose used the word "still," and that could
suggest that at one time they did, but that they no longer do.
Maybe, for example, during the Old Testament times.
And actually, I don't have any evidence that that happened in the Old Testament times.
There are passages, both in the Old and the New Testament, that talk about the dead being
asleep, but really that's a euphemism.
It's like today, even, you know, though a Catholic believes you do go immediately to
the personal judgement, the ending up in Heaven or Hell or temporarily in Purgatory, a Catholic
might still tell a child, "Well, Grandma fell asleep."
That's a euphemism.
It's a way of softening an unpleasant reality by speaking of it using a more pleasant term.
And the reason that that sleep metaphor gets used for death in all different kinds of cultures
is obviously because dead people look like they're asleep.
You know, they don't stand up, they don't walk around, they tend to lay there, they
tend to have their eyes closed, if they don't have their eyes closed, people tend to close
their eyes so they look more like they're asleep because it's less disturbing; and so
there's an obvious basis, just in human nature, for the sleep/death euphemism.
And that's what we encounter in Scripture.
So knowing that there's this euphemism that's in use in all different kinds of languages
and all different kinds of cultures over the planet would form part of my answer to people
who think that the dead enter a sleep-like state, like, let's say, until the final judgement.
But I wouldn't stop there.
I'd also go to various passages; like in Luke's Gospel, you have the parable of Lazarus and
the rich man, and that depicts Abraham, Lazarus, and the rich man, all three, as conscious
in the state between death and resurrection, what's called the intermediate state.
Now someone could say, "Well, but that's just a parable."
Maybe it is.
It's the only parable of Jesus where you have somebody who's named: Lazarus.
None of His other parables have that.
And coincidentally, this parable involves the suggestion of Lazarus coming back from
the dead.
And we actually know there was a Lazarus who did come back from the dead, and that raises
the question of "Just how much of a parable is this?"
But even if it's purely a parable, even if it's symbolic, Jesus still populated His parables
with real things.
So He's got--in other parables, for example, He has fathers and sons and wine presses and
crops and weeds and kings; and all of these things really exist, so He's drawing on actual
occurrences to craft his parables.
And if that's the case, when He tells us a parable about the afterlife, that depicts
people conscious in the afterlife, we could infer He's drawing on real life there too.
But we don't have to stop there, because if you go to the book of Revelation, that SHOWS
us what's happening in Heaven before the Second Coming, we see all kinds of people in Heaven
who are conscious, including people who are coming up out of the great tribulation, and
they washed their robes, and now they're praising God; we see the Saints in Heaven, worshiping
God; we have the souls under the altar who have been martyred, crying out for justice
from God, they're obviously conscious; so we just have a lot of evidence from multiple
sources indicating that we don't enter a sleep-like state, that we are conscious between death
and resurrection, and those are some of the considerations I'd point out.
Thank you Emily Rose.