Well after a very unseasonably cool spring and early summer here in Michigan, it has finally gotten hot. At least for a couple weeks! The grass is dying, the people are sweating, and we’re starting to wonder what was so bad about that whole winter thing. OK, maybe I should only speak for myself. To some people, the weather has allowed them to go to their personal heaven at the beach. But to me, it has been hot as hell everywhere I go!
We joke about the many heaven and hell references we make in everyday life. On our less jovial days, we might even tell someone to go to (usually one of) these locations. And we certainly have it in our brains, whatever we believe, that those are two places people might go right after they die, if they go anywhere at all.
And we’d be absolutely wrong. Of course, heaven and hell are the two locations that the Bible teaches every human will eventually end up in. But not a single time does the Bible teach that anyone goes to the forever heaven or the forever hell right after they die. Not even once!
And if you think about it, that’s a very very good thing. If we all go to heaven or hell immediately after dying, there are a huge number of very difficult questions that are impossible to resolve about God, his nature, his words, justice, and any sort of logical consistency to Christianity. But if we instead believe the postmortem plan for every human that God does teach in the Bible, Christianity becomes rational and refreshing! God and his afterlife make sense.
Don’t believe me? Well get ready to enjoy the numerous passages of Scripture that do tell us what really happens to each of us right after we die. After all, making sense of God’s biblical hereafter is what my free Healing Hereafter book series is all about! But don’t worry about going too deep; I’m giving you the lite version! Below is the Quick Read summary of the middle chapters of Booklet 3, continuing to explore God’s very sensible afterlife.
Keep in mind that these “Quick Reads” below aren’t meant to extensively prove anything, just intrigue more interest concerning nearly all the questions and conclusions found in Chapters 5-8 of Booklet 3. Please explore the Full Version of this booklet (free and two clicks away!) for a more thorough discussion and extensive biblical and scholarly evidence supporting what’s below.
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Booklet 3: The Ultimate Publicity Stunt
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Chapter 5
Since this teaching challenges the common belief that the saved go promptly to the current heaven and the unsaved go promptly to Hell upon dying, we comprehensively survey the Bible’s commentary on humanity’s immediate fate after physical death. We unveil that both the Old and New Testaments, as well as Jesus himself, continually exclude both Hell and any place called heaven (either the current heaven or the coming, eternal Heaven called the New Earth) as archetypal destinations for humans until after judgment day.
Some argue that individuals who were raised to life in the Bible proceeded on to the current heaven or that it became available to humans after Jesus’ resurrection, but we discover that their examples either contradict each other or prove the opposite. Moreover, we learn that the Bible undeniably states that no humans—except Jesus—were in the current heaven even long after Jesus rose. We also find no biblical examples of humans currently in Hell, further solidifying an intermediate abode for all humans between death and judgment.
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Chapter 6
However, there are three people who appeared to have at least visited the current heaven before their physical death, so we examine these cases to see if they add information to our understanding of life right after death. After acclimating ourselves to the ancient Jewish understanding of the current heaven, reading the Bible for what it actually says, and placing these examples in their biblical context, we can only support the presence of humans in the current heaven by embracing logical and scientific inconsistency and by making the gospel unnecessary for salvation.
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Chapter 7
There are also five human parties in the Bible who seem to be headed for the current heaven immediately after dying, so we evaluate them as well. We find that these humans could only be in the current heaven right now if it were a frustrating, sorrowful place of segregation, if we disregard biblical context, if we implement concepts that have no biblical basis, if we make judgment day purposeless, if we equate the desire to be in the current heaven with the immediate fulfillment of that desire, and if we ignore clear examples of the saved going somewhere besides the current heaven when they die. In many ways, the proposed objections to a distinct residence for humans between death and judgment are actually found to confirm that this is the Bible’s rule of thumb for them.
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Chapter 8
Because one of the primary driving forces why Hell and Heaven are currently uninhabited by humans is the unequivocal biblical teaching of a single, future judgment day for all humans, we ask why God waits until then to allow humans into their eternal destinations. The inseparability of final human judgment with the rather unique events of the apocalypse is one adequate explanation, but we also find that the Bible reveals that neither Hell nor Heaven are even available yet for human habitation.
However, since the current heaven conceivably could be, we peruse various ways people have tried to reconcile humans having already been judged worthy of this heaven with a last day of judgment still to come. Multiple judgment days with multiple purposes for multiple different groups of people are the only possible options, and we confidently conclude that the amount of unwarranted speculation, biblical partiality, logical inconsistency, practical problems, and resulting widespread disagreement about these judgment days invalidates their existences, especially compared to the sublimely simple, single, universal, final, and biblical day of judgment.
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But what exactly happens before that day of judgment then? What is that postmortem prejudgment existence like? And why don’t we hear about this more often? Stay tuned! If you’re asking it, I’ve asked it. And I like finding answers.
