Yep, you’re right. I made a pretty bold statement a few posts back when I claimed that nobody goes to heaven or hell right after they die. Not only is this claim repeatedly defended in the Bible (where else and why else would I make it?), it also makes a great deal of sense and answers so many big, important questions about Christianity.
But I fully realize that many of you are familiar with the accounts of Enoch, Elijah, and Paul in the Bible. These men appear to have experienced heaven in at least some way while they were yet living or even perhaps as they died. I don’t want to hide anything at all from you, hoping you don’t notice, so in Chapter 12 of Healing Hereafter, we look carefully at what the Bible actually says about these guys to discover where they most likely went and for how long!
Chapter 12
There are three people who appeared to have at least visited the current heaven before their physical death. They are Enoch, Elijah, and Paul, so we examine their 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. Therefore, the immediate postmortem destination of these three men was likely the same place we will find all humans going to in the subsequent chapters.
