What happens to a person in the time between death and the resurrection?

Question 10200.

The intermediate state is the condition of a human being between the moment of death and the morning of resurrection, and it is one of the questions people ask me most often at a graveside. Is my mother with Jesus now, or asleep, or waiting somewhere? Does she know anything? Does she have a body?

Scripture answers more of that than you might expect, and it declines to answer some of it. I want to give you both the certainties and the boundaries, because a grieving Christian deserves the truth rather than a comfortable guess.

Why there is an intermediate state at all

The reason this question exists is that Scripture puts a gap between two events which we tend to run together. A believer dies and goes to be with Jesus. A believer is also raised bodily at the resurrection, which for the church happens at the rapture. Those are not the same moment, and Paul says as much in 1 Thessalonians 4:14 to 16, where the dead in Christ are brought with Jesus and their bodies rise at His descent.

So between death and resurrection there is a real interval, which theologians call the intermediate state. It is not a third destination and it is not a waiting room in the sense of somewhere neutral. It is a condition, and for the believer it is a condition of being with the Lord.

If we were pure spirits the question would not arise, and if we were only bodies it would not arise either. The intermediate state exists because a human being is more than a body and yet was made for one. I hold that we are spirit, soul and body genuinely distinguished, and death separates the material from the immaterial without destroying either.

It helps to name the two mistakes that crowd in here. One is to collapse the two events, so that a believer is imagined receiving his resurrection body at the moment of death, which the New Testament nowhere teaches. The other is to empty the interval of consciousness, which the New Testament flatly denies. The doctrine of the intermediate state exists to keep us from both.

What Scripture says about believers who die

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:8 that he would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. In Philippians 1:23 he says his desire is to depart and be with Jesus, which he calls far better than staying. Neither statement makes sense if the intermediate state is unconsciousness, because nobody prefers oblivion to fellowship with Christ and calls it gain.

Jesus told the dying thief in Luke 23:43 that today you will be with me in paradeisos. Not eventually. Today. That one word settles the timing question for anyone willing to take Jesus at His word.

Stephen, as the stones fell, prayed for the Lord Jesus to receive his spirit. John saw souls under the altar in Revelation 6 who spoke, who were aware of what had happened to them and who were told to wait. Every strand points the same way: the believer in the intermediate state is conscious, personal, in the presence of Jesus, and at rest.

Jesus settled the principle in argument with the Sadducees. Quoting God’s words at the bush, He said in Matthew 22:32 that God is not the God of the dead but of the living, and He used the present tense of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob centuries after their funerals. If those men were unconscious, the argument fails. Jesus treated the intermediate state as a state of life.

The transfiguration adds a further glimpse. Moses and Elijah appear and speak with Jesus about His coming departure, aware of what is happening in redemptive history and able to converse about it. Whatever else we do not know, personal identity and awareness are plainly retained.

Conscious, but without the resurrection body

What the believer does not yet have is the resurrection body. Paul is careful about this. He speaks in 2 Corinthians 5:1 to 4 of longing to be further clothed rather than found unclothed, which tells you he did not regard the disembodied condition as the goal. The intermediate state is blessed and it is incomplete.

That is worth saying plainly, because a good deal of popular Christian talk stops at heaven and never reaches resurrection. Our hope is not escape from the body but the redemption of it, and the intermediate state is the interval before that hope is realised.

Whether there is some interim form or the person exists as spirit and soul without any bodily aspect, Scripture does not say. The souls in Revelation 6 are described as speaking and wearing white robes, which may be figurative or may not. I would rather hold that loosely than pretend to information I have not been given. What our risen bodies will be like is a separate question, which I take up in the article on resurrection bodies.

This is why I resist the popular habit of describing heaven as our final destination and stopping there. Paul’s hope was resurrection, and he called the disembodied condition being unclothed rather than fulfilled. The intermediate state is a genuine blessing on the way to a greater one, and preaching that omits the second stage leaves people with half a hope.

What about soul sleep?

Soul sleep is the view that the dead are unconscious until the resurrection, and it draws on the frequent biblical description of death as sleep. Jesus said Lazarus had fallen asleep, Paul speaks of those who have fallen asleep, and Daniel 12 speaks of those who sleep in the dust of the earth.

The difficulty is that the metaphor describes the body as it appears to the onlooker, not the soul as it is before God. A sleeping person is present, breathing and expected to wake, which is precisely the comfort the image is meant to carry against pagan hopelessness. The same Paul who uses the sleep language is the one who says being away from the body means being at home with the Lord.

You cannot hold soul sleep and Luke 23:43 without rewriting one of them. I deal with the arguments in more detail in the article on soul sleep, and my conclusion is that the intermediate state is conscious rest, not suspended existence.

There is also a plain grammatical point in the sleep passages. Paul says the dead in Christ will rise, and it is bodies that rise. When Scripture speaks of sleeping it consistently uses that language of the body laid in the ground, and when it speaks of the person it uses the language of departing to be with the Lord. Two vocabularies for two aspects of one human being, which is exactly what a trichotomist reading of our make up would expect.

There is a historical point worth adding. Soul sleep has appeared repeatedly in church history and has usually travelled in company with a denial of eternal punishment, which is not a coincidence. If the dead are unconscious until judgement, the doctrine of conscious loss becomes easier to soften, and the two adjustments tend to arrive together.

What about the unsaved dead?

Scripture is more restrained here and more sobering. The rich man in Luke 16:23 is in Hades, in torment, conscious, able to see, speak and remember, and separated by a fixed gulf. Whatever else that account is doing, it is not describing unconsciousness.

The Hebrew sheol and the Greek hades describe the realm of the dead rather than the final lake of fire. Revelation 20 has Death and Hades giving up their dead before the Great White Throne, which means Hades is a holding condition that itself comes to an end.

So the intermediate state runs in two directions. For the believer it is presence with Jesus. For the unbeliever it is conscious separation awaiting judgement. I have written more on where each goes in the article on where believers go.

We should also resist speculation about a second chance. Hebrews says it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgement. Nothing in the intermediate state is described as probationary, for the believer or for the unbeliever, and the fixed gulf in Luke 16 is fixed by God rather than by circumstance.

Did anything change at the cross?

This is where the older writers spent a good deal of ink. Before the cross, Luke 16 describes a twofold realm with a place of comfort called Abraham’s side and a place of torment, separated by a chasm. Some hold that the righteous dead were held there rather than in heaven, and that when Jesus ascended He led them into the presence of God, taking Ephesians 4:8 as a reference to that.

Others hold that Old Testament believers went immediately into the presence of God all along, and that Luke 16 uses the language of the day to describe a distinction that was always one of destiny rather than location. Both are held by serious men, and the question does not touch the gospel.

My own view leans to the first, mainly because of the way Luke 16 pictures a shared realm with a chasm through it, and because of the emphasis Hebrews places on the way into the holy places not being opened until Jesus. Either way, since the cross the answer for the believer is unambiguous, and it is with the Lord. On the earlier arrangement see the article on Abraham’s side.

There is a wider point behind that debate which does matter. Whatever the arrangement before the cross, nobody in either era was saved by anything other than the work of Jesus, applied by God to those who trusted His promise. The Old Testament believer looked forward in faith without knowing the details; we look back knowing them. The intermediate state has always been entered on the same ground.

Prayers, purgatory and the departed

Two errors grow in this soil and both need naming. The first is purgatory, the idea that believers undergo purifying punishment in the intermediate state before entering glory. It has no exegetical basis, it borrows from a book outside the canon, and it contradicts the finished work of Jesus. If His blood cleanses from all sin, there is nothing left to burn off. I set out the case in the article on purgatory.

The second is the practice of praying to the departed or for them. Scripture directs prayer to God through one mediator, and it never once instructs us to address the dead. The saints in glory are alive and well and utterly occupied with Jesus, and they are not a switchboard.

What we may do is grieve honestly, thank God for those He gave us, and comfort one another with the words Paul actually supplied. He did not tell the Thessalonians to contact their dead. He told them that they would see them again.

Some ask whether those in glory are aware of us. Scripture gives us very little, and I would not build on the little there is. The souls in Revelation 6 know that they were killed and that justice has not yet fallen, and Hebrews 12 describes a great cloud of witnesses, though that passage is more about testimony given than spectating done. On what the departed can see I have written separately in the article on that question.

Grief itself needs a word here, because doctrine that cannot be preached at a graveside is of little use. Paul did not tell the Thessalonians to stop grieving. He told them not to grieve as those who have no hope, which leaves plenty of room for tears. The intermediate state gives sorrow somewhere to stand rather than somewhere to stop.

How this shapes a funeral and a sickbed

When I stand at a graveside I can say two things without qualification. If this brother trusted Jesus, he is with Jesus now, conscious and at rest, and nothing about his condition is diminished or uncertain. And his body, which we are placing in the ground, will rise, because the Lord who took him is coming for it.

That is a fuller hope than the vague comfort our culture offers, and it holds weight in a room where somebody has stopped breathing. The intermediate state is not the end of the story and it is not a shadow existence. It is the interval between two mercies.

It also removes any need to speculate about signs and messages. A believer who has died is not hovering, not lingering and not trying to reach anybody. He is with the Lord, which is far better, and he is waiting for the same trumpet we are.

There is one more pastoral use for this doctrine. People who are dying often want to know what the next moment will be like, and the intermediate state gives us something definite to say. Not a tunnel, not a long sleep, not a period of purification, but the presence of the Lord Jesus, immediately and consciously, on the strength of what He did rather than what they managed.

I have sat with believers who were frightened of the process of dying and not at all frightened of being dead, and that is a rational place to be. The valley is real; the shepherd is in it. Death for the Christian is a departure and an arrival on the same afternoon.

And there is a word here for the believer who is not dying but is simply weary. Rest is promised. Revelation says of those who die in the Lord that they rest from their labours and their deeds follow them, which is a striking way of putting it. The work stops; the fruit does not.

So, now what?

If you are grieving a believer, take the two certainties and let them do their work slowly. He is with Jesus now. His body will rise. Everything else you would like to know is God’s business, and He has told you what He judged you needed.

And if you are afraid of dying, notice how Paul spoke about it. Departing was gain to him, not because he was tired of life but because he knew who was waiting. What would it take for you to be able to say the same sentence about your own death and mean it?

Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.

2 Corinthians 5:8 (ESV)

For Further Study

For the wider doctrine I would point you to Charles Ryrie in Basic Theology on the state of the dead, J. Dwight Pentecost in Things to Come for the sequence of resurrections, Lewis Sperry Chafer in his Systematic Theology for the older discussion of Abraham’s side and the ascension, and John Walvoord for the relation of the rapture to the dead in Christ. Millard Erickson in Christian Theology surveys the competing views of the intermediate state fairly, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum sets the Jewish background out helpfully in his writing on the life and resurrection to come.