What is the Intermediate State?

Question 10101.

The intermediate state is the condition of a person between the moment of death and the resurrection of the body, and Scripture presents it as conscious, personal and, for the believer, immediately in the presence of the Lord. It is called intermediate because it is temporary. It is not the end of the story and it was never meant to be.

I find that most Christians have a rather vague picture here. We speak of a loved one being in heaven, and we speak of the resurrection at the last day, without quite noticing that we have described two different things. Both are true, and holding them together is what the intermediate state is about.

Why we need the category at all

The Bible teaches that the body returns to the dust and that the body will one day rise. Between those two events there is a gap, and the person does not cease to exist during it. That gap is the intermediate state.

We are made as spirit, soul and body, and death is the tearing apart of what God joined. The body goes into the ground; the immaterial person goes to be with the Lord. That is not the finished salvation Scripture promises, which is why Paul can describe the intermediate state as being unclothed and can long for something better still.

So the intermediate state is real, it is good for the believer, and it is incomplete. All three of those need saying together.

What happens to believers

Paul is as plain as anyone could wish. He writes at 2 Corinthians 5:8 that to be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord, and at Philippians 1:23 that to depart and be with Christ is far better. The Greek word he uses at Philippians is analuo, a word for casting off the ropes of a ship or striking camp. He is going somewhere.

Jesus said the same thing to the dying thief at Luke 23:43. Today, he said, you will be with me in paradise. Not eventually, not after a period of adjustment, not when the last trumpet sounds. Today. That man had no baptism, no church membership, no record of service and no opportunity to acquire any of them, and he went straight into the company of Jesus on the strength of a single believing request. Whatever else the intermediate state involves, it involves the immediate presence of Jesus for everyone who belongs to him.

There is no waiting room, no probation, no purification. I have set out why in my answer on where believers go when they die.

What happens to unbelievers

Luke 16 is our clearest window. The rich man dies and finds himself in Hades, conscious, in torment, capable of memory, speech and concern for his five brothers still living. Whatever we make of the details of that account, Jesus told it, and he told it as a description of the condition of the lost after death. He did not signal that he was speaking in cartoons, and he gave one of the characters a name, which he does nowhere else in a parable.

Hades in this sense is the intermediate state for the unsaved, not their final destination. Revelation 20 shows Hades giving up its dead for the second resurrection before the Great White Throne. The lake of fire comes afterwards, as I explain in my answer on the lake of fire.

This is why the intermediate state is not a second chance. Hebrews 9:27 puts death and judgement in that order and leaves no interval for a change of mind.

Are we conscious, or asleep?

The New Testament does describe dead believers as having fallen asleep, and some have built a doctrine of soul sleep on it. I think that misreads a gentle idiom. Sleep is what death looks like from the outside, applied to the body, in the confidence that the sleeper will be woken.

You can see the idiom breaking down whenever the writers describe the experience from the inside. Nobody who is asleep is at home with the Lord in any meaningful sense, and Paul plainly thinks departing is gain rather than an unconscious interval.

The full case is in my answer on soul sleep. For now it is enough to say that the intermediate state is a waking state.

Why the intermediate state is not the goal

Here is where our hymns sometimes let us down. We sing about going to heaven when we die as though that were the finish line. Scripture treats it as the corridor, not the room.

The hope held out to us is bodily resurrection and a new heaven and new earth. Paul does not long to be a disembodied spirit; he longs to be further clothed. Redemption is not escape from the body but the redemption of the body, and until that happens even the happiest condition of the dead in Christ is unfinished business.

That is worth remembering at a graveside. We do not say goodbye to a soul that has left matter behind for good. We commit a body to the ground in the certainty that it will be raised. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and then the words that matter most in the whole service, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life. The old liturgy knew exactly what it was doing when it put those two halves in that order, and I have never found a better way of saying it at a graveside on a wet Tuesday morning.

Old Testament saints and the intermediate state

Before the cross the Old Testament saints went to Sheol, described in Luke 16 as Abraham’s side, a place of comfort separated from the place of torment. Many dispensational writers hold that at the ascension those saints were taken into the immediate presence of God, and I find that reading persuasive.

Whether or not one presses that detail, the substance is unchanged. The godly dead of the Old Testament were not annihilated and were not in torment. They waited in comfort for a promise that had not yet been kept.

I have written more fully on Abraham’s bosom if you want to follow that thread.

What we are not told

Scripture is generous about the fact of the intermediate state and reserved about its furniture. We are not told what the dead in Christ do, how they perceive time, or how much they know of what is happening here. Revelation 6 shows martyrs under the altar asking how long, which suggests awareness of unfinished justice, but it is a single scene in a highly symbolic book and I would not build a system on it.

That reserve is deliberate, and I have come to be grateful for it. Every generation produces books that fill the silence with detail, and the detail always turns out to say more about the author’s imagination than about the text. When someone tells me exactly what their grandmother is doing at this moment, I do not argue; I just notice that the Bible declined to say.

What we are told is the one thing that matters, which is who they are with. Presence, not scenery, is the substance of the promise.

Living in the light of the intermediate state

Doctrine like this earns its keep in a hospital corridor. When someone I love is dying, the intermediate state means I am not saying farewell to a person who will be nowhere for two thousand years. They will be with Jesus before I have finished the sentence.

It also means grief is honest. Paul does not say we do not grieve; he says we do not grieve as those who have no hope. The intermediate state is comfort, not anaesthetic.

And it means the resurrection stays in view, which keeps our hope from evaporating into something wispy and Greek rather than solid and biblical.

So, now what?

If you have buried someone who trusted Jesus, take the comfort that belongs to you. They are with the Lord now, and their body is in the ground on loan.

If you have not settled your own standing before God, notice that the intermediate state begins the instant your heart stops, and nothing after that point can be altered. That is not a scare tactic; it is simply what the text says. Today is the day of salvation.

There is a pastoral use for this doctrine among the living as well. A church that has grasped the intermediate state visits the dying differently. It does not fumble for something vaguely spiritual to say. It reads Scripture, prays, and speaks to a person who is about to see the face of the Lord Jesus within the hour. I have sat by beds where that certainty changed the atmosphere of the room, and I would not trade it for all the comforting vagueness in the world.

And if you are a believer who has been living as though this world were the whole of it, what would change this week if you really believed you were an eternal creature on a short deployment?

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