What Is the Intermediate State Between Death and Resurrection?

Question 5100.

The intermediate state is the condition of a human being between the moment of death and the resurrection of the body. It is one of those doctrines that hardly anyone can name and almost everyone has opinions about, usually absorbed from hymns, films and funerals rather than from Scripture.

It matters more than it looks. Get it wrong in one direction and you end up with the dead asleep in the ground for centuries. Get it wrong in the other and you lose the resurrection altogether, which is where the New Testament actually places our hope. So it is worth taking the trouble to see what the Bible says.

Defining the intermediate state

Scripture describes three conditions for a human being. There is embodied life now, which is what we are all experiencing. There is resurrection life to come, embodied again but transformed and no longer subject to death. And there is a period between the two, when the body is in the ground and the person is not.

That middle period is what theologians call the intermediate state. The word intermediate is doing exactly the work it sounds like it is doing: this is a stage between, not a destination. Any account of it that treats it as the goal of the Christian hope has quietly replaced resurrection with something smaller.

It is also, by definition, a disembodied condition. That is unusual for a human being and Scripture treats it as such. We were made embodied and we will be embodied for ever. The intermediate state is the one stretch of our existence in which that is not the case, and the New Testament is noticeably uncomfortable about it.

The Old Testament picture

The Old Testament speaks of Sheol, the realm of the dead, and it is remarkably reserved about the details. The dead go down to Sheol. They are described as weak, as shades, as cut off from the activity of the living. Hezekiah complains that the grave cannot praise God. The atmosphere is one of diminishment rather than of blessing.

That reserve is not an accident. Progressive revelation means the earlier writers had less light on this than we do, and honesty requires us to admit it rather than reading later doctrine back into Job. What the Old Testament does hold, in flashes, is the conviction that God will not abandon his own to Sheol. Psalm 16 and Psalm 49 both reach for that hope.

So the Old Testament view of the intermediate state is genuinely dim compared with what follows. It knows the dead continue. It knows God’s people have a hope beyond death. It does not spell out the shape of it, and the fuller picture arrives with Jesus, who alone brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.

The intermediate state after Jesus

With the New Testament the fog lifts considerably. For the believer, to be absent from the body is to be at home with the Lord. To depart is to be with Jesus, which is far better. The dying thief is promised Paradise that same day. Stephen commits his spirit to Jesus as he dies.

There is no waiting, no interval of unconsciousness, and no probationary period. The change is immediate. Whatever the intermediate state involves, it begins the moment the heart stops, and for the believer it consists first of all in the presence of Jesus. I have set out that evidence more fully in what happens to the believer at death.

For the unbeliever the picture is the reverse and equally immediate. The rich man in Luke 16 is in Hades and in torment, conscious, remembering, aware of his situation and of a fixed chasm he cannot cross. That account is dealt with separately in what happens to the unbeliever at death.

Consciousness in the intermediate state

The evidence for continued awareness is strong and comes from several directions. Moses and Elijah appear at the transfiguration and converse with Jesus about his coming departure, which is a good deal more than dormancy. The rich man in Luke 16 reasons and pleads. The martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6 cry out and ask how long.

Paul’s whole argument in Philippians 1 depends on it. He weighs continuing in the body against departing to be with Jesus and calls the latter far better. If the intermediate state were unconsciousness, the comparison would be meaningless. An unconscious believer gains nothing over a labouring apostle, and Paul would have had no dilemma to describe.

And Jesus’ argument with the Sadducees turns on the same point. God says I am the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, in the present tense, long after all three had died. He is not God of the dead but of the living. That is Matthew 22:32, and Jesus rests a whole doctrine on a verb tense.

Soul sleep and why I reject it

Soul sleep is the view that the dead are unconscious until the resurrection, so that the intermediate state passes in an instant of subjective time. It appeals partly because the New Testament repeatedly describes dead believers as having fallen asleep, and partly because it removes some awkward questions.

The sleep language, though, is applied to the body rather than to the person. It is a natural euphemism for a corpse, which does look asleep, and every culture reaches for something similar. Luke uses it of Stephen in the same paragraph in which Stephen commits his spirit to Jesus, which would be a flat contradiction if sleep described the whole person.

Beyond the vocabulary, the positive evidence is simply too strong. The rich man, the martyrs, Moses and Elijah, Paul’s far better, the promise of Paradise today. Each of these would have to be explained away individually, and a doctrine that requires that much explaining away is usually the doctrine at fault. I do not doubt the sincerity of those who hold it; I do not think the texts allow it.

Purgatory and the intermediate state

Roman Catholic teaching holds that most of the faithful pass through a purifying suffering before entering the presence of God. The doctrine developed gradually and rests substantially on 2 Maccabees, which I do not regard as Scripture, together with strained readings of 1 Corinthians 3 and Matthew 12.

My objection is not chiefly historical. It is that purgatory is unnecessary given what the cross accomplished. If the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin, then there is no residue requiring further treatment. The thief on the cross had no opportunity to make satisfaction for anything and was told he would be in Paradise that day.

1 Corinthians 3 does describe a testing by fire, but the context is plain: it tests the believer’s work, not the believer, and the person is saved even if everything they built is burned. That is a judgement of service at the seat of Christ, not a purification of persons in the intermediate state, and the two should not be confused.

Did Old Testament saints change location?

This is where I want to be careful, because it is a genuinely disputed question among people who agree about everything else. The traditional dispensational view holds that before the cross the righteous dead were held in a separate compartment of Sheol, often called Abraham’s bosom or Paradise, and that at his ascension Jesus led them into the immediate presence of God.

The argument rests mainly on Luke 16, where the two men are in the same general realm but separated by a chasm, and on Ephesians 4:8, where Paul says that when he ascended on high he led a host of captives. Read together, they suggest a transfer took place, and a number of careful writers have defended it.

Others take Abraham’s side in Luke 16 as simply a way of describing the presence of God from the start, with no relocation involved. I lean toward the traditional view because it does better justice to the change the cross made and to the Ephesians text, but I hold it loosely. It is not a doctrine I would divide over, and anyone teaching it should be honest that the evidence is suggestive rather than decisive.

What the intermediate state is not

It is not the Christian hope. This needs saying loudly, because a great deal of popular Christianity stops at going to heaven when we die. The New Testament does not. Every major passage about the future runs on past the intermediate state to resurrection, to the return of Jesus, and to a renewed creation.

It is not a second chance. Hebrews 9:27 puts death and judgement in immediate sequence, and Luke 16 has a chasm fixed so that none may cross. Whatever decisions a person makes, they make on this side. The intermediate state is a condition, not a corridor with doors along it.

And it is not a place of activity in the way we might imagine. Scripture tells us very little about what the departed do. There are prayers in Revelation 6 and there is rest. Beyond that, speculation is just speculation, and I would rather say I do not know than fill the silence with guesswork dressed as teaching.

The disembodied problem

Paul finds the prospect of disembodiment genuinely uncomfortable, and it is worth noticing how candid he is about it. In 2 Corinthians 5 he groans, longing to be further clothed rather than unclothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He does not want to shed a body. He wants a better one.

That instinct is right, because a human being without a body is a human being in an incomplete condition. This is one of the reasons I hold to a real distinction between spirit, soul and body rather than a materialist account of the person: something continues that is not the body, and yet its separation from the body is treated as an abnormality to be reversed. The case is laid out in body, soul and spirit: two parts or three.

So the intermediate state is blessed for the believer and it is not final. Being with Jesus is far better than remaining here. Being with Jesus in a resurrection body on a renewed earth is better still, and that is what the whole creation is waiting for according to Romans 8.

How the intermediate state ends

For the Church it ends at the coming of Jesus for his own. Paul describes it in 1 Thessalonians 4: the Lord himself will descend, the dead in Christ will rise first, and then those who are alive will be caught up together with them. God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep, which assumes they are already with him.

I hold that this event precedes the tribulation period and that it requires no preceding signs, which is why the New Testament writers speak of waiting for it at any moment. The passage ends with an instruction to encourage one another, which tells you what Paul thought the doctrine was for.

For the unrighteous the intermediate state ends at the great white throne, where Death and Hades give up the dead in them and judgement is passed. Revelation 20 places that after the millennial reign, which is one of the reasons I do not treat the resurrection as a single undifferentiated event. There is more on the sequence in the other resurrections in the Bible.

Why any of this matters

It matters at funerals, first of all. What we say over a coffin either rests on something or it does not, and Christian comfort is not the general hope that things work out. It is the specific claim that the person who trusted Jesus is with him now and will be raised bodily later. Both halves of that are needed.

It matters for how we face our own death. The intermediate state is not a terror for the believer and it is not the end of the story either. Knowing both of those keeps us from the two errors of dreading death and of treating the body as disposable packaging we will be glad to be rid of.

And it matters for how we live now. If bodies are going to be raised, then what we do with them matters. If the dead in Christ are with him and will return with him, then the church is a far larger thing than the people in the building on Sunday. Doctrine like this quietly reorders the way you look at everything.

Two words worth knowing

Two terms keep appearing in any discussion of the intermediate state, and knowing them saves a good deal of confusion. The first is hades, the Greek word that translates the Hebrew Sheol. In the New Testament it is used of the holding condition of the unrighteous dead, and it is emptied and disposed of in Revelation 20. It is not the final state and translating it as hell has caused endless muddle.

The second is paradeisos, Paradise, a word borrowed from Persian for an enclosed garden. Jesus uses it of where the thief would be that afternoon. Paul uses it of the place he was caught up to. Revelation puts the tree of life there. Whatever the geography, the substance of it is the presence of God, and that is what makes it Paradise rather than the scenery.

Keeping those two apart clears up most of the popular confusion about the intermediate state. One names blessing in God’s presence, the other names conscious separation from it, and both are temporary conditions awaiting a final and public resolution.

A note on prayers for the dead

Since the intermediate state is fixed at death, prayers for the departed have no biblical warrant and no biblical example. Scripture never instructs us to pray for the dead and never records anyone doing so with approval. The practice grew up alongside purgatory and depends on it, which is why it disappeared from the churches of the Reformation along with the doctrine that required it.

This is not a small pastoral point. Where prayers for the dead are practised, the bereaved carry an ongoing burden of responsibility for someone they can no longer help. Where they are not, grief is grief and nothing more, which is heavy enough. David stopped fasting when the child died, and his reasoning in 2 Samuel 12:23 is instructive: I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.

What we can do is thank God for those who have gone, and take the lesson Hebrews draws from them. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. That is the biblical use of the departed, and it is a good deal more useful to the living than an anxious prayer that changes nothing.

So, now what?

If you have lost someone who belonged to Jesus, the biblical answer is better than the vague one we usually reach for. They are not asleep, not waiting in uncertainty, and not being made ready by suffering. They are with him, and their body has an appointment that has already been fixed.

And if you have been living as though this life were the whole of it, the intermediate state is a reminder that death changes your address rather than ending your existence. That is either the best news you will hear this year or the most serious, and which of the two depends entirely on what you have done with Jesus. What would you want settled before that day arrives?

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.

1 Thessalonians 4:16, ESV

For Further Study

Charles Ryrie treats the intermediate state briefly and clearly in Basic Theology, and J. Dwight Pentecost gives the fullest dispensational account of the sequence of resurrections and judgements in Things to Come. John Walvoord is careful on the relationship between the Rapture and the resurrection of the Church, and Lewis Sperry Chafer discusses the condition of the departed at length in his Systematic Theology. Millard Erickson surveys the debate over soul sleep and the disembodied state fairly in Christian Theology, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum is helpful on the Jewish background to Sheol and Abraham’s bosom.