What Is the Final Destiny of the Human Person According to Scripture?

Question 5199.

The final destiny of the human person is one of those questions that people think they have already answered until you press them on it. Ask a congregation where they are going and most will say heaven. Ask what they will be doing there and the answers thin out considerably. Ask whether they expect to have a body, and you will get a pause. Scripture is a good deal more concrete than our vagueness suggests, and the concreteness is the comfort.

I want to set out what the Bible actually says about where a human being ends up, and I want to do it in order, because the order is where most of the confusion lies. There are stages to this, and collapsing them into one blurred picture of clouds and harps has done real damage to Christian hope.

Death is not the final destiny of anyone

Start with what death is not. It is not extinction, and it is not the end of the story for anybody, saved or lost. Scripture treats death as a separation rather than a cessation: the body returns to the dust and the spirit returns to God who gave it. The person continues. That is why Jesus can tell the dying thief that today he will be with Him in paradise, and why Paul can say that to be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8).

This intermediate state is real, conscious and blessed for the believer, but it is not the final destiny. Paul does not describe it as the goal. He describes it as being unclothed, which is not a word anyone chooses for the happy ending. He longs not to be stripped but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Disembodied existence is better than this world for the Christian, and it is still not what we were made for.

Resurrection, not simply survival

The Christian hope has never been the immortality of the soul. Plenty of religions offer that. The Christian hope is resurrection: the raising of the body, transformed and incorruptible, reunited with the person who left it. Paul builds an entire chapter on it and refuses to let his readers treat it as optional. If the dead are not raised, he says, then our preaching is in vain and we are of all people most to be pitied.

I hold that this happens for the church at the return of Jesus for His own, when the dead in Christ rise first and the living are caught up together with them (1 Thessalonians 4:16). That is not the end of the programme either. Israel’s promises are kept, the nations are judged, and there is a literal reign of Jesus from Jerusalem before the last things are settled. But the point for our purposes is the shape of the thing: the final destiny of the human person is embodied.

Two destinations, honestly stated

I would rather not write this paragraph, but leaving it out would be dishonest. Scripture speaks of two final destinations and not one. Jesus spoke about the second more than anyone else in the Bible, which ought to give pause to those who present Him as too gentle to mention it. Those who reject the Son face a conscious, unending separation from God, described in language of fire, darkness and outer exclusion.

I do not hold that the lost are annihilated, and I do not hold that everyone is eventually saved. Both would be easier to preach. The same passages that promise eternal life to the believer use the same word for what awaits the unbeliever, and you cannot make one temporary without making the other temporary too. The final destiny of a person who will not have God is to have their wish granted permanently, and that is a terrible thing rather than a satisfying one.

The new heavens and the new earth

For the redeemed, the final destiny is not a disembodied heaven but a renewed creation. John sees a new heaven and a new earth, and the movement is downwards rather than upwards: the holy city comes down out of heaven from God, and the announcement is that the dwelling place of God is with man (Revelation 21:3). God does not evacuate His people from the material world. He comes and lives in it with them.

That reframes a great deal. Bodies matter. Places matter. Work and beauty and food and company matter, because the world to come has all of them in it. The frequently repeated idea that Christians are so heavenly minded as to be no earthly use usually attaches itself to a version of the hope that Scripture does not actually teach.

What the person will be like

The person who arrives is the person who left, and that continuity is essential. The word Scripture uses for the inner life, psyche, is never treated as a temporary costume. You are not replaced by a better model. You are the one who is raised, healed, completed and confirmed in righteousness, with the same memories and the same name and a body you will recognise as yours.

What is gone is the capacity to sin and the vulnerability to death. What remains is you. I have written on the constitution of the person in body, soul and spirit: are we two parts or three?, and on the resurrection body itself in what will our resurrection bodies be like? Both bear directly on this question, because the final destiny of the human person is only good news if the person survives the journey.

Judgement stands between here and there

Nobody arrives at their final destiny without passing an assessment, and Scripture describes two different ones. The believer stands before the judgement seat of Christ, where the question is not salvation but service, and where work that was built out of straw goes up in smoke while the builder is saved (1 Corinthians 3:15). That is a sobering scene and not a terrifying one. It is the difference between an examination you might fail and an examination that decides whether you are in the family.

The great white throne is another matter entirely. There the books are opened and the dead are judged by what they have done, and the only rescue is a name written in the book of life. I mention it here because a good deal of loose talk about the afterlife assumes that everyone drifts to the same place by default. Scripture does not know that idea. It knows a road that forks, and it puts a cross at the fork.

None of this is offered to frighten anybody into faith. Fear makes converts who do not last. It is offered because the final destiny of the human person is a matter of fact rather than preference, and I would be a poor pastor if I let you think otherwise for the sake of a comfortable afternoon.

Why this changes how you live now

A vague hope produces a vague life. If the future is a fog of pleasant feelings, then present suffering has no shape and present obedience has no weight. But if the final destiny of the human person is a real resurrection into a real world under a real King, then what you do with your body now is connected to what you will be given then. Paul finishes his great resurrection chapter not with speculation but with an instruction to be steadfast and immovable, because your labour is not in vain.

It also changes how you grieve. Christians do not pretend death is a friend. We stand at the graveside and call it an enemy, because that is what Paul calls it, and then we say it is a defeated enemy on a fixed timetable. That is a far sturdier comfort than telling a widow her husband has become a star.

So, now what?

Settle your own case first. All the theology in the world about the final destiny of the human person is of no use to you if you have not dealt with the Person who determines it. The question is not whether you find the doctrine attractive but whether you are in Christ, and that is a matter of trusting Him rather than admiring the scheme.

Then live forwards. Let the certainty of resurrection make you braver with your money, slower to take offence, and more willing to spend yourself on things that will not pay you back in this life. And when you next stand by a grave, say the old words as though you mean them, because they are true. Where do you actually expect to be a thousand years from now?

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” (Revelation 21:3)