If mankind doesn’t go to ‘hell’ or ‘heaven’ when he dies, but goes there once Judgement Day comes (after being brought from the ground after death) — where do you think we go in the meantime? The time between death and Judgement Day?
Well that is a big question. We’d have to qualify first what we are referring to. If you are asking what I think, you first have to presuppose that I believe in this paradigm of death/Judgment Day. If you are asking what the Bible says, that is something else. I lay out in my book that Jesus teaches about a Judgment Day at the end of the world (aka the apocalypse), when he will return to carry out God’s judgment of all humanity. The good will live immortally in the new earth–earth restored to an Eden-like state for all eternity, while the evildoers will be thrown into God’s fire and be destroyed (though there are variations on this).
In that view, all the people who have ever died will be resurrected from the dead and be judged accordingly as stated above. Your question is where do the dead go in the meantime. First, we have to acknowledge that the above paradigm is true if we believe Jesus was talking literally and not metaphorically. That is really impossible to be sure of, although the biblical evidence leans heavily to the side of the literal. I personally believe the talk about judgment day is much more metaphor and allegory. But, if we want to understand it literally, we would have to take into account the Judaism of Jesus’ time, and the period preceding him for about two hundred years when Jewish apocalyptic thinking rose significantly.
In that case, the dead would be in Sheol as it says in the Old Testament. Sheol is just the ground or the grave–the dead would be in the ground awaiting resurrection on judgment day. Some took Sheol to be an underworld–abode of the dead–but nothing like what we think of as hell where souls are tormented forever (a simple question few seem to ask is: if we suffer there for eternity, how is it that it is then interrupted when Jesus returns. And when he returns the wicked will be risen only to be condemned again and sent back to hell? Doesn’t make much sense). Sheol was a place all the dead would go while awaiting judgment–not just the wicked. In addition, the ancient Jews did not believe in a separation of body and soul. God breathed life into a body and that is who we are; when the body dies, the breath goes back to God.
I could write about this all day but will have to leave it there. I hope this was helpful!
Kevin
