One of the most unusual doctrines that I have read about, is that of soul sleep. This is a belief held by certain religious groups such as the Jehovah Witnesses which makes the claim that when one dies their soul sleeps until their body is resurrected upon the second coming of Christ. Now, when I first heard of this theory I immediately dismissed it as not only non-Biblical, but unsound. After all, when we die we all know that our souls are instantaneously transported to either Heaven, the place where the saints of the Lord go, or Hell, a place of eternal torment for the unbelievers. However, I must admit that upon considering the nature of the soul and the body, I was a little confused with the process. For instance, why is it that our souls need to be reunited with our physical bodies? For most of us, we think of Heaven as being the final destination of our souls, to where, the prospect of being brought back to a physical reality employs a most disagreeable situation. The bottom line is this, first, why is it that Heaven is characterized in Scripture as being our eternal dwelling place, yet, it also states that we are to be resurrected in the body? Does this imply that the Bible is being inconsistent in dealing with our ultimate destinies? And lastly, why must we go to Heaven when we are only going to be brought back to earth, albeit, a perfected one, as is made clear in Isaiah 65:17-25?

Initially, when dealing with life after death, there is this image of there being another place, separate with and unconnected to, our physical world. This would be what we think of as Heaven or Hell. The Bible tell us in Corinthians 5:6 that “we are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.� As this implies, when we die, our disembodied souls go to another place, another side of reality where dwells our Lord. Furthermore, this is during the period of time we, who are still alive, dwell in this physical world. We know this because Jesus, in the gospels, spoke of a beggar named Lazarus who dwelt in such a place after his death. However, according to those who believe in soul sleep (the belief that when one dies their soul sleeps until the resurrection-and their consciousness thus awakens contemporaneously to a new body), the soul is not conscious during this period. Yet, this can not be the case, since, there are accounts in Scripture of individuals who exist in one place while we who are alive exist in another. Then, the Bible is clear that when we die, we go to Heaven without a body.

And even more, the Bible promises that the soul will be reunited with the body. In 1 Corinthians 15:51-53 it says that “we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed…� Though, I would like to stop right here and clarify something. It is necessary to understand that Paul is not communicating a doctrine of soul sleep. Sleep, as the term is used here, is done so in the same sense as, when in the Old Testament, people died they were viewed as sleeping. This does not mean that they were literally sleeping. In the same manner as Jesus illustrated with the story of Lazarus the beggar, people who die go somewhere although their body sleeps. With this in mind, the passage goes on to say that “for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed, for this corruptible must put on incorruptible, and this mortal must put on immortality.� In short, the body dies away, we go to either Heaven or Hell, and then in the resurrection we are reunited with our bodies that are glorified and incorruptible.

But, for many of us, we often wonder why it is that this whole process is necessary. After all, our souls go to be with the Lord. And, is not Heaven where He dwells? Why should we wish to be sucked back down to an earthly dwelling when, as Jesus promised, “In [His] Father’s house there are many mansions…I go to prepare a place for you (John 14:3)� Is not the resurrected earth still somehow unconnected to Heaven and where our Lord is? Remember however, in the beginning, Adam’s intimate relationship with God was so pure and holy that there was nothing that separated Adam from Him. Why should the new earth be any different? We think of the physical world as being somehow located below Heaven, but I propose that when it is renewed, it will be like it probably was, surrounded by it, not beneath it. Earth may be God’s footstool now, but it may have been something more like His table where he sat with humanity face to face. So, the resurrection is not taking us from Heaven, it is more like putting in a few extra rooms on our homes. We will never be taken from His presence; we will just be given more places to be with Him. Heaven will be, in a sense, physical and spiritual.

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