While we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord . . . and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.
2 Corinthians 5:6, 8
In the dead of a Minnesota winter, a couple decided to thaw out on a Florida beach. But personal responsibilities kept the wife home an extra day, so she planned to fly down the day after her husband. When the husband arrived in Key West and checked in to the hotel, he unpacked and then shot off a quick email to his wife before going to the beach. Unfortunately, in his rush to get out the door he transposed two letters in his wife’s email address.
Meanwhile, a minister’s wife in Chicago had just buried her husband of forty-five years. Entering her home after the funeral, exhausted and numb from losing him so suddenly, she decided to check her email in hopes of reading messages of condolence to soothe her shattered spirit. Overlooking the address of the sender, she screamed when she saw the first message . . . and then fainted. Rushing into the room, her daughter saw her mother on the floor and revived her. Then the daughter read the message:
Darling Wife:
I’m sure you’re surprised to hear from me. I’ve just arrived and checked in, and I wanted to send you a quick note saying I can’t wait until you get here. The staff has everything ready for you. I’m looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. And if everything goes as planned you should get here as quickly as I did.
PS: It sure is hot down here. I know you’re gonna love it!
Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once advised: “It is unwise for Christians to claim any knowledge of either the furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell.”1 And while there is some truth to Niebuhr’s warning, I think we can safely assume that hell isn’t anything like Key West!
We can also assume, based on what the Bible reveals about the new heaven and the new earth, that Key West—for all its beauty—doesn’t hold a candle to the splendor of the future home God is preparing for us. But one thing is certain: every human being is going to either heaven or hell when they die.
In his book Heaven, Randy Alcorn observes that “worldwide, 3 people die every second, 180 every minute, and nearly 11,000 every hour. If the Bible is right about what happens to us after death, it means that more than 250,000 people every day go either to Heaven or Hell.”2 The mind staggers at those statistics—a quarter of a million spirits depart the earth, every single day, bound for one of two destinies. Numbers like this prove the accuracy of the old adage: “No one gets out of this world alive.” But why is death inevitable—both for Christians and non-Christians?
Why the Living Must Die
Death is the result of the universal disease infecting us all: sin. Solomon declared that death is the “fate for all men” (Eccles. 9:3)—“for the righteous and for the wicked . . . for the clean and for the unclean . . . [for the] good man [and for] the sinner” (v. 2). The universality of death is illustrated at every funeral and in every cemetery throughout the world. J. Sidlow Baxter was correct when he wrote:
A million graveyards proclaim with ceaseless voice that man is mortal and that the living are dying. What wreckage of the race has Death made! What is this revolving orb on which we live but the vast cemetery of mankind?3
Death is every person’s fate because every man, woman, and child is guilty of sin against God. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” Paul declared in Romans 3:23. And sin—the thumbing of our noses at God’s moral code—is punishable by death, just as Paul wrote later in his letter to the Romans: “For the wages of sin is death” (6:23).
From the very beginning of human history, death was the just punishment for sin. God warned Adam and Eve that if they rebelled against His clear command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would die. And die they did.
With the exceptions of Enoch and Elijah (and those believers alive at the rapture of the church), every person since Adam and Eve has died or will die. The fact that death awaits us all strikes fear into the hearts of many people. Job called death “the king of terrors” (Job 18:14). The psalmist confessed that his heart was in agony because “the terrors of death have fallen upon me” (Ps. 55:4). And the writer to the Hebrews likened death to a slave master, chaining humanity in fear (Heb. 2:15).
Death is the nightmare of all nightmares for those who face death without faith in Jesus Christ. The actor Jack Nicholson knows the terror of death. He wrestled with his own mortality while making The Bucket List—a movie about two terminally ill men who leave a cancer ward for a road trip to do the things they always wanted to do before “kicking the bucket.” In an interview promoting the film, Nicholson said:
I use to live so freely. The mantra for my generation was “Be your own man!” I always said, “Hey, you can have whatever rules you want—I’m going to have mine. I’ll accept the guilt. I’ll pay the check. I’ll do the time.” I chose my own way. That was my philosophical position well into my 50s. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to adjust. . . . We all want to go on forever, don’t we? We fear the unknown. Everybody goes to that wall, yet nobody knows what’s on the other side. That’s why we fear death.4
It’s understandable for unbelievers to fear death—they don’t know what awaits them on the other side of the grave. But even for believers, the prospects of death and dying can be unnerving. Joni Eareckson Tada wrote:
I look at my own degenerating body and wonder how I will approach that final passage. Will it be short and sweet? Or long and agonizing? Will my husband be able to take care of me? Or will my quadriplegia better suit me for a nursing home? It’s not so much I’m afraid of death as dying.5
Without a doubt, the thought of death can fill us with terror and dread. However, knowing our destination when we depart this life can dramatically diminish that understandable fear.
Where the Dead Go When They Die
One of my mentors in seminary, Howard Hendricks, always encouraged his students to keep the hope of heaven at the center of our preaching because it is in heaven where life is found. He would say, “We are not in the land of the living on our way to the land of the dying. Instead, we are in the land of the dying on our way to the land of the living.” How true that is!
For a Christian, death is not a terminus of life; death is a transition to life—real life. However, for the unbeliever, death marks a transition to what the Bible calls “the second death” (Rev. 20:14)—an eternal existence separated from God.
I believe every person born is presented with a choice at some point in his or her life: to either accept or reject God’s free gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. It is a choice that can only be made in this life. Once we’ve passed through death’s door into the afterlife, our choice is eternally fixed.
An epitaph on a century-old tombstone in an Indiana cemetery serves as a stark reminder of the certainty of death for all of us:
Pause, stranger, when you pass me by;
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you will be,
So prepare for death and follow me.
An unknown visitor to the cemetery saw the tombstone and, after a few moments in contemplation, scrawled a reply:
To follow you I’m not content,
Until I know which way you went.6
Whether you will die is not up for debate. The crucial question is this: “Where are you going after you die?” That question can only be answered by another question: “Did you trust in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins?” Your eternal destiny rests on your answer to that question.
Two Possible Destinations
The Bible employs various terms to describe the future destination of those who die—sheol, hades, Abraham’s bosom, and Paradise—but ultimately there are only two destinies: heaven or hell.
However, as we saw in chapter 2, there is a present heaven—the “third heaven” of 2 Corinthians 12:2 where God dwells—and a future heaven that is being constructed for us as described in Revelation 21:1–2. The present heaven is the “temporary heaven” while the future heaven is the “permanent heaven.” (We’ll look at hell in greater detail in chapter 9, but, like heaven, there is both a temporary and a permanent place of suffering for the unsaved.)
Where Do Christians Go When They Die?
It is a great hope and comfort to know that at death the spirit of every believer is immediately ushered into the presence of God—the third heaven. And we have Jesus’s promise to rely on for that assurance. He declared to the thief on the cross who, moments earlier, had professed his faith in Christ: “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).
When Stephen was being stoned, he anticipated being with Jesus at death. Stephen “called on the Lord and said, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!’” (Acts 7:59). Paul’s great desire was “to depart and be with Christ” (Phil. 1:23). The Greek word for “depart” (analuo) was used in reference to a ship being loosed from its moorings so it might sail away. The “mooring” that kept Paul tethered to his earthly life was his commitment to the gospel ministry. But his ultimate desire was to “sail away” to Christ.
However, the most complete explanation of what happens to a believer the moment he or she dies is found in 2 Corinthians 5:6–8:
Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord—for we walk by faith, not by sight—we are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.
Without getting lost in the grammatical weeds of the original language, let me point out two important insights from the Greek. First, the phrases in verse 6, “we are at home in the body” and “we are absent from the Lord,” are in the present tense, representing continuous action. We might paraphrase verse 6 like this: “Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are continuing to live at home in the body we likewise are continuing to live absent from the Lord.”
In other words, while our bodies are here on earth, we’re not in the presence of Christ in heaven, any more than I am in my home with my wife, Amy, in Dallas while I am also in a lonely hotel room in New York. Guess where I would rather be?
Second, the phrases “to be absent from the body” and “to be at home with the Lord” indicate actions that are completed rather than continuing. We might paraphrase verse 8 like this: “we are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to have completely departed from the body and to be finally at home with the Lord.”
That is exactly how I feel when I’ve been away from home too long. I’m ready to be completely absent from New York (or wherever I happened to be) and to be finally at home with Amy.
When I’m away from home, I’m thinking about Amy and can’t wait to get back to her. But once I’m home, I certainly don’t long to be in that lonely hotel room in an unfamiliar city. That’s the point Paul is making in 2 Corinthians 5:6, 8. To be present here (earth) is to be absent from there (heaven), but to be absent here is to be present there. Once we leave our earthly bodies behind—which are nothing more than the cocoon from which a butterfly emerges—our spirits are instantly transported to our heavenly home where Christ is, as we await the time we will receive our eternal bodies. More about that in the next section.
The Third Heaven: Our Real but Temporary Home
Until the new heaven and the new earth are completed, all Christians who die are immediately transported into the presence of God—the third heaven. The apostle Paul is clear that at the rapture all Christians will receive their new, glorified bodies in which they will live for eternity. “All Christians” includes those Christians who died prior to the rapture (“the dead in Christ,” as Paul calls them), as well as those Christians who are alive at the rapture and never experience death:
For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words. (1 Thess. 4:16–18)
Paul describes the instantaneous change that both the “dead in Christ” and those Christians alive at the rapture will experience:
Behold, I tell you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. (1 Cor. 15:51–52)
Not every Christian will die (or “sleep,” as Paul describes what happens to the Christian’s physical body at death) but all Christians—both those who are alive at the time of the rapture and every believer who has died since the time of Christ—will receive a new incorruptible and imperishable body that is designed for eternity.
One interesting question people often ask is about the physical state of those Christians who die before the rapture. Are they simply disembodied spirits who are ushered into the presence of the Lord, or do they receive some kind of temporary bodies until they receive their permanent, new bodies at the rapture?
Some writers such as Randy Alcorn believe Christians will be given temporary bodies when they die before receiving their resurrected, glorified, and eternal bodies at the rapture. Alcorn writes:
Given the consistent physical descriptions of the present Heaven [a term referring to the third heaven, where God is] and those who dwell there, it seems possible—though this is certainly debatable—that between our earthly life and our bodily resurrection, God may grant us some physical form that will allow us to function as human beings while in that unnatural state “between bodies,” awaiting our resurrection.7
God created us body, soul, and spirit, not just soul and spirit. There has never been a time when we existed without a physical body. Before our conception in our mother’s womb we didn’t exist at all. But at our conception, when God breathed life into us, He gave us a body.
Furthermore, we will also exist in bodily form rather than as disembodied spirits in the new heaven and the new earth. These “made for eternity” bodies will be given to us at the rapture of the church. Thus, the reasoning goes, if we have always existed in bodily form in the past and will also inhabit physical bodies in the future, why would we exist only in spirit form during the relatively brief span of time between our death and the rapture?
The Bible does not definitively answer the question of whether Christians receive a temporary body before the rapture, but as we will see in the next section, the story Jesus told in Luke 16 about the experience of Lazarus and the rich man provides a strong clue to that question’s answer.
Where Did the Old Testament Saints Go When They Died?
If Christians since the time of Christ go immediately to heaven when they die, where did those believers who lived before Christ go when they died? This is a little more complicated and debatable than answering the question concerning Christians who die today.
First, we need to understand who qualified as an Old Testament believer, or “saint,” as some people call them. An Old Testament saint was anyone—Jewish or Gentile—whom God declared “righteous.” In my book Not All Roads Lead to Heaven, I explain in depth that all believers—whether they lived before Christ or after Christ—are saved the same way: by the death of Jesus Christ. For those who lived before Christ, His payment for their sin was “credited” to their account the moment they exercised faith in God’s revelation. Abraham lived thousands of years before Christ, yet “he believed in the LORD; and He accounted it to him for righteousness” (Gen. 15:6 NKJV).
Second, it’s important to understand two important biblical terms that refer to the place of the dead: the Hebrew word sheol and the Greek word hades. Both words mean roughly the same thing: “covered” or “hidden.” According to some scholars sheol is divided into two compartments: Paradise (or “Abraham’s bosom”) where the righteous reside, and a place of torment called hades where the unrighteous reside. According to these scholars, the best illustration of this division between Abraham’s bosom and the place of torment is found in Luke 16:19–26:
Now there was a rich man, and he habitually dressed in purple and fine linen, joyously living in splendor every day. And a poor man named Lazarus was laid at his gate, covered with sores, and longing to be fed with the crumbs which were falling from the rich man’s table; besides, even the dogs were coming and licking his sores. Now the poor man died and was carried away by the angels to Abraham’s bosom; and the rich man also died and was buried. In Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torment, and saw Abraham far away and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried out and said, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus so that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool off my tongue, for I am in agony in this flame.” But Abraham said, “Child, remember that during your life you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus bad things; but now he is being comforted here, and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you there is a great chasm fixed, so that those who wish to come over from here to you will not be able, and that none may cross over from there to us.”
Some people believe that given the amount of detail in this story—including the use of the name Lazarus (no other parable uses a proper name)—this is not a parable but the actual account of the deaths of two different men who experienced two different destinies. Whether this is a parable or not, Jesus uses this story to reveal some basic truths about the hereafter.
The most obvious principle in this story is all people do not experience the same destiny when they die. Some, like Lazarus, are ushered into a place of peace while others, like the rich man, immediately begin to experience horrific suffering. Notice that the division between comfort and agony centered on being in or being away from Abraham’s presence or “bosom.” For the Old Testament believer, being in the presence of the beloved father of the Jewish people was synonymous with being in the presence of God Himself. For so-called New Testament saints and sinners—those who either accepted or rejected God’s grace in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ—the afterlife centers on being in or apart from Jesus’s presence.
As I said earlier, some biblical scholars believe that “Abraham’s bosom” was one of two divisions of this holding place for the dead called sheol that was reserved for those believers who died before the resurrection of Jesus Christ—such as Lazarus in Jesus’s story. After having been carried away by angels to Abraham’s side, Lazarus found comfort, blessing, and intimate fellowship with the Old Testament patriarch.
But to me this description sounds very much like the present (third) heaven where God is rather than one-half of a “duplex” that houses believers and unbelievers. After all, Abraham’s bosom was said to be “far away” from hades (the place of torment for unbelievers), not an adjoining compartment. Also, Jesus promised the repentant thief—who died before Jesus’s resurrection—he would be with the Lord—not just Abraham—in Paradise (Luke 23:43).
Additionally, the weight of Scripture supports the interpretation that Abraham’s bosom is heaven. For example, it is strongly implied that faithful Enoch was transported directly to heaven and not to a holding place in sheol or hades, when God “took him” (Gen. 5:24; Heb. 11:5). Furthermore, 2 Kings 2:1 and 2:11 clearly say Elijah was taken “by a whirlwind to heaven.” Moreover, David believed God would not “abandon [his] soul to Sheol,” but would give him “fullness of joy” in God’s presence (Ps. 16:10–11).
David also prayed that after “all the days of [his life],” he would “dwell in the house of the LORD forever” (23:6). That can only refer to one place: heaven. Finally, David’s son Solomon observed in Ecclesiastes 12:7: “The dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.” In other words, Old Testament believers’ bodies would decay and return as dust to the earth, but their spirits would continue to live in the presence of God—also known as “Abraham’s bosom.”
Where Do Unbelievers Go When They Die?
As we’ve seen, Old Testament and New Testament believers immediately enter the presence of the Lord when they die. They are very much alive and aware that they are in a place we refer to as the “third heaven” as they await the new heaven and new earth, in which they will reside for eternity.
But what happens to unbelievers when they die? According to Jesus’s story of the rich man and Lazarus, they are immediately dispatched to hades—a place of unbearable pain and agony. Hades is the immediate, but temporary, destination of non-Christians when they die. Let me explain what I mean by “temporary.”
Just as Abraham’s bosom or “the third heaven” is not the eternal destiny of believers, hades is not the final destiny of unbelievers. Instead, hades is a holding place for unbelievers as they await the resurrection of their bodies for the great white throne judgment, as described in Revelation 20:11–15:
Then I saw a great white throne and Him who sat upon it, from whose presence earth and heaven fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged, every one of them according to their deeds. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
The lake of fire (also referred to as gehenna in the Bible) is the eternal destination for all unbelievers, just as the new heaven and new earth is the eternal destination for all believers. Just as the third (or present) heaven is the temporary destination for believers as they await the new heaven and new earth, hades is the temporary destination for all unbelievers as they await the eternal lake of fire.
Neither the third heaven nor hades is any kind of neutral “waiting station” for the dead. Although hades is only a temporary location for unbelievers, it is a place of indescribable suffering. Just as believers begin to immediately and consciously experience the comfort of being in God’s presence when they die, unbelievers begin to immediately experience the horrendous suffering of being separated from God at the moment of their death.
Notice how the rich man in Jesus’s story begs for mercy and asks whether Lazarus might come from heaven and “dip the tip of his finger in water and cool off my tongue, for I am in agony in this flame” (Luke 16:24). The rich man’s request is filled with irony. During life, he knew of Lazarus and his suffering. Unable to buy food, or even fend off the dogs that came to lick his sores, Lazarus sat at the rich man’s gate every day, begging for a few crumbs of food from the rich man’s table (vv. 20–21). Yet the rich man did not lift a finger to relieve Lazarus’s misery.
However, after he died, the rich man couldn’t buy relief for himself. He’s reduced to begging for mercy from the one he mistreated in life. The rich man reaped in death what he had sown in life, just as Jacob Marley did in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Marley’s ghost lamented to Scrooge, “I wear the chain I forged in life. . . . I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”8 And so it is with all who measure life according to self and not according to the Savior. Jesus said, “by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return” (Luke 6:38). And what was measured to the rich man was “agony”—odynaomai, meaning continual pain and grief.
But the rich man was mistaken in thinking that Lazarus could leave Abraham’s side and become a minister of mercy in hades. Even if Abraham had wanted to dispatch Lazarus to minister to the rich man he would have been unable to. God established an impenetrable barrier between the righteous and unrighteous—“a great chasm fixed” (16:26)—preventing those in heaven to travel to hades and those in hades to travel to heaven, thereby eliminating any possibility of salvation after death.
In fact, “the Lord knows how . . . to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment” (2 Pet. 2:9). “Keep” is in the present tense, indicating that the wicked are held captive continuously, as a guard keeps careful watch over a condemned prisoner on death row. Once unbelievers die and are held for final judgment, their fate is fixed.
However, the rich man was not completely heartless—even in hades. Not wanting his brothers who were still living to experience his suffering, he pleaded with Abraham to send Lazarus to his five brothers to warn them about what awaited them unless they repented. But again, Abraham refused. The brothers had the Scripture, which provided all the information they needed about salvation.
But the rich man refused to take no for an answer, and stated his brothers would only believe if they had a miraculous sign of someone coming back from the grave. Abraham countered, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone [like Lazarus] rises from the dead” (Luke 16:31). These words from Jesus proved to be prophetic, for even when Jesus returned from the dead the vast majority of people continued in their unbelief.
Heaven or Hell: A Forever Choice
Here’s the basic truth Jesus’s story of Lazarus and the rich man reveals about what happens when we die: either we immediately begin experiencing the eternal bliss of being in God’s presence or we immediately begin experiencing the unending horror of being separated from God.
It’s true that at some future time after death, Christians will change locations from the third heaven—the presence of the Lord—to the new heaven and the new earth. Likewise, unbelievers will also experience a change of address after the great white throne judgment, moving from the place of temporary suffering (hades) to the place of eternal torment (the lake of fire).
But both cases are nothing more than a change of location and are not a change in experience. The most fundamental truth Jesus reveals in this story is that the moment we die our eternal destiny is sealed—forever.
As you contemplate whether you are traveling on the road leading to heaven or hell, consider these sobering words from my friend Erwin Lutzer:
Five minutes after you die you will either have had your first glimpse of heaven with its euphoria and bliss or your first genuine experience of unrelenting horror and regret. Either way, your future will be irrevocably fixed and eternally unchangeable.
In those first moments, you will be more alive than you ever have been. Vivid memories of your friends and your life on planet earth will be mingled with a daunting anticipation of eternity. You will have had your first direct glimpse of Christ or your first encounter with evil as you have never known it. And it will be too late to change your address.9
If you wait until the moment you die to choose your eternal destination, you will have waited one second too long.