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Heaven, hell, and..sheol? The Bible and the Afterlife

by James Barringer  
3/21/2010 / Bible Studies

One thing has bothered me about the Bible for quite a while: the Old Testament and New Testament seem to have vastly different concepts of what happens to a person after death. The Old Testament talks only about a place called sheol, the underworld, a sort of shadowy nether-realm that was the final stopping-off point for good and bad souls alike. Fast forward a few hundred years to the New Testament, and all of a sudden there is a well-defined and widely-accepted belief in places called heaven and hell, complete with feuding groups of religious leaders who held to the old sheol (Sadducees, who did not believe in resurrection for this reason) and who believed in heaven and hell and resurrection (Pharisees). What's the deal?

While I still don't have it all the way figured out, I have found a few things that may be helpful to the person like me who has wondered about this issue. First of all, which of the two ideas is true? Is there merely a sheol after death, or a heaven and hell? Second, how do we explain the disparity between the two Testaments? Thirdly, what actually happens to souls between death and the final resurrection?

Firstly, I would like to observe that Jesus confirms that heaven and hell are the true cosmology, with sheol merely a placeholder. In Luke 10, he says, "I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning," indicating that (provided we believe Jesus to be credible, which we do) there is a true heaven. As a follower of Christ, his eyewitness testimony settles the matter for me. However, Christ was also the culmination of the Hebrew tradition, so we are still left with the question of why his teaching and the Old Testament understanding do not agree.

I think this is obvious. The Old Testament belief about the afterlife was a placeholder, just like so many things about the Old Testament were. Animal sacrifices were a placeholder until the arrival of Christ, the perfect spotless Lamb. Following the law was a placeholder until the dawning of the new covenant of grace. The Old Testament belief in sheol prefigured the truth about heaven and hell, and for a very sensible reason.

The sensible reason is this: if the Old Testament taught heaven, it would have to teach how to get to heaven. But the problem is that the Hebrews, still under the covenant of the law, would have believed that you get to heaven only by your own acts of righteousness. This is, most emphatically, not the case (see Ephesians 2:8-9). In other words, as long as they believed they had to earn their own salvation, they couldn't conceive of a place that could only be obtained through God's grace to Jews and Gentiles alike. Their minds, unable to conceive of heaven and hell, melded them together into sheol, which has characteristics both of heaven and hell, until Jesus could arrive and show them what their whole faith had been pointing to since the beginning: one perfect sacrifice, grace trumping law, and eternal life in heaven instead of merely sheol. You could even argue that belief in sheol was brilliant spiritual commentary on God's part, hammering home the idea that good works cannot get a person to eternal life, which is of course the reason that all of us need salvation through Christ in the first place.

So far I have answered the first two questions, that of why the two testaments do not agree and why the Jews were allowed to persist for so long in a partially-true belief. Now I would like to address the much more complicated third point, which is what happens to a person immediately after death.

Let me establish a brief chronology of events here. The Bible teaches that all of us die, until the second coming of Christ, when we will rise out of the ground to meet him in the air (1 Thessalonians 4:17). Many Christians believe that people who die are instantly in the presence of God (Paul hints at this in 2 Corinthians 5), but I think Paul has been misinterpreted. In other words, I don't believe that we die, go into God's presence, and then are stuffed back into our graves at the second coming so that we can go meet Christ in the sky. That is quite incoherent.

Instead, I have long believed that the Bible means something when it refers to death as "falling asleep" (see Acts 7). Much like sleep, I believe that our eyes close at death, and then we wake up at the second coming, rising from the ground to meet Christ in the air. This is what I make of Paul's writing that "to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord." When I fall asleep, to be absent from midnight is to be present at eight in the morning; I am simply not aware of the time that passes in between. By earthly chronology, I don't think we can argue that a person who dies is instantly in the presence of the Lord. They will be the next thing they know, but there will almost certainly be a gap of "sleep" between the last thing they know and the next thing they know.

I say all this not merely to push my opinion - because honestly, none of us will ever know until it's happening, so it's almost pointless to even have an opinion - but because it helps explain sheol, the underworld. What if, when we die, we do go to sheol, the shadowy and sleepy nether-world, dozing away the generations until Christ comes back? Good and bad alike go there to wait for the final resurrection, just like the Old Testament taught. Then, when Christ comes, we rise from the ground, just like 1 Thessalonians says - only not from our graves, but from sheol instead. It all matches up so perfectly. The Jews didn't believe a lie, and the Old Testament is not teaching error. It is merely teaching the first part of the story - the only part that was available to know before the coming of Christ.

We can see here how the Bible is in complete harmony with itself. The gap between Old Testament and New is not as large as some people would like us to believe. In fact, it does its job perfectly, given that its job was to prefigure the coming of Jesus, humanity's messiah. We can see how the Old system of animal sacrifice anticipates Christ, the perfect sacrifice, and how the Old system of the law demonstrates that no one deserves salvation based on works, paving the way for the New teachings about grace to all who believe. How marvelous that, across fifteen hundred years and forty different authors, the Bible teaches the same message start to finish. That alone demonstrates why it is no ordinary book.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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