Chapter 18: The Map of the Afterlife

“And being in torments in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.” — Luke 16:23 (NKJV)

A. The Question on the Table

A woman I once spoke with had a simple question. Her husband had died six weeks earlier, peacefully, with a look of quiet wonder on his face. She believed he was with the Lord. But she wanted to know where he was. Was he in heaven? Was he in some kind of waiting room? Was he already at the final destination, or somewhere in between? And what did the Bible actually call that place?

She is not alone in asking. Most Christians use the word “heaven” as a catch-all for wherever the believing dead go. Most use the word “hell” as a catch-all for wherever the lost go. And most assume those are the only two options.

But the Bible’s picture is more detailed than that. Scripture uses at least five distinct place-words for what lies beyond death, and they do not all mean the same thing. Two of them refer to a waiting place. Two refer to the final state after the last judgment. And one sits in between, used sometimes for the waiting place and sometimes for the destination. If we blur them all into “heaven” and “hell,” we lose something the Bible is trying to tell us.

This chapter draws the map. Not a tourist’s atlas. The Bible does not give us a floor plan of the afterlife, and I would not trust anyone who claims to have one. But Scripture does give us enough to understand the basic shape of what comes next: a waiting place for the dead, a final reckoning at the end of the age, and two very different outcomes. Getting those pieces straight matters for our comfort, for our honesty, and for the way we read the near-death experiences that sometimes seem to echo these very places.

In Chapter 4, we looked at the doctrine of the intermediate state, the truth that the dead are not asleep and not extinct but awake in God’s keeping. This chapter takes a different angle. It asks: what does the Bible call the places of the dead? And how do those places relate to each other?

The answer hangs on a single distinction that much of the English-speaking church has lost. The waiting place is not the final place. Hades is not Gehenna. Getting that straight changes the way we read the Bible, and it changes the way we weigh the stories of those who say they have glimpsed the other side.

B. The Place-Words of the Bible

The Bible uses several distinct terms for the realm of the dead. Most of them come from the Old Testament in Hebrew, carried forward into the New Testament in Greek. Let me lay them out plainly before we dig in.

Sheol (Hebrew she’ol, “the realm of the dead”). This is the Old Testament’s primary word for the place where the dead go. It appears over sixty times in the Hebrew Bible. It is deep, dark, below the earth in the Hebrew picture of the world. It is not “hell” in the modern sense. Both the righteous and the wicked go there. Job expected to go to Sheol. So did Jacob. So did David. Cooper puts it plainly: Sheol is not the “hell” to which the wicked are condemned while the Lord’s faithful are spared; both believers and unbelievers were thought to go to Sheol when they died. It is the great holding place of all who have died.¹

Hades (Greek hadēs, “the unseen place” or “the realm of the dead”). When the Old Testament was translated into Greek (the Septuagint), the translators chose Hades as the word for Sheol. In the New Testament, Hades carries a similar meaning. It is the realm of the dead before the final judgment. Jesus uses it in the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:23). It appears in Peter’s sermon at Pentecost (Acts 2:27, 31). And in Revelation, death and Hades are themselves thrown into the lake of fire at the end (Revelation 20:14), which shows that Hades is not the final destination.²

Paradise (Greek paradeisos, “a garden” or “a park,” from an old Persian word). In the Old Testament Greek translation, it is the word used for the Garden of Eden. In later Jewish thought, it became the name for the bright, restful place where the righteous dead wait in God’s presence. Jesus uses it from the cross: “Today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). Paul uses it when he describes being “caught up into paradise” (2 Corinthians 12:4). In Revelation 2:7, the “tree of life” is in “the paradise of God.”³

Gehenna (Greek geenna, from the Hebrew gē hinnōm, “Valley of Hinnom”). This is the word Jesus uses most often for the place of final punishment. The Valley of Hinnom was a real place just south of Jerusalem, where the Israelites once committed the terrible sin of burning their children as sacrifices to the pagan god Molech (2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:31). By Jesus’ day it had become a symbol for the ultimate fate of the wicked. When Jesus says, “fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28), the Greek word behind “hell” is Gehenna, not Hades. Cooper confirms that Gehenna became “the figurative designation for the place of eternal fiery torment of the damned” and that “it is not necessarily the same as Hades, the realm of the dead.”⁴

The Lake of Fire (Revelation 20:14–15). This phrase appears only in Revelation. It is the final destination for the devil, the beast, the false prophet, and all whose names are not found in the book of life. It is where death and Hades themselves are thrown after the last judgment. Whatever exactly the lake of fire is, it is the end of the line, not the waiting room.⁵

These are the pieces of the map. The key texts that show them in action are Luke 16:19–31 (the rich man and Lazarus), Luke 23:43 (Jesus’ promise to the thief), 2 Corinthians 12:2–4 (Paul’s visit to the third heaven and paradise), Matthew 10:28 (the warning about Gehenna), and Revelation 20:11–15 (the great white throne and the lake of fire). We will return to each of these as we trace the shape of the afterlife.

C. The Heart of the Case

1. The Words Matter

The single biggest source of confusion in English-speaking Christianity is the word “hell.” Most English Bibles translate both Hades and Gehenna as “hell.” The King James Version does this throughout. So when a reader picks up an English Bible, she sees “hell” in Luke 16:23 (where the Greek says Hades) and “hell” in Matthew 10:28 (where the Greek says Gehenna). She naturally assumes both verses are talking about the same place.

This is not a minor point of translation. It is a confusion that has shaped the way millions of Christians picture the afterlife. If Hades and Gehenna are the same place, then the dead go straight to their final punishment the moment they die. There is no waiting. There is no intermediate state. The judgment has already happened. But if Hades and Gehenna are different, and the Bible gives us good reason to think they are, then the picture changes. The dead enter a holding place first. Final judgment comes later. And that holding place is not the same as the final destination.⁶

John Cooper, one of the most careful biblical scholars to write on this subject, shows how much confusion the King James translation caused. He points out that the New Testament itself treats these as separate concepts. Luke, for example, uses Hades to describe a place from which the dead can be released. In Peter’s Pentecost sermon, he declares that God did not abandon Jesus’ soul to Hades (Acts 2:27, 31), quoting Psalm 16:10. Jesus passed through Hades. He was not trapped there. Hades is a place you can leave.⁷

Gehenna, by contrast, is the end of the road. Jesus warns about the destruction of both soul and body in Gehenna (Matthew 10:28). He speaks of Gehenna as a place of fire and finality (Mark 9:43–48). There is no return from Gehenna. It is not a waiting room. It is where things end.

The difference between a waiting place and a final place is enormous. And the English word “hell” hides it completely.

2. The Waiting Place and the Final State

Once we see the distinction, the Bible’s map begins to take shape. There are two stages to the afterlife, not one.

The first stage is the intermediate state. This is the period between a person’s death and the final resurrection and judgment at the end of the age. During this time, the dead exist consciously in Hades. They are not asleep. They are not extinct. They are aware and waiting. We covered the biblical case for this conscious in-between in Chapter 4, so I will not repeat it here. The point for this chapter is simpler: the Bible has a name for the place where this waiting happens. It is called Sheol in the Old Testament and Hades in the New.⁸

The second stage is the final state. This comes after the last judgment, after the resurrection of the dead, after Christ returns and all things are set right. Revelation 20 describes a great white throne, the opening of the books, and the judgment of every person according to their deeds. Then “death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:14). Notice what happens. Hades itself is emptied and destroyed. The dead are raised. And the outcome is permanent.⁹

This two-stage picture is not a modern invention. Cooper shows that it was standard Jewish belief by the time of Jesus. The Pharisees, who are a major presence in the Gospels, held exactly this view. Cooper writes that they “held that at death, souls depart from bodies and continue to exist in an intermediate state, already enjoying or lamenting the anticipated consequences of God’s judgment.” They “awaited the coming Messiah, who would effect a resurrection of the dead and initiate his kingdom.”¹⁰

Josephus, the Jewish historian and himself a Pharisee, confirms this. He describes the Pharisees’ belief that souls continue after death, with the righteous receiving a pleasant waiting place and the wicked a place of suffering, both of which are temporary holding grounds before the resurrection.¹¹

This is exactly the picture Jesus draws in Luke 16. The rich man is in Hades, not in Gehenna. His brothers are still alive on earth. The final resurrection has not happened. He is waiting, and he is suffering, but his situation is not yet final. Lazarus, meanwhile, rests at Abraham’s side. He too is waiting, and he is comforted. Both are conscious. Both are in the intermediate state.¹²

3. Paradise and Abraham’s Side

When Jesus hung on the cross, one of the criminals beside Him asked to be remembered when Jesus came into His kingdom. Jesus answered with one of the most comforting sentences in all of Scripture:

Notice what Jesus promises. Not the distant future. Not “someday after the resurrection.” Today. This very day, the repentant criminal would be with Jesus in paradise. Whatever paradise is, it is a place the dying can enter immediately. It does not wait for the final judgment.¹³

Cooper traces the word “paradise” through its rich history in Jewish thought. It comes from a Persian word for a walled garden or a royal park. The Greek translators of the Old Testament used it for the Garden of Eden. Over time, it became the name for the place where the righteous dead rest in God’s company. The Rabbis stressed the intermediate rather than the final character of paradise, and sometimes placed it inside Hades, as one section of the broader realm of the dead. In other texts, it was placed in heaven. In the Apocalypse of Moses, the body of Adam is buried in the earthly paradise, but God tells the archangel to find it “in paradise in the third heaven.” The location shifted from text to text. But as Cooper notes, “the central idea that paradise is where the blessed dwell with the Lord underlies the various accounts of its location.”¹⁴

In Luke 16, this bright side of the waiting place is pictured as “Abraham’s side” (sometimes translated “Abraham’s bosom”). Lazarus rests there after death. Abraham himself is present, awake, and able to speak. The blessed dead are gathered to the patriarchs. They are at rest. They are not yet in the final kingdom, but they are safe, conscious, and comforted.¹⁵

The other side is dark. The rich man suffers in the same broader realm (Hades), but on the far side of a great chasm that cannot be crossed (Luke 16:26). He is aware. He remembers his earthly life. He can see Abraham and Lazarus in the distance. But he cannot reach them, and they cannot reach him.¹⁶

So the waiting place has two regions: paradise for the blessed, and a place of suffering for the lost. Both exist within the broader realm of the dead. Both are temporary, in the sense that they come before the final judgment. And a great gulf separates them.

This passage from Cooper clears up a puzzle that has bothered many Christians. If Jesus went to “hell” between Good Friday and Easter Sunday (as some creeds say), how could He also have been in paradise that same day (as He promised the thief)? The answer is simpler than it sounds. He went to Hades, the realm of the dead. And within Hades, He was in paradise, the section reserved for the righteous. He was not in Gehenna. He was not in the place of final punishment. He was in the waiting place, on the bright side, exactly where He said He would be.¹⁷

Paul gives us one more piece. In 2 Corinthians 12:2–4, he describes being “caught up to the third heaven” and then says the same experience was being “caught up into paradise.” For Paul, paradise and the third heaven are the same place. Cooper notes that this connection also appears in Jewish tradition: in 2 Enoch, paradise is located in the third heaven, a striking parallel to what Paul says. This may suggest that after Christ’s resurrection, the location of paradise shifted from the lower realm of the dead to the heavenly realm. Or it may simply reflect the variety in Jewish ways of talking about the same reality. Either way, the core meaning holds: paradise is where God’s people go at death to be with Him.¹⁸

4. What NDEs Seem to Show

Now, with the biblical map in hand, let us turn carefully to the NDE evidence. What do people who come close to death actually report about the places they seem to visit?

I want to be careful here. The Bible is the map. NDEs are not a second Bible, and they do not override or add to what Scripture teaches. But when the reports of the dying echo the Bible’s own categories, that echo is worth noticing. And when they don’t match, that too is worth noticing.

The great majority of near-death experiences are positive. In my doctoral research, I found that roughly 80 percent of remembered NDEs are positive. People describe leaving their bodies, entering a realm of brilliant light, feeling overwhelming peace and love, and often meeting deceased relatives or a being of radiant welcome. Many describe landscapes of stunning beauty: vivid colors, green fields, crystalline water, and music beyond anything on earth.¹⁹

Jeffrey Long, who has studied thousands of NDEs through the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation, notes that when people describe unearthly or “heavenly” realms, those realms are usually beautiful beyond earthly experience. There may be buildings, landscapes, and brilliant colors that do not exist in the physical world. Over 42 percent of NDErs in his survey said they visited beautiful or distinctive locations. Over 51 percent said they entered some “clearly mystical or unearthly realm.”²⁰

Miller makes a helpful observation about what NDErs seem to visit. He writes that the primary NDE experience is probably an encounter “not with heaven as the throne-room of God, or even the final resting-place of the redeemed, but some type of vestibule or entryway to the ultimate afterlife.” He draws on George Ritchie’s well-known NDE, in which Ritchie visited first a hellish domain, then a pleasant park with buildings, and finally glimpsed in the far distance a spectacular city of light he took to be “ultimate heaven.” Miller concludes that Paul’s language of the “third heaven” (2 Corinthians 12:2) may support this layered picture.²¹

Does this sound like the intermediate state? In many ways, yes. The peace, the light, the welcome, and the presence of the faithful dead echo the Bible’s picture of paradise. And the not-yet-final quality that many NDErs describe fits well with a vestibule, not the final destination.

But there is another side. About 20 percent of remembered NDEs are distressing. Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush, in a landmark study, identified three types of distressing NDE: the inverse, in which typical NDE features are experienced as terrifying rather than peaceful; the void, a dreadful sense of emptiness, isolation, or nonexistence; and the overtly hellish, with graphic imagery of torment and demonic figures.²² Long found that roughly 1 percent of NDEs shared with NDERF are what he calls “hellish,” though the broader category of frightening or distressing experiences is much larger.²³

Miller notes that distressing NDEs have been recognized since the earliest days of NDE research. They are too common to be dismissed as flukes. And he warns that they are probably underreported. Cardiologist Maurice Rawlings witnessed one of his patients, between repeated cardiac arrests, describing a horrible experience with the other side. Yet days later the patient could remember none of it. Rawlings and other researchers surmise that many patients may suppress their frightening experiences, so that the true percentage is higher than the studies show.²⁴

I will say more about distressing NDEs in Chapter 22. For now, the point is narrower. The NDE evidence, taken as a whole, seems to describe two kinds of realm: a bright, welcoming one and a dark, frightening one. That is strikingly similar to the biblical picture of the intermediate state, where the waiting place has two sides divided by a great chasm.

One more observation. Many NDE reports describe a sense of not-yet-final quality to the place they visit. People are often told it is “not their time.” They encounter a border or a barrier they are not allowed to cross. They feel pulled back. Long groups these heavenly-realm encounters into three overlapping patterns: an overwhelmingly beautiful place, a boundary between life and death, and a meeting ground with God, spirits, or deceased loved ones. The boundary element is especially interesting: many NDErs describe a physical barrier (a fence, a stream, a stand of trees, or an unmarked line) beyond which they know they cannot pass and still return to life.²⁵ This not-yet-final quality is consistent with an intermediate state rather than a final destination.

I hold all of this loosely. The map from NDEs is partial. It is filtered through the minds and the words of imperfect human beings. And it must bow to Scripture at every point. But the fact that thousands of people, across cultures and decades, describe something that sounds remarkably like the Bible’s two-sided waiting place is worth considering carefully.

5. What We Can and Cannot Say

So what does the map look like when we put it all together? Let me be as honest as I can about what we know and what we don’t.

We can say, on strong biblical grounds, that the dead do not cease to exist. The soul survives the death of the body. This is the argument of the whole book, grounded in Scripture (see Chapter 3) and confirmed by the veridical NDE evidence (see Chapter 9).

We can say that the dead enter a conscious intermediate state, not the final state. They are awake and aware in Hades. The blessed are comforted in paradise. The lost suffer. A great chasm divides the two sides (Luke 16:26). Believers who die go immediately to be “with Christ” (Philippians 1:23) and are “at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). And the last judgment is still future. Hades is emptied and destroyed at that judgment (Revelation 20:14). It is not permanent.²⁶

We can say that the final judgment will come. Christ will return. The dead will be raised. The books will be opened. And the outcome will be permanent. What that permanent outcome looks like for the lost is a question I will address briefly in Chapter 19. I have my own leanings on that question, and I will share them openly. But the book does not stand or fall on the answer. Its load-bearing claims are these: we have a soul, it survives death, the dying often glimpse the next world, and we must test every glimpse by Scripture.²⁷

Now for what we cannot say. We cannot draw the floor plan. The Bible does not tell us whether the intermediate state is “above” or “below,” whether paradise is inside Hades or separate from it, or how the geography of the unseen world maps onto the geography of the physical one. Jewish writers through the centuries put paradise in different places. Some placed it in Hades. Some placed it in the third heaven. Some placed it in the New Jerusalem. Samuel Sandmel, the Jewish scholar, put it well: “both paradise and hell were not usually conceived of as being eternal, but rather only places of sojourn between death and the future Great Judgment.” The variety tells us something important: the faithful have always known the destination without agreeing on the route.²⁸

We also cannot say with confidence exactly how the geography of NDEs maps onto the biblical categories. Do positive NDEs take place in paradise? Do distressing NDEs take place on the dark side of Hades? It is possible. The parallel is striking. But the parallel is not proof. NDEs are filtered through human minds, shaped by the limits of language, and reported by people who came back, which means they were never truly in the final state at all. Miller wisely cautions us not to assume that having a hellish experience means you will eventually go to hell, any more than a good NDE guarantees you are going to heaven. Both NDEs and deathbed experiences occur prior to our final death and the judgment.²⁹ I believe many NDEs are genuine glimpses of the next world. But I hold the map they draw loosely, and I measure it always against the map Scripture gives.³⁰

D. What the Researchers and Scholars Say

The distinction between the intermediate state and the final state is not some eccentric view held by a few scholars on the fringe. It is the standard position of careful biblical scholarship, and it has been for a long time.

John Cooper’s Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting remains the most thorough treatment of the intermediate state in modern evangelical theology. Cooper traces the concept from the Old Testament through the intertestamental literature, through the New Testament, and into the early church. He devotes careful attention to the topography of the afterlife in Jewish thought, noting that the books written between the Old and New Testaments did a great deal of “imaginative exploration and mapping of the realm of death.” Those texts put distance between the Old Testament’s simple picture of Sheol and the later, more detailed depictions of paradise, heaven, and hell.³¹

What emerges from this literature, Cooper writes, is “a general, though not wholly consistent, map of the postmortem environment.” There is “a definite sorting of people at death into the blessed and the cursed. This may be the final separation in a few cases, but most frequently it is a provisional division in anticipation of final judgment.” Despite the variety of images and terms, the broad shape remains the same: a divided waiting place, two kinds of outcome, and a great judgment yet to come.³²

Cooper is particularly helpful on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. He shows that its details match the pattern found in Jewish texts like 1 Enoch 22, which describes “chambers” or “hollow places” within the realm of the dead, where the blessed and the wicked are sorted after death. One chamber is bright, with a fountain of water, and holds the blessed. Three are dark and hold various categories of the wicked. Cooper notes the “striking parallels of phraseology and conception” between this text and Luke 16, “including the great chasm and the thirst of the damned.”³³

Cooper also raises an important caution. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is a parable. Its main point is ethical, not eschatological. Jesus is warning about the dangers of wealth and the duty to love one’s neighbor. So we should not press every detail of the imagery as though it were a doctrinal map. Still, Cooper argues that Jesus would not have used imagery that was flatly false. He notes that Luke himself “uses Hades to refer to an interim condition which does not hold the dead, Jesus Christ preeminent among them” (Acts 2:27, 31). The picture Jesus draws is fully consistent with what the rest of Scripture teaches about the intermediate state.³⁴

J. Steve Miller takes the discussion in a slightly different direction. Miller notes that NDE data broadly confirm two things the Bible teaches: that both pleasant and distressing destinations exist after death, and that the dying are conscious and aware beyond the body. He also makes a practical point that matters for the map. He observes that what NDErs call “heaven” is probably not the final resting place of the redeemed. He prefers to call it “the other side,” to keep it open-ended. Miller notes that the Bible is comfortable using the word “heaven” to refer to several different things: the sky, the stars, and the afterlife abode of the redeemed. So we should not assume every reference to “heaven” in NDE literature points to the same place as the throne room of God.³⁵

Miller also makes a point I want the reader to hear. He warns against the assumption that the mostly positive nature of NDE reports means everyone will eventually go to heaven. If distressing NDEs are authentic experiences with the other side, they provide evidence that heaven is not the only possible destination. But Miller also says that having a hellish experience does not mean a person is destined for hell, since NDEs occur prior to final death and judgment. God may use such an experience as a warning and a last chance to repent (2 Peter 3:9).³⁶

Michael Sabom, the cardiologist whose Atlanta Study was one of the first rigorous medical investigations of NDEs, reaches a conclusion that fits this chapter well. After more than two decades of study, Sabom writes that the NDE is “a powerful spiritual experience which causes dramatic changes in one’s behavior and beliefs. Without the Word of God, we are without a road map to determine good from evil.” His conclusion is exactly the stance this chapter takes: the NDE is a confirmation of the afterlife’s reality, not the afterlife itself. Scripture, not the experience, is the guide.³⁷

The standard biblical lexicons support the distinction as well. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT) treats Hades as an interim location in the New Testament. Murray Harris, in Raised Immortal, states plainly that “Hades is always an interim location in the New Testament.” These are not peripheral voices. They represent the center of New Testament scholarship on the question.³⁸

It is worth noting that the Catholic tradition adds its own vocabulary to this picture. Catholic teaching has long recognized four afterlife states: heaven, hell, purgatory, and limbo. Purgatory is the state of purification after death for those who belong to God but are not yet fully ready for His presence. Paul may hint at this when he speaks of building on Christ’s foundation with gold or straw, and of the builder being “saved, yet so as through fire” (1 Corinthians 3:10–15). A Catholic Understanding of the Near-Death Experience notes that many NDE accounts map onto this idea of purgation, including descriptions of a layered afterlife with levels of increasing brightness and closeness to God.³⁹ Protestant readers need not adopt the full Catholic framework to recognize that the Bible’s picture of the intermediate state is rich and layered, not a flat binary.

E. Counter-Objections

Objection 1: “It is all metaphor, not geography.”

Some readers will object that the Bible’s language about Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna is purely symbolic. These are not real places, the objection goes. They are images meant to express a spiritual truth, not descriptions of actual locations.

I partly agree. I do not think Hades is a literal cave under the ground. I do not think paradise has physical walls or a stone gate. The Bible’s language is richly figurative. But figurative language does not mean no reality behind it. When Jesus says the rich man “was in torments in Hades” (Luke 16:23), He is using imagery. But He is using imagery to point to something real: a conscious state of suffering between death and the final judgment. The imagery is not the point. The reality behind the imagery is the point. And the Bible uses different images for different realities, which is exactly why the distinction between Hades and Gehenna matters.⁴⁰

Objection 2: “Hades and Gehenna are the same place.”

This objection holds that the Bible uses these words loosely, and there is no real difference between the intermediate state and the final state. You die, you go to your permanent destination, and that is that.

But the evidence runs the other way. Revelation 20:13–14 is decisive. There, Hades gives up the dead who are in it, and then Hades itself is thrown into the lake of fire. If Hades were the same as the lake of fire, this verse would be nonsense. You cannot throw a container into itself. Hades is one thing; the lake of fire is another. The dead leave Hades to face the final judgment. Hades is temporary. The lake of fire (Gehenna, the final state) is permanent. The Bible itself distinguishes them.⁴¹

Objection 3: “NDE geography is unreliable and shaped by culture.”

This is a fair concern. NDEs do show some cultural variation in how people describe the places they visit. A Christian may describe golden gates. A Hindu may describe a different set of images. If the geography of the NDE is shaped by the experiencer’s expectations, how can we trust it to line up with the Bible?

I have two answers. First, the core features of NDEs remain remarkably consistent across cultures and decades. In my doctoral research, I found that the basic pattern (leaving the body, entering light, encountering deceased loved ones, feeling peace, reaching a boundary and returning) stays stable no matter who reports it. The surface details vary. The deep structure does not. Greyson’s review of thirty years of NDE research confirms this stability, and Atwater found the same pattern across her decades of independent fieldwork.⁴²

Second, I do not rely on NDEs to draw the map. Scripture draws the map. NDEs are a secondary witness that sometimes echoes the biblical categories. When the echo is strong (as with the two-sided waiting place), I note it. When it is weak or absent, I do not force a fit. And when an NDE contradicts the biblical picture, I set it aside. NDEs confirm. They do not create.⁴³

Objection 4: “The Bible gives too little to build a map at all.”

Some will say I am making too much of too little. The Bible is not a geography textbook. It gives us a few images and a handful of place-words, and I am turning them into a map they were never meant to be.

I take the point. As I said above, the Bible is not a tourist’s atlas of the next world. I do not claim to know the floor plan. But I do claim that the Bible makes several things clear: the dead are conscious, the waiting place is real and has two sides, the final judgment is still future, and the final state is permanent. Those are not small claims. They are enough to give a grieving widow real comfort and a wandering soul a real warning. The map has blank spaces, and I honor those blank spaces. But the parts we can read are clear enough to guide us.⁴⁴

F. Comfort Grounded in the Map

If you are a Christian who has lost someone you love, the map gives you this: your loved one is not in a void. They are not asleep. They are not extinct, waiting to be reassembled at the end of the world. They are with Christ, in paradise, in the bright and restful place the Bible promises to all who belong to Him. Paul said that to depart is to “be with Christ, which is far better” (Philippians 1:23). Jesus promised the dying thief that he would be in paradise that very day. That is where your loved one is. That is where you will be.⁴⁵

If you are someone who wonders about the dark side of the map, I will not hide it from you. The Bible teaches that the waiting place has a painful side too. The rich man suffered. He was conscious. He remembered his life. He wished he could warn his brothers. I do not say this to frighten you. I say it because honesty matters, and because the warning is itself an act of love. If there is something to fear after death, the Bible tells us so that we might run to Christ now, while there is still time.⁴⁶

If you are a pastor trying to comfort a grieving family, the map gives you language. You can say, with full biblical confidence, that their loved one who trusted in Christ is with the Lord right now. Not someday. Now. You can also say, with equal candor, that we do not know every detail of what that looks like. The Bible gives us the shape, not the blueprint. And that is enough.

As for what the final state will look like, the Bible points us forward. The intermediate state is not the end. There is a resurrection coming. There is a new creation coming. The soul that survives death will one day be reunited with a glorified body (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). The Christian hope is not an endless, bodiless existence in a pleasant waiting room. It is a resurrection. A new heavens and a new earth. A world remade. The waiting place is real, and it is good. But it is not the last chapter of the story.⁴⁷

The woman whose husband died peacefully can be told, with confidence: he is with the Lord. He is awake. He is at rest. He is in the place Jesus promised. And a day is coming when death itself will be swallowed up, and the waiting will be over, and all things will be made new.

Notes

↑ 1. The Hebrew she’ol (ש׀ְאול) appears 65 times in the Old Testament. Its etymology is uncertain, though it may derive from a root meaning “to ask” or “to demand.” In Hebrew cosmology, Sheol is depicted as a subterranean realm, deep beneath the earth, reached through the grave. It is “the Pit,” characterized by darkness, dust, and silence. See Job 17:13–16; Psalm 88:3–6; Isaiah 14:9–11. Cooper notes that “Sheol is not the ‘hell’ to which the wicked are condemned and from which the Lord’s faithful are spared in glory. Although the Old Testament has a few hints that even in death the Lord spares and communes with his righteous ones, . . . there is no doubt that believers and unbelievers all were thought to go to Sheol when they died.” John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism–Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989; repr., 2000).

↑ 2. The Greek hadēs (ᾅδης) occurs ten times in the New Testament: Matthew 11:23; 16:18; Luke 10:15; 16:23; Acts 2:27, 31; Revelation 1:18; 6:8; 20:13, 14. The Septuagint regularly translates she’ol as hadēs. See J. Jeremias, “ᾅδης,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. G. Kittel, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964–1976), 1:146–149.

↑ 3. The Greek paradeisos (παράδεισος) derives from the Old Persian pairidaeza, meaning a walled enclosure or royal garden. It appears three times in the New Testament: Luke 23:43; 2 Corinthians 12:4; Revelation 2:7. In the Septuagint it translates the “garden” of Genesis 2–3. In intertestamental literature, paradise denotes both the intermediate dwelling of the blessed dead and, in some texts, their final home. See J. Jeremias, “παράδεισος,” TDNT, 5:765–773; Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting.

↑ 4. The Greek geenna (γέεννα) derives from the Hebrew gē hinnōm (גֵּי הִנֹּם), the Valley of Hinnom, located south of Jerusalem. It was the site of child sacrifice to Molech (2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:31–32; 19:6). By the intertestamental period, it had become a symbol for the place of fiery, final punishment. Jesus uses geenna twelve times in the Synoptic Gospels: Matthew 5:22, 29, 30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33; Mark 9:43, 45, 47; Luke 12:5; James 3:6. Cooper writes: “Originally the Valley of Hinnom, where the Israelites burned their children to Moloch, Gehenna became the literal garbage dump of Jerusalem and the figurative designation for the place of eternal fiery torment of the damned. This is what the New Testament means by ‘hell’ as a place of punishment. It is not necessarily the same as Hades, the realm of the dead.” Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting.

↑ 5. The “lake of fire” (Greek hē limnē tou pyros, ἡ λίμνη τοῦ πυρός) appears in Revelation 19:20; 20:10, 14–15; 21:8. In Revelation 20:14, “Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire.” The “second death” language signals finality. This is not the intermediate state but the terminal outcome after the last judgment.

↑ 6. The confusion is not minor. When English readers see “hell” in both Luke 16:23 and Matthew 10:28, they naturally assume both texts describe the same place. But the Greek text distinguishes hadēs (Luke 16:23) from geenna (Matthew 10:28). Modern translations such as the ESV, NASB, and NKJV have begun to preserve the distinction by transliterating “Hades” rather than translating it as “hell.”

↑ 7. Cooper observes that Peter’s citation of Psalm 16:10 in Acts 2:27, 31 treats Hades as a place from which the Messiah’s soul was not abandoned, implying that Hades is a realm that can be entered and exited. Murray Harris reaches the same conclusion: “Hades is always an interim location in the New Testament.” Murray J. Harris, Raised Immortal: Resurrection and Immortality in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 134. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting.

↑ 8. On the continuity between Sheol and Hades, the Septuagint’s regular translation of she’ol as hadēs establishes the semantic link. Both terms denote the realm of the dead in their respective linguistic traditions, though neither automatically implies punishment.

↑ 9. Revelation 20:11–15 describes the sequence: the dead are raised and stand before the great white throne; the books are opened; each person is judged; then “Death and Hades” are thrown into the lake of fire; and “anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire” (NKJV). The emptying and destruction of Hades is decisive evidence that Hades is not the final state.

↑ 10. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. The quotation combines two statements from Cooper’s summary of the Pharisees’ beliefs. Acts 23:8 implies that the Pharisees held to the intermediate state, and Josephus, himself a Pharisee, attests to the same belief in multiple passages.

↑ 11. Josephus, The Jewish Wars, II.8.14; Antiquities of the Jews, XVIII.1.3. Josephus describes the Pharisees’ view that souls are imperishable and that those of the righteous pass into a new body while those of the wicked are punished with everlasting torment. The emphasis on the temporary quality of the intermediate condition is attested across multiple Josephan passages. Cooper discusses these texts in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting.

↑ 12. Cooper argues that the parable of the rich man and Lazarus depicts the intermediate state because (1) the final resurrection has not yet occurred (the rich man’s brothers are still alive), (2) the rich man is said to be in Hades, not Gehenna, and (3) Luke himself uses Hades to refer to an interim condition that does not permanently hold the dead, as shown by Acts 2:27, 31. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. See also I. Howard Marshall, Commentary on Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 632–639.

↑ 13. Cooper devotes detailed attention to this verse. He argues that “today” should be read literally (“this very Friday”), not as a Semitic idiom for “I tell you today.” He notes that Jesus’ “Truly” (Amēn) saying is “a straightforward teaching text,” not a parable or throwaway line. As I. Howard Marshall summarizes: “The criminal’s petition expresses the hope that he will attain to life at the parousia; Jesus’ reply assures him of immediate entry into paradise.” Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting; Marshall, Commentary on Luke.

↑ 14. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. Cooper traces paradise through multiple Jewish sources. In apocalyptic literature it refers to the home of the blessed dead, both during the intermediate state and as their final abode. The Rabbis stressed its intermediate character. Strikingly, the Rabbis at times described paradise as contained in Sheol (E. O. James, The Tree of Life [Leiden: Brill, 1966], 79). The Apocalypse of Moses locates it “in paradise in the third heaven” (40:2), a parallel to Paul’s language. Cooper concludes that “the central idea that paradise is where the blessed dwell with the Lord underlies the various accounts of its location.”

↑ 15. “Abraham’s bosom” (Greek ton kolpon Abraam) in Luke 16:22 denotes a place of honor and comfort. The image suggests reclining at a banquet beside the patriarch, a picture of peace and fellowship. See the parallel use in John 13:23, where the beloved disciple reclines “at Jesus’ bosom.”

↑ 16. The “great chasm” (Greek chasma mega) in Luke 16:26 separates the two sides of the waiting place. Cooper notes the striking parallels with 1 Enoch 22, where the bright and dark chambers of the dead are likewise divided. The chasm is impassable: “those who would pass from here to you cannot, nor can those from there pass to us” (Luke 16:26, ESV).

↑ 17. Cooper demonstrates that in terms of Jewish eschatology, the apparently contradictory accounts of how Jesus spent the intermediate state (in “hell,” in paradise, preaching to spirits in prison) “are not contradictory at all. The composite picture is a fully coherent one which necessarily presupposes the existence of the person Jesus Christ between his death and resurrection.” Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting.

↑ 18. 2 Corinthians 12:2–4. Paul entertains both possibilities: that he was taken to the third heaven bodily or apart from the body. Cooper notes that “both the embodied and disembodied possibilities of mystical experience are found in Jewish tradition.” In 2 Enoch, paradise is located in the third heaven, a striking parallel to Paul. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting.

↑ 19. The author’s doctoral dissertation (Th.D., Trinity Theological Seminary) analyzed 5,278 NDEs. About 80 percent of remembered NDEs are positive. The positive rate is consistent across the scholarly and online datasets. Descriptive features include leaving the body, entering brilliant light, encountering deceased loved ones, and experiencing landscapes of extraordinary beauty.

↑ 20. Long, God and the Afterlife. Long’s NDERF data show that over 42 percent of NDErs reported visiting beautiful locations, and over 51 percent said they entered “some clearly mystical or unearthly realm.”

↑ 21. J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings. Miller writes: “I’d consider the primary NDE/DBE experience to be an encounter, not with heaven as the throne-room of God, or even the final resting-place of the redeemed, but some type of vestibule or entryway to the ultimate afterlife.” He draws on George Ritchie’s NDE, in which Ritchie saw first a hellish domain, then “a beautiful sunny park” with buildings, and finally glimpsed in the far distance a spectacular city of light he took to be “ultimate heaven.” Miller concludes: “So perhaps there are many levels or dimensions or areas of ‘the other side.’”

↑ 22. Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush, “Distressing Near-Death Experiences,” Psychiatry 55, no. 1 (1992): 95–110. Their three-type classification has become standard in the field. See also Nancy Evans Bush and Bruce Greyson, “Distressing Near-Death Experiences: The Basics,” in John C. Hagan III, ed., The Science of Near-Death Experiences (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017), 93–101.

↑ 23. Long, God and the Afterlife. Long estimates that about 1 percent of NDEs shared with NDERF are “hellish,” though the broader category of frightening or distressing experiences is much larger. Those with frightening NDEs were more likely to indicate they had a lower level of consciousness and alertness during the experience.

↑ 24. Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? Miller uses a figure of about 20 percent for hellish and distressing cases and acknowledges that these accounts “are woefully understudied.” On the Rawlings case, Miller notes that the patient could remember none of his hellish experiences days later, suggesting that many patients may suppress such experiences. See also Maurice Rawlings, Beyond Death’s Door (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1978).

↑ 25. Long, God and the Afterlife. Long writes that NDErs experience the heavenly realm in three overlapping ways: “(1) as an overwhelmingly beautiful place; (2) as a boundary between life and death; or (3) as a meeting place with God, spirits, or deceased loved ones.” Many NDErs describe a physical barrier (a fence, a stream, a stand of trees, or an unmarked line) beyond which they know they cannot pass and still return to life. This not-yet-final quality is consistent with the intermediate state.

↑ 26. Philippians 1:23; Luke 23:43; 2 Corinthians 5:8. The consistent New Testament testimony is that believers who die are immediately in the conscious presence of Christ. This is the core pastoral comfort of the intermediate state.

↑ 27. On the final-state question held lightly, see Chapter 19. The book’s load-bearing claims—that we have a soul, that it survives death, that the dying often glimpse the next world, and that every glimpse must be tested against Scripture—hold whether one affirms conditional immortality, a Christ-centered universalism, or the traditional view.

↑ 28. Samuel Sandmel, Judaism and Christian Beginnings (New York: Oxford, 1978), 202. Sandmel writes: “It is clear, however, that both paradise and hell were not usually conceived of as being eternal, but rather only places of sojourn between death and the future Great Judgment. It is to be noted that in the Rabbinic literature the view of hell is relatively undeveloped, but that of paradise, the heavenly Eden, very much elaborated.” Cooper cites and discusses Sandmel’s observation in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting.

↑ 29. Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? Miller writes: “I don’t think we can conclude that having hellish experiences suggests you will eventually go to hell any more than that having a good NDE guarantees you’re going to heaven. After NDEs and DBEs, people often still have time to make decisions and life changes. And according to Christian theology, both DBEs and NDEs occur prior to our final death and the judgment.” He suggests God may use such experiences as a last chance to repent (2 Peter 3:9).

↑ 30. In my doctoral research, I found that about 87 percent of scholarly NDE cases showed high or moderate compatibility with a biblical framework, and about 71 percent of the full dataset lined up well with Scripture. But at least one in ten carried clearly unbiblical content. This mixed picture reinforces the need to use Scripture, not NDEs, as the primary map of the afterlife. See Chapter 17 for the full compatibility data.

↑ 31. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. Cooper devotes a full section to “Where Are the Dead? A Topography of the Afterlife,” tracing the development from the Old Testament through the intertestamental literature. He notes that in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, “Sheol became Hades” and that “Sheol/Hades continues to feature prominently in many of the intertestamental texts.”

↑ 32. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. Cooper’s full statement: “From all of this a general, though not wholly consistent, map of the postmortem environment emerges. There is a definite sorting of people at death into the blessed and the cursed. This may be the final separation in a few cases, but most frequently it is a provisional division in anticipation of final judgment.”

↑ 33. 1 Enoch 22 describes four “hollow places” or “chambers” within the mountain of the dead, where the righteous and the wicked are separated. One chamber is bright, with a fountain of water, and holds the blessed. Three are dark. Cooper notes the “striking parallels of phraseology and conception between this parable [of the rich man and Lazarus] and the depiction of the intermediate state in I Enoch 22, including the great chasm and the thirst of the damned.” Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting.

↑ 34. Cooper acknowledges that Luke 16:19–31 “is a parable whose point is not to teach about death or the intermediate state, but to warn its hearers about the dangers of riches and the consequences of failing to love their neighbors.” But he also notes that “competent scholars as diverse as Oscar Cullmann and Murray Harris conclude on the basis of Luke’s theology in general that this parable does shed light on the issue of the afterlife.” Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting; see also Harris, Raised Immortal, 134–135.

↑ 35. Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? Miller writes: “Don’t consider every reference to ‘heaven,’ either in the Bible or in NDE/DBE literature, as referring to the same place, like the throne room of God.” He notes that the Hebrew word for “heavens” can refer to the upper atmosphere, the realm of the stars, the paradise of the intermediate period, or the throne room of God. Miller prefers the term “the other side” to keep the distinction clear.

↑ 36. Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? Miller observes that distressing NDEs “report hellish scenes, evil creatures, and deceased people suffering. If these are authentic experiences with the other side, they provide evidence against heaven being the only possible destination.” He also notes that the NDE occurs at “halftime, not the end of the fourth quarter” and describes these experiences as “a vestibule to eternity,” functioning as a warning rather than a foretaste of the person’s final state after death.

↑ 37. Michael B. Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor’s Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998). Sabom writes: “The NDE is a powerful spiritual experience which causes dramatic changes in one’s behavior and beliefs. Without the Word of God, we are without a road map to determine good from evil, and Satan and his demons are free to deceive ‘even the elect’ (Matt. 24:24).” Elizabeth Hillstrom, associate professor of psychology at Wheaton College, summarized Sabom’s thesis well: “Dr. Sabom clearly argues that the NDE is not an experience of the afterlife but a confirmation of its reality.”

↑ 38. J. Jeremias, “ᾅδης,” TDNT, 1:146–149, treats Hades as the intermediate realm of the dead in the New Testament. Harris, Raised Immortal, 134, states that “Hades is always an interim location in the New Testament.” These standard reference works represent the mainstream of New Testament scholarship on the distinction.

↑ 39. M. C. Ingraham, A Catholic Understanding of the Near-Death Experience, rev. ed. (2016). Ingraham notes that Catholic teaching has long recognized four afterlife states: heaven, hell, purgatory, and limbo. He argues that many NDE elements map onto Catholic teaching about purgation and the layered nature of the afterlife. His treatment of purgatory draws on 1 Corinthians 3:10–15, where Paul speaks of building on the foundation of Christ and of being “saved, yet so as through fire.” See also CCC 1030–1032.

↑ 40. The use of figurative language does not eliminate the reality behind it. When Jesus says “I am the door” (John 10:9), no one thinks He is made of wood. The metaphor points to a real function: He is the way of access to God. Similarly, when the Bible describes Sheol as dark and deep, it uses imagery to point to a real condition of the dead, not a literal geographic location beneath the earth’s crust. On the hermeneutics of eschatological imagery, see G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 50–69.

↑ 41. Revelation 20:13–14. The logic is inescapable: Hades is emptied of its dead, and then Hades as a container is thrown into the lake of fire. A container cannot be thrown into itself. Therefore Hades and the lake of fire are distinct realities, one temporary and one final.

↑ 42. The author’s doctoral dissertation (Th.D., Trinity Theological Seminary) found that core NDE features remained remarkably consistent across seven decades of reports and across the 1975 dividing line when Moody’s Life After Life was published. This cross-decade stability undercuts the argument that NDE geography is merely a product of cultural expectations. Bruce Greyson, in his overview of thirty years of NDE research, confirms that the accumulated findings have essentially confirmed Moody’s original description of the core features. See Bruce Greyson, “An Overview of Near-Death Experiences,” in John C. Hagan III, ed., The Science of Near-Death Experiences (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017), 13–28. P. M. H. Atwater, The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2007), reaches the same conclusion from her independent fieldwork spanning several decades. See also Chapter 11 for the full discussion of the culture objection.

↑ 43. On the use of NDEs as a secondary witness to biblical truth rather than an independent authority, see Chapter 17. The governing principle is stated in 2 Timothy 3:16–17: all Scripture is God-breathed and sufficient for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness. No NDE is a new chapter of the Bible.

↑ 44. The humility advocated here is not agnosticism. We know that the dead are conscious (Luke 16:19–31; Luke 23:43). We know that believers are with Christ (Philippians 1:23; 2 Corinthians 5:8). We know that the final judgment is still future (Revelation 20:11–15; Acts 17:31). We know that the waiting place has two sides (Luke 16:25–26). These are clear biblical teachings. What we do not know are the fine-grained details of the afterlife’s layout, and honest scholarship does not fill those gaps with speculation.

↑ 45. Philippians 1:23; Luke 23:43; 2 Corinthians 5:8. The consistent New Testament testimony is that believers who die are immediately in the conscious presence of Christ. This is the core pastoral comfort of the intermediate state. For pastors and those who counsel the grieving, the key biblical texts are Philippians 1:21–23; 2 Corinthians 5:6–8; 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18; and Revelation 14:13. For a synthesis of what a Christian can rightly say at the bedside or the graveside, see Chapter 19.

↑ 46. The dark side of the intermediate state is addressed pastorally and in greater detail in Chapter 22. The purpose of naming it here is not to frighten the reader but to be honest about what the Bible teaches. Warning and love are not enemies.

↑ 47. 1 Corinthians 15:42–44, 53–54; Philippians 3:20–21; Revelation 21:1–5. The Christian hope is not merely the survival of the soul but the resurrection of the body and the renewal of all creation. The intermediate state is real and good, but it is penultimate, not final. The final hope is embodied life in a new heavens and a new earth.