Chapter 19

The Geography of the Afterlife — Paradise, Hades, Sheol, and Where NDErs Actually Go

One of the most important questions in any honest study of near-death experiences is also one of the simplest: where do these people go? If an NDE is more than a hallucination — if the soul really does leave the body and travel somewhere — then that "somewhere" must be a real place. We can't treat NDEs as genuine spiritual experiences while remaining vague about the territory experiencers visit.

I want to argue something that may surprise some readers. The Bible is not silent about the geography of the afterlife. Scripture provides a remarkably detailed map — distinct realms, distinct populations, distinct destinies. When we lay NDE reports on top of this biblical map, the fit is striking. NDE descriptions match the biblical geography better than any other religious or philosophical framework on offer.

To see this, we need to walk through five landmarks: Sheol, Hades, Paradise, Gehenna, and the new heavens and new earth. Then we'll map the NDE evidence onto the geography and see what emerges.

Sheol — The Old Testament Realm of the Dead

The Hebrew word Sheol (שְׁאוֹל, pronounced "sheh-OHL") appears about sixty-five times in the Old Testament as the standard term for the realm of the dead. But Sheol is not a simple concept. It develops across the Old Testament, and its picture grows richer as Scripture unfolds.

In the earlier and more poetic texts, Sheol is portrayed as a shadowy, silent place where all the dead go — both righteous and wicked. The psalmist asks God, "Is your steadfast love declared in the grave, or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness?" (Psalm 88:11-12, ESV). Ecclesiastes says of the dead that "there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going" (9:10). King Hezekiah laments, "For Sheol does not thank you; death does not praise you" (Isaiah 38:18).

If those were the only texts we had, we might conclude Sheol is a state of unconscious, dim, almost-nonexistent waiting. But other Old Testament passages tell a different story.

Consider Isaiah 14. The prophet pictures the king of Babylon descending into Sheol — and what does he find there? "Sheol beneath is stirred up to meet you when you come; it rouses the shades to greet you, all who were leaders of the earth ... All of them will answer and say to you: 'You too have become as weak as we!'" (Isaiah 14:9-10). The dead rise. They speak. They taunt. This is not unconsciousness. This is a population of aware, communicating souls.¹

Ezekiel paints a similar picture. In Ezekiel 32:17-32, the prophet describes a procession of fallen nations descending to "the pit." Egypt, Assyria, Elam, Meshech, Edom — each people group has its place. They recognize one another. They speak about the new arrivals. Sheol is populated, structured, and aware.

So which is it? Is Sheol silent oblivion or a populated underworld? The best answer is that the Old Testament's language is multi-layered. Some texts speak from the perspective of the living, describing how the dead seem to us — silent, gone, unable to act on earth. Other texts pull back the veil and show what is actually happening on the other side. As revelation progresses, the veil pulls back further. By the late prophets, hints emerge that not all the dead share the same fate. Daniel 12:2 is the clearest: "And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt." The dead are sorted, and the sorting matters.²

By the intertestamental period, Jewish writers had developed this picture in detail. Sheol came to be understood as containing distinct compartments — a region for the righteous (often called "the bosom of Abraham") and a region for the wicked.³ John Cooper notes "the consolidation of Old Testament hints that there are divisions within Sheol itself" was a development clearly underway in Jewish thought by the time of Christ.⁴ When Jesus told the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, He was speaking into a Jewish framework that already understood the realm of the dead in exactly these terms.

Hades — The New Testament Equivalent

When the Old Testament was translated into Greek (the Septuagint), the translators rendered Sheol as Hadēs (ᾅδης). The Greek word carried similar associations — the underworld, the realm of the dead — but the New Testament writers gave it sharper definition.

The most vivid New Testament window into Hades is Luke 16:19-31, the story of the rich man and Lazarus. Some readers treat this as "just a parable," but I want to push back on that. Whether or not the specific characters are historical, Jesus is using a framework He clearly accepts as accurate. He is not contradicting first-century Jewish beliefs about the afterlife — He is teaching from inside them. And what He teaches is remarkable.

The rich man and Lazarus both die. Lazarus is "carried by the angels to Abraham's side." The rich man is buried, and "in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side" (Luke 16:22-23). What follows is a conversation across a great chasm. The rich man is conscious. He remembers his earthly life. He remembers his five brothers. He sees Lazarus and Abraham. He even reasons about evangelism — wanting Lazarus sent to warn his family.⁵

Cooper points out that this picture maps almost perfectly onto intertestamental Jewish ideas about the intermediate state, including the chasm and the thirst.⁶ But notice something crucial: Jesus does not place the rich man in Gehenna, the place of final punishment. He places him in Hades. And Hades, we will see, is temporary.

Two other passages confirm this. In Acts 2, Peter quotes Psalm 16: "You will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One see corruption" (Acts 2:27, 31). Christ Himself entered Hades — not as a prisoner of the wicked dead, but as the conqueror who would not be held there. And in Revelation 20:13-14, John watches as "Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them ... Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire." Hades is emptied at the final judgment. It is not the final hell. It is a holding place — real, conscious, sometimes dreadful, but temporary.

Paradise, Abraham's Bosom, and the Third Heaven

Just as Hades is the intermediate state of the unrighteous, Paradise is the intermediate state of the righteous. The New Testament uses three terms — Paradise, Abraham's bosom (or "Abraham's side"), and the third heaven — that all appear to describe the same blessed reality.

The Greek word paradeisos (παράδεισος) is a Persian loanword meaning "enclosed garden." The Septuagint uses it for the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2-3. By the New Testament era, it had come to mean the dwelling place of the righteous dead.⁷ Jesus uses the word in His promise to the dying thief: "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43). The promise is striking. Jesus does not say, "On the day of resurrection." He says today. The thief's body will hang on a cross and be buried, but the thief himself — his conscious, knowing self — will be with Jesus that very afternoon, in Paradise.

Paul gives us the only first-person glimpse into Paradise we have in Scripture. In 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, he describes a man (clearly himself) who was "caught up to the third heaven" and "caught up into paradise — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows — and he heard things that cannot be told." Paul equates "the third heaven" with "Paradise." He cannot describe what he saw or heard.

Paul's longing in Philippians 1:23 — "My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better" — and his confidence in 2 Corinthians 5:8 — "away from the body and at home with the Lord" — round out the picture. (I exegete these passages in detail in Chapter 20, on the conscious intermediate state.) The blessed dead are with Christ. They are conscious. They are at home. They are not asleep, not annihilated, not waiting in unconscious storage.

The promise to the overcomer in Revelation 2:7 — "To the one who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God" — completes the New Testament's witness. Paradise is real. It is where Christ is. It is where the righteous dead dwell now.

One more thing must be said. Paradise is vast. There is no biblical reason to assume Paradise is a single small location. It must accommodate every righteous person who has ever died — Old Testament saints, New Testament believers, the countless multitudes who have come to faith over twenty centuries of church history. That is a staggering population. Whatever Paradise is, it is large enough to hold them all.

Gehenna — The Final Lake of Fire

Gehenna (γέεννα) is the Greek form of the Hebrew "Valley of Hinnom" — a real ravine south of Jerusalem where, in the Old Testament era, child sacrifice to Moloch had taken place (2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:31). By Jesus' day, the valley had become a refuse dump where garbage burned continuously. Jesus drew on this image to describe the final destiny of the unrepentant: "It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire" (Mark 9:43; cf. Matthew 5:22, 29-30; 10:28; 23:33).

Cooper observes that "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."⁸ The two terms are routinely conflated in English Bibles by translating both as "hell" — and great confusion has resulted. The King James Version's translation of both Hadēs and Geenna as "hell" has done real damage to Christian thought about the afterlife.

The decisive text is Revelation 20:13-15: "And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them ... Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire." Hades and the lake of fire cannot be the same place. Hades empties out, and what is left is thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the final state after the last judgment. Hades is the intermediate state before that judgment.

I want to be careful here, because my own theological convictions on this matter are still developing. I lean toward conditional immortality — the view that the unsaved ultimately cease to exist rather than suffer eternal conscious torment — and I am open to a conservative biblical universalism. Whatever one's final view of the duration and nature of the lake of fire, the geographical point stands: the lake of fire is a future, post-judgment reality, not a present one. No one is in the final hell right now. Everyone who has died and not been raised is, at the moment, somewhere in the intermediate realm.

The New Heavens and the New Earth

The final landmark on the biblical map is the renewed creation described in Revelation 21-22. "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away ... 'Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.'" (Revelation 21:1, 3). This is the ultimate Christian hope — not a disembodied existence in the clouds but a renewed, embodied life in a renewed cosmos. (Chapter 17 treats Revelation 21 in detail.) The critical point here is simple: the new heavens and new earth have not yet arrived. They await Christ's return, the resurrection, and the final judgment. Whatever NDErs are seeing now, it is not the new creation.

Where Do NDErs Actually Go?

Now we can put the map together. We have five labeled regions: Sheol/Hades (intermediate state of the unrighteous), Paradise (intermediate state of the righteous), Gehenna (final state of the irredeemably wicked), the new creation (final state of the redeemed), and earth. Two regions are intermediate, two are final, and one is the present material world. NDErs return to earth. The question is where their souls travel during the experience itself.

The mapping is straightforward.

Positive NDEs map onto Paradise. NDErs who report entering a realm of overwhelming light, beauty, peace, deep love, gardens, cities, music, reunions with loved ones, and encounters with Christ are visiting the blessed intermediate state — the place where the righteous dead currently are.⁹ Burke's massive collection of NDE accounts in Imagine Heaven documents this terrain in detail, with experiencers describing landscapes of impossible vividness and a "realer than real" quality that consistently outshines anything earthly.¹⁰ Long's NDERF data confirms the same patterns at scale.¹¹

Distressing NDEs map onto Hades. NDErs who report darkness, isolation, fear, void, mocking voices, malevolent beings, or torment are encountering aspects of the intermediate state of separation from God.¹² Sabom documents several such accounts in his hospital research, including patients who described hellish landscapes that left them desperate to escape.¹³ Burke's chapter on hellish NDEs gathers the testimony of experiencers like Howard Storm, whose accounts describe precisely the kind of conscious, populated, dreadful existence we would expect Hades to be.¹⁴ (I treat distressing NDEs in detail in the next chapter.)

Crucially, NDErs are not visiting the final states. They are not seeing the lake of fire, because the lake of fire does not yet hold anyone. They are not seeing the new heavens and the new earth, because the new creation has not yet been inaugurated. What they are seeing — at most — is what J. Steve Miller helpfully calls "the vestibule of heaven." Miller writes that he sees the NDE encounter as "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."¹⁵ NDErs cross the threshold of death into the intermediate realm — and then are sent back.

Christ in the Intermediate Realm

One more piece of the picture deserves attention. The intermediate realm is not just where humans go when they die — it is also a place where Christ Himself has been active.

1 Peter 3:18-20 tells us: "For Christ also suffered once for sins ... being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God's patience waited in the days of Noah." This passage has been debated for centuries. Are the "spirits in prison" wicked angels? Wicked humans? Both? Cooper notes that "between his death and resurrection, Christ went to the realm of the dead to preach to Noah's wicked contemporaries" is a "live possibility, defended by a number of scholars," even if the passage is admittedly difficult.¹⁶ What is clearer is that the passage assumes a real intermediate realm where Christ, in His soul, was active during the days between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Ephesians 4:8-10 adds another layer. Paul writes, "In saying, 'He ascended,' what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth?" However we interpret the descent — whether to Hades, to the realm of the dead, or simply to the earthly grave — the passage assumes Christ's mission included a movement downward before the ascent upward. The early church confessed this as "He descended to the dead" in the Apostles' Creed. (My companion volume The Word Made Flesh argues this descent at length on Christological grounds.)

Why does this matter for understanding NDEs? Because it confirms the intermediate realm is real, populated, and that Christ Himself has walked through it. When NDErs report encountering Jesus on the other side, this is not theologically strange. It is exactly where He has been. The risen Christ is Lord of both this world and the world to come.

Practical Implications

Three implications follow from this geography, and each one matters pastorally.

First, the diversity of NDE descriptions of heaven is not a problem. It is exactly what we should expect from a vast intermediate realm visited briefly by ordinary, finite human souls. The skeptic who says, "If heaven were real, everyone would describe it identically," has not thought carefully about the size of the territory. The Christian who says, "These NDE descriptions don't match the Bible because they describe gardens and rivers and cities all together," has not noticed that the Bible itself describes Paradise as containing all of those things.

Second, distressing NDEs do not consign the experiencer to the final hell. A distressing NDE is a glimpse of Hades, not Gehenna. Hades is real and dreadful — I do not minimize the experience — but it is not the final word. Many NDErs who reported terrifying experiences came back, sought God, and were transformed. We will see this in detail in Chapter 21. The geographical distinction between Hades and the lake of fire opens a door of hope that a flat, undifferentiated view of "hell" closes prematurely.

Third, the NDE is not the experiencer's final destiny. NDErs are sent back. They have not faced the final judgment. They have, at most, taken a step into the vestibule and then been told to return. Their earthly lives still lie ahead. We should be careful not to read too much, theologically, into what an NDEr is permitted to see. They are visitors, briefly, to a real but intermediate place.

Conclusion

The Bible is far more detailed about the geography of the afterlife than most Christians realize. Sheol and Hades, Paradise and Abraham's bosom, Gehenna and the lake of fire, the new heavens and the new earth — these are not interchangeable terms or vague poetic gestures. They name distinct realms with distinct populations and distinct destinies. And when we listen carefully to what NDErs say, their reports map onto this geography with surprising accuracy. Positive NDEs go to Paradise. Distressing NDEs go to Hades. No one goes to the lake of fire, because the lake of fire is not yet inhabited. No one sees the new creation, because the new creation has not yet arrived.

This framework will do real theological work in the chapters ahead. In Chapter 20 it will support the case for a conscious intermediate state. In Chapter 21 it will reshape how we understand distressing NDEs. In Chapter 22 it will help us make sense of why the Christ encountered in NDEs is so consistently loving toward people who have not yet faced final judgment. The geography matters. And the geography fits.