A careful study from Genesis to Revelation reveals that God alone possesses immortality (1 Tim. 6:16). Human beings only receive immortality at Christ’s Second Coming on condition of their faith in Him (1 Cor. 15:22, 53; 2 Tim. 1:10). However, some Bible passages seem to support the view that humans possess an immortal soul that goes immediately to either heaven or hell at death. Applying the principle of using clear Bible passages to understand less clear ones, let’s examine four of these puzzling passages.
Jesus’ promise to the thief on the cross, “Verily I say unto you, today shalt thou be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43), has been widely used to support the belief in immediate life after death.
But did Jesus Himself go to heaven the same day of that promise? Not according to the Bible. Two days after His crucifixion, on the day of the resurrection, He met Mary at the garden tomb and said: “Touch Me not; for I am not yet ascended to My Father.” John 20:17. Jesus could not have gone to Paradise on Friday if He hadn’t yet ascended to the Father by Sunday.
Why then did Jesus say, “Today shalt thou be with Me in Paradise”? The apparent problem vanishes when you consider that the original Greek manuscripts had no punctuation. The commas and periods were introduced into the text by translators, who inserted them where they thought they should be. But one comma can change the whole meaning of a sentence. By repositioning the comma after “today,” the passage reads: “Verily I say unto thee today, thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.” This is what Jesus is really saying. Today, when all seems lost; today, when I do not look like a Lord or King, and after even My disciples have fled; today, although My hands are nailed to a cross, I can still save you!
Someday that thief, along with all others who have died in hope of the resurrection of the righteous, will rise to be with Jesus in Paradise.
Many people refer to this parable in Luke 16 as biblical proof that souls go to either heaven or hell upon death. But numerous aspects of the parable show that Jesus didn’t tell it to make a point about the state of human beings in death.
Jesus used parables frequently. Parables are stories with particular lessons; not all their details should be taken literally. For example, Jesus told a parable of wheat and tares, in which the servants of a farmer were instructed not to pull up the tares in the field (see Matt. 13); this doesn’t mean we should never weed our gardens! The parable was simply an illustration of how God’s people shouldn’t try to remove the unconverted from among them.
Use clear Bible passages to understand the less clear ones, and you will find harmony in the Scriptures.
Likewise, the details in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus should not be taken literally. Rather, Jesus was using popular fiction about the afterlife to teach a lesson about the choices people make in their present lives. Here are clues which demonstrate that the illustration is fictitious:
1. The rich man puts Abraham in the place of God, as if Abraham had the prerogative to alter his conditions in hell. See Luke 16:24. But Jesus taught that Abraham was still in the grave awaiting the resurrection of the righteous. See Luke 20:34–38.
2. The rich man asks for a drop of cold water to cool him in hell. This is clearly exaggerated language.
3. In the parable, the redeemed spend eternity observing the torments of the damned while the damned observe the heavenly bliss of the redeemed, and are able to communicate across the chasm. The Bible does not support this idea. See Mal. 4:1, 3.
If we examine all that Jesus taught about death and the immediate afterlife, we have further proof that He employed a fictitious illustration in this parable: Jesus taught that no man, neither evil nor just, will receive his eternal reward until after Jesus returns in glory. “For the Son of man shall come in the glory of His Father with His angels; and then He shall reward every man according to his works.” Matt. 16:27. That day is yet to come.
Jesus also likened death to sleep. When speaking to His disciples about Lazarus’ death, He said, “Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.... Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.” John 11:11, 14.
So what was the parable’s true lesson?
Jesus was warning the “Pharisees, who were lovers of money” (Luke 16:24), about the curse of selfishness. The rich and poor are on equal footing in God’s sight, and the destiny of the rich is impacted by how they treat the poor in this life.
Another Bible passage often quoted to prove that humans possess an immortal soul is found in Revelation 6:9, 10, where John in vision heard the souls of slain saints crying under the altar to God: “How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?”
The expression is symbolic. A similar symbolism is recorded in Genesis 4:10 concerning the blood of the first martyr, Abel: “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground.”
Beyond any reasonable doubt, these “souls under the altar” are not literal disembodied humans. They symbolize martyred saints, whom God has not forgotten.
The most puzzling passage used to promote the idea that an immortal soul survives the body at death is found in 1 Peter 3:18–20:
“For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, …being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: by which also He went and preached unto the spirits in prison; which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.”
Was Peter teaching that after death some souls might be in an intermediary place like purgatory? If the text is treated literally, the meaning becomes even more obscure. Did Jesus descend into hell, limbo, or purgatory at His death? No Bible passage confirms this. In Psalm 16:10, “hell” (KJV) means the grave—Sheol in Hebrew, Hades in Greek. Acts 2:27, 31.
Notice also that the preaching occurred prior to the Flood. So the text cannot support that Christ went to preach to spirits after His death either. We must search other Bible texts for the understanding of this passage.
In Psalm 142:7, David uses the term prison to refer to afflictions: “Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise Thy name.” Isaiah represents spiritual darkness as a prison. See Isa. 42:7.
The Bible sometimes refers to the dead as “prisoners” of the grave. See Job 3:18. Yet these are prisoners that cannot hear. The “spirits in prison” cannot be dead, for Christ wouldn’t preach to dead, unhearing people.
The most logical conclusion is that through the Holy Spirit, Christ sent a message by way of His prophet Noah to the antediluvians who were imprisoned in spiritual darkness.
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