Eternal Promises of HeavenSample

What Happens When We Die
Where are our loved ones who have passed from this life to the next?

“Where are they now?” is a question I’ve been asked many times.

Just as physically we sleep and expect to awake, so in the spiritual realm when we die, we can be assured that one day our bodies will be awakened by the return of the Lord. Paul used the word “sleep” to signify those who had died. The word has a two-fold sense in the New Testament. It can be used in its natural sense for natural sleep, or it can be used in the metaphorical sense for the sleep of death.

For Christians it is always used of in the sense of the sleep of death in the New Testament. It is never used for those who are not Christians.

Today let’s directly and definitively answer the question: What happens to people when they die?

The Bible says they go to one of two places —

·The Saved Go to Heaven

·The Unsaved Go to Hades

In Luke 16, Jesus talked about the rich man and Lazarus, allowing us to see them beyond their life on this earth and into eternity. This is an actual account. Characters in parables are not given names, and this is the only story Jesus told where He gave a name to one of the characters, calling the beggar Lazarus. He knew Lazarus. It’s a true-to-life story. Jesus is the only one who could have looked beyond the grave and accurately followed these two men.

Lazarus goes to Paradise. This was a place of comfort and peace. But it wasn’t yet heaven. Something dramatic happened to it on what some people refer to as Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Paradise, the temporary place for believers at that time, was taken by Jesus out of that intermediate place and transferred to heaven. Believers who have gone before us are with Jesus now in Paradise in the third heaven.

Non-believers are in Hades where they continue until a particular time in the future which the Bible describes where Hades will give up its inhabitants, and they’ll be sent into the lake of fire—eternal hell.