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Referring to Death as Sleep

Jimmy Akin

Jimmy Akin explains why we often use “sleep” as a euphemism to talk about death, and uses the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, along with Revelation, to argue that we will not be literally unconscious in the time between death and the Second Coming.

Transcript:

Host: The following question comes to us via Facebook Live, Emily Rose typed this in:

“I was wondering how you answer Christian denominations who believe that humans still fall into a sleep-like state when they die until judgement happens at the end of time, instead of each person immediately going to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory upon death.”

Jimmy: Okay, first of all, I noticed that Emily Rose used the word “still,” and that could suggest that at one time they did, but that they no longer do. Maybe, for example, during the Old Testament times. And actually, I don’t have any evidence that that happened in the Old Testament times. There are passages, both in the Old and the New Testament, that talk about the dead being asleep, but really that’s a euphemism. It’s like today, even, you know, though a Catholic believes you do go immediately to the personal judgement, the ending up in Heaven or Hell or temporarily in Purgatory, a Catholic might still tell a child, “Well, Grandma fell asleep.” That’s a euphemism. It’s a way of softening an unpleasant reality by speaking of it using a more pleasant term.

And the reason that that sleep metaphor gets used for death in all different kinds of cultures is obviously because dead people look like they’re asleep. You know, they don’t stand up, they don’t walk around, they tend to lay there, they tend to have their eyes closed, if they don’t have their eyes closed, people tend to close their eyes so they look more like they’re asleep because it’s less disturbing; and so there’s an obvious basis, just in human nature, for the sleep/death euphemism. And that’s what we encounter in Scripture. So knowing that there’s this euphemism that’s in use in all different kinds of languages and all different kinds of cultures over the planet would form part of my answer to people who think that the dead enter a sleep-like state, like, let’s say, until the final judgement.

But I wouldn’t stop there. I’d also go to various passages; like in Luke’s Gospel, you have the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, and that depicts Abraham, Lazarus, and the rich man, all three, as conscious in the state between death and resurrection, what’s called the intermediate state. Now someone could say, “Well, but that’s just a parable.” Maybe it is. It’s the only parable of Jesus where you have somebody who’s named: Lazarus. None of his other parables have that. And coincidentally, this parable involves the suggestion of Lazarus coming back from the dead. And we actually know there was a Lazarus who did come back from the dead, and that raises the question of “Just how much of a parable is this?”

But even if it’s purely a parable, even if it’s symbolic, Jesus still populated His parables with real things. So He’s got–in other parables, for example, he has fathers and sons and wine presses and crops and weeds and kings; and all of these things really exist, so he’s drawing on actual occurrences to craft his parables. And if that’s the case, when he tells us a parable about the afterlife, that depicts people conscious in the afterlife, we could infer he’s drawing on real life there too.

But we don’t have to stop there, because if you go to the book of Revelation, that shows us what’s happening in Heaven before the Second Coming, we see all kinds of people in Heaven who are conscious, including people who are coming up out of the great tribulation, and they washed their robes, and now they’re praising God; we see the Saints in Heaven, worshiping God; we have the souls under the altar who have been martyred, crying out for justice from God, they’re obviously conscious; so we just have a lot of evidence from multiple sources indicating that we don’t enter a sleep-like state, that we are conscious between death and resurrection, and those are some of the considerations I’d point out.

Host: Thank you, Emily Rose.

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