1WD Eccl. 12:7. At death the body goes back to dust; the spirit returns to God who gave it. This spirit which returns to God is not some entity which is capable of a conscious existence apart from the body but it is the breath of life (James 2:26 margin), which God gave to man to make him a living conscious personality. Gen. 2:7. At death, that life passes into God's hands for safekeeping till the resurrection.
2WD Acts 2:34. One thousand years after David had died, Peter declared that David was not in heaven. This proves that the righteous do not go to heaven when they die.
3WD Ps. 17:15. David expected to go to heaven when he should awake from the sleep of death on the resurrection morn at the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.
4WD 1 Thess 4:16,17. The righteous do not go to heaven until the coming of Jesus Christ at the last day. 1 Thess 2:19; John 14:3. All life after death depends on the resurrection.
5WD 1 Cor 15:16-18. Without the resurrection, the good people who have died are perished. This could not be true if they went to heaven when they died. If the righteous went to heaven when they died, there would be no need of a resurrection. There could be no reason for Christ to come back to this earth the second time to gather His saints (John 14:3) if they had already gone to heaven at death. If the wicked go to hell-fire at death, and the righteous to heaven at death, there is no need of a judgment day at the end of time, or for Christ to come to reward every man according to his works. Matt. 16:27; Rev. 22:12. This idea of a person going to hell or heaven at death destroys the Bible doctrine of the resurrection, the coming of Christ, and the judgment at the last day. There is no text in the Bible which, when rightly interpreted, teaches that anybody goes to hell or heaven at death, because the Bible does not contradict its own teachings.
6WD Eccl. 3:20. All go to one place at death, and that one place is the grave, where all turn to dust again. Job 30:23; John 5:28,29. The Bible never speaks of the soul or spirit going out of the body at death to maintain, or to become capable of maintaining, a conscious existence somewhere else. Eight times the Bible speaks of the soul as going into the grave. Acts 2:31; Job 33:18,22,28,30; Ps. 30:3, 89:48; Isa. 38:17.
7WD Ps. 146:3,4. When a man dies, his soul is unconscious till the resurrection.
8WD Ps. 115:17. If the righteous went to heaven when they died, they would certainly be praising God now, but this text says that the dead praise not the Lord.
9WD Job 14:21. The dead do not know anything about what takes place on the earth after they die, because they are unconscious. In the Bible, death is call a sleep 54 times. Thus we understand that the dead are unconscious, just as a person is unconscious who is in a deep sleep. The breath of life from God made Adam a living soul, a conscious being, and when that breath of life was taken away at this death, it would necessarily leave him to be a dead soul, an unconscious being, till the resurrection, when that breath of life or spirit is put back into him again.
10WD Eccl. 9:5,6. The dead do not know anything. When a Christian dies, the next moment, as far as his sensations are concerned, he is with Christ to stay. The lapse of time between a Christian's death and Jesus' second coming, the glorious resurrection day, will seem to him like an instant. To him it will seem but the next moment after he closes his eyes in death when he awakes to be with his blessed Saviour forever. The first righteous man who died will awaken and stand in Christ's presence at the same time as the last man who dies. To each the elapsed time between death and the resurrection will seem but a moment.
For more information on this subject, click on Spirit, Breath, and Soul. Also, go to Try the Spirits under Apples of Gold.
