Heaven or Hell right after death?

Question

So what happens after death?
Does one wait or "sleep" until judgement day? Or does one go automatically go to heaven/hell/purgatory?

Answer 1

Catholics Believe

That, as nothing defiled can enter heaven (Apoc. 21:27), souls with the slightest stain upon them must go through a process of purgation before coming face to face with Him "whose eyes are too pure to behold evil" (Hab. 1:13).

"I am thy father's spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day, confined to waste in fires Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burned and purged away!" (Hamlet, Act 1, scene 5).


Catholics Believe

That there is a "prison," a place of temporal punishment, where souls (whose guilt of sin has been forgiven) go to make restitution for their transgressions:

"I (Christ Jesus) say to thee, thou wilt not come out from it, until thou has paid the last penny" (St. Matt. 5:25-26).


Catholics Believe

That the prayers, good works, acts of mercy, of the living help the souls of the departed who are in purgatory.

"Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of" (Tennyson).

"Lay this body anywhere: be not concerned about that: but one favor do I beg of you, that wherever you may be you will always make a remembrance of me, when you stand at the altar of God" (St. Monica to her son St. Augustine).

Answer 2

I think it depends on how you lived your life and what beliefs you had when you were alive. I do think that if you don't know of Christ, or you didn't get a chance to learn what you need to, you go to a sort of purgatory, to learn. Then you have the option of accepting it or not. If you had the option of accepting it on earth and you didn't, you may get another chance, but it may take longer for you. If you have already accepted the gospel, and are living like you should, you go to heaven. You will be judged right after death, but I don't think you will sent straight to hell or heaven. I think God gives us all a chances to make things right. I do think that no matter what religion you are, you get a chance to show the type of person you are. That goes into it.

I don't believe in a hell like most do. I believe hell is a place without God. Not fire, not burning for eternity. I think the burning is the agony you feel for being out of God's presence. It's the pain of knowing that you could have changed things in your life that would have allowed you to stay with Him.

Answer 3

One sleeps until judgment day.

Actually what happens is after the coming of the beast there is one final battle where Jesus will raise the bodies of the dead to fight the forces of evil and the victorious will go to heaven. The "religious folk" will have you believe that one you die you go straight to heaven to be judged and then the good ones will enter heaven while the bad ones will go to hell. This rather narrow definition ignores other viewpoints; the "religious folk" think that those who don't believe in God, and most especially their brand of God will go to hell.

Actually, all we are good for are to serve as Jesus' shock troops. The truth has been bent so that people think a few moments after death they will wake up in heaven and they can watch their loved ones on earth. Instead they will be fighting for their very immortal lives along side their loved ones and the rest of the army. They also assume that it is God’s plan that they will win the war, but given God’s desire to allow freedom of choice the final outcome is not certain.

So when did this idea of heaven and hell gain its new meaning and its current impression? During the Dark Ages; agriculture is a manpower intensive situation with a lot of people having to live for dirt-cheap or no wages to slave over the land and work it. America’s solution was in slavery, that wouldn’t work in the Dark and Middle Ages, because it wasn’t nice to enslave white people, how would you know the difference between the slaves and the people who mattered? Religion provided the reason. The Church promised that if you worked long and hard for you whole life and you obeyed the laws then you would be rewarded with life eternal in heaven. If you didn’t follow their rules, one of which was to give to the church, then you would be lost in damnation for eternity. This was a wonderful scam that kept the peasants in line and since nobody came back from the dead to say that heaven didn’t exist it was a foolproof plan to control the masses. Then it you expanded the idea to cover nobility you could insure that the Church wouldn’t be challenged by the government; to do so would be morally wrong and would force that ruler to be excommunicated (just like Henry the 8th who just went and founded the Church of England instead of listening to the Catholic Church). This left the Bishops, Cardinals and the Pope sitting high and pretty in an unassailable position.

The system was running fine until a monk had a problem with the excesses of the Catholic Church; things like the practice of selling the “favors” of nuns or selling indulgences, which gave the purchaser the right to commit a certain sin. If you wanted to hold a barbecue on no-meat Fridays all you had to do was to donate to the Church and get the right documents. The Monk Martin Luther wanted to start a discussion on this so he posted his list of complaints on the door of St. Marks, in Germany. It might have died there except that Guttenberg was looking for fresh material. He had just come off of his publishing of that old blockbuster, the bible, and he was looking for a new one to follow it up. So he published this essay of Martin Luther’s and unknowingly gave birth to the restoration.

Why is it that atheists seem to know more about the bible and the history behind it than most “religious folk?” For me that knowledge started my departure from organized religion.

Answer 4

What happens to the spirit when a person dies? Psalm 146:4 says: "His spirit goes out, he goes back to his ground; in that day his thoughts do perish." When a person dies, his impersonal spirit does not go on existing in another realm as a spirit creature. It "returns to the true God who gave it." (Ecclesiastes 12:7) This means that any hope of future life for that person now rests entirely with God.

The ancient Greek philosophers Socrates and Plato held that a soul inside a person survives death and never dies. What does the Bible teach about the soul? Adam "came to be a living soul," says Genesis 2:7. He did not receive a soul; he was a soul—a whole person. The Scriptures speak of a soul's doing work, craving food, being kidnapped, experiencing sleeplessness, and so forth. (Leviticus 23:30; Deuteronomy 12:20; 24:7; Psalm 119:28) Yes, man himself is a soul. When a person dies, that soul dies.—Ezekiel 18:4.

What, then, is the condition of the dead? When pronouncing sentence upon Adam, Jehovah stated: "Dust you are and to dust you will return." (Genesis 3:19) Where was Adam before God formed him from the dust of the ground and gave him life? Why, he simply did not exist! When he died, Adam returned to that state of complete absence of life. The condition of the dead is made clear at Ecclesiastes 9:5, 10, where we read: "The dead know nothing . . . In the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom." (New International Version) Scripturally, death is a state of nonexistence. The dead have no awareness, no feelings, no thoughts.

Answer 5

The bible says that everyone waits until judgment day. It's in the book of Revelation.

11 Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. Earth and sky fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. 12 And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. 13 The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what he had done. 14 Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. 15 If anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

The Bible confirms that "no one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven" (John 3:13). Even righteous King David, a man after God's own heart (Acts 13:22), was described by Peter as being "dead and buried" (Acts 2:29), not alive in heaven or some other state or location.

Answer 6

There is no soul sleep of the righteous. The bible clearly says:
2Co 5:8 Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. (ESV Translation)

Only the damned sleep in their graves.
1Co 15:51 Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,

Those that have died in Christ now reside in heaven. Since Christ, the second person of the Godhead, has always existed, the elect of God have been known to Him before Christ actually walked the earth. So anyone who has died since the world began exists in heaven or in the grave as described above.

The spiritual bodies of the righteous will result from the joining of their heavenly natures with their resurrected bodies at the second coming of Christ at the final judgment.

Those that are damned will awake from their sleep to be judged and join Satan in their separation from God in Hell.

Answer 7

There is no purgatory, the Bible does not say anything about it.The Bible says in Hebrews 9:27, Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.

Answer 8

You have stated two of the ways theology explains.
After death there are different interpretations. Find a religion and ask. You will see how they differ. Yet hell is hell. Heaven is heaven.

Answer 9

In Ecc.9:5 the bible tells us that the dead know nothing. When Jesus went to Lazarus after he was already dead, Jesus told his disciples that Lazarus was sleeping and that he was going to awaken him. If Lazarus was already up in heaven, would that not of been cruel to put him back on earth. I think that would have made him the saddest person on earth. And last but not least, if everyone is in heaven or hell as soon as they die, then what is the day of Resurrection about and why does the bible speak of judgment day?

Answer 10

We go to heaven or hell right after death, but those places are not permanent. According to Revelation, at the last judgment, all who have died will rise, and those whose names are found in the Book of Life will spend eternity with God in the new heaven and new Earth, and those whose names are not in the Book of Life will be cast into the lake of fire.