Well - I did say I was returning briefly. Let’s hope I can keep my promise.

I suppose my interest beyond the immediate discussion might be why the NT and early church seemed to show so little interest in life after death (before the future resurrection). The expectation of Jesus’s imminent return (I mean in the traditional sense) would be one reason maybe, on which life after death expectations focus. But the delay of that return was already becoming an issue in the NT letters.

Maybe there’s a better reason for the NT’s absence of interest in an intermediate state - that imminent or not, the return of Jesus and fulfilment of God’s ultimate plans for creation are a more important focus than personal, immediate post mortem existence (or not). Maybe there’s a lesson there somewhere.

Just going back to the posts: we’ll have to disagree about Isaiah 14:9-17 - I don’t detect any comedy in it - and not really literary hyperbole (though maybe others do).

But what about other NT examples - such as Mark 12:24-27? Admittedly, Jesus here is using the form of the verb associated with resurrection when he speaks of life after death, but then he says: “God said to him: ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob’ - - - He is not God of the dead but of the living.” It is the final sentence, in which he interprets God’s words to Moses, which suggests that there is no intervening period of ‘death’ before resurrection. (Otherwise it would not be suggested that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were, in fact, at that time alive - and therefore still are).

Bear in mind too, that when the NT talks of future resurrection, it imports the effects and therefore the language of that resurrection into the present. It’s not, therefore, a strictly compartmentalised future occurrence.

Then there is the Transfiguration: “And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus.” - Mark 9:4. The context suggests that these were living beings, not apparitions, and that the disciples took them as such, wishing to set up booths for them and Jesus. To dispose of the intermediate state theory, you would have to argue that God brought these figures back from the dead prematurely to talk with Jesus. Then what - did they stay alive, or did he put them back in their graves again?

You could argue that this is the exception which proves the rule - but it does stand alongside hints that it is not the only exception. The troubling appearance of Samuel after his death - 1 Samuel 28:11-20 is another example.

One could add Romans 8:38 to the collection of NT passages hinting at an intermediate state - death cannot “separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” What would that mean, if in fact we were separated, albeit temporarily, from conscious experience of God’s presence? The thrust of Philippians 1:20-23 suggests the same to me: no time interval between our earthly experience of Christ and the post mortem experience.

To argue against myself, I could point to passages such as Romans 8:23, paralleled with 2 Corinthians 5:1-5, which I personally take to be Paul expressing his spirit’s longing not to be ‘unclothed’ (ie living a dismebodied spiritual existence) but to be ‘clothed’ with the new body which will come at the resurrection of the dead. (The same language is used in 1 Corinthians 15:53). But who is to say that an ‘intermediate state’ cannot give us a foretaste of the resurrection body to come, which whilst incomplete, nevertheless provides a satisfying mode of existence prior to the completion of the process? In other words whichever way you argue it, there is no decisive biblical position on the subject here.

I was perhaps not very clear about the cross-over into the passages concerning hell/Gehenna/lake of fire. I was considering whether there are any hints concerning an intermediate state of the non-righteous. I guess you are probably right - that most interpreters would consider the conscious everlasting torments of the beast and false prophet in Revelation 19:20 and 20:10 (and perhaps their followers) to be future, and therefore not an indicator of an intermediate state now. Though it’s not a decisive interpretation. You could probably say the same of Isaiah 66:24 (I wouldn’t really want to dispute it).

It’s interesting that Jesus invokes this passage (Isaiah 66:24) repeatedly in Mark 9:42-49. It’s here that there is a cross-over into the other discussion taking place. I guess from your standpoint, you’d argue that these torments are future. On the other hand, it has been argued (on OST)that ‘Gehenna’ refers only to the imminent 1st century destruction of Jerusalem. Past or future then? If it were past, Isaiah 66:24 should perhaps not have been invoked - since the torments described there appear to be unending.

My main point would be that while you argue a good case, the reason it has not been universally accepted previously is for these anomalies - and perhaps an extra-biblical logic as well. If God redeemed a people for himself at such cost (the death of Jesus on the cross), would he really want to wait so many years (thousands before and after Christ’s first coming) before he could enjoy their presence, described as “the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints” - Ephesians 1:18? I realise there is counter logic to this line of thinking, but nevertheless, it makes its impact.

My perspective, as a pastor who does counsel the dying, is somewhat different from yours. I don’t want to encourage anyone to believe things which are purely fanciful, and in a sense whether we experience an intermediate state or not is irrelevant to our conscious experience - both in a time lag before we experience God’s presence after death (there isn’t a conscious time lag), and probably to the thrust of what we are encouraged to believe and hope for: which is the resurrection of the body, accompanying (in my opinion!) the return of Jesus, and the establishment in their completion of a new heaven and a new earth. I’m personally looking forward very much to the latter.