Devin's Happy Place

If you don't believe the Bible is true, stop reading this right now.  My entire hypothesis is based on scripture I read today and on nothing else.  I didn't have any kind of apparition enter my room and tell me that ghosts are real, I just pursued my thoughts and reasoning and came to a conclusion.  A conclusion I think is very conceivable.

The passage I came to this conclusion from is 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18.  Six verses and I'm writing up a thesis. Awesome.

In this passage, Paul (the author) refers to Christians who have died as "asleep".  Now, this has two implications.  The first, death is no longer anything to be feared.  Just as sleeping comes naturally to the body, so does death.  Those who are truly in Christ will pass away peacefully and quietly. 

The second implication is that they don't go anywhere.  Just as you fall asleep in your bed, you wake up in your bed.  I don't want to say that people's souls stay with their bodies and thus in their graves, but I don't want to say that they don't.  I don't know where their souls go, all I know, well, all I think is that their soul is neither in heaven nor hell.  Christian or non-Christian, I believe (until proven otherwise by either rhetoric or scripture) that when someone dies they are not "on the other side".

At the end of this passage Paul says that when Jesus Christ comes back to earth with the resounding shout and trumpet the dead in Christ shall rise.  Those sleepers will wake up.

Imagine when you sleep.  You have no cognitive way to tell the time, you can't describe to me how your bedroom looked while you were unconscious, and I doubt you could tell me who entered and exited your room during your slumber.  Just the same, when you wake up you feel that no time has passed.  All the time I close my eyes at 10:00 PM, only to open them at 6:30 AM and feel like I only blinked.

Surely this is what it is like for those who are dead in Christ.  They're not gone anywhere, they've just been removed from the action of the world so that they can be around when Christ returns, but not endure the ages playing the waiting game.  It really is a nice thing, maybe they'll have a dream or too to entertain them...what if they sleepwalk!?

So, what happens to people who die who aren't in Christ?  Well, they certainly don't sleep.  They aren't in any physical form but, just like the Christians, they're not in heaven or hell.   I think they're walking.  The "ghosts" that we hear about. Sightings and stuff, whatever.  All the people we've called ridiculous and stupid because they claim they see epic battles on old Civil War Battlefields in the middle of the night, are just being revealed what the spirits are doing.  I don't know why or how ghost sightings are as strange as they are, but I don't think these people are freaking out over nothing.

I think that it's a punishment.  The dead in Christ will rise, awaken from their slumber feeling no passage of time, but all heathen who have perished will have to endure the days between their death and the end times.  Doomed to walk the earth.  Then at the end of the age will be thrown, with Satan and all his minions, into the lake of fire to burn for the rest of eternity like the hell we've been taught so much about.

Don't take my word alone for it.  These are the conclusions I personally drew from a passage of scripture.  I'm not saying I'm right, I only think I could be wrong.  If anything I hope all this makes you think about how you view the spiritual realm.  It's real, do you really want to watch a few thousand years pass by?

Reference:

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

13But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope.

14For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.

15For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep.

16For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.

17Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord.

18Therefore comfort one another with these words.

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