This piece is adapted from a longer entry investigating Word of Faith theology.

Generations of believers have been taught that they will go to heaven when they die. People, of course, know they will not go to heaven as they are on earth. Everyone knows that the body decays in the grave when someone dies. Hence, one tradition says it is the spirit of the person that goes to heaven. So, life after death is quite spiritual. In this piece, I want to show that this common view is mistaken by exploring biblical data on life after death.

Let us begin with this: Do humans continue to exist when they die—that is, when the spirit separates from the body? This is a remarkably complex question that we cannot do justice to in this short entry. However, we will make a few key points. First, the answer is both Yes and No. When people die, they obviously cease to exist in the way they used to be. Indeed, death seems to be the precise word we use to describe the cessation of the life of a person as we knew it. Properly speaking, a human life is an embodied life. So, once the body ceases to be animated, life as we know it ceases. But it is also true that the ancients in the Bible thought that a dead person continues to exist:

Ecclesiastes 12:7 ESV
and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

This text, made famous by its frequent use at Services of Songs for the deceased, suggests a reversal of the creation of the human in Genesis: the breath of life returns to God, and the body dissolves into the earth. This may lead one to think the dead continue to exist with God in some spiritual form. But as we shall soon see, this existence consists of almost nothing. Some other texts suggest that the dead go to the realm of the dead, characterized by inactivity:

Ecclesiastes 9:10 ESV
Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.