As a pastor and a Christian, I have quietly dreamt of going on a field trip to see what lies beyond death. Just think about how life changing it would be. We speak of Heaven and Hell, but we don’t usually see them before we go there. As a result they seem surreal to us at best. Some people in history have seen parts of life beyond the grave via out of body experiences. They all are profoundly affected. While my hope in Christ is to someday be with Christ in Heaven and eventually experience the resurrection of my body and live with God in a New Earth, I think I would like to see even more. While disturbing, I think I would even like to briefly see the fate of the damned. I might change my mind on that if ever given the opportunity.
Normally, we don’t get to see beyond the pall of death. Yet, I can think of no topic more important to each of us. We don’t want any rude surprises when we leave this world. We want to know what will happen, and to some extent we can know.
What I would like to do with you in this series of articles is to take a field trip of sorts. We are going to see what scripture shares about all aspects of life after death. We will give Near Death Experiences (NDE) of both heaven and its counterpart a little consideration. For me, they don’t hold the weight of inspired scripture as a source of information. There are factors that could make a Near Death Experience imagined or even a deception, but they still need to be addressed. That is why we will be primarily discussing scripture. Using scripture, we will go on a verbal field trip, doing our best to imagine what is described. It will be interesting, but hopefully it will also be life-changing. This information was not given by God to be simply FYI.
First Stop: Sheol
Lets start at the bottom. The first life-after-death destiny mentioned in the Bible is Sheol. Sheol is the counterpart to heaven. You mean you never heard of Sheol? I wouldn’t blame you if that were true. Apparently my spell-checker hasn’t either. Sheol is a Hebrew word that is often translated away. In English, it is often translated as “the grave” or “hell” or “the pit”. I would contend that these translations are usually wrong or at least confusing. Sheol is a not the hole where we put dead bodies, nor is it a vague concept of where dead people go, nor is it what most of us think of when we hear the word, “hell”. Sheol is a place. A place with somewhat complicated properties.
Now the conventional wisdom about the translation of the word “Sheol” is that the meaning depends on the context. When you see how it gets used in the original Hebrew, it is easy to understand why this is thought. Sometimes the word gets turned into a compound word. In this case, it expresses a closely related subject, like decay. More often, though, the appearance of slightly different meanings in various contexts is probably created by the individual’s confusion over what Sheol is like.
Confused individual ideas about Sheol need not create confusion for us, because Jesus really did clear up the nature of Sheol, as we shall see. When it comes to the nature of life after death, Jesus is the ultimate authority.
Next Time: Sheol gets connected with the Greek word/idea: Hades
afterdeathsite 
Our SURE Hope – thank God!
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