Ask Pastor Mike Live

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Let me tackle some of those. Sandra asks, when you die, your soul immediately goes to heaven or hell. Why would your soul need to go to hell to await judgment, or heaven and await the Great White Throne judgment? It seems like the decision has already been made if your soul is somewhere immediately.

You do not die and have your conscious awareness, your soul or your spirit as I would put it, go to heaven or hell. That is not the case. Let us put it this way: if you are a Christian, you will go according to Second Corinthians chapter five to the right hand of Christ, who is at the right hand of the Father. You will be there in His presence and you will have time with Christ because you will be with Christ.

To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. If Christ is at the right hand of the Father, and the Father is enthroned in a place called heaven, you will be there until you get your body back. When your body comes back to you at the time Jesus is dispatched to get His church, you will be put in a place on this earth that has been reworked and reformed so that Satan is no longer causing trouble here. Something will be different enough to let people live long periods of time. God is going to sustain life for longer periods of time for those that inhabit that physically. It is called the Millennial Kingdom.

After that, you will have the eternal state. All of those realities will put you in a place of enjoying whatever rewards you will be granted at the Bema Seat judgment. The Bema Seat is for Christians; the Great White Throne judgment is for non-Christians. You are going to experience an existence in an eternal place that is not like the existence that you have in a disembodied state before God. Sandra, you do not immediately go to the eternal place where you are going to be.

When it comes to the word hell, we usually mean specifically the lake of fire. That is where people go, assigned a particular level of judgment based on their deeds. You ask why they would have to wait for that. Wherever they are going now, it is not the lake of fire. They are going to some place that is not pleasant, as Jesus clearly taught, but it is not their end home. It is not the end game for them, nor is it for us.

Let us say today my non-Christian neighbor dies and I die. We both die. I am going to go and be disembodied to a place of comfort. I will be judged at some point on the timeline, then I will get my body back. I will be assigned a place in the Millennial Kingdom to rule and reign with Christ, and then I will be assigned a place in the eternal state, the new heaven and the new earth. I am going to spend my time on the new earth because God is going to spend His time in the new heaven. We will experience the fullness of all the rewards, including reputation, relationships, riches, and real estate. You will experience those, and that will be your permanent home.

If my non-Christian neighbor dies, he goes to a place that is not comfortable or pleasant. He is there until he gets his body back. Those who go to hell will have a resurrected body. They will stand before the Great White Throne and then be put into a real, literal, physical place because they are in a real, literal, physical body that is put on immortality. They will go to this place to be punished according to their deeds.

The essence of your question is: why wait? I am telling you that you do not go to the same place when you die that you will inhabit eternally, either as a non-Christian or a Christian. We can only speculate about why there is a wait, but it seems very logical. Some of the things that you have done, both good and bad, are going to rack up a reverberating effect that is going to go on for a long time.

Others have rightly illustrated this by people who have started movements or cult groups that deceive and hurt people. That may reverberate for a long time. Suppose I am the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. I started this thing and pulled people away from the truth of Christianity. What is his judgment going to be? A lot of what he is going to be judged for is not only what he wrote or taught, but what he started and how that thing is affecting people for generations.

Conversely, your pastor may write a pamphlet on prayer that provokes a lot of people to do righteous things. In that, he may be racking up rewards for a long time based on the actions of sitting down and doing the hard work of writing things that help Christians, or preaching a sermon that is recorded and broadcast on the radio.

Think of J. Vernon McGee. He has been dead for a long time, yet he is still being broadcast, and people are hearing him for the first time and being brought to faith in Christ. I was just texting with someone this morning about the lasting impact of his preaching. Things like that necessitate waiting until this era of time is completely played out before we are judged and assigned the proper rewards or punishments. Sandra, I think that is why this is going on.