Snoozeville or Heaven, Part 2

My co-worker and I have continued our conversation today while working, about whether or not the soul "sleeps" after death. He believes that it does, while I believe that the Bible says otherwise. We did a lot of joking around about it, but our positions are essentially unchanged. He told me that he is very open-minded and asked me if I could give him some Scriptures to support my position. Without benefit of my Biblesoft computer program, (I'm spoiled now) I could only come up with few for him to look at, and they ended up in my last post.

I don't know what I expected in the face of such open-mindedness. Perhaps, "Golly David, these Scriptures have cleared it all up for me! You were telling me the truth!" (Laughing here) This man attends a Baptist church, and I went to school with his pastor's wife. I don't believe that they are teaching this doctrine there. I discovered through the course of talking with him that his parents are Seventh-Day Adventists who are not the least bit pleased that he has joined a mainstream Baptist church. They view the teaching he receives there as misguided. For all I know, they may even view it as cultic.

This illuminated things for me a little bit. Generally speaking, Seventh-Day Adventism while sharing some of what I consider to be essential doctrines of the Christian faith, also holds to some aberrant teachings of its own, which are decidedly apart from the teachings of the Bible. One of those is that the soul "goes to sleep" at death.

When he was asking me for Scriptures, I was racking my brain trying to come up with the obvious passage that would take away all doubt for him on this matter. I don't know why I didn't think of it then, but I should have mentioned the account which Jesus gave to us about Lazarus and the rich man, in Luke 16:19-31. For me, this passage sums up the whole matter of whether or not the soul is conscious after a person dies physically. In the passage, both Lazarus and the rich man are dead and their bodies are buried, but the soul of each man was obviously conscious and interactive. The rich man could not only see Lazarus across a "great gulf", but it is also obvious that the rich man could also hear, speak and feel. That doesn't sound like any sort of "sleep" state for the soul to me.

I guess it was so glaringly obvious that I just missed it. Ah well.