Soul Sleep (the unconscious dead)

to some degree.


also, just wanted a real life example of.....

 

Using modern terminology, I have heard the "spirit of man" likened to a commuter's hard-drive: a place where man's memory is stored; the memory of who we are and the memory of our life's experiences. And we will get "our spirit" back in our new resurrected bodies.

 

some excerpts from Holman Bible Dictionary, article: soul -----

In the Bible, a person is a unity. Body and soul or spirit are not opposite terms, but rather terms which supplement one another to describe aspects of the inseparable whole person.

Such a holistic image of a person is maintained also in the New Testament even over against the Greek culture which, since Plato, sharply separated body and soul with an analytic exactness and which saw the soul as the valuable, immortal, undying part of human beings.

According to the Bible, a human being exists as a whole unit and remains also as a whole person in the hand of God after death. A person is not at any time viewed as a bodiless soul.


http://www.studylight.org/dic/hbd/view.cgi?number=T5974

 

I believe that is the gist of the dictionary article, yes.

 

I think the author is talking more about the soul than the spirit.

At times, soul simply replaces a preposition such as the expression “let my soul live,” which means “let me live” (1 Kings 20:32).

The Bible definietly talks about man's spirit, upon death, going back to God. -- perhaps in Job.

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Here is Holman Bible Dictionary's article on "spirit ---

http://www.studylight.org/dic/hbd/view.cgi?number=T5991

[ August 12, 2004, 09:36 PM: Message edited by: wopik ]

 

"For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him" (1 Thess. 5:9-10).

Here Paul contrasts those who are alive [awake] and those who are dead [asleep] in the Lord.

 

THAT VERY DAY Jesus told the thief he would be in Paradise.

"Today" was the day Christ made the promise, not the day they would be in paradise.


Jesus emphasized "today" because the thief repented and believed in Jesus that day. The previous day he was lost.

Moses uses the word "today" similarly in Deuteronomy 30:16-18. In verse 16, he commands them "today" to follow the Lord. He was not saying they only had to follow the Lord that day. Just as Moses gave the command that day, Jesus gave the promise that day.


Then Moses says, "But if your heart turns away so that you do not hear, and are drawn away, and worship other gods and serve them, I announce to you today that you shall surely perish . . ." (Dt. 30: 17-18).

They did not perish that day. In fact, they did not even perish the first day they turned away, because of God's patience and mercy.

 

GODzThunder,
When the Bible says people are asleep [dead], it never says that the body or the soul is asleep; it says the person himself is asleep.

An example of this is 1Thess. 5:10 - "...who died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep...."

(It never says Joe's soul is sleeping; it says Joe is sleeping.)

Where does this idea of "soul sleep" come from?

 

GODzThunder -- about 1 Peter 4:6, IMO, this is the best explaination I have heard.

I Peter 3:19,20 and I Peter 4:6 ---

It seems to me that the most natural and obvious interpretation is to refer it to those who were then dead (in Peter's time), to whom the gospel had been preached when living, and who had become true Christians.

Were they spirits then, or were they people like others?

Peter speaks of them as they were when he wrote; not as they had been, or were at the time when the message was preached to them.

The idea is, that to those spirits who were then in prison who had formerly lived in the days of Noah, the message had been in fact delivered. It was not necessary to speak of them precisely as they were at the time when it was delivered, but only in such a way as to identify them.