Are there souls in heaven now?

The remaining questions

Four more texts and three names are usually raised at this point. We take them in turn, briefly, because the ground has been well prepared.

“Cannot kill the soul”

And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

Does this verse teach that the soul survives the body? Read the second half. God “is able to destroy both soul and body”. The soul is destructible. What the first half means is that a persecutor can end your present life but cannot touch your eternal life, the life that God holds in trust for you and will restore at the resurrection. Your enemies can kill you; they cannot un-save you. God alone has the final word, and that is why He alone is to be feared. The verse is a warning against the fear of men, not a statement that the soul is immortal; it says the exact opposite in its second clause.

“David did not ascend into the heavens”

On the day of Pentecost, Peter preached about David and the resurrection of Jesus, and said something that would be very strange if David were in heaven.

“Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day.

Then, a few verses later: “For David did not ascend into the heavens” (Acts 2:34). Peter is explaining that Psalm 16 and Psalm 110 could not be about David himself, because David is still in his tomb and has not gone to heaven; they are about Christ, who rose and ascended. If David’s soul had been in heaven for a thousand years, Peter’s argument would be false, and his hearers would have known it. Peter states it as plain fact, and Jesus had already said the same thing in general terms:

No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven.

“Not made perfect apart from us”

The great roll call of faith in Hebrews 11 lists Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Joseph, Moses, David, Samuel and the prophets. Then it says this about all of them:

These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise, God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us.

They “did not receive the promise”. They are waiting, so that they “should not be made perfect apart from us”. The heroes of faith will receive their reward together with every believer, at the same moment, at the resurrection. That is precisely what Paul said: the crown is given “on that Day, and not to me only but also to all who have loved His appearing” (2 Timothy 4:8). Heaven’s roll of honour is not already assembled. It is waiting for the trumpet.

Enoch, Elijah and Moses

If no one has ascended to heaven, what about Enoch, who “was not, for God took him” (Genesis 5:24), and Elijah, who “went up by a whirlwind into heaven” (2 Kings 2:11)? And Moses, who appeared with Elijah at the transfiguration (Matthew 17:3)?

The answer is that these are the exceptions, and the Bible names them as exceptions. Enoch and Elijah were taken to heaven without dying; Hebrews says of Enoch that he “did not see death” (Hebrews 11:5). They were not disembodied souls; they were living men, translated. Moses did die, and was buried by God Himself (Deuteronomy 34:5-6), but Jude tells us that Michael the archangel contended with the devil “about the body of Moses” (Jude 9). Why argue about a body if the real Moses had already gone to heaven as a soul? The contest only makes sense if Moses was to be raised, body and all, and the devil disputed God’s right to do it. God won the dispute; Moses was raised; and so it was a resurrected Moses, not a ghost, who stood with Jesus on the mountain. Every one of these cases is a special act of God, and every one involves a whole person, not a soul without a body. They are not evidence that souls go to heaven at death. They are evidence that the only way to heaven is the way God Himself provides: translation or resurrection.

The pattern holds

Step back and look at the whole. A human being is dust and breath. Death is their separation. The dead sleep and know nothing. The hard texts, read in their paragraphs and in the light of the plain ones, do not teach otherwise: Paul longs for the resurrection body, the thief is promised Paradise when Jesus comes, the rich man and Lazarus is a parable, the medium of En Dor is a forbidden deception, and the souls under the altar are blood crying for justice. David is in his tomb. The heroes of faith are waiting for us. The Bible is one book, and on this subject it speaks with one voice.