Pslam 139:8 affirms the Lord is in sheol/Hades
"If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there."
A terrible misappropriation of Psalm 139.
(Now this, He ascendedwhat does it mean but that He also first[
c] descended into the lower parts of the earth? (Ephesians 4:9)
For You will not leave my soul in Sheol, Nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption. (Psalm 16:10)
So then, after the Lord had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went out and preached everywhere, the Lord working with
them and confirming the word through the accompanying signs. Amen. (Mark 16:19-20)
Christ is in heaven seated at the right hand of God.
There is no punctuation in Greek and would be a contradiction as Christ was in the grave for 3 days and did not ascend til sometime later after his resurrection.
Regardless, Christ himself made the promise that the thief would be with him in paradise. This single handedly refutes a non-conscious after life and the idea that believers are not with Christ at death.
For I am hard-pressed between the two, having a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.
No reference to the future coming of Christ, Paul is clearly telling us that departure from his physical body equates to him going to be with Christ. It is incontrovertible.
The intermediate state is unconciousness as Ps 146:4, Psalm 115:17 proves.
"His spirit departs, he returns to his earth;
In that very day his plans perish."
No state of unconsciousness is implied at all, you would be misappropriating the text. It does tell us his spirit departs, meaning it simply goes elsewhere.
The dead do not praise the LORD,
Nor any who go down into silence.
Claiming this is a reference to unconscious after life is an extortion of the text. This passage simply means to reveal the nature of Sheol (in OT times, a critical point to understand) and that it is cut off from the land of the living.
but I think you need to look into this a lot more deeply as the odea of an immortal soul surviving physical death is not biblical.
9 Hell from beneath is excited about you,
To meet you at your coming;
It stirs up the dead for you,
All the chief ones of the earth;
It has raised up from their thrones
All the kings of the nations.
10 They all shall speak and say to you:
Have you also become as weak as we?
Have you become like us?
11 Your pomp is brought down to Sheol,
And the sound of your stringed instruments;
The maggot is spread under you,
And worms cover you."
(Isaiah 44)
This passage is in reference to Sennacherib, the deceased king of Babylon. Those in Sheol are
conscious of their state and can even perceive those who enter.
" 14 So that no trees by the waters may ever again exalt themselves for their height, nor set their tops among the thick boughs, that no tree which drinks water may ever be high enough to reach up to them.
For they have all been delivered to death,
To the depths of the earth,
Among the children of men who go down to the Pit.
15 Thus says the Lord GOD: In the day when it went down to hell, I caused mourning. I covered the deep because of it. I restrained its rivers, and the great waters were held back. I caused Lebanon to mourn for it, and all the trees of the field wilted because of it. 16 I made the nations shake at the sound of its fall, when I cast it down to hell together with those who descend into the Pit; and all the trees of Eden, the choice and best of Lebanon, all that drink water, were comforted in the depths of the earth. 17 They also went down to hell with it, with those slain by the sword; and those who were its strong arm dwelt in its shadows among the nations.
18 To which of the trees in Eden will you then be likened in glory and greatness? Yet you shall be brought down with the trees of Eden to the depths of the earth; you shall lie in the midst of the uncircumcised, with those slain by the sword. This is Pharaoh and all his multitude, says the Lord GOD.
(Ezekiel 21)
Graves are not made in the depths of the earth but its surface, hence this is Sheol (hell). Men are brought down to the Pit (Sheol) and are found with others around them. A similar passage is found in Ezekiel 32 and speaks specifically of Egypt sharing this same fate.
"So Jacob tore his clothes, and put sackcloth on his loins and mourned for his son many days.
35Then all his sons and all his daughters arose to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. And he said, "Surely I will go down to Sheol in mourning for my son." So his father wept for him."(Genesis 35)
Jacob acknowledges his son is in Sheol and despite his perceived death, Jacob still referred to Joseph as his son (a person continuing to exist). He even expresses a desire to reunite with him..."surely I will go down to Sheol".
The hebrew word "rephaim" is also a term that refers to the actual
residents of Sheol, see Isa. 14:9, 26:14,19; Ps. 88:11; Prov. 2:18, 9:18, 21:16; Job. 26:5.
Also, the Hebrew equivalent for grave kever is never equated with Sheol and these two are consistently portrayed as opposites, hence kever being the state of the physical body and sheol being the state of the soul. One represents unconsciousness (grave) while the other represents consciousness (after life). Same goes for the greek counterparts, mneema meaning grave is consistently contrasted with Hades in the septuagint, which is the NT word for Sheol, the conscious state of the after life. There is a very big significance to this distinction, if there truly was no conscious state at death then there would not exist a distinction between kever/mneema (grave) and Sheol/Hades.
