The Comfort Of Sheol

The Biblical Sheol (called Hades in the New Testament) with the physical "grave" of the ground or sea for the body and unconsciousness for the soul until resurrection (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10, Job 3:11-19) is not only very different from the evangelical conception of it, but it is also much better.  On a moral level, it is not unjust, while the evangelical distortion of it involves everyone's consciousness going to heaven or to a proto-hell when their body dies, with terrestrial events unfolding until the body is resurrected and reunited with the mind that is supposed to have been in existence the whole time.  A person who died sooner in human history than someone else would suffer or experience delight for longer.  It could not be justice to suffer for this reason.

With soul sleep until their resurrection, all the righteous and saved are resurrected at one moment and receive eternal life that begins at the same time.  They perceive nothing in between death and their physical revival.  No one receives more bliss and a longer experience in heaven based upon when they happened to be born or, more relevantly, when they happened to die.  Eternal life, while it might differ in its content somewhat from person to person (those who were morally greater in life receive greater rewards, but all receive eternal life itself), is not granted to some sooner than others, and especially not for an uncontrollable factor.  Where this is truly unjust, however, is with the treatment of the wicked.

With soul sleep until their own separate resurrection, all the wicked and unsaved are resurrected at one moment to receive their punishment--one that does not involve the abomination of eternal torment (Ezekiel 18:4, 2 Peter 2:6).  They are not damned to shorter or longer periods of intermediate suffering for their sins based upon when in history they died, which would be inherently unjust.  If this was such, they would be punished based on happenstance variables rather than according to the true nature of their sins.  The circumstances of birth and death do not determine if divinely inflicted suffering is just, and it is death rather than extreme torture that is the real Biblical justice for sin as it is (Romans 6:23, Revelation 20:15).  Hundreds or thousands of years of punitive pain before bodily resurrection would not be just punishment for a much shorter lifetime of sin, nor would suffering even longer durations for those who died earlier be just.

There is comfort in looking to Sheol, but not for the unconscious or nonexistent minds within it.  They would not be perceiving anything.  It is this absence of experience, a suspension of the capacity for pain of any kind, that Job longed for when tragedy fell upon him (again, Job 3:11-19).  He preferred to have died at birth and gone to Sheol, where all the righteous and wicked, if their souls continue to exist at all, "sleep" in a perceptionless state until their resurrection.  Anticipating this, though he would not have experienced anything, was so desirable he did not want to live.  No, the Bible does not teach that the righteous dead are "looking down" on us from heaven right now, or that the wicked are suffering agony even before they are resurrected and placed in the lake of fire.

The latter would be egregiously irrational for the aforementioned reason.  Logic, truth (which is grounded in reason), and evidence for Christianity do not depend upon preference, but there is indeed personal comfort to be found in the actual Biblical Sheol concerning the death of loved ones.  Many people are irrationalistic to their core; they care nothing for logical necessities that exclude certain afterlife concepts from even possibly being true, or for the high probability of Christianity being true.  They understand nothing of or care little for what Christianity actually consists of.  Even so, evangelicals who fret over thinking that their dead friends or family are in torment right now if they were not Christians at the moment of death, or over the even more erroneous idea that all the unsaved dead go to hell now and that suffering in hell lasts forever, could find deep peace in what the Bible really teaches about Sheol, the intermediate abode of all the human dead.