Many people have various misconstrued ideas concerning what happens after death. The Bible is clear in what it says, however, there is a lack of clarity concerning what many people think it says. We don’t go to some holding place called paradise. I know that Jesus says to the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise,” but there is very little evidence to that effect that there is a waiting room beyond the grave where we hang around waiting for the resurrection. Let me explain as clearly as I can what I mean. What the Bible teaches is that when Jesus returns at the consummation of the age and the advent of the new heaven and new earth then we will be resurrected from the dead as in 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians 15. So what happens in-between death and the general resurrection of the dead in Christ? What I think takes place, and I am speculating here. Is that it is analogous to having an anaesthetic before an operation. You are in the room next to the operating theatre, and the anaesthetist comes and elucidates as to what is about happen, and then she gives you an injection. The result is that one moment you are awake and the next moment you are out, and the very next moment or so it seems you are awake again. There appears to be no gap between getting the injection and waking up. I think it is like that when we die, one moment we are awake and about to go into the deep sleep of death, and the next moment we are awake and meeting Jesus together with the rest of the people of God from all the ages of history. It seems that there is no time lapse between the two events. I say this because God dwells and functions beyond this thing we call ‘time.’ For God, it is always the eternal now. We are bound by time, but God is not and so when we die we step out of time and into God’s eternal today if that makes sense. Thus, when we die we await the resurrection of the dead, and it does not matter that in this world whether we died two-thousand years ago or yesterday, we wake up in God’s eternal today, and it appears as though it was just moments ago that we fell asleep. I don’t know if that helps, but it makes sense to me.