If the supposedly present (to them) intermediate state is the accurate way to frame this, you are correct. If, however—and, as I have been trying to say, [this] may be the case—what we consider described as an ongoing intermediate state is not (to them) ongoing, but one-and-done with the resurrection... That it may not seem so to your use of the mode of expression does not make it so. God is not like us. His ways are not our ways.
Let me grant for the sake of argument that the dead do not experience any perceptible duration of the intermediate state, that the very next moment of which they are conscious after death is the resurrection, even though decades or even centuries may have elapsed. (This is easy for me to grant because it is close to what I actually believe.)
Here is the point:
That does not disprove the intermediate state.
The question is not whether the dead perceive duration in that state, but whether there is a state between death and resurrection. You said it yourself: They don’t experience any perceptible duration of—what? The intermediate state, the interval (
medius) that lies between (
inter-) death and resurrection. But the fact that they don’t perceive anything in that interval
doesn’t disprove the reality of the interval itself. The state remains intermediate because death and resurrection remain distinct events, regardless of whether the dead are conscious of that interval.
The language is of the temporal frame, which, concerning the afterlife, does not necessarily translate to the same frame we experience. That we (I) don't know the nature of the afterlife frame does not incapacitate the prevailing fact of a very possible other-frame. Logical sequence of fact, may rule the day, there. To accept a temporal-only use of the temporal language, as though it necessarily defeats any other use, to me is not justified.
I said that Sproul is conflating the intermediate state with the final state by attributing to the wicked now what belongs properly to final hell. Your response doesn’t engage that distinction. Instead, it shifts the conversation to a different issue altogether, namely, the relation between temporal language and the afterlife.
But that misses the point. Even if the afterlife is not experienced by its inhabitants in the same temporal mode we now experience—which is what I believe anyway—it simply doesn’t follow that the distinction between
intermediate state and
final state disappears. The latter is an ontological and eschatological distinction grounded in revelation, not merely a projection of our “temporal frame.”
And you even recognize and maintain the very distinction you are trying to blur. On the one hand, you argue for an intermediate state in which no duration is consciously registered; it is not “ongoing” for them “but one-and-done with the resurrection.” On the other hand, you argue that in final hell the wicked experience the presence of God intensely with excruciating torment and anguish (
like here). No conscious experience in the intermediate state vs. conscious experience in the final state. (Same for the redeemed, I should think. The very next moment of which they are conscious after death is being raised to meet Jesus.)
