John tells us that no one went to heaven before Jesus. (John 3:13) He is
“the firstborn from the dead”.…..the first human to attain a heavenly resurrection, (Col 1:18)…but not the first human to be resurrected. Jesus and his apostles resurrected several people, back to their former lives and reunited them with their families.
This is the second or general resurrection of the dead as Jesus said…
“Do not be amazed at this, for the hour is coming in which all those in the memorial tombs will hear his voice 29 and come out, those who did good things to a resurrection of life, and those who practiced vile things to a resurrection of judgment.”
All the dead (both righteous and unrighteous) are called from the same place…..their graves. (Acts 24:15)
Since the soul IS the sentient being, the soul dies when the last breath is expelled from the lungs. (Ezekiel 4:18, 20) The soul, or what remains of them, returns to the dust just as God said. Why does there need to be a storage place when the grave itself (Sheol) is the storage place. (Eccl 9:5, 10)
What “lives” is the memory of that individual with the one who can recreate them….the one who can return the spirit (breath) of life.
God’s memory is infinite as the scripture in Psalm 147:4 tells us….
”He counts the number of the stars;
He calls all of them by name.”
Astronomers tell us that there are trillions of galaxies and each contain billions of stars…if God can remember each of his stellar creations, how much more so will he remember those made in his image?
Not a molecule of any individual needs to be present for God to resurrect a person and give them a new body. Every single person on this planet is a ‘new creation’ every seven years because of the continual process of cell renewal, so there is not a cell in your body that was there seven years ago……suggesting that God needs to “store” souls is rather pointless. The earth itself is the storage unit for the earthly remains of all his creatures who all die the same death as we do. (Eccl 3:19-20) The difference with humans is the promise of a resurrection because humans alone were not designed to die, but to live forever in their mortal flesh.
The meaning of “mortal” is that they CAN die….but humans had access to “the tree of life“ in the beginning, and this guaranteed them “everlasting life”, which is not “immortality”. When sin entered the human race, God denied access to that life preserving tree. (Gen 3:22-24)
The fact that they CAN die doesn’t mean that they HAD to. Continued life was contingent upon their obedience to their Sovereign Creator. Disobedience was the only cause of death in Eden.