Answer:
(by Rev. Joel H. Linton)

When you are considering the question, the first thing to do is go to Bible verses that speak about man's state after death. When their bodies decay, where do their spirits go?

There are several places that speak to this:

To start with:

There is no reincarnation. There is only one life, then a waiting for judgment, then a resurrection and judgment and an eternal state -- either the second death in the Lake of Fire or eternal life in the New Heavens and the New Earth.

Hebrews 9:27 "Just as man is destined to die once, and after that face judgment..."

What happens to a man's spirit when the body dies?

There are only two places that men's spirits can go.

1. For a Christian: The man's spirit goes to be with Jesus in Heaven awaiting with him His second coming and the resurrection of their bodies.

2 Corinthians 5:8 -- "We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord." Being absent from the body for a Christian means that a person is present with the Lord Jesus in Heaven.

These people are where the Lord Jesus is in Heaven so they do not roam around the earth.

Philippians 1:21, 23 -- Paul says to die is gain; it is better to depart and be with Christ.

So that means that the spirit in Heaven is conscious. There is no soul sleep. He is speaking of relationship and presence, which means a person's spirit does not sleep until the Resurrection Day but that he is conscious and waiting in Heaven.

2. For a non-Christian, their spirits after their bodies die do not go to be present with Jesus. They are held in prisons in Hell (apart from God's presence and goodness, but only with God's wrath hanging over them) awaiting the Judgment Day.

1 Peter 3:19-20 "through whom also he went and preached (before) to the spirits (now) in prison who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built."

So you have the people who were preached to by Jesus through the Holy Spirit at the time when the ark was built, but who disobeyed and did not repent. So they died in the Flood. What happened to them after they died? They are now in prison. They are like in a holding cell awaiting the final judgment. Just like you arrest someone and put them in jail until a trial.

People cannot get out on bail. People are not free to roam around on the earth until jugment day.

Think about Jesus' parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16. The rich man begs Abraham to let Lazarus come bring water to cool his tongue since he is in torment. But Lazarus cannot come to him. There is a vast chasm that separates them that cannot be crossed either direction. Then the rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus back to earth as a ghost to warn the family. Notice, the rich man cannot go back himself to warn the family. That means that the dead who are not in Heaven do not stay and roam the earth, but go to hell to await the final judgment.

Luke 16:23 "in hell where he was in torment." This is after his death, but before the final judgmenet because his five brothers are still alive on earth and he is begging that Abraham send Lazarus to go warn them. The rich man cannot leave his place of torment to go back to earth, and he also cannot communicate in any way with the living, otherwise he would directly give a message to his brothers through dream or something.

In no place in the Bible is there a description of spirits of dead people hanging around the earth. They have passed on -- to either heaven to be with Jesus or hell to await the final judgment day.

So what about all the accounts of appearences of ghosts who haunt places who have the form of the dead person. The answer is that evil spirits, fallen angels, pretend to be these dead persons as ways of bringing people away from believing in God and away from understanding hell and judgment. They want people to fear the dead and fear them as demons or false gods instead of looking to the true God. And of course, demons have been hanging around. They know all about people from hundreds of years ago. They can imitate their appearance. They can also share secrets that only those people would have known. Why? Demons might have witnessed what happened to that other person in history.

The same with people who under hypnosis have visions as if they had former lives like they were around thousands of years ago as some Roman general or living is some town. They might be able to have a vision that is accurate to that point in history and even have a name of a person who really lived there at that time. These details might prove true after a historical investigation. But this does not prove that the person under hypnosis who saw a vision was reincarnated from the person in the past. Rather, it is more likely that under a trancelike state, the person's mind is more susceptible to a demon's manipulation and the demon can plant in them memories or visions of a past time that the person never witnessed, but the demon certainly witnessed those past events. It is not reincarnation at all.

In the Old Testament, you have a command not to attempt to contact dead people (Deuteronomy 18:11). If someone does it, they were to be put to death. This does not imply that dead people actually can be contacted. It just means that there was a practice among the pagans in Canaan to try to contact dead people. And perhaps the prohibition, like the one against worshipping idols was partly due to the fact that participating in those things caused you to be interacting with demons, fallen angels.

Now we have the one account of Saul trying to contact Samuel using the Witch of Endor. Even in this case, we do not know if this was really Samuel or a demon pretending to be Samuel. And if it was really Samuel's spirit, we do not know if this was a normal possibility, or if God intervened and allowed the contact unexpectedly. It is possible that what happened was not what the witch was used to seeing. She seems a bit frightened and surpised. We must look to other Scriptures that are more clear.

We do know that in an extraordinary situation, for instance, Elijah and Moses were seen by Peter, James and John at the transfiguration of Jesus in Matthew 17. But Elijah and Moses were not talking to the disciples, but to Jesus. It is almost like Heaven was opened and unveiled for them to see, not that Elijah and Moses came back to speak to the three disciples.

So that is it.

The Bible's model is that the dead do not have contact with the living. That the dead's spirits do not hang around the earth, but go away to Heaven or Hell to await the resurrection and judgment day. That the dead are conscious. That the dead in Christ do not suffer but experience God's love and fellowship in Heaven. But the dead who are not in Christ will experience torment in hell as they await the resurrection of their bodies for the Final Judgment Day.

The direction as spirit goes is not according to the free will of the person. They are not free. Their destination is determined by whether they are Christians or not.

If there are reports of the spirit hanging around, it is probably a demon pretending. Even Satan masquerades as an angel of light. How much easier the deception of a demon to pretend to be the spirit of a dead person.

The problem in Christian circles today, is that people do not listen to God's revealed Word in the Bible. They rely instead on experience. They write books about how they were almost dead and caught a glimpse of the other side and woke up. How can you know this was not a deception of a demon to give a false teaching about death and what happens next? The only way to know is to test your experience with the Bible.

But people love to write best-selling books and talk about exciting experiences of visions of angels and dead loved ones. And I think over all demons are happy to ablige and give those visions to people. We do not even need demons to have visions. Human beings are capable of dreaming. And they have big imaginations. And people might convince themselves that what they imagined or dreamed was real.

Additionally, I would say that some people who write these books are actually simply liars. Some never did have the experience; they just made up the whole story.

So we need to remember that the most important thing to know about our futures after death is that we need to know Jesus and trust in Him and His righteous life and death on the cross to take our sins, so that when we die, we will not have to face judgment because of our sins. When we die, we will be able to be present with Jesus in Heaven. And on Judgment Day, we will be declared righteous because we are clothed in Jesus' righteousness.

Hope this helps.

In Christ,

JOEL

P.S. The question "What happens after Judgment Day?" is a related question but that will need to be derived in a separate discussion of the relevant Bible verses.