Where are the people who died before the Rapture?

If you die today, then you are in the presence of the Lord. The easiest place to see this is when Paul talks in 2 Corinthians 5, about wanting to please the Lord whether we are “at home or absent”. That’s a way of saying whether we’re here on the Earth or if we’re with Jesus.

In 2 Corinthians 5:8, Paul says that to be absent the body, to see the body die and the spirit to be freed from the body, that event is to equal us being at home with the Lord. So if we die our spirit goes immediately into the presence of God in the throne room.

If we were to die right now, our body would lay lifeless and eventually turn to dust, but in that very moment our spirit would have left our body and, according to the parable of Lazarus in Luke 16, our spirit is escorted by angels into the heavenly throne room. Any christian who dies today, their spirit is alive with Christ in the heavenly realm. Except they don’t have a body around their spirit, though we can’t understand quite what that might be like.

But if we are one of those people who are alive all the way until the resurrection moment then we will never have to know what that is like. We will move directly from living here on earth with our body, to living in Heaven with our body. Because at the resurrection, all church saints will receive their new bodies. The saints who are already with Jesus now will come down with Him and receive their new body in the air, and we will also.