Paradise, and What the Word Meant

The word Jesus uses — paradeisos, paradise — was not a vague synonym for "somewhere good." It carried a specific resonance for a first-century Jewish audience: the Septuagint uses the same word for the garden of Eden, and by the first century it had also become the term Jewish literature used for the blessed portion of the intermediate state, the place of conscious rest for the righteous dead awaiting resurrection. When Jesus promises the dying man paradise that same day, He is promising him exactly what Paul would later describe from his own experience and his own longing: conscious, personal, immediate presence with Christ, prior to and distinct from the future bodily resurrection this book will discuss in Part Six.

Paul makes his own expectation explicit, writing from prison, uncertain whether he would live or die under Roman custody, weighing the two outcomes honestly in front of the church he loved:

"I feel torn between the two, because I have a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far."

— Philippians 1:23 (NET)

Far better. Not merely different. Not a neutral holding pattern, a dimmed-down waiting room where the dead mark time until the resurrection restores them to full experience. Paul — who elsewhere writes some of the most soaring language in Scripture about the future bodily resurrection, who has every reason to value embodied life and does not treat death lightly — still describes departing to be with Christ as better than everything he currently has, including the active, fruitful ministry he goes on, in the very next verse, to say is also worth staying alive for. Both things are true for Paul simultaneously: ongoing life and ministry is genuinely good, and departing to be with Christ is genuinely better. That is not a contradiction. It is the honest testimony of a man who has thought carefully about both options and found death, for the believer, to hold no terror — only nearness, arriving sooner than he might otherwise have expected.