Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit
shall return unto God who gave it. (Eccl 12:7)
For those
who may wonder how someone who holds to soul sleep/death may respond to Eccl
12:7, consider the following from an anti-Mormon book from 1902 (the author was
a member of the Church of God Abrahamic Faith):
That the spirit returns to God at death we admit. It was with God
as a person of the energy or universal spirit of God, before our existence,
from all eternity, and returns to the same condition after man’s death. It was
not man’s spirit before his conception and quickening. It is not his after
death. Man has no spirit of his body after death. It is not man’s spirit that
raises the body at the resurrection, but God’s spirit. Rom. 11:8; 1 Cor. 15:26,
44; Psa. 71:20; 104:29, 30. (W.L. Crowe, The Mormon Waterloo: Being a Condensed
and Classified Array of Testimony and Arguments Against the False Prophet,
Joseph Smith, his Works, and his Church System and Doctrines: Based upon
Standard History, Science, the Bible and Smith Against Himself [St. Paul,
Nebr.: 1902], 122)
For a
thorough refutation of the belief the dead are unconscious in the intermediate
state, see:
Response
to Douglas V. Pond on Biblical and LDS Anthropology and Eschatology