The Fellowship of the Dead Precludes "Soul Sleep"

There the wicked cease from troubling,
     and there the weary are at rest.
There the prisoners are at ease together;
     they hear not the voice of the taskmaster.
The small and the great are there,
     and the slave is free from his master.
- Job 3:17-10 

Regarding the spirits of the deceased, the Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses teach distinct, though related, doctrines. SDA's claim that the spirit is unconscious, remaining with the body until the resurrection and judgment. Witnesses, on the other hand, teach the annihilation of the spirit at death, to be recreated at the judgment. This is in contrast to the historic Christian doctrine, which is that the spirit passes to the place of its eternal repose, whether Heaven or Hell, conscious in bliss or torment, until the judgment, when the spirit is rejoined to the body in the resurrection, its eternal state confirmed, and both body and spirit return to its place. 

Both groups argue from Bible verses, often from the more-obscure portions, that address the state of the bodies of the dead, and then commit a bait-and-switch, assuming that those verses also describe the state of the spirit. That is a simple logical fallacy, and is erroneous. 

The verses above are an example. As verse 17 says, the weary are at rest in death, and verse 18 adds that they are at ease. That immediately precludes the Witness doctrine; non-existence is not resting or being at ease. However, what of the SDA's "soul sleep"? 

Notice that the spirits of the dead are at ease together. Being unconscious in their graves would not be being together. Notice also what the weary dead enjoy: freedom from their taskmasters and slavemasters. How does a person enjoy freedom when he is unconscious? The Adventist intermediate state is not that described here (or in the rest of Scripture).