How do Southern Baptists who believe in the immortality of the soul explain what death means in scripture The Bible often speaks of death as "sleep" and Ecclesiastes 9:5 says dead aren't aware of anything. Yet many Christians claim reward or punishment begins immediately when one dies.

If there is really no death, but just immediate transformation from physical to spiritual beings what is death?  Why do these same Christians speak about the resurrection which means standing back up to life?  I would like a Southern Baptist perspective.
The Southern Baptist position is that we will be resurrected with physical bodies, as they state in The Baptist Faith and Message:

X. Last Things
God, in His own time and in His own way, will bring the world to its appropriate end. According to His promise, Jesus Christ will return personally and visibly in glory to the earth; the dead will be raised; and Christ will judge all men in righteousness. The unrighteous will be consigned to Hell, the place of everlasting punishment. The righteous in their resurrected and glorified bodies will receive their reward and will dwell forever in Heaven with the Lord.

I would not phrase the destination of our resurrection &quot;Heaven&quot;, because it does suggest a mode of living far different from what we know now, but they do at least give Revelation 20-21 in the references supporting this position, which teaches the &quot;new heaven and a new earth&quot;. Perhaps the lack of clarity here represents a lack of consensus as to whether the new earth should be understood as a renewal, a transformation, a purging, a destruction and recreation, or somewhere else on that spectrum. (To be fair, I doubt that there are many other denominations of comparable size that also wouldn't have a lot of disagreement over the origin of the new earth.) But in any case, it is clear that, whatever a &quot;glorified&quot; body is, our destiny is not to change from a physical to a spiritual being, as the question suggests.