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DO PEOPLE HAVE AN IMMORTAL SOUL?
"O that Thou would hide me in the grave, that Thou would keep me secret, until Thy wrath be past, that Thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me! If a man die, shall he live again? All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come. Thou shalt call and I will answer Thee; Thou wilt have a desire to the work of Thine hands" (Job 14: 13-15).
The Almighty God already warned the first two human beings right there in the Garden of Eden that if they eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they will surely die (Genesis 2:17). "And the woman said unto the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the tree of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, ye shall not surely die" (Genesis 3:2-4). Eve did not have to believe Satan but through her own human reasoning she believed his blatant lie. Their wrong decision was the turning point that ushered the downfall of man.
Together, Satan, Eve and Adam caused God to cut mankind off from eternal life (Genesis 3:22-24). As it is written Christ had to come and die for humanity and that leaves professing Christians today something to explain why they need Christ's sacrifice and resurrection. After all, they already believed on the immortality of their souls. The reasoning doesn't make sense at all when God plainly tells us in 1Timothy 6:16 that Christ alone has immortality.
God's utterances were never tainted with falsehood. It was genuine absolute truth. But Satan the devil was the master of deception and repeatedly told them a lie until he succeeded in kidnaping the whole human race. "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lust of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar and the father of it" (John 8:44).
Down through 6000 years man has continued to believe on a number of damnable heresies as absolute truth. One of them is the false doctrine of the immortality of the soul. In this context, it should also raise an interesting question in our minds; why was it necessary for Christ to tell Nicodemus - a respected leader within the Jewish community, that no man has ascended to heaven unless Judaism was one of the many other religions to have accepted this satanic lie. "If I told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things? And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but He that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven" (John 3:12-13).
The following quote will prove that Judaism has believed on the pagan immortal soul doctrine which includes the false belief about heaven and hell. "The belief in the immortality of the soul came to the Jews from contact with Greek thought and chiefly through the philosophy of Plato" (Jewish Encyclopedia).
The fundamental belief is that the souls of the wicked go to hell. And hell to them is directly associated with the lake of fire. Since the soul is immortal, they will remain in the ever burning inferno, utterly helpless, suffering that indescribable pain, tormented forever.
This teaching, however, is never compatible with what the Holy Bible says. "If the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23), how is it that man could teach that people have an immortal soul? Death is the absence of life. It is the discontinuance, "the cessation of life. "His breath goes forth, he returns to his earth, in that very day his thoughts perish" (Psalm 146:4). That's what it says. Contrary to this popular belief, it is clearly revealed from the word of God that the souls are not immortal. They can be destroyed. "But rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body" (Matthew 10:28). "And the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breathed of life and man became a living soul" (Genesis 2:7).
In other words, the very breathing person that you are is the living soul. Without the breathed of life we are nothing more but a dead soul. A corpse, ready to be buried in hell [the grave].
In Ecclesiastes 3: 19-20 King Solomon puts it this way, "For that which befall the sons of men, befalls beast, even one thing befalls them, as the one dies, so dies the other; yes they all have one breath, so that a man have no preeminence above a beast. " All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Clearly, there is no such thing as an immortal soul in man. Just like the beast when a man dies he returns to dust because from dust he came.
Jesus Christ Himself said: "Marvel not at this for the hour is coming in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth, they that have done good unto the resurrection of life and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation" (John 5:28-29).
Christ knew that many would find this astonishing exactly the reason why He told His disciples, "Marvel not at this." Clearly, Christ would like us to understand that all who have ever lived and died are now in their graves waiting for their resurrection. They are nowhere else suffering in an ever burning inferno concocted by the innovative invention of the human mind.
No wonder David said, "As for me, I will behold Your face in righteousness. I shall be satisfied when I awake with Your likeness" (Psalm 17:15). King David understood that the resurrection is an awakening, a coming back to life after death and not life after life as the advocates of the immortality of the soul would like us to believe. How can people be resurrected if they are already alive being an immortal soul? To believe otherwise would not make sense at all.
Like King David, Job also looked forward to his resurrection from the dead. In chapter 14 verses 13 to 15 of his own book, Job said, "O that you would hide me in the grave, that you would keep me secret, until your wrath be past, that you would appoint me a set time and remember me! If a man dies, shall he live again? All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come. You shall call and I will answer You." Now look at the question he asked, "If a man dies shall he live again?" If Job was going to be still alive at death, how could he ask if he will live again? Certainly that would be a lot of nonsense on his part. Clearly, Job understood well that he was waiting in the grave for his resurrection at an appointed time when his change would come.
And when will this change takes place? The Apostle Paul wrote of a change that would come to all true Christians in 1 Corinthians 15:51-53, "Behold I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump, for the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible shall put on incorruption and this mortal shall put on immortality."
Our understanding of the soul is very important to God. Twice He caused it to be written in Exekiel 18:4 and 20. "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." How can the soul die if it is immortal? Of course, it is not true. Mortal that we are, we die. We die because, "It is appointed unto man to die once and after that the judgment." We die because, "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). We die because, "The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23).
Immortality then is something we do not have. It is a gift from God. It is something we will put on once we are saved and born again into the divine kingdom of God. There is no mystery on the fabled idea of the immortality of the soul. The Holy Book clearly illustrates that man himself is the living soul. If we are to believe that the Holy book is the unbreakable word of God then we must believe that death means death, " the cessation of life and that the resurrection is our only hope either to live a spirit being in the kingdom of God or die on Judgment Day and be gone forever lost, even in the memory of men.
Romeo Samudio
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