Your Soul Is Not Immortal!
DO YOU believe as the poet Longfellow wrote, “And in the wreck of noble lives, something immortal still survives”? Or as Shakespeare wrote, “And her immortal part with angels lives”? If you are a member of one of Christendom’s many churches, it is most likely that you do. But what makes you think that the soul is immortal?
Surely you do not believe that the writings of a poet or a playwright are sufficient grounds for believing that you have an immortal soul. What they wrote was just their personal opinion. The same can be said of philosophers who have expressed belief in an immortal soul. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato, for example, wrote: “The soul of man is immortal and imperishable.” If that is your view, it would be well to remember that Plato’s opinion was influenced by his pagan religion.
More likely than not you will say that your belief in the immortality of the soul has resulted from the teachings of your church. Most of the churches of Christendom teach this doctrine. Cardinal Gibbons of the Roman Catholic Church expressed the belief in his book Our Christian Heritage, saying: “Let us now contemplate man’s spiritual nature. In a mortal body, he carries an immortal soul.” Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam of the Methodist Church concurred when he said: “Man is immortal.” The Jewish view is similar. In the book The Jewish People, Faith and Life, by Louis Newman, this statement is made: “Judaism believes in the reality and the immortality of the soul.” We might go on to say, so do adherents of Hinduism, Islam and the many tribal religions of primitive peoples. Notwithstanding its being a widespread belief, the truth of the matter is that your soul is not immortal.
PROOF FROM RELIABLE SOURCE
The only source of information that supplies the truth on the subject is the Holy Bible. The One who inspired it is our Creator, and he certainly knows whether your soul is immortal or not. Not once in the sixty-six books of the Bible does he inspire a Bible writer to testify that the human soul is immortal. On the contrary, the Bible repeatedly states that the soul dies. At Leviticus 23:30, Jehovah God says: “As for any soul that will do any sort of work on this very day, I must destroy that soul from among his people.” At Ezekiel 18:4, he also says: “The soul that is sinning—it itself will die.” Jesus Christ asked: “Is it lawful on the sabbath to do good or to do injury, to save or to destroy a soul?” (Luke 6:9) Does that sound as if the soul is immortal?
The Hebrew word that is translated into English as “soul” is nephesh, and it conveys no thought whatever of something that can continue your conscious existence separate from your body. Nephesh means a living being. This is admitted by the Baptist clergyman Robert Laurin of the California Baptist Theological Seminary. He observed: “The nephesh cannot be separated from the body, any more than it can from the spirit.” The Jewish editor of a new translation of the Bible, Dr. Harry M. Orlinsky, commented: “Nefesh is the person himself.”
YOUR SOUL IS YOU
When the Bible tells of man’s creation, it speaks of his becoming a living soul, not his being given a soul. “And Jehovah God proceeded to form the man out of dust from the ground and to blow into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man came to be a living soul [nephesh].” (Gen. 2:7) But you may ask, “Does not the Bible state that the spirit returns to God when a person dies?” That is true, but the Bible does not indicate that the spirit is an immortal part of man that continues his conscious existence.
The spirit is the active force of life from God. It is written at Ecclesiastes 3:19: “For there is an eventuality as respects the sons of mankind and an eventuality as respects the beast, and they have the same eventuality. As the one dies, so the other dies; and they all have but one spirit.” This spirit enlivens the visible, earthly animal and human souls. It activates them and can be likened to electrical power, which activates all kinds of electrical motors. This impersonal force, then, is what returns to God when a person’s conscious existence ceases. So Ecclesiastes 12:7 states: “Then the dust returns to the earth just as it happened to be and the spirit itself returns to the true God who gave it.”
Acknowledging that the Bible does not teach that man can exist apart from his body, The New Bible Dictionary by J. D. Douglas states: “But nowhere in the Bible do we get a view of man as existing apart from the body, even after death in a future life.” Thus it can be seen that the hope held out by the clergy of Christendom of life after death as an immortal soul is a false hope. It is based upon human imagination and not Scriptural fact. Does that make any difference? It certainly does! People who let their worship be guided by the imaginative, traditional beliefs of men that contradict the truths of God’s inspired Word have a form of worship that is vain. Jesus Christ pointed this out regarding people in his day who did the same thing. He quoted for them a statement by Jehovah God in the Bible book of Isaiah: “It is in vain that they keep worshiping me, because they teach commands of men as doctrines.” (Matt. 15:9) For worship to be acceptable to the Creator, it must necessarily be in harmony with the truth of his inspired Word.
“But,” you may say, “if the soul is not immortal, what happens to a person when he dies?” The Bible answers this very pointedly at Psalm 146:4: “His spirit goes out, he goes back to his ground; in that day his thoughts do perish.” His thoughts perish because he ceases to exist as a living soul. The dead person sleeps in death, unconscious. Hope for future life lies in a resurrection from the dead, being brought back to life, as the Bible promises: “Do not marvel at this, because the hour is coming in which all those in the memorial tombs will hear his voice and come out.” (John 5:28, 29) Since God gives you the hope of a resurrection from the dead, why hold to the false hope that comes from belief in an immortal soul—something that does not exist?
Notwithstanding what poets, philosophers and many religious leaders claim, your soul is not immortal. Your soul is you, and the reliable, Scriptural hope for those who are dead in Hades, or the Bible hell, is a resurrection, being brought back to life so as to be a living soul once again. (Rev. 20:13) Build your hope on Scriptural truth, not on the imaginations of imperfect men.