the Word of God, it speaks with authority on death and life. Briefly, here is what it teaches.

When all the vital functions of a living organism, be it small or large, simple or complex, cease completely, that organism is dead. What happens at death? The Bible simply states: “For dust you are and to dust you will return.” No informed persons will argue with those words.—Gen. 3:19.

What is the cause of death? Only the Bible can give us a reasonable answer. The apostle Paul states: “The wages sin pays is death.” Death is not merely a natural fruit of sin, but its just punishment, an expression of divine justice. It is sin’s wage. What is sin? The Bible answers: “All unrighteousness is sin.” Sin is the transgression of God’s law, the missing of the mark of perfection. The first record of sin is found in Genesis, when Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit. Their willful disobedience was sin, and the wages of sin is death. Adam and Eve both died as a result of sin.—Rom. 6:23; 1 John 5:17; Gen. 2:16, 17; 3:17-19.

The offspring of Adam, being conceived in sin, were born sinners. They had no choice but to reap sin’s wage. Therefore the Scriptures state: “Who can produce someone clean out of someone unclean? There is not one.” “Through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men because they had all sinned.”—Job 14:4; Rom. 5:12.

What is the condition of the dead? We have already touched on that. The Bible speaks of the dead as being asleep, resting, unconscious. As for the soul, the witness of the Bible is that “man came to be a living soul.” (Gen. 2:7) Soul and man are used synonymously in the Bible. A living, breathing, sentient creature, animal or human, is a soul. Nowhere does the Bible say the soul is immortal. It plainly speaks of the soul as mortal. At Ezekiel 18:4 we read: “The soul that is sinning—it itself will die.” It was not God but the Devil that told Eve: “You positively will not die.” People to this day have clung to that lie.—Gen. 3:4.

Where are the dead? They have returned to the dust from which they were made. The Bible speaks of a resurrection for “the righteous and the unrighteous.” As for wicked persons, there is no hope of a resurrection for them. Such ones are “comparable with the beasts that have been destroyed.” The righteous will receive a blessing, whereas the wicked will not. “The mention of the righteous one is due for a blessing,” say the inspired Proverbs, “but the very name of the wicked ones will rot.”—Acts 24:15; Ps. 49:20; Prov. 10:7.

At a funeral a group of skeptics present asked what hope there was for the dead. “My friends,” replied a friend of the deceased, “I do not know what you believed yesterday and I do not know what you may believe tomorrow, but for today we hope in God.” Those who know the truth about the dead and of God’s purpose to resurrect them in his new world of righteousness do not despair. They rest their hope, not in a nonexistent immortal soul, but in the true and living God, who has raised his Son Jesus “to be judge of the living and the dead.”—Acts 10:42.

“God Loved the World So Much”

“Sometimes Christianity is presented in such a way that it looks as if it was the work of a gentle and loving Jesus to pacify a stern and angry God, as if Jesus did something which changed the attitude of God toward men. The New Testament knows nothing of that. The whole process of salvation began because God so loved the world.”—Barclay in More New Testament Words.