In part 1 of this Q&A, we discussed the fact that many religions believe that each person has an immortal soul. Orthodox Christianity, in general, has the same understanding. But is it true?
In our booklet “The Theory of Evolution – A Fairy Tale for Adults,” the Spirit in Man is discussed and below are a few selected highlights taken from pages 19-26. This shows that the Spirit in Man is not the soul.
“Herbert W. Armstrong… published his findings in a book entitled, ‘The Incredible Human Potential.’ This is what he wrote on pages 74 and 75, ‘Animals are equipped with brain and instinct. But they do not have power to understand and choose moral and spiritual values or to develop perfect spiritual character. Animals have brain, but no intellect—instinct, but no ability to develop holy and Godly character. And that pictures the transcendental DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ANIMAL BRAIN AND HUMAN MIND.
“‘What then can account for the vast difference? Science cannot adequately answer. Some scientists, in the field of research, conclude that, of necessity, there has to be some non-physical component in human brain that does not exist in animal brain….’
“Mr. Armstrong then explains that, according to the Bible, each human being has a non-physical component in his brain, called ‘the spirit in man.’ On page 81 of his book, he points out, ‘[T]his spirit is not the man—only something in the man… This spirit cannot see, hear, or think. The man sees, hears and thinks through his physical brain and the five senses of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and feeling. The spirit in man imparts the power of physical intellect to the physical brain, thus forming human mind.
“‘This spirit acts, among other things, as a computer, adding to the brain the psychic and intellectual power. Knowledge received in the brain through the eye, ear and the senses is immediately “programmed’ into the spirit computer. This “computer” gives the brain instant recall of whatever portion of millions of bits of knowledge may be needed in the reasoning process. That is to say that memory is recorded in the human spirit, whether or not it is also recorded in the “gray matter” of the brain. This human spirit also adds to man a spiritual and moral faculty not possessed by animals.’
“Most people know nothing about the existence of the spirit in man—even many religious people—lay persons and theologians alike. When they read passages in the Bible describing the spirit in man, they assume the Bible is talking about the soul. But the soul is not a non-physical component of the human being. The soul, according to the Bible, is totally physical. The Bible does not teach the concept of an immortal soul. Rather, we read in Ezekiel 18:4, ‘The soul who sins shall die.’ The word ‘soul’ in the Bible refers to the living body of both man and animals. In Revelation 16:3, we read that every living soul—both men and beasts—died in the sea. The soul does NOT distinguish man from animals. Rather, the spirit in man is THE distinguishing factor between man and animals. It explains man’s superiority over the animals and totally disproves the concept of evolution.
“The Bible strongly indicates that God gives the human spirit at the time of conception, and then takes it back at the time of death. We read in Zechariah 12:1, ‘Thus says the Lord who stretches out the heavens, lays the foundation of the earth, and forms the spirit of man within him.’ Ecclesiastes 12:7 says, ‘Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.’ When the spirit in man leaves a person, that person is dead. James 2:26 says, ‘For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.’
“Jesus Christ Himself, at the time of His death, cried out to the Father to receive His spirit. What exactly did He say? Let’s read in Luke 23:46, ‘And when Jesus had cried out with a loud voice, He said, “Father, into Your hands I commit My Spirit.” Having said this, He breathed His last.’ When He died, His human spirit returned to God, as we read in Ecclesiastes.
“Understand though, that when a man dies and his spirit returns to God, that spirit does not continue to live consciously, apart from the body. Rather, God ‘stores’ it, so to speak, in heaven, until He unites it at the time of the resurrection of man with a new spiritual or physical body. The concept that man’s soul is immortal is as wrong as the concept that man’s spirit continues to live consciously after death. Rather, the body—or soul—dies, and the spirit of man returns to God to await a resurrection.
“Note Ecclesiastes 9:4-6, ‘But for him who is joined to all the living there is hope… For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing…Also their love, their hatred, and their envy have now perished…’ And verse 10, ‘Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going.’ In other words, there is no conscious activity after a person dies. The spirit does not continue in the realm of consciousness.
“Jesus Christ also made it clear that dead people do not continue to live on. Rather, the dead will have to be brought back to life through a resurrection from the dead. In Matthew 22:31-32, He asked the Sadducees, since they did not believe in the resurrection, ‘But concerning the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was spoken to you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.’ If the dead persons of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had somehow continued to live consciously after their death, including a conscious existence of their spirit that had returned to God, then Christ’s words to the Sadducees would have been without sense.
“WHY does God give each human being a spirit? The spirit in man records all the human characteristics of the person, as well as his or her outward appearance. At the time of the resurrection, the spirit of the dead person is combined with a new body of the dead person. This means, all the experiences and memories and ideas of the former life are back in the resurrected individual, and the resurrected person will also look the same way he or she did in their former life.
“When a person dies, his body returns to dust. But the spirit of man in him has recorded the appearance of the person, the personality, the personal attributes, and God gives the spirit of that person back into the newly created physical body.
“Just as the Bible teaches a resurrection to physical life, so it also teaches a resurrection to spiritual life. Those who died after having been counted worthy to enter the Kingdom of God at the time of Christ’s second coming, will have part in a spiritual resurrection, as the Apostle Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-44, ‘But someone will say, “How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?” Foolish one, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies. And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be… But God gives… a body as He pleases… So also is the [spiritual] resurrection from the dead [to spiritual life]: The body is sown in corruption [flesh and blood], it is raised in incorruption…It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.’ But as with a resurrection to physical life, the resurrection to spiritual life will also incorporate the spirit that was in man and that recorded the person’s characteristics.
“So we see that it is the spirit in man that explains the vast differences in self-awareness, intellect and intelligence between man and animals.”
What you have just read is something that so many simply don’t understand. Because so many believe in an immortal soul that has to go somewhere when the body dies, Bible verses are interpreted in a way that allows this belief. As we saw in the previous instalment, many religions are convicted of this and even in mainstream Christianity, it is the prevailing view with the good going to Heaven at death and the evil unbelievers going to Hell being accepted as Biblical Truth, when it isn’t. And once such error is accepted, then further errors creep in, which is why it is so vital to have the correct understanding that we don’t have an immortal soul.
In part 1 of this Q&A, we mentioned that one writer opined that “the present Heaven is not our final destination, it’s a wonderful place, and it’s understandable that those who have had loved ones die in Christ wonder what life is like for them there. Based on the Bible’s teaching, we know several things: the present Heaven is a real (and possibly physical) place. Those who love Jesus and trust Him for their salvation will be with Him there, together with all who have died in Christ. We will be awake and cognizant.”
We had explained that this is most certainly not the prevailing view in orthodox Christianity which holds that the good remain forever in Heaven as their final destination. But this writer even thinks that “The Present Heaven May Be a Physical Place.” He also wrote that “A fundamental article of the Christian faith is that the resurrected Christ now dwells in Heaven. We are told that His resurrected body on Earth was physical and that this same, physical Jesus ascended to Heaven, from where He will one day return to Earth. It seems indisputable, then, to say that there is at least one physical body in the present Heaven. If Christ’s body in the intermediate Heaven has physical properties, it stands to reason that others in Heaven could have physical forms as well, even if only temporary ones.”
To add to the confusion even more, he writes: “Given the consistent physical descriptions of the intermediate Heaven and those who dwell there, it seems possible—though this is certainly debatable—that between our earthly lives and our bodily resurrection God may grant us some temporary physical form that will allow us to function as human beings while in that unnatural state ‘between bodies’ awaiting our bodily resurrection. If so, that would account for the repeated depictions of people now in Heaven occupying physical space, wearing clothes and crowns, carrying branches, and having body parts (for example, Lazarus’s finger in Luke 16:24).”
As mentioned previously, we address the question about Lazarus and the rich man in our booklet “Do We Have an Immortal Soul?” on pages 31-32:
The opinion of the writer, as quoted above, is wrong for many reasons. One, there are no physical bodies in heaven, and there never will be. Two, nobody went to heaven except for Jesus Christ, but not in a physical body, but as a Spirit being.
We said in one of our Q&As: “God also created the third heaven with all its spiritual components, including His throne, His temple, the heavenly Jerusalem, and the heavenly garden or Paradise, because we read that the Father created everything there is through Jesus Christ (John 1:1-3)—the visible and the invisible (Colossians 1:16). We understand, of course, that both the Father and Jesus Christ have always existed; Christ was not created (Hebrews 7:3). So it was the God Family who created everything.” In view of this information, how could anyone even think that heaven could be physical?
Another disagreement we would have with the concept of going to heaven and that it might even be physical etc, we write in our booklet “Why This Confusion About Life After Death” on pages 8-9 under the heading “Man Can Reach Two Heavens But Not the Third Heaven Where God Dwells” the following:
“As Lewis Brown explains in ‘This Believing World’: ‘In very early times that idea flourished not alone among the Babylonians and Egyptians, but also among the barbaric tribes in and around Greece… these mysteries [came] down from Thrace or across the sea from Egypt and Asia Minor… they declared that for every man, no matter how poor or vicious, there was a place in heaven. All one had to do was to be ‘initiated’ into the secrets of the cult.’
“The Hebrews did not believe that we go to Heaven when we die. Neither did the early Christians. But in time, the concept developed within the Roman Catholic Church that one will be saved and go to Heaven when one has been baptized into the church, including as a little baby.
“The Bible does not teach this. Much confusion exists because many do not understand that the Bible speaks of more than one heaven.
“When the Bible speaks of ‘heaven,’ it may refer to any one of three different locations. The first heaven is the atmosphere, surrounding the earth, where birds can fly and clouds move (Genesis 1:20; 27:28). The second heaven is the universe, with all its galaxies, suns, stars and planets (Psalm 8:3).
“It is possible for man to reach these two heavens—at least, to a limited extent. But man cannot reach the Third Heaven, where God dwells—where His angels live and where His throne is located. It is spiritual, not physical. Physical beings cannot enter it—except in a vision—and we won’t go there after our death, either.
“According to the biblical testimony, the only Being who entered the Third Heaven after death was Jesus Christ. Others saw the Third Heaven in a vision—such as Daniel (Daniel 7:9), Paul (2 Corinthians 12:2), Stephen (Acts 7:56) or John (Revelation 4:2), but they did not enter the Third Heaven in bodily form, or as spirit beings.
“Christ said in John 3:13 that no human being—except He Himself—has entered the Third Heaven. The German Luther Bible from 1964 wrote: ‘And no one goes to Heaven except for the One who came down from Heaven, namely the Son of Man…’ (‚Und niemand fährt gen Himmel, denn der vom Himmel herniedergekommen ist, nämlich des Menschen Sohn…‘).
“Most translations render the passage as, ‘No one has ascended up to heaven…’, but even then, it is at least clear that no one before Christ ever went to the Third Heaven. This means that contrary to popular belief, Elijah and Enoch did NOT enter God’s Third Heaven.”
In Time Magazine in December 2019, author N.T. Wright wrote the following:
“Indeed, for most modern Christians, the idea of ‘going to heaven when you die’ is not simply one belief among others, but the one that seems to give a point to it all.
“But the people who believed in that kind of ‘heaven’ when the New Testament was written were not the early Christians. They were the ‘Middle Platonists’ — people like Plutarch (a younger contemporary of St Paul who was a philosopher, biographer, essayist and pagan priest in Delphi). To understand what the first followers of Jesus believed about what happens after death, we need to read the New Testament in its own world — the world of Jewish hope, of Roman imperialism and of Greek thought.
“Israel’s scriptures had long promised that God would come back in person to dwell with his people for ever. The early Christians picked this up: ‘The Word became flesh,’ declares John [1:14], ‘and dwelt in our midst.’ The word for ‘dwelt’ means, literally, ‘tabernacled,’ ‘pitched his tent’ — alluding to the wilderness ‘tabernacle’ in the time of Moses and the Temple built by Solomon. Studying the New Testament historically, in its own world (as opposed to squashing and chopping it to fit with our own expectations), shows that the first Christians believed not that they would ‘go to heaven when they died,’ but that, in Jesus, God had come to live with them.
“That was the lens through which they saw the hope of the world. The book of Revelation ends, not with souls going up to heaven, but with the New Jerusalem coming down to earth, so that ‘the dwelling of God is with humans.’”
There is so much confusion in all of this mainstream “understanding” and over many years we have covered all of these issues in our literature and in sermons, where the Bible is clear. In brief, the answer is that if the understanding about the spirit in man was accepted, no one would need to be in heaven, a temporary waiting place, purgatory or any other variation of such an erroneous belief. And understanding that we do NOT have an immortal soul is basic Truth and understanding right from the Word of God. If we did have an immortal soul, we couldn’t be destroyed, and if the “going to hell at death” reasoning was correct, then those going there would be there for eternity which is neither correct nor would it be the act of a loving God.
The correct knowledge about the immortal soul is vital to our understanding about God, His plan of salvation and His love for all His creation. Incorrect knowledge will lead to further misunderstandings as we have seen in these Q&As.
Material available for further study:
Our booklets pertinent to what has been discussed in these two Q&A’s are:
The Theory of Evolution – A Fairy Tale for Adults?
Do We Have an Immortal Soul?
And in our 79-page-booklet “Why This Confusion About Life After Death,” we cover many topics, a few of which are:
Man Does Not Have an Immortal Soul Which Goes to Heaven
Man Will Not Be Judged at the Moment of His Death
Man Is a Soul Not Has a Soul
Mary, and Everyone Else Who Has Died, Are Still in the Grave
Limbo and Purgatory Are Not Biblical Concepts
Indulgences
The False Concept of Hell
An Ever-Burning Hell-fire; After Death, Is Unbiblical
The Dead Know Nothing
The Spirit in Man
Most People Have No Knowledge About the Existence of the Spirit in Man
and much more, which can be accessed online via this link: https://www.eternalgod.org/why-this-confusion-about-life-after-death/
Lead Writer: Brian Gale (United Kingdom)