“Now may the God of peace make you holy in every way, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again.” (1 Thessalonians 5:23 NLT)
What happens to us when we die? Do we lose any sense of being? Does our soul “sleep” until awakened by the second coming of Christ? Or does our oneness with our Savior continue uninterrupted? In 2 Corinthians 5 Paul speaks at length about the relationship between our earthly bodies and our heavenly bodies.
For example, in verses 6-8 he writes: “So we are always confident, even though we know that as long as we live in these bodies we are not at home with the Lord. For we live by believing and not by seeing. Yes, we are fully confident, and we would rather be away from these earthly bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord.”
“At home” has reference to being with the Lord in His dwelling in heaven. Yes, of course, He is omnipresent and is with us and we with Him as long as His Spirit indwells us, but once we leave this body our spirit is free of the shackles of humanity and can be forever united with God’s Spirit in heaven. But doesn’t our spirit “sleep” when we die? Our bodies “sleep” in death, but our spirits are alive and with the Lord. How do I know that?
There are many Scriptures that verify the immortality of our spirits, but a key verse for me is in Romans 8:16 when Paul uses the vitality of the spirit to verify our oneness with the Lord when he writes: “For His Spirit joins with our spirit to affirm that we are God’s children.” As long as we are alive in Christ our spirit is alive with Christ, whether in life or in death.
What, then, are we to do with 1 Timothy 6:16, which says that God “alone is immortal”? We see this verse as teaching that God alone is immortal in and of Himself; that is, He alone possesses immortality as an essential part of His nature. Our soul’s immortality, on the other hand—and that of the angels—is derived from God. God is immortal in His being; our souls are immortal as a result of God’s creation. Commentator Albert Barnes put it this way: “God, in his own nature, enjoys a perfect and certain exemption from death. Creatures have immortality only as they derive it from him, and of course are dependent on him for it. He has it by his very nature, and it is in his case underived, and he cannot be deprived of it. It is one of the essential attributes of his being, that he will always exist, and that death cannot reach him” (Notes on the Bible, 1834).
In John 5:26 Jesus says, “The Father has life in himself.” This is another way of saying that God alone is immortal. The immortality of the human soul, that is, its quality of continuing forever, is a reflection of God’s nature in us. God alone is without a beginning or end. All of His creatures, animal, human, and angelic, had a beginning. Our souls came into being at a certain point in history, and there was a time when our souls did not exist, but once created we also became immortal. Only our Creator is truly eternal in the sense of having no beginning and no ending.
While our soul and spirit are not the same, both are immortal in the sense they will live forever. Obviously, this is a snapshot of a whole series of Scriptures that speak of eternal life and death, but a key verse for me is Matthew 25:46 where Jesus says: “And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous will go into eternal life.” The same Greek word is used both in reference to punishment and life. There are only two options when it comes to eternity: separation from God or oneness with Him! Which will you choose?
Food for thought.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 