Thoughts for the Day

… be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.            Matthew 10:28

Jesus is preparing the disciples for their first taste of mission without him.  He sends them out in pairs with an exciting message, a good deal of practical instruction and warnings of unpleasant things they can expect to face … being arrested, flogged, hated and persecuted!  Against this background he encourages them not to be afraid of people who can (at worst) kill them.  “Rather be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell,” he says.

Aside from this mention of hell as the location where this destruction would happen, it seems an almost self-evident comment.  Could anyone doubt that our all-powerful God can destroy both soul and body?  Actually, many people consider our souls are inherently immortal and therefore, by definition, doubt this.  Perhaps it is worth a quick check!

We cannot deduce whether or not our soul is immortal purely from being made in God’s image, because much of His nature we clearly do not possess.  In fact, there seems very little else to substantiate this unless resurrection and the promise of eternal life in Christ is considered evidence for an immortal soul.  Paul certainly did not think so.  He wrote to Timothy that ‘only God is immortal’, and in Romans, ‘the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’.  The key word is ‘gift’.  We all have life on earth by God’s grace and our every breath is sustained by His power.  Beyond that, it seems that immortality is not the nature of man but part of the gift of eternal life that Christ offers … if we will believe in him.  Nothing requires God to extend it to those who do not believe, and I’ve looked in vain to find anything that declares that He will !