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 - Endorsed - Indifferent - Contested
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| The Nashville Statement
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Name:Daniel
Home: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
About Me: I used to believe that evolution was reasonable, that homosexuality was genetic, and that people became Christians because they couldn't deal with the 'reality' that this life was all there was. I used to believe, that if there was a heaven - I could get there by being good - and I used to think I was more or less a good person. I was wrong on all counts. One day I finally had my eyes opened and I saw that I was not going to go to heaven, but that I was certainly going to suffer the wrath of God for all my sin. I saw myself as a treasonous rebel at heart - I hated God for creating me just to send me to Hell - and I was wretched beyond my own comprehension. Into this spiritual vacuum Jesus Christ came and he opened my understanding - delivering me from God's wrath into God's grace. I was "saved" as an adult, and now my life is hid in Christ. I am by no means sinless, but by God's grace I am a repenting believer - a born again Christian.
My complete profile...
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Daniel's posts are almost always pastoral and God centered. I appreciate and am challenged by them frequently. He has a great sense of humor as well.
- Marc Heinrich
His posts are either funny or challenging. He is very friendly and nice.
- Rose Cole
[He has] good posts, both the serious like this one, and the humorous like yesterday. [He is] the reason that I have restrained myself from making Canadian jokes in my posts.
- C-Train
This post contains nothing that is of any use to me. What were you thinking? Anyway, it's probably the best I've read all day.
- David Kjos
Daniel, nicely done and much more original than Frank the Turk.
- Jonathan Moorhead
There are some people who are smart, deep, or funny. There are not very many people that are all 3. Daniel is one of those people. His opinion, insight and humor have kept me coming back to his blog since I first visited earlier this year.
- Carla Rolfe
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| Thoughts on Immortality and the Soul. |
Plato reasoned (and I am grossly paraphrasing here) that every instance of a concept as found in our reality was merely an imperfect reflection of an ideal form of the actual concept. These "forms" were not only the ideal that was only imperfectly expressed (or recognized) in reality, but were in fact the "cause" of the expression. Thus Plato reasoned in the Phaedo that since the soul is living, it must participate in the "Form of Life", and as such the soul cannot ever die.
I start here because in my opinion Plato, more than any other ancient source, was able to aggregate and harmonize into one expression the various pagan concepts of immortality - and this in an articulate and rationally pleasing way. He began with a proposition - the soul is immortal, and supported that proposition with the rational that the soul was caused by the "form of life" and was therefore an expression of this ideal. That kind of reasoning seems nice and tidy when you apply it to other things and so we have an expression that allowed Plato to argue in favor of metempsychosis (reincarnation), since the soul was immortal, it stood to reason that reincarnation was "possible".
Those who are inclined to imagine that Christianity is just another religion that borrowed various elements from other, preexisting religions, have argued that the Christian concept of the soul is merely a hand-me-down pagan concept. Were that not enough, there are others who recognize that while most bible believing Christians would reject any sort of pagan influence in theory, their understanding of such things as immortality and the soul are in fact a patchwork of both biblical and pagan ideas that have never been separated in their thinking by any real study on the matter. That is, they believe what everyone else believes, not because they have studied the scriptures, but because they can't be bothered to challenge "common knowledge".
I am inclined to agree that there are probably a significant number of Christians, and I would guess these would be (sadly) the majority, whose understanding of such things as the soul and immortality are more influenced by pagan ideas than they are by scripture.
One of the songs of Solomon (not "the" song, but a Psalm, #127 to be exact) states that unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. I believe that is true. Whatever I manage to offer up here today whether advice or wisdom is only going to benefit you, the reader, insofar as I stay close to the words of scripture. God help us to understand His word, and to apply it correctly to our lives.
As can be guessed from the word "mortal", the concept of mortality and immortality differ in that one describes life as it pertains to this present creation, and the other describes a life that will transcends this creation. To possess mortal life is to possess that tangible breath of life that is breathed into all living creatures in creation, but to possess immortal life is to posses a life that that will transcends this creation when the flesh dies.
Thus when the Apostle Paul writes to Timothy (see 1 Timothy 6), that Jesus Christ alone possesses immortality, we must stop and examine what that means. According to what I have just said, it means that No other person in creation possesses a life that will transcend this creation - that Christ is unique in this way.
It is pretty easy to go wildly astray at this point, given that there is plenty of room for ambiguous ways to interpret what I meant in saying that. Let me therefore, be precise in expounding the thought.
First let me explain what I don't mean when I say that, and I think I should start with what our Lord said in John 5:28-29. Here John writes the very words that fell from our Lord's mouth": "Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs will hear His voice, and will come forth; those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment." I presume this will be the same day that Christ returns - the day in which our souls and bodies are reunited (hence the resurrection). So when I say that no other person in creation possesses a life that will transcend creation - I do not mean to imply that because no one but Christ is immortal, that no one but Christ will be resurrected, since every person who has died will, according to Christ's own testimony, be resurrected. I mean only that no person other than Christ has immortality in and of himself. If we live, our life is dependant upon something other than our self. What Paul is saying is that Christ alone possesses (in and of Himself) immortality. If we live again, it is because something acts upon us from without, rather than from within. Our life is dependant, His life is independant.
That is what I think Paul is saying there, and that fits perfectly with what is said elsewhere concerning the life of Christ, and again within the context of the doxology from which the text was pulled.
That Christ alone possesses immortality is significant because if we are to partake of immortality, we must partake of Christ who alone possesses it.
Ezekiel described God as owning every soul, and in the same breath, describes every soul that sins as dying. This Ezekiel records in Ezekiel 18:4, "Behold, all souls are Mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is Mine. The soul who sins will die." Looking into the context, we find that Ezekiel is talking about God's dealings with individuals in the here and now. That is important because if we fail to see that, we may infer from the passage something that isn't there in the text. Consider the flow of the passage: The argument Ezekiel is responding to is that God was punishing the (then) present citizens of Israel for the sins of their fathers and their father's fathers. That is, the (then) present generation was saying that they personally didn't deserve the punishment which God had hung over them, and that God was (in essence) "unjustly" punishing them for the sins of their ancestors> Ezekiel argues that they are guilty for their own sin, and that God is responding, not to the sins of their parents, but to the sins of that present generation. Thus the life or "soul" that Ezekiel speaks of here as being owned by God is, in the context, referring to the daily lives of those individuals in the (then) present generation.
To be sure, the "soul" here is simply the life that an individual possesses. Job describes this well in Job 34:14-15, "14"If He should determine to do so, If He should gather to Himself His spirit and His breath, All flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust." - that is, we are all, those of us who are alive at any rate, in present possession of a life that is currently being sustained entirely by God. When we die, this "life" returns to God, and our flesh returns to dust. At the resurrection, life returns to our flesh, and inbetween death and resurrection our life, depending on whether it was in Christ or not, goes immediately into Christ's presence, or withers in Hades, but both remain there awaiting the resurrection and judgment (though those who are in Christ will not be condemned at this judgment, even though will have to give an account of themselves. Those who are not in Christ will likewise give an account of their lives, the former will be welcomed into the marriage supper of the lamb, and those who are not in Christ will be cast into the lake of fire).
In Genesis 2:16-17 16 the Lord God commanded Adam saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die." Question: Did Adam die on that day or not?
Clearly Adam's physical life continued; yet the Apostle Paul writes in the fifth chapter of his letter to the Romans, that death entered the world through Adam's sin. Thus God's warning, or so Paul tells us, was not an empty threat: Adam did die that very day (if we understand what it means to die); but more than this the corruption of life that Adam's sin produced, remains in the world to this day.
When we speak of light, we speak of a thing that can be measured. It is visible, it is even tangible, on some levels - it has properties that can be measured. Darkness however is nothing, it has no substance, it has properties to measure, in fact it is just a consequence of "lightlessness". We use the word darkness to describe the absence of light.
In the same way, death is likewise nothing of itself, except that it describes what happens in the wake of life ever since Adam's sin corrupted life itself. The consequence of Adam's sin was that it corrupted the life that was already in creation, it separated man from the source of life (God). It isn't that Adam's sin brought something "tangible" into existence, because like darkness, death is nothing in and of itself, rather it that Adam's sin produced a separation between creation and the life that sustained it - a separation that we call "death". Adam's sin corrupted creation by introducing a disconnect between creator and creation; just as outer space is an airless vacuum, so also Adam's sin introduced a life vacuum so that all things that have life, perish.
We are right to ask therfore what it was that "died" on that day. Was it physical? Was it spiritual? Mythical? What?
Well, I think the answer is found in the gospel that Christ preached to Nicodemus in the third chapter of John's gospel. There our Lord instructed Nicodemus that he needed to be born from above. That is, Nicodemus had been born into a physical life, but that physical life could not carry him beyond the grave - if Nicodemus wanted to survive the grave he needed to be born once more, but not in the same manner as the first birth.
Stop and think for a second. Before you were born, did you possess a life? No. You didn't. You began to possess life at the moment you were conceived; prior to the moment of conception you did not exist in this creation.
When Jesus speaks about being born in a completely new way, He is not speaking about having this present life (that will perish) simply be fortified so that it continues beyond the grave. Jesus was talking about coming our into a new life that exists apart from the one we are presently living. For the scripture describes sinners as "dead" in their tresspasses and sin (Ephesians 2:1) - our physical life is manifest, yet we are described as already "dead" by the Apostle.
If sinners, though physically alive are described as dead in their tresspasses and sins, what the Apostle Paul says about believers is all the more astounding for he teaches that believers have become partakers of Christ's life while they are still living in this present world in their current mortal bodies (2 Corinthians 4:10-11). This treasure (the life of Christ) is held by the believer in an earthen vessel i.e. in their own sinful flesh (see 2 Corinthians 4:7). We come into possession of the life of Christ as our own life through a spiritual immersion into Christ that is described in Romans 6:3 - a spiritual union that unites our mortal lives to Christ's immortal life; we become, as the Apostle Peter writes, partakers of the divine nature having escaped the corruption that is in the world (2 Peter 1:4).
In order for our Lord Jesus and the Apostles to write about the new life (Christ's own life) that believers become partakers of, we must conclude that what Adam was cut off from, and what believers are reconciled to is one and the same source of life.
Don't miss that.
On account of Adam's sin a separation took place between the believer and the source of life itself. This separation was a spiritual and experiential separation - we died immediately in our spirit, and immediately began to experience the consequences of being separated from God in that we began to deteriorate and die.
We conclude that our life consists of at least two components - the physical and the spiritual. The physical dies during our sojourning here in creation, and the spiritual died in Adam already so that though we live, we are already dead in our tresspasses and sin.
Thus even a sinless babe is born separated from the life of Christ - not condemned on account of his or her own sin, as there is no sin in the babe yet, and God cannot condemn the child for Adam's sin, for that contradicts His own words whereby a man shall die for his own sins and not for his father's sins. The babe being sinless is not condemned for Adam's sin, nor condemned for his or her own sin (yet), but is separated from God so that if the babe should die he or she needs no Savior on account of his or her sin - but nevertheless requires a Redeemer to reconcile himself or herself to that life that they born separated from.
I believe that God, in His mercy, reconciles all children who die in their infancy to Himself - reconciling them to Himself even as Christ suggested in Luke 18:16 ("Permit the children to come to Me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these"). They do not need to confess their sin, for they have none, nor are they condemned for Adam's sin for that violates the word of God, but they do need to be reconciled to God through Christ's life, for they are born spiritually dead just as the rest of us are.
We see this same kind of mercy unilaterally poured out on children in the wilderness where the children of the Israelites were not put to death for their parents sins on account of their being children. God had mercy unilaterally upon all the children up to a certain age. This is a demonstration of God's unchanging character, and I think it is consistent therefore to conclude that all children who perish in their infancy will go to be with God, and this reconciliation will take place through Christ as an act of mercy consistent with God's actions in the past.
In Job 14:1-2 we read, "Man, who is born of woman, is short-lived and full of turmoil. Like a flower he comes forth and withers, he also flees like a shadow and does not remain." The thrust there is on the fleeting nature of man's life. It happens, then it is gone. This the psalmist agrees with when he says, "Thus He [God] remembered that they were but flesh, a wind that passes and does not return." Our life, our physical life, is fleeting. I don't think we need to study the scriptures to learn this - but we do need to study the scriptures to make sure we understand that much of what is said in scripture concerning our "soul" or "life" is actually directed at our physical life, and not directed at that which died when Adam sinned.
Our Lord Jesus, in speaking to the multitude spoke of the mortality of our souls in this sort of round about way, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves." (John 6:53). The wise Jew would understand this to be a statement running parallel to the temple sacrificial offerings. A sinful Jew took a sin offering to the temple, and stopped in the gate to symbolically transfer his own sins unto the head of the animal by laying his hands on the beast and confessing his sins. The animal was then slain, and both the sinner and the priest ate of the sacrifice. Once the sacrifice was dead, the punishment was symbolically over, and by eating the flesh you were taking the propitiation itself into your body - God's wrath was spent in the killing of the animal who was "holding" your sins - and when you eat that flesh you took into yourself its propitiated flesh, and in doing so you were "united with" the that which had already satisfied God's wrath. Christ in describing the eating of His fleah, and drinking of His blood is aluding to the means of propitiation in language that while symbolic should have been understood by those who understood the symbolic meaning of the sacrifices.
What we note though in this verse is that Christ says they do not have that life in themselves - they (people who are not united to Christ by faith) lack the life of Christ, which alone is immortal.
In John 5:21, and again in John 10:27-28 Jesus spells it out for us, that He is the one who gives eternal life. Given this we presume that we do not presently possess an immortal life and will not possess one until He gives it. That life we know from other verses is in fact Christ's own life which we become partakers of through faith.
I may be overstating the point, but what I want to articulate is the fact that mortal man is not in possession of a self-sustaining, immortal life. The bible doesn't say that God gave Adam a living soul (c.f. Genesis 2:7), it says that God breathed life into Adam and Adam became a living soul (some translations "became a living being").
Thus when a person dies, the breath of life that they borrowed from God returns again to God (Ecclesiastes 12:7) and the body turns to dust. So long as the breath of life is in a man, he is a living soul, and when that breath leaves a man he is no longer a living soul. In Psalm 146:4 we read, of the death of a man in this way, "His spirit departs, he returns to the earth; in that very day his thoughts perish." - here what departs from the dying person is called his spirit. Note that here the scriptures say that the man's thoughts perish. Consider the girl in Luke 8 who died, and whom Christ subsequently revivified. We understand that when Christ said that she was not dead He was not suggesting that they had misdiagnosed her condition, rather His remark demonstrated His understanding of the reality that all people live to God (c.f. Luke 20:38).
Putting it all together, the life that we presently live is corrupted by the death that Adam brought into the world through sin, and spiritually speaking, we are born spiritually dead in tresspasses and sin so that unless we are united to Christ's immortal life through faith, we are spiritually dead already.
If scripture said nothing else on the matter, we would probably conclude that when you die you you lay dead in the grave until Christ returns, at which time everyone who ever died is resurrected, the just to their reward, and the unjust to their condemnation.
Yet our Lord Himself describes Lazarus and the rich man at whose table Lazarus begged, as both having died, and both experiencing a conscious afterlife. In Revelation 20:14, we are told that following the judgment, Hades will be cast into a lake of fire. When Christ describes the rich man as being in Hades, it seems to indicate that the example Christ is giving demands that there must be some conscious state in between death and the final judgment, since Hades has not yet been cast into the lake of fire in this example that Christ gives.
Paul is torn between competing desires in 2 Corinthians 5 - to die means to go immediately into Christ's presence, and to live means to continue on ministering here. Paul seemed convinced that when he died he would immediately enter into Christ's presence which would be "gain" (Philippians 1:21). The thief on the cross who repented and turned to Christ was told by our Lord, "Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise." - suggesting that both He and the thief were off to Paradise immediately following their death here on earth.
There are several passages in scripture however which on the surface seem to paint our demise as a sort of end; the dead do not praise God (psalm 6:5), in death there is no rememberance of God (Ecclesiastes 9:5), etc. How do we reconcile these perspectives?
I think the answer is right there in the way I have worded the question: perspective.
From the perspective of men who continue to live after other men die - they see these corpses and conclude that the corpses do not praise God, are silent, as it were, and have no rememberance of God etc. They are correct of course - corpses do not do these things, but if the righteous go to paradise to await judgment day, and the unrighteous go to hades to await judgment day - and if on judgment day these people are resurrected, the just and the unjust, we understand that something of our life continues beyond the grave, either going to paradise or hades, there to dwell until judgment day when every righteous "soul" will be reunited with his or her earthly body, which itself will be redeemed and forever after incorruptible. The unjust will likewise be resurrected to the judgment, and condemned. Then will be the marriage supper of the Lamb, followed by a new heavens and a new earth, and the new Jerusalem descending etc. etc.
I think the summary of scripture is that those who have been joined by faith to the life of Christ will, upon physical death, immediately enter into Christ's presence, never to be separated from Christ. On judgment day these same will return with Christ to earth, and their former corpses shall rise from the grave to meet them in the sky, transforming as they go into redeemed and incorruptible bodies. Those who are in Christ on His return shall likewise rise up to meet Christ in the air, having their corrupt bodies likewise redeemed and transformed in the twinkling of an eye. I think that the angels will come just prior Christ's return to remove all that offends in the earth - bringing it to justice. If a just man and an unjust man are standing together, the unjust man will be taken away to judgment, and the just man left to be claimed by Christ who is coming. I could be wrong about the timing here, but that is how I see it in the scriptures.
Okay, time to wrap this up.
To summarize, Christ alone possesses immortality, the rest of us are dead in our tresspasses and sins. When we exercise justifying faith in Christ, we become united to Christ (and therefore partakers of His immortal life). It is this life, and this life (the life of Christ) alone that will survive to the new heavens and the new earth. Everyone who is a partaker of this life will likewise, on account of their union to Christ) survive to the new heavens and new earth - passing through the judgement in Christ even as Noah and his family passed through the judgment in their day.
Every person's consiousness will depart their body and go immediately into the Lord's presence upon their demise - from the innocent infant to the guilty sinner - all will go and reside either in Hades or in Paradies, awaiting the judgment to come.
On Judgment Day the angels clean out the rest of the sinners from earth, and those unjust who died outside of Christ before this day will be resurrected for judgment, and those who are alive on that day will be harvested by the angels for the judgment - and they will be condemned, and cast into the lake of fire.
On Judgment Day Christ Himself will return to earth, along with the life of all those who died in Christ, whose lives will be reunited with their former bodies which will be resurrected on that day as incorruptible - and those who are still upon the earth, will rise up to meet their Lord, and their sinful bodies will likewise be redeemed, changning to incorruptible bodies in the twinkling of the eye - and these shall be off to the judgment also to give account for themselves, but not to condemnation - they shall receive their rewards, then it is off to the marriage supper, then the new heavens, earth, and new Jerusalem.
The souls who were condemned will be in torment in hell - some argue that they live forever thus, some argue that at this point they death is eternal but they do not experience it eternally, etc. I will hold off on my opinion on that for now.
A soul therefore, depending on the context, is either the life we are living now, or that which retains our consciousness when we die and go to either Paradise or Hades.
I don't think that any person's life is immortal in and of itself, given that the scripture describes Christ alone as possessing immortality. Their physical life is fleeting, and the persistence of their consciousness depends entirely upon God from whom they borrow life itself.
I think that if we want to call that which transcends this life and progresses to either Hades or Paradise as "the soul" that's fine, but we need to be careful to distinguish that concept when the language in a particular passage is intended to describe not that which transcends this life, but that which describes this life.
Finally, immortality then describes a life that survives not only the physical life, but the final judgment.
I write all this not to wax on about immortality and souls, but to establish a few points which I can point to when I am counseling people who suffer from obessive compulsion disorders as they pertain to the notion of selling your soul to the devil.
Can you sell your soul to the devil?
No you can't because you don't own your soul - God does. That means that if the devil wants to purchase your soul, he can't purchase it from you, but would have to purchase it from God.
Of course that supposes that the devil (who doesn't even own his own soul) has some sort of currency by which to purchase your soul, and again, that God is actually selling souls - both of which are preposterously ridiculous notions, steeped entirely in superstition and error.
You can't sell what you don't own, and the devil can't buy it because he doesn't have any currency, and God is the one who would sell it, and God is not selling the life that He breathes into you.
Bottom line - you can't sell your soul, you can't lose your soul, you can't touch or see your soul - and even if you manage to convince yourself contrary to all that the scriptures teach, that there is some way to sell you soul - it wouldn't make one bit of difference - when you die, if you are in Christ you will pass through the judgment, and if you are not you will be condemned - regardless of whether you have been duped into believing you can sell your soul or not.Labels: immortality, souls |
posted by Daniel @
2:43 PM
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| Can You Really Sell Your Soul To The Devil? |
Satan was fully aware of what God had said in the Garden to Adam, "but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die." (c.f. Genesis 2:17 [NASB]). When Satan tempted Eve, it was a malicious act intended bring about her demise. Jesus said of Satan, "He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies." (c.f. John 8:44b [NASB])
If our image of Satan doesn't begin and end with his desire to see all of humanity destroyed, we have a rather inaccurate picture of who the bible describes Satan to be. Whatever the source of this murderous hatred for mankind is, it is real, and it is the defining point upon which we start such a commentary. Satan is a murderer, and a liar, and quite active in his murderous pursuits.
Satan is not alone in his rebellion, but drew along with him in his fall, a third of the heavenly host. Like minded, haters of men, who (unlike them) were created in God's image.
In the book of Daniel we read something that will help our discussion here a bit too. In Daniel 10:13 we read that an angel had tried to come to Daniel sooner, but was prevented from doing so for three weeks by another angel who had withstood him. From this we note that even spiritual creatures cannot be in two places at the same time.
Now, I want to be sure we understand what I am saying. God is not a creature, He is the Creator. God -is- omnipresent, but the same cannot be said of -any- creature, and that includes Satan, for Satan, like everything else, is just one of God's creatures; He is a part of creation - not a power separate from and equal to God, but a being that God not only created, but allows and sustains the existence of moment by moment. Should God suddenly decide to, he could stop sustaining Satan's existence, and poof! No more Satan.
In order to discuss the feasibility of selling a soul to Satan, one must know who Satan is.
If the idea that you can sell your soul to Satan does not come from scripture, where does it come from? Officially, I suppose it began with Theolphilus of Adana, but even then it was only the "Christianizing" of older fables. The idea that a human could enter into a bargain with a spiritual being is not a Christian teaching, but a pagan one. A sixth century bishop named Theophilus, or so the legend goes, gained the office of bishop through a pact made with Satan. The sixteenth century story of Faust is likewise based upon the same idea. Whatever this idea has grown into today, has its roots in paganism, and folklore.
But, we might ask, can a person really sell his or her soul to Satan?
To answer that, let's ask another question first, can you sell your neighbor's house to me? Why not? Well, because it is not yours to sell. You can draw up papers and we can both sign them, but the whole exercise has no legal authority whatsoever. So in that sense, yes, a person -can- sell their soul to Satan, in that they can have some sort of ritual, draft out an agreement, sign it in their own blood (or worse), even perform all sorts of macabre rites and whatnot - but at the end of the day, the whole thing is still quite bunk: You don't -own- your own soul, so you can't sell it.
No where does God say that you own your soul. He owns it, and you can't sell what is not yours to sell. In the same way, Satan (that liar!) couldn't (legally) buy it, since it isn't yours to sell. Even if Satan himself showed up at the signing ceremony, it would all be bunk - and Satan would know that.
But let us look even deeper at the typical pact: I will deliver my body and soul to Satan in exchange for such and such.
There are a few things wrong about that idea. To start with, Satan is a creature just like us. We can no more deliver our soul to Satan, than he could claim it. If you sold your soul to your neighbor, would it be a legitimate sale? Purchase? No. You don't own your soul, and so you can't sell it to your neighbor, nor can you give it away - it isn't yours to give (or sell). Satan is not God's equal, nor is he the "ruler" in hell. He is a creature, according to scripture, who is going to be thrown into the lake of fire on the day that God judges him. He has no authority or power to own your soul, even if you could sell it or give it away, Satan is just another creature, and therefore has no place to hold your soul, or power to do so.
Next, the idea that you sell your soul to the devil and hell, in exchange for something is preposterous on this count: If you have sinned even once, you are already going to hell, no matter how many good deeds you do. The idea that if our good deeds outweigh our bad we get to go to heaven is not found in scripture, and is not believed by Christianity. Christianity teaches (from the scriptures) that if you sin even once, you are condemned to hell, and that all of your good deeds are in fact tainted and worthless - they can no more purchase heaven for you than sin itself could. In short, anyone who can even imagine selling their soul, has probably told a lie or lusted in their heart - or stolen something, or even just hated someone - all of which marks them as rebels who have rejected God and His rule, and condemns them to hell. Thus, the devil has nothing to "gain" by pretending to buy your soul, since whether he buys it or not, you are already condemned to hell.
To be sure, the reason God sent Jesus into the world is because no one (bar none!) will escape hell by being good.
On judgment day God is not going to weigh the good you have done against the bad you have done and send you to hell if the bad outweighs the good. I reiterate this because most people who wonder about whether you can sell your soul or not have never read the bible in its entirety - and as such they think there are some things in it that are not there, and again, they think that some things that are not there are! So let me repeat, the idea that you go to heaven because you good deeds outweigh your bad is -NOT- what scripture teaches.
Scripture teaches that if you have -any- sin, from one sin, to a ga-zillion sins, you are a sinner, and all sinners will have their part, along with Satan, in the lake of fire. That is, if you have ever told a lie, you will go to hell. No probation, no mercy, and no amount of charity or good deeds will ever outweigh even the smallest white lie.
The race as a whole is condemned already. That is, the message of scripture - that is why we NEED a Savior. Jesus didn't come to save those who weren't cutting the mustard - He came to save people who could not save themselves - people who were already damned.
If you have ever sinned, you fall into that category - you have been separated from God, and are condemned already. You don't need to wait until judgment day to know where you are going, I will tell you today, if you trip on the way home, and crack your skull, you will wake before your Judge, and He has already found you guilty. What Jesus did on the cross will no longer be held out to you as a means of being reconciled to God. So it behooves you, if you don't know what it means to be a Christian, or are unsure of what Jesus did, to learn what Christianity really is.
So ask yourself, if everyone is going to hell anyway - what could Satan possibly gain in such a pact? You are already going to hell already, so..... why... exactly... would... Satan.. make himself your personal servant? The answer is, that he wouldn't - and since he can't be in two places at once, you would probably be entering into a pact with some demonic imposter anyway.
Yet Satan does benefit greatly, I think, in that he is a murderer bent of your destruction. The last thing Satan wants is for you to learn about your own condemnation and your pressing and dire need for Jesus to save you. He wants you to go on thinking that living a good life will get you to heaven, and that the only sure way to go to hell is to sell your soul to him. He would love if some fool entered into a pact with him, because and thereafter believed themselves to be damned on account of some bogus pact, since that might make them less inclined to learn the truth about salvation.
Let me tell you if you sold your soul to Satan a thousand times over, he would not own it, nor could he stop you from turning to Christ to be reconciled to God and thereby saved from sin, and consequently, from the damnation associated with it.
Satan doesn't care which one of his many lies ensnares you - so long as the end result is that you are cast into the lake of fire with him. He won't be your master in hell - just a co-sufferer.
In conclusion then, Satan doesn't need to buy your soul, for you are going to hell already because of your own sin. Satan cannot buy your soul because you cannot sell it, for your soul was created by God, just like Satan was -and both belong to God, and God has already declared what He plans to do with both the soul that has sinned and Satan - they shall be cast together into the lake of fire. The idea of selling your soul is not biblical, but pagan in origin. It is a fairy tale that borrows Satan's identity from the same scriptures that plainly reveal the folly of such a notion to those who are willing to read it. The creature named Satan has been embellished by this myth, and puffed up to be God's equal, when in fact he is nothing of the sort. Satan may be the most profound of all of God's creation, and his fall an epic thing - but make no mistake, Satan is dependent upon God for life just as you and I are - for God and God alone gives life - even to Satan, and no one and nothing can live autonomous from God.
The lesson we learn then is that you can go through the motions of selling your soul all you want - but such a thing is as bogus as can be. Satan doesn't get to define himself, nor do satanists get to re-invent the devil. If you want to know who the devil is, read the bible. If after reading this article you find yourself concerned for your soul - read the gospel - Jesus died to save you from damnation. Read the link I gave above that tells you how to be saved from your sins, and call upon the Lord while it is still today.Labels: myths, souls, the devil |
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posted by Daniel @
9:05 AM
158 comment(s)
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