MAN’S INSTINCTS ON IMMORTALITY b y U o y d T . A n d e r s o n
I N t h e W o r d o p G o d we find many- wonderful prophetic truths con cerning the closing age of the New Testament Church. As an example, Paul had to write to the Thessalonian believers who were greatly troubled about their loved ones who, although they had believed in Christ, they had experienced physical death. In I Thessalonians 4:13-18 we have this wonderful treatise on the rapture of the saints. I would urge you to study this portion very carefully, and com mit it to memory as you seek to help others in our own day and age. We need to keep in mind that man is a trinity just as God is a Trinity. We are made in the moral image of the Lord. We have body, soul and spirit. This is what Paul means in I Thessalonians 5:23, written under the inspiration of the Spirit of God. While the spirit gives man his God- consciousness, the soul gives him self- consciousness and the body world consciousness. While body is the out ward man, the spirit and soul togeth er constitute the inward man. The spirit is the seat of the intellectual being which is a distinct entity. The soul is the seat of man’s emotional nature including will, personality, and ego. These two, spirit and soul, are never separated even though man is a trinity. Scripture alone distin guishes them. Man was characteristically, in his initial creation, the perfect manifes tation of innocence. In the first and second chapters of Genesis we see that he was perfect in intelligence.
He gave names to all the beasts of the field. He was placed in the best earthly environment possible, a repli ca of the paradise of God. He was the ruler over all the things of the earth. Adam found superb satisfac tion in Eve, the helpmeet whom God gave him. In his spiritual life, he was in touch with the Lord. Having said all of this, it is quite evident that man is not what he once was. Because of his sin, iniquity has passed on to his posterity so that every human being born into this world has been born in a condition of sin (Rom. 5:12, 19). The wages of sin is death. Now comes the question, “Can we really believe in life after death?” Wherever man has appeared, instinc tively there has been the idea of a longer span of life than that which is between the cradle and the grave. “If in this life only,” Paul says in I Corinthians 15:19, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.” The true believer in Jesus Christ has the hope of a future life in glory. The only Book that tells us what we can know of the future is the Bible. When this life is over, there is some thing that follows! For the one who has placed his faith and trust in Christ, he can say, “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (II Cor. 5:1). The unbeliever, however, must face 3
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