WHEN THE BODY DIES, WHAT OF THE SOUL?
F. W. Cochran of Arizona would like to know about the killing of the soul, spoken of in Matthew 10:28. In many instances in the New Testament, in both the King James and the American Revised Version, the Greek word psuche is translated life and not soul; as, for example, in Matthew 2:20; 6:25; 16:25, 26. See especially the margin of Luke 12:19, 20, 22, 23; 21:19 in the American Revised. Psuche should appear as life and not soul in Matthew 10:28; for what Jesus is positing is that men may “kill the body,” our purely temporal physical life, but they cannot kill our future everlasting life, that real life (psuche) which rests with God. Only God can deprive us of this eternal life, which certainly proves the soul to be not immortal. The fact that God can destroy the soul is further shown by the word “hell,” which in the original is Gehenna (see margin of American Revised). As the place near Jerusalem where the Jews burned up and finally disposed of their refuse, Gehenna afforded Jesus an apt illustration of the complete destruction of the wicked in their “Gehenna” of punishment. There is no living survival of any part of an individual after his death, until the resurrection brings him forth again to being. The very fact that there must be a resurrection shows there can be no soul or spirit as an entity apart from the whole person. Therefore, the soul cannot be said to live in the interval between death and the resurrection.