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Lesson 24 Hope of Israel Ministries BIBLE Correspondence Course 3

DEATH -- Where Is Your Sting?

LESSON 24

No Immortal Soul!

All the ancient pagan philosophers and
every heathen tribe and nation from antiquity
have believed that man is essentially a spiritual
being -- some kind of vague immortal spiritual
soul housed in a body of flesh -- that the human
body is merely the house we dwell in, or the
cloak put around us temporarily -- that the
REAL man is not the body, but an invisible,
immaterial, immortal soul that thinks, that hears,
that sees and that will live on consciously
forever.
At death, according to the speculation of
the ancient pagan philosophers, the SOUL -- the
real you -- leaves the body and journeys to a
heaven, to a purgatory or to a hell. The BODY,
they observed, went to the grave.
A few philosophers speculated that the
souls of the departed re-enter other kinds of
bodies after death and live on earth again in the
form of monkeys, cattle, serpents, or perhaps as
human beings. This doctrine is called Iraqi woman mourns over the death of her child.
“transmigration of souls.” To this woman death has suddenly become vivid
But what is the AUTHORITY for these and real.
beliefs? Do these doctrines come from the
BIBLE? Soul”).
The answer is: there is NO authority for Nowhere does the Bible say YEHOVAH
these speculations of the pagans! God created an “immortal soul” in man!
What the Bible does reveal is exactly Then where DID the Jews, Catholics and
OPPOSITE to what most people have blindly Protestants acquire their present belief about the
assumed! immortality of the soul?
Consider this candid admission of the
Jewish Encyclopedia: “The belief that the soul Inherited from PAGANISM
continues its existence after the dissolution of
the body" -- after death -- “is a matter of Here are the astounding words from this
philosophical or theological SPECULATION same article explaining where the doctrine of the
rather than of simple faith, and is accordingly immortality of the soul DID originate: “The
NOWHERE TAUGHT IN HOLY SCRIP- belief in the immortality of the soul came to the
TURE" (from article, “Immortality of the Jews from contact with Greek thought and

DEATH -- Where Is Your Sting?