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Does Body Minus Breath Equal Missing Person?

When most biblical Christian teachers explain what Adventists believe about death, they say what I thought myself: that the immaterial part of a person, or the soul, sleeps in the grave. They call this belief “soul sleep”. They don’t say that the Adventists really teach that at death the soul, which is the person, ceases to exist. Can you make a comment on that?  

My next question is about a letter in last week’s Proclamation! email. Someone who I think is an Adventist emailed you. The title of the letter was “With The Lord In Death Is Satan’s Deception”. I noticed you did not answer the person. To be honest, I would like your reply. 

First, let me say I do not believe the Bible teaches soul sleep, especially in the New Testament, but in The Old Testament it’s a little bit vague. There was something interesting in that email. The writer said that the body and breath make a soul. Then he gave this example: take a few boards (being the body). Take some nails (being the breath). Put them together, and you can make a box(soul). Then and only then will it become a box. Take the nails out; there is no box. 

This example makes sense, but I still do not believe in soul sleep. Satan is very very deceiving, but I would like your input on this example. God bless your ministry. You are doing God’s work here on earth.

—VIA EMAIL

 

Response: Thank you for writing. We have received several reactions to that letter last week with requests for our answer to it. If anyone does not remember the letter in question, go back and read it here. Adventists teach their members that body + breath = living soul, and they use this idea to say that without breath, man ceases to exist. This formula comes from their misunderstanding of Genesis 2:7 when God created Adam. The verse says this:

Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being [soul].

Genesis 1:26 also says this:

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

Notice that God made man in His own image—something that is never said about the animals. God personally formed Adam and then Eve (Gen. 2:22), and He personally breathed His breath of life into Adam. His creation of the animals was not personal in this way. Genesis 1:24 records God saying, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind…”

God formed only the humans and breathed the breath of life only into humans, and only humans were created in God’s image. Adventists say that our physical form is part of our bearing God’s image, but the whole of Scripture does not tell us this story. Rather, our being in the image of God requires us to know what Scripture tells us about God.

When Jesus spoke with the Samaritan woman at the well, she asked him where the right place of worship was located. Was it Mt. Gerazim, as the Samaritans believed, or was it in Jerusalem, as the Jews believed?

Jesus shattered her paradigm of worship with an answer that revealed the truth about God’s nature, our nature, and the nature of true worship:

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he” (John 4:21–26).

Jesus’ answer tells us the truth about our being made in God’s image: God is not physical. He is “spirit”, and true worshipers must worship Him in “spirit and truth”. 

In other words, we humans are created with spirits—immaterial identities that are in the image of God who is spirit. Adam and Eve, unlike the animals, were created with bodies and with spirits; God’s breath of life brought those spirits to life, and the first man and woman came to life.

We also know that God told Adam that if he ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he would die that day (Genesis 2:17). He DID eat, and he DID die! He died spiritually—although his body kept living. Adventism says that God mercifully kept Adam alive, that he only began to die that day, but Scripture says that the day Adam would eat that fruit, he would die.

If Adam did not die that day, God lied.

Adam and Eve DID die that day; their spirits died. He and Eve hid from God; they tried to cover themselves; Adam blamed Eve; Eve blamed the snake; Adam blamed God for the woman He gave him! Neither one took responsibility for his or her sin.

This spiritual death is our inheritance in Adam; we are all born dead in sin, by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2:1–3). Importantly, when Adam and Eve sinned, they experienced spiritual death years before they experienced physical death. In a similar manner, when we are born again through believing in the gospel of our salvation and are made alive and indwelt by the Holy Spirit (Eph. 1:13, 14), we receive eternal spiritual life (Jn. 5:24) before we receive the glorification of our bodies at the resurrection. Nevertheless, we pass from death to life when we believe, and Jesus said, 

I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die (Jn. 11:25, 26).

Adventists are very careful not to publicly admit that they believe a person ceases to exist when they die, because the Bible simply makes it clear that idea is not true. But Adventists do NOT believe there is an immaterial part of a person. They believe the “spirit” is merely “breath”. They say the breath goes to God, and the physical body goes into the ground—and God remembers our details in His memory. They say that the resurrection is God creating a new body and putting His memories of us into the new body. 

The Bible does not describe the distinction between our “spirit” and our “soul”. It just refers to both and says we have them. Furthermore, 1 Corinthians 14:14, 15 makes a distinction between “spirit” and “mind” when Paul says that if he prays in the spirit only, his mind is unfruitful. So, he says, he will pray with the spirit and with the mind, and he will sing with the spirit and with the mind. 

This distinction reflects what Jesus said to the woman at the well: true worshipers worship in the spirit and in truth. In other words, our born-again spirits worship God who is spirit, and our minds which perceive factual truth also worship God. 

Adventists say all conscious, willful acts and awareness comes from the MIND, the brain. They try to explain the spirit somewhat like an “attitude”, or a mindset. Yet Scripture is clear that our spirits are distinct from our minds, or brains. 

God is spirit, Jesus said—and we were made in God’s image. The fact that we are to worship God in spirit and truth means that our spirits are in God’s image—because God does not have a body. It is our immaterial part of ourselves that is born literally dead in sin, by nature an object of wrath (Eph 2:1–3). It its our spirits that must be born of the Spirit, as Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3:3–6. It is our spirits that can come to life and KNOW God. In fact, Paul clarifies in 2 Cor 5:1–9 that our spirits are simply housed in our bodies, or our “mortal tents”, and when we die, “we” are unclothed because the body dies. But if we are believers, WE go to be with the Lord when we are absent from the body! 

The letter writer’s analogy of putting boards together with nails to make a box and then removing the nails and no longer having a box, is a flawed argument. He is comparing two physical items with the biblical reality of a physical item (the body) and a spiritual one: God’s breathing His spirit—His breath of life—into the body. God did not JUST put air into Adam. He didn’t need to breath into him just to make Adam breath. After all, he gave the animals the ability to breath as well. No, God breathed His own breath, His own LIFE into Adam—and Adam was made in God’s image. Adam received a spirit from God—something the animals didn’t receive. Yet Adventists say that humans die like animals and have no advantage in death over animals. This teaching is a lie. Jesus told the thief He would be with him in paradise THAT DAY, and Paul is clear that the part of us that identifies US leaves the body at death and is immediately present WITH The Lord. 

It is true that death is a separation of our body and our spirit. The body does go into the ground, and the spirit does go to God who made it. But our spirits are our IDENTITIES. We are given eternal life when we trust Jesus, and that eternal life is literal, not a metaphor. It is not a future promise; it is a current reality when we believe (Rom. 8:11; 5:10). Our spirit receive the eternal life of the resurrected Jesus—and our eternally alive identities go to be with the Lord. The resurrection is when God reunites our spirits—our identities (not merely His memories about us—but the real US) with the new bodies He makes. 

Here is an article that might be helpful to you: Are Humans More Than Living Bodies?

 

Read With Disdain

I read with disdain the first letter of last week’s Proclamation! which was an indignant defense of the Adventist doctrine of the State of the Dead.

 As I read it through, I thought, this is a typical Adventist argument—although I had not heard about the box of boards with nails before. 

 Since reading my Bible many times during the last 30 years and growing in faith and listening to other points of view, I have come to realize what a sad doctrine this is. We are much more than a box of boards and nails.

 We have a mind, a will, and emotions. These three components make us different from the animals. The animals are similar to a box of boards with nails. When they die, they are “no more”. We are not like them. We have a soul which has to be born again, and we will live again. God gave animals life and breath, but they did not become living souls. If a person really thinks about this, it is very easy to believe that there is something inside of us that makes each of us unique. It is our soul [our immaterial identity] that goes to God when we die to be reunited with the body when Jesus comes. 

Remember the Hymn “Safe in the Arms of Jesus”? The Adventist church does not sing it anymore. [The hymn, with words by Fanny Crosby, was in the Adventist Hymnal that was published in 1941. The current, updated Adventist Hymnal published in 1985 no longer contains this song.] The Apostle Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:1 that when we leave our bodies, we have a building from God—but Adventists ignore this verse. There are many other verses too, including the last verse of Psalm 23, which assure us we have an eternal home with the Lord when we die.

Instead, Adventists just hammer the Old Testament verse which reminds us that the “dead know not anything” (Ecc. 9:5). We do not know anything about how God will care for our souls when they are in His care, but to say that God will merely remember us is too simplistic for me to believe. We know that when Jesus comes, He will bring His saints with him to be reunited with our recreated bodies (1 Thess. 3:13; 4:14).

—VIA EMAIL