Where Are Your Dead Relatives Right Now?

What Is a Soul?

There is exactly one place in Scripture where God defines what a soul is. It is Genesis 2:7. And what it plainly says is the opposite of what Christendom teaches.

Notice the wording carefully. God took dust of the ground — ordinary physical matter — and He formed a body. Then He breathed into that body's nostrils the breath of life. And the result? Man became a living soul. There is no mention that man has a soul. There is no mention of an immortal spark descending from heaven. Man is a soul — the composite of a physical body plus the breath of life.

The Hebrew word rendered soul here is nephesh. It means a breathing creature. And in Genesis 1:24 the very same word is applied to the beasts of the field — cattle, creeping things, wild animals. The identical Hebrew word your Bible translates soul in one verse it translates creature in the other. A cow is a nephesh. A crow is a nephesh. You are a nephesh. And when the breath departs and the body returns to dust, the nephesh — the living soul — ceases to be. This is precisely why Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in The Incredible Human Potential that man does not have a soul; man is a soul, and souls die.

The Dead Are Asleep — Awaiting the Trumpet

Christ Himself was as plain about this as He was about anything He ever taught. He did not say His dead friend Lazarus had gone to paradise. He said Lazarus was sleeping.

Read the record: "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep…. Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead" (John 11:11–14). The Lord equated death with sleep by direct declaration. And then He performed the resurrection. If Lazarus had been enjoying four days of heavenly bliss, as Mr. Armstrong asked in Do You Have an Immortal Soul?, why on earth would Christ drag him back? What kind of friend would rip a beloved soul out of paradise and force him into a decaying body again?

The apostle Paul echoed the same doctrine to the Thessalonians: "I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him" (1 Thessalonians 4:13–14). And David — a man after God's own heart — wrote plainly: "His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish" (Psalm 146:4). The apostle Peter, preaching at Pentecost, confirmed it: "David… is both dead and buried… David is not ascended into the heavens" (Acts 2:29, 34).

Not an Immortal Soul — a Resurrected One

Here is what most Christians miss. The truth Mr. Armstrong recovered is not less hopeful than the tradition — it is infinitely more so.

If the tradition were true, the immortal soul departs at death and is done — frozen forever in whatever spiritual state it happened to be in when the heart stopped. Trillions of souls consigned to eternal torment because they had never so much as heard the name of Jesus. That is not the God of the Bible. That is a monster.

The truth is this: the dead sleep, and the dead shall rise. Paul wrote it plainly: "Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible" (1 Corinthians 15:51–52). The immortal soul doctrine has no room for a resurrection. The Bible doctrine makes the resurrection the whole point.

In the Great White Throne Judgment of Revelation 20, the untold billions who never had a chance in this life will stand up out of their graves, be given God's Holy Spirit for the first time, and be offered eternal life — real, conscious, glorified life — as spirit-born sons in God's own Family. That is the doctrine of Herbert W. Armstrong. That is the doctrine of your Bible. That is the hope Christ died to give you.