Objection 70: Christ said, “Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell!” Matt. 10:28. This proves that the soul and the body are two distinctly different things, that the body can be destroyed and the soul remain, and therefore, that the soul is a separate entity that lives on forever after the body is dead.
Preliminarily, we would note that Jesus clearly says that a soul can be killed, so whatever this verse is teaching, it is not teaching that the soul “lives on forever.” Quite to the contrary.
Many Christian groups teach that the soul is immortal, and that upon death the redeemed go directly to heaven to live forever, whereas the lost go directly to hell to suffer torment forever. By contrast, Adventists teach that death is an unconscious or dreamless sleep until the resurrection, and that after the second resurrection—the resurrection of the unsaved after the millennium—judgment is executed upon the unsaved. They are cast into the lake of fire and consumed, so that they no longer exist. Nothing of them remains, neither a body, nor a “soul.” Other Christians sometimes refer to this belief, somewhat disparagingly, as “annihilationism.”
And yet what do we find Jesus teaching in this passage? Annihilationism! Jesus clearly stated that both the body and the soul are destroyed in hell. There is no eternal torment of a soul that cannot die. So when Seventh-day Adventists teach annihilationism, we are merely following what Jesus clearly and plainly said to His disciples.
But, yes, Jesus is also teaching that there is more to a living soul than just the body. We also have a mind, and by that I mean more than just a brain with firing synapses. We have a will, an intellect, memories, a character, and all these things that are not just our body. The mind is what makes us us.
An imperfect analogy is to a computer. There is the physical part, the machine, but there is also the software and the data. The software and data are not part of the machine; they are portable. But it is important to note that you cannot run the software, the program, or access the data without a machine. It doesn’t have to be your machine, but it has to be a machine of some sort.
And so it is with us. The mind is not part of the body, but the mind cannot operate without a body. So when our body is dead, our mind ceases to operate. As the Bible says, our thoughts perish. Psalm 146:4.
But, thank God, that is not the end of the story. God, in his omnipotence and omniscience, has made a copy of your software and data. He knows and remembers everything about you—your likes, dislikes, your memories, your character. God knows everything that makes you you. God can load the data He copied onto an even better machine. He can resurrect you, and give you a glorified body and put your mind into that glorified body.
This is what Jesus means when He says you have a body and a soul. By soul, He means the mind, the character, whatever makes you you. What Jesus is saying in Matthew 10:28 is that the death of the body shouldn’t be a terror to us, because God has promised to resurrect us, including everything that makes us us. But we should fear the eternal death of the lost, because both the machine and the software will be destroyed in the fires of hell. Both body and mind are gone forever.
Is there any reason to get hung up on the fact that Jesus used the word “soul” as distinct from the body? No, because there clearly is more to us than just our body. We do have a mind that is not a just a product of our body, that is more than just a brain.
Perhaps we fear the word soul because so many Christians have attached immortality to the word “soul.” But as we see in Matthew 10:28, the Bible doesn’t teach the immortality of the soul. Souls can die in hell. The soul that sinneth shall die. Ezek. 18:20.
By the way, the Greek word translated as soul in Mat. 10:28 is psuche, and that word is also often translated as “life.” Consider this passage:
“For whosoever will save his life [psuche] shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life [psuche] for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul [psuche]? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul [psuche]?” Matt. 16:25, 26.
Psuche is translated as both “life” and “soul” in the same passage. So Mat. 10:28 could have been translated “fear him who can destroy both life and body in hell.”
The main point is that what makes you you is more than your body. There is something else, call it a soul, call it a life, call it a mind, call it software and data. But fear not, because whatever it is, God has that thing in the palm of His hand. He will not lose it. The grave is not the end of our story.