From: "Stuart d Kirkley" <stucandu@lycos.com>
> What is soul? If we are all individual souls, then what sustains us?
Why didn't Adam and Eve die immediately when they sinned? After all, they
cut themselves off from a close personal relationship with God and God is
the only possible source of life. They should have died instantly.
However, there is a big problem with that for God. God wants to win their
loyalty back. He wants to win their love again so that they can live
forever with him. Then he will be able to love them forever, and they will
be able to love Him forever. But, since the dead know nothing and are not
able to respond to any overtures of love towards them, He cannot allow them
to die until he has the opportunity to try to gain their trust, love and
obedience again. So human kind is endowed with a certain vitality that
allows a person to be born, grow and live until the body wears out or is
destroyed by disease or is killed in violence.
> Are we self sustained souls? That would be sophistry, which is pretty
limited.
The Bible is clear, only God has immortality. As souls, we are mortal, not
immortal. We exist for a while because God wants the opportunity to win us
back in love. Each one of us has the chance to either live forever in love
with God or reject God's love and sustenance and thereby, simply erase
ourselves.
> But what sustains us, obviously something does, since we all
> have consciousness. Perhaps we are not individual entities or souls,
> but reflections of the one Soul, or Life which is God, who is our
> life and our truth of being. If we acknowledge God as the one Soul or
> one Life, are we not more in tune with the first commandment? As soon
> as we divide the one Soul into multiple souls, or multipel lives, it
> is like a schism, and we are without a rational basis for what
> sustains these souls. This is pantheism, which is also very limited,
> and breaks the first commandment. But if God is Soul, the one Soul,
> in whom we live and move and have our being, then we know what
> sustains us, and we don't have to feel overly burdened by the notion
> that we are ultimately responsible for our fate. We can cast our
> burdens on the Lord, and He will lift us up.
You are right, it is pantheism. And certainly not Biblical theology.
We truly are guilty and responsible for our choices. But being guilty and
feeling the burden of guilt are two separate things. We can get our guilt
erased by simply accepting the substitutionary life and death of Jesus. We
are thereby justified -- not guilty -- in Christ. Once we are justified and
no longer guilty, we need not feel guilty, for God has thrown our sins and
the responsibility for them to the bottom of the sea to be forgotten. And
as the song goes, "He put up a no fishing sign." We are not to dredge them
back up. We are forgiven. We need to forgive ourselves.
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