The first lie

Two statements in the garden

In the garden of Eden two statements were made about death. One came from God and the other from the serpent. They cannot both be true, and the whole history of the human race, including the history of what people believe about the dead, turns on which one we accept.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

God said, “You shall surely die.” The serpent said, “You will not surely die.” It is the first lie recorded in Scripture, and Jesus named its author: the devil “is a liar and the father of it” (John 8:44). What is striking is how long that first lie has lived. Strip away the religious vocabulary and the claim that human beings cannot really die, that the real person survives the grave by nature, is the serpent’s claim, repeated.

What God did about the tree of life

Many readers skip the end of Genesis 3, but it is one of the most important passages on this subject in the whole Bible.

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.

Think about what this means. Adam’s continued life depended on access to the tree of life. Cut off from it, he would not live forever. If Adam had possessed an immortal soul, the tree of life and the flaming sword would have been pointless; the guard would have been protecting nothing. God barred the way precisely so that sinful humanity would not become immortal. Immortality, in Eden, was conditional. It was received, not possessed. Sin forfeited it. And the last chapters of the Bible show the tree of life restored to the redeemed in the New Jerusalem (Revelation 22:2), because by then the problem of sin has been dealt with for good.

Death spread to all

Paul traces the consequence:

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned—

Death is not a natural feature of a good creation; it is an intruder, the wages paid out by sin. And Paul defines the alternative with the same precision:

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Read that verse as if for the first time. The contrast is between death and eternal life. If every human being already had eternal life by nature, merely in different locations, the contrast would collapse. The sinner would also live forever, somewhere, and the wages of sin would not be death at all but a change of address. Paul does not say that. Eternal life is a gift, and a gift is only given to those who receive it.

Who has immortality?

which He will manifest in His own time, He who is the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see, to whom be honor and everlasting power. Amen.

God alone has immortality. The Greek word is athanasia, deathlessness. It is used only three times in the New Testament: here, and twice in 1 Corinthians 15, where it describes what the saints put on at the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:53-54). It is never used of the soul. Immortality is not a property of human nature; it is a gift from the God who alone possesses it, bestowed through Christ.

but has now been revealed by the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ, who has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel,

Immortality was brought to light through the gospel. It is good news, announced, not a fact of biology. Jesus put it the same way in the verse every child learns: “whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). Perish is a real alternative. The gospel is not that nobody perishes; it is that nobody needs to.

Where the idea of an immortal soul came from

If the Bible does not teach that the soul is naturally immortal, where did the belief come from? The honest answer is: from outside the Bible. The ancient Egyptians built their entire civilisation around the survival of the soul after death. The Greek philosophers, Plato above all, taught that the soul was immortal and the body a prison from which death released it. When the gospel moved out into the Greek-speaking world, that philosophy was already in the air, and over the centuries it settled into Christian teaching until most believers assumed it had always been there.

The early Hebrews had no such idea, and the Old Testament never expresses it. The hope of Abraham, Job, David and Daniel was not that their souls would escape their bodies but that God would one day raise them. We will meet that hope again and again in the chapters that follow. For now it is enough to notice that the two statements made in Eden are still being made, and that the one which promises that we cannot really die did not come from God.