This deception is couched in the conception of the immortality of the soul.
Vast multitudes of the human race, and indeed the whole human race, naturally, as it is, have come under the power of that deception—of thinking that they have life themselves so certainly that even the Lord himself cannot deprive them of it.
Through the deception in which they are involved, they have come to believe that a part of themselves is “immortal,” and, logically enough, that, therefore, it is “a part of God”—and then the conclusion, “How can God destroy a part of Himself?” By that argument they convince themselves that the Lord himself could not destroy them, if He wished to.
The whole human race is naturally under that deception.
The whole human race is naturally under that deception.
---And the way in which they came under this deception is precisely the way in which they came under the deception of sin.
Q: For what was it that the deceiver said to the woman, to get her to
depart from God into sin? What was it?—“Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be like God.”
Q: For what was it that the deceiver said to the woman, to get her to
You will be like the divine, and not subject to death. That was the original proposition in the original deception that brought us under sin; that was the original deception into which the race went by that “one man,” by whom came sin and death."
A.T. Jones