Whosoever believes that, and grasps the fact there stated, is prepared to understand the fullness of the salvation that the Lord Jesus brought to the world.
If each person in the world would hold upon his heart, would hold in his very consciousness, the truth that death has hold on him,—that to death he is subject, as expressed in the Scripture, though not in our translation: “Death is their shepherd,”—that death is the watchman over all mankind,—that death is to each one as a shepherd herding his flock,—there would be a universal readiness to believe the gospel.
The deception of thinking that they have life in themselves has been for ages, and is still, the bane of mankind. 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. But the Lord spoke otherwise. Before this deceiver spoke, the Lord had said: “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Genesis 2:17. And this was the truth. It was the truth when He spoke it; it was the truth the day they ate of the tree; and it is the truth forever." A.T. Jones