The Soul That Sins Will Die

Traditionalists might claim that annihilationists distort the plain meaning of language when discussing the topic of hell, but it is actually traditionalists who usurp the common meanings of words.  They take death and destruction to mean eternal conscious torment and eternal life to refer to a "quality" of life, after all!  It is far from uncommon for them to claim that Romans 6:23, the popular verse proclaiming that the wages of sin is death, actually means that the wages of sin is perpetual torture in hell!  Romans 6:23 is an overtly annihilationist verse, and yet its point can be found as far back as Old Testament verses like Ezekiel 18:4.  "The soul that sins shall die" is quite clear, and yet traditionalists persist in ignoring its meaning.

Whether the soul as referred to here encompasses the physical and mental components of humanity (as some annihilationist claim) or human consciousness alone (as the word often means in contemporary usage), Ezekiel 18:4 explicitly affirms annihilationism and/or conditional immortality.  Even though this verse alone does not specify if death due to sin occurs because God directly destroys someone or because sin itself brings about an inevitable state of non-existence, it clearly teaches that death, not eternal torture, is the ultimate consequence of sin.  This is the inevitable conclusion of a literal reading of the text, which evangelicals might pride themselves on allegedly pursuing!

Ezekiel 18:4 foreshadows Romans 6:23 in rather blatant ways.  Traditionalists laughably interpret the promise of "death" for sin in Romans 6:23 as a promise of eternal conscious torment for every fallen being, but the verse plainly describes death as the penalty for evil.  Still, no one needs to read the New Testament to realize that the Bible teaches the same doctrine found in Romans 6:23 in the Old Testament.  The New Testament does not suddenly introduce the concept of eternal conscious torment for every being that has sinned; instead, it continues the obvious predictions of the Old Testament that the wicked will be destroyed.

Human consciousness does not exist forever when it is cut off from God, the only being who possesses eternal life by nature (1 Timothy 6:16) and the source of life itself.  The very idea that there is something inherently immortal about the human soul--which is nothing other than a heresy that defies 1 Timothy 6:16--is a pathetic myth that has been repeated so many times by Christians that many inside and outside of the church think the Bible truly teaches that humans are immortal by nature, just as God is.  Ezekiel 18:4 is just one of multiple verses stating that humans will not live forever by default.