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The Great Controversy
The only one who promised Adam life in disobedience was the
great deceiver. And the declaration of the serpent to Eve in Eden—“Ye
shall not surely die”—was the first sermon ever preached upon the
immortality of the soul. Yet this declaration, resting solely upon the
authority of Satan, is echoed from the pulpits of Christendom and
is received by the majority of mankind as readily as it was received
by our first parents. The divine sentence, “The soul that sinneth, it
shall die” (
Ezekiel 18:20
), is made to mean: The soul that sinneth, it
shall not die, but live eternally. We cannot but wonder at the strange
infatuation which renders men so credulous concerning the words of
Satan and so unbelieving in regard to the words of God.
Had man after his fall been allowed free access to the tree of life, he
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would have lived forever, and thus sin would have been immortalized.
But cherubim and a flaming sword kept “the way of the tree of life”
(
Genesis 3:24
), and not one of the family of Adam has been permitted
to pass that barrier and partake of the life-giving fruit. Therefore there
is not an immortal sinner.
But after the Fall, Satan bade his angels make a special effort to
inculcate the belief in man’s natural immortality; and having induced
the people to receive this error, they were to lead them on to conclude
that the sinner would live in eternal misery. Now the prince of darkness,
working through his agents, represents God as a revengeful tyrant,
declaring that He plunges into hell all those who do not please Him,
and causes them ever to feel His wrath; and that while they suffer
unutterable anguish and writhe in the eternal flames, their Creator
looks down upon them with satisfaction.
Thus the archfiend clothes with his own attributes the Creator and
Benefactor of mankind. Cruelty is satanic. God is love; and all that He
created was pure, holy, and lovely, until sin was brought in by the first
great rebel. Satan himself is the enemy who tempts man to sin, and
then destroys him if he can; and when he has made sure of his victim,
then he exults in the ruin he has wrought. If permitted, he would sweep
the entire race into his net. Were it not for the interposition of divine
power, not one son or daughter of Adam would escape.
Satan is seeking to overcome men today, as he overcame our
first parents, by shaking their confidence in their Creator and leading
them to doubt the wisdom of His government and the justice of His
laws. Satan and his emissaries represent God as even worse than