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Footnote:
Immortality is usually understood only in the sense of continuous life; and in addition, men try by argument and inferences to attach to it the idea of never ending--that is, of the continuous life being so established that it can never be ended. But this belief is all erroneous. For God could allow each and every soul to continue to live throughout all eternity, and yet they would still not be immortal. A lot of scientists would define Immortality the way a philosopher like Wittgenstein, for instance, defines infinity: as a continual possibility, where for each moment in time, call it z, man can be said to have the possibility of z + 1.
But these types of definitions on continuous life do not, in any way or shape, pertain to the true nature of Immortality. For true Immortality, as Luke tells us in Vol. I, ("Immortality,") "can be derived only from that which is immortal, and all arguments that merely tend to show that a thing must be immortal because of the desires or intentions of God, do not suffice. All the facts that may be established as premises, are not sufficient to logically prove the conclusion desired to be established and men cannot depend upon such method of reasoning. It is utterly impossible to derive Immortality from anything less than that which is immortal in itself, and to attempt to do so by argument or inference is a mere waste of time by the exercise of the reasoning faculties. As has been said, only God is Immortal, and that means that the very Qualities and Nature of Himself is Immortal; and if it were possible for Him to have any qualities that are not of a nature that partakes of the Immortal, then these qualities would not be Immortal, but subject to change and dissolution. Among the Qualities of His Being is the great and important one of Love and without It God could not be. His existence would be less than that of a God; and that being a fact this great Quality of Love must be Immortal, and into whatever this Quality may enter and form a part, that thing is necessarily Immortal, and in no other way could it become Immortal."
As Matthew says in Vol. I, ("The Soul and Its Relationship to God and Future Life and Immortality,") "Only that mortal or spirit who has received this Divine Love of the Father can be said to be Immortal, all others may live or they may not. It has not yet been revealed to us whether the life or existence of these spirits who have not the conscious knowledge of Immortality will continue to live through all eternity; but if they do it will be because God so wills that they shall live. But their existence will be subject to change and if such change should take place, only God knows what its character will be. While on the contrary, the soul that has acquired Immortality can never die, its status as to a life through all eternity is fixed, and even God himself cannot destroy that existence because it is the possessor of that Divinity which makes God Immortal."
Having then been transformed by the Divine Love, as Jesus says in Vol. I, ("Immortality,") "there is a difference between the state and condition of a human soul that continues in the spirit world the life that it had when embodied in the flesh, and the state that not only continues this life but makes the extinction of this life an utter impossibility--even by God, who in the beginning of man’s existence created that soul."
"True Immortality then," |