There is nothing that more characterizes God than creating and giving life. The life of man originally and directly came from God; it was given by the inbreathing of God. This is the reason why he alone has an immortal soul. Other animals had a suited soul and life, but this did not come from God's breath; it was merely of God's will and power. He allowed their temporary existence, but this is wholly different from breathing personally into the nostrils of man, a way never applied to any other creature on the earth. Man only was thus favored. The recognition of this difference clears up the ground of man's moral being and accountability—namely, the immortality of his soul.
But there is a privilege immeasurably greater than simply being immortal in the sense of the soul's perpetual existence, for it may have an issue unspeakably awful. Think of a perpetual existence in the lake of fire! Everyone must come under the everlasting judgment of God, if he rejects His Son: never-ceasing existence to suffer at the hand of God, because one stubbornly and willfully refuses to believe that He in grace suffered thus judicially that the guilty might never suffer from Him, but only be blessed forever! How rich God's mercy to proclaim salvation to the lost because Christ bore sin's judgment on the cross! And if I believe not on Him nor in the glad tidings of what God wrought by Him, where am I? In darkness under the power of Satan, the unrelenting power of the enemy that hates both God and man. But man cannot have non-existence. This becomes the terrible guilt of the sinner who would if he could make himself non-existent. He may commit suicide, but he must give account of it to God, for God gave him life, and who gave him license to make away with that life by his own hand? How could such wicked folly work for any good? If murder in any shape be such as to denote a dark and deadly crime, self-murder is one of its worst forms, and a direct and extreme insult to God. As Jesus was ever the perfectly obedient One, it flowed from a life expressly eternal. In us who believe this does not always act, because flesh may work to our shame, but the new life, being eternal, always remains for due activity. The old life may break forth through unguardedness and lack of watching to prayer, for the old life, or mind of the flesh, is there too, and enmity against God (Rom. 8:77Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. (Romans 8:7)). It is man's own will, and whom is he obeying then? Satan, for man's will surely becomes Satan's service. Such is man's boasted free-will.
W. Kelly