For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? (Matthew 16:26 ESV)

“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” (Matthew 16:26 ESV)

Sunday, April 24, 2022

At the beginning of 2022 I did a fast read-through of the Bible, marking all the questions. When that was completed, I went back through and made a list of what I subjectively considered to be “critical questions” in the Bible. I wrote these down in the back of my 2022 calendar, 16 hand-written pages. I’ve been writing about different ones of these “critical questions” for several weeks now.

When I do one of these studies, I try and decide what might be the foundational text for the whole series. Again, this is subjective. But this post is my suggestion: Matthew 16:26, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?” These verses are also found in Mark 8:36 and Luke 9:25.

I’m not exactly sure what it means to “gain the whole world.” Has anyone ever done this? Oh, I know there have been a string of business titans and military champions. But have they really  “gained the whole world?” Alexander the Great was said to have wept when there were no more lands to conquer, though he died in his 30’s and was soon replaced by others. I think men may aspire to “gain the whole world,” though none are truly successful. I do believe, however, that many have “forfeited (their) soul.” Either they mistakenly lived as though they had no soul; or they sought to feed their souls with all the wrong things.

With regard to the second question, “Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?”, we come to a second dead-end. Just as we cannot “gain the whole world,” we also cannot redeem our own souls (and that is how I understand the phrase “give in exchange for his soul”). If the devil has your soul, or, as the phrase goes, if you’ve sold your soul to the devil, what will you give in exchange? How will you buy it back? The truth is, you don’t have the resources to do so, even if you think you’ve “gained the whole world.” 

Perhaps the reason we can’t “redeem” our souls is that they aren’t really ours. They are lent to us by God, the Source of life, and we owe them to Him, and if we do not give our souls back to Him, then we won’t have them either. What does it mean to give our souls to God? The answer is found in the earlier verses: “Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).