Luke 23:46
Luke 23:4646Then Jesus called out in a loud voice, “Father, into Your hands I commit My Spirit.” And when He had said this, He breathed His last.
The Watchtower reads Jesus' dying commitment of his spirit to the Father as a statement about his "life-force" returning to God — consistent with the JW soul-sleep doctrine where pneuma is breath / life-force rather than a conscious soul. The personal-handoff language ("into your hands") is treated as idiomatic rather than as a statement about an active conscious entity being entrusted. Jesus is understood to cease existing until his Father raises him three days later.
Jesus addresses the Father directly and entrusts his spirit to him at the moment of death. Stephen mirrors this prayer in ("Lord Jesus, receive my spirit") — the exact same verb applied to Jesus. Two data points at once: (1) the consciousness argument — Jesus expects his conscious self to be received by the Father in that moment, not to go into non-existence until resurrection; (2) the deity argument — Stephen does to Jesus exactly what Jesus did to the Father. If this is only life-force language, both Jesus and Stephen are using the most personal vocabulary imaginable — "into your hands I commit my spirit" — to describe something impersonal. At the door: "Jesus says 'Father, into your hands.' Stephen says 'Lord Jesus, receive.' Both are personal addresses at the moment of death. If this is life-force returning, who is the 'Father' receiving it, and why does Stephen then pray to Jesus the same way?"