Spirit
| Body and Soul Understanding how and why God created us to be a tri-fold being is of monumental importance to every Christian. I don't believe that I could have been led from such a dark place in my own life to where I am today if I had not gained at least some rudimentary knowledge of this great Bible truth about the spirit, body and soul of a human being. Understanding the God ordained uniqueness of our tri-fold makeup through the word of God has given me the foundation necessary to then grow in knowledge of His powerful word in all areas of my life. That growth in turn has then given me the power in my own life to overcome the destructive forces of a very dysfunctional family, the negative effects of my Vietnam War experience, satanic bondage, deadly liver disease and the most destructive of all which is the false doctrines that are a part of almost every church in America. It has been a basic understanding of spirit, body and soul which has set the stage for every victory in my life but God is no respecter of persons and if it is working for me it can also work for every Christian reading this. As a matter of fact it can work better and faster for those reading this because the reader can learn here what it took years for me to learn through the hard knocks of life. Again, understanding spirit, body and soul gives a believer the connection to other foundational truths which will pave the way to an understanding of many of the other great truths of the New Testament concerning who we are in Christ and it is the appalling lack of knowing who we are in Christ that has given Satan such vast inroads into the destruction of the individual Christian, the church, America and the world.
Paul names the spirit, body and soul in
1 Th. 5:23 and it's the only place in the Bible where they are listed
together, I believe, because the early church had such a better
understanding of the tri-fold makeup of a human being thus taking this
knowledge for granted. A Christian with any understanding whatsoever of
the tri-fold nature of mankind today has only to visit almost any church
in the world to realize that it can no longer be taken for granted that
most Christians understand this foundational truth. The false teaching to be refuted before I explain the attributes of the human spirit is that Adam was sinless and then Adam sinned causing his spirit to become corrupted. Well, Adam did sin but nowhere does the Bible say that his spirit became corrupted. If you want to believe this false assumption, which I am sure is taught in many Bible Colleges, just know that the Bible does not say this. Here is the way The Bible describes the human spirit. Mosses said in Genesis 2:7 that God breathed the breath of life into man and he became a living soul”. Job said in Job 33:4 that the breath of the almighty had given him life. In Acts 17:23 Paul, while addressing unbelievers, noted that God’s spirit is the life creating force which gives unique existence to every single human being on the face of the earth when he said, “It is in Him that we live and move and have our being”. However, it is important to realize here that nowhere in the Bible do the scriptures say that Adam became a living spiritual being. The Bible says only that he became a living soul. Clearly, by the scriptures, all mankind has been given the spiritual breath of life from God at the natural birth but that spirit is unborn and God has provided only two ways for man to become born of the spirit. Those two ways are the tree of life and the redemptive spirit of Jesus Christ. Think about it. If Adam had been a fully formed spiritual creature when God created him there would have been no need for the tree of life to be placed in the garden. A good comparison for this spiritual breath of life is the egg in a female which is alive but unborn. Yes, the Bible makes it very clear that God is a Spirit (John 4:24) and that His spirit gives life to everything (John 6:63) that is living on the face of the earth but does that mean that a single celled bacteria becomes a viable spiritual being which lives forever in the realm of the spirit just because it receives God’s spiritual breath of life here on earth? Ah, I have now given the reader an excuse to meander since I am now going off on a tangent but let us stay focused. We can see by these scriptures that the spiritual breath of God does give life to the soul and the body at the moment of conception, but I cannot find a single scripture in the entire Bible that indicates that mankind becomes a living spiritual personage at the natural birth. As a matter of fact, scriptures indicate just the opposite not just by what they say, but also by what they don’t say. For example, in Mat. 10:28 Jesus mentions the soul and body being destroyed in hell but says nothing about the corrupted spirit of a person being destroyed in hell. Why not? Wouldn’t what happens to the spirit be important to mention here? In Ecc.12:7 Solomon says, “Then the dust will return to the earth as it was and the spirit will return to God who gave it” and If you understand Ecclesiastes, you will realize that Solomon is addressing what happens to the spirit of all human beings, believers and nonbelievers. Do you think Jesus understood what Solomon had said and knew that the spirit of a man returns to God instead of going to hell? The Bible is really a very logical and orderly book. Jesus told Nicodemus that one must be born of water (natural birth) and of the spirit to even see the kingdom of God but nowhere did he say that the spirit of man needs to be regenerated. No, it doesn't need to be regenerated. It needs to be born of the Spirit of Christ in the first place. If that doesn't happen then the unborn spirit of a human being returns to God and the soul and some type of body goes to hell. Nowhere does the Bible say anything about the spirit of a human being needing or being regenerated by the Spirit of Christ. Yet this false teaching is being embraced by naive Christians across the glob. According to Genesis 3:22, if Adam had eaten of the tree of life after sinning he would have become as the angels in heaven who sinned and therefore would have lived forever in his sin as the angels live forever in their sin with no possibility of redemption. Why? The only sensible answer is because the tree of life gave birth to a person’s unborn spirit but it had no redemptive qualities for forgiveness of sins. Only the Spirit of Christ has both. Nowhere does the Bible say that the spirit of mankind goes to hell yet it does say that angels who sin go to hell. Why? Because angels are fully formed ministering spirits with the free will to choose between right and wrong and mankind’s spirit returns to God because it is not a fully formed spiritual being with free will to choose. The only way to understand one's own spirit is to except the facts as I have presented them. In summary, those facts are as follows. At the natural birth a person is created by God with as a unique soul which has free will and a natural body made from the natural elements and an unborn spirit which the Bible describes as the candle of the Lord because it is designed to unite with the spirit of Christ thus becoming born of the spirit, making us sons of God. (Prov. 20:27)
Scriptures
Gen. 1: And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as
one of us,
to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take
also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever:
Col. 1:27 To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles
are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is
Christ in
you, the hope of glory.
Rom. 8:9-11 You, however, are not in the
flesh but in the Spirit, if
in fact the Spirit of God dwells
in you. Anyone who does not have the
Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.
But if Christ is in
you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life
because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the
dead dwells in you, he who raised
Christ Jesus from the dead will also give
life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells
in you.
2 Co. 13:5 Examine yourselves, to see whether you are
in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you
not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus
Christ is in you?—unless indeed you
fail to meet the test!
Gal. 3:14 so that in
Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might
come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit
through faith.
Gal. 3:26 for in
Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.
Col. 2:6
Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus
the Lord, so walk in him,
Eph. 1:4 even as he chose us in him before the
foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless
before him. In love |