Clough Proverbs Lesson 3

The words “spirit” & “breath;” What constitutes “life;” Human & animal spirits

Turn to Genesis 2:7. As part of the introduction to Proverbs we are covering the areas of the vocabulary of the Bible, that is soul, spirit, heart and so on. These terms are used very vaguely by many believers, many have very little awareness of what they are and so our attempt will be in the following weeks to run a ground work so that you might have some idea what these terms mean. The reason for this is that it is ridiculous to go through the book of Proverbs without some understanding of what these terms mean and it’s ridiculous to even think of why Proverbs is necessary unless we know what these terms mean.

I received a question last week that shows why we have to do this. I would like to know more on the body, soul and spirit and how they interact with one another. And then there is a series of questions, such as: will the soul stop existing if the body is put in the lake of fire; the spirit that returns to God, is this man’s own spirit or God’s spirit, and what is Ecclesiastes 3:11 talking about, is the heart another name for the soul, the spirit or the body? These questions will be answered as we go through; I’m not going to stop to answer those specifically because they will be answered along with a lot of other questions as we continue.

Last week we dealt with the first part, a very obvious part, and that’s the body but all of these will be dealt with out of Genesis 2:7 because Genesis 2:7 is the crux, it’s the key passage of all God’s word that shows how we were made; shows how you were made. And if we are going to study man we have to realize that if the Bible is correct then man is made in the image of God. If man is made in the image of God then it logically follows irresistibly that we cannot know what man is unless we know what God is. We can’t study the image if we don’t have the reality and the reality of God, God cannot be known by man’s own efforts, He can only be known if He chooses to reveal himself. And if God chooses to reveal Himself then we have revelation and if we have revelation then we can find out what God is like. And if we find out what God is like then we can find out what man is like.

This is what is wrong with all naturalistic psychology today. Naturalistic psychology is never going to understand…never going to understand what man is like and this is why as I showed and indicated in the first lesson why a lot of psychotherapy is not producing any very encouraging results today. The reason it isn’t is because it is so far off base when it comes to ascertaining the constitution of what man is really like. If the Bible is correct, we iterate once again, if we are made in the image of God then how can you study man on a naturalistic basis? There’s no way you can do it, the only way you can do it is to go to revelation.

Later on I will show why this is not just an academic question; this leads to a very crucial legal problem and the legal problem is this: what happens when a person is suffering from a psychological problem? Society today grants the psychiatrist the legal right to declare the status of that person. If I were in a situation like this I believe in some case I might find myself into a legal collision with the psychiatrist in that I as pastor, I have the right to determine the status of the individual, and since I approach the man as made in the image of God then I have as much legal authority to declare a person in his status as any psychiatrist. And I think this ought to be legally clarified in the court system. Our society, by default, seems to have granted the naturalistic psychiatrist and psychologist total and complete authority in the realm of ascertaining men’s mental problem and this is a violation of biblical Christianity because the pastor, who is trained in the area of the soul, who is trained in the area of the spirit should have the legal right in these areas. And so this is again like the problem of the public school, it’s one where Christians have been sleeping at the switch and as a result of this we have lost our rights. And this is a case where evangelicals for years have slept while their rights have been taken away and I think it’s about time that we started making our own waves and got some of our rights back. And this is one right that I as a pastor have and a naturalistic psychologist operating in certain situations would not have, as we’ll demonstrate later on.

We came out with the fact that the Word of God has two words for body: one is soulish and one is spiritual. Now the soulish body is a body which you occupy at the moment and it is a body which is characterized by a two-way interaction between the spirit and the body. That’s the way things look inside you at the present time. And this means that your human spirit is being affected by the body. For example, take chemicals, drugs and so on, you can affect the human spirit through the body. You can also affect the body by the spirit and you can choose in the realm of your spirit and it obviously has physical implications in your body.

Now what Paul says is that when we get our resurrection body this is going to be changed so that we have this kind of an equation, where the spirit influences the body but the body doesn’t influence the spirit. Physically the sign that the body today influences the spirit or one characteristic of the natural body that is not true of the resurrection body, is that our natural body has certain needs. It has a need for O2 and it has a need for elimination of CO2. It has a need for nutrition and elimination of cellular wastes. And so our body is constantly in a two-way interaction with its physical environment. And this is just on a chemical/biochemical sense, this is just a picture of our body and our soul’s dependence upon each other.

Today we are going to come to the second factor in Genesis 2:7, “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground,” up to that point biochemically our bodies had been more complete; our bodies were complete; now he says He “breathed into his nostrils the breath of…” and in the Hebrew it reads this way, “the breath of lives.” Now the “lives” is what we call a compound noun in the Hebrew. It means a complex; the trick, however, is what is it a complex of. For example, water in Hebrew is never written, this may amaze you, water in Hebrew is never written singularly; it’s always written plural, that’s the way it looks in the original. And apparently this shows us how the ancient people viewed water, they viewed it as a bunch of drops and so when they had a body of water it was the waters, whether it was a cup of waters or whether it was an ocean of waters, it’s still called… and now we have the same problem, we come here, “the breath of lives.” Does it mean that man has more than one life? Are we like the cat with nine lives? What is this? There is a plural noun here and we have to study this.

But first let’s be clear about Genesis 2:7 and that the mere building up of the body does not guarantee the presence of the existence of the spirit. Now I’m laying the groundwork because in a couple of weeks we’ll make an astounding statement about when the spirit comes to the body, and particularly some of you ladies get very emotional about this because we are going to show from Scripture that the soul does not exist until the baby takes its first breath and therefore the argument that you have heard that abortion is wrong on the basis of murder is invalid on Scriptural grounds. Abortion can’t be wrong on the basis of murder. Now abortion may be wrong on other grounds, but if the fetus in the pregnant woman is a living soul then obviously abortion is murder, that’s easy to see. The question, however, is the fetus in the pregnant woman a living soul, and the Scripture is unanimous: negative, negative, negative. Now every time this is taught, it never fails to watch what happens, is that women, particularly those who have recently borne children feel very emotional that when they felt the child in them that was a real living soul and you can’t tell me any other way. And I’ve had women tell me this and I say well, that’s too bad, we have to go back to the Word of God and what is life. So today we are going to begin this problem of the spirit so pay attention because all of this falls together and it’s such a long drawn out thing that I can’t cover it all in one Sunday.

But there is a graphic picture that repeats Genesis 2:7. Turn to Ezekiel 37:1-14. Again, there’s another rule that I would like you to be clear about in understanding God’s Word in these areas. The rule is this, and I wish I had known this rule when I was involved in some philosophical discussions on the campus years ago, and that is that when you are in discussion with someone about the existence of the soul or the spirit, the tendency always is in your discussion to treat the soul as some abstraction some place, or the spirit as some abstraction. The thing I want you to see is that the Jewish people of the Old Testament never, never though in abstraction. When they used the word “spirit” they had something that you could see and hear in mind. When they used the word “soul” they weren’t talking about an abstraction, they had something you could see and hear in mind. Now if they didn’t we are in trouble. But fortunately for us, the Jewish people always thought concretely.

This is my argument why the psychology of the Bible is scientifically valid and useful because if these words, like soul and spirit and body, are not abstractions but related to an empirically observable phenomenon then much can be made with modern scientific work and I’ll try to do this as we go on, starting today with the concept of the spirit so that this won’t be an abstraction in your mind; we’ll try to get this into something that’s concrete, something that’s measurable, something you can get your teeth into so this won’t just float off into an abstract world.

In Ezekiel 37 we have a vision of Ezekiel, and in this vision we have the symbology of Genesis 2:7 repeated all over again. Ezekiel 37:1, “The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the Spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones. [2] And caused me to pass by them round about; and, behold, they were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. [3] And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answers, O lord God, You know. [4] Again He said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones: and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. [5] And thus,” that’s the motto that was sarcastically chosen when we were at seminary for the young preachers.

Verse 5, “And thus the Lord God unto these bones, Behold, I will cause breath,” see, there’s your word, “I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.” Now just stop right there. The word “breath,” can you see this; this is not an abstraction for you. The point is that “breath,” I’m going to equate later on here with spirit; now do you understand what the Jewish person was thinking about? Think the way he would have thought so you can understand this. He is thinking in terms of breath, physical breath, it’s observable; that’s breath, and this is what he has in mind when he’s going to turn around and use the word “spirit.”

Verse 6, “And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in your, and you shall live; [and ye shall know that I am the LORD]. [7] So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a noise and, behold, a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. [8] And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them above, [but there was no breath in them.]” Verse 9, “[Then said he unto me,] Prophesy unto the wind,” now this is another thing, again we’ll deal with in a moment but in the ancient world, both in the Hebrew and in the Greek there is no difference in the original language with regard to “wind” and “spirit.” For example, here is what the Hebrew word for spirit looks like; here is what the Hebrew word for wind looks like: no difference, r-u-a-c-h, r-u-a-c-h, ruach and that is the word here “wind” so it could also be “prophesy” or preach or address the word to the “spirit.”

Now in the Greek it operates the same way. In the New Testament here’s what it looks like, pneuma, pneuma; both mean wind, both mean spirit. This is from which we get pneumonia, p-n-e-u-m-a, those of you who get hung up on your spelling and you say what jerk ever dreamed up “p-n” on the front of a word, well, pass it off to the Greeks, it’s their invention: p-n-e-u-m-a, pneuma. And that is the Greek word for spirit and wind and it’s the Hebrew word for spirit and wind. So don’t think of some philosophical abstraction off into the wild blue some place; they are talking about literal breath. “And then he said to me, Prophecy unto the ruach, prophesy, son of man, and say to the ruach, Thus saith the Lord God: Come form the four ruachs, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. [20] So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceedingly great army.”

Do you see it repeats the same sequence of Genesis 2:7? In Genesis 2:7 you have body, but the body alone is incomplete, you have to have the addition of pneuma or ruach. And that is what makes it real. This, by the way, is why the baby doesn’t have a spirit until it takes it’s first breath. It’s interesting that you never breathe as deeply as you do the first breath you take. Do you realize that when a baby is born it takes a deep breath, and it has forever afterward in its lung a residue that is never exhausted until the time it dies, and it has about 1500 cc of air in the bottom of its lung that is taken in on the first breath. From that point forward the baby never exhausts this breath; he uses the rest of his lungs but he never uses this last part, this 1500 cc reservoir. This is why doctors use this fact to test whether a baby was stillborn or whether it took its first breath. In an autopsy they take the lung out and they float it and see if it will float, and if the baby’s lungs float then it has the 1500 cc residue in there and it means the baby did live and died. If it doesn’t and it sinks then it means that the baby was stillborn and never lived. So something unique happens physiologically to the body at the time a baby takes its first breath.

This is the background for spirit. Now there’s one other illustration in the Bible and that’s in John 3:8, in the middle of Jesus’ discourse with Nicodemus and here again is an attempt by the Word of God to give us as precise concept as possible of spirit. And of course this shouldn’t be strange to most of you. I might point out that the Word of God uses the word “spirit” and “soul” very precisely. Now I know there are some people who bother to distinguish between these two. But, isn’t it interesting that of 200-300 times in the Word of God that the following two rules are never, never violated. In other words, the men who wrote the Bible, 66 books, Old and New Testament alike, always used the word soul and spirit in the following two ways and they never, never, violate it. And this is the evidence I would throw up to you to prove to you that these people thought in terms of a specific entity; it was not vague to the original authors of the Bible.

One rule is that the spirit is never said to be living. This may strike you as odd but the word “living” as an adjective is never ascribed to the spirit; it is only ascribed to the soul. The soul is a living soul but the spirit is never called a living spirit. Well, why do you suppose this is—the spirit is never living but the soul is living? And this rule occurs hundreds and hundreds of times, over and over, you can take a concordance, check it out and never find a violation of this rule, not that I know of and I’ve checked through most of them. So we have this rule that the spirit and the soul, the soul is living and the spirit sometimes is life-giving. Now that’s the difference, the word life is associated with soul, not spirit. The spirit is not said to be alive. It is said to cause life but the spirit itself is never, never, never said to be alive.

A second rule that is always observed in the Word of God, time and time again, and I throw this up as another evidence to you that these terms are technical, specific and in the original author’s minds very concrete, and that is that the soul is only addressed in soliloquy, never the spirit. In soliloquy you talk to yourself. Now most of you are experts at that, well, that’s soliloquy. Soliloquy is when you address yourself, in Psalms, for example, “my soul, oh my soul,” and they talk to their soul but isn’t it interesting they never talk to their spirit and this occurs over and over and over and over again.

So here we have two rules that occur over and over again in the Bible and to me these argue against the usual Christian view well, these are just little terms and they don’t mean too much. Not to me; the linguistic evidence is that they are technical terms.

Now in John 3:8 Jesus gives us the classic idea of spirit. He’s talking about those who are regenerated, those who are born again, those who have a renewed human spirit. So He says in verse 8, “The wind” or the pneuma, this is Greek, “the pneuma blows where it wills,” listeth” is just an old English word meaning to will, “The wind blows where it will, you hear the sound of it but you can’t tell where it comes, and where it is going; so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.” And most scholars believe this was said, Jesus was talking to Nicodemus on the roof, and it was during the nighttime, Nicodemus came to Jesus Christ by night and they’re up here on the roof of the city in Jerusalem and they hear the wind blowing, the nocturnal breeze over the mountains on which the city of Jerusalem is and they hear this wind, and Jesus says hear the wind? Hear it Nicodemus, you can hear it but you can’t tell where it’s coming and where it’s going. In other words, what does this say? It says that the spirit cannot be seen, but its effects can be observed.

So let’s summarize the fundamental concept behind spirit and then we’ll deal the spirits of the animals, dedicated to all dog and cat lovers. But before we get to the animal spirits let’s just think of the general concept of spirit. The general concept of spirit is that it is causative of life or energy given; it is energy provided. It can never be seen but its effects can be felt and seen. Another way of putting it: if personality is the soul, then personality changes are the result of the spirit… personality changes are a result of the spirit. That’s the spirit’s working, but the personality itself is the soul. So we can observe the change in the soul, we can observe the change in the personality, from anger to love, from meekness and mildness to hate; we can observe these shifts of personality; those shifts are in the soul but they’re caused by the spirit in back of the soul. You want to see this; remember the Jew is not thinking of something abstract; he’s thinking of something he can see in you and me. If Isaiah, Jesus, John, Paul, walked in here they would walk through, they would know you and they would say certain things about your spirit, my spirit; they would say certain things about your soul and my soul. And if you have the average Christian’s understanding of these words it would be just Greek to you, but if you understand this you could understand when Paul would make an observation, say you know, you’re troubled in your spirit and he could read you. And you’d say what do you mean I’m troubled in my spirit, and then he would explain what he means. But you see, that’s the biblical vocabulary.

So let’s look at one, the general concept of spirit to start with and that is it is that which provides and causes and sustains life. It can be observed indirectly only. The spirit cannot be seen, it can only be observed in its effects.

Now let’s go to the first category of spirit, the spirits of the animals, and I’m deliberately working up to man because I want this to be razor sharp in your minds. So let’s turn first, because there’s incredulity expressed in some of your faces about the spirits of animals, so first I want to clear away that and I want to show you that your dogs and cats have spirits. So let’s turn to Genesis 6. In Genesis 6:17 God brings the flood upon the world and He says, “I do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein there is the breath of lives,” plural, same expression used in Genesis 2:7, the same expression! And it’s talking about air breathing animals, so what are we to conclude. Remember again, what did I say, the Jews thought concretely; what did the animal have that you have? He breathes. All right, the Jew would see that and to him, he isn’t sophisticated, you might say, to divide between the breathe of the animal and the breath of man, it’s breath, you can see it, you can hear it, you can observe it, so its spirit.

Let’s look again, Genesis 7:15, “And they that went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of lives.” Verse 22, now this is one that’s translated in your King James, those of you who have a modern translation check this, I haven’t had a chance to look at a modern translation on this verse 22 but here’s the way it should read: “All in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of lives,” now those of you who have a new one it should of corrected that, it should be “the breath of the spirit of lives,” and I use verse 22 to prove to you beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Jew was talking in terms of ruach in dogs and cats, “the breath of the spirit of lives.” They do have spirits. And one further reference, Ecclesiastes 3:21, the spirit of man goes up and the spirit of animals go down but both do have a spirit. [Who knows the spirit of man that goes upward, and the spirit of the beast that goes downward to the earth?”]

Now we have to analyze this and we’re going to go through it in the following way. Let me explain what we’re going to do to try to put this together for you in some sort of a framework. The first thing I want to do is deal with the biblical evidenced. That is, I want to deal with what we know about the Bible as far as its statements about animals and plants. See, we’re studying the difference between animals and plants here really. Then I want to deal with the scientific evidence or what we’ll call the experimental evidence because I want you to get away from this idea so many Christians have, well, that’s just the Bible and this is just a few abstractions. If the Bible really is the Word of God that is revealed into history then it must be making statements that can be checked scientifically; if it isn’t making statement, incidentally, that can be checked you can throw the Bible out because if you can’t check its statements there’s no way of telling whether it’s true or false. So we’re going to deal with these two areas; first we’ll deal with the Bible, then we’ll deal with the evidence, experiments. Then we’ll deal with the evidence of the Bible, then we’ll deal with the evidence of the experiments, and we’ll do this in two cases.

First let’s deal with Genesis 1; let’s go back to the overall framework of creation and study the categories of creation, just so we get our vocabulary accurate. This is going to necessitate a vocabulary change on some of your part. The Bible divides creation into two great categories. In Genesis 1:9 he deals with plants. “And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. [10] And God called the dry land Earth;” and so on. Then in verse 11 he makes the following statement. “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass [vegetation],” and then comma, and here for the first time in the narrative of creation we have a new phrase introduced, “the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. [12] And the earth brought forth grass [vegetation], and herb yielding seed after its kind, and the tree yielding fruit,” and so on. Now if Professor Morris comes here in the fall for his lecture series I’m sure he’ll probably deal with the problem of kind so I won’t take away from his fire except to say that the Bible does say that there are certain kinds, now whether these are species like Darwin thought or not is another big debate. But we can at least say this, that up before Genesis 1:1-8 God was making the earth, He was making the sea, He was making the gas, in other words in the areas of physics and chemistry everything was a structured system.

But now beginning in verse 11 we have the biological, the introduction of the biological. But instead of using the word biology in verse 11 the phrase that is used is “the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind,” so let’s make the following distinction. The Bible says there is reproducing creation and non-reproducing creation. In other words, what we would call plants and animals are in the reproducing part of creation. Everything else, the rocks, gas and so on are in the non-reproducing area. So there’s a new factor introduced into creation at the point of verse 9. Now most of you, and I would too, I admit, expect to find the word life here, wouldn’t you. Wouldn’t you expect to find, here’s the creation of life. But doesn’t it strike you as peculiar that this noun, “life,” is not used here. The word “life” in the Old Testament doesn’t mean just reproduction. So let’s see what that means.

Scientifically what have we said, put it over in a scientific vernacular. What is the difference between non-reproducing systems and reproducing systems? The difference is simply the cells. And I know some of you immediately think of a virus but since the virus needs a cell host to replicate then we’ll just say cells. So we translate it in scientific vernacular what the Bible is saying here is that there is non-cellular existence and cellular existence. That’s the division, the cell is the smallest unit, basically, that reproduces itself. But cells in the Bible are not said to have life. Now this is what I want you to see; even though the cell can reproduce itself, biblically it is not a living thing…biblically.

Now what does this mean? There are five observations I want to inject at this point. First, this is why Cain’s sacrifice was not acceptable to God. The only kind of sacrifice that is acceptable in God’s sight is the sacrifice of life. Cain, you remember, brought agricultural produce from his farm. In other words, put in modern terms, the rancher has it all over the farmer in that the rancher is producing life, the farmer is not. He is producing that which is needful for life, we’re not knocking his necessity here, we’re just saying that Cain’s sacrifice was not accepted because it was cellular tissue all right, but the cellular tissue was not living, in the technical biblical sense of the word.

A second observation; this is why God can say everything was very good before the fall when animals and man both ate cellular material. There was a destruction of cellular life; Adam and Eve did eat vegetables, they did eat those things, the animals ate those, and so could say aha, aha, death before the fall, death before the fall, everything isn’t very good, introduction of suffering. But that’s not correct because if the cells aren’t living in the technical sense then there was no destruction of life before the fall. This is why God says it is very good when men and animals both consume cellular tissue.

A third observation; even if modern man goes beyond what he has done with the amino acids and goes up into the more complex protein molecules and tries to erect even a virus and maybe even a cell in the hierarchy of complexity, even if modern man were to create a cell, and believe me, he’s very far away from making a full operating cell, but even if man were to make a cell, this still, according to the Bible, is not the creation of life… it is not the creation of life. The mere creation of a virus or even a cell is still not creation of life in the biblical sense.

Fourth point, fourth observation; this is why the fetus in a pregnant woman is living cellular tissue but is not life. We’re not denying… we’re not denying that the baby’s cellular structure is operating and functioning, we’re not denying that. I once had a doctor argue with me, I’ve been in various arguments about this, one of the first doctors I put my foot into when I came to Lubbock was headlining on the UD that I advocated abortion. I don’t know how that ever happened but you know how news reporters are. That’s the only time I’ve made the headlines. But that was a time when obviously the dear lady who came over to get the interview did not understand my difference and distinction between cellular existence and real life. The fetus has cellular existence but it is not living.

A fifth observation; this is why a person can die and parts of his body still be alive. This is why heart transplants can occur; the cells in the human heart can still function after the person’s spirit has departed because your body is operating as a system and it takes time to phase down after the departure of the spirit. And so therefore many parts of your body can go on living. In fact, Dr. Alexis Carrel as I pointed out earlier at the Rockefeller Institute kept a chicken heart alive for 30 years in New York City; the chicken had long since died, but the heart kept on going. Why was that? Because the cellular life [can’t understand words] was there; there was cellular activity but not real life.

I think we’ve stressed that enough. Now let’s look at another subdivision in the biblical concept of reality and this right here; in the reproducing area there is that which is not life and that which is life. In Genesis 1:20, here is the introduction of life in the Bible, not with the level of the cell but at a hierarchy, higher level. “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that has life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.” Then verse 21-25 is all talking about what we would call the animals, and they had life. So we have cellular and non-cellular scientifically speaking, and then we have not-life and life.

Now again, is there a scientific label for what we just said biblically; like we said there was non-reproducing creation, reproducing creation. There was a scientific label that we could attach to make it meaningful for 20^th century man, cellular and non-cellular. But now in the realm of the cellular can we divide up. Those of you taking biology know that it is customary to divide life into the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom. Those of you who have new biology books they talk something about the kingdom of the Protista, mean the one cellular thing, entities that some how are plants and somehow are animals and you can’t tell the difference. All we can say at this point in the advance of modern science is that the distinction between the animal and the plant kingdom is not defined because obviously one cell is one cell beings never die, right; one cell just keep on multiplying so there’s no death there. So there has to be some sort of a complexity and I would say that this is where the Christian who is informed biblically and also informed scientifically has a research project, to find out where it went, the thing that God… the lower bound in the animal kingdom, where the soul first starts. It’s somewhere over here, but where its exact location is we don’t know.

Now the bible gives us certain hints and from this point forward, for the rest of the time I’m going to try to work with this boundary, the boundary between the plants, or the non-living reproducing and the living reproducing. First we’re going to go to the Bible, then we’re going to go to science and we’re going to rock back and forth until we can see if we can come up with something that we can get our teeth in, the difference between that which has spirit and that which does not have spirit. First a series of verses from God’s Word that speak of the characteristic of that which if living… the characteristics of that which is living.

First in Genesis 1:20, you’ll notice the word, let us bring forth “the moving creature,” … the moving creature. If you look again in verse 24 you’ll notice the verb of motion, that is the “creeping thing,” that creep on the earth, there’s a motion there. Also Ezekiel 47:9. So we have one characteristic that the Bible links with the presence of life, that is locomotion. That’s one characteristic, locomotion. And this is not locomotion in the sense of a seed being blown with the wind; this means a locomotion that is in and of the thing itself. Locomotion!

A second characteristic is found Genesis 9:4. A second characteristic of those things that are called living in the Bible. First we have that they are locomotive, they have the source of their own changing points in space, and then in Genesis 9:4 we have a second characteristic of so-called living things. “But the flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, ye will not eat.” Cross reference would be Leviticus 17:10-14. So a second characteristic of the Bible about those things that are truly living is that they have blood or some blood-like substance. What is blood? Basically it’s a transport system, exchanging oxygen CO2, changing nutrients and waste to the cells. So it will have some sort of a blood system, plus locomotion.

A third characteristic is breath, we’ve seen this in Genesis 7:22 and Ecclesiastes 3:21. So we have at least three characteristics, there may be more if you study this in more detail, but at least we have locomotion, the presence of blood or a blood-like substance, and breath, or exchange, even fish in one sense have breath because they are operating in the sense they need oxygen.

There’s been a suggested characteristic, now this is a physiologist, he’s a great Bible-believing Christian, he has done much original thinking and I think he’s correct but I’m not going to be dogmatic here, and that is that the key factor that separates the non-living from the living is the presence or absence of a central nervous system. That is, that which has life has a central nervous system in the body structure. That which is not living does not have a central nervous system. Therefore, and I will not go into the details of this chart, this is why, and we’ll develop the details of this chart as time goes on, but this is an attempt to visualize the difference between the soul and the spirit in man, but just suffice it today to make the idea the difference between the body and the spirit. The red overlay represents the body; then this is the concept that you have in the Bible, that you have the body here, this would be the cellular material. On top of this you have the presence of the spirit and when the spirit is in the body they overlap, so you have an overlapping and that overlapping is called soul or nephesh, Genesis 2:7. Man was first the body, he was first the body, then God breathed into him a spirit and then he became a living soul. So the soul is the result of the union of the body and the spirit. This is why on the chart, just by way of explanation I put CMS at the intersection of the two, simply to indicate that the soul is… I’m trying to relate this to something that’s empirical out there so you can work with it. This is the presence of the central nervous system.

Now, the Bible then raises the question, or we might raise the question, and that is, why do animals have spirit and how can we see this. In other words, if we can observe the spirit itself of an animal can we observe some more things about the sex in animals, or asked another way, can we really state the difference between animals and plants in a way that will expose what we mean by the fact that the animals have spirit and the plants don’t. Those of you who are bored with this, I’m sorry but I have a lot of people who are interested in this and so we’re trying to clarify ground; you can tune out and then come back in when we deal with Proverbs. But spirit and soul and body must be clarified and it takes a lot of strain and brain work to think through this thing because our culture is so removed from that of the Old Testament.

Let’s look at these references. I say that the Old Testament gives us hints about the presence of animals. The first hint is Genesis 1:22. In Genesis 1:22 I find it most interesting that the first time God gives a command to any part of creation it’s to the animals. Isn’t it strange that God does not command the plants in Genesis 1, He just says let the earth start sprouts, literally in the Hebrew. But when He comes to the animals He I once create animals and after he creates them then He addresses them in verse 22, “God blessed them,” and He says something, not to man, He’s narrating this probably to Adam, he’s not talking to Adam in verse 22, he’s talking to the animals, and He doesn’t talk to the plants this way, He talks to the animals and only the animals this way. “Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply on the earth,” and He addresses them.

Furthermore, in Genesis 9:5, at the Noahic Covenant, animals seem to be held responsible for murder. “Surely” He says, “your blood of your souls,” literally, “I will require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of ever man’s brother will I require the soul of man.” The animals… this is not a strong argument, I’m just going to put this in a chain so you can observe the mentality of the Bible and come to your own conclusion. But I want you to notice, first the animals are addressed, the animals must receive judgment because verse 5 is part and parcel of the governmental judgmental unction of the fourth divine institution.

Then we come to a passage in Exodus 23:12, the Sabbath provision is extended not to plants but to animals, to man and to animals, both participate in the Sabbath rest. “Six days thou shalt do thy work, and on the seventh day thou shalt rest; that thine ox and thine ass may rest, and the son of thy handmaid and the stranger may be refreshed.” There’s many, many parallel verses to this. So the animals are brought in to the Sabbath rest, at least those animals that are being used for work.

Then in Deuteronomy 20:16, when the judgment is passed on the cities of Canaan I find it interesting that not the plants are destroyed in Canaan, they are preserved explicitly, and in Deuteronomy 20 we have the difference between plants and animals as they are treated in the land of Canaan. “But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God does give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breaths,” this is a command to destroy all animal life in the cities of Canaan. But contrary in verse 19, “When you shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them,” conservation of the plant area but destruction of the animal. It’s very interesting how this occurs. Deuteronomy 25:4, again one could argue this is simply chakmah, dealing wisely with the animals, but still I do think it says something about the animals. “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treads out the corn.” Later this same proverb is used to refer to people and so therefore it seems to be some sort of humanitarian provision for the animals.

Now finally a lesson in Jonah 4:11, this is the very last verse of the book. I think it’s interesting that God has commissioned Jonah to preach the gospel to a Gentile city. Jonah has become very irritated with grace. He went in there, Jonah was a super patriot to Israel, and he didn’t care for the fact that these nations were repenting and believing the gospel, so therefore when these people began to accept Christ, as known in the Old Testament, he gets very hacked; now that means that we can’t clobber them Lord; that means we’re not going to have war. And so Jonah becomes incensed that these people are receiving Christ and he does want to go, and he sulks, operation crybaby, he goes and he sulks. And while he’s sulking God deals with him. And then the last, in verse 11, God says this: “And should I not spare Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?” Now why does God bring the word “cattle” in with people? Why is there this closeness that you don’t have with plants; you have a closeness between man and his beast.

I think the answer is found in Psalm 8, reference Genesis 1:28, but Psalm 8 shows man in his position in the universe. And again I think it’s interesting, since Psalm 8 really is a repetition of Genesis 1:28, that it lists that which man is to rule over, it doesn’t list the plants. It lists the animals. Look at Psalm 8:6-8, “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet.” Now there’s the idiom for rulership. And included in the rulership, verse 7, “All sheep and oxen, yea, the animals of the field, [8] The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passes through the paths of the seas,” but no plants. And the reference is consistent with Genesis 1:28 also. In Genesis 1:28 the same thing, I have given you to rule over, and then He lists animals but never plants. So it appear that in some way the animals are ruled over by man and are in some sort of a unique relationship to man.

Two times in the Bible we also have another observation about animals, we haven’t got time to refer to these, I just mention them in passing, giving you the references and the idea. Here it is: animals are also linked to angelic beings because angels will appear as animals but never as plants. For example, the book of Revelation, what are the four animals that are around the throne of God, are they real animals. No, they are angelic beings. The angels are able, apparently, to show up as animals, and incidentally, in the new creation angels occupy the place of animals in the old creation. In this creation man is given to rule over the animals; in the future creation man is given to rule over the angels. So the angels in the future creation occupy the same place as animals occupied in the old creation. And it’s most interesting to me that when you have demons indwelling they don’t indwell plants but they do animals. Can you think of one lesson? Genesis 3:1, the snake, that’s the first one, but there’s another one and let’s turn there, Matthew 8:31. This is the day that hog prices went up, meat shortage at Galilee.

Matthew 8:31, this is a very hard passage for a 20^th century person because obviously it shows that Jesus believed in the existence of demon powers, and since most people like Jesus but they don’t like that, they don’t know what to do with this passage. “So the demons besought Jesus, saying, If you cast us out,” and there about 3,000 of them, 2,000 in this one person, so those of you who are philosophically oriented, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, figure out there were 2,000 in this one person. And so “the demons besought him, saying, If you cast us out, allow us to go away into the herd of swine. [32] And He said unto them, Go.” That’s Jesus commanding the demons to come out of the person and go into the swine. “And when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine; and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters.”

The first time you ever had paranoia in swine. But the point is that you have this and in parallel references, such as in Mark 5 the number of swine is 2,000. So what are we to conclude? We can conclude a lot of thing but we’ll just conclude one thing tonight and that is that animals apparently are sophisticated enough in their bodily structure to permit the existence of an indwelling spirit. And I suggest to you, though I’m not dogmatic, that that complexity is the central nervous system. It’s that which plants do not have which permits the operation of a spirit in the structure.

Now let’s go to the experimental evidence and then finally we’ll tie it together, we’ll go into one of the proverbs in the book of Proverbs. What is the difference observable between animals and plants? Let’s think of… you gardeners for a moment, and your ivy, and you like to train the ivy to grow up a certain way. How do you train a plant? You apply a stimulus to the plant, don’t you, and as a result of constantly applying the stimulus to the plant the plant responds. So, we have a stimulus and a response and the plant responds by you constantly guiding that ivy. And so the ivy gradually takes the design, whatever you want. You have trained the plant by continually applying a stimulus; you caused a pattern of response in the plant.

Now, what is the difference between training a plant and training an animal? In experiments with animals two things have been discovered and these are unique with animals, and not true with plants. And that is, instead of having a stimulus that you constantly have to apply to get the response because the moment you take way the thing from the ivy it’s going to go, you’ve got to keep training it, so instead of that with animals you have this kind of a thing. In between the stimulus and the response you have some sort of thought processes going on. Now I am going to use the word perceptual thought to distinguish between human thought; so I’ll use the word perceptual, and we’ll use another word for human thought and I want to distinguish between the two. We will use the term perceptual thought for the thinking that animals do in their training situation.

What characterizes perceptual thought? First when experiments were begun, we begun working with animals in learning experiments and so on, there were two kinds of experiments; these were called delayed reaction experiments and detour experiments. In a delayed reaction experiment we’ll provide the animal with food, and you would show them how to get to it, and then you’d take it away from him and see how long it was before the animal later on could figure out how to get to the food; delayed reaction. In other words, there’d be a time delay between the time you stimulated the animal with food and the time the animal actually got the food. And as a result of this and another kind of experiment, the detour experiment where you would show the food to the animal and he’d have to detour through an area where he couldn’t observe the food. In other words, to get over to the food he had to pass between an obstacle between him and the food, so for a while he wasn’t getting any optical input or sensory stimulation from seeing the food. In other words, that’s the detour; he had to go from point A to point B to the food and detour around obstacles to get there. And while he was detouring he couldn’t observe the food.

So as a result of these, both the delayed action experiments and detour experiments it was concluded that animals have to have something there that permits this sensation to stay. In other words, they have to have some form of memory. So animals have something that plants do not have, apparently; in one sense, they have some sort of a psychological thought process that involves memory.

A second series of experiments, very famous, is Pavlov’s bell ringing experiment in which the animals were able to substitute one stimulus for another. Remember Pavlov, he constantly trained the dogs, he rang a bell every time he’d feed them, roughly speaking, and then finally he rang the bell and the dogs would act as though the food was on the way. Why? Because in the dog mind they had substituted the stimulus of food for the bell. In other words, the dog had come to learn what the bell sounds would lead to. And so a second factor that was posited for animal thinking is pattern recognition. And this is why every once in a while you read in the papers how sometimes they can teach pigeons to count and they’ll touch different things. They’re not really learning how to count in the methodical sense but the pigeon can recognize a pattern; it has been taught the pattern.

So we have these two factors, memory and pattern recognition. Now what is this? This is a psychological factor present with animals that is not present in plants. Since the Bible says in parallel to this that animals have spirit and plants do not, does it not seem reasonable to suppose, then, that one observed result of the presence of the spirit is a psychological thought pattern that is impossible if the spirit isn’t there; if the spirit is there then you have a psychological process going on. I’m well aware that some will argue at this point using various fazes of the mind/body problem, namely that you can have a computer that can learn and it doesn’t have a spirit; my answer to that is who programs the computer and who operates the computer. A computer does not operate itself and the programs are not generated by the computer itself. So therefore that to me is not a valid objection.

So let’s tie this together and see what comes of it. Turn to Proverbs 12:10; this has all been separation so that next week we will understand the human spirit. But by contrast we’re studying only the animal spirit. What have we said? Here’s the plant; the plant gets a stimulus, the plant responds, automatically. The animal who is trained gets a stimulus and he thinks and responds. In between the stimulus and response is some sort of a thought process that goes on. Not only is it a thought process but who trains the thought process? Man. Now obviously dogs can be trained in various situations in environment but man can effect the link between a stimulus and a response, he can affect the thought pattern. So one conclusion we can come to is that animals can learn in a way that plants cannot.

And by the way, this is going to be the whole reason for Proverbs. And when we get into the man’s… the human spirit we’re going to find something most amazing, that most human behavior is non instinctive. We’re going to see how man and man alone is the only creature known who can’t eat by instinct. We’ll eat and overeat and under eat; animals eat by instinct. Man is the only creature that will drink when he’s not thirsty and he’s the only creature who, when dehydrated will never drink enough. Man’s reaction to his environment has to be all learned; animals partly learned. In other words, here we have instinctual behavior pattern; Proverbs is the means by which the human spirit is trained to respond to the stimuli of life. Man must learn how to respond, even in the area of eating we have to learn how to eat, we have to learn how to drink. Why, and what has this got to do with the Lordship of Jesus Christ in every area of life. Man was made to show forth the glory of God; man was made as a creature unique and utterly different from the animals in that man and man alone behaves non-instinctively.

Man and man alone has a propositional language and we’ll see next time that man and man alone can never learn language unless there’s another human being there to teach him. Language is non-instinctive and we can prove that by having cases where boys, two boys grew up, utterly separated; there were two of them and they grew up utterly separated from all people and they never learned to speak. You cannot learn to speak unless there’s another human spirit there to teach you to speak. And from that we will see the wonderful nature of the whole Genesis narrative, why God comes to Adam and He says I have made the light, and Adam, I called that day and I called I called that night and I call those animals and I call those plants. God is the One who teaches Adam how to speak. All of this is related to Proverbs and I jus throw these out for you to encourage you to keep with us, that we are moving toward the goal.

In Proverbs 12:10, here’s one proverb that doesn’t make sense unless you have the background that we’ve given this morning. “A righteous man regards the life of his beast, but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.” The word “regard” is the Hebrew word is the Hebrew word yada and it means to know and it means know on a personal basis. And it seems to suggest therefore that the man who is righteous, who is moral by God’s standards is the one who knows the life of his beast, can train it, is merciful toward it and so on. Just an illustration of the fact that animals have a spirit, the presence of that spirit is not just locomotion, blood and death, but also a learned behavior pattern is part and parcel of animals, instinctive, yes, but still the rudiment of a learned behavior pattern.

Next week we’ll deal with the human spirit and our own learned behavior patterns.