Clough Proverbs Lesson 11

The Body: “Bowels”, Heart”, and “Kidneys”

 

We’re still on our introduction to the book of Proverbs in which we are studying the composition of man, his nature, from the Word of God, because part of the Christian position is that man is made in the image of God and because man is made in the image of God it means that he cannot be understood by naturalistic psychological theories.  These theories are very limited.  They have limited and valid insight into the certain parts of man’s behavior but they never touch the real roots of what man is because if it is as the Bible says man is made in the image of God, then we must know about God in order to understand man.  And therefore we must understand God’s revelation of Himself in order to understand man.  And therefore we conclude that modern sciences, psychology and psychiatry, are very, very limited in how they can treat man, simply because they have no way of finding out what man is like. 

 

So in the Word of God we find various statements that are data, that are revelational data on which we can build a comprehensive view of what man is like.   And we have dealt with man and his body; we have dealt with man and his spirit.   And we have said that on the basis of Genesis 2:7, when God made the body God gave to man certain things in this body.  And when He had finished making the body then He breathed into that body a human spirit and that human spirit has certain things; primarily and most importantly the human spirit has a conscience and this conscience is the center of activity for the human spirit; it’s the center of activity for man, and any theory that does not deal with the conscience is a theory that is never going to help anyone simply because 99.9% of mental problems have to do with this one little thing called conscience. 

 

The human spirit has certain needs and we have just finished speaking of these three needs; needs which are analogous to the needs of the physical body.  The physical body has needs of nourishment, it has needs of exercise, and needs of elimination of waste material.  Same with the human spirit, it must take on food, “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”  And this means you and it means me, and every man who has ever lived has this need.  Yet how many people today are devoting 1,000th of a portion of their time to spiritual food as they are to physical food.  Therefore, because the Word of God is neglected men are not receiving the nourishment for their spirits that is necessary and therefore we have one of the most massively malnourished populations in the history of the Church as far as Christianity is concerned. 

 

We have the second need of the human spirit; the second need is exercise which we said besides taking in the Word under nourishment, and by the way God has made four provisions for you and for me to take in the Word: He has given us an infallible canon of Scripture; He has given us fallible pastor-teachers; each one of us is a believer priest and therefore can go directly to the Lord and not through any religious organization; and the fourth provision is the indwelling Holy Spirit which verifies the teaching of the Word of God in our heart, or at least aid in the verification.

 

Then the second area of need spiritually that you have is needs of exercise.  And exercise means taking the Word of God and applying it by faith.  Exercise is the faith technique as it is applied in all areas of the life.  Whatever problems come up, whenever guidance is needed, to take the known principles of the Word and operate from the known into the unknown by faith and appropriating these promises daily.  Exercise physically has to be daily; if your body is exercised once a week you can actually ruin your body doing this kind of thing; this is what so foolish about the men who think on Saturday or Sunday they’re going to get a lot of exercise and during the week nothing.  They’re not exercising; they’re just ruining their bodies this way.  You have to exercise every day; if you go two or three days without exercise your whole cardiovascular system will show the effects; if you don’t believe it, try it.  If you engage in any sport or activity, if you run or if you do anything like this, and you break off for 2 or 3 days and you start back you can feel it; your whole body responds to this kind of thing.  And it’s the same thing in the spirit.  The spirit must be exercised daily by the application of the Word of God by faith.   The faith technique is the means of exercising.  The more obviously as your body is exercised the stronger it gets.  The more your human spirit is exercised the stronger it gets.

 

And then thirdly as the body needs to eliminate waste material, CO2, solids and liquid, so also the human spirit has the need of elimination and that is guilt from the conscience and this elimination can only be done by confession of sin once the sin is known.  A lot of people try to confess and are unsuccessful because they try to confess too fast; they try to confess sins that perhaps the Holy Spirit is not pointing out to them at that moment.  They must confess the sin that is at the end of the finger of the Holy Spirit as He points into the conscience.  And this requires some time and it requires some sort of a certainty that this is the exact sin that the Holy Spirit has chosen to point out to you at this present moment.  So the human spirit has these three needs.

 

Today we are going to move back, not dealing with the soul, we’re going to save the soul for the last, but we’re going to deal somewhat with the soul and we’re going to introduce something new to the body today and that is the concept of the flesh, because it is the flesh that has to do with the soul and how it operates.  And so therefore we return back to the body, and by way of review, Genesis 2:7 says that God “formed man of the dust of the ground,” the Hebrew word for man is Adam, the Hebrew word for ground is Adamah, and you can see where man got his name; Adam from Adamah, the two words are related.  Man’s very name in the Hebrew means that he is earthy; this is why in 1 Corinthians 15 Paul says the first man was earthy, that is, he was so earthy that his name was earthy.  Maybe you’ve never thought of calling Adam and Eve “Earthy and Eve,” but this is actually what it means, “Earthy and Eve.”  And the point is that Adam’s nature reflected that of the earth.  In other words, he was not spiritual, so to speak, when he was… he was innocent but he wasn’t really truly spiritual either because spirituality must be a result of maturity; Jesus Christ Himself had to learn spirituality, He had to learn obedience over certain time intervals.  And so Adam, although he was innocent and although he was free from any known sin or unknown sin, nevertheless, Adam’s nature could not yet be called spiritual, for the reason that his human spirit had not yet developed.  He had a choice whether he might develop his human spirit as we have a choice whether we can develop our human spirit’s, in a slightly different manner of course, but nevertheless in the same direction.  So he was known as Adam, from the word Adamah. 

 

And then you remember when we talked of the body we distinguished three states of the body. We distinguished the first state as corruptible but not yet corrupted.  In other words, Adam’s body could be corrupted but in innocence it wasn’t yet corrupted.  It was corruptible but not corrupted, and that state we call the state of innocence.  And it has to do with his physical body, Adam’s body as it came from the hand of God.

 

Then we have the second state of the body which is the state of fallenness and here is where it is corrupted.  All of us today fall in the second category; all of our bodies are corrupted.  From the time we’re born until the time we die we never know one single moment when we’re not living in a body of corruption.  And so we live in stage 2.

But there’s a third stage to the body in resurrection when it is incorruptible.  Now please notice the difference between resurrection and innocence.  In innocence the body is corruptible and in resurrection it is incorruptible; in other words, no test in resurrection.  Now the analogy carries over into the spiritual world.  We are born with a human spirit that is corruptible; we are bon again with a human spirit that is incorruptible, this is the doctrine of eternal security once again in another aspect or another life.  You get eternal security by a thousand different ways of approaching Scripture.  Here’s another way that points to the doctrine of eternal security, that at the time of regeneration we have a resurrected human spirit that like the resurrected body is incorruptible.  So we have these three states of the body. 

 

Now today we’re going to come to the bodily terms that are used in the Bible. Remember we said from Genesis 2:7 that the soul is a combination of the body plus the spirit.  This is why we have used this diagram with different colors.  I have used all the primary colors so I could so I could generate a secondary color by their overlap. And so we have yellow, body; red, spirit; orange, soul.  The reason for this is to show you that the soul is a composite made up of two different things.  You must see this because many of you have been exposed to Platonism, whether you knew that was the name of it that you were exposed to or not, you have been exposed to the idea of the body and soul being utterly different.  That is a wrong terminology; it is a simplistic view of man. Plato was a genius but Plato did not have God’s revelation and he came up with some very false conclusions.  And one of his conclusions was that you have a body and a soul.  Now what Plato was calling soul we would call spirit and Plato wound up, more or less, with something like this: Plato wound up with no overlap. 

 

Plato wound up with a body and a spirit and one of the weaknesses of Plato’s dualism and has always been a weakness I the whole Greek system has been that they never got the material and the spirit together.  This led to severe philosophical problems with Platonism.  But the Bible you see, if Plato had known it, solved the problem by bringing the spirit and the body together so that the soul would be a composite of the two.  And the soul has the mind.  And so if Plato had known the Bible he would not have made the mistake; the mind is the knowing organism of man and the knowing organism of man is made up of both body and spirit together; there’s no dualism at the point of knowing.  And this is an important, important point that the Bible has that Plato never noticed.

 

This could be brought out no more sharply than in the area in which we’re going to talk about this morning.  Actually, I am talking about the soul this morning.  Actually we’re going to talk about the mind and the emotions this morning, but we’re going to talk about them in terms of the body because the Bible talks about these, the mind and the emotions, not as abstractions, but in terms of bodily organs.  So we are going to talk about bodily organs and yet we are at the same time going to be talking about the soul.  So rather than talk about mind in an abstraction, talking about emotions as an abstraction, we are actually going to try and think the way the Jew thought.

 

Now again I have to ask you to do something if you want to really get out what we’re trying to do here. We want to go to the text of the Bible and we’re going to have a very difficult time this morning because most of us are not used to thinking in the terms the Bible thinks in terms of.  In other words, these terms are foreign to us, we’re not used to thinking in these terms.  But unless we learn to think a little bit in these terms we’ll never understand what the Bible is teaching about man.  Believe me, it’s going to require of you, as you listen, some mental gymnastics to try and put your mind out of the 20th century and take a time machine and come back with me and think about yourself the way you would have thought about yourself had you lived in Israel centuries and centuries ago.  We’re going to have to undergo a mental transformation and we’re going to have to do this so we can understand what the Bible says.  Then if we do understand what the Bible is saying then we can come back in our 20th century terminology and talk about it.  But until we actually go back and have a sympathetic view and an ear and a sympathetic ear to how these people thought we just will not understand what they spoke of.

 

Now the first thing to remember about it is that the body is an instrument for service.  The human spirit provides the power for service but the body is the instrument of the service.  The spirit manifests itself always through the body, not by itself.  And this being so, we then ascribe the result, emotions here, we ascribe these emotions to bodily organs; they become the expression of life.  Now this isn’t so far fetched as it might seem; in fact it isn’t too far fetched to imagine, if you think of the common problem of what the modern man refers to as psychosomatic diseases.  Again, we’re not going to go into a big long thing on psychosomatic diseases, but one Christian doctor drew this chart in which he pointed out that having the emotional center, what he called the emotional center, it has another medical name, the emotional center that is located in the brain affects all the bodily organs. 

 

This chart is taken from None of These Diseases by Dr. S. I. McMillan, and he points out there how mental attitude sin destroy your body, and how time after time after time, as he points out, he points out some of the attitudes, self-centeredness, envy, jealousy, resentment, hate, worry, over-sensitivity, guilt feelings, fear, sorrow, desire for approval, frustration, all of these work on the emotional center and as a result of these attitudes working on the emotional center you set in motion in your nervous system, the autonomic nervous system and so on, you set in motion or you set up pathways of reactions that begin to work on your organs. 

 

Now he’s not saying that these diseases are caused just by this; all we’re saying is that these diseases are aggravated by this.  There’s a big debate in medical circles about the extent of psychosomatic; we’re not arguing the extent of psychosomatic causes; we’re only arguing the existence of them.  And so he would list ulcers of the stomach and intestine, colitis, high blood pressure, heart trouble, strokes, arterial sclerosis, kidney disease, headaches, mental disturbances, diabetes and arthritis.  These are [can’t understand word] nerve diseases that are set off, triggered or agitated by mental attitude sins.  So therefore to help you bridge the chasm between where you are now and the mentality of the Bible, don’t think it’s totally strange because the link between how you think and how you feel physically is not so diverse as you might think.  These things are very related.  One of the most obvious ones is in the area of ulcers.  People make a joke about people with ulcers; if you worry too much you’ll have ulcers. Well, this just one of these pathways between how you think and the breakdown of your body.  So you see, there is a link between how you think and how your body acts. 

 

Now the Bible recognized this long before modern medicine and therefore began to ascribe emotions in terms of bodily organs.  Now the terminology of the Bible is imprecise from the modern point of view. We are going to deal with three bodily organ names this morning.  The first one will be the “bowels,” I thought that’d be the place to start; then the “heart” and then the “kidneys.”  And we’re going to deal with these three terms.

 

Now the first one is not just the intestines; the word “bowels” in the Bible is used for, in addition to the intestines, the womb, it is used for the stomach, and it is used for those organs down in the abdomen.  So you have this whole area and so on this chart I’ve indicated all of these are included by the Hebrew word “bowels.”  So when you see this word it doesn’t just mean the modern tight definition; it is a looser definition and refers to these organs.

 

Now again, why are we getting so explicit?  Simply because if you want to capture the biblical mentality and you want to appreciate the work of Jesus Christ in saving man, try monitoring your own self in terms of these organs, and I think how to do this will become progressively clearer as we move on.  Try to recapture in your own heart the thinking of these people so you can monitor your thoughts the way the Jew would have monitored his and not the way we think, some abstraction off some place.

 

First let’s deal with the word “bowels.”  For those of you don’t like the word I only have one other choice and it’s the Greek word and it looks like this: splagchnon so you choose between bowels and splagchnon, I’ll give you the choice.  I prefer the word “bowels” so if that’s not too embarrassing to you we’ll proceed through some of the verses that speak of the bowels.  And we could be technical splagchnon but I won’t. 

 

Turn to Psalm 22:14; again we are trying to go to passages that speak of human emotions and human mind in terms of bodily organs.  Psalm 22:14 is a prophecy of how Christ felt on the cross.  Jesus Christ, as we have leaned in the evening series, was true humanity and undiminished deity united in one person forever without confusion.  That’s the doctrine of the hypostatic union; Jesus Christ had true humanity and since he had true humanity he experienced the emotions and the minds and the thoughts that we all experience.  So in Psalm 22:14 as He hung on the cross he experienced this emotion, this feeling; “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax, it is melted in the midst of my bowels,” in other words, this whole idea is that His heart is sunk, so to speak, He feels that it is just sunk and that His whole internal organs are all out of kilter.  See, it’s an [sounds like: im per ci sive], it doesn’t just refer to the intestines, just the whole abdominal area is just in an upheaval with Him and He feels the whole thing there; He feels it in the gut is the way we would translate it.

 

In another context, the Song of Songs 5:4, here sexual desire is expressed in terms of the bowels.   “My beloved put his hand to the hole of the door, and my heart was moved for him.”  Now that could be very humorous if you didn’t understand what this girl was saying. What she was saying is that she experiences sexual desire in anticipation of her lover.  By the way, those of you who are so prissy the Bible speaks quite freely of this; in fact this book is devoted to sexual love and in this case you have the feelings in the general organs and so on expressed in this very physical way.  This is sexual desire but it is described in physical terms, in terms of organs of the body.  And so this is sexual desire, Song of Songs 5:4.

 

Now we go to another book and see another kind of desire that is expressed and described in terms of the bowels, Lamentations 2:11, here’s how Jeremiah felt at the death of his country.  Jeremiah was one of the men who was a true patriot, a man who dearly loved his country but he wasn’t a patriot in a naturalist sense; he wasn’t a patriot that said my country right or wrong; he was the kind of patriot that said my country under God and Jeremiah understood that his country was undergoing the fifth degree of discipline, the fifth cycle of discipline and he had to stand by and watch his country go down before his eyes, as many of us may live to see our country go down for the same reason Jeremiah had to sit and watch his country go down.  Here’s how Jeremiah feels, and he describes his feeling in terms of the physical organs that express these thoughts and emotions.  “Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured out upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people, because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city, [12] They say t their mothers, Where is corn and wine?”  Jeremiah has tremendous compassion.  The book of Lamentations is named because of his compassion, and the compassion is expressed in the physiological way these things show up. 

 

Now this should again start making you think.  Emotions aren’t experienced as abstraction.  You don’t experience an emotion as an abstraction; it only becomes an abstraction when you tell somebody else, I feel this emotion, I feel the emotion of _______blank, you fill it in, hate, love, sorrow, happiness, I experience these and you try to communicate it to someone else, but the Bible doesn’t try to communicate at the high level of abstraction; the Bible tries to communicate at the lower level of experience and the Bible communicates these in how the person felt physiologically.  And if you will be honest and stop and as you go through the week and as you encounter different situations, ask yourself, how would you express it in the Hebrew way of expressing yourself.  When you experience this week, when you experience thoughts of hate, love, and so on, ask yourself, how do my physical organs feel at this moment; how does my body feel right at this moment as I experience these emotions. And if you’ll ask yourself this over and over I think you will capture the mentality that the Old Testament man had.

 

Now in the New Testament a passage that shows the role of emotions; 2 Corinthians 6:11; emotions actually have a helping function and a hindering function.  Emotions help as a flywheel helps a machine. Some of you may have children with these little toys that you push along the floor, you push along for about a foot and then you let it go and it keeps on going.  The reason for that is that what you’re doing when you push that toy along for about a foot is that there’s a heavy wheel in side and it’s got a lot of momentum, a lot of angular momentum when you get the thing started, and you’re starting a flywheel in motion and it takes effort to start that flywheel in motion but once the flywheel is moving, there’s this big heavy wheel that’s moving inside relative to the weight of the toy, then as you put the toy back down on the floor the energy from the flywheel is acted out through the wheels, it flows out to the wheels and makes it move.  Now emotions act like that on the mind. 

 

The mind, as we’ll see later on, actually in a well-ordered person, now a person that’s in revolt against the Lord is something else, but under normal conditions your mind should trigger off emotions.  And the emotions are triggered by the mind and then… for example, through your mind you perceive somebody is going to clobber you; what does your mind do?  Immediately you have mental attitude or you experience the emotion of fear.  You experience the emotion that you’re going to either have to fight or run away, one of the two.  And your mind has first perceived the situation but then immediately your adrenalin starts to flow and you experience this emotional response.  Now the emotions start in action, and they in turn help the mind keep on going and working, under normal conditions of a well-ordered system.  Now what we experience today so often is the opposite of this, which we’ll get into in a moment.

 

But let’s first look at this from the normal point of view, 2 Corinthians 6:11-12. Paul had a problem with the Corinthian church in that they heard his teaching, they heard his claim to apostleship but they were not warm at all toward Paul personally.  And with the result that they were not taking in his teaching; they did not emotionally respond to Paul’s words.  And so Paul says you people are all tight, you’ve got a hang-up, and so he says, “O ye Corinthians, our mouth is open unto you, our heart is enlarged,” in other words, Paul is saying I desire to teach you the truths about Jesus Christ; I desire to do this.  “But you are not straitened,” now we’ve got a problem, the word strait means to constrict, to be very tight, “But you are tight, you’re not loose, you’re not relaxed, you’re all tight and tense, “but you are not tense because of us,” in us, instrumental, “because of us,” you’re not tense and tight because of something I’ve done “but you are tight and tense in your own bowels,”   In other words, what he is saying is that due to their emotional pattern their emotions are dead, as far as Paul is concerned.  They’re heard a lot of gossip and false maligning of Paul.  The gossipers have gotten busy and have started spreading all sorts of rumors about Paul and his teaching and so what the result is that other people who come to Paul for his teaching now have been turned off by the rumors they have heard about Paul. And because they have been turned off by the rumors they have heard they are unable to respond to his teaching, and their emotions are dead, “you are constricted,” tense, not relaxed because of your emotional attitude toward me, Paul says.  Now here the emotions were wrong; here the emotions were actually hate, they despised Paul because of what they had heard in the gossip, what they had heard in the rumors; they despised him, they hated him and because of these emotions the emotions did not help the mind any more, and so the mind was out here listening to the teaching but the emotions didn’t go with and so therefore they took in very little of the word; the emotions weren’t going with the mind, the emotions were going against the mind.

 

Today we’ve got a very similar situation. We’ve got people, both within fundamental circles and without whose emotions are wrong, whose emotions are not working with the mind but against the mind.  And this is what I have pleaded with over and over again but nobody seems to listen until they get personally hurt by this thing.  I have warned from this pulpit over and over and over about this hallelujah business and love Jesus and all the rest of the stuff that’s going on, clapping of hands, rolling down the aisles and all the rest of it that’s supposedly a great sign of spirituality.  It’s not a spirituality, it’s a sign of stupidity, foolishness, that’s a not a sign of spirituality.  Do y you know why I know this?  Because it’s not in the New Testament.  Point one text out in the New Testament where they went into hysterics; point out one verse in the New Testament where they said oh brother, being saved is not enough, you’ve to be baptized by the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues.  Where is that found in the New Testament?  There’s not one verse but yet we have groups in this town who make that the second gospel.  We have groups in this town who are replacing the gospel of the risen Lord Jesus Christ with the gospel of the baptism of the Holy Ghost with tongues. 

 

Now that’s another gospel and if it goes further, then I have seen it in some areas and some of the things I’ve seen and heard about seem to border on the point we must part company and declare this a heresy or another gospel.  This is a gospel that violates the norm of orthodox Christianity because what it is saying that the finished work of Jesus Christ in the believe at the point of regeneration is not enough; you’ve got to have a second blessing, you’ve got to add to the work of Jesus Christ.  When regeneration occurs that’s insufficient to supply you with the assets to live the Christian life, you need more than just what you are given in Christ, you need to be baptized by the Holy Ghost.  Now what these poor individuals fail to realize is that the Greek of 1 Corinthians 12:13 proves the baptism occurs at the point of salvation.  So the baptism of the Holy Spirit actually occurs at the point of salvation, there is no second blessing, there is no speaking in tongues after the first century, there is no such thing as that going on, there’s a lot of phenomenon going on and these phenomena is in 90% of the cases I venture to say are demonic and in other cases are simply psychological.

 

But before you hastily conclude that these phenomena that we are witnessing are of the Lord, one has to ask one’s self is the Lord Jesus Christ glorified is it just Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus?  Who’s Jesus; Jesus was John, Joe, Harry, it’s a common name; I don’t know who Jesus us; I know who the Lord Jesus Christ is, but Jesus, I don’t know any more about him than I do about Harry, Dick or Joe, it’s just a common name to me, I don’t know any Jesus, all I know is the Lord Jesus Christ but I don’t know any Jesus.  And we have a lot of it going on today and a lot of it is spread by people who have nothing up here and the reason they have nothing up here because they have gone on mental attitude hate for the Lord.  And as I progress in the morning series I will prove that to you and show you from the text of the Word of God how it is possible for you to be highly religious and highly emotional and be in the deepest form of apostasy known, idolatry.  Some people become so idolatrous that their new idol becomes their emotions.  So that everything is determined by their emotions; truth is determined by their emotions.  Falsity is determined by their emotions; it’s not whether something is true or false, it’s whether I emote over it or not.  Brother, you’re not getting with it, you’ve got to do just like we do, see. 

 

Now normally emotions will follow; emotions can be sophisticated or unsophisticated.  Emotions are the appreciator of your soul.  Now look at something here, just going back to what we’ve already learned about the body and the soul and the spirit.  Here’s where all this will be useful to you.  The emotions are a cross between the spirit and the body, are they not, part of the soul. What have we already learned about the body?  You inherit certain patterns.  So part of your emotional pattern is inherited and that has absolutely nothing to do with spirituality.  Part of your emotions and you respond to life is inherited; that’s what the doctrine of the body means, these come because you are born the way you are born, you have the hormones the way you are.  And so some people are naturally going to emote in different ways than others.  But no, not content with that we have people who want to emote all over the same way.  So we have one believer here, one believer here, then we have a few that act as believers and aren’t and all of them are supposed to emote the same way right across the board, let their tongues flap at both ends and raise their hands and shout Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus and Jesus loves me, O Jesus, show us a miracle and all the rest of it. And they’re all supposed to respond the same way but that violates inherit­ance; does every one of these persons weigh the same, are they all the same height, do they all like the same food, why should they all emote the same way.  It doesn’t make sense and it’s not commanded in Scripture either.

 

So 2 Corinthians 6:11-12 shows the role of emotions in response; emotions are needed but emotions under control.  Someone often brings up the issue in football, people get emotional; yes, one of the emotional men on the field happens to be the quarterback. What happens if the quarterback’s emotions get out of control?  Then are emotions a good thing.  Huh-un; emotions are good if they are under the mind.  The mind always precedes, starts, triggers and controls the emotions.  And if it’s any other way it’s satanic.  The spirits of the prophets, 1 Corinthians says, are subject to the prophets. 

 

One final verse on bowels, 1 John 3:17; notice so far in all these passages that the bowels are pictured as responding.  In Psalm 22 they were responding to pain.  In the Song of Solomon they were responding to sex.  In Lamentations 2:11 they were responding to disaster.  In 2 Corinthians 6 they were not responding to the Word and they should have and now in 1 John 3:17 we see again the responsive nature of emotions.  “But whoso has this world’s good, and sees his brother have need, and shuts up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwells the love of God in him?”  Paul castigates those who do not allow their emotions to follow the Word; the emotion is to be there but it is to be followed, controlled by, triggered by, and rigorously monitored by the mind filled with the Word.  Nobody is denying emotions but emotions have a responsive nature, notice.  Emotions have a responsive nature, all these verses, the emotions aren’t initiating, they are responding. 

 

Now this should clue you to how you can personally control your emotional life and how you can develop your emotional life and how your emotional life can be made something wonderful instead of something that’s horrible, something to be embarrassed about or something else.  If your emotions are always responses, what are they responses to?  They are responses to what our mind sees.  For example, it’s not actually what’s out there, it’s what your mind sees that is out there to which you respond, is it not?  For example, when you dream, are you dreaming about something that’s really there in the bedroom, or are you dreaming about something that only exists in your mind?  Obviously you’re dreaming about something that only exists in your mind, aren’t you?  But if you are only dreaming about something that exists in your mind, haven’t had you had the experience in dreams of your emotions starting to respond.  Now are they responding in that situation to reality or are they responding to what you’re thinking?  They’re obviously responding to what you’re thinking.  So therefore the way of developing your emotions is to start filling the mind with divine viewpoint and train your emotions to respond to truth. 

 

Emotions have to be trained, they’re like little children, they have to be trained.  And the only way they can be trained is indirectly; you cannot… cannot directly control your emotions.  This is why somebody that comes to the pastor in a jam and is in a crisis and he’s in the middle of a disaster situation, there’s emotion, emotion, emotion, emotion all over the place, do something, quick…there’s nothing you can do because the emotions can’t be stopped; the emotions have to be stopped by what is being felt at the time.  And if, over the years, the mind has been full of human viewpoint and/or nothing then the emotions have learned to respond to human viewpoint and/or nothing.  And so if you want to train your emotions fill the mind with divine viewpoint and the emotions will learn to respond; they will follow like a caboose will follow a train.  They’ll always follow, and this is the trick in the Christian life.  Emotions are not wrong but they have to be trained to follow truth so that you can have a wonderful pattern of emotions; you can have emotions with clear conscience, emotions because your emotions you know deep in your heart are responding to what is truth; they are really responding to the Lord.  Now you can’t respond to Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, hallelujah, praise the Lord and all the rest of this garbage that passes for spirituality; you’ve got to have something in your mind that is thought upon and after and only after your mind is filled with divine viewpoint then you can have an emotional response to the Lord Jesus Christ.  Only after, after, not before, after the Word of God penetrates the mind, not before.  This Jesus, Jesus, Jesus business, hallelujah, praise the Lord, and all the rest of it is an attempt to start the emotions off before you fill the mind with the Word.  It’s an attempt to short circuit the basic mechanics of the Word.

 

Let’s go to the second thing; let’s go to the heart.  What about the heart?  Turn to Deuteronomy 6:4.  Very unfacetiously spiritually trouble is usually heart trouble, but not the kind that you can go to Dr. Cooley or DeBakey with, this is the kind that you have to go to the Lord Jesus Christ with.  “Heart” in the Old Testament has to do with mind.  Now the bowels have to do with the emotions; heart has to do partly with emotions but mostly with mind and conscience together.  The heart, and also better put ego which includes self-consciousness and volition, those are the things that the word “heart” is used for in the text of Scripture.  Now why is heart used?  Let’s first see how it is used and then let’s talk a little bit about the physical heart.  We are commanded in Deuteronomy 6:4, “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God [is one LORD:] the Lord alone, [5] And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, [and with all thy might].”  Now over and over again you have this phrase that is used, “love the Lord with your heart and soul.”  What does that mean?  The word “heart” is used in this sense for internal mental attitude, and “soul” is used in the sense of the details of life.  If you want to translate this again, “Love the Lord with all your heart and life,” if you love somebody with your life that means that you love them manifesting this love in various patterns in your life.  And so the phrase, “Thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart and soul,” means that you love the Lord internally and externally. 

 

We have another use of heart and this is found in Psalm 51, I’m just using verses that are just one verse in whole set of verses; we’re not going to deal with the set, we’ll just one representative sample out of the set of verses.  You can look at a concordance if you want to find the whole set.  In Psalm 51:10, here is another representative use of how heart is used in the Bible.  In Psalm 51:10 we read David’s plea at the point of confession, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me,” and so here we see heart used parallel in synonymous parallelism with conscience, and the spirit as a source of power in the life and so on.  So “heart,” thought it’s a physical organ appears to be used in the Bible to refer to spiritual things. 

 

Furthermore, we have a most interesting phenomenon and to see this let’s turn to Revelation 2:23, Jesus Christ speaks, and this, by the way, is one of those little verses that proves the deity of Christ because over and over again in the Old Testament it was Jehovah who searches the kidneys and the heart, and here Jesus Christ says “I am the one who searches the kidneys and the heart.”  If Jesus is the one who searches the kidneys and the heart and you know your Old Testament, you can’t go by verse 23 without concluding that Jesus Christ must be God.  “I am the one who searches the kidneys and the heart,” the heart is the place of responsibility; the heart is judged.  Now this is something interesting; the spirit is not said to be judged in the Bible; never!  Only the heart, the heart is that which is judged.  So obviously the heart must refer to the judge-able part of the human spirit and the judge-able part of the soul, that is the mind, how you think, how you act and so forth.  Side reference is 1 John 3:19, 22, this is where the heart is used in parallel with conscience.

 

But now we come to another phenomenon, in Revelation 18:7 we find the heart used as the location of the origination of speech. This is a phenomenon that appears over and over again in the Word of God.  Thinking, in the Bible, is said to be this:  I say in my heart.  That idiom is a word which we would mean by think, but the Old Testament man didn’t say that.  He said I’m saying words in my heart.  I didn’t fully appreciate this until one day one of my little boys came and I don’t know whether he used the word heart or head but he was narrating something he was thinking and he said, “I said something something to so and so,” and I said what, “I said something so and so,” and the way he said it I knew he hadn’t said it to any of us, and I got to thinking and he was naturally using the same terminology of the Old Testament.  It was just natural for him because a child will speak phenomenological, you listen to them, they’ll always speak naturally.  And here he was trying to say I was thinking the thing, but he didn’t know, apparently, how to use the word think so he said “I say words” in my head or in my heart. 

 

Now this is the same thing in Revelation 18:7, “I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow,” this is the great prostitute here in Revelation 18, it says, “she said in her heart,” so internal speech is said to be thinking in the Word of God, showing that thinking depends upon vocabulary and if you’re one of those kind who get upset every time I use a four or five syllable word, oh, that’s deep, I’m just trying to give you a tool so that you can think more effectively in your heart.  I’m giving you tools; words are tools to be used to think with. 

 

So now we come to the problem, we know the bowels are pointing to the emotions by pointing to the physiological result of the emotions.  Now what does the heart do? Are we referring to the literal heart; is the literal heart the source of these thoughts?  In the ancient world thoughts were not considered as a pastime, but they were considered as something that really counted, so that when you thought immediately there was a response or there was a detectable activity in the heartbeat.  So the ancient man, when he thought, was feeling his heart, literally.  He would think and as he would think about the great issue seriously, his heart would respond to that kind of thinking, and obviously you can’t feel your brain, except when you have a headache, so what did he feel moving; what did he feel pulsating, what did he feel that was going with his thinking?  It was the heart and so even in Homer as well as in the Bible, throughout the whole ancient east there’s one common tradition: thought common with the heart.  It never referred to the brain, that’s a late Greek development, and the only book of the Bible that speaks of thoughts in the head are Daniel.  Apart from the book of Daniel, no other book in the Bible speaks of thoughts originating in the head; they’re always in connection with the heart.  Why?  Those of you who went to Bible Science School know why if you paid attention. 

 

The heart supplies, each time it beats, most of its blood to where?  To the brain.  So actually what is it that keeps the brain going?  The heart.  So is it so wrong then to refer to thoughts as coming out of the heart?  Isn’t the heart the functioning thing that supports the brain; the brain is just a tool of thought but it’s the heart that gives life to the brain.  So therefore the heart, not the brain, is the center of attention in God’s Word because real thinking that has to do with something that you really feel deep in your heart is serious thinking.  You see, the reason I think why we in the West have gotten away from the idea the mind is in the heart is simply because we do a lot of trivial thinking.  We think as though it doesn’t matter anything to us and of course our hearts don’t respond to that kind of thinking.  That’s cold dead thinking that is unconnected to how I live moment by moment but if you start thinking about something that touches your very life then you can’t think without having a physiological reaction; there’s got to be one if you’re thinking seriously.  If you’re really thinking about a problem, if you come to the solution, there’s a physiological reaction that is detectable, and so therefore the Old Testament man in the second category of words: the bowels are the emotion, the heart is the mind.

 

Now we come to the third, the kidneys.  The kidneys are used as parallel with the heart but not so often, and the kidneys are, therefore, judged with the heart.  They’re not the emotions; they are the center of meditation in Psalm 16:7, David says while he sleeps he meditates with his kidneys.  [“I will bless the LORD, who has given me counsel: my reins [heart] also instructs me in the night seasons.”]  Now we know from the book of Leviticus they knew what the organ, “kidneys” were because you can read the descriptions of the animal as they are torn apart and so on and it’s obvious that they knew the word kidney, it referred to kidney.  Now why is this?  I take this as a metonymy; metonymy is taking a part for the whole.  For example, if you open your newspaper, you listen to TV, and instead of saying, “President Nixon says,” they say “the White House says,” that’s metonymy.  The White House didn’t say a thing, the White House has been sitting there for many, many decades and I don’t believe anybody ever heard the White House talk.  Some of the people we have in Washington probably they heard the White House talking but the White House literally never spoke words.  Why do we say “the White House said?”  Because it’s a metonymy, we’re using the White House as part of the whole complex to stand for the whole.  So we refer to the White House said.

 

So similarly with the kidneys in the Old Testament here; that is, that the kidneys represent, again, the inner bodily responses and causes behind thought processes.  If you want to divide it, although you have to be very careful, it might be that the heart is more of the conscious end and the kidneys are the unconscious thought pattern, but I can’t be dogmatic about that.

 

So these are three bodily organs that I’ve described: the bowels describing all the abdominal cavity; the heart describing the physical heart and they detected it.  Remember I said the people in the Old Testament weren’t think of abstraction, they were thinking of some thing real that they could feel, hear, touch and sense.  When they talked about “I say in my heart” they meant it and they could feel it in their heart; and so the kidneys.


Now we come to one final word today and that is the flesh, because of our time we’ll only have time to go part way into the flesh but let’s turn to Genesis 2:17.  Here we deal with one of our great enemies, and we must understand the flesh and how to work with it.  “Flesh” can be both good and bad.  The Greeks came to the conclusion in Plato’s day that the solution to man lay in killing off the body because the flesh hindered the mind and the soul from attaining truth.  But the Bible says that the flesh is good originally.   Remember the three states of the body?  What was the first state?  Corruptible but not corrupted, the flesh is okay.  Flesh, by itself is all right but what is bad is the curse that has come upon the flesh. 

 

And so in Genesis 2:17 we have a promise by God and we must analyze this promise because all of your troubles as a Christian in mind hinge on this one promise.  “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest of thereof thou shalt surely die.”  Now from what we’ve learned already, what can die?  The spirit, the body or the soul?  Something can only die that has been made alive.  Is the spirit every said to live?  No, so the spirit can never die.  What can die?  The soul, because “soul” is the word for life.  So when he says that “in the day you eat thereof you are going to die,” he simply means that your soul will be destroyed in the day that you eat thereof. 

 

Now what about this; we see death when the soul departs or when the spirit departs from the body.  So you have a bifurcation, the spirit breaks off from the body, that equals death.  Now let’s not get so abstracts about this, let’s just think of it concretely, relaxed, let’s not think it in terms of some big long theology; just think of it in a normal common sense way.  What would you do if somebody came up to you and said “in the day that you eat of that you’re going to die?”  Would you think of some theological definition of spiritual death, not that this isn’t important but let’s just get the primary thing first?  You’d think of physical death, wouldn’t you?  We don’t have time but those of you who would like to study further, in 2 Kings 2:36 if you want to do a little word study on this “thou shalt die,” in 2 Kings 2:36 you’ll see a passage where Solomon promises a man that in the day that he goes forth from Jerusalem he will die, it’s the exact same phrase.  Solomon isn’t talking about some hyper spiritual thing; he’s talking about the fact that if the guy goes out he’s going to get killed, that’s what he’s talking about, it’s as simple as that, so the day that you go out you’re going to die.  Did the man die actually the day he went out of the city?  No, what Solomon meant was the day you go out of the city is the day that the death sentence is passed; it may not be fulfilled for a while, and it wasn’t until they caught the guy in 1 Kings 2, and after they caught him they killed him.  But from the day that that man walked outside the city of Jerusalem that day he was as good as a dead man. 

 

So now in Genesis 3 we see how God fulfills the command for literal physical death.  Genesis 3:15, we want to see this because each one of us lives in a corruptible body, each one of us bears the mark of this curse in ourselves.  First we now that before Genesis 3:15 something happened, because at least by Genesis 3:11 they knew they were naked, their conscience began to work.  So the conscience worked immediately from the second they violated the Word of God.  Now notice this, the conscience went into action immediately; this was an immediate response that Adam and Eve had because they violated the Word.  And the moment they violated the Word, bang, conscience was going. 

 

But there was something else that was not immediate, something that came hours later, and that was when Jesus Christ came walking in the Garden and said in verse 15, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed,” this is the promise of Christ’s virgin birth, why?  Because “her seed” literally reads in the Hebrew, “her sperm.”  Now why that?  This is the only time, you can look in a concordance and this is an amazing statement.  Over and over and over and over again you read so and so’s see, Abraham’s seed, David’s seed, so and so’s seed, always the male.  Why is it in this one verse and only this one verse you have the woman’s sperm?  This leads us to suspect there’s something very interesting about the effects of the fall.  The effects of the fall are such that when we have the male and the female, we have the sperm in the male and the ovum in the female, this, the ovum of the female is potential immortal; the ovum has not been cursed to the extent the sperm has been cursed in man. 

 

For example, we have several lines of evidence.  The first one is that in this promise the mechanisms by which God will bring Messiah into the world is through, by the virgin birth, by the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit, true, but it still will be using the physical remnant of what was originally there.  And to me there are four lines of evidence that support that “the seed of the woman” refers to the literal, physical, potential immortality that is present in every female. 

 

First, the ovum never really dies; it’s ejected and destroyed but never dies.  A second thing is that we have something called parthenogenesis where the ovum of the female can be stimulated to grow into a living being, apart from any male contribution.  Now this does not undercut the virgin birth simply because in mammals it will always result in a female, never in a male so this does not slight the virgin birth; you had to get Y chromosomes from some place and Jesus got them from the Holy Spirit.  So we’re not denying the miraculous nature of the virgin birth of Christ.  We’re only saying that parthenogenesis is a proved phenomenon and it isn’t something that can be done with a man’s sperm; it can only be done with a woman’s ovum.  This being the case then we have further evidence that the ovum has more powerful life than the male sperm.  Furthermore, we have another line of evidence.  Throughout the ancient East fertility was always associated with the female.  Why is there not fertility gods?  Why are there only fertility goddesses?  Simply because in the ancient East this had a tremendous widespread belief that the woman, downgraded as she was in society, was always looked upon in all the basic cultures as that person that potentially had immortality; not the man, only the woman.  The woman and the woman alone has immortality potentially in her ovum.  And this is the meaning of 1 Timothy 2 and that passage.

 

Those of you who would like to read further in this I refer you to Dr. Custance, The Virgin Birth and the Incarnation in which he develops the physiology of this, the Doorway Papers, Box 291, Brockville, Ontario and you can send there and get the report on this.  

 

Genesis 3:16, this is the curse further, though it is true that in the ovum of the woman we have immortality in a potential form, yet in verse 16 here body is cursed so that she will experience pain in childbirth.  This is a physical thing; it’s not some hyper spiritual thing, it means that the woman’s body has been modified somehow since the fall or by the fall that causes her pain in childbirth.  It might be interesting for some of you going into medicine in some area to study why is this pain and if you can locate it why it is this would be the thing that was effected by the fall.

 

[Genesis 3:17] “And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and has eaten of the tree …cursed is the ground for thy sake,” now the cursing of the ground, becomes an analogy which we will pick up on the book of Proverbs, for the sin nature.  The cursing of the ground is here said to result in thorns and thistles.  So the cursing upon the ground is an analogy physically with what happens to us spiritually.  First, cursing of the ground means that what you want to grow doesn’t; think of your lawn.  Bermuda grass will grow everywhere except where you want it.  It’s most excellent in flower beds and every other place except in the lawn, and once again, this is part of the curse, that things will grow where you don’t want them and they won’t grow where you do.  So you have a positive and a negative; positively you’ll have thorns and thistles; what you don’t to grow will grow and so similarly out of  your behavior pattern those habits that you don’t want will automatically, easily, spontaneously, grow by themselves, and those good patterns of righteousness which you want to develop will never grow.  Like the Bermuda grass, it will grow everywhere except where you want it and this comes forth from the cursing; the parallel between the physical cursing and so on.

 

There’s one other part to this, Genesis 3:22 and the last three verses for here we have something else that’s equally physical—equally physical now, don’t go off into the spiritual things too quickly.  “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,” notice, physical, “and liver forever; [23] Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from where he was taken.  [24] So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubim, and flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”  What was the tree of life?  Something physical.  Why was man excluded from the Garden?  And here we’re going to come to a conclusion which we’ll end with today and pick up next time and that was that at the time of the eating there was introduced into man’s body some sort of a poison, a literal poison was introduced at this point.  Therefore from the time that he took that he was a dead man.

 

Genesis 3:22-24 is the administration of the sentence, because verses 22-24 were the antedate to that poison, and the antidote has been removed and the poison will now have its effect and you will have, in direct violation of evolution, the inheritance of an acquired characteristic, and here we have the origin of the flesh; the picking up of an acquired characteristic that will be inherited forever because the antidote has been removed.  The antidote that could have given man life forever has been removed and now that antidote is available only through the cross of Jesus Christ and through resurrection.  The tree of life, where is it?  It’s the cross; the cross of Christ has become the new tree of life. 

 

Shall we bow….