The Soul: Immaterial Part of Man. Gen 2:7
2)
It is through
our physical body that we rule nature. Unlike the immaterial angels man has a
physical body, and from that he is to from that vantage point rule physical
nature. He is to exercise dominion over all the creatures. Thus we are to see
that there is a connection between the material part of man and an immaterial
part, and that these are united in one person and the totality of that person
is said to be in the image of God. He represents God in the universe. We can’t
emphasize one over the other; they are both important. John 14:9—Jesus is
emphasizing, “If you have seen me you have seen the Father.” The point is that
in the incarnation everything that God was in terms of being infinite is
scrunched and packed down into the highest possible expression of deity in
finite form, and that is in the person of Jesus Christ in His humanity.
Colossians 2:9, we are told that in Him all the fullness of deity dwells in Him
in bodily form. It is not just the fact that He is God but that He is in a
truly human body that is important. So man rules nature through his body and
mans dominion rule was lost at the fall. Because of the fall man could never
exercise his dominion as God originally intended. That dominion rule is going
to be recovered through the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and that dominion is
ultimately going to be exercised when the Lord Jesus Christ returns at the
second coming. This is seen in 1 Corinthians 15. In the process of the Church
Age each individual believer is going to be spiritually matured through the
exercise of ruling. As we learn to rule our flesh, which includes mastery of
the sin nature under the power of the Holy Spirit, and then working outward in
all of the dimensions of life around us. Even Jesus Christ (and He was sinless)
had to be matured in this same manner of exercising authority—He learned
obedience through the things which He suffered. Jesus didn’t have to be
disobedient or ever disobey anyone to learn obedience any more than we have to
learn that murder or some other crime is wrong by having committed that crime.
We learn these things in the process of our growth and in the same way, the
Lord Jesus Christ in His humanity, learned to exercise dominion and apply
doctrine to every area of life as He was prepared to go to the cross. In 1
Corinthians 15 we see how powerful the implications from the creation are.
Picking up the context from verse 22,
“For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all
be made alive. But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits;
afterward they that are Christ's at his coming. Then cometh the end, when he
shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have
put down all rule and all authority and power.”
Look at the way this is expressed. It is very similar to the expression
of man’s exercise of dominion in Genesis chapter one where man is to rule over
the fish of the sea, the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. He is to
rule over every dimension of the creation. Here we see that history culminates
when a human being (this isn’t talking about Jesus Christ in His deity, it is
emphasizing Jesus Christ in His humanity) will fulfill that dominion mandate.
This is why Jesus is given the title of Son of Man [son of Adam] in Scripture.
It emphasizes the fact that He is the son [descendant] of Adam and that He is
fully human and in the one who lives out the command given to Adam and fulfills
God’s plan where Adam failed. The second part is that man rules nature. One
important point from this, going back to the importance of the union of
material and immaterial, and that is that the soul is never to be understood or
thought of as having some sort of independent existence. Some of our ideas
about the soul really have their historical roots in Platonism, and for Plato
there was an idea known as the preexistence of the soul. So for Plato the soul
could exist all by itself and the body, therefore was not that necessary; it
was just something the soul had to live through for the period of migration on
the earth before it eventually returned to the world of the ideal. This is why
the physical world and its importance was downplayed in Platonism, Gnosticism,
and later Docetism. But we look at Scripture and we realize that the soul must
always be united to some sort of body. There is no independent existence of the
soul. Cf. Luke 16.
3)
All human
beings are made from Adam’s single body. When God created the human race He did
not, as in the case of animals, create male and female individually. He started
by creating the male and then the female is taken from the male, so that every
single human being goes right back to Adam. Adam is our representative head and
he is our physical head. This makes the human race unique among all of God’s
creatures. This is why God can send the Lord Jesus Christ to die on the cross
as the representative for the race because there is a genetic unification in
the human race that makes it possible. That can’t happen for angels because
each angel is created differently and in distinction, so that there is unity
among the angels.
4)
Man in his
immaterial nature reflects his creator. Do not misunderstand. This is not
saying that man in his body reflects the creator, but in his immaterial nature.
The immaterial part of man reflects God, and it is going to be housed in a
material body that has to be the best possible expression of that which is the
representative and the reflection of God. We are to represent God and reflect
His character in ruling the creation.
There are some basic issues that
have to be covered. The first is what the components are in the human being.
This is otherwise known as dichotomy vs. trichotomy. The second has to do with the
location of emotion: whether it is in the soul or the body; whether it is
material based or immaterial based. The third is the nature of the soul itself.
Dichotomy or trichotomy. These are
traditional theological terms that have been used for centuries. There is one
view in church history that said that man is trichotomous—in three parts.
The other view is that he is dichotomous—two parts. In trichotomy, which
is the view of the early church, man is comprised of three parts: body, soul and
spirit. In dichotomy, man is composed of two parts: the material and the
immaterial, not body and soul. In trichtomoy the view is that man is comprised
of the body, the soul, and the spirit; that the soul has different components
to it, and that would include self-consciousness, mentality, volition, and
conscience where the norms and standards are stored in the soul. The spirit is
that immaterial element which makes it possible for the elements of the soul to
relate to God and to understand the things of God. In trichotomy we recognize
that when Adam sinned he died spiritually. That means something wasn’t active
or present once he sinned that was there before he sinned. In dichotomy the
belief is that all the terms you find in Scripture—soul, spirit, heart,
mind—are all virtually synonymous and interchangeable terms, and that you
can’t go into the Scripture and make distinctions between these terms, because
the dichotomist would argue that there are many places where the terms are used
in an overlapping manner. The argument for trichotomy: 1 Corinthians 2:14, “But
the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are
foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually
discerned.” The two key words that must be understood from this verse are
“natural man” and “spiritually.” In the Greek the terminology that is used for
“natural man” is not a term that would normally be translated “nature.” It is
the word PSUCHIKOS [yuxikoj] which has to do with the soul; it means
soulish—“the soulish man.” The “spiritual man” is the Greek word PNEUMATIKOS [pneumatikoj]. So there is a contrast here between the two men. Jude 19, “These be
they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the [being devoid of] Spirit,” uses this same
word PSUCHIKOS.
The context of Jude 19 is a contrast
between believers and unbelievers. The phrase “devoid of the spirit” is
correctly translated, “not having spirit.” There is no capital S in the word
“spirit” in the Greek text. It is a decision of the translator whether the word
should have an upper case or lower case S. Since the context is believer vs.
unbeliever it is not talking simply about “devoid of the spirit,” it should be
understood in contrast to PSUCHIKOS and not having lower case spirit.
The reason for saying that is if we
look at 1 Corinthians 2:9ff there is a quote from the Old Testament in Isaiah.
Paul goes on to talk about the special revelation given through the Holy
Spirit. So whatever Paul says about soulish men and spiritual men in the
context of 1 Corinthians 2 must also be true of Old Testament believers. Now
Old Testament believers were never filled with the Holy Spirit. They weren’t
indwelt by the Holy Spirit; that is unique to Church Age believers. The point
is that if we are going to take a quote from the Old Testament and make
application to the ministry of the Holy Spirit, whatever is said has to be true
as well for the Old Testament believers. Therefore this can’t be a discussion
between having the Holy Spirit and not having the Holy Spirit, but must be the
human spirit vs. not having the human spirit. God creates man with a human body
and then a human soul. The human soul is comprised of self-consciousness,
mentality, conscience and volition. Then there is another immaterial part, the
human spirit, and they are so interconnected that you can speak of one as the
whole unity by talking about one. You can use either word to describe the
whole. What we have in the Old Testament is a presentation of man being created
with a physical body and an immaterial part, and that immaterial part has
components. One component is the human spirit, which allows the
self-consciousness to relate to God in terms of God-consciousness, the
mentality to think God’s thoughts after Him, the conscience to appreciate and
understand the absolute norms and standards revealed by God, and the volition
to choose to follow God in terms of positive volition. But when Adam sinned
that immaterial part of man’s nature was lost. It died; it disappeared. So that
the self-conscious, the mentality, the conscience and the volition could not
longer relate to God. They no longer had the capacity to relate to God so they
are left out to figure life on their own, apart from divine input.
When someone puts their faith alone
in Christ alone then they are born again, and God the Holy Spirit creates and
simultaneously imparts to them that human spirit so that they go from being
spiritually dead to spiritually alive. That new human spirit acquired at
regeneration is what enables them to learn the Word of God again and to grow
and advance in both the Old and New Testaments. However, in the New Testament
we have the Holy Spirit who is the one who teaches when we are in fellowship
with Him. That explains the difference between trichotomy and dichotomy.
Problem passages: Luke 10:27, “And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength,
and with all thy mind.” The dichotomist says there are different elements
there; they are all treated differently. But that is not true. There is a
progression in that verse: “all your heart” has to do with the inner core of
the soul. The problem with most dichotomists is that they fail to realize that
when you have different terms such as these (heart, mind, conscience) they all
relate to components of the soul. The same thing can be said of the Old
Testament. Ecclesiastes 3:21, “Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward,
and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?” There the word
“spirit” [ruach]
is used in just a general sense to refer to the immaterial part of man. This is
where people get into trouble. That is, when they say the soul and the spirit,
and they learn there is these three parts and then try to go into every passage
and make every time they see the word “spirit” equal the human spirit. You
can’t do it. In the Old Testament there is a much more generic use of these
terms than in the New Testament. The New Testament gives us precision so that
we can understand this tripartite make-up of man. Same thing in Luke 1:46, 47,
when Mary is praising God. This is Hebrew synonymous parallelism and you don’t
want to go in and try to make a distinction between the soul and the human
spirit in that passage. They are just used in very generic terms. Remember,
there are eight different ways these words are used and they don’t always mean
the same thing in every single context.
How do we know that there are
distinctions? Hebrews 4:12, “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and
sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul
and spirit.” Here the writer of Hebrews makes it clear that there are times
when there is a distinction between the soul and the spirit; they are not
synonymous terms. Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5:23, “And the very God of peace
sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be
preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He sees that
there is a distinction there between spirit, soul, and body. The conclusion is
that the Bible makes it very clear that man is made up of three parts. The
other immaterial components comprise the elements in the soul—the nature
and make-up of the soul.