Adult Sunday School - Pauline Psychology

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Lesson: Pauline Psychology Date: Aug. 11, 2024 Teacher: Pastor Josh Sheldon

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I pray your blessing upon the Sunday school before us now and for the entire day of worship that we have ahead of us.
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And I pray you'd be with us, you'd be pleased with what you will hear in this place. May God be praised and Jesus Christ be exalted in His name.
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Amen. Okay, so I have Sunday school, morning and afternoon preaching for three weeks.
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So you're under my control. Sunday school. What I have put together for Sunday school though is a three
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Sunday study of what I'm calling Pauline psychology, Paul's psychology.
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Now don't get worried about the word psychology, as I explained to Albert, though he didn't challenge me,
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I just wanted to tell him, I'll tell all of you, I don't mean the practice of psychology, I don't mean secular psychology,
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I don't mean psychologists, I mean Paul's biblical view, so it's going to be a biblical study of Paul's view of how we work, how we're put together.
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So psychology in this sense is a slice of really biblical anthropology.
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Anthropology is a huge subject, we're not going to do that in three or even 52 Sundays, but just three
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Sundays studying Paul's view of how we're made up, what makes us the way we are, how did
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God wrap us together. So we're going to study psychology, and it simply means the study of mind and behavior, so again it's
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Paul's view of that. It's a Greek word, so we're not studying psychology as the word is used today, it's a biblical study of the apostle's view of humankind, of how we operate and why.
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Now we're going to get to as we go through this towards the end, maybe the third Sunday we're going to talk about are we tri - or bipartite, anybody know what
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I mean by those two terms? Exactly, so if you think that we're made up of three parts, body, soul, and spirit, as 2
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Thessalonians 5 .23 or 13, one of those two, would say it talks about body, soul, and spirit, and a tri -partite believer would say soul and spirit that are different, okay, two different components.
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Bipartite would say no, body, the physical part, and soul, spirit, simply synonyms for that non -physical side of us.
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We're going to try and get to that later. We're also going to be able to talk about when we get to the third
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Sunday, we're going to have a lot of background, talk about, well, if God has converted us, if the
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Holy Spirit has washed us, as it says in Titus, Ezekiel 36, he's given us a new heart, why do we sin?
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Did God take out that heart of stone and put back a heart that was three -quarters flesh and 25 % stone?
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Is it 99 % flesh and 1 % stone, or did he give us a good heart, a right heart, could we say a perfect heart, which would then help us answer the question, why then do we sin?
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And I think studying Pauline's view of our makeup, psychology, is going to help us in that regard, but we need to get some background.
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We need to understand the milieu in which Paul lived and the things that he was contesting and the worldview that was there when the gospel was first bursting forth from Jerusalem and going out into Samaria and then into all the earth.
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There was a worldview, an understanding of things that Paul was constantly contesting, and part of it, we have to understand, was there some of it
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Paul understood in biblical ways and had to fight back against things, but we need to know where this all came from, and then we can see how the
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Scripture then answers how Paul mainly, but the others will bring in, answers how we're made up.
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And that helps us understand then, why do we live the way we do? How is God working in us?
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Why do we stumble and fumble as often as we do? There's a lot of resources that I've studied to put this together.
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The main one, though, is one that I studied in seminary, which has been a long time, George Ladd's Pauline Psychology, which is still a standard of good biblical scholarship even today.
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It was written in 1974. The version I have was the final revision, which is 1993.
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So fairly old, but still a standard of scholarship even today, biblical integrity is very high.
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So that chapter in that New Testament psychology, just to give him credit where it's due, so I don't always have to say quote, unquote, this is what he said, you'll be able to tell just by the way
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I speak when I'm quoting him, but he's the main guy I'm using for the outline of where we're going. And then a lot of other resources come in.
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So why is this important? Why are we doing this? Why are we trying to understand this?
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Well, for one thing, Paul uses a whole bevy of terms to describe us, how we're made up, different parts of us, different aspects of our being.
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Usually he describes us as individuals, and he uses terms like psyche, or psuche in the
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Greek, which means soul, soma, which is our body, sarx, which is our flesh.
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It's interesting, even when I said that, it might be interesting to some of you that there's one word for body and there's another word for flesh, aren't they the same thing?
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That's part of the study, we're going to flesh those out, sort those out, they're going to sort those out.
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Melos in the Greek, which means our members, well, what's the difference between members and flesh and body? Kardia, our heart, nous, our mind, and synodesis, our conscience, and those are the main terms.
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We're going to go through those, get some definitions of those, understand how they're used in the biblical sense.
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And these terms can be used literally in physical sense, more often they're a metaphorical sense. They convey an ethical idea, so all these terms, psyche and members and soul and body and flesh and all that, are used in ethical contexts where our behavior as Christians is something we're responsible for in each of these aspects.
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Now just one example, and we're going to move pretty quickly through this, just one example.
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In Romans 6, 13, Paul says this, Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness.
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Now members, what are members? Parts of you, okay? Your foot is a member of your body, your nose is a member of your body, your hands, everything.
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Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness, okay?
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So members, what are those? They're the individual parts that make up our bodies, the hands, feet, mouths, ears, and so forth.
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The verse is clearly about our ethical lives in light of the gospel, right?
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Everybody agree with that? Romans chapter 6, our ethical lives in light of the gospel, the salvation that God has wrought for us in Christ.
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That being the case, our members, our physical components, move under the control of what?
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Now that's not rhetorical, what would you think? If I left that question dangling out there, our physical members move under the control of what?
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What would you say? What was that? Brain. Brain, good.
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Your brain? Give me some other answers. Your will, okay? Your noose, your mind, cardia, your heart, psuche, your soul, penuma, your spirit, okay?
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It's your non -physical side of you, your non -physical aspect, brain, and heart, and would you say the will?
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All these things are what control the members, okay? So, the hand, if I go and sin and I do something with my hand,
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I strike you, the hand is not morally culpable, is it?
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It's a hand, hand doesn't have a brain, hand doesn't have a soul, hand doesn't have a will. It's all controlled from elsewhere, mind, will, noose, psuche, all those things.
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The mind directs the hand or the members to do that which it wills to do, okay?
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That's a really simple example, but it gives a foretaste of the value of studying Paul's view of our makeup, physical, which
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I'll use the term corporeal, which means physical, non -physical, non -corporeal.
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There's a value in studying our makeup both ways, because again, this physical makeup is usually used metaphorically to drive us to ethical behavior in light of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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And like I said earlier, the question, one question we will answer, and this will be in our third lesson, Lord willing, is whether we're made up of two or three constituent parts.
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So, two parts, just to throw it out there, because I'm going to just use these terms and I'm not going to stop and define them every time, two parts is called dichotomy or dichotomous, di meaning two, sometimes bipartite, they mean exactly the same thing, okay?
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So dichotomy, bipartite, and I might even say two parts, it all means the same thing.
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Then three parts or three aspects would be a better way to say that, three aspects would be trichotomy or tripartite, okay?
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And Lord willing, I'm not sure we're going to get to this other thing, I threw out my notes, but I would like to get to it, is the origin of the soul.
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You ever wondered about the origin of the soul, where does the soul actually come from? Well part of that, before we answer that, we have to decide whether the soul and spirit is the same or soul and spirit are two different things, that bi versus tri debate.
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So the origin of the soul, there's the idea of creationism, that God creates a soul at the time of conception.
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Does anybody know what the other view is? Good, this will be new for you. Traditionism, you heard that term before?
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Traditionism is the idea that the soul is brought about by the physical union of the parents and the conception of the child.
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So when the child is conceived, at that moment of conception, a soul is also created in the child, or created is a bad word, a soul is made along with the child, okay, at the time of conception.
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So creationism versus traditionism. Now I just want to throw those terms out to kind of whet your appetite, so you're ready for those by the third lesson, let's see, the 25th.
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And it's not just academic discussions, not just philosophical meanderings, because it does make some difference in how we understand our makeup, and again, we're going through this so we understand our responsibility in terms of our behavior.
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Why then do we sin? Most of us have jobs that can be broken down into parts, right?
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Mine, when I was, when I prepared to preach, what are the parts, the aspects I do, there's exegesis of the languages, there's assignment and analysis by proper genre of what
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I'm reading, there's history of interpretation and so forth, there's aspects, there's parts of my job that bring together,
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Lord willing, bring together a sermon that's comprehensible. A mechanic's task can be broken into physical parts, there's pistons inside the engine, there's alternators outside of it, and there's non -physical parts, the, what do they call it, the
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ECC, is that what they use today, electronic control computer? The main computer that runs the engine, okay?
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So there's aspects to everything, there's parts to it. The study of our makeup as people morally responsible
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God is like that, okay? Because we have our physical, we have our non -physical, and we need to understand that we need to understand our constituent parts so when we analyze a problem, like a mechanic diagnosing a car or us diagnosing our sinful behaviors, when we analyze it, we go to the right place, okay?
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So today, I have to tell you up front, there's not going to be a whole lot of Bible because we need to get the background of the first century world that Paul lived in and what was influencing the thought process of the day, the worldview that he most often encountered.
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Now, I didn't give you any real hints, so I'm just going to throw this question out there. What would you think would be the basis of that worldview that Paul's most often encountering?
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An unbiblical, non -biblical worldview that he most often encountered. Gnosticism was an early heresy that was invading the church, yeah.
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I'm still talking a little broader than that. What is the worldview that Greco -Roman, especially
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Greco view of things, of the world, of man? Platonism, bingo, yeah.
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Plato is something we need to understand. Now, I'm no scholar in Plato, so what
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I'm going to give you, and if anybody knows more about Plato, I'm not going to be offended if you can flesh out what
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I'm going to say. He's one of those terms again, what I'm going to say. But I did study enough,
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I think, to get us just an idea of what Paul was encountering. So he was one of the most influential figures in psychology then and even today was
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Plato. He lived from 427 to 347 BC. Now remember, BC, when you're born, it's a higher number, and the number's going down towards Christ's birth.
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And then after Christ, the numbers start going up again. So he was a disciple of Socrates.
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His concept of humanity held sway in Paul's world and is influential still today.
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Now, Plato's view of the physical world, physical things, was a very pessimistic one.
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We use the word platonic that way. A platonic relationship between a man and a woman is one that's devoid of physicality.
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He devalued the physical completely. And he did this because he had this idea of forms.
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Forms. I'm seeing some nodding. Do you know the idea, the platonic idea of forms?
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Okay, he believed that reality could not be discerned or understood by the senses. Okay?
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So we have the five senses. We got sight and smell and tongue and touch and hearing.
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Okay? You can't discern reality. According to Plato, that doesn't give you a real view of reality.
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He thought experience was not a valid means to ascertain reality because experience varies amongst people.
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It's subject to misinterpretation. It can at best only perceive facts in a changing world.
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And it is the mutability of things that devalues experience as a way to perceive reality.
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Any questions about that? Does that make sense the way I put that out to you? Do you understand what
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I'm trying to get to? Okay, so he devalued the physical.
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You know, I'm touching this thing, and I can tell you that these corners here are rounded.
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I'm not going to cut myself on them. It weighs about 60 pounds. You know, I can tell you some things, but Plato would say, that's not reality.
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Okay, that's not ultimate reality, you could even say. But what he held to was this idea of forms.
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Okay, forms. Or ideas even. They were not physical things, but rather the perfect idea of a thing that can only be imperfectly reflected in its physical correspondence.
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Okay, for Plato there were forms slash ideas. And the form or idea was the perfect version of a thing that could only be imperfectly reflected in its physical manifestation.
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Okay? Now remember, I'm not saying he's right. I'm trying to describe the worldview
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Paul was encountering. Okay? So, Plato in his work
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Timaeus, the form comes from God's thoughts about a thing. Now when you say
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God, he believed in God somehow, but not the God of Israel, not the God of the
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New Testament. So when I talk about Plato and his belief in God, he was more of a deistic sort of person.
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A God, a deity that put things in motion, that didn't take his hands off. Deism even today would hold to that.
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So remember, when I speak of Plato believing in God, I don't mean the
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God that we believe in. His concept of God. Okay? So it's
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God's thoughts about a thing that are the form of the thing that's imperfectly represented here.
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The physical world, including you and me, patterned after that form. Now forms had no hierarchy.
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There was good, there was truth, there was beauty. Those were the high forms. And lower forms were justice and courage and wisdom and piety.
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Now I'm not going to sort those out and why those were there. Remember, he had a hierarchy of the forms.
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In his cosmology, his understanding of the universe, of the whole physical realm, in Timaeus again, he presents a craftsman who fashions pre -existing matter by patterning it after the forms.
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Now the craftsman was called, does anybody know the term I'm going to use? What was the craftsman called in Platonic understanding?
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It's the demiurge. Demiurge. Demos meaning people, ergos work.
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Okay, so this is the person, the one, the being that did the work. So we have then
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God with the thought of a thing. The world, the people, the trees, whatever it is, he has the thought.
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And the demiurge then, almost like a subordinate, has been delegated the task of putting that thing together from the form, from the idea of the form, he then crafts it in material existence or into material existence.
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I can't tell if we're tracking or if we're going, what on earth is he even talking about and why? We all okay?
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Remember, this is just to get some background on what Paul was encountering to understand Plato a bit. Okay, so Plato's idea was that the physical world did not give you ultimate reality.
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Reality, true reality, ultimate reality is the form which God thought, which was put together by the demiurge, put into physical existence.
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And so when we touch this thing, God had a thought about this lectern, but this lectern is an imperfect representation of that thought.
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And thus, platonic means a devaluing of the physical.
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Again, like the earlier example, platonic relationships, that's where that would come from. Augustine, the great theologian then of the 5th and late 4th century, he seemed to think in terms of God the creator.
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That would be Genesis 1, 1, in the beginning God created and the rest of that. And God the creator then delegated the work of creating to Jesus.
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And so Jesus is almost that demiurge, that platonic demiurge. Remember, you had God with the thought, the form, the demiurge, the one who puts it together.
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And then Augustine then, with platonic background, said that, okay, so God the creator, or God the form, the idea, and Jesus Christ the creator.
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And that would be consistent with John 1, 1, all things are made through him, nothing that was made...
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I should have had my Bible open. Do you know what I'm trying to say? Can somebody quote it for me? All things are created by him and through him, nothing that was not made by him.
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Colossians 1, 15 -20 would say the same thing. All things are created through him and for him.
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So that could fall back, that could relate back to platonic type of thinking. Let me try that again, because I have right here in my notes
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John 1, 1 -3. And then in bold, I wrote to myself, read. Excuse me.
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Give me just a second. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was
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God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.
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That's what I was trying to quote. And then Colossians 1, 15 -20.
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He, that's Christ, is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities.
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All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
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And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.
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For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
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Now, there's a beautiful piece of theology that was in last week's preaching. I would argue that one reason that Paul makes that so clear, that Jesus Christ was not simply delegated to make the form into something physical, but that he is the maker, he is the thought, he is everything, was to go against that platonic kind of thinking that could have infused the church.
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And the people who were coming into the church at that time would have that kind of a thought process. And Paul is saying, no, it's not
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God and some demiurge craftsman with an anvil and a hammer, as he's often depicted. No, it's
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Jesus Christ, the sovereign. Jesus Christ, God himself.
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Do you see the connection? Do you see how platonic thinking would be one of the reasons
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Paul would write something like that? That kind of Greco way of thinking and understanding reality.
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Plato on the immortality of the soul. For Plato, death is marked by separation of body and soul.
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And up until this time, up until the last breath, for him, the body is a hindrance.
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Like platonic, the physical is lowly thought of. And the body then served only to oppose or even to imprison the soul.
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Platonic thinking, again, the thinking of the first century world where Paul was bringing out the gospel.
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And Peter and John and the others as well. So this idea that started with Plato is that your body is simply a prison, in a negative sense, trapping the soul and keeping it from developing and keeping it from becoming what it ought to be.
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So he taught a dualism. And we've used this term a lot in preaching, Conley and myself both, dualism.
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There's this strict separation or division between physical and non -physical.
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At first you might think, well that makes perfect sense. But the platonic idea in this division,
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I mean we know that there's a non -physical world, there's a physical world, and we know that they're different. But the platonic idea devalues the one.
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The physical is devalued. At the end of this, God willing we'll have time, we'll do some biblical passages about that and see how we can answer it.
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So he taught this dualism. And a couple of words you're going to hear more in these lectures.
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Numinal, meaning the physical world, versus phenomenal, the non -physical side of it.
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Numinal is something as it truly is, the reality or the form, God's initial thought.
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Plato's God, his initial thought of the thing, the form. And phenomenal, the appearance that it takes after, imperfectly, the form, knowable.
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And because phenomenal is the copy, even if something phenomenal were perfectly known in its reality, that knowledge is imperfect because that on which the knowledge is based is only a representation of the true form,
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God's thought. So the idea is even if I can describe and know this lectern perfectly, describe every aspect, give you all the angles of the corners, the exact width of everything, and the weight right down to a microkilogram, even if I could describe it perfectly, it has to be imperfect because only the thought, only
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God's thought of the thing is perfect. The physical cannot be as good.
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It's by its own nature imperfect. And this led to then a similar idea of humanity, his dualism of body and soul.
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The body was not evil in and of itself, but it was a burden, it was a hindrance to the soul.
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Now, Gretchen brought up Gnosticism. Gnosticism in his day agreed with his dualism.
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Gnosticism is the idea of a special knowledge, a special way to understand something. Gnostics were coming into the churches, possibly the
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Colossian church, which we're going through in the preaching here for the next few Sundays. Some of the other letters
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Paul wrote were probably against Gnostics or the beginning of Gnosticism. We often talk about, you know, do you know the secret handshake?
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Do you have the code that will take apart the Scripture for you? That's the way we picture it, and it's not far from truth.
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Gnosticism would teach that, that you have to have this special knowledge, special technique, this inner way of looking at things, that the
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Scriptures couldn't tell you what God meant just on the face of it. You had to have the secret handshake, as I like to call it.
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The challenge then was to cultivate the soul so that it might rise above the body.
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The hope was that at death the soul would be freed and escaped to the world above, to the noumenal.
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He also taught that souls are immortal and that they learn about the phenomenal and the noumenal world by being born many times.
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And he had a limit. He said for up to 10 ,000 years. But souls develop, souls learn by this idea of being born.
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Now, he didn't use the term reincarnation, but it's interesting that Buddhism, I forget the guy's name.
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If anybody remembers that, tell me. I did put it in my notes. Thank you.
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Siddhartha lived, and he's known as the initiator of Buddhism.
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He lived about this time. It sounded to me, now again, I'm no scholar in this, I'm no expert in Plato, but the time frames and the connections between the beginning of Buddhism and this
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Platonic thought process seem pretty close. Especially when
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I was really startled to see that Plato taught about this souls being reborn again and again.
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And then the idea in Buddhism of reincarnation. So before we go on, we're going to then go into Hebraic thought,
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Paul's thought, how was Paul, when he was Saul, raised to think of the physical makeup.
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But just in the way I describe Platonism, Plato's thought process, and very quick,
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I mean 35 minutes on Plato, goodness, on how his thought process could have infused that world that Paul lived in.
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Any thoughts about that? Any biblical answers to any of the things I presented that Plato would think?
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Let me throw out one to you right away.
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The Demiurge. The idea of the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the craftsman who takes the thought slash form from God and crafts it.
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Makes it into reality, which is everything. To me, and I'd love to know if you agree or not, that denigrates
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Jesus. If that's the thought process, if that's the framework that Augustine had when he spoke of Jesus in that sense as creator, if Demiurge was what influenced
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Augustine, whose thought process still influences us today, 16, 17 centuries later, would you agree with me that that denigrates
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Jesus? See, when I read, thank you, when I read the scripture, I don't see
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Jesus as an underling who's delegated a task. I see Him as sovereign
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God who made, not following a form of God, though we know the
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Trinity and that they eternally work together and all three members of the
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Trinity, Father, Son, Spirit, all persons are each all that God is.
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I think the idea of Demiurge is something that would lower Jesus even just a notch, which is unacceptable.
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Hebrews 9, verse 27, on the idea of souls coming around for 10 ,000 years and growing and developing and coming back again.
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Hebrews 9, verse 27, somebody got that or could get to it? Hebrews 9, verse 27, you'd read that for us?
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Go ahead, please, nice and loud. Thank you.
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So how many times does a soul exist? Class said once.
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So this idea of coming back again and developing through 10 ,000 years in Platonic understanding, which
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I think may have at least influenced Buddhism when it was begun, this idea of reincarnation.
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No, we cannot agree with that. You don't have that many opportunities to grow.
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And even if you understand reincarnation and Plato's understanding of the soul growing, you have no control over how you're going to come back.
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If you come back as something lower, how are you going to develop? It just gets crazy, but Hebrews 9, verse 27, we dismiss that out of hand because the
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Scripture does. Nick, would you get 1 Timothy 4, 4, and 5 for us?
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1 Timothy 4, 4, and 5. What does that say about the denigration of the physical?
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Can we do that? Can we despise the physical things based upon just that one verse, 1
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Timothy 4, 4, and 5? What would you say? No. God made all things good.
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That includes the physical body He gave us, the physical life He gave around us, the physical things
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He gave us to enjoy. In Proverbs it talks about wine making the heart merry. That's a physical thing.
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It's something to be enjoyed. The beauty of the relationship between a husband and a wife married under Christ is a thing to be enjoyed.
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I don't know. The demiurge was Plato's idea. That's in Timaeus, his work. I didn't read
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Timaeus. I read about Timaeus. I'm not a Platonic scholar. A lot of it had to do with his learning from Socrates.
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That's beyond me. Socrates' death, he committed suicide, but he was condemned to death.
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That affected Plato a lot as well. Somehow that led to this thinking. His idea was that God has an idea slash form that's perfect that then has to be made physical.
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Between the form idea and the physical thing, he had the demiurge make it.
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I can't really go any deeper on that. No. I don't think so.
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Gretchen is saying that they weren't looking to Scripture to understand it. At the time it would have been the Old Testament Scriptures.
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They weren't looking there to find out the reason for creation and anything about our existence.
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They were reasoning in a human sense. Really, we're going to be in the preaching next week in Colossians.
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Let me get this. See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition, according to the elementary spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.
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That really answers it there. They were working on the elementary spirits.
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They were looking in their own reasoning. They were trying to understand it philosophically, all those things. It came up with some answers that would sound logical, but they're wrong.
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Everything created by God is good. Nothing is to be rejected if it's received with thanksgiving. That, to me, very clearly goes against platonic thought processes and the sort of things that Paul would have the church not believe.
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That's not the world he wanted us or them to have. 1 Corinthians 7, Ephesians 5, 22 -33.
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Again, hold high the physical aspects of a husband and wife. List it very high.
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Not denigrated, not something that we need to be released from or rescued from. Any questions about that?
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You've seen the limitations of my ability to answer deep questions about Plato, but just on this thumbnail sketch that we got.
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Please. Was Augustine affected by platonic thinking?
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Again, I don't want to step too far away from my expertise, which is low. I believe so.
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The way he framed God, Jesus, and creation seemed to have this idea of the forms, the demiurge, and then the physical.
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Augustine's an interesting case, though. So many books are written about him and I'm not going to touch very much except to say his understanding of things developed over time.
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There was a lot of change in him as he developed. He was a brilliant, brilliant man.
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If you ever read Augustine, that guy was really smart. Say your question again.
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Was Augustine affected by Platonism? I believe so. Was he, throughout his theological career, affected?
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I don't know. But his idea of God, Jesus, form, and demiurge
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I think are pretty parallel. That's part of the worldview that Paul was encountering.
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Let's talk about Paul's thought, about Hebraic thought. The Hebraic view of humanity is very different from the
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Greek. There is no trace of dualism. So said George Eldon Ladd.
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This is important because Paul brought this view to his writings and his understanding of Christianity. This is part of the disconnect from Paul's Hebraic mindset versus the
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Platonic mindset of the world that he was bringing the Gospel to. As we're going to see later,
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Jesus also held a holistic view of our makeup as compared to the influential
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Greek or Platonic thought of his day. So this dualism is something we need to be ready to contest.
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Now what are the kind of words that the Hebraic thought would have? Well, there's body, physical.
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Geviah in Hebrew. That word is only used 14 times in the
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Old Testament. I'm just going to go quickly because I've gone too long on some of the other things. Genesis 47 -18
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There is nothing left in the sight of my Lord but our bodies and our land. Judges 14 -8
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There is a swarm of bees in the body of the lion. Nehemiah 9 -37 They rule over our bodies, meaning the rulers of the land for the exiles when they came back to Judah.
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They rule over our bodies and over our livestock as they please. We are in great distress. One more,
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Nahum 3 -3 Hosts of slain, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end.
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They stumble over the bodies. This word is used for our physical body, dead or alive, animal or human.
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Remember, this is Hebraic thought. This is Saul of Tarsus the Pharisee and the kind of thought process he brought into his apostleship when he became
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Paul. So there's body, Geviah. There's flesh, which is Bashar.
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It usually means flesh. That's the most common way it's translated. Bashar, flesh, is physical life.
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It's something we possess that God, who gives physical existence, does not Himself possess.
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Interesting. He gives us something He doesn't possess. Physicality.
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God is spirit. No one has seen Him at any time. So He's given us this physical existence.
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And it is used to strike out the difference between us and Him. Genesis 6 -3
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My spirit, this is the Lord speaking, it is God. My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh.
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So there's a difference between God and men. Now God created us physically, but in creating us with physicality,
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He gave us something He Himself does not have. Now we know that in Christ God became flesh, and we're going to come to that, okay?
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So I'm not forgetting that. But in terms of Old Testament understanding, there is that difference.
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God gives us flesh, God made us physical, but He Himself is spirit. Saul, in Hebrew, nephesh, never used over or against the body.
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The soul is not a higher form of existence than the physicality in the Hebraic thought. And again, this is
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Saul the Pharisee and his learning that he brought as Paul the Apostle and his understanding of our makeup and what he was contesting in that world.
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One example, Genesis 2 -7 Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living creature.
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And we could more literally, that would be translated like, Then formed the Lord God the man of dust from the ground and breathed napach, never mind that, that comes later, breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and became the man a soul living.
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So note that body and soul are both from God. Adam was not formed as a dead person then made alive by the addition of the soul.
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Rather, when formed, he was alive in the literal sense, but not a living creature ready to commune with and serve
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God. That's when God gave him a soul. It was when the Lord breathed into him that he became truly alive.
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Now we can think here of John 20 -22 And when he had said this, he breathed on them, this is
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Jesus to the disciples, John 20, breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit.
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If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them. If you would withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.
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So this spirit, this soul infusion that God gives to man. Families were numbered like in Genesis 12 -5 as souls, the people, the souls they
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Abraham and Sarah had acquired in Haran. The people they had acquired in Haran is the souls they had acquired.
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Somebody told me recently, I think it was Dale was telling me that they still number ships as the number of souls on a ship.
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I really like Master and Commander. The naval war during the
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Napoleonic Wars. And in there they talk about the number of souls on a ship. This frigate has,
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I forget the number, 120 souls on board. So nefesh, which is soul in Hebrew includes feelings, it includes will, it includes passions and mentality.
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Never used in the Old Testament as life absent the body. In the
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Old Testament it's never used as life absent the body. Numbers 23 -10 says, let me die the death of the upright.
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So let me die, which is mut as in Genesis 2 -17, you shall surely die mot,
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I should say, mot to mot, you shall surely die let me die, let me mot the death, and the word there is nefesh of the upright.
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Let me die the soul of the upright, as it were. But the soul and the body are never seen as distinct separate things where the soul is going to depart from the body.
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Hebraic thought had ruach or spirit, literally means air and motions used of any kind of wind often of breath.
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So you have Job 41 -16 one is so near to another, meaning the crocodile scales that air cannot come between them.
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Isaiah 25 -4 for you have been a stronghold to the poor, a stronghold to the needy in his distress a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat for the breath of the ruach, the breath of the ruthless is like a storm against the wall like heat in a dry place.
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Okay? It's used of animals. Genesis 7 -22 everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of the ruach, the breath of life died.
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That was when the flood came. Humanity gets its breath from God's son.
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Thus says God the Lord, Isaiah 42 who created the heavens and earth and stretched them out who spread out the earth and what comes from it who gives breath to the people in it and spirit ruach, spirit to those who walk on it.
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So his ruach is in -breathed, literally in -breathed by God, an element of our personality.
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But when they told him, this is Genesis 45 all the words of Joseph which he had said to them when he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent to carry him the spirit, the ruach of their father revived.
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So that said God is the spirit supreme Genesis 6 -3, again my spirit shall not abide in man forever for he is flesh.
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Now in Hebraic thought this idea of spirit a ruach overlaps with the fesh or soul in conveying a whole range of emotions in our volitional life.
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The difference according to George Ladd is that nefesh designates a person in relation to other people as one living the common life of humans while ruach is the individual in his or her relation to God.
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Okay? So soul is our relation to each other, again like number of souls on a ship it speaks of us as living creatures together.
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Ruach or spirit is the individual in his or her relation to God.
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We often say that God gives us spirit and it's by the spirit that we're able to relate to God. It's by giving us spirit that we are in an analogy like God.
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Okay? Like God by analogy. Importantly neither ruach which is spirit or nefesh which is soul is conceived in Hebraic thought as a part of a person capable of surviving the death of the flesh.
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Okay? So again what are we getting at here? We struck out platonic idea that was the first century world where the gospel first burst out of Jerusalem and what
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Paul and the other apostles, but mostly Paul had to contest and Hebraic thought which was based upon scripture which was more holistic held us together and wouldn't separate these ideas of body, soul, spirit.
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You're a person. They didn't like to break it apart.
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So do we see the difference between what was most likely Paul's thought of man's makeup in light of the
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Greek? I think we've gotten a pretty good idea of it. There's no dualism in the
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Hebraic thought. There's no denigration of the phenomenal or the physical world and they're holistic.
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They don't break us up into parts in the Hebraic thought process. Paul is going to.
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So we're talking about Saul. Remember we're still talking about what Paul as Saul was raised with and I think a pretty good understanding of the
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Hebrew idea of it and I would argue Jesus himself. We'll get to that.
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So just some questions here. We do have some time to discuss them.
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I'd like to get some conversation going on this because this is the background. Next week we're going to really jump in and it's going to be more of a biblical study.
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This is in the background. What might be some of the differences between Paul's or maybe better Saul's thought processes and what we have in the
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New Testament? What might be some of the differences between the Hebraic thought and what we see in the
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New Testament? Any thoughts on that? Just with what I've put forth as manual. This may be a bit of a stretch but you quote
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John 1 .1. That he just took strictly with the Greek Logos is impersonating a
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Jew. Logos is not him.
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Logos is Jesus. If I understand what Emmanuel is saying here. In the beginning was the
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Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Now Word every time there is Logos. And you're saying in the
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Platonic thought of the day Logos would be an impersonal force. But then
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Jesus says the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. So Paul changes that thought process if that's what he's arguing.
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It's a good idea to say no it's a personal God. Don't you get that?
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I would agree with that. I wonder
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I put this question out there. I'll just ask it. Does this affect your view of Samuel's appearance to Saul when the witch of Endor called him up?
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No that's interesting though. I hadn't heard that. We will cover the transition from the
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Hebraic holistic idea. It's not in conflict with what's in the
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New Testament. The New Testament does rule over the Old as far as we're concerned here. But yeah we'll get to that.
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I was thinking about Samuel's appearance though when I was looking at this idea. At least in the
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Hebraic thought and in the context I like that she was surprised. I wonder if she just thought she'd get some money and do an incantation.
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It'd just be all phony baloney but somehow she could do an act that would satisfy them and she'd get her pay.
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It really happens. I like that idea of Gretchen. She was shocked by it.
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But I think that was Samuel. I don't see the division of Samuel as some disembodied spirit coming up and looking like Samuel.
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I think it was Samuel that got called up. How she was able to call him up and everything We'll never come out of that if we get that discussion that we could just say
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God's sovereign. But for me it did affect it because I always wondered about that.
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The Hebraic idea here where we don't divide body, soul, spirit and Paul in the
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New Testament doesn't divide. He doesn't break us apart. He just shows how we're made up.
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It's a big difference. He changed my view of that appearance as one of the odd, very hard to understand or interpret incidents in the
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Old Testament. If Jesus' thought was Hebraic also, as I would argue it was what might we say then about Luke 16 19 -31 which is
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Lazarus and the rich man? We've only got a couple minutes so I'm not going to read the whole thing. We're all familiar with that parable.
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Now so I said parable and Pastor Owens just taught it as an actual historical point.
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We disagree on that, okay? We're still brothers. We still love each other. We can still pastor together.
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I think it's a parable. But can a Hebraic thought process if that was
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Jesus' thought process help our view of that parable? Any thoughts there before I give you my thoughts?
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Well Abraham is seen body and soul united, okay?
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In that parable there's Abraham and there's Lazarus and the rich man and they're also body soul together.
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They're not disembodied spirits, okay? The rich man is suffering in his body in the fire.
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And there's Lazarus and he doesn't say anything.
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He's only named. He doesn't say anything. But he appears to be physically there in paradise in Abraham's bosom.
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Abraham's bosom was a term used for paradise in Hebrew thought.
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So if Abraham's bosom was a term for paradise did that then teach that the saved are literally in his bosom, literally on him.
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There's only one man, only Lazarus who is there. But this idea of the holistic view of man that the
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Hebraic thought had would be consistent with Jesus' teaching parable or if it's a real story or something that's truly happened or happening that that man, soul and body soul, spirit and body, his whole person is suffering in the flames, okay?
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Lazarus, soul, spirit, body his whole person is being comforted.
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Okay? Matthew 10 .28 Jesus says and do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.
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Kill the body, cannot kill the soul. But rather fear him who could destroy both soul and body in hell.
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So again, this lack of division, he doesn't break us apart like platonic thought would.
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I've got a few more but we're two minutes beyond time and I don't want to stretch us out. Next week we're going to go through the list of words from the introduction and we're going to see how they're used.
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Okay? These are going to be the Greek words that'll be more of a Bible study next week because we look at those
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Greek words, define them very quickly most of us are familiar with them but then we're going to get into some contexts and how they're used.
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Okay? So that'll be more of a Bible study. Any last thoughts or questions before we close? Emmanuel?
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Yes. Yeah, we're going to come to that. The quick answer is that that soul and that body correspond and will be reunited.
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Perfected but reunited. You're not going to get a new body. Okay? Your soul and body will be perfected at the resurrection.
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But even though they are apart now they're not divided ultimately which platonic thought would have had.
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Well it says in John chapter 12 that Isaiah saw this when he saw
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Jesus' glory. So it's listed, it's given to us in Isaiah 6 as a vision.
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Okay? So whether he was in a physical place we could ask the same question of John.
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He was in the spirit on the Lord's day. Was he physically in that throne room and saw the scrolls opened?
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Or was he seeing something literally, truly was happening or had happened? And the same with Isaiah. I would say,
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Francisco, that at that time pre -incarnation he saw a vision of Christ.
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And that's what John says. He said this when he saw Christ's glory. Heavenly Father, I give you thanks again for this day.
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For this time we could have together to look to your word. And I just pray that you would help us along in this and help us understand how we're made up by your will,
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Father. And what that means to us in terms of how we live our lives. In Jesus' name, amen.