Adult Sunday School - Pauline Psychology Part2

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Lesson: Pauline Psychology Part 2 Date: Aug. 18, 2024 Teacher: Pastor Josh Sheldon

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Okay, so we're going to go through some Biblical terms for body, soul, spirit, where they came from, some of the background of them, and the way
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Paul uses them. You recall from last week that what we're trying to get to is a
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Pauline, meaning of Paul the Apostle, a Pauline psychology, and don't want to let the word psychology scare you.
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We're not talking about secular psychology. I'm not going to bring in psychologists, psychology just in the definition of the word, how we operate, how our minds work, how we are put together from Paul's Biblical, by which we would say inspired, perspective.
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Okay? So I'm going to use psychology. When I use that word, don't panic. We're not becoming worldly here.
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We mean that just by the definition of the word. Remember from last week, we want to understand
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Paul's mindset as a former Pharisee. So what did he understand of the human makeup as Saul the
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Pharisee, a very learned man advancing beyond all his peers in Phariseeism, so he understood the
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Hebraic mindset of how we're put together. What are our constituent parts, physical or non -physical?
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That's what we were studying last week. I remember that the Hebraic mindset was holistic.
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They didn't see man in constituent parts really, but they viewed him as a cohesive being which existed in definable aspects.
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So they didn't separate them as parts, but they saw soul, spirit, heart, heart being the seat of wills and motion, and so forth.
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And they didn't see them as separating out of the person, but as just different ways of viewing the whole person.
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That's the Hebraic mindset. So we're talking about what Paul brought into his understanding of the gospel.
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In the intertestamental period, the so -called 400 silent years, anybody heard this term before?
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Okay. Between Malachi and John the Baptist, about four centuries is called the 400 silent years by some people.
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I taught on Sunday School. We did like a three -week series on it, and I made the case that God wasn't really silent at all during what they called the silent years, but there was no acknowledged prophet during those years, and that's why they call it that.
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There's no new revelation of God, but we can see very clearly. If we ever study that, now
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I'm getting off topic, it's definitely not silent in terms of God working, but from about 400
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BC to about 4 BC, so when Malachi ended his prophecy to the beginning of the gospel in about 4
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AD. During that time, Jewish thought had some development, and it seems to have incorporated some
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Hellenistic ideas. Alexander the Great had conquered the known world, he was very influential, obviously.
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So we need to talk a little bit about this intertestamental period, Malachi to John the
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Baptist, which is really Malachi until Jesus is coming, is what we're talking about. And during that time,
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Pneuma, which was soul, psyche, and we're going to use those terms a lot, so if you forget which is which, just ask, and we'll remind you, because even in doing my notes, you can get mixed up, because we'll start with P.
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But Pneuma means soul, psyche is spirit, and these two were conceived as distinct entities capable of separate experience.
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So there's some development in the Hebraic thought during this period that is largely due to the
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Greek influence. And we're going to talk about some extra -biblical books.
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Some are acknowledged by the Catholics as inspired, we do not call these inspired books, they are not
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Bible books. We're going to talk about the wisdom of Solomon, we're going to talk about 1 Enoch a little bit, those are not scripture, but they are a good historical reference for the mindset of the time.
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If we know when they were written, and we will tell you when they were written, they just tell us the thought process, like using the
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Septuagint for the Greek in the New Testament. It shows us how those words were used, it gives us some context, shows us the development of the thought behind certain words.
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So good reference, but not scripture. Are you with me? So in the wisdom of Solomon, which was roughly the first century
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BC, written in Alexandria, most likely, and 1 Enoch, which was 3rd century
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BC, though we have to say some scholars say no, not 3rd century BC, but maybe 3rd century
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AD. I'm more on the BC side, but I just want to be fair and honest and tell you that some scholars push it out a few centuries.
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I think it was 3rd century BC, probably written in Ethiopia. Enoch, interestingly, was found at Qumran in some of the
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Dead Sea Scrolls. So somebody thought it was worth recording, and it was found in those sealed up vases.
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Everybody familiar with the Dead Sea Scrolls? So most important to our study is the
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Psyche and the Pneuma, and how they were detached from one another. They began to have, consistent with Hellenistic thought, separate existences.
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So 1 Enoch 9 -10 speaks of souls that have died in this way,
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And now to you, the holy ones of heaven, the souls of men, make their suit, saying, Bring our cause before the
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Most High. That's 9 -10. And now behold, the souls of those who have died are crying and making their suit to the gates of heaven.
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Now, when I read those, especially that second one, does that remind you of anything? Think for a second.
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Do you remember in Revelation chapter 5, I forgot to put a Bible right on my lectern.
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Excuse me a second. I think it was
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Rev 5 or 6. Let's get this in a second. Rev 6.
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Okay, when he opened the fifth seal, that's Jesus opening the seals, I saw under the altar the souls,
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Psyche, the souls of those who have been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. They cried out with a loud voice,
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O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?
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That sounds a little like what we have in Enoch, which was written some centuries before that, where they say,
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And now behold, the souls of those who have died are crying out and making their suit to the gates of heaven.
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So you see how this thought influenced and how the thought was consistent. One, extra biblical in Enoch, but there's a consistent strain, there's a consistent idea in the inspired text that we have in Revelation.
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First Enoch 22 verse 3 speaks of the dead like this, says, Then Raphael, and we're not going to go into who he was,
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Raphael answered, One of the holy angels who was with me and said unto me, Those hollow places that have been created for this very purpose, that the spirits of the souls of the dead should assemble therein.
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So it seems to imply that they thought the spirit lived on separately from the soul. That'd be first Enoch 22, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, all referring to their spirits.
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These references are available too if you want them afterwards. I'm kind of going pretty quick through them.
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George Ladd says here, The wisdom of Solomon uses soul and spirit interchangeably and refers to the pre -existence of the soul and to its existence after death.
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So an eternal soul, okay. Immortal is a better word, not eternal, only
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God's eternal, an immortal soul. So Wisdom 1 chapter 1 verse 4,
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Because wisdom will not enter a deceitful soul nor dwell in a body enslaved to sin, for a body and for a holy and disciplined spirit will flee from deceit and will rise up and depart from foolish thoughts and will be ashamed at the approach of unrighteousness.
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In another chapter in that same book, Because he failed to know the one who formed him and inspired him with an active soul and breathed into him a living spirit.
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Okay. And that leaves one place in wisdom, chapter 9 verse 15,
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The body is seen as a hindrance to the soul. So a little of that platonic thought that we talked about last week. It says,
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For a perishable body weighs down the soul and this earthly tent burdens the thoughtful mind. Now it does have that platonic ring to it, but again, we're talking about how this thought process developed and then became incorporated in some places into the inspired text.
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Like I said, we read from 1st Psalm and then we read from Revelation 6. Not to say that 1st Psalm was inspired, but Revelation 6 had some of that same idea of these souls living and crying out for justice before God.
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Here, Wisdom of Solomon, I just read to you, but 1st Corinthians 15, 42 says, So it is with the resurrection of the dead.
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What is sown is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor. It is raised in glory.
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It is sown in weakness. It is raised in power. It is sown a natural body. It is raised a spiritual body.
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If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. So this idea of soul and body and the soul living on and separate from the body.
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2nd Corinthians 5, 1, 2, and 4 have the natural physical body, all called a tent.
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So some of that thought process that developed in this intertestamental period became part of the thought process of our inspired authors in the
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New Testament. Yeah, so 2nd
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Maccabees, again. Do the Catholics have Maccabees' scripture? Is that part of their apocrypha?
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Does anybody know offhand? Okay, it doesn't matter.
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Everybody know the story of the Maccabees? The Maccabees are the ones who rebelled against Antiochus Epiphanes, one of the three kings who...
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When Alexander the Great died, his kingdom was split amongst three kings. And in Palestine, that king was
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Antiochus Epiphany, a hater of the Jews and of God. And the Maccabees are the ones who led the successful rebellion against him.
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So in chapter 6, verse 30 of 2nd Maccabees, when he was about to die under the blows of a man who was being tortured because he wouldn't deny
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God, he groaned, saying, The Lord in His holy knowledge knows full well that although I could have escaped death,
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I am only enduring terrible pain in my body, my soma, which we'll get to later, from this scourging, but also suffering it with joy in my soul, which is psyche, because of my devotion to Him, to God.
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Later, like my brothers, I offer up my body, my soma, and my life, my psyche, for our ancestral laws, imploring
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God to show mercy soon to our nation and by afflictions and blows to make you confess that He alone is
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God. One thing to note here, just in those couple of quotes, that psyche, soul, is actually a stand -in for life.
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So a lot of this sounds kind of Hellenized, kind of Greek -ish, and it is, we have to admit that's part of the development of the thought from the more strict
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Old Testament understanding in that intertestinal period where there was so much Greek influence leading into the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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W .D. Stacy, in The Pauline View of Man, he wrote this, the idea of pre -existence was not the highly developed belief which
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Philo, who is an influential Jewish writer, an
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Alexandrian Jew from about 20 B .C. to about 40 A .D., so right there, smack dab in the middle of Jesus' life, was not the highly developed belief which
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Philo took into his Judaism from the Greek philosophers. My main author,
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George L. Ladd, in his New Testament theology, he says, while in the Old Testament ruach, which is spirit or breath, is the power of God at work in the world, in later writings, the personal use of penuma, soul or life, is primary.
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This does not necessarily imply Greek influence, only that the development of ruach was completed in the penuma of intertestinal writings.
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So the idea of spirit and soul took this development in those four centuries.
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And again, we're going through this because those four centuries are what led into the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the thought process of the disciples and later apostles.
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We do know from Enoch that they thought of God being the Lord of all spirits. And again, we have some consistency in that kind of a thought process.
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We opened up Colossians in the preaching a week or so ago. In Colossians 1, 15 to 20, he is the image of the invisible
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God that, of course, is Jesus, the firstborn of 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 all things to himself, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
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So God, or Jesus Christ, the Lord of the spirits, and this idea of being
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Lord of the spirits, King of kings, Lord of lords sort of thing also, consistent kind of thought, that thought developing amongst the
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Jews in that four centuries. So that's background. Any questions about that?
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Any thoughts about any of that? Did I go too fast? Does it make any sense?
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Everybody okay? I don't feel like you're all okay, but...
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Okay. We can get to Paul, how Paul used those terms in other places in the
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Bible. I want to talk about psyche, soul. The living principle of mankind.
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And now we're really going to be focused on a New Testament thought. We just have some idea of how that thought process might have developed during those four centuries.
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Psyche is souls. A living principle can actually even be applied to animals. In Revelation 8, verse 9, a third of the living creatures in the sea died.
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So a third of the living psyche, which is translated often as souls. So it's that living, that life principle.
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A third of the living creatures died. Genesis 1, verse 30, and every beast of the earth and every bird of the heavens and everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life.
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So it's psyche. Okay? Again, translated soul. In the
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Septuagint, that word is zois, which is the Greek word for life. Okay? In the
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Hebrew, we have nephesh. Oh, excuse me. It's nephesh kai, which means soul living.
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Okay? So this word psyche, verse soul, but soul is also a stand -in for living principle.
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Life, okay? It's applied to God. Genesis, I think my reference there is wrong.
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I said Genesis 1 through 3, but I just read that. I'm not sure where this came from. But he does say, I quote, I will make my dwelling among you, and my soul, my nephesh, my psyche, shall not abhor you.
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Isaiah 42 .1, God says, Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul, again, nephesh in Hebrew, psyche in Greek, in whom my soul delights.
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Just two more. Jeremiah 1 .27, I have forsaken my house, I have abandoned my heritage,
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I have given the beloved of my soul, same words, into the hands of her enemies, and finally,
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I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness with all my heart and all my soul.
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This is God speaking through the prophet Jeremiah. So soul is that living principle of man and beast.
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It's synonymous with spirit, and it's seen in, like, Luke 23, 46, then
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Jesus called out with a loud voice and said, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit, which is pneuma, okay?
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Not psyche, but pneuma. And having said this, he breathed his last, and in John 19 .30,
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he bowed his head and gave up his spirit, again, pneuma. A scholar named
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M .E. Osterhaven says, While soul in the New Testament normally means an individual spiritual entity with a material body, so that a person is thought of as a body's soul, spirit is that special gift of God that places one in relationship to him, okay?
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So we can note, for example, Psalm 51, verse 10, 12, and 17.
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Well, as he says, Created me a clean heart, O God, and renewed a right spirit within me.
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Renew to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart,
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O God, you will not despise, which is in the psalm, also in Isaiah 57, 15, and Isaiah 66, too.
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Now, Paul uses this word, psyche or soul of individuals, of people, okay?
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So in Revelation, excuse me, Romans 2 .9, There will be tribulation and distress for every human being, which is psyche, okay?
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And let every person, psyche, be subject. So psyche beyond life is used for living and for thinking and for feeling, okay?
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In psyche, we're going to feel the tribulation and the distress in our soul, in our psyche.
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We're to be subject, that's Romans 13, we'll be subject to the rulers that God has put in place.
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So some examples here of this, how psyche is used, how Paul understands us.
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Dale, would you pick up 2 Corinthians 12 .15, and then Nick, I'll give you 1
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Thessalonians 2 .8, and Albert, you have Philippians 1 .27, 12 .15.
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Okay, thank you.
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The word behind that is psyche, soul. Next one. 1 .27,
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I'm sorry, 1 .27. Thank you.
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So one spirit is pneuma, as you might expect. One mind is not the word nous, which means literally mind, it's the word psyche.
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And I think it's well translated as mind here. So Rudolf Buchmann, if you ever read him, you have to be very circumspect in using him.
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He had some funny ideas, he had some good ideas. He wrote here, psyche is that specifically human state of being alive which inheres in man as a striving, willing, purposing self.
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So psyche, soul, mind. It incorporates a lot of thought there, but I think he gets this right.
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It's that human state of being alive which inheres or brings into man striving, willing, and purposing.
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And we might note that Paul nowhere uses the Hellenistic view of the human being as body and soul.
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And we're going to come to that next week and I'll give you a little hint at the end of this what we're going to do next week.
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So that's psyche. Any questions about psyche? Any thoughts?
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I'm trying to give a broad overview of the thought process that we can see in Paul and the development of it from about 400
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B .C. We're going to pull those together Lord willing next week when we talk about trichotomy, dichotomy, traducianism, or creationism of the soul.
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We'll try to pull those together then. So yeah, some of the thoughts sound different.
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I picked that up when I was reading it. I didn't quite see it when I was looking at it. Thank you for picking that up for me.
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There's a breadth of authors there. But we'll come to that. We'll put them together more next week.
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Trying to just really get to how they're being used here especially by Paul. So that's psyche.
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Pneuma is the word for spirit. Most importantly of God's spirit. So Romans 8 -11.
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Gretchen, would you get Corinthians 2 -11? First Corinthians.
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I didn't put a one or two by it so I hope it's first. No, let me get
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Romans 8 -11 first. I'll get that one. Romans 8 -11 says,
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If the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised
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Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who dwells in you.
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Now please. And also we have, for example,
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Jesus in John 11 -33. Remember, he groaned in his spirit. This is when he's approaching the tomb of Lazarus.
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He groaned in his spirit as all the emotions around him were being brought to him. John 4 -24, descriptive of God.
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God is spirit. So it's of God. Pneuma is spirit.
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Most importantly of God's spirit. It speaks of that of man as well.
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And that again is what we might expect. Romans 1 -9.
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We start at 8. First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you because your faith is proclaimed in all the world.
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For God is my witness whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son that without ceasing I mention you always in my prayers asking that somehow
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God, somehow by God's will I may now at last succeed in coming to you.
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1 Corinthians 6 -17. But he who is joined to the
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Lord becomes one spirit with him. We have communion with God because of the spirit.
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We find grace bestowed to us in the realm of the spirit. So what's important about us being spiritual beings?
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Especially with God's spirit in us as Paul says in some of the verses that we just read.
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What's important about that? Psyche is our soul. It's that living, thinking, emoting aspect of ourselves.
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Not exclusively. There's others that will pick up some of that. So there's some overlap. But here on spirit, what's important about us being spiritual beings?
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Especially spiritual beings because of the spirit within us. What would you say?
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So in prayer, we commune with God through the spirit. I would also add faith to that.
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Because of the spirit, we do have faith. We can actually see reality.
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Anything else? I would say, it separates us from the animals.
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Because psyche is used often of just that living animation that all creatures have.
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Those are some limited contexts, but it is used that way. But not spirit. Spirit is exclusive to us.
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By having our God -given spirit, we correspond in that way to God.
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And we're able to meet with Him on His terms. That's John 4 .24. John 4 .24.
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This gentleman sitting here next to Nick, I just can't get your name off my lips. John 4 .24
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please. If you would read that for us. So Jesus is talking to the
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Samaritan woman and really talking to all of us. If you're going to worship God, you have to worship Him in spirit and in truth.
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And how do we worship Him in spirit? Because of the spirit within us. But what
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I want to draw out of that is that by giving us the spirit, giving us
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His spirit within, making us spiritual beings, He makes us in that way correspond to Himself.
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Now by analogy, we're not gods. We're not little gods or anything even like that. But by giving us the spirit, and Jesus says several times in John 15 and 16, that God the
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Spirit, God the Father, God the Son will dwell within us. So we have the spirit within us. Ezekiel 36 .27,
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we've got the new heart. Titus 3 .5, the spirit has washed us and regenerated us, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy
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He saved us. So we've been made spiritual beings. And as spiritual beings, we correspond to God in that way.
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Without the spirit, we cannot correspond to God. We cannot, as Dale was saying, commune with God. We can't commune with God.
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So being spiritual, God gives us an aspect of Himself to us.
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You remember from last week, it was interesting that as mortal, fleshly, physical beings,
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God gave us something that He Himself doesn't have. Now we know Jesus Christ is
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God in the flesh. We're talking about God the Father, God is spirit. We have to come to Him by the spirit.
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He gave us flesh which He doesn't have. Setting aside the incarnation, we're talking about God the
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Father. And by that, we're able to, as Dale was saying, commune with God, because now by that spirit we correspond to God.
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Yes? Yeah, I wouldn't say it quite that blankly, but they certainly have no spirit of God.
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I would want to hold open the hope that we're all at some level spiritual beings, and I say that only because I don't want to go into an excursion onto heaven and hell, but those who are in hell are suffering in spirit in some way, a small -ass kind of spirit.
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So I just want to hold that as a possibility. So in general, I agree with what you said. You okay?
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Okay. You're waiting for the trichotomy argument, right? Okay, so Pneuma spirit is the inner man that can also be found set against the outer man.
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It's not Platonic dualism, but it's something we must understand as we strive for sanctification of our spirits by the
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Holy Spirit. So Pneuma inner man can also be found set against the outer man.
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And one of the things we're going to come to next week, Lord willing, is we talk about trichotomy versus dichotomy and traducianism versus creationism.
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We're going to talk about why, then, do we still sin? That's something we're going to get to, and this is still setting groundwork for that, because I think it's an important question.
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1 Corinthians 7 .34 says, But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided.
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And the unmarried or betrothed woman is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit.
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1 Corinthians 7 .1 Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body, soma, and spirit, pneuma, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.
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In Romans 8 .10, Paul points out that while the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is life because of righteousness.
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Only, by the way, where it says the spirit is life because of righteousness, only the NIV does not capitalize the
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S. Okay? So our major English versions, most of them say spirit, the spirit, capital
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S, the spirit of God is life because of righteousness. The NIV, just so you throw this out there for you, says spirit, so we're talking about our own spirit.
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Now, they mean the redeemed spirit, okay? They're not being heretical there. They take it a little differently.
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The pneuma, the spirit in man, when quickened by the Holy Spirit, is diametrically opposed to the flesh.
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We're going to get to flesh and how Paul uses that term in a few moments, but the spirit diametrically opposed to the flesh.
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It's not Platonic reasoning. We're not going to say that the flesh, the body, is sinful per se. That's Platonism.
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We don't go there. We covered that last week. Philippians 3 .3,
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it says, for we are the circumcision who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh.
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Okay? We worship by the Spirit, spiritual beings, we glory in Christ and we have no confidence in the stuff that we're made of, but in Christ and the
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Spirit that He gave us. This is talking about sanctification, growing in the Lord there particularly.
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1 Corinthians 14 .14, we find that a person's pneuma, their spirit, is differentiated from their mind.
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For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful. And George Ladd says here, the conclusion is unavoidable that the spirit is the human spirit, once true inner self, and I would say converted inner self, that enjoys direct fellowship through prayer with God.
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Okay? So psyche, soul, pneuma, spirit. Any questions?
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Any thoughts? Oh, both depending on context.
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When I mean the Holy Spirit, I usually say the Spirit. Spirit of God generally means
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God is a spiritual being and that then could be Father, Son, and Spirit. Okay. Soma.
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Soma means body. And this is maybe the most complicated of all those terms that Paul uses, the way he uses it.
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Soma might be the most complicated, hardest to sort out. Ladd says here again, you know
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I rely a lot on George Eldon Ladd for this, somatic experience is conceived as being the normal and proper mode of existence.
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Like Romans 8 .23, and not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the
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Spirit, that's the Holy Spirit, okay, grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption of sons, the redemption of our bodies, of our soma.
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Okay? So Paul teaches positively about the body.
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There's one place where we understand the Platonic reasoning that says that the body is just a hindrance, the body is no good, we need to get out of the body because it entraps the spirit, and once we die the spirit is finally free.
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Sounds very much like Buddhism, like we talked about last week. That's not where Paul goes.
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First, although we live in our bodies, they're corruptible, they're mortal, and so in that sense they're unlike our spirit, they're unlike our
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God -given spirit. That's not corruptible, that's life.
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These bodies are deteriorating, we know that. So there's a stark difference.
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Someone read, I just need volunteers, Romans 6 -12?
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Romans 8 -11? 2 Corinthians 4 -11? Who's got
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Romans 6 -12? Who can get Romans 8 -11? Jonathan, and who's got 2
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Corinthians 4 -11? Nick, in that order please. Keep that one in mind because remember next week we're going to talk about given all this, why then do we still sin?
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That's one of the ones that's going to help us there. 8 -11? Thank you.
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And 2 Corinthians 4 -11? Okay, so bodies corruptible, bodies deteriorating, the law of sin and death is going to take us all eventually, but that is something distinct from the spirit that we have within us, the spirit being incorruptible, very opposite of the body.
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In Romans 7 -24 he even calls it a body of death. Just meaning, and again, it's not platonic reasoning.
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Some of these bodies are going towards that. So secondly, our soma, our body is not only weak and mortal, it's an instrument of the flesh, that's sarx, and we'll get to that in a little bit.
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And because our soma, our body is mortal and capable of sin, we must keep our body under subjection and under subjection to our pneuma, to our spirit.
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So these bodies are capable of sin and therefore to be kept under subjection to pneuma, to spirit.
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By which we mean the redeemed spirit. Talking about converted people. 1
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Corinthians 9 -27, But I discipline my body, my soma, and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others
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I should find myself to be disqualified. So, capable of sin, but able to be kept subjected to the spirit that God has given us.
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So even our physical, our somatic, our physical life has spiritual implications.
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What we do with our body has spiritual implications. We have the spirit within us and when we do what is right in God's eyes, that is the spirit leading us in the right direction and us obeying and submitting to the spirit.
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Now again, this is jumping a little bit ahead to what I want to do next week, but when we sin, what have we done?
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We have allowed the desires, the fleshly desires to overcome the spirit within us.
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And whose fault is that? We've all got to raise our hands. We're going to get to that in a lot more detail next week, so I just want to put that out there as a little teaser for it.
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Bodies need to be kept under control by the spirit that we've given us. It's the body that is capable of sin and I would argue the spirit is not.
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Because the spirit we have within us is the spirit of God. This makes us all the more culpable.
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It doesn't make us perfect. It makes us more culpable. Even our physical, somatic life has spiritual implications.
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Romans 12 .1. Present your bodies as living sacrifices. Present your whole self, your physical self, your life, all you think, do, and say, but especially as we live in these bodies, it's a sacrifice to God and that's definitely a spiritual endeavor.
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So we acknowledge that our soma is indwelt by God's Holy Spirit.
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1 Corinthians 6 .19. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the
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Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own. And finally, bodies will be redeemed in the greatest of all spiritual transactions, which is the resurrection.
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Romans 8 .23. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who are the first fruits of the spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption of sons, the redemption of our bodies.
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Philippians 3 .21, which says we await a
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Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.
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So physical, somatic life has the spiritual implications. It means something because of the spirit within us.
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So soul, spirit, body. And I said soma, body is the most complicated thing that Paul uses and it's not.
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I got that wrong. It's sarx. It's flesh. And the way Paul uses flesh in the
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Greek is sarx. It's really the most difficult thing to sort out, not body. I misspoke there.
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Sarx is flesh. It's clearly a stand -in for meanings other than its literal definition.
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So what's flesh literally? It's literally the stuff, the muscles and the stuff that's attached to the bone. I know this might not be medically completely accurate, but that's, you know, flesh.
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It's that stuff that is seen, that outer part of us. Flesh is the substance attached to the structure.
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Flesh is physical. The Spanish or the Latin word for meat is carne, like in carne asada.
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Made with steak, made with meat. To be a little more crass about it, carne asada is cow flesh.
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Okay? That's what it really means. And it's the core of our word for Jesus Christ's coming. His incarnation.
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His carne -ation, if you will. So a quick review of some of the ways that Paul uses this term sarx or flesh.
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He uses it of the physical tissues that constitute the body, the human or the animal.
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1 Corinthians 15 .39 For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish.
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So it's the physical tissues that constitute the body and even could differentiate us from other, or all beings from those, all animals and ourselves from each other.
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Flesh is where pain and suffering could be experienced. 1 Corinthians, or 2
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Corinthians 12 .7 So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of these revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.
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So where did he suffer the pain of whatever that thorn was? In his flesh.
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Flesh is where circumcision is performed. Suffering is an interesting thing because suffering is really mental.
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Even if the pain is real, the suffering is mental as well. Circumcision performed in the flesh.
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Circumcision ultimately is to be of the heart. And finally,
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Colossians 1 .22 speaking of the flesh says,
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I'll start at 1 .21 And now you who were once alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he is now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him.
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So where were we reconciled? In the body, the soma of the flesh, the sarx.
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Of whom? Class said. What? Jesus.
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We were reconciled in his body of flesh. So that's one idea that you can't really differentiate there.
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Flesh and body. Jesus Christ, the physical, real, literal man who went to the cross.
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In his body, in his flesh brought about our reconciliation.
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Paul uses flesh to speak of his countrymen in chapter 9, verse 3 of Romans.
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We spoke about the flesh being different kinds of flesh for different kinds of animals and for us. 1
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Corinthians 10 .18 Consider the people of Israel.
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Are not those who eat the sacrifices participants?
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That doesn't make any sense.
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Let me see if 2 Corinthians will work there. I think I got a bad thing in my notes there.
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10 .18. Nah, can't get it.
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Don't know what that meant. But the point was going to be though I don't have the right verse for it, that the sarx, the flesh refers to natural to bodily generation.
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He talks about his relatives, his countrymen according to the flesh.
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One man, E. Schweitzer, says sarx, the flesh is the human person in terms of outward appearance and condition.
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That's pretty easy. Now again, sarx, this idea of flesh is also used in the ethical sense.
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Again, we're setting up for this idea from next week we're going to answer why do we then continue to sin. Can somebody get
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Romans 8 and read 1 -8? Jonathan, would you get that for me? Romans 8, 1 -8.
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And John Davis, Galatians 2 .19 -20
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Thank you. Thank you.
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So the idea there is Paul uses flesh in an ethical sense.
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Now we know flesh is this stuff and we know we have the spirit, we have immortal souls.
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But when he speaks of flesh, he uses it in all kinds of different ways. Sometimes literally flesh as we would expect it to be.
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Sometimes to differentiate different kinds of animals from each other and from us, because it's different kinds of flesh.
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He also uses it, and this is really important here, in the ethical sense. We are ethically responsible or I should say we are morally responsible for God for how we ethically use the flesh that's given us.
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And so the deeds of the flesh, and again I don't want to give away too much from next week, but in Galatians 5 .16
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-22 we have that differentiation between the works of the flesh and the fruit of the spirit.
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So flesh has great ethical implications. He uses flesh most often, but can you really differentiate flesh from body?
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What he's talking about is that physical part of us that reaches our hand out to do sin. He usually uses flesh for it and bodies in other ways.
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But sometimes, as we've read, the two really can't be differentiated. So the idea we're getting at here is even when we have the spirit of God within us we've been made spiritual beings who correspond in that way to God because God gave us his spirit, his
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Holy Spirit. Even with that we still have ethical demands upon us in how we use our flesh because of the spirit within.
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So the two passages of Romans 8 .1 -8, Galatians 2 .19 -20 really bring that out.
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Next week we'll bring it out even more. But we are responsible for what we do. If we said, okay,
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I sinned with my flesh, is that any different than I sinned with my body? Paul talks about joining with the prostitute, becoming one with her.
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Who would bring Christ into that? Would there be any difference there between joining with her in flesh or in body?
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No. We're just talking about the way Paul uses them. Sometimes they're together. Usually flesh is by itself in that ethical sense.
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So in Romans 8 .1 -8 what Jonathan read it's really speaking about the problem of the human being the person who is not indwelled by the spirit of God.
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They cannot please God. And why can they not please God? Because without the spirit of God you don't correspond to God.
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Without the spirit of God you cannot want to please God. And without the spirit of God you have no control over what your flesh actually does.
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Some people are more disciplined than others. God bless them, they're disciplined. But having the spirit of God and wanting to please
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God is a different thing than just sheer discipline. So keep this in mind that flesh is used of our physical selves.
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He uses it to speak of the generations of ancestors that are his countrymen by the flesh.
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But most often and most importantly I would argue he uses it to speak of the ethical lives that we have.
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Moral lives. So as we wrap this up and get just a few more minutes did
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Paul view our physical selves as sinful per se? I think the answer is no, not at all.
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1 Corinthians 16, the body is not meant for sexual morality but for the
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Lord and the Lord for the body, for the soma. 1 Corinthians 6 .15, do you not know that your bodies, which is soma the plural, not the church his body but the individual body of each believer, your bodies are members of Christ.
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Now elsewhere bodies used in the singular, your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that's speaking of the church. But when he has it here, bodies he's speaking of the individuals.
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And he's saying they were members of Christ. So what we do with our flesh has great implications.
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One point is that sarx is that unredeemed remaining old nature. I would argue not speaking of the heart, the heart has been redeemed.
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Sarx is usually speaking of man as unregenerate and unable to commune with God because he doesn't correspond to God in that way.
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So we're going to look at this in a lot more detail next week again. First, why then do we sin?
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If we have the Spirit of God, why do we sin? We're going to pull these terms together mainly through Galatians 5 .16
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-22. But I say walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.
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There's an antinomy there. There's a difference between the two. If you do the one, you won't do the other. Walk by the
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Spirit, that's capital S. You won't gratify the desires of the flesh, the sarx.
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For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh. For these are opposed to each other to keep you from doing the things that you want to do.
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There's a few others I wanted to go through but it would take too long. It's 10 .30 now.
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So I'll go really, really quickly. Cardia, life or heart.
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That's the inner life of the person. That's where emotions, good or bad, find their source. The heart is to be fully
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God's as Deuteronomy 6 .4 -5. That's what Jesus said in Matthew 22.
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The heart must be circumcised. Hearts can lack discernment. Hearts are the seat of our will.
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I'm not giving you all the verses here because I'm going very quickly because I don't want to hold us too much afterwards.
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Hearts can be hardened as Pharaoh and God can decide to harden a heart.
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Heart is where ethical judgment is found, whether good or bad, Romans 1 .21, Romans 2 .14
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-16. Ethical judgment, good or bad, found in the heart. Omnus, N -O -U -S, is mind.
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Intellect, our thought processes, our judgments. Logizimae, which is to think logically, depends a lot upon having a mind.
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Paul uses synodesis, conscience, quite a bit. Our conscience condemns us or clears us,
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Romans 2 .15 would say that. Conscience can be weak, 1 Corinthians 8 .7
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-13. Yeah, that was really, really fast on that last part of it, but the main idea is how
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Paul uses spirit, soul, flesh, and body.
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Those are going to help us the most for next week. Why then do we sin? Trichotomy versus dichotomy or tripartite versus bipartite, those all mean the same thing.
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Are we made up of body, soul, spirit, or are soul and spirit one, so we're two aspects according to Paul.
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And then if there's time, traducianism versus creationism, where does your soul come from? Is it part of the physical generation of the child in the womb, or is it something that God creates upon the beginning of life in that way?
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Any last thoughts or questions? I know some of this didn't quite hang together the way it looked like it was going to in my notes.
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I apologize for that, but I hope I got through to you how some of this thought process developed, how some of the intertestamental time between Malachi and John the
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Baptist, some of that development actually worked their way into the thought process of our inspired authors, and then most particularly how
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Paul uses those kinds of terms, and then we can answer those questions next week about why we sin, where does our soul come from, and what are we made up of, okay?
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So let's close in prayer. Heavenly Father, I thank You again for this day You've given us, and just pray You continue with us as we worship
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Christ Jesus, our Savior, and we give You thanks for this and all things in Jesus' name. Amen.