1 Thessalonians 5:23

One of the verses Dr. Zodhiates hammered into Erik Christensen and me was this verse. Paul says, "And may the God of peace Himself set you apart completely, and your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless until the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." This verse had to do with how the Greek's viewed the entire individual and how it was divided up. In oriental philosophy there was the outer man and inner man. In Greek thought the individual was made up of three components, the spirit, soul and body. In this post I will deal with the spirit and what the Bible and the Greeks believed. The Greeks had a temple at Delphi devoted to the god Apollo. The high priestess was a young girl who would seek Apollo's answers to the questions pilgrims would bring to her. At the base of the statue of Apollo in the temple was a crack in the earth on which the temple was built. In this fissure ether was emitted. This gas would intoxicate the high priestess and she would give answers that had to be interpreted by one of the priests. The Greeks believed there had to be a device within man by which the gods could communicate to men. They called this pneuma, or spirit. Pneuma literally means breathe or gas. This ability to communicate with the Divine, Jews adopted and translated into their own culture. In Genesis 2:7 the Hebrew text says that man was made into a living being, the Septuagint, uses psuche which means soul. We know from John 4:24 that God is Spirit and that what He breathed into Adam was life and part of that life was spirit. So what is the function of pneuma? Ephesians 2:1 tells us, "You were dead in your trespasses and sins". After the fall the spirit was rendered inactive. So what was the spirit like before the fall? In Genesis 3:8 it says that Adam and Eve had the ability to hear God walking through the garden. Genesis 2:15-17 tells us that God communicated openly and audibly with Adam and Eve. He also had interaction with them as they were in their physical form. So the spirit could communicate with with God but how did it interact with the other parts of the individual? Ephesians tells us that the spirit was inactive. Jude 10 calls the individuals invading the church as natural or that which is related to the body. Luke 12:19-21, 1 Peter 2:11 and Matthew 11:29 are some of the verses that show once the spirit was inactive something happened to the body and soul. They began to fight for control of an aspect of the soul, the will. So the spirit before the fall was the chief authority of the individual because the connection between the individual spirit and God was never severed. But when Adam and Eve ate the piece of fruit they broke the connection and immediately saw their nakedness and that God would be coming to be with them. The soul and body took over because their spirits had been rendered inactive. Without a central authority chaos takes over. Information then becomes the crucial point of contention. God communicates to us giving us spiritual food by which to base our decisions to act upon. If our information is solely based on what we can see in the physical world or imagine, or what we feel at the moment or what needs our body projects we act on what is the strongest persuasive information given to our will. So when our spirits are rendered active by the Spirit of God through Christ then a central authority is installed again. But the battle for control over the will still exists with a fourth player, the spirit involved. One of the reasons why our hearts are not the focal point of ingested scripture is because the heart is the seat of emotion not of reason or intellect. We can agree with God's communication to us and feel a connection toward Him but it is the actions of the spirit strongly overriding the natural mind, heart and body to control the will that is the seat of acceptance. It is not a matter of going from our heads to our heart but rather does our spirit trust the information God has given to us to persuade our will to act accordingly. We'll look at the mind and heart later but it is important to understand that the spirit has to be convinced first of what God is communicating through His Spirit to us. Without faith it is impossible to please God and it is illogical to have a clean clear communication with Him as well. Sometimes, depending on our faith, we hear half of what God is saying to us because we stop trusting somewhere in the conversation. When that happens we are vulnerable to our natural mind, heart and body. Many Christians confuse their clear communication from God with their fleshly faculties. You see believers tolerating others who are involved in sin because they only heard unconditionally love one another but didn't finish the communication in that if we catch a brother in sin we have an obligation in that love to restore them. If we keep a clear line open consistently, we consistently hear from God the whole message. This is the reason for growth and progress, because faith is a journey and not an automatic thing for us. Using the spirit within us as often as we are challenged to by scripture we learn to trust God and the more we trust the clearer the connection becomes and the more powerful we are to affect our wills.