Week 3
Genesis 1:26
“Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness.””
What does it then mean that we are made in His likeness if God is unseen?
Ephesians 4:24 “put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”
When God created the universe, spun the galaxies into place and filled the earth with all kinds of plant and animal life, He said ‘It is good’. But when He created mankind, he said ‘It is very good’ because God was then in creation.
Above all of creation, mankind is the apple of God’s eye. We are created in His likeness, designed to be in communion with Him and to be a reflection of His character. No other creature in all of existence has been given this design.
1 Thessalonians 5:23 “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Notice the order in which our three parts are mentioned in that verse. The order is important we are going to get to that in reverse order starting with what I think we understand best.
Body
The ability to hear, smell, see, touch and taste allows us to engage with the world around us. We were designed to enjoy what we experience with our senses fully connected to our spirit and soul but it is also through these senses that we quickly discover discomfort and pain.
God has placed us in a galaxy, on a planet that is perfectly tuned for life to exist and our bodies live by all the tangible elements provided by Earth.
On its own, the body is purely functional with no soul or spirit. By itself, all it’s capable of is speech, sensation, and action. Without a soul, there is no motivation for the body to say, sense, or do anything which is why we need a soul.
The body is our dwelling place; it is not who we are. You are not your height, your weight, your shape, your age, your colour, or your gender. You are deeper than your body.
Soul
Our soul is our personality or character which consists of our mind, will, and emotions.
- The Mind
The mind is the thinker and it is here where we calculate logic and reason which is the basis of what we believe.
It is in our minds where battles are fought; this is where our battles are lost or won.
Isaiah 26:3 (NIV) “You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed on you!”
Romans 8:5-7 “5 Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. 6 The mind of a sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; 7 the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.”
Romans 12:2 “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
- The Emotions
Our emotions are incredibly unstable and by evaluating them with our thinker, we can deceive ourselves into believing we are something we are not.
Our emotions are real and you are supposed to feel them but they are unstable and do not define who we are.
Our emotions tell us that what we are experiencing is either favourable or not but they do not tell us who we are. When we experience depression or anxiety, with our mind we evaluate what our emotions tell us and then believe we are depressed, and then with our will, we choose to act out depression in the body based on what our mind has calculated in our emotions.
We must be careful of this and the only guaranteed way to avoid this type of deception is to hold on to the truth of who God says we are.
Psalm 139:23
“Search me O God and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.”
Philippians 4:6-7 “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
- The Will
Our will is where we do our choosing. Here is the line between temptation and sin. Temptation by itself is not sin but when we choose to give into temptation, by our will we move our body to sin.
James 1:14-16 “But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.”
Even Jesus was faced with choices His entire life long. Jesus was truly God but also truly man with His own developed mind, emotions, and will.
In the Garden of Gethsemane on the night He was betrayed, we see one of Jesus’ greatest struggles and one of the best examples of the human soul’s struggle. Jesus was faced with choosing His own will which was not to go through with the crucifixion or to submit to the will of His Father and be torn to pieces and nailed to a rugged wooden cross in place of a world that hated Him.
Matthew 26:38
“38 Then He said to them, ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.”
Jesus was overwhelmed with emotion when He thought of what had to come next – His mind and emotions were engaged and He was faced with a choice, His will – which He surrendered to His Father’s
The soul is our personality which contains our mind, will, and emotions. Here is where our beliefs are put to the test and where our battles are fought. It is from this place that our bodies do what we want but without a spirit in the soul, we are unstable and live like the waves of the sea being tossed from one thing to another.
Without a spirit, our personality isn’t grounded in anything, and for most people, this is as deep as people get. However, there is more and so… show slide our souls; our thoughts, feelings, and choices are not who we are. We have to go deeper.
Spirit
Our spirit determines our identity. This is who we really are.
Genesis shows us that the spirit is the central part of our human existence by what happened in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve disobeyed God.
Genesis 2:17
“17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Genesis 3:4-5
“But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’
Genesis 3:7
“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked…”
Did Adam and Eve die the day they ate the fruit?
Was satan actually telling the truth?
It appears that everything the serpent had just said was in fact true. Adam and Eve immediately after eating the fruit knew both good and evil and it appeared as though they did not die.
Genesis 5:5 says that Adam lived to be another 930 years old before he died. We are not told how old Eve was when she died but we do know that she did not die on the day she ate the fruit because she bore Adam a number of children.
So, either the serpent was right and the all-knowing God is a liar, or the serpent tricked Adam and Eve by making a different reference to death than a physical one.
Genesis 3:1
“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the other beasts of the field that the Lord God had made.”
John 8:44 tells us that the devil was a murderer from the beginning and has nothing to do with the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
Hebrews 6:18 says that it is impossible for God to lie.
So if the devil lied to Adam and Eve and what God said was true, then what part of Adam and Eve died the moment they ate of the forbidden tree?
The devil said they would not die and he was right in referring to their physical bodies but God wasn’t only talking about their physical bodies. God was talking about their spirits; their identity which was connected to Him.
The moment Adam and Eve disobeyed, their spirits immediately died causing their connection with God to be severed. Adam and Eve now had a dead spirit because life can only come from God. We are born into this world with a dead identity which is why we put all of our efforts into trying to define ourselves by our physical appearance or our personality.
Isaiah 59:2
“But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.”
Whether our spirit is dead or alive, it is crucial for us to understand that we are spirit at the core of our being because the One who created us is spirit and He made us in His likeness. When we understand that, we can better understand our sin condition and the need for redemption.
We are made in the likeness of God, having three distinct parts that function as one. Our three parts are a gift of understanding for the very reason of knowing God and enjoying His favour forever.