By Jim Mettenbrink
In the last article, we considered the Bible’s declaration that humans consist of three separate parts – body (matter), soul (life force; Leviticus 17:11), and the spirit (eternal part) (1 Thessalonians 5:23). (By the way this in contrast to all living non-humans. Although many have accepted the evolutionary ruse that humans are animals, thus animals are our relatives, nowhere in the Bible is an eternal spirit assigned to an animal). The life force and the spirit are not tangible, but literally invisible. They cannot be touched or contained. One looks at his body and says, this is my body. One does not say, this is me. Inherently, a person knows he is actually separate from the body, that it is a container of the spirit. Yet nowhere is your spirit found in the body. It is invisible. As noted in the last article, at the moment of death Jesus and Stephen commended their spirits to the Father (Luke 23:46; Acts 7:59). Other than one’s spirit is the eternal part, what is its character? Note, without the Bible, we do not have a clue that we even have a spirit, let alone its traits.
As we begin this exposition, we must note that the Bible refers to the heart and spirit as at least overlapping if not synonymous. The heart is a metaphor for the self because the ancients thought the heart – the blood pump – was the self. One example of their reasoning is emotions caused the heart to race, thus they concluded the heart is the seat of all associated with one’s thinking, beliefs, emotions, motives, and attitudes.
Note the Bible’s synonymous references. The psalmist used the spirit and heart in the Hebrew poetic form of synonymous parallelism six times. For example, in Israel’s King David’s anguish, he wrote, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me” (Psalm 51:10). However, even if the heart and spirit are not the exact same entity, they work in close concert, e.g., when the Israelites were asked to give materials to build the tabernacle, “…everyone came whose heart was stirred, and everyone whose spirit was willing….” (Exodus 35:21). And e.g., when the Israelites rebelled against God, because that generation “… did not set its heart aright, and whose spirit was not faithful to God” (Psalm 78:8). This is a poetic synonymous parallel, but seems to point to a cause and the result. Knowing that these nuances of meaning between the heart and spirit, we begin to discover the characteristics of a person’s spirit.
What we do know is the mind is associated with the spirit and the brain…. somehow. But the mind is not seen. How does the “unseen” mind fit into the faith of “I believe only what I can see?”