I was asked recently to give some Bible teaching to deal with
the double lives that plague some Christians. Hands raised in the air in
worship at church; hands on the keyboard at home to look at a porn site. Tongues
full of praise for God in church; tongues full of curses at home. It’s an old
but sad story.
I thought the best approach would be to give some teaching
about the heart, for when things are well in the heart, usually the journey is
gentler. So I had to define my terms. When the Bible talks about our hearts
(which it does over 700 times) does it just mean all our inner life? Does that
mean our souls, our spirits, and our hearts are all the same or are they
different?
These are important questions. So I reached for my copy of
Walther Eichrodt’s ‘Theology of the Old Testament’, a sure guide if ever there
was one, and got to work. I also looked at some Tom Wright, always good value.
And the faithful IVP’s New Bible Dictionary.
Here – very briefly – are my conclusions:
The Soul
The Hebrew word for soul is nephesh, and it literally
means the throat, the place our breath passes through. The famous Leviticus
17:11 underlines the same point. It says: ‘The life of the flesh is in the
blood’, the word for life here is nephesh. Interestingly Eichrodt tells
us that the root word for blood in Arabic is nafs, and that has come into
Persian where nafs can mean both breath and soul. So the word soul simply
means our life. When our breath stops, so our soul dies. Later the word came to
be a way of referring to our whole selves, so David’s ‘Bless the Lord, O my
soul’. Both Eichrodt and Tom Wright robustly reject the idea that there is an
invisible soul in each person that goes on living. Wright says there is not a
hint of this in the Bible. This rejection of an invisible eternal soul is
confirmed by the resurrection. Jesus was raised from the dead not as a soul or
a spirt, but as a physical man. And with the eating of the piece of fish He went
out of his way to prove this.
The Spirit
The Hebrew word for spirit is ruah and it literally
means wind. There are two aspects to our spirits. One is that this is the deepest
part of our being where our most powerful and profound senses lie. The other is
that this is the part of our being that makes contact with outside spirits, or
responds to outside events that have an overwhelming impact on us. When someone
turns to God, it is this part of our being that meets the Holy Spirit. One
writer put it like this:
Man’s
spirit is his inward organ for him to contact God, receive God, contain God,
and assimilate God into His entire being as his life and his everything.
The Heart
In the Bible the heart is the seat of government in a person’s
life. It is the control centre. In the heart is our will, our thinking, our
conscience, our feelings, which are all expressed through our body. So the body
and the heart are wholly woven together. While today we associate thinking with
the head, in the Old Testament it was seen to happen in the heart. Jesus had the
same view, so he asks the frowning Pharisees why they are questioning – in their
hearts.
The main difference: control and responsibility
My existence is not in my hand. I do not control when I was
born, or when I will die. This is not my arena of responsibility.
Likewise we are not in control over the spirit world,
certainly not of God’s spirit. Jesus underlines this in his famous conversation
with Nicodemus – ‘the wind blows where it wills.’
When it comes to our hearts it is different. We have
control. Our wills can choose to move towards God, and so connect with His
Spirit; or to move away. We can think things through carefully. We can listen
to the witness of our conscience. We can be sensitive to our feelings and
bodies and govern our lives in a way which is best for them.
So, when it comes to moving away from the double life, it makes
sense to get Christians to look carefully at their hearts, and to think through
how they can work with the Holy Spirit for its renovation.
If this is of any interest to you probably the greatest modern
writer on this subject is Dallas Willard. Anything by Willard is worth reading,
but especially his, ‘Renovation of the Heart.’
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