The Image of God--Spirit, Soul, Body

This could easily be part 5 of "The Workings of a Religious Spirit" because one of those workings is the inability to distinguish between the works of the spirit and the works of the soul. It seems better to use a couple posts to discuss what it means to be created in the image of God. Most of what we have learned about the distinctions between spirit and soul we learned from the great Chinese theologian, Nee Tu-sheng who ministered in China before and after that country's fall into communism. For greater detail and greater insight, we highly recommend his book, The Spiritual Man which is now available in one volume. The book is written under his more famous pen name of Watchman Nee.

There are whole segments of the evangelical church that believe man is bipartite (two parts), having a corporeal (flesh) part and an incorporeal (not flesh) part. This understanding is not incorrect, it is simply incomplete. Anyone who cannot understand this simple truth from 1 Thessalonians 5:23 and Hebrews 4:12 will probably not understand our explanation either. Our incorporeal part is really two parts, spirit (the part of us that connects us to God) and soul (mind, emotions, and will). We really have three parts to us just as God has, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Thus, this is at least a part of what it means to be created in the image of God. The reason for this misconception is largely historically, bad teaching, but there is more to it.


When Adam and Eve sinned in the garden of Eden, they chose their will over God's will. The result was their souls came between their spirits and God's spirit which effectively meant their spirits died. They were unable to connect properly with God's spirit due to interference from the soul. They passed that condition down to the rest of the human race. The end result for us is that we are born natural men who cannot understand the things of God. They are foolishness to us. (1 Corinthians 1:18) This is why Jesus told Nicodemus we must be born again in order to see (perceive, understand) the kingdom of God. (John 3:3) Being born again returns our spirits and souls to the proper attitude (double meaning intended) so that we are able once again to have individual, direct contact with God through our spirit. It is usually better to move from a known area to an unknown area when attempting to understand something, so before we discuss the spirit, let us detail the workings of its worldly counterpart, the body.

Our bodies really only have one primary function. While it is true they house the spirit and soul during our earthly pilgrimage, their real function is to give us contact with the world. By world, of course, we mean the physical world, everything that can be perceived with the physical senses. Our bodies were created to see, hear, taste, touch, and smell this world. Were we in a different world with a different atmosphere, different light spectrum, different gravity, etc., our bodies would be ideally suited to that world. We might say the body is situated so that it receives input from this world. This information is then relayed to the soul where we process it according to what we think (mind) about it, how we feel (emotions) about it, and what we will do (will) about it. We then send that information from the soul back to the body to act on it. This is the whole of what the natural man does. The man who has been born again, however, has another factor to consider when evaluating input from the world.

The spirit is the God part of man. When it is working properly, the spirit keeps us in constant and direct contact with God. Our spirit has only this one function, communion with God. Like the body, our spirit takes in information, but the only information it receives is from God. Do not be confused here. Evil spirits do not work in our spirit. Their playground is our soul. It is in the mind and emotions they do their evil work. In fact, one of their primary methods is to attempt to convince us the entire spiritual world is nothing more than a figment of our imagination. To be a little more complete, there are also demons that affect our bodies, but we are outside the scope of this teaching.


The information our spirit receives from God is then sent to the soul for processing. We determine what we think about it, how we feel about it, and what we are going to do about it. That sounds hauntingly familiar. The problem is, even after we are born again and our spirit is functioning properly, we do not always know whether the information in our soul came through our body or our spirit. We also cannot ever discount demonic influences in the soul. Once we have processed the information we have received we decide what we will do about it. Primarily there are two options--do something or do nothing. Doing nothing is the easiest of the two choices, unless the information truly came through our spirit to do something. Then doing nothing becomes a very uncomfortable choice. If we decide to do something, we formulate what it is we want to do and send that information from the soul to the body to take action.


We could almost call this next item a mystery since a mystery in the New Testament is something that was heretofore hidden, but has now been revealed to us who operate in the spirit. The mystery that has been revealed is that Jesus is the body part of God, if you will. His earthly body was just like ours, but his resurrection body is different. However, put your thinking cap on, because while Jesus is now in the heavenly throne room in his resurrection body, he also left his body behind to continue his work on earth. We are Jesus' body on earth. He works through us. Of course he can intercede in any circumstance at anytime without our help, but when he does that, on the earth side we call it a miracle. In heaven, God works the same way we work. Wait, reverse that. On earth, we work the same way God works in heaven. He receives information from the world, processes that information, and acts on it. When he chooses to act via his body, that is us. We do the work. That is our job. We were created in the image of God to be his body on earth, to do his works. If that does not make you want to treat yourself (and other Christians) will a great deal more respect, there is not much else we can say to you about it.