CHAPTER 9
GOD IS A THREE PART BEING = MAN IS ALSO A THREE PART BEING
I have heard that a three-part man (body, soul, and spirit) can be likened to a 1) carriage and horses, 2) a driver, and 3) the owner or master riding in the carriage. The carriage and horses represents our body. Our body interacts with and moves about within the physical world. The driver of the carriage represents our soul. The soul represents our emotions, our thoughts, our intellect, and controls the body and decides how the body will interact within the physical world. The master of the carriage represents the spirit of man. The spirit of man represents our intuition and conscience. The spirit of man must have authority over the driver and thereby over the carriage because only the spirit knows the final destination of the man.
When a man is not a Christian, his spirit is dead and his carriage becomes a hearse. Then, either the soul or the body is in charge. If the soul is in charge, the man’s life will appear normal, but he is adrift in the world and does not know his purpose or where he is going. The body represents our desires and our passions and interacts with the world. If the body is in charge, God help the man. If the body is in charge, it is similar to a carriage being dragged about by runaway horses. Everyone will be in serious danger.
God the Father is likened to our spirit. The Father knows everything, the Father is everywhere, the Father is invisible and the Father has final and supreme authority. God the Holy Spirit is likened to our soul. The Holy Spirit leads us, He can be grieved, He fills us, He speaks to us. God the Son interacts with the physical world through His Church. He ate with His disciples, He slept, He wept, He walked, He spoke with authority, He was lead by the Holy Spirit, He was totally obedient to the Father. God the Son is our perfect example.
AND THE LORD (YEH-HO-VAW’) GOD FORMED MAN OF THE DUST OF THE GROUND, AND BREATHED INTO HIS NOSTRILS THE BREATH OF LIFE; AND MAN BECAME A LIVING SOUL.
GENESIS 2:7
YEH-HO-VAH’; from haw-yaw’; a prime root; to exist, i.e. be or become, come to pass. (The) self-Existent or Eternal; Jehovah, Jewish national name of God: -Jehovah, the Lord. (The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, James Strong, LL.D., S.T.D., Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1984.)
God has always been and will always be, and God is the author and creator of all life. At one time I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor. Therefore, I studied biology in college and eventually I earned a bachelor degree in microbiology. I guess there are still arguments among scientists concerning what is life and what is not life. Biologist have been studying life for centuries and they have noticed that living organisms have a few things in common:
1) Living organisms have organization, hence the word “organism”. Living organisms are separated from their environment by organized cell structures.
2) Living organisms maintain homeostasis. Living organisms regulate the internal environment of their cells by regulating when, where, how, and what resources from the external environment are allowed to enter their cells and they can also eliminate waste products.
3) Living organisms undergo metabolism. Living organisms transform external resources into building blocks and energy in order to build and maintain their cellular components.
4) Living organisms respond to stimuli. Living organisms interact with the environment. Living organisms have a tendency to be repelled by negative environmental stimuli and tend to be attracted by positive environmental stimuli.
5) Living organisms have the ability to reproduce new living organisms.
6) Living organisms possess coded information. All living organisms contain coded instructions made up of two types of nucleic acids: deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA). All of the cells properties are determined by its DNA or RNA code.
As you have probably realized, living organisms are very complex! Simple viruses possess a complex code of several hundred nucleotides and viruses often need to use another organism’s more complicated DNA to reproduce. Nucleotides are the basic subunits of DNA and RNA. The human genome has over three billion (3,000,000,000) nucleotide base pairs! There are many living organisms, some plants for instance, that have even more complex DNA than people!
There have always been some people who believed in what today seem like unreasonable ideas. People used to believe the world was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth. At one time there was a theory called “spontaneous generation” widely accepted by the scientific community for several hundred years. Proponents of spontaneous generation believed that microscopic organisms arose spontaneously from nonliving material. It was only within the last one hundred and fifty years that spontaneous generation was disproved by people like the French chemist, Louis Pasteur and the English physicist, John Tyndall.
However, proponents of evolution still believe in spontaneous generation! They claim spontaneous generation occurred billions of years ago in the “primordial soup”, under environmental conditions that are completely different from conditions today. These “scientists” are not exactly sure what the conditions were like billions of years ago. Therefore, they cannot replicate the conditions in a laboratory; neither can they prove exactly how spontaneous generation of living organisms occurred from nonliving material originally. I am going to make a not so bold prediction.
“Scientists” will never prove spontaneous generation! Essentially, people believe what they want to believe, whether the belief is reasonable or not. Why am I telling you this? When we attempt to lead somebody to Jesus Christ, he or she cannot be saved by “scientific” arguments and reasoning. The Apostle Paul said it best:
O TIMOTHY, KEEP THAT WHICH IS COMMITTED TO THY TRUST, AVOID PROFANE AND VAIN BABBLINGS, AND OPPOSITIONS OF SCIENCE FALSELY SO CALLED.
I TIMOTHY 6:20
Needless to say there are plenty of armchair, brainiac, pseudo scientists, who will try to drag you into arguments about evolution. They will want to talk about dinosaurs and billions of years ago, but don’t get dragged into “scientific” arguments because they are mostly only “vain babblings.” The only hope anybody has is if they hear the Word of God!
IS NOT MY WORD LIKE AS A FIRE? SAITH THE LORD; AND LIKE A HAMMER THAT BREAKETH THE ROCK IN PIECES?
JEREMIAH 23:29
When we enter into stupid verbal sparring matches, we are laying down God’s supernatural and mighty hammer and throwing aside the sword of the spirit, which is the Word of God. Don’t do it! Many of God’s people are being held in bondage. They need to be saved. We can’t save people by our own wit, or our own wisdom, or our own strength. People can only be saved and delivered by hearing the Word of God! We must memorize and speak God’s Word if we want to deliver people from the darkness into the light, from bondage into liberty.
AFTER THESE THINGS THE WORD OF THE LORD (YEH-HO-VAW’) CAME UNTO ABRAM IN A VISION, SAYING, FEAR NOT, ABRAM: I AM THY SHIELD, AND THY EXCEEDING GREAT REWARD.
AND ABRAM SAID, LORD (AD-O-NOY’) GOD (YEH-HO-VEE’), WHAT WILT THOU GIVE ME, SEEING I GO CHILDLESS, AND THE STEWARD OF MY HOUSE IS THIS ELIEZER OF DAMASCUS?
AD-O-NOY’; an emphatic form of aw-done’; from an unused root word (meaning to rule); sovereign, i.e. controller (human or divine); the Lord (used as a proper name of God only). (The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, James Strong, LL.D., S.T.D., Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1984.)
God is sovereign over everything and everyone. God’s eye is on the sparrow. God controls every event from the birth of a baby to the supernova of a dying sun. God is not unapproachable, nor is He unconcerned. God is willing and able to be on intimate terms with everyone, just like he was on intimate terms with Abraham. That is why Abraham is called the father of our faith. He showed us that a man can be a friend of God.
God showed us through Abraham that He wants to be our friend. However, God is not like any other friend, God can and will intervene in any circumstance on our behalf. God can part the Red Sea, God can make the sun stand still upon Gibeon and the moon stand still in the valley of Ajalon! All we have to do is speak His Word and believe. Oh what a friend we have in Jesus!