April 3rd, 2025

THE FUNNY THING ABOUT BEING HUMAN

Of all earth’s creatures, human beings are the only ones who wonder what they are. The Psalmist asked three related questions: “What is man?” And then continued by asking why on earth would the Creator, who created so many amazing creatures, especially care for human beings, “that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him?” (Psalm 8:4) The answer to the Psalmist’s questions are found toward the end of the opening chapter of the Bible where it states: 

¶ Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens
and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
¶ So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:26-27

Human beings are unlike any other creation. Only human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. After this seminal introduction to the creation of humankind as male and female in Genesis 1, we then get some further details of this creation of humankind in Genesis 2. It is here that we learn that unlike the creation of all of the other animals who were created by the word of the Lord, humankind was created by the touch and breath of God: “then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Gen. 2:7). After the man was physically created with dust, God breathed “the breath of life” — which presumably describes God putting the unique human spirit into the physical corpse of the first human. After the man’s lifeless body was given ‘god-like’ spirit he became a “nefesh” (which is the Hebrew word often translated into English as ‘soul’). Thus, a ‘soul’ equals a body plus a spirit. This is why when the Bible refers to the whole person – body and spirit – it frequently uses the word soul (consider verses like Psalm 22:20).

This is also why the word ‘soul’ is biblically used interchangeably with the word ‘body’ (Gen. 42:21) or ‘spirit’ (Gen. 35:18). This is also why philosopher who discuss anthropology often use the interchangeable word for the human spirit, soul. These scholars argue for or against what they refer to as “substance dualism”. Substance dualism is the idea that human beings are physical and spiritual. Philosophers such as Brandon Rickabaugh, and J.P. Moreland, in the 2024 book, The Substance of Conscious, make the case that human beings are more than just physical beings. They offer several reasons for this: (1) Human consciousness, (2) Neural-plasticity (the mind has the capacity to create new neural pathways that “re-wire the brain”), (3) human intuition (our awareness that we are more than our bodies), (4) human beings are diachronically the same (even though humans atomically change every few years yet they are ostensibly the same and possess all their knowledge and memories which therefore cannot reside in them physically), and (5) so-called ‘near-death experiences’ [NDE] where a person experiences a cessation of brain-wave activity and vital organ functions and yet in that state they have an out-of-body experience including physical sensations, sight, hearing, and even conversations with deceased love ones! After being revived, they can describe in detail their NDE.

These reasons offered by J.P. Moreland and Brandon Rickabaugh, are just a few of the evidential reasons they offer for the reality of the human soul. These reasons for accepting the reality of the human soul lend support to the biblical texts which also describe the reality of the human soul – (i) Christ’s story of the rich man and Lazarus (Lk. 16:19-31); (ii) Christ’s statements that God is not the God of the dead (Mtt. 22:31-32); (iii) Christ’s statement to the crucified thief on the adjacent cross that he would be in Paradise with Him “today” (Lk. 23:43); (iv) Paul’s statement about dying by putting off the body like “a tent” and then be clothed with a heavenly tent after physical death (2Cor. 5:1-4); (v) The dead martyrs being conscious in heaven and enquiring how long they would have to wait before they were resurrected, and are told that they would receive what the Apostle Paul described to the Corinthians (Rev. 6:9-11). 

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If we can appreciate the implications of Christ’s Lordship over the whole earth we should begin to realise that His redeemed ones are also to beautify the earth just Adam and then Israel had failed to do. This at least should involve every local church which has a physical property taking every possible step to landscape their grounds beautifully. It should then lead to every family in every church also beautifying their properties as well – to the glory of God. To find out more about this, read my eBook THE MOST EMBARRASSING BOOK OF THE BIBLE… [CONTINUE]