DEATH AND BEYOND

Souls and spirits
in the Old Testament

Him. The body or the flesh cannot love on its own, the breath cannot love on its own but put them together and there is a living soul that can love Him fully. The conclusion to be drawn is that there is no part of us which can live separately on its own, and worship and love God in another form somewhere away from us.

Here is another aspect to think about.
The flesh cannot sin on its own, the breath cannot sin on its own, but the flesh and the breath together make a life that can choose to sin. The Bible tells us sin is breaking one of God’s commandments. It follows naturally that someone who has done wrong and has died is not alive somewhere else suffering torment for eternal ages. There is no part of us that can do this.

• It is important for us to be able to make a clear distinction between mythology, philosophy and God’s word.

Just as Plato said that the flesh was sinful and that we have a double that is the ‘divine spark’, so he also said there was a heaven and a hell that exist side by side. The Bible does not say this. It is found only in philosophy.

Souls and spirits in the New Testament …
Jesus and the disciples spoke together in Aramaic, a Syrian language but the written language of the New Testament was Greek. As a result of Alexander the Great’s conquests, Greek was the international language of that time. It was a little like the way English is used today all over the world in computers, in professional journals or for research. The writers of the New Testament were careful to choose Greek words that reflected the same concepts as in the Hebrew of the Old Testament The theology did not change, when the written language of the day changed.
There are just two words that need to be considered in this study:

psuche and pneuma.

• Psuche The first word psuche is used in the same way as nephesh, in the Old Testament to mean ‘soul’. In the Authorised Version of the Bible it is translated ‘soul’. The question we are considering is whether any of these verses contain anything referring to an ‘immortal soul’ that lives on beyond death.