Man

Good morning. We've been going through the doctrinal statement and the last time, well, we talked about the Holy Spirit and somebody came up to me afterwards and said, you know, that was way too much information, way too fast. So hopefully today, the subject today is man, as you can tell by the scriptures that were read. And the doctrinal statement reads as follows.

We believe that man was originally created in the image and likeness of God. but that he sinned by disobeying God. He thereby incurred spiritual and physical death. Spiritual death, which is separation from God, has been transmitted to the entire human race, the man Christ Jesus being the only exception, so that all are sinners by nature and by practice.

So what the Scriptures show us that we'll go over today is that there really are three types or categories of men on the earth, or have been, maybe is a better way to say it. There was Adam as he was created by God before the fall. He's different than men after the fall. There are the man, which all of us are really familiar with, the man after the fall, and then there's the new man, who's the Lord Jesus Christ.

Man is an unqualified declaration in the Word of God. He is created by God. In Genesis 1, 26 and 27, God said, let us make man. And we'll make him in our own image and after our own likeness, and he'll have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the heavens, and over the cattle, over the earth, over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. And God created man in his own image The image of God created he him, male and female, he created them. If you look at this verse, it doesn't go into so much about the makeup of what God did in creating man, but kind of discusses more the intentions he had for him and the place and the responsibilities he would have being a creature of God.

And then in Genesis 2.7, which is more along the lines of the makeup of how God did it, And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives.

And man became a living soul. So you have three elements here. You have the material element, which is the dust of the ground. And you have the crucial factor, which is God breathing into his nostrils the breath of lives. And the final issue is that man, because of that, became a living soul. This is a chart, and I have several charts that I stole from Hal Malloy because he has good ones, about what man's makeup is.

He's a priune kind of a creature with a body, soul, and spirit, and in the unity of a heart, mind, essence, natures, and flesh. his body really gives him world consciousness, his soul self-consciousness, and his spirit is God consciousness. So, the first part is that he was made from the dust of the ground, and I think most people will accept that man, well, maybe not most people, the material side of man being, he's a direct and immediate creation of God. The word Adam in the Hebrew, means of the earth and it also, part of it means red earth. I don't know why red earth.

So God formed the body of a man out of existing material that he already had created. So he didn't just say, let's have a human body. He took material that he'd already made and he formed this body. And then that body has certain characteristics to it. It's fashioned by God from the elements that are already in the ground. And then, as we'll see in a minute, it's given life by the breath of God or the Spirit of God breathing into it. And it's really a natural or a soulish body.

It's designed to function in this environment. And it's adapted to the soul and the earth. And it's mortal and it's neutral. By neutral, I mean that the body itself is not sinful, neither is it righteous. it can manifest either life, either the life of Christ or the life of the sin nature.

And the life of the body is sustained by God via the soul and the spirit that's in him. So the body returns at death back to the elements in the ground, which was part of the curse. Now, that's the material part. Let's look at some of the elements of the immaterial part of man. God breathes into him the breath of lives.

And so it's not said anywhere that I could find that the immaterial part was created. It was a direct transmission of life from the eternal God into man's body. Now that makes him unique, don't you think? Because there's no other creature that I could find that was generated like that.

So the life that was in God came out of him directly into the man, and that's what animated him. So because of that, man has a fairly exalted position and dignity and honor that really is above all other creatures because he got life directly from God. So the human soul and the human spirit are originated from God himself and so thus they're in his likeness and his image. So we have two aspects here. The Lord God, the one who affected who affects this transmission of life, and the breath of life, which is the means that he uses.

Now, no matter where you look, you won't find anything said about the fact that man's body has anything to do with his image and likeness of God. His body doesn't at all. But when you consider the immaterial parts of man, that is what is in the image and likeness of God.

Man has a higher nature, and this is communicated directly and not created, it was just communicated. So in Genesis 26 and 27, it says in our image and likeness, if you look at God, you can say God is a spirit, he's not soul, he's not body, and he is a person. On the other side, you could say, well, man has a spirit that he got from God, and he has a soul that he got from God, and he has a body and he is a person.

So by creating man, God determined, I think, that he was going to deal with all the circumstances in his creation through man. He was going to use man to do it. And he was going to do it in man by creating this image and likeness in him. And that, you could say, is his personhood and his spirit. And I think he could probably say soul, too. I find it interesting that because of this communication of life, Man is immediately given a position of authority and other things that are similar to God.

How do I know about God's image? What would you say if I said to you, well, Adam before the fall was created in God's image, what would that be like? I actually struggled a lot with this until I spoke with Hal, and Hal said, well, you know, maybe what you ought to do is take a look at what God is and see if man lines up next to him. So God is glorious, and you take a look at his attributes, he's holy, he's righteous, and he's just.

Well, you know, man has the capacity to be set apart to God, and he has the capacity to be righteous and fair. The difference is that God is all of this to the absolute nth degree, and man has some of it, maybe is the best way to say. God is infinite, man is finite. God is omnipotent, which means he is all-powerful. But man has some power that God gave him. God is omnipresent, which means he's everywhere. Man has the capacity to be in one place at one time. God is omniscient.

Man has the capacity to think abstractly, reason, understand. He has intelligence. Well, the difference between God and man there is that man, we think sequentially, don't we? We think this thought, then the next thought, and then the next thought, and the next thought. God has all knowledge. He doesn't think sequentially. It all is available in his mind right now. God is self-existent. Man depends on God for physical and spiritual life, but man is eternal, just like God is.

God is love. Man has a capacity to love and worship God. He has a capacity to love and worship God. manifest God's love. The believer has said in Romans 5 that the Holy Spirit sheds abroad in the heart of man a love for God. So he has a capacity to receive God's love and to manifest it. God is grace and man can manifest God's grace and mercy. Grace and mercy are two characteristics of God that men can definitely demonstrate.

God is immutable, which means He doesn't change. He's the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. And I think sometimes we think that our sinning or our prayers or our begging will get God to change. No, He's the same. We're changeable. We can change for good. We can be conformed to the image of Christ, which would make us to some degree immutable.

God is truth. The Lord Jesus said, I am truth. We can learn truth, and we can identify with the truth. God is ever faithful to himself and to what he says, and we can manifest the faithfulness of Christ. God is spirit, as we talked about a minute ago, and we have an eternal spirit, and with that spirit we can fellowship with God. God is sovereign. We're subjects to God. I think sovereignty is a difficult concept for Americans. They don't understand sovereignty very well.

But before the fall, God gave dominion of the creation to man over all life on the earth, which is a characteristic of God himself. The spirit of man is not an act of creation, necessarily, but rather it's in the nature of procreation. The breath of life procreated man's spirit, something which, being out from God, creates in man, you could say, an organ or a faculty as well as a function.

In Zechariah 12.1, at the end of that verse, it says, and God forms the forms of the spirit of man within him. So your spirit and my spirit is something God formed, it's not created. So I also would say that the general teaching of scripture would say that we'd have to conclude that this former of your spirit is the Holy Spirit himself, who breathed into man, and by this breathing not only made him animate, he could move, gave him a source of life, soul life, but formed the link with God, which is the human spirit.

So, by union with God and Spirit, Adam was conditioned by God to have everything in relation to and dependence upon God. Now, I'm talking about Adam before he falls. Adam's spirit is a principle of life which was breathed into him by God, and his spirit and man's spirit allows him to know God and to fellowship with Him, because Adam walked with God, communicated with Him, had fellowship with Him. And Adam's knowledge and power before the fall, I think, were essentially to be spiritual. So a spiritual relationship through a spiritual organ and function made all of this possible with God and with Adam. In this breath of life, the next part of this verse says that man became a living soul.

It's interesting if you see that statement up there, trying to distinguish the difference between a soul and a spirit. Lewis Barry Chafer says the distinction between soul and spirit is as incomprehensible as life itself. And the efforts of man to frame definitions must always be unsatisfactory. Well, he probably studied it a lot more than I ever have, but he's right. It's a very difficult thing to distinguish You can define it like you could say soul is immaterial part of man which relates to his human life, his action, his emotion, his environment or mind, emotion and will. Give it a definition. But it's hard to find a definition for what the immaterial part of man as a spirit is.

You could say that it relates to his ability to worship and fellowship with God and divine connection and influence from God, which is okay. But I found three verses that define, or not necessarily define, but do describe that there is a soul and that there is a spirit. 1 Corinthians 15, 44, talking about man being sown in a natural body but raised in a spiritual one. And if there's a natural body, there's also a spiritual body.

So it would indicate from that verse that we have been sown, we all sit here now in natural bodies, but there's a spiritual body waiting for us. in 1 Thessalonians 5.23, and the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly, and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire without blame at the coming of the Lord Jesus.

So the Word of God defines three And then, Hebrews 4.12 is the one that probably is the most significant in terms of understanding or separating out what's of the soul and what's of the spirit. For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing of the soul and spirit.

I'm persuaded that only a believer, a true believer, who is in the Word of God will ever be able to decipher what's spiritual and what's soulish. And I would say that most of Christianity that you see portrayed today is soulish and not spiritual. And without the Word of God, and without the study of the Word of God, I don't think you'll ever be able to tell the difference. I really don't. So the soul gives man Self-awareness. The soul is that aspect of the immaterial part of man that is related to the natural earthly life and life that he functions in.

It's kind of an in-between maybe. He has mentality, has intellect, discernment, he can think, he can reason, he can make decisions. He has senses, he can interpret, how his body is doing. He can feel it. He can have instincts about things. He has emotions, sensitivity to other people. He has compassion. And he has the ability to make a choice about different things. Also within that, I think you could say that man has a conscience. There's this apparatus within a man that one's kind of a witness as to whether his activities are acceptable to God or not, or if they're bad or good.

I'm not sure, because I couldn't find it, whether Adam had one of these or not, because he was created innocent and he didn't know good and evil, so he didn't have the contrast. He was not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, We all like to say, well, gee, he didn't know what evil was, but he didn't know what good was either, because he was innocent. So I don't think he was conscious of something that was in play with him. How did I jump ahead there?

So the word translated here for soul is, I'm not sure I can pronounce that in Greek, it's suke, It's also translated by words like living creature, a person, appetite, mind, etc. The other part of man that you'll read in the Word of God is that he has this thing called a heart, and it generally refers to the center or the seat of the human life, but it can be used to discuss physical heart. He's got this organ in him that is referred to as a heart.

It can also be referred to as his intellectual life, Emotional life, volitional life, even a sinful life and spiritual life. In Romans 10, 9 and 10, the Word talks about that it's with the heart man believes, resulting in righteousness or salvation. So there is this word used of the core or the center of human life in the Word of God referred to as the heart. The soul also has a property called the mind, and it usually refers to the center of the seat of reflective consciousness, comprising the faculties of perception, of understanding, of judging and determining. But it also talks about the mind of the flesh and the mind of the spirit.

So the mind of the flesh can be It can be blinded, it can be darkened, you name it. Pick one or two. Defiled, it can be blinded, it can be darkened, and it's at enmity with God. So the mind of the natural man, after the fall, is described as the mind of the flesh, and it's at enmity with God. It can't be reconciled.

And we as believers can manifest either one of those two minds. We can manifest the mind of the flesh, which means that we're not any different than the natural man. There's a perception that when you become a believer that you can take this mind of the flesh and you can somehow make it better. The believer with two natures has two minds.

It's either the mind of the flesh or the mind of the spirit, which is, the mind of the spirit is literally the mind of the resurrected Christ, his mind. Let this mind be in you, the viewpoint that was also in Christ Jesus. And then there's this other issue about natures. When you talk about a nature, the description of a nature is what makes a creature what it is. I use angel, man, horse, duck, chicken. I've used the term dog a lot. Why does your dog bark? Because it's a dog. It's got the nature of a dog. You won't go home and you can't teach your dog to meow. You can't do it because it doesn't have that nature.

So man is unique in that he was made in the image and likeness of God and that he had a nature with all the elements of it that were of him and like him and would be pleasing to him. But he sinned. And when he sinned, that image and likeness of God was severely marred. And we'll talk about some of those elements in a minute. Adam's nature, his whole nature became sinful.

And not only that, because of the way God created him, he had the capacity to pass it down. to pass it on. So after Adam sinned, Adam really turns out to be a creature that's something other than what God created. And believers, through their identification with Christ, possess a new nature, which is sinless, and they become partakers of the divine nature, which is Christ. This sin nature, this fall that we have, it's not merely that at some point man had a lapse or that he took a wrong turn.

He was heading towards the tree of life and turned left to the tree of knowledge and good and evil. Or he just became a delinquent. Or he's just an offender. Or he's not just on the wrong road needing to be redirected or put on the right one. Neither is man just a victim of an evil mood, or a fugitive from the law, running free, sowing wild oats, or estranged from his better self. That isn't what man is. Man, by nature, is a sinner, and he's alienated from God, and he is something different now, after the fall, than what God created.

Also, it says that he has flesh, and so the term flesh is kind of a difficult term, because in the Bible it refers to all kinds of things. It can refer to the material part that in Genesis 1711, it talks about the flesh that was attached to the bones. Or in Acts and Ephesians, it just talks to the flesh as the physical body. It also can refer to the immaterial and material parts of man that he has infirmity in his flesh, or he's flesh and blood, meaning that he's frail and he's feeble. or that it says about the Lord Jesus Christ that the Word became flesh. And it also talks about the life in the flesh, and referring to just a totally immaterial part of man.

In Galatians 5, it says that the Spirit lusts against the flesh, or the Spirit has really strong desires against this thing called the flesh, and the flesh against the Spirit, and they're contrary one to another. I always ask the question there, if it's the Holy Spirit who has strong desires against the flesh and the flesh against the spirit, where are you?

Are you the spirit? No. Are you the flesh? Not as a believer, you're not. Here's this entity within man, termed the flesh, that has really strong desires to manifest through the believer, and the Spirit of God on the other side of that battle is engaged the flesh to manifest the life of the Lord Jesus. Paul says in Romans 8 that if you're in the flesh, you can't please God. You can't do it.

And believers in 8 and 9 are not in the flesh, but the non-believer is. Now, here's another. that God said in 128, be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

So God gave Adam and Eve the power to procreate. They could generate bodies, they could generate souls and spirits, and they would do it according to the principle of after their own kind. They would do it materially and immaterially based on that principle. So if Adam and Eve would have had children before the fall, they would have been just like them. You see that?

So it's part of the image and likeness of God to be able to do that. So you could sum up and say man as created by God, was or is a living soul that abides in a body that has a spirit, and that man was created in the image and likeness of God, he's unique from all other creatures, he's a person, and he was created innocent, and he was given dominion over the first creation, and he has the ability to procreate after his own kind. But then he sinned, and he disobeyed God.

Now, in Genesis 2.17, it says that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, and in the day that thou eat of it, thou shalt surely die. In Hebrew, when they want to emphasize something in that language, they just repeat the word. So in Hebrew, if you read this, you would say, for in the day that thou eat thereof, thou shalt die, die. that would put a real emphasis on the fact that you are going to die, and this is a principle and a consequence. It's interesting that God puts into play not only this law for Adam, but he implements the consequence that disobedience equals death.

And that principle, once in place, can't be changed. So when the appeal comes to Eve and Adam, it doesn't come, Adam, In any other way than attack, the first thing is to attack this principle. So what does he say? You're not going to die. That principle isn't right. You will not die. So the first lie that Satan tells is to contradict this principle. The principle is that if you sin, you're guilty, and if you're guilty, you die. It's unbreakable. This is an unbreakable connection between sin and its consequence, which is death.

Now, Satan's temptation to man was to his soul. The appeal wasn't to his spirit, because if it would have been, his spirit, because it was out from God, would have immediately gone to God for reference. But Satan comes at Eve soullessly. He comes after the organ that creates the self-consciousness. And so he's dealing with her based on reason, desire, will, things like that, the faculties of the soul. And instead of allowing the Spirit of God in, man begins to act independently or soulishly. The temptation to Adam was to have everything in himself. This was suggested as possible and that he could be a self-directing, self-possessing, self-sufficient, independent being. So watch the soulish things here as we look at the appeal to the soul.

Satan says, for God knows that in the day that you eat thereof, your eyes will be opened. You're going to know. And you'll be as God, you'll know good and evil. Appeal to the soul. And in verse 6 he says, And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, appeal to the soul. And that it was a delight to the eyes, and the tree was desired to make one wise. You see anything that appeals to the spirit of man in there? I don't. It's all to his soul. She took the fruit thereof and did eat it, and she gave it to her husband with her, and he did eat. So, guess what? The principle was implemented. If you sin, you die. So, in dying, they died.

So, you have to ask yourself, how much of this image and likeness to God that Adam had was harmed or was retained, maybe, by man after he fell? Well, God was set aside inside man absolutely as his head and his Lord, and Satan was given that place. The spirit of man was so violated, it ceased to be the link between God and himself. And fellowship of God, which was always spiritual, was destroyed, and the spirit sank down and became really in subjection to the soul, I think. This doesn't mean that the spirit no longer existed, but that the ascendancy of the spirit in man was surrendered to the soul. So far as man was concerned, he died to God. And it was the upsetting of God's order so that spiritual function was affected fatally.

So thus you can say that man has become really an altogether other type or species than God intended. The main difference, I think, is that man became a soul man, and a soul that's infected with a sin nature, and that's what controls man. His soul infected with a sin nature, and he's not preeminently anymore a spiritual man. He's a soulish man.

So, every man with a soul controlled by a sin nature has him in abject bondage to sin because of the fall. In Genesis 6-5, Jehovah saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. There isn't any wiggle room in there. There is no wiggle room in that at all.

In Jeremiah 17.9, the heart is deceitful above all things. It is exceedingly corrupt.

Who can know it? So spiritual death, which is separation from God, has been transmitted to the entire race of men was a federal head or he was the beginning of the race. And all that's going to be true of the head of the race is going to be true of all those that come from him. Because of the principle of after its own kind. So when Adam procreates, what does he get? He gets what he is. He gets what he is.

In Genesis 5.3 it says, Adam lived 130 years and begat a son in his own likeness after his image and called his name Seth. Was Seth a sinner? Yes, he was. Where did he get that? From his dad.

Psalm 51.5, Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. That doesn't mean that she committed a sin by conceiving you. It meant that in sin, in this thing sin, conception took place. And here's kind of the kicker part. We talked about this in Sunday school.

Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, And so death passed upon all men for that all sin. And so the question is, when did you become a sinner? Was it when you were begotten? Was it when you committed your first sin? Or was it when Adam sinned? Answer, when Adam sinned because you sinned in him. So you became a sinner before you were even progenerated. Isn't that something? because you sinned in Adam. I mean, I've had guys tell me, you know, that Adam's a rat, because if I'd have been Adam, I wouldn't have done it.

Oh yeah? So God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, etc. So now God gave Adam and Eve the power to procreate. So what do they produce? They produce a generated body that's decaying. And now they produce a soul with a sin nature. and they produce a spirit that's dead to God. That's what they have the power to do. All offspring by decree are always produced after its own kind, whether it's materially or spiritually. So we're all sinners by nature and practice. Every single human being is.

A fool has said in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt and they have done abominable works. There is none that does good. None. And they are all gone aside. They are all together become filthy. There is none that does good. No, not one. Romans 3.10 repeats the same thing. For it is written, there is none righteous. No, not one. There is none that understands. There is none that seeks after God. They've all turned aside. They have all together become unprofitable. There is none that does good.

No, not so much as one. We're talking about the man after the fall of Adam. That's his description. Not a single one. So, the only man that's different is Christ himself. And why? Because he's a new man. He's a brand new man. He didn't come from Adam, so he's not after Adam's kind.

Hebrews 1.3 says, Who being the brightness of God's glory, His glory, and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power. This man is not made in the image and likeness of God, and it never says that man is the express image of God, but it does say that Christ is. He is exactly in the flesh of who God is.

In Colossians 1.15 it says, Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature. Exactly, exactly who God is.

For it pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell. Nothing lacking, all the fullness of God is in Him. And then it says about you and I who are believers, For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead, no problem there, and you are complete in Him which is the head of all principality and power. When you and I, coming from this group to being in Christ, it's said about you that you're absolutely complete in Him.

So now you have all the representations of the image and likeness of God. So every person on the planet now is either an image bearer of Adam and his wonderful state, or he's an image bearer of Christ positionally. And image-bearer means that he's a continual representation and a manifestation, but not necessarily the expressed image of a person as Christ is of the Father. You and I can represent or manifest the life of the Lord Jesus as believers, but the Lord Jesus Christ is the expressed, exact, full image of who God is.

The history of man's image can be defined as God's plan and purpose was to make man in his own image and his own likeness, as we said in Genesis 1, 26 and 27. The fall and its results, every man born bears Adam's corrupt image and likeness except for Christ. And the last question, and I'll close with this, is has God accomplished his purpose? Has God now, in mankind, created men and women that are after his own image and after his likeness, I would say, yeah, everybody here is one of those people.

Because positionally, if you're in Christ, you have his life, and he is the express image of God himself. So those of us who are in Christ have the capacity and really the privilege of manifesting the very life of the Lord Jesus Christ as you spend your time. Let's close. Our dear father, how we thank you for the life we have in your son. How we thank you for the position that we enjoy as being your very offspring. Father, we look forward to growing in the knowledge and grace of your dear son so that we are more and more conformed to his very image. We thank you and we pray in your son's precious name. Amen.