The Scriptures speak much concerning the flesh, perhaps even more than concerning the soul. Romans 7:18 says, “For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, nothing good dwells.” Romans 8:6 says, “The mind set on the flesh is death,” and verse 7 says, “The mind set on the flesh is enmity against God.” In order to know how to experience the inner life, we need to know the things related to the flesh.
What do the Scriptures mean by the word flesh? It is not easy to give a proper, definite, and adequate definition of the flesh because the flesh is very complicated. Genesis 6:3 says, “And Jehovah said, My Spirit will not strive with man forever, for he indeed is flesh.” Here the word is may be translated has become. Because man became flesh, God gave him up, and the Holy Spirit of God would no longer strive with him. This indicates that before this time the Holy Spirit had been striving with man, but at this point God made the decision to give man up because man also became flesh.
We need all the Scriptures to give us the proper meaning of man becoming flesh. We have seen clearly that man was made of three parts: a spirit, a soul, and a body. At the time man was created, man had the flesh of his body, physically speaking, but he did not have the flesh as spoken of in Genesis 6. As we shall see, the flesh came into being through the transmutation of the body.
Man was made with a spirit, soul, and body, but man himself is neither a spirit nor a body. In all the Scriptures man is called not a spirit or a body but a soul. Genesis 2:7 tells us clearly that the man whom God created is a living soul. Genesis 12:5 also says, “And Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother’s son and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the souls that they had acquired in Haran.” The many people Abraham acquired in Haran are referred to as souls. Genesis 46:27 says, “All the souls of the house of Jacob, who came to Egypt, were seventy” (lit.). Man is called a soul in not only the Old Testament but also the New Testament. Romans 2:9 speaks of “tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man who commits evil, both of Jew first and of Greek,” and James 5:20 says, “Let him know that he who turns a sinner back from the error of his way will save that one’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.” A person is a soul, not a spirit or a body, yet this soul has a spirit to contact God, the spiritual world, and a body to contact the physical world. Man is a soul with two additional parts.
The soul is the very self, the very being of a person. God’s intention is that this soul would choose God as life and take God as life by man’s spirit through the Holy Spirit, so that God will be in the spirit within the soul, that is, in the spirit of the person, to be the highest authority. Thus, the soul comes under the control of the spirit in which God dwells. Then the soul is controlled, governed, and directed by God through the spirit, and it becomes the very person to act, express, and do things through God. In this way, God is expressed through the very person. This is God’s intention, and this is the right order of the three parts of man-spirit, soul, and body. The spirit must be first with God in it as life. The soul must stand with the spirit to take God as life and to submit to the spirit, to be controlled, directed, and governed by the spirit with God as life, so that under the direction, government, and control of the spirit, the soul expresses God Himself through the actions of the body. The body is under the direction of the soul, and the soul is under the direction of the spirit with God in it as life.
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