In this message we come to the fifth mystery in 1 John.
We began with the mystery of life, the divine, eternal life which is in reality the Triune God Himself. Then we spoke of fellowship, that is, the life moving in us to bring God and us into oneness. After that we continued with the mutual abiding. We abide in the Triune God and He abides in us. Then in the last message we dealt with the anointing, the moving within us of the Triune God as the all-inclusive compound Spirit.
The anointing, as we said, imparts the divine elements into us. All these elements are included in the compound Spirit. Besides divinity, there is humanity, Christ’s death and its effectiveness, and His resurrection and the power of that resurrection. This life-giving Spirit, the very Triune God processed into our being, is now anointing, “painting,” us that we may gain more of Himself. As we receive not only the divine elements but also the death and resurrection of Christ, we get the proper killing and the rich nourishment. That wonderful death works in us to kill the negative things of our natural being. That wonderful resurrection supplies us with Christ’s divine riches. By this anointing we are being transformed and are growing into maturity.
The fifth mystery in 1 John is twofold. It comprises both our regenerated spirit and the seed of God. These are within us, though they are abstract and invisible.
The Bible clearly teaches that we have a spirit. The belief that man has three parts-body, soul, and spirit-is called trichotomy. This is according to the Bible. In Genesis 2:7 “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Even from this verse it is clear that man has three parts. God firstly used the dust to form a physical body for man. Then He used breath to form man’s spirit. The breath of life got into man and became his spirit. The spirit of man is mentioned in Proverbs 20:27. Spirit and breath in Hebrew are the same word. This indicates that the breath breathed into man became the human spirit. When these two parts, the body and spirit, came together, they produced the third part, a living soul. First Thessalonians 5:23 also mentions these three parts. “And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Trichotomy then is a scriptural teaching.
Some Christian teachers, however, believe instead in dichotomy. They follow psychology, which claims that man has a visible, outward part and an invisible, inward part. The outward part is lower; the inward, higher. To those who believe this way, the spirit and soul are synonyms.
The translators for the New American Standard Version evidently believe this way. In Philippians 2:2 they have “united in spirit” and in 2:20 “of kindred spirit.” In both instances the Greek word is not spirit but psuche, soul. In our Recovery Version we are careful to translate these words according to the Greek. These scholars may know Greek well. Yet because of their concept that spirit and soul are synonyms, they have translated according to their concept rather than according to what the Bible says.
Do you believe that spirit, mind, soul, and heart are simply different ways of referring to one thing? The Bible makes a distinction! It treasures our spirit while it condemns our soul. In His salvation, God has rejected our soul but regenerated our spirit. Our spirit is a pleasure to Him. Animals have souls, but trees and flowers do not. If we do not distinguish between the spirit and the soul, we put ourselves in the same category as cats and dogs. As human beings, we have a treasured part. Zechariah 12:1 says that the Lord “stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.” How great must be the spirit of man for it to be ranked with the heavens and the earth! In the Bible, besides God there are three important things: the heavens, the earth, and man’s spirit (not his soul). We are not mere animals. We are men with a spirit.
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