Ascension Life Booklet . Paul's Revelation . What is Man?

What is man

Spirit Soul and Body

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. (I Thess. 5:23)

As we said earlier, the revelation that the apostle Paul received from the Lord Jesus Christ concerning His redemptive work and what it means to the believer is really a system made up of about seven interrelated parts. You won't find all seven of these laid out step by step as we will study them in any one passage or any one letter of Paul's. But when you collect all that he said about who the believer is and what he has as a result of Christ's redemptive work, a system will emerge. It helps us greatly to see this system, for it brings the major areas of "Paul's Revelation" together and gives us a more comprehensive grasp of who we are and what we have in Christ.

The first pillar or link in Paul's system is that man is a spirit, he has a soul and he lives in a body, but first and foremost for Paul, man is a spirit. Paul is the one that gives us that classic statement "spirit and soul and body" in I Thessalonians 5:23. And as we study his epistles, we find that his division and emphasis of these leads us to the conclusion that for him man is a spirit, he has a soul, and he lives in a body.

The human spirit as distinct from the mind or soul, has a prominent place in Paul's thinking. You see, your spirit is your innermost being; your soul is your intellect, emotions, and will. Paul's emphasis on the spirit of man lies at the heart of his understanding of the fall and how the fall affected man. It also lies at the heart of his understanding of the believer, his place and identity in Christ Jesus, and of how the believer is to grow and develop once he has been put in Christ.

For Paul, the spirit of man is the real man. He uses the term "heart" meaning the core or principle part in referring to it (Romans 2:28,29; Ephesians 3:16,17). He uses the term "inward man" in referring to it as in II Corinthians 4:16 "...though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day." We know from Romans 2:28, 29 that the term "inward" refers to the heart or spirit, so the term "inward man" here refers to the spirit. Paul uses the term "I" or "we" in referring to his own spirit in II Corinthians 4:16-18; 1 Corinthians 14:14; I Corinthians 9:27. He uses the pronoun "you" when he speaks of others spirit's as in Ephesians 2:1, "...you hath he quickened, who were dead...." We know this refers to their spirit because these Ephesians weren't dead physically, but spiritually before they were saved. He doesn't even bother to say "your spirit was dead," he just says "you were dead." In Ephesians 4:24, he calls the reborn spirit the "new man."

We will continue this line of thought in our next lesson

What is man ?