Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What is the Soul? | My Favorite Verses | Genesis 1.20

Starting point is 00:00:01 Welcome to 10-minute Bible talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. We are currently exploring some of our favorite Bible verses and how they've changed our lives. Also, if you want to connect with us, follow us on Twitter at TMBT podcast. You can also check out our hashtag, hashtag, AskTTMBT, where you can ask us anything and we'd love to connect with you. A few months ago, Disney Pixar released their latest. film Soul to rave reviews. I was not one of those rave reviews. Now, here's the thing.

Starting point is 00:00:38 My bad review wasn't because I actually watched the movie. It was because I had watched the trailer. And in the trailer, I saw a pop culture version of what the soul is. And of course, it's what everybody kind of thinks of as a soul. Some sort of non-material inner nature of a person. Some sort of non-material part of a person that defines who he or she really really is. The soul is the locus of our personality. It's the heart of our personhood. It's our immaterial identity. The soul isn't my body. The soul is me who I really am. Now, a friend of mine told me how dumb I was being. He said, look, you cannot dislike a movie before you've watched a movie. And he was right. As it turned out, I loved the movie's soul, mostly because it's

Starting point is 00:01:28 not a movie about your theology of the soul. It's a movie with a theology of the soul as a little plot device. So look, the movie is not bad, but I do think it begs a question. What is the soul? Does your conception of the soul differ much from Disney Pixar? Do you believe that God makes human souls, each with their own individual spark, each with your own unique euness that makes you who you really are? Do you believe that you can divide you? up the human person into essentially two parts. Your body? You know, that's the meaty stuff, your bones, your flesh, and the other part, which is your soul. And do you think that the soul, this immaterial part, that it's the fundamental part of who you are? Do you believe that when we die,

Starting point is 00:02:15 the soullish part of us returns to God? And that that's really what we're supposed to be, freed of this flesh, freed of our blood and bones, and freed to go be with God, free of our desire to sin and rebel. I used to believe all these things. Until I read a verse that changed my life, it's the first time the word soul is ever used in the Bible. So I'll go ahead and read that verse. It might surprise you.

Starting point is 00:02:40 Genesis 120. And God said, Let the waters swarm with swarms of living things and let the birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens. So, did you hear it? Is soul anywhere? Probably not. And that's because it's not in our English versions. I was reading Genesis 120 in the Hebrew with some friends. And yes, in case you're wondering, that's a real thing. I have sat around and read Hebrew with people. But let's hop in. The Hebrew word that we translate as soul in English is the word nefesh. It's used over 600 times in the Hebrew Bible. And like many people, I assume that the very first use of nefesh of soul had to do with Hebrew.

Starting point is 00:03:24 In Genesis 2.7, check this out. And the Lord God formed the man of the dust of the ground, and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul. But I was dead wrong. That's not actually the first use of the word soul. The word nefesh, it appears four times before the Bible ever even mentions humans. And all four of those times apply to non-human creatures. Starting with the verse I just read, I'll give you my own translation, let the water swarm with swarms of living souls. The first souls were fished. That's the point here. Or at least that's what I yelled out during my eureka moment while I'm reading Hebrew with my Hebrew pals. They all looked a bit dumbfounded. I guess they wanted to move on and ignore this extraordinary insight

Starting point is 00:04:16 that I thought we had all seen together. But I wouldn't let them. I started asking them questions. Does this mean that animals have souls? Not just humans? Should this change how we think about fishing, how we think about hunting? I was shocked, as we kept reading, to discover that it's not just sea creatures who are called souls, it's also land creatures. In verse 30, the author describes all living animals as living souls. So as you can imagine, this ended up sending me on a journey to explore what the Hebrew word nefesh really means. And what I came to discover is that the Hebrew word for soul is a wildly flexible word. It's related to the Hebrew word for breathing.

Starting point is 00:04:58 In fact, it's so closely related to it that sometimes nefesh means throat or neck, because you breathe through your throat and neck. And this word nefesh, it can be applied to virtually anything that breathes. Now, that's probably the case because in the ancient world, the quintessential sign of life was breathing. So sometimes in the Hebrew, you'll see the phrase my nefesh. And in English, it's just translated as me. You don't even get my soul. It's just me. Sometimes nefesh is simply translated as people, right? So it'll say, look at all those nefesh's, and it will translate as look at all those people. The more that I read, the more I realized that

Starting point is 00:05:38 nefesh or soul, at least to the Hebrew mind, it wasn't just a part of me. The nefesh is me. I don't have a soul. I am a soul. According to the Hebrew mind, a soul is any living being in all of its composite parts. When you give me a high five, you give my soul a high five. If you want to find my soul, you're going to have to come and find the real world physical me. This is why Genesis calls fish souls. They're alive. And that alivishness, that's nefesh, your body, your breath. your blood, your bones, your will, your mind, your desires, all of you and all of your glorious wholeness, that is your nefesh, that is your soul. You don't have a soul, you are a soul. Now, you might be asking, are you saying that I'm just all physical, that there are no non-material parts of me? I'm not quite

Starting point is 00:06:36 saying that. I'm saying that the Bible doesn't really talk about those non-material parts. At least it doesn't talk about them very often. And that's not what the Bible is. is talking about when it uses the word soul. In fact, in those rare instances where the Bible talks about us in a non-material sense, that non-material part of me, it rarely does it in a positive way. And it never uses the word soul. It most frequently uses the word shades. So whenever it's talking about dead people, it will talk about their shades, their non-material part. And again, they're usually not in a very good condition. If part of us can exist apart from the body, this non-material part, which, by the way, it does somehow seem possible. That part of me,

Starting point is 00:07:18 divorced from the body, is not in a good or natural state. We aren't who we fully are without our bodies. So when the Bible uses the word soul, it's not just talking about that immaterial part. It's talking about the whole of me, including that immaterial part. Now, I know what you're wondering. You're probably thinking, well, what the heck happens to me after I die? Well, you'll have to wait for another episode to come in a few weeks. Right now, I just want to focus on the soul. Where did we get these ideas about a non-material essence inside of me that really is me? Where do we get this idea that the body, it's not the real me, that the soul, that's the real me? Well, they came from a pagan philosopher who lived hundreds of years before Jesus in the Greek city of Athens. His name was

Starting point is 00:08:06 Plato. Now, Plato, he believed that this physical world was broken and corrupted. The goal of life was to escape our physicality into the realm of the non-material, into the realm of the ideal. He imagined that through philosophical development, people could, after death, ascend into this ideal state and permanently shuck off their prison of bone and flesh. In other words, Pixar's theology is far closer to Plato's theology than it is to Jesus' theology. Jesus comes to us firmly within the Hebrew tradition, which embraces physicality. He taught about the resurrection of the dead consistently. Why did he talk about it? Because the ultimate goal of

Starting point is 00:08:50 humanity is not to leave our bodies behind and go up to heaven. The ultimate goal of humanity is to be resurrected and live in a renewed earth. So when he spoke about protecting your body but losing your soul. He wasn't saying, don't worry about your body, only worry about your immaterial parts. He was saying that this life is longer than the life that you will live in this one body. You can live for this one body, but you shouldn't live for that. You should live for the whole of you. You should live for your whole life, which of course he calls the soul, because the soul, that whole you that lives forever, that is the true you. What is a soul? He tells us again and again by speaking about the resurrection. You don't have a soul. You are a soul. Why does this matter? How does this

Starting point is 00:09:37 change my life? Well, it made me realize that I am a whole being and God designed me this way. My brain, my body, my food, my health, my spirituality, it's all intertwined because I'm all intertwined. Soul care isn't about mental exercises in quiet times. It's not about just that, I should say. it's about that and real exercise and how I use my body and how I use my time. I am a whole being. I'm not made up of parts that can be ignored and parts that can be nurtured. I honor my creator by integrating that whole self and taking care of the whole. When I say that God cares about your soul, I'm not talking about the immaterial bits of you. I'm talking about all of you. God wants all of you, body, mind, will, desires,

Starting point is 00:10:28 relationships, everything. You are a soul, all of you. Don't waste your soul. The only way to do that is by not wasting yourself and giving yourself all of your living soullishness to Jesus. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to or a family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.

Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What is the Soul? | My Favorite Verses | Genesis 1.20

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