From Self-Life to God-Life

There are two words that are often translated ‘life’ in the NT: psyches and zoes. Psyches is also often translated ‘soul’, and this is the better translation. The soul of a person is the life of a person in the sense that the soul is constituted by the mind, the will, and the emotions. The difference between psyches and zoes is that psyches is the personal life of a human person, and zoes is the life of God that comes as the gift of Jesus Christ. For instance, when Jesus said that he came that we might have life, and have it to the full, he did not say that he came that we might have psyches; he said that he came that we might have zoes. He does not come to give us the gift of soul; that was what God gave Adam when he created him out of the dust of the earth: “God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul” (nephesh in the Hebrew). The life that Jesus brings to us goes beyond the life of the self, constituting the life of the Spirit; it is deeper than self-life, it is God-life.

This does not mean that there was something wrong with the gift of soul that God gave Adam at creation. In fact, it was a perfectly good gift. To be a living soul meant that Adam was aware of himself, aware of God, and aware of the world that he lived in. The gift of soul that Adam possessed was pure and untainted by the corruption that comes from evil desires. Because this was the case, Adam was able to serve God in the garden with a pure heart, never seeking to obtain anything for himself, because his self (or soul) had no consciousness of any kind of need. Adam had no wants, no unfulfilled desires, no unmet needs. He simply did what God asked him to do without asking what he would get out of it or what it would cost him.

God was the one who recognized that something was missing in Adam’s life, not Adam. The Scripture does not say that Adam asked God for a wife, or that he realized that he was missing something. It was God who said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” God knew what Adam needed before he asked for it, and he made provision for Adam without him even knowing that he had a need. In other words, it wasn’t that Adam had no needs, but that he fully trusted God to meet them, and so he was not conscious of any needs. Thus, he was able to serve God with a pure heart without giving thought to himself. So when God asked him to name the animals, Adam did not ask God how much he would be paid for such a task. He never barters with God, or attempts to obtain something. Instead, he entrusts himself to God and to the work to which he is called and is conscious only of the fact that his needs are fully met and that God is the one who provides for every one of them!

It was the serpent that convinced Adam and Eve that something was missing, that they needed something that God had not provided them with. Once this lie took hold in their minds, sin was the next logical step. All sin begins with the idea that I need something that God has not provided me with. This is what it means to be in want. David says, "The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want," and by this he means that he fully entrusts himself to God, knowing that God will provide him with everything that he needs. The soul that has God as its shepherd does not experience want, but simply assumes that all of its needs are provided for. But Adam and Eve experience want in the garden, not because of real need, but because of a lie. The type of needs that bring us into bondage to sin are always based upon a lie, never upon reality.

Sin led to the death of the soul. God had promised concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, "In the day you eat of it you will surely die." The death they died in that moment was a soul death: they suffered the loss of themselves. By believing the lie and embracing want, Adam and Eve plunged themselves into a world characterized by want and need, and suddenly the soul - which originally was anchored in God and God alone - took on a life of its own; a self-life detached from God's life. The consciousness of want and need led to fear, and fear led immediately to shame. They look at themselves and realize they are naked, so they hide from one another. Then they hear God coming and are afraid, so they hide themselves even further. Now that the soul has asserted its independence from God, it turns inward, collapsing upon itself, and becoming completely consumed with a three-fold pursuit: self-preservation, self-gratification, and self-actualization. These three drives are the impetus behind all (fallen) human action from that day forward, for we all must protect ourselves from pain and death, we must find ways to fulfill our own desires, and we must find a way to fulfill our potential and actualize our dreams. This is the activity that characterizes the life of the dead soul; it is always in danger, always in need, and always in process. It is never safe, never satisfied, and never settled.

Paul distinguishes not only between the flesh (sarkos) and the Spirit, but between the soul (psyches) and the Spirit. The flesh, to Paul, is the realm of sin's operations; it is the inner impetus to rebel against God that we are all born with. But to Paul the life of the believer is not constituted by a war between the flesh and the Spirit, as is popularly believed. Paul does not believe that every believer must constantly fight the sinful nature every day of their lives! Rather, Paul says that those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh, with its passions and desires (Galatians 5:24). However, once the flesh has been put to death, the believer must make a conscious choice to live by the Spirit, rather than the soul. In fact, Paul says that "The soulish (psychikos) person cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1 Corinthians 2:14), meaning they are only discerned and understood as the Spirit of God comes in contact with the human spirit. This is because the soul is fallen, and thus it is incorrigibly focused upon self-preservation, self-gratification, and self-actualization. The soul is the place where hurt resides and where pain is stored up. Living from the soul means living to unravel this pain, to get through it and find gratification and fulfillment in life. Living from the soul makes life one big self-therapeutic exercise! Soulish living is self-life; it is life of the self, for the self and by the self. When we live this kind of life the Spirit of God can't get a word in edgewise. 

We are living in a day and age in which soulish living is in! The pervasive hegemony of the soul in our culture screams through our slogans and popular sayings: do what you like, express yourself, have it your way right away, obey your thirst, be yourself, march to the beat of your own drum... The list goes on and on. The message behind each of these slogans is that we should be self-determining individuals who assert our independence and take responsibility for our own destinies. We have even given voice to this secular way of living in the church, and the result has been the pervasive abandonment or abuse of the concepts of submission and authority in contemporary Christianity. We either teach that you should obey God, and God alone (ignoring those very prominent passages of Scripture which command us to obey our leaders and submit to their authority), or we teach people to arbitrarily submit to their leaders to the point of manipulation and control, and we are so afraid of manipulation and control that we have virtually abandoned the concepts of submission and authority all together. And this goes both ways; pastors are afraid to assert their authority because they are afraid of being perceived as being abusive, and members of churches are afraid to submit to authority because they have had the experience of being manipulated and controlled. But the fact of the matter is that submission and authority are the only means to the healing and conversion of the soul. For it is only through submission and subjection to authority that our souls are set free from the undo assertion of the desires of the self.

Look at how the 2011 version of the NIV has softened the biblical mandate of submission to godly leaders in Hebrews 13:17.

"Have confidence in your leaders and submit to their authority, because they keep watch over you as those who must give an account."  

Now look at it in the NKJV, which stays closer to the original Greek:

"Obey those who rule over you, and be submissive, for they watch out for your souls, as those who must give account."

There is a big difference between having confidence in a leader and obeying a ruler. But we have a problem with the idea that someone could rule over us! I don't need a ruler, I just need a coach! I just need a spiritual advisor who will make suggestions that I can either take or leave. But the bible says that the only way your soul will be shepherded is if you allow someone to rule over you, and you obey them; you submit to their rule! The soul must be subjected before it can be healed; only through full submission can it be extracted from its focus upon itself. Submission is the only way that this extraction becomes real, because if I only submit when I agree with my leaders, I am really not in submission at all, but simply in agreement. I am still soulish because I am still bent on self-preservation (how often do we fail to obey our leaders because we don't feel safe?), self-gratification (how often do we become angry with our leaders because we feel that they are depriving us of something that we deserve?), and self-actualization (how often do we distance ourselves from our leaders because we are afraid they will hinder us from an opportunity to enlarge ourselves?).

Jesus said that he came that we might have life (zoes), but the only way to obtain that life and live in the flow of it is to lose your life (psyches). Jesus said that to seek to save your life (psyches) will result in your losing it. But losing your life (psyches) for his sake will result in your saving it. The only way to save it is to lose it. In the living of the self-life we are like sheep going astray, but in self-denial and self-surrender we return to Jesus, the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls (1 Peter 2:25).

David says, "The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want." The soul that has the Lord as its shepherd is a soul that does not know want or need. The Lord was able to shepherd David's soul because David knew how to make his soul an offering to God. "To you oh Lord I lift up my soul" (Psalm 25:1). Jesus is called the Shepherd of our souls (1 Peter 2:25). With Jesus as our Shepherd, we will not know want. But he will only be able to shepherd our souls if we learn how to make them an offering to God. The offering of the soul is the surrender of the self, the renunciation of our independence. At every place where the soul asserts itself it must be offered to God, rather than validated. Learning to live by the Spirit requires that we first make the soul an offering, transcending the life of the self (psyches) and entering into the life (zoes) of the Spirit of God. Then we will not only sing that popular worship song, Lord I give you my heart, I give you my soul, but we will live it!