Joined: 6/28/2007(UTC) Posts: 1,030 Location: Palmyra, VA
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I don't know if it will help you to understand the issue, In His Name, but I found myself writing about the Neshamah once again in the chapter I'm currently working on in TOM. And I ran across a very interesting Messianic connection. Quote:(927) Man is a spiritual being. “And Yahweh, God, formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7) We’ve encountered this verse several times in our exploration of the scriptures, and for good reason. This is God’s explanation of what makes mankind different from the animals: we have Yahweh’s “breath of life” within us. It’s not just that we’re living beings, that is, that we have souls (nephesh) that are alive (chay), even though those very words are used here to describe our condition: “man became a living being.” But other animals—apparently all of them—are described in exactly the same terms: “living creatures” that abound in the waters (Genesis 1:20), every “living thing” that moves (1:21), more “living creatures” like cattle, creeping things, and beasts of the earth (1:24), and beasts, birds, and creeping things that have “life” (1:30). But none of these are described as having received the neshamah, the breath of life, from Yahweh—only man is. In other words, animals are “alive,” but not in precisely the same way that men are. The difference is our capacity for spiritual life: we, among all of God’s creatures, have the opportunity to remain alive even after our bodies have perished, for just as the soul makes the body of an animal physically alive, a spirit, indwelling our neshamah, can give a soul (our nephesh) spiritual life. And since spirits are eternal, our souls will endure as long as their spirits dwell within them—forever!
That is good news, of course, but it also has a potential downside. First, there’s the eventuality about which Yahweh warned Adam and Chavvah (Eve) in the Garden. If they disobeyed Him by eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, they would “surely die,” and not just “someday,” but on the very day of their sin. Because we are then told that Adam lived on as a mortal man for 930 years, begetting sons and daughters, it’s obvious that physical death (the separation of the soul from the body) was not what Yahweh had been talking about. No, it was the departure of God’s Spirit (his Ruach) from Adam’s neshamah: Yahweh withdrew His “breath of life” from Adam and Eve, making them, for all intents and purposes, mere animals, spiritually lifeless, subject to corruption. But the capacity for spiritual indwelling remained intact, and I believe Adam and Chavvah, by accepting the coverings of the slain-animal skins Yahweh provided (a picture of the imputed righteousness still available to us today), demonstrated their repentance—and their salvation through the blood sacrifice Yahweh had made on their behalf.
But the “bad news” doesn’t end there. You see, Yahweh’s Ruach Qodesh—His Holy Spirit—is not the only spiritual being in existence, even if it is the only uncreated spiritual entity. But God also made angels, beings of pure spirit, some of whom rebelled against Him and became demons. These too are capable of indwelling the neshamah of a man—with eternally disastrous results. We are warned about this in Proverbs 20:27, “The spirit of a man is the lamp of Yahweh, searching all the inner depths of his heart.” “Spirit” here is a bad translation. The word is neshamah, the place within us where the spirit resides. Solomon is informing us that the neshamah discloses to God the “inner depths of the heart” of man. That is, the neshamah is the light that reveals his spiritual condition: it is indwelled either with Yahweh’s Spirit, with no spirit, or with the spirit of a demon. It is the litmus test that determines whether a person is alive, dead, or damned for eternity.
None of that, of course, reveals anything directly about the coming Messiah. But there’s one more word we should examine a bit more closely. What did Yahweh do after He “formed man from the dust of the ground?” He “breathed” into him the neshamah. Not surprisingly, the verb translated “breathed” is related to nephesh, or soul. It’s the Hebrew naphach. It means “to breathe, blow at, sniff at, seethe, or (and here’s what we need to take note of) to give up or lose one’s life.” (S) The Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains points out that when used in conjunction with nephesh (as it is here in Genesis 2:7) naphach can mean “die: formally, breathe out life, i.e., enter into the state of death, as an extension of breathing out one’s last breath of air.” In the same vein, it can also mean “to die: formally, cause to pant, i.e., make another to be in a state of anxiety or distress, as an extension of causing a person to exert great energy and so gasp for breath.”
I realize that as Messianic clues go, this one’s about as esoteric as they get, but try to visualize what Yahweh is telling us here: by “breathing into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life,” He gave him a choice: either God could breath out His own life on behalf of man, or His death would “make another [i.e., the one whose neshamah was empty or had been indwelled with a satanic spirit] to be in a state of anxiety or distress.” And how did Yahweh intend to “breath out His own life?” By setting aside His glory, becoming a man Himself—the Messiah—and offering Himself up as a sacrifice to atone for the sins of a fallen human race. Once again, a careful study of God's word gives me goosebumps. kp
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