Ask Pastor Mike Fabarez

Speaker 1

You and I are created in God's image, but does that mean God looks like we do? Not exactly. Pull up a chair and pour yourself a cup of coffee because we're about to explore this topic right now on Focal Point.

Welcome to Focal Point. I'm your host, Dave Drouy, and today we're sitting down with Pastor Mike Fabares to ask him a compelling listener question. Now, you've heard that you have a soul and a spirit, but do you know the difference between the two? And how does it relate to being made in God's image?

These are good questions that deserve thoughtful answers. So we're turning the mic over to Jay Wurton, executive director of Focal Point, as he ventures to ask Pastor Mike. Jay.

Speaker 2

Well, thank you, Dave. Pastor Mike I have a very interesting question from a listener today. This listener asks, what is the difference between a soul and a spirit? Or are they the same thing?

Speaker 3

Yeah, that's a great question. The words that we see, soul and spirit, are just two of several words that are used in the Bible. I mean, there are many ways to describe who we are, but what has really taken root in a lot of people's teaching is this distinction between the immaterial part of who we are and saying, well, there's two kinds of immaterial parts: soul and spirit. Usually when they say that, they mean the more kind of earthly, non-godly part of me, and then spirit that has the connection to God. That's a view we in theology talk about in terms of trichotomy.

But I'm of the camp, which many people are, that soul and spirit are not distinctions between our immaterial part. Really, the word soul is usually generally describing the whole of a person. In other words, he is immaterial and material. He's body and spirit. The whole of who he is is often referred to as a living soul. It's much like the old ship captains talking about how many souls are on board. We're not talking about spirits; we're talking about people.

So I'm of the view that in the Bible, I think we see clearly we are material. That means we're body, we're tangible, and then we're immaterial; we are spirit. The whole of who we are can rightly be described as soul. Like Genesis 2:7 talks about, God formed us out of the dust of the ground. That's the material part. And he breathed into us the breath of life or the spirit of life; that's the same Hebrew word. And we became a living creature or living soul.

So that's my view. And again, I don't think it's worth Christians dividing over, but I believe we're two parts, and there's not two components of my immaterial part.

Speaker 2

So how would someone who is a trichotomist argue the difference between a soul and a spirit? Are there two different words in the original languages, either in the Old or New Testament that refer to two different words for that?

Speaker 3

Yeah, I mean there are both in Hebrew and English, Greek. There's a distinction in the words, but so there is with other parts of who we are. We have strength, we have a mind, we have all of these elements describing parts of who we are and they're just descriptive.

But when you get down to it and you talk very technically about us, well, we are material and we're spiritual, we're non-material. We're, as I like to put it in my teaching, we're hardware and we're software. Now we're one unified whole. I get that.

At least in this particular point in human life on earth, we are one whole, but we have two distinct components. And that's why I am of the camp of being a dichotomist. I believe there's two clear distinguishable parts. And though you can describe the immaterial parts with lots of different words, I don't think the Bible is making a clear cut case between dividing up our immaterial part.

Speaker 2

Does this have anything to do when the Bible talks about us being made in the image of God?

Speaker 4

No, not really.

Speaker 3

Although, I mean, there's something germane to that in that we are made in the image of God, not physically. Because clearly the Bible says in John chapter 4, God is not physical; he's spiritual. And as Jesus said after his resurrection, when he wanted his disciples to touch his body to prove that he wasn't a ghost or a spirit, he said, "A spirit doesn't have flesh and bone, as you see I have." So we know God does not have a material form. The images and the visions and so forth that we see recorded in the Bible are not to be taken as something literal that we can touch or feel. He's Spirit, as 1 Timothy says; he is the invisible God. He dwells, as 1 Timothy 6 states, in unapproachable light whom no one has seen or can see.

So we're not talking about God as a physical being. I'm not made in the image of God in that I am the template in a human form the way that God is in some form. No, I'm in the form of God only insofar as my spirit has the capacities that his spirit has, at least those capacities he's chosen to share. I have unique characteristics, unlike the rest of the living creatures on the planet, that make me like God. I'm in his image in that I have, as I often put it, intellect, emotion, and will, which are the components of personality.

And that doesn't need a physical form, although we are put in physical form and we're here now in a physical body, contained in a physical body.

Speaker 2

So speaking of that physical body we're contained in, obviously when we die, we're separated in some way from that physical body.

Our soul is going to be, we trust in heaven, yet we're going to be reunited with that physical body.

Again, speak a little bit about that.

Speaker 3

Yes. The Bible teaches in 2 Corinthians 5 that we are going to be at our point of death, absent from the body. Who we are—our software and our hardware—is going to be separated. We're going to bury a body in the ground, and that body, what's left of it, much like Christ's body in the sepulcher in the tomb, is going to be resurrected on the day of God's resurrection. Those bodies will be remade, impervious to death.

That body is going to be reunited with the software, our spirit. So when we die, we are separated from our bodies. We will be with Him until we're reunited with our bodies at His return. Then we'll inhabit the earth, and there will be, in my theology, several things that are going to take place. The end product is that we will be in bodies impervious to disease, death, decay, or any of the problems we have now as fallen creatures.

We will be encased; our software will be encased in perfect hardware at that point. So yes, we will be separated, as it's put in 2 Corinthians 5. Paul used the euphemism that we'll be naked; we'll be without our earthly tent for a while until that gets resurrected and remade.

Speaker 2

Well, thank you, Pastor Mike. I trust that's going to be an eye-opening conversation for some and helpful in understanding those two concepts.

And we're going to continue this conversation with a message you did from the series Fallen Humanity. The message is called "Man in the Image of God."

Speaker 4

Probably once a month we get a question about animals. We need to recognize that as high as they are in the creative order, there is a clear line of demarcation between every animal that God has ever made and mankind in Genesis. So let's get more specific here when we think this through. You have in Genesis 1:26, the statement, "Let us make man in our image after our own likeness." These two words play throughout this narrative. Looking back to this narrative later in the Bible, we find the terms "image" and "likeness."

So often, especially in the early church when it moved to the West, we had a lot of folks making a big distinction between likeness and image, suggesting that these meant two different things. I just want to look at these two words real briefly. "Teslam," this Hebrew word that is translated "image," if you look this up and examine every reference to it, you would find the definition to be similar to "it bears some semblance from one thing to the next." A painting, for instance, is not the real thing, but it's a semblance; it's a depiction of it. That's how it's often used in a very common sense.

"Demuth" is the other word that's translated "likeness." Similar to "image," you're certainly going to find that, but you're going to find this word used more often in terms of abstract references. For instance, here's an example from Psalm 58, verses 3 and 4: "The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray from birth; they are speaking lies; they have venom." They really don't have venom like the venom of a serpent. This is almost like an illustrative or parabolic reference. There's a semblance, there's a similarity, but it's more of an abstract correspondence.

If you look for this distinction, which is very subtle, and you try to build theology on it, as some people have done in the past and some people do today, I think you'll come to some wrong conclusions. You know this. I trust John 4:24, where God is described as spirit. In essence, He is spirit. That's the passage where the woman at the well hears Jesus say He is looking for worshipers that worship in spirit and truth. The idea is that He is spirit, and that was because we're doing away with the temple on Mount Gerizim and the temple in Jerusalem. God is making a point about who He is.

You can look elsewhere in the Bible; it's everywhere, right? God dwells in an approachable light. No man has seen God or can see God. All the manifestations of God or descriptions of God that present Him in physical terms clearly indicate that when we talk directly about what God is, He is spirit. Whenever spirit is described in any detail, like it is in Luke 24:39, it couldn't be more clear that spirit is not physical. There's no physical component.

Now, clearly, we believe in the incarnation. Jesus Christ showed up, and He has a physical form—two ears, a nose, eyebrows, teeth, a chin, elbows, toenails. You could say, "Well, sure, God, as He says to His disciples, is spirit, but if you've seen me, you've seen the Father." We must not be talking about a visual image of something physical because the Bible is clear that God is spirit. So what are we dealing with? To use a word that has been coined throughout discussions of what this means, let me introduce the word: personhood.

We clearly can't be talking about the physical aspects of God. We've got to be talking about whatever it means to speak of someone as a person. If you look at the context of what's going on, it's certainly different than trees and rocks because it's animated. Like animals, they are animated; they're alive, they move, they can make noises, they breathe. Whatever "animated" means, it does not refer to a physical sense but relates to personhood.

Now I'm starting to get some sense of what it means that I'm made in God's image. To be made in God's image is more than just being animated and alive. It's having the ability to reflexively and rationally think, to be able to cogitate, to process thoughts in my mind that would come out in speech or creativity. Elsewhere, we find, though we don't see it in Genesis chapter one, we see it by Genesis chapter six. We've got all these chapters between one and six about people feeling all kinds of feelings. Whether it's Adam or Eve or Cain or Abel, we have lots of emotions being displayed.

Then God comes in Genesis 6 and says, "I am grieved in my heart." The idea of being pained in my heart indicates that I'm having an emotional feeling about the sin on the planet. This is just prior to the Flood. We see the correspondence; it's very different than just having something animated or alive. It goes beyond that—volition, the ability to make rational decisions, to prompt, to plan, to strategize, to have thoughts express themselves with purpose.

A being that is not just flocking together like an animal might, but having the kind of concern for self-disclosure and the acquisition of knowledge of other human beings. You might ask, "How can God be relational and social? He was all by Himself until He created Adam and Eve or Michael and Lucifer, right?" No, of course not. That's the amazing thing about the triune God that we discover in the Bible: He exists as some eternal fellowship—Father, Son, and Spirit—without any need for a bigger party than that, if you will, who's able to have relationship in the triunity of His makeup.

Moral and ethical dimensions go a bit further. We'll see these distinctions in passages like Psalm 32, where you get the description of animals in contrast to human beings. Animals do not have the ability to feel grief and guilt—not because of something that hurt or was caught or exposed, but because of something we just know through a conscience was wrong before God and His plan. To have a conscience, to be moral, to have a sense of ethics, to feel that sense of shame and guilt over a decision that didn't just destroy but one that hurt a relationship—this is a significant distinction.

In context, we have so much talk about dominion and jurisdiction. This is yours, this earth; subdue it—these plants, these animals. Limited dominion, but it's a dominion that you have, just like God has dominion. Even that idea of subduing the world creates an element that's going to produce something much like we had described in the first 25 verses of the Bible: God creating, giving us a pattern of creating six days a week, producing something, creating something, standing back and saying that it was good.

If there's anything that distinguishes us from the rest of God's creation, it would be that we're animated. We have intellect, emotion, and will. We're relational, moral, ethical. We have dominion and sovereignty over things. We create and produce, even producing things just for the pleasure of standing back and saying it was good. That's really good art. I mean, you don't see a lot of art shows among the animals.

Let's keep moving. I think about life here on earth and what we experience as human beings now and the picture of God. If you have a really good understanding of the Bible, it seems like the chasm between God and His image in the pages of Scripture and God's image in my life, or my neighbor's life, or my co-worker's life, is significant. As I like to say, the idea of God's image being damaged certainly is damaged, but it's not destroyed.

There are many things you can say about this. Even if you're thinking in theological terms, like words such as "total depravity," you can use that word if you want. It really does not, in any way, destroy the image of God. To use Ryrie's phrase, the image of God is defaced, but it's not erased. That's another way to say it. That's his phrase, not mine. But the idea of being damaged, not destroyed; defaced, but not erased—that's what we need to affirm.

This is very familiar. In Psalm 83, when I look at the heavens, the psalmist says, "the work of your fingers, the moon, the stars." Without TV and without a lot of city lights, you can imagine it's like being out camping all the time. You see the magnitude of nature. He says, "When I think of all that, I think, what is man, human beings, that you're mindful of him?" Speaking in the singular here, mankind and the Son of Man. Here we are, generations from the first man, and it's getting worse, not better, in terms of who we are.

He asks, "Why would you care?" Yet you've made him, here's his worth, "a little lower than"—here's how the ESV translates it—"heavenly beings." The reason I think the translators here translated "heavenly beings" is that it's been a debate. "Elohim," if you know, is the word that's often translated, usually translated, "God," usually with a capital G. The problem with "God" is that He is so majestic, transcendent, and great that He is described. One of the nouns for Him, "Elohim," depicts God.

But the word itself is plural, which is a little confusing. Anytime you see a Hebrew word transliterated with "im" at the end of it—"Elohim," "cherubim"—that's plural. So when you say "Elohim," that can be capital G, God, because He's so great, He's not contained in a singular. We call that a majestic plural in Hebrew grammar. Or you could be talking about small g, plural gods. The idols are called gods; the things that people trust in are called the gods. Even the angels are called the gods.

So here, the translation is "heavenly beings." This goes way back to before the time of Christ. The Septuagint was the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible in the wake of Alexander the Great, a couple of centuries before Christ. It was translated into Greek. These 70 scholars that worked on this took every passage seriously, caring about the true translation of this text. They were very careful about moving Hebrew words into Greek words.

In this text, it was not translated from "Theos" or "Thei." It wasn't translated into plural; it wasn't "gods," and it wasn't "God." They translated this as "Angelos." You know, because it's transliterated into English as the word "angels." So what the psalmist is referring to, we don't know, but all we know is that it's something about something greater than us—whether it's the angelic court, whether it's some sense of God Himself.

But here, just a little bit lower than something so beyond human, something supernatural—that's how you've created us, and you've crowned us. Here are two words usually given to God: all the glory, all the honor, all the riches and power go to God. Well, here, God has endowed human beings with glory and honor. These aren't redeemed people; these aren't Christian people; these aren't the priests of Israel. This is just a description of mankind.

You know that from the singular there in verse four: "What is the son of man that you cared for him?" Mankind, you've given him—now we're back to Genesis chapter one—dominion over all the works of your hands, and you put all things under his feet. He's supposed to be in charge of things down here—all the sheep, all the oxen, all the beasts of the field, the birds of the heaven, the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the path of the sea. He's in charge down here. He's at the pinnacle of creation.

He's not the largest, he's not the strongest, he's not the fastest, he can't fly, but he's supposed to be. And he is endowed with such glory and honor that he's just a little bit lower than the gods or the angelic beings or perhaps God Himself. This is a big statement about mankind, even after the fall. You can go throughout the Bible and find those things.

But you keep talking about there's no distinction really between Christians and non-Christians. Well, let me make just the point that there is a distinction. There's always a priority in the Bible, particularly in the New Testament, as it relates to what regeneration does. Regeneration—generation, to make; Genesis, generation; regeneration, to remake, to be reborn, to be born again. Someone who's born again has in their life, according to the Bible, this restored image of God.

That becomes something that now is my goal: sanctification. Usually, as we use it just as a standalone word, we're describing a process. The process is trying to get back to and restore the image of God. What kind of thinking would He have? What kind of emotions would He share right now? What kind of decisions and planning and strategy would He make? What kind of even things would He do that He would stand back and say, "That's a good product, that's well done?" Those are the kinds of things I'm shooting for in my sanctification.

Of course, the God-man, Jesus Christ, is held up as the perfect template for us because the people in the first century got to experience Him, see Him, and listen to Him teach. In Romans, in the wake of all that, verse 29 says, "Those He foreknew, that is, foreloved ahead of time, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son." It's a process of conforming them to be more like Christ. We say that all the time: to be Christlike.

That's the goal. As it's put in Second Corinthians 3:16-18, "When one turns to the Lord," there's the idea. I think it's "a strefo," the word there, like "metanoia," to repent, to turn to the Lord. That veil is removed because the context there is talking about how Satan is one who blinds. He'll make that very clear in the next chapter.

Now, "the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." I'm no longer blinded here, and with all, with unveiled faces—because it was the parallel of Moses who had that veil over his face—now it's gone. We can now behold the glory of the Lord, being transformed into the same image. As you stare at Christ, as you see who He is, as you study Him, you stare into that image. You are now informed of Christ, and that transforms you into the same image from one degree of glory.

You look more like Christ this year, I hope, than you did five years ago. You're being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this all comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. That is His goal in your sanctification: to be more like that original creation before the fall. That's the process. My sanctification is a restoration of God's image—not His physical image, but His likeness.

Speaker 1

You're listening to a special feature called Ask Pastor Mike with author and speaker Pastor Mike Fabarez. You're on Focal Point, and you can listen to the complete unabridged sermon when you visit focalpointradio.org. You can also listen through the Focal Point app or on many of your favorite podcasting apps. We love being able to provide these free, flexible Bible study options so everyone can have access to the life-changing truths found in God's Word. And we know that for many, these messages have been an important source of encouragement.

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