01.05.01. His Creation
1. THE CREATION OF MAN. The creation of man is described in Genesis 2:7 : “And Jehovah Elohim formed man, dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”
Here are three stages. 1. A material form fashioned but of material particles, dust. This is the body. 2. A somewhat inbreathed by God, named in Ecclesiastes 12:7, “spirit.” That the “breath” of Genesis 2:7, and the “spirit” of Ecclesiastes 12:7 are one is confirmed by the combination of the two terms in Genesis 7:22 : “All in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life.” 3. The result, that man became what is here called “soul,” a living soul.
1. As to the body, it is to be observed that it was not itself the man. It lay there, fashioned and prepared, but the man was not yet there. The body was an inanimate form, which preceded the existence of the man. This as against the Sadducean materialist and his assertion that the body is the man, and that when it dies his existence ends.
2. The same is true of the breath or spirit, which God inbreathed. It also was in existence prior to the man, for God breathed it into the body. It was not God; it is not divine: it is not said that God breathed of Himself, or breathed His Spirit into the body, but a somewhat not to be defined by us as to its substance or nature, but which God terms “spirit.” In Zechariah 12:1 it is declared to be a created thing, a thing “formed,” as an article made by a potter. It is the same word as “potter” in Zechariah 11:13, and is found first at Genesis 2:8, God “formed man.” This as against the pantheist, and the doctrine akin to pantheism, that there is a measure of divinity in all men by creation. The immanence of God in all creation is truth, the identity of all things, or of any created thing, with God is error, deadly error.
Thus the spirit was not the man, for he only came into existence by reason of the inbreathing of the spirit into the body, which conjunction of two separate, previously existing things, resulted in the creation of a third: “man became a living soul.”
3. It remains only that the man is what he is here described to be, “a living soul.” The man is the soul, not the spirit, even as he is not the body. This as against the annihilationist theory above mentioned.
It is fairly certain that every false philosophy that has beclouded the thoughts of man had been instilled into men’s minds by spirits of darkness in Babylon before Moses wrote Genesis, and had thence infected all races. In that case he would have been instructed in them in Egypt among the rest of its learning; and when he was re‑instructed by the God of truth, he so described the creation of the universe, and of man in particular, as to deny every false idea current then or since. This threefold composition of man is implied everywhere in the Word of God, and sometimes is distinctly stated. Thus in 1 Thessalonians 5:3 : “And the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire, without blame in the parousia of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The body is distinguished from the spirit in James 2:26 : “The body apart from (the) spirit is dead”; and the soul from the spirit in Hebrews 4:12, “The word of God . . . piercing to the dividing of soul and spirit.” The man has a body with which he operates upon the material world; but the body is not the man. He has also a spirit with which he has dealings with the spiritual realm; but the spirit is not the man. The man himself, the conscious ego, is the soul. Personality in man inheres in the soul, which will become yet more apparent as we proceed, but may be seen in such passages as Exodus 1:5 : “all the souls were seventy souls”; Leviticus 4:2 : “if a soul shall sin” Leviticus 5:2 : “if a soul touch”; Leviticus 5:4 : “if a soul swear” Leviticus 7:18 : “the soul that eateth”, etc., etc. The evident sense is: “If a person” do this or that. See also LXX Ezekiel 16:5.