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Tuesday 21 September 2021

The physical soul and the God's promise of the resurrection.

  Genesis2;7KJV "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

According to the Judeo-Christian scriptures man does not possess a non physical soul he is in fact physical soul(Hebrew nefesh) in this he is indistinguishable from the animal life with which he shares the planet.
  Ecclesiastes3:19-21 NASB "For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. 20All go to the same place. All came from the dust and all return to the dust. 21Who knows that the breath of man ascends upward and the breath of the beast descends downward to the earth?"
 Man and beast live and die via the same breath(Hebrew Ruach).
  However unlike the beasts the prospect of an unending life and divine sonship has from the beginning been held out to loyal members of the human species.
Genesis2:9 mentions the tree of life in the original paradise a sign of the divine promise of perpetual life for the physical son of God.Man was thus assured that although physical in nature he was as much a son of the creator as his elder siblings in the spirit realm.
 We note though that this pledge of a perpetual and ideal life was conditioned on the man's demonstrable loyalty to his creator's rightful sovereignty over his creation. Genesis216,17 KJV "And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: 17But of the tree of the knowledge of good and  evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."
 It remains a basic principle of natural morality that whatever one invents/designs/produces on ones own time is ones lawful possession and that any proprietor has the right to stipulate the terms and conditions for the use of his property.
 Basically then the creator was insisting on fair treatment from his intelligent creation in return for a covenant relationship that guaranteed their possession of divine sonship.So man's continued existence as an individual was conditioned on divine favour and not the unconditional guarantee of his immortal nature.

The resurrection of the dead was initially not an issue it certainly was not God's purpose that the man betray him to say otherwise is to make the creator responsible for man's sin and thus take Satan's side of the cosmic argument.So initially man's continued life in physical perfection would not require a resurrection, but now that it does some are presuming to set  arbitrary limits on the creator's power and wisdom claiming that God cannot possibly resurrect an intelligent physical soul,but merely create a convincing replica to substitute such a soul.
 Jesus had to respond to some of like mind in the first century his response is instructive Matthew22:229NASB "But Jesus answered and said to them, “You are mistaken, not understanding the Scriptures nor the power of God"
 I mean how arrogant can you get.Note firstly neither Jesus' first century deniers of God's power to effect a physical resurrection nor their modern counterparts deny that God could in fact produce a physical soul capable of human level intelligence,and indeed scriptures indicate that in the case of man this is exactly what he did see Genesis2:7.Now if God can cause a material form to become a conscious self.Bearing in mind that his power and consciousness transcend time and space themselves.What is there to prevent him  from completely mapping any particular self and reproducing the exact same self some time in the future in a body of his choosing.I'm guessing nothing but the limits of his would be correctors' imaginations.Here is how the apostle Paul explains Jehovah's power as manifest in the resurrection 1Corinthians15:35-38NASB " But someone will say, “How are the dead raised? And with what kind of body do they come?” 36You fool! That which you sow does not come to life unless it dies; 37and that which you sow, you do not sow the body which is to be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38But God gives it a body just as He wished, and to each of the seeds a body of its own."
   Paul's theology is very commonsensical if one is immortal then certainly one would not need a resurrection a disembodied spirit person would simply need to be re embodied not resurrected.So it is the physical soul that is resurrected not the body.God gives this self/soul a body that suits his place for it in his purpose.
  Consider further Revelation20:4NASB "Then I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgment was given to them. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony of Jesus and because of the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or his image, and had not received the mark on their forehead and on their hand; and they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. "
  Note that the souls are spoken of as coming to life this time in a body suitable for life in the spirit world where they rule with Christ over a reformed global civilisation.The tech that caused my self to emerge from this particular form can cause this same self to re: emerge in the future in a perfect sinless form.I certainly am not brave(or is it stupid)enough to pit my imperfect understanding of reality against the creator's perfect understanding of same.

 

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