Thesis #69 of 95 - What Christians are being saved from is the malign influence of the mortal intellectual vessel which the soul/spirit currently inhabits
BIBLICAL REFERENCES
Rom7:23-24 I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my (spiritual) mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God it is through Jesus Christ our Lord.
1Pet4:6 For the gospel has for this purpose been preached even to those who are dead, that though they are judged in the flesh as people, they may live in the spirit according to the will of God.
Mk9:49-50 For everyone will be salted with fire, salt being good; but if the salt becomes unsaltable, how can it be made salty again?
Mt 15:13 But (Jesus) answered and said, “Every plant which My heavenly Father did not plant will be uprooted.
1Jn3:12a Be not as Cain, who was of the Evil One and murdered his brother.
COMMENTS
I have been explaining that a human being’s spirit is created in God’s image before being planted into a morally disordered procreated intellectual vessel at the commencement of life. Whilst that earthen vessel’s control centre or brain is procreated, the faculties pertaining to man’s spiritual component being the part of us that survives physical death are from God. As Paul explained, that results in opposing laws governing flesh and spirit within the human psyche (cf. Rom7:23; Eccles12:7). Rejecting such a hypothesis implies either that human reproductive organs are capable of producing what is spiritual and eternal or that God through Christ directly creates and plants within man a spiritual entity polluted by sin, hateful towards its Creator and deserving of eternal torment from its conception. Neither is acceptable: the one opposes reason; the other opposes the notion of a God described In Scripture as love personified. Paul’s “body of this death” resolves the matter, indicating man’s moral and spiritual predicament to be temporal [note#1], as more explicitly does Peter (1Pet4:6).
A sinful nature cannot and does not derive from what God has directly provided to man but from the intellectual vessel procreated ultimately from our first parents that the God-given soul/spirit currently inhabits. Whilst the devil’s desire is to darken man’s mind, the Creator’s wish has always been to enlighten man. That is for the benefit of human society, the creative order set under man and the wellbeing of his own soul. Such He does through the Christ-enlightened human spirit (Jn1:9KJV) that all possess but not all reference. For not all soul were planted by God (Mt15:13; 1Jn3:12 – a recent post elucidates). Of those that are, many do not benefit from salvation in Christ whilst in mortal flesh. The post I have just highlighted delineates these distinctions.
ANNOTATIONS
NOTE #1 – By which I mean that the body and brain, unlike the soul, pertains to a temporary feature of a person’s journey through eternity. But especially in the unsaved, that vessel’s corrosive impact upon the soul can have more enduring consequences, requiring what Jesus describes as salting. But some souls will be beyond redemption, being unsaltable. (Mk9:49-50) [Considered in more detail in my interim summary post under heading “Hell – a divinely ordered establishment”]