Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
Genesis 2:7
“The Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”
Familiarity with Scripture should certainly be our goal, but our familiarity can lead us to miss certain things if we are not careful. Some verses are so well known that we can gloss over their depth and beauty. Today’s passage may be one case in which many people miss some of what is conveyed.
Genesis 2:7 records the actual process that the Lord followed when He made Adam. In relatively few words, Moses the author gives us a detailed and intimate presentation of God’s work. Our Creator made Adam with great care, putting His hands into the dust of the earth, so to speak, to fashion his body. Then God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” This is a picture of the Lord’s looking at the body of Adam face-to-face, getting as close to him as possible to breathe into him and bring him to life fully and completely. It was an intimate act, one that implies God’s intent to be in a relationship with human beings and that we can find ultimate satisfaction only in a loving bond with our Maker. The result of the Lord’s act was that man became a “living creature.” More literally, the Hebrew actually says a “living soul.” We have here the revelation that human beings are a body-soul composite, creatures who are a union of a physical aspect and a spiritual aspect.
Unlike God and the angels, men and women have physical bodies and nonphysical souls. But is there yet a third part of human beings? Some thinkers in Christian history have argued for what is called trichotomy, the teaching that people have a body, a spirit, and a soul. Those who hold to trichotomy base their belief on texts such as Hebrews 4:12, which makes a kind of distinction between soul and spirit. The weight of the biblical evidence, however, favors the position known as dichotomy, which says that humans are creatures of only body and soul; there is no third element of our nature. The words “spirit” and “soul” are used interchangeably in Scripture, and evidence against a third element of human nature can be found in texts such as 2 Corinthians 7:1, where Paul calls for cleansing from everything that defiles body and spirit. Surely, if there were a third part of the human nature, Paul would want that cleansed as well, but he does not mention it. A text such as Hebrews 4:12 is not telling us that we have a spirit that is different from our soul; rather, it uses both words to stress how deeply the Word of God does its work in the spiritual part of human beings.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
In the history of Christian theology, those who have affirmed trichotomy have often held other erroneous or even heretical views as well. This in itself does not make trichotomy an error; Scripture alone can judge that. Nevertheless, it should always make us wary of a certain position when it is almost always associated with other errors. Errors in theology tend not to be isolated from other errors.
For further study
- Proverbs 16:24
- Matthew 10:28
The bible in a year
- Ezra 3–5
- John 20
- Ezra 6–10
- John 21:1–Acts 1:11