Spiritual Warfare – The Last Enemy – part 1

The Bible describes death as The Last Enemy and it will be finally destroyed by the Lord Jesus (1 Cor. 15:26) Who is “the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). This will be when it is cast into the Lake of Fire (Rev. 20:14) – pictorial language! But what does it picture?

Apart from those alive when Jesus returns, we will all die, so this affects us all personally but we tend not to think about it and it becomes shrouded in mystery – something to be feared and avoided if possible (which it isn’t, despite the scientists’ best efforts to merge man and machine and create something which will live for ever! A project known as Transhumanism – the Fourth Industrial Revolution according some.)

The Bible does face the fact of death but records a developing revelation about it, what happens after death, and the glorious prospect of our bodily resurrection! Can we clearly articulate what the Bible says about what happens at and after death? What happens to body, soul and spirit? Why we should not attempt to contact the dead if their spirits or souls are ‘alive’ in some way?

Before we consider what it is to die, we need to consider what it is to be alive! Humans are revealed in Scripture to be tri-partite beings – body soul and spirit. There is increasing revelation of this in the OT which becomes clearer and complet in the NT. The OT refers to ruach (spirit, wind, which is the Spirit of God in more than a third of the instances), nephesh (soul or life force which characterises animals, Gen. 1:20, and humans, Gen 2:7, but not plants), which is also translated ‘body’ and could also be translated ‘people’. Hebrew has 5 other words for ‘living bodies’ which in total are about the same usage as nephesh (11). But it also has 4 different words for dead bodies!

God breathed (naphach) the breath of life (neshamah chai) into Adam and he became a nephesh chai – a living being (Gen. 2:7) which the AV renders as ‘living soul’ and Paul quotes in 1 Cor. 15:45 using the Greek word for soul.

In the NT, Paul prayed that the Thessalonians’ “whole spirit (pneuma) and soul (psuche) and body (soma) would be kept blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess. 5:23) and these are the only words used for these three things in the NT. Heb. 4:12 tells us that the Word of God is able to divide between soul and spirit – which tells us that they are not divisible by human reasoning (esp. not by Greek philosophy!), but only by divine revelation – a warning we need to take heed of in this study!

Body, soul and spirit – words and usages

Spirit (270)
– ruach – wind, spirit
– pneuma – breath or current of air
Soul (565)
– nephesh – soul or life force
– psuche – breath, originally the last breath
Body (189)
– nephesh (11), also beten (8) plus 4 others for living bodies (10 in total) and 4 for corpses (14)
– soma – body (146)

(Interesting contrast, God’s Name, Yahweh, occurs 6823 times, Elohim 2601 times and Adonai 438 times in the OT, and in the NT Lord and God occur over 2100 times – a rebuke to our obsession with ourselves!)

Salvation is for body, soul and spirit – our spirit is made alive to God when we are born from above (John 3:7-8; Rom. 8:10), our souls are saved by our believing (Heb. 10:39) and our bodies are redeemed through resurrection (Rom. 8:23) which will happen when the Saviour comes from heaven (Phil 3:20-21)

Main focus/purpose is the New Creation into which we enter by rebirth and enjoy to its fullness in resurrection – bodily, not just immaterial (soul/spirit). This was a Jewish expectation but was nonsense to the Greeks (Acts 17) who wanted to escape from the body into the ’real world’ – the realm of ideas.

“Socrates reiterated that the human soul is immortal and must suffer a series of reincarnations. For Socrates, the physical body (soma) was a tomb (sēma), which trapped the soul, and death was simply the separation of the human soul from the physical body. He posited that during the process of rebirth, the individual would forget everything they had learned in their previous life. It is through the keen study of philosophy that the individual eventually remembers – a process known as anamnesis. The philosopher’s life’s goal was to release the human soul from this loop through purification and contemplation.”

In contrast, the Bible says that it is appointed unto man to die once and after that the judgement! (Heb. 9:27)

Rev. 20 gives more details (the end of the story!)

v. 1-3 Satan bound for 1000 years **

v. 4 Saints resurrected and rewarded to reign with Christ for 1000 years **

v. 5-6 The first Resurrection defined, contrasted to the Second Death

v. 7-10 the final rebellion, and the destiny of Satan

v. 11-13 The Final Judgement, and the Second Death defined

** 1000 years may be an actual period of time or may be figurative

Important to note that no believers will stand before the Great White Throne Last Judgement. For the believer in Christ, the sentence from that Judgement (eternal death) has already been paid in the death of Christ (2 Cor. 5:21) and the verdict of ‘Righteous’ has already been handed down when we passed from death to life by believing in Christ (John 5:24). There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:1)! Under the New Covenant, God says that He will remember our sins no more – once confessed and forgiven, we are justified – “just as if I’d” never sinned.

However, Believers will stand before the Judgement Seat of Christ, but that is a matter of assessment of our works for reward, not condemnation and that is something that we will look at later.