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“Life” -verses- “Soul”
By Mikkel Dahl
Now we are going to have a short period of Bible study, and take a look at that much overworked subject of the human soul. Time and again, I remind readers that our Lord Jesus never spent as much as sixty consecutive seconds in talking about the human soul. I keep telling readers that He mentioned it incidentally at times, but that in quite a number of places in the Bible where the ‘soul’ is spoken of, ‘it’ is done so through a mistranslation. If not an actual ‘mistranslation, then certainly a misunderstanding.
In this article I want to deal with one of those outstanding instances where He spoke of the human soul, according to the standard translations extant, but He certainly did not have in mind that which you and I think of when we use the word ‘soul’. But bear in mind that the Israel people of Jesus’ day had received next to no teachings about the human soul (that is, the ‘soul’ as you think and I think of it). They had never heard of anyone dying and going to Heaven! They believed in an earth life, and that in “the resurrection at the last day,” their earthly bodies would again come to life, to live here on earth, providing that their first earth life had been sufficiently good and right to merit that grace of God. That is why Jesus didn’t speak to them about the soul, because they knew nothing about it. He spoke to them with reference to their entire sentient being and earth life in terms which they could under-stand. Now, read verses 15 through 23 from the 12th chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel.
Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”
And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop.
He thought to himself, `What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’
“Then he said, `This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.
And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”‘
“But God said to him, `You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
“This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”
Then Jesus said to his disciples: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear.
Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes.
I regret the need of shocking you, but I have more respect for truth than I have for your pet delusions. I have before me a copy of the eight oldest complete Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. All of them agree on this one point which I am going to set before you: The Greek word in verses 22 and 23 which has been translated ‘life’, is precisely the same as the Greek word in verses 19 and 20, which was rendered ‘soul’. The Greek word is psucha. The word may be properly rendered ‘soul’; yet that word the way the Jews used it from the time (their fathers until the days of our Lord, was not that of an ethereal something which takes flight at the death of a body, and is given wings to go to ‘Heaven’, or maybe sent to Hell. Never had they been taught anything like that. To them the word ‘soul’ meant the living conscious person: it was life, conscious life in connection with the physical being.
Now, when we come to those words in verse 19, where it reads that the soul has much goods laid up for many years, and therefore to eat, drink and be merry, we can understand that a soul could be merry but does the soul (as you and I think of it), eat bread, and drink wine or coffee, and munch grapes? You see beloved, so soon as we stop to think, any person can see the ridiculousness of attributing the thought that you and I have in mind, to the word ‘soul’ as it is used in that verse. When we come to verse 20 where it says that “this night your soul shall be required,” we immediately fly away in thought that an inner something is to be taken out of the body and given wings to fly away, yet that was not the thought our Lord Jesus tried to convey. He used the word in the way that they understood Him: they could understand it only in one way; that is, their conscious life. That is what the Lord said God would require of the person in that night. In other words, the flame of life would depart from the body
Now, when we come to verse 22, if we are honest in our search for truth, we will do no juggling with words. As I already state the Greek word is precisely the same in verses 22 and 23. So, if in verses 19 and 20 we are going to use the word soul, then are we equally as bound in verses 22 and 23 to use the word ‘soul’, for there is no change in the Greek. If then we should use that word, it would read: ‘take no thought for your soul what you shall eat”. You see, when we think of the word soul in the way we have been taught to believe in it, then verse 22 makes no sense, because that soul which people prattle about does not eat bread and butter, meat and potatoes! I repeat: our Lord spoke to the people in language which they could understand. He was conversant in a language common to His day, and He was also honest. Unless we give Him credit for being honest, how can we believe in Him as the Son of God and the Redeemer of man?
We can make the case still stronger by going to verse 23, wherein the Authorized Version reads. “life is more than meat.” In the Greek we still find the same word: psucha. Now the point is: in the Greek they have a special word for life just the same as we have. It is zoe. This proves that the Lord was not talking about that life: that is, pure life by itself, but He used the soul word, which to the Jews implied that conscious life of a human being, including his faults and emotions: that is, the composite living human being with all of its potentials
That is precisely the same as what we find in most of the other instances when the Lord used the word soul. Invariably it was used in precisely the same way as we have found it here, and that without the slightest reference to something within which flies away on wings when the body is dead.
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