| John's Index | Greater Emmanuel | Email John |
The Origin of Humanness
Part Two
A Living Soul:
Its Problematic Dimension
By John Gavazzoni
| Origin Of Humanness Series | ||
| Part 1 Adamic Development |
Part 2 A Living Soul: Its Problematic Dimension |
Part 3 First The Natural Than The Spiritual |
| Part 4 Humanity's Commission |
Part 5 Deficiently Glory-Bound |
Part 6 Searching the Depths of God |
I expect that this second installment of our series will leave the reader with a lot of "loose ends." I'm pretty certain that it will be far from a well packaged, orderly-structured message. As I meditated on our subject, the word came from my spirit, "write about the big problem of man becoming a living soul." With that came a picture in my mind of the words: "Big, BIG problem," just that way.
What's the problem with man becoming a living soul, that is, the soul-particularity, unique to humanness? Well, being a human living soul (other creatures in the Genesis record, are also called living souls) involves the burden of having a capacity of self-awareness which is integral to having been made to share in God's Personhood, by His very personal in breathing of life, but with that personhood's self-awareness, there is an intuitive sense of an imperative of glorious destiny that you can't shake. It presses in on you from within. There's a certain sense of "I'm supposed to be more than that of which my present self-awareness informs me."
The living soul of humanness, is therefore vulnerable to the extreme of being tricked into trying to "hit the mark," of its destiny, hence sin, which as my readers know, is essentially means to miss the mark. You see, there's no sin, if there's no trying to hit the mark. You only miss the mark, when you're trying to hit it, and the living soul will try and try and try to hit the mark, and fail over and over again. The pressure of the glory-imperative is a terrible thing. Big, BIG problem.
Sin did not originate by man deliberately choosing to ignore the mark, and choose his own mark. Sin originated from God presenting to the subjective dimension within man's new soulness, a mark that he couldn't possibly hit. In the wisdom of God, our destiny of sharing the Divine Glory, required that we try our very best to obtain it, and fail to do so.
Biblical scholars have noted a characteristic of particularly, but not exclusively, the Old Testament text, which they call, if I'm remembering correctly, "parallelism." It's a form of declaration in writing where the writer makes a statement, and then repeats the thought with different words, or using a different metaphor or analogy. It's a way of driving home a point.
In the Genesis account of God forming man of the dust of the ground, and then breathing into the (already existent) man the breath of life, and the account of Him putting the man who He formed into the garden He planted eastward in Eden, it may be that we have an early example of parallelism. As for the essential message the Lord is conveying, both accounts, may be saying essentially the same thing in wonderfully different and creative ways.
The soul-capacity that I've described, may equate to the presence of the serpent in the garden, whose guile was such as to render Eve defenseless against it. The woman taken out of the side of the man, may equate to the particularly receptive, thus particularly vulnerable dimension of Adam's new personhood. I have to insist that the Adam-race's stubborn rebellion against God, has come from the frustration of trying to get it right before God. Such frustration inevitably leads to hurt, and the hurt to resentment, and the resentment to anger, and finally the anger to rebellion. That, by the way, is a psychological truism.
The story of man's placement in the garden, may be another description of the condition that arose from God making him a living soul. Before that, he had not the same capacity as he had after God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. His existence, by comparison, was far, far simpler, with none of the complexity and bewilderment that the sense of divine destiny places upon one. In that first-stage state, he had an animal-like simplicity about him in his relationship with the world around him and beyond him. No God-compulsion troubled him. No sense of destiny-imperative.
He was perfectly "well adjusted" to the natural world, and even, foolishly speaking, if God had tried to share something spiritual with him, he would not have been able to receive it, "For the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, neither can he know them, for they are spiritually discerned."
He had to be first given that unique dimension of soul, peculiar to mankind, but even then, he was helpless, for his new capacity had to acted upon by grace. We, together, as a whole race, have the capacity for all the fulness of God, but that capacity, left to itself is impotent. What a situation: to have a capacity for the fulness of Him who fills all in all, and be completely unable to experience its fulfillment.
Enters the factor of the Tree of Life. Only by partaking of its fruit can the human potential for glory be realized. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, equates to all that our serpent-activated vulnerability is deceived into seeing as the answer to our dilemma. The fruit of the Tree of Life is the Spirit, and in the Spirit is the Christ-Seed.
When we receive the Spirit, we get the edible Seed, that has already gone through death and resurrection into glory with the Father. That seems to be why they were cast out of the garden, lest they eat of the Tree of Life, and live into the ages, for the Seed in the fruit, had to be processed through death and resurrection, before becoming food for the man. It had to be, in the eons, food for glory. I'm seeing in the two scenes of the story of the origin of humanness, an implicit picture of what Paul explicitly taught about God subjecting all creation to futility with a view toward sharing His glory with us all.
I wonder if my readers can relate to the following: I have had times when I felt like I needed to get God off my back. I remember a time when God's call on my life, coupled with the demands of being a good attentive husband, with Jan reminding me of the latter, nearly pushed me over the edge. I actually spoke out loud to the Lord, "Lord, I can't handle you and my wife both." Go ahead and laugh if you must, or be horrified at where I was coming from, but I think if you will reflect on it, you'll be able to relate to my experience in your own way.
There have been times when having a job outside of formal institutional ministry, was a great relief to me, in that I had to get my mind off of God. Without such a mundane demand upon my thinking and time, I can be prone to a kind of compulsive God-reckoning, that becomes oppressive. Yeah, yeah, I know that His yoke is easy, and His burden is light, but, left to itself, my soul takes on a yoke and burden that are not His. When the Lord steps back, and leaves the soul to its own devices for a season, God becomes a problem to the soul.
At this point, it would be customary, as preachers go, for me to offer some how-to exhortation toward some action that will result in us being extricated from the above dilemma. Well, sorry folks, I don't have any how-to. Every one of them I've tried, turns out to be, itself, intrinsic, to the dilemma. I can only proclaim with Paul, "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord........For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death."
| Origin Of Humanness Series | ||
| Part 1 Adamic Development |
Part 2 A Living Soul: Its Problematic Dimension |
Part 3 First The Natural Than The Spiritual |
| Part 4 Humanity's Commission |
Part 5 Deficiently Glory-Bound |
Part 6 Searching the Depths of God |
| John's Index | Greater Emmanuel | Email John |
