Part 2 – The Body-Soul Connection

Introduction

“Welcome to Torah Today Ministries and our continuing series on the body, soul, and spirit. This will be a four-part series, and this is part two.

In the first episode, we had an introduction to the soul, and how we do not have a soul, but we are a soul.

Our soul is made up of our mind, our will, and our emotions. But we have a body, and we also have a spirit. And many times, as believers, when we see the word spirit in the scriptures, we think Holy Spirit.

But most of the time that the scriptures use the word spirit is talking about your spirit, or my spirit, or some other kind of spirit, and many times God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit. But we have to understand that each of us has a spirit. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”

Adam and the Breath of Life

“I introduced in the first episode how when God breathed into Adam’s nostrils, here’s Adam’s physical body, he breathed into his nostrils the nashamah of life — this is the spiritual. Man became a living soul.

So where the spirit and the body interact, that is your soul. And notice, as we allow the Spirit of God to invade our soul more, and we continue to walk in the spirit, and yield our physical being to the control and to the authority of the spiritual, our souls grow.

But if we refuse to do that, our souls shrink. And eventually, our soul and spirit leave our body, and we’re dead. Death means separation.

So what we want to do in this episode is explore the body-soul connection.”

Two Views of Humanity

“Now, many people in the world don’t believe in the soul at all. They think that your mind is just the firing of synapses in your brain, and that your emotions are just chemical reactions and just the responses to chemicals in your body, and that your will is just your fight-or-flight instinct.

And they believe we’re nothing more than just a collection of cells. We come into being, we live, we eat, we reproduce, and we die.

But more people, I think, in the world believe that there are two parts to us. Our bodies, obviously, the physical part, but they sense there’s something that is non-physical about us, and that is the soul.

And in most cultures in the world, the soul is seen as something that transcends the body, that’s bigger than the body. And whereas the body is temporary, the soul has more permanency to it.

And for most people, it’s these two areas that exist. What we’re going to see in next weeks and in the continuing episodes is that we are made of three parts. We are a soul, but we have a body, we have a spirit.”

The Battle of Body and Soul

“So let’s get down and explore this body-soul connection. This is the part that is most familiar to us.

We all perceive ourselves as having to take control of our bodies, and if we don’t, our bodies will take control of us. And we often have — if you’re trying to diet, trying to lose weight, or trying to build muscle, or learn how to do something that requires discipline — you understand this battle, that to make your body subject itself to your will.

And unfortunately, we make our souls do all the heavy lifting. Now what we want to see from this point as we go on out, is God has given us a spirit, a spirit that He wants to infuse with His Spirit, so that our souls can find rest.

And again, I’m getting a little ahead of myself, but I want to set the tone for what’s coming up.”

The Five Physical Senses

“So, let’s think about this for a moment. This relationship between the body and soul is a very familiar one.

And if I were to ask you how your soul interacts with the physical world, you could tell me the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

And though some scientists say there’s actually a sixth, seventh, and eighth sense, these are the big five that have been recognized throughout human history, and these are the five that the scriptures speak about.

So there are five ways that my soul knows about the world around it. I can see it, I can hear it, I can taste it, touch it, I can smell it.

And there are five ways that the world and the people in it can communicate to me through these five senses. So we’re familiar with this connection.”

The Five Spiritual Senses

“But if I were to suggest to you that your spirit also has five corresponding senses, could you name what they are? Probably not.

You might guess one or two. But because we are so sensitive physically and so insensitive spiritually, we doubt the existence of these spiritual sensitivities, we might even doubt the existence of our spirit altogether.

It’s almost as if when sin entered the world and Adam and Eve followed their senses — they saw that the fruit was good for food, they reached out and they took it, they touched it, they ate of it, they tasted it, I’m sure they could smell it — their senses were involved in that temptation.

And when the enemy tempted Yeshua, he started from the outside in: you’re hungry, turn the rocks into food, and so on.

And because sin came into the world because of the indulging of the physical senses, it’s like our spiritual senses became almost comatose. They came to the point where we are hardly even aware that we have them.”

Discovering the Spiritual Senses – Sight

“But let’s see if we can figure out what these five senses are, and recognizing what they are will help us then to develop them and to recognize them and appreciate them and to grow in them.

So let’s start with sight. Now, we don’t walk by sight. We’re to walk by what? We’re to walk by faith. Paul tells us we walk by faith, not by sight.

So the corresponding sense to sight would be faith. I’m gonna try to print this as clearly as I can. Faith, and as the writer of Hebrews says, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

So we can go by what we see, or we can say, Father, what is the truth? And through His Word, He explains to us what is real. With our eyes, we see the 1% world, but through faith in God’s word, we can become aware of the 99% world, the world of reality.

And we can either depend on how we figure things out and do what’s right in our own eyes, or we can close our eyes, and we can say, God, what is the truth? And we walk by the light of His word, not by the physical light only, but by the spiritual light of His word, because His word tells us what reality is. And it doesn’t always agree with what we see.

So what are you gonna trust? What you see and the logical conclusions you come to because of that? Or are you gonna go by what God sees, what God knows, and what God speaks to us through His word? We’re gonna walk by faith, and not just by our own human sight.”

Hearing and the Conscience

“When it comes to hearing, I think of hearing as being the conscience.

Know those cartoons you saw when you were a kid, and the character is trying to make a decision, and you have the good angel sitting on one corner, one shoulder speaking, you know, do the right thing, and then you’ve got the little devil over on the other shoulder telling the person to do the wrong thing?

This is more true than you might at first think.

But our conscience is that spiritual sensitivity within us that sounds a warning when we’re about to do something we shouldn’t do, or gives us a little nudge to do what we should do even though we may not feel like it.

Our conscience is that bit of awareness that we have, that there’s more going on than what we see. And though I can see physical things, I sometimes cannot see the things that are making sound.

We all know this experience. You’re going along and you hear something and you turn, then, to see what it is you heard.

Because our hearing is something that can come to us from all directions, whereas our sight, we can only see what’s straight ahead of us.

So hearing is that thin whisper, that voice of God that can kind of speak to us and nudge us, and it’s so easy to ignore.

How many times when you see something, you tell someone, look at that, they look at it, you both agree at what you see.

But other times, you’ll say, did you hear that? They’ll say, hear what?

Well, that sound.
Oh, that’s nothing.

And you argue as to whether how real it is or not.

And that’s how the conscience is. It’s easy to argue with, it’s easy to silence. And if we’re not careful, we become seared in our conscience to where our consciences do not function.”

Taste and Smell

“Now, smell and taste, as you know, are very closely related.

And though you can have taste without a sense of smell, you need a sense of smell to experience flavor.

I remember when I was a kid, my brother, who’s five years older than me, he came home and wanted to do an experiment. He learned it in a science class at school.

So I guess I was very trusting and naive, but it worked out okay.

But I put on a blindfold, and my brother had me smell something, and he says, now taste this. And I smelled one thing, but what he put in my mouth was something completely different.

I think he gave me a piece of onion to taste, but I was smelling a strawberry. And when I did that, I tasted a strawberry. And when the blindfold came off, I realized I’d actually eaten a piece of an onion.

When I was smelling a strawberry, and the onion tasted like a strawberry, all that to say, taste and smell are very, very closely related.”

Discernment (Taste)

“And for years, as I’ve taught the five spiritual senses, I’ve taught that smell corresponds to discernment, and taste corresponds to communion.

But I’ve just decided in preparation for this teaching to reverse those, and here’s why.

I think taste has to do with discernment, because as I continue to learn Hebrew and read it, I have found that the Hebrew word for discernment is the word toam, which is also the Hebrew word for taste.

So I can’t quite argue with the scriptures. So discernment and taste are the same word in Hebrew, and when it says taste and see that the Lord is good, that’s the word toam.

But in the Psalms and Proverbs, there’s the prayer that, for it to give me good discernment, and it’s also the word toam.

It says of the woman of valor, she discerns that her work is good. The word discerns — toam, taste.

So discernment is that ability to tell that there’s something going on that does not meet the eye. That things may look one way, but your discernment tells you they’re different.

I think this is why we’re told to taste and then see that the Lord is good.

You say, open your mouth, let me put something in there, trust me, and then you taste it, our eyes are enlightened. It’s like when Jonathan tasted the honey, it says his eyes lit up, he was enlightened.

And so discerning right from wrong also helps us to see God more clearly and to see evil more clearly as well.”

Communion (Smell)

“Smell, I think that this has to do with our — I just want to make sure I’m giving you the right one here because I’m switching these around.

This has to do with our communion with God. And by communion, I’m not talking about the beautiful Christian ritual of communion, taking the bread and the wine, but I’m talking about real connection with God.

It’s interesting that when people brought sacrifices, it did not say that the sacrifice was a good taste to God or that it was beautiful looking to God or it sounded good to God.

It says, it’s a reich nechoach, it’s a sweet smell to him. And he would take pleasure in the sacrifices because of the aroma.

Well, that word reich, aroma, is almost identical to the word ruach, which is spirit.

And our connection with God is very much a spiritual one because he is Spirit. And so I see this sense of smell as being the way we really have communion with God.

The altar was where people would have table fellowship with God. They would eat and taste the meat, but he would smell the fragrance, and they had fellowship and communion with one another at the altar.”

Touch and Worship

“And then touch, the last one, corresponds to worship.

Yeshua told the woman at the well, God is spirit, and he seeks those who will worship him in spirit and in truth.Worship is an utterly spiritual activity. It is non-physical.

And unfortunately, we’ve replaced worship with praise. We’ve replaced worship with singing. Now, don’t get me wrong.

Praise is wonderful. Singing, clapping, dancing, shouting — these are wonderful expressions, and they’re encouraged. But they’re never to be a substitute for worship, which is spiritual.

Now, I think in many redeemed communities today, there’s a lot of praise going on, but little or no worship. And when you have praise without worship, it’s nothing more than cheerleading.

Instead of the praise being an expression of what is inside me, what I’ve experienced spiritually in an act of worship, and it just coming out of me as praise — we now use praise as a way of trying to manipulate the crowd into getting into some state of mind to where we can control them or get them to feel something. And it’s backwards.

So I encourage you to learn to worship.

But worship means being utterly still. The word kava, worship in Hebrew, means to go prostrate.

In other words, you get the flesh out of the way. The flesh becomes still. It becomes quiet. You go on your face.

It doesn’t mean you have to go on your face to actually worship. You could be driving a car and worshiping.

But what it means is you’re very still inside. You’re very quiet.

And in your mind, you rehearse who God is. You review his attributes and his works.

And suddenly, there is this touching, this very subtle connection, and a growing awareness of God’s closeness to you.

You know what it’s like when you’re talking to someone and they may be rejoicing over something, or maybe they’re very sad about something. So, what do you do to increase the connection with that person?

You reach out and you touch them. You put your hand on their arm, on their shoulder, or you hold their hand.

And when someone touches you, you know what it’s like. There’s heightened awareness of connection with that person simply by touching them.

Touch is a powerful thing, and we need to be careful how we use it, and we should not abuse it.

So worship and touch seem to be the corresponding physical, spiritual sensitivities.”

Spiritual Gifts Overview

“So I challenge you to be more aware of faith, conscience, communion with God, discernment, and communion can also be communion with other believers.

Discernment and then worship of God — these are spiritual sensitivities. These are the way we receive information from the spiritual, the holy realm and of God’s presence.

Now, I want us to look at something else as well. Something’s been very confusing among the body of Messiah, but that has to do with spiritual gifts.

Now when we look in the scriptures, we find three lists, one in Romans, one in 1 Corinthians, and another over in, I want to say Ephesians. Ephesians, yes. My mind blanked out for a second.

We find three lists of gifts, but they’re different lists. There’s some overlap, but there’s some very dissimilar things about them.

And I have seen books that have been written about the spiritual gifts, so they just take all three lists and throw them together in one list. This is a mistake.

If they’re meant to be together in one list, the scriptures would have presented them together in one list, but the scriptures give us three distinct lists. Why?

Well, I think it might have something to do with the body, soul, and spirit.”

Gifts, Services, and Activities (1 Corinthians 12:4–6)

“Let’s take a look. In 1 Corinthians 12, verses four to six, we read:

Now there are distinctions of gifts, but the same spirit. There are distinctions of services, but the same Lord or same Master. There are distinctions of activities, but the same God, who activates all things in all.

God himself corresponds to the soul. We are souls. God is God.

There’s one of you, there’s one of me, there’s one of me, there’s one of him. But just as we express ourselves through our flesh, God also expresses himself through Yeshua the Messiah, through his Son.

Because the Word was with God, was God, the Word became flesh. So God speaks through his Son, as the opening verses of Hebrews tells us.

But God also has a spirit, just as you and I have a spirit. And so God, there he is. He has a spirit. One God, but he communicates in the spiritual realm through his Spirit.

He communicates in the physical realm through his Son and through his Word, written and incarnate.

So we see God express himself these two ways, and so we see gifts, services, and activities. We see three lists.”

The Body Gifts (Ephesians 4:11–13)

“Let’s analyze this a bit further. Let’s begin with on the left what I call the body gifts. These are found in Ephesians 4, 11 to 13.

Now, I’m not going to read the whole passage, but you have the references here. You can look these up. Please look them up so you can follow along and go back and review this teaching with your Bibles over in front of you.

But in Ephesians 4, we’re told that God has provided gifts to the body of Messiah. He’s provided gifts. These gifts come in the form of people, people who fulfill particular roles and offices that God has assigned them.

Not everyone is one of these five, but God has picked certain individuals to fill these five roles. And they have apostles, and then there are prophets.

And let me just say here that prophets are not people who foretell the future. When you read the prophets in the Scriptures, the prophets speak more about the present and the past than they do about the future.

The word prophet, it’s the word na’vi, or prophesy, na’vi, a prophecy is na’va. It means just an outgushing, an outflowing.

A prophet is someone who simply speaks God’s word. He speaks forth God’s message, whether that message has to do with the past, with the present, or with the future.

So please quit thinking of Bible prophecies always being future-oriented. It isn’t.

Evangelists are those who proclaim the Gospel, the one-gelion, the Gospel, the evangel. The evangelist teaches the Gospel.

And then there are pastor-teachers. And these two go together. The role of a pastor is that of a shepherd, and a shepherd feeds his flock, and he protects his flock.

If you are a father, you must feed your children, physically and spiritually, and you must protect your children, physically and spiritually.

If you are leading a home group, leading a Bible study, if you are given authority to lead this Bible study, then you are in charge to make sure those people go away fed. And you must also protect them so that wicked influences do not come in and cause any damage to the people who are gathered there at that moment.

And if you oversee a larger community, regardless of size, you must feed that community and protect that community. Those are the things that a pastor, teacher does.

Now again, not everybody is one of these five. But we might even argue, do apostles even exist today? If so, where are they? I don’t think I’ve ever met one.

I have met one prophet. I’ve met a number of evangelists. And of course, many pastor-teachers.

And this was a role God gave me for the time I led Beth-Tikkun Messianic Fellowship.”

The Spiritual Gifts (1 Corinthians 12)

“But now let’s go over to the 1 Corinthians list and 1 Corinthians 12. We have seven here, and these are called spiritual gifts.

And it talks about how God, through His Spirit, gives these to each person as God chooses. So each of us has at least one of these.

And that’s the gift of wisdom, of knowledge, faith, healing, miracles. And there we see prophecy again, discernment, languages, and then interpretation of languages.

And of course, as you know, in the church at Corinth, there was a lot of confusion arising from speaking in tongues about this, the languages, their proper use and misuse.

But he says, what you should discern or desire more than anything else is prophecy.

Remember, that’s not foretelling the future. That’s simply speaking what God wants spoken, in the way and at the time that he wants it spoken.

And we should all desire that. We should all ask God to give us the spirit of prophecy so we can speak his truth.

And this is what Messiah did. He was always speaking for the things he heard from God, the things God had given him to say. Nothing more and nothing less.”

The Motivational Gifts (Romans 12:6–8)

“Now, this middle list of which there are seven is found in Romans 12 verses 6 to 8. And I call these the motivational gifts.

I did not come up with that term many years ago. Almost 50 years ago, a friend that I grew up with who lives up in the Chicago area, we got together, we got to visit each other, and he began to share with me what he had learned about this.

So I’m not sure if he came up with this name, motivational gifts, or he heard it from someone else, but I like it, so I’m just going to use the same term.

But this list is different from the other two. The other two, the body gifts, the spiritual gifts, these are gifts God gives to individuals. That’s different, though, here with this middle list.

This motivational gift is what you are. One of these will ID your soul. It will identify your soul as to the kind you are.”

Motivational Gifts: Prophet and Mercy

“Let me show you what I mean. And again, we see prophet here. Now, when it comes to the motivational gifts, some people, their very soul is wired with the soul of a prophet.

They may not have the gift of prophecy, and they may not have the office of prophet, but their soul is the soul of a prophet. In other words, they see everything in black or white.

Everything is good or bad. Everything is right or wrong. They don’t see gray very well at all.

So these people could come across as being rather harsh. But there’s nothing they love more than repentance. And when they see repentance, they’ll be the first to embrace that person, to rejoice with them, to welcome them back in. They love repentance.

But the prophet is this kind of attitude. I’ve met people with this kind of soul, this type of soul. They don’t have the gift of prophecy. And they may not be very pleasant people to be with. But boy, they are opinionated.

Everything is black and white. Right or wrong, there’s no gray area.

Now what I want to do is skip from the first one on the list all the way down to number seven, the last one on the list. And that is the mercy person, the one with the gift of mercy.

The mercy person’s soul is the opposite of that of a prophet. To the mercy person, nothing is black or white. Everything is a shade of gray.

No matter how rotten somebody might be, a Hitler, oh, well, you know what, he liked dogs. They will always see something gray. You can’t pin them down to identify something as totally wrong or something totally right, something totally good or totally bad.

They just can’t do that. They’ll always see gray.

Now, because women are more emotionally gifted, they’re more emotionally astute, and women tend to be more merciful, you find the mercy person more among women than men, though I’ve met plenty of men who are definitely mercy persons.

And I find that men who are more a mercy person tend to marry a wife who’s more the prophet person, which is good. It brings balance.

But the mercy person, the problem with the mercy person is that they can be manipulated through their emotions. And if you’re a mercy person, you need to be warned about this and to be careful.

And I especially think of the number of godly, beautiful young women I’ve known who meet basically some delinquent, some guy who has a police record and is pretty loose with his morals, but he’ll cozy up to her.

He’ll appeal to her emotions. And because she can’t see black and white, she’s easily manipulated. She thinks, oh, he’s a good boy. I think I can help him. And he wants to marry her, so she marries him, thinking that she can just kind of redeem him and bring him into the fold and win him to the Lord.

And she enters into a life of utter misery.

So the mercy person needs to learn a bit more about how the soul of a prophet works. And the prophecy person needs to learn more mercy, not be so black and white about everything.”

Servant and Administrator

“So now let’s move back up and go to the second one on the list, and that is the servant.

Now, the servant is the most common type of motivational gift, because you need more servants than any of these other six. You can think of the person who has this gift of service as being the muscle in the body of Messiah. They’re the doers.

They love to serve. They love to do things. These are the people you can always call on, and you know they’re going to say yes, and they’ll pitch in, whether it’s setting up chairs or slicing the bagels or helping on a work day.

Whatever it is, they’re there. They’ll help, and they’ll enjoy it. They’re fulfilled by serving.

The problem with the servant is that they have trouble saying no. And sometimes, they will serve to the point where they’re actually damaging their health, maybe damaging time with their families, and other parts of their lives suffer because they just have a hard time saying no.

Now, the one that corresponds to them is the person I call the leader, or maybe administrator would be the better term.

Administrators love to make a plan, list out all the steps that need to be done, make the flow chart, get the people, the materials together, and execute that plan and see it come to a happy outcome.

This is not my gift. I hate doing administration. I’m horrible at it, but I sure do love people and appreciate people who have this gift. And I thank God for the administrators that He has brought into my life to take up the slack where I just simply don’t have any aptitude at all.

The problem with an administrator though, is if they are not sensitive, they’ll grind up people in the wheels of the plan. And people will be hurt, they’ll fall aside, they’ll quit, but the administrator — we got to get the plan done. They just want to keep going to get it done.

So, the servant needs to learn to say no on occasion. And the administrator needs to be sensitive to people to make sure people are not being sacrificed for the sake of the goal.”

Teacher and Giver

“And then you have the third and the fifth gift, which are teacher and giver. Both of them are givers, but the teacher loves to study and loves to give the knowledge and the things that they’ve learned.

Guess which one I am.

The problem with the teacher is sometimes they don’t see the practical. And I confess, that’s my shortcoming in this department.

So, God has blessed me with an amazing wife who sees the practical. And I really count on her to point out the practical to me and say, okay, you’ve been teaching this, but we need to do this thing. Oh, okay.

And I really appreciate that.

But the giver is the person who’s generous. They give of their time. They give of their resources, of their money.

And these people always have more to give. They’ll give their money to this and to that. They’ll give their resources here and there.

It seems no matter how much they give, God keeps supplying them with more. They just give, give, give. This is what they love to do. They’re good at it, and they never run out.

The problem with the teacher is they’ll give information, but they may not be generous with their resources.

The giver may be generous with their resources, but they fail to study and learn the way they should. And if it comes to doing something, earning money so they can support this project, they’ll do that, but they’ll skip their time of prayer and study to get that done.

So the teacher and the giver balance one another out.”

The Exhorter

“And then right here in the middle, we have the Exhorter. This is the most rare of the seven motivational gifts.

And you can see with the markings I’ve put here, we’ve kind of made a menorah up on its side. And this is not by accident. Because these motivational gifts, not things you have, these are things that you are. That’s why I believe there are seven of them. Seven is a number of completion.

And each of these need the other six. And whichever one of these you are, you need to work in developing the other six as much as you can.

Think of Yeshua though. He had all seven of these in perfect balance.

And these motivational gifts are in the middle because they correspond to your soul. You are a soul. You are one of these seven.

I’ve met some people who are two of these seven. But everybody has potential for all seven, but there’s going to be one, like a taproot, this is the one you are.

But try to develop the other six as much as you can. And if nothing else, express your appreciation for the other six.

But let me get back to the Exhorter here for a moment.

The Exhorter has a very unique gift. They exercise their gift basically by just showing up. They show up.

When they step into the meeting, everything in the meeting just elevates a step. Everybody is a little happier, things just run a little more smoothly, and you feel encouraged. Everyone feels encouraged by this person.

They may even stop to think about that they are feeling encouraged or why they’re feeling encouraged, but when they do think about it, it’s when so-and-so stepped into the room, everybody got a little happier.

The encourager, the Exhorter, is one who is very good at pointing out people doing what’s right. He catches them doing good.

And when something needs to be done, the Exhorter just seems to know it without being told and just kind of shows up. You only need one or two of these in a large community. Just one or two is plenty.

The problem with the Exhorter, though, is though they are rarely depressed, when they do get depressed, they are very, very depressed. And it’s almost impossible to lift them out of a depression when they get into it.

So we all need an Exhorter, and if you think for a moment, you can probably identify one or two that you’ve known.

So, these motivational gifts, we could actually call the soul gifts, because these are what earmark seven kinds of souls, seven kinds of people.”

Prophet Across All Three Lists

“Now, let’s take prophet for a moment, because we see it appear in all three lists, and maybe we can understand why it appears in all three.

In the motivational gifts, prophet is a kind of soul, the person who sees things in black and white. But, over here in the spiritual gifts, God may give a person the gift of prophecy, to where they’re sensitive to what God wants to say, and they have the ability to say it.

But then, God may take one of these people and give him the official office of a prophet, and this becomes basically his full-time calling to serve as a prophet. And we see prophets in the Bible.

So, there’s the gift of prophecy, there’s the role of the prophet, but then there’s the motivational gift, the soul that has like a prophet-like demeanor, a prophet-like way of seeing things.

So, there’s so much more we could say about these, but I wanted you to see again how the topic of body, soul, and spirit applies even to these gifts that we see spread out through the apostolic scriptures.

And I just keep having, there’s a little thing in my mind that says move on, move on, so we’re going to move on.”

Soul as Tyrant or Slave

“Now, at the beginning of this teaching, I mentioned that for most of the world, the world sees the human being as being a body and a soul, just a body and a soul.

And because of that, because we don’t see the spiritual, and most of the world doesn’t recognize or appreciate the spiritual, psychiatry doesn’t even acknowledge the spiritual. It’s just the soul and the body.

What happens in the body and the soul, what happens is, is there’s a conflict here.

And we can either get very proud in our souls to where we use our bodies as a way of expressing how proud we are, how accomplished we are. It could be in the clothing we wear, or in the muscles we build, or in the makeup we put on our faces, or in whatever it is. We want to always try to appear something more than we are.

And the soul becomes a tyrant over the body, to where the body is nothing more than a billboard to express and proclaim to the world our praises. And the body will submit to the soul because the soul will always do what’s right in its own eyes.

On the other hand, the soul can become the slave of the body. If the body wants to sleep, then we’ll sleep. If it wants to eat, then we eat. If it wants to play, we play. And it becomes a slave to the physical impulses.

So we see that either the soul can be this tyrant over the body, always living according to its logic and its way of seeing things and its pride and its ego. Or the soul becomes a slave of the body, living according to the physical impulses.

For us as believers, we must conquer both of these impulses. These are the two things that are the greatest enemies of obedience to God. These are the greatest enemies of faith.”

The Two Great Enemies: Sihon and Og

“And this is illustrated in a magnificent way in the Scriptures. To illustrate this, I want us to look at a map. Here, I call this map the two great enemies of obedience.

Let me show you what I mean. Let me shrink it down a little bit so you can see the whole map here.

What we see here is the land of Canaan, the land of Israel. Up here is the Sea of Galilee. And down here is the Dead Sea. And then connecting the two, flowing from north to south, is the Jordan River. So everything to the west of this is Israel. Things to the right of it are the wilderness.

And of course, Israel had come up from Egypt. And after 40 years of wandering, they are ready to enter the land of Canaan. But there are two great enemies here.

On the eastern bank of the Jordan River, we see two groups. We see the Amorites up here under the rule of King Og. And we see Amorites down here under the rule of King Sihon.

Now, I know in our Bibles, people tend to say Sichon and Og, but it’s Sihon and Og. They’re both kings of the Amorites. The Amorites were this massive group of people.

On the eastern bank of the Jordan River, you could think of them as the guardians to keep people from crossing the Jordan. Israel needed to cross the Jordan to come into the land of promise. But to do so, they had to conquer Sihon in the south and Og in the north.

And 16 times in the Scriptures, Sihon and Og are mentioned together. And over and over and over in the Bible, it talks about the great victory Israel had over Sihon and Og. They conquered Sihon and Og. They destroyed Sihon and Og.

And 16 times you have to stop and think, why is this so important? What is going on here? Well, if we look a little more closely at these two characters, and we look at the words associated with their stories, we discover something quite fascinating.

Let’s begin with King Sihon in the south. King Sihon, everything about him is a picture of public enemy number one — human reasoning. Everything about Sihon is a picture of human reasoning and its dangers.

The name Sihon means swept away. Now, this is an amazing picture, because human reasoning has the ability, if we’re not careful, to just sweep away our faith.

… He lived in Kheshvon. Kheshvon comes from the word cheshav, which means to think or to reason. So, King Sweepaway was the king of the talkers. He lived in thinking. He lived in reasoning.

This is where the soul dominates the body, but it does what’s right in its own eyes. It does what it thinks is right. It doesn’t listen to God. It doesn’t listen to wisdom and to truth. But it figures things out and decides, this is what we’re going to do, and makes his body do it.”

King Og: Comfort and Ease

“Now, the larger area of the two is the area to the north that was ruled by the Amorite king, Og. Now, Og, his name means round or cake. No sharp edges here.

Og is all about comfort and ease. Og is a giant, by the way. Did I mention that?

You want to see how his size is described? We find his size described in Deuteronomy 3:11. Look how God chose to have his size described:

For only Og, the king of Bashan, was left of the remnant of the refi, and behold, his bed was a bed of iron. Nine cubits was its length, and four cubits its breadth.

So how do they describe his size? By his iron bed. Og liked to sleep.

But the scriptures note that his bed is made of iron. It makes the bed sound like a jail cell with iron bars, doesn’t it? And I know of people who are trapped in a prison of their own beds, and they just can’t manage to rouse themselves to stand up, to be a man, to be a woman, and to do, and to walk, and accomplish God’s purpose for their lives.

Their bed, they might as well be chained to it, because they become a slave, they become a captive of their bed.

So, Og, the name means round and cake. He’s king of the Amorites. Again, Amorites means talkers.

He rules in Bashan. Bashan means soft. It can also mean sandy soil, very comfortable underfoot.

And there are two battles described. One battle took place at Edre, which means good pasture, and the other was at Socha, which means forgiveness.

Why would this town called forgiveness be part of Og’s kingdom? Because people who are addicted to ease and to comfort will always excuse their lack of obedience by saying, God’s gracious, God will forgive.

Now, people who sin because they know that God will forgive them, I think are kind of hopeless, because they have no fear of God. And like King Og, they’re addicted to their own comfort, to their own ease, and they lose the battle of Socha.

God will forgive, so why even try to live a righteous life?”

Conquering the Two Enemies

“Do you see these two enemies? So one is the enemy of the soul, the other is an enemy that dwells in the body.

The one wants to do what’s right in its own eyes, live by its own human logic. The other wants to live according to its physical impulses.

And if you want to make your way into the land of liberty, the land of fruitfulness, the land of Canaan, into the promised land, you must conquer both of these enemies.

Conquering one is not enough. They are all Amorites. They are all Amorites. They are all one enemy.

But there are two leaders. And they are in two pockets. And we must conquer them both.

The king of human reasoning and the king of human comfort and ease. And if you can’t conquer those two in your life, you’ll never know what it is to live an abundant life, a spiritual life, a life of purpose, a life of serving God and accomplishing your destiny in this world. So I challenge you to rise up and conquer these enemies.”

Warning Against the Idol of the Age

“As we close this out, I want to introduce you to the idol of the age, especially here in the United States. There it is, the EZ chair, the cushy chair. This is the idol. This is the throne of King Og.

And oh, how we love to sit in it. Now, there’s nothing wrong with leisure. You have to have leisure and rest to be a good steward of your body and to be obedient. Rest is important.

But rest is there to serve us. We are not there to be a slave to it. So let’s be careful. We do not worship at the idol of the age, which is the EZ chair.

In Proverbs 6:9-11, here’s a warning to the worshipers of the idol of the age:

How long will you lie down, oh sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest. And your poverty will come in like a robber and your need like an armed man.

So, I hope this brief teaching, I could have made it so much longer, but I hope that this teaching about the body-soul connection is helpful to you.

But I’m really excited about the next one, the soul-spirit connection. That’s where we really get into the meat and potatoes of this series on the body, soul, and spirit.

So until then, I wish you shalom and may God bless.”