The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Bible Study Course Lesson 4 – 9
God certainly knew when He designed us that giving an inexperienced soul and a good-but-naive conscience a selfish beast would cause us regularly and repeatedly to be led astray and sin (Genesis 8:21). So why would God do that? After all these lessons, an obvious answer should come to your mind – we have a carnal heart to give us something to master. An ever-present source of temptation; something within us to battle constantly, spurring us on to do evil.
And that’s certainly a nice answer. It’s just not the whole answer. Another part is culpability; if your soul chose to do evil, there could be no sacrifice for your sin (Hebrews 10:26). But what if your soul sins because your heart deceives you? (Isaiah 44:19-20). Certainly then, Jesus can be justified in asking God for your forgiveness because your heart, not your soul, chose evil. Your soul made a choice, yes, but it was a deceived choice, and for deception there can be forgiveness (1 Timothy 1:13).
The wages of sin is death. For your sins, something has to die. Something has to bear the blame (Romans 7:24). Notice that it’s his soul which is seeking deliverance FROM the dead body! (Romans 7:18). To be clear, Paul’s soul chose to follow his beast to sin – just as Adam chose to follow Eve. Adam, alone, would not have been deceived by the devil; but Eve was (1 Timothy 2:14). And Adam then chose to follow her deception.
Without a selfish heart, your soul would not be easily deceived by sin. But it would eventually have made a mistake someday. And without the heart to pass the blame to (compare Genesis 3:12-13), your soul would be unforgivable. So the heart gives the soul a scapegoat; God can forgive your soul and put it in a new body because while the soul probably would have eventually sinned… it DID sin because of the heart (Proverbs 16:9).
The soul made a bad choice, but the choice was not motivated by pure selfishness; it sinned because the heart whined, nagged, and deceived the soul into doing something that only the heart really didn’t care was a sin. And that’s certainly part of why we have a carnal nature. But that, too, is not all the story.
THE GOLDEN RULE
As you well know by now, every apostrophe and comma in the law can trace its source back to the golden rule. But ponder for a second the actual text of the golden rule; Matthew 7:12 (WEB) Therefore whatever you desire for men to do to you, you shall also do to them; for this is the law and the prophets. Without the heart, no man could keep the golden rule! Why? Because knowledge of the golden rule is based on asking your heart, your selfish heart, what it desires! How IT wants them to treat YOU!
Without a heart that is selfish, you would not know what you want done to you; and it would be impossible, then, to do that to other people! Our soul never feels hot or cold, never has physical hunger or pain, so how could it ever grasp the idea of feeding the hungry? How could it understand what it means to suffer, if it didn’t have a beast to tell it and teach it how to empathize with other beasts to suffer? Even the pre-human Jesus struggled with this problem, and it made Him incapable of being the high priest we deserved! Hebrews 2:14-18.
Jesus didn’t have a carnal nature in the Old Testament, and that kept Him from relating to us. Not having a selfish heart prevented Him from being a perfect judge of the golden rule in the time of Moses! The pre-incarnate Jesus needed someone like Moses, someone who did have a beast, to remind Him that we were only flesh and this isn’t as easy as it looks to a God! (Psalms 78:38-39, Exodus 32:9-14). I mean, He knew that… but not like David did (Genesis 6:3).
So Jesus came and showed us that what He asked us to do is not as hard as it looks (Philippians 2:5-8)… but it is harder than He realized (Hebrews 5:8, Matthew 26:36-42). Having a selfish heart didn’t prevent Him from being righteous… but He can’t deny it makes it a greater challenge! And now He uses the memory of how hard it was to have a selfish nature to intercede with His Father for us (Romans 8:34, Hebrews 7:25) – His father who hasn’t felt what it was like to be tempted! (James 1:13).
And the Father trusts Jesus’ judgment, and actually doesn’t punish those whom Jesus makes excuses for, because Jesus proved that He can be objective when judging the human heart having done it successfully with His own!
CONVINCING THE BEAST
Jesus’ soul was from heaven – it dying for our sins was relatively straightforward. After all, His soul knew why this had to happen, it was why He came into this world, after all! (John 18:37). To be clear, He wasn’t born knowing that, but He learned it, and His soul understood it (Hebrews 10:5-9). Nonetheless, it was not the death of His soul that was the real prize; His soul could have died in the temple in heaven! (Revelation 11:19). There was no need for it to be put into a human first!
No, He became a human specifically to sacrifice His human body – His beast. For it was not only the death of the beast that mattered… to win the ultimate prize, the beast had to go willingly to the sacrifice! (Isaiah 53:7). See, simply ruling the beast, as you learned how to do in the first few lessons of this series, is a vital first step. But it isn’t enough. With a strong, vigilant, and diligent soul you could micromanage your beast for your entire life, and you could indeed keep it from sinning.
But a far better approach is to teach the beast what you want, so that you don’t have to control every move it makes! The heart is extremely stubborn and difficult to train. What was God’s continual complaint about Israel? Zechariah 7:12. What did God want our beast to act like? Psalms 34:18, Psalms 51:17. What did David ask God to do to his heart? Psalms 51:10. Like any animal, our beast can be trained. Within certain limits, it can be changed into a better animal. You cannot change a cow into a philosopher, nor make a pig into a soprano. But you can make it a better version of what it is.
The process of training any animal is always the same; first, you get its attention. You teach it you’re the boss, and make it listen to you. This process in horses is called “breaking”. And it is, indeed, a “broken and contrite heart” that we are trying to create… as a first step. After breaking comes the training. You teach it what is expected from it; with a horse, this might be wearing a saddle, or turning left when you pull left on the reins. Once this is done, you’ll have a very useful animal; it is obedient and knows how to do what you need it to do.
You might call this an Old Covenant training – it is capable of doing everything you want, but it does not know how to feel what you want, or to correctly anticipate your needs because it doesn’t really know you. It works for its hay, it works to avoid the spur, but it doesn’t work for any deeper meaning. But there is a step beyond this, a relationship which a very few trainers develop with their animals. Where it no longer obeys you out of fear, or even out of duty, but out of a deeper bond of trust, from a sense that obeying you is its sole reason for existing.
With an unbroken beast, its own wish is its command. With a broken beast, your wish is its command. But with the ideal beast, its own wish is to do your commands (John 5:30, 6:38). This perfectly illustrates, respectively, a no-covenant, Old Covenant, and New Covenant relationship between a heart and a soul.
LIFE BY DEATH
The ultimate goal of all training of the heart, the ideal relationship you can hope to develop with your own beast, is when you can tell it to jump off a cliff and have it obey you with no thought of the consequences, gladly going to its death because it pleases its soul which it has learned to trust absolutely. Note that this is different from the dog, which often gives this trust to anyone whom fate makes its master, even masters who treat it cruelly and abusively. But with the horse, or the human heart, this trust must be hard-earned and, if given, is well deserved.
This is the ultimate test, and the deeper purpose to why we have a carnal heart; yes, we needed it to give our soul an enemy to overcome, as you learned above. Yes, we were given a heart as a scapegoat to buy our souls grace. But those reasons are just the beginning of its purpose; for the ultimate goal is not to overpower the beast; not to bind it to your will, not to destroy it. This would end the war, it is true… but if God simply wanted the war over He would never have cast you into one in the first place!
The true challenge is not to win the war in the traditional sense. The true goal is to not to kill your enemy… but to change him. Your task is to convince the most selfish creature in the universe that the only way to live… is for it to die! (Luke 17:33). The beast cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, because it is made of flesh (1 Corinthians 15:50). The beast cannot grasp any covenant higher than the OC, which only ends in death – there is no other way out of that covenant.
As long as the beast obeys the law, it will continue to live… but sooner or later, it will make a mistake and thus sooner or later, it will die. There is no way out of it. And it is your soul’s job to explain this to it; and to convince it that the only way to live is to die. (Psalms 69:30-32). The question of “why we have a beast” is answered fairly simply in Romans 8:20-21. Yes, we were given a powerful, selfish beast so that our souls could learn to set themselves free… but not only that, but also to set even the creature – the heart – free of its corruption! (1 Thessalonians 3:13).
HOW TO CONVINCE THE BEAST
So it’s not enough merely to wrestle the beast to the ground and pin it there. It’s not even enough to get the beast to admit you won, so you can let it up. You can’t say you’ve truly won until you’ve done all that and then made the beast love you. I’ve said before that Ecclesiastes is written by the beast; but more precisely, it is a conversation between Solomon’s soul and his heart. Most of the book is clearly “I said in my heart” (Ecclesiastes 9:1 NLT for instance).
And yet in that verse, you see that “*I* considered in my heart”; this “I”, therefore, is not his heart! (Ecclesiastes 9:11-12 NLT). So from here on out, this is Solomon’s soul responding to his heart! He was reasoning with his heart, using the best answers he had, the best wisdom his soul knew, to answer the arguments of his beast! And it wasn’t good enough – but it was good enough to tell us WHY it wasn’t good enough. Solomon couldn’t convince his beast, and his best answer after the argument was a compromise between them: Ecclesiastes 12:8-13 NLT.
The majority of the book of Ecclesiastes is not simply justifying the beast; it’s tearing down the soul, and haranguing on its mistakes; Ecclesiastes 5:6 NLT criticizes it for making promises the heart is unwilling to keep;Ecclesiastes 5:10-16 NLT remind the soul that all their work for money was a waste of effort; that even his soul’s desire for wisdom backfired (Ecclesiastes 6:7-8 NLT), and so on throughout the book.
In short, this is somewhat like a divorce, where the spouse dredges up every mistake the other person ever made, everything they ever did that even might have been wrong, to justify their own mistakes. And Solomon’s response? He didn’t concede the beast was right, he just said “Sometimes bad things happen to good people” (Ecclesiastes 9:11-12 NLT).
His beast found this… unconvincing. Then Solomon’s soul argued that “people make mistakes” (Ecclesiastes 10:1 NLT); his soul whined that it was unfair that the tiniest mistake was used to discredit it; true enough, but the beast doesn’t care about fair. It was never about fair. And the mistake was in allowing the argument to be about fair.
So Solomon talked about the shame of their situation (Ecclesiastes 10:2-7 NLT), inappropriate that the heart ruled over the soul. Again, the beast doesn’t care, it only cares about getting its own way. The soul shouldn’t rule because it’s fair. It should rule because that’s what it was created to do. The beast wanted to make this a contest between the soul and the heart, to see which one had made more mistakes in their life; the beast, being fully grown, had a huge advantage over the stunted soul so the contest was always unfair, in the beast’s favor, from the beginning!
But this is not a contest. This is not about doing more right than wrong. The same beast accused God of the same thing; how did God respond? (Ezekiel 33:17-20). This is not about karma. The soul made mistakes, true, and like souls do, it learned from those mistakes! But the heart made mistakes that it is still making because hearts won’t change without someone forcing them to do so! So the argument should never have been counting and comparing mistakes. The soul should have demanded that they only play the game based who was most likely to save them tomorrow! Luke 12:16-21.
This is the argument Jesus told us to have with our heart when it said “soul, let’s not work so hard!”; the reminder that no one cares who has made more mistakes yesterday; because either way, the soul is the best choice to make decisions for tomorrow! Most psalms are prophecies of Jesus, and when His own spirit was envious at the wicked (Psalms 73:1-3); when His heart said “all is vanity and vexation of spirit” (Psalms 73:12-14), at first His soul wasn’t sure what to say!
That is, until it went to the house of God, and God showed it what to say! (Psalms 73:15-20). Something Solomon’s soul never thought to do! And that answer actually made a profound impression on the heart (Psalms 73:21-28), and that was why Jesus was greater than Solomon! Because Jesus was actually ABLE to convince the gainsayers! (Luke 21:15, Titus 1:9).
FUTURE OF THE HEART
The beast cannot enter the Kingdom of God, because it is made of flesh. So your beast will not be in the first resurrection; that simply is not on the table (1 Corinthians 15:50, 2 Peter 2:12). And yet what does Psalms 69:32 promise the heart? That it shall live. Isaiah 57:15 (Jubilee) …to cause the spirit of the humble to live and to cause the heart of the contrite ones to live.
And yet Genesis 3:19 and Ecclesiastes 12:7, together, say pretty clearly that the flesh is strictly a single-use commodity. And yet Job 19:26 says the opposite. This is a contradiction not easily resolved. And yet… consider the sacrifices. We are to make our bodies – our beasts – living sacrifices (Romans 12:1). Paul said he “died daily” (1 Corinthians 15:31). We are to crucify, mortify, sacrifice and so on our beast, flesh, lusts, etc. (Colossians 3:5, Romans 8:13, Romans 6:6, 1 Peter 4:1-2, etc.).
Only clean animals could be sacrificed on God’s altar, for unclean beasts are an abomination Him (Isaiah 66:17). So if our hearts are unclean (Romans 1:24) we cannot offer them to God. Thus, even a normally clean animal like an ox, if its works are evil – which would tell us its heart is evil (Matthew 15:19) – then it becomes unclean: Exodus 21:28. But by that same logic, couldn’t a normally unclean beast, such as a donkey, become clean… if its heart were pure, and if a sacrifice were provided to pay for past sins? Exodus 13:13.
Was that law just about donkeys and lambs? Or was there a deeper meaning? Exodus 13:14-45 NLT. See, before Israel got so stubborn, God actually made an effort to explain the meanings behind the rituals, that this pictured their deliverance from Egypt. After Sinai, He mostly stopped trying. Yet this is only another layer of the onion; for Israel leaving the bondage of Egypt is only a type of our leaving the bondage to sin, which in turn is just another way of saying bondage to an unbroken spirit and an unbroken heart.
But once our soul has broken the heart, it is our job to bind it up again – as Jesus bound up His own (Isaiah 61:1) once it was broken (Psalms 69:20). Likewise, having convinced it that you are right, you must then teach it how to be right; teach it what it should want. Your soul must write the laws of God, not the lusts of the flesh, on that broken heart and thus bind it up again. Thus making the unclean heart clean. And that’s why Exodus 13:14-15 tells us the “asses” in this metaphor pictured “my children”, who were redeemed by the lamb!
So we are the donkeys, the unclean beasts, who become clean and are redeemed by the lamb! And that is how our hearts that seek God will live! All the hearts of unclean beasts who will let Jesus be their soul, and put His bit in their mouth, will live! (Matthew 21:1-5).
TRIED BY FIRE
It may be ambitious to hope that we will be completely pure in heart in this life, although Jesus does indicate that’s a possibility: Matthew 5:8. Yet getting back to the idea of sacrifices, our sacrifice doesn’t have to be without carnality… in fact, that’s why it’s tried by fire. Isaiah 66:16 For by fire and by his sword will the LORD plead with all flesh: and the slain of the LORD shall be many.
Reading the rest of that chapter, believe it or not, it’s talking about this question. In Isaiah 66:17, “they that sanctify themselves” while eating unclean things shall be consumed by the fire and the sword, “for I know their works and their thoughts”, which are obviously unclean (Isaiah 66:18).
In 1 Kings 18:38, the fire comes down and consumes the flesh off the sacrifice, just as it does on a regular temple sacrifice. But really, is “consumes” the right word? You’ve been to a barbecue. If it’s left on the fire too long, is it really consumed? Or is it changed? Converted from FLESH into smoke… into SPIRIT!
Fire changes flesh into spirit. That’s literally what it does, and everyone who has ever seen a fire has always known that. It takes material things we can touch like wood and meat and turns them into insubstantial gases, spirits which float away on the breeze and drift up towards heaven… returning to God who gave it! (Ecclesiastes 12:7 NLT).
God enjoys the smell of meat being converted to spirit (Exodus 29:18) – whether it’s the meat of a clean animal, or an unclean animal (2 Corinthians 2:14-16). Because let’s face it, roast lamb, roast pig, roast dog, even roast human (I imagine) all smells pretty great sizzling over a fire. And by the golden rule, you could have already known that; for we’re made in His image, and there are few better smells in the world than the smell of roasting flesh; the smell of a beast’s selfish heart being burned away and converted to spirit by the fire of God.
And what does fire represent in the Bible? 1 Peter 1:7, 1 Peter 4:12, Proverbs 17:3. Our main job in this life, as you’ve learned in this lesson, is to convince our heart that God’s way is right. And it is that work that must be tried by fire! (1 Corinthians 3:12-15). Work which is done in the temple of God – our bodies! (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).
We may think we’ve finished the job, and that our heart is completely obedient; and when God tests us the fire will reveal whether or not we were right! A particularly miraculous example of this would be Daniel 3:20-27. These were men on whose bodies the fire had no power! Men on whom the fire could rest without hurting them (Acts 2:1-4), because God IS a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29).
In Isaiah 66:19 He says He will gather “those that escape” – those who pass through the fire of Isaiah 66:16 – and bring them to Jerusalem for an offering in a clean vessel! (Isaiah 66:20). You are in an unclean vessel, just like the donkey’s heart. But if your heart can survive the fires and the sword, it will be put into a clean vessel, one paid for by the death of the Lamb. And it is those people who shall be Kings and Priests in the world to come (Isaiah 66:21).
And then, as Paul said – think very literally about the words – “this corruptible [heart] must PUT ON incorruption [a new body] and this mortal [heart] must put on immortality [spirit body]”! (1 Corinthians 15:53). The spirit of Christ, a spirit that is a consuming fire, dwells in the hearts of all those who have been called and chosen. And day by day, choice by choice, it exposes the flaws in that heart to the judgment of your soul and burns away the selfishness it finds there.
And as the Father sees your hearts learn the law, and forget the selfishness hardwired into them, as each tiny morsel of flesh is burned away in the fire of His spirit, it creates a smell of roasting flesh which pleases Him; whether the vessel the heart resides in is a benevolent ox or a selfish ass.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
In the end, the beast must die. There is no way around it. “It is appointed unto men once to die” (Hebrews 9:27). And yet we shall not all die (1 Corinthians 15:52). And yet no seed becomes a plant without dying (1 Corinthians 15:35-38). So for your soul to receive life, the beast must die (Mark 8:35). …But the heart doesn’t have to die with it. Even though I use them interchangeably, they aren’t the same. The beast is the vessel which contains the heart; the heart is that which motivates the beast to behave as it does.
If Ecclesiastes made anything clear, it’s that the beast is absolutely certain this is its only life. It doesn’t believe in the mumbo-jumbo about afterlife for the spirit or soul either, but it knows the beast has no future in God’s Kingdom. And it’s right. But what if it weren’t? What if the beast’s heart were to have a hope of survival – provided it was so thoroughly changed, it would be almost unrecognizable? Would the beast, on that slender thread of hope, be willing to give up this life in exchange for the hope of that one?
No, of course not. Not unless it had absolutely no other choice. And it is your job, as a soul, to make it see that it really doesn’t have any other choice. Because the beast has no future in the Kingdom of God… but the heart might (Psalms 73:26). Notice the flesh and the heart fail… but God only strengthens the heart!
So you must take a mirror, and show the heart what it truly is (James 1:23-25). You must hear its arguments, and answer them clearly; you must listen to its complaints, and explain why it deserves this; you must show it, using whatever wisdom you have – and asking for more if you need it (James 1:2-5) – why it is unhappy, why this trial is happening to it, and what it needs to do to make it change.
You must teach it the law, and change it over time into the same image it sees in that mirror (2 Corinthians 3:15-18). For the law is spiritual (Romans 7:14). And as you replace the selfishness that is native to the heart with the spiritualness that is native to the 1-2-10 law… you are changing the contents of the heart from flesh into spirit!
You are burning away the flesh from your heart and converting it into something that can inherit the Kingdom of God… incorruptible spirit! And using that law, you must show it that death is what it deserves, by the law now written in its own flesh. This doesn’t mean you must be tortured for your beliefs to be in the first resurrection; but God must know if your heart would be willing, were He to ask (Genesis 22:1-12 comes to mind). He can learn that in a lot of different ways without you actually being martyred, and all of them the heart will hate by nature.
He might ask for your son’s life, He might make you be alone, He might have you swim with sharks or go to prison; whatever your beast fears worse than death can substitute for death for the purposes of the testing. Whatever form the testing takes, before you are saved, God will know if your heart would die for your soul, as He did with Abraham. Because we don’t all have to actually die to be in the Kingdom of God… but we do all have to be CHANGED (1 Corinthians 15:51).
So you see, it’s not about having a clean heart. If God had merely wanted you to have a clean heart, He would have given you one. No, it’s about having a soul that’s capable of creating a clean heart and spirit no matter what kind of heart it is given to work with! Which, had you simply read 2 Corinthians 7:1, you would have seen a long time ago. And to prove that you’ve done your work well, that heart must be willing to die for you. Whether that death is at the stake of the martyr, or to be slowly burned away, one selfish thought at a time, at your own soul’s hands.
This is the greatest test because it requires the one thing the beast lacks most: faith. You must convince it to trust you. It must lay down its life at your word, not knowing if it will ever live again. And it must die willingly, trusting in you, hoping that it will live again… but knowing, based on the laws written within itself, that even if it doesn’t… this is exactly what it deserves.
And on that day, your soul wins. And on the next day, your perfect heart will live again.