The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Bible Study Course Lesson 5 – 5
The word “spirit” simply means “air” or “breath”. Greek has no capitalization or punctuation, so when you see the word “spirit” in your Bible it is exactly the same, in Greek, as the word “Spirit”. You learned this in Lesson 2-6, but it bears repeating because I’m about to radically change the way you see some things in the NT. Despite it being plainly stated in places like 1 Corinthians 2:14, Philemon 1:25, Romans 1:9, and so on, the world doesn’t know that we have our own spirit. So when people read verses like these, they tend to cram all mentions of “the spirit” into being about the holy spirit, even when it’s clearly stated otherwise (Galatians 6:18, for instance).
Again, the Greek word is the same regardless of whether it speaks of the spirit of Jesus or the spirit of a man. And so when you read a scripture like, say, the fruits of the spirit you need to ask… the fruits of which spirit? Ephesians 5:7-10. The world is comfortable believing that “goodness and righteousness and truth” are gifts that God gives us. But look at the context here – it is talking about being partakers of the world; that means sharing their spirit, their conscience!
It talks about us BEING light; and what is the spirit? Proverbs 20:27. Now be clear! That is our spirit which is the “candle” God uses to search our inward parts! Not His spirit! And our spirit gives off light – truth – if God “lights” it (Psalms 18:28). Now God thinks His metaphors through thoroughly. So imagine, how would you go about lighting a candle? You would use another candle! (John 1:9). So to teach one spirit truth, you use another spirit that already gives off light! (2 Corinthians 4:3-6, Job 32:8).
Who is the light of the world? Jesus? Jesus in us? Matthew 5:14. Why is it so hard for the world to accept that we can be light? Psalms 119:130. Anything that chases away the works of darkness is, by definition, light! (Ephesians 5:13-14). The whole POINT of what God is doing is specifically to light our lamps so that WE, not just He, can lighten the universe! (Daniel 12:3). He gives us this light, and then it burns IN us, because our own spirit now holds a true record of right and wrong, and it no longer needs His to point out sin, for WE are light in the Lord! (Philippians 2:15).
And the fruits, or the result, of our very own spirit becoming broken, becoming meek, turning away from the unfruitful works of darkness is that our spirits will learn truth, goodness, and righteousness! (Psalms 19:8). So that our spirits will be a bright candle to light the path for our soul, and indeed the rest of the world! (Psalms 119:105, Psalms 43:3, Proverbs 6:23). So the “fruits of the spirit” are not fruits that are gained spontaneously because He gave us His spirit!
They are fruits that our own spirit creates, as it burns and gives off the light of Truth! The light of Truth which His spirit sparked but which is not the light of His spirit, but our own! “Spirit” OR “spirit”? Knowing this, we need to re-examine all the times “spirit” is mentioned in the Bible, particularly the NT, whether it was capitalized by the translators or not. We need to see based on the context whether it really refers to Jesus’ or the Father’s spirits, or to our own.
Most references do in fact refer to Jesus’ or His Father’s spirit, for They are actively involved in igniting our spirit; 1 Corinthians 12:3-13, for instance, is clearly talking about the gifts that come from Jesus’ spirit. Yet 1 Corinthians 14:2, 12-16, 32, etc., are just as clearly talking about our own spirits. The word “holy” is in the original Greek, not added by the translators, so any reference that refers to the “holy spirit” is specifically talking about Jesus or the Father, usually Jesus. Yet it was clearly not Jesus’ spirit which was stirred up in Acts 17:16, but Paul’s own.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 mentions both our spirit and God’s spirit, and for that matter our beast (body) as well. John 4:24 is clearly a reference to our own spirit being meek enough to learn from God’s spirit; to adjust its definition of right and wrong to match His (Romans 10:1-3). Jesus was clearly referring to Peter’s spirit, not His own, in Matthew 26:41; Luke 1:46-47 are clearly Mary’s own soul and spirit, not God’s. And so on. In James 4:5, this clearly isn’t God’s spirit; and yet this is a spirit that James said without qualification dwells in all of us.
But isn’t it the beast who envies? Not exactly; the beast lusts. Lust is “I want that”. That is, of course, something which comes from the heart. Lust is a simple emotion, not cluttered by reasons or excuses. It simply wants, it has no desire to hurt someone – nor any desire not to. Lust is honest. But envy is different; see Psalms 73:3. Envy is wanting something specifically because someone else has it (Proverbs 23:17). More to the point, envy is saying you should have it because he has it.
Envy says “I deserve it more than him”. This is an opinion based on what is right, based on what should be which is a matter of the spirit! That’s why it’s mentioned alongside anger and wrath, other spirit problems (Proverbs 27:4). Thus envy is the rationalization of lust. Envy is a spirit finding a good-sounding excuse to justify the heart’s lust, rather than correcting it! And thus converting simple lust INTO envy!
PAUL’S STUBBORNNESS
In 1 Corinthians 4:21, it is clearly Paul’s own spirit which is offering to act meekly towards them; yet as you’ve seen in Lesson 5-2, Paul did not always act meekly. Paul tended to be arrogant, and one way that arrogance manifests itself is by being stubborn and bullheaded – and that always comes with a price (Proverbs 15:31-32). Something Paul knew well (Proverbs 13:15, 2 Corinthians 12:7-11, Acts 9:5, 16). Read Philippians 3:4-6, and you can see that Paul was clearly a spirit-dominated person. He himself said that he had more reason to trust in the flesh than anyone – that is trusting in the “righteousness as touching the law”, which was managed by his own spirit, not Jesus’!
And he acknowledged that he was still working through this problem (Philippians 3:7-14). He went on to mention that it was better to have this problem than to be ruled by your belly (your beast) in Philippians 3:18-19.
Paul’s arrogance got beaten down a lot in Paul’s life. He suffered, by his own admission, a lot more than the other apostles (2 Corinthians 11:23-30). And this doesn’t mean Paul didn’t eventually overcome this and get his spirit thoroughly broken – but it was not a fight he had won by Acts 19:21. In that verse you see Paul saying “I must…”, which is clearly a spirit word, to make a decision. That’s not a bad thing, of course – there are things all of us must do from time to time. But notice an odd phrase there; Paul said he was “bound in the spirit”. Bound to God’s spirit, everyone assumes… but is it really God’s spirit that was “binding him” to go to Jerusalem? Acts 21:4, 8-14.
He wasn’t bound by God’s spirit… God’s spirit was telling him not to go! (Acts 20:22-24). No, Paul went to Jerusalem as a slave to his own spirit, arrogantly ignoring the advice of all other spirits, including God’s own! When you stubbornly try to do things your way, God makes it work out according to His plan… but you always suffer more as a result of doing it your way. If he had listened to Proverbs 3:5, he would not have leaned on his own spirit’s understanding (Proverbs 17:27), and he would have had a much easier life (Matthew 11:28-30).
Because of his stubbornness and unwillingness to take correction, he spent most of the next five years imprisoned in one way or another. But none of this was because of what God’s spirit had said. It was because of what Paul’s spirit felt must be done, and no amount of persuasion from the other disciples, nor even prophets and signs, would prevent Paul from seeing it through.
How often has your own stubborn spirit led you to do things that, in retrospect, were obviously stupid?All the signs were there, everyone told you it was dumb, but you just wouldn’t listen? So you kept kicking against the pricks? So try to learn from Paul’s experience, and “lean not to your own understanding”.
THE SPIRIT OF LIFE
Figuring out which spirit was meant in a given verse can be difficult, especially in places like Romans 8:9-11, where no less than three spirits are mentioned, with little to differentiate them. The KJV mangles these verses pretty badly, but Weymouth says… Romans 8:10 (Weymouth) But if Christ is in you, though your body must die because of sin, yet your spirit has Life because of righteousness. Compare this to Isaiah 38:16. This is an important difference from the KJV’s meaning, because it’s not Jesus’ spirit that somehow “is [our] life because of [his] righteousness”, as most people read it.
It’s simply that when His spirit dwells in us and lights our candle, then our own spirit becomes righteous, gives off light, and therefore HAS LIFE (John 6:63, 1 John 1:1-3). The process of salvation, as Paul says in Romans 7:6, is about breaking our spirit from the old habits of the letter of the law and teaching it to serve the law in a new and better way. To serve it with understanding, not memorization. 2 Corinthians 3:6-9 is another example of this; everyone assumes the “spirit” here is the holy spirit, but this is talking about the difference between the OC, which had the letters of the law written on stony tablets of the heart, and the NC, which has the meaning of that law written on our spirits!
Anyone can compare themselves to a list of do’s and don’t’s, even a beast. The spirit’s job is to be capable of understanding those laws as infinite fractions and breaking them down to apply to any situation. And it is that better, spiritual law which Paul was a minister of – the law of the NC. The letter always kills eventually, because it is never clear enough to prevent all sin. Yet the spirit gives life, for it can grasp and teach the beast to keep all four sides of the law. That is why it is life, because of its own righteousness!
Ephesians 4:22-26 says this in yet another way; first look at the context, “be angry, and sin not”; clearly, this is talking to the spirit, our spirit. “Righteousness and holiness and truth” is also clearly about our spirit. And that is why it is your spirit, not God’s, which must be “be renewed in the spirit of your mind”. It is not God’s spirit, but your own, which “puts on a new man”. God’ spirit lights the candle, but without your own spirit bearing witness to the truth a hundred times a day to keep your heart in line, you will never become a new man!
SANCTIFICATION OF THE SPIRIT
Most translators mess up Romans 8 because they don’t know we have our own spirit – and even if they do, it really bothers them to write “your spirit has life”, because that isn’t something that Protestant theology can admit. Because it is central to most religions that we cannot please God, that we cannot obey God (the Antichrist doctrine, you’ll recall). Yet this is exactly what God is doing; trying to light spiritual candles that can be the light of the world (Luke 11:33-36). The creation of new holy spirits starts today, while we’re still alive. For if our spirits are not just and righteous today, they will never be made perfect in the resurrection (Hebrews 12:23).
That’s actually exactly what 2 Thessalonians 2:13 says… if you understand which spirit it is talking about! When people read the “sanctification of the spirit”, they naturally assume sanctification by the holy spirit of God. Yet that really isn’t what it says, if you look at it closely. Sanctification means “making holy”. So does this speak of our sanctification by HIS spirit… or does it refer to the washing and purifying of our spirits, making them holy? The WEB translation makes the answer easier to see…
2 Thessalonians 2:13 (WEB) …because God chose you from the beginning for salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief in the truth; We are saved because OUR SPIRIT is made holy; because OUR SPIRIT learns what the law truly means, and because OUR SPIRIT learns to trust in the Truth, and not in its own traditions, habits, and customs!
Hebrews 9:13-14 says the same thing in more detail; there Paul says that as the beast had to be washed and sanctified by the sacrifice of animals, so our conscience must be purged from dead works (inaccurate laws), and therefore our spirit must be sanctified by the sacrifice of a spirit being!
And it was this exact event (possibly these exact verses, for he had read Paul’s writings according to 2 Peter 3:15-16) – that Peter was referencing in 1 Peter 1:2. The sanctification of our spirit unto obedience by the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus! (See also 1 Peter 3:21). These verses don’t refer to the holy spirit, they outline the process of how God uses His spirit to create hundreds of thousands of new holy spirits, washing them in His own spirit and purging them from unnecessary, outdated, and just plain wrong laws!
SPIRITUALLY MINDED
We tend to get stuck in ruts caused by translations over time, and it’s often quite surprising how a new translation changes a passage. Romans 8 is very… cliched to us today, having been the subject of innumerable ignorant sermons. But knowing that the word spirit often refers to our spirit, look at what Williams says on these verses [my suggested identification of the spirits in brackets]: Romans 8:2 (Williams) For the life-giving power of the [our] Spirit through union with Christ Jesus has set us [our spirit] free from the power of sin and death.
That idea fits very nicely with Romans 8:10 as you studied above, where our spirit is life because of righteousness. That life is set free “through union” with Christ’s spirit, as His spirit’s candle lights our own spirit’s candle. Verse 4 (Williams) so that the requirement of the law might be fully met in us who do not live by the standard set by our lower nature, but by the standard set by the Spirit.
The bar of the OC was set by the capacity of the beasts of the Israelites (Matthew 19:8). That never truly met the standard of the law; it was simply the best God could hope for from people who wouldn’t rule their hearts and break their spirits (Deuteronomy 5:29). Yet obeying this law of Moses was, in a sense, committing adultery (Mark 10:2-12), and certainly not what God originally wanted (Malachi 2:14-16). This type of adultery was tolerated under the “standard set by our lower nature”… but it will never “fully meet the requirement of the law”!
Verse 5-6 (Williams) For people who live by the standard set by their lower nature are usually thinking the things suggested by that nature, and people who live by the standard set by the Spirit are usually thinking the things suggested by the Spirit. For to be thinking the things suggested by the lower nature means death, but to be thinking the things suggested by the Spirit means life and peace. Millions of Christians read these verses every day thinking these things refer to the spirit of God; even these translators capitalized “Spirit” to indicate their own opinion of which spirit was meant.
But this is just referring to the struggle you’ve been reading about for a dozen lessons now, where the “lower nature” of the heart’s “I want!” is pitted against the “standard set by the spirit”, which says “I should!” Verses 7-8 (Williams) Because one’s thinking the things suggested by the lower nature means enmity to God, for it does not subject itself to God’s law, nor indeed can it. The people who live on the plane of the lower nature cannot please God.
The heart is not going to voluntarily subject itself to the law of God. It can learn it, and it can even teach it (Romans 2:15b, Romans 5:5). But it will never willingly subject itself to that law! Thatrequires a soul in charge of the heart AND the spirit! (Romans 8:9).
BECOMING A SOUL
Your spirit may not be well-educated in the law. It may not be broken. But if you have Christ’s spirit in you, you should be gradually learning what that “standard set by your own spirit” should be! (Romans 8:14). Your spirit should be led into righteousness, into a true and full understanding of the meaning of the law, by Jesus’ spirit. If you then use the righteousness and light in your spirit to condemn the selfish nature of your heart, you shall live! (Romans 8:13). Seen in this light, Romans 7 takes on new significance. Starting in Romans 8:14, it tells us plainly that the law is spiritual – meant to be understood by the spirit, not by the heart!
Romans 7:21-23 (Williams) “So I find this law: When I want to do right, the wrong is always in my way. For in accordance with my better inner nature I approve God’s law, but I see another power operating in my lower nature in conflict with the power operated by my reason, which makes me a prisoner to the power of sin which is operating in my lower nature.” So Paul is describing, yet again (compare Romans 2:15a), the conflict between his heart and his spirit. Not, as most people believe, the conflict between himself and Christ’s spirit, but between his own spirit and his own heart!
What Paul is complaining about is simply that he had a soul that was too weak at that time to manage the war between the beast and the conscience! ( Romans 2:17-18). How can Paul resolve this? Romans 2:24-25. The same way all of us must – by getting our soul to wrestle its way to the top of the heap with Christ’s help (2 Corinthians 7:1, 1 Peter 1:22). And to do that, the soul needs to have its spirit at its side against the heart (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12). And to do that we have the instructions in Romans 8, and Christ’s spirit helping it to learn the truth under our soul’s management! (1 Corinthians 14:32).
FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT
The book of Galatians repeats a lot of the same themes from Romans, and switches back and forth between mentions of our spirit and God’s spirit. For example Galatians 3:2,3 is clearly God’s spirit, since it’s something we received and therefore didn’t already have. Yet verse 3 says that having begun in the spirit – that is, begun working to improve your spirit’s understanding using the spirit of Christ from verse 2 – “do you really think you can finish the job by using the external negative law of the flesh?”
Later, in Galatians 5:5, this is most likely our own spirit which must hope for righteousness; and in Galatians 5:16-18 we have a close paraphrase of the first few verses of Romans 8, which again says that we should follow our spirit, not our flesh. It goes on in Galatians 5:19-21 to show exactly what our flesh wants; pretty much all the things which Jesus said come from the heart (Mark 7:20-23). Then in Mark 7:22-24, Paul goes on to contrast what will happen if we follow our spirit once it’s been educated by Christ’s spirit Notice that many of these things are specifically things our spirit must learn; meekness, for example; goodness; faith; patience.
These virtues are the automatic result of breaking your spirit, so yes, they are the fruits of the spirit… the fruits of BREAKING your own spirit! These are not things that must come from Christ’s spirit in us. These things are the result of doing things even the Gentiles can do when they obey the laws of their own spirits! (Romans 2:13-15). But hoping that God will just give you these attributes somehow through His own spirit is what the world does… and why, naturally enough, they have none of these fruits. And Paul wraps up his point in Galatians 6:8… because sowing to your flesh causes corruption to grow;sowing to your own spirit causes life everlasting to grow as a result!
LIMITATIONS OF YOUR SPIRIT
The process of self-examination you learned in the last lesson is very powerful; but it is limited by the knowledge of the law your heart has, and the understanding of the laws your spirit has. Therefore your righteousness, even if your soul judges perfectly, will not be objective righteousness! Your spirit will still be too ignorant to be capable of creating objective righteousness. If you always choose it over your heart, it is capable of creating flawless subjective righteousness, but that’s all. And that’s a great start; for you will have a pure conscience (1 Timothy 3:9), a pure heart (Psalms 24:4), and a soul that can go boldly before the throne of grace for help (Hebrews 4:16), knowing it has always followed the spirit instead of the heart.
And yet… you’re still unrighteous in all those things you don’t know about. And those sins don’t count against you… but they’re still an objective problem. Grace covers all those objective sins, as long as they are not subjective sins; that is, as long as they are not sins to you (Romans 3:19-25). There is no sacrifice, no grace, for a willful sin – a sin you committed knowing it was a sin (Hebrews 10:26). Even in the OT, all of the sacrifices were for sins of ignorance, not sins of rebellion (Numbers 15:28-31).
So as long as you have faith – faith that God exists, that He rewards the good, and that you are being good – then God overlooks all your other sins through grace, and considers you righteous in spite of your lack of works! And that’s great for us, for obvious reasons. We do a lot of things wrong, and probably always will in this life, and this way God judges us not on the objective sins we commit, but only on those sins where we were warned by our conscience and did them anyway!
And yet, we are still objective sinners. And while we aren’t being judged for it, the fact is we are hurting ourselves and our neighbors. Doing it in ignorance means we bear no special penalty for it… but all of our loved ones, and indeed the world at large, are punished by our ignorant sins all the time. And that’s why faith is not enough; 2 Peter 1:5. You must add “virtue”, a word the translators struggle to explain, which we might call “character”, but in fact the Greek word comes closer to the slang phrase “manning up”.
In other words, once you believe you’re doing the right thing, you must make good choices and stand behind that belief, knowing you may be wrong, for you don’t have all the answers. And after you build faith by obeying everything you know to be true, that faith will have to be tested. God will have to see if you really believe with your heart, spirit, and soul that He will save you because you really believe you haven’t given Him any reason not to do so. Even after you’ve taken a stand on your newly clean conscience, you’re still objectively a sinner, even as you’re subjectively a saint. And that’s why you must add to your virtue knowledge.
JESUS’ CONSCIENCE
Eventually, in theory, you could derive all the information you needed from the 1-2-10 law, because all of this is based on what you yourself want done to you – so the law isn’t something you truly need explained to you (Romans 10:6-8). And yet we’re human. And we only have a finite time on Earth, with plenty of things to distract us during the few years we have… and there is a lot to know (Romans 11:33-36). That version leaves us with the impression that no one knows the mind of Christ; which is why you must merge it with Paul’s other words in 1 Corinthians 2:10-16.
We have a badly educated conscience/spirit/mind. That spirit knows everything about us, and if we obey it perfectly we would probably be better people, but that is only enough to guarantee subjective righteousness. It cannot build objective righteousness out of a flawed spirit! The only way to narrow the gap between our objective sins and our subjective sins is to constantly compare our spirit to a better standard. To make our subjective measure of truth (our conscience) align itself as closely as possible with the objective measure of truth (Jesus’ conscience).
And for that, we need the mind of Christ. In this lesson, I may have given you the impression that we don’t need His spirit since our own spirits are life on their own; and that’s not true at all. Without His candle to light our own, there is no way any of us could learn the objective truth we must know to be the light of the world. We’re already too deceived, already too compromised in our conscience to be able to learn the truth by ourselves now. Yes, in theory, had we started when we were children, never letting our conscience get confused by the ideas of the people around us, we could have easily done it.
Yet now, even if we had a perfect soul and the best of intentions, it would take hundreds or even thousands of years to learn it purely on our own, by trial and error. And so God has given us shortcuts; we can learn from other people (Romans 11:14-15), but only if we’re willing to listen (Romans 11:16-18). Yet learning from foolish preachers is, itself, a time-consuming exercise. And no preacher goes home with you, and even if he did, he couldn’t peer into your mind and be there, constantly, ready to tell you the right and the wrong thing to do. What you really need is in Isaiah 30:20-21.
And so that’s exactly what He gave us; the mind of Christ living in us, to constantly give us another standard; another voice to condemn us, and say “you may be satisfied with that answer, but I don’t think it’s good enough”. When you examine yourself on your own, you are limited by the understanding of truth that you have. Yet when you examine yourself and Christ’s spirit dwells in you, you are limited only by your ability to process His correction, which He will dole out as fast as He thinks you can handle it (1 Corinthians 10:13, Revelation 2:24).
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Yet whether the correction comes from your heart, your spirit, God’s spirit, my spirit, or the spirit of Satan, your soul must question it (1 John 4:1-2). It must see if this spirit is speaking according to the law (Isaiah 8:20), because if they don’t, then they aren’t light! So use the spirit of God, use ANYTHING that will inspire you to look into your heart and repent of sins – but back up every single word ANYONE says, even if you were certain it was the spirit of Christ (John 5:31-39). Search the scriptures (Acts 17:11); do nothing based solely on some whim or feeling you have, except to search for proof in the Bible that yes, this IS the will of God! Only this way can you be SURE you’re not falling into the trap of 1 Timothy 4:1!
Your spirit is far from perfect. But it could be; because if you have the spirit of Christ, it will lead you into all truth (John 16:13). Hearing that spirit and obeying it will strengthen the inner man (Ephesians 3:16). So yes, we desperately need His spirit. And yet when we have learned that objective truth from His candle, then we cannot help but BE the lights of the world He so wanted us to be; when we have learned the way to life, when it is indelibly inscribed on our spirits, how can we not be spirits of life?
As always, one verse – this time a particularly easy one that most Christians have read many times – says all of this: Romans 8:16. God has a holy spirit; we have an unholy spirit; we are becoming His children, becoming like Him… therefore we are making our spirits holy. And when our spirits are filled with the fullness of God, when we comprehend the breadth, length, depth, and height of the law (Ephesians 3:16-19)… When we have fully understood the Truth that He has given us, how can our spirits not be holy, for they are filled with something holy? What else could they be, if not sanctified spirits of God? …Do you see how much is missed if you just read “spirit” as “Spirit” every time?