The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Bible Study Course Lesson 5 – 7
Read Deuteronomy 4:5-6. As often happens, people tend to lump similar words together, and here God said “statutes” and “judgments”, and most people sort of hear the word “laws” and move on… but these words all mean very different things! (Genesis 26:5). In the previous lesson, we established that the judgments of God were their wisdom in the sight of the nations. Therefore the proof of their understanding in the sight of the nations was their statutes!
The commandments Abraham kept are clearly the great ten, which, by inference, would be their knowledge in the sight of the nations (Mark 10:19). The commandments are supposed to be written on the heart, like all knowledge; likewise the judgments are a matter of wisdom, which is clearly the soul’s territory, which were laid out starting in Exodus 21:1 and stretching for several chapters.
These are not separate laws, but rather examples of how those laws are applied to practical situations; they are sample judgments for the soul to compare against its own judgments… which is why God calls them… judgments! The statutes are neither spiritual laws nor judgments, but separate physical practices that they were to do; for example, casting the tree into the waters of Marah (Exodus 15:25), or the maintenance of the lamp of the temple (Exodus 27:20-21), or the prohibition against fat and blood (Leviticus 3:17).
To put this in a modern setting, the laws of your home might be “thou shalt not hit your sister”, which could be considered commandments. There will never be a time, or an excuse, which will make that acceptable. These are things every child should have written on their heart because breaking them causes direct harm to someone else – thus breaking them is a sin against the 1-2-10 law. And breaking them has clear consequences, which are called judgments.
In a home, a typical judgment might be “I told you never to run in the house, but you did and broke a lamp; so no TV for a week”. This is not an eternal law because you might give a different punishment if the circumstances were a little different (for example, if the child ran in the house but didn’t break anything that time). This is a judgment based on the facts of this case. But the statutes fall somewhere in between; they are conditional rules, based on situations or lengths of time. For example, “always wash your hands before making dinner”, “take out the trash when it’s full”. “if you finish the toilet paper roll, replace it”.
These are not directly a part of the main laws of the house; they do not need to be written on your forehead for constant reminder because they only apply in certain specific situations. And unlike the other laws, they are not preventing sins but rather minimizing the potential for sins. It doesn’t actually hurt anyone to cook dinner with dirty hands, therefore it is not a sin against your neighbor. But it might hurt them if they get sick afterward, which would be a sin against your brother.
So not washing your hands isn’t a sin (Matthew 15:20), but since it might make your brother sick, it would be a wise precaution as it avoids the possibility of a sin in some cases. And this brings us back to the spirit’s fences in Lesson 5-1.
It is the spirit’s job to curate the fences around the law, not the laws themselves which the heart should know automatically! The heart doesn’t need the spirit to tell it that kicking a puppy is wrong. It knows it wouldn’t want to be treated that way, so it clearly violates the 1-2-10 law. The statutes of the spirit are for more abstract situations, they are “just in case” laws based on conclusions the spirit has drawn. These are things the heart wouldn’t immediately recognize as something it wouldn’t want done to it; something not immediately obvious from the 1-2-10 law.
SPIRITUAL LAWS
For example, kicking a puppy is clearly a sin… but how is letting a woman make a vow a sin? (Numbers 30). How does that violate the law? It clearly doesn’t. But what if she vowed saying “I will give my firstborn son to the Temple” (1 Samuel 1:11)… while her husband vowed “no man of my lineage shall ever work in the temple”? If their vows were both binding, then whether they did or didn’t give a son to the temple, their house would break their vow and commit sin! (Ecclesiastes 5:4-5). So Numbers 30 is not a law, for it doesn’t prevent sin directly. It is a statute which prevents sin indirectly.
It provides a tiebreak system so that a family will never have conflicting vows, and thus be forced to sin! (Ecclesiastes 5:6). Thus, it protects against the possibility of sin! It exists to safeguard against a hypothetical “what if” scenario! Breaking statutes of God is not a sin – except inasmuch as God said “keep them” like, a hundred times (Leviticus 18:5 for instance). These are lesser laws, not universal truths; they are situational. Some of the things God told Israel simply aren’t relevant to us today; they were meant to prevent a sin which would be practically impossible to commit today (Deuteronomy 23:12-13, Deuteronomy 22:8a, etc.).
These rules are outdated, imperfect, physical laws for a bygone era. But that doesn’t mean they are meaningless – the statutes were there to prevent against the real threat of an actual problem (Deuteronomy 23:14, Deuteronomy 22:8b). We may not hang out on our roofs today, so that particular threat doesn’t need to be guarded against. But the principle of personal liability “that you bring not blood on your house” still exists. So while that particular statute is no longer relevant to us, we may need a new statute “thou shalt verily put a fence around thy pool, so that children falleth notteth therein and drowneth notteth”.
Likewise, we don’t need to worry about going outside the camp to use the toilet, we have indoor plumbing. But the idea “that God see no unclean thing in you, and turn away” still applies, in every possible sense. Yet we are not bound to that statute because it was not an eternal truth! It was a guardrail to keep Israel from a path down which sin most likely lay. That is why God distinguished statutes from laws which are eternally true, and from judgments which are specific applications of that law… because He knew the statutes would change from time to time. That is… they should change… if the spirit is broken.
A BROKEN STATUTE
But here’s the problem. The spirit’s job is to create and manage these fences. If your heart sins, the spirit will leap to say “we need to make a new statute so that can’t happen again”. In general, this is a good practice. But it can also be a greater evil than the original sin. To show how, let’s step in the wayback machine, back before germs and so on were understood. The heart easily understands basic right and wrong, and doesn’t need to ask the spirit about it. But the heart wouldn’t necessarily know it would want people to wash their hands before preparing food.
But let’s say over the course of the year, three people get sick from eating your food. Your spirit will take these experiences and try to draw conclusions from them; what was special about these people? These meals? These days? And if those happen to be the days when you didn’t wash your hands, the spirit would draw the conclusion that not washing your hands might cause your brother to be sick. Therefore, it could create a new statute “thou shalt wash before cooking”. This is, in effect, what the Jews had done in Jesus’ day (Mark 7:2-5).
And this is a good thing! …Just as long as you remember it was a statute your spirit made up, and not an eternal law. The Jews, with their stiffnecked, unbroken spirits blurred this distinction in their laws, and that was a problem – when their spirit’s understanding interfered with the actual laws that should have been written on their hearts (Mark 7:7-9). Their understanding caused their spirits to create a good, healthy rule, based on good information but not conclusive information.
These people might have gotten sick for many other reasons, so they shouldn’t have leaned too heavily on that conclusion! (Proverbs 3:5). A conclusion drawn, not from the law, but from their own fallible understanding of that law! Jesus didn’t condemn the rule, He condemned its primacy over the actual law (Matthew 23:23). Because the fact is, not washing your hands before preparing or eating food will not usually make you sick. Kids do it all the time! So while this was a good principle, all things being equal, it was not worth “laying aside the commandments of God”!
UNBROKEN SPIRITS
When people allow their spirit to run wild, creating new fences ten times a day, they quickly box their beast and soul into a corner where literally nothing is permissible, and where simple tasks take hours “just to be on the safe side”. It is the soul’s job to rein in this hyperactive spirit and repeal its statutes when they are wrong, or even when they are no longer relevant (Isaiah 29:24). This requires wisdom, to look at the laws the heart knows, and look at the statutes the spirit writes, and then to decide which are good and which are evil.
Let’s say you wake up with a stomach sickness tomorrow. You should look back over what you ate the day before and say “what did I do that might have caused this”? (Jeremiah 8:6). This is the spirit’s job, to understand what you did wrong! And as your heart thinks back over the slightly-sour milk you drank, the restaurant you ate at, and the expired can of peas you ate, your spirit is looking for a lesson to learn from this; something to pounce on, and say “Ok, we’re never doing that again”.
This is, of course, a good thing. But it becomes a bad thing if you can’t really be sure what caused it but your spirit feels compelled to make a rule anyway because it is frustrated by the problem and feels it has to do something. So most spirits would make a rule, like “we’re never eating expired food again”. You don’t know that it was the peas; it could have been anything. So it’s unfair of the spirit to make a rule that might not be even based on anything real!
This is where your soul needs to say… well, what I just said. Your soul should demand of your spirit “how do we know that’s what caused it? We’ve been eating expired peas for years and never got sick before”. The spirit has to have a rational counterweight to its obsessive rule-making, and that’s what the soul is there for. A rampant spirit will try to fence off every possible injury, physically, emotional, or otherwise. If you tell someone you love them, and they don’t say it back, or they dump you later, or whatever, your spirit will construct an emotional wall to shield your beast from harm, just as a mother would try to shield a child.
But the soul should step in, and remind the spirit that pain is good for a child – emotional, physical, and spiritual. We all have to learn to face and process the setbacks in our life, and while shutting yourself off from your emotions does help you avoid being hurt that way… the loneliness hurts much more in the long run. Likewise, while making a statute against expired food might give your spirit comfort, thinking it had done its job and made a rule to protect its beast against future discomfort, the reality is that it will have to throw out hundreds of dollars of (probably) perfectly good food in the coming years.
When the real solution is for the soul to make the beast slow down, and smell the food before it eats it; the soul needs to make judgments based on that information, and if there is reason to be suspicious look it to death. Do you see how much better that is? Rather than a beast and spirit pushing back and forth between lust and fear, you have a rational soul making wise judgments and enjoying the FREEDOM of not living under excessive statutes! In the end, the beast will be happier with fewer fences; and the spirit will be less stressed and frustrated because it won’t have to be responsible for keeping track of all the arbitrary rules it’s foisted on its beast and soul!
A POUND OF CURE
The spirit truly believes “better safe than sorry”. It should – that’s what it’s designed to believe! Its job is to PROTECT us from probable sin. There’s an old saying “an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure”. This is true. But is a pound of prevention better than an ounce of cure? In other words, is it better to wear gloves than the very real probability of losing a finger? Absolutely. But is it better to wear gloves than a very small risk of getting a minor cut? All things being equal, yes; but what if wearing gloves makes it take twice as long to do the job?
It is it better to work twice as long, or take a small risk at getting a minor cut which will heal in a matter of days? A person whose spirit has been allowed to take charge of their life will always say “safety first!”, no matter what the real cost of safety, or the actual risk of taking a chance. But safety should not be first. Safety should definitely be in the top five, but not first. Certainly, risks of life-threatening injuries should be minimized as much as possible. But minor cuts, scrapes, and burns heal.
If avoiding a small risk of them doubles the length of time it takes to do a job, then your fear of faint possibilities of easily repairable accidents will be getting in the way of your own goals (2 Timothy 2:25). So if your quality of life is impaired by, say, your fear of airplanes based on a statistically tiny risk, then it is not better to be safe than sorry. We all know people who are paralyzed by fear, which manifests itself as obsessively cautious, slow, “just in case” behaviour.
But life requires risk. There is no safety in the world, you can be struck by lightning in your living room or you can die in a freak shuffleboard accident. So it is patently impossible to prevent risk; it is arrogant of your spirit to even try to completely prevent it. Sure, avoid the stupid things; driving drunk, rock climbing without a rope, telling your wife she’s just like her mother. These things have a statistically significant chance of ending in severe injury or death.
But skydiving does not (1/143,000 chance of dying). So the question is do you let a (literally) 1 in 11.5 million chance of being attacked by a shark prevent you from enjoying a day at the beach? (And the odds of being killed by the shark are 1/264.1 million.) Most spirits do exactly that. Because in a sense, the spirit’s job is to be the mother of the heart. When the heart gets hurt, just like a mother would, the spirit makes a rule to protect the “child” from being hurt again in a similar way. If you get sick after eating at a restaurant, your spirit might make a rule “I’m never eating there again”.
But is that really fair? You have no idea why you got sick. Yes, it might have been those tacos, but who knows for sure. Is it really better to be safe than sorry in every situation? The spirit would confidently respond “absolutely!”, but is it… really? Odds are, it wasn’t the restaurant that made you sick; and if it was, it was probably a fluke; an employee didn’t wash his hands or sneezed on a towel. Odds are, you’d never get sick again from the same place. So is making a rule that you will never eat there again really fair?
Unless you have facts to show that this place has a poor health inspection rating, or that you saw someone handle raw meat before preparing your salad, it is a sin for your spirit to make a rule against eating there, even though its intent is solely to protect the beast from future harm! But to enforce that rule, the soul must be watching, and must be dominant over them both; and like the father of modern households, that’s rarely the case. And the few cases where it is, the soul is often no better than the spirit and heart it rules over.
HELICOPTER SPIRITS
And so this wisdom is absent in the world today. This is why playgrounds today are so… sterile. Because a tiny risk of a child getting injured, an injury that in almost all cases would easily heal, and teach the child an important lesson about how to walk or when to be careful – is too terrifying to contemplate. Yet isn’t the alternative far more terrifying – having children grow up unprepared for the real risks of the real world? When a child trips, it’s because his heart got too excited and his soul wasn’t able to calm it down and make it look where it was walking.
If we remove everything in the world he might trip over, the injuries caused by tripping can be avoided. But what about the thousands of other injuries that will be caused, physical, emotional, and spiritual, because the child didn’t learn to rule his heart on that playground? The world has decided that accidents do not exist; that when a child gets hurt, it must be someone’s fault but never the child itself. So if a child gets hurt in a playground, the parents often are awarded millions of dollars in lawsuits just because the child was too high on sugar to rule its own heart and was careless.
Yet children can learn not to trip. They can learn not to fall out of trees, not to crash their bikes. I did. Yes, I have some scars to show for the experience. But I also learned to control my hyperness, to recognize the possibility of danger and move slowly, and to not let anyone goad me into taking risks that my soul judged were too great. Children raised in a bubble can’t learn that, because pain is what taught me. Pain got my attention, because it hurts the beast; and when the pain subsides, it puts it in a mood to listen to the soul’s admonition “I told you not to run!”
But if the child is taught that the world will be tamed to protect it, the soul will never be able to tame its own heart… which means no world will be safe for it… or from it. “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.” – Herbert Spencer. No quote better sums up our world today. Children are shielded from every possible effect of folly their whole lives, so when they reach adulthood, of course they are foolish. They never learned not to be! They never learned to make good decisions, because the spirits of everyone around them kept them bound up in so many fences their souls never had to learn how to choose wisely… so what else could they be but fools?
CONFRONTING FAILURE
Most millennials have never been injured on a playground, never crashed their bikes, never walked to school alone, never had unchaperoned play. They’ve lived behind so many rules and the fences of so many different overprotective spirits, that they never had to develop any of their own. If they somehow did manage to hurt themselves, they were always told it was someone else’s fault; that there should have been a rule, that person shouldn’t have done this, there should have been a law to prevent that. Worst of all, they have never had to face failure since the whole class got ribbons and trophies for every event. So how could they be expected to learn that the world won’t revolve around them when they are adults?
When they face the real world for the first time, they face it like small children would – with temper tantrums and whining. Because their soul never had to force their beast to process failures when they were actual small children! God designed the family like He designed the mind, after the same pattern. The soul is the father, the spirit is the mother, and the heart is the child. And the goal of parents is to take that child ruled by its heart and turn it into a good soul with a meek spirit and a humble heart (Proverbs 22:6).
Because God designed us that way, it’s far more instinctive for a man to say “let him get hurt, it’s good for him” (like a soul would) and it’s far more instinctive for a woman to say “oh no, it’s 70 degrees today, you can’t go out without a jacket, you might catch a cold!” (like a spirit would). So as decisions in the world, in particular those involving children, are more and more made by women, the hyper protectivity of the helicopter mom has made its way into the laws and policies, and now generations of children have been raised by unbroken spirits.
The spirits of parents terrified lest their children hurt themselves, terrified lest they fail to live up to their potential, terrified lest anything bad ever happen to them… and thereby guaranteeing that they will hurt themselves, they will fail, and that when bad things do happen, they will be completely unprepared to deal with it.
THE GARDEN OF MIND
As I said, the human mind is based on the same pattern as the human family; a father who is head of the house (soul), a mother who is his helper and counsellor (spirit), and a child who is selfish and puts itself at the center of the universe (heart). In the Garden, there were three people; Adam, who had the rule over all the Earth, and Eve his helper (Genesis 1:25-26). And in this case, the serpent, the dragon, who is the head of the beast! (Revelation 13:14).
God had searched high and low among the beasts for a helper for Adam, and found none; so He created one (Genesis 2:18-20). And it was to her that the beast appealed, expecting to find her more sympathetic to its desire! Because this beast wanted something. He wanted to prove God wrong; and to do that, the beast (Satan) wanted the spirit (Eve) to break the law and violate her own conscience! And without the soul (Adam) around, the spirit was deceived! The heart overcame the conscience, as it so often does in all of us!
The heart convinced the conscience that its rules were outdated and incomplete (Genesis 3:4-5). This had the direct result of them feeling embarrassed (a beast emotion) in Genesis 3:7. Because now the heart had learned it could win a battle against the spirit! And then it could use the spirit to turn the soul (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12) and thus the feelings of the heart were what they now acted on, not the decisions of the soul! And thus they became the slave of their beast, and the beast, because they obeyed it! (Romans 6:16).
Remember I told you about my cow who learned how to push against fences; the idea had never occurred to him at my farm, even though my fences were weak. But as soon as he went to that other farm, he learned he could push fences and win! And after that, he never stopped trying! So Satan’s real accomplishment that day wasn’t in getting Adam and Eve to commit a single sin. His accomplishment was in freeing their beasts! Teaching their beasts to rule their souls just as his own heart rules his own! (Ezekiel 28:17).
And all humans have been following their example, and each generation of beasts learns from their parents how to rebel against their souls. Which means that all souls born since then have quickly gone into captivity… a captivity that Jesus came to free us from! (John 8:32-36). In case you’re doubting that the serpent was ruled by his beast, God called him one, nay, worse than a beast, in Genesis 3:14; and He prophesied that he (the heart) would fight against the woman (the spirit) forever (Genesis 3:15). See how this all ties together? Galatians 5:17.
Until then, the spirit and heart had no reason to disagree! The heart hadn’t noticed that the fruit was desirable to make one wise! The spirit knew it wasn’t supposed to eat it, so the heart never even considered the possibility of looking OUTSIDE the fence! But by teaching the heart to rebel, the heart and the spirit were now at war! Before this, they had no reason to disagree; the soul wanted what was right, the spirit knew what was right and could be trusted to be right, and the heart wanted what they wanted.
But now the spirit’s beliefs had to be made subject to the final approval of the soul! Because the spirit had proved it couldn’t be trusted to rule the devil by herself! And that’s why from this point forward, the spirit/woman was officially subjugated to the soul/man (Genesis 3:16). The soul also failed, but not to rule the heart/devil; he was prepared for that, and that’s why the devil didn’t approach him. The soul didn’t fail to rule the heart, the soul failed to rule the spirit (Genesis 3:17).
This brings to mind Genesis 27:5-13. A spirit and a heart conspiring against their soul. And because of this sin of all three parties, when making children in their image and after their likeness – the job of the soul and the spirit, working in tandem – they would find great sorrow, as their children would inherit this war in their members, both literally (as in the case of Cain and Abel, and again Esau and Jacob) and metaphorically, as in the case of James 4:1. That’s why God told the soul (Adam) that because he obeyed the voice of his spirit, and by extension the voice of his heart, he would spend his life in sorrow (compare Genesis 3:17 to Job 30:15-16, and to a lesser extent Job 30:17-33).
Because that’s what happens once your spirit and heart get out of hand! They never stop pushing those fences again! And so the ground which should have brought forth grapes would bring thistles instead (compare Genesis 3:18 and Matthew 7:16). And without the pure blood of the grape (Deuteronomy 32:14), there would be no payment accepted for Adam’s life but his own beast’s blood (Genesis 9:5). He would eat bread, but only enough to keep him alive for a time – not enough to provide eternal life. Compare Genesis 3:19 to John 6:49.
For it was now appointed to him, and all his children, once to die (Compare Hebrews 9:27 and Genesis 3:22-24). His soul was taken from below the ground (Psalms 139:14-16), and if it is overwhelmed by the beast or spirit, it will return there (Ecclesiastes 3:20), like water poured out on the ground (2 Samuel 14:14), vanishing into nothingness like smoke in the wind (James 4:14).
A “CURIOUS” SPIRIT
The spirit is, by nature, fearful. Its job is to worry about hypothetical scenarios and create statutes to avoid them. Taking a chance – any chance – is contrary to its very nature. This gives a great deal more meaning to Lesson 5-4; because trusting something it can’t understand is hard for the spirit to do. But to learn faith, it has to learn to trust that someone else can take care of it. When the soul knows it can solve these hypothetical problems in a few moments, the spirit should not be allowed to waste time planning them out weeks in advance.
Obviously, planning the future is a good thing. And being prepared for what’s coming is wise (Proverbs 22:3). Yet there are things which cannot be known; things which we cannot prepare for too far in advance, and shouldn’t try (Mark 13:11). I don’t need to know what I’m going to eat for lunch next Thursday. So there is no reason to think about it. Now, if I was going on a camping trip high in the mountains where every meal needed to be packed in, then thinking about it would make sense.
But we all know people – a large percentage of which are female, who by nature are more spirit-led than men – who over-plan everything. Who think they need to know things that they don’t really need to know. When you challenge them, they will say “oh, no reason, I just wondered”, “I just wanted to know”, “I was just curious”. True curiosity is a wonderful thing. But the spirit lies, and cloaks its fear-based obsessive need to know the future in phrases like these.
The spirit isn’t truly curious. In fact, the spirit may be the only uncurious part of our mind. For curiosity stems from a sense of wonder, and wonder is by nature destroyed by understanding. When you know how the magic is done, it becomes boring. No, the spirit-bound want to know where we’re going to go, what we’re going to do, when, and how, and for how long, so they can feel in control of the situation. And that’s fine… for those situations that are the spirit’s responsibility!
But most things in the world are simply not our problem, and we have no business worrying about them. And part of the process of conversion is to not worry about things that aren’t your problem, or don’t affect you right now. This obsessive need to know the future so you can prepare is exactly why so many people love end-time prophecy; their spirit is afraid, so they hope if they put together the verses in just the right way, they can find where the place of safety is and hide there; but God will put you there if you’re worthy, and if not it won’t matter if you know exactly where it is, He’ll never let you get there (Luke 21:36).
They hope that by poring over the book of Revelation they can identify the man of sin, and hide from the beast. And by wasting their time doing that, they miss the fact that their own spirit is the man of sin, and their own heart is the beast. No man can hide from them, and there is no place of safety where they won’t find you. So no, you don’t need to know what 666 means, and no one is “just curious” about it. They are fearful in spirit, and what you need to do is teach your unbroken spirit and heart to trust you, and God (Psalms 37:27-34).
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
The spirit doesn’t need to know where we’ll sleep tomorrow night. The soul should simply say “we’ll find that out tomorrow afternoon, once we see how far we get” (Luke 9:58). If the spirit trusts the soul, that’s all it will need to hear. But most people’s spirits do not; and that sort of answer would make spirit-bound people nervous wrecks, obsessing over the what-ifs (“What if there are no hotels? What if they’re all full? What if we can’t afford them? Where will we sleep!?!”).
The soul knows these are problems it can solve in the moment; there are so many possibilities, so many easy ways to solve that problem (drive a little farther, pay a little more, nap in the car, etc.) that the plan need not be more rigid than “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”. Unbroken spirits never let it go at that. It is not the spirit’s job to decide where we stay. Its job is to advise, not decide. It forgets this, and tries to rob the soul of its authority out of fear – just like the horse does, when it thinks it knows which path I want to walk down better than I do.
And so this false curiosity is just a manifestation of a lack of faith; and the soul should not pander to it. Let it be in the dark when it doesn’t need to know the future. When your soul knows you don’t need to decide something now, don’t let the spirit nag you into looking it up so it can think/worry about it without your permission! The spirit does not need to know these things. Its job is to offer what understanding it has for the soul’s decision-making process, and then meekly trust the soul to provide for it. If we end up sleeping in the car, it will not be the spirit’s fault; it will be the soul’s choice.
And if we have to push the beast a little harder to get to the next town, the beast will not die. And if we all die… well, that, too, is not the spirit’s responsibility; for it, too, should rather die for the soul, than to live for itself. If that’s not how it feels, it’s not yet broken. It’s far better to take the soul’s calculated risks, than it is to trap the soul and beast into the spirit’s statutes; for when you over-minimize risk, you also minimize flexibility and adaptability which inherently limits the soul’s choices, which in turn hampers its ability to do what it does best: make good decisions. Oh, and the one verse? Matthew 6:31-34. As usual, you already knew all this… if you’d only thought it through.