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Nature of The Beast

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Bible Study Course Lesson 6 – 7

I’ve used the word “beast”, and its associated symbolism many times in these lessons. Because beasts are led by their selfish heart, so what your own heart and body want is generally exactly what the heart and body of a beast would want. Yet I’ve glossed over the fact that literal beasts are not “all heart”. They do in fact have a spirit and a soul as well: Genesis 1:30 (Jubilee) And to every beast of the earth and to every fowl of the air and to every thing that moves upon the earth, in which there is a living soul… Genesis 7:22 (NKJV) All in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, all that was on the dry land, died.

Like us, a donkey has a heart, soul, spirit, and flesh. And he is an ideal image of the average human because like us, his soul is imprisoned, and his spirit mostly works at the bidding of the heart (Psalms 73:21-22). Everyone knows that animals are creatures of habit; yet habit is not a matter of the heart, but of the spirit. The heart is impulsive, lustful, impetuous; the spirit is there to rein in that spontaneity to protect the beast.

The spirit is not there to make the heart do the “right” thing. It is there strictly for the beast’s own protection. When the heart lusts after the grass across the fence, the spirit is there to say “no, remember that yellow wire hurts you”. These laws are not to prevent themselves from doing wrong to others, they’re to prevent wrong from being done to them – by themselves or others. “I am always fed in this pasture, it’s a sin for you to put the hay in that other pasture.

MOOO!” “It’s 7:30 AM, this is when I am always milked! MOOO!” “It’s dinner time, MEOW!” Likewise, your own spirit is there for protection, not the good of others. When you don’t eat your peas, you get punished. Your spirit then learns for your protection that you must eat your peas, even if your beast doesn’t like them. It learns that when you hit your sister, your dad spanks you.

Thus, the spirit learns that what you do to her, will be done to you. This is, of course, the Golden Rule – at least, the external OC version of it: “it will be done to you as you have done to others” (Leviticus 24:17-21). And when your spirit sees the results of hurting your neighbor (Deuteronomy 19:19-21), it should lead your spirit to the conclusion “if what I do to them will be done to me, I will treat them as I would want to be treated”.

TRAINING THE SPIRIT

Training an animal involves either a carrot or a stick; often both. And it is the heart which cares about these things; but it is the spirit which reins in the heart’s impulses and guides it into the correct patterns to get the carrot and avoid the stick. The spirit’s job is to protect the beast, like a mother protects her child. And it is that fact which makes animals trainable. For the spirit guides the beast into the familiar patterns, reminding the beast where to stand to be milked, how to wear a saddle, what “roll over” means.

The soul is almost, if not completely, inactive in the beast. Watching animals behave, they rarely make active choices. A soul could say “my belly is full, and if don’t eat all this food now, I’ll have more later”. A dog says “FOOOOOOOD” and eats until it physically can’t fit more down its throat. The only way to make it not eat everything is to make it clear that eating certain foods will bring punishment; if this message is clear enough, the spirit will make the heart so afraid of crossing that line, that it will control its impulse to eat everything in sight. But this is not a reasoned choice; this is simply fear and reaction.

Squirrels bury nuts, but not by choice; that is just instinct, a programming God placed in their spirit to help them survive the winter, hardly a reasoned choice. It is a compulsion of the spirit, just like the bird building a nest or the germaphobe washing his hands. It is this spirit that makes animals walk the same crooked paths through the field, because that’s just how it’s always been done. Maybe another path would be better, but we know this one is safe, why try a new one?

The heart and spirit may at times struggle (“but I WANT the grass!”, “but the fence HURTS!”, “but I WANT it!”), but this is not a decision, not a judgment of a soul; like in most people, it is simply two fractions struggling for dominance. And so in an animal, any animal, the lusts of the heart are balanced against the routines of the spirit. If the lust is strong, it easily overwhelms the spirit; if the spirit’s fear is very strong (I remember that yellow wires shock me, so no matter how much my heart wants that grass, I dare not touch it!) it can overrule the heart.

All the spirit’s laws are created to protect the beast – not for the protection of others. So telling a child “people don’t like it when you do that” will have no effect at all. The child must first see that hurting them, hurts himself. Then he can reason that he should treat them nice so that he will be treated nice. ONLY then will the phrase “people don’t like it when you do that” have any effect. Today’s children are monsters because their parents insist on treating beasts as if they were reasoning souls. And as long as you treat a beast as a soul, and not as a beast, the beast will be incapable of becoming a soul!

MOTIVATIONS OF THE BEAST

All living creatures are, by nature, ruled by some balance of our selfish heart and self-protecting spirit. You, your children, your dogs, your cats. In fact, those last two examples illustrate this perfectly. While there are exceptions, we can generalize the difference between cats and dogs as follows: Dogs are impulsive, emotional, excitable, lustful to the point of eating themselves to death (Isaiah 56:11), disgusting (Proverbs 26:11), desperate for attention; the nature of a dog is best summed up by the way they poop; they don’t care where they are, whenever they feel the need they just go right there.

Compare that to cats; cats compulsively dig a hole and bury their feces. Cats bathe themselves constantly. Cats are reserved, patient, cunning, unemotional to a point that verges on sociopathic. So we can see that, on balance, the heart is dominant in the dog, and the spirit is dominant in the cat. Yes, there are exceptions; there are individual dogs who are more reserved, and individual cats who are emotionally needy. But this is simply an individual cat or dog’s mental balance. In an individual, the spirit may be stronger or weaker; but as a species, dogs are beasts and cats are spirits.

This helps to explain, on a deeper level, why there are no dogs in the Kingdom; because if you are ruled by your selfish heart, you will not be there (Revelation 22:15). Whereas Jesus was pictured as the lion of the tribe of Judah (Revelation 5:5), and cats are generally portrayed in positions of leadership in the Bible because a spirit-led person will always rule over a heart-led person. Even if that spirit is self-serving and imperfect, a cat will always rule over a dog. The only way a dog can beat a cat is to band together into a pack. Because a group of hearts can overwhelm a single spirit by barking it to death. That’s why they form churches – but that’s another lesson.

THE THIRD FRACTION

The three fractions of our mind spend our whole lives in a struggle for dominance. There are periods of truce and periods of war, but they never rest (Ecclesiastes 2:23). In animals, as in most people, the soul quickly falls behind and leaves the heart and spirit to find their balance. You can visualize this as a triangle; usually, the heart and spirit form a partnership with the soul at the bottom. But as I said, this is a struggle; it will tilt more one way or the other as the beast or the spirit clambers the the top; and not just from day to day, but throughout each day the pyramid will wobble as the beast is grumpy, then the spirit comes back to power and controls it, then the beast breaks loose again.

Yet in most people, excepting at times of stress and crisis, the triangle has a stable resting point that it returns to after the crisis is over. For some, it leans so far to the right it almost touches the ground; these people are impulsive, thoughtless, lustful. For others it leans just as far the other way; such people are neat, obsessive, cautious. Most people of course fall somewhere in between; everyone you know – you, me, God – can be described very simply, and their various neuroses understood and resolved, based on an understanding of the three fractions of the mind, and in particular which fraction is dominant.

#1. The Average Person.

Those whom we consider “normal” are like the first triangle above, with the soul in prison. They strike a balance between the spirit and heart, and sometimes it may rotate a bit more one way or another as the heart or spirit gets the upper hand for a few minutes, then goes back to equilibrium again. Those who are considered “successful”, college-educated, upper-middle-class types, mostly are like the first triangle below left. They are highly motivated by doing the right thing, the thing the herd approves of. It throws the beast a bone now and then, but mostly is capable of succeeding at most things the world wants it to do.

#2 The Successful Person   #3 The Unsuccessful Person    #4 The Ideal Person

Less successful, lower-middle-class types are like the middle one. These people indulge their beast more than their spirit, and that gets in the way of the things required for success in this world; getting along with others, being diligent at work, paying consistent attention to the job at hand, and so on. But we should be more like the last one; the soul should be firmly and comfortably seated atop the pyramid, with the heart and spirit both trusted advisers. The soul doesn’t prefer the one or the other in its judgments (Leviticus 19:15). It hears both out fairly and demands proof from both equally, but makes the decision on its own authority. Yet as I said, these triangles are not static. There is an active war in our members and there is a constant scrambling for power.

You might be #2 most of the time, but when you have low blood sugar your spirit’s control drops and your beast will moo at people. Or you might typically be #3, but when you go to church you fear people will realize that, so your spirit makes sure you’re on your best behavior when you’re there. So you’re a spirit-led person for a few hours a week, and a heart-led person the rest.

You might even be #4, but when you’re terrified of dying, your heart and spirit fight and surge and rock your pyramid to the core: Matthew 26:37-44. He was facing a heart who was terrified of dying, just as yours would be; and a spirit that was angry about being murdered for no reason just as yours would be (Psalms 69:20-29). And yet His soul, troubled and sorrowful as it was, managed to stay in charge. How close that battle was, and how close He came to losing, it might terrify us to know. Yet He did, and that is what judged the world: John 16:7-11. Because He proved it could be done.

MENTAL DISORDERS

Armed with this understanding about what our heart is actually like and what motivates it – and in what ways it might have been damaged by our childhood, our parents, our love life – we are able to solve problems the world cannot solve. Likewise, we understand the spirit’s desire to do good; but we also understand its desire to be right at any cost, please the herd, not take chances, and so on; this prepares us to tackle problems like OCD behavior, peer pressure, and so on in a way no psychologist ever would. And by understanding the way all three fractions are supposed to work together, we can better understand where the breakdown in the process lays.

It’s hard to fix a car when you don’t know what makes it run; likewise, you can’t fix a psyche if you don’t know what makes it tick. Thanks to the Bible, we’re much closer to that than anyone in the world is. The bulk of the soul’s actual work is not in making decisions, but in demanding the material with which to make them. Thus, it will spend most of its time making the other fractions gather the facts and tell the truth; and mostly, that means asking the question “why”, over and over again. (Psalms 77:6).

So what psychologists do when they ask “how do you feel about that?” is to present themselves as a surrogate soul; asking the question their own soul should have, had it not been duped into accepting an idiotic lie from the heart or spirit. For even when souls aren’t in prison at the base of the triangle, they are still kept in the dark by a heart and spirit who lie! (Jeremiah 17:9, Psalms 120:2-3). The soul must not be so gullible that it takes their thoughts at face value (Proverbs 18:17).

To illustrate how understanding the I’s would apply to a few random disorders, consider PTSD; PTSD involves uncontrollable panic in response to situations that remind someone of past trauma; whether war, rape, car accident, or what have you. Someone who was terrified by war and has PTSD flashbacks is a heart whose fear has never been properly processed by the soul, and who continually must raise the specter of terror at every backfire of a car.

Animals feel this, too; we just call it by a different name: “cornered”. When an animal feels trapped with no way out, they react in an uncontrollable panic. And just like any other beast, PTSD victims panic, run, shake, or collapse in response to the stimuli; totally unaware if they are hurting themselves and others in the process. Anyone can show symptoms like PTSD if they are pressured enough, scared enough, and given no way of escape.

The psychological diagnosis is reserved for those who show the symptoms when no real danger is present, just something which triggers the memory of extreme trauma. This is, obviously, a heart which has totally lost faith. It doesn’t believe there are any safeguards which can protect it, having lost all faith in the spirit’s and soul’s abilities to take care of them (since it perceives them to have failed so spectacularly at least once before). Thus, no matter who ordinarily runs the triangle, that heart’s fear is so powerful it can instantly overwhelm them and they seem to become a different person, because in that moment they ARE a different person!

Since the problem is a total lack of faith, the solution is obviously for that heart to learn faith in its own soul. The soul must get the heart to process the terror in a safe environment, and help it work through these feelings and learn that the soul can protect it – and that even if it can’t, the panic is not helping to keep it safe. I don’t want to minimize the very real suffering of people like this, nor to imply that this is always going to be easy; but this is the only way to actually solve the problem.

In another example, someone who lost a deeply meaningful relationship, whether through death, being dumped, cheated on, or whatever, might refuse to let the heart feel anything that might lead to that sort of connection again, for fear of feeling this bad again. They would focus on their work, shut out relationships and friendships in their determination to never risk being hurt; in this case, their spirit has locked their heart in prison in the name of protecting it, mother-like, and placed their spirit firmly on top of the triangle. And, therefore, the solution is for their soul to ask the spirit if the heart is really happy; what is the point of a life lived in antiseptic safety, if it’s lived alone in misery? And the soul will have to break the spirit, and hold the heart’s hand as it learns how to feel again.

PSYCHOPATHS

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Psychopath and sociopath are often used interchangeably in common speech to describe a person who is pathologically prone to criminal or violent behavior and who lacks any regard for the feelings or interests of others and any feelings of remorse or guilt for his crimes.” psychopath is, effectively, someone without a functioning spirit. They know what they are doing, and they know why; but the concept of right and wrong is completely absent. Yet they are often brilliant, genius-level minds, with incredible planning skills. Why? Because their triangle looks like this. Psychopaths are often acting on some need to avenge a perceived wrong to their heart, or earn the approval of a disapproving parent, or to punish one (possibly long-dead) authority figure by murdering people who remind them of that person.

So in the worst of the criminally insane, the heart has managed to find an ally in the soul – the most powerful of all the fractions – while imprisoning its greatest enemy, the spirit. And so the soul hears no voice of reason to mitigate its bestial appetite, no matter how depraved the desire of that heart. Whatever impulse, whatever lust or need it feels, the soul obediently carries out without being hobbled by conscience.

#5. The Psychopath.

And since it is the spirit which looks inward, and the heart looks only outward and sees only the external side of the law, psychopaths, having little or no activity in their spirit, see things in very external terms. Rather than say “I’m angry”, psychopaths will always say “you make me angry”. This shifts the blame entirely on the other person’s actions; they made him angry because of their desires and their actions. His own reactions to their betrayal, in this beast-centric view, are entirely justified; if his girlfriend hadn’t made him angry he wouldn’t have stuffed her into that freezer. All the ways of a man are right in his own eyes (Proverbs 21:2); and without the conscience to balance it, the heart has no restrictions. And worst of all, when the soul is the heart’s willing servant, it harnesses the power of the soul’s genius to be evil in a way no pure beast ever could.

That’s why every religion is at least a little bit psychopathic. Not to the same extent usually as Hannibal Lecter, but think back… he had nothing on the Spanish inquisitors. Their justification? The sinners brought it on themselves by doing things to make them angry (allegedly, their god, but… really, just them). Any time the beast comes into absolute power and the spirit of reason becomes muted, the person, church, or state becomes a monster. The more willing the soul to help the heart, the more wholly given to wickedness they are.

And the greatest evils in history came because the heart’s selfishness, the spirit’s self-protecting nature, and the soul’s desire for approval all united in a three-fold cord; when the heart wanted something it couldn’t have, when the envious spirit wanted to avenge that injustice, and when the soul believed God wanted it to kill the infidel… When they all find a way to believe that torture, rape, pillage, and slaughter is good and right and what God wants… that is the recipe for absolute evil. Thus are devils born.

INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL

When the heart rules, as it does in most of the world, it only can grasp the external, because the internal things are only visible to the spirit and the soul, they are “spiritually discerned”. The more muted the heart, the better able the spirit is to hear the truth internally and externally. How does God judge us? 1 Samuel 16:7. Notice that God looks at the heart. With His eyes, symbols of the soul! The spirit can listen to the heart, but only the soul is capable of truly seeing the heart for what it is – a selfish beast! So the higher the soul ranks on the triangle, the better able it is to apply its objective judgments internally, and the better able that person is to accept responsibility for the thoughts of the heart – good or bad.

See, that’s the thing no Abrahamic religion does (Jews, Muslims, Christians). They are all focused on external things; going to church, owning crosses/stars/horns, doing good deeds, praying, killing heretics – it doesn’t really matter. Even things you might think are internal, like faith, are manifested by external acts like prayer and telling your enemies you forgive them; few, if any, of these religions practice true faith, which is a passive thing; my house is unlocked right now. I trust God to protect it.

But faith isn’t the fact that my house is unlocked (an external thing). True faith is in the fact that, until writing these words, the fact it was unlocked hadn’t occurred to me since I left home three months ago. Which is an internal thing, showing that my spirit isn’t worried about protecting my stuff. When defined that way, these religions don’t teach faith at all. They teach acts of faith, which are inherently external things! Because they only look at the outside of the cup: Matthew 23:25-28. Because the beast rules their triangle, and their spirit only thinks to protect it from external threats!

Yes, a few people in these religions may have developed such a faith, just as a few people in the external OC developed internal NC faith (Joshua and Caleb, for instance). But their religion, like the religion of Moses, is an external religion! Eastern religions on the other hand (Buddhism, Taoism, etc.), are very inward looking. Yet since they’re so far from the Bible, they are groping in the dark more than most; at least, though, they’re groping in the right place for answers – inside themselves!

And yet because their religion is strictly internal, fully spiritual, the outside of the cup is nowhere close to the righteousness of God. We must not only elevate our soul and rule our hearts, we must rule them by the Golden Rule and teach our souls to judge as God would judge. Not knowing the true God except by groping for Him in the dark, they have no idea what that is! In their defense, the Eastern religions have done a better job (looking internally for the problem) with what they were given (almost nothing since the tower of Babel) than the Jews did, or for that matter, the Christian world of today. For we have the Bible, we hear God speaking whenever we open its pages. And yet the Western religions can’t look inside themselves to save their lives. Which, of course, is exactly what they must do to save their souls.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

Without your soul ruling your mind, it is quite impossible to see the things of God, for they are only discernible by spiritual things – and your spirit is too busy protecting your heart from the Bible to listen to what it says. Truly understanding the Bible requires the eyes of a soul. Because a heart can only look at the outside of things; and if that’s all it’s been taught to do by its religion and its society, the spirit will only look at the outside as well. To take these lofty terms out of the clouds and show you why this really matters, take Mark 3:27.

To the world, this is what that means: “He takes a new illustration to confute the Pharisees, drawn from breaking into a house… So I, says he, have taken this property — this possessed person — from the dominion of Satan. It is clear proof that I have subdued Satan himself, the strong being that had him in possession…” (Barnes commentary). This is not really wrong. It’s just a very, very, external application – despite the inherently internal concept of demonic possession, they still manage to show it as an external act: Jesus taking the property of Satan, this possessed person’s body from the dominion of Satan!

But read Luke 11:21-23. Doesn’t this also describe when your triangle is dominated by your own unclean spirit? The “strong man” here is an unbroken spirit; the stronger man is the soul which comes out of prison to rule (Ecclesiastes 4:14), just as Jesus Himself did (the prison being the grave, and a better prison was never built). All of the “armor” the spirit had – the excuses, the statutes, the arguments – were overwhelmed by the liberated soul, who then proclaimed “He that is not with me is against me: and he that gathereth not with me scattereth”.

Which is exactly how the soul should act to the other fractions – for it is the house HE was built to rule, and they can fall in line or go to prison themselves until they repent. Or consider the example of Jesus’ yoke I used in an earlier lesson (Matthew 11:29-30); commentators say of this passage…“My yoke is easy, etc. That is, the services that I shall require are easily rendered. They are not burdensome, like all other systems of religion.” – Barnes“…The members of Christ are not without a yoke, a law and rule by which they are obliged to walk; and though the service of God be a perfect freedom, yet to flesh and blood it is a yoke, grating upon our sensitive appetite, and restraining our natural motions and inclinations.” – Poole

Notice what these both have in common? They are strictly, and I mean strictly, external understanding of these words. And sure, they do have external meaning, as all things in the Bible are true on all levels; yet they never think to look deeper! No one ever considers that all examples, all instructions, all parables are primarily meant to apply to the inner man; our beast is guided by a rough and flimsy yoke (our own spirit), and our soul is being dragged all over the field by the untamed beast because it is looking back (Luke 9:62). The spirit won’t let go of the past; and if the soul gets distracted by what has happened, by its earlier failures, it will certainly fail to keep the beast walking down the straight and narrow way that leads to life!

So God offers to give us His yoke, His spirit, to help rule over our heart and temporarily replace our own spirit’s statutes. Something to give us a set of rules that can actually restrain the beast, and teach it to listen to the souls’ commands – how far are Barnes and Poole from understanding that? Not far at all… they just need a soul to ask a single question “how does this apply to our heart, spirit, and soul?” Only by pointing the soul at the top of the triangle is it possible to understand these things… because they were written specifically to free the soul and enthrone it! (John 8:31-36).

I won’t bore you with the many more-or-less true lessons the world draws from Adam and Eve and the serpent; but as you’ve already seen, that, too, was meant to apply internally; the Garden is our body, and the serpent is our heart. They can’t see, because their soul is blind to the internal things, that because of Adam’s sin, the soul and spirit (Adam and Eve) would spend the rest of their lives trying to feed their beast (Genesis 3:19, Ecclesiastes 6:7). But these things also apply on a higher level; for as the Garden is our body, the Garden is also the temple of God in heaven; and the water which flows from the Garden is the Father, the tree of life is Jesus, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents what we will be… …the spirits of just men made perfect, living and reigning with Him, when the judgment of that same Garden is given to the saints of the Most High… after they have proven they can dress and keep the Earth of their own internal garden.

At the end of the day, no matter what your triangle looks like now, or why; no matter who helps or doesn’t help, you will be the one who has to make the choices to rule and stand behind them. If your soul can’t do that… God has no use for you. Because you ARE a soul. But if your heart or spirit is running your mind, you’re not really “you”… you’re just another animal. Until your soul is in charge, you’re not really a person. Just a beast. And He has plenty of beasts in the universe already.