Body, Soul and Spirit: What Man Is Actually Made Of

You can see your body, touch it, feed it, wash it, and one day it will be buried. But the person inside the body is not the body, so who is that person?

Most of us use these words without ever checking them, saying "soul" when we mean feelings and "spirit" when we mean a mood, as in high spirits or low spirits. Scripture is more careful than we are, and the distinction it draws changes how you understand yourself.

Man is not one part but three: body, soul and spirit, all in one person. What follows is what each one is, and how to tell the soul and the spirit apart.

It starts with dust and breath

The account in Genesis gives you two ingredients rather than one, since God "formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul" [Genesis 2:7]. The dust is material and the breath is not, and a man is what happens when the two meet.

Read that last sentence again, because it is easy to read past. The verse does not say God gave man a soul, it says man became a living soul, which means the soul is not an accessory bolted onto the body but what man is when body and breath come together, and when the breath leaves, the soul goes with it and what remains gets buried.

Notice also how man arrives, because everything else in creation was spoken into existence while man alone was breathed into. That is personal, and it is why man stands apart from the rest of what God made. Animals have flesh, and some would say animals have soul, but only man was made in the image of God, which by itself tells you there is more to a person than what you can see.

Three parts, one person

When Paul prays for the Thessalonians he does not ask God to preserve their spirit and body, he asks that "your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" [1 Thessalonians 5:23], naming three things deliberately in a prayer meant to cover the whole person.

The writer of Hebrews goes further, describing the Word of God as "sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit" [Hebrews 4:12], and you cannot divide what was never distinct, which means there is a real line running between the two. Notice as well what does the dividing: not philosophy, not intuition, and not a feeling you arrive at on a quiet evening, but the Word itself.

Paul then gives you the two names that hold everything together, writing that "though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day" [2 Corinthians 4:16]. The outward man is the body while the inward man is the soul and the spirit taken as one, and the two run on different timelines, one of them wearing out while the other is renewed daily.

The body is a tent

The body is the house, the way you touch the physical world and the way the physical world touches you, since sight, hearing, taste, touch, heat and cold all run through it. Paul calls it a tabernacle when he writes that "if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens" [2 Corinthians 5:1], and a tabernacle is a tent, which is where a man lives without anyone ever confusing it for the man himself.

Here is the test that settled it for me. Break your finger right now and you will feel it, but do the same thing to a body after the person has died and there is nothing at all: no flinch, no cry, no pain. The nerves are still there and the finger is still there, so what is missing is the one who was doing the feeling. That is worth sitting with, because it means the body is not where feeling happens. The body reports, and something else suffers.

The body is also temporary and Scripture never hides it, telling Adam plainly that "dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" [Genesis 3:19]. If the body were all you are, the grave would be the whole story and there would be nothing else worth saying. But James writes that "the body without the spirit is dead" [James 2:26], which is another way of saying that a body with no spirit in it is a corpse, since everything that made the person a person has gone. The body was never the driver, it was only ever the vehicle.

The soul is the part of you that wants

The soul is where you think, where you choose and where you feel, which is to say mind, will and emotion, and if the body is the house then the soul is the person living inside it.

In Gethsemane, Jesus does not say that his body is in pain, he says "My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death" [Matthew 26:38], which places the deepest grief recorded in Scripture squarely in the soul. Job splits the two in a single line when he says that "his flesh upon him shall have pain, and his soul within him shall mourn" [Job 14:22], giving pain to the flesh and mourning to the soul, two different kinds of suffering in one man at the same moment.

David reaches for the same distinction when he writes that "as the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God" [Psalm 42:1]. That is physical language used for something that is not physical, and he is plainly not describing thirst, because the soul gets thirsty the way the body does and you cannot satisfy the one with what belongs to the other.

The soul is also where people are bound to each other. Saul had just made it plain that he wanted David dead, and Jonathan went to David anyway, after which Scripture records that "the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul" [1 Samuel 18:1]. Not their bodies and not their minds: the bond happened at the level of the soul.

And the soul does not only feel, it also decides, because before anyone commits a sin the body is not the thing choosing it. The body is the vehicle while the driver picks the destination, so every decision you have ever made came out of your soul.

The spirit is the part of you that knows

Nobody knows your private thoughts except your own spirit, and Paul takes that everyday fact and builds an argument on it, asking "what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him?" before answering that "the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God" [1 Corinthians 2:11]. Knowing God is therefore not something you reason your way into, it comes Spirit to spirit.

Think of how a device connects to the internet, where the connection never happens through the casing but through a component inside, and without that component the device is just a well made object. The spirit is that component, the part through which a person actually reaches God, and the body cannot do the job no matter how well you maintain it.

Solomon calls it a lamp, writing that "the spirit of man is the candle of the LORD, searching all the inward parts of the belly" [Proverbs 20:27], and that lamp is where conscience lives. That's why no matter how depraved a person is, they know when they have done evil, and although you may never see it on their face and they may never admit it, inside they know, because the lamp is still doing its work.

Jesus makes the reason plain in a single line, telling the woman at the well that "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth" [John 4:24]. That one fact decides how he can be reached, since you cannot meet him with your body and you cannot argue your way to him with your mind, and it is also why no one posture works better than another, because people meet God kneeling in prayer, and walking, and in their sleep, which tells you the place and the position were never the point.

Paul adds that "the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God" [Romans 8:16]. Notice that it runs spirit to spirit rather than spirit to feelings, since God's Spirit does not set out to convince your emotions that you belong to him but bears witness with your spirit instead, which is why assurance can hold steady on a day when your feelings are in pieces.

The man who has everything and still feels empty

Body toward the world, soul toward the self, spirit toward God: one person facing three directions at once. Now think about a man with a healthy body and a settled mind, no illness, no disability and no mental trouble, who has people who love him and something he has achieved, and who still feels empty. That emptiness is not physical, and it is not emotional either since his mind is fine, so what is left is the third part of him reporting that it is not connected to anything.

Paul has a name for that man, writing that "the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" [1 Corinthians 2:14]. The word behind natural is psychikos, which means soulish, and he is describing a man running on soul alone. That man has a mind, he has feelings and he has a will, and he still cannot receive the things of God, not because he is unintelligent but because he is using the wrong faculty. Jude arrives at the same diagnosis in a handful of words and reaches for the same Greek root, describing those who are "sensual, having not the Spirit" [Jude 19].

Isaiah then holds the whole thing together in one verse, naming both and handing each of them its own work: "With my soul have I desired thee in the night; yea, with my spirit within me will I seek thee early" [Isaiah 26:9]. The soul desires and the spirit seeks, which is to say that it is the soul that notices the emptiness and the spirit that goes and finds God.

Knowing which part is asking

The body is where you live, the soul is who you are, and the spirit is how you meet God.

When your stomach is empty you eat, and nobody has to teach you that. But some emptiness is not physical hunger and food will never touch it, because what is starving is the third part of you, cut off from the one thing it was made to connect to.

I would add one more thing: the strength of that connection seems to set the level of access, working much the way a network does, since two people can both be online and still have very different experiences of it. Anyone who has waited on a poor connection knows the difference between being connected and being connected well, and I suspect the same holds between a man and God, and that much of what we call growth is simply that connection improving.

So the next time you feel restless, ask which part of you is actually asking for something, whether it is body, soul or spirit, because that one question changes how you answer it.