Why Does the Soul Need Saving?

In the last article we saw that a human being is made of three parts: a body formed from the dust, a soul that came into existence when God breathed the breath of life into that body, and a spirit, which is the part of us that connects to God. That raises a question worth sitting with, because if God himself breathed the soul into man, it is fair to ask how something that came from the breath of God ends up needing to be saved at all.

The answer goes back to the garden of Eden.

It started with a conversation

God had warned the man and his wife not to eat from the tree in the midst of the garden, and in Genesis 3 the devil comes to Eve in the form of a serpent. He tells her that she will "not surely die" and that she will "be as gods, knowing good and evil" [Genesis 3:4-5], which is another way of telling her that God lied to her, and the tragedy of the passage is that Eve stops to weigh the serpent's word against the word of God.

What happens next is told in one verse, where Eve "saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise" [Genesis 3:6], so she took the fruit, ate it and gave it to her husband (Adam), who ate it too. Read it slowly and you can see the order of events: she saw the fruit, then she desired it, and only then did she take it.

That order matters, because desire comes from the soul. Before your hand does anything, a decision has already been made, and that decision is made in the soul, which is why I describe the soul as the driver and the body as the vehicle it drives. The serpent never laid a finger on Eve's body, because he did not need to, since he was pressing on her soul.

The three pulls

The Bible names exactly what was pulling on Eve, although it does so near the very end of Scripture, when John writes that all that is in the world, "the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father" [1 John 2:16]. Lay that verse beside Genesis 3:6 and the two fit together: the tree was good for food, which is the lust of the flesh, it was pleasant to the eyes, which is the lust of the eyes, and it was desired to make one wise, which is the pride of life.

The last of the three is the one that did the deepest damage, because Eve was reaching for wisdom, and in reaching for it she disobeyed God and was cut off from him. She wanted to become more than God had created her to be, and she lost what God had already given her.

The wisdom that turns out to be foolishness

Scripture says plainly that "the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God" [1 Corinthians 3:19], and the wisdom the serpent promised Eve was exactly that kind. You do not have to look far to see the same thing today, because people do a great deal in the name of being wise, in how they handle money and in how they deal with other people, and very often it is the world's idea of wisdom that dictates how they behave.

Paul describes where that road ends when he writes, "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools" [Romans 1:22]. People chase the world's wisdom to look clever and to look glamorous, and much of what that chase produces, whether hatred, pride or theft, runs against the word of God, so that the harder they work at being seen as wise, the more foolish they become in the sight of God.

How the sin of Eden reached us

It is reasonable to ask what a sin committed in the Garden of Eden has to do with you and me, and Paul answers it directly: "by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men" [Romans 5:12]. Because Adam sinned, the sin of Adam passed down to every one of his descendants, which means every single one of us.

An illustration I came across on LinkedIn puts this better than I can, because it pictures Adam and Eve committing their sin and being put in prison, and every one of us being born inside that prison. We did not walk in, since we were born there, and that is what it means to inherit the sin of Adam.

Scripture does not leave it at inheritance, because it also says that "all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" [Romans 3:23]. So we are not only born into sin, we have also sinned for ourselves, in many ways and ever since we were born, doing things that separated us from God and things that did not honour him.

Led by another spirit

Remember that the spirit of man is the part of us that connects to God, and this is where I believe the fall did its quietest damage: sin disconnected man from God. Paul describes what happens once that connection is broken, when he writes that we "walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience" [Ephesians 2:2].

When a person is disconnected from God, the spirit of disobedience, the spirit of the world and the spirit of the enemy become dominant in that person's life, and they find themselves doing things they may never have planned to do. We often say that people who do evil are doing it on purpose, and some of them are, but there is a reason Jesus prayed for the very people who were crucifying him, saying "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" [Luke 23:34]. I take that prayer as a window onto this same condition, because people who are cut off from God are being led by a spirit that is not of God.

What sin is, and what it pays

Before we go further it helps to be clear about what sin is, and the simplest definition I know is that sin is anything that does not align with the will of God, whether that is lying, stealing or any of the others you could name.

That brings us to the payment, because the Bible says that "the wages of sin is death" [Romans 6:23]. Wages are what you earn, and because of the sin we inherited from Adam and the sin we have committed ourselves, the payment we have earned is death, which is exactly why the soul needs to be saved.

In summary

God gave us a soul, and through a desire of that soul man lost his connection to God. That loss passed down to all of us, we have added our own sin to it, and we now find ourselves separated from God and led by a spirit that is not his, earning wages that end in death.

In the next article we will look at the answer: how the soul can be saved.