Chapter 3: The Tripartite Man

To understand God’s Way of salvation, we must first examine how sin corrupts man in the sight of God. To do this, I will revisit the subject of what man is. I touched briefly on this in chapter one, but I will expand on it here.

7 And the LORD 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

Man was formed from the dust of the earth. But he became a living soul after the breath of God entered him. This breath of God is spirit, even as God himself is a Spirit. Once the Spirit encountered the body, man’s soul was created. Man, immediately had his individual personality encapsulated in his will (to make choices), his intellect (for thinking) and his emotions (for feeling) and these make up the personality of the man, the soul of the man. The man however also has a physical body which is the outer container for his soul (or personality) and for his spirit (the breath of life from God). This is the tripartite nature of man. Man is a tripartite being consisting of his spirit, soul, and body.

Please note that every time I use the word man, I refer to human beings, male and female, men and women, boys, and girls.

To quickly revisit the injunction that God gave to Adam, we begin to understand what happened to man.

15 And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: 17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Genesis 2:15-17

So, in the day that man sinned, he died spiritually by losing connection with God. Due to his willful disobedience, his spirit (the breath of Life in the man) lost communication with the Father of all Spirits. This occurred because a Holy God cannot abide iniquity.

14 What is man, that he should be clean? and he which is born of a woman, that he should be righteous? 15 Behold, he putteth no trust in his saints; yea, the heavens are not clean in his sight. 16 How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water?
Job 15:14-16

So spiritual death came to man, because God cannot abide iniquity so the spirit in man was cut off from having contact with God. This severance was instantaneous. His spirit was separated from God.

God is the Author of all Life. All creatures on earth exist because they have life in them from God. Once a creature becomes separated from this life, they immediately experience death. This death means that the spirit is separated from God and communication with Him. The spirit is still active but is in a much-weakened state. Imagine if you will, a paralytic who is paralyzed from the neck down. The paralyzed is confined say to a wheelchair and is capable of minimal activity, while his body and muscles slowly atrophy, and he wastes away. This is the state of the spirit who has lost communication with the Source of Life.

This is the nature of the spirit of all men, from the time of birth until they die physically.

So, just like a virus or bacteria attacks the body and without treatment can kill and cause death, sin attacks the spirit of the man by bringing death to the spirit, by separating the spirit from the Source of all Life. This death then begins to spread from the inside out to all of man. In the day man sinned, he died. Both physically and spiritually. I already went over this in chapter one. A thousand years is as a day before the Lord. So, in the day (1,000-year span) that man is born, he dies. Methuselah, the oldest living man died in the day that he was born. Please revisit chapter one again to go over this.

So, though the man is dead spiritually, he doesn’t appear to have any physical symptoms. He or she looks like every other man on the outside as they’ve always done; but on the inside, their spirit is paralyzed. This paralysis in the spirit doesn’t mean that the spirit cannot be active. I say paralyzed because it is cut off from its Source. There are those who are very active in occult practices and with their spirits can contact the dead (necromancy) or with their spirits they interact with other spirits and fully co-operate with them (sorcerers). Spiritual death, however, is that man since the disobedience of Adam cannot please God but is steeped in lawlessness (from God’s perspective). See what the scripture says about this:

5 And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
Genesis 6:5-6

Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was evil continually. This is spiritual death. When fruit goes bad, it usually does from the inside out, from the core. Once the core rots, the rot begins to spread to the outer part of the fruit until the entire fruit is only fit to be thrown away. Now on the outside of the fruit, sometimes we can have insects that may have burrowed a little way in, but this wouldn’t make the fruit bad. One can cut off the offending part and still enjoy the rest of the fruit.

As a result of Adam’s sin however, the core of every human being is rotten from birth. The core or spirit has lost its way because it is in a fallen state. As a result of this, though the man may do “good” and may have empathy for others and give alms and be a good, upstanding, law-abiding citizen, his primary nature is still rotten. In the right environment, under the heat of persecution, the good man will surprise himself by the amount of evil he is capable of, in his need to preserve self.

As a result, since all men were born with the Adamic nature, all men are born into this state of spiritual death. As a result, man doesn’t know that he’s missing anything. He feels normal and he feels fine. He was “born this way”. And so, because the spirit of man is pretty much dead, man cannot sense his spirit. Rather, his soul dominates him.

The man’s soul is the seat of his will (for power of choice), his intellect (by which he processes thought) and his emotions (by which he feels pain and pleasure). The spirit is the seat of the man’s conscience and intuition and revelation. With the spirit sick, the man is dominated by his soul. So, we have the expressions: What a personality! What sheer force of will! What determination! What concentration! She is the absolute life of the party!

The personality of the man controls him. For some, their emotional sides are dominant, and they are very emotional or very empathic towards others. For others, logic and reason is their bent and they become scientific-minded or highly analytical. For others, they are natural-born leaders. These are the doers. Their force of will blossoms and they exude a take-charge persona and others instinctively turn to them for guidance, because they don’t “live in their heads” but are apt to do.

All this is fine. The soul of man is a beautiful thing and all the myriad of personalities that stem from these three dominant personalities hitherto described make the world a beautiful and interesting place to live in.

But there is a catch.

Since the spirit of the natural man is lost communication with the Source of all Good, and the spirit is his seat of conscience, intuition and revelation, man has no way of directly communicating with God, hence no way to know right from wrong. Without this way of communication, man has two options. First, he turns to rules, aka dogma, aka religion for guidance regarding what is right or wrong and how to live for general guidance. Secondly, he turns to his senses for specific guidance. The natural man has no other choices.

The soul of man is his Executive branch of government. Again, we see the tripartite nature in government. All governments consist of the Judicial, the Legislative and the Executive branches. The legislative branch makes the laws, declares war, regulates commerce and taxation and spending while the judicial branch interprets the laws and decisions stemming from the legislative and makes final interpretive rulings based on the laws and the executive branch enforces them.

The soul of man takes all the input from all sources and by force of will, makes his decisions after engaging his thought and emotions, so the soul of the natural man governs the man.

Hence for his first choice, depending on what kind of home the man is raised in, be it a Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, or some other type of home, the man tends to adopt the rules, dogma, and religion of his parents as rules for general living. In this vein, all religions of the world preach the same thing. Do good unto others, don’t do evil. They may have other specific things in the religion regarding how to worship in the religion, say pray five times a day bowing down and facing the rising sun for instance, or burn incense or chant some certain prayers, etc., but as a rule, all the religions preach the doing of good to others and not evil.

Other men who aren’t brought up in religious homes also have general rules of society governing them. In every society, the same theme permeates. Do good unto others, not evil. If you steal from your neighbor, you will get punished, etc.

Others may have been brought up either within or without the confines of a religious home but because their souls are dominated by their thought, they have a scientific or analytical mind and they conclude that all religions are unnecessary, because they have no proof they say of the existence of a God. They love to say things like: If there really is a God, why do good things happen to bad people? Where was God when the Jews experienced the Holocaust? Why did my child die of xyz disease? Whatever did the two-year old do to deserve such a disease? What God would allow that? And so on and so forth. And they embrace the concept: Do good and not evil, but let’s leave God out of it.

Secondly, asides from the general rules for living, man’s soul turns to his senses for more specific guidance. The natural man has five senses: Sight, Smell, Taste, Touch and Hearing. Through these five senses, man processes inputs from the world around him. These inputs pass into his thought and emotions and ultimately, his will when he acts or doesn’t act on the information received.

Now that we’ve established the nature of man, we must turn again to see how sin corrupts the man. To fully understand this, we must revisit the temptation of Eve in the garden of Eden.

1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: 3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. 4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: 5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. 6 And when the woman 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, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. 7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
Genesis 3:1-7

First, the serpent challenged the Word of God. He made God a liar. And the serpent said unto the woman: Ye shall not surely die. The first stroke of calling God a liar was to silence the protest of the spirit of the woman, which at this point was fully functional in wanting to obey God. Next, he elucidated the properties of the fruit of the tree. Rather than die, your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be like gods, knowing good and evil. The woman’s soul (thought) then became actively engaged. In one sentence, the serpent put the instruction of God on the backburner. Rather than sticking to what God said and the protest from her spirit, the serpent engaged her soul such that her thoughts and emotions became engaged. Then her soul reached for more input.

And the woman saw that the tree was good for food. She saw the luscious fruit and reached out with her body and felt it. It was solid and firm. It looked lustrous. How can such an innocent beautiful thing kill her? Moreover, why would God put something that could kill them in the garden? Surely, God wouldn’t do that would He? God is good right? So why did God say it would kill them? Is God trying to control them? It would be nice to be like a god…maybe they could even be like God Himself? The fruit is pleasant to the eyes. Yes, and it would make us wise, she thought, her imagination going into hyper drive on the various possibilities. Maybe Adam didn’t fully understand what God meant? Maybe if I just take a bite? Maybe not eat the whole fruit?

So how did Eve sin exactly? How did she disobey God? Yes, she took the fruit but how? Sin attacked both her body and her soul.

Sin came in from the outside.

16 For 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, but is of the world.
1 John 2:16

Sensory inputs are just what they are. Sensory inputs. They in themselves are neither good nor bad. What makes them good or bad is what we do with them. A lion that kills a child is neither a good nor a bad lion. It is simply a lion. A wild animal that does what wild animals do. I once took my son who was two years old at the time to the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston. We were in front of the Tiger enclosure when one of the Tigers charged at the fence. The boy was petrified, and I had to scoop him into my arms and console him. He wasn’t smack against the fence of the enclosure or anything, but the Tiger did what Tigers do. They hunt. Did that make the tiger a bad cat? Absolutely not! In the same way, there are no good or bad inputs. Only what we do with them or what they are designed to do by other people is good or bad.

So, what is the love of the world and the things of the world? Like with the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (most likely not an apple!), if we subjugate the Word of God to satisfy any desire that we have which is contrary to the command of God, to us it shall be sin.

What do I mean? Watching TV is not a sin. But if I indulge in inordinate watching of TV rather than doing what God says, this makes Watching TV a sin to me. If I indulge in just 30 minutes of TV a week to satisfy my lust (say a particular show), to me it is sin, if it causes me to break the commandments of God. Does this mean I can never watch TV? Absolutely not. But if it trumps my doing what God wants or leads me to do what God doesn’t want, to me it is a snare that leads to sin.

So, eating fruit is not a sin. But eating that particular fruit after God said Do Not Eat This Particular Fruit is sin. Adam and Eve after eating the fruit didn’t develop stomach aches. The fruit itself was not bad. Eating the fruit after it was forbidden is what was bad.

Therefore, sensory inputs are neither good nor bad. BUT ALL SENSORY INPUTS ARE POTENTIAL SNARES. Like lures to fish, not all lures will lure all fish; but different types of lures exist because fish are lured by different things. The lure itself is what tempts the fish to bite. They bite and then they get the hook and can hardly get free. Or they get free and are severely injured by the hook in the process. Does this make the lure itself a good or bad thing? Absolutely not! But if the fish falls into temptation and bites the lure, it will get the hook and that is bad for the fish. Similarly, all sensory inputs can accidentally or intentionally be weaponized to ensnare the man and lead him down the rabbit hole called sin. And as with the fish, once the lure is taken it likely leads to death of the fish. With man, once man sins (and takes the lure), death begins to work in him.

There are several reasons why a fish might bite the lure. But I would say two principal reasons are that the lure looks pleasing to the eyes as something good to eat and secondly, maybe the fish was hungry. Other reasons would be the fish was greedy and loved that particular lure.

13 Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: 14 But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. 15 Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.
James 1:13-15

In the same way, the serpent dangled the lure in front of Eve. Of the say 1,000 trees in the garden, this is the only fruit she couldn’t sample! And it would make her wise, like the gods! What was God thinking? The serpent said she wouldn’t die! So, against her inner misgivings she bit into the lure. And she died. The death? Her spirit lost its dominance in directing her soul and body to obey the word. Her spirit was no longer listened to. Rather the soul was now in control.

When God judged Adam in Eve in the garden, he also judged the snake for causing them to sin.

14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: 15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
Genesis 3:14-15

Why was the snake also judged? He didn’t disobey after all, but he caused others to stumble. He created a snare for others. He caused them to sin. In the same vein, though nothing is by itself inherently good or bad, all inputs can be weaponized into snares, can be turned into lures to cause men to sin. The input itself may be a lure to a man because of his own lust, as stated in James, without anyone weaponizing it; it still doesn’t make the lure inherently good or bad.

In Matthew 18, we are warned against leading anyone to sin (to offend). The result? It would be better for such a one to be drowned in the sea.

6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble and sin [by leading him away from My teaching], it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone [as large as one turned by a donkey] hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. 7 “Woe (judgment is coming) to the world because of stumbling blocks and temptations to sin! It is inevitable that stumbling blocks come; but woe to the person on whose account or through whom the stumbling block comes!
Matthew 18: 6-7 (AMP)

Like the serpent in the garden, he that causes his fellowman to sin will be in danger of judgement.

15 Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For 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, but is of the world.
1 John 2:15-16

So how did Eve sin? Firstly, she doubted God’s word (“Ye shall not surely die”, said the serpent), then she saw that the fruit was pleasant to the eyes (lust of the eyes), and it was good to make one wise (pride of life). Only one of these three is sufficient to lead one into sin. Eve was bombarded by two of the three lusts and the greater error of doubting God’s Word in the first place. She may have desired the fruit but if she hadn’t doubted the Word, she may not have succumbed.

And Adam? How did he sin? Did he doubt the word of God? Or was he overcome by the fruit?

6 And when the woman 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, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
Genesis 3:6

Adam, the scripture says, was with Eve! Why didn’t he stop her and interrupt the serpent? He didn’t doubt God’s word. Neither was he overcome by desire for the fruit. Rather, he wanted to please his wife. He could see her desire for the fruit. And he regarded her desires above the commandment of God. He decided to “make an exception, just this once”. He “looked the other way”. How many times do we go along with others just to “be a friend”, not be a “party pooper”? What excuses do we come up with to willfully disobey God? The penalty? Death. Unfortunately, we don’t think of the death penalty, so we go along with whatever.

20 The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.
Ezekiel 18:20

So, in eating the fruit, the soul of man usurped the legislative power of the spirit of man which communicated the commandment of God: Do Not Eat the Fruit of this Tree. In Eve’s mind, her conscience, the voice of her spirit was yelling: Don’t Eat the Fruit! The same yelled in Adam: Stop her! But in turning deaf ears to the spirit, the soul engaged her Executive Functions and decided to contravene the voice of the spirit. In an instant, the fruit was eaten and there was no going back. This was the fall of man.

The soul now became man’s dominant center and man’s spirit was cut off from God, since the man chose not to obey.

One may argue that the man’s soul chose not to obey, not his spirit, so why cut off the spirit? The spirit, soul and body of man make up the man as one entity, but the power of choice rests with the soul. Therefore, man has free will. So that he can choose. Whatever choice he makes then becomes binding upon the man, spirit, soul, and body.

Like a President of a country has Executive powers, he cannot act without the acquiescence of the legislative body of the House and Senate. Governments that do this, are dictatorships that tend to lead to the destruction of their countries.

In the same manner, when man sinned, he became a dictatorship unto himself. He enthroned himself as a god whose sole purpose was to serve himself. In the eyes of God, man became a tyrant, a loose cannon, headed toward destruction.

So now we see that sin comes into man from the outside, from the inputs that he takes in through his senses. With his spirit in its weakened state, whatever the spirit remembers about the commandments of God may either be brushed aside or adhered to. The more they are ignored, the weaker the voice of conscience gets, until the man can no longer hear his conscience by willfully and continually choosing to ignore it. Until man became utterly depraved.

5 And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
Genesis 6:5-6

What is this wickedness? Man kept turning from God’s commands and fulfilling his own desires and doing the opposite of what God wanted. He became an absolute tyrant. And broke the heart of God.

Man was fit for only one thing: Death. Death is the penalty of all sin. Why? Because God is so holy, he cannot behold iniquity. Man can only be in the presence of God when he is sin-free. And this is what salvation is all about. This is what it means to be saved.

Saved from what? Saved from certain death. I have already discussed the sacrifices that man offered at the behest of God. Yet these did not please Him, because man still wasn’t turning from sin.

I have also discussed man’s idea of goodness. His idea involves doing good. But the problem is that God considers the source of all things. Most people have ulterior motives for doing good when you get to the root of it. Some people give to charity. Giving to charity is a good thing, but if people give because they can take deductions at tax-time, it isn’t good enough for God. As a test, one may say, how much would one give, if tax deductions were not allowed? How much would one give, if rather than feel good about the giving, you get whipped one stroke of the cane, for every $100 you gave? Then we can tease out the real motive behind the giving. Others may help in a homeless shelter. This is a good thing, nothing wrong with it; but people often do this because it makes them feel good about themselves, so it isn’t good enough for God. This is the holiness of God.

Before I discuss God’s plan of salvation however, we must inspect the lives of the men who please God.