THE world of the hidden life of our soul is so mysterious and baffling that, the older you become, the more you become aware, of that world of miracles which you carry about with you in your own inward life.
Numbers of questions here arise to which cleverest scholars cannot even begin to give an answer. They, who carry their studies outside of God’s Word, lay indeed intricate problems before you regarding psychology. But the end always is, that they are unable to tell you, what the soul is, where she dwells, in what relation she stands with your body, what law she obeys, and how she operates.
In His Word God the Lord has spread so much light upon the life of our soul, as is needful for us, to live godly lives and to die in His peace; but answer to all sorts of questions of curiosity Holy Scripture does not give us.
The clearer and richer insight in that hidden world of our soul is here withheld from you, and comes only later on. When God the Lord had put Adam completed in Paradise, by his clearer sense Adam must have been more conscious of it than you; but yet to him also the background of the life of the soul must have remained mysterious. It does not belong to the “visible,” but very positively to the “invisible” things, and over invisible things there ever hangs a veil.
It avails you therefore nothing, that with burning and passionate curiosity you try to penetrate this world full of mysteries. He who drives this too strongly, runs danger of becoming even insane. And for God’s child the safest stand is, that, in humble faith you accept, what God has revealed to you, that you allow yourself to be led by that revealed knowledge, and rest therein with your pondering.
And the outcome has shown, that the life of the soul developed itself harmoniously and in beautiful simplicity, only when we did not try to look into what was withdrawn from our gaze, but quiet as the weaned child contented ourselves with what knowledge is revealed.
Especially one point then is fixed for you, namely this, that your soul and body are two, and, in that duality, are yet one. Different in kind; for your soul is something altogether different from your body, and your body is something altogether different from your soul; but yet also again belonging together, for without your soul your body becomes a corpse, and without your body your soul enters upon that separated and deprived state, which Paul, the holy apostle, prays against as a state of being “unclothed” and “naked.”
He even speaks so strongly, that in 2 Cor. 5, 4 he does not hesitate to say: “We, who are still in the body, groan, being burdened, not that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon.”
Of course this does not mean, that Paul rebelled against dying and did not want to die. Did he not equally have “a desire to be unbound and be with Christ?” It only means to say, that a temporal existence as soul alone, without body, is anti-natural for us; that therefore we always look to dying as to something that does violence to our nature; and being “burdened and groaning in ourselves,” we long after our “unclothing” the sooner the better again to be clothed upon, that is to say, to obtain our body back again.
No Christian man therefore may say, that, so long as he but saves his soul, the body does not concern him.
He who says this does not honor God’s holy ordinance.
For when God created man, he did not create a soul, but even created the body first, and breathed into that body the breath of life, and so man became a living soul.
Thus a soul is not a man. Man alone is he who has soul and body both. So death does violence to your existence-as-man. And then only shall the power of death be broken for you, when in the day of resurrection you obtain your glorified body back again, eternally to dwell in that body before the face of God.
BUT therefore your dying must also be such a dying, that you know what you do; and this the Scripture delineates in the ever-recurring expression, that he who dies yields up the ghost.
So at Jacob’s dyingbed you see three operations of faith glisten.
First he sets his house in order and provides for his own. Then he lays himself down upon the bed, to die. And finally he dies.
Death to this patriarch is a pale stream of forgetfulness, into which he does not allow himself to be pushed, into which he is not thrown, but into which he lets himself go down.
The spirit is not taken from him, but he yields up the ghost.
And that with the old patriarch this was no overboldness nor imagination, Golgotha shows.
For there dies the Expectation of the fathers, and also your Savior does not alone give up the ghost, but acts therewith with so clear consciousness, that just before He died He exclaimed with a loud voice: “Father, into thine hands I commend my spirit.”
Even in our own mother-tongue that self-consciousness and self-activity on the part of him who goes into death, is so beautifully expressed.
He who passes away, is not killed, but he doeth it himself; he himself dies.
He was born, for this took place outside of himself; but in his departure he is no longer passive.
In dying he dies himself.
WHAT then in dying have you to do?
See it in Jesus, Who first commended His spirit into His Father’s hands, and then gave up the spirit.
By “spirit” here, which you are to give up, are you to understand your soul?
Really not.
What in dying you give up is not your soul, but your body. Also after dying you still have your soul; but what after your dying, at least for a time, you have lost, is your body.
Your soul does not leave you for a moment. Your soul goes with you, wherever you may go. From your soul you cannot even be separated. For even at times, when you lose your consciousness, and know nothing of your soul, your soul is ever present with you and you with your soul.
What you keep, you do not give, and cannot commend into the hands of another; and if you had to choose between soul and body, it would always yet be better sense to say, that he who dies gives up his body, rather than that he gives up his soul.
And yet, that you give up your body, is still something different from giving up the ghost.
And this also must be something different.
For it is easily understood, that he who in the midst of glowing youth and splendid health is suddenly overtaken by death, finds it a dreadful thing, to give up that sound, strong, flourishing body; while when you have become old, and all sorts of ailments and disease have come upon you, and the body creaks and grates in its structure, separation from that body is certainly not so hard, and many an one utters the humble prayer: “O, God, deliver me from this body, that so burdens and troubles me.”
NO, what in dying you have to do, is: to give up the ghost, and ghost here has no other meaning than “the breath of life.”
Adam and spirit, both in the language of the Old and in the language of the New Testament, are frequently expressed by the same word. At one time it reads: “Thou takest away their adem (breath) and they die,” and at another time that “the spirit returneth unto God Who gave it.” And this occurs, not only with respect to man, but also to animals. For “that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath” (Eccl. 3, 19).
Only when the “breath of life” goeth out from an animal, it never comes back; and when you breathe out that “breath of life” and give it over into God’s hand, in the day of resurrection, God Almighty shall bring that “breath of life” back into you again.
Your spirit, your breath of life, which in dying you yield unto God, He preserves in His safe and holy hand, and in your resurrection that spirit comes back to you again.
In the meantime your soul is truly alive, and enjoys, after the nature of the soul, the blessedness of your Savior; but you miss that “breath of life,” which here you had, simply because that “breath of life” is the wondrous secret, whereby God the Lord turned your body from a dead clod into an animated and living body.
So with Jesus that spirit, which He commended into the Father’s hands, remained in that Father’s hands, until that third morning, until He rose again, after God by giving back to Him that “breath of life” had quickened Him from the dead.
What thus also in your dying you have to do, is, that clearly conscious you have to acknowledge, that only by that breath or that spirit of life your soul stands related with your body; that now your soul must separate from that body; that this is possible only as that breath or that spirit of life is given back to God by you, by you is entrusted to His Father-hand; and that now you die in the assured hope and knowledge, that God Almighty shall once bring back again that “breath of life” in you, that after soul and body both again, and then eternally, you might live in His presence.
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