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Welcome to Day 1491 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomImager - A God-Breathed United Council\xa0\u2013 Worldview WednesdayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge.\xa0Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy.\xa0Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1491 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday.\xa0Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today\u2019s current events.\xa0To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word.\xa0This week, on our Worldview Wednesday episode, we will continue our study based on a course I recently completed taught by Dr. Michael Heiser. Our study is titled \u201cSons and Daughters of God: The Believer\u2019s Identity, Calling, and Destiny\u201d Throughout this multi-week course, we will demonstrate that, in the Old Testament, \u201csons of God\u201d and \u201choly ones\u201d refers to supernatural beings whose Father is God and who work with God to carry out His will and that this divine family was present before humanity. By fully engaging with biblical texts such as Psalm 82; Psalm 89, and Deuteronomy 32:8\u20139, our study will show that this divine family functions as a template for God\u2019s human family. God desires of humans, as His imagers, to participate in His council. This study addresses issues such as polytheism, the nature of the (little \u2018g\u2019) \u201cgods,\u201d and Yahweh's uniqueness. This study will apply insights to the New Testament texts and show how the metaphor of being in God\u2019s family informs our sense of identity and mission as believers.
Imager \u2013 A God-Breathed United Council\xb7\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0Segment 24: Humans Animated by the Breath of God
Introduction
Last week we left off talking about the one outlier in our list of candidates for what the \u2018image of God\u2019 idea might be: the possession of a soul, soul/spirit. People use different terminology; we\u2019re not worried about parsing the terms necessarily here, and you\u2019ll quickly see why.
Animals Like Humans
If we\u2019re going to go with biblical language, the idea of having a \u201csoul\u201d is having a nephesh. In Genesis 2:7\u2014this is when God breathes into the man, into Adam, and he becomes a living soul\u2014the Hebrew there is the nephesh chayyah. That\u2019s biblical language. It turns out, though, that if you go back to Genesis 1:21, we read this: \u201cSo God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves. [the term there is \u2018every nephesh hachayyah\u2019]\u201d So animals and humans are described with the same terminology with respect to the \u201csoulishness\u201d of each of them. What it refers to\u2014the nephesh chayyah in both passages\u2014is a reference to this sort of animate life that we sort of know and experience.
I can look at my dog and know that my dog is an animate life form. It looks at me. Something is going on up there in the head. It moves around; it makes decisions, so on and so forth. It decides to go into that room or this room. That\u2019s what animate life is.
Animals and humans are both described with the same vocabulary in the Hebrew Bible. Animals also have a ruach. So for those who want to say, \u201cWell, the nephesh is different than the ruach; the soul is different than the spirit,\u201d we have a problem there too. Ecclesiastes 3:21 has animals possessing a ruach; it\u2019s the same word for \u201cspirit\u201d used of humans.
\xa0Nephesh and Ruach Interchangeable
The problem becomes even more than that. If you studied the terms, you would discover that \u2018nephesh\u2019 is often translated \u201csoul\u201d in English Bibles, and \u201cspirit\u201d comes from the Hebrew \u2018ruach.\u2019
If you studied both of those Hebrew terms, you would learn very quickly that they are used...