I’ll have a go! Please note, I am terrible at remembering scripture.
Physical death has always existed. You eventually just lay your body down and move on. They wear out, even with the best care - anyone over 50 can confirm that! We are told our time - 3 score years and 10, and it is again accurate. Impressivly so for a culture that tended to die of old age in their 50s. Sure, some go over, some die earlier. The average though, with a good diet and modern medicine is around 70. (Men die a little younger - no nagged to death jokes please!)
There was a study of the body, purely on engineering principles that found the human spine will degrade to total uselessness in 200 years of use. Knees go out much sooner, about 120. Even the replacement of cells wears out over time.
Yet, we are promised eternal life, and God does not lie. That is my fixed thing here - God does not lie, he cannot.
“The wages of sin is death” to me means if you sin, don’t trust in the Lord and don’t repent, your chances of eternal life go down the tubes because you reject the freely given gift.
The body is not the person. We are admonished on that. The soul is the person. (Please, don’t ask me what a soul is, I have NO idea! That is an area where I trust the Word - I have to.)
Since sin arrived with the first person and before he died, we can’t know. Animals, so I am told, do not go to heaven. Not keen on that idea, but it is something I must accept.
The Bible does flat out tell us in several places that physical lifespans, at least for some, were not as they are now. Reports of people living 400 years, 700 years, for example. That, I must accept. It is in the book. Then again, I know people who are fit and vigorous at over 100 years old, and people who died of old age diseases in their early 20s.
Still working on this aspect - understanding the Word is a journey that is life long - but that is my take.
People haven’t always lived a mere 70-ish years. There was a time when people lived hundreds of years.
Two questions to ponder, regarding lifespan:
1) What significant event took place the year 969-year-old Methuselah died?
2) Prior to that event, people lived hundreds of years. Following that event, people gradually came to live fewer and fewer years. Did that “event” change the environment in such a way that humans just weren’t able to live as long as before?
EnglishCon — there’s a lot in Scripture. A lot that can be missed by digging deep into secular evolutionary theories, rather than digging deep into God’s Word and creation. It really is fascinating how it all comes together to support what it plainly says.
You wrote: “...The body is not the person. We are admonished on that. The soul is the person. (Please, don’t ask me what a soul is, I have NO idea! That is an area where I trust the Word - I have to.)”
Re “bodies”, “souls” and “persons”:
I don’t know if you’ve had the time to read it yet, but here are some excerpts from The_Reader_David’s very valuable link in post # 39 above -(forgive the length :):
THE SIX DAWNS
http://www.scribd.com/doc/75080212/The-Six-Dawns-by-Dr-Alexander-Kalomiros
Author: Alexander Kalomiros First edition in Greek: 1993 First edition in English: 1997, in the “Ark”Translated in English by George Gabriel (1997)Copyright: George Gabriel, 1997
PREFACE
Very carefully clear your minds of all Western conceptions, whether they are theological,philosophical, or scientific. You must forget what is taught [about creation] in your public schools and also your reaction to this teaching. All of it is conditioned by human reason andspeculation and has as a background a Roman Catholic rationalistic mentality which was also inherited by Protestants. It has infected many “Orthodox” minds as well.
The first chapter of Genesis is the narrative about a sequence of events that took place through the word and acts of God. God spoke and creatures came into being. How? It is a mystery. In any case,creation did not come into being instantly, but followed a sequence of manifestations, a -development over six different “days”. What shall we call this progress of creation in time, if not evolution?St. Gregory of Nyssa is very clear on this: “Man was made last, after the plants andanimals, because nature follows a path that gradually leads to perfection...Thus, nature — I mean the various properties of life — makes an ascent as if by steps, from the smallest forms to perfection... The Lawgiver sees a necessary sequence of order for the last to be perfect”.Even if evolutionists today are atheists and they believe in blind and accidental evolution without God’s will and action, we should not reject evolution itself. Evolution was taught thousands of years ago by
Genesis and explained by the holy Fathers centuries before Darwin. God created the universe in time and with a path from the simplest to the more complex, finishing with His perfect creature: man—perfect because of His image in man, as we shall see, and not because of man’s material nature. ......
[HUGE SNIP]
.....How did He save us from returning to non-existence, to which we should return as creaturely beings made from nothing? Naturally, those who argue for two different natures in man would have to say the Word of God took only the common nature of man, the flesh. And He did not take the other, the unique nature of each of us, since it had no need of salvation, of resurrection, of being made incorruptible, because it was eternal and incorruptible in itself. In other words,they would say the Word of God took the bodily human nature since it had need of resurrection and of being made incorruptible, but He did not take on the soul since it is divine, and only the divine nature is immortal and incorruptible.A variation of this heretical view of man and the Incarnation of God is the theory of Makrakis regarding a triple nature of man. According to him, man does not have two, butthree natures: the body, the soul, and the spirit. Being creatures, both the body and the soulare corruptible and mortal, but the spirit is divine since it is part of the Holy Spirit.Essentially, both versions of this heresy argue that man is partly mortal and partly divine.And both versions are clear examples of rationalism and scholasticism that are totally aliento the Christian faith. And both versions try to comprehend man while ignoring a realitythat is essentially unknown to paganism: the reality of the person.
7. The person
The person is not a nature. God is one nature in three persons. The nature of God is common to the three persons. Each of the three persons, however, is unique.The fact that God created man “in the image of God” implies, among other things, that in man, as in God, the same distinction exists between nature and persons.
And like God, man is one in his nature, but many in persons.
What makes us all human is our nature which is common to all of us. What makes each of us a unique and unrepeatable being is our person. We have seen what our nature comes from and how it was created.
Our person, however, is a mystery. Although it is something we experience daily in ourselves and in the people around us, it is a totally intangible mystery. In essence, what makes us human, different beings from the animals, is the existence of our person. The person exists only in reason-endowed beings: in God and in the image of God—in men and angels. Animals do not have a person; they have a nature only. .....
Our person is not what is called the soul, for we humans are not the only ones who have a soul. All animals and all plants have a soul. Soul means life. Whatever has life has a soul. Life and soul have identical meanings. What, then, is the person? ......
....The person is what remains of man after death. It is what connects him with the new nature that he will acquire in the resurrection. It is what bridges the old body of corruptibility with the new body of incorruptibility and makes both the old and the new body the body of the same unrepeatable man.
Perhaps an example from the material world will help us with an insight into the incomprehensible mystery we are speaking about. There are many materials in nature. When they come in contact with fire, some of them burn, some of them harden, some of them melt and dissolve. But some, even though they are of a nature altogether different from fire,are constituted in such a way that when they come in contact with fire they too become fire.One such material is iron. Away from fire, iron is a material like many other materials. But when it comes in contact with fire it becomes red hot, it glows, radiates, and heats without ever ceasing to be in its essence iron. The fire does not give it a second nature, but it gives it properties that its nature does not have. Iron is constituted in such a way that it is receptive to the properties of fire and becomes itself fire as long as it is in contact with the fire.Man too is something like this. He has properties that he got because the Word of God became man and took our nature upon Himself. The Incarnation of the Word of God acts in the nature of man and makes him a person. The breath of the Holy Spirit acts upon the person because it is able to receive the Holy Spirit, and man becomes a living soul.”And God formed man of the dust of the earth, and He blew the breath of life into his face, and man became a living soul”. In his nature man is dust of the earth. He has personhood because it is God’s will for him to be in His image, and He became man for him.Upon that personhood God blew the breath of life, the grace of the Holy Spirit. And man became a living soul in the same way that iron is receptive of fire and, when it comes into contact with fire, it too becomes radiant from the energy of the fire.
8. The confusion
The confusion that exists about the subject of the soul has its roots in paganism. Basically, Christianity expressed itself and spoke to the world in the Greek language. But the Greek language, like all other languages that Christians used, except for Hebrew, is a language of pagan origin that was Christianized. The words remained the same, but they took on new meaning. Among the pagan words that took on another meaning in Christianity was the word “soul”. This word took on two different meanings in Christian literature. The first one is the meaning used in the Holy Scripture: soul equals life. “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the Gospel’s the same shall save it”.
(Mk.8:35)
The second meaning with which this word was used by the Christianized, former pagan world, that is, by the Christians from the nations, is that soul equals person. The idea of the person was not at all familiar to the pagan world. The pagans did not know what person means since, for them, God is creation, He is the universe; God is Pan (Gr. all that exists).
But this Pan of pagan pantheism is personless.
For pagans the ultimate destiny and perfection is for them to become identical with the personless Pan. The person,for them, the individual soul, is a lesser state that must be transcended. Universality requires all things to lose their distinctiveness.
For Christians, however, the meaning of the person is the most basic concept in our faith. We have not known God as a nature, but as a Person.
A nature is manifested and exists in the person. To us the nature of God, however, is inaccessible, unapproachable, but we have known and experienced the Person of God because He willed to come in our midst with our nature. God has revealed that our persons are images of His Person, capable of being”partakers of His divine nature” (2Pe.1:4).
And since they are images of His Person, they can receive the fire of the divine nature and become themselves fire, without being fire by nature.
But since the concept of the person, which was of such critical importance to the Christians, was unfamiliar, the properties that belong to the person were assigned to the familiar word “soul”.
And “soul” was used to express the meaning of person. But the word “soul” did not cease to be burdened with its old pagan meaning of a second nature, a spiritual nature of man.
The person is a mystery: the mystery of the divine seal upon the earthen human nature. The mysteries are not familiar to man. But the pagan meaning of the soul held no mystery: a different nature is intertwined and coexists with material nature.
It is the spirit that becomes intertwined with matter. The body dies and the material nature dissolves, but the spirit remains as a second, independent nature. These are very easy things for the rationalistic mind to grasp. Thus, for some Christians the meaning of the word soul slowly regained the ancient pagan meaning, and man, at least in the people’s mind, became compounded of two natures.
In this way, a spiritual nature of its own was imputed to the personality of man that remains after the body has dissolved. This means, of course, a clear return to paganism.
In this conception, man’s person is preserved after death because it has its own independent existence and nature, and not because it remains “in the hand of God”, in the knowledge of God which is true existence and is also completely dependent on God.
An immortality of this kind, therefore, would be of the same nature as the immortality of God. And even if it were believed to be given by God, in the final analysis, it would be self-sufficient and independent. God, of course, could have given such an immortality outright; it would have been a gift from God by grace. But if it were given, from that moment man would have perceived it as his own natural possession, in other words, as a second nature in man. Thus,he would believe he is compounded of two natures, of mortal matter and immortal spirit.
(Let us not even discuss the fact that there are many people who argue passionately and fanatically that the soul is immortal by nature and not by grace.) The source of our immortality is the Resurrection of Christ. Christ raised our earthen nature and made it incorruptible. There is no other source of immortality except the Resurrection since there is no second nature in man.
What we call immortality of the soul is nothing but the identity of the human person sustained in God. Our person is the same in both the state of corruptibility and the state of incorruptibility, before the Resurrection and after. In what we call the soul’s “life after death” there is no dimension of time since, after death and the dissolution of the body, our persons are “in the hand of God”,and in God time does not exist.
After death, souls do not live another autonomous life, since they are not natures but persons. Their life and existence is God, the prototype of the seal that is called the “person”.
Because people cannot comprehend such mysteries, it is easy to slip into pagan rationalism. In the time up to the general Resurrection, souls after death do not live in a bodiless state as if they are spiritual natures that have been separated from their bodies. A time period of this kind exists only for the living, for the natural world, of which one dimension is time.
The state of death has never been described by the Church, because it is not a state that is a natural state and describable. It is the preservation of the person and the subsistence of our being in God.
Whatever is in God is outside of nature and indescribable. The souls have no direct contact at all with the living; they neither perceive nor sense the world and the flow of time. .....They do not have self-existence of their own. Nevertheless, the dead exist and live, not in time and not by nature, but by God.
Whatever anyone may grasp of these truths, so be it.
The mystery of the distinction between nature and person is the most basic one in our faith. We do not comprehend the mysteries, but we live them. .....Our nature is material and earthen, as is the entire nature of creatures.
Our persons are the divine seal upon this earthen nature; they are the effect of an event on our nature, the event of the Incarnation of the Word. The Incarnation of the Word added the impress of the Person of the Word upon our nature and made man the image of God. It is the person that makes us humans; it is the person that bridges our pre-resurrection corruptible nature with the incorruptible nature that the Resurrection shall give us.
That resurrected nature already exists in the Person of Christ. Whatever it is that we are, we are it in Christ. We can escape the confusion of what man is only if we understand that Christ is the very root of our being and the foundation of our existence.
9. The breath of life
“......Many explain that when the Bible says, ‘God breathed the breath of life into the face of Adam the first-created, who was created by Him from the dust of the earth,’ it must mean that till then there was neither human soul nor spirit in Adam, but only the flesh created from the dust of the earth. This interpretation is wrong, for the Lord made Adam from the dust of the earth with the constitution which our dear little father, the holy Apostle Paul describes: ‘May your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ’. (1 Thes.5:23)” And all these parts of our nature were created from the dust of the earth, and Adam was not created dead, but an active living being like all the other animate creatures of God living on earth.
The point is that if God had not breathed afterwards into his face, this breath of life (that is, the grace of our Lord God the Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son and is sent into the world for the Son’s sake), Adam would have remained without having within him the Holy Spirit, Who raises him to Godlike dignity.However perfect he had been created and superior to all other creatures of God, as the crown of creation on earth, he would have been just like all the other creatures which,though they have a body, soul, and spirit, each according to its kind, yet have not the Holy Spirit within them.”But when the Lord God breathed the breath of life into Adam’s face, then, according to Moses’ word, ‘Adam became a living soul’ (Gen.2:7)....
Before he received the breath of God, Adam was a living creature like all the other animals on earth, with all of his physical characteristics, having a spirit,soul, brain, heart, just as all animals have, each according to its species. ...
“..... The “breath” of God does not have a natural or biological meaning; it is not one of the natural elements in man. Rather, it is the uncreated energy of the Holy Spirit, given to man by Christ.The breath of God, the uncreated energy of the Holy Spirit, is the same as that which is implanted as a seed in Christians....What really makes man different from the other animals is the fact that, in contrast to the animals, he has the ability to receive the energy of the Holy Spirit. What gives man this ability is not his biological superiority, and it is not the superiority of his brain. The ability of man to receive the energy of the Holy Spirit, if he wishes, is not given to him by anything natural. It is given to him by the fact that he is created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), in other words, he is a person (Gen. 2:7).”And God formed man of the dust of the earth, and He blew the breath of life into his face, and man became a living soul”. Here the Holy Scripture gives us three ontological truths about man: l. In his makeup man is dust. 2. The breath from God was given to what He called “his face”. [In the Greek Septuagint O.T., the word for “face” also means”person”.] 3. The breath was the “breath of life” that made man a “living soul”. In other words, man, like all creatures, is dust; however, he has a face upon which God blew the”breath of life” that made him a “living soul”.In order to better understand the distinction between just soul and living soul, we need to recall what Christ said to the man who wished to follow Him, but asked if he may first go to bury his deceased father. Christ said, “Let the dead bury their dead”. (Mt.8:22) What is clear is that the Lord considers as dead all those who do not have a living communion with God, regardless of whether they are biologically alive or dead. All are essentially dead,except that those who are biologically alive are able to bury those who are biologically dead.Consequently, what makes man truly alive, what makes him a living soul, is something not found in all men. It is something given only to those who are disposed to accepting it, to those who freely wish it. It is not a natural component of man like the soul; rather, it is a divine gift and energy beyond nature: the gift and uncreated energy of the grace of the Holy Spirit. The acquisition of this gift of the Holy Spirit is the purpose of our life, as St. Seraphimso vividly taught Motovilov, his student. This is what we were created for, and it is to it that we are invited. ...
Adam is neither the biological nor the historical forefather of mankind, but the first-made ontologically, not only of mankind, but of all creation. He is the root of the universe we see and know today. He is the man chosen by God to recapitulate in his person all of creation as God had formed it.....
....With Adam and Eve begins the history of Israel, the history of the people who knewGod, amidst all the nations of the world that did not know Him. Adam is not only the firstman who knew Christ, the first who was essentially a faithful Christian, he is the first andfurthest forefather of Christ and the beginning of His genealogy in the flesh and in time.
12. Genesis
As we already said in the beginning, the book of Genesis is divided into two units. The first unit (Chapter One and verses 1-3 of Chapter Two) is about the creation of the world and all of mankind.
The second unit (the remainder of the book from the fourth verse of Chapter Two to the end) is nothing but the history of those people to whom God revealed Himself who knew God and who sinned and repented before God. It is the history of Adam and his descendants. .....
“And God said, Let us make man in our image and likeness...And God made man; in the image of God He made him”. God wants man to be His image and likeness, but as we have seen, He made man only in His image.
He left the likeness to our own preference. All are “in the image of God”, but not all are “in the likeness”, except those who desire it. We all have the ability to accept the Holy Spirit, but not all of us wish to have the Comforter dwell in us.This is the difference between the image and likeness. The image is given to our nature because of the Incarnation of the Son and Word of God. The likeness relates to our person and is dependent on our personal freedom. ....”
bttt