The Creation and Death of Adam

We humans create all the time.  We use simple ingredients or components to create something more beautiful or complex.  Anything from gourmet meals and delicious cakes to computers and skyscrapers, unless of course you have children who just love to take an ordered room and create a marvellous mess!  We create from ideas within our minds, from recipes written down and when the instructions of that flat pack furniture are barely intelligible, we create from a good diagram (or Youtube!).

Having made everything within this world, our Creator God created the first man, Adam, on the sixth day of creation.  Genesis 2 enlightens us as to what God used and how He did it:

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 being.   

Genesis 2v7

God used the dust of the ground to form his body, breathed into his nostrils and at that moment Adam became a living being or living soul (Hebrew nephesh).  However it is not long before we read of Adam eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the subsequent consequence, as previously warned by God, was death.  It was death ‘in the day’ he ate.  Part of the non-physical Adam died in that literal 24 hour day.  He now had a guilty conscience; he was no longer perfect; he had lost his glory/covering, resulting in him knowing he was naked.  Yet, he died physically at 930 years old ‘in the day’ which means within 1,000 years (see my book Born2Know for further explanation).  This leads us to ask the question: what happened to Adam when he died at 930 years old?  His physical body returned to the dust but where did the non-physical part go? 

To answer this question we first need to understand how Adam was made up, what is commonly referred to as the constitution of man.  If we fail to understand what happened to Adam when he died how will we properly understand God’s gracious plan to save us?  There are two main views concerning the constitution of man.  Firstly, there are those who see the Bible teaches a dichotomy, that man is made up of two parts, namely the body and the soul/spirit.  Alternatively, some see the Bible teaches a trichotomy, that man is made up of three parts, namely a body, soul and spirit.  From what I can glean the majority view is dichotomy, but when were the majority ever right?  Just ask Noah. 

What ensues is a game of biblical ping-pong with verses from here or there used to argue for one view or the other.  Some topspin is applied to this verse and in response some backspin applied to another with a few swerve shots thrown in for good measure.  Let me give you a quick example by looking at Hebrews 4: 

For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and it is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

Hebrews 4v12

One theologian comments on this verse, “¹The author is not saying that the Word of God can divide ‘soul from spirit’ but he is using a number of terms that speak of the deep inward parts of our being that are not hidden from the penetrating power of the Word of God.”  Another says, “²Neither theory can really be proved, but we can say that the Scripture does draw a distinction between spirit and soul, even if it does not say that there is a difference between them.”

After reading or watching this game of ping-pong, you can start to play the game in your own mind.  In my younger days I attempted many times to play ping-pong by myself, running round the table trying to keep the ball alive.  It is not long before exhaustion sets in, you either miss the ball or miss the table with the ball, but the great advantage is you always win and never lose.

Why should we examine this subject and expend the energy if there is so much debate?  Hard days working by the sweat of our brows, children to look after, homes to maintain, church life and the list goes on, surely there are more important things for our limited leftover energy.  Why should we?  Our future depends upon it. 

Like a ship setting sail from port, only a few degrees off at the beginning of her journey, not steering a true course, over time and distance she will reach a radically different destination.  Add to the rudder a further degree or two through faulty interpretations of Scripture and the possibility of running aground looms ever nearer, taking all aboard down with her.

So how do we determine if man has one, two, three or maybe even four parts for that matter?  We look not to the first Adam but to the life and words of the last Adam, Jesus Christ.  Jesus Christ who was one hundred percent God but also one hundred percent man.  After all, the Apostle Paul did write to the Colossians that, “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” are hidden in Him (Colossians 2v3).  We know that Jesus remained on earth for 40 days after His resurrection to fulfil the law of purification after giving birth to the Church on Resurrection Sunday and had not returned to the sanctuary i.e. to heaven during this time.  This is corroborated by what He said to Mary after His resurrection, “Do not cling to Me, for I have not yet ascended to My Father…” (John 20v17)  (see my book Born2Know for further clarification of this).  Did He mean though, that He had not ascended even between His crucifixion and His resurrection?  Did Jesus not say those famous words upon the cross, “Father, into your hands I commit My spirit?”  At this point we enter further debate concerning the whereabouts of Jesus between His crucifixion and His resurrection.  Another game of ping-pong erupts, this time more vigorous than the first.

The dichotomists (body and spirit/soul) and some trichotomists (body, soul and spirit) launch an offensive forehand with plenty of topspin declaring Jesus’ non-physical part(s) went straight to heaven when he died.  The remaining trichotomists respond with a defensive backhand chop quoting Acts 2, “that His (Christ) soul was not left in Hades” (Acts 2v31).  All of this raises even more questions: is the soul the third part or just the non-physical part?  Where is Hades?  Is that hell or another name for the grave?  The situation appears hopeless for discovering a definitive answer and exhaustion starts to override our second wind. 

But the solution is simple.  Find the diagram, look at the picture and discover what is wrong.  The writer to the Hebrews specifically says that the holy places i.e. the earthly tabernacle/temple is a copy of the things in the heavens:

For Christ has not entered the holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true, but into heaven itself…

Hebrews 9v24

Therefore we can look at the earthly tabernacle/temple with its laws and ritual cleansing procedures to understand what can and cannot take place in the Holy of Holies in heaven.  There are two Scriptures regarding the priests/high priest which we can learn from:

And if you make Me an altar of stone; you shall not build it of hewn stone; for if you use your tool on it, you have profaned it.  Nor shall you go up by steps to My altar, that your nakedness may not be exposed on it. 

Exodus 20v25&26

And you shall make for them linen trousers to cover their nakedness; they shall reach from the waist to the thighs.  They shall be on Aaron and on his sons when they come into the tabernacle of meeting, or when they come near the altar to minister in the holy place, that they do not incur iniquity and die.

Exodus 28v42&43

Aaron the High Priest, and his sons the priests, had to ensure their nakedness was covered except their hands and feet.  Nakedness was not acceptable to God when ministering in the tabernacle/temple.  From Adam and Eve realising their nakedness, as we have seen above, and right throughout Scripture, nakedness before God is unacceptable.  Uncovering men and women’s nakedness is sinful except in the context of a man and woman in marriage (Leviticus 18).  What has this picture to do with where Jesus was between His crucifixion and resurrection?  The Apostle Paul brings out the answer when speaking of our physical bodies which he describes as tents:

For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.  For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. 

2 Corinthians 5v1-3

Paul is saying in these verses that if we are unclothed, i.e. we are disembodied from our earthly tent or heavenly building, we will be naked.  The non-physical part/parts of man are naked when not clothed with a body.  Even though Jesus was God, He was a man, made up of the same parts as the first Adam.  Between His crucifixion and resurrection He was not clothed with a body and according to the Apostle Paul He was deemed naked.  It was not possible for Him to go back to the Holy of Holies during this time as He would be breaking the Old Testament commands regarding nakedness and being ritually unclean.  The result: incurring iniquity and death (Exodus 28v43 from above).  As Jesus committed His spirit into His Father’s hands the only logical deduction is that Jesus had a third part – the soul.  This is exactly what Peter on the Day of Pentecost told the crowd as quoted above from Acts 2v31.  We also see these three parts in Genesis 2v7 above: the body, the breath/spirit and the living being/soul.  Jesus as a man required a resurrected glorified body to return to the Holy of Holies and to sit at the right hand of His Father.

The spirit part of every person goes back to God which is what Solomon, the wisest man apart from Jesus, tells us by his general conclusions in Ecclesiastes:

Remember your Creator before the silver cord is loosed, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the well.  Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.

Ecclesiastes 12v6&7

If we turn to the words of Jesus, in his dialogue with Nicodemus He said this:

No one has ascended to heaven, but He who came down from heaven…

John 3v13

Up until this point no one had ascended to the Holy of Holies where God the Father resides and so we can conclude that when Adam died at 930 years old his spirit went back to God, his soul went to Hades and his body returned to dust. 

I will further examine the definition of words, like Hades, in future blogs but for now it can be defined as the place of departed souls.

Before I leave this subject, dichotomists argue that spirit and soul is used interchangeably because certain emotions and attributes of a man are ascribed to the spirit and also to the soul.  For example, in John 12v27 Jesus says, “Now is my soul troubled,” and in John 13v21 He says, “troubled in spirit.”  Therefore the spirit and soul can be troubled.  The conclusion is then that the soul and spirit are one and the same.  However there is a flaw in this argument.  Allow me to explain by asking a question. 

Who raised Jesus from the dead?  God the Father (Romans 6v4), God the Son (John 2v18,19) and God the Holy Spirit (Romans 8v11).  We conclude from this that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are God because they were able to raise Jesus from the dead (one of many evidences for the doctrine of the Trinity).  Yet the one God has three distinct Persons.  Similarly, the fact that a person has a soul and spirit which can be described as performing the same function does indeed show the unified wholeness of man, like one God, but the possibility remains for distinction between the soul and spirit which we have biblically proved above.  As God is One yet three Persons so man is a unified whole or conditional unity yet three distinct parts, body, soul and spirit, which become separated at death.  We are after all made in the image of God.   

It is only with this understanding of how man is made up that we can safely proceed to examine the Bible to learn of God’s gracious plan to save us. 

Simplicity in Christ: Man is made up of body, soul and spirit.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®.  Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson.  Used by permission.  All rights reserved.

¹ Systematic Theology An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, Wayne Grudem, p479

² Great Doctrines of the Bible, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, p161