THE HEALING OF THE SOUL AND THE TEN COMMANDMENTS WITH SCOTT KARDASH

 

 

SCOTT KARDASH AT NBCC

Working with Paul over the last few years has been a real privilege for me, a real pleasure. And as you know, a lot of you have been with Paul for many, many years. And it's very rare to find somebody with a depth of wisdom and understanding of the Scriptures that Paul has. He has a real detailed recall and is able to connect dots across Scriptures in a way that I've never seen anyone else do it.

Paul approached me and said, you know, we were talking about just other things. And he said, "Oh, well, you'd really like to get something going with some podcasts to get some of these messaging out." I said, "Oh, yeah, I'd love to help you." And so we've put out two series to date, hopefully many more to come: Our Ten Commandments and The Healing of the Soul and the Life-Giving Spirit. And so today I wanted to put some of that in context. Actually, they are related. It's all on a very similar theme. And the theme is all around the Spirit who heals us and reshapes us.

But before I do, I might just mention briefly that for those that don't know, I did speak to Paul during the week. And he's recovering well from the operation. I think he's been home for a few days now. On Friday, he got home. And so he said things could be going as well as could be expected. That's really good news. I have a lot of faith for Paul's situation. I know we're all praying for him.

An Ancient Look at the Ten Commandments

In preparation for this, I did listen to Peter Carblis last week. You all here for that? Did you all hear Peter Carblis? I was very impressed with his ancient Greek. So I decided to one-up him and use an ancient manuscript. He used like modern Greek. He had lowercase. There's no lowercase of the original manuscripts. And I also decided to go for the Hebrew, not the Greek. So this is even older than the manuscripts he was relying on.

Now, would anybody like to give it a crack? Because I can't read it. No? Does anybody know what that might be? No. I didn't know either. I had to look it up. So it's the Ten Commandments. And this is probably the earliest manuscript we have of the Ten Commandments. And it was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And you can see they've got a numbering system, which is a bit mysterious until you realise that it's quite simple. 4, Q, 4, 1. 4 is the cave they found this scroll in. Q means Qumran, which is where the caves were. And 41 was the number that they registered the scroll. So there's nothing magical about the 41. It's just the one. They got two in that sequence.

And you can see that with these ancient manuscripts, they're actually quite different to the modern languages that we have. There's no punctuation. They have the same in the Greek. There's no punctuation. There are no spaces between words. They all run together. There's no chapters or verses. There's no vowels or accents. They call it the Tetragrammaton, which is Yahweh. It's always written out in full. In the New Testament, they contracted Jesus Christ, and they put a line above it. But in our Bibles, the Yahweh is always written as capital L-O-R-D, Lord. So in the Old Testament, you'll see where it's written Lord, capital letters, it's in the original, it's Yahweh. And they had very strict rules about how they created these scrolls, parchment and kosher animals. And of course, in Hebrew, it's right to left, not left to right. If you start on left and try to go to the right, you'd be in real trouble.

But maybe it's better that we deal with the English today. I know I find this a lot easier. The Old Testament law, and God was forming a new nation. And so they needed a set of commandments. And it was part of a covenant that God had with this new nation. He formed them out of nothing. This nation didn't exist. It was a miracle, really, where God spoke to Abraham. And from Abraham, he said, "I will bless through you all the families of the earth, all the nations."

He started with these commandments. He wrote them. He wrote them on two tablets of stone. He wrote them with his finger and gave them to Moses. Remember what happened then? Moses came down the mountain. And what were the Israelites doing? They were already rebellious and worshipping a calf that they'd made out of the gold. And so what Moses did, he smashed the Ten Commandments. They had to go back up and get a new set. The fact that they're on tablets of stone is quite important because where is the law written now? On our hearts.

And Jesus came to fulfill that. He came to fulfill the law. And he helped us understand that there are two commandments that actually summarize everything. Love the Lord your God and love your neighbour. And then he said, "On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets." That's a phrase which actually means the entirety of the Hebrew Scriptures. He wasn't just talking about the Ten Commandments, he was talking about the entirety of the Scriptures. And in the New Testament, when you see the word Scriptures, it's referring to what we now call the Old Testament. So they're referring to the Old Testament. They were always talking about the Old Testament when they talked about Scriptures. And Jesus came to fulfill everything in that Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures.

The Purpose of the Law

So there's a purpose to the law, and the purpose is still around today. So you can see since the law comes, it produces a knowledge of sin. Have you seen those YouTube videos of Ray Comfort running around and interviewing? Has anybody seen him? And he convicts people through the law. He says, "Have you ever told a lie? Have you ever stolen anything? Even something small?" And he's using the Ten Commandments because most people think they're good people. And they need to have something which exposes sin and to make them realize they need a Savior.

Paul tells us later on in Galatians, the law was our guardian until Christ came in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.

And then Paul again says,

But God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do, by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin. He condemned sin and the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.

So there's an uplifting of the law, and that's what Jesus came to do.

From the Law of Stone to the Law of the Spirit

And then Jesus ascended. It always surprises me that the disciples spend their time in the Holy Spirit, and they walk in the Holy Spirit. They spend all this time with Jesus face to face, had no clue who he really was for most of that time. And even when he died, they all went back to fishing and they thought, what was that all about? And it wasn't until they saw him resurrected that they realized actually who he is and he's still alive today.

Jesus did ascend and there was a prophecy in Joel, which was fulfilled in Acts.

I will pour out my spirit on all flesh...

And I will give you a new heart. This is Ezekiel now.

And a new spirit I will put within you and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh and I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and to be careful to obey my rules.

We're seeing a transition here from outer to inner. And then this is a key passage here, and Paul actually talks about this a lot in the healing of the soul.

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father. And he will give you another helper.

Who's the helper? The Holy Spirit.

...to be with you forever, even the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.

And the disciples, they were terrified that Jesus is going to ascend and leave them all alone again. "No, no, no. Go back to Jerusalem and wait and I will send the Holy Spirit."

And then one of the most startling verses I think in the Bible,

...he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.

For me, that's amazing that we are joined with our Creator through the Spirit and through our spirit, actually.

The Spirit of the Law: A New Perspective

So that now opens up a whole different view of the Ten Commandments. And this is where Paul has really made some interesting insights. And you can see the letter of the law is phrased in a very negative, "thou shalt not." Most of it's negative, but the spirit of the law in the New Testament enhancement of that is rephrased and uplifted in positive terms.

Take a few examples, "don't murder." The New Testament spirit of the law really is to say, is addressing the root of anger and unforgiveness to become an agent of reconciliation and peace. We're moved from avoiding murder to fostering life. And you see that the whole thing is flipped on its head.

Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labour, that he might have something to give.

So we're moving from a taker to a productive giver.

"Don't tell lies, don't bear false witness." Speaking words of life that fill others' hearts. Not just avoiding literal falsehoods. So we're moving from avoiding deception to speaking truth in love. So can you see this transformation?

The other thing Paul has noticed is that each of these commandments are linked. They're not just a laundry list of commands. One actually leads to the other, and ten actually goes back to one. But if you go the other way, you have a diagnostic tool. So say you're having a problem with honouring your parents. You go back one, and it will help you. And there's probably an issue there that's resulting in a symptom in the next one. I won't go into any more depth than that. If you'd like to find out more, go to YouTube and just search on "uncreated ten commandments." And there's a playlist there of all of them. It goes into much more detail there.

Sanctification: The Process of Being Renewed

Now, we're moving to a Greek text. Can anyone read this? I'm not even sure whether Pete can, but that's all right. Well, I was going to whisper to Carlos when you need him. He would love to get into this. I bet he'd struggle with this one, mate. This is actually Ephesians, chapter 4, verse 23 to 24.

The truth is in Jesus to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life, and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God, in true righteousness and holiness.

The new self is created in the likeness of God. Does anybody know what process this is describing? Think of justification, sanctification, glorification. This one here is a process, so justification, glorification, less of a process. This is talking about sanctification. That's the technical word for it.

Our Threefold Salvation: Spirit, Soul, and Body

There's a number of scriptures which talk about that. And the reason I'm bringing that up is because you will have heard Paul talk about, the three stages of being saved. In the past, our spirit has been saved—this is our justification. We can look at it this way with the spirit. And the soul is being saved, or sanctified. This is the process, which is a lifelong transformation process. And in the future, our bodies will be saved, or glorified.

Very tempting for us to separate these into three discrete entities, body, soul, and spirit. But in reality, that's very Greek thinking. Greeks used to like to separate everything into their parts. Hebrews liked to keep everything together as one entity, and they looked at different aspects of that one body.

This is a key verse that Paul has really lent on heavily for the healing of the soul. And it provides a lot of meaning around sanctification.

For you're receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation, or healing, of your soul.

So, the Greek word for salvation can be translated as healing. Most of our modern Bibles just call it salvation. But some of the earlier English Bibles really did translate it as healing or health. That's 1 Peter 1.9. But in reality, we are one person. And so, we have three aspects that work together to keep us whole.

How Spirit, Soul, and Body Work Together (Clip 1 with Paul O'Sullivan)

And so, I just wanted to now move on to having Paul tell us a little bit more about this. To answer the question, how do our spirit, soul, and body work together to shape our lives?

Paul O'Sullivan: Well, we've spoken about the spirit, and the soul, and the body. And there's three parts there. So, our whole being is tripartite, if you like, Paul. And it's interesting that God is a trinity, a Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three in one making unity. And you said that the soul is both part of our inner life and part of our outer life. So, could you illustrate how the spirit, soul, and body work in harmony to shape our lives?

Well, if you draw three concentric circles, and you can see the diagram there, we can see that the body in the outer circle sends information to our souls from the outer circle of our outer world. There's a world out there, a sense world, a material world. And our spirit sends information from the innermost circle of our spirit into our souls. And our spirit is made up of our heart and our mind. So, there you've got parts. And there are divisions of working parts all working together. That's functional, but it's a design.

And all of that information from the spirit coming in from the deeper parts of the spirit and then coming outwards from the body inwards to the soul can be either helpful or harmful, whatever direction, whether it's coming from the spirit or coming out from the body. It can be good information or bad information. I mean, good things can come from the outside. Bad things can come too from what the body experiences and sees and feels. There can be traumas, all kinds of things.

And our spirit also sends information from the innermost circle on that diagram. And as I said, that's made up of the heart and the mind. And so the information from the spirit and from the body can be helpful or harmful, good or bad, true or false. And that can have a damaging effect upon the soul, that expresses everything that it receives from the body and the spirit. It doesn't say, "Oh, look, I'll just decide to accept certain types of information." What it can do is after it has received certain types of information that it realizes it doesn't like, it can learn a lesson and say, "I don't want to receive that anymore." But at first, if you're a young child, you're not discernible. You're not understanding what authority that information's coming from. I mean, that's just the way things are. We need to know that. There's naivety and vulnerability.

Scott Kardash: Well, Paul, you're moving into an area now that we need to elaborate on quite a lot in the upcoming episodes because we've laid out a foundation, I think, for the series in this particular session. We talked about the different parts of the body, how they interact and how they function together as an overall person. But we're going to start to unravel this now and talk about the healing of the soul, aren't we? So we're going to drill into this in quite a bit of detail because it's important for people to understand. And there's going to be little keys to unlocking different applications within people's lives that I don't think they would have even realized were there. They didn't even realize there was a lock there to unlock. And I think that's where a lot of the value of this series is going to come.

Paul O'Sullivan: Yeah, that's good, Scott. Yeah. And we're going to go right back to the beginning, the beginning of humanity, creation.

Scott Kardash: Excellent. Yeah, thanks, Scott.

Through my interactions with Paul, there are many things that I've disagreed with him on, actually. I know it doesn't come through in the podcast, but after spending time with him, I've realized he's right on just about everything. And some of them are quite big things, you know. Well, one of them was this. And I think there's a lot of confusion. Many people may not agree with this. He said, "Our spirit is made up of our heart and mind." So the heart and mind are in the spirit. Actually, I thought it was in the soul. So I was a bit confused about that.

A Profound Question: Who Forms the Soul? (Clip 2 with Paul O'Sullivan)

The answer to that question relates to the answer to this question. Who created our body, spirit, and soul? Quite a profound question. And this is one of the keys that Paul's unlocked as part of this series. And again, I'm just going to play some of that to look at the answer to that question.

Paul O'Sullivan: Okay, remember, we're body, soul, and spirit.

...God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

A Hebrew word there, ruach, the spirit of life. So Adam has an inner spiritual life now. He'd already become an outer physical body. He had two God-created parts. As we all do. But then it goes on to say in that verse, and this is the pivotal turning point,

...and man became a living soul.

That's the third part. The astonishing statement made here is not that God instantly created a living soul like he did with the body and the spirit. It says man became a living soul. So that begs a question. If God didn't form that living soul and man became a living soul, then who forms the living soul?

Scott Kardash: All right, Paul. So this is a concept which was a bit of a revelation here. So would you say that this understanding sparked this series?

Paul O'Sullivan: Yeah, that was the trigger. The startling question of who formed the soul. Because we'veseen God create man in his spirit and body, and suddenly the body and spirit become something. They became something, a living soul.

So the startling conclusion that I've come to, I'll put it to you now, we'll look at it in the scripture, is that the first living human soul was ready to be formed by the created spirit and body of man himself. So man formed the human soul from the God-created body and spirit that it already had. So we're going to look at that scripture a little more closely. I want to say here that God made provision for that soul. That's part of his creation for us. But he left it to us to form its nature.

First of all, the human spirit is breathed into the body by God. Then the soul and its inner life is formed throughout each person's life out of the activity of the two God-created parts. The inner part, the spirit. The outer part, the body. We form or generate our own souls. That's what I'm saying.

Scott Kardash: Alright, and it says that in Genesis.

Paul O'Sullivan: Well, all it says in Genesis is that man became a living soul. Now I've pondered that. What does that word became mean? It does not state God created. It said man became. So where does the Bible say that we are forming or generating the soul?

Well, that's another journey. I had to start searching for that and in the New Testament I found the place where Paul, writing in Corinthians, describes what it means to become a living soul. He knew about this. The same English word, became, that's used in Genesis in Hebrew. That's the English word. And that was a breakthrough. I was looking for something that humanity could generate and perhaps have a responsibility for, like a stakeholder with accountability. The formation of character within us and how the soul operates and how we participate in that. And that was all in that scripture that Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15.

1 Corinthians 15, 45, where he says,

So it is written, The first man, Adam, became a living soul.

And Paul is using the same English word that's used in Genesis. Same English word, right? But Paul, who was a Greek and Hebrew scholar, knew the deeper meaning of that Hebrew word became. He uses a Greek word in the New Testament. And the Greek word is which means "to generate." Now that's not apparent in the Old Testament, became. But here it is in the New Testament. To generate, to cause to be, to become, to come into being, to have a self. It's all there. You can read it in the concordance.

So humanity generated a living soul. And that scripture is pointedly clear. Man became a living soul. It has to come into being and become the responsibility of the person who generates that soul over the period of a lifetime. So God is not forming or generating the nature of that soul. We are. There is something waiting to become the expression of our spirit and our body. The angels didn't have one. The soul didn't exist. God designed the means whereby the living spirit and the body of man could generate a soul for the first time ever. And our whole life is the expression of that becoming of a living soul.

Scott Kardash: So God designed humanity to have a soul and he gives us the responsibility to form and shape that soul with all the decisions and choices we make in life, both the good and the bad, Paul.

Paul O'Sullivan: Exactly.

That's profound. And I hope you all caught that because I don't know anybody else who's noticed that in the scripture. I've heard nobody else teach about the soul that way. And I think he's absolutely spot on. And that opened up a whole set of discoveries all based on the scriptures about how our souls get damaged and how healing can occur within the souls.

And if you want to know more, just go to YouTube and there's a whole series on there. The channel is called Uncreated and the series is Healing of the Soul and the Life-Giving Spirit. It goes into much more depth later on about helper parts and how these helper parts are created in our souls and originally for good reasons, but we carry them throughout life and their purpose is no longer serving us anymore. In fact, it can be detrimental to us. Paul talks about how that can happen.

Summary: Salvation as Healing

So just to summarize, salvation can be translated as healing.

You're receiving the end result of your faith. The salvation or healing of your souls.

Our soul is shaped by choices and experiences. In a fallen world, our soul becomes damaged and disordered. It needs healing and renewal.

The Holy Spirit is our healer. Salvation is not just a one-time event. It's an ongoing, effective process.

We all are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

Salvation is the process of being reshaped into the perfect image of God, the risen Christ. We are being saved. Sometimes we might look back and say, "I was saved on that date." Well, you probably realized on that date you were justified, but we are being saved. More than rescue from sin, it's healing, transformation, union with God.

It is to be conformed to the image of His Son,

...to not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.

And the ultimate goal is to restore us to the purpose for which we were created, full communion with God,

...that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us.

That's our ultimate objective.

Application: Presence Prayer

And then how do we apply these principles? Well, you would have heard Paul talking about presence prayer. So he's done a couple of weeks here, I think, on presence prayer. And we will be doing a podcast to talk more about presence prayer and how to apply the healing of the soul. All right.

Closing Prayer

So why don't we just bow our heads in prayer and thank the Lord.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for gathering us together and for the truth of your word that reveals your heart for us. Lord, we invite the Holy Spirit to continue the work of transformation within us. Heal the places in our souls that are wounded and need reordering. Renew our minds so that we may walk in your ways. Unite us as one body filled with your Spirit, Lord, so that we may reflect your love and bring glory to your name. We pray all this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.