They Are Unable To Kill The Soul

Well, it is a joy to be here, and I bring greetings from Bloomington. You folks, whether you know it or not, are regularly in our prayers and in our thoughts. We miss you guys, and we think about you. We love you very much. And so greetings from Bloomington. So today, the title of my sermon is, They Are Unable to Kill the Soul. And I want to start by asking, how many of you have had the privilege of teaching children that are, you know, fifth and sixth grade and younger? A lot of moms, of course, hands will go up, but a few of the men. That's difficult work, right? It's challenging work. And for some reason, this past summer, I was asked by the little school we've got down at the church to teach fifth and sixth grade history.

Right? And so because I'm a little bit insane, I said yes. And it's been a joy to do that. It's been really wonderful. But it's also been very challenging. I did not know what I was signing up for. And it's just hard. It's a hard job. And so my hand is off to teachers who do that work on a regular basis. This is the first time I've had to do that for this kind of an academic setting. But it's been a real joy. And one of the things that's been fun about it is just the chance to study ancient history. We've been studying the ancient Egyptians. And can you guess what we have to study when we study the ancient Egyptians? We study the oldest stories, oldest known stories that we have.

recorded of ancient Egyptian history. What's included? If you could take a guess, what's included in those ancient old stories? You want to venture a guess? Okay, all of their gods, right? Their pantheon of gods. Does anybody know why the... And maybe one of the children can answer this question. Does anybody know why the pyramids? Have you ever seen pictures of the pyramids? Why were they built? What did they build those for? Yeah? Tombs, that's right. And why did they build such elaborate and enormous tombs? Yeah? Why did they need to put the king's stuff in them? What were they doing? Yeah? To store it? Yeah? Isaiah, why? That's right. They were preparing for the afterlife. So the oldest information we have from the people that we have records of, the oldest records we have of civilization, for the afterlife, right? They were preparing for a reality that was not just physical, but spiritual. So we know from the very beginning of time that humans have believed in spiritual reality. Now, these days we've got terms like fake news, right? You should at this point be familiar with the term fake news. And sometimes when you watch the news these days or

or hear discussions, you feel like you're living in an alternate reality. Like, how is it possible that this group of people can believe this when it seems to me that reality is like this? Now, what does that have to do with ancient Egyptians? I think that this concept of spiritual reality, of the fact that we have a soul, sometimes feels like, as a Christian, you hear people talking and there's no assumption. that there is anything more than the physical reality around us, that you can see and touch and taste and hear, right? There's this assumption that all there is is this physical reality. And the Bible clearly paints a picture that there is more than simply the physical reality. But sometimes you feel like you're in this alternate universe. Like, how could you possibly believe that there is no God or that there's no spiritual reality when it seems so clear to me that there is?

So today, I want to do a couple things. I'm going to be talking about the soul and about the spiritual reality that we live in. And I know as Christians, we take that for granted, but I want to make sure, sometimes it's good to go back to foundational principles and see, okay, why do we believe this? What is it in Scripture that we can point to to know that this is true? And then I want to go on to talk about the care for our soul specifically. Okay, so I'm going to highlight two groups of people that like to deny the reality of the soul, the reality of the spiritual world, the reality of the soul. And you can kind of think of them like a modern-day priest and prophet, okay? The first group of people are the scientists, secular scientists, non-Christian scientists. They study the world around them, right?

And as a result of their study and their discipline, they give us things that make them seem to us like they're gods, right? So, for instance, you need a cure for disease? Here you go. Here's a pill or some kind of medical device that will save you. You need to increase your crop yield by 10%? Here you go. Here's some tools or some chemicals you can use. You want to build a skyscraper a thousand feet up? Here's how to do it. Scientists regularly give us gifts that explain the world to us, and their position in our society gives them an enormous amount of authority and prestige. But scientists have gotten very cocky and cocksure with their successes and have lost sight of the limits of their craft.

the cause and maybe a cure for a deadly epidemic, but he can't actually tell you, just by studying the world around him, he can't actually tell you whether or not we should use the cure, right? So what do I mean by that? Well, a scientist can maybe give you a medicine that will make your body continue to function, but he can't actually answer the question, is it better to die or to live? That question, that deep foundational question, is something that you have to turn to religion for. There's a deeper answer there. There's a deeper place to go. And yet scientists today, non-Christian, secular scientists, seem to think that they don't need religion, they don't need God, and that they can answer everything that they need to answer by simply studying the physical.

world around them, and so they deny the existence of the soul, they deny the existence of God. The other group of people that do this, that are very prominent in our society today, are what I call the technologists. If the scientists are kind of like priests, the technologists you might think of as the prophets, because what do they like to think about? A lot of times these guys, whether you're talking about whether they're at Google or some other well-known technology place, They think about the future a lot. They think about the new things that are going to be coming out and the new stuff that we're going to be able to do. For instance, self-driving cars. You probably see this in the news from time to time. Really interesting stuff. But a lot of it's also about artificial intelligence. These guys love to think and write and talk about artificial intelligence. And they love to predict what's coming down the pike. They love to write books about it.

and they love to think about it. And the other thing about them is that if anyone gets in the way of what they think of as progress, that person is vilified. That person is immediately evil, no good, in the way. If you get in the way of their progress, whatever it is, then you're the bad guy and you need to be quiet and listen to them. And so again, There's this group of people, because of their power, I should say, scientists give us a lot of interesting things, but these technologists, they also give us things that make them seem godlike. They give us iPhones, and they give us artificial intelligence, and they give us Google. Isn't it incredible? You can type something into Google and get an answer in an instant. That's amazing.

So they also have an enormous amount of prestige and authority in our society, and they also deny, a lot of them deny, the existence of God and the existence of the soul. And so again, my aim today is twofold. It's to examine what the Scripture teaches about the soul, and then to dig into our passage for today from Matthew 10 to see what it has to teach us about what we are to think about the soul we are to care for our soul. So first, what does the Bible teach about the soul? So in the Old Testament, there are basically two terms that are significant for this topic of the soul. And the first is nephesh, and the second is ruach. So nephesh occurs nearly 800 times in the Old Testament, and it's primarily used of humans, but it can occasionally be used of animals and of God himself.

It has a number of different nuances, but it usually refers to the soul of man that departs at death and returns with life at resurrection. So here are a few examples. In Leviticus 17.11, For the life, for the nephesh of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls. And then in Psalm 30, verse 3, You have brought up my soul from Sheol, you have kept me alive that I would not go down to the pit. Proverbs 21.10, for instance, the soul of the wicked desires evil. And 1 Kings 17.21, the prophet Elijah raises a boy from the dead and he says, O Lord my God, I pray you let this child's life, let his nephesh, return to him. So this term is very common in the Old Testament.

The second important Hebrew term is Ruach. And this term is not quite so common. It appears about 350 times. And it is most frequently translated spirit. It can refer to the spirit of God, of angels, of man. It can refer to the wind and a few other things. But it's overwhelmingly the term used for God. So, for instance, in Job 34, it says, If he should determine to do so, If he should gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together and man would return to dust. In Jeremiah 10.14, it says, Idols are deceitful because there is no breath, no ruach in them. They can't move. They possess no consciousness. So, in both the Old and the New Testaments, the Bible teaches that there is an intermediate state between death and the final resurrection.

where we are temporarily disembodied, right? There's a sort of a holding pattern. There's a period of time where our bodies and our souls are not together. And the term Sheol in the Old Testament can mean a few different things, but it mainly refers to the place where you go when you die. You don't cease to exist, which many people these days believe. Instead, it's clear that even in the Old Testament, there was an understanding that you're in kind of this holding pattern. So here's a few examples in the Old Testament. There's the example of King Saul using the services of a witch to actually summon someone from the dead to talk with them. That's kind of a weird example. You remember from your Bibles, the witch of Endor, I think it was. There's also Psalm 49, 14 to 15. It says, As sheep they are appointed for Sheol. Death shall be their shepherd, and the upright shall rule over them in the morning. And their form shall be for Sheol to consume, so that they have no habitation. But God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me.

And then in Job 19.25, it says, As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will take His stand on the earth, even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh I shall see God, when I myself shall behold, and whom my eyes will see, and not another. My heart faints within me. So, again, there's this idea, this concept, all throughout the Old Testament, that there's this holding pattern. that we're in before we're finally resurrected. We don't cease to exist. We will exist eternally. In the New Testament, there are many passages, many references to life after death, including our passage in Matthew 10, which we'll get to here in a minute. Jesus talked about the afterlife quite a lot. But remember, the question of whether or not there is a spirit world and whether or not our souls continue to exist after we die was an open question even in Jesus' time.

Do you remember who denied the existence of the afterlife? Who said that there was no afterlife in Jesus' time? Do you remember this? The Sadducees. That's right. That's exactly right. They were in conflict. That's the center of the conflict between the Sadducees and the Pharisees who denied that there was a resurrection and an afterlife and the Pharisees who claimed that there was. You'll remember from Acts 23 that Paul... who was on trial, when he was on trial, claimed that he was on trial for the hope of the resurrection of the dead. And he was clearly siding with the Pharisees, as Jesus does also on that particular point. So the question then comes to us, why do people deny the existence of the soul and of the spiritual reality all around us today?

You can read a lot about that, and my aim today is actually not to wade into apologetics, and so I'm not going to really get into that. But ultimately, my conviction is that it's a terrible kind of blindness and hardness of heart, right? That people deny the existence of the soul. Many people are unwilling to believe in things that they cannot test in a lab. We've seen so many successes. to our scientific achievements that it's like we're drunk with them or something. We've lost the ability to see and understand that there's things beyond what we can see and test in a lab. But I'm not going to get into the apologetics of that today. I'm just going to say that there are people that deny it, and you can read about that. But what I want to focus on today is if Scripture claims...

clearly and plainly teaches that we have a soul, then how does it teach us to care for this soul? What do we need to do about it? And this is where things, I think, get a little tricky because there are many religions and worldviews out there that teach that there is something inside of us that we have to care for, right? The term for that is different depending on your religion you're talking about. The ancient Greek philosophers talked about the soul quite a lot. And even today, if you walk into the self-help section of the bookstore, it's going to be filled with books about how to make yourself better, both inside and outside, right? So I was working on this sermon at a Barnes & Noble, and one of the tables that's meant to catch your eye caught my eye as I walked in. And it was a book about yoga, and it said the following.

It started like this. For years, my life was fine, but not amazing. I realized I was carrying around bucket loads of tension. I seemed to never get what I wanted. What was I doing wrong? This is the problem that this book sets up. What was I doing wrong? I was filled with tension. Some of you moms resonate with this, right? Filled with tension all the time. What's going on? Yeah, yeah, apparently not. Even those who deny that there is a soul and deny that there is anything but the physical world around us still generally believe in this concept of self-improvement. And self-improvement is rarely just about eating right or sleeping right or whatever. Included always is addressing something deeper within us. And so all of our advertisement...

does exactly the same thing. It promises peace and happiness and joy if you just buy the right soap or drink the right beer, right? It's trying to tap into something deep inside of you so that you buy the product that they want you to buy. Now, when we're able to pull ourselves away from our televisions long enough and stop and think about it for a minute, we can all recognize that these advertisements are a lie, right? Bacon is delicious, but it's not going to make you happy forever. That car might be cool, but even pagans would agree that buying a car isn't going to make you a better human being. There's lots of other things that might promise you fulfillment. And again, I say even the pagans can see that whether it's drugs or sex or food, these things cannot satisfy you forever. They might satisfy you for a time, but they're not going to have everlasting, enduring satisfaction with them. And I'm saying this again, even pagans can see that, right? And so again, this is where things get confusing, because if you wade past all the garbage, all the false, the obviously false claims about how to care for your soul, how to improve yourself, what's going to give you lasting peace, even if you wade past all the shallow, false answers to that,

you'll notice that the teaching of many different religions and philosophies looks very similar. The Dalai Lama, for instance, is a Buddhist monk. He's not a Christian. And he's the spiritual leader of Tibet. If you look at the kinds of books that he's written and the stuff he talks about, much of it will sound very similar to what you might hear here at church, what you might hear from the pulpit here at church. If he were to come into this church and give a seminar, for instance, he might very well talk about one of the following things. He might talk about thankfulness. He might talk about hope. He might talk about love. He might talk about kindness. He might talk about overcoming anger. He might talk about forgiveness or humility. He might talk about living with a sense of wonder and awe and gratitude. Now, these are all things that you might very well hear here at church, right?

this guy, the Dalai Lama, even wrote a book called The Good Heart, A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus. It's very much in vogue to have some perspective on Jesus. And so, when we see the similarities between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of the Dalai Lama, there's a tendency in our pluralistic and relativistic age to be lazy and to lump it all together, to act as if it's all the same, you know? To wave our hands and to simply say they must all be saying basically the same thing. For one thing, you'll never make an enemy that way. You'll be the friend of everyone. Even the scientists I spoke about and the technologists I spoke about earlier won't make a fuss at you if you simply agree that all spiritual roads lead to the same place. But I want to ask a very simple question. What did Jesus actually teach about the soul? What did he teach us?

about how we are to care for our souls? Is it any different than what the Dalai Lama teaches? Or even what is taught in that silly yoga book? And my answer today is yes, it's very different. And here's where we're going to take a look at our passage today from Matthew chapter 10. So if you have a Bible, feel free to open it to Matthew 10. We're going to be looking at verse 26 to 31. This is Jesus speaking. And he says, therefore, do not fear them. He was just done talking with the Pharisees who were challenging him, right? He says, do not fear them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be revealed or hidden that will not be known. What I tell you in the darkness, speak in the light. And what you hear whispered in your ear, proclaim upon the housetops.

Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul, but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So do not fear. You are more valuable than many sparrows. So how do we care for our soul? What does Jesus say about how to care for this non-physical reality in us? How do we care for our soul? The first point I want to make is that we care for our soul primarily by doing business with God. We are made to have a relationship with God. We are relational by default. And so that means that you don't need to go on a pilgrimage to a mountain in India.

and you don't need to become one with the cosmos. John Calvin said many hundreds of years ago that wisdom is knowing God and knowing yourself. And it's true. To begin to care for your soul, you must come to God. And this draws us of necessity to the Scriptures, His Word, right? The Scriptures are God's Word to us. And so if we want to walk with God, if we want to know God, if we want to know... what God thinks and what he says. We must be in his word. We must know what he says in the scriptures. If you want to know God, you must get to know his word. You must study it. You must love it. Second, whenever anyone writes about how to care for your soul, they generally try to focus on one issue. For some, the problem is a lack of wisdom and knowledge. And so the answer is what? Is maybe more education, right?

For others, it's negative emotions. And so the answer is to try to get rid of those bad emotions. For the pop psychology book that I picked up in Barnes & Noble, the problem was stress, right? Stress that was weighing down on this particular author. And so the answer was ease, trying to figure out how to remove that stress. But if you begin to care for your soul by coming to God, as I've said, then the problem that hits you in the face immediately is not any of those things that I just listed, but it is rather the guilt that we bear toward a holy God for our sins. So it's not education or stress or fast food that's our main problem. It's not sugar that is our main problem. It's not even our lack of kindness or empathy. It's the fact that we are full of sin.

and that God is righteous and that we will one day be judged. This is our problem and this is the problem of everyone that we meet. Jesus said that we have sinned against the Holy God and for that evil we justly deserve to be placed in hell for eternity. This is the meaning behind Jesus' warning that we should fear Him who can put both body and soul into hell. Elsewhere, Jesus describes hell as a place where the fire never goes out and where there will always be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Romans 6.23 says, For the wages of sin is death. Now the world is filled with people who will shake their heads and scoff at the idea of a God who is wrathful towards sin and who judges people by sending them to hell for eternity. They'll wag their head and they'll think, What a petty, vengeful God you serve.

Or worse, they'll say that such a God is monstrous and evil. They'll accuse God and be a judge of God. Now, it's a very foolish objection to say these things, and it just amounts to excusing our awful wickedness, our awful evil. It amounts to saying that we're really not all that bad, and that Christians should just get over our fixation on sin and evil. But the perfect holiness and the perfect goodness of God, our truths, that should give us joy and hope and peace. Finally, we all know that this world is a hard place. You don't have to look very hard. It's a difficult place to be. There's an enormous amount of pain and suffering and darkness in this world. And so finally, when we look at God, there is one who is true and righteous altogether. Finally, we have hope that our terrible wickedness will be dealt with forever by a God who is pure and holy. This is good news for us and for the world. So the scoffers overlook the kindness and patience of God who has given us His Son, Jesus Christ, as our mediator. Again, Romans 6.23 says, For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

So Jesus came to rescue sinners from the wrath of God, and no one else could have done that or did that. Jesus Christ alone is able to give us peace with God because He's the only one who could have paid the penalty for our sin and did. This leads me to my next point in another place where the world scoffs at us. The Bible tells us in many places to fear God. Today, we're never supposed to fear authority. And if we do, it must mean that we live either in a dictatorship or are part of some kind of cult. But notice what Jesus says in this passage. He says that we should not fear man, but we should instead fear God. Immediately after that, he explains that the very hairs on our head, some of us have fewer hairs than others, but the very hairs on our head are numbered by God and that he cares even for little sparrows who are worth very little.

how much more does God care for us? The world tells us that fear and love are incompatible. What the Bible teaches, the exact opposite. Now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways and love him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul? That's Deuteronomy 10. God's judgments are surely terrifying. There's no doubt about that. but he commands us to come to him for comfort and for security. The very God, this is the paradox, the mystery of the gospel of Jesus Christ, of this God that we serve. The very God who will one day judge the earth is the one who invites us now to come to him for our comfort and our joy. The very one who will judge us is the one who has the answer to our problem.

He has the ability to give us peace. Psalm 36.7 says, How precious is your loving kindness, O God, and the children of men take refuge in the shadow of your wings. There is no incompatibility between the fear of God and the love of God. Now, I want to do a little advertisement. Sorry, but a little advertisement. This book is a book that came out The Warhorn, you can get it for free online, okay? So not much of an advertisement if you can get it for free. But Warhorn Media down in Bloomington put this out, and it's a wonderful book. It was written by a guy by the name of Horatius Bonner. I think he lived about, what is that, 200 years ago or so. And it's a wonderful book. It's called Peace and Holiness. And it's basically two books, actually, Peace and then Holiness.

all about how we get peace with God, and then as a Christian, how we grow in holiness. For being 200 years old, it's very simple, and it's very convicting, and it's very good. So I just want to recommend that to you as we think about this, caring for our soul. It's one way, reading it and meditating on it is one way you can care for your soul. Now, if it's possible to care for our soul, then it's also very possible, as a word of warning here, it's also very possible to be careless and harmful to our souls. What should we watch out for? Now, we cause harm to our souls when we consume garbage, and there's quite a lot of garbage out there. Whenever we consume the sex and the violence that's spewed constantly on our televisions, We do so saying that it will have no impact on our souls. Have you ever told yourself that lie before? This won't make a difference to me, to my walk with God, what I watch or what I consume. What makes you so sure? Why do you think you can take fire into your lap without getting burned? You cannot. You cannot consume the very things that God hates and expect to have a healthy soul.

No, they will certainly destroy your soul. Do you honestly think that companies would pay millions of dollars for the chance to run a 30-second commercial if they didn't think that it would have an impact on you and your behavior? This is the thing that I always think about when people say, oh, TV, it doesn't cause violence or it doesn't do anything, it's just entertainment. Well, okay, if it's only entertainment, then why do people spend enormous amounts of money to run a 30-second commercial because they know that it's going to change your behavior. They know that, and it does. And so if you think that what you watch on television doesn't make a difference, you're very wrong. You're very, very foolish. And they know much better than the pagans. The pagan advertisers know much better than you do. Remember, garbage in, garbage out. We convince ourselves that it's no big deal, but let me assure you, you will reap what you sow.

If you sow sexual perversity and violence, you won't reap holiness, right? You're not going to do that. Remember what the Apostle tells us to think about? Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, Philippians 4.8. Now, I want to mention one thing that's particularly soul-destroying, and that's pornography, right? Remember how I said at the beginning that we care for our soul, by doing business with God. Well, our God is a personal God, and this means that we can have a relationship with Him. In fact, we must have a relationship with Him in order to properly care for our souls. God Himself is both three and one, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That means He has relationship within Himself. So my point here is that relationship isn't some kind of sideshow.

It's not a separate thing. You don't care for your soul by hiding in the woods your entire life. Instead, you don't care for your soul by going to a mountaintop and being a hermit. You must do it in relationship with others because our God is a relational God. You care for your own soul by being in relationship with others. So one way to gauge the health of your soul is in the health of your relationships. Jesus said the greatest commandment, The greatest commandments were to love God and to love your neighbor. Pornography is an evil attempt to selfishly get what we want without any care or concern for anyone else. We were created for deep, meaningful relationships, and relationships like that are very good, but because of sin, they're also very hard. And the pornography is the lie that you can have easily and cheaply what is actually very difficult and challenging.

The image is a lie. Pornography is a lie, and it's very destructive. God made us to have intimate, real relationships, and one mark of the healthy soul is that it has healthy, loving relationships. How can you say that you love God and yet hate your brother? You cannot. Now finally, I want to remind us to use accurate weights and measures. Paul says this about our souls. For momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. This life is temporary. This service is temporary. The afflictions we face today are temporary.

and all the pain, all the joy, and all the sorrow of this life is going to be gone in an instant. All you have to do is look at your children. Think how old your children are already. How long are you going to wait to begin caring and tending for your soul? How long are you going to wait to care for the soul that God gave you, this soul that will never die? How long will you spend Caring for your car more than you care for your soul. How long will you wait to care for the soul that will spend an eternity either in heaven or in hell? Ecclesiastes 7 says it is better to go to a house of mourning than to go out to a house of feasting because that is the end of every man and the living takes it to heart. Will you take it to heart? Will you consider the end of your days. Brothers and sisters, let us take these warnings to heart while there still is time. Let's pray. Father God, you have given us an eternal soul, a soul that will one day stand before you. And Father, we are so easily distracted. We are so easily caught up with the shiny toys that are around us, with the things of this life that are here today and then gone tomorrow.

We forget that our lives are but a mist and a vapor, and then after that, there will be eternity forever. Father, forgive us for our short-sightedness and our foolishness. Help us, Father, to think about eternity, to keep it in our minds, to know that one day we will face you, and help us to give ourselves to you, to walking with you, Father. We ask all these things in Jesus' name. Amen.