Meditation on the Text of the Week

Spirit and Flesh: Life and Death

It is the Spirit Who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are Spirit and are life.
John 6: 63

Unbelief is a comprehensive world-view in which the Living God is presupposed not to exist. Unbelief is likely to talk incessantly of god or of gods. It is often found to prate endlessly about powers, higher forces, subliminal influences, world-spirits, universal being-in-itself, pure reason, the god of nature, and so forth—but common to all these falsehoods is the universal belief that the God spoken of in the Scriptures does not exist.

At this point, Unbelief descends into the Lie. But regardless of all the permutations and combinations the Lie may adopt, it cannot escape the world as God has structured it to be, nor can it escape God Himself. Therefore, Unbelief is forced to adopt certain patterns of thought which recur over and over again. Sadly many of these have been insinuated into the Jerusalem and need rooting out. Belief and Unbelief do not mix.

One prevailing sub-lie of the great Lie is to believe that all reality is divided into an upper and a lower sphere.
The upper sphere is the realm beyond matter; it is the realm of the gods and angels. It is the realm of pure reason, pure spirit, pure mind. The lower sphere is the realm of the body, of the flesh, of matter—which dies and rots.

This higher and lower world view was most powerfully put forward by Plato and his disciples, and the neo-platonists around the time of our Lord. Regrettably, it later influenced many church fathers,and it has bedeviled and weakened the Church to this day. If you are not aware of this particular lie of Unbelief, you are almost certainly captured and influenced by it—even as a Christian believer.

Now, of course, Jesus and the apostles were well aware of platonism, of the lie of setting the material world over against spirit, for Greek thought had penetrated deeply into Israel at the time of our Lord and was openly advocated by many. These “moderns” at the time of our Lord were arguing that Judaism and Hellenism had many common elements and could be fused together. A merging of the Truth and the Lie, of Belief and Unbelief, of Jerusalem and Athens always ends in the triumph of Unbelief not truth.

Our Lord completely crushed the Lie in His utterance above which is our text of the week. He returns us to the Truth. There is, indeed, a higher and a lower realm. There is God, the Living God and there is everything else, which He has created out of nothing. The Spirit—that is, God—alone gives life. Life is not to be found in some higher realm, some non-material zone, or in some abstract principle. Life comes from the Spirit of God—and none other. The realm of flesh is the realm of death. Satan himself, although a spirit, is of the flesh, the realm of sin, death, corruption, and decay. "Flesh" therefore is a metaphor for rebellion, unbelief, and sin and the death and decay which accompanies them.

The flesh is worthless. It contributes nothing. By “flesh” Jesus deliberately takes up the platonic perversion of the truth and reconstructs the word. Our Lord uses “flesh” to refer to all, and any part of, the creation or creaturehood, separated from God. Thus Unbelief and all its works and faces is flesh. Any part of the creation not subject to the Spirit of God is dead, and without life. The flesh is worthless, even as all sin is worthless, and all Unbelief is vanity.

The words that Jesus has spoken, however, are Spirit and life. They are of God; they are true; they are of Belief; they are holy. Thus the contrast is not between matter and non-matter, but between Belief and Unbelief, God and Satan, righteousness and sin. That is why the Apostle Paul was later to say that the works of the flesh are immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envyings, drunkenness, carousings and so forth. But, by contrast, the works of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, etc. (Galatians 5: 19—23)

Thus, almost universally when the Holy Scriptures speak of the realm of the spirit, they are referring to the realm under the control of the Spirit of God. Thus “spiritual” is to be filled with the Holy Spirit, not being in some non-material realm. The opposite to “spiritual” is the life and practice of sin and unrighteousness.

Thus, in the world of Belief, all of life is to be spiritual. A spiritual body is having one's physical body under the control of the Spirit of God. Spiritual money is having one's income and material possessions under the direction and control of the Word of God. Family life in the spirit is having a household subject to the Word of God—for the Word of God is of the Spirit and, therefore, is life. To help reinforce this and to wean ourselves off the platonic lie we should almost always capitalise “spirit” when we read it in Scripture—for almost always “spirit” means “of, or from, the Holy Spirit of God.

The redemption of Christ has not come forth to enable us to escape from the creation or from the material realm. The redemption of Christ has burst forth to empower us to cleanse the creation of sin, enabling us to live clean and holy lives, so that sin (or flesh) is destroyed, but creation is restored to the glory and goodness it had before the Fall. Before Adam's sin, the entire world was spiritual. After Christ's atonement and resurrection, the entire world will be made spiritual again.

This will occur as the nations are discipled and come under His Word—for His Words are of the Spirit and bring life. Unbelief is flesh, of the flesh, and is the realm of decay and death.