Luke 22:42 “saying, "Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless, not My will, but Yours, be done.”
The soul of man can be further divided into three separate parts. The first part of the soul of man which we will discuss in this section is the will of man. Unlike our spirits which become new creations when we are born-again, the will of man does not change after salvation. In other words after we are saved we have the same will that we had before we were saved. Let me say at the outset of this discussion, that if God had created us without a free will we would be no better than an extremely sophisticated machine incapable of having true fellowship with our Creator. Sadly there is a strong belief among many ministers in the church that the sovereignty of God precludes any possibility of any of His creations having a free will, for in their carnal thinking they naturally assume that the moment God gives any of His creations free will then He loses sovereignty over that creation. However God is well able to give His creations free will and still maintain His sovereignty over them. Without realising it these same ministers almost accuse God of narcissism. So why do I say that? I say that, because when these individuals accuse God of being incapable of creating any of His beings with a free will they therefore imply that God pretends that His creations desire to worship and have fellowship with Him, whereas all they are doing is simply what He has “in His sovereignty” programmed them to do. I have noticed that “ministers” of the gospel that hold this view are very intellectual in their arguments, but display no close relationship with the Lord. And the reason for that is obvious, for their erroneous belief forces them to view their relationship with God as one of Master and slave, not Father and Son and certainly not friend. So what about the free will of man? We all know the account of how Adam and Eve sinned against God by rebelling against their creator. Because God knows everything, when He created Adam He knew that Adam would rebel against Him, but He gave Adam his free will anyway. And so we see from that account that man’s will reigns supreme in the makeup of man, to the point of even being able to rebel against his maker, for it was as an act of Adam’s will that he rebelled against God. As revealed to us in the above quoted passage of scripture, the Lord Jesus who came to the earth as the Son of Man also has a free will. Unlike Adam however, who as an act of his free will rebelled against God, our Lord Jesus, as an act of His free will, submitted His will wholeheartedly to the will of God our Father.
Acts 24:16 “This being so, I myself always strive to have a conscience without offense toward God and men.”
The second part of the soul of man which we will discuss is the conscience of man. God has given the conscience to mankind to guide them to choose good and reject evil. In other words man’s conscience acts as referee that blows its whistle when the individual chooses to do that which is evil, and gives them the green light when they choose to do that which is good. All men have a conscience, believer and unbeliever alike, and the conscience performs the exact same function in all men, for you will recall that it was the consciences of the unbelievers that prevented them from stoning the adulteress when they accused her before the Lord Jesus in the temple (John 8:9). And so we do not get new consciences when we come into the kingdom, for our conscience performs the same function after we are saved as it did before we were saved. Although we do not receive new consciences, we can however either weaken or strengthen our consciences. We strengthen our consciences when we obey them. In the passage of scripture quoted above the apostle Paul speaks of always living his life in a way that did not violate his conscience. Those who choose to violate their consciences however will weaken them over time (1 Corinthians 8:7). The Old Testament makes no mention of the conscience of man, and the first time that man’s conscience is mentioned in the bible is in John’s gospel, nevertheless the conscience of man has always been a part of man. The conscience of man is a physical component of the brain and is thus located there. And so strictly speaking, the conscience should be described as being a part of the outward man. Nevertheless because of the interaction that the conscience has with the mind and the will of man, we list it as being part of the soul to more easily understand its function.
Michael E.B. Maher
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