Automatic Transcript Generated:
Wendy:
All right, here it is. Okay. So Michael asks you recently answered, do we have a spirit, body and soul without mentioning the word heart? Are the heart and the spirit the same thing as an example. Jeremiah 17:9 say the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? Also, it’s interesting, at least to me to note that the word soul appears 498 times in the King James version. Spirit appears 523 times and heart 884 times. All right. So, Tina, what do you think?
Wendy:
What does the Bible say? Our spirit and heart the same thing.
Tina:
Thank you so much for that question.
Jay:
By the way, I don’t know if we are live yet. I’m checking a live stream and it’s saying the video hasn’t started.
Tina:
It’s saying live accounting. No, it’s showing live.
Jay:
Okay. I want to make sure we’re live.
Tina:
Yeah. No, that’s a good point. All right. I’ll go ahead and answer it if I answer it again, that’s okay. So just to go back to the question because it’s kind of three parts and it basically said there is a question the Bible asks. It said, do we have a spirit, body and soul without mentioning the word heart? So the first question was, do we is a heart and the spirit? The same thing is what I understood. And I would say that the answer to that is no Biblically speaking.
Tina:
When it comes to the soul, let us look as to what a soul is. In Genesis chapter two, verse seven, it says, 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 soul. So when you become a soul, it’s a combination of two things. One is the dust of the ground combining with the breath of life, which is the spirit. And there’s other verses you can find to substantiate that. But just to make this point, only when those two things together become one that’s going to become a living soul.
Tina:
And that’s what the soul is. It’s a living being with a body made of the dust and a spirit breathed from God Himself. So once those things separate, when we die, the breath returns back to God and the dust returns to the Earth. Biblically speaking. So a heart is definitely not a soul, but when it comes to your heart, that also is another word for your mind. I would say when thinking about in the spiritual sense of things because it says, like you’re quoting in Jeremiah, the heart is desperately wicked, who can know it?
Tina:
And the heart longs for things. But the mind is kind of where you imagine these wicked thoughts. And so heart and mind are kind of connected in that sense. And that your heart isn’t your brain. It can’t think so. The heart and mind, I would say, are more connected than any other thing in the Bible. But that is a good fact that you definitely know your Bible words, and they’re listed hundreds of times. So, again, that shows that those are very important things as part of our walk with God and as part of our Salvation.
Jay:
It’s interesting to me that the first time heart shows up in the Bible is when God talks about how or it says in Genesis six five, that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was evil, continually speaking about man before that time. So it says his heart is imagining evil thoughts. So that clearly is not just talking about a physical organ, but really is our consciousness, our thoughts, our mind.
Wendy:
I’d be really interested to know you talked about the accounts of these words, but we know that every translation is a bit removed from when they do a translation of a word from the original Greek of Hebrew. There are changes that come into place with that, because there’s some interpretation that has to come in around that word. Is there anything you want to add as far as some of the original words and the definitions that go with those.
Jay:
It’S a good point, because, like, we talked about spirit, did you talk about rock and nafesh? Like, there’s two different words for spirit, so each we can have a different meaning with heart, there could be many different words for heart also. And even in the New Testament, you’re going to have your own different words there. So it’s not going to be exactly the same translation every time you look at different versions of the Bible. So the person asked a question trimmed in terms of King James. So that was very well thoughtful to do it that way.
Jay:
But what’s really interesting with word heart is actually, I think it’s one that’s more consistent. Right? I think it’s the word Kelleb. Actually, I could pull it up right now. And here’s a good tip if you are struggling with what are the words in the Bible? The best resource I’ve found that’s free is the blue letter Bible, blueletterbible.com, and it has an inter linear option where you can pull up a word and you could see what is it in the original text. It gives you the translation everything.
Jay:
So heart is, for example, LEB. And then there could be other variations of lab be shorter, longer, or love. And yeah, it does mean heart mind misunderstanding, heart and wisdom, like all sorts of different things.
Tina:
Exactly. And it’s actually funny. I was actually going to make that same plug because I’m on blue letter Bible right now. I love that resource just because you can get back to the original Hebrew. And I found so many answers to questions I’ve had about the Bible. Like, Why did it say it that way? But then when you look at the original meaning, you’re like, oh, okay. You get a clearer picture. And it’s definitely something you have to take verse by verse when you come to a verse and you don’t quite understand it, it’s always best to go back to the roots because.
Tina:
And just like many other passages in the Bible, I know, when I was studying Daniel, there’s a verse for basically a prophecy or a vision. And there’s two different words that basically indicate which one he’s talking about. And so just like you’re saying when you’re looking at the meaning of those words, it’s really important, just like you’re saying, Jay, to go back to the original language.
Wendy:
Absolutely. I completely agree on that. We just had it up here. Can you go back into that one?
Jay:
Maybe you can share the screen. You can show people a little bit about what it looks like with Bible blue letter Bible and how they can look up the words for themselves, because we really want to empower people. Right? We don’t want to even take our word for granted. We want to empower you so that you could go straight to the source. And one thing to talk about, too, I think, is in Hebrew. It’s a very metaphorical language. They didn’t have Sigmund Freud, and they didn’t have the level science that we do today.
Jay:
And we have a word for everything. So when they’re talking about how you’re thinking how you’re feeling and all these things, they’re going to probably go with more tangible descriptions. So heart, your chest, this area where you’re feeling things, and that’s what they’re going to go with.
Wendy:
So what I found interesting in heart here for LEB on the blue letter Bible. It particularly mentions mind knowledge, thinking, reflection and memory. And that, I think, is a key distinction from, for instance, spirit. I think it would be useful if we could pull up spirit as well and look at that here to compare that in this. But it’s interesting to me that this specifically talks about memory and reflection and knowledge, which are fairly distinct from spirit. Here other aspects of the mind for spirit. It’s talking more about courage and kind of more temperament sorts of things.
Tina:
Yeah. And I think where I’m looking it up, too. Like spirit can mean wind breath, mind, spirit. So it can be multiple things, just like going back to the Genesis 29 verse, the spirit being the spirit of God, which is like the breath of God, right. It can mean the same thing. But then, yeah, in your spirit, which is a different meaning. And I believe it’s a different word. It’s kind of more like your feeling or your personality and that sort of a thing.
Jay:
Exactly. So I think Kia is don’t take a Bible necessarily too literally and think there might be these different things. And really, Bible might be using different words to discuss overlapping concepts, even the way they might demarcate these thoughts and ideas might be differently than how we do today. The word mind and heart might mean very different things to us today, but maybe not so much back then.
Tina:
Yeah. Because I believe the King James Bible was translated in what the early 1006 hundreds. You think of how many words have changed in the last ten years when my mom was a kid, the word cool meant it was cold when I was a kid, it meant what you wanted to be. There’s a lot of words like that. Yeah. That’s another really good key factor to keep in mind is that language is always changing. How long ago was groovy a word? We don’t really use that anymore.
Tina:
There’s so many things like that, too. I still do because they’re super groovy.
Wendy:
Yeah. I think it’s a really important point that we associate certain meanings to language based on our current understanding today. But the Association that people had for these words at the time this was written is very different. And so we have to be mindful of that. When we are reading and coming to understand what the Bible is talking about, I think it’s really helpful to tune it to look up some of those the original Greek and Hebrew on it. And my husband is Lebanese, and his family speaks Arabic sometimes, and they are hearing how they describe definitions of some of these words versus stories in the Bible versus how I learned it growing up in the US and in the American way is very different.
Wendy:
And I think it’s useful to kind of look at some of the these different perspectives and different angles to get to the best understanding of it.
