Dividing Soul & Spirit to Find What is Really from God

DIVIDING SOUL & SPIRIT TO FIND WHAT IS REALLY FROM GOD. Now that December has come, we can see that most of the events prophesied by Dana Coverstone did not come to pass. Based on his very vivid dreams, Pastor Dana said that by November the US would have Chinese and Russian soldiers on the streets of the nation’s capital. The city would burn and our leaders would lose control there. Also, inflation would skyrocket and banks would fail.

Pastor Dana’s December 2019 dreams about our March-June 2020 crises did come true—people wearing masks, waiting in long hospital lines, headlines about thousands getting very ill, and rioting in the streets. This gave him credibility among many prophetic leaders, especially those who had long been prophesying similar events.

So I published in August an article Severe September-November Surprises to Pray About. And I began to pray every day that those events would not come to pass, even though the prophecies about March-June did. Now in hindsight, it was right to pray, and we should thank God.

But many of us, including myself, should have also taken more time to evaluate these prophecies. And try to discern what was of the Spirit and what was of the human soul.

To be fair, some prophetic leaders did. They concluded ahead of time that Pastor Dana had allowed soulish influences to cloud his judgment. I appreciate his great courage and his great concern to warn us of the events that he saw. I’m sure prayer made a big difference.

But let us learn better how to evaluate what parts of prophetic words really are from God, and what are not. And how better to pray, that we too may discern what God will do ahead of time….

Testing prophetic words

How can prophetic words go wrong? You may receive a revelation from God in your spirit. But your soul may influence the way you understand and act on that revelation. If so, you may act against God’s will when you think you are obeying Him.

That is why 1 Thessalonians 5:20-22 says, “…do not despise prophetic utterances. But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good; abstain from every form of evil.”

God wants you not only to receive prophetic words, but to examine them with Him. He will help you keep the spiritual separate from the soulish, and the pure from the impure. He does this to sanctify you and to prepare you for great honor when Jesus returns:

“Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (verse 23).

God created man as spirit, soul and body. “Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Gen. 2:7). God made the body from dust. He breathed into the body a spirit from His Spirit. (The Hebrew word for breath, ruach, also means spirit.) Then the man became a living soul (“being”, or nephesh, also means soul).

God made the man’s body to depend on the fruit of the trees He had provided. He made the man’s spirit to depend on His Spirit. And God made the man’s soul—his heart, mind and will—to depend on His love, knowledge and direction.

How to divide soul and spirit

We see these three components—heart, mind and will—of the soul, divided from the spirit, in Hebrews 4:12.

“For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

The word of God not only divides soul and spirit. It divides the soul into “the thoughts and intentions of the heart”, and judges them. Of course the heart includes emotions. But in Scripture the heart also includes the thoughts of the mind, and the intentions of the will.

Since both heart and soul include emotions, thoughts and will, what is the difference between heart and soul? We see “heart” and “soul” used together 34 times in Scripture, as comprising the whole conscious person.

The soul is more conscious of the outer world on which it depends for life and sustenance. (In fact, another word for psyche is life.) The heart is more conscious of the inner self and its inner resources.

For example, David says in Psalm 57, “They have prepared a net for my steps; my soul is bowed down” (verse 6). Yet at the same time David can say, “My heart is steadfast; I will sing, yes, I will sing praises!” (verse 7). All the while he is hiding from Saul in a cave. In other Psalms, too, enemies often afflict the psalmist’s soul but not his heart.

In the same way, your soul may have doubts and fears about where Jesus is in your current crisis. But if you “believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9).

How the heart and soul go astray

Why doesn’t God simply eliminate wavering emotions from our souls when we are saved? Because He wants us to keep living by faith and not by feelings. Faith is not an end in itself. Rather, it is the narrow way to life, that our hearts must follow.

But the heart, with its “thoughts and intentions” (Heb. 4:12), may at times be deceived and go astray.

For he heart itself “is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick. Who can understand it?”

God Himself answers in the next verse. “I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give each man according to his ways” (Jer. 17:9-10). God Himself searches the straying, deceived heart with His living word. He pierces it as with a double-edged sword, “to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4:12).

The sword of the Spirit “is the word of God” (Eph. 6:17). That is why our spirit needs to cooperate with God’s word. According to Vincent’s Word Studies on John 4, “Spirit (pneuma) is…the point of contact between God and man.”

Moreover, the spirit “knows the thoughts of a man” (1 Cor. 2:11). But the soul of a man often does not know what is occurring in his spirit (14:1-2,13-14). So we must pray for better spiritual sensitivity.

The soul needs the spirit

The heart, though it serves as the innermost part of the soul, needs the spirit to tell it when it is straying. In that sense, the spirit is even more interior than the heart. Or you might say it transcends the heart. The spirit receives influences from the spiritual world. The heart mostly processes soulish emotions, thoughts and intentions about how to cope with the natural world.

As we saw, the spirit depends on God’s Spirit. The heart depends on love. But the heart too easily looks for love in the wrong places. The spirit must remind the heart to keep turning back to God.

“Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God… But a natural [psychikos, or soulish] man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God…because they are spiritually appraised” (1 Cor. 2:12,14).

The heart can choose to be influenced by the soulish or the spiritual. But another problem comes when the spirit itself goes astray…

Upcoming follow-up article: The Spirit of Prophecy Testifies of Fullness in Christ