The Shape of the Soul

By creating us in His image, God has specially fashioned us for fellowship with Him. But because of sin, our souls have been bent out of shape. Today, Sinclair Ferguson thinks about our need for restoration in Christ.

Welcome again to another week on Things Unseen. This week, I want to think with you about what I’m going to call “soul shapes.” I suspect you could look through many volumes of systematic theology and not find a section headed “soul shapes.” And for all I know, you might be able to look through every Christian book you own and still not find a reference to “soul shapes.” So, what am I talking about here?

Well, it’s just a slightly idiosyncratic way of thinking about ourselves and the challenges we face as individuals—sometimes challenges we don’t even recognize. The idea actually came to me one day when I was thinking about one of our children, whose calling is in the field of psychiatry—forensic psychiatry. Of course, she doesn’t talk to me about her patients, some of whom, incidentally, seem to be very sick physically and mentally, and some who have been profoundly abused and come from very deprived backgrounds.

But it so happens that when our daughter was young, she was a great doodler. Maybe if she hadn’t become a physician, she might have got a job as a syndicated cartoonist. And this gave me the rather whimsical idea: maybe we could write a book together on spiritual conditions entitled Soul Shapes and How God Reshapes Them. She could draw a series of illustrations of souls that are bent out of shape—sick, distorted—caricatures, of course, to make the point as visually vivid as possible. And then, we could write on how the gospel reshapes us to the new norm; namely, our Lord Jesus Christ.

Well, since I don’t think we’re ever likely to write that book, I thought maybe we could reflect on that theme for a week on Things Unseen. So, this week, we’re thinking about soul shapes. But first of all, we need to think about what we are talking about when we speak about “the soul.”

Think back to Genesis 2:7. In the old King James Version, that’s translated, “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.” Now, perhaps the most basic clarification that’s needed to our thinking here is that in the Hebrew text, this is the very same language that was used earlier in Genesis 1:24 of the animals God created.

I wonder if you’ve ever heard someone answer the question, “Will there be animals in heaven?” by saying, “No, animals don’t have souls.” Now, let’s not get completely off track here. I don’t want to start a controversy about whether there are animals in heaven. But when Genesis speaks about man becoming a living soul, it doesn’t mean he’s got some mysterious extra part to him that the animals don’t have. Genesis uses exactly the same language about the animals and about men and women. It means they’re living creatures.

So, what distinguishes us from the animals, what distinguishes man—male and female—is not that we have souls and they don’t. We’re all God’s living creatures. The difference is that we, men and women uniquely, have been made as the image of God. That’s who we are. That’s what we are made to be. That’s how we are intended to function. That’s the specific soul shape that we have. That’s the specific kind of living being we are. The animals certainly reflect God’s creative genius, but they’re not shaped the same way we are, as His image and likeness.

Now, the word that’s used in the Hebrew Bible for both animals and humans here, nefesh, simply underlines our creatureliness. It carries with it the idea of being dependent—being dependent on God for life and for all good things. We didn’t create ourselves. We don’t sustain ourselves. Every day, every hour, every moment, we are dependent on our loving and caring God for everything. And we’re meant to know that and to acknowledge it and, indeed, to enjoy it and to sense the privilege that it is.

So, soul is not so much something we have; it’s the privilege of what we are. It’s the way in which God has given us, as humans, a very distinctive shape. We are shaped, as it were, in His image. We’re meant to be a kind of miniature reflection of who He is. And because that’s so, we have the very special potential to have fellowship with Him. That’s what we were made for. That’s why our souls have been fashioned into the way we are.

Now, I wonder if you’ve ever used an implement, a tool, to do something it was never designed to do, and then, to your horror, you realize you’ve both damaged the thing you were trying to use and you’ve also damaged the tool itself so that neither can function the way they were originally designed to do. The thing you were trying to fix gets bent out of shape, and the tool you were trying to use seems no longer to be fit for purpose. That’s a kind of parable of what happened to our humanity in the garden of Eden.

In fact, one of the Hebrew words for sin has the idea of being twisted right at its root. And as Paul says in Romans 1, we have exchanged the truth about God—the truth in our own lives, the truth of what we were meant to be—we’ve exchanged the truth about God for the lie, not for neutrality. And the result is that we’ve forfeited the glory of God for shame.

So you see, what Scripture teaches us is that we are all, by nature, souls that have been bent out of shape, and what we need is for our true soul shape to be restored. And the good news of the gospel is that Jesus Christ can affect that restoration. I hope you’ll join us tomorrow as we think further about these soul shapes.