What is the spirit?
Question 05031
When the Bible speaks of the human spirit, it is pointing to something distinct from the soul, though the two are closely related. The spirit is the God-ward dimension of who we are – the aspect of our humanity that stands most directly in relation to God and most directly under the influence of the Holy Spirit.
The Biblical Word for Spirit
The Hebrew word is ruach, the Greek is pneuma. Both words carry the sense of breath or wind, and both are also used of the Spirit of God Himself. This overlapping usage is not accidental. The human spirit is the part of us most directly shaped by the divine breath at creation, and it is through the human spirit that the Holy Spirit operates most intimately. Romans 8:16 says that “the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” – it is with the spirit, not the soul, that this witnessing takes place.
Where the soul can be described as the self as an individual experiencing subject, the spirit is the self as a creature dependent upon and oriented toward God. It is the God-consciousness dimension of the person: the capacity for genuine worship, for prayer that goes beyond words, for the kind of knowing that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 2:10-11, where “the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God,” and only the spirit of a person knows what is truly within them.
The Spirit Before and After Regeneration
Scripture is honest about the condition of the human spirit outside of Christ. Ephesians 2:1 describes the unregenerate person as “dead in the trespasses and sins” – and this death is most properly located in the spirit. The body is alive; the soul is active; but the spirit, in its proper God-ward orientation, is dead. This is why Jesus told Nicodemus that what was needed was not moral improvement or religious sincerity but a new birth – being “born of the Spirit” (John 3:5-8). Regeneration is the Spirit of God making alive what was dead, awakening the human spirit to relationship with God.
After regeneration, the spirit becomes the sphere in which the Holy Spirit makes His home and does His deepest work. The contrast Paul draws in 1 Corinthians 2:14-15 between the “natural” person (literally the psychikos, the soul-governed person) and the “spiritual” person (the pneumatikos, the one whose spirit has been made alive by the Spirit of God) is not a contrast between two types of Christians. It is a description of the difference between someone in whom the spirit is still dead toward God and someone whose spirit has been made alive. The difference is not one of degree but of kind.
The Spirit at Death and Beyond
It is the spirit, rather than the soul, that is returned to God at death. When Jesus breathed His last on the cross, His words were: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). Ecclesiastes 12:7 says that at death “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” This language of return suggests that the spirit’s ultimate belonging is with God, that it came from Him in a particular sense and goes back to Him. The soul is the individual life given and expressed; the spirit is the God-given capacity for God-communion that death does not extinguish.
Hebrews 12:23 speaks of the heavenly Jerusalem as the dwelling place of “the spirits of the righteous made perfect” – indicating that the spirit persists in a conscious, identifiable form in the intermediate state between death and resurrection. The full person awaits the resurrection body, but the spirit is with God in the meantime.
So, now what?
If the spirit is the deepest and most God-oriented dimension of who you are, then tending to it is among the most important things you can do. Paul’s instruction to “be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18) is precisely about keeping the spirit yielded and open to the Holy Spirit’s influence rather than grieving or quenching Him (Ephesians 4:30; 1 Thessalonians 5:19). Prayer, Scripture, worship, and honest confession are not merely religious habits; they are the breath of the spirit, the means by which the deepest part of you stays alive to God.
“The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” Romans 8:16
