The Theft Of The Soul

Satan will and can steal the soul of a person as he did with Adam and Eve, which led to their spiritual death. He did it too to King Saul and Judas, taking the soul, mind, will, and emotions, the parts of a human being he is in charge of. So, he begins his destruction through an appeal to the five senses, where a person receives what he or she will choose and what he or she will believe and acts upon either his or her weakness or his or her strength. Satan feeds the senses with fun, deception, confusion, and a false sense of no harm done: No one will ever know, and if they find out, I can take care of it. Another fact that Satan takes advantage of is a person’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His pattern never changes. It is what he leveraged with King David and is leveraging today, and people are still falling for his tricks. The soul, the mind, the will, and the emotions now take on a double-minded nature. The mind in such a condition is no longer loyal to God, or to the world, or to itself. It is no longer able to receive truth to establish the faith of God, which we must have to live the life God has given us. Confused, deceived, and now perverted, the mind now refuses to renew itself with the Word of God so that it may prove the will of God. No longer having the mind of Christ, it now cannot and will not surrender itself to the will of God, which could take the person to victory as it did for Jesus when He surrendered His will to the will of God at Gethsemane. The mind, now confused and depraved, has lost the ability to choose the truth of God’s Word and to go free and live and serve God, and has also lost the will to yield to the will of God and be victorious. What is left is only the emotions, the last of the soul. And why are the emotions important? Because they release the tears of the joy of the Lord, which is our strength. The tears no longer come because there is no joy left and no strength to declare. No tears means there is no more a broken and a contrite heart by which the Lord can draw near to us and us to Him. The heart is now hardened by the depravity of sin. The theft of the soul is now complete.

Now comes the destruction of the body, where the senses live. The same things that Satan used to steal the soul he will now use to destroy and kill the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit. How will he do this? Through the works of the flesh as listed in the fifth chapter of Galatians. Each has a purpose. Let’s take the whole list one by one. Everyone may not have done all these things, but everyone has been guilty of some. Before we begin with the list though, let’s look at three verses of scripture showing that the choice to do the works of the flesh is entirely up to us to make:

All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. (1 Corinthians 6:12)

All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not. (1 Corinthians 10:23)

But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway. (1 Corinthians 9:27)

Each one of these scriptures offers a choice. The first choice to make is about what you want to have power over you. Because what you yield to, what your body is to obey, whether righteousness or sin, is your boss. The second choice is between edification and destruction. And the third choice is, will we or will we not bring our bodies into submission and, if not, lose out with God?