Welcome to Day 1491 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomImager - A God-Breathed United Council – Worldview WednesdayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1491 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today’s current events. To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word. This week, on our Worldview Wednesday episode, we will continue our study based on a course I recently completed taught by Dr. Michael Heiser. Our study is titled “Sons and Daughters of God: The Believer’s Identity, Calling, and Destiny” Throughout this multi-week course, we will demonstrate that, in the Old Testament, “sons of God” and “holy ones” refers to supernatural beings whose Father is God and who work with God to carry out His will and that this divine family was present before humanity. By fully engaging with biblical texts such as Psalm 82; Psalm 89, and Deuteronomy 32:8–9, our study will show that this divine family functions as a template for God’s human family. God desires of humans, as His imagers, to participate in His council. This study addresses issues such as polytheism, the nature of the (little ‘g’) “gods,” and Yahweh's uniqueness. This study will apply insights to the New Testament texts and show how the metaphor of being in God’s family informs our sense of identity and mission as believers.
Imager – A God-Breathed United Council·      Segment 24: Humans Animated by the Breath of God
Introduction
Last week we left off talking about the one outlier in our list of candidates for what the ‘image of God’ idea might be: the possession of a soul, soul/spirit. People use different terminology; we’re not worried about parsing the terms necessarily here, and you’ll quickly see why.
Animals Like Humans
If we’re going to go with biblical language, the idea of having a “soul” is having a nephesh. In Genesis 2:7—this is when God breathes into the man, into Adam, and he becomes a living soul—the Hebrew there is the nephesh chayyah. That’s biblical language. It turns out, though, that if you go back to Genesis 1:21, we read this: “So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves. [the term there is ‘every nephesh hachayyah’]” So animals and humans are described with the same terminology with respect to the “soulishness” of each of them. What it refers to—the nephesh chayyah in both passages—is a reference to this sort of animate life that we sort of know and experience.
I can look at my dog and know that my dog is an animate life form. It looks at me. Something is going on up there in the head. It moves around; it makes decisions, so on and so forth. It decides to go into that room or this room. That’s what animate life is.
Animals and humans are both described with the same vocabulary in the Hebrew Bible. Animals also have a ruach. So for those who want to say, “Well, the nephesh is different than the ruach; the soul is different than the spirit,” we have a problem there too. Ecclesiastes 3:21 has animals possessing a ruach; it’s the same word for “spirit” used of humans.
 Nephesh and Ruach Interchangeable
The problem becomes even more than that. If you studied the terms, you would discover that ‘nephesh’ is often translated “soul” in English Bibles, and “spirit” comes from the Hebrew ‘ruach.’
If you studied both of those Hebrew terms, you would learn very quickly that they are used...