WRONG ASSOCIATIONS OF IDEAS.
By Daniel T. Bourdeau
In the matter of soul and spirit, care should be taken to avoid forming ideas which are not wholly founded on fact. The traveler who had conceived sublime thoughts about the scenery of Switzerland, but who happened to visit that country when it was rainy and foggy, and ever thereafter associated gloomy thoughts with that beautiful land, made a mistake. But such a mistake is of much less account than those mistakes which are committed at the sacrifice of Bible truth. There are those who, believing that man has an immortal spirit, which thinks and acts independently of the body, find passages where spirit signifies angel, as in Acts 23:8, 9; or phantom, as in Luke 24:37, 39; Matt. 14:26; Mark 6:45-49, and they hastily conclude that the spirits of the dead, in the fabulous sense of that expression, are intended. And this false impression will follow them in their entire investigation of this subject, unless it is corrected. As to Acts 23:8, 9, we think that Heb. 1:7 will shed some light upon it, giving us a clue to its true meaning. In this text Paul, speaking of angels, certifies, “Who maketh his angels spirits.” The French translation reads, “Making winds his angels.” Not that winds, in the common acceptation of that term, are angels, but that God has given angels, who are real, tangible beings, the faculty of doing their work either visibly or invisibly, that is, without manifesting their form. In the latter case they are like the wind, that does its work without our seeing it. They can serve in this manner, or can manifest the light and glory of Heaven with which they are clothed, and which resembles the brightness of the sun when it shineth in its strength, or a flame of fire. Read Matt. 28:3, 4; Luke 24:4; Judges 13:19, 20. This enables us to understand the difference that is made between angel and spirit in Acts 23:8, 9. As to Luke 24:37, 39, where it is stated that on a certain occasion the disciples were frightened, believing that they saw a spirit, Mr. Greenfield in his Greek Testament puts in the margin of that passage, phantom, indicating that this word is found in Griesbach’s Greek Testament. And that phantom is the proper term appears from the fact that the same word, (phantasma) is found in Matt. 14:26; Mark 6:45-49, where a similar fright of the disciples is recorded, when, on another occasion, Jesus met them walking on the sea. It was while speaking of a phantom, a being that exists only in the imagination, or an appearance produced by a fallen angel, that Jesus said, “Handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” Neither Christ nor the evangelists speak of the spirits of the dead in these passages. In fine, no inspired writer ever speaks of the spirits of the dead in the superstitious and deceptive sense of that expression.