Spirit and soul are never separated; one is the higher part of the other, so to speak. The Word of God is the only thing that can distinguish them. Philosophers were wrong, as Aristotle. To them it was merely mind and the animal soul which loves, for instance, one's children. I have a mind that thinks about children, and so on: that is all right so far, and philosophers recognized that there was this in man. But they went no farther than this intellect. We know there is a link between man and God, and that is responsibility too, though now man has got into enmity.
The "dividing asunder" in Hebrews 4 is that which just gives the difference between the two, for it cuts them in two. Heathens saw the superiority to beasts, but I do not believe the intellect that they owned has anything to do with God. All philosophy is a perfect delusion; intellect has nothing to do with God at all. God may act upon it; that is another thing.
It is not, of course, as with a stone that God acts upon man, but it is through his conscience. It is not the activity of man's intellect at all. A man of considerable intellectual powers is all the more likely to go wrong. God may take a chosen vessel and fit it for Him to act in and by, but never for the vessel to act. Wherever the vessel acts, it shuts God out. That is what Paul insists on so much in the opening of I Corinthians. Faith is never in the intellect, and what is more, the intellect never knows a truth. Intellect knows consequences, but these are not truth. That is, truth is not the object of intellect, but of testimony. This is where the difference lies. You tell me something and I believe you, but the thing that receives truth (on a testimony) is not intellect. "He that hath received His testimony hath set to his seal that God is true" (John 3:3333He that hath received his testimony hath set to his seal that God is true. (John 3:33)).
The very thing by which man proves there must be a God is a proof that he cannot know God. Take this world: there is evidence of skill, there must have been a designer, someone must have made it. So it is with a watch (the common illustration), someone must have made it. So to the infidel geographer they brought once a globe, and when he asked, "Who made that?”
“Nobody," was the reply.
“What do you mean? I ask who made that globe?”
“Nobody." Of course he was confounded. I am not capable of conceiving of such a thing existing without a cause, but if I see it there, I must get a former [maker] of it. I am so constituted that I cannot think of such a thing without a cause. This is exactly what it amounts to. God must have wrought: without a cause you cannot think it out. I cannot conceive of anything existing without finally a causing cause. But a cause not caused is above me! The thing that proves He must be, proves I cannot tell what He is. Logic says, If so-and-so is true, then so-and-so must be, but this does not say that it is, which is a very different thing to my soul. If I say "must be," that is a mere inference. The moment I get a testimony that it is, how different! I get a divine testimony, and set to my seal that God is true. This is faith, divine faith. One thing flows from another, and I cannot help inferring. That is the constitution of man, and he must think according to what he is; he cannot think otherwise.
Intellect never discovered anything in divine things; it may deduce correct conclusions, but it never can go above itself. That is another way of looking at it lf intellect pretends to go above itself, it is an absurdity on the face of it. If it pretends to rise to God, He is not the true God at ail, but the mere conclusion of my mind, God can act on me, as physic [Medicine] acts on man; but that is not what I am. God has given us receptivity so far as that goes. It is as simple as ABC. Here is God, and if I bring Him in, it closes reasoning, and if I leave Him out, everything is false.
1 may have the pennies but no dollars in the account. Nine-tenths of our ideas come from relationship, not from intellect, just as a child knows its father. Relationship is never known by reason; mind is fond of a kind of metaphysical reasoning about this, but it is all folly. The moment relationship is formed, all moral duty flows from it, and from it alone. Duty has nothing to do with intellect. This it is that makes us totally dependent. Man at the outset tried to get out of dependence on God, and really got into dependence on the devil and his own lusts. "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God" was dependence and obedience, and that was where Christ was. It is the proper place of every intelligent creature who ought to be both dependent and obedient.
J. N. Darby