During this series we’re breaking down the Shema, looking at the specific words and their meaning. The Shema is a prayer found in Deuteronomy 6. It’s a prayer that declares one’s devotion to God, it highlights God’s character, and it shows us how to respond to him.
In this part of the series, we’re looking at how this prayer calls us to love God. It uses three words that describe aspects of who we are. Last week we looked at the word “heart.” Today we’re following this with the word “soul”. The word is “nephesh” in Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament.
Last week, we saw that the “heart” is your inner person. It doesn’t just mean your emotions, but every aspect of your inner being: what we might call mind, will, and emotions. This week, the word “soul” refers to the whole person. There is some overlap between these words. In English, we have a lot of words for our inner reality (like consciousness, psyche, etc.), and they all share some common meaning. The same is true of the Hebrew words we’re exploring.
In English, the soul is the non-material essence of a human, the part that survives after death. But that idea is foreign to the authors of the Old Testament. Biblically, people don’t HAVE a soul; they ARE a soul. In Hebrew, “nephesh” is a living, breathing, physical being. In fact, this word is often just a synonym for the words “me” or “I”.
What the author is emphasizing here is not just the inner part of himself, but his entire being. He’s saying, “My whole person, my inner and outer self, offers praise to God.” So “soul” in the Bible means your entire life, your personality, your whole self, your identity - the core you.
Now that we understand the word “soul” as our whole person, I want to talk about three ways we can love the Lord. These three elements provide a circle that defines what a mature Christian life looks like. As you adopt each element in turn, you go "full circle" in your relationship with God.
Let's put Deuteronomy 6 into the context of the whole Bible. Whether it’s in the Old or the New Testament, people are invited into a relationship with our Creator. That begins when we put our faith in him, meaning a complete trust in him for our life and our eternity.
Think about the people the Shema was originally addressed to. God had called this people - Israel - to be his people. He had rescued them from slavery in Egypt and brought them to the borders of the promised land. In Deuteronomy, this is like a coach’s pregame speech. Moses is getting them ready for the game. He is reminding them who they are. He is going over everything he has taught them, so they can go into the promised land and succeed.
But in order to have this kind of relationship with Israel, God had to set up a way to deal with their sin - because sin always creates a barrier before a holy God. So right after the people had escaped from Egypt, God instituted a system of sacrifices. When someone sinned, they offered a sacrifice to cover that sin, to allow them to remain in a relationship with a holy God. That’s the heart of all the religious rituals we read about in the Old Testament, involving all the priests and ceremonies and the temple. It was a repetitive process, because people kept on sinning.
We learn, when Jesus comes, all of that was temporary. The whole system looked forward to him and found its
