One area that Christian apologist, Lee Strobel, delves into in his latest book, “Seeing the Supernatural: Investigating Angels, Demons, Mystical Dreams, Near-Death Encounters, and Other Mysteries of the Unseen World, is the existence of man’s spirit.
Throughout the Bible we find references to man’s spirit, soul and body (1 Thessalonians 5:23). While many believe that the spirit and soul are the same thing, they are distinctly different.
Our spirit exists separate from our human body. It is non-corporeal and the essence of who we are in spirit form. Our body is that earthly contraption our spirit lives in, The soul, which is our mind, will and emotions, is created when our spirit interacts with our physical or material body.
In his book, Strobel sought out stories that could be documented which proved the existence of the supernatural or spiritual realm. When it came to existence of man’s spirit, he cited the case of a woman who died during an operation at a hospital.
The woman claimed that her spirit (some call it soul) separated from her body causing her to float upwards. She saw the doctors below as they tried to resuscitate her. But then she saw something else.
“When she was ultimately revived, she said, ‘Oh, by the way, on the ceiling fan here in the emergency room, on the upper part of the blade … is a red sticker,‘” Strobel said in his interview with Charisma News. “And she couldn’t have seen it. Nobody could see it from the room because it’s on the upper part of the blade of the ceiling. So they got a ladder and they went up, and, sure enough, there’s the red sticker that she only could have seen from her perspective of her spirit floating near the ceiling of the emergency room.”
In 2006, a neuroscientist from the University of Montreal, Dr. Mario Beauregard, researched the mystical experiences of a group of Carmelite Nuns, when they had a spiritual encounter with God.
MRI scans conducted on the nuns’ brains as they relived these experiences, discovered that over 12 areas of the brain lit up. Beauregard also found what he described as unusual electrical activity, He did not believe that these could be explained by natural processes in the brain. Beauregard suggested that this hinted at the existence of a non-material part of men and women, which the Bible refers to as our spirit.
Aside from the numerous scriptures that refer to our spirit soul and body, we see several passages that address man’s spirit as being separate.
Certainly, the most controversial of these involves the irritated spirit of the prophet Samuel that appeared and spoke when Saul consulted the witch of Endor (1 Samuel 28:3-25).
Jesus also spoke about the existence of our spirit in the story of Lazarus and the rich mean. In that account both Lazarus and the rich men continued to exist in spirit form after their death. Both were self-aware and could communicate in their spirit form (Luke 16:19-31).
In his teaching on spiritual gifts, the Apostle Paul writes that when we speak in tongues it is our spirit (empowered by the Holy Spirit) that is praying not our mind (1 Corinthians 14:14).
The Bible is clear that after death we continue to exist. But that is not our final destination as we will eventually be restored to new resurrected bodies (1 Corinthians 15:13 and 52, Philippians 3:20-21).
