jehovah witnesses: when jesus said on the cross into your hands i commit my spirit, what does that mean to you?

Question

luke 23:46 Jesus called out with a loud voice, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." When he had said this, he breathed his last.

is the spirit the same as the body or soul to you?

cause apparently jesus was going somewhere, someone disagrees?

Answer 1

Greetings,



No, as used in God’s Word, the “body,” “soul” and spirit are not the same things.





The word “body” refers to the physical human body or to spirit heavenly bodies. “Sometimes the word stands, by synecdoche, for ‘the complete man’ or ‘the person.’



The “body” and “breath of life” are the constituents of the man. When God breathes the life giving “spirit” into a body it becomes a “soul.” The "soul" is the *living* person or animal. For example, Adam the man was not a soul until God breathed into his nostrils.





The Biblical definition of the original language words for "soul" is a "breathing creature" or "living being" and also can be used in the extended or metaphorical senses of "life."



'Soul' is "self- conscious life." The NEPHESH is the person, not an immaterial part of him that survives when his body dies.



Baker's Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology: "Soul in the OT is never the ‘immortal soul' but simply the life principle or living being...Hebrew thought could not conceive of a disembodied nephesh."



The term [psy khe] is the NT word corresponding with nepeš. It can mean the principle of life, life itself, or the living being."—New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967), Vol. XIII,?pp.?449, 450.







Now when it comes to the Hebrew and Greek words for “spirit,” people are often extremely confused because of the various senses in which it is used in the Bible.



The basic definition for the Hebrew and Greek words rendered "spirit" is "wind." It is used in various senses such as "breath," "life-force," "invisible being," and a person's "attitude" or "disposition." The context must be used to help determine in what sense the writer was using the word.



Vine's: "pneuma...The NT uses of the word may be analyzed approximately as follows: "(a) the wind...(b) the breath...(f) the sentient element in man, that by which he perceives, reflects, feels, desires..."



ISBE: "Spirit... As Wind, Breath .... As Mental and Moral Qualities in Man: Hence, applied to man -- as being the seat of emotion in desire or trouble, and thus gradually of mental and moral qualities in general..."





Now, at Matthew 27:50 many translations render the Greek word PNEUMA here as "spirit":



“But Jesus, again crying out in a loud voice, yielded up his spirit.”



But, like the one you quote, other translations read: “and then he died,” "breathed his last," or “stopped breathing." (NRSV, CEV, REB, NEB, TEV, Weymouth, Phillips, Barclay)





So, the meaning here is that Christ “stopped breathing.” “Yielded up his spirit” is simply the idiom used in Bible times for when someone has died.





Some desperately attempt to read into these words evidence that a conscious spirit leaves the body at death and continues to exist. But, this interpretation is easily disproved by explicit Scripture.



Matthew was obviously very familiar with the teachings of God's Word including Psalm 146:4:



"His spirit departs, and he returns to the earth. In that very day, his thoughts perish."–WEB, Young's Literal Bible

"His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; In that very day his thoughts perish."–ASV



This verse is very explicit. When the "spirit" (RUACH) leaves the person ceases to exist, he "returns to dust" and "his thoughts perish." The Bible is always in agreement that when the "spirit" returns to God it means the whole person becomes dust:



Ps 104:29: If you conceal your face, they get disturbed. If you take away their spirit, they expire, And back to their dust they go Ec 12:6-7; Job 34:14-15).



EVERY explicit verse in the Bible agrees that when the spirit goes out you do not continue to exist somewhere.



This understanding is reinforced when we note that scholars recognize that the "spirit" is synonymous with "breath."



This is easily seen by the parallelism at Job 27:3: "While my breath (NESHAMA) is yet whole within me, And the spirit (RUACH) of God is in my nostrils"(Cf. Isa 42:5).



Now, what is in your nostrils? Some, conscious entity or part of you which continues to exist at death? No. Just the "breath" or by extension the "vital force" of life that God gave all living things.



The Bible also demonstrates that the "spirit" is just the "breath of life" when it shows that we do not have *individual spirits* and that the "spirit" (RUACH) we have is the same spirit in all animals (Ec 3:19).



So when we do just a little research, we find that the Bible is always in agreement. It is then very easy to interpret Christ’s words without forcing our personal beliefs into the text.





There are hundreds of clear, explicit scriptures which state that the dead return to the "dust" and are unconscious (Gen.3:19; Eccl.3:20; 9:5,10; Ps. 146:4; Ezek.18:4; etc.).



The scriptural hope for humans is the resurrection--a coming back to life, not a continuing of life in some mystical and ephemeral state.



Yours,



BAR-ANERGES

Answer 2

As Jesus’ spirit went out of him, he was not literally on his way to heaven. Jesus was not resurrected from the dead until the third day, and it was 40 days later that he ascended to heaven. (Acts 1:3, 9) At the time of his death, however, Jesus confidently left his spirit in his Father’s hands, fully trusting in Jehovah’s ability to bring him back to life.



The spirit is a person's lifeforce. The soul IS the person. As Gen. 2:7 says: "And the Lord God Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

Answer 3

Related to the top of this system of things, he charges Jesus as pronouncing: “involving that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the Son, however simplest the father.” (Matthew 24:36) Jesus says that the daddy is aware of greater than the Son does. If Jesus had been a part of Almighty God, however, he would understand the identical facts as his Father. So, then, the Son and the daddy cannot be equal. In his prayer to his Father, Jesus made a transparent distinction between him and his Father when he stated: “this means eternal lifestyles, their taking in advantage of you, the one authentic God, and of the one whom you sent forth, Jesus Christ.” (John 17:3) If we suppose Jesus and have an understanding of the plain instructing of the Bible, we will be able to admire him as the divine Son of God that he is. We will be able to additionally worship Jehovah as “the one authentic God.”

Answer 4

The Watchtower Society used to teach that the pyramids were from God and actually claimed that the great pyramid was a "Bible in stone." Using Pyramidology, the date of 1914 was first arrived at by the measurement in inches along a passageway of the great pyramid, that even turned out to be a wrong measurement. Even though it is the wrong date, they still use it.



The Watchtower organization now teaches that Pyramidology is the work of Satan, therefore in their own words they have admitted that they taught the work of Satan as the work of God. Do you know of any Christian organization that does that?



For some time they even had the winged disk of Baal on the cover of the Watchtower magazine.



They blame bad light for their “Old truths” and need “new Light” to see the the new truths that are often then reverted to the “Old Truths” anyway.



I know I would never trust my eternity to an organization that taught the works of Satan as God’s works. Then they tell us that Christ approved of them teaching how to follow Satan???

Answer 5

This a quote from the bible, I don't claim to be a witness of G-d. (Jehovah's witness)



The word of G-D:

Ephesians chapter 6.

17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God:



The helmet of salvation is Jesus Christ, and the sword of the spirit is the Holy Ghost – or the Spirit of G-D a witness to conscience.

Answer 6

Actually, I would redirect that question back to you.



The general belief among other Christian denominations is that Jesus went to hell. Some say that Jesus collected the good who had died before he had died, and so they went to a fairly benign part of hell (a place of ease but that was without God's glory and light), and then brought those to heaven after the three days he remained dead. Others say he collected the keys of death, etc. The list can go on and on.



But if I understand your question correctly, if Jesus entrusted his spirit to God (his soul went to heaven), then would that not contradict the idea that he went to hell to help the good who had died before him (like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, King David, the prophet Samuel, and so on)?









As to your question, Genesis 3:19; Psalms 146:3,4; and Ecclesiastes 9:5 tells us that the dead are simply unconscious, like in a deep sleep. This would seem to mesh with Job's call to God to send him to hell (Sheol in the New World Translation, but in the King James Version it is translated hell) rather than let him continue to suffer as he was suffering on earth. Why would Job ask to be sent to even worse suffering in hell if hell is the fire-ridden place claimed by other denominations? Jesus corroborates the idea that Sheol or hell is not a place of burning torture himself in John chapter 11 when he says that the dead Lazarus is "resting in sleep."





In other words, when Jesus was dead he was simply unconscious, much like in a deep sleep. His spirit was entrusted to God in the sense that the spirit that gives life (similar to how electricity powers a blender, but this spirit is the electricity that powers our bodies) went back to God (who gives all life); and in a more symbolic sense, that Jesus was entrusting the memory of him back to God, so that God would remember him and restore him to life at the proper time.

Answer 7

I'm nmo not a Jehomah witnesses