When we say the soul is the natural life (blood) of man we mean it is the function of which preserves us alive in the flesh.
Genesis 1: 21 So God created the great sea monsters and every living (soul)creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good.
The word for every living creature is soul.
Our soul is the life human beings and other living creatures share in common.
This is the life we naturally possess and by which we live before we were born again; it is the life which every human has. The Greek lexicon gives the original meaning of psuche as “animal life”; so that soul life is what makes man a living creature.
It belongs to the natural world. Though the soul life may not necessarily be evil: since many sins have been overcome by believers through their old man being crucified with Christ: yet it remains natural. It is the life of man; hence it is most human.
It makes man and women a perfectly human being. Perhaps it is good, loving and humble. Nonetheless it is but human.
This life is entirely distinct from the new life the Holy Spirit gives us at new birth. What the Holy Spirit imparts is God’s uncreated life; the soul is but man’s created life.
The Holy Spirit grants us a supernatural power in our spirit; the soul-life is merely the natural. The Holy Spirit gives the zoe life in our spirit; the soul is the psuche-life.
Life is that power within a man and woman which animates every member of their body.
So, this inward soulical power finds expression through the outward physical activity. The outer activity is but the effect of the inner power, our blood. What therefore lies unseen behind the activity is the substance of life. All we naturally “are” is included in that life. This is our soul life.
SOUL AND SIN
Soul life supplies the energy for executing whatever is commanded. If the spirit rules, the soul will be directed by the spirit to exercise its will to decide and do the spirit’s desire.
If however sin reigns in the body, the soul will be enticed by sin into using its will to decide and to do what sin desires.
The soul works according to its master, for its function is the execution of orders.
Prior to man’s fall it committed its power to the spirit’s direction; but after the fall it responded completely to sin’s compulsion.
Because man turned into a fleshly being this sin which afterwards reigned in the body became man’s nature, enslaving the soul and the life of man and compelling him to walk after sin. In this way sin became man’s nature while soul became man’s life.
We often treat life and nature as synonymous. Accurately speaking they are different.
Life it would appear is much broader than nature. Each life possesses its special nature which, being the natural principle of existence, includes life’s disposition and desire.
While we were yet sinners our life was our soul and our nature was sin. By the soul we live, and the disposition and desire of our life were according to sin.
To put it another way, what decides our walk is sin but what supplies the strength to walk in that fashion (sinfully) is the soul.
The nature of sin initiates while the life of the soul energizes. Sin originates; the soul executes. Such is the condition of an unbeliever.
When a believer accepts Jesus as Lord and Savior. Jesus being our substitute on the cross, although the person may remain miserably ignorant of their being crucified with Christ, they are given God’s life nonetheless and has their spirit made alive to God, (God consciousness).
This imparted new life brings with it a new nature as well. So, there now exists both two lives and one nature in the believer: the soul life and the spirit life on the one side, the sin habit and God’s nature on the other.
These two self’s: old and new, sinful and godly: are fundamentally unalike, irreconcilable and unmixable, and the old self is incompatible with God.
The newborn spirit and the old flesh daily strive for authority over the whole man.
During this initial stage the Christian is a babe in Christ because they are yet fleshly.
Most inconstant and most miserable are their experiences, intermingled by both successes and failures, with the emphasis on failure.
Later on the new believer comes to know the deliverance of the finished work of Jesus on the cross and learns how to exercise faith in reckoning the old man as crucified with Christ.
He is thereby freed from that sin which has paralyzed the body. With his old man crucified the believer is now empowered by walking in the spirit, to overcome and enjoy in actual experience the promise that “sin will have no dominion over you.”
With sin under their feet and all lusts and passions of the flesh behind them, the believer now enters a new realm, the realm of the spirit.
They may picture themselves wholly spiritual when they look at others who remain entangled in sin, and may feel prideful but little do they realize that far from being completely spiritual they still remain partially carnal.
Because until we learn how to walk constantly in the spirit, we still react on the human level even though the sin that had us bound has been broken.