The soul has organs of volition, emotions, and intellect. God views the man’s soul as the man himself as written in Matthew 16:26 “For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul? What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” Our Spiritual life is meant to be Zoe. At regeneration, we receive the very life of God called Zoe in Greek Language meaning Everlasting life. This is the life the Father has in Himself, and He gave to the Incarnate Son to have in Himself. John 5: 26 says, “For as the father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself.”
The state of perfect harmony and state of innocence prevailed before the Fall. That is the meaning of the Hebrew shalom. Shalom (peace) implies wholeness and harmony between man and God, man and nature, man and his fellow man. In the realm of human behavior, death came into the world through the sin of Adam. Passages such as Romans 5:12-14 remind us that death was initially foreign to man. As described in the Bible, death means not only the dying of the body but also spiritual separation from God accompanied by the symptoms of boredom, loneliness, loss of purpose, crime, violence, blights, disease, and a thousand miseries common our daily human experience. Despite all the advances in science and medicine, health, education, and sanitation, the mortality rate still stands precisely 100%.
The human mind is wicked; the explanation I can deduce for the corrosive nature of man is within the secrets of dust. As I said earlier, Earth’s outer core is composed mainly of a nickel-iron alloy, while the inner core is almost entirely composed of iron. Iron, as we all know, corrodes. Maybe that is why man’s attitude is corrosive. We know stories of human greed, lust, wickedness, hatred, sexual immorality, and other bad behavior (s). The human race had no character and no integrity. Darkness covered the whole surface of the Earth by the sins of men. God got very angry once and destroyed the whole Earth with water, but in His Name, He swore not to do it again; but has the Earth changed? No. The Earth is still full of hypocrisy, but God’s love is unfailing. This logic of the relationality of being and cosmic life gives rise to the view that all reality is interrelated. This same relational metaphysics undergirds the individual’s life in the community.
J. S. Mbiti captures this relational metaphysics succinctly in the proclamation: “I am because we are and because we are therefore I am.” The individual’s life comes into fruition through the social ritual of rites of passage. These rites are the process that can help the individual to attain the goals of their destiny, given at birth by God. Those who successfully go through the rites of passage become candidates for ancestor hood — the goal of the ideal life. For the African, ancestors are much more than dead parents of the living, and they embody what it means to live the whole life contained in one’s destiny.
The various elements of African religion that make the metaphysical structure of African religion are expressed differently by the various African people based on their social organization and environment. The strenuous resistance by man can never alter the Divine purpose of God. The hammer cannot break the anvil! It is madness to dream of thwarting God’s purpose. God made man do three main things: (1) Do Justly, (2) Love Mercy, and (3) Walk humbly with Him. With these three dictates, you might be one of the few to discern the secrets of dust or why God formed man from the dust of the ground. I am still searching the secrets; I might be lucky one day!
