NOTES for Act 20:10
In the New Testament books there are a number of testimonies to the raising of dead people both by Christ Himself and by His disciples. How are these cases connected with the resurrection of the Savior Himself? And how are they connected with the resurrection that awaits each of us at the end of time?
The Bible looks at human life as the unity of two processes: natural and spiritual. The spiritual process is connected with the breath of God that God "breathes" into man's "nostrils" (exactly so in the Hebrew text) at creation. By this breath man is alive; it makes him the image of God, and the unique thing that could be defined as humanity is connected with it.
Life as a natural process is called "soul" in the Bible. We are used to looking at the soul as the center of a person's personal qualities, as what makes him unique and unrepeatable. Egyptian priests and Greek philosophers looked at the soul this way.
Biblical authors, however, by the word usually translated into Russian as "soul," meant an impersonal life force shared by humans and animals. This life force appears in man after God "breathes" into him the breath of life.
Animals also have such a soul, and in them it is connected with blood: blood is the basis of all life processes in an animal organism. In man before the fall it was connected with the breath of life received from God, but after the fall it became connected with blood, as in animals. After the fall, man, apparently, became much more like an animal than like God, whom he had resembled before the fall.
Death too is described in the Bible as a twofold process. The breath of life that a person received from God returns to God at the moment of death, while the life force, the soul, simply departs, dissolving into the surrounding space. Only a very small part of it remains, making possible the postmortem existence of what is usually called a person's shadow, whose dwelling place is in the lower world called Sheol.
It is precisely this life, which departs so easily and so inevitably, that Jesus calls us to give to Him so that He may give it a new quality, renewing it by the breath of His Kingdom, of which it will then become a part. The breath of the Kingdom is still the same breath of God; it permeates the Kingdom in a fullness that had never before been opened to man.
But the life of a person, his soul, must be renewed so as to become an organic part of this Kingdom toward which the person strives. Both the Savior's resurrection and the resurrection of each of us at the end of time are impossible without such renewal, and depending on whether it becomes possible for us (only our unrepented sins can hinder this), our destiny in eternity will be determined.
There is also a resurrection of another kind, as a return to the former, untransformed life. This can happen if the life force has not yet finally left a person, as in the case described in the Book of Acts. Yet this is not transformation; it is only a return to the former old life, one more chance given to a person by God for salvation.