Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. Deut. 6:4-5

Yesterday we looked at loving God with all our ‘heart’, today let us consider loving God with our all our ‘soul’. There is obviously some overlap between these categories, yet they are all unique.

If you were to ask the average English person what the ‘soul’ was, they would probably list many of the categories we listed yesterday when we looked at the heart. Indeed, when Jesus spoke these words in Matthew 22, it is recorded in Greek. The Greek word for soul is ‘psuché’, it’s where our word ‘psychology’ comes from. From Greek and an English perspective this encompasses the thoughts, will and emotions of a person.

While this has some parallels with the Hebrew words of Deuteronomy there is more that we can uncover. The Hebrew word for soul is ‘nephesh’ and you may be surprised to learn it means a lot more than it first appears. It can refer to personality in the same way we might use the word ‘soul’ but in Hebrew also the living being as well. If you were to read an article stating that ‘souls’ had perished in an accident, you’d know that it meant people. It’s a possible use of ‘soul’ in English but not a normal use of the word. Such as in Genesis 46:15 where we are told that there are thirty-three sons and daughters, thirty-three ‘persons’ (nephesh) who go with Jacob to Egypt. This word nephesh refers to a living being, both of people and animals. It can just mean ‘life’ such as in Deuteronomy 12:23, ‘be sure you do not eat the blood, because the blood is the ‘life’, and you must not eat the ‘life’ with the meat’.

So, to love God with your all ‘soul’ means to love God with your very life.

This Hebrew word for soul is also used in other surprising ways, it can be used of a person’s desire such as: A ‘nephesh’ who is full loathes honey - Proverbs 27:7. And: as the deer pants for water so my ‘nephesh’ pants for you, my God. My ‘nephesh’ thirsts for God (Ps. 42:1-2). By reading the text of scripture in this way we can easily see that loving God with your soul means loving God with our living being, our self, our person, our desires, passions, and appetites. For us to love God with all our ‘soul’ it must therefore mean that God comes first in everything. If we are to truly love God, we cannot prioritise other things above God. It’s an easy thing to do, we reason that some things are necessity, and we therefore excuse them. We must realise that God is of greater importance than even our very life, than our ‘soul’.

Perhaps one of the more interesting uses of this Hebrew word, nephesh, is in Psalm 119:175 where is says: Let me live that I may praise you. In this verse the word ‘me’ is the Hebrew word nephesh. When we praise God with all our ‘soul’ we are choosing to put God above ourselves. God comes first. The psalmist wants life so that he can praise God. His very reason for existing is to praise God.

Will we choose to love God with all our soul? If we don’t put God first we are actually saying that something else holds pre-eminence in our lives.

To quote a Kenyan proverb: ‘wewe mungu mimi hapana’, It means ‘you are God, I am not!’ We must learn to love God in a way that denies our self, our soul, in order for God to be first in our lives.

- Joseph Jones