Are We Divided as Humans? Is the Soul Better than the Flesh?

1 Peter 2:11

Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul.

There is an implied division in the human, between the soul and the flesh.  All have fallen into sin because of Adam.  Jesus’ salvation has begun with the soul.  This is to recognize the fact that people who believe in Jesus, have accepted him as Lord and Savior, they are still sinning.  Belief did not come with automatic perfection.  How does one account for that?

One possible explanation is to divide the human into soul and flesh.  The soul is “Godly”, the flesh is…”fleshly”.  Thus we shed the one to achieve the divine soul.  But that runs into the problem that God created the flesh in the beginning.  Thus, flesh is not inherently bad, because God does not create inherently bad things.  Genesis is clear on this, God looked at His creation, did not pronounce it bad, nor indifferent, but good. 

It needed to score ‘good’ before He took His vacation Sabbath.  The idea seems to be that there is the evolution of goodness within us.  Over time, as we abstain from desires of the flesh, as we ‘put to death the sinful nature’, to borrow from Paul, we gain a more glorified aspect, we move deeper into the glory of God that is extended to us through Jesus.

But in the meantime, until it is all done, we need to be working at and struggling with changing those behaviors that are not conducive to the Christian life.  It is not simply from the point of view of the Gentiles, looking in at the community of believers, that Peter is writing from.  He is also writing to them of the transformative work of Christ in their lives.