Psyche in Mark, Luke, John, and Acts: Sellers on the Soul—Part XI

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ for over 73 years, was an industrious student of the Bible. His mission was the study and proclamation of God’s Word through radio broadcasts, the writing of Bible-study literature, a tape-recorded ministry, and semiannual Bible conferences. He arrived at his conclusions after considering all the Biblical and any other material that shed light on the subject under consideration. He studied Hebrew and Greek words to bring forth their historical and grammatical meanings. As study forced him to alter some of his beliefs, he implored his readers always to take his latest writing to be his latest light. Sellers received Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior at age 18 on November 23, 1919. Throughout 1921 he attended Moody Bible Institute; the following year he was ordained a Baptist minister. He traveled with an evangelistic party for years and served as pastor in Baptist churches. By 1932, however, after his studies led him away from the rituals and ordinances (e.g., water baptism), he left the Baptist Church, never looked back, and never joined another. He began writing pamphlets in 1935; by 1936 he was publishing The Word of Truth (17 Volumes over the next 20 years). He expanded this ministry with booklets, radio broadcasts, and 570 recorded messages covering most books of the Bible and many doctrinal issues. In 1971 he began publishing Seed and Bread, four-page leaflets, 196 of which he had produced by the time he passed away in 1992. With the cooperation of his daughter, Jane Sellers Hancock (1927-2020) and her son Rusty Hancock and the assistance of Sam Marrone (who remembers Sellers teaching at his home in the 1950s when Sam was a boy), I’ve been researching his life and thought for a book tentatively entitled “Maverick Workman: How Otis Q. Sellers Broke with the Churches, Discovered the Premillennial Kingdom, and Embodied Christian Individualism.” I would be grateful to anyone who could share information, memories, or photos for the purpose of this study.—Anthony G. Flood

[Prior installments: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X]

In What is the Soul, Sellers has much to say about common interpretations of psyche in the New Testament. Having looked at the Gospel of Matthew, we’ll turn to salient passages in the other two synoptics as well as John and Acts.

In the King James Version, Mark 8:36-37 reads:

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul (ψυχην, psychen)? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul (ψυχῆς, psyches)?

Sellers comments:

The customary sermon on this text usually contains thoughts such as the following: All the wealth of the world—the gold, the silver, the precious stones, the coal, the oil, the grain, the land, the buildings—is placed on one side of the balance, and the human soul is placed on the other side. It is discovered that the soul is worth more than all these, but the speaker has proved something that no one but a fool ever doubted. It can also be proved that one glass of water is worth more than all these. Let a man be dying of thirst in the midst of a great desert, and let that man be given the choice of the wealth of this world or one glass of water, and he will choose the water. He will not even weigh the matter.

Sellers thinks this misses the point:

This passage does not teach the value of a soul, but it does teach that it would profit a man nothing if he should gain the whole world if in doing it, he loses his power to enjoy it, his power to use it, yes, even to lose his own soul. All man’s wealth cannot purchase the redemption of his soul. (My emphasis.—A.G.F.)

. . . Men have said that God looked at the lost souls of men on earth; looked at the most precious thing in heaven; then determined that those souls were so precious that He gave His precious Son that the souls should be saved. The exact words of one such preacher were, “What exceedingly precious creatures we must be that God would give His Son to die for us.” All such teaching is a lie; it contradicts the Word of God; it denies the gospel of grace; it originates in the base pride of the depraved human heart.

Sellers alludes to counter-considerations from Paul’s letter to the Romans:

. . . Christ died for the ungodly [5:6]; while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us [5:8]; when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son [5:10]. These are the words of Scripture. It is there that we read of the ungodly, the sinner, the enemies. We do not read of exceedingly precious creatures. All who know the grace of God should forever renounce that vain pride which causes men to teach that God received fair value in exchange when He gave His Son for the redemption of lost souls.

. . . He loved us because He is love. He loved us when we were unlovely. He also loves the sparrow, and He notes when it falls, but He has provided no life for it beyond this one. Its body returns to the soil and its life must return to God the giver of all life. The sparrow will not live again, but man will. God in grace has not only provided for man’s resurrection. but for rich blessings in the life to come.

It is the redeemed man that is precious to God. Salvation makes us exceedingly precious to Him, but God did not save us because we were precious.

Luke’s Gospel has many passages that show that soul or psyche is connected with the capacity to enjoy and to suffer. Consider Simeon’s words to Mary, the mother of the Lord Jesus:

Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul (ψυχην, psychen) also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed. (Luke 2:35)

This is, in Sellers’s view, a “very clear illustration of how the word soul is, by a figure of speech, put for the person when viewed from the standpoint of sensations and experiences.”

Consider Luke 9:24:

For whosoever will save his life (ψυχην, psychen) shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life (ψυχην, psychen) for my sake, the same shall save it.

Not “life,” but the capacity to enjoy it.

By not casting their lot with the Lord [Sellers writes], the disciples could avoid much suffering. All suffering is connected with the senses. Thus, they could save their souls, but they would lose all the blessings and joys of the kingdom. If any chose to lose their souls by association with Him in the time of His rejection, they would save their souls for all the joys of the day of His exaltation.

Luke 12:19:

And I will say to my soul (ψυχῇ, psyche), Soul (Ψυχή, Psyche), thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.

“The soul craves food and drink, and this man had made full provision for his soul.”

And in the very next verse (20):

But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul (ψυχην, psychen) shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?

“No longer would he be a living soul with the power to gratify his appetite.”

Luke 14:26:

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life (ψυχην, psychen) also, he cannot be my disciple.

Again, not “life”: “Hating your soul means rejecting every physical comfort and enjoyment when these in any way hinder our service for Christ.”

Psyche occurs many times in John’s Gospel—written that you might believe Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and, believing, you might have life (ζωην, zoen; not ψυχην, psychen) in His name (John 20:31)—but Sellers calls out two passages for special notice.

John 10:11:

I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life (ψυχην, psychen; not ζωην, zoen) for the sheep.

“Our Lord put the welfare of His sheep above every physical comfort. He lay down His soul for the sheep.”

John 15:13:

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life (ψυχην, psyche; not ζωην, zoen) for his friends.

“The wrong translation in this verse,” Sellers writes, practically destroys its message.”

The force of it is gone if we confound soul with life. To lay down your soul for others does not mean to die for them. It may . . . include that, but a man can lay down his soul for others and yet live to a ripe old age and die a natural death. Paul is the great example of a man who lay down his soul for his friends. He spurned every physical comfort, every earthly honor, all joy and all wealth that he might serve his brethren. His stripes, his labors, his imprisonments were more abundant than any other apostle. Three times he was shipwrecked, he spent a night and a day in a swamp, he was always in peril, weary, hungry, in pain, thirsty, cold and naked. None of these needed to be his lot. He could have been at ease and in comfort, but he chose to lay down his soul for others.

The same selectivity must govern our overview of Sellers’s study of “soul” (psyche) in Acts.

Acts 2:27-31:

Because thou wilt not leave my soul (ψυχην, psychen) in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Thou hast made known to me the ways of life; thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance. Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre is with us unto this day. Therefore being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him, that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne; He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption.

We note first that it is David himself, all of him, not a part of him, that is declared to be “dead and buried.” We also note that verse 31, the last one in this passage, contains οὔτε ἐνκατελείφθη, oute enkateleiphthe, but no form of ψυχῇ, psyche. The Greek simply means “He was not abandoned.”

Sellers’s first comment is that the “full exposition of this passage does not come under the question of ‘What is the Soul?’ for it properly belongs to the question, ‘What is Sheol or Hades?,’ a topic for another day.

The Lord Jesus Christ had life in Himself [Sellers continues]. Just as the Father had life [ζωην, zoen] in Himself, even so He has given to the Son to have life [ζωην, zoen] in Himself. John 5:26. This life was His spirit. On the Cross He commended His spirit into the hands of the Father, and we are told that He gave up His spirit. Luke 23:46. His body was placed in Joseph’s tomb. From this many deduce that His spirit went to God, His body to the grave, and His soul to sheol or hades. But those who affirm this hesitate to give any definition of the soul. They are confident that it represented the real man, the true man. Yet they would not dare say that the spirit and the body were not essential parts of the man Christ Jesus. (My emphasis.—A.G.F.)

The apostles looked upon the man Christ Jesus as one in all His experiences. Peter speaks of “His resurrection (Acts 1:22);” “this Jesus hath God raised up (Acts 2:32)”; “killed the Prince of life whom God hath raised from the dead (Acts 3:15)”; “Jesus Christ of Nazareth whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead (Acts 4:10).” Paul says, “God raised Him from the dead (Acts 13:30)”; “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that He was buried, and that He rose again, and that He was seen of Cephas (1 Corinthians 15:3-5).”

All of Jesus was raised from the dead (or rose again); all of Jesus was seen of Cephas and others.

Acts 15:26:

Men that have hazarded their lives [ψυχας, psychas; no form of ζωή, zoe here] for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

“Men are commended for hazarding their souls,” Sellers notes. We can learn much from this.

Too many today shrink from discomfort and suffering which may come from proclaiming the truth. They crave ease, delight, success, and honor, and are proclaiming the message which they feel will bring these things. They do not want to be disturbed, and refuse to disturb those to whom they minister.

To Be Continued.

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