Scripture has revealed repeatedly that humans possess an immaterial part of our being called the “spirit”. This is the human spirit, not to be confused with the Holy Spirit. But, from whence cometh this human spirit? If we all have one, how did we get it? When did we get it? What does it do? And, what does it consist of?
We know the physicality of our bodies was conveyed genetically from the preceding generation of our parents. That’s amazing enough, so amazing we are almost compelled to pronounce each new birth a miracle even though it has happened billions of times. But the birth of the human spirit…now, that’s another issue altogether, and one that tends to leave us in a quandary. Here are the possibilities for its origin, at least to the extent we are aware of: number 1, the pre-existent theory says that God has created a huge warehouse of human spirits, billions of them, in fact, and each time a human being on earth is conceived physically, God, then, dispatches one of those waiting pre-created human spirits to inhabit that particular human. So, according to the “pre-existent” theory, these “in-waiting” human spirits are simply biding their time doing whatever human spirits do, until being assigned to a new human being just born.
The “direct-creation” theory holds that God creates each new human spirit at the time of its physical conception or at its actual birth. The position is divided as to when, but the idea is that God creates the non-physical human spirit to accommodate and inhabit the newly conceived baby boy or baby girl at the time of conception, or later, at the time of the actual birth.
But, to date, no one has been able to establish any of these theories with any kind of satisfying certainty. Again, be reminded that our perplexity is due to the unobservable nature of spirit. It is unobservable, and observation is critical to doing science.
As to biblical authority, speaking on the issue of the origin of the spirit, we have only the model of the original man, Adam. But, he is unique in that he got here under entirely different circumstances than all the rest of us. While we all began in our mother’s womb, Adam had his beginning by the direct agency of the Creator, who imparted Adam’s spirit by the breath of life breathed into him, as recorded in Genesis 2. How we received our human spirit remains a mystery, but it is no mystery that we each have one. We received it from God, however he imparted it, and it returns to God who gave it at the time of our physical death. All of these the Bible makes abundantly clear, and they are revealed in Ecclesiastes 12, Zechariah 12, Job 34, James 2. Of the three likely ways we received our spirit, it appears that the “tradution” is the most plausible. It contends that in the same way we receive physical characteristics from each parent via the genetic route, so too our immaterial spirit was received from both parents. Our difficulty is we have no idea how a non-physical entity can be transmitted from one person to another. Yet, we cannot conclude that such is impossible.
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