I'll admit, I didn't see this one coming. It would never have occurred to me to use the story of Jacob and Esau to redefine the Apostle Paul's use of "flesh" (Greek: sark) in the purely physical dualistic terms of Gnosticism. There is a reason for that, of course: The Apostle Paul isn't talking about our physical bodies (in opposition to our soul/spirit) when he writes about wrestling with the "flesh," which is why the NIV has chosen to translate Paul's intention "sinful nature" rather than a more literal English word like "flesh" which has a physical connotation that's hard to let go of.
And here we have Daniel Lancaster's Torah Club material stating that the cause of Paul's inner wrestling was his "flesh" is connected to the Hebrew idiom "flesh and blood" and therefore dovetails nicely with the idea that Lancaster has embraced of pre-existing souls that only wear a physical body like clothing. There are several problems with this whole line of thinking, including that these ideas were troubling enough to the Early Church to have been condemned as heresy at the Council of Constantinople. This path leads toward the Gnostic Dualism that so troubled the Apostle John in his first letter {1 John 4:2-3 This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3 but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.} and went on to cause enormous trouble for multiple generations within the Church before that idea of a divide in humanity between flesh/bad and spirit/good inspired by Greek philosophy died out.
When I fail to live up to my calling as a disciple of Jesus, it isn't my material body that's to blame (as if my spirit/soul is a helpless victim unable to stop that nasty body), it is me, all of me. I'm a whole person, not a collection of competing parts. Jesus Christ died to save all of me, not just my soul, and the Holy Spirit works to transform all of me, not just a corrupted flesh, so that on the day of Resurrection I will be fully renewed, body, spirit, and soul; one person made new by the power of God's grace.
The previous post from lesson #1 of The Beginning of Wisdom {The very first Torah Club lesson (covering Genesis 1:1-6:8) undermines the Trinity} presents, along with Daniel Lancaster's disturbing The Only Begotten Son {The boldly heretical anti-trinitarianism of Daniel Lancaster (One of the key leaders of the FFOZ and Torah Clubs) in his own words}, a picture of the Word of God as an avatar of God (not a person) who simply indwells the human man Jesus of Nazareth {who presumably had his own preexistent human soul}, with that same idea, "The spiritual aspect of a human being dwells within the body like a man living in a tent." (p. 10)
If Jesus Christ was a human being indwelt by an avatar of God, "like a body wearing clothing," as FFOZ is apparently teaching its followers, then that same dualism makes sense for the rest of us as well. "The word of God then divested himself, like took off his outer garment so to speak and clothed himself in a human body. Kind of like the word would dwell in the Tabernacle or would dwell in the temple." - Daniel Lancaster, The Only Begotten Son
But of course that's not the nature of Jesus described in the scriptures or accepted by the Church throughout its history at all, not even close. The spirit and body of Jesus Christ was made one (the hypostatic union) at the Incarnation when the eternal Word (2nd person of the Trinity) permanently took upon himself humanity, including a human body, that same body that was resurrected on Easter Sunday.
It can be difficult to wrap your mind around such concepts that are so far removed from the orthodoxy of the Church, but that's the rabbit trail of dangerous error that Daniel Lancaster and FFOZ is leading countless people along.
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