CHOOSING OUR IMAGE

Because the soul is the instinctive and the inner part of the makeup of our personality, emotions, will, feelings, desires, and appetites; it is subject to happiness and unhappiness, misery and joy, healing and wounding, fortune and misfortune, judgment and misjudgment, giving and misgiving and eventually life and death.
The Lord has determined that lower creatures be governed primarily by instinct. But humans are given the distinction of free will and reason, which makes them capable of conforming, or not conforming, to the image of God. Animals conform by nature and purpose and with only their instincts are perfectly in the image of God. The soul gives the distinction of choice. When God imposed a law (the choice of the trees in the garden, Genesis 2:16-17) it gave humans the ability to understand a law. Or, to deal with a choice.

To understand a law is to produce a conscience, which literally means ‘a knowing with, or co-knowledge with oneself, the faculty by which we can apprehend the will of God.’ (Dictionary) When Adam heard the law he had an instructed conscience and when he disobeyed the law he suffered from an accusing conscience. The soul knowingly and willingly sinned against God. It can just as well knowingly and willingly obey God. It is a choice.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” Jesus