Part of the mindset of the old self that must be renewed in the new one is what was absorbed through contact with the Greek and Roman world, because that worldview was a human understanding forged in material reasoning rather than in the spiritual realm.
A human being who has not been reconciled with God remains bound to a purely earthly mindset and interpretation. Such a person cannot truly understand matters of the Spirit, because their natural or animal mind—the purely human, psychological, and instinctive level of perception—does not process spiritual reality correctly. As it has been said: “The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.”
From that state, one may construct a pseudo-spiritual version of reality—an imitation of spirituality—but it is not the spirituality that comes from the Spirit of God. True understanding is reached only through reconciliation with Him. Without reconciliation, spiritual realities are interpreted through earthly criteria: human logic, cultural patterns, inherited ideas, and imagination shaped by the material world.
This mindset attempted to understand spiritual truth using philosophical and rational standards. That was not the original prophetic Hebrew way of perceiving spiritual reality. Human ideas—philosophy, rationalism, and polytheistic concepts—were mixed with what had originally been received, and the essence was distorted. It is like adding water to pure perfume: it keeps the name, but loses its potency.
Human interpretation blended with what was originally spiritual understanding. To grasp what this means, consider a concrete example: the Hebrews viewed body and spirit as a unity created by God. They never understood them as enemies.
God did not give the first created couple a body as punishment for transgression, but as protection within the material realm where they would live. The penalty for transgression was death, and in spiritual terms that meant total separation from the Light, which is God. The body was shelter, not condemnation: a way to preserve the life they still had and an opportunity for reconciliation with the Creator. They were separated from total light, but also preserved from being delivered into eternal darkness, absolute separation from divine Light. Greek thought, however, taught that the body was the prison of the soul. That idea did not come from the Spirit; it came from human philosophy. When that philosophy entered interpretation, the spiritual began to be explained with earthly ideas. Instead of seeing the body as part of divine purpose, it came to be seen as an obstacle.
That distortion altered the essence of the message. Another example is the concept of evil. For the Hebrew prophets, evil was a choice: one turns away or one returns. It was not an inherently evil nature present from birth, but a deviation from the path. Greek and Roman thought, however, began to develop the idea of a “sinful nature,” as though the human being were born evil at the root. That idea also did not come from prophetic spiritual thought, but from Stoic philosophy. When that thinking entered interpretation, the message shifted: responsibility became inherited guilt; action became condition.
Here an essential clarification is necessary. The people in Ezekiel’s time did not think like the Greeks. They did not believe that one is born evil by nature. Their error was different: they believed they were suffering for the sins of their parents, as though punishment were inherited. That was a fatalistic interpretation of their history, not a doctrine about human essence. This is why God intervenes so forcefully and says, “You will no longer repeat this saying.” That belief—even though not Greek—still removed personal responsibility and distorted divine justice.
Thus, the spiritual was reduced to reasoning. When that happened, what was the power of the Spirit became doctrinal thought, and the living experience of inner balance was replaced by concepts and human ideas. That was the inheritance the old self absorbed from the world, believing it could comprehend the eternal with the temporal mind.
The path of the new self begins precisely here: when the human mind stops seeking on its own and learns to reason from the Spirit. This is not the elimination of reason, but its alignment—its association with the divine mind so that it thinks in harmony with it. The new self does not reject knowledge; it illuminates it with spiritual understanding. Its comprehension no longer arises from intellectual effort alone, but from inner communion with the Source. In that state, reason becomes an instrument of the spirit, and the mind a channel for genuine discovery.
For this reason, the new self does not live divided—between belief and thought, between body and soul, between the human and the divine. It lives in balance. Its thinking no longer rests on inherited interpretations or systems created by others, but on living instruction flowing from the Spirit within. That is true transformation: when the mind stops repeating what it has learned and begins listening from within, where the voice of life dwells.
All of this has a purpose: the fulfillment of God’s prophecy:
“This is the new covenant I will make with my people: I will put my words within their mind and write them on their heart. I will be their God, and they will be my people. They will no longer teach one another, saying, ‘Know God,’ because they will all know me, from the least to the greatest. I will forgive them and remember their errors no more.” And this will be fulfilled in the prophecy that says: “The whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of God.”
The new self does not reject human knowledge, because we are earthly beings. We cannot erase our humanity—that is not the point. The goal is to bring our humanity into a spiritual state, with a scope of discovery—both spiritual and earthly—that the natural mind cannot imagine. It is an extraordinarily powerful union, because it restores the authority of God that was lost in us.
Even with the promise that God Himself would teach us from within, many continued reasoning with minds shaped by Greco-Latin culture, trying to understand the spiritual using human intellectual tools. In doing so, they repeated the same error: explaining with the mind what can only be understood through the spirit. This is why the new self abandons that way of thinking—not because reason is bad, but because without the Spirit, reason closes in on itself, becomes limited, and reduces the eternal to human theories.
A clear example of this influence is the idea that body and spirit are two separate entities, each with its own nature. That separation did not exist in original Hebrew thought. In the ancient prophetic vision, the human being was a single integrated being: body and spirit forming one life. The body did not act independently or possess its own will; it was the visible expression of what the spirit chose. Greek thought—especially in Plato, the Stoics, and later early Gnosticism—introduced the belief that body and soul belong to two different realities. This artificial division produced a dualistic worldview that shaped spiritual interpretation.
Here the connection with Pauline thought becomes evident. The writer adopts language reflecting that cultural dualism when he speaks of his “body of death” on one side and his “inner man” delighting in God’s law on the other. This description reveals a sharp division between the physical and the inner, suggesting a conceptual framework influenced by the Greco-Roman environment. This way of thinking does not appear in the Hebrew prophets, who never describe the human being as two opposing natures, but as a unified whole that either strays from or returns to the path by spiritual choice.
In the Gospels, this influence is less pronounced because they emerge from Hebrew oral tradition. Still, the fact that they were written in Greek allowed certain Hellenistic concepts to enter. For example, in John we find the term Logos: “The Logos, the Word, became flesh and dwelt among us.” Logos is a Greek philosophical concept used by thinkers such as Heraclitus and Philo of Alexandria to describe universal reason or ordering principle. The writer uses it to express the living Word of God (dabar), but the nuance shifts: the Logos becomes a cosmic mediator, more abstract than the creative voice of the Hebrew God.
Matthew and Luke preserve more of the Hebrew vision—God acting within the physical world, not against it—while John adopts a more philosophical language, reflecting his cultural context. This shift from prophetic to philosophical language opened the door to more mental and doctrinal interpretations in later generations.
Within that cultural framework also emerged the idea that the human being is divided into an “inner” and an “outer” level, each with its own mode of existence. Some writers adopted this Greek dualistic language to describe spiritual experience. But that was not the original understanding. In the ancient prophetic vision, the human being was created as an integrated being: body and spirit forming a single life. Harmony between the two was essential to sustain a spiritual existence within the earthly world.
That harmony was not a philosophical concept, but a lived reality: the body could be strengthened, renewed, and healed through the spirit dwelling within it. This is why God’s promises of strength, vitality, and renewal did not depend on matter, but on inner connection with the Spirit of God. When the human being disconnects from that source, the body weakens and the soul dims. The ancients tried to explain this reality through rational, earthly thought, and in doing so separated what was originally one. It was a human attempt to explain the spiritual with material logic. The error was turning those interpretations into doctrine, as if they all came directly from God, when many arose simply from human effort to understand spiritual reality through reason.
The good news that the Kingdom had drawn near reached us filtered through a non-Hebrew understanding. That was not the original worldview, nor the purest one, nor the one Jesus held when He announced the Kingdom. The announcement was clear: “The Kingdom has drawn near.” It meant that spiritual restoration had begun. The process of returning to the Light had started. Between the moment those words were spoken and the complete closing of the cycle of the fall, there is a path humanity must walk. That path is not passivity, waiting, or resignation. It is mastering evil through a life of integrity, because it is precisely there that God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven. When that happens, the Kingdom of God will have come.
What Adam and Eve described—the loss of spiritual vision and the transformation from a luminous body to a body of flesh—will be reversed. They said, “Our eyes have become flesh; we no longer see as we once did… our body today is not what it was in the ancient days, when we lived in the Garden.” The veil that covered the eyes of our first parents will be lifted. We will see the spiritual as it truly is. What was hidden by matter will be revealed. And our body—no longer limited by corruptible flesh—will return to its spiritual nature, as it was in the beginning.
That was the purpose: not to flee the world, not to declare it lost, not to wait for an external rescue, but to overcome what overcame us. When belief passed through Greek and Latin minds, the meaning shifted. The Greeks turned spiritual life into philosophy and escape from the body. The Romans turned faith into a legal system. The focus changed: from responsibility to inherited guilt; from transformation to fear; from spiritual maturity to passive waiting; from victory to escapism.
The original mission was not to survive until being removed from this world. It was to defeat evil and restore lost spiritual authority. That is why the Kingdom drew near in Jesus—not to remove us from the world, but to ignite the light within us again and lead us toward complete restoration.
A final clarification: the words “sin” and “hell,” as we understand them today, did not exist in the ancient Hebrew world. The word jatá did exist, but it meant something different: “to miss the mark,” “to stray from the path,” “to lose direction.” It did not say “you are evil,” but “you took the wrong path.” The consequence was not eternal punishment in hell, but loss of communion with God—loss of Light, spiritual separation.
For the Hebrews, sin was not an identity. We are not born guilty. Sin was an action: departing from God’s way. And there was always the possibility of return.
When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, jatá became hamartía. In Greek thought, hamartía carried the meaning of “fault,” “guilt,” or “tragic error.” When it passed into Latin as peccatum, it became loaded with moral guilt and offense. Thus, what once meant “you missed the path” became “you are guilty and deserve punishment.” The phrase “you missed the path” contains mercy and an open way back; peccatum introduces judgment and condemnation.
In ancient tradition, Adam was gentle, kind, and docile. This shows he was not evil from the beginning. What was his error? Failing to master evil when he should have. He was overcome by what he was meant to overcome. That failure opened space for evil in his descendants. But that does not mean humanity is born evil. If God gives life, and God is pure, we cannot be born evil. We become evil through wrong choices, not through inherited nature.
In the original Hebrew vision, God created the human being with the capacity to think, reason, discern, and choose. When humanity was deceived by twisted words, it deviated from its purpose. But the solution was not infernal punishment; it was returning to the correct path. That return is called teshuvá—“returning home,” “going back to the origin.”
Jesus explained the same truth in the parable of the lost son. The common translation says, “I have sinned against heaven and against you.” But the Hebrew sense is clearer: “I have strayed from the path before heaven and before you.” He does not say, “I am evil by nature.” He says, “I lost direction.” Therefore, the solution is not condemnation, but return.
In the most legalistic book of Scripture, written from a priestly perspective, everything revolved around sanctuary order. There, sin was not understood as moral evil, but as a rupture in balance between the people and the divine Presence dwelling among them. In that context, jatá was not universal moral evil; it was ritual impurity or failure within the sacred system. It was repaired through symbolic restitution: offering, confession, or compensation.
If someone “sinned,” it meant impurity had been introduced and needed correction to restore communion with God and community. The purpose of the ancient system was to maintain the camp in purity so the divine Presence would remain. If impurity—through error, neglect, or contamination—was not addressed, the Presence withdrew and order collapsed. Straying from the path was not individual morality; it was introducing disorder into the system—an energetic rupture between human and divine.
With the adoption of Latin, peccare acquired a moral and religious tone. It no longer meant “to stray” but “to offend God” or “violate divine law.” Thus, a concept that once meant stumbling came to mean spiritual guilt. This linguistic shift led to the belief that human beings are born evil—a concept foreign to ancient Hebrew Scripture and rooted in later writings influenced by other cultures.
Psalm 51 has been used for centuries to support the idea of original sin: “In sin my mother conceived me.” But the Hebrew text does not say that. The words avón and jatá mean distortion and missing the mark, not moral sin. The real sense is: “I was conceived in a twisted world, amid human distortion.” David was not declaring himself evil by birth nor accusing his mother; he was justifying his guilt in poetic language. Later Greco-Latin interpreters took the word “sin” literally and, believing the body to be corrupt, turned it into doctrine. Thus, a personal lament became the belief that humanity is born morally corrupt in an evil body—foreign to Hebrew thought, which saw humans as upright, capable of straying or returning.
This interpretation also distorted the image of God, turning birth—the purest act—into guilt. A God who makes someone guilty at birth would be unjust, just as in Ezekiel’s time when people said, “The parents ate sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” God corrected that idea: each person answers for their own path.
Ancient Hebrew understanding says the opposite. Ecclesiastes states: “God made humankind upright, but they sought many distortions.” Texts describing children who do not yet know good from evil clearly show that humans are not born corrupt. We are born innocent, morally undefined, and form our path because we are born free.
One more essential clarification: later texts portraying humans as “evil from birth” considered only earthly condition, not spiritual origin. In that view, humanity was flesh and bone, and after the fall its nature became corrupt. But ancient Hebrew thought did not teach a biological inheritance of evil, but an inheritance of consequences. Children were believed to suffer from their parents’ failures—a primitive understanding of justice, not transmission of nature. This idea appears in Pentateuchal passages where God is said to “visit the iniquity of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”
Ezekiel directly corrects this belief: each person dies for their own deviation, not for the actions of others. This restores the original spiritual principle of individual responsibility and true justice. It also reveals that earlier expressions reflected limited human understanding of spiritual reality—especially of the original transgression, which was an act of the spirit, not of flesh, since flesh did not yet exist in our first ancestors.
We are born free, capable of choice. We cannot blame God for the consequences of our wrong decisions. Some tragedies are not the result of conscious choices, but they do not come from God either. Whoever lives under His protection does not live under the dominion of misfortune. They may face difficulty, but the promise is deliverance. We are not born indebted; we are born good. We could remain in the Light if we chose. We stray by our own decisions, and the good news is that we can always return.
Hell is another belief better removed from our minds, because it creates an image of God that does not belong to Him. Ancient Hebrews had no concept of eternal torment; that idea arose from Persian, Greco-Roman, and later Christian theology. In Hebrew understanding, divine justice does not torture; it restores or destroys evil. God will destroy the source of evil. The prophets announced the final eradication of the rebellious spiritual power that led humanity to transgress the Word. Though humans may choose separation, they are not the authors of evil. That is why God chose to save them—if they accept salvation.
In Hebrew understanding, fire symbolizes purification, not eternal torture. In the Gospels, the word Gehenna was mistranslated as hell, altering Jesus’ meaning: “If your right eye causes you to stumble, remove it… for it is better that one part be lost than for your whole body to be thrown into Gehenna.”
Gehenna referred not to a spiritual realm, but to a real valley near Jerusalem—the Valley of Hinnom—where refuse and corpses were burned. It symbolized idolatry and destruction, and prophets used it metaphorically for divine judgment. It did not represent eternal punishment, but the destruction of what no longer serves—a cosmic refuse site.
When Jesus spoke of Gehenna, He used severe symbolic language: it is better to cut off what destroys you spiritually than to end completely ruined. He was not speaking of eternal torture, but of losing the purpose of existence. His language emphasized the seriousness of departing from the path of Light. Jesus removed uncertainty about what comes after death when He manifested to Mary Magdalene and His closest collaborators, confirming His words: “I go to prepare a place for you, so that where I am, you may also be.” He showed that the Kingdom is real and continuous—not illusion or metaphor, but true life in the Spirit.
As you can see, there is much to renew, remove, and transform from the old self—not only what remains in our memory from the former fallen spirit, but also what came from outside and was accepted without discernment as though it were divine inspiration.