I was listening to a teacher and he said that humans were in spiritual form walking the Earth before they were in fleshly form walking the Earth. Is this true, and where in the Bible would it be located?
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I would be equally interested in knowing what biblical reference (if any) the teacher mentioned in the question can cite for the stated teaching. Paul (for example) clearly taught that the physical body precedes the spiritual, and that the physical body must die before being reborn as a spiritual body (1 Corinthians 15:35-50). Nowhere (to my knowledge) does the Bible teach a spiritual pre-existence of humans. Although there are statements such as Jeremiah 1:5 (where God speaks of having known a particular individual even before forming him in his mother's womb), that is not due to the person's spiritual existence prior to his physical birth, but reflects the fact that God is omniscient, eternal, and outside of time. He has known every person who has ever lived (or who will ever live) from eternity past, but that does not mean that any of those persons existed before they were physically born on earth. Jesus was (and is) the only human who ever had (or will have) such a pre-existence, since He (unlike any human) was (and is) truly God, as well as (by His miraculous conception and birth) truly human.
My Bible tells me that God created the heavens and the earth. Then in a specific sequence all else was created. The God said let us make man in our image. So man was created and given the breath of life. Male and female were formed. After earth and everything came to be, God gave spiritual life, ruah to man. So, I hardly think, that spirit beings of the human kind were walking earth before God created the "fleshy"kind. Now if you are talking about Satan, that is a whole different topic. He is a spirit being. Genesis chapters 1 and 2.
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