John 3:7-8 Marvel not that I said to you, You must be born again. 8 The wind blows where it wants, and you hear the sound thereof, but can not tell from where it comes, and where it goes: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is very powerful. The work of the Spirit is very real, and very physical. Just as sin is very real and physical.


Our personal identity, our character is very real and very physical.

I don't see how you can hold this. Do you think a physical part of us returns to God (since the character returns to Him)?

What is it that God preserves?

He preserves the stamp of our character in His memory (and our identity, our memories, our feelings, etc.) - IOW, all the contents of our mind.

There is no separate soul, I think you do agree with this. When our characters are reconstructed as EGW says, it is not the individual particles of matter that important, God does not need the exact same particles, what He knows is the pattern in which they are constructed. God remembers the pattern. Memory is not an immaterial thing, it is made up of matter, the arrangement of neurons, the interconnections, etc. It is all physical and real. There is nothing immaterial about "us". All parts make up the whole. Yes, we can get by without an arm or a leg, the real action is in the brain. But it is the physical pattern on how everything is arrange that makes up "you". If I were to sustain a head injury which destroyed my frontal lobes, my personality would change. We are real and physical beings. Sin is the same. It is real and physical. The work of the Holy Spirit is real and physical. You might not see it working as John says in Chapter 3, but it is powerful. And yes, it is working on the physical level, even at the microscopic, atomic level. And what we eat and drink does matter as it affects us physically.

Our memories are stored in physical structures of the brain, but they are not these physical structures. The brain is where our life experiences are stored, but our brain is not our life experiences. We are the result of our conscious choices, of our interactions with others, with the world, and with God; this is completely real, but not physical.
The human mind is shrouded in mystery, but I would say that if you were to sustain a head injury which destroyed your frontal lobes, your personality might change, and you might exhibit even bad character traits, but it's interesting that God wouldn't hold you responsible for that. This happened to James White after a stroke.

Our memories are nothing without the physical structure. Yes, consciousness is a mystery, but it is not immaterial, it is real. God's communication with us is via the physical. You can not separate "us" from the physical structure. It is not our outward appearance, height, weight, etc., but it is the arrangement of the neuronal connections, the biophysical chemistry which is "us". We are made up of living machinery.

As I said, if the physical structure is damaged, thus altering your behavior, God doesn't hold you responsible for that, for the new behavior is not what you really are. Notice, your new behavior is what your physical structure make you to be now, but it's not what you really are. So what you really are goes beyond the physical structure.

You have mentioned what God holds us responsible for several times now, I have no worry about God for He will do the right thing. Man judges by the appearance, but God looks on the heart. An excellent example is when Christ healed the demoniacs. Don't let them near an Adventist church today! They would be judged unworthy. Not so with God.

Back to the physical structure - WHAT goes beyond our physical structure? We are nothing without our physical structure. Did you notice in EGW's quote above, that it is via the electrical impulses of the brain by which God communicates with us? Is this not real and physical? It is!

It seems I'm not being able to convey my point very successfully. Think about James White after his strokes. He thought Ellen was trying to control him, and he made her life very difficult. Was this the real James White? This was the James White that his damaged physical structure at the time made him to be, but this was not James White's real character that God preserved for his resurrection. God preserved his character/personality of years before, as God remembered him. IOW, his physical structure was no longer correspondent to the person he really was.