But how, we may ask, does the believer pass from the fleshly state to become actually a “spiritual” man?

The “spiritual” man is distinguished above his fellowmen as strong one in whom the spirit of God rules. The “ruling of the spirit” does not mean merely the Spirit of God ruling the carnal, or the natural man, but the regenerate spirit grown stronger than soul, mind and body, so that it rules over all three as it indwells in the soul and is there strengthened by the Spirit of God; according to the prayer of Paul for the Ephesians, that they might be “strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man.”

The “spiritual man” is he who “walks after the spirit,” and “minds” the spirit—the spirit being thus so in co-working with the Holy Spirit, that the Life-giving Spirit of the Second Adam is able freely and fully to animate all the faculties of the soul—i. e., the mind, imagination, reason, and judgment, to quicken the members of the body (Rom. 8:11), and manifest through them His fullest and highest will.

THE BELIEVER who has become really “spiritual”—that is, with his spirit ruling soul, mind and body—does not at that time pass out of the realm of conflict, but enters upon a more subtle phase of it, as set forth on Ephes. 6:10-18. The man who is said, in Ephes. 2:6, to be seated “in heavenly places in Christ Jesus,” is afterwards described as “wrestling with spiritual hosts of wickedness in high places,” particularly in the form of “wiles” of the devil.

This indicates that the spiritual believer in conflict has mainly to watch against subtle spiritual wiles of spirit-foes, who are seeking to entangle him in matters connected with the spiritual realm, rather than in the conflict between flesh and spirit described in Gal. 5:17.

In this phase of conflict, the wiles of the powers of darkness are mainly directed toward getting the spiritual man to walk, in some degree, after the psychic state and not after the Spirit; that is, to be influenced by and to walk by anything in the realm of the desires and emotions, instead of in the Spirit in co-operation with the Holy Spirit of God.