What God Has to Say about Our Bodies

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
—
WHAT'S WHAT GOD HAS TO SAY ABOUT OUR BODIES ABOUT?

At the center of the Christian faith is the belief that by coming to earth as one of us, Christ could die for our sins, rise to new life, bring us into fellowship with God, and begin the process of putting right all that's gone wrong. But at the center of that claim, tucked away where we don't always see it, is the notion that to become one of us, Jesus had to become flesh. To become a human person, he needed to become a human body.

Become a body, not simply don one for a few years...

Bodies matter. Jesus couldn't become a real human person without one. And we can't hope to enjoy authentic life without one either. That his body matters is proof that mine and yours do too. He became what he valued enough to redeem. He couldn't come for people without coming for their flesh and without coming as flesh.

Hardwired into most of us is some sense that we all get what we deserve. So it is easy to apply that mindset to sickness and infirmity and wonder if the suffering isn't some sort of payback for sins. But Jesus is unequivocal in his response: “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents” (John 9:3). We're not to extrapolate from someone's suffering what they might have done to deserve it. It doesn't work like that. The main connection between suffering and sin is at a general, humanity-wide level rather than at an individual level. It is not that one person's suffering is a sign of his or her sin, but that anyone's suffering is a sign of everyone's sin.

WHAT GOD HAS TO SAY ABOUT OUR BODIES

We need to know this. In too many areas of our discipleship we have separated our Christianity from our bodies. There are areas of our physical life that we think are irrelevant to our faith, and there are parts of our Christian life that we think have nothing to do with our bodies.

The truth is that the New Testament often speaks of discipleship in bodily terms, and in ways that tend to surprise us...These things are not trivial or spiritually irrelevant. The problem many of us have is that we are oblivious to their spiritual significance; we don't see them as part of our discipleship and service to God.

* Basically “taste not, touch not” kind of things.