Good Guys Kill Bad Guys

The following is an excerpt of a conversation I had with my three year old son as best as I can remember it. It happened after I watched him hit his sister though he did not know I was watching. I approached and asked him what he did to her and he said she hurt herself. Even after telling him that I saw him, he locked up in fear and would not admit his crime. After giving him spankings he told me that it wasn’t nice of me to give him spankings. The following is what we said:

Me: Why did I give you spankings?

Everette: (crying) I don’t know

Me: I told you it was because you hit your sister. Did you hit your sister?

Everette: I don’t want to hit her anymore

Me: But you already hit her. You were not loving her. That makes you a bad guy.

Everette: I don’t want to be a bad guy! I’m not going to be a bad guy anymore! (crying more heavily)

Me: It’s too late. You’re already a bad guy. Good guys love God and people all the time. You already did not love Audrey. You can’t take it back. You’re a bad guy.

Everette: I don’t want to be a bad guy!

Me: You know what happens with bad guys don’t you? (Everette stares at me blankly) the good guys kill the bad guys. I should have killed you for being a bad guy but I only gave you two spankings.

Everette: I don’t want to be killed! (now sobbing uncontrollably)

Me: but you’re a bad guy. The good guys should kill you.

Everette: Please! I don’t want to be killed! I don’t want to be killed! (still sobbing)

Me: Do you want Jesus to be killed for you? (his crying completely stopped and I can see that he remembered what we told him about the cross and Jesus dying for our sins)

Everette: Yes, (whimpering) I want Jesus to be killed for me. I want him to go on the cross so I don’t have to die.

Me: He already did that. He was killed so that you could be a good guy and love God and love people. Did you know that Jesus had to die for Daddy too? Daddy was a bad guy too, but Jesus died for me too.

Everette: Yeah

Me: Does that make you love Jesus?

Everette: Yeah (he snuggled up next to me while sitting on my lap)

Me: we really love Jesus don’t we

Everette: Yeah

Me: He rescued us

Everette: Yeah, he rescued us from the bad guys.

Me: He rescued us from ourselves. We’re the bad guys. And because he rescued you, you need to love your sister and mommy and daddy and other people and God. Can you go give Audrey a hug and a kiss and tell her you’re sorry?

Everette: Yeah! (he gets off my lap and goes to find Audrey)

About five minutes later he took a toy from Audrey and he had to be reminded of this conversation all over again… and again… and again. But every time we have to remind him it hammers in the truth that he cannot be a good guy, only Jesus is a good guy, and he needs to rely completely on Jesus for both forgiveness and a change of heart. Don’t we all need that constant reminder?

God always intended to have a clothed humanity

I think, sin or no sin, God always intended to have a clothed humanity. Nowhere in the bible is any other creature said to be naked (as far as I can find). Yet Adam and Eve discovered that they were naked. Discovered! How would there even be a term for nakedness unless they were originally intended to be covered up eventually. Satan doesn’t create something out of nothing. There would have to be such a thing as clothes for a lack of clothes to be bad (or incomplete, for nothing was bad before the fall though things were incomplete, like the cultivation of the earth and like the man before the woman was made). Here is what I think happened.

I think to some extent the serpent must have known that mankind was in process, that God had more in store for humanity. Perhaps he didn’t know what it was, but I think he knew there was something more coming. His crafty plan then was to play off the desire God inherently put in the humans for the complete plan and get them to try and short cut their way to it and ruin God’s great design for them.

Satan tried the same thing on Jesus in the wilderness. He told Jesus, “Bow down to me and I will give you the whole world.” He tempted Jesus to try to get the same thing God promises but without the suffering. But it is a trick because Satan does not have the ability to come through on the promise. His only desire is to screw everything up for God. A kind of “If I can’t have my way then neither can you” mentality.

But little did Satan know that it was through Judas’ betrayal and Jesus’ death that God’s plan was realized. The apparent victory of Satan became his ultimate defeat.

Likewise, the serpent didn’t want God’s plan for the humans to succeed so he promised the same thing he thought God was going to eventually give them, though the serpent did not have the ability to come through on the promise.

And little did the serpent know that it was through the transgression of Adam and Eve that God’s plan to clothe them with his righteousness through the sacrifice of his Son would be realized. And they not only get the clothes he originally intended for them, but they also get the recreated bodies as well. For Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that the kind of bodies we have now cannot inherit the kingdom of God. But instead of saying that our bodies need to be made like Adam’s was, he says they need to be resurrected to be like Christ’s is. He says if there is a natural body then there is a spiritual body, but the natural comes before the spiritual.

From the beginning Adam and Eve inherently had a desire for resurrected bodies and for life in the Spirit like we will have one day and for the true marriage, the true one flesh relationship between God and his people, Christ and the church. I think it may have been this unspoken desire that made the temptation possible. They felt in their heart that there was something more, but they didn’t wait and see what God would do.

Being the Bride Makes Church Men More Manly Not Less

It has to do with holiness.  The church is made more holy as the Bride than if it were merely children, brothers, friends of God.

What does it mean to be holy?

Most of us would define holiness as being set apart. This is true but we usually just mean set apart from sin which is only a small part of what it means to be holy.  To see this, think about our holiness when we are in heaven. Will we be perfectly sinless? Yes. Will we be just as holy as God? No. He is infinitely Holy whereas we are finite.  But there is no such thing as degrees of sinlessness.  I would like to suggest to you that there are degrees of holiness. If so, then what does holiness mean?

Let me propose this statement to help us understand holiness:  To increase in holiness is to increase in becoming like Jesus as prophet, priest, and king.

Each of these roles have to do with overseeing or ruling over the rest of creation. They are positions of power and respect and responsibility. Positions that are ingrained in the genetic makeup of men in ways that are different than women, though present in women as well. 

God is set apart from all creation because he is the Creator. But God made us to be creative in his image, to be holy as he is holy. God is set apart to rule over all creation because he upholds it and in him everything moves and lives and has breath. But God made us to rule over creation in his image, to be holy as he is holy.  God judges creation declaring what is good and very good and not good.  But God made us to judge creation in his image declaring what glorifies God and how excellently it does so. In the new heaven and new earth, we are to be holy as he is holy. What can be more manly than ruling with power and authority and gentleness and love?

To be holy is to rule over creation in distinct male and female roles for the glory of God. To be holy is to be manly and womanly as God created man and woman to be, respectively.

Being the Bride makes us Holy

Paul shows us this in Ephesians 5:25-27

“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify [make holy] her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.”

Shortly after this statement he says that the one flesh relationship between husband and wife is pointing to the relationship between Christ and the church.  Clearly the above quote is referring to the same relationship of Christ as husband and church as bride.  So it is through betrothal to him as his bride that we are made to be actually holy.  Why is that?

The short answer is, “Because that’s how God wanted to do it.” But we can see why through various means.  First, think about how a girl who is not a princess might become a queen. She marries a prince.  But if she is to function well as a queen she must be made queen-like even though the marriage itself makes her truly a future queen.

Second, perhaps this could be done by adoption instead but the sister of the king is less holy than the queen and God wants us to be as holy as possible. (He wants this because the more we are glorified by him the more his glory is seen to be infinitely greater.) True he adopted us, which makes us holy, but he also will marry us, which makes us as holy as any mere creature could be. It is the only way. 

Thirdly, if we were mere brothers then all we would experience of God’s love is fatherly and brotherly love.  But we are made in God’s image and there is a love between the persons of the Trinity that only marrital bliss can emulate.  Being made in his image means we desire to have this sort of love as well. So in order to experience this sort of love from God we must be his bride. This too makes us more holy. No other creature experiences marrital bliss with the Creator. And if we are more holy we are more manly (or womanly if a woman). 

Men, maybe you are not concerned about your manliness when the Bible calls the church his bride, but if you are like me it gives you great joy to find out that being the bride actually makes you more manly and not less. It is one of the great ironies of the Gospel. To recover our intended masculinity we need first be his bride.

From Lust to Love: One Flesh

Previous post…

“Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

In the previous post we discovered that Paul wants us to know that whenever we lust we forget (with our hearts and minds) four aspects of the Gospel and two aspects of our sin. Here they are.

Four aspects of the Gospel:

Our bodies are members of Christ

He who clings to the Lord becomes one spirit with him

Our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit

You have been bought with a price

Two aspects of our sin:

He who clings to a prostitute becomes one body with her

Sexual immorality is the only sin against your own body

Pulling out these points in list form helps us to see just how much Paul stacks up against sexual immorality in just a few verses. However, we will not be looking at them in that particular order. Instead we will follow the same flow of thought that Paul does.

We already looked at Paul’s first point. In this point we found that like a finger is a member of your body, so your body is a member of Christ, sharing in the divine nature, working together with all the members to manifest God’s glory for the world to see who God is.

What happens when a member of Christ has sex with or fantasizes about sex with a prostitute? In order to understand this we have to look at what it means to be “one flesh” since Paul quotes Genesis 2 to explain it.

“And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”

And earlier it says,

“‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness….’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.”

Why does the man’s song about the woman (“flesh of my flesh”) cause the author of Genesis to interject a command for marriage? It seems to me there are a number of conclusions he could have drawn here. He could say, “Therefore a wife must submit to her husband,” as Paul concludes from this passage in Ephesians 5:31. Or he could say, “A wife must wear a sign of her husband’s authority on her head,” as Paul concludes in 1 Corinthians 11:8 from this passage.

Or why did God even institute marriage at all? Why have a man leave his father and mother and cling to a wife? Especially since most of the time in that culture they still lived at the man’s parents’ house? Could not mankind fulfill the “be fruitful and multiply” commandment just fine without marriage? Remember, there was no marriage before this. God invents it here. He does not base it off of something else in creation. Why does he do it?

God created marriage to set the stage for the clearest image of who he is in the world. Marriage is based off of what God is like within himself. To be sure, man by himself is made in God’s image (likewise the woman by herself) but it is not good for man to be alone because God is and was never alone. He was always in relationship within the trinity. He is relational by nature, so he made relational beings in his image. For he said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” So male and female are together a fuller image of who God is and that is seen most clearly in marriage, which is ultimately fulfilled in Christ and the church.

God did not give woman to man merely as a friend or a companion but as a wife. The two became one flesh. This does not happen with all human friendships but only with the husband and wife. That tells us that it is more than a mere commitment or rubbing off on each other for you can have that with close friends. To become one flesh is to become a new united person, a new united body. It is to become two in one reflecting the way that God is three in one, though it is not entirely the same.

To become one flesh is to become a new outward expression of a spiritual unity or oneness. Take some time to think about how remarkable that is. Two people can become spiritually united, spiritually one and thus physically one body even when their bodies are not together. For the body is the outward expression of the soul. Likewise, husband and wife are together one body outwardly expressing a oneness of soul. They have distinct wills and emotions and personalities but they are consumed by the same desire to see the other glorify God by enjoying Him forever. Like a dancing couple they orbit around each other continually making the other look good. And all this happens by saying ceremonial words and consummating those words!

This image of the triune God has been distorted by the fall but the reality of this spiritual unity still remains. For Jesus still said of marriage thousands of years after the fall, “What God has joined together, let no man separate” (Mk. 10:9). Thus when Paul addresses sexual immorality, specifically regarding sex with prostitutes, he understands that this one flesh relationship is created with whomever you sleep with. You become one flesh in this way with a prostitute. And Jesus takes this even further and says that if you even look at a woman with lust in your heart you have already committed adultery with her in your heart. You have already created a one flesh relationship with her in your heart.

That is very real. And very very serious. Men, I implore you to plead with God to make this truth about your sin real to you and to bring you to broken hearted repentance over even the slightest glance of lust. Can you see how even the slightest glance or thought of lust is worthy of eternal punishment? Can you see how much we need to be forgiven for? Meditate on this until you do.

—

On that note, I want to let anyone who has been following this series know that I will be taking a short break from blogging. It has been very rewarding doing the research for these posts but it has also taken very much of my time and attention to do all the studying that goes into them. As a pastor for my family in a time that is difficult for my family, I need to make sure I am devoting as much attention as I can to leading them well and to following Christ’s leading of me. I hope that you will continue reading these when I resume them in the future. Thank you for taking the time as I know they are quite long. And thank you for your prayers; I covet them greatly.

Grace and peace,
Peter James

From Lust to Love: Members of Christ’s Body

Previous post…

“Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.”

If just reading through this passage does not make your jaw drop then you processed it too quickly. Look! Our bodies, not just our souls, are members of Christ like your finger is a member of you or like a branch is a member of a tree. Look at what happened on the cross and in the empty tomb and when you said, “Jesus is Lord” in your head and heart. Your soul was joined to him in his death and resurrection. And your body too! It is not just your soul that already is being renewed and will be renewed it is also your body.

Sure, your body will fall apart and die one day but it is already being filled with the life-giving Spirit learning how to be used for the Lord for His glory. Your mind, your hormones, your emotions, hands, eyes–every part of your body is learning from the Spirit how to be engaged in the Lord’s work. Though your body will die, what you have learned to do with your body for the Lord will be preserved and made complete in the resurrection of your body.

So what is the problem when you sleep with someone you are not married to or even fantasize about it? Does Paul say, “You’re breaking the ‘Do not commit adultery’ law,” or “You’re going to ruin your marriage to your wife” or “You’re going to become a despicable person?” No, he says, “You are not believing the Gospel!” You are not living in a way that makes sense with what happened to you when you first believed and what is happening to you if indeed you continue believing.

When he says “Do you not know” he is not referring to a head knowledge. The Bible never considers knowledge of the mind a complete knowledge. If you really know something you know it with your heart and your head. You feel the knowledge living inside of you. You start using sensory language like taste and see and hear and touch for how your heart experiences this knowledge. Do you have knowledge of your unity to Christ like that?

When you do not it is called forgetting for–like knowledge–forgetting in the Bible is never only about the mind either. You have forgotten with your heart and you need to remember–with your heart.

You remind yourself through meditation and prayer. But there is more that Paul wants us to know. It is not just that we are forgetting the Gospel. We are forgetting four aspects of the Gospel and two aspects of our sin. Every time we lust we forget these six things with our heart.

The first aspect of the Gospel was that our bodies are members of Christ, the other three are for the next posts…

From Lust to Love: The Body to be Raised

Previous post…

There was a man who lived in a house in the middle of, as they call it, nature. A quiet stream gave drink to his garden which grew adjacent his back porch. The trees were large but fairly sparse letting sunlight into the forest like vertical blinds. The green of the leaves and of the moss growing on the trees and of the underbrush covering the floor of the forest were of a green so rich and deep it gave the appearance that it was the green itself giving life to the plants and not their roots.

The man thought there was nothing better than living among nature. In fact, he wished that he did not even need his house and food and shelter but only nature itself. It was this wish that lead him to have his house demolished not two months ago. For he had found out that there was a new drug on the market that replaced your need for food and made your flesh so tough and quickly self-healing that shelter was no longer necessary as well. He was both anxious and dismayed that the earliest his pharmacy could have the drug delivered to him was in one year’s time. So he scheduled the demolition for the same day.

As you can imagine, by the time one year came, his house was a disaster before the demolition team even got there. During the year a leak had let rain water flood the kitchen and damage the wood flooring and cabinets; he failed to sweep or pick up any food that had fallen on the floor in any part of the house; he never cleaned spills off the furniture; a nearby branch broke a window during a strong wind and he just boarded it up. The house was no longer a home months before it was no longer a building.

Today, the man is full of regret. He came to find that instead of being a barrier to fully enjoying nature, his house had been one of the ways to enjoy nature even more. The drug not only took away his need for food and shelter it also took away his enjoyment of it. He no longer hungered but he also no longer tasted. He no longer felt pain, but he also no longer felt. He used to love picking berries on his walks and eating them lying on his back in the cool grassy meadow that felt like a million kisses on his skin. Now he could taste and feel neither. He was like a ghost haunting the world it used to live in, longing to partake of it again.  He would have to wait another year and a half for the drug that reversed his condition to arrive. And he had to start from scratch with regaining his belongings and rebuilding his house.

There was another man in this same forest with a similar house just far enough away that the two never knew of each other’s presence in the forest. He also loved nature. Around the same time that the other man’s house was demolished this man’s house was also torn down. But his was immediately rebuilt bigger and with greater integration into the forest around it. One year prior he had received a phone call. He had been chosen out of millions of contestants to receive a free remodeling of his house.

But there were some rules. They would tear down the house and rebuild a new one, but they would use as much of the original materials as they could. Also, their total budget was to be three times the value of his home and belongings at the time that they tore it down. So he had one year to make it as valuable as he could so that he would get even more out of the free remodeling. Of course, he could have left it how it was, but he wanted the most he could get out of the prize.

All year he worked at remodeling his home, making sure everything he did could also be taken apart and reused for the new home. He worked hard on this home but only so that the new home would be grand.

When a year came the total budget for the new rebuild was 3.5 million dollars. Much of his current home was already new and of valuable material and would be reused in the new home. However they would also add material worth three times more than what he used and they would be side by side in the home: granite with marble, maple with cherry wood, and so forth.

It was also very much integrated with it’s surroundings. There were two main sections to the one building so that the whole house was straddling a small but lively stream. There were low bridges that connected both parts of the house where he would frequently dangle his feet into the stream and go fishing or send boats downstream. The whole house was surrounded by a garden that supplied much of his food. There were skylights and entire walls of etched glass that gave stunning views of the forest as the sun reflected off the many prisms and chimes that hung along the ceiling. You could not go anywhere in his house without seeing at least three rainbows dancing on the walls and floors and ceiling. The whole house danced with joy and peace and fullness of life.

—

If the men are souls and their houses are bodies, which would be closest to your belief about the body and soul and what happens at death (the demolition)? Which one is like what the Corinthians believed? Which one is like Paul’s belief? Let’s look at the next verse in the passage from the previous post:

“Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power.“

The Corinthians thought that it did not really matter what you do with your body since it was just going to die and rot while your soul lived on. They thought who you are is a soul and your body is just a shell for your soul, an unnecessary vessel that we will one day be free from. But Paul says the “I” is both the body and soul, to exist without the other is to no longer be fully human or fully you. The body is the outward form or manifestation of the soul. To touch the body is to touch the soul, to see the body is to see the soul. To hear the physical vibrations from larynx and tongue and lips in speech is to hear the immaterial soul’s voice. The two are intimately woven together and interdependent.

And look what Paul says will happen to the body:

“What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body…. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.”

Your body will be raised.  It will have differences; it will be better.  But it will still be your body that is raised, not a new shell for your same soul.  Like a plant comes from a seed, so the resurrected body will be from some of the same physical material that makes up your current body.  You, both body and soul, you will be raised.  He raised Lazarus who had the same body, not a new body.  Surely his body had already started to decay, but Jesus raised the same body of Lazarus and restored its condition.  The Father can and will do the same for us.

This means that what you do with your body matters.  Earlier in the letter, Paul says this about the church, but it also includes what you do with your body for the Lord, as we will see later that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit:

“Let each one take care how he builds upon [the foundation]. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.”

The good news of the gospel includes forgiveness of sins and reconciliation and adoption and redemption. These are at its core. But it also includes the body to be raise by God for God once for all time. God raised Jesus and he will also raise us up by his power.  The body is for the Lord and he will raise it from its mire and clay to glory so that he will get all the more glory. And we will be judged based on what we do with our bodies among other things, not to determine salvation but to determine rewards in heaven, real rewards that correspond to the work we do for Him:

“And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”

Do you, Christian, believe that this awaits you? How much time and thought do you devote to eternal rewards? Jesus tells you to be motivated to work for him for the rewards he has waiting for you in heaven. Does that strike you as odd and idolatrous? Only if we realize that the rewards are merely means of truly enjoying him better do we see that being motivated by rewards is being motivated by love for God. Just like the second man who was able to enjoy living in nature more because of his house and not less.

But how does this relate to our sexuality?

Next post…

From Lust to Love: The Lord for the Body

Previous post…

The believer reading these posts knows how to become part of the story of the Gospel: repent and believe. But I believe few of us realize the spiritual realities that take place when we believe, especially as they relate to sexual immorality. When it comes to fighting against sexual sin we often skip or skim over the “what Christ has done” in regards to our sexuality and go straight to “what we do in response.” We are in need of a thorough explanation of what happened to our sexuality when Christ died, was raised, and we believed and keep on believing.

Paul gives us this explanation, which is easily the most crucial passage in the bible on sexual immorality, in his first letter to the Corinthians.

“‘Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food and God will destroy both one and the other.’ The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, ‘The two will become one flesh.’ But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

Paul begins by either quoting the Corinthians or summing up what they are essentially believing. That is, they are saying that sexual desire is just an appetite like the desire for food; it is merely something we satisfy and then move on from, having no real consequence on spiritual matters. This is a popular view of sex today as well.

Food is for the stomach, but sex is for the whole body. The stomach is for food, but the whole body is for sex. The reason to exercise, the reason to diet, to eat and to not eat, these are all for preparing the body as the best possible vessel for sex to get the most out of sex. The best thing that we could do with our hands and legs and eyes and etc. is to engage in the best possible sex.

Perhaps we Christian men would never say that, but do our lives reveal that we actually do believe it?  Is sex the dominating thought in our lives? When we are out among people in the world do we look around for people to love and share Christ with or do we look around for the most beautiful women to enjoy looking at? When we have free time to think or to do anything we choose what does our mind default to?  What our mind defaults to is what we believe the mind is for.  What our bodies default to and pursue is what we believe our bodies are for.  Does your life show that you believe your body is for sex or for the Lord?

The body is for the Lord. How do we believe that?  The body with all of its urges, appetites, longings, and desires was designed to intimately belong to the Lord. And the Lord intimately belongs to the body of desires.

God did not have to create physical bodies for his creatures.  He did not have to give us two hands, two feet, two eyes, a mind, a stomach, hormones, reflexes. There was no unchangeable document floating in the void called “If You, God, Are Going to Create Humans, Here is What They Should Look and Be Like.”  Rather, God from his own creativity and out of his own purposes designed us in his own image for his own delight.  God designed our bodies from scratch with no model to go off of except himself.   He decided to put himself in the design of our bodies more than any other thing he created, so that he could say,

“‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them…. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” (Genesis 1:26-27)

From the very beginning he gave us feet and hands and hearts so that we could go and serve and love.  These are not just things he wants us to do with our bodies.  They are the reason he gave us bodies!  We are designed for his work, to do his work as a royal priesthood, as managers of his property, as sons and daughters in their Father’s house.  The body is for the Lord!

And the Lord is for the body.  The Lord is in favor of the body, looking out for it, caring deeply about what happens to it and is done with it. He wants the body and its desires to be fulfilled and he knows fulfillment is in himself alone through the many gifts he has given to it.  Not only that but he also designed the body so that it would be sustained and animated and satisfied and fulfilled in him and him alone.  The Lord is for the body, almost like electricity is for a computer.  Without electricity the computer is lifeless.  Without the Lord, our bodies and souls are walking zombies.  Do you believe that God is in favor of your physical body? Do you believe that he wants wholeness and pleasure and peace and healing for your physical body and not just your soul? Do you believe that he wants all those desires and longings that ache inside your body to be satisfied completely?  He wants it more than you do, for only he knows fully what your body is missing.

Are you beginning to see the richness and largely untapped wealth of truth there is in scripture in regards to our sexuality? We are only one verse in to the passage and already we have seen incredible power for redeeming our sexuality.  But even this will not change our hearts.

Knowing the purpose for the body will only lead us to try harder to repurpose our bodies by our own will power.  How do we get caught up in to the story of the Gospel that gives power to the powerless? What happened on the cross and in the empty tomb that has anything to do with God being for our body? Wasn’t that just about forgiveness, adoption, eternal life, and other spiritual things? What did the death and resurrection of Jesus have to do with our physical bodies?

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