As an American, you are a Westerner. So much of how you think comes from the Greeks, even though you may not be aware of it. Most of our default ways of thinking aren’t scriptural or biblical; they’re fundamentally Greek. That’s why the Apostle Paul calls us to not to be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12).
This is particularly true when it comes to sex, and how we view our bodies.
A lot of it started with Plato. He believed that matter, what we see all around us, is corrupt and a distorted view of the true and good nature of things. Only what he called “the forms”, the unseen essence of things, were pure and good and worthy of knowing. In its simple sense, this train of thought led to the Greek philosophy of body, or matter, and soul, or spirit, as separate things, with the human body as corruptible and impure, while the soul or spirit as good and pure.
This was never true of Scripture, of Judeo-Christian teaching. The body was and is good, a holy creation, as is the spirit. Body and spirit are one. In fact, one of the early, most dangerous heresies of the early church was Gnosticism. In addition to believing that one could be saved only through gaining certain mystical knowledge, the Gnostics believed in this Greek body/spirit duality. Gnostics asserted that matter is inherently evil and spirit is good. As a result of this presupposition, Gnostics believed anything done in the body, even the grossest sin, was meaningless because real life exists in the spirit realm only.
“This is all well and good, Mr. Philosophy,” you may be thinking, “but what does this have to do with us and how we treat sex as Christians in our society?” Well, pretty much everything. Because every time we pull up a screen with a pornographic image, or hook up in an unchaste act, treating a fellow image-bearer of God as a piece of meat; every time we forget the way human sexual anatomy is designed actually teaches us something about how God intended it to be used; and, every time we forget that God made us man and woman spiritually and physically, we act as though we are functional Gnostics and heretics. So, it’s crucial that we get this right, and it’s equally crucial that we teach it and model it well to our kids. What we do with our body matters.
Our bodies matter to God. Our spirits and our bodies are joined. God spoke the entire universe into existence by the power of His Word. When it came time to make the bodies of man and woman, however, Genesis 2 tells us He created us in a completely different way. By hand. With a special dignity and worth. He molded our bodies from the dirt, and breathed our spirits into them. When Jesus was resurrected, it wasn’t only His spirit that rose from the tomb. He didn’t appear to the apostles in ghostly form, but bodily, both body and spirit renewed and joined together in victory. Jesus rose to Heaven in bodily form, and sits at God’s right hand in that form. While we’ll be separated from our bodies temporarily as we await Christ’s return, we’ll one day populate the New Earth and the New Jerusalem—you guessed it— in whole and complete, renewed resurrection bodies. Our bodies are given a special dignity, and, as Russell Moore says, “Christians respect the body because we believe our material bodies are part of God’s goal for us and for the universe.”
In a recent Christianity Today article, Mark Galli observes that there’s a powerful movement in our society that the body does not tell us much about what it means to be human. It’s no longer questioned among some that one can be born with a male body while actually being a female. Or, that one’s sexual organs have no bearing on selecting one’s sexual partners. For Christians, these perspectives deny what is true; they are contrary to the deepest realities. God teaches us the maleness and femaleness of His nature and character by making us physically male and female image-bearers. He teaches us about His perfect design and plan for human sexuality by the simple design and compatibility of male and female anatomy. Our bodies teach us about God and about what it means to be truly human, and serve as physical testimonies against our attempts, distorted by the fall of man, to argue these things away.
This is why purity and holiness is so important, and why claiming a close relationship with God while living any way we want with regard to our bodies and our sexuality is incongruent and impossible, it’s Gnosticism, treating the body and spirit as separate. As Moore notes, the old Christian heresies “didn’t lead to body-denial but to body-obsession. The heretics could fight and fornicate and carouse, because they believed the ‘real me’ was the spiritual person within, communing sweetly with Jesus in a garden somewhere.”
Instead, holiness is holistic. God calls us to holiness in every aspect of our lives–in our spirits, yes, but in our spirits as manifested in our bodies. If we say we love Jesus, we have to love Him with all of us: our souls, our minds, and our bodies. It’s why Paul urged the Thessalonians (and us): God wants you to live a pure life. Keep yourselves from sexual promiscuity. Learn to appreciate and give dignity to your body, not abusing it, as is so common among those who know nothing of God…God hasn’t invited us into a disorderly, unkempt life but into something holy and beautiful–as beautiful on the inside as the outside. (1 Thess. 4, MSG).
As with anything, giving dignity to our bodies by living holy lives of chastity- meaning refraining from sexual promiscuity outside the God-ordained bounds of marriage between man and woman- boils down to love and passion. Do the greater passions of loving and serving God loom larger within us than the lesser passions of pursuing our own desires? We all desperately need someone outside ourselves to tell us that we are good enough, that we have value and worth; that we matter. Will we use our bodies to get it, crucifying our spirits along the way, or will we surrender body and spirit to the one who was crucified to do and be that for us, the only one who truly can?
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