Masterfully woven together, its sinews and vessels and nerves forming a breathtaking tapestry, the human body visibly displays its invisible Creator.
Scientists have spent billions unlocking the marvels of the human body, answering many of the how questions. But we must turn to the body’s Maker Himself to answer why He designed it so.
1. The body is a stewardship on loan to the occupant for a limited time. “What? know ye not that your body…ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Cor. 6:19-20).
2. Our bodies are the sanctuary of God, the only place where He feels at home on earth. “…your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own” (1 Cor. 6:19).
3. The human body is used as an apt illustration of the organic unity and marvelous diversity that exists in the Church. “But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased Him” (1 Cor. 12:18). “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling…For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:4, 12).
4. My body is a temporary tent, a pilgrim’s portable dwelling, and as long as I live in it I am not really at home. “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens….knowing that, while we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:1, 6).
5. The body is the tool box of the soul, instruments for righteousness or unrighteousness, weapons of war. “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad” (2 Cor. 5:10). So the body should be subject to the spirit. “But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway” (1 Cor. 9:27). “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof” (Rom. 6:12).
6. As such, our bodies need to be prepared as one would prepare holy vessels for the sanctuary. “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water” (Heb. 10:22).
7. In fact they are to be offered as our supreme act of worship, our logical service in light of Calvary. “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service” (Rom. 12:1).
8. As we live in this world, our bodies, like telescopes, can bring Christ near to people who by nature are far from Him. Unregenerate men can see the Lord up close as He lives out His purposes in our bodies. “According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death” (Phil. 1:20). “Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body” (2 Cor. 4:10).
9. Our natural bodies are faint glimmers of the spiritual bodies we shall enjoy in the life to come, illustrated by the contrast between a wrinkled seed and the plant into which it grows. The body “is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: 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” (1 Cor. 15:42-44).
We “…also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, (that is), the redemption of our body” (Rom. 8:23). The Lord “…shall change our vile body (body of humiliation), that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself” (Phil. 3:21).
To this end, we offer this ancient prayer for every saint living in the world today: “And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess. 5:23).