“Man does
not live by soap alone;
and
hygiene, or even health, is not much good
unless you
can take a healthy view of it or,
better
still, feel a healthy indifference to it.”
G. K. Chesterton
One of my favorite films is Gallipoli.
It was made in 1981 and depicts two Australians sprinters who are sent to fight
in Turkey
The whistle sounds, and the men lurch forward.
As they do, the rat-a-tat-tat of the enemy’s Gatling guns fills the air, and
the men begin to fall. They fall at the crest of the trench; they slump to the
ground a yard from its edge; they stagger and collapse ten yards forward. The
sprinter throws his head back and charges, his legs turning like pistons. He
outruns all his comrades. And, then, twenty yards from the enemy’s trench, he
is struck and thrown backward. The picture freezes as his arms splay out.
Albioni’s Adagio begins to play.
It was a futile charge. Every one of the men
was mowed down by the machine guns. The slow, the fast; the weak, the strong.
They all died.
I find in this scene a powerful metaphor of
death. – I am thinking here of physical death. – The whistle is man’s physical birth
(or, theologically, Adam’s fall into sin), and the charge is the time of his
pilgrimage here on earth. He is forced forward. He must breach the edge of the
trench and lurch forward. (The movie doesn’t show that any of the men hid in
fear or shrank from obeying the call, but, even if they did, it would only
demonstrate that trench warfare was the lesser of the two harsh realities. In
the battle of life, no one can exempt himself.) And then, the bullets that
strike, these herald the arrival of death. No one escapes the moment of death.
It comes to all, be they strong or weak, good or bad, prepared or unprepared.
As we Christians consider the topic of
physical health, I believe it is essential that we begin with a consideration
of our mortality. Its recognition and acceptance is a critical theological and
philosophical reality upon which such a discussion must be founded. It
contextualizes all our endeavors and causes us to look with sympathy upon those
around us. We all fall short. No one’s striving for health will prevent an
ultimate demise.
That said, in the meantime, I would like to
suggest three simple principles to remember as we think about our physical
health:
- We have been given bodies for a reason.
When God made man and
woman, He created them with bodies, and He saw that what He had created was
“very good.” (Gen. 1:31) Material bodies are not a result of humanity’s fall
into sin; they are a result of a good Creation. Men and women were meant to
have physical bodies.
But, of course,
humanity’s fall into sin brought death; and the bodies of men and women began
to die. (Gen. 3) Or, to use the analogy mentioned above, the whistle sounded,
and humanity’s sprint into death commenced. This condition, the introduction
and inevitability of corruption within the physical realm, is called entropy.
On that day, entropy became a part of humanity’s (and all of Creation’s)
physical experience. Our bodies would decay, they would incur illness, and they
would ultimately die.
But man was not given
a body originally in order to experience death! Man was given a body “to
glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” He was to serve God by loving Him and
worshiping Him, and by fully enjoying the Creation over which He had given
dominion.
I won’t belabor the
point. We all know that the introduction of sin caused man to pervert the
body’s God-given purpose. Man began to use his body, its members, for his own
selfish purposes; and, doing so, he occasioned immediately the spiritual death
(separation) from God that would be evidenced progressively in his physical
body.
Praise God that we
weren’t left in that state! Amen? God, in His mercy, sent Christ Jesus to die
in our place, to pay the penalty for our sins, and to give us the right to
become children of God! And when we believed on Him, that is what we became –
and we were spiritually ‘born from above’ or ‘born again.’ Praise God.
And yet, we remain,
physically, in our unglorified, sinful bodies. Thus came a new conflict.
We find now, as
children of God, that we experience both the desires of our unglorified bodies,
the flesh, and the desires of God’s Spirit within us. A war rages, with God on
one side and our sin nature (the old man) on the other. But, praise God, even
in this, we can now be victorious. We are to consider ourselves ‘dead to sin,
but alive to God’ in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6) We are to use our members (our
fleshly bodies) now as instruments of righteousness. And this we can do, by
God’s grace. We are empowered to join in Paul’s joyful declarations in Romans
8.
Having said all that,
I want to point out that our new life in Christ occasions also a new calling.
We, who were formerly at enmity with Him, are now called to follow Him
wholeheartedly and put His desires first in our life. And that means, simply
put, that our primary attitude now is to be love – for God and others – and our
primary action is to be the making of disciples.
Love and discipleship
should now shape all of our considerations of physical health. If we have been
blessed with physical health, we should use it in the present by loving God and
others, and by making disciples of others. If we can improve our physical
health, and, by doing so, occasion greater love and making disciples, we should
do so. If our physical health faces harm, but the result of embracing that harm
is that love is expressed and others are made disciples, we should permit it.
And if our physical deterioration is permitted within God’s perfect, sovereign
love, we should accept it.
Ultimately, we should
always see our bodies as His, to be used for His purpose, according to His
purposes.
- We have been given stewardship over our bodies.
The considerations
above lead naturally to this principle, that God has given us stewardship over
our physical bodies. Wisdom principles apply, and we ought to use common sense
in the treatment of our bodies. That means we should avoid things that we know
will cause harm to our bodies. We should try to keep our cholesterol down, diet
off those extra pounds, brush our teeth and take our multivitamins. And we
should get some exercise and stay mobile.
But these things are
not an end in themselves. It is essential that we keep things in perspective.
The value of physical health is that it permits us to love and serve our Lord.
Any other reason for pursuing physical health is ‘iffy.’ Seeking better health
or prolonged health for the sake of being useful to the Master is appropriate.
- We will receive glorified bodies in the future.
Our ultimate hope is
not in this world, anymore than our ultimate home is here. We are pilgrims, a
people merely walking through the foyer of eternity. We look forward to the day
when our bodies will be raised incorruptible, a day when we will experience
physical health in a way we have never experienced it before. Accordingly, we
are hopeful and optimistic concerning the future. Even as Christ has been
raised with a glorified body, we too will one day. And in that day, all the
suffering, illnesses and hardships of this day will appear as nothing. So don’t
get too worked up about the physical struggles you face today. They are only
temporary. The best is yet to come.
So, there it is. Three simple principles to
guide us Christians as we think about our physical health. What do you think? Are
there other principles you would add? Let me know.
“For
bodily exercise profits a little,
but
godliness is profitable for all things,
having
promise of the life that now is
and of
that which is to come.”
1 Timothy
4:8
-- Christian Pilet
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