What God Has to Say about Our Bodies E-Book

Sam Allberry

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

"God's eternal plan for us involves our body. We can't write off our physical life as spiritually irrelevant." —Sam Allberry There's a danger in focusing too much on the body. There's also a danger in not valuing it enough. In fact, the Bible has lots to say about the body. With the coming of Jesus, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us"—flesh that was pierced and crushed for the sins of the world. In What God Has to Say about Our Bodies, Sam Allberry explains that all of us are fearfully and wonderfully made, and should regard our physicality as a gift. He offers biblical guidance for living, including understanding gender, sexuality, and identity; dealing with aging, illness, and death; and considering the physical future hope that we have in Christ. In this powerfully written book, you'll gain a new understanding for the immeasurable value of our bodies and God's ultimate plan to redeem them.

Leseprobe

Thank you for downloading this Crossway book.

Sign up for the Crossway Newsletter for updates on special offers, new resources, and exciting global ministry initiatives:

Crossway Newsletter

Or, if you prefer, we would love to connect with you online:

“I am very happy to endorse this book with the highest level of enthusiasm. I have been waiting for Sam to produce this book, and it does not disappoint. All aspects of living in fallen-and-yet-to-be-renewed bodies are comprehensively and biblically addressed with lucid writing that is a pleasure to read. Sam’s compassion for all the ways in which people suffer in those fallen bodies is full of understanding and tenderness. Please read this book with every expectation of being enlightened and edified.”

Kathy Keller, Assistant Director of Communications, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City, New York

“One of the most confused aspects of our culture relates to how we see the body. That confusion often extends to the church, despite the fact that our faith is centered around the Word who became flesh. In this wise and practical book, Sam Allberry casts a vision of the body that is neither beastly nor mechanistic but instead is creaturely and Christ informed. After reading this book, you will be better equipped to think through questions from eating disorders to the transgender debate to transhumanism, as well as the more perennial questions of how to think about ‘soul’ and ‘body’ in terms of the gospel. You will come away with even more awe and wonder at the words of one who said to us, ‘This is my body, broken for you.’”

Russell Moore, President, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention

“Evangelicals have excelled at many things; theological reflection on the body isn’t one of them. If you’re thinking, ‘I’ve seen many books on the church!’ then your assumption proves my point. Far more attention has been devoted to Christ’s spiritual body than to our physical selves. But we desperately need guidance here, for we inhabit a confused age that waffles back and forth between body obsession (my body is the most important thing about me) and body denial (my body is irrelevant to who I really am). Feel the whiplash? This book is medicine for the moment. I’m thrilled it now exists.”

Matt Smethurst, Managing Editor, The Gospel Coalition; author, Deacons and Before You Open Your Bible

“This book is good news for everybody, everywhere. There is a plethora of books written by women about the body these days, but men have bodies too, and a perspective on them that is often overlooked. I commend Sam’s words to everyone who needs to think more about their body and the bodies of others.”

Lore Ferguson Wilbert, author, Handle with Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry

“Winsome. Quotable. Simultaneously relevant and timeless. What God Has to Say about Our Bodies manages to be both deeply positive and hopeful about our bodies while also being deeply compassionate toward those who suffer in their bodies, especially with broken bodily longings. Clearly forged through long years of honest conversations in the pastorate, Allberry embraces the hard questions, gives wise and measured guidance, and will convince and inspire you with his core thesis: ‘We can trust Christ with our bodies.’”

Alasdair Groves, Executive Director, Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation; coauthor, Untangling Emotions

“Pastor-theologian Sam Allberry has given a gift to the church: a volume full of texture and beauty related to God making us enfleshed persons. For far too long, evangelicals have neglected the significance of the body as an integral part of our embodiment and discipleship. So much of the current cultural confusion persists, both inside and outside the church, because we’ve misunderstood the gift of the body and the message it would teach us about God. Sam Allberry has ably remedied that gap. Read this book.”

Andrew T. Walker, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Fellow, The Ethics and Public Policy Center

What God Has to Say about Our Bodies

What God Has to Say about Our Bodies

How the Gospel Is Good News for Our Physical Selves

Sam Allberry

Foreword by Paul David Tripp

What God Has to Say about Our Bodies: How the Gospel Is Good News for Our Physical Selves

Copyright © 2021 by Sam Allberry

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Micah Lanier

First printing 2021

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-7015-5ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-7018-6PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-7016-2Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-7017-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Allberry, Sam, author.

Title: What God has to say about our bodies : how the gospel is good news for our physical selves / Sam Allberry ; foreword by Paul David Tripp.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020044051 (print) | LCCN 2020044052 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433570155 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433570162 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433570179 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433570186 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Human body—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Human body—Biblical teaching.

Classification: LCC BT741.3 .A45 2021 (print) | LCC BT741.3 (ebook) | DDC 233/.5—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044051

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044052

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2021-05-10 02:54:23 PM

To my favorite body of all, the church family at Immanuel Nashville.

Thank you for continuing to make Jesus non-ignorable to me, week by week,

through gospel teaching and gospel culture.

I love you.

Contents

Foreword by Paul David Tripp

Introduction

Part 1: Created Bodies

1  Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: The Body and Its Creator

2  Man Looks on the Outward Appearance: The Body and Our Identity

3  Male and Female He Created Them: The Body and Biological Sex

4  God Formed the Man: The Body and Gender

Part 2: Broken Bodies

5  Subjected to Futility: The Body, Affliction, and Shame

6  The Body Is Dead Because of Sin: The Body, Sin, and Death

7  A Body You Have Prepared for Me: The Broken Body of Jesus

Part 3: Redeemed Bodies

8  A Temple of the Holy Spirit: The Body and Christ

9  As a Living Sacrifice: The Body and Discipleship

10  To Be Like His Glorious Body: The Body and the Resurrection to Come

Acknowledgments

Notes

General Index

Scripture Index

Foreword

There is an inherent danger in writing a foreword for a book you haven’t written: you consent to write the foreword before reading the book. But I agreed without any fear because I know Sam Allberry, and I have enormous respect for the depth, clarity, and practicality of his gospel voice.

I have good news for you—the book you’re about to read is not only good, culturally relevant, and easy to read, but it is also an essential book. This book should be on the desk of every pastor, ministry leader, parent, or any Christian who wants to think their way through the body confusion of this moment in the human community.

I want to tell you why this is such an important book. The gospel of Jesus Christ is profoundly more than a message about our entrance and our exit. Often the gospel gets reduced to the “gospel past,” that moment when, by grace, we saw our sin and trusted in Christ for our forgiveness and reconciliation to God. Or the gospel is lessened to only the “gospel future,” the glorious destiny that is secured for us by grace. Many believers have a pretty good grasp of the gospel past and the gospel future, but they live with a significant gap in the middle of their gospel. They don’t understand how the present implications of the person and work of the gospel change how to think about and respond to everything right here, right now. Sadly, many Christians suffer from living in a relatively constant state of gospel amnesia, the fruit of which can be seen all around us.

Much of my writing has sought to unpack the now-ism of the gospel of Jesus Christ for married couples, parents, Christian leaders, and those going through midlife or suffering and in the areas of sexuality and money. The gospel is that profound narrative of God’s redeeming grace in Christ Jesus, and that narrative provides a way for us to see everything in life. Between the “already” of our conversion and the “not yet” of our homegoing, the gospel of Jesus Christ is the world’s best hermeneutic—that is, the best interpretive tool God has ever given. It is how we make sense of ourselves and all that we encounter as we journey through the broken world that is our present address. It may sound trite, but I tell people all the time to put on their gospel glasses and take another look at something in their life and see how it looks different to them when they look through the lens of the gospel.

I don’t think there is a better example of what I have just described than What God Has to Say about Our Bodies. The brilliance of this book is that it enables you to look through the lens of the gospel at an issue that has never been more culturally and spiritually important—the body. In so doing, it cuts through the cultural confusion and gives us clarity as to who we are as creatures made in God’s image. And what I appreciate so much is that as Sam does this, there is not a hint of theological arrogance, no pseudo-Christian snarkiness, no trivializing of the deep identity struggles of others, or no war with the culture. This book is shaped not just by the message of the gospel but also by the character of the gospel, which makes it even more approachable, convicting, encouraging, motivating, and hope giving.

I have spent much of my writing ministry unpacking the gospel for the heart, proposing that change that doesn’t start as deep as the heart may be temporary behavioral modification but isn’t truly change. I’ve applied that message to various dimensions of everyday life, but as I’ve done so, I have had a concern. I have been bothered that an overspiritualization of the gospel would leave us with a Christian culture that is body ignoring, if not body negative. It has worried me that we would come to see people as disembodied hearts. A gospel for souls that excludes or overlooks bodies is not the gospel of Scripture. The gospel without a theology of the body is a truncated, inadequate gospel. A church that doesn’t have a robust gospel theology of the body will be unprepared to meet this generation’s philosophical, psychological, sociological, scientific, and media challenges.

We are in a moment when society is asking questions like never before. We cannot go to our social media sites, watch something on Netflix, or read our digital newspaper without hitting this discussion again and again: Who are we? What do our bodies mean? What does sex mean? What is gender anyway? This discussion should not make us afraid, and we surely don’t have to become part of the confusion, because God has answered these questions for us in his word. The answer is splashed across the pages of Scripture in historical narratives, divine declarations, wisdom principles, and in God’s commands and promises. This unsettling moment in culture is a moment of opportunity for us. We can move out in tenderhearted love and grace and speak with surety into the difficulty precisely because God has spoken to us with clarity.

As I mentioned earlier, what you are about to read is a critical book because it gives you a robust theology of your body. No, I don’t mean an esoteric, academic, and impersonal handling of the topic. I mean a theology that has the dust of everyday life on it. It’s theology that lives where you live and speaks into places where you struggle. It’s theology that is bold and clear while being gracious and tenderhearted. It’s the kind of theology that ends up not only helping you to understand yourself but also makes you thankful for God, for the wisdom of his word, and for his Son, who shares the majesty and humanity of a body with us.

I am thankful for What God Has to Say about Our Bodies, and I am sure when you finish it, you will be too. I can’t think of a book that speaks more clearly and more winsomely to our culture’s widening dysphoria. My prayer is that it will result not only in clarified thinking but in hearts filled with gratitude and worship for the one who formed our bodies in the garden and will give us new bodies that are form-fit for our final home.

Paul David Tripp

December 3, 2020

Introduction

Sometimes we tend to notice our body only when something is wrong with it. A new pain develops. Or we become self-conscious about some aspect or other of our appearance and wish it was different. At other times we can be happily oblivious.

I remember when, as a young schoolchild in biology class, I first saw one of the plastic models of the body’s internal workings––the skeleton, the organs, the intestines, and so on—and being both curious and a little repulsed. It was so complex and intricate and yet a bit gross too. It was weird to think that all of that was going on inside me. I didn’t want to know much more about it. When some medical issue or other arises, I find out what I need to know to understand what the doctor is telling me. But other than that, I live in generally happy ignorance.

While we tend to focus on our body when it’s letting us down, it’s easy to ignore it when it comes to spiritual matters. Even the word spiritual suggests we’re talking about the nonphysical. So when it has come up in conversation that I’m writing a Christian book about the body, many have said, with a quizzical look, something like, “Do you mean the church, and how it is like a body?” That seems to make more initial sense than a book about our actual bodies.

That is why I’ve written these pages. The first surprise for some of us might be how much the Bible has to say about our body. The second is how the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news for our body.

Your body––my body––is not just there, happening to exist. It means something to God. He knows it. He made it. He cares about it. And all that Christ has done in his death and resurrection is not in order for us one day to escape our body, but for him one day to redeem it. Far from being a spiritual irrelevance, Scripture tells us our body is meaningful––so much of discipleship in the New Testament is spoken of in bodily terms––and it is part of God’s eternal plan for us.

Part 1

Created Bodies

1

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

The Body and Its Creator

Whenever American friends and I engage in friendly discussion about the relative advantages of life in our respective countries (I am British), I tend to feel I’m on the losing side. Sure, life in Britain has lots going for it. We have cream teas, country pubs, moderate weather, chocolate that doesn’t taste like wax, and castles that aren’t made of plastic. But America has a lot going for it too: optimism, proper lemonade, customer service, better dentistry, and the Grand Canyon. But when it looks like all is lost for dear old Britain, Boxing Day becomes the clincher. In Britain, December 26 is a public holiday, and it’s one of my favorites. After all the hype and gastronomic overexertion of Christmas Day, Boxing Day (so called because it was when you’d box up gifts for the poor) is a day to exhale a little. You can rest a bit, pick up and start to enjoy the gifts received the day before, join the cousins, and take the dogs for a walk. In short, you can retain the Christmas vibe but at a more genteel pace. There’s lots to do but nothing much that urgently needs to be done.

As I write, it is Boxing Day. Yesterday was Christmas. At church, we heard the apostle John’s iconic summary of what happened in Bethlehem so many years ago: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). That’s the claim behind Christmas: God became man. For many, the scandal is the claim that there is a God at all. But even more electrifying—both when John first wrote those words and for us today—is the claim about what this God did. He became flesh. Theologians call it the “incarnation.”

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. He could, in theory, have turned up as a ready-made thirty-year-old male, prepared to immediately gather his disciples, teach about God’s kingdom, and head to the cross. But really becoming one of us took more. To truly become human, Jesus needed to become a fetus in the womb, a baby in a cot, a toddler stumbling about as he learned to walk, a teenager going through puberty, a fully grown man. It wasn’t enough to have a body. He needed to truly be one.

Jesus’s incarnation is the highest compliment the human body has ever been paid. God not only thought our bodies up and enjoyed putting several billion of them together; he made one for himself. And not just for the Christmas season. The body of Jesus was not like my Christmas pullover, little more than just a festive novelty. No. His body was for life. And for far more than that. After his death he was raised bodily. And after his resurrection he returned to his Father in heaven, also bodily. When he ascended into heaven he didn’t ditch his humanity like a space shuttle ditches its booster rockets (to borrow a phrase from N. T. Wright). Becoming human at Christmas was not meant to be reversible. It was permanent. There is now a human body sitting at the right hand of God the Father at the very center of heaven.

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.

C. S. Lewis sums it up neatly:

Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body––which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty and our energy.1

This is part of what makes Christianity stand out. It has been common among other religious (and nonreligious) belief systems to demean the body, along with our physicality––to see it as something unspiritual or in need of escaping.

In contrast, the Bible sees our body as a good (if imperfect) creation of God. It is a gift.

We’re not used to thinking of our body as a gift. Perhaps one reason is that when we think of our body, we tend to think of the frustrating limitations it places on us. This is true even when it is working well. At the peak of our strength and fitness, our energies and capacities are still finite. As the prophet Isaiah reminds us, “Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted” (Isa. 40:30). We can’t be and do all that we would want. We’re constrained. Physical life is, by definition, one of being contingent when perhaps we would rather be free. I’m sure this is one of the reasons behind our fascination with the idea of life unconstrainted by our physicality. It is a popular trope in science fiction.

In C. S. Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength a secretive scientific lab is attempting to establish a form of human existence that is not dependent on our bodies. It is presented as a great leap forward; our bodies as nothing but an unfortunate constraint that needs to be escaped. As one of the characters puts it:

In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould––all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body.2

Needless to say, in the novel it is this pursuit that leads to all kinds of evil. And, in any case, most of us wouldn’t put it in such a mad-scientist sort of way. But we can nevertheless come to resent the hindrances our body brings, and it is easy for us to see the ways in which our body is a limitation rather than an opportunity.

In the novel (and subsequent movie) Ready Player One, humanity in the near future does most of its living in a virtual reality world called the OASIS where we can choose our own appearance. It is not hard to see the appeal:

In the OASIS the fat could become thin, the ugly could become beautiful, and the shy, extroverted. Or vice versa. You could change your name, age, sex, race, height, weight, voice, hair color, and bone structure. Or you could cease being human altogether, and become an elf, ogre, alien, or any other creature from literature, movies, or mythology.3

We’re not ditching the body altogether, but we’re able to make it take whatever form we could ever want. We exchange what we were born with for something more idealized; something that really feels exactly as we would want ourselves to be.

In one case the body is escaped; in the other, exchanged. But in Christianity neither of those is what we need. The body is intrinsically good, not bad. So it doesn’t need to be abandoned or changed into some completely different form. In the words of the apostle Paul, it needs to be redeemed: “We wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:23). It is a gift. In a sense, right now, a broken gift in some ways as we’ll come to see. But a gift nonetheless.

Handmade

Only one of the presents I got for Christmas yesterday is truly unique. It’s not a slight on any of the other gifts, but this one has a property that sets it apart: it was handmade. A friend made me a beautiful, framed, artistic rendering of a favorite Bible verse. To my knowledge it is the only gift I received this year that was not mass-produced. That’s not to say it is intrinsically more valuable than the other gifts, but it does make it unusually meaningful.

The Bible shows that our bodies have been very carefully made by God. King David put it famously in the following prayer to God:

For you formed my inward parts;

you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. (Ps. 139:13–14)

God’s craftsmanship is not just restricted to David’s outside but includes his inward parts. All that he is, both the inner and outer aspects of his being.

David speaks of being made with great care and attention. He has been individually handcrafted. That is not to say his body is perfect. As we’ll see later, our body is actually broken; it’s not entirely as it was meant to be, and we have all sorts of issues with it. But David can say even of his imperfect and fallen body that it has been “fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Fearfully Made

Just think about that language. I think of my friend making that Christmas gift for me. I imagine her lips pursed as she drew the words of the passage and then colored and illustrated them. David says he has been made fearfully. Were we to know the full extent of the intricacy of God’s workmanship, we would rightly be in awe.

We approach what this means when we see new parents hold their baby for the first time. It looks like it’s happening in slow motion as they very carefully pick up and then take care to support the baby in their arms. There is a sense of appropriate fearfulness. They are aware of the sheer preciousness of the little bundle in their arms.

Well, David would say they don’t know the half of it. A baby is far more precious and awe-inspiring than we realize. It’s not just the delicate body of a baby. Even when we’ve long outgrown our new-baby cuteness, when we’re long past our physical best, and when our body shows all the frailties and limitations of advancing age––whatever stage we’re at, we have been fearfully and wonderfully made. We could not begin to measure the value of our body, however it looks and however we feel about it.

Individually Made

There seems to be a trend for artisanal products––coffee shops, bakeries, and the like. When I first noticed this, I didn’t know what artisanal meant, other than assuming it meant (in the case of the bakery) “misshappen and expensive.” But I eventually realized it meant “traditional” and “nonmechanically made.” A person made it, not a machine. It may have some imperfections, but even those are proof of authenticity.

Similarly, we human beings are not the product of a factory or the process of copy-and-paste. Our distinctive physical individuality is intended. We have been made by the ultimate artisan. Our God has produced billions of human bodies, but we are not mass-produced. We’ve each been handcrafted with infinite care. David says we have been “knitted together” in our mother’s womb. Now, I’ve never knitted a stitch of anything in my life, but I’ve watched others, and it is wonderfully hands-on—each and every stitch individually knit by hand.

Purposefully Made

Being handcrafted means none of us has come about by accident. Our body is not random or arbitrary. I know people who were not planned by their parents—a sensitive issue indeed. They were an “accident,” a surprise, and those among them who are aware of their origins can struggle with long-term relational insecurity. But when it comes to God, no one is unplanned. Every one of us is the product of God’s deliberate choice. However many people there turn out to be in the whole of human history, not one of them will have been an accident.

The Bible doesn’t just affirm that we are all, in some way, the result of God’s work, that we have come about because of him. It says much more than that. We’re not just the outcome of God’s activity; we are the product of God’s intention.

Think about it this way. Imagine I am preparing a meal for a group of friends. I have decided, somewhat ambitiously, to cook a meal with several complicated dishes. I am attending to one of these, getting a sauce just right, when I detect the faint smell of smoke. I realize that the meat in the oven is burning. Edible, but burnt. I serve it up anyway. The meal is not going to kill anyone, and parts of it may even be nice, but no one is going to ask for the recipe. Or imagine––and this is less likely––I pull off the entire meal with aplomb. Each component turns out the way I want. It is a success. It may not be perfect in every respect, but nevertheless this is what I want my guests to enjoy. In both cases I have produced the meal. In both cases it is the fruit of my labor and work. But only in the second case is the resulting meal what I intended.

It is a bit like that with our bodies. It’s not that God made them (but didn’t particularly care how they turned out). He purposed them. They are what he intended them to be. We can affirm, as David does, even of these imperfect bodies, that God made them and that he meant to.

Personally Made

All of this means that you have the body God meant for you to have, even when not everything about it is wonderful. It may have any number of problems. It may be a mix of your parents that you didn’t want (your dad’s eyes and your mother’s nose, perhaps, rather than the other way around). But it does mean that God knew what he was doing when he made your body. We can often feel about our body the way we feel when we pick up a hand of cards at the start of a game––why did I have to be dealt this? But in the case of our body, it wasn’t random shuffling of the deck or luck of the draw.

The intentionality of our bodies obviously runs counter to how many people think in the Western world today. One article I recently read made the following comment: “Most of us have the bodies we occupy because of luck of the draw.”4 Tellingly, this was simply stated as self-evident fact rather than as an argument. It is easy to just assume our physical origins have no plan or purpose behind them.

If our body is not accidental, it must also therefore not be incidental. If it were merely the product of accidental processes, we could justifiably write it off as having no theological significance. Our body would tell us nothing substantial about who we are. Our sense of self would be found entirely elsewhere, with no necessary reference to our body. But if we have been created, then our body is not some arbitrary lump of matter. It means something. It is not peripheral to our understanding of who we are. For all the difficulties you may have with it, it is the body God wanted you to have. It is a gift.

If this is so, it has some crucial implications for how we are to think about our body.

Being Grateful for Our Body

Our first response to our body should be to give God thanks for it. I am conscious that the words I’m writing are very hard for some to read. They’re hard to write. As with so many, my body has been the cause of some very deep pain for me. I know people whose body has even made them think seriously about taking their own life. Our body can lead to horrific suffering––both physical and psychological. The Bible does not deny this and in fact is able to uniquely account for it, as we shall see in due course. Accepting our body as having been fearfully and wonderfully made does not mean we have to pretend everything about it is good.

But however difficult we may find it, the bodily life we have remains a gift from God, one for which we need to be thankful. It is the means he has given for you