Our Bodies Do Not Belong to Us
"My body, my choice!"
Perhaps you have heard this rallying cry for the abortion
movement. This idea is all too common in our culture. Most people believe that
their body is their own personal property and they can do with it what they
will, up to and including the ending of a precious, innocent life developing in
that body.
But this attitude extends beyond abortion and is used to
excuse all manner of sinful behaviors and lifestyle choices. "It's my
body, I can have sex any time I want! It's my body, I can smoke, drink, or eat
whatever I want! I can do whatever I want, and nobody can tell me otherwise! My
body belongs to me and no one else!"
As long as we are not hurting anyone else, anything goes. Or
at least that is what many believe.
This is not the shape of reality presented in the Bible. Over
the next few weeks, we are going to look at a few ideas about what the Bible
teaches about our bodies. First of all, we need to understand that our bodies
are the special creation of God.
This truth finds its roots in the earliest chapters of
Scripture. Genesis 2:7 says this, "And the Lord God formed man of the dust
of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man
became a living soul."
Notice the careful, personal language here. God is not seen
as some far-off, invisible force guiding evolution or some other nonsense. He
has his hands in the dirt, crafting us and forming us, then breathing his life
into us to make us living souls. God was not in the distance, observing our
creation with disinterest.
King David put it this way in Psalm 100:3, "Know ye
that the Lord, he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we
are his people, and the sheep of his pasture."
Did you get that? We did not make ourselves. God made us. I
think what is fundamentally at the root of materialistic theories like
evolution is this idea, that somehow, we made ourselves. After all, it was
people who invented the idea of evolution, so in a way it is an attempt for
people to explain their own existence without God. We want our sin. We want
sexual liberation. We want to embrace homosexuality and transgenderism, but we
can't do that while a personal, creator God looms over us, dictating what is
right and wrong.
Again, David writes in Psalm 139:14-15, "I will praise
thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and
that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was
made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth."
The secular culture and materialistic scientists force-feed
us the fable of evolution: that we are essentially highly developed apes. Somehow
magical, impersonal forces managed to bring life from non-living, primordial ooze
(a process that has never been observed in nature or in a laboratory, by the
way) and across millions of years and millions of accidents we became the
elegant, finely tuned organisms that we are today. It is amazing to think that
all the marvelously designed structures of the body, the eye, the brain, the
circulatory system, even the simplest of cells, somehow came about because of
some cosmic accident, or series of accidents. I do not have enough faith to
believe that.
If I happened to be wandering the desert, far from
civilization, and happened to come across the Venus de Milo, the statue of a woman carved from
marble, I would never assume that the wind, sand, and time managed to create
that object. I would be compelled to believe that an artist had a purpose and
design in mind and took a hammer and chisel and with time and effort carved
that statue. He wanted to make something beautiful. It would be incredulous to
believe that time and chance could create a statue of a person and it is even
more incredulous to believe that time and chance could create a living cell,
much less a living human being.
What the Bible teaches is that God's hands and heart were
involved in our creation. In the secret parts of our mother's womb, God crafted
and shaped us into the glorious bodies that we have today. Every human body,
even the broken and disfigured ones are still hand-crafted by God and bear his
image. The human body is not a cosmic accident, it is a piece of art. We are
not slightly more developed animals; we are divine masterpieces.
We are not simply chemistry in motion. We are not highly
evolved animals. We are the special creation of God. He shaped us and formed us.
He breathed life into us and made us living souls. His desire is to know us, to
be a father to us, and for us to be his children. He is our shepherd, and we
are his sheep.
What this means is that our bodies do not belong to us. They
belong to God. He is our creator, and he has the right to decide what we do or
do not do with our bodies.
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