Body Love Series

I don't care how widely traveled you are, I know you have never sailed among the Island of

Langerhans, or drifted lazily down the Aqueduct of Sylvius. Nor have any of you ever

strolled along the banks of Hunter's Canal, or watched the sun go down behind McBurney's

Point. None of you have ever ridden through the Tunnel of Carti, nor have you ever

climbed the Pyramids of Malpighi. I can say this with confidence, not because I know where

all of you have ever been, nor because all of these places are fictions and unreal. On the

contrary, they are more abundantly real than most of the places you have ever been. But I

can say this because all of these places are parts of our body.

The Islands of Langerhans are small masses of tissues in our pancreas.

The Aqueduct of Sylvius is part of the brain.

Hunter's Canal is in the thigh.

McBurney's Point is a spot on the right side which is tender to the touch in acute

appendicitis.

The Tunnel of Carti is in the inner ear.

The Pyramids of Malpighi is in the kidneys.

The point of this little anatomy lesson is that there is a great deal about our bodies that we

do not know. We live in them, but we know more about the house our body lives in than we

know about our bodies, which is the house of our spirit. Sophocles said, "Numberless are the

world's wonders, but none more wondrous than the body of man." We live in this wondrous

temple 24 hours a day, and 365 days a year. We never leave this house in which we dwell

until we die, for to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.

This body we dwell in is the first part of man that God made. Man was a body before he

was anything else. As Paul says in verse 46, the natural comes first than the spiritual. Man

was first a body as a part of God's creation. Then God breathed into man the breath of life

and he became a living soul. Man is a combination of the creation and the Creator. He has a

material and a spiritual reality. He is akin to the animal, mineral, and vegetable on the one

hand, and a kin to God and angelic beings on the other hand. In God's ultimate plan we can

safely say that man is the best of both worlds. He is a mixture of both the dust and the

divine. As soon as man begins to lose his awareness of the reality of this combination, he loses his

understanding of just who man is, and of the role his body plays in God's plan. All through

history men have followed three basic philosophies concerning the body. They are-

The body is nothing.

The body is everything.

The body is something.

We want to examine each of these philosophies, for only by doing so can we come to a

clear understanding of the biblical view of the body. This is important in understanding I

Cor. 15, for this is the body center of the New Testament. There is no other part of the Bible

where there is so much on the body, and where it is so basic to Christian doctrine. First let's

look at the view-

I. THE BODY IS NOTHING.

This does not mean that those who hold this view reject the existence of the body, but they

do reject its significance. They say the body is not a value or an asset, but it is a liability, and

so it is to be despised and held in contempt. Heraclitus considered death a blessing because

it got rid of the contemptible burden of the body, which he called a fetter and dark abode of

the soul. Epictetus called the body a corpse, a beast of burden, a product of filth. He

referred to himself as, "A poor soul shackled to a corpse."

Pathogarus called it a soma-semas, that is a body tomb. Plato and Socrates felt that the

body defiled the soul, and man could never be at his highest until he escaped the prison of his

body and entered into the immortality of the soul. Seneca the Roman said, "I regard the

body as nothing but a chain which monocles my freedom." Dr. Ralph Stob in Christianity

and Classical Civilization writes, "It can be put down as a mark of the Graeco-Roman world

that men wanted a deliverance from the body..."

There was another side to this, and some Greeks had a high view of the body. Aristotle

came along and took an opposite stand from Plato, and he made the body of first priority,

and he said it was before the soul, even as Scripture teaches. But the negative philosophy is