Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

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 want dominated the New Testament world.

It gave rise to the great enemies of Christianity, who were the Gnostics.

They picked up on the anti-body doctrine and made it fundamental to their theology.

They said the body is evil and the source of all sin.

Because of this they rejected the Incarnation.

They said that Jesus could never take on a real body, for God is holy and could never enter into sinful flesh.

He had to be in a phantom body, for real flesh is totally evil.

This negative body thinking influence both later Judaism and early Christianity.

It was a part of the culture and people could not escape it without deliberate efforts to resist it.

In the Wisdom of Solomon 915 it was written, "This contemptible body weighs down the soul..." Some Jews felt this way.

Some Christians picked up this negative spirit and developed Asceticism, which is a very anti-body form of Christianity.

The body was no friend, but was an enemy.

You had to fight it constantly and deny it as much as possible.

This led to celibacy in the church.

Truly spiritual people would not marry and engage in the practice of sex, for this was a body centered activity.

Some of the church fathers said that sex even in marriage was a polluted way of life.

Origin, one of the church fathers, went so far as to castrate himself to thrust the foul desires of the body from him.

We do not have the time to trace the impact of Greek thought and Gnosticism in the history of the church, but let me assure you that it can be traced even into the present day so that many Christians feel about their body that which comes from Plato more than that which comes from the Bible.

Christians are often more a product of their Western culture than they are a product of God's Word.

The reason is obvious.

They live in the culture 24 hours a day, and live in God's Word maybe 24 hours a year.

The Greek view is not the biblical view, for it says the body is negative, and what matters it the immortality of the soul.

The anti-body feelings were so strong that at one point in Christianity it was considered giving comfort to the enemy to bathe.

Some of the saints went for years without a bath, and vermin would fall from their bodies as they walked, and this was proof of their hatred for their body.

Some of you probably have children who have a touch of Gnostic philosophy because they hate to bathe, but fortunately most Christians who have anti-body feelings do not carry it to such a logical conclusion.

Christians can, however, as Christians were in Corinth, carry their low view of the body into their theology and corrupt the Christian doctrine on the resurrection of the body.

The idea that the body is nothing is anti-Christian, and totally out of line with the biblical view of the body.

Next let's look at-

II.

THE BODY IS EVERYTHING.

Novalis expressed this view as strongly as anyone when he said, "There is but one temple in the world, and that is the body of man.

Nothing is holier than this high form...We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body."

The materialist says the body of man is all there is of man.

There is no non-material spirit, but only matter.

This is the view of the atheist and the secularist.

The conclusion you come to with this view is, "Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die."

If the body is everything, than all life is good for is sheer animal pleasure.

If it feels good, do it, for physical pleasure is all there is.

In contrast to those who say the body is evil, this view says the body is the only good, and anything that deprives the body of pleasure is evil.

This leads to the rejection of all moral restraint and a libertine life-style.

The body becomes an idol, and men worship it by devoting all their time, talent, and treasure to its exaltation.

This view is totally anti-Christian, but it is a very popular view in our culture.

Evolution is taught in the schools, and youth get the impression that they are just another animal, and if their is a soul and a spiritual part of them, they do not get much insight into that.

They become almost totally secular.

I wonder how many young people are writing things like this essay I found on anatomy written by a young boy: "Your head is kind of round and hard and your brains are in it and your hair is on it.

Your face is in front of your head where you eat.

Your neck is what keeps your head off your shoulders, which are sort of shelves where you hook your overall straps...You arms you got to have to pitch with and so you can reach the biscuits.

Your fingers stick out of your hands so you can scratch, throw a curve, and add arithmetic.

You legs is what you got to have to get to first base, your feet what you run on, and your toes are what gets stubbed.