Whose Body?

Whose body?

That was the question that faced the famous detective in Dorothy Sayers’ debut novel – and which he successfully answered, exposing the truth and leading to the arrest of the criminal.
But who would’ve thought that a hundred years later Lord Peter Wimsey himself would be considered the criminal if he answered truthfully when asked the question today: “Whose body?”

“My Body My Choice”

“My Body My Choice” is the rallying cry of those who assert their right to do whatever they want with their own bodies, as well as the ones they carry inside, in all matters of sexual practice, marriage and reproduction.
The slogan has been used around the world and translated into many different languages. Amnesty International jumped on the band wagon with their own slogan: “My Body My Rights”.

This has meant each has a right to assert, and require others to affirm, that their body is patently what it is not: a male that he is female; or a female, male.
It has meant others have the right to dispose of their body at will through the practice of (so called) “eu-thanasia”.
It has meant that a pregnant woman can assert she not only owns her own body to dispose of how she likes, but also the life of the different body she carries in her womb.

In all this, our culture has lost all sense of the real purpose of the body.

Deicide and the Death of Purpose

The fundamental problem here is not suicide, but deicide. Deicide means literally “to kill off God”. The culture we live in thinks it has killed off God.
Those with an inflated view of themselves, legends in their own minds, have killed off God – at least in their own minds.

But at what a cost!
Those who kill off God in their legendary minds kill off any sense of purpose in their lives. The Bible describes them as “having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12). Such are doomed to live a meaningless life.
Without God, there is no real purpose, because there is no real meaning to life. We are just a random collection of molecules that exist as the result of an evolutionary roll of the dice. No design, no purpose.

The pregnant woman who wants to get rid of who God is creating inside her does so believing “it” is simply a random mass of purposeless cells. She doesn’t believe in a Creator-God.
The male who would rather be female can deny the obvious design and purpose of the body God has made him and pretend to be something else – again, because he doesn’t believe in a Creator-God.

This is not Christianity; it is pure Gnosticism.
David Koyzis comments:

“The notion that I can do with my body as I please is predicated on the very Gnostic dualism that plagued the early church. The real ‘me’ is a transcendent ego that ‘uses’ its body for its own desired purposes. The opposition between the ego and the body, coupled with the belief in the supremacy of the ego, produces a society in which everyone is thought to have absolute ownership over this biological dwelling he or she just happens to inhabit.”

Owned

You cannot dissociate yourself from your body. You don’t just have a body; you are body and soul.
The Bible teaches we are only complete when we are finally united, body and soul, in the resurrection:

“In this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven… being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life. Now He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who also has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.” (2 Cor 5:2-5)

But an early form of Gnostic-like dualism was already emerging in the early church. Especially as it related to the body of the God-Man. Against such, the apostle John asserted:

“Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God.” (1 Joh 4:2-3)

You cannot dissociate yourself from your body; you are body and soul.

Furthermore, you don’t own your body: the Creator-God does. God formed your body in the womb. And as your Creator, He also owns you – body and soul.

“You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb.” (Psalm 139:13)
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” (Jer 1:5)

Also, the pregnant woman does not own the child in her womb. That child is being purposely created by God Himself.

Tim Challies comments:

“You don’t own your body. The Bible makes it clear that as Creator, God owns the body of every human being. This means you are responsible before God to learn how a body is to be used, and then to only ever use it in those ways.”

Every human being is obliged therefore “to present his body a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is our reasonable service.” (Rom 12:1)

Owned Again …and Again

But there is more.
If you are a Christian you are owned by God a second and third time.

God owns you again because Christ paid the ultimate price to redeem you, body and soul: “For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.” (1 Cor 6:20)

And once redeemed, God owns you again, by making His home in you, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit – you are not your own: “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?” (1 Cor 6:19)
Through the indwelling Spirit, the Father and the Son, as well as the Spirit, dwell in us – Jesus said: “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.” (Joh 14:23)
I find this incredible!

The implication is inescapable: You and I are not free to pursue any sexual practice we like.
That is the conclusion Paul draws in the context of 1 Cor 6:19-20, cited above:

“Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body.
“Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? etc”

Owned a Fourth Time

God is not against sex or sexual expression; after all, He created such. God created us as physical bodies as well as souls.
Tim Challies rightly observes:

“Christians can fall into the [error] of making sexuality something that’s so spiritual and so transcendent that the earthy or bodily component becomes almost irrelevant or, worse, it becomes borderline sinful. We may want someone to desire us with their minds, but get hurt when they desire us with their bodies. Yet elsewhere in life we take bodily clues as part of God’s good design, and we follow our desires to satisfaction. While granting that sex is not a need like food and sleep, it’s still a bodily desire or appetite – some combination of the physical, emotional, and spiritual.”

For this reason, having dealt with sinful expressions of sex in 1 Corinthians 6, God’s Word then proceeds to deal with the right use of this wonderful gift of God – which is only in the context of monogamous, heterosexual marriage.
This brings us to a fourth aspect of ownership of your body, if you are married.
Here’s some more of what Challies has to say:

“After these divine claims, comes the claims of your spouse. Here’s how Paul says it: ‘For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does’ (1 Corinthians 7:4). Therefore, ‘the husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband’ (7:3). In marriage, you have willingly given your body to your spouse, acknowledging that you do so on their terms, not your own.”

He goes on:

“At some point you need to think seriously about what it means to be owned twice [I would say, three times!] by God and once by your spouse before you even get to your own rights of ownership. You need to talk this over with your spouse, then live it out in your marriage.
“Consider this as one application: Whatever else it means, it means that you have no right to do anything sexual, either by yourself or with someone else, that is not sanctioned by your spouse. Why? Because it’s his or her body, not your own. You have no right to a secret sex life, whether that involves another person or whether that involves just you.”

This does not mean one party can selfishly demand whatever they like of their spouse’s body to satisfy their desires.
Love doesn’t demand. Love shows respect for the other person’s body, just as he would his own:

“Husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it.” (Eph 5:28-29)

This is important since a husband’s and wife’s levels of sexual desire are rarely equal, and are constantly fluctuating anyway. But, rather than “solving” this by making selfish demands, Challies advocates seeing this as “an ideal setting to learn to grow in love for one another.”

“Learn how to respond positively when another person’s desires contradict our own, learn how to put the interests of another person ahead of our own. That unequal desire calls both spouses to move toward the other – for one to request less from the other than he or she would otherwise want, and for one to give more to the other than he or she would otherwise want. That sounds like love!”

The Christian’s Witness

“My Body My Choice” encapsulates all that is wrong with society’s understanding of our bodies when it comes to sexual practice, marriage and reproduction. We live in a messed up society in which selfish folly is now deemed to be wisdom.
This is not surprising. Romans ch 1 tells us that deicide inevitably leads to society calling folly as “wisdom”; and this inevitably manifests itself in aberrant sexual practices that are destructive to society.
I have written about this elsewhere:

Ever since the Fall, Man has rebelled against who and how God made him. “Although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools.” (Rom 1:21:22)
“Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness… For this reason God gave them up to vile passions… Even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting…” (Rom 1:24,26,28)

But the darker our society becomes the more brightly our light will shine – if it does shine. (Phil 2:14-15) Though the world at large shun that light for the time being, let us pray that more and more will begin to see how horrible the darkness is into which they have plunged themselves, and be drawn instead to  the light. (Matt 5:16)

Reading through Deuteronomy again recently, I have been greatly encouraged by God’s charge through Moses to His ancient people:

“Surely I have taught you statutes and judgments, just as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should act according to them in the land which you go to possess. Therefore be careful to observe them.
“For this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes, and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’” (Deut 4:5-6)