The onset of summer means we are bombarded with body messaging: what to wear, what sunscreen to use, what protein hack builds muscle, and what weight loss drug builds our dream body.
Recently, I saw a wellness influencer’s video stating that if I believed positively, I could magically change how I live in and feel about my body. The video left me feeling hopeless and frustrated.
How I feel about my body changes based on the weather, my clothes, my dinner, how I interact with the people around me, and even the data from my smartwatch. Something besides our own feelings or our culture’s idea of the perfect appearance must give our bodies worth and value.
God’s Design for Our Bodies
From the beginning, God created embodied human beings. Rather than simply creating us with souls, he chose to create us with physical bodies. We know little about Adam and Eve’s particular physical bodies, but we are told two important things about their bodies – they were made in the image of God, and they were physical.
Our physical bodies are gifts from the Creator. Your body was created to fill space so the world might better know your heavenly Father. You were created to sit with friends, dance at weddings, hug your relatives, hold hands on dates, rock your children to sleep, run, golf, and enjoy the beach. God gave you a body so you could engage in activities like these.
Embodiment is such an integral part of God’s creation that he sent an incarnated Savior to work a physical redemption. Jesus came in the flesh so he could live in our brokenness and pain. Isaiah 53 tells us “he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (v. 2b). Jesus won no beauty competitions, and his physical body attracted no attention. Yet, the incarnated Jesus was the most beautiful human imaginable because he used his body to tend to and bless his people.
Jesus touched the man with leprosy, restored the sight of the blind, wept with the grieving, sat with the shamed woman at the well, fed the 5000, and extended his hand to the outcast. Jesus’ beauty came from his physical presence as he occupied space in the lives of his people, let John baptize him, healed the sick and dying, helped his disciples catch fish, ate in the homes of his friends, and welcomed children. His body allowed him to bring glimpses of God’s kingdom.
Every day, our bodies allow us to proclaim the goodness and love of our God. As you kneel on the floor and hug your children, they learn about a heavenly Father who loves them. As we share a meal with a friend, we learn about a God who fed a hungry crowd and sustains his people with manna from heaven. As we serve at our churches, sit in meetings with our coworkers, and engage in daily tasks, we learn about a God who delights in our work and callings. The beauty of our bodies comes not in their size, age, or how we feel about them, but in our ability to reflect our Savior to a broken world.
Our incarnate Savior knows the pain of living in broken bodies. Jesus did not shy away from the most brutal torture on the cross, the greatest and most humiliating form of pain a body could experience. On the cross, he took upon himself all the hatred of our bodies, all the harm we do to our bodies and the bodies of others, every curse we utter against the way God created us.
Ultimately, Jesus died a physical death to take on himself the greatest physical destruction we are all trying to outrun: our unavoidable deaths. Jesus came not only to die for our bodies’ pains and sorrows but also to physically defeat them.
Our Resurrected Bodies
Jesus is the “firstfruits,” a foretaste of our hope for our own bodies (1 Corinthians 15). His resurrection promises redemption and restoration for our physical bodies. It promises a day we will no longer hate our bodies, and we will no longer weep over their diseases and losses. The resurrected body of Jesus points us to the new heavens and new earth where we will joyfully live in physical bodies without insecurity or doubt.
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul describes our resurrected bodies: “What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (v. 42-44).
Notice, Paul never describes the appearance of this resurrected body. Instead, he describes a body beautiful because it is filled with the power of the Holy Spirit in the presence of God. He describes a body living as it was created. This is a beautiful body– a body engaged in the joy of living in God’s presence, rejoicing with God’s people, unafraid of death and decay.
The Lord knows our struggle to remember the glory of our bodies. He knows our tendency to see our worth in cultural standards of beauty, our physical capabilities, or the number on the scale. He hears our groanings for a day when our bodies will be restored. He weeps with us as we mourn the devastating loss of death.
He knows our struggle to remember the worth of our bodies so he gives us weekly, tangible reminders of his promised restoration.
We worship together corporately not because God needs it, but because we need physical reminders of God’s love. The rituals of standing, sitting, bowing our heads, and singing physically remind us of the God who loves us. We worship corporately to remind ourselves of the community God gives us to wipe away our tears, pass the peace, and bear us up in the Lord’s calling. We participate in tangible sacraments because our bodies need physical reminders of Jesus’ work in the water at baptism and the bread and wine at communion.
We are called into physical friendships and marriages so we can be reminded through all our senses of the deep love of our Father. In Matthew 28, he gives his disciples an active, physical, embodied command to go and make disciples because ministry points us to a God who cares about the whole person. He knew we would struggle with our bodies, so he gave us sacraments and spiritual disciplines as physical reminders of his embodied love for us and the good purpose of our bodies.
This theology of our bodies changes how we live and move in the world. In a biblical theology of the body, the purpose of the body is to serve God and rejoice with other believers.
In Acts 3, Peter heals a beggar lame from birth: “And leaping up, he stood and began to walk, and entered the temple with them walking and leaping and praising God” (v. 8).
God gave this man the body he longed for his entire life. Yet, he finds his delight in his body’s new ability to praise his heavenly father with jumping, leaping, and walking. His restored body brings joy because it points others to the glory and power of God.
This is the joy of our bodies – not in their appearance or what they can or cannot do, but in their ability to point the world to our loving God.
This mindset allows us to rejoice in the different bodies we all have.
- Rather than longing for perfect hand-eye coordination, we can rejoice that God gifted others to shoot a basketball with finesse and power.
- Rather than longing for the body we had at 25, we can rejoice that God enabled our bodies to birth and raise children.
- Rather than obsess over the food we eat, we can be thankful for the nourishment that enables us to care for others.
- Rather than despising our sagging skin and wrinkles, we can rejoice in the Lord’s faithfulness to us for many years.
We are given these bodies for a life lived running and leaping and praising God. May he free us to do that with confidence and joy in summer, in every season of the year, and in every season of life.
Leslie Janikowsky serves as campus staff with Reformed University Fellowship at Rhodes College.