The Lord’s ways are not our ways (Isa. 55:8–9). Do we take this seriously, or do we revert to “our ways” in desperate seasons when we wander from God to seek meaning?
I revisit this battle every time I look in the mirror at a quadriplegic body I desperately hope is not me.
“Our ways” tell me that the body is incidental to identity. It’s an enticing lie that exploits disorienting bodily experiences such as disability, sickness, gender dysphoria, or other bodily insecurities hindering people from seeing meaning in bodies that feel foreign.
I don’t see the nobility of God’s image or a temple worthy to house the divine when I’m being catheterized, bathed, or rolled in bed to prevent pressure sores. For others, disfiguration, tumors, or injury characterize bodies they can’t wait to “escape” at the second coming. For still others, their bodies contradict strong inward feelings telling them who they “really” are. Whatever the motivation, we tend to downplay bodily meaning when we feel it compromises our dignity.
But this is autonomy’s way, not the Lord’s way.
Scripture tells us there’s nothing undignified about weak, broken, dependent, or foreign-feeling bodies. The apostle Paul says our bodies (of all conditions) are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19). No higher calling exists for the physical than to serve as a temple to house its Creator.
Paul’s claim is a hard truth for those with bodily insecurities, because it means we must trade the disdain we feel toward our bodies for contentment—a difficult but worthy exchange.
‘Glory of the Immortal God’
Paul is well acquainted with bodily fragility and limitations, yet he doesn’t hesitate to make the body central to the identity of people he calls “more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Rom. 8:37).
For example, Paul observes in Romans 1:18–31 that the quintessential sin resulting from “exchang[ing] the truth about God for a lie” (v. 25) and “exchang[ing] the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man” (v. 23) is bodily sin that distorts God’s “very good” design for the body (Gen. 1:31). Thus, the “glory of the immortal God” of which Paul speaks is, at least in part, our bodies, which God created as his image (vv. 26–27).
In Romans 6, Paul includes the body as part of the life Christ calls us to after “we have died with Christ” and subsequently “also live with him” (v. 8). He exhorts us to use our bodies “as instruments for righteousness” (vv. 12–13).
Paul makes no exception for those with bodily insecurities. The body God gave you is an instrument for righteousness, no matter how broken or “inauthentic” it may feel.
God’s Image, Not Ours
Scripture teaches that my bodily self, no matter how foreign it feels, is me. And, like the rest of me, it doesn’t “belong” to me for two reasons.
First, we’re not our own because the Lord makes his temples. Under the new covenant, “the Most High does not dwell in houses made by hands” (Acts 7:48), and the “Lord of heaven . . . does not live in temples made by man” (17:24).
I did not make myself. The Lord “fearfully and wonderfully made” me; I am his “wonderful” work (Ps. 139:14) and “workmanship” (Eph. 2:10). He “formed my inward parts” and “knitted me together” (Ps. 139:13). Even brokenness, including disability, is the Lord’s wonderful work (Ex. 4:11; John 9:2–4).
Second, we’re not our own because the Lord purchased us, body and all. Paul tells us bluntly, “You were bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6:20). A very high price: the death of his Son.
My body is his, disability and all. Nothing about me is “mine” to do with as I please. My body is a temple for the Lord, not for me. He designed, constructed, and purposed it. “I” am no longer my own. Rather, my body is “meant . . . for the Lord, and the Lord for [my] body” (1 Cor. 6:13).
My body is his, disability and all. Nothing about me is ‘mine’ to do with as I please.
God has purposed my broken body and purchased my identity at the great price of his Son’s death to proclaim his glory as he sees fit. The Christian mustn’t disparage his body, no matter its condition, because it’s no longer his. It never was.
If the “me” I prefer conflicts with the body God fearfully and wonderfully made for himself, it’s my will, not my body, that must change. It’s best if we don’t find ourselves in league with the money changers who repurposed God’s temple for their own designs (Matt. 21:12–13).
Grasping for Godhood
Self-construction is the sinful alternative to the example Jesus provided when he “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant” and “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6–8).
God’s identity for Jesus was to be “Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23). The foreignness, frailty, weakness, vulnerability, physicality, and struggle of that identity were precisely God’s purpose: He would reconcile the world to himself through the things fallen man finds folly.
His identity for each of us to serve in that “ministry of reconciliation” is no different (2 Cor. 5:11–18). We must view our foreign-feeling bodies as Jesus saw his weak and disabled body on the cross: as vessels through which God demonstrates his redeeming strength.
We must view our foreign-feeling bodies as Jesus saw his weak and disabled body on the cross: as vessels through which God demonstrates his redeeming strength.
Unlike Jesus, I became bitter after God rejected my desperate (decades-long) plea to let his “cup” of disability pass from me. Unlike Paul, who accepted God’s grace as sufficient in the face of his rejected pleas to remove his “thorn” (12:7–10), I exchanged my royal crown of glory for captivity to an autonomy that told me I was shameful. I failed to resist Babel’s temptation to rename myself through self-construction (Gen. 11:1–9).
I hated the idea that my body was especially suitable for proclaiming the gospel. I refused to be the man God made disabled so “the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3). Even now, three decades after my injury, I’m still learning to say, “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (Matt. 26:39).
It’s a hard lesson to learn that when God gives you a “cup,” you drink it. He won’t be giving you another. Whether in hardship or healing, God’s grace is sufficient.
No Less Beautiful
The temple in Jerusalem was a site to behold. No precious metal, jewel, or expert craftsman was spared in its design and construction (1 Chron. 28–29). It had to be beautiful because it housed the holy: “The glory of the LORD filled the house of God” (2 Chron. 5:14). The temple stood august and strong as the center of life in Jerusalem.
God abides with his people differently now, even in bodies as far from “august and strong” as the east is from the west. Yet God’s temples today are no less beautiful than the temple under King Solomon or King Herod—even more beautiful because the image of God (us) is the best possible place for God.
Thank God that the Lord’s ways are different from our ways, which only serve to blind us to the truth that broken bodies make beautiful temples.
The Gospel Coalition