
The Importance of Both the Inner and Outer Body for the Christian
Since I got active on Twitter in early 2024, I often come across comments like this as people debate spirituality and physical fitness:
From by what I can gathered and have observed by those who predominantly post about masculinity, not all but some, focus more on outward appearance than the inward man. Being physically in shape is great but being spiritually minded is far greater.
This is undoubtedly true, not least because Paul tells us this exactly in I Timothy 4:8:
For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.
If that was all there was to say I wouldn’t be writing or talking about this, and given I’ve had a massive red pill experience regarding physical health because of Donald Trump and then the Covid scam, I have a very lot to say about it.
When I say because of Donald Trump, it wasn’t so much about Trump per se, but the reaction to Trump when he came down the escalator in June 2015. Even though I was not a fan of Trump, and in a way despised him and everything I thought he stood for, the reactions to Trump were so unhinged I thought, nobody can be that bad. So I started to take him seriously, and a year later in the Illinois primary I begrudgingly voted for him over Ted Cruz, and not with a little guilt. I never looked back, though, because the lies of the media, the Democrats, and NeverTrump Uniparty Republicans made me actually begin to appreciate the guy. I thought, he must be a singular threat to their grift to engender this much hatred, and it’s only gotten worse. They’ve even driven the Republican Party to become the Trump party,
something unfathomable just a couple years ago. What has this all to do with health? As it turns out, Everything.
Covid, The Neutron Bomb of Truth
Not too long ago this phrase popped into my mind as a metaphor for how powerful Covid was as a societal red pill about health, and other things as well. Theoretically, a neutron bomb is a weapon that kills by irradiation killing everything that lives while sparing property. So when this particular bomb exploded around the world in 2020, it effectively killed lies about health and modern medicine that had developed in the previous hundred years, while at the same time sparing the property, so to speak, of our every day lives. No longer could those of us affected by it see anything related to our health in the same way. This included the modern medical industrial complex, Big Pharma, and those things that contribute to feeding the beast while destroying our health, like Big Food and Big Ag.
When my cousin told me in March 2020 that Covid was a scam, I was nonplussed, a word that means the opposite of what it seems to mean; to perplex or bewilder someone; to confound or flummox. The “experts,” the CDC, the WHO, governments and media organizations everywhere on earth treated Covid as if it was akin to the Bubonic plague, aka, the Black Death, a real pandemic that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351. A rough estimate is that 25 million people in Europe died from plague during the Black Death, and the population of western Europe would not reach its pre-1348 level for 250 years. I don’t remember seeing anything during the Covid years like Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s, “Bring out yer dead.” All I remember is masks, masks, everywhere masks. I wouldn’t wear one. Initially it was intimidating, but I learned, for example, to enjoy going to the local Walmart and being the only person in the entire store without a mask, virtue signaling of another sort. I kind of miss those days.
My cousin also started me on my health journey, giving me reading suggestions, while I started searching out resources online about the history of medicine, and how we got to the place where modern medicine seemed to be getting it all so wrong. I learned that modern medicine isn’t so much health care as disease care, the focus on treating symptoms. Like everyone else, I believed it was medicine that healed us. After several years of this journey, and slowly making changes in eating and exercise habits, I had a final red pill experience that in effect confirmed everything I’d been learning since the bomb dropped.
Earlier this year I came down with an unpleasant case of dermatitis, with itchy red splotches all over my body. It started when I noticed white flakes, lots of them, coming out of my hair, and I’ve never had dandruff. It got so bad, gross really, that scabs were appearing on my scalp and I was losing small chunks of hair. That will freak you out! I had been thinking of finding an integrative or holistic doctor for some time, and this was the opportunity to do that. But initially I went to a dermatologist, a skin doctor that I knew was your typically modern medically educated professional. I learned this was Seborrheic dermatitis. They prescribed some medicine and gave me a paper explaining the condition, and on it were these words I could hardly believe I was reading: “Dermatitis is an immune response of the body with no known cause.” What? Are you serious? Talk about nonplussed; I was shocked. And the more I thought about it the more ticked off I got.
The medicine was a steroid cream and some anti-fungal shampoo and some other medicine for my scalp. Not too many years before, pre-Covid, I would have continued to use it, and since it only treated symptoms would likely have had to use it for the rest of my life. What a depressing thought knowing what I now knew. Looking at these ugly red splotches on my arms and legs and the terrible itching was the final motivation I needed to find a holistic, integrative medical professional to figure this out. I found a local nutritionist who had me take several tests, and discovered I had severe fungal and bacterial overgrowth in my gut which led to something called leaky gut. She put me on a protocol of herbal supplements, a specific strain of probiotic, and helped me tweak my diet, and by golly the dermatitis went away! No more ugly red splotches, no more itching. My body like God intended healed itself, no medicine required. Talk about mind blowing.
This doesn’t mean medicine doesn’t have its place, but even when it’s appropriate it isn’t what heals us so much as it allows the body to heal itself. That was the paradigm shift, that God created our bodies, and the ridiculously complex immune systems he gave us, to heal themselves. After six decades of believing the former, it was not an easy transition to fully embrace the latter, but dermatitis sealed the deal. I was automatically conditioned, like everyone had been prior to Covid, to run to the doctor whenever anything was wrong. I now look back with 20/20 hindsight and realize God had been leaving health breadcrumbs throughout my life to help me begin to see that he’s provided everything we need in creation to live healthy and well-functioning lives. Prior, like most others, I believed health and disease was a crap shoot, a matter, for lack of a better term, of luck. Now I know better. We are responsible for our health, or lack thereof.
The Apostle Paul and Bodily Exercise
For much of my Christian life I mocked those who were obsessed with health and exercise. I wanted to be healthy and exercised, but I assumed the people who obsessed about it were deluded, thinking they could live forever. Then Covid. I slowly came to believe our health isn’t merely something that’s nice to have if we’re fortunate, and something to be wished for, but something we have control over. It’s not a crap shoot, a mere roll of the dice. If we just happen to get the wrong number, bad luck, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, whatever. That is what we’ve been programmed to believe by a well-meaning medical establishment that is blind to their own indoctrination. Thankfully, with the explosion in knowledge and the Gutenberg Press of the 21st century, the Internet, distributing it to anyone who wants it, the indoctrination is slowly being revealed for what it is, false information, also known as lies, about human health and disease.
Living 2000 years ago when the average lifespan was probably 30 or 40 years old, and knowledge about disease and health was guesswork, Paul couldn’t imagine what we know now. I would like to believe if he were writing to Timothy today, he might write something like this:
For physical training and your health is of great value, but godliness has even more value and for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.
Paul and people in the ancient world in general did have some idea what they did had some effect on their health. He even implies in chapter 5 that Timothy’s ill health is bad for his ministry and that he should do something about that:
23 Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.
Think about what he might say if he had our knowledge about the human body and could suggest more than wine. Or what he might say about how much value physical training and our health has if the choices we made allowed us to live productive, healthy lives into our 90s. Let’s look at this theologically and get a big picture perspective on these issues.
God has chosen to reveal himself to us in two ways, one through His creation, and the other verbally through His word, Scripture, in Greek, graphé-γραφή, the writings. In Matthew 4, Jesus tells us that “man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Here Jesus is telling us both are required for life, physical substance from the earth and spiritual substance from God’s word. Without either one we die. Regarding the former, God’s material created order, Paul tells us this in Romans 1:
20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so they are without excuse.
We can see the maker of matter through His matter, the Creator of all things from His creation. Through it He is “clearly seen,” no ambiguity, no guesswork whatsoever. And since all knowledge has it origin in God, we gain knowledge of God through His creation. In the Middle Ages, Christians came to see these as two books, the book of nature and the book of Scripture.
Related to both, is the concept of progressive revelation. As we can see in Scripture, God doesn’t pull up the dump truck of revelation and unload it all at once. Rather, he slowly, painstakingly slowly (God is never in a hurry), revealed Himself and knowledge about the nature of reality over 2000 years to give us our Bibles. When the canon of Scripture was closed, that didn’t mean God stopped revealing himself. The Bible itself being the revelation of God is a bottomless ocean, the depths of which can never be fully comprehended, but He’s also revealing Himself slowly but surely in creation. Knowledge grew slowly through the first 1500 years of so of the church, but when the scientific revolution started this process picked up speed. People who lived at the turn of the 20th century were dumbfounded at the growth of technology and knowledge. A hundred years later that had multiplied exponentially, and in the third decade of the 21st century, human knowledge is mind boggling. All of it is revelation from God, including knowledge about the human body and our health.
Our Health, Our Responsibility
When we lived in Illinois, the Chicago area, we went to a large church, and because we’re not fans of modern praise music, we attended the traditional service, which meant there were a lot more older people there. Many times I would see some old guy with a cane or something hunched over hobbling down the isle to his seat, and I would tell my family, I don’t want to be that guy. Yet I really didn’t believe I had control of whether I became that guy or not. Sure, to some degree I did, but I still bought into the crap shoot mentality of health and illness. Knowing better now, I see Jesus’ words in the parable of the master and the servant in Luke 12 as relevant for this discussion:
47 And that servant who knew his master’s will but did not get ready or act according to his will, will receive a severe beating. 48 But the one who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, will receive a light beating. Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more.
Related to health and the body, we can’t pretend the last 2000 years didn’t happen, specifically that there has been an explosion of knowledge about the human body, disease, food, exercise, and optimal health. Nor can we pretend that we don’t have agency, and that the choices we make have implications for our health, nor that all this is a gift of God to be utilized for his glory and in service to others. To whom much is given applies here as much as to any of the other gifts of life God has graciously granted us. We’re also taught by Jesus in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25 that he expects us to invest what he’s given us to multiply it and not bury it in the ground.
Lastly, who wouldn’t rather be healthy than sick? If God has given us the knowledge and technology to be the former rather than the latter, why wouldn’t we do that? And further, if being healthy allows us to more effectively and for more years be part of God’s glorious effort of bringing his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, shouldn’t we do that? Think about the implications of this. Effectively, it means physical training and our health has great value not only for this life but for the one to come. There are spiritual, eternal implications for the choices we make regarding our health, including how much we exercise, what we eat, how much we sleep, and how we handle our stress. No more do we need to play the physical off the spiritual, as if somehow they were either in conflict or mutually exclusive. They are both oriented to the same end; the telos, purpose, of each is the glory of God, our good and the good of others. Because of this, the Apostle Paul would tell us:
Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.
What I’ve learned and what I’m sharing here is that physical health and it’s connection to spiritual reality is part of the 21st century Great Awakening. As a convinced postmillennialist, I now believe that what Isaiah tells us about the “new heavens and earth” in chapter 65 is becoming a reality it our time.
20 “Never again will there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not live out his years;
the one who dies at a hundred
will be thought a mere child;
the one who fails to reach a hundred
will be considered accursed.
What an exciting time to be alive! And remember, God has chosen us to be here, you, me, and everyone one else, to be alive at this very moment, as Paul tells us in Acts 17:26:
He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.
Onward Christian soldiers!
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