Encore Post: Soon after the death and resurrection of Jesus, as the gospel spread throughout the Roman world, the Gentiles Christians met had no problem with the truth that Jesus was God. They were accustomed to thinking of great leaders, like the Caesars, as sons of the gods. The chief obstacle was the belief that the spiritual world was good, but the physical world bad. No god worth his deity would want to be a man and no man in his right mind would want to rise from the dead bodily.
In fact, a popular religious movement, known as Gnosticism, was very popular during the early years of the church. Gnostics liked to adapt existing religious systems to their own worldview. To them, the spiritual world is good, perfect, ideal and pure. The physical world is bad, evil, imperfect changing and polluted. The body, they believed, was a prison, in which pieces of the true God are trapped. These pieces, known as immortal souls are deceived and ignorant of their true identity. Unless someone gives them the secret knowledge (the word Gnosis, from which the movement is named, means knowledge) that they are one with God. That is where gnostic teachers came in — to give new Gnostics the knowledge they need to escape the physical world. Το Gnostics, the desires of the body were either evil, because they convinced you this world was real, or didn’t matter, because they are an illusion.
When Gnostics decided to make Christianity their own, they saw Jesus as the λόγος — Logos — The Word, who pretended to be a man or adopted the man Jesus as a vehicle, to give us this secret knowledge. To them, there was nothing more offensive than the incarnation or that God would suffer and die. So they found ways to explain them away. The church rejected this movement very vigorously. Yet in the process of trying to make the faith attractive to Gnostics, they adopted the philosophy that the body and its passions were bad.
Yet there is nothing further than the truth. God made us, body and soul. He made us male and female. He created the emotions and drives that bring a man and woman together in marriage. He called it all very good. Sin and death corrupt these drives, seasoning them with self-interest. Yet, in their place, these things are great blessings. One day, spirit and body will be severed violently and unnaturally. They were never meant to be a part.
That is why God the Son became a man, suffered and died for us on the cross and rose from the dead. The seal of the grave broken, he will call us back from our graves, restore our bodies and bring us — body and soul together again to the marriage feast of the Lamb. So, it’s not Body vs. Spirit. It is Body and Soul together in Christ forever.
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