Clough Manhood Series Lesson 18

Law: Subduing the Body

…what we’ve done so far in the manhood series on Sunday evening. In the manhood series the solution to the job versus wife was that there basically is no conflict inherent in the situation; that the woman is the helper and the job and the wife are coordinate parts. What, then is the priority of the working wife? What is the priority the working wife should have in order to be the helper and yet perform her work outside of the home as unto the Lord? Well, obviously when the woman works outside the home the price that is paid for that sort of situation is that the man himself is going to have to back down on his role and take over some of her areas; it’s that simple. And so there’s got to be some give; you can’t expect the woman is going to do both things on top of everything else. So there’s a corollary that comes up with that situation.

When you ask something of God, such as a sign for a job, how do you know if the sign that you get is from God or not? Well, you can’t; the problem that you’ve got with this sort of situation is because you basically have violated Genesis 2:19-20 that tells you you don’t put out fleeces to decide those questions. You solve the problem by dealing with it with the wisdom principles of Scripture. And you’ve got to go on that point and not expect direct revelation to solve that kind of a choice; you’d be waiting around an awful long time because God is not going to give you special revelation on that kind of a choice any more than He gave Adam special revelation on what to name the animals. I think I covered that pretty well when I went through that Genesis 2 section.

Another question, we were talking about Rebekah and Isaac and choosing a wife, and there was a question asked: What about one who is a believer who just comes from a bad family background situation, and it’s just kind of a gross thing; do you fear that? Well I think the answer to that is that if a person has a trusting relationship with a person of the opposite sex this shouldn’t be a source of embarrassment, it’s not the person’s fault, they can’t help it, but I think that deliberate subterfuge and secrecy on that kind of a situation can breed some suspicions later on that you’re going to be sorry you bred. So honesty is the best policy and trust the Lord with the results.

Tonight we come to Lesson 18, dealing with the man and the law. We’ve dealt with the great male characters of Scripture in Genesis; now we come to the man’s relationship to the law. We’ve so far said that law can be simply defined as a revelation of God’s will. That’s a simple definition, that law is the revelation of God’s will. As such, each dispensation has laws. It’s just simply not true… I don’t know where these anti dispensationalists get all this propaganda— the dispensationalists don’t have law in the church age. It’s foolish; all they have to do is read Dr. Ryrie’s book, Dispensationalism Today which is the authoritative statement and it’s all laid out there. This is a nitwit retort to dispensationalism. Dispensationalists have defined wills of the church age, and if defined will is law then we have law for the church age. So I don’t understand what seems to be the problem with people.

So law, the revelation of God’s will, it’s one of the two means of sanctification. Remember the two means that God uses in sanctification—law and grace. Law defines what God wants; grace enables us to carry it out. So we have those two parts in sanctification. And law is the source, then, since I know what God’s will is, of confidence. A man who operates under a framework and within a framework of law is a confident man. A man that doesn’t know where he stands is not confident, he’s insecure. We also observed that the law when viewed scripturally is primarily contractual. That is, it is a contract between God and man, and that’s the primary idea of law in the Scriptures, a personal contract. Last time we showed why the male believer is the one God holds responsible for knowing the terms of the law, and not only for knowing them, for making them known to others. And this falls on the man’s shoulders; that is the way the Scriptures are written.

Tonight we come to the first of a series of areas of man subduing the earth under law. And the first of these areas, since we are talking about subduing the ground, that would be logical is talk about the ground that’s closest to the person, and therefore the man and his body. Remember Adam is called Adam because he is made from the ground. In the Hebrew the word Adam and Adamah, Adamah means red and it can also mean ground; Adam is called Adam because he is from the ground; this colors his character literally and so therefore that’s why we have our name in the Hebrew, this is our basis, this is our source. So tonight we’re going to deal with passages, primarily from the book of Deuteronomy, that deal with the man and God’s directions for the use of his body. We are then going to move through these sections of the law and then we’ll conclude with a New Testament picture of where this takes us now.

Where do all the commands that we’re going to deal with tonight basically root from? They root from the same place the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill” roots from. “Thou shalt not kill expresses God’s attitude toward physical life. God does not want physical life destroyed; he does not want it harmed and He wants full physical life. And so therefore God has protection devices built into the creation and revealed in the Mosaic Law and other places. So that’s the source of this whole spectrum of rules; the issue is the view, “Thou shalt not kill.”

Now let’s go to the first area; the first area under the law is a series of laws that are to prevent mutilation of the body. There is only one mutilation or tampering with the body, and that is circumcision, permitted in Scripture. This is in contrast to the religions of the Ancient East that had a form of tattooing by carving it into the skin. If you were here for Wednesday night when Joe {?} came here, when he had the scars of his face from his tribal initiation, that’s typical of the Ancient Near East too. And so this kind of thing was prohibited in the Scripture; no bodily mutilation.

Turn to Deuteronomy 23:1, this is talking about the male who is castrated. It literally reads in the Hebrew,
“He who has been castrated shall never, never enter the congregation of the LORD. [2] A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the LORD. [2] And Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to their tenth generation….” The reason that verses 1-3 must be interpreted together is because the key to the interpretation lies in a subsequent biblical history. Verses 2-3 just on the surface appear to permanently exclude a person because of his race. They appear at first glance, an Ammonite or Moabite shall never enter the congregation, even to the tenth generation. And yet we have an obvious case of Ruth who does enter the congregation.

Now why? The answer is found in the spirit of the law. Ruth made Yahweh, the God of Israel, her covenant God and when that conversion was established then she conformed with the spirit of the law and they were acceptable. And so the book of Ruth is the interpretive answer to verses 2 and 3. That tells us how God, what He meant by mental attitude and spirit. And so we say the same thing in verse 1; verse 1 is talking of an internal policing type thing. This castration was done for one of two reasons in the ancient world; basically religious; in certain cases certain priesthoods had to have eunuchs, and so therefore it was backed with the religious apostate reason. But then the second reason was that men were often castrated to act as guards to the king’s harem. And this was for preventive reasons, it doesn’t require too much imagination. And so that was why they had eunuchs in that area. But both cases, as far as God is concerned, both cases are insufficient reasons. The first reason it’s insufficient is because it’s an apostate religious reason; it’s a form of self-atonement. The second reason it’s insufficient, because the man should be under the control of the Scriptures in the Spirit of God. And so therefore those are insufficient reasons and therefore this prohibition against all sterilization and all castration. This could not be accomplished in the congregation of God.

It goes back to the fact that God wants to produce a godly seed, and He will protect that godly seed, and therefore no eunuchs in this situation. However, remember the exceptions we’ve discussed in Matthew and so on. Deuteronomy 23:1 is one of the references that prohibits any form of bodily mutilation and in particular the most popular form of bodily mutilation.

Now Deuteronomy 25:11, women knew self defense and they would often, when their husbands involved in a fight grab the other person and you know where. And they would not only grab, they would ruin, and this is reported in all the Ancient Near Eastern codes; this is not unique to Scripture. This was a common means; it was just normal self defense. And in verses 11-12 [“When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draws near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him who smites him, and puts forth her hand, and takes him by the secrets, [12] Then thou shalt cut off her hand; thine eye shall not pity her.”] this is the only case beyond circumcision, I must amend what I said before, there are two cases of bodily mutilation and verse 12 is the second place. That is the only place in all of Scripture you’ll ever see anything like that. In verse 12 the punishment is to cut her hand off. And apart from that one thing, that never occurs at any other place in the Mosaic Law.

Now why is this? Because the woman, she may love her husband, and there’s a tremendous principle in verse 11 and it shines through the rest of the Law; the woman may love her husband dearly, but even as much as she loves her husband and as much as her husband may need her help she cannot help her husband unlawfully. She must love God more than her husband, and that’s the dilemma, and this is just one of several instances in the Scripture where the woman would be faced with a test between should I obey God or should I come to the aid of my husband, and when there’s a choice you obey God and trust God for your husband. You do not help your husband unlawfully. So there again is the protection, the protection of the godly seed God cares for and He cares for it very much. And so He writes these kinds of things into the Mosaic Law. It’s a protection.

Turn to Deuteronomy 14:1, in verses 1-2, and also turn to Leviticus 19:28, [“Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks upon you: I am the LORD.”] These are a series of verses continuing with the same point of the prohibition of any bodily mutilation. In Deuteronomy 14:1, “You are the children of the LORD your God: ye shall not cut yourselves,” the priests of Baal cut themselves as they prayed that Baal would answer the famous prayer for fire from heaven, and Elijah was chiding them and so on, they cut themselves until they bled all over their bodies. This was a system of compelling God, it’s a sort of magical rite and it involves a form, in a way, self-atonement, salvation or sanctification by works, and God prohibits this. There shall be no bodily mutilation. God has made our bodies and we are to leave them alone. “You shall not cut yourselves, nor make any baldness between your eyes for the dead,” this is undue grief. The “baldness between the eyes” literally is they would shave the hair all the way back, down to the scalp, and this was a religious sign of intense grief. And the idea is that we are to grieve not as others who have no hope; and so the believers are compelled to avoid this kind of thing. Bodily mutilation was for that purpose.

Now the reason in verse 2, “For you are a holy people unto the LORD your God, and the LORD has chosen you to be a peculiar,” or a witnessing “people to Himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth.” They are not, then, to engage in these practices of bodily mutilation, for whatever reason, whether it is self-defense, whether it is religious, whether it is fear, pragmatic bureaucracy in the case of the harem, whatever the reason God says no, no, no, no! I have designed the body, this is basically what it’s saying, God says I have designed the body the way I want your body to be and you will leave it the way I designed it. That’s basically what He’s saying.

All right, there’s another passage in Leviticus, Leviticus 21:5, [“They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard, nor make any cuttings in their flesh.”] again this includes shaving the corner of their beards, for the shaving of the corner of their beard was again a religious rite in the ancient world akin to cutting the skin. The shaving of the beard was what the ambassadors of David received when they went over into Transjordania, and there’s a story on that in 2 Samuel. But this whole point is that God is content with His body design, and He doesn’t want it tampered with. So in all these we can summarize this whole first set of references and you can find more if you look, this whole first set of references, we can collect them together and label them, that its God’s law over how the body is to be used; God claims this as His sovereign right. So when I say is Jesus Christ Lord, if I were an Old Testament believer I would say if Yahweh is Lord, when I would make the claim that Yahweh is my Adonai, is my Lord, I would have to be saying that then I respect what Yahweh says about the use of my body. That is His claim; I am His slave and He owns my body.

Now this is a picture of sanctification you don’t get with full force in the New Testament, and that’s why tonight I’m going to save the New Testament passage all the way to the end because it won’t hit you right unless you expose yourself as the Jewish readers of the New Testament had already been exposed, and knew very well that God had made rules and laws concerning the use of the body.

Now all these commandments in this first set, no bodily mutilation, all these commandments are not seen directly in the New Testament, and one can ask the question, how come? How come in all the dozens and dozens and dozens of do’s and don’ts in the law of Christ we don’t have any of this? And the answer seems to be that the New Testament judiciously abbreviates God’s laws to handle the problem what do you do when you go out into a pagan culture. Now what, for example, would you do with a tribe like Joe? Joe had, from childhood, had his face cut with a tribal insignia. All right, in that situation do you make the cutting the issue? No, says God, there are far more basic issues; there’s creation, the other things, and salvation, and finally getting down to the gospel of Christ, and then when you get there, then you can discuss that God cares for your body and we can have the outworking later on. It’s not saying that these are totally irrelevant to the church age, it’s just saying that the general principle behind them is important, but God is not making them law in the law of Christ. The law of Christ in the New Testament does not contain provisions against mutilation. But the law of Christ does contain provisions, as we’ll see, promoting the care of the body, but it never flushes it out, it never tells you well, what all is involved in caring for the body. The New Testament doesn’t tell you that; for that you have to go back in the Old Testament, and in the Old Testament you pick up the flavor of all of what God has meant. I’m trying to outline the relationship of the Old and the New Testament here.

Let’s look at a second set of verses; turn to Numbers 5, this is a second set of God’s laws with regards to the body, and the man is to subdue the earth under these laws. This second set of laws concern sanitation and sanitation particularly of the body, cleanliness. The saying that “cleanliness is next to godliness,” that comes out of the Christian tradition. Cleanliness is commanded in the Scriptures. Said another way, slobs are basically degenerate people and so the Scriptures are simply saying that principle in so many words.

Numbers 5:1, “And the LORD spoke unto Moses, saying, [2] Command the children of Israel, that they put out of the camp every leper, and everyone that has an issue, and whosoever is defiled by the dead. [3] Both male and female you put them out, outside the camp shall you put them; that they defile not their camps, in the midst whereof I dwell.” Notice the last phrase, “in the midst of whereof I dwell.” God doesn’t want to be defiled with filth. God dwells in a clean camp. God does not dwell in a place where the results of the fall are that obvious. See, physical filth in the Scriptures is a picture of spiritual filth and the two are not directly separated because the result of the curse is what? The introduction of disease. And so where you have physical filth and no sanitation you are basically looking, physically, at the result of the curse, and God doesn’t live in His own curse. That’s what He’s saying, so He says get these things out of here. Basically stated, what you’ve got in verse 2 is quarantine… quarantine! Long before modern science ever thought, long before Louis Pasteur came up with the germ theory, and Professor Hooke with his microscope and others who worked in this field. So in this situation we have anticipated by centuries the laws of sanitation.

This is always a time when I like to hop off the text here a minute and create a little mental experiment. Let’s pretend we live back in that day. And let’s suppose that we have absolutely no idea and we wouldn’t have, no reason why we should have, we have no idea of germs and the causation processes of disease, and we’ve lived all our lives, say in Egypt, where the filth was dumped in the streets just like medieval Europe, that’s why the man walks on the outside and the girl on the inside because if somebody dumps it goes on him and not on his girl, and so the idea was that you just let the streets wash it off, that’s it. And hope that it rained every 3 or 4 days to clean things out. So this was the basic sanitation of the ancient world. Now had we been brought up that way, with all the filth, then all of a sudden we get acquainted with this new God, Jehovah, and the first things He asks us is I don’t want this; I challenge your whole lifestyle, I want it changed. You say what’s going on, what harm does it do?

Now at that point does God ever, in any of these Scriptures, ever tell us the harm that it does? No He doesn’t. Does He ever give us other reasons for it? No He doesn’t. So what are we faced with? Aren’t we faced, then, with a clear cut decision whether to trust His Word and do it, no questions asked, or do we sit well, I’m not going to do it God until You give me 25 reasons on the germ theory of disease. No! For century upon century upon century because science hadn’t got into that area yet it didn’t understand. But nevertheless God’s command has been vindicated. There are good reasons for this and there may yet be more reasons that we haven’t even yet uncovered. Meanwhile we can’t hold our breath waiting for science to uncover cause/effect. We have to go ahead and operate and live and so we live in accordance with the Word of God. So this is just an admonition that when you see commands to do things in Scripture and abstain from other things in Scripture, and you can’t figure out psychologically, sociologically, and other ways why God tells you to do this, think of the sanitation in the Old Testament. They couldn’t figure it out either, but we now know in retrospect it was very, very wise.

Now further in Numbers, Numbers 19 we have the priestly sanitation system. In fact, generally speaking throughout the Old Testament you have washing after washing after washing. The person who comes before the temple, he washes. Jesus continues that in that passage we repeat every communion service when He washes the feet and He says that that is a symbol and a sign of regeneration and confession, so that throughout the Scriptures there’s many, many different washings. Now in Numbers 19:5 it’s talking about the sprinkling of the blood, you will burn the heifer “her skin, and her flesh, and her blood, with her dung, shall he burn. [6] And the priest shall take cedar wood, and hyssop, and scarlet, and cast it into the midst of the burning of the heifer.” Absolute sterilization. That’s why we know that’s there, but they didn’t know that, and so they had sterilization by heat and fire. Notice verse 8, “He that burns it shall wash his clothes in water, and bathe his flesh in water, and shall be unclean until the evening,” or sunset. And the idea there was you washed and you got out in the sun, where the sun sterilized, and what we have is ultraviolet sterilization; primitive but it’s there.

And so again these hygienic principles, [9] “A man that is clean shall gather up the ashes of the heifer, and lay them outside the camp in a clean place … it is purification for sin.” And it goes on and on, you can just skim down here, very quickly with your eyes, and you can see washing after washing after washing. Notice Numbers 19:16, “And whosoever touches not that is slain with a sword in the open fields, or a dead body, or the bone of a man, or a grave, shall be unclean seven days.” Now again it’s watch out from disease, stay away from this thing; quarantine, use separation techniques. All of this listed here far before the days of Pasteur. Verse 18, “A clean person shall take hyssop, and dip it in the water, and sprinkle it upon the tent,” wash everything down, wherever there has been death. Verse 19, “…bathe himself in water, and you’ll be clean at evening.” In other words, again stay out in the open sunlight for that day so you can get the benefit of the sterilization of the sun’s rays.

And it goes on to describe the many different things, just over and over, I think there’s one place here if you look carefully, verse 17, it even talks about using “running water”. A while ago we showed the Dr. Semmelweis film where Dr. Semmelweis pled and pled and pled for the medical students in Vienna to wash their hands in their examinations of women, and what he was doing, all he advocated was washing the hands in a static bowl of water. Well, what God advocated was what is done today, washing your hands with running water so the dirty water runs off and you don’t recontaminate the situation.

So here you have a tremendous forward leap in the human race as God, in His omniscience, tells man how to subdue the earth—by simple sanitary laws. You see, we’re looking now at the physical things of subduing the earth through these principles and through these rules.

Turn to Leviticus 13, 14, 15, we’ve got a whole section here of purification again; one washing after another, wash this, wash that, this is clean, this is unclean, and this has to do with leprosy. Now we stated in the Gospel of Matthew series that leprosy is the picture par excellence of what sin does; leprosy is a gruesome disease. It’s a highly visible degenerative disease, and because it’s so highly visible what God says is are you offended by leprosy, you like these people who are leprous? Gross, aren’t they. Well, what God says is well, that’s what you do to Me, you’re gross in my sight. And so as we are kind of turned off by looking at these horrible pictures, if you’ve never seen one I’ll have to add to my slide collection, of a leper, and then watch, that the transfer concept over to the way we are in God’s sight.

Now you’ll notice here in Leviticus 13:1, 2, 3, 4, we won’t go through the whole thing but just far enough so you get the flavor of what’s happening here, [2] “When a man shall have in the skin of his flesh, a rising, a scar, or bright spot, and it be in the skin of his flesh like the plague of leprosy, then he shall be brought unto Aaron the priest, or unto one of his sons the priests.” Do you notice, of all the people in the nation Israel, who was picked out to be the physician? The priest. And that’s why wherever Christianity has gone where it has had an influence, where the Bible has had an influence, you have always had the doctor looked upon as a priest of sorts; the doctor carries over part of those priestly functions in today’s society, and as we see paganism arise and so on, you’re watching medicine fall apart. You’re watching the medical students train that man is a mere evolutionary machine.

Those of you who saw the Schaeffer seminar had that graphic picture in the film of the proposal to harvest organs, where if a person has a flat brain wave keep them there and then you can have a little tap out and take their blood off and feed them some more fluid and get some more blood out, and that way we don’t have to have blood donors. And this kind of manipulation that goes on in the name of medical science. This is coming, it’s all coming, abortion is here, euthanasia is just right around the corner and the next one will be eliminating the morons, idiots, and grandmothers over 85. It’s just a matter of time. Once the Supreme Court did what they did in 1973 it’s just a matter of time. So if that’s the case, then here you have the original view of medicine, the priestly view.

And so it’s the priests what perform the work of the physician. Leviticus 13:3, “And the priest shall loon on the plague in the skin of the flesh: and when the hair in the plagues is turned white, and the plague in sight is deeper than the skin of his flesh, it is a plague of leprosy: and the priest shall look on him, and pronounce him unclean.” Notice the diagnostic test; God is giving them a diagnostic procedure. [4] “If the bright spot be white in the skin of his flesh, and in sight be not deeper than the skin, and the hair therefore be not turned white, then the priest shall shut up him that has the plague seven days. [5] And the priest shall look on him the seventh day, and, behold, if the plague is in his sight be at a stay, and the plague spread not in the skin, then the priest shall shut him up seven days more. [6] And the priest shall look on him again the seventh day, and, behold, if the plague be somewhat dark, and the plague spread not in the skin, the priest shall pronounce him clean; it is but a scab: and he shall wash his clothes, and be clean. [7] But if the scab spread much abroad in the skin, after that he has been seen of the priest for his cleansing, he shall be seen of the priest again; [8] And if the priest see that, behold, the scab spreads in the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him unclean: it is leprosy.”

So a complete diagnostic proceeding here. These are God’s laws to protect us, to help us subdue the earth and it includes care for the physical body. Turn to Deuteronomy 23:12, I have to do this in the light of someone’s comment about there is a biblical basis for toilet paper, well here it is. Last time I faced this passage was on Christmas Eve, a beautiful Christmas Eve topic, how they dug latrines in ancient Israel. This is just to convince some of you that the Word of God does speak to every area. Also it’s just to irritate those people who are prissy.

In Deuteronomy 23:12, “Thou shalt have a place also outside the camp, where you shalt go forth abroad. [13] And you shall have a shovel [among thy weapons],” notice, this is for the army, by the way, the context of this is in military maneuvers, to protect the army, “and it shall be, when you will ease yourself abroad, that you shall dig, you shall turn back and cover [that which comes from thee]. [14] For the LORD thy God walks,” notice the reason now, notice the reason… “For the LORD thy God walks in the midst of your camp, to deliver you, and therefore shall your camp be holy, that He sees no unclean thing in thee, and turn away from you.”

Now you see the connection between physical cleanliness and spiritual cleanliness? And this strangely, wherever the Christian gospel has gone with force in the world, you have always had the effect of an increase in hygiene in these areas. It’s simply the effect, it’s the normal outworking of the Christian gospel. As people desire spiritual cleanliness they just, as a corollary, want to be physically clean. So these are passages, all these passages, dealing with the second area. We’ve worked with no bodily mutilation; the second area is sanitation and care for the body’s cleanliness.

Now it’s interesting, we said the first area was never encountered in the New Testament, but this area is encountered. If you turn to Matthew 8 Jesus does a very interesting thing here. All down through the eons of Old Testament history, the centuries, time, no one had ever been miraculously healed of leprosy as far as we can tell from the Scriptures. There’s not one case of recorded healing, other than perhaps Nahum. So what do we have? The Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew 8:1-4 puts forward a healing of leprosy and watch how He does it. Now keep in mind everything we’ve read so far in the Old Testament to get the background of how this must have really frosted people in His day. “When He was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed Him. [2] And, behold, there came a leper and kept worshipping Him, saying, Lord, if You will, You can make me clean.” And it’s a first class if, “Lord, you can, so please make me clean.” [3] “Jesus put forth His hand and He touched him….”

Notice that, Jesus did not have to touch the leper, He could have instantly commanded him and that man would have been healed, but the Lord Jesus Christ showed that He had power to go where God’s law prohibited contact. And what you’ve got here, since leprosy is a picture of men’s sin, this is an adumbration of Him going to the cross; He touches sin, He comes into contact with it. The holy God, who prohibited all those things we saw in the sanitation code, He said because I walk in your midst and I do not want to see something unclean in your midst. Here, when God becomes incarnate He reaches out and He touches, of all people, the leper, and He heals him. And this is a picture of God coming into contact with our sin.

And then He sends him forward in verse 4, go to the priests and tell them what happened. That’s a challenge to the authorities of Jesus’ day because He knows darn well there’s never been a case like this before and when those men get this guy they have to go through that procedure we just read about in the book of Numbers, and it’s going to qualify the Lord Jesus Christ’s Messianic claims to them. It’s going to be a means of presenting Christ to them and He knows it, so He says go, go ahead and show yourself to the priest. He’ll know what to do and He’ll know who sent you when he gets through is diagnostic test. So besides being a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ, here we’ve got the same imagery tied over into the New Testament from the Old, physical uncleanness is a picture of sin; it’s associated with sin, and Jesus carries it forward.

All right, let’s go to another area of the Scriptures where man is under God’s law with respect to his body. Not only the area of mutilation, the area of sanctification, now the area of his food. Turn to Genesis 1, diet and nutrition, what you eat and what you don’t eat, God has something to say about that. And here it’s very easy for the person who (quote) accepts Christ as Savior (end quote), and then proceeds to go on, never making the connection that now his body has become a temple of Christ and he ought to take care of it. He says my body is mine and I do with it as I as please, nobody’s going to tell me what I’m going to eat, I’ll eat what I want to. Sure, you might see the Lord sooner that way. The point is that God has a wise set of nutrition rules. And so here we find him interested in nutrition.

In Genesis 1:29 He defines the diet of man, right from the very beginning man is said not to know proper nutrition; it does not come naturally to Adam and Eve. After all, what was the whole fall itself about? Wasn’t it about nutrition? The very concept of salvation and sin is tied in with physical eating. That wasn’t a spiritual tree and had spiritual fruit and she kind of went pfft, like this, that was some fruit, we don’t know, the nearest guess that Scripture scholars have is that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is pomegranate and it’s an early form of it which had a poison it that literally poisoned the human race and affected the genetic tissue. Whether this is true we don’t know, it’s not dogmatic. But the point is that it was a physical tree to which Adam and Eve went, and that tree had chemicals in it that were poisonous to the human body and they couldn’t perform the experiment. So God had to tell them, again like the germ theory of Louis Pasteur, the whole point is I sit here as a finite limited man, I don’t have enough data to tell me what’s right to eat and what’s not right to eat. And so therefore I have to trust God in this area.

Now today, yes, we have tests and so on, we can devise principles, but from the beginning that wasn’t so. Adam and Eve did not have enough accumulated experience to tell what they ought to be eating, so we have a definition of their diet in Genesis 1:29-30. [“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for food. [30] And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creeps upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for food: and it was so.”]

Now let’s come to the end of Genesis 3, at the end, after the fall of man, we know that they partook of the poisonous food, maybe it was poisonous, we can’t be dogmatic but it’s suggested it was, in Genesis 3:22, “And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever,” there was some sort of a physical antidote, apparently, in that tree, and Adam and Eve could have eaten the tree, gotten the antidote, and lived forever; it would have neutralized the curse in their body but it would not have neutralized the curse on their spirit, and so they would have been doomed to live forever and ever and ever and ever and never die and be able to be redeemed. So God in His grace [24] “drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden the cherub,” with their swords. And so again the very concept of salvation and death is connected with nutrition in the Scriptures.

Coming forward to Genesis 9, after the flood, God again specifies man’s diet. He again outlines the principles of nutrition. He again insists that he has the right to tell us what to eat and tell us what not to eat. That’s His right as Creator. Genesis 9:2-3, “And the fear of you” and so on, verse 2-3, you know the text most of you, the carnivorous element of man, can’t we have the eating of meat protein. Meat protein is authorized as of the point of the flood. We don’t know why, presumably it is because the protein in vegetation after the flood is incomplete. Apparently before all the amino acids before the flood, all the 22 or so amino acids and proteins were complete. So many vegetables before had a complete set of nutrition. Afterwards, because of deterioration in some way man could not get and secure enough of the protein and he had to do it through meat.

But in the process, by the time we get to Genesis 9 something else has happened. Now we’re talking about eating animals, meat, but now we come across another new thing because prior to the flood man had devised, under God’s law, a difference between clean and unclean meat. This division was there, not because of nutrition but because of animals picked to sacrifice. That’s why in Genesis 7 it says, Genesis 7:2-3, Noah brought seven of the clean animals, but only two of the unclean. He did so because of the need for sacrifice.

Now, originally animals were divided along lines, and we don’t know what these lines are, some lines, into these two categories. Now can we guess, and this is only a guess, but can we guess what the line was? I think so. Why is the lamb picked out as the animal to depict Christ? Well, there’s certain qualities about the lamb, when we showed the lamb film here you observed those qualities. You observed certain qualities about the animal as he lay there and was slain. And so God, since He uses His own creation as a mirror back at us, we can suggest that the reason for the difference between clean and unclean animals is behavior pattern; the clean animals behave in a certain way, they have a certain ecological niche, and it’s that that’s a picture of something to man.

The unclean animals also have an ecological niche because if you look at the lists, and by the way, the two lists of them are Deuteronomy 14 and Leviticus 11 for those of you interested, if you look at those lists you’ll find that many of the unclean animals are scavengers. The scavengers, again, deal with the unclean thing, and so here you have the same thing you had with sanitation; God says I want latrines outside the camp because I walk in the camp and I don’t want to walk on dirt. I want it clean if I’m going to be in your camp. And so it is, if I’m going to be in your camp I want you to eat clean things, I don’t want you to associate with animals that have a scavenger function. Yes, in a fallen world scavengers are necessary. In the final days the Lord God Himself calls for the fowls of heaven and says come, eat the flesh of the unregenerate kings; go ahead, there’s plenty of garbage, eat until you’re full. So scavengers are needed in a fallen world. But that doesn’t mean God’s people have to be identified with those scavengers, and so therefore the clean animals are said to be that which man alone can eat.

There are several other things of nutrition in the Old Testament; you could not eat the fat of the meat; you could only eat the lean of the meat, and now we know, with all this talk about cholesterol and so on there may be a very bona fide nutrition answer to that. The second thing, you could not eat meat of animals that had died; they had to be killed there and eaten fresh. You could not eat unfresh meat, and we know good reasons for that.

So pulling it all together, we have a situation where God is dictating in the area of diet, we saw from Genesis 1 he dictates diet and now come to the last book of the Scriptures, Revelation 22:2, the very last picture we get in the Scriptures of salvation is presented under the imagery of nutrition. “In the midst of the street thereof, and on either side of the river, there was the tree of life, which bore twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” The picture is that men who were prohibited to eat from the tree of life in the Garden in Genesis 3, now can eat freely. Jesus promises in other places, I will let you eat, eat of the tree forever and ever and ever.

So why do we have this coherent imagery all the way from Genesis to Revelation about nutrition? Obviously because God considers it very important what you put into your body. He does not want us to put junk, trash and poisons into our body. This is carried out in the New Testament. We have some well known passages against drunkenness, but let’s turn to 1 Peter 4:3. Drunkenness is the same thing, putting that which is not healthy into the body. Two sins are mentioned here involving nutrition, both are equally so. “For the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, and revelings, and banquetings,” the banqueting is the sin of gluttony, overeating, and we would say not just overeating but eating wrong food. Remember Daniel refused to eat. So we have the two things carried over. Peter looks askance at these kinds of people with their bad nutrition.

Now there’s going to be one verse that someone’s going to quote afterwards saying that this undoes the whole thing I’ve said, and that is Colossians 2 so I’ll preempt that complaint and we’ll turn to Colossians 2:16-17 they’ll say we’re not under the law. Correct, I agree. And they’ll say therefore nutrition is of no concern for the Christian. Not true. Here they will quote this passage saying, “Let no man, therefore, judge you in food, or in drink, on in respect of a holy day, or of the new moon, or of a Sabbath day, [17] Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.” See, they’ll say, that negates the nutrition advice. No it doesn’t.

The point in verse 16 is making it law, the Shabbat, the Sabbath, but the principle of the Sabbath is carried over, isn’t it, into the New Testament dispensation, the principle of six days of work and one day of rest; isn’t that a bona fide principle? And by the way, empirically that has been shown to work, the communists tried one day in ten when they first took over in Russia, and they found out that workers, the produce went way down and so the only way they could maximize the produce was work six days and take one day off. Go tell the labor unions that. But the point is that God’s ration between work and leisure is six to one. Now, here in Colossians the point is that the principle remains, as with the Sabbath, so with this. It’s just not making it Law, but that’s not to say don’t take care of your body, of what you put into it.

Now there’s one other area besides nutrition, besides the area of sanitation, besides the area of mutilation, and that’s the area of exercise. Turn to 1 Timothy 4:8. See, God’s Word does cover every area after all; there is something to find out, it is “sufficient unto every good work.” You do not have to go to your friendly humanist anti-theistic psychiatrist to find out what to do at $50 an hour. 1 Timothy 4:8, now this one is often used as an argument against exercise; it’s converse, it’s exactly opposite. “For bodily exercise profits little, but godliness profits unto all things,” now the way that reads is this: bodily exercise profits for a time; godliness profits forever. Now that’s not [can’t understand word] exercise, that’s an admission that it’s valid; it is possible for a time, for this life. So again, and we have the athletic metaphors that Paul uses in sanctification, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, the argument I had with the editor of Christianity Today, some woman editor that said that Paul, nowhere in the Scriptures do you find the apostles interested in contact sports. So I said what do you do with 1 Corinthians 9? Boxing always looked like a pretty contact sport to me? And I never got a reply from here. What happened? See, they write before they read.

The point is that Paul knew athletics and he thought so much of the exercise that he used that as a model for sanctification. And just because he’s using it as a model doesn’t mean he just discards it. It means it was considered valuable enough to be used as an illustration of sanctification. So the very employment of exercise as a model of sanctification is a validation that in a common sense world it was considered to be useful.

So now let’s look at what we’ve found and turn in conclusion to our key New Testament passage, 1 Corinthians 6:20. The man under law is the man who cannot claim his body as his own. That’s the principle. This is an area of sanctification battle; maybe this has never been taught to you before. Maybe you’ve never thought that it can become a sanctification problem. Food can become a sanctification problem. Exercise can become a sanctification problem. How you handle your body, your general cleanliness, can be a sanctification problem. These things God is interested in and the proof thereof is the fact they are included in the Mosaic Code.

Now in 1 Corinthians 6:20, when we read that passage, “[For we are bought with a price, therefore] glorify God in your body … which is God’s,” that ought to hit you harder because 1 Corinthians 6:20 and verse 19, your body is the temple of the Spirit, that’s written with all the Old Testament as its backdrop. Now what does all that mean? That means God is interested in these things; not just these areas, he’s talking about fornication just above it, but if you keep on going backwards up to verse 10, what do you notice? “Drunkards, nor revilers,” he’s talking about the gluttony there. So Paul has all these on his mind when he mentions the temple of the Spirit.

Now we have kind of a disobedient lazy fatalism in Bible-believing circles; it goes somewhat like this: Well, I’m saved and I’m just going to trust the Lord with that kind of thing and not bother with it. Now is that trusting the Lord? No, that’s just being lazy and blaming it on God. If God wants to take me home, God will take me home; I don’t have to worry about nutrition, don’t have to do all these things. Why don’t you stop breathing? You know, why do you breathe? Because you have to probably. Try not to. That kind of thing, you know you do eat three meals every day, why bother? See, they never take this to the logical conclusion; they always reduce it down to some antinomian thing.

All right, what can one do in this area? What’s some practical things? Okay, here’s the Christian believer, he’s under law, particularly this is addressed to the men. God’s Word specifies that He says our bodies are to be used and not used in a certain way. Whether we like it or not, that’s His law. He has that right because He is our Creator and He has the legal right to specify. And He says that our bodies are the temple of the Spirit and they ought to be taken care of and if you don’t take care of it, that’s the vindication your attitude toward God Himself. A man’s attitude, in fact, this is so much so that in that very passage that’s read in the wedding service, where it says let every man love his wife as his own body, for no man ever hates his own body, see, it’s taken for granted that the man would be interested in taking care of the body. But when we have the body identified as a temple, no less, then to allow that temple to be desecrated is essentially to allow the Spirit to be desecrated who dwells in the temple.

So this is a matter of sanctification. Now let’s just suppose a person has a problem in this area. What would be a practical way of coping with that kind of a problem. There are ways of handling this situation. All right, what would be one way of handling it, let’s have some suggestions. Start out, first of all I would advise you pinpoint Scriptures, you’ve got to be convinced that it’s Scriptural, otherwise you can’t generate and pull on the resources of your conscience; if you just take it because I’ve said it or somebody else said it, that just won’t give you enough power. You’ve got to be morally convinced of the issue because until you are you’re never going to be able to operate in this area by faith. And the only way I know to bring your conscience into it and bring all of its power and deployment under the Holy Spirit is to work with the Scriptures and be convinced from specific Scriptures of specific violations.

Okay, you make a list of these; then you pick out the easy ones first; don’t clobber yourself trying to graduate from college when you haven’t graduated seventh grade; take the easy ones, encourage yourself. All right, how then do you succeed? Suppose you’ve pinpointed one area. Okay, let’s go on. There are two problems you’re going to have and they both have to be solved at the same time; there’s the –R learned behavior patterns, and the positive learned behavior patterns, and they’re both fighting each other, and the trick is, one is a weed and one is a productive plant and you’ve got to make one die and the other one grow. So you’ve got to do everything you can to think of things that hinder this and things that encourage this. Think of the context when you have a problem with X, Y and Z, what are you usually doing; where are you usually. A person may have trouble with eating; okay, the person may be a traveling person and they don’t have a diet because they’re in one restaurant to another and so on. Okay, there’s your context, there’s the context for the situation. It’s not just a diet problem, it’s a traveling problem. It’s a problem where you are and what’s happening before, during and after when this problem goes on. So you isolate the context.

And then you begin to develop aids to change that context. Okay, now, one of the aids, resources you have, are many of the things in recent days about these areas, in the area of exercise there’s the aerobic series by Major Cooper, where he’s worked out the different point systems and so on in physical exercise; in the area of nutrition there’s many books, there’s one book coming out, I just was working with its author last week, it ties exercise and diet together for the Christian, and that will be off the press in about 3 or 4 months. But one very practical thing that every married man has is a wife.

Turn to Proverbs 31 to show how she can help. Keep in mind that we’re not just talking about some isolated problem there, relate it… relate it to the overall problem of subduing the earth. What we’re trying to do is subdue our bodies, and we’re trying to do it as unto the Lord. And so there are certain principles we use. We take advantage of everything He gives us. Notice in Proverbs 31, this whole eulogy to this wise wife, notice now, say we’re involved with the food issue or something; notice Proverbs 31:11, “The heart of her husband safely trusts in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. [12] She will do him good, and not evil, all the days of her life.” Suppose the guy does have a diet problem. All right, he can get help from his wife, that’s what it says, she will do him good and not evil.

Notice at the end of this text, in Proverbs 31:15 what does she do, one of the things, “She rises while it is yet night, and gives food to her household,” that’s explicitly mentioned, and the giving of food would include nutritious food. It would include well thought out food, and it would include this area. And so the wife, who is the help for the man, this is a very practical instance where the wife can be used by the man to help him in these areas. Some men have a thing about this, but if they rely upon their wife for anything like this, oh, this threatens their manhood. Well, what kind of man are you that’s so delicate that’s going to be threatened by a woman helping out once in a while. What are you? See, that’s the wrong concept of man and that doesn’t come from the Scriptures, that comes from your spiritual king of the mountain game that you’re playing. But that doesn’t come from the Scriptures. Your wife has been given as a helper and she ought to be used in these areas.

Next week we’ll deal with another area of men from the law and again we’ll try to cite some specific passages and specific application.