Clough Proverbs Lesson 2

Mental Illness; The biblical view of the body

 

We’ll eventually get to the book of Proverbs; we cannot actually start in to the book of Proverbs until we have defined various terms, terms that have to do with the human soul, body, spirit and the rest of the nouns that are associated in God’s Word with the field of psychology.   Contrary to the classroom propaganda, when the Bible speaks of soul, spirit and heart and these other terms, it is not talking about some abstraction.  The people of the Old Testament, almost it seems, were incapable of visualizing abstractions; therefore when the Word of God speaks about the soul, when it speaks about the spirit, when it speaks about the body, the flesh, the heart and these terms, these are not abstractions.  They are observations of empirically observable phenomenon. 

 

For example, the word “spirit” as we will see later on, whether in the Hebrew or whether in the Greek, means that it is connected with the observable breath of an individual.  When a person breathes they have the spirit; when they do not, according to the Old Testament, they do not have the spirit.  And I want you to see that the words of the Bible are always, repeat, underlined, capitalized, ALWAYS in contact with empirically observable phenomenon.  The Jews never dealt with just metaphysical abstractions; they always dealt with observable phenomenon, the spirit would be one of these, the soul would be one of these, heart would be one of these and so on down the line.  So what we are doing in our [can’t under­stand word] of biblical psychological terms is to simply try to recapture the ancient Jewish mode of thought in order that you may be able to understand the Word of God.  God revealed Himself in this vocabulary and therefore it behooves you, if you are really interested, if you’re not don’t worry about it, but if you’re really interested it behooves you to understand this vocabulary in order that you might receive the Word of God into your mind and digest it.

 

Proverbs deals with the concept of chakmah or wisdom and chakmah is a word which would be best translated as skill, skill in living.  And it’s this skill in living that we want to capture for ourselves as believers because a few of us evidently, by the evidence available, know how to live skillfully.  The book of Proverbs is geared to that very objective, to learn skill in living.  And this is the content of the word chakmah.

 

Now to introduce the aspect of skill in living, last week I started with the theme of what is mental illness, which obviously raised a few eyebrows and produced several good questions because of what I said in connection with mental illness.  And you’ll recall, and we want to clarify that so that you’re perfectly clear what the Bible teaches and what it does not teach, that mental illness as it is currently dealt with in various circles is out of line with regard to the Word of God.  The Word of God has some very, very serious differences with 20th century man’s idea of mental illness.  And to recapture this difference and clash between the content of the Word of God and the prevailing assumptions of 20th century man, I went back and I dealt with the problem of mental illness, in the light of ancient Israel versus the ancient Near East. 

 

Israel was a unique culture and every idea that you meet with in God’s Word basically has come to you from and out of Israelite culture.  This culture was radically different from the ancient world, contrary to what the classroom propaganda is in English and history courses.  The Israelite culture was absolutely and radically different and in the area in which we’re interested in this morning, it differed at one major point and was similar in another major point, in that most of the ancient world believed that mental illness was caused by the activity and the mechanic of evil spirits.  And of course this is out of vogue with 20th century man because he can’t stand to think of somebody in the universe beside himself but the Word of God insists that the ancient world was right; that much of the mechanisms that are used that precipitate mental crisis fall into the area of evil spirits and we’ll deal more with those later.  If we don’t they’ll deal with us.  So we have the evil spirits as a similar mechanic between ancient Israel and the ancient Near East.  Through this the two spheres of culture were the same.  However they were radically different in another and this is the one that interests us most because at this point, as I said last Sunday, we don’t care about the mechanics right here; we’re not interested in the mechanics.

 

We’re interested in ultimate causes and in ultimate causes Israel differed radically.  The ancient world believed in the harmony of nature and they had nature here and man was inside nature and if man was ill it was just part and parcel of the laws of nature.  In other words, it was chance; it was just the laws of nature operating; very much like modern thought.  Israel, however, said no, that’s not right, you’re all wrong; it’s actually incorrect to say that man is part of nature.  Man is not part of nature, man is above nature and man has what we call responsibility, or we have called it volition, or we will later call it ego.

 

So we have volition and responsibility.  Now volition and responsibility set Israel apart as and against the rest of ancient culture, in that disease and illness was a result of bad choices on the part of the creature against the Creator, so that responsibility is the ultimate cause of all suffering.  Theologically put it’s harmartiogenic, that means doctrine of sin is that which originates, harmartiogenic, all illness, all suffering is harmartiogenic according to Israelite thought, and we believe Israelite thought is God’s thoughts then we have to adhere to the same thing.  Since Jesus Christ is an Israelite Jesus Christ went along with the same kind of thought, therefore either we submit to Christ or we reject Him and part of the submission to Jesus Christ is submitting en toto to all of His cultural thinking, all of His cultural thinking.  You don’t take part of Jesus’ cultural thought, excerpt what you like, “love thy neighbor” or something, you like that so you keep that and then you don’t like Jesus’ belief in evil spirits so you jettison that.  That’s not intellectually honest; you either take the whole parcel or you dump the whole parcel.  So either we accept Jesus’ belief in evil spirits along with His ethic, “love thy neighbor” or we reject the concept of loving our neighbor and reject the concept of evil spirits.  Now that’s the only fair way to handle the person of Jesus Christ. 

 

So we have then this responsibility introduced by Israel.  However, they did it at two points and so we drew a chart last week; a chart which I want to redraw because it is very important, and that is the concept of general responsibility and the concept of specific responsibility.  General responsibility would mean that we are genuinely responsible because of the fall and our participation in the fall.  Again I presume that you have thought through the problem of Genesis 1-3; we have tapes on the evolutionary problem, the problems of geology and so on, and these are all problems but I just say to those of you who are new, we dealt with those problems elsewhere and we can’t spend the time to redo that, so we are starting off with the presupposition that Genesis 1-3 are literal history, for reasons which I can’t go into at the moment.

 

So starting with Genesis 1-3 as literal history we come to the conclusion that the fall caused two categories of suffering or illness.  One is physical and the other is mental.  And these are the two (quote) “categories of illness.”  Now it becomes quickly obvious there is some lap over in these and I’ll deal with that problem to clarify some of your questions that you handed in last week.  But what we said last week was that as a result of the fall we have fallen bodies.  We live in a fallen nature, therefore we experience disease and physical suffering, as a result of a general responsibility.  And we gave you verses like John 9:1-3, the problem of congenital defects and so forth, to show you that because a person has a congenital defect, because a person has a physical problem does not, repeat, does not necessarily imply that person is specifically responsible, that he did something bad and he’s’ getting clobbered for it.  Jesus denies that theory by attributing part of sicknesses to simply a general responsibility of all men by participating with Adam in the fall.

 

So we have physical suffering in part brought about by the fall.  Please notice Israelite thought, the biblical thought, is that this is brought about a responsible choice still, it’s a general choice, yes, it’s a general choice but still it is a choice, and it is a result of the creature rebelling against the Creator.  Evil does not come about by chance; evil does not come about because that’s the way God makes us.  Evil comes about because it is a creation brought into existence by the creature in this case.

 

And then we have specific causes of physical illness and we cited this one example, 1 Corinthians 11, the problem of physical discipline, why oftentimes physical disease is a result of a carnality on the part of believers.  It is a result of carnality, and Paul exclusively states this; he goes so far as to say not only is physical sickness a part of a believer’s carnality or result of it but he even goes so far as to say that believers can be destroyed physically, that is, they will die; they can actually commit a sin unto physical death and that is taught in 1 Corinthians 11.  So we have specific and general causes behind physical suffering.

 

However, we said when we come into the area of mental illness, when we come into the area of mental suffering, barring all mental suffering that is due to chemical disturbances, brain damage at birth, in other words, that have an organic base, we’re not talking about mental illness that has an organic base, just to clarify, some of you asked questions last Sunday, very good questions, but we’re not talking here about mental illnesses that are obvious reflections of physical problems.  But mental illnesses that are caused because of people, their reaction to their environment and reaction to their life situation, the Bible denies that there is a category of mental illness due to general responsibility.  In other words, all mental illness in biblical thought is due to a specific rebellion on the part of that individual.  He refuses to submit himself to his Creator properly and as a result he experiences the laws of cause and effect in the mental life.  And as a result of this, then this precipitates what we call mental illness.

 

Now a word of caution and this is a very important word of caution.  By this we are not trying to malign those who are mentally ill.  Please do not draw that conclusion; there’s nothing of what is said here that is meant to set apart the mentally healthy from the mentally ill.  To all degrees, since we all rebel, we are all partially mentally ill because all of us have sin natures and the sin nature affects the mind.  So there’s no such thing as perfect mental health.  There’s not one of you people sitting there in the pew that’s perfectly mentally healthy right now; in phase 3 when you’re face to face with the Lord, yes, but not right now.  We’re talking about degrees and so therefore when we see somebody having tremendous mental problems, don’t look down your nose at them; there but for the grace of God goes you too.  So this is not to disparage the person with the problem; this is simply to point to the fact there is a specific cause and the cause is specific rebellion on that person’s part.

 

Now, to review one little point, to go back to the fact and firmly establish in your mind my assertion last week that Israel alone introduced the concept of responsibility in history I quote from Professor Frankfurt who was one of the greatest Egyptologists that American has produced for many years, at the University of Chicago, from his book called Kingship and the Gods, page 278 and following.  Dr. Frankfurt says this: “It is true that the Mesopotamian,” now he’s contrasting the Mesopotamian with the Israelite, with the Jew.  My objective in giving you this quotation is so you will listen to this quotation carefully and see that here is a man who is a student of ancient history and he clearly sees the difference between Jewish culture and non-Jewish culture.  “It is true that the Mesopotamian lived under the divine imperatives, and knew themselves to fall short of what asked of them, but they did not have what we call the Law.  The will of God had not been revealed to them once and for all.  The Mesopotamians, while they knew themselves to be subject to the decrees of the gods, had no reason to believe that those decrees were necessarily just.  Hence, in their penitential psalms,” that is when they are bemoaning the fact that they are having mental problems and they’re trying to come to grips with what we call conscience, those are the penitential psalms, you can read the penitential psalms, they are in Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Text, the third edition, if you want to read some Babylonian and Egyptian penitential psalms, but when you read the penitential psalms he says this: “… their penitential psalms abound in confessions of guilt but they ignore the sense of sin.”  I’ll read that again.  “… their penitential psalms abound in confessions of guilt but” they are utterly lacking in any “sense of sin.”

 

Now what is the difference?  We would rephrase Frankfurt’s words as: the Mesopotamians in their penitential psalms expresses what you would feel when you feel guilty, when you feel there’s something wrong, there’s something guilty, it’s more of an emotional thing, I feel guilty about something.  They had that same sense of guilt.  But what they never did seem to have was the fact that the guilt was caused by a point act of rebelling against a just Creator.  That was wrong.  In other words, they didn’t have the Ten Commandments so that there was no definition for sin.  You can’t have sin unless you have a yardstick to find it, you’ve got to measure it by some standard and they did not have this absolute standard by which they could measure sin; they had no absolute standard, they had no Ten Commandments and because the Mesopotamian had no Ten Commandments, therefore he knew no such thing as sin. 

 

So “the penitential psalms about in confessions of guilt but they ignore the sense of sin.”  And I handle the point of Frankfurt’s point there because this is precisely the way 20th century America is going, exactly the same thing.  In the area of mental illness, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, everybody talks about guilt and those that even tampering up the word sin redefine it so it doesn’t really mean what the Bible means.  So therefore we are in exactly the same boat as the ancient Egyptian and the ancient Mesopotamian in the area of the psychological.  We have come no further than ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia, no further whatever and therefore it’s refreshing to see this contrast and see what we do have out of the history of Israel.

 

Speaking again of the penitential psalms of the non-Jew: “They are vibrant with despair,” says Professor Frankfurt, “but not with contrition.  They are vibrant with regret but not with repentance.  And for intelligent people conformance with the will of God can be a source of joy.  But for the Mesopotamians the divine decrees merely circumscribe man’s servitude.  Religious exultations fell for them outside the sphere of ethics,” that means good and evil don’t really enter into the religious.  So therefore you can see that as far as spiritual and mental was concerned in the ancient world it paralleled very precisely the mental and spiritual laws of 20th century America, in that we culturally are very, very akin to Mesopotamia and Egyptian thought.  However, the Bible says no, this is wrong, that the problem is a specific rebellion on the part of you against your Creator and if you would stop rebelling you would stop experiencing your effects of sorrow, heartache, guilt and fear.  These are the result of your own rebellion against your personal Creator.

Now it’s quite obvious the reason why the Jew could have this is because simply the Jew in history is the only one that had a monotheism.  He is the only one that had a personal God against whom you could rebel.  Therefore we have shown that in history it’s obvious that Israel and Israel alone is the source of responsibility, volition, or responsible ego.

 

Now one of the greatest Jews on the modern scene that has done much to twist Western thought about the inner workings of the soul is Sigmund Freud.  Sigmund Freud probably represents one of the most virulent forms of anti-Christianity in the last 200 years.  Sigmund Freud did the best he could to erase the contribution of his forefathers and this is no accident.  Here is a quotation from the writings of Sigmund Freud about this problem.  Freud was well aware that he was a Jew; Sigmund Freud was well aware that the Jew was the one who had brought responsibility into the world through the Law and here’s what Sigmund Freud says:  “The Jew carries the burden of a historical super ego,” super ego is Freud’s word for what we call conscience, so redefined, “The Jew carries the burden of a historical conscience,” and then he added this very, very profound statement and this certainly explains the rest of Sigmund Freud’s life, “Therefore the Jew alone can remove it.” 

 

And Sigmund Freud considered himself messianically called to undo the work of his Jewish forefathers.  Sigmund Freud hated Moses; that’s why he wrote the book, Moses and Monotheism.  Moses was the one who brought into history, so to speak, conscience and responsibility in the areas of mental area of thought, therefore Sigmund Freud dedicated himself to undo and reverse Moses.  You want to see this because oftentimes in the public classroom you are presented with the fact that Sigmund Freud was a great psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud was a great scientist but never, never, never in the classroom is it ever touched, Sigmund Freud’s religious motivation: it was to undo the faith of his fathers.  And the result of his psychoanalysis and everything else proceeds out of his religious commitment, that he had to destroy Moses and he wanted to undo Moses and so therefore he produced psychoanalysis.  Psycho­analysis is a means of carrying out his messianic objective in the world, that is to bring Moses back down, get him off Mount Sinai and Freud and Moses are the antithesis.  Moses, the Jew, brings responsibility into history in connection with the mentally ill; Sigmund Freud says no, it is not, the super ego must be crushed and smashed and if you have mental illness, if you have your hang-ups, the problem is that you’ve got a conscience and the solution out of your mental illness is to destroy the conscience.  So very, very simply put you have Moses against Freud; the two represent the polarities of thought and this, of course, is the whole problem that we’re dealing with here. 

 

Let’s turn to the New Testament a moment to show that Jesus Christ and His biographers recognized this problem.  Matthew 4:24; I quote this passage, it’s a classic reference to show that the people in the ancient world did recognize all kinds of diseases and did not attribute them all to demonic.  Some yes, not all however.  And in Matthew 4:24, “And His fame went throughout all Syria; and they brought unto Him all sick people that were taken with various diseases and torments,” and then he lists the categories, Matthew here lists the very category of diseases, “and those who were possessed with devils [demons],” it’s one word in the Greek it’s like this, [diamonizomai], demonized, it’s one word in the Greek, demonized.  So that’s one category of sickness; it can be both physically and mental, demonized where you have spirit forces as the mechanics of delivering this kind of illness.

 

 “…and those who were lunatics,” and the word lunatic comes actually from a Greek word, it’s very similar to that in sound and it means here mentally damaged in the case of epileptics, and here you would have the mental illnesses that are organically caused, the recognition of them and in particular this word often is used in ancient literature for what we call epilepsy.  They recognized that this was not due to demonize, so the Bible is not wrong when it attributes some illness to demon forces and other illness to organic; modern man is wrong when by his materialist reductionism insists on making all diseases materially caused.  Modern man is in error, not the Bible.  And then finally the other, “and those that had the palsy,” the palsy here is a paralysis and again would be bodily damage.  So you see they represented various categories of sickness in the ancient world, there’s no fanatical thing that all is demonic, not at all.  This is wrong if you have that view of the Bible; it just doesn’t fit the text. 

 

So we have sub categories and various categories of illnesses.  Now what do we want to say about this?  Someone after the class last week made a very interesting observation and that is that isn’t it true that God never asks us to do something with which we don’t have the facilities to do it.  God never asks you, He never asks me to do such and such when we don’t have the means at our grasp to do such and such.  One of the great comforts I have received from the text of the New Testament is 1 Corinthians 12:13 that no testing or temptation has taken me that has not been prepared in advance by God, that God has always made a way of escape that I may be able to bear it.  So you will never face a time of testing or anything in life for which God has not provided in advance adequate resources to cope with it.

 

Now in light of that principle of Scripture, doesn’t it strike you as interesting that nowhere in the text of either the Old or the New Testament do we ever have an imperative to be healthy, physically.  Isn’t that interesting; you never have the imperative, be physically healthy.  This would support our contention that we have made that there is a category here of physical illness for which you are not directly and individually responsible, thus the Bible doesn’t command you to be physically healthy.  But contrary wise the Bible does insist that you be mentally healthy.  Doesn’t it command us to be joyful?  Doesn’t it command us to have peace in our heart?  Doesn’t it command us to have all these things?  And using the principle that God never asks us to do something for which we are not equipped, does it not follow, then, that mental health is a possibility for every creature, barring the problem of organic damage?  Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the New Testament and Old Testaments have no imperatives to be physically healthy but they have tons of imperatives… imperatives, by the way, for those of you who are studying sex instead of English, an imperative means a command, I see a blank look on some faces; imperative means as a verb means that you order something; those of you who have been in the army, ten-hut, that is an imperative.  So this is the imperative and there are no imperatives for physical health but there are imperatives for mental health. 

 

Now we can go to the next point.  I want to conclude this section of dealing in a preliminary way with mental illness, though we’ll get into it later, I’m introducing it only to give you some of the mentality of the Old Testament and the New Testament, but I want to read an extended quotation about a group of people who probably were the most mentally healthy in the last four centuries of history.  I speak of the Puritans, and I am going to quote from a man who was not really sympathetic with the Puritans, Thomas Macaulay, in his book, Critical and Historical Essays.  Macaulay made an extensive remark about the Puritans and I want you to listen carefully.

 

I want some of you young people to listen carefully because you’re being fed a line of bull in the classroom that the Puritans burned witches all the time or they were a bunch of queers that ran around Boston 300 years ago or some other nonsense that’s cranked out by some high school English teacher that never read anything of the Puritans.  You just forget that because you’re dealing with a clod English teacher who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.  But for those of you who are interested in knowing about the real Puritans, particularly those of you who are Christians, you ought to be very, very concerned about the Puritans.  These were your brothers and sisters in Christ and these Puritans had a most fantastic effect on history and that is precisely why they are maligned today, because little people, little men always love to malign big men.  Little people always like to gossip and malign about big people.  Look at the animal life, ever see a small dog, what do they do?  Yip, yip, yip, yip, yap, yap, yap, yap.  Did you ever see a nice big dog like a German shepherd or something, a big collie, and very rarely if they’re trained to they yip, yip, yap, they don’t have to, they’re big, they don’t have to get attention and when they want attention they can easily get it, take a hunk out of your leg or something.  But it’s the same way with people.  You take a strong individual, a person who excels and your small individual, the person that teaches in the classroom or something always have to malign them and pull them down and primarily it’s a contest because they can’t stand good people, they can’t stand the elite, they can’t stand the aristocratic, they have to bring everybody down to their low level.  So the low class people that are in our universities and classrooms always have to malign the upper class.  This is a pet theme in the classroom, to malign the aristocracy.  Spiritually speaking the Puritans were the aristocrats of Western civilization.  Nobody can compare with them. 

 

Let me read you this extensive quote and you listen and listen thinking about all the propaganda that you’ve got about the Puritans, all the things you’ve heard about these baddies, these queers, these guys with the black hats and brooms, the people dunking witches in the rivers and so on.  Just think of all the propaganda you’ve heard and now listen from a man who is also a critic of the Puritans, but an honest one.

 

“We would speak first of the Puritans, the most remarkable body of men perhaps which the world has ever produced.”  Keep this in mind, as you listen to this quotation… as you listen to this quotation remember we are talking about a people who manifested a strong mental health.  “The odious and ridiculous parts of their character lie only on the surface, and he that runs may read them, nor had there been wanting attentive and malicious observers to point them out.  For many years after the restoration they were the theme of unmeasured invective and derision.  The Puritans were exposed to the utmost licentiousness of press and stage,” sound familiar, “at the time when the press and stage were most licentious.”   See, you had a lot of small people writing the newspapers, they can’t stand big people either; your little two-bit reporters that CBS sends out to Vietnam, these kind of people, they have to appear a big-shot, and when they really run across a big-shot they can’t stand it because it makes them look like a small-shot and so they have to malign them and run them down, so we have little-shots in the press too, same thing. 

 

“They were exposed to the utmost licentiousness of the press and stage at the time when the press and stage were most licentious.  They were not men of letters; they were, as a body unpopular.”  Now that would immediately cause tremendous mental illness with most Americans, oh, I’m not popular; I’ve got to be popular.  It didn’t bother the Puritans, they weren’t popular and they knew it and they could care less.  So they had no approbation lust; they knew they were unpopular and they didn’t give a damn.  Now what would you suppose if someone did that in your classroom, they could care less whether they were unpopular or not.  Suppose you could care less whether you were unpopular or not; would that change the way you think, the way you react to what people say about you.  They were as a body not popular.

 

 “But it is not from the [can’t understand word] alone that the philosophy of history is to be learned.  Those who roused the public to resistance, those Puritans who directed their measures to a long series of eventful years, those Puritans who formed out of the most unpromising of materials the finest army that Europe has ever seen,” repeat that, “who formed out of the most unpromising of materials the finest army that Europe has ever seen, those Puritans who trampled down kings, church and aristocracy, who in the short intervals of domestic sedition and rebellion, made the name of England terrible to every nation on earth, those Puritans were no vulgar phlegmatics.  Most of their absurdities were only surface.  The Puritans were men whose minds had derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests.  To know God, to serve Him, to enjoy Him was with them the great end of existence.  Instead of catching occasional glimpses of the deity through an obscuring veil, these Puritans, not content with that, aspired to gauge full on His entirable brightness and to commune with Him face to face.  They recognize no title to superiority but His favor and they despised all the accomplishments and dignities of the world.”

 

“If they were unacquainted with the works of philosophers and poets they were deeply read in the oracles of God.  If their names were not found in the registry of heroes, they were recorded in the book of life.  [Can’t understand words] eloquence are nobles and priests they looked down with contempt for they esteemed themselves rich in a more precious treasure; nobles by the right of an earlier creation, priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.  Events which short-sighted politicians described earthly causes, the Puritans claim, had been ordained on God’s account.  For God’s sake empires had risen, flourished and decayed.  And thus the Puritan was made up of two different men, the one of self-abasement and the other proud and sagacious.  He prostrated himself on one hand before his maker but on the other he set foot on the neck of the king.  He’d cry in the bitterness of his soul that God had hid His face from him, but when he took his seat in the council, or he put on his sword for war, these contemptuous workings of the soul had left no perceptible trace behind them.  People who saw nothing of the godly but their uncouth visages and heard nothing from them but their groans and their whining hymns might laugh at them, but those had little reason to laugh who encountered them in the hall of debate or the field of battle.”

 

“These fanatics brought,” and notice this, he’s using fanatics in a correct sense of the word, “These fanatics,” and notice what they did, here’s one of the signs of the mental health of the Puritan movement.  “These fanatics brought to civil and military affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose.”  Underline those two, “a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose.”  Do you know what that means? “Immutability of purpose” means no matter how many obstacles, no matter how many people are against you, if it’s right it’s right and that doesn’t matter.  That is the mentality of the Puritans, “immutability of purpose” regardless of the obstacles of history, they didn’t care, if it was right with God’s Word, that was it.  “They went through the world [can’t understand several words] crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human beings but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities, insensible to fatigue, to pleasure and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon, not to be withstood by any barrier.” 

 

The Puritans had a strong, strong mental health.  Do you know why?  Because they studied the Word of God, that’s why.  And I might also add it was the Puritans that contributed to the early scientists.  Do you know why the early scientists are contrasted to modern ones, do you know why they really wanted to start out, investigate?  Because they wanted to see how God had made His creation.  The scientific investigation was a means of worship, that’s why.  I needn’t stress the point any further, you see what we talk about when we talk of Biblical mental health.

 

Now I want to start today by taking you through some of the terms of the Word of God, uses for involved in this psychology thing.  The first we’re going to study and the only one this morning will be body.  Turn to Genesis 2:7, we’ll deal with the first psychological term; it should be a physiological term but it’s one which I want to capture the biblical thought and we’re going to deal with this word and next week we’ll deal with spirit; today it’s body, the biblical view of the body.

 

Genesis 2:7, this is the crux that is behind all biblical understanding of man.  “The LORD formed man,” in the Hebrew adam, “adam out of the dust of the adamah, so you have the adam and the adamah, you see the play on the words; adamah means red earth.  Now do you see where Adam got his name from?  Red earth, that means dark, and it’s a word that describes man and I want you to notice that it’s physical so that man’s very name emphasizes his physical, not his spiritual, nature.  “The LORD formed adam out of the dust of the adamah, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”  Now there’s a formula that is going to be used throughout the Bible and it’s going to be used again to introduce the new birth.  And I want you to get this formula.  It is body plus spirit yields soul; soul is a result of the body indwelt by the spirit.  Please notice, then, that soul in the Bible means more than just the immaterial; it is the body plus the indwelling or the in-breath that causes the soul. 

 

Today we’re not concerned with the soul or the spirit; we’re concerned with the body and therefore I want go through three states of the body.  The Bible describes the human body in three phases and you all passed through two of these three phases.  There are three phases in the Bible.  The fall separates one and the resurrection separates the other two.  So we have phase one, before the fall, phase two between the fall and resurrection, and phase three after resurrection.  These are the three categories of bodies.

 

The first phase we call innocence.  In this the body was corruptible but not corrupted.  Watch those words; it was “corruptible” but not “corrupted.”  In other words, the body could have been corrupted but it didn’t have to be corrupted.  So man was given originally a corruptible body.  Adam was given, in innocence, a body that was able to be corrupted.  This body was, and we’ll deal with the reasons behind it later, the body was potentially incorruptible. 

 

Now let me show you this in Genesis 3:22-24.  At the end of the narrative of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, have you ever noticed that the narrative ends with these three verses, or do you just think of the narrative ending with God cursing. The narrative doesn’t end with God’s curse; there are three verses that some people don’t look at too carefully.  “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, [23] Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from where he was taken.  [24] And so He drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”

 

There were two trees in the Garden of Eden; there was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and there was the tree of life; two trees in the Garden of Eden.  It was this tree that surrounded the test of Genesis 2:17; it was this tree that would provide everlasting life.  Please notice also that in those very, very literalness of this narrative; it is by eating that the body is destroyed.  In other words, there was an acquisition of something into the physical body that causes its corruption.  Evidently whatever it was that was eaten could have, God could have directly done this by a curse but He could also have done it secondarily, and that is whatever it was destroyed both the spermatic and the body tissue, the spermatic tissue and the seed tissue, the reproduction system was affected as well as the bodily tissue.  And so you have man corrupted but man could have eaten of this tree in verse 22 and if he had, what would have been the trouble then?  He would have had an eternally lasting body with a soul that could never be redeemed.  You see this, what looks like to be so cruel in verse 22-24, this exclusion from the Garden that seems to be so cruel is actually a blessing because conceive of what would happen if Adam was forever doomed to stay in a body that was corrupted and he would have to, as a sinner, continually live under this condition.  He would never be redeemed.  The exclusion of verses 22-24 made possible the future resurrection and transfer of Adam’s spirit into a new body.  That’s why you have this exclusion here.  So we have the first kind of body as innocent.  It could have lived forever.  By the way, it’s interesting that cells taken out of the body can live for an extended period of time.  Dr. Alexis Carrel Rockefeller Institute kept alive chicken tissue for 30 years that had been taken out of the body.  It didn’t die, even though the chicken died; it didn’t die; from 1912-1946. 

 

So we have, then, this first body.  Now out of this, it may seem mundane to you but out of this we get an exciting principle that should clarify some thinking.  Why Adam’s body anyway?  It isn’t necessary for people to have bodies, the angels don’t, why does man have a body?  And it seems there are two reasons given in the Bible why man has a body.   The first one is found in Genesis 1:28… [Tape turns]

 

Notice this, Jesus never sinned but I want you to notice something.  [Can’t understand several words] yet Jesus learned obedience by the things which He suffered.  Now, did He suffer because He sinned?  He did not.  Didn’t He have to learn obedience by experience?  Yes.  Was Adam assigned to learn obedience and loyalty by experience?  Yes.  What was the chief means?  The body.  So the body has a purpose, even in innocence now, we haven’t even gotten to the fall yet, because Jesus here is not a fallen creature.  So even here Jesus Christ is learning and having to learn obedience, and this means discipline and please notice something now.  This will introduce two words, tension and discipline.  And by discipline I don’t mean spanking, discipline I mean in the sense of military discipline, athletic discipline.  Both tension and discipline were present before the fall and God called it very good.  That may shock some of you if you think of that; some of you aren’t thinking because it’s too late, but those of you who are still left with some functioning in the frontal lobes, take those two words and think about them for a minute because that means that tension and discipline God says are good.  That’s not part of the fall.  It has nothing to do with the fall.  The fall increases these, true, but they were there before the fall.  Adam had tension; the tension was should he obey or shouldn’t he obey; that was psychological tension and God called that psychological tension very good. 

 

So, it is not good for man to be in some sort of a zombie state where he’s floating in thin air with no tension; it’s the tensions that develop you psychologically and mentally.  It is the tensions that develop you physically.  What athlete would there be who would not have discipline in his physical body?  So you see, then, innocence, in innocence you have tension and discipline so this business, oh, there’s so much tension, maybe there’s too much, true, because of the fall, but don’t ever think that Adam and Eve did not have tension; they had it every day of their life, every time they walked by that tree there was tension and God, we have His word here, in Genesis 1, the last part of the chapter, this is all very good.

 

So during the time of innocence, where man is being tested and learning loyalty it is very good to have discipline and tension.  This is precisely the opposite view that most people have, oh if I could only get out and a lot of people when they get to retirement, they want to get out from under the tension and discipline; I can be sympathetic with them, it would be nice, but don’t you ever delude yourself into going over into some passive zombaic state; you will atrophy and become a senile fool.  That’s where your retirement is going to go unless you recognize the principle that some tension and some discipline is very good from God’s perspective.

 

Now we have the second state of the human body and that is the fallen state. Turn to 1 Corinthians 9.  Here the body deteriorates so that that original tension and discipline become impossible.  In other words, as a result of the fall the body begins to deteriorate and we experience physical death, we experience pain, we experience numerous disordering changes; those of you who study physics the second law of thermal dynamics begins to take over in a radical way inside the physiological system of the body and we had adjustments in bodily metabolism, the introduction of sweat, so on and so forth.  In 1 Corinthians 9:27 Paul speaks of battling with his fallen body, and I want you to notice the metaphor that he uses.  “I keep under my body,” that doesn’t means he gets underneath it, like you would get underneath and fix the car, that means I subject it, and I “ bring into subjection,” isn’t that interesting, exactly the words used in Genesis where a man shall subdue the earth.  And Paul says you know what, in the Christian life your mandate starts with subduing your own body and having discipline and control.  And so he says “I bring my body into subjection, lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.”

 

As I said last Sunday we have some people in this congregation that have at least one member of their body flapping in the breeze and that’s the tongue. We have altogether too much maligning and gossip around here and it just simply shows a violation of verse 27.  If you are the kind that can’t wait to get on the phone to report to somebody about somebody else you saw sitting in the 8th pew or something, and they were sitting with a different person and you have to give a complete G-2 support to somebody and then speculate on whether they’re out of it spiritually or not and all the rest of it, you are not bringing your body into subjection; your tongue is not brought into subjection, it’s loose, flapping around, causing trouble.  This is the doctrine of the flapping tongue; this means that somebody has not brought it into subjection, it’s part of your body that’s hanging loose.

 

But I want you to notice in verse 27 that this follows a metaphor that was developed in verse 24; “Know ye not that all they which run in a race fun all, but one receives the prize?  So run, that you may obtain.”  Do you know many Christians that are exerting, so to speak, the will power of a person training on a track situation?  Verse 25, “Every man that strives for the mastery is temperate in all things.  Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we, an incorruptible.  [26] I, therefore, so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beats the air.”  In verse 26 he has track and boxing as metaphors, athletic discipline. Elsewhere in the New Testament you have the discipline of the military training in 1 Timothy.  So I want you to notice that the Word of God furthers this concept and much of your Christian life comes, and many of the problems mentally, we are going to find later on, come because you are not by your spirit submitting your body to it.  You are letting your body control your spirit and not your spirit control your body and you have an undisciplined life and because you have such an undisciplined life you fall apart every time there’s something wrong; you don’t know how to cope with your situation in life so you run to tears and you fall apart and you panic and so forth.  It’s all because you have a very, very weak and passive spirit and very poor discipline.  This is one of the things that we’ll find out later.

 

Now the third phase of the body in the Word of God is found in 1 Corinthians 15:44, we’ve dealt with the innocence when the body was corruptible but not corrupted; we’ve dealt with the second stage, when the body was fallen and corrupted, and now we deal with the third stage, the resurrection body which is incorruptible.  The period of testing is over and because the period of testing is over a new word or adjective is used to describe the body in 1 Corinthians 15:44-45.  “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.  There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.  [45] And so it is written, The first man, Adam, became a living soul; the last man was made a quickening spirit.” 

 

Now verse 44, do you see the word “body” occur there several times; do you see the adjective that precedes the noun “body?”  “natural—spiritual” that adjective, “natural” is the word that means soul; “natural” actually is soulish, and the word “spiritual” is properly translated, that is, it’s spiritual.  Now why do you think Paul uses the adjective “soulish” to describe our present bodies but the word “spiritual” to describe our future bodies?  Some of you, not thinking, are going to throw it right back and say oh, I know why, because the spiritual body is beyond the grave, our body is dead and so on.  Oh no, wrong, because the resurrection body has flesh and bones, Luke 24, so he’s not denying the materialness of that future resurrection body, but nevertheless he uses the strange word “spiritual.” 

 

Why use the adjective spiritual to describe a material body?  Here’s why; in the soulish body we have an interaction between body and spirit.  We’ll see this more and more as we go through the biblical psychology; in other words, you can eat something bad and it affects your spirit, it taints it, maybe you have low blood sugar, your hormones are out of balance or something, and it can be detected and can affect your spirits.  Spiritual life can be affected very easy by the physical, very easily.  And so we have a two way interaction going on and this two way interaction centers on the soul.  Remember I said soul is the result of body plus spirit; remember the formula.  All right, now we come to the resurrection body and it’s not called a soulish body any more; here’s why.  Because in this time you have body and you have spirit but the reaction is only one way, the other one it’s a two way reaction and when you get in resurrection body, no more pain, no more sorrow, and you don’t have to eat though we can eat according to Luke 24, and all these things, and the body isn’t affecting the spirit; the spirit is a one-way street now.  The spirit operates through the resurrection body and brings into perfect submission the new material universe.  So this is why the adjective “spiritual” is used to label that third body.

 

Next week we’ll deal with the noun “spirit.”