Systematic Theology – Eschatology

The Body of Humiliation

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 19 of 32

Track: #19

Year:

Dictation Name: 19 The Body of Humiliation

[Rushdoony] Oh Lord our God unto Whom all flesh shall come. We come to Thee by Thy grace and in Thy mercy to praise Thee for all Thy blessings and Thine unfailing care. To cast our every care upon Thee who carest for us. We rejoice oh Lord in Thy word, Thy sure mercies, Thy prospering hand, and Thine unfailing government. Make us ever joyful in Thee, and ever grant us Thy peace. In Jesus name, amen.

Our subject this morning is the body of humiliation, the body of humiliation and our text is from I Corinthians 9, first of all, 24-27 and then Philippians 3:20 & 21. First of all I Corinthians 9 verses 24-27

“24 Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain.

25 And every man that striveth 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 beateth the air:

27 But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.”

And then Philippians 3:20&21

“20 For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ:

21 Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.”

How seriously God takes the body, and how seriously we must regard it’s use is stressed in I Corinthians 3, verse 17. “If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy. For the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.” Too often these words are passed over as having primary or entire reference to the church rather than to the physical bodies of believers.

Now it is true that in a sense the primary reference may be to the church, because in I Corinthians 3 verse 1-17 Paul uses three figures to describe Christ’s church. First of all, in verses 1-9 he describes it as a field cultivated by men under God’s supervision. Then second in verses 10-15 - a building whose foundation is Jesus Christ. Then in the last two verses, 16 and 17, the church is the temple wherein God dwells. However we must not restrict this image of the temple to the church alone because in I Corinthians 6:19 it is very clear that our physical bodies, as well as the church, are temples of God. Moreover in this passage in I Corinthians 3, in verses 12-15 Paul refers to any man’s actions again and again. This indicates that the church as a unite, and we as persons, are both in Paul’s minds. Our bodies are equated by Paul in his Thinking with the church, as the temple of God. The temple is a Holy Place, temples are sacred because the house of God is a temple, and a temple means literally, “The habitation of God, the house of God.” And wherever God is, there is a holy place and a temple. Thus in Exodus 3:1-6 the incident of Moses before the burning bush he is told to take the shoes off his feet because the place where he stands is holy ground.

Moreover we are told in scriptures to be in sin and to see God is to die. When Manoah the father of Samson in Judges 13:22 describes the fact that they have seen God and this fact comes home to him, he says “we shall surely die because we have seen God.” Sin cannot live in the presence of God, and the sinner can only stand before God by His grace. Now this fact about God was adopted by royalty very early. We see for example a haswayrus {?} in Esther 4:11 “All the king's servants, and the people of the king's provinces, do know, that whosoever, whether man or women, shall come unto the king into the inner court, who is not called, there is one law of his to put him to death, except such to whom the king shall hold out the golden scepter, that he may live.” We still have an echo of this in the fact that any approach to President’s and other rulers is by their sufferance and grace alone. The presence of God was and is death to sin and the sinner.

Because the temple of God is His habitation, His palace, it’d defilement is a most serious, a deadly crime. In the Old Testament we see very clearly that the law of the tabernacle and of the temple was agreed. Defilement is death. Paul refers to this penalty in I Corinthians 3:17 and indirectly in I Corinthians 6:19. “If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy. For the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.” This is why all sexual is so strong condemned by Paul, by all of scripture, because it is a defilement of the temple of God.

Now in the Greek view of the body, Paul was writing to Corinthians. The sins of the flesh were, at best, lesser sins, are not sins at all because the body was regarded as so trifling a matter. This Greek heresy has very extensively affected the church, and so sins of the flesh are now very lightly regarded or punished. There was a time as we saw a week ago when the church regarded certain sins of the flesh as irremissible, because they were serious. Now they are hardly considered more than trifling matters in all too many cases.

Now some moderns accuse Tertullian of depreciating the body. But Tertullian insisted that even gold is earth, so that to depreciate matter and our bodies, is nonsense. He spoke of the gold of our flesh which God purifies by His grace. His thinking here was very clearly and obviously Biblical.

To understand what scripture has to say about the body we must understand its covenant context. The body was created by God for covenant man, for covenant creature, who is a body, a living person. Now when God gives His covenant to man basic to that covenant is His law, because a covenant is a treaty of law. God’s law is an expression of God’s nature, it reveals what God is like. When God makes us His covenant people He gives us His law, and He requires that the law require become a part of our nature because we are now members of the royal family. This is very clearly singled out as a mark of the new covenant in Christ by Jeremiah 31:31-34:

“31 Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah:

32 Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord:

33 But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.

34 And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

Now what Jeremiah is saying is simply this, if a man is not a walking law in that God’s law is second nature to him, and governs his being, then he does not belong to the new covenant in Jesus Christ. You cannot be an antinomian and belong to Christ, because the mark of the new covenant is precisely that the law of God is now written in all our being, in our inward parts. This is the mark of a covenant man, our bodies are now temples of God, a housing for God’s spirit. Now in the Old Testament we read that the Ark of the Covenant was in the holy of holy’s. It was the habitation of God. The Ark of the Covenant had in it the pot of manna, Aaron’s rod which budded, but especially the law. So that when we are told that our bodies are the temples of God, and that the law must be written on the tables of our hearts, we are told that our bodies are not only temples, but Ark’s, the ark of God.

Thus, this is a tremendous dignity that is given to the body, it is the habitation of God’s Holy Spirit, it is the housing for God’s law, and profanation of the temple and profanation of the body are therefore related; they are related in theology, in eschatology, and in everyday life. The body was created, we are told, for the Lord, and it is to find it’s in the resurrection of the body when it is forever the perfect ark, the perfect temple of the Lord.

At this point of course we run into a very much abused and misunderstood text. Philippians 3 verse 20-21, because whenever anyone speaks about the body and its significance in the plan of God, someone is likely to say “but our bodies are called by the Bible, ‘vile.’” Our vile body, is this true? Now the key word here is ‘vile’ of course, from the Latin meaning “cheap” or “worthless”. The word has gone down-hill over the centuries to mean something more than something that is lowly, and is come to have a bad moral connotation and to indicate something that is lacking in value. But the word vile is a translation of a Greek word meaning, “depressed, humiliated, pushed down in estate” so that it connotes something that is great that has been humiliated.

Thus when Paul calls our bodies vile what he means, according to the Greek text, is that because of the fall our bodies no longer have their original dignity. They have been humiliated, they have been depressed in abilities by the fall. Paul is saying by that term that before the fall our bodies had a potential intellectually and physically that we cannot even begin to imagine now. We were created a perfect, a glorious body, and we have an even greater glory facing us in the resurrection in our flesh. But with the fall sin and death entered in, sin and death are a cancer on our being, a cancer which has made us vile, or humiliated. Our potentialities now are only a fragment of God’s original creation and intention, so that we do not begin to realize but a very small amount of our intellectual and physical potential. Our body has been humiliated, it is as though every one of us were carrying a hundred pound weight all the time, so that we could not move with the rapidity that we would like, and we are so conscious of it all the time that we cannot thing properly. Our body is dragged down by such a weight. Well this dimly conveys the meaning of vile, or better, humiliated.

Thus what Paul is saying is that Christ will change our humiliated body to be like His own glorious body, He will refashion, remake, or change our bodies to give them a totally new appearance, and a glorious one; and at that time because we will be morally perfected there will be a correspondence between the perfectly sanctified person and his body. Paul speaks further as we saw in the reading of I Corinthians 9:24-27 of the fact that believers must be like athletes running a race, and a man who is trained for a race and running a race is not indolent or lazy. He gives it his best effort, he pours every bit of energy that he can into the race and he runs to win. Now Paul says we’re all to be running to win if we’re Christians, to outcompete everyone else. Now Paul indicates all who run with this zeal win the prize. He doesn’t say what we are running against, perhaps against the sin and death that haunts our being, but we are running to win an incorruptible crown, so we have to show a dedication. And because our bodies are the temples of God, and God is described as a consuming fire, when we make our bodies true ark’s of God, true dwelling places of the Spirit, we are on fire, we run, we do our work with a passion and with a zeal.