No, Your Body Isn't Your Own
by Audrey Stallsmith
In the debates over abortion and “alternative lifestyles,” many a person has declaimed that “My body is my own and what I choose to do with it is up to me.” That simply isn’t true. And we all know that if you start with a false premise you are going to end up with cockamamie conclusions.
What, after all, did you ever do to create that body? Nothing, nil, nada. In fact, none of us even asked to be created and the most despondent often wish that they hadn’t been. So, at the very least, you belong to your parents and not to yourself. But, since they didn’t create the reproductive cycle, even they can’t legitimately lay claim to what resulted from it.
Only God holds the patent on that. So, a human being laying claim to his or her own body is like an invented gadget laying claim to itself. Granted, a gadget doesn’t have the capacity to think as we do, though a well programmed robot might be able to mechanically spit out the answers about its origin without comprehending them, which is what artificial intelligence does.
But, if it rebels against its creator, it won’t have the capacity to become what it was made to be. And even us humans, who also wouldn’t be here without our Inventor, don’t have the capacity to understand our purpose as thoroughly as He does.
If you don’t believe in God and hold that life evolved purely by chance out of chaos, your life is likely to degenerate into chaos simply because you can find no reason for it. But many of us hold that we weren’t an accident but intended and that we aren’t a mechanical creation but one imbued with a soul through which God can communicate with us. We also hold that God doesn’t own us simply because He created us but because He bought us back after we had wandered away from Him.
As Mark 10:45 tells us, Christ came “to give his life as a ransom for many.” Timothy Keller mentions in one of his sermons that “ransom” in the Bible actually meant the buying back of prisoners of war from their captors, since those captors would make their prisoners slaves. And, of course, an enemy king could charge an exorbitant price to friends or relatives desperate to free their loved ones from his abusive control.
Unfortunately, in our case, we weren’t captured while fighting valiantly in battle but lured away by a rebel's insinuations that we needed to free ourselves from God’s unfair restrictions, only to find ourselves slaves to a much more malevolent taskmaster. But dire results are bound to follow from dependent creatures trying to become self-sustaining.
Evil originated when Lucifer attempted to do so and took a third of the other angels with him. Ever since, in their futile quest to attain the kind of power God has, they’ve been trying to coax humans into following their example.
The chief devil in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters advises that “The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they ‘own’ their bodies — those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!”
No matter how hard we try, we can’t shake our dependence on God. And why should we want to when nobody else loves us as much as our Creator does? Still, many of us attempt to transfer our allegiance to someone or some thing less adequate, as is proved by how blindly members of cults follow a human leader or by how blindly ambitious people pursue the idea that success and independence will make them happy.
Fortunately, although God could simply have said, “Serves them right!” and abandoned us to our own devices, He didn’t. I sometimes get an inkling of how He must feel since farm animals also are owned and dependent beings who don’t make the brightest of choices on their own.
My old white rooster, for example, has taken to roosting on a low branch in the lilac tree even though there are predators such as raccoons and possums roaming in that vicinity every night. So, once it gets dark enough for him to be fairly passive, I gingerly lift him off that branch, wearing long leather gloves because he has sharp spurs, and stuff him into our cat carrier. I then lug him to the chicken coop and close him in there for the night.
No doubt, some people would say that I was restricting his freedom to make his own decisions. What I actually am doing is trying to keep him alive so he still can make any kind of decisions.
Because he is costing me time and trouble every night, it would be easier for me to abandon him to the consequences of his own bad choices. But I am fond of my elderly birds, including the hens who really would have to be considered more pets than egg producers, as finding their nests is a hit or miss thing—just as their egg laying is!
Back when the hens decided they didn’t like the coop, I eventually had to give up on trying to drive all of them back into it every night and they now perch high above a pig pen in the barn. But the coop was meant to protect them, not stifle them, so they still would be free to wander during the day. Just as God’s protection is meant to give us the spiritual safety and freedom we need to thrive.
Free-ranging chickens can make a mess of other living things, often scratching up new seedlings I’ve just set out in their quest for insects or dust baths. As if that wasn’t bad enough, one of the black hens recently has taken to climbing up on the porch tables which hold my houseplants during the summer. Even though I did attempt to clear space for her to sit on those tables, she still insists on walking on and sitting atop the plants instead, breaking many of them off and killing at least a couple.
In frustration and anger, I have to ask myself, “What does she think she is doing anyway?” After all, some of those plants are cacti which could stick her full of quills. God must often have the same reaction to people who, because they won’t play by His rules, make a mess of both other lives and their own.
But, to prevent us from committing that kind of carnage, he would have to make us prisoners, just as I would have to keep my hens cooped up every day to prevent their killing my plants. And, speaking of plants, they can be as frustrating as poultry.
No matter how much I hover over them and feed them and attempt to coax them into bloom, if there is a bug of some kind going around—of either the insect or disease type—they will get it. Just as it seems we Christians always are getting infected by doubts and fears that we long since should have become immune to. I have to wonder whether God, like me, ever is tempted to fling up His hands and say, “Why do I bother?”
I doubt my bird-brained biddies or pestilence-prone plants have the capacity to change their ways. Fortunately, we humans do because God can give us as much of His Spirit as we allow Him to, but He is not going to force that Spirit on us.
Unfortunately, many people get their sense of identity—of who they are—from their bodies when it should come from the combination of body, soul, and spirit instead. As Charles Colson noted in a graduation address at Geneva College: “We say that the body is like an automobile: I can get in it and drive it and take it anyplace I want and use it for pleasure and simply do anything I want. . .The problem is that is how we dis-integrate individuals. Because we disintegrate mind, body, and spirit. And. . .disintegrated people cannot form integrated relationships toward others. Disintegrated people create disintegrated societies, precisely what we have done.”
Self-serving societies too. That whole “you do you” concept holds that people should concentrate on self-fulfillment when the whole of Christianity is based on sacrifice. And, as most of us eventually find out, we get more genuine fulfillment from sacrificing for our loved ones than we do from trying to raise ourselves up.
The quest for self-fulfillment usually just leaves us empty as, to have any sense of identity, we still need to feel acknowledged. As Timothy Keller pointed out in one of his online sermons (my quoting of which may not be completely accurate due to my slow notetaking), “You can’t bless yourself and name yourself. You need recognition. You need somebody from outside to come in and speak to you. . .And what kind of person should this be?
“Well, you need the love, and you need the approval, and you need the esteem of someone you esteem if you’re going to have any self-esteem. This person, whoever it is, should not be someone who can ever let you down or disillusion you. . .This also can’t be a person who’s fickle, somebody who’s up and down with you depending on how well you perform. . .And also. . .this has got to be a person whom you esteem enormously. What kind of person should that be?”
Deep down, we all know what kind of Person that should be. And creatures who were created to serve God are never going to find any alternative adequate. As Paul notes in I Corinthians 6:19b to 20a “Your own body does not belong to you. For God has bought you with a great price. So use every part of your body to give glory back to God, because he owns it.” (LB)