(Continued from Part 1)

               Physical health should be something that enables us to love God and our neighbors more fully.  Self-caused limitations created out of poor stewardship of physical health can limit our ability to care for family and participate productively in community. For example, a lifestyle with overindulgence in food which leads to heart disease or uncontrolled diabetes could prevent one from productive labor to care for one’s family financially.  On the other end, over-emphasis on personal physical health can be a detriment to caring for our family if one is spending so much time on physical self-care that their family is neglected.  Physical health can therefore be an empowerment to the higher goals or a hindrance, even an idol. 

               Growing our minds and balancing our emotions deserve recognition as part of our stewardship of the gift of life as well.  Greater knowledge or greater wisdom may serve not only us but those under our care or under our leadership.  A greater knowledge of God enables greater serve to His purposes.  A greater knowledge of the created world enables more accurate and likely more productive benefitting others.  A greater wisdom in reasoning through the dynamics of life enables fruit for not only self but for multitudes of others around us.  Similar to the possibilities for a downside to emphasizing physical health, there may be downsides to pursuing intellectual health also.  Knowledge for the sake of knowledge alone or for the sake of using that knowledge as power over others can turn this into sinful attitudes and behaviors.  The pursuit of knowledge may become an idol and this possibility must be guarded against.

                Growing our minds and our bodies, again, cannot come at the expense of our spirits.  Idolizing the fitness of our bodies or minds will take away from that which is eternal.  Loving God and our neighbor cannot be in mind or in body alone.  Our physical bodies and the physical minds they care will come to an end at some point.  In the Bible we read that physical care of our bodies have some value, but the greater care is for the spirit in its walk before God (I Timothy 4:8).  Our walk with others in relationship is tied up also with this walk with God.  Yet, even the spiritual emphases can become an idol.  The pharisees were instructed by Jesus to stop disobeying the commandment to honor father and mother when they gave their inheritance to temples rather than to care for parents.  When one moves into the realm of believing only the spiritual has any value but not the physical world, one moves into philosophy, particularly Greek philosophy rather than theology.  This contrasts with the “new bodies” in the ”new heavens” we will receive and will experience respectively in the end times. 

               From here we can evaluate what virtues to practice in how they serve this higher goal of loving God and loving our neighbor.  We can ask if something has become an idol in our lives and overtaken the higher goals.  Questions include:

1.            Has physical fitness become an inordinate part of our lives?

2.            Has control of food become an obsession that is causing more harm to family or others?

3.            Has study of physical reality distracted or distorted from pursuing a knowledge and wisdom of spiritual reality?

4.            Has a pursuit of knowledge about God overtaken relationship with God and with His children?

We can ask in what way is something serving the higher goals.

1.            Does your physical fitness enable present relationship with God and others?

2.           Does your physical fitness serve to steward one’s health for the good of not only self but others? Long life with family? Less money spent in the future on health care?  More ability to be with family?

3.            Does your  healthy eating do likewise in stewarding health?

4.            Does your knowledge about God lead to a better relationship with God and with other mankind?

               The virtues are then rooted in pursuit of the higher goals of loving God and loving neighbor.  One should view oneself as a steward of a gift of life that is meant to not only benefit yourself but serve God and others.  Caring for one’s body becomes a responsibility but should not become an idol.  Pursuing knowledge and soundness of mind equips one to serve God more truly and mankind more productively.  Pursing spiritual health as a priority, but not exclusively, enables one to use the physical fitness and the mental fitness to serve God and others more truly.  Walking each day with the virtues inherent in stewardship leads to a more abundant life for self and for others.

Next in this Series… “To Be Determined”

               We must avoid “everyone doing what’s right in their own eyes” while avoiding a one size fits all approach that does not adapt for our individuality when attempting to pursue whole person health.  Oughtness or rightness must come from outside of our persons as we cannot depend on our own limited knowledge, reasoning or fallen tendencies. We start with the obedience of the creature to the Creator and then recognize the gift of life and health as an assigned responsibility to nurture.  We are called to act as stewards of this gift, looking to our Creator for what virtues to pursue.  The virtues should not be solely self-directed but ones that promote our ability to love God and love our neighbor as well as care well for ourselves.  We must learn to care for our physical body, our mind, and our spirit in ways that enable us to rightly relate with God and others.   

               Today many gurus and health prophets emphasize health practices and principles which focus almost solely on what the individual gets out of their own health.  These experts sell “feeling good”, “stronger/faster/more fit bodies”, “Peace with nature”, “control of your own health”, and other slogans that do not extend beyond the mundane realm of existence.  They are not necessarily inherently bad values, but at least incomplete values, primarily because they miss out on the obligation which exists beyond one’s self.  At most, some will encourage us to be examples to our children or to do something so we can see our grandchildren one day.  At this basic level, they are not inherently wrong, but they miss out that there is a higher purpose to life’s existence.  Targeting the virtue of doing what is best for only oneself will never fully get at a healthy life because it misses the larger picture.

               The rightness of a proposed virtue to pursue should be evaluated to determine its true worth in pursuing.  We are not our own gods to set our own realities as creation needs a lawgiver, one who determines what is a virtue and the necessary means to achieve those virtues.  Our creaturely limits pose an obstacle to even choosing the right virtues much less achieving them for whole person health.  The limiting influence of fallen emotions and desires means that we are practically guaranteed to pursue the wrong set of virtues if left to our own wills.  Logic and science do not automatically overcome the desires of our fallen natures. 

               Even without the distorting influence of emotions and desires, determining virtues to pursue in health through the assumed emotionless process of science falls short of what we need.  Science neither knows enough about our functioning nor can extrapolate that to virtue to provide a foundation for us.  On one hand, contrary to popular opinion, science does not understand mankind fully from a biologically mechanistic standpoint. Science does not have the ability nor technology to know the dynamic and vastly intricate operations of our physical body at any given moment, much less in an ongoing dynamic sense.  The amount of data required to know and simultaneously process exceeds our capacity.  The computational capacity for even the information we can access is already beyond our ability leaving us with broad probabilities for understanding what is happening within our bodies presently much less for what will happen next in time.  As a result, we are left with an insurmountable obstacle to determining what appears good for our bodies in all circumstances of life.  On the other hand, even if science fully understood how our bodies function, transferring what is into what should be in terms of oughtness in pursuing a particular virtue cannot be proven.  Virtue cannot ultimately be derived from the descriptive nature of science. 

               To move beyond the realm of science and our limits, we must acknowledge the creature – creator distinction with its implications.  We are not our own, but belong to our “potter”, the one who formed us like clay from the earth.   We are beholden to follow the rules of this designer rather than attempt to make up our own rules by our own standards.  We are beholden to submit to the values and pursue the virtues our Creator ordained.  This moves us to an appreciation of this life as a gift which our Creator did not have to bestow upon us in creating us as He did.  When this life we live is viewed as a gift with responsibilities, we can approach its working out as ongoing acts of stewardship.  We are called to care for our health and nurture it so it can serve the purpose our Creator intended for it. 

               With the purpose of stewardship before our eyes, we can ask God what virtues should be our models.  We base these on the purposes He has laid out before us and also the direct instructions He has given us.  Loving God and loving our neighbor are set before us as the two greatest commands.  These two commands sum up the first and second tables of the Law, the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai.  Loving our neighbor is a reflection of how we love ourselves as we are told to love them as we love ourselves (Matthew 22:39 and Mark 12:31). Our virtues should lead to fulfilling the obedience of these two great commandments while vices would lead us away from fulling these commands.

               From here, we can look at our approaches to physical, mental, and intellectual health.  All forms of health can be means to these great ends or they can become ends in and of themselves which transform into idols at that point.  In other words, when the goals of health supersede the goals of loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves, they function as an idols.  In contrast, when the goals of health functions as a means to serve these two commandments, they become worthy virtues to pursue.

(Continued in Part 2)

Next in this Series… “Virtues to uphold in Whole Person Health: Part 2”

Part 3: Various Scriptures Addressing God’s Approach to Man’s Health

               (Continued from Part 1: Old Testament Wordy Study and Part 2: New Testament Word Study

               Beyond the word studies considered in the Old and the New Testament in which physical or spiritual health were restored, many other Biblical references address various aspects of health where God through His Scripture authors addressed issues of physical health.   An attempt to formulate a Biblical view of whole person health would be deficient without considering these examples.

               We see some explicit instructions for both Old Testament Israel and the New Testament church which teach us that God cared for the physical needs of His people as well as the spiritual needs.  Beginning with the Old Testament in the Pentateuch, in the giving of the Ceremonial food laws, there were religious aspects and additionally there were physical health aspects which we better understand now.  Certain prohibited foods like those which feed on the filtering of sea water are now known to be ones with higher contaminants and parasites.  Avoiding these foods benefitted the Jew not only  spiritually in obedience to God’s commands, but also benefitted them physically. 

               In the New Testament, Paul could instruct Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach which apparently was causing some type of distress for Timothy.  Paul was not a masochistic leader telling others to buck up and take the punishment but wanted Timothy to be well physically (I Timothy 5:23). However, in balancing spiritual and physical health, Paul would also urge Christians to submit one’s body to the spiritual health race.  One’s physical health was important, but clearly not the primary and ultimate goal (I Corinthians 9:24

               Many other inferences to the importance of physical health to the reality and order of God’s created world then come to attention when looking for them even if they are not the primary focus of the particular Biblical text.  In Genesis, God created man out of the dust of the earth and created man with the need to breathe, eat, sleep, and relate with others.  This was God’s design.  Later we see the sin in taking of another human’s life whether in Cain killing Abel and receiving judgment or in other condemnations of murder (Genesis 4) up to and including the 10 commandments prohibition of murder (Exodus 20:13).  God also demonstrated care of the physical bodies of the Jews during the plagues on Egypt in the Exodus.  While the Egyptians suffered multiple bodily illnesses, the land of Goshen where the Hebrews lived was spared.  Even the Egyptians took notice of God’s preservation of the Hebrews.  During their time in the wilderness, God provided food and water to the wandering Hebrews rather than just making them to not need such physical things.  During the time of the famine, God provided for Elijah (I Kings 17).  While God cared for the physical needs of the Jews in the Old Testament time, He concurrently called them to pursue holiness over comforts and pleasures. 

               We also see pictures of God providing for the physical needs of believers and unbelievers in the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ works.  His first miracle addressed a physical need and also a relational need at the wedding feast in Cana as He made water into wine (John 2:1-12). As we already read, He healed countless diseases.  He often addressed spiritual and physical needs together either in series or simultaneously in these accounts.   God as the Father and in the humanity of the Son demonstrated God’s interest in caring for the physical, emotional, spiritual, and relational needs of his disciples and followers. 

               Taken together and considered in light of the principles gleaned from a broader understanding of the Bible we get a better sense of God’s view of health for mankind.  God created man with a body and a spirit, with a mind and with emotions relating to other humans.  He provided a garden to meet the physical needs.  He created a woman to meet relational needs.  He preserves humanity despite the rebellion of the fall and promises to restore man to a state of holiness again in the new heavens and new earth, still with body and soul in Revelations.  While we live upon the present earth waiting for the  future restored earth, he continues measures of temporary restoration in healing body, mind, spirit, and relationships through obedience and His Spirit’s work.

               The shalom he offers is one of wholeness without an exclusive focus on any one aspect of health, although He emphasizes the primacy of spiritual health with its greater impact in the eternal realm.  With this emphasis on the spiritual health of His children, He does not ignore the physical needs of His people. He uses many physical pictures to explain the blessings of the spiritual life so that the two are analogically tied together.  He mentions feasts in heaven (Revelation 19:7-9 and many others), the bread of life (John 6;35), and “living water” (John 4:14). In each, a physical reality images the spiritual blessings that God provides or offers to mankind.

               Our values should reflect His values for health if we are to be obedient. Shalom which includes body, mind, spirit, and relationship should be sought with spiritual health being primary and never sacrificed for any other aspect of health.  In this way, blessings can be enjoyed in all areas as none are inherently sinful unless they become an idol.  The blessings of whole person health are interdependent parts of a whole interacting in such a way that Ignoring one aspect, especially the spiritual, can limit enjoyment of others.  We can thus view ourselves as stewards of the gift of spiritual and physical life, caring for our body so that we can pursue spiritual health, mental strength, and relational health.  We should and can value the right ordering and functioning of our whole being rather than an overemphasis on a single aspect.

Next in the Series… Virtues to uphold in Whole Person Health