Board index ‹ Assorted Bible Questions

[Michael the Riveter]

First, let me preface this by saying that I know the post title is silly, childish, and lots of other adjectives. I do not intend on this being a silly topic, so I'll acknowledge that it sounds like one and try to get it out of the way. The post might as well have been why do I have to cut my nails.

On to the actual discussion. I grew up learning Christianity and I can't seem to make this thought fit into the Christian description of God and man. God created man in his image, and created the universe, earth, all that we see. Man has a soul. God also created heaven and only man's soul goes there, essentially in a timeless other dimension/plane of existence. If God can create multiple existences, and the soul is what's really important, why the need for all the biological processes? Why do we need to eat, go to the bathroom, why does our hair grow, why cut our nails, I could go on I guess. It seems it would be possible to create the universe in a way that we have free will, but it is simply our soul that is interacting with it.

I'll take it a step further. If God is real, then I am in no way more intelligent than God. That's a given. And yet, if I were creating a reality for my most prized creation, I could do so without the requirement that they consume things for energy, have a pointless physical body that changes over time, creates waste, and requires certain elements from the air to stay alive. I find it hard to comprehend that I could think of a better universe than what we're in, given I am nowhere near omniscient. Granted, this is under the assumption that it is only our soul that defines us, and what goes onto heaven.

I'm not trying to claim I know more than God, or that I question his decisions, it just seems a contradiction that our soul is important and everlasting, and yet the length of time in this universe absolutely depends on our body interacting with the environment. If humans were born and never given food or water, their body would die, but their soul would move on to live eternally (either in heaven, hell, or purgatory). Why not make the universe a bit more conductive to life?

I doubt this is worded well, and I'm not even sure if it successfully gets the point across. To sum it up again, God could have created the universe any way he saw fit. Our soul is really all that is important, and what is possible to move onto the afterlife. Why make this universe focus on so much that isn't the soul?

[jimwalton]

One of the distinctives of Christianity is that the body is important. Christian teaching is filled with directives for the body:

The body is more than clothes (Mt. 6.25)
Body and soul have a place in eternity (Mt. 5.29; 10.28; Acts 2.26; 2 Cor. 5.1)
What we do with our bodies matters (Rom. 8.13; 1 Cor. 6.13, 18; 7.34; 2 Cor. 5.10)
We use our bodies to glorify God (Phil. 1.20; 1 Thes. 4.4; 5.23)

1 Corinthians 15.35ff. tells us that the body will be resurrected and given new form.

Other religions say the body doesn't matter but only the soul. Still others say only the soul matters, not the body. Christianity says it all counts. The body and the soul in this life matter, and both will go into eternity.

So why a body at all? Why not just create us as spirits? It has to do with the way we relate to God. The spirit beings (angels, cherubim, seraphim, archangels) seem to have a different quality of life, I would say even inferior to ours. 1 Corinthians 6.3 says humans will judge angels. God giving us bodies seems to be a blessing, an advantage, not a deficit.

Why do we need to eat, go to the bathroom, cut our nails, our hair, etc.? Everything needs maintenance; it seems to be one of the characteristics of life. God even maintains the universe (Heb. 1.3). Besides, these functions of life requiring maintenance also serve as metaphors for our spiritual lives, that also require maintenance, and our relationships, that also require maintenance. As we hear repeatedly from Jesus in his teachings and parables, the elements of life make understandable pictures of spiritual things, and help us to grasp spiritual things better. Breathing, eating, farming, , walking, and almost every other part of life has a spiritual tie-in. Even our problems and suffering have spiritual tie-ins.

Feel free to dialogue back. I'm sure I haven't addressed all your questions.