Raising Your Hand
Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. Romans 12:1 NASB
Present – When I was a child in elementary school, every morning the teacher took attendance. This was not an informal process of simply counting heads or looking for empty seats. Each name was read aloud and each child was expected to say, “Present” and raise his or her hand. It was an acknowledgement of willingness and conformity. Children presented themselves to the teacher for instruction.
The image that Paul gives us comes from his time. If we lived in the first century, we might present ourselves before Caesar. More likely, we would present ourselves before a judge. Even today before a legal proceeding begins, the judge asks if the parties are present and accounted for. Paul wants us to see the same images when we think of standing before God. That is the sense of this word – paristano – to stand before someone.
Did you notice that this is something that we must do? Just like raising my hand as a child, I must stand before God, ready and willing to receive His commands. There is an Old Testament theme here. Many people in the Old Testament actually performed this action when they responded to God’s call with the phrase, “Here I am, Lord.”
This thought contains an unusual instruction. Paul tells us to present our bodies. Now how else could you present yourself? We are embodied in this life. We don’t exist as some sort of spirit captured in a body. We are our bodies. So, when we present our bodies before God, we are really saying, “Here is my embodied self, ready and willing to take Your instruction. Tell me today what you want me to do for you with my body.”
My friend, Dr. Ben Lerner, had a best seller called Body by God. But Paul wrote the first “Body by God” book. He knew that God wants us to give Him our whole self, captured in the Greek words, body, mind and spirit. Of course, Hebrew doesn’t make these Greek distinctions. In Hebrew thought, it’s an all-inclusive package. God’s classroom instruction covers the whole deal. This is particularly important for our culture. If we think like Greeks, we might conclude that God wants our “spiritual” life but we have our “physical” existence. Nothing could be further from the biblical truth. God wants you! What you do with your body is a direct indication of your relationship to Him. The Greek separation implies that I can maintain a relationship with God while living a bodily existence that is separated from Him. Not a chance. The real you is woven into what you do.
Today: Have you raised your hand today and said, “Present”? Are you ready to live out God’s instructions in your body?
Topical Index: body, present, stand before, Romans 12:1
The Torah is full of instruction for what to do with not only our bodies, but our physical surroundings, too. We are supposed to wash our hands with “living” (running, or, unstagnant) water after bodily excretions. Um, and we are told to bury those excretions, too! Its the first codified sanitation that I have seen references to. We may not think we are teaching Torah to our little children when we teach them this stuff, but we are. I have thought that the instructions to burn the caul fat (fat around body organs, which is the fat highest in cholesterol) on the sacrificial altar kept it out of human circulations systems. If there was mold in a home, the instructions were specific to removing it. If you were a Torah-observant Hebrew you didn’t live in what we call now a ‘sick’ home. If a clay (absorbant) dish came in contact with something that would permeate it with dangerous rot, the instructions were to break it so it would never be used for food again. At that point, it would be used for road gravel, or something else.
Most of the civilized world is living with varying versions of Torah today, but they don’t know it. If it makes sense and is pertinent to physical, mental or spiritual health, Torah covered it first. I think sometimes that our relative success with this health is directly indexed on how well we are following the instructions.
One of the things that I have spent a long time thinking about is about the instruction to present ailments to the priest for not only diagnosis, but a pronouncement of cure. I wonder how many preachers and evangelists today would be prepared for this one, but shouldn’t they expect to be, as part of their job description? Even primitive societies get this one better than we do, for there is still recognized in those cultures a relationship between physical and mental maladies with the spiritual. We have a lot of ‘healing ministries’ springing up today, as we are now only beginning to dimly realize that the medical world is simply unequipped to deal with a certain segment of illness: mainly the segment that has an underlying element of mental and spiritual fragmentation. Perhaps we may even see the seminaries start to offer biology and nutrition and mental health classes. Sigh. Perhaps not. We have too much booming business tied up in the separation of all these disciplines. There are plenty of laws now that keep us from following this portion of the Torah. I think the Bible refers to this as “framing mischief with a law”. Is it really a mystery why we are sick with little relief?
I wonder how much less illness there would be if Torah was obeyed better. I especially wonder how much keeping Sabbath is related to rarely getting sick. One way I can present my body to God is, when I get sick, to go to Him first and simply ask Him, “What is behind me being sick right now and what do you want me to start doing differently?” I like to do this. God’s “treatment” has often not been very medically sound (the treatment the world would prescribe) but it sure has been right on!!! We now understand the reasoning behind so many of the hygiene instructions of Torah but way back then, it probably required obedience without understanding. I apply the same reasoning to when God tells me something off the wall to do today. So sweet how much He cares!
You’re right, Joanne! I have learned to ask, first, too. We can and should represent ourselves in lieu of that priest. If the curses arise out of disobedience, then it stands to reason that obedience reverses them.
The Sabbath issue is huge. Unrelenting stress is the single biggest killer we have now. If you can’t break it off (sin and its curses) at least once a week, if not by sundown every day, which is how it keeps from going into sin (at least that is how I read the scripture), then longterm corrosion of vital body forces is going to occur. The ritual Sabbath instructions were highly symbolic when it came to sin and the curse. Ritual cleanliness was about heart purity – the “putting away” (repenting) of sin. When we confess our sins and wash them in the blood, then we are free of them and their effects (curses); even though we may choose to pick them back up at the next sundown, at least we would have gotten a taste of the freedom without them for a day. Our bodies would have, too. When stress lets up, the body goes into healing and repair mode. At least until the stresser is reintroduced!
You mentioned mental & spiritual fragmentation – through the Holy Spirit & EMDR I am revisiting my past as God integrates these trauma fragmented places in me I trust to create a whole heart for Him ..
Then you know what I am talking about. I am there with you, sister.
Oh, and another thing: HOW do we “present ourselves” spirit, mind and body? HOW do I present myself with my body? Is it not in the physical obedience? A “living sacrifice”? Am I presenting myself holy before the Lord when I am washing my hands in the bathroom, or when I am doing due diligence in my mental exercise of the exhortation to capture all my thoughts and hold them captive? Isn’t this the WAY that I present my body and my mind to Him? And when I examine the underlying belief behind why I responded the way I did to that person: examined what I was believing about them, myself, God and reality to have come to that conclusion and, consequently, to that particular behavior; isn’t that HOW I present (bring into the present) myself spiritually?
Torah is how I see minute-by-minute living, very little of which (of what I have seen, anyway) will ever actually occur in a pew seat…
Yesterday in our local newspaper they were photographs of a drunk driving crash reenactment that took place at our local high school. The photographs where of crunched cars and bloody bodies holding beer bottles. My nine-year-old granddaughter saw the disturbing photos and wanted to know what it was all about. I explained to her that they were acting, it wasn’t a real crash. We talked about how Abba designed our bodies to remember through doing. Those highschooler’s would remember the warning about drinking and driving better through participating in a reenactment then they would through reading a pamphlet. We talked about our Passover reenactment coming up, Shabbat, food… Even how being kind to her little sister reminds us of Abba’s kindness. Creator Abba is so smart : ) His instructions can be trusted!
One of the most eye opening things I learned from reading Guardian Angel and repeated here in the last paragraph is how the separation of mind, body, spirit are thoroughly Greek and I thought how I have heard that so many times in sermons and Bible study but learning here that in Hebrew there is no distinction. I’ve come to see how truly destructive this Greek line of thought is to spiritual growth, many believe what I believe in my spirit has nothing to do with what I do with my body.
“What you do with your body is a direct indication of your relationship to Him.” “The real you is woven into what you do.”
Clearly, the physical- attitudes, habits, speech, activities, mannerisms, reveals/distinguishes the spiritual reality of where a person is at in their relationship with Him.