By Van Yandell
1 Peter 2:5 “You yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
Americans spend nearly eight billion dollars every year on weight loss endeavors. We spend 160 billion dollars on dental care and over 34 billion of that is cosmetic.
American women spend nearly 900 billion dollars on their hair yearly while men spend almost 600 billion. Over 100 billion dollars is spent on make-up by both men and women.
These are just a few examples of the exorbitant amounts we spend on our bodies. Also, tremendous amounts are spent on clothing, body decorations such as tattoos, body rings and other adornments.
Gyms take their fair share of our earnings as well as nutritional supplement expenditures. Running shoes, bicycles and riding gear; hiking equipment and other sports necessities also are very expensive.
I doubt that anyone is exempt from at least a few of these accusations. I have a kayak, a bicycle and several pairs of running shoes. We have also learned to exercise at least thirty minutes, five days per week.
1 Corinthians 6: 19-20. “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.”
Verse twenty clearly indicates we should “glorify God in our bodies.” A superficial consideration of this verse could be misdirected. In depth, He appears to be telling us to use our bodies in His service and not to glorify ourselves.
Verse nineteen is straight forward. Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Probably when Socrates said “know thyself,” he was referring to other than a religious connection. To know ourselves as Socrates meant is to understand or realize why we do the things we do, act the way we act and say (or write) the things we say.
To examine ourselves daily is imperative in order to maintain any semblance of sanity, reality and our connection to the real world. We are indeed spiritual beings but we exist as flesh and blood, skin and bone humans in this physical world.
Every Christian serves as a liaison between God and the unchurched world. To self-glorify sends a wrong message to those we must reach with the Gospel (Matthew 28: 18-20) and builds a wall between the two.
Matthew 3: 11 “I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance. But he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.”
In this verse from Matthew, John the Baptist is telling us that at the moment of belief, we become indwelt with the Spirit of God (Holy Spirit).
Genesis 1: 27 “And God said, Let us make man in our image.” The words “us” and “our” are further verification that Jesus was and is God (John 10: 30).
We do understand of course, we do not look like God and He does not look like us. We are physical, flesh and blood beings and He is spirit. Therefore, “in His image” must mean His spiritual image. We can determine from the wording of the verse, we are spiritual beings.
Humans have certain characteristics the animals do not have. We have a written and spoken language. We are also capable of transferring knowledge to subsequent generations.
At times it appears some animals can understand certain words we say but that is from repetition and conditioning. The Bearcat knows the sound of his name from hearing us talk to him. He responds to certain words the same way he responds to the sound of a can opener.
Genesis 1: 28b “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
God made man His special being for the purpose of spending eternity with Him (Romans 6: 23). Man’s brain is capable of feeling such things as fear, compassion, respect, joy, shame, rage and others. We are emotional beings whereas the animals are instinctual and subject to conditioning.
I find it interesting to observe certain animals. We came upon a watering hole in the high desert in north east Arizona. A herd of wild horses were drinking. The month was December and there was about four inches of ice on the water source.
The horses had opened a hole in the ice with their hoofs. When they saw us they ran like a herd of wild animals, which they were. At other times and other places, we have seen horses eat from someone’s hand. Conditioning is the difference in the two types of horses.
The scriptures surely indicate we are spiritual beings. These bodies we reside in are only temporary; they will die but scripturally speaking, our spirit/soul will live forever. For the carnal mind eternity is a difficult concept because, in the flesh, we are finite beings.
For the human mind to grasp the reality of eternal life one must be born of the spirit or as Jesus told Nicodemus in John chapter three, “Ye must be born again.”
The question remains, “do we know ourselves” as Socrates admonishes us to? If we continue thinking of ourselves as physical beings we cannot truly understand our existence.
Socrates was a philosopher. However his philosophies were riddled with religious components. Having not explained in detail his statement of “know thyself,” it is difficult to determine to what extent religion held in his admonition.
He appears to have been a monotheists believing in an afterlife. His influence on the Greek’s connotation of religion was profound but their polytheism was not changed by him.
We do not have the mind of God and cannot understand on His level. We can however, accept the scriptural references as fact and truth by admitting that we are not on His plane.
Proverbs 3: 5 “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.” At times we must accept that we do not have His intellect and determine in our hearts and minds to believe Him.
Eternity is a free gift of God by our simple faith based belief. Man’s only salvation is belief by faith that Christ Jesus died for the remission of sin and was resurrected from the dead (Matthew 28: 6).
As long as we regard ourselves as physical beings, we will never really know ourselves. By accepting Him as a personal Savior is a beginning for all of us to “know thyself.”