God of Flesh

I have some news for you, and it may be hard for some of you to accept: 

You were made to be human. 

The longer we live in these fragile bodies, the more that frustrates some of us. The more we are trapped by the things we keep trying to get away from, the more we are limited by the things we keep trying to grow out of, the more we are troubled by the things we keep trying to fix but can't, the more frustrated we become with our flesh and we start dreaming of the day when we can leave these bodies behind and just be done with it. 

But God's design for you - for us, for me - was for us to be human. He intended for us to be flesh. 

That's means there's something special and beautiful and "very good" about it. (Remember Genesis? God saw it and said it was "very good.")

Ezekiel was a prophet during a time when Israel was, to say the least, disobedient. Their love for God had fallen away, and they were turning in their own direction, and their lives and their nation were in turmoil. Babylon was a breath away. Defeat. Loss. Curse. Ezekiel spoke the truth about all of it to them. 

But he also spoke hope. And in one of his messages of hope, he promises that God is going to restore them. When God restores them, the prophet says, He will "replace your heart of stone with a heart of flesh" (11:19).

Not a heart of spirit. Not a heart of fire. Not a heart of holiness. Not an eternal heart. Not any of the things that we think about when we think about finally being restored to the way God desires us to be. 

No, when God restores His people, He puts in them a heart of flesh, the very same way He made them in the very beginning. 

But, you say, my flesh is so weak. My spirit...that's where it's at. His Spirit, even better. But the flesh? 

There are denominations of Christians who have spent their entire existence waging war against the flesh. Even if you don't belong to one of these denominations, you've probably heard at least a sermon or two in your own church about the spirit vs. the flesh. You've probably been hinted at enough that you've developed a theology that understand that the flesh is bad. 

Friend, the flesh is not bad. The flesh is God's great, beautiful design for you. 

The flesh is tender; it feels things deeply. It is strong, but fragile - able to stand up to this world, but definitely affected by it. It is constantly regenerating, always becoming new, just as God intended us to do. It is enveloping; it wraps our whole being in its embrace. It is the flesh into which God first breathed life, and it is the flesh, then, that holds that life.

Yet what happens over the course of our living that life is that we become hardened. We become rigid. We become something less than we were meant to be, and we ache for the day that God restores us. 

And He will. 

But when He does, don't be surprised. He's going to make us flesh again. 

After all, that was the plan in the first place...wasn't it?