Daily Manna · Day 296 · October 23
Temple of the Spirit
“What? 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?”
We are the last generation that would think of the body as belonging to anyone.
We run ours like machines and intend to settle the bill in a later decade, or we speak about ours in terms we would find unbearable if a friend used them about theirs. The two habits look like opposites and they are the same mistake, and most of us practise both in the same week.
Paul is not writing wellness copy. He is in the middle of arguing with a slogan the Corinthians were fond of, all things are lawful unto me, and telling them to run from sexual sin, and the reason he gives is a property question. The word he uses for temple is not the one for the whole complex with its courts and its traders. It is the inner room, the one place the crowds did not go. That is what he says a body is. Then the sentence that does the actual work: ye are not your own. And the next verse gives the ground, which is not that your body is impressive or healthy or yours to be proud of. For ye are bought with a price.
Which cuts in two directions at once, and we usually only want it to cut in one. It rules out doing whatever we like with it. It equally rules out contempt for it. Both are the behaviour of an owner.
So we are not the last generation to think of the body as belonging to someone. We are a generation that decided it belongs to us, and has been quietly worse to it than any landlord would have been.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 296 is The Fat and the Strong (Ezekiel 34:16).