I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. — Psalm 139:14
I want to continue yesterday’s thoughts with this:
The human body is made up of about 100 trillion cells and contains millions of different kinds of molecules. The blueprint for your entire body is somehow contained in each one of those 100 trillion cells, but nobody fully understands how to read it. You could argue that your body is one enormously complex chemical reaction, but no chemist can predict exactly what your body will do, or tell you how to fix it if something goes seriously wrong. From brain surgeons to cancer specialists, no doctor can claim to have all the answers. Even if you combine the insights of all the doctors in the world, there are many more questions than there are answers about how our bodies are made.
None of this surprises us.
But stop to think about this: Intricate though they are, our bodies are disposable; our inner selves are eternal. Jesus died on the cross not to save chemical reactions, but to save people — eternal people. The time will come when we toss this body aside and claim a far superior model. Meanwhile, God salvages what is of eternal fascination to Him, the part of us that receives His deepest love — our inner selves. All of this seems to say that our souls and spirits are probably far more complex than our bodies.
Letting people be complex is an act of worship. For many years I acted as though people were nothing more than sinners who needed repentance and salvation. While it is true that we need to repent, and while it is true that we need salvation, I was making an enormous mistake: I was turning people created in the image of God into stick figures, cardboard people like the targets we used to shoot at on the police pistol range.
I believe that God wants to engage us as the complex people that we are. Put another way, He wants to validate us. No, He doesn’t approve of everything that we do. But He is here to begin an eternal relationship with Him — a relationship so multifaceted that we will never get bored, and a hundred million years from now the honeymoon will have just begun.
Be encouraged!
Dwight
Dwight Clough is the author of four Christian books and is an active member of Lake City Church in Madison. This devotional is also available via email and you may review the archives back to 2002. To contact Dwight or Kim, use their contact form. You may also support their ministry.