There's a popular saying, something akin to "we all have a God shaped hole in our hearts". The idea is that at some point in our lives, we all run up against the concept of religion, our purpose, and wrestling with the concept of 'God'.
That struggle doesn't end merely because one says the sinner's prayer and goes to church. Quite often, accepting that there is a God, and He is omnipotent is only the beginning of our unyielding search for answers about who God is. If you are a Believer, then no doubt you've run up against this time and time again.
The concept of apologetics is similar to the concept of a catechism. It's predicated on the passage in 1 Peter chapter 3 that commands us to always be ready with a reasoned answer for our faith. I truly believe the need to search out answers is part of who we are as humans, and in order to understand our faith in our God better, and have a deeper relationship, we must always be in prayer and reading our Bibles to understand things that we wrestle with.
One such thing that I have wrestled with for many years is the concept of the Trinity, or God-Head. The very term God-head smacks of paganism to me. A three tiered god? Sounds like something from greek mythology. And so, for many years, when the question came up, I would acknowledge it, and then bury it as deep as I could in the back of my head, waiting for the day the Holy Spirit was ready to reveal this tricky subject to me. But, if there's one thing I've realized about the Holy Spirit, it's that he tends not to reveal something to us until the ground work for our understanding is laid, and when you have a lot of wrong, preconceived notions, he has to root out the foolishness before he can plant the new wisdom. And for some of us, that part takes a little while.
Let me back up a little bit...
I have chronic back pain. And hip, shoulder, neck, jaw... basically the entire trunk of my body is often aching. Pretty standard state of affairs for a 27 year old mom of three. I have spent years looking with chagrin towards my future, which I have always assumed would follow my mother, and end up in pain that no doctor could solve, so I'd hobble around, having good days and bad, and ending up needing to wear a wool cowl in the summer because the wind hurt my skin. I was already heading down that road with pain.
So I was quite eager when my mom was finally feeling well enough after her surgery last year to go back to physical therapy for her chronic pain. Quite often, she and I will swap tips from our doctor visits to help one another out, and PT is definitely one of the ones we both use. Imagine my surprise when I picked her up from her appointment and she was babbling about the 'mind-body connection'.
Her doctor told her that her pain is very much real and it's all in her head. Huh? How can it be both? He sent her a book by Dr Sarno, and a link to a website for curablehealth.com.
I went home, downloaded the Like Mind, Like Body podcast, picked up a Dr Sarno book, and started perusing. And oh. my. goodness. My brain couldn't even keep up with how fast I was devouring this concept. You mean to tell me that my emotions effect my physical health?! Are you saying that the myriad of disconnected symptoms are actually all because of an event from when I was a teenager?!
Perhaps it was so easy for me to swallow the idea because I was primed for it, years ago by my friend Margaret Barry, Ttap coach and owner of MB Mind-Body Fitness. Some time ago, I remembered her sharing about how emotions can get trapped in sticky fascia, and sharing fascial releases on her Instagram page to help release the emotions. I didn't exactly blow it off back then, but it was a part of the onslaught on information on my instagram that got drowned out and subsequently filed away to detangle later.
But it was all there. Mind-body fitness. It stuck. It made sense to me. I thought of every anxiety attack I've ever had (and there are plenty!) and noted that I would always have physical symptoms before I could figure out what triggered it. Oh sure, sometimes it was obvious (boy I had a crush on walked in the room, and suddenly I was light headed and my stomach hurt) but sometimes not so much. Sometimes, like when I was working 7 days a week for a ski slope and trying to balance my duties to my son and husband, I ignored the problem for so long that I had physical anxiety symptoms for days without ever being able to figure out why. I spent 5 months in a near constant panic attack, and only was able to come out of it when ski season was over and I could slow down again. Back then, I didn't realize that my working there was causing my body's symptoms. It was my mind-body connection at work.
There were so many instances, it began to become impossible to ignore. None, perhaps, more obvious than my 3rd birth...
When I say the Holy Spirit has to lay some ground work first, I mean years of ground work sometimes. Last year, I was heavily pregnant with my 3rd son. I was 39 weeks pregnant in late June, and every appointment my midwife would say "You're pretty effaced, you could go into labor anytime". My body felt ready. I can't explain it, but other pregnant mamas will know. You kind of just know when baby is done cooking.
And yet, I was stubbornly pregnant day after day. I hadn't hit my 'due date' yet, but I knew it was time at any second. I didn't understand why, after weeks of slow and steady prodromal labor, I wasn't going into active labor yet.
Then one day, the tension between my husband and I came to a head. I told him, in no uncertain terms, that I didn't want him planning a 4 wheeler trip with his friend until well after I'd had the baby, because I wanted, or should I say needed his undivided attention. He promised he would be available, anytime I needed him. He put a big fat pause on all his plans. And I went into labor that very same day. Within 14 hours of my first contraction, I was holding my baby in my arms, and my labor was perfect. I could not have asked for an easier, more fulfilling labor and delivery. My cervix opened so easily, my body even went ahead and pushed my baby out without my effort. I did not push this child out, he came out on his own. Why? Because I was relaxed, and the emotional tension was gone. I didn't even mind any of the contractions until the last 3. Maybe 15 minutes of the "I can't do this" feeling, but the rest was nothing but rest, praise, and thankfulness. A far cry from my first birth, where I spent 8 hours at 8 cm, crying and throwing up and shaking. I had a giant ball of anxiety, bigger than my baby, and it was obvious in my nightmarish birth experience.
Fully convinced, I began to see evidence of this connection everywhere, and with it, a fracture in society became startlingly clear...
If our minds, bodies, and emotions are so intricately connected, then why is modern medicine so bad at recognizing that? With so many personal instances of a time where my emotions impeded something physical, it was beyond obvious to me that often the root of physical issues are emotional. The example of perfectly healthy women unable to conceive, in spite of strict cycle tracking comes to mind. How many couples are not infertile, but the stress of trying to conceive essentially renders them thus? As someone who stalks TTC boards, I can tell you the number is quite high. And yet, not a single woman comes to those boards saying "my doctor told me that my fanatic cycle tracking, inability to enjoy my life because of the dreaded two week wait, and only enjoying the company of my husband during my fertile window is stressing me out too much, so I relaxed and fell pregnant". Instead, myriads of women with no underlying health issues, no physical reason, not even age are getting IUI and other forms of IVF in order to conceive and still are unable to fall pregnant. These doctors, for all their efforts to treat the body, (a body that is not ill, I might add), fail because they're not taking the whole picture into account. The same can be said for any condition that is 'not well understood' like chronic pain, fibromyalgia, and even things such as seizure disorders and anxiety disorders that seem to have no basis in the body.
And yet, western, modern medicine continues to treat the body as a separate patient to the mind. We spend countless money every year seeing a primary care doctor, and then turning around and wandering around in a haze of pain, misery, and depression, falling further into a hole of pain medication, all the while ignoring that there's something wrong in our minds. And that doesn't count how often we see a therapist or psychiatrist, only to be still more medicated, rather than digging through the painful issues to solve and heal. You'd think, with all the great minds and countless billions of dollars thrown around in the medicalized west, someone would start to notice that treating a whole person works better than treating only the body.
Ahhhh, but there lies the root of the problem. We don't see a person as a whole. All this ground work has been being laid for me for months, and finally, here is the reason.
We are made in the image of God, so why can't we seem to figure out what we are?
and he told them "You are to love YHWH your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength."- Matthew 22:37
Modern, western society has worked tirelessly to divorce this statement into 3 separate pieces. Your heart (emotions or mind), soul (the thing that makes you you), and strength (your physical body) are all one thing. You wouldn't exists as you without one of those things being here right now. But we have become a multiplicity in a body; a body, soul, and brain. And, for many people, that's broken apart further to be simply a body, or a bag of meat to hold your organs, and a brain, or a complex computer system that creates chemical reactions that drive you. It seems the more we are able to understand the human body, the more foolish we become about what it is.
Because we are separated into pieces, we become a 'they/them' instead of a whole person. They, grammatically speaking, refers to others, not ourselves. Is it any wonder, in a society that divorces emotions from the person, that more and more people are referring to themselves in the third person, as if what they feel is somehow someone else? Our bodies and minds are pathologized separately, and both are dreadfully sick when they are longing for each other to be whole. That's not even accounting for the soul, which longs eternally for God. In modern society, we not only have divorced our souls from our mind and body, we have tried our hardest to quell it's longing as foolishness, and starved it nearly to death.
We see many instances in scripture supporting multiple entities being one whole. Take for example, perhaps the most obvious;
For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.-Genesis 2:24
In a society that so readily rips in two the perfect one that was called good from even a time before sin entered the picture, is it any wonder we have become so fractured and compartmentalized in our thinking? Our very Messiah had to confront this issue in his time, telling us that "they are no longer two, but one," because God himself joined a married couple together. If our God joins two into one, then it truly is one, because His word is as immutable as gravity. And yet, I can guarantee you know several couple who are divorced, or perhaps living together as if they are married, and just as easily will walk away from one another.
Marriage leading to babies is no mistake, it is a feature of the two becoming one.
Marriage was given to man and woman long before the Fall. And, although Adam and Eve brought about their curses before this, children were always meant to be a part of that oneness that God made when he made male and female. I recently heard a Voddie Baucham talk where he mentioned something about how the love between husband and wife is so beautiful and pure that it grows into something bigger than the both of them; another human being. And when you do not divorce the soul from the body, then we can look at a marriage, look at two becoming one, and see that it's so perfect that a new soul, an eternal and everlasting soul is made from the connection. And then, perhaps, we can start to see the gravity of marriage, and why our world tries so hard to ignore oneness. When God allowed for divorce, it was because He knew, as He knew all the way back in the days of Noah, that our hearts are hard and sinful. But divorcing your spouse, breaking apart an entire half of yourself is literally tearing apart the fabric of who we are.
Scripture is replete with repeat examples of this perfect oneness. We see husband and wife as one, but deeper than that, we can see how we, ourselves, are one, and the world is trying to break that apart.
Dennis Prager and the porn debate...
If this seems random, then hang on, because I'm about to show you again how the Holy Spirit had to lay some serious ground work.
I recently listened to a spirited debate between Dennis Prager, founder of PragerU, and the man who runs the Pints with Aquinas Youtube channel. Dennis was being interviewed because of some comments he made in a panel with Jordan Peterson about pornography, lust, and adultery. I came away from the video feeling deeply disquieted about the man's viewpoint on porn, women, and the Bible. You see, Dennis is Jewish, and as such doesn't ascribe to Yeshua being the Messiah, and lives only with the actions he can perform to save him, as many of his forefathers, which is precisely what Yeshua was talking about in so many instances in the Gospels. (I want to note here, this is not a condemnation against the Jews, nor against keeping the Torah. I myself keep the Torah, knowing also that Yeshua is the Messiah, and while my works will not get me to heaven, my love for my Savior bids that I live as he lived, which includes keeping His commands).
This exchange prompted me to consider that this attitude, one where a man watching porn is somehow better than a man cheating physically on his wife, is a deeply flawed view point, and rests solely on the idea that our thought life isn't as important as our actions. Yeshua had some very specific thoughts on this exact subject.
You have heard that our forefathers were told "Do not commit adultery". But I tell you that a man who even looks at a woman with the purpose of lusting after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.- Matthew 5:27-28
The entire rest of this passage continues in a similar manner. He's telling them, in simple terms "The Torah says not to commit this action, but I am reminding you not to even let it be a thought."
Why would Yeshua have to say that if there was not a deep and unbreakable connection between our thoughts (mind) and our actions (body)? He expounds on this to include our souls shortly after in Matthew.
The good person brings forth good things from his store of good, and the evil person brings forth evil things from his store of evil. Moreover, I tell you this: on the Day of Judgement people will have to give account for every careless word they have spoken; for by your own words you will be acquitted; and by your own words you will be condemned.- Matthew 12:35-37
If our words will condemn us on the Day of Judgment, then it's pretty clear that our words are coming from a place deeper than just what we say. From our heart (mind) comes our fruit, be it good or evil, and by that, we will be judged one day, and our souls will either live on in eternity with our Creator, or be condemned to destruction.
So, Yeshua makes the case that our body and minds are connected, and that our minds and souls are connected, ergo, we are one.
But Yeshua didn't just say this, he showed us in the most perfect example of mind-body oneness that has ever existed...
The work on the cross was physical. Yeshua gave his body, and suffered and died in that body. People had to take his physical, broken form down, and put him in the tomb. But the work on the cross began before the nails ever touched his skin.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, Yeshua is broken. He is crying and sweating and calling out to his Father in anguish. He knows what's coming, and no human being on earth, even our Messiah, can look forward to a death like what he was about to experience without feeling at least a little trepidation.
While he is praying, Yeshua asks that the cup he is about to drink be taken from him. The man is about to be beaten, humiliated, and torn while he dies slowly in front of his family and friends. I'd be crying and begging for help too.
But then, in the most selfless and perfect act of submission that we will ever see, he quiets himself and says "Not my will, Father, but yours be done."
His Father and he are one. If we look back, all the way back to the beginning, we can see that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are there, together. How do we know?
The earth was unformed and void, darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the surface of the water.- Genesis 1:2
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.- John 1:1
The Word became a human being and lived with us, and we saw his Sh'khinah (glory).- John 1:14
Here we can see clearly the Spirit, the Word which became Flesh, and the Father were all together in the beginning. And we can see the Word is God, and the Spirit is the spirit of God.
Why is this significant? Because when Yeshua cries out, and then quietly submits to the will of His Father, he isn't submitting to some higher power that has control over him. Yeshua is God, but he knows there is no way for His Bride (we, the church) to be joined to him without this sacrifice on his part. Yeshua is not forced to do this, he willingly submits. His mind is submitted, and importantly, he isn't resigned to his fate. He cries. He lets the emotions of fear and anguish be known. He doesn't try and hide that he's not excited about this moment, even to the disciples who notice something is wrong before he is arrested. He even invites his friends into this emotional moment with him, asking they pray with him. In this example of perfection, Yeshua doesn't stuff his emotions to bravely face his fate. He lets them out, he faces them, he deals with them, and he hands them to his Father, finally submitting himself to what is happening, and only then is he lead like a lamb to the slaughter. Would he have been able to give such reasoned, quiet, and meek answers if he had not dealt with his fear beforehand?
Only once his mind is submitted is his body able to submit. He dies in his submission. And afterwards, most significant of all, his soul submits, in the hardest act of submission of all. God, the Father, YHWH, turns His face away from Yeshua, because the sin of the world is on him, and YHWH will not face him anymore. This is why we see the heart wrenching cry before his death;
At about three, Yeshua uttered a loud cry, "Eli, Eli, L'mah sh'vaktani?" (My God, My God, why have you deserted me?).- Matthew 27:46
He is repeating a cry from David in the Psalms, where David cries to YHWH, asking why he has been abandoned in his pain. Yeshua is abandoned before his soul leaves his body, the most painful thing anyone could endure. His soul is bearing the weight of sin, and his mind, soul, and body, finally begins to fracture. As this happens, his fracture from his Father appears in real time as the curtain in the Temple is torn, the Spirit of God leaves the Temple, and God on High turns His back on Jerusalem, and Yeshua.
This perfect act of submission on the part of Yeshua lead to redemption and salvation for us, the Bride of Messiah. And because of his submission, his willingness to take on this yawning chasm of fracture in the oneness, we are allowed to come back into Oneness with our husband. Because YHWH divorced his Bride for her sin and adultery with other gods, we could never return to him, because we are parted until death. Because of this death, we are washed clean and new, and can come to him as a new Bride, keeping in line with God's plan for marriage, so we two, God and mankind, can become One.
It is no mistake that the World has worked so hard to pervert this perfect Oneness.
We are out of alignment with God. It's not just a God-shaped hole in our hearts. It is a complete shattering of ourselves. The World has worked tirelessly to break apart everything that God made to be One; the One flesh of marriage, the One unit of the family, the One person of ourselves even. Everything, down to our very own selves are shattered and torn. God's Law, the irrefutable reality that He created for us, that He called good has been twisted and perverted so much that we can't even tell up from down.
This is beyond breaking God's commands, which is the act that got us divorced from Him in the first place.
I realized something the other day (once again, the Holy Spirit ministering to me after months of laying ground work). The Torah, also known as the Books of Moses, is the first 5 Books of the Bible. For many, myself included, it is seen as a list of levitical laws, sprinkled in with the story of the Patriarchs. One day, not too long ago, I began to read through Genesis with the idea that everything God says in these books is Law, and I realized there is a difference between God's Law, and His Commands.
God's commands are explicit instructions for our behavior. Things like do not kill, do not steal, don't leave a hole in the middle of your yard that animals and people can get hurt in. This is what most people consider the Torah.
God's Law is woven into the very fabric of reality. It is reality. It is male and female. It is good and evil. It is day and night. Commands are things that are given to us for our good, things that make our lives better, a Covenant between us and our Bridegroom so we have a way to show with our actions our love for him. We are given the choice to keep and obey the commands, and be blessed, or break them and be separated from our God, but in the end we choose to keep the commands.
Laws are things we can deny, but cannot escape, no matter how hard we try. Trying to break the Law of God is like trying to breathe underwater. We can certainly try, but we cannot escape the reality of drowning.
One of these Laws is that a human being is made in the image of God.
So God created Humankind in His own image; in the image of God He created them; male and female he created them.- Genesis 1:27
If we are made in the Image and likeness of God, then it can only follow that we have a Body, a Soul, and a Mind, just as He does. He made us distinct, but for each other. It's not a mistake that in this passage we are told we are made in His image, and made us male and female. He tells us that we are made like Him, that we are made distinct, and also tells us that He made male and female for each other, to become One flesh.
We cannot break the Law that we are made in the image of God. We cannot ignore that God has different aspects of Himself that play very important, and yet distinct roles. And we cannot ignore than without integrating those parts of Himself we could not have salvation. So, like Him, we cannot ignore that we have different, important aspects of ourselves that we must integrate in order to live in Oneness, like we were made to live. We are not made to feel broken, scattered, and alone. We are made to live whole; whole with ourselves, whole with our spouse, and whole with our God. These three things are not separate, they all link together to create a picture, woven since the beginning of time, showing us the perfection of being One.
So what about the Trinity?
I personally still do not like the terms God Head or Trinity. I understand why we have concepts for them, but it feels like trying to put a label on something rather than just integrating and accepting it for what it is.
However, for the sake of understanding, I use the word Trinity. And I will close with this; God is a Trinity, and yet, he is still One God. And we, made in His image, must strive to bring together the broken and separated aspects of ourselves into One, to become ever more like the One who's image we bear.
It is no mistake that Israel has remembered and proclaimed the Sh'ma since ancient times. It is true, irrevocable, and immovable.
