A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.
If you’ve been reading this blog for long, today’s verse will be not surprising but rather an echo of something you’ve seen before. Yet it is a sweet comfort to have Scripture’s authority added to our observations. Joy and contentment and the pleasant virtues are truly healing, even to the body; sadness and fear and stress, the sons of Adam’s sin (and sometimes of our own sin) are truly harm, even to the flesh. What to do?
First, we must set aside the foolishness of man’s history, which has gotten this wrong in an impressive number of ways. We have those who say that body and spirit exist, but they have no truck with each other’s health (Leibniz, for instance, who invented calculus and did bad philosophy). This being obviously foolish, most favor the power of one or the other. The trend in the West for a few centuries has been towards prioritizing the body. Surely, it is offered, the body can influence the mind, the spirit, the soul, for when it is sick, the pain is felt there in the mind, and insanity is a breaking merely of the brain, not the spirit directly. Yet they see no evidence for the spirit’s touch upon the body; that man’s soul might shape his flesh is derided.
We have on the other hand the old mystic foolishness which makes the soul entirely above the body and entirely its ruler. No matter how hard my soul works, I can’t make myself grow a functional pancreas with pure will power (it’d be nice). Mind over matter has truth to it, but that truth is limited. These men often think (like the Greeks and the Gnostics who learned from them) of the soul as being bound to a ‘base flesh’, an ignorable materiality.
Neither of these is tolerable to the Christian. God is spirit, assuredly (John 4:24), but the spirit and flesh of man alike are integral to man. We are made a flesh-and-blood being; even the word ‘incarnate’ falls a little short of communicating the integrality of both to man’s nature. The purpose of God as He has declared it includes His nature as ‘spirit,’ though His spirit and ours are as far apart as His thoughts and ours, His ways and ours (Is. 55:8-9). The purpose of man, in part, is to be both body and soul, both flesh and spirit. It is this that Isaiah alludes to in Isaiah 10:18, when he declares the utter destruction of a people in terms of soul and body together.
Because we are flesh-and-soul, to harm the flesh touches the soul’s health, and to crush the spirit tears at the body’s vigor. This first we can see easily in ourselves even in minutia. We grow grumpy and short when we are in pain, even with the merest cold. We speak a little harsher right after we stub our toes. We find it easier to forgive others when we’re well-rested and in good health. The flesh’s influence upon the body, at least in this small way, is readily apparent.
Yet we are one being. To harm the body without affecting the soul is like cutting a pie without splitting its filling or cutting a cake without affecting the icing, except more absurd. It is as if we kneaded together red and blue clay into purple and then cut the blue clay apart without splitting the red which it is integrated with. So this relationship goes both ways. A ‘crushed spirit’ brings pain to the flesh, whether in passing, a momentary headache, or for a great portion of time, a chronic ailment born from stress.
All this rises from sin. Do not mistake me. I do not say that stress is sinful, that a ‘crushed spirit’ refers only to the sin of that spirit. Certainly it can come therefrom- and even without being a sin itself, for was not David crushed in spirit because of his sin when he repented (Ps. 31:10)? Yet that repentance itself was a goodness in him. The pain and hurt of soul which cuts even to the body’s bone is not solely born from that soul’s sin, however it is generally exacerbated thereby. The pain of grief, of betrayal, of weariness before the world’s sin, of waiting upon the Lord (Ps. 33:20), of physical suffering new or old, all these can grind down the soul of Adam’s children, even of Christ’s beloved.
What then is the solution? What to do?
We have only this hope: Christ and Him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2). We have only this joy: Christ and Him resurrected (Phil. 3:10-11). We have only this hope and faith: Christ and His love (Rom. 5:8). There is healing for the body in wisdom and knowledge, in the medicine which men work with earnest skill; this healing is only a beginning and a part. Without the wisdom of God which heals also the soul, medicine’s greatest achievements go astray and to wickedness, as we have seen in the past few years. In Him, however, in the fear of the Lord which brings knowledge (Ps. 111:10), in His redeeming work, there we find rest for our weary souls, healing for our crushed spirits, contentment and joy and life truly living.
God bless.
Written by Colson Potter
