Episode 9: Reemergence of the Gnostic Heresy
Season 1 · Episode 9
Reemergence of the Gnostic Heresy: Physical Healing, Sex, and Gender
Show Notes
Amy and Justin Howard make the case that physical healing is not a fringe add-on to the faith but a priority Jesus made central to his ministry, and one that belongs at the heart of ours. Along the way they name the deeper obstacle keeping many Bible-believing Christians only theoretically open to healing: an ancient Gnostic instinct that treats the body as less real, less good, and less trustworthy than the unseen. Rooted in the incarnation, the resurrection, and a God so committed to matter that the second person of the Trinity took on a body forever, this conversation invites you to move from theory into practice. It closes with a tender, hands-on path toward renouncing lies about your body, releasing anger and shame, and asking for the healing you need.
In This Episode
- Jesus made physical healing a priority, so if it mattered to him it should matter to us, even when we are only beginners in the West.
- Meeting tangible needs can be done without much faith, but healing requires God to actually show up, which is why it feels risky and challenging.
- Two obstacles keep Christians from healing: a theology that says the gifts have ceased, and the deeper heresy of Gnosticism.
- Gnosticism, rooted in Platonic thought, treats the physical world as evil or less real and prizes secret, transcendent knowledge over the body.
- The incarnation shatters Gnosticism: God became a zygote, took on a body, and a human now sits in the Trinity for all eternity.
- Because God is committed to matter, our bodies matter, and we can receive good things with thanksgiving, live sacramentally, and expect healing.
- The call to action is to renounce lies about the body, forgive self, others, and even God, release it all to Jesus at the cross, and ask for healing.
Going Deeper — Discussion Questions
- Amy and Justin describe being 'theoretically charismatic' but not 'functionally charismatic.' Where do you notice a gap between what you believe about God's power and how you actually live and pray?
- They observe that we can often meet the needs of the poor without much faith, but healing requires God to show up. When was the last time you prayed for something you truly could not accomplish on your own?
- The episode names Gnosticism as the belief that the physical world and the body are less real or less good than the unseen. Where do you see that instinct at work in the culture, the church, or your own heart?
- How does the incarnation, God taking on a body as a zygote and remaining embodied forever, change the way you think about your own body?
- Justin and Amy talk about the practice of receiving good things, a warm shower, a good meal, the smell of lilacs, with thanksgiving as a priestly function. What everyday gifts could you begin to offer back to God in gratitude?
- They invite listeners to renounce specific lies about their bodies, that it is hateful, ugly, unimportant, or dangerous. Which of those lies most needs to be renounced in your own life?
- The call to action includes forgiving others, the media, bad teaching, and even God for pain connected to your body. Where might unforgiveness be keeping you from a healed and hopeful relationship with your physical self?
Full Transcript
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0:03Introduction
Welcome to Between Heaven and Earth. We're your hosts, Justin and Amy Howard. And together, we lead a mission agency right here in beautiful New England. We are thrilled that you've joined us. In each episode, we'll explore what it means to follow Jesus by bringing heaven and earth together in your family and community. Our goal is to empower you to thrive in the collision of kingdoms and courageously join with Jesus in his great project of healing and restoration. This podcast is brought to you by Encounter Culture Mission Collaborative, dedicated to working with ordinary followers of Jesus to mend, make, and multiply disciples right where they are. Let's dive in.
Welcome back, Between Heaven and Earthers. Can I say that? Between Heaven and Earthers? It sounds like some alien show from the 90s. It really does. But we are all between heaven and earth, and we happen to be on the earth. So we are Between Heaven and Earthers. Well, today, the promise of this episode, this is what it is. We want to help you understand how—well, this is basically what we want to do. We want to give you a vision for physical healing, but also help you understand why it's difficult for many of us and our churches to, A, either believe in physical healing. And B, if we do believe in physical healing, why we are perhaps just theoretical. Yeah. In our understanding.
Why should we care? And because it really needs to be more than theory and needs to be functional—but it needs to be something that we actually function in. Yeah, should we have a warning on the label of this episode, something like, in the Northeast where we are anyway, this is really outside of the paradigm of even most Christians. Like, we believe in a virgin birth. Yes. We believe in a bodily resurrection of Jesus. Yes. And bodily resurrection at the end of the age. For everybody—believers who are going to go be with Jesus, and for those who don't, to like a fire, the whole deal. But for some reason, the supernatural elements of physical healing are really, really challenging.
2:32Loving Jesus Means Action
Yeah, but really challenging. Yeah, and I think that, going to seminary, being in sort of the academic evangelical world that we have been schooled in, we've run across just a lot of fellow believers who I like to say are theoretically charismatic. But they're not functionally charismatic. It's like, well, the charismatic thing is for those people. But let's just stick with the good teaching about salvation. Let's stick with the good teaching about what we have to do to follow Jesus, and let's have good theology. But it's like, well, why are we neglecting like functioning in this?
Yeah, and John—when First John says something really challenging, he basically equates—and John, I'm going to say chapter four, kind of near to the end of chapter four—he basically equates, he says, you love God if you obey him. And to obey him means you live like Jesus lived. And man, that is a huge thing to say. I mean, what does that mean? Does that mean you don't own a home? Does that mean you challenge the local kind of power structures by healing on the Sabbath? Like, what does that mean? And we are not going to fully unpack what that means in this episode. However, we are gonna look at one of the things that Jesus made a priority in his life, which was physical healing.
Physical healing. And if this is a priority in Jesus' life, and if the ministry of deliverance is a priority in Jesus' life, then it should be a priority in our lives. Yeah, we say, if it mattered to him, I want it to matter to me. Yeah. Even if I don't have a good paradigm, even if I've got to start out as a learner and a baby—us, all of us in the West are starting out as learners. But I mean, that's true of anything in the kingdom of God. And it's safe to grow up in love in the kingdom. Like, God's not standing over us with a stick: You didn't learn this fast enough. You didn't get it. You're totally wrong.
I mean, he wants us to be nurtured in his character and his nature, and also his works. Like, what does he do? Why does he care? And how does that matter to me? Yes. And I just want to say, he cares. He cares about the poor of the earth who are poor financially. He does—extremely, like really, really, really cares about the orphan and the widow. He cares about the poor. But I just want to say something that may sound really, I don't know if it's controversial or rude or something. We don't address controversial things in this podcast. Well, it's very important that we stay away from those things. We just wait until people come over to our house. Yeah.
So in the West, we, much of the time, can feed and minister to the tangible needs of the poor without any faith at all. That's right. We don't need God to show up. That's right. And it's important for us to—because we are so materially wealthy. I mean, yes, we give in faith, and I don't want to diminish like the tithe that costs, that genuinely costs you something, and living a generous life. Like, that's not what I'm aiming to do, or to say don't do tangible acts of mercy in your region. Do those things, absolutely do those things. But they don't require faith. But yeah, I just want to throw out there that those things don't require any real, or not much real, risk.
You don't need God to show up. Right. I mean, it requires faith in the sense that you want to obey Jesus. That's right. And I don't want to diminish it. Right. I can hear myself getting in trouble with somebody right now. So I just want to reiterate. But you don't have to depend on God to show up, to show his power, to show his presence in—in a, you know, supernatural way. That's right. I've created for myself, much of the time, a safe version of Christianity where I am good. I be good. I am well behaved, and I try to do good things.
And the rest of it, I—you only really feel the moments of pressure when—I mean, honestly, when there are kind of incurable, a lot of times, mental and physical illnesses that pop up. And then all of a sudden you're like, wow, I—I just realized I don't have a lot of faith. Yeah. I really actually need God to show up in a way that I can't pay for. That's right. Yeah. I can't work harder and make this work. Right. So we want to care about the things that God cares about, and not just have a sentimental caring about it, but we want to act on it and grow up and assume that we're going to start young.
And so, to go back, you know, First John—you know, we know that we love Jesus if we live like him. Yeah. And that means action. That means—that doesn't mean just belief. And one of the things that I've found out in ministry is that it is so hard to get church folks to obey Jesus. It's hard for me to obey Jesus. Well, I'm talking down—well, it is. It is, because—yeah, the muscle that we've been exercising in Western Christianity is the muscle of the intellect. Yeah. Oh, say more about that. Well, we receive good teaching. I mean, there is not a—I mean, you can get so theologized and get so much good teaching right now, you know, podcasts—and there's a lot of bad teaching out there too.
But you can—I mean, N.T. Wright has these courses that you can take for 25 bucks. I mean, you know, some of the scholars' books are, you know, information—it's all there. You know, growing up in the church, it's like every Bible study, every new book, every, you know, really good material. And we have equated obedience with gaining knowledge. And intimacy with gaining knowledge. Like, I want to be friends—somehow we have a personal relationship with Jesus because we have more knowledge. Because I've read his Wikipedia article. Yeah. And that's demeaning. No, but I mean, I've read about him. Have I done stuff with him?
Have I risked not having it all together and trusting that he is a good father? Have I found out that he's a good father by trying things that are hard, or stepping out, or loving in difficult situations, or—anyway, I—just praying for the ill. Yeah. And here, that's really challenging. I just want to say that it's really, really, really challenging in a Western environment that has leaned into the intellect so significantly, to exercise that muscle. So I just want to put that out there. Like, it's okay that that feels challenging and that's a little hard. Yeah.
And I think there are some regions of the United States where it is a little more challenging, particularly in regions that are historically, you know, more educated or rational or whatever. It is more difficult, I think, to mobilize people, or maybe, you know, they've been affected by a tradition of the church that's more scholastic, you know, more intellectual, more sort of, you know, all about the study and about, you know, getting the doctrine right? And I'm all for doctrine. I think we need good theology. We need good doctrine. We need to know who got us, because the primary task of all theology is to know him and to love him. Yeah.
You know, and so to know him, not just to know about him. So, okay, so we're going to talk about healing. And we're going to tackle some of the reasons why it's hard for you, our listeners, and for us, to sometimes believe for healing—physical healing, or mental healing. You know, these are—you know, emotional healing, I don't want to say is easy, but it's a little more intangible. Whereas, oh my gosh, you know, my femur was broken and now it's not broken. It's a little more tangible. And so we want to talk about, like, why is physical healing important?
Just like meeting the temporal needs of the poor through feeding them and giving them opportunities—the poor of the earth—opening your home, being hospitable, those are all very tangible things. We believe God cares about that. But what about the healing piece? Now, we've already established that it requires more faith. It requires, like, faith in the sense like God needs to show up. Lord, you need to show up. I cannot heal this femur. I can't heal this person's headache. I can't heal the fact this person has trauma. And our prayer becomes more like the disciples' when they couldn't, you know, heal that little boy who was demonized.
We say, Lord, we have faith—increase our faith, where we realize the weakness and vulnerability of our own faith. That it's like, that we need the author and perfecter of our faith to shepherd us and grow us up in intimacy and belief and relationship with him. Yeah. We need to come to a place where, like, whoa, this is beyond my capacity to even hope for. Right. This is bigger than my belief. This is bigger than my hope. Lord, teach me. Yes. Teach me. Lead me. That's what the disciples finally cried out. They're like, wow, we operated in a lot of cool stuff. But there's still stuff that we're just not even there. Yeah.
Even the disciples, who walked in tandem with you—physically, Jesus was there teaching them how to pray for healing and deliverance—and they still came up against problems they couldn't solve supernaturally, and Jesus had to step in. Right, right. Now, you know, so there—I think that there are a few things that are obstacles to Bible-believing Christians operating in physical healing, seeing physical healing happen in us and around us. And, you know, Amy, at some point we'll talk about some of the reasons why people don't get healed. And it's not as easy as, well, you didn't have enough faith. Yeah, that's kind of a punk answer. That's a punk answer.
That is—you know, this isn't, you know, sort of word of faith, prosperity gospel teaching. Absolutely not. I love what John Wimber said. He said, you know, if you pray for 100 people and one person gets healed, right—he's like, that's success. But that one—I'd rather pray for 100 people and have one person get healed than pray for no people and have no people getting healed. That's right. Yeah, there it is. You got that right. Yeah, so I love that. I love that approach. But so there are two things. And I think the first one is just the theological one.
14:08Obstacles to Believing in Healing
There are folks—Bible-believing folks in the church—who would say, well, you know, we don't need healing anymore because we have the canon of scripture. We don't need the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit—tongues, prophecy, you know, sort of the ones that get all the kind of airtime these days. We don't need those things because, when the perfect comes—1 Corinthians chapter 13, at the end of the chapter—then whether there are prophecies or tongues, they will cease. So we're not gonna fully—yeah, yeah, yeah. I hadn't thought about that.
Right, but I think that within the church, that is a big thing among some of the folks that are really preoccupied with getting the doctrine and the theology and, you know, expositional preaching—those are all really wonderful things. But I think that that is a hurdle. Yeah. That, okay, well, we don't really need those things anymore because now we have the Bible, and the Bible has replaced those things. Yeah. Yeah, and I would, without even kind of really tugging on the thread of cessationism, I would just like to say, if the perfect has come, why is there still sickness? Like, why are believers themselves—
Why do we statistically have such similar statistics as the rest of the world when it comes to health and relational integrity and divorce and pain and all of the things that are so hallmark of pain in this age? You would think that if the perfect had come, we would be living in the image of the kingdom having fully come. Right, right, yeah, which obviously is not true. And it didn't start in 325 AD. That's right. It didn't start with the canonization of scripture. That's right. And if anything, that passage of Scripture points to the fact that we still need prophecy and tongues.
And we've discussed in previous episodes, and we've discussed in the last few weeks, that the Spirit still moves and gifts and empowers people to perform miracles.
Yeah, that's true, then. So I would say, so that first—the first obstacle is just that theology. And then some folks would say, well, you know, I theoretically believe in these things, but functionally, you know, I don't even know how that really operates in the church. And that—you know, it can get messy. We're gonna, in another episode, we're gonna tackle cessationism, I want to. Okay. And I wanna talk about why some of our brothers and sisters—you know, it's like, you don't have to be afraid. You don't have to be afraid of Holy Spirit.
And you don't have to be afraid of him moving in a community and maturing us, as long as love is the goal. The exaltation of Jesus and love is the goal. We will attain to the maturity, as, you know, as Paul talks about in Ephesians chapter four. So there's that. Now this is—this is the thing we really wanna tackle today. The other thing is Gnosticism. Yes. This is my great nemesis. The great nemesis. And I think—I take it personally. And I think—Gnosticism is my personal nemesis. Well, it's the nemesis of Christianity right now. Yeah. I really believe. And it has kind of been. Yeah. So what is Gnosticism?
17:27Gnosticism's Roots in Plato
Well, Gnosticism actually has its roots in Platonic thought. This is—what's Platonic? So Plato—Plato, who lived in the fourth century BC. So before Jesus. There's old Greek guys. Old Greek philosopher. And without getting into all of sort of the nuances of Platonic thought and kind of the evolution of it through the centuries, there's basically this idea that there's this transcendent reality that's completely sort of, you know—wouldn't wanna use the word spiritual, but is transcendent. It's off in the distance. It's kind of the most real. It's the most real. That's right. Whereas what we are living in right now, the material realm, is the least real. Yeah.
And so that morphed and affected some early Christians and their followership of Jesus, and this philosophy began, called Gnosticism. And it was this idea that you had to gain secret knowledge, philosophical transcendent knowledge, in order to transcend your physical reality. So—because the spiritual is better. Because the spiritual is better and more real, and the physical is actually evil. Yeah. And so they developed also a theology saying that, you know, the God of the Old Testament is a different God. It's a demiurge, this God who is actually evil, who's created the material realm to entrap what is actually real. In order to get liberated.
Because if the physical world were bad, and it has all of these delights in the midst of it—you'd have to be a bad God for it to be a bad world but also make it so beautiful. Well, yeah. And they would say that, you know, all those physical delights are all bad. Are all bad. Yeah, all bad. Because they're hedonistic, because they're tying you to the earth. The fact that you walk into a room and you smell a smell that reminds you of, like, coming home and your mom made bread, and you feel home and have that deep sense of home.
When you walk outside and you smell, you know, lilacs in the spring, and you're like, "Ugh, finally the winter's over." And you're filled with hope and it's connected to a smell. Right. The fact that that can happen in your brain—that's a physical, material reality, a sign of, we would say, a sign of the goodness of God and his presence and his kindness. That material world matters. But to Gnostics, those signs aren't signs of a good God. They are actually signs of the brokenness of our flesh. Yeah. They are signs of our embodiment, our entrapment. Now, would modern-day Buddhism have a similar flavor to it a little bit? And—well, I don't know about—I'm wanting to transcend the physical.
Yes, I mean, I don't know about all sort of the sects within Buddhism. But I would say that, you know, Buddhism at its core is this idea that you need to transcend desire, that you need to basically escape desire. Because desire is the source of all suffering. Yeah. So if you can be devoid of desire, then you can be released into that Nirvana state, where you're, you know, one with the universe. Whereas in Christianity, we're not about the suppression of desire. We're about the satisfaction of desire. So I love that so much. I've been reading some Gregory the Great. And like, that is just—oh, the theology of desire is just such a rich topic.
But so, how would you say neoplatonism—like neo-Platonism—so this Gnosticism that we're talking about, how do you see it showing up in a negative way? I mean, I'm sure that there are ways of thinking—I mean, we want to not be governed by our carnal desires. We don't want to be slaves to the need to, you know, have physical experiences. We want to be able to love in a self-giving way, even when it costs us in physical experiences. So we don't want to be in bondage to the things of our physical world. How would you say that Gnosticism is showing up in a bad way, in a negative way, in today's kind of Christian thought and practice? Yeah.
Well, I think that Gnosticism is an ancient heretical principality. Ooh. I think that it is—you know, when you think about—we've used the term cosmology, that there's an unseen realm of angels and demons that are duking it out. So you think this happens on purpose? This isn't just an accident where we're trying to solve the problem, the mystery of suffering, and we split these two things? No, I think that it's the—I think it's the age-old accusation that what God has created is bad. And our bodies are bad. And, you know—that is, we'll get to this, but that is ultimately—that thought is devastated in the incarnation of Jesus. Yeah.
That—I mean, he just takes a sledgehammer to that thought. But I see this primarily culturally speaking, and it's seeping into the church, but I see this culturally speaking in the conversation around the difference between gender and sex. Agreed. I think that we're seeing its sort of logical end, even in the church, with this conversation. Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. And the church is buying into it. And that's fascinating, because they bought into it for what seemed like good reasons 100 years ago. Yeah. But there are a lot of, you know, there are a lot of so-called, you know, evangelical churches—mainline churches fell to this decades ago.
23:38Gender, Sex, and the Image of God
And some of them even, you know, were the clarion kind of the heralds of it, of this dichotomy between gender and sex. Gender and sex. I mean, even—and I know I'm gonna get in trouble saying this twice in one episode, I know someone's gonna—but C.S. Lewis kind of bought this idea, that gender was something higher and more true that was sort of poured into sexed bodies. And where did that start? With Freud? I think the separation between gender and sex, that idea that those two things are divisible—yeah, it did start with Freud. And I think also Lewis was a little influenced by Platonic thought.
I mean, you look at The Great Divorce, and they come out of that purgative experience and they're up in the real land. And the grass is more real and it hurts to stand on it. And there's—which is a beautiful concept. Which is a beautiful concept. And I think that we can do that without getting into the bad Gnostic stuff. Yeah, but that idea that, like, the spiritual is somehow more true. That my gender is the unseen part, the unseen sort of sexual expression of who I am. Right, so let's just parse this out a bit, because I think this is so pernicious. It's so bad. This is so bad. I'm clapping my hands—oh, so bad. The church swallowed it whole in the early 20th century. Absolutely.
And it worked for gender roles. Right, right. And that's another conversation altogether, however it worked. Yeah, so let me just give you a little story here. So we were at a healing conference back in 2017. And someone that is a leader in the healing movement—for, well, not the movement, but has just been a healer for a while—got up and was talking about gender and kept referring to the masculine and the feminine. Yeah. And I was really unsettled thinking about this, or hearing this. I was like, oh man, you know, this just doesn't—you know, not every man has the masculine traits that this person is saying they need to have in order to be healed.
And not every female has all the feminine traits that this person is saying they need to have in order to be healed. You follow that down to its logical end, and it's a pretty rigid system. It is a rigid system. It is absolutely a rigid system. It's entirely based on the width of your hips. Yeah, yeah. Right? No, I mean, for real, like, either you're geared toward childbearing, and so everything is nurture about you, or—how do you achieve real healing if there's not a rule? If there's not a clear, like, this is what it means to be a man. Well, also the dangerous part of that too is that a lot of those gender thoughts of what makes someone masculine or feminine are socially constructed.
Or just a beautiful cultural expression. A beautiful culture. I'm not saying that social construction is a bad thing. I think that social construction can, like, emanate from God. Yeah. But what happens when you have a man who doesn't have all those cultural masculine traits? That person can feel like less of a man—or the same thing with women. They could feel like less of a woman and not feel secure in their bodies. And the culture is taking that to far, far-reaching implications, basically saying, yeah, there is only one definition. And if you are sort of divergent from what we've determined is a true man, you must be something else. Right. You are gay. Or you are bisexual.
Or you are actually a woman. Right. And so the emphasis on the unseen part, the gender part—I'm putting air quotes. Yeah, the unseen bit. The unseen bit. My desires, how I feel in the world, the sort of unique chemistry that makes me want to, I don't know, pursue math or whatever, I don't know. Or a man who is more nurturing and empathetic. Yeah, those are considered more feminine traits. More female traits. And I'm not saying that that's not stereotypically or generally true. I think that it's generally true that women have specific feminine traits that most men don't. Absolutely. And God has gifted us with ways that are in line with our biology. That's right. Yeah.
If you're a woman, you can have babies and you can nurse them at your breast. And that is incredibly nurturing. You know, the eye contact that's made when you are nursing an infant. And that is the image of God, right? I mean, that, like, the nurturing heart of God. So all these quote-unquote female or masculine traits, they all come together—or they're all from the triune God. Am I hearing you say that maybe—can I just draw this in a little bit? Am I hearing you say that you feel like even the terms masculine and feminine are a little fraught? Because, like, Jesus said, I long to gather you as a mother hen. Did that mean he was feminine? Yes.
No, it meant that he was a man who wasn't strictly defined by the—he was a man who exemplified a portion of the image of God as nurturer. Yeah. And so, yeah, absolutely. And I think that what we have done is we've so divorced gender from sex that now we have normalized gender dysphoria. We have now normalized that people can feel a different way than what their body proclaims. Hey listeners, are you ready to become fully alive? Life can feel overwhelming, and many of us struggle to feel fully alive. Perhaps you feel stuck in your marriage or career.
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They will help you continue your journey of becoming fully alive. Visit youronelife.co to learn more. You don't have to go through it alone. Check out OneLife Group today. Okay, so say more about this. So, can I just say, I think it worked for the church in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s to sort of assign masculine and feminine characteristics, because we love the security of roles. Yes. We really love that. The trouble with that is we want a law, and you and I talk about this a lot. We love to say sex is like the prose—like prose, like if you're writing prose. Gender is like poetry. It's not not true, but it's highly nuanced. It is individualistic. It doesn't follow all of the same rules.
31:54Looking to the Body for Reality
So one is what you want to read if you're looking for rules. So when we look to our bodies for reality, where do we start? Do we start with how I feel? Or do we start with the prose? Or do you start with the prose? What's real? What's there? Or do we start with the—if there is an intangible, larger narrative of, like, there is a feminine and a masculine that are two distinct things, not just attributes of God, that Jesus can have some of these and some of those—and however that plays out. But if we as humans are orienting ourselves in the world, how do we do that? Do we do it by a transcendent spiritual reality that we prioritize, like, because it's spiritual, it's more true?
Or philosophical, it's more true? Or do we start with our body? Through our body. And so that gets us back to the Gnostic heresy. This ancient heresy that is rearing its ugly head in culture and in the church. Yeah. Where we prioritize people's interior life, inclination, attractions above what their body proclaims, for the formation of reality. And we've played in this a lot in the church. I mean, really, if you think about it, I think the church has always struggled with sex. It's never been a great conversation. I don't say never, but I mean, you read some of poor Augustine—I'm gonna stop picking on him, 'cause he wrote some amazing things.
But he really did believe you couldn't have sex without sinning. Yeah. Like, he really did believe that. And that got sort of filtered into the church. I mean, by the Middle Ages, the early Middle Ages, there was a real sense that you really couldn't—like, that sex itself, because it was so sort of full of desire and intangibles and spiritual in nature—you know, that bit is fine, but that physical expression that is full of temptation, and it's fraught—and then he would say that you just can't have that physical experience without sinning. So probably it's better. It's superior somehow. Maybe. To be celibate. Maybe, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
And even if you don't come right out and say that, sort of, culture moved in that direction. Like, the really holy people are the ones that were celibate. Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah, and the church ultimately adopted that expression. Yeah, and then all the way down through the ages. I mean, I don't know if you grew up in a church that handled conversations about sex super well, but—it was awkward for us. I mean, it was all about—a lot of shame in it. It was a lot of shame and behavior management. Yeah. So, I mean, I think the people that were leading us had good intentions, but, like, you know, the absolute worst thing that could happen is if you got pregnant out of wedlock, right?
Yeah, so you never learned to really love your body through all of that. No, no, no. And we've ministered to a lot of people that grew up in good, you know, churches who have had problems, you know, in their marriages enjoying sex because they are ashamed, or they think that it's bad or dirty. So we can get to that one at some other time. Put a pin in it. Yeah, we'll put a pin in it, and we'll make sure that we have a, you know, at the beginning—oh, you probably don't want to play this in the car with your children present. Yeah. A little disclaimer, that's what I was looking for. So yeah, so the Gnostic thing, I think that—it creates comfortable categories for us.
It gives us rules where we want them, or maybe where they don't belong. But I see—where is this, how does this translate into healing? Well, I think that we are seeing kind of the apex of the Gnostic heresy expressed in the transgender movement. Previously, it was in the acceptance of homosexuality as a legitimate practice and lifestyle, even within the church. That is an expression of the Gnostic heresy, in my opinion, because you don't feel like you belong to the male or female club. And your own sex is more mysterious to you than the opposite sex. Prioritizing the internal and the mysterious. Prioritizing the internal drive is prioritizing the internal romantic inclinations—
over what your body also proclaims and declares. Over what your body proclaims, yeah, absolutely. So, we're gonna get into that in another episode. I can't wait to talk about that. Homosexuality and transgenderism—the church is called to minister to these communities and to provide a healing atmosphere. And we do that in Encounter Culture Mission Collaborative. Yeah, come to an Encounter weekend. This is not—we don't hate on people for their disordered desires. We all have disordered desires. Like, come on now. I mean, if I told everyone on this podcast of my disordered desires, I mean, this would—come to an Encounter weekend, you testify all the time. Yeah, you could hear, yeah.
Put a pin in that too, and come to an Encounter and you'll hear all of our stories of disordered desires and needing healing. That's just everybody. And how God satisfies those desires. And how it's a journey, and how we walk with one another on the journey, and how the goodness of God is declared in our bodies, in the created world, and that he wants to redeem it. He's so committed to winning over the created world that he himself took on a body, that he resurrected from the dead, and has decided—the second member of the Trinity has a body for all of eternity. That's right, yeah, ooh. He's so committed to the physical world.
37:56God's Commitment to the Physical World
Yeah, he's so committed to the physical world that there will never, ever be a day where our humanity, the material of earth, is not in the Trinity. Ah, come on. There is a human in the Trinity, people. Right, there's a guy, probably with a beard. So let me just, you know—he's sitting wherever the right hand of the Father is. Yes, yes. Still in a body. He's still in a body, and he condescended to take up residence in a womb. A real one. Like—he wasn't just a symbol, he wasn't just a spirit.
However that happened in the Holy Spirit—when the Holy Spirit brooded over Mary, as the Holy Spirit brooded in Genesis one over the waters and the chaos of uncreated reality—he took up residence, the Holy Spirit and the egg. Yeah. He was a zygote. Yeah. The second—you know, he didn't have a physical body before this. He was a zygote. What a condescension. What a condescension, for the uncreated to become the created. And that right there is why we believe in physical healing. We believe in physical healing because matter matters. Because God has demonstrated the Trinity's commitment to matter. To your body. The Trinity is committed to your body.
And Jesus demonstrated it as he walked on the earth, that God cares that death has been reigning in your body. Yeah. He wants to win. Amen. And a part of this, what we have been talking about is, you know—between heaven and earth—a part of our priestly ministry is to bring heaven and earth together. In the way—one of the ways that heaven and earth come together is through the healing of physical bodies. Jesus is healing the rift between the way things are in heaven and the way things are on earth. And, you know, we would say, well, but aren't we gonna be disembodied in heaven? And no, no, we are not gonna be disembodied in heaven. What do you mean, at the resurrection?
At the—like, when you die, your body's in the ground. Yeah, well, we can talk about this some other way, you know, soul sleep or whatever, but, you know, do you immediately pass into—I know there are—our Adventist friends are just in. Justin believes in soul sleep. No, I did not say that. But we love our Adventist friends. But what we need to—and this, I would recommend this book to everyone, N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, where he basically says—and this is a freebie, podcasters—the goal of your Christian spirituality is not heaven. The goal of your Christian spirituality is resurrection. Come on. You will be resurrected on the last day.
Read 1 Corinthians 15, the whole chapter, the whole thing—it is one of the most amazing chapters in all the New Testament—and then you go to, you know, the end of Revelation, where you have the resurrection of the just and the unjust, but everyone will be resurrected. And, you know, your body that you have right now, that's the one that's gonna get resurrected. And, you know, with all of its foibles and all of its weaknesses, it will be so imperishable, and will be raised imperishable. Without those foibles and weaknesses. Without the foibles and the weaknesses. But probably still, I will enjoy coffee in the morning. You will enjoy coffee in the morning in your resurrected body.
I mean, Jesus ate fish, and then he walked through a wall and the fish stayed inside. Yes. So your resurrected body—we will be, right, Jesus is the first person. That's like my favorite verse in the entire—no. That's really—wow, that's—no, but it's, like, top 10. Well, it doesn't actually say the fish stayed in, but yes. It didn't fall out. I feel like that would have made the record, the record—if, like, Jesus walked through the wall but there was a masticated fish that walked in. The masticated fish, that's like ground. Ew. That's disgusting. I just feel—the bolus, the—one of the gospel writers would have made mention of that. If it had happened. Ew.
That would have been very, very material. Shocking. But I think that you will be raised in the—the scripture says that he is the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep, meaning just the way Jesus was raised from the dead, you're gonna get raised from the dead. That's right. Why? Because, just as Amy just said, death will not have the final word over anything that God has created. Anything—he has the final victory. And because he cares so much—by virtue of the fact that we will be raised to life again at the end of the age, by virtue of that fact, and by virtue of the fact that God became a man and was put to death, was resurrected, and now ascended to the right hand of God—
now he's in the Trinity—by virtue of all those things, God cares about your body and wants to heal it. Amen. Yeah, and I feel like this should be in two parts, but if we choose to keep going here—how, so how do we form a better relationship with matter? Because I feel like matter—what does cause—I mean, the Buddhists in that respect, I mean, they're not wrong, matter causes you to suffer, right? My body is a big part of my suffering. My body has headaches. My body wants things that aren't good for me. My body—you know, there are a lot of things about my body, it's hard to have a body. So how do I begin to have a better—how do I begin to heal?
43:48Renewing Our Relationship With Matter
How do I begin to have a better relationship with matter? Yeah, well, I think that we need to—I think we need to really become students of the life of Jesus. We want what matters to him to matter to us. And so, just asking the Lord, "God, I want what you love to be what I love." I think also, I personally think that receiving these things with thankfulness, you know? It's like you take a nice warm shower—God, thank you. God, thank you for water. Yeah. You know, you eat a good meal—thank you. God, thank you. Take time to—that's Eucharist. Yeah, to ingest it. That's Eucharist, that's to give thanks. To ingest and then give thanks. That's right. And that's your priestly function, people.
Your priestly function, our priestly function, is to take the good things that God has given to us and then offer them back to him in thanksgiving. That is the telos, that is the goal of all humanity—to take these good things, all the matter—when we look at the trees or at springtime, you know, looking at the lilacs, looking at the forsythia, and we pause and we say, "Oh God, thank you. You have such good ideas. Thank you. You did such a good job. This was a good thing that you did, thank you." Yes, yeah. And it says something good about you.
Yes, so thanksgiving, you know, for the matter, for the things—even if you don't like it, you know, you need to renounce the lies. When you look at your body—you know, I think this is another way that we enter in, is that we renounce lies and we receive the good things that God has given us. But so I would say we need to ask Holy Spirit, Jesus, Lord, we wanna love what you love. I think that we need to give thanks for all the bodily things, for all the good things in our life, for the things that we see, the smells—we just take a moment to just thank him and realize that it's all gonna be transfigured at the end of the age. It's all gonna be here.
The trees, the mountains, the rivers, the oceans—they're all gonna be here. And we're gonna have a role in pristine-ing them. And then thirdly, also the sacramental life, you know—all things were made to be a conduit of the grace of God to us. All things were made to be a means by which we receive grace. And that means, preeminently, in baptism and the Lord's Supper, that he has given us these tangible material things. To be a conduit. That when we receive them by faith and give him thanks—you, Christ, give him thanks—we receive them into our bodies and they become channels of spiritual grace, and we become one with him, he and us, and we and him.
And Jesus kind of pointed to the whole world needing to serve that purpose in certain ways, right? I mean, like, he used his spit to heal. He healed through his clothes. Shadows, handkerchiefs. Dirt. Yep. He was not—he purposed the physical world to be a conduit of his presence and his healing power. Yeah. And I mean, we can also go a step further and say, you cannot be saved without physical matter. Well, Jesus' body is physical matter. That's right. So you absolutely do need to do that. Jesus' body hanging on the cross, resurrected and ascended. Yeah. Physical matter. You cannot be saved without the physical body of Jesus. And this is why John was so intent on saying this.
That we have tasted, that we've seen—that our eyes have seen, that our hands have touched. This is what we proclaim, the word of life. First John chapter one. And also, when the centurion takes the spear and jams it into Jesus' side and blood and water flow out, John takes a moment and he says what? He says, "The one who testifies to this is true. I saw blood and water flow out of his side." He wasn't just a spirit being. He was a body. And that—because John was combating the Gnostics, that early in the church's history. So while John's still alive, this kind of teaching was eking into the church.
And he was like, "Don't even let teachers that are teaching this come into your house." In Second John, he tells the elect lady—whoever's church is meeting in her house—he's like, "Don't even let people that deny the incarnation teach at your house. Don't let them inside." I would say, don't let Gnostics inside. Gnostic teachers. And how many of us, in the name of wanting to be Christian and compassionate—a lot of times we sit down with Christian leaders that are promoting things like this radical gender ideology. And it is such false teaching that we shouldn't even let them in our house. Well, I think we can teach and we can clarify.
We can have conversations, but we're not really at the same table. No. It's a different conversation. No, but there's a reason why he said, "Don't let them in your house." Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We let a lot of people in our house. So this is personal. We have a tradition where, if you eat at our table, we ask you to sign underneath it, which is a very human thing to do. It's like my favorite part of dinner when somebody just—it's just so embodied and physical to climb under a table and sign the underside of a table. Anyway, so let's give a call to action. How do we begin to embrace a healed and healing and hopeful paradigm where matter is concerned? Yeah.
49:51Renouncing Lies and Welcoming Healing
Well, first of all, we need to renounce lies. Yeah. So that's an actual action item. You can even start making a list right now. Yep. You know, renounce the lie that your body is hateful and ugly. Yeah, or unimportant. Yeah. Just say it right out loud, maybe to another person: God, I just—I'm handing that to you. I'm done with it. Yep. Renounce the lie that your body is dangerous. Yeah. That your body is just dangerous—maybe because you've experienced unsafe things in your body, or because you have urges that make your body feel unsafe. That's right. And so you hate your body because of that. Or even parts of your body. Yeah.
And in the New Testament, most often when Paul talks about the flesh, the Greek word is sarx, and it doesn't mean your physical body. It means the sinful nature. That's the flesh. So he's not talking—he's not being down on the body. Yeah. Okay. So renounce the lies that your body's bad. How about renouncing any lingering anger toward yourself about your body? Like, it's my fault that my body's broken. I did this to myself. I've been addicted. I've hurt my own body. I've done these different things. And so it's so much my fault that I just need to wallow in this.
I need to stay here forever and pay the natural consequences to all of the bad stuff that I've done to my own body. Can you—we need to renounce that as well? Absolutely. Because that's basically saying the cross is good enough for everything else except for the bad stuff I've done to myself. That's right. Yep. So renounce that. Forgive yourself. Yeah. Release yourself. Repent of your alignment with the enemy and in hating that which God loves. Yeah. You can't—you can't heal things if you still hate them. You're, like, wanting them to go away and die, and simultaneously passively wanting them to live. Yeah. How can you hate that which God loves? Yeah.
You need to align yourself with his evaluation. Yeah, and I would say also pay attention to any anger toward others about your body. So, like—this looks like, and it's a process of healing, so I don't want to make this sound like a light one-off reality—but forgiveness for abuse and neglect and insult toward your body. So the nasty stuff the kids said on the playground when you were eight, and the horrible things maybe that have happened to your body, and the people that have done those things to you or neglected to. Notice any anger toward others about your body, and begin to embrace a culture of forgiveness. It also looks like forgiveness of individuals, the media, and the culture. That's wild—like, the idea that I need to forgive the media for telling me lies about the physical world and my body, for prodding me into anxiety or fear or self-hatred. I'm actually gonna release those things to Jesus for him to deal with, and I'm gonna let him tell me what's true. I don't have to live embittered, in rage and bitterness. And then also forgive any bad teaching—like, so maybe you got—it may have been immature, it may have been outright error, but beginning to forgive. I mean, I remember when I was in college—and I don't know if anyone ever actually said it out loud to me, but I was 19 years old and I just had this profound encounter with the Holy Spirit. And I was walking back with my tray to the lunch conveyor belt where my dishes magically disappeared—which honestly has never happened since, so that was kind of wild—that my dishes—you say, I put them on this little conveyor belt and they just went away.
Yes. Yeah, I gotta find that conveyor belt. Where is that conveyor belt? But I had this—as the Holy Spirit just began to love me, I had this sudden—as I'm walking with this tray—revelation that God didn't hate me inherently because I was female. Mmm. And it shocked me. I can tell you where I was standing. And did anyone ever say that to me? I don't think so. But was it kind of there in the air, in some of the relationships and communities and churches? And from that day—you never felt like you had to do dishes again.
No, but it began a journey of healing when I stopped agreeing with what I had thought was true—which was, God hates—God in some way likes me less, or thinks I'm dangerous or dirty because I'm female. I mean, that was just that idea. Mm-hmm. So, forgiving people that have given you bad ideas, not just being angry forever. Be angry and do not sin—let the anger point you toward where you need forgiveness. And then maybe even notice any anger toward God about your body. Yeah, like, God didn't heal me. He must not care. Right. Or, you know, I was in an environment where my body wasn't safe.
So, our—God didn't, or isn't, healing this person that I love, and so that means that their body must just be a shell, and now I just kind of need to put my hope in the afterlife. Yeah. So, all right. So renounce all of those lies and notice where you need forgiveness. And then what? Well, and then you need to release yourself, your body, others who need forgiveness, to Jesus at the cross. Yeah. So repent of all self-hatred and unbelief, and then you need to release all of that stuff to Jesus at the cross. Yeah. And then ask for healing that you need—yeah, which can feel really risky—or, and invite other people to pray for you, to lay hands on you, anoint you with oil if you need physical healing.
Yeah. What does that look—it looks like welcoming a healed and healing and hopeful understanding of the physical world, right, your body, and God's commitment to matter. Ask the Holy Spirit to teach you—this is not just a one-and-done—ask the Holy Spirit to teach you about how God feels about matter. That's right. Yeah. So, yeah, that's great. I love it. I think we need to have an episode on some of the most common reasons why healing doesn't take place. And we want to answer some of your questions too. So you can email us at podcast@encounterculturene.com if you have questions about physical healing, because this is a hot one.
The reason why it's a hot one is because our physicality matters so much. That's right. It really does. Because it matters so much. And we don't want to admit it, but it really does. It really, really matters. And so, you know, we want to move beyond the theoretical into the functional. And take our disappointment, and take the things that we wish that we had seen but we haven't seen yet, perhaps, and bring them to Jesus and have a conversation with him about it. And take our place and bring it together. And bring it—heaven, earth. That's right. Amen. I'm going to go do some dishes. All right. Love you all. Bye-bye. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Between Heaven and Earth.
We hope that you are stirred to curiosity and courage as we explored bringing heaven and earth together right where you are. Remember, you're not alone on this journey. We're here to support you in understanding what the Spirit of God is doing in your life and responding in obedience to his good leadership. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please take a moment to like, share, subscribe, and leave a review. We'd love to hear from you. Share your thoughts and questions with us on our Facebook page or by email, podcast@encounterculturene.com. Your support helps us reach more people who are eager to join Jesus in his great project of restoration.
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