The Flesh Series Part I: Friend, Meet Your Flesh

I am so excited to present this series because it represents the very core of the new convictions I have formed via the Word of God, borne out of my relentless struggle with compulsive eating and subsequent weight issues.

I would like to propose an idea that I believe has been lost to time for centuries, but has found new life (albeit in a veiled way) in recent years. It is not an overstatement to say that this notion has revolutionized my thinking about weight loss, self-control, and battling essentially anything that gets in the way with my walk with God. This is the beginning of a long series, so grab a beverage, take your shoes off, and get comfy.

Let me tell you how I found this “secret” of mine. I am total Bible geek, if you hadn’t guessed already. For the past 25-ish years I have studied the scriptures using mostly the 1984 New International Version (NIV). I often read passages that referred to the “sinful nature”. I had never fully understood what that meant, except that it seemed to be a fairly abstract reference to the sinfulness of human beings. Okay, so we do bad stuff because it is a part of who we are. It’s our “nature”. Got it.

When the 2011 NIV came out I realized that almost all of the passages that had previously used the term “sinful nature” had begun to render the term as simply “the flesh”. Now that was really different. When I hear “flesh” I think of either horror movies or meat going through a meat grinder- not some ethereal doctrine of human sinfulness. I soon learned that in the Greek, the word “flesh” is a translation of “sarx”, which depending on context might refer to the human body or our earthly nature apart from God’s influence. However the definition that caught my eye seemed to fit with the spirit of the translation “sinful nature”. That is,

“the sensuous nature of man…the animal nature with cravings which incite to sin”

Those words popped off the screen. That definition of the flesh sent my mind racing as I thought about all of the Bible passages that might be talking about the animalistic nature of my body. Of course! We are animals, and that idea has profound implications.

Suddenly, I had a word to describe what I felt during the moments when I was compelled to behave like an animal; to mindlessly eat something extremely unhealthy, to lose my temper and lash out in anger, to lust after the woman sitting next to me at Starbucks, to compulsively play video games when I had work to do. That word was “flesh”! These were all acts of the flesh (Galatians 5:19).

Instead of viewing those struggles and sins as disembodied, theological wrongs, I now saw these urges and acts as understandable and expected behaviours that are incited by my body itself. Not me. Not the true me. By my flesh.

Paul drew a sharp distinction between his true self (what he called eso anthropos– the “inner man”) and the flesh. His true self loved God and what was good, but his fleshly self desired only to gratify its base desires. In fact, Paul made a point in Romans 7 of distancing his true self from the flesh. Paul the animal was not the “real” Paul. That is why he says “So then, with my mind I serve the law of God, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin” (Romans 7:25).

Sigmund Freud latched onto this idea when he proposed the notion of the Id; an aspect of self that was different from the Ego or Super-Ego. Freud’s Id is animalistic, unreasonable, and driven by base desires. In this way, the Id looks very much like the flesh in its conception. Freud believed that the mind of a newborn baby was entirely Id and that the Id was the source of all impulsive desire. There are places where the analogy between Freud’s Id and Paul’s flesh breaks down, but they share a basic structure.

Nowadays, neuroscientists have suggested yet another rough parallel with the flesh: that of the limbic system in the brain. This is a region that sits deep inside our brains and is considered to be older and governs more basic functions. It is also sometimes referred to as the “emotional brain”. This is in contrast to the more advanced prefrontal cortex that governs executive functioning and is sometimes referred to as the “rational brain”. In traumatic or life-threatening situations, the limbic system can effectively take over and compel us to take a number of animalistic actions designed to protect us. Basically, our “instincts” or animal nature take charge.

So all of this is to say that there is broad consensus, spanning the realms of faith, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, that we possess two “selves’. One is “lower” or animalistic and the other is “higher” or what might be described as our true self.

More about that in the next post…