7.2 What Is a Body?
© 2016 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
Christ is a corporate Body. What is a body?
The body without the spirit is dead (James 2). A corpse looks like a body, but it’s not really a body; a corpse is not a body because there is no one there. A body is alive when it is inhabited by a person. A spirit-alive body is for being lived in by a person.
Now, I have taught that we as humans have “two” bodies, our physical body for the earth and our spirit body for the heavens. That is how we come to know ourselves, but only in the classroom.
Christ as a Spirit of Power
In the classroom, we take things apart so that we might know them. In real life, our physical body and our spirit body function together entirely as one entity. If they don’t, we’re dead.
The last session, Christ as a Spirit of Power, is one of the greatest of milestones in all my years of seeking to know the living God. It stands as a most significant transformation for us. Spend time in that session until it is how you see all reality. Here is what I suspect. Just as Word comes in the form of Spirit and Spirit comes as Word, so we will find a similar relationship between Spirit and Body. I hope to discover what that might mean.
An Image of a Village
And so, let’s return to our metaphor of the computer, of power code creating an image on the monitor, an image by which I can do good things. On the background of my computer monitor, I have several revolving pictures of scenes from Norwegian
fiords. My favorite scene is a small village, a community of brightly colored red and white houses at the bottom of a steep slope, right on the edge of the fiord. The many shades of green, both on the slope and in the reflections in the water are rich and beautiful.The code coming by electricity by which that image on my screen is formed is about the size of two Bibles.
Pixels
To form this image of a village on the edge of a fiord on my large, double-sized computer screen, the computer divides the packets of code into more than two million small streams. Each of those packets of code, then, is sent to its own very specific place on the monitor called a pixel. Each pixel is a specific color and hue.
As every one of the more than two million pixels find their place on the monitor, I see the beautiful image. As I look at the image, I am seeing the fiord, the mountain slope, the colorful houses, the garden spaces. I am NOT seeing pixels or packets of information or electrical code. Yet consider the distinction and place of each pixel.
Pixels in Their Place
I see a red pixel right next to a white pixel. What if the pixels refused to be what they were; that is, what if every pixel was trying to be like an image they held in their minds of “the perfect pixel?” If that were the case, if the pixels envied one another for their individual color and hue, what would happen to the picture? Regardless, I would not have it on my computer screen.
You and I as members of the entire picture are as each one of those pixels, each one in its place – and thus the image of God is seen by the entire gathering together. Consider these words, until we all come to a perfect man, to the… fullness of Christ, as all pixels being exactly what the code creator intended and each in its place.
No Image from Studying Code
Now the written code governing every pixel on my computer screen, it’s color, hue, and placement, is found in the file containing that picture. If you were to print out that code, you would have over 2000 letter-sized pages in intricate detail. Study those pages. Can you determine the picture from the code? NO! There is no relationship whatever between the appearance of the code and the appearance of the image on the screen. ONLY when the computer turns that written code into power code can the image come clearly into view.
Yet think about what Christians do.
No “Perfect” Pixel
Christians quickly learn to hate themselves, convinced that they are not what the “perfect pixel” should be. But there is NO perfect pixel. There is no “perfect” individual image of what Christ “ought to be.” Such a “Christ” does not exist. But Christians read the Bible, assuming that, without Spirit bringing forth Life, they can image the perfect “Christ” out from the words on the page! And even those who do know a Spirit Word, still, because they hate the exact pixel color, hue, and place God made them to be, they continue to attempt to become a non-existent “perfect pixel” image.
The Image on the Monitor
That is not, however, what you and I do. We know that Jesus is revealing Himself exactly as He wishes through us in every particle that we find ourselves to be and through every circumstance coming our way.
I am the image on the monitor being formed every moment by the energia of Personal Spirit Word. I am the appearance of Christ.
We together are the image on the monitor, each one of us as an individual pixel, being formed together every moment by the energia of Personal Spirit Word. We together are the appearance of Father. Though very different from each other, we are each one perfect.
A Living Body
There is one large difference between the image on the screen of the monitor and a living body. The image on the monitor is two-dimensional; whereas a living body is three-dimensional and can move around and interact with other three-dimensional and personal images, that is, three-dimensional pixel images of God. The pixels on the screen stay in one place; we living pixels in three dimensions are in constant movement, with our relationships together fluctuating constantly as a living tapestry of God.
But our question in this lesson, as we move to God’s metaphor of a living human body, is not how does it work, but rather, what a body IS.
Scalable Power Code
The human body operates by power code a trillion times more complex than the power code that creates the images I enjoy looking at each time they rotate onto my screen. And the Body of Christ operates by Spirit Word a trillion times more complex than the power code that operates the human body. Yet we are speaking of something entirely scalable; that is, the same workings regardless of size or complexity.
Thus, to eventually arrive at some understanding of what is the Body of Christ, we must turn next to the living, dynamic, moving, lived-in image that is our physical bodies. We are fearfully and wonderfully made.
The Swarm
A physical body is a swarm; in fact, it is many swarms all moving together. Swarm – think of a flock of birds, all moving together, with no actual “control” Picture that flock in your minds; each bird does exactly what it wants entirely together with the birds near it. There are no “orders of control” coming from anywhere.
Michael Crichton wrote a book titled Prey. The story is focused on the development of intelligence in nano-particles through “evolutionary” processes. Crichton simply took what scientists were working on more than ten years ago and expanded it into fictional possibilities. I want to bring in a few paragraphs from Prey.
~~~ If you want to think of it that way, a human being is actually a giant swarm. Or more precisely, it's a swarm of swarms, because each organ – blood, liver, kidneys – is a separate swarm. What we refer to as a “body” is really the combination of all these organ swarms.
We think our bodies are solid, but that's only because we can't see what is going on at the cellular level. If you could enlarge the human body, blow it up to a vast size, you would see that it was literally nothing but a swirling mass of cells and atoms, clustered together into smaller swirls of cells and atoms.
Who cares? Well, it turns out a lot of processing [thinking and decision-making] occurs at the level of the organs. Human behavior is determined in many places. The control of our behavior is not located in our brains. It's all over our bodies.
So you could argue that “swarm intelligence” rules human beings, too. Balance is controlled by the cerebellar swarm, and rarely comes into consciousness. Other processing occurs in the spinal cord, the stomach, the intestine. A lot of vision takes place in the eyeballs, long before the brain is involved.
And for that matter, a lot of sophisticated brain processing occurs beneath awareness, too. An easy proof is object avoidance. A mobile robot has to devote a tremendous amount of processing time simply to avoid obstacles in the environment. Human beings do, too, but they're never aware of it – until the lights go out. Then they learn painfully just how much processing is really required. ~~~
Two Visions of Order
Sustaining all things by the word of His Power. – Without the spirit the body is dead. I am attempting to take the same picture of power code ruling the image on my computer screen into the living, moving, dynamic reality of the human body.
There are two visions of order in the universe, the Kingdom of God versus the human kingdoms of this world. Michael Crichton is describing for us the nature of order that is the Kingdom of God, an order seen throughout God’s natural creation. Order defined by Satan in this world is command and control, an “order” that brings only chaos and misery.
The Order of God
When a flock (a swarm) of birds flies in beautiful formation, every individual member of that flock is doing only what is entirely in its heart, in conjunction only with those birds closest to it. The fact that the whole flock moves as one is entirely the order of God.
Now, here, I want to refer you back to Symmorphy II: Essence, Session 10: What Is Faith? And particularly to Lessons 10.2 Symmorphic Man and 10.3 What is Faith? As you read through those two lessons again, the questions of God’s will IN our will as applied to us individually are now applied to us here in Kingdom as One Body moving together.
The Appearance of Father
Sustaining all things by the word of His power is living, dynamically active, continuous, and utterly personal. I am the constant image of Christ, formed in every particular and in every moment by Personal Spirit Word, that is, Jesus, who, in every moment is calling forth an invisible God out into visibility.
Thus, you and I together are the constant appearance of Father in His creation, formed together in every particular and in every moment by Personal Spirit Word, Jesus, that is, the becoming known of Father.
A Body, a Temple, prepared for God, is two things. The Temple is where this Personal God lives; the Body is the outward appearance, the image, of our Father.