4 Just as each of us has one body with many members, and not all members have the same function, 5 so in Christ we who are many are one body, and each member belongs to one another.
Romans 12:4-5
I once knew a doctor at the Mayo Clinic who expressed to me that “only a doctor can fully appreciate the miracle of the human body.” He was probably correct, but it doesn’t take a PhD in medicine to recognize that this human body we possess is a wonder.
I’m not going to run us through a full lecture on anatomy, but let’s just visit a few roadside vistas as we tour.
Consider something as basic as skin. It’s flexible, durable, sensitive, self-healing, and protective– both physically, as from cuts and abrasions, and sanitarily, as from germ invasion. The skin is part of our body’s self-regulating temperature mechanism with active hairs that can stand to keep us warmer and glands to emit moisture for the cooling effects of evaporation.
What about bones? Strong, yet light-weight. And the space inside major bones isn’t wasted– that space is used to house cells designed as factories to make specialized, important germ-defense cells. Bones can also self heal. They are integrated into joint-systems giving our bodies mobility. Bones are also tied to hundreds of muscle-groups that motivate us with an efficiency unmatched by any human invention.
Think about your nervous system– a network of protein-based cells able to rapidly pass along chemical impulses that act like biological electric circuits. Although not as fast in their ability to pass these signals as electrons in a wire, they are completely organic. Nerve cells have difficulty repairing themselves, but some can if only damaged slightly. The nervous system is integrated with all your senses, your brain and the muscles that move your bones and joints.
Getting hungry? It’s hard not to notice that this body doesn’t need batteries, a power plug or even fossil fuels. All your energy is gathered by an enzyme, acid and water-based digestive system that breaks down nearly everything we eat into tiny molecules ready to either energize our cells and the teeny protein machines that run in them or deliver the basic building blocks our cells need for growth or repair.
There is much more to note about our body, but remember that our bodies actually can reproduce themselves using a process that boggles the mind. Built into every cell in your body is a code of detailed information that guides teeny protein machines to create new cells using information found in this code. You’ve probably heard of DNA. This incredibly long helix of four different amino acids form a molecule, encoded with information that will define your height, hair color and gender as well as millions of other definitions that when properly differentiated in the early growth process will turn a single female’s egg cell and a single male’s sperm into a new human body. Try breeding your Android Phone and your iPhone together sometime and see if you get a new phone.
This chapter would go on for miles if I attempted to give, the eye, nose, ear, mouth, lungs, heart, blood, kidney, and brain a proper review.
Suffice it to say, the body is a component of what we are as a human being, and it was clearly designed by an intelligence, infinitely far beyond genius.
And that’s just the human body… there is an entire planet full of other animals, just as carefully engineered out there that can fly, breath underwater and withstand being completely frozen in ice…
One last thing about a body– the body is not just a tool or mechanism like a screwdriver or a mouse-trap. The body is a system that is active, adaptive, responsive and automatic in many of its features– this implies that bodies require an operating system. For more about this, wander into the appendix that covers the soul.