A man’s spirit will endure sickness, but a crushed spirit who can bear?
A heart attack can be triggered by shock, spiritual triggering physical. Anger or despair can be elicited by a long-running injury, physical triggering spiritual. In daily life, a ray of light, impacting the eye, can cause the spirit to perceive beauty- of a flower, a story, another person. Words, heard or written, can bring wise counsel, and wise counsel can become words. We humans live on both sides of the divide between physical and spiritual. Sometimes we pay the price.
We are not merely flesh, and we are not merely spirit. God made man out of the dust of the earth and gave to him the “breath of life” (Gen. 2:7). We humans are therefore body-and-soul, both at once. The downside to this marvel is that sickness in the body affects the spirit, and that hurt in the spirit affects the body.
Lengthy sickness is wearing upon the soul. Even when the direct impact of a sickness upon the mind is minimal, as with my diabetes (the type where an organ stopped working years ago), the care necessary to deal with the illness leaves a mark. For me, some of that mark is positive- ingrained habits of attention to health, for instance. Not all, though; it can be tempting to look away from God and fiddle with despondency, considering how this will be a factor for my entire foreseeable future on this earth.
Others have illnesses which strike much more directly and deeply upon the soul, whether by nature of the trouble or from circumstances conspiring. Mold sensitivity yet untreated or interminably recurring, chronic fatigue, chemical sensitivities, Lyme disease, an old injury, the sickness of a family member: they can all hurt deeply and for years.
This proverb points to the spiritual danger these sicknesses pose. We, made in His image, can endure physical damage; it is temporary and will be completely remedied in the Second Resurrection (1 Cor. 15:50-54; Rev. 20:6). Our bodies will break and fail us in the end; “Death will arrive… to sweep you away” (Beowulf, ln 1767-8, trans. by S. Heaney). The body, however, is united in us with the spirit. As a result, pain, hindrance, the direct mental effects of illness (brainfog, etc.), these wear us down.
The greatest danger of illness, of adversity, of prosperity, is the same: a breaking of the spirit. Yet the spirit can be broken in three ways, each of which has a very different end, a very different character, a very different fruit.
First we have the most terrible of the three: the spirit which breaks to final death. The man who does not know God and the woman who disregards His call, this person lives in an unstable world. When the flood rises around this person’s house, he finds that his foundation is insufficient; the beliefs and desires around which he has centered his world cannot hold against reality, against pain and suffering, against the questions prosperity allows. The man who rests on this world finds he has nothing to rest on, in the end, when his body breaks and his spirit’s brokenness becomes unavoidable.
The truth of this sort of breaking is that it is not the breaking of a whole. This breaking is a revelation of what sin already did in Adam: the shattering of human nature’s structural (moral) integrity. Sin’s curse breaks down our bodies, unmistakably and unavoidably (Rom. 8:22). Sin’s curse upon our spirits leads just as certainly to death, as per Romans 6:23, but men often ignore this. We live with spirits that function, and so we forget that they cohere and are kept from fully breaking only by His mercy, only for a time. Then He asserts reality against us, and we are undone (Gen. 18:25).
For the second breaking, we have that breaking which walks alongside the first near to death, but not into Sheol, for this man is broken not to death but to repentance. This is the man who cries, “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” (Ps. 130:3), who knows his own desolation. This is the breaking which the Christian is delivered from.
For this breaking ends not in death but in deliverance. The soul which He crushed, He now raises in life eternal (John 3:1-15). He gave His life for this one (John 3:16), and so the broken man is made whole as he, being born of Adam, never was before (Rom. 6:1-4). Yet the third type of breaking can come to this man, for we Christians on earth are not given an easy task. We live still in a world of sin, and we still sin (1 John 1:8-10). This sin brings us down to the dust, over and over, bringing us yet again to the mercy seat of the God who gave forgiveness already, repenting in sackcloth and ashes: crushed, yet not truly broken, for the Christian is not slain by his sin. Indeed, he rather triumphs over that sin- yet not me but Christ, “who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). This hope sustains against all breaking of the spirit: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last He shall walk upon the earth, and after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me!” (Job 19:25-28).
God bless
Written by Colson Potter
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
Colson Potter writes copious fiction and nonfiction, including a weekly Proverbs post and his blog at Creational Story.
