Asking the Most Important Question About Your Health So You Can Get the Right Answers

The most important question you can ask to guide you in evaluating your health and to prepare you for sifting through the Himalayan mountains of health advice is: how did I get here?

I don’t mean how did you get to this point in your health and fitness, though that is certainly a useful question in due time. I mean how did you come into existence? It is a core perspective issue that shapes all of our decisions, whether we admit it or not.

If we don’t directly answer this question, we are still affected by it. Avoiding the question leaves us vulnerable to every passing cultural wind and supposed scientific discovery. Choosing the wrong answer quite often leads to wrong premises, which typically leads to wrong conclusions.

I won’t leave you hanging. I know how I got here. God created me. The triune God of Christianity, who communicates with us via the scriptures that he has preserved for us through time. I know that’s a big statement and I can back it up, but for now I’m going to just state it as fact and explain why it is important.

Let me compare this with the common superstition of macro-evolution (I say macro-evolution, because some people refer to natural selection as micro-evolution, though it is a totally different phenomena). If you think you accidentally evolved from goo and have the hope of progressing to some higher form, you will probably have a more exalted view of human wisdom and intelligence.

For some reason, people who believe in goo-to-you also look to the past for examples of how to eat and exercise. This seems odd to me, since, according to them, we are supposed to be evolving. But somehow the conjectures of what super-ancient humankind ate and did is still supposed to be a model for us. Where we do have evidence of what people ate in the past, there are a multitude of factors to influence that. It cannot be realistically said to reflect what is best for everyone.

Then there is the contradictory, but usually simultaneously held, position that the intelligence of mankind is now so superior that we are near to figuring out everything and that everything we now view as fact is approaching the knowledge of God. Well, the god that some humans think they are becoming. Or we are finally attaining the wisdom of some alien race that is waiting for us to reach this enlightenment so they can once again visit us. It begins to sound suspiciously like religion.

The key in this prideful view is that people are the masters of themselves. They will heal themselves. They will defeat aging and death one day. They get to decide what the standards of life are.

And yet, it is in submitting to the knowledge of the God who made us that we have the best chance of understanding our bodies and minds, both of which affect our physical health. Unfortunately, submitting is a dirty word in our culture. It is misconstrued and misunderstood. When someone tells us we should submit, defiance wells up within us. It’s like a don’t touch the wet paint sign.

Part of the problem is that when people force other people to submit to them, there is often abuse of power. However, God isn’t just some big bully in the sky looking for a chance to boss us around. He actually knows us way better than we know ourselves AND he loves us and wants what is best for us. It makes perfect sense to submit to the ways of a God like that. Unless you are just stubborn, of course. Which a lot of people are.

If you acknowledge that God made you, then you can begin to realize that he designed the body to work a certain way. You will be less likely to mess with that design willy-nilly based on limited human knowledge. You will be more aware of the failings of human nature compounded by the fact that a little knowledge puffs up, making you more careful in evaluating health advice. You might even begin to ponder that man has lost knowledge in some cases, as well as recognize the gradual decay of human DNA.

This need not be a matter of despair, though, because if you respond to God’s invitation to salvation as it is clearly and simply laid out in the scriptures, you will get a new and improved body one day in the future. Meanwhile, most of us still want to take reasonable care of the bodies we have now. God has given them to us and they are what we have to work with.

At this point it may occur to you to ask if God does say anything in particular about health in the Bible. He does. There are some basics that up until a few years ago were generally accepted, like don’t be a glutton and don’t be lazy. And while the Bible is not a textbook on health, health is part of the text in a variety of ways.

I’m in the beginning stages of writing a book on this very subject, so if you want to stay informed about that, I invite you to make sure you are signed up for my email newsletter (see left sidebar). Along the way you will get other encouraging emails about health and fitness. Of course, I recommend you read the Bible yourself on a regular basis.