If any reasonable person could still have doubts that nakedness is good in God's sight after reading the passage in Isaiah discussed in Part 2 last month, those doubts would be utterly vanquished by the events described in I Samuel 19:18-24.
King Saul had developed a jealous hatred of David and sent successive parties of men to seize and kill him. But God himself thwarted his intent, for as each party approached Naioth, where David was staying with Samuel and the prophets, the Holy Spirit came upon them and they fell into prophetic rapture. Finally, Saul went to do the murder himself, but the Spirit of God came upon him as he went and he also became enraptured. Then, as the Bible says, when he came to Naioth, "he too stripped off his clothes and like the rest fell into a rapture before Samuel and lay down naked all that day and all that night."
These men were seized by the Spirit of God; they were elevated to the highest state of being possible on this earth, touched by God himself; all their actions were inspired by his Spirit; they were fully under his command--and they were all naked in ecstatic worship before Him.
In Acts 10:15 God tells Simon Peter, not once, but three times: "It is not for you to call profane what God counts clean."
Since, then, as we saw in Part 2, "God has given special honour to the humbler parts", we have no right to think or teach otherwise. If we do, the result is not only immortal peril, but a "sense of division in the body', which as we see daily in society causes nothing but the Satanic damage already referred to, and so perfectly described in Romans 1:18-19 & 28-32.
"For we see divine retribution revealed from heaven and falling upon all the godless wickedness of men. In their wickedness they are stifling the truth. For all that may known of God by men lies plain before their eyes; indeed God himself has disclosed it to them.
"Thus, because they have not seen fit to acknowledge God, he has given them up to their own depraved reason. This leads them to break all rules of conduct. They are filled with every kind of injustice, mischief, rapacity, and malice; they are one mass of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and malevolence; whisperers and scandal-mongers, hateful to God, insolent, arrogant, and boastful; they invent new kinds of mischief, they show no loyalty to parents, no conscience, no fidelity to their plighted word; they are without natural affection and without pity. They know well enough the just decree of God, that those who behave like this deserve to die, and yet they do it; not only so, they actually applaud such practices."
These things are as true of the truths of nakedness as they are of the great central truths of the Gospel. We should pay all them due heed.
Truly, as we are told in Isaiah 55:8-9, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways. This is the very word of the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways."
In Luke 11:34 we read: "The lamp of your body is the eye. When your eyes are sound, you have light for your whole body." Your whole body --genitals, pudenda and all else--are suffused with light if your vision is sound. The passage continues in verse 35, "See to it then that the light you have is not darkness.' The truth we are anchored to must be real, not imaginary or concocted; not the traditions of men but the truth of God.
Your body is the garment of your spirit, the spirit with which you worship God the Father through Jesus Christ our Lord. The body was also a garment Jesus was pleased to wear so that he could give us the way of salvation. It is thus a garment that the Holy Spirit was and is pleased to wear.
If you are in Christ you glorify him as much in your God-created nakedness as in any clothes. He certainly glorified God no less when he was naked on the Cross, naked at his resurrection, or naked at his baptism.
Some clothing is downright dangerous from a spiritual point of view, as Jude 23 tells us: "Hate the very clothing that is contaminated with sensuality."
The central point is that morality is a matter of the human heart, not the human exterior. A saint does not become immoral by going naked, nor a sinner moral by going clothed. As Jesus said in Mark 7:21-23 "evil things come from inside, and they defile a man." The two wonderfully perceptive verses in James 1:14-15 concisely sum up the progress to evil: "Temptation arises when a man is enticed and lured away by his own lust; then lust conceives, and gives birth to sin; and sin full-grown breeds death."
In Paradise Lost Milton amplified those two verses in horrifying images. First hideous Sin springs full-formed in female shape from Satan's head, generated by his lust for God's throne, then she is raped by him, falls out of Heaven with him and the rebellious angels, becomes the Portress of Hell-gate, and the fiendish child within her is born: Death.
Apart from militating against the progress of lust, there are other good, practical reasons why it is spiritually right for us to include nakedness in our lives.
For example, we are told in Ecclesiastes 5:15, "As [a man] came from the womb of mother earth, so must he return, naked as he came; all his toil produces nothing that he can take away with him."
Nakedness serves as a visual reminder of that, a reminder of what our beginning was and what our ending will be. It is thus both an aid to Christian humility, and a reminder of what Jesus commands us in Matthew 6:19-21: "Do not store up for yourselves treasure on earth, where it grows rusty and moth-eaten, and thieves break in to steal it. Store up treasure in heaven, where there is no moth and no rust to spoil it, no thieves to break in and steal it. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
And in Jude 8 we read: "So too with these men today. Their dreams lead them to defile the body, to flout authority, and to insult celestial beings." There is a connection between the way we think and act towards our bodies, and the way we regard authority and act towards higher beings. The start of the downward slope is to defile the body, which includes falsely calling it indecent or obscene.
We are told in many passages that the bodies of those who belong to Christ are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Again, that means their whole bodies. And in I Corinthians 6:20 we are told to honour God in our bodies. We cannot do that if we follow the world and call the body dishonourable, a thing to be shamefully hidden, to be despised, denigrated and demeaned. In the non-spiritual world in particular, as shown in NLNZ's September cover-story, the false shunning of nakedness causes great evil.
In New Zealand we have the legal right to go naked, a right granted through a landmark victory in court. Victories, as Proverbs 21:31 tells us, come from the LORD; and, as Proverbs 22:12, says, "The LORD keeps watch over every claim at law, and overturns the scoundrel's case." It was the case of the anti-body brigade that was overturned in 1991.
We also know that nakedness is good in God's sight. So in Christian love, in a desire for drawing closer to the truth, and as an antidote to bodily lies and disharmony with nature, we can--we should--live this way as part of our witness to the truth (so far as climate and circumstances allow).
As 2 Corinthians 10:5-6 says: "We demolish sophistries and all that rears its proud head against the knowledge of God; we compel every human thought to surrender in obedience to Christ." (emphasis added).
The motto of the Danish Naturist Association looks at the same thought from another point of view:
He who seeks Nakedness, seeks the Truth.
He who fears the Truth, fears Nakedness.
The same thought, on a higher plane, is expressed in Hebrews 4:12-13: "For the word of God is alive and active. It cuts more keenly than any two-edged sword, piercing as far as the place where life and spirit, joints and marrow divide. It sifts the thoughts and purposes of the heart. There is nothing in creation that can hide from him: everything lies naked and exposed to the eyes of the One with which we have to reckon."
(Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that a naturist organisation in Lutheran Denmark formed such a motto.)
The clothing we must seek, then, is spiritual--"righteous deeds"--which is what we are told in Revelation 19:8 is signified by the fine white linen that the Church and its saints are portrayed as wearing (it is certainly not moth-corruptible cloth). The King James Version puts that verse more clearly: "fine linen *is* the righteousness of saints" (emphasis added).
Daniel 12:10 underlines the point that the visible exterior being talked of here is the expression of the pure inner being--"Many shall purify themselves and be refined, making themselves shining white." Themselves, not added garments.
Many other passages tell us that our first responsibility is to be spiritually clothed, using metaphors that again show us clearly what God's attitude to physical nakedness is.
In I Corinthians 15:53-57: "This perishable being must be clothed with the imperishable, and what is immortal must be clothed with immortality. And when our mortality has been clothed with immortality, then the saying of Scripture will come true: "Death is swallowed up; victory is won!" "O Death, where is your victory? O Death, where is your sting?" The sting of death is sin, and sin gains its power from the law; but, God be praised, he gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."
In Colossians 3:12-15: "Then put on the garments that suit God's chosen people, his own, his beloved: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience. Be forbearing with one another, and forgiving, where any of you has cause for complaint: you must forgive as the Lord forgave you. To crown all, there must be love, to bind all together and complete the whole."
In I Timothy 2:9-10: "Women again must dress in becoming manner, modestly and soberly, not with elaborate hairstyles, not decked out with gold or pearls, or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, as befits women who claim to be religious."
In I Peter 3:3-4, also addressed to women: "Your beauty should reside, not in outward adornment--the braiding of hair, or jewellery, or dress--but in the inmost centre of your being, with its imperishable ornament, a gentle, quiet spirit, which is of high value in the sight of God."
In Psalm 132:9: "Let thy priests be clothed in righteousness and thy loyal servants shout for joy", and in Psalm 30:11: "Thou hast turned my laments into dancing; thou hast stripped off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.' (Sackcloth garments are worn alone, next to the skin.)
In Galatians 3:26-27: `For through faith you are all sons of God in union with Christ Jesus. Baptised into union with him, you have all put on Christ as a garment."
Born-again Christians can thus raise their voices with the hymnist, who paraphrased those verses in the lines: "Jesus, thy blood and righteousness --my beauty and glorious dress."
Revelation 3:14-18 addresses the church at Laodicea, as well as all who do not stand strong, with these words: "These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the prime source of all God's creation: I know all your ways; you are neither hot nor cold. How I wish you were either hot or cold! But because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. You say, "How rich I am! And how well I have done! I have everything I want." In fact, though you do not know it, you are the most pitiful wretch, poor, blind, and naked. So I advise you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, to make you truly rich, and white clothes to put on to hide the shame of your nakedness, and ointment for your eyes so that you may see."
That does not mean physical clothes, any more than it means physical gold or physical ointment, or physical nakedness or blindness or poverty. All are emblems of the spiritual. We must be covered with Christ's nature, rich with his wealth, healthy with his healing.
In short, it is the clothing of God himself that we need and must seek--his holiness, his attributes, as freely given through faith in Jesus, the garments described in Psalm 104:1-2.
Bless the LORD, my soul:
O LORD my God, thou art great indeed,
clothed in majesty and splendour,
and wrapped in a robe of light.
God has no need of any covering, no exterior but his own glorious attributes. The robe that Isaiah saw filling the temple was a visual expression of those attributes, not a piece of cloth. God is a spirit, so does not wear physical clothing; for as the Psalmist again tells us in Psalm 93:1:
The LORD is king; he is clothed in majesty; the LORD clothes himself in might and fastens on his belt of wrath.
Isaiah 11:5 and Revelation 1:13 also show us clearly that the clothes seen when God or his risen Son appear to us are symbolic, not actual cloth. In Revelation 1:13 John saw: "One like a son of man, robed down to his feet, with a golden girdle round his breast." In Isaiah 11:5, which is also talking about Jesus, we see what that girdle actually is: "Round his waist he shall wear the belt of justice, and good faith shall be the girdle round his body."
The pure, naked truth is glorious covering. Job saw that; for in Job 29:14 we read, "I put on righteousness as a garment and it clothed me; justice, like cloak or a turban, wrapped me round." And in Isaiah 61:10, "Let me rejoice in the LORD with all my heart, let me exult in my God; for he has robed me in salvation as a garment and clothed me in integrity as a cloak.' In Psalm 96:9, we are commanded to `worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness" --literally, clothed in holiness.
In Job 40:10 (RSV), God challenged Job to do just that. After asking him is his mortal arm and voice could match his omnipotent ones, he commands:
Deck yourself with majesty and dignity, Clothe yourself with glory and splendour.
Can you, God is asking Job--and us--can you, by yourself, in your own strength, put on the clothing essential to stand in my presence?
We can see from this article that there are three kinds of nakedness in the Bible: ordinary nakedness, such as Isaiah's; the nakedness of hardship, of not having clothes when they are needed (a need that Matthew 25:31-46 and Isaiah 58:7 shows it is our duty to fulfil); and the nakedness of the shame that accompanies sin, either the particular sin of lust, or the general sin of following your own lusts, your own desires, of saying in your heart, "I come first, not thee O LORD."
It is also clear that neither ordinary nakedness nor the nakedness of hardship do separate us, or can separate us, from the love of Christ or God, as the last words of Romans 8:35:39 tell us: "there is nothing ... in all creation that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." Only the nakedness of lust can do that, for that is not the nakedness of creation, it is of our own making.
The choices, then, are all ours: clothes or nakedness, good nakedness or bad, good clothedness or bad.
The essential thing is that we should learn to echo Psalm 119:72, where a true appreciation of our bodies is linked with trusting obedience:
Thy hands moulded me and made me what I am; show me how I may learn thy commandments.
Finally, we can and should behold our naked bodies with humility and joy, and cry out to God in praise for them, joining our voices with that of Psalm 139:13-17:
Thou it was who didst fashion my inward parts; Thou didst knit me together in my mother's womb.
I will praise thee, for thou dost fill me with awe; wonderful thou art, and wonderful thy works.
Thou knowest me through and through: my body is no mystery to thee how I was secretly kneaded into shape and patterned in the depths of the earth.
Thou didst see my limbs unformed in the womb, and in thy book they are all recorded; day by day they were fashioned, not one of them was late in growing.
How deep I find thy thoughts, O God, how inexhaustible their themes!
END
Author: Nobilangelo Ceramalus.
©Naturist Life New Zealand; in 3 parts, September, October and November issues, 1994.