The Famous Flesh

We have two enemies as Christians – the famous devil, and the famous flesh. The devil, of course, taught to be omnipresent, omniscient, and interested in our lives; the flesh, something of a mystical concept, but our most real ‘enemy’, if you will. Now the flesh, our body, is also sometimes called ‘the sinful nature’, which will appear more times in the letters than ‘the flesh’.

The flesh is the perpetrator of all our sins – things of a sexual nature, or sins of the mind such as greed (Galatians 5:19-21). It even implies to be some sort of object, like a tumour within, that is responsible for stirring us up to do wicked things.

But this is just another example of over-spiritualizing and complicating simple things. The flesh is simply the body, being fashioned like an animal to have eyes for nothing more than feeding and multiplying itself. In length, I explained that the present state of our bodies as humans is a fall from the original form in my posts: Who Was Adam? Who Are We? The Profound Mystery and What Then is Salvation?

Because we live as fallen beings, as spirits within animal bodies, the redemption includes a change/regeneration of our bodies to the original form. In the meantime, we battle this ‘flesh’ or at least suffer its insistence, until the day dawns, and the morning star rises in our hearts (2 Peter 1:19). The flesh is simply our body, our nature, our instincts. Whenever Paul refers to our nature, in his distaste for it, he labels it sinful every time – our sinful nature.

It’s simple – the flesh is our bodies. Our instinctual, bestial bodies.

Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. Romans 8:5