The concept of shalom has to do with having right relationships with God, with other people, with yourself, and with God’s creation. Biblical shalom has several dimensions. There is the shalom of God’s creating an ordered universe out of a primordial void. There is the shalom of God’s creating humans in His image with a responsibility to take care of the earth and the creatures living on it. There is the shalom of humans taking care of their own bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit. There is the shalom of humans having right relationships with God. Finally, there is the shalom of humans relating rightly to each other.
Terry McGonagal lists several aspects of shalom. He says that the term includes peace, wholeness, prosperity, integrity, truth, salvation, covenant loyalty, faithfulness, righteousness, justice, grace, reconciliation, restoration, healing, love, life, and goodness. He points out that the Bible contains references to a state of shalom as bookends to the entire narrative. In the beginning, God creates an ordered universe and a shalom relationship exists between God, the natural world He has created, and the humans living in the Garden of Eden. In Revelation, Jesus is there with the towel wiping away every tear and reestablishing a shalom relationship with the created world and His people.
In between the ideal states of shalom in the Garden of Eden and the end times envisioned by John in Revelation, the state of shalom was disrupted by the rebellion and sin of angelic beings, led by Satan, and humans, starting with Adam and Eve. Christopher J.H. Wright summarizes the situation:
God wanted a mutual relationship between God and human beings, and between human beings themselves, within the context of the created, material environment, which God had declared ‘good.’ In all these respects there was a transparency of relationships. We read that Adam and Eve were naked but not ashamed. They had nothing to hide from God, or from each other. There was an absence of dishonesty and corruption because there was no need to dissemble or deceive.
Satan, taking the form of a serpent, convinced Adam and Eve that God was not being truthful with them. By calling God’s honesty into question, he assailed the foundations of human honesty. After all, if God can’t be trusted, why need men and women be honest and truthful? Next, Satan offered Adam and Eve the opportunity to be as or equal to God by taking and eating the forbidden fruit. Wright states that Adam and Eve’s decision to listen to Satan corrupted every dimension of human life, including:
1. The spiritual relationship with God, in which we are basically dishonest and cannot face the truth about ourselves.
2. The mental realm, in which the human mind is darkened and reason employed for dark ends.
3. The physical dimension, both in that the human body becomes subject to decay and death and victim to the ravages of sin and oppression, and in that the whole physical environment is now under the curse of God.
4. The social realm: the story of Genesis 1-11 quickly goes on to show how the sin of Adam and Eve not only estranged them as individuals, but soon gave rise to other social expressions of evil, including jealousy, anger, murder, vengeance, corruption, violence, pride, strife, and division.
How we treat our bodies plays an integral part in this web of right relationships. First, our bodies are gifts from God. He is the wise and intelligent Creator and Designer who made the universe, all living things in general, and our living bodies in particular. The Scriptures say, “And the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.” David expresses the wonder of this creative act of God when he says , “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
The wonder of this creation of our bodies can be seen in the smallest cells in our bodies. Franklin M. Harold described a single-cell organism as a high-tech factory , complete with “artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction … [and] a capacity not equaled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours.”
A one-cell organism is amazing enough, but our bodies are made up of millions of cells that combine into specialized structures such as bones, cartilage, muscles, nerves, and organs. These individual structures in turn combine to form a skeletal system, a muscular system, a nervous system, a respiratory system, a lymphatic system, a digestive system, and an endocrine system, each with their specialized functions.
The Scriptures describe the inter-relationship of the parts of the body. “The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts…. In fact, God has arranged the parts of the body, just as he wanted them to be.”
The right relationship of parts of the body working together for a common purpose is an example of shalom.
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