Yoga: Is it just stretching and increasing your flexibility? Or is there something more to it than simple exercise?

Yoga is tied heavily to Eastern Religion, predominately Hindu. In the Hindu Religious worldview, the nature of spiritual reality is that the only thing that exists is an impersonal God and that we are all a part of God, existing in some sort of dream or illusion called Maya. We think we are separate from God but in reality we are part of the divine essence. The goal in the Hindu worldview is to perform certain spiritual practices known as “asana’s” in order to get back to the Godhead. Also known as transcending or achieving enlightenment. Some of these asana’s are fasting, praying, chanting, meditation and yoga.

Now you can’t get away from the fact that yoga is first and foremost a spiritual discipline. Yoga is not done for your physical health but rather your spiritual health. In “kundalini” yoga there is a belief that there is a spirit at the base of the spine, and the kundalini spirit is released with the aid of the yoga asana. Yoga is a system of doing physical things (stretches, breathing, poses and utterances) which is tied to a spiritual outcome.

Thinking that doing yoga is simply physical activity would be like taking the Catholic Rosary beads and praying the Rosary prayers over and over again to calm you down, to make you feel better, all the while believing that praying the Rosary is not religious.

The concern for a Christian doing yoga simply for the stretches is that not all of the stretches are benign. Some have a specific goal which is an Eastern spiritual goal. There may be some physical benefit from doing yoga, and that may be part of the appeal, but yoga should not be confused with a gym workout. By all means, if you can isolate the stretch from the yoga system, then fine, a stretch is just a stretch. But if it’s tied in with the yoga system then there is a concern for the Christian, or anyone else for that matter who doesn’t think that what they are doing is buying into an Eastern religion.

Paraphrased from Greg Koukl’s radio show (www.str.org)

Josephine Tovey writes in Thursday’s Sydney Morning Herald (June 3, 2010):

JESUS may have welcomed prostitutes into the kingdom of heaven, but the reception in Sydney’s ”Bible belt” is distinctly less friendly.

The Hills Shire Council, home of the Hillsong church and one of the fastest-growing regions of Sydney, is pushing for a change in state planning laws to allow it to ban brothels.

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/hills-folk-reject-oldest-profession-20100602-wzul.html

In typical What-Would-Jesus-Do fashion, the basic rub of her article is that although Jesus lovingly welcomes prostitutes into heaven, hypocritical unfriendly Christians (supposed followers of Christ) won’t even allow prostitutes to work in their town; trying instead to ban brothels (a safe haven for these women to practice their craft), potentially forcing them to prostitute themselves in more dangerous territory. And the standard by which Josephine measures this alleged hypocrisy… who knows? Dropping the J-bomb is about as close as she comes to providing any reason whatsoever for us to believe that her opinions are based on anything more than creative scripture twisting.

And as Josephine provides no reason for us to think that these Christians are acting against the desires of our Lord, I will not presume to respond as if she had. However, in the interest of highlighting a basic hermeneutical principle that I find helpful, I suggest that the best candidate verse is the second half of Matthew 21:31

… Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. …”

Whenever I am trying to figure out the meaning of a verse or passage, there is a principle I use which flows from good hermeneutics; something Greg Koukl calls ‘Never Read a Bible Verse’:

When I’m on the radio, I use this simple rule to help me answer the majority of Bible questions I’m asked, even when I’m totally unfamiliar with the verse. It’s an amazingly effective technique you can use, too.

I read the paragraph, not just the verse. I take stock of the relevant material above and below. Since the context frames the verse and gives it specific meaning, I let it tell me what’s going on.

This works because of a basic rule of all communication: Meaning always flows from the top down, from the larger units to the smaller units, not the other way around. The key to the meaning of any verse comes from the paragraph, not just from the individual words.

If we read on from verse 31 to verse 32, it would appear the reason “…the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God…” is not because Jesus merely tolerates and accepts prostitutes for who they are, or because he thinks brothels are such a good influence in the community and he wants to ensure there will be women willing to work the streets in the Kingdom. No, it is because they believed what John the Baptist had preached about Jesus, repented of their sin, and put their trust in Christ. “For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did.” It is not that all prostitutes are entering the Kingdom with Jesus’ approval despite their way of life, but only those who heard John, believed what he said, turned from their way of life and trusted in Christ; those are the ones who are “entering the kingdom of God.” It has nothing to do with them being prostitutes and everything to do with how they responded to Jesus.

So whatever basis Josephine is using to justify her position, it can’t be Matthew 21. That passage provides no basis for believing that Christians should support or condone prostitution in their community, or that by banning brothels they are somehow being unfriendly, unloving, or acting against the desires of our Lord.

The truth of the phrase “a picture tells a thousand words” holds much persuasive power. The media has long used a variety of images to convey the truth and reality of situations far removed from the every day viewer; we use images to provoke, to emotionally stir and to captivate people’s attention. We are, by and large, a visually stimulated people. The success of the movie industry and of TV programming is testament to that. Yet can we intentionally use graphically disturbing pictures to promote a cause or to bring awareness of an issue to the uninitiated? Can we use images to sway our opponents on the abortion issue? If they’re used appropriately, then the answer is an emphatic, “yes”.

The use of pictures does have its place; the use of factual pictures entomb the truths of an event for future generations. One man who understood this in totality was General Eisenhower who, on visiting the Nazi concentration camp at Ohrdruf on April 12th, 1945, ordered that every citizen of the nearby town of Gotha visit the camp; that media personnel make full documentation; and that military cameras be sure to capture the horrific scene, immortalizing in photographs the barbarity and cruelty.

Said Eisenhower, “I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”^[1] Eisenhower envisaged that the documentation was necessary because, at point in the future, he believed there would be people who would deny that such astrocities ever took place, perhaps thinking them some elaborate conspiracy to stir the hearts and cloud the minds of a gullible people. Yet there are groups who deny the holocaust; I’m sure Eisenhower would not be surprised.

Read the rest of this entry