The Christ Centred Cosmic Civilisation
Rod Dreher wrote “to order the world rightly as Christians requires regarding all things as pointing to Christ”
Christ is the One in Whom in all things consist and humanity is not the measure of all things. If a defining characteristic of the modern world is disorder then the most fundamental act of resistance is to discover and life according to the deep, divine order of the heavens and the earth.
In this series we want to look at the big model of the universe that the Bible and Christian history provides.
It is a mind and heart expanding vision of reality.
It is not confined to the limits of our bodily senses - but tries to embrace levels fo reality that are not normally accessible or tangible to our exiled life on earth.
We live on this side of the cosmic curtain - and therefore the highest and greatest dimensions of reality are hidden to us… yet these dimensions exist and are the most fundamental framework for the whole of the heavens and the earth.
Throughout this series we want to pick away at all the threads of reality to see how they all join together - how they all find common meaning and reason in the great divine logic - the One who is the Logos, the LORD Jesus Christ - the greatest that both heaven and earth has to offer.
Colossians 1:15-23
The Christ Centred Cosmic Civilisation
Episode 108 - The Theology of Hair: Identity, Glory, and Sacred Embodiment
Your hair tells a story—one that God reads with more attention than you might imagine. From the elegant symbolism of the Nazarite vow to Jesus' profound statement that "every hair on your head is numbered," Scripture reveals surprising truths about this seemingly mundane aspect of our physical existence.
This exploration of hair in biblical theology uncovers how our physical appearance connects to deeper spiritual realities. We examine how hair functions as both glory and authority in 1 Corinthians, why military recruits have their heads shaved upon entry, and what it means that hair literally carries a biological record of where we've been and what we've consumed—a physical parallel to spiritual identity.
The biblical approach to hair challenges our modern preoccupations. While we obsess over styling products and salon visits, Scripture presents alternatives like the Nazarite vow—where followers deliberately appeared unkempt as a sign of their radical devotion to God. Jesus himself grew up in Nazareth, the "town of Nazarites," surrounded by people whose appearance declared their counter-cultural commitment.
Most comforting is the revelation that God's attention to our physical being exceeds our own anxieties. When Jesus told his followers that the Father has "numbered every hair" on their heads, he wasn't speaking metaphorically but revealing divine intimacy with our embodied existence. This transforms how we should view ourselves—not defined primarily by appearance but by relationship with the Creator who knows us completely.
As we age and our hair whitens, we physically begin to resemble the Ancient of Days described in Revelation. This natural transformation parallels our spiritual journey—growing ever more like our heavenly Father in character and wisdom. Subscribe now to continue our exploration of how theology intersects with the human body in ways that will transform your understanding of embodied faith.
The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore
Well, welcome to another episode of the Christ-Centered Cosmic Civilization, and we have, after quite a lengthy introduction about the importance of the human body. We want to continue with that and let's again, let me just remind us that the goal is to think of the human body, even if this is just a provisional thing, to think of the human body, even if this is just a provisional thing, to think of the human head and the human body as if they really were visible representations of what the father looks like and what the son looks like, and that there is something theoid about humanity and that the human body is to be seen and understood and treated as something sacred. And to even touch a human body is to do something quite theological, and to harm a human body is like something done against God, and to honour humans is to do something towards God also, so that the way humans are treated is very, very tied up with the way we treat the Father and the Son and the Spirit. So I'm not going to repeat all that again, except just to remind us of this importance of looking at the human body not as if we project our form onto the father and the son, but that the father and the son have formed, handmade. The father sent the son in the power of. Now let's get into the human head. Now there's lots that.
Speaker 1:There is this basic distinction in the Bible between the head and the body and there's a mutual dependence between them. And then the head has a particular role. And then the head has a particular role, a kind of leadership role, and then the body has a kind of everything that is accomplished, everything that we do is to do with our hands and feet and our feelings is to do with our body. But there's something about the tasks performed by the head that has a slightly different role with respect to the body. And that relationship between the head and the body I'm not going to pursue now. We may do it at the end of the whole enterprise, but there's too much in it that I don't feel ready to engage with, because it's to do with Christ and the church. It's something to do with husbands and wives. It's something to do with how authority and life flow from Christ to us. There's so many things going on in it that I feel as if were we to open that now, we'd be caught up in a lot of other issues, and I want to first the purpose. Our focus is to actually examine different aspects of the head, and then the body, now then the head. Let's begin from the top and work our way down from that so that the hair on our head Now.
Speaker 1:1 Corinthians 11 is a passage I remember preaching on this at All Souls, like well over 25 years ago, and I remember spending about 100 hours preparing the sermon. Because, just diving into because 1 Corinthians 11, at the beginning, paul talks about passing on some traditions to them in verse 2. And he is without. Again he gets into this issue of Christ. The head of every man is Christ, the head of the husbands and wives, the head of the wife is man.
Speaker 1:Look, we've already said we don't want to get too into that for the moment, but rather he does say that any man or any husband that has long hair hanging down is dishonouring his head, and if a woman doesn't have her covering her head, she is dishonoring her head. So a guy with too much hair on his head is dishonoring. A woman with too little hair on her head is dishonoring, or a wife it's probably husband and wife and her head is dishonoring, or a wife, it's probably husband and wife because of the context it's probably husband and wife rather than just men and women generally. But so he's saying like if a wife doesn't have her covering her head, she may as well just shave her head and be bald. He says that in verses 5 and 6. And then this idea that even in verse 10, this idea that a woman ought to have authority on her head and authority, there is her in the context, and he said her is given as a covering. So sometimes in verse 15, it says her is given to a wife for a covering, and it says similarly that if for a woman or a wife, the her is her glory, and then in verse 10, it's her authority. So her is glory and authority. She is to have plenty of glory and authority on her head and a man isn't to have so much glory and authority on his head.
Speaker 1:And OK, look, there's a lot to say about this passage, but I'm wanting to just touch on it slightly because I remember, when studying it in depth, that the idea came up that many modern commentaries regarded it with a sort of amusement or sometimes hostility, because the idea was how weird to bother so much about what hair style people have or the quantity of hair people have on their head. How weird, how unspiritual, how meaningless is that. But that is not a realistic approach to the issue of the hair on our head. No part of our bodies perhaps gets as much attention as our hair. And for, like men can really obsess about the hair, really obsess about the lack of hair on their head. It can be a terrible sense of insecurity, obsession, going to extraordinary lengths to replace hair on their head or mimic hair on their head or whatever to cope with that. They're amazingly bothered about it.
Speaker 1:And the most common shop in modern britain is, or was the news agent. I don't know if it still is. Actually this was certainly the case when I looked at this 25 years ago. The newsagent was like a corner shop. Probably still is like a corner shop. That is like a general. Now, not so much the newsagent. I suppose it's more of the corner shop that, because the newspapers don't really function anymore. So that concept of a place to pick up a newspaper is that's not why people go to the corner shop, but that concept of that little corner shop. Probably that's the most common shop, but the second most common and now maybe the most common I think in Leytonstone, the most common shop on the high street is the hairdresser. There are multiple of those on our high street and that's true nearly wherever I go. There are multiple men's hairdressers and women's hairdressers, and I remember someone said no town is too small to have a hairdresser. So it's like even villages have them, let alone towns. It's like you've got to have it because people are very, very bothered about the hair.
Speaker 1:So when the Bible addresses the subject of hair and says something about it, that there is a theological significance to it and that if a guy makes too much of his hair and has too much of it on his head and and uh, allows her to dominate his head, there's something theologically wrong with that. There's something going on. Why is he doing that? What's? Why does he want so much authority and glory on his head? Was what? What's? There's something wrong with such a man? That's the idea that Paul says. Now he does say it's a tradition he's passing on, so that we've got to keep that in perspective, like not go around carefully examining one another's scalps and taking too many measurements about it all. But he is pointing something out about what it tells us about a person and then, similarly, he says it is a glory and authority. A wife or a woman has glory and authority and it is appropriate for her to have more her on her head and to be more, more, uh, bothered about the display of it somehow. Now why is he speaking like that?
Speaker 1:Is that weird again, think supermarkets have whole aisles devoted to her care products. More than ever, more than ever, we obsess with her and her products, her styling, everything. If people are having a bad day, I don't know if they still do this, but they used to say it's a bad her day, as if to say, well, if your her's bad, your whole day's bad. As if to say, well, if your hair's bad, your whole day's bad. And the way we think about our hair reveals so much about men and women and life in general and the amount of money that can be spent on styling it or attempting to get it. And everyone knows that the appearance of our head, and particularly in our hair, affects not only how others see us, but also how we see ourselves. Also how we see ourselves, people sometimes style the hair to show that they're part of a group or a lifestyle, and they make statements with the hair, the color of the hair, dye it, bleach it, shape it, make it totally black, totally bleached all sorts of different colors, lots of styles, in order to indicate an allegiance, a statement, something they're wanting to project about themselves, even just to give some confidence.
Speaker 1:Or they may cut it all off out of a sense of tragedy or crisis or despair, and they may have been through a terrible experience and may shave all the hair off all of these things. And it used to be like having a Mohican, where you shave the sides and then keep the hair in the center and sometimes even spike it up. That used to be, was that? I think that was like punk rock or something that was. That that was a very distinctive hairstyle and goths, I think, now to tend to dye their hair as dark, as matte black as possible. And then others of us might say I don't wish people to know that I'm going grey, so I'm going to dye my hair a inverted commas natural colour. All of that goes on, but the Bible addresses this.
Speaker 1:People give great weight to someone depending on their hair. It's the glory of who we are, and I find it fascinating in 2 Samuel 14, 26, that Absalom, he's the most famous man. Absalom, he's the most famous man? No, maybe that or Samson, those are your two big men who are obsessed with her for one reason or another, or who we think about in terms of their hairstyles. But for Absalom, the fact it's obviously to do with glory, because each year when his hair was cut it was weighed, and glory is heaviness. So that's saying something that Absalom's had this amount of glory on his head, this amount of heaviness, this weight of hair on his head. 2 Samuel 14, of her on his head. 2 Samuel 14, 26,. This idea, then, and that was something, and of course, his downfall was this her that got entangled in a tree and he's left dangling, suspended between heaven and earth, from a tree, which is like a cursed death. So there's something about Absalom that, though, that he has all this weight of glory upon his head, but it is his downfall that he has that. So, in Leviticus 21, verse 5, the Lord warns his church not to have pagan death cult, sacrificing babies, killing. Don't do that. Don't have your identity tied into the pagan world. Have an identity tied into church life Like. Don't like, if anything, style your hair in a way that alienates you from the pagan world around. And that idea of making a statement with our hair.
Speaker 1:I always find it interesting that with the army. I don't know if they still do this. I don't know if they do it in Britain, but I think they do. But it's like when in films they'll often have it that when a person joins the army, the first thing that happens is they shave all the hair off. Why do they do that? Or why did they do that? I don't know if they still do, but they used to do that and it's because and this is to do with identity what the army is doing is saying your identity, you leave that behind. Now, whatever you were as an individual, that is gone. You are not that individual anymore, and to shave off the hair is to shave off your individual identity. However, whatever group, whatever family, whatever name you were identified by, was shaving your hair off to say no, we are going to define you from now on. Your old identity is gone, shaved off. You are now a soldier in the army, you are a number, you obey orders. You do not define yourself anymore, you do not determine your own life anymore. You do what you are told, kind of thing. It's a very, very strong psychological statement the shaving off of her in an army to sort of capture the person and assert like a new identity on them.
Speaker 1:In Job, chapter 1, verse 20, he shaves off his hair in the depths of his grief and anguish and it's as if he can't. He's losing his identity and he manifests that in shaving off his hair. Or it could be that the traumatic events that have happened to him, he wishes to get rid of them and does that by removing his hair. And we find that same thing, don't we? Very often today. Even you, I know I've at times done that sort of thing in great stress, to shave my head just because now I do it because there's not much to work with there anyway, so I do it for neatness, but I have in the past done it just because of a sense of stress and despair and things like that. I know what it's like to do that, and Job did that and people do that. And then other times people do it.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think, without getting into all the reasons that people might shave off the hair, I think it's important to say this that the hair on our head is a record of our life. So I found it fascinating that you can analyse human hair and it will tell you many, many things about a person's lifestyle what they have eaten, what drugs they've taken, what beauty products they've used, even what places they've been to. That leave a record written into their hair. So a strand of your hair can be analyzed as a record of your life. So, for the amount of time that hair took to grow, imprinted upon it are clues to your life what's happened to you, where you've been, what you've consumed and so on. Our hair is a record of our life. So cutting off our hair is a way of cutting off the record of our life. It's to say I'm leaving my life behind and we've seen that with the army. They want you to leave your old life behind.
Speaker 1:But there's a way in the Bible that to cut off your hurt is to say I'm repenting or I'm rejecting my old life, I'm getting rid, like. In spiritual terms it's a way of saying I want rid of the old humanity and I want a new humanity, or I want to get rid of my old identity and I want a new identity. So that repentance and grief, the cutting off of her in repentance, to shave your head in sackcloth and ashes, the sackcloth and ashes, is to do with death. Like ashes, from dust to dust, ashes to ashes, we end up in dust. And so the idea is you cover yourself in dust because you say that is what I am. Ultimately, I am just dust and ashes.
Speaker 1:But the shaving off of the head is to say I want to be rid of my former life, I want to repent of it, I'm rejecting my former life, I'm cutting all my hair off. Sometimes people say if they get a new hairstyle they'll say I'm trying to get a new start in life, I want a new beginning, and they'll do that sometimes by getting a new hairstyle or hair color or something like that. So that idea of that hair is tied up with a new beginning or a new start. But the idea of shaving it off it's interesting in Deuteronomy 21, from verses 10 to 14, where a woman who is going to join with Israel, her, is shaved off because it is a way for her to say my old identity, my old life as a pagan person, as a part of a pagan nation, that's going, I'm letting that go, I want rid of that, I want a new identity. So the shaving off of her and you'll notice that the shaving off of her is, in the Bible, tied up with getting rid of an old life and beginning a new one. Deuteronomy 21, 10-14 is a good example of that. But it's also it's not just the shaving off of the hair, in that also her nails are to be trimmed. So even your nails contain a record also of your life. And to trim away the nails right down to minimum is another manifestation of getting rid of an old life and ready to start a new life in the church family.
Speaker 1:So shaving hair, a sign of a clean start, a new beginning. Leviticus 14, 8 to 9 start a new beginning. Leviticus 14, 8 to 9 is that idea? Well, like the Nazarite vow, let's get to the Nazarite vow.
Speaker 1:In number six there's this idea that if you are going to have this unique dedication to the living God, you must not cut your hair, not shave your head in any way, and also not tend to your hair. You can't brush and comb it or anything like that. It's not that you merely allow the hair to grow, but that you also do not bother with it. It's like allowing yourself to look overgrown and wild, almost unbrushed, uncurred, for Because if we see somebody wandering down the street and their hair is just grown and totally long, uncurred for unbrushed, unwashed the hair. What do we think about them? We think, ah, this is somebody who is possibly have lost themselves in substance abuse. We might think that and that's quite likely or that they are, they've lost their mind and that there's some there's like mental or social problems that have deeply broken them.
Speaker 1:And in a way, all of that is contained in this idea of the Nazarite vow, that the person is to manifest to the world a kind of disregard of their appearance and that they might look out of their mind or under the control of something else, like a person who is utterly obsessed with the living God might, in this number six sense of the Nazarite vow, men and women who've taken such a vow might look quite scary, wild, shocking, because they just don't care about all the things, like if the most common shop is the hairdresser and the biggest aisles in the supermarket are Herca products, and then they're completely immune to these obsessions and they don't even care what they look like to these obsessions and they don't even care what they look like, and that they have this kind of the authority. If there is authority and glory on their heads and loads of it. It isn't in any controlled sense and it's like there's something wild and out of control about such a person. Why? Why does the lord god ask them to do this? Because he wants them to say I don't care about anything other than the living God. I'm not. My identity is completely detached from the expectations of the world around me and I don't mind if I look like a tramp or an alcoholic or a mad person or whatever. That's okay. I want people almost to think I'm out of my mind because I want to be out of my mind in devotion to the living God.
Speaker 1:And that idea then of Samson, of course we've mentioned, has this miraculous strength from the Holy Spirit. I always think he's a little guy, because no one can understand how he's so strong, so he cannot have looked physically strong, but he does look uh wild somehow, because he's never cut his hair at any point in his life. What would that look like? And he doesn't care for it. Or in its uncut, unkempt long hair he would look a strange, terrifying, unnerving person. Why? Because of this obsessive dedication to the Lord. And then, when Samson wasn't focused on the Lord anymore and he wasn't obsessed with the holiness and separation and dedication to the Lord. Then he allowed his hair to be cut and so his strength was gone.
Speaker 1:In Judges 16, verse 19. That idea, then, that you could take a vow, a Nazarite vow you could still do that today and say I'm going to take a Nazarite vow and I will not. It's not just not cutting her, not shaving at all, it's the not caring for it, not tending to it, because it does mean you can't then appear with beautifully managed and styled hair and say I'm on a Nazarite vow. No, no, no, no. The Nazarite vow is something that cuts into our identity and alienates us from the expectations of the world around us and indicates to people that there's an obsession about us, something unearthly almost about us. And so you'll remember in Acts, isn't it? And so you'll remember in Acts, isn't it? Is it?
Speaker 1:Somewhere in Acts 18, middle of the chapter, paul has taken the Nazarite vow, and then, when he gets to Cancria, he eventually shaves all his hair off because he's completed that Nazarite vow. But let's just pull this together a bit more, then, about her in our last few minutes, because, no matter how much we might obsess about our her and its style, its colour, its quantity, all of that, in a strange way, our heavenly father cares even more, even more, because Jesus makes that extraordinary claim in Luke 12, 7 to 8, that for his people, the people I don't know if this is true of all humanity, but it's certainly true of those who belong to him, part of the Lord's family, church people. He has numbered every hair on your head and sometimes people go. Well, that obviously isn't literally true. I think it might be, I think he might.
Speaker 1:I think it is true that the father, for those that belong to him, part of his family, he has this obsessive attention to them and really looks at them and notices them and appreciates them and their bodies, their bodies. The point of that is you worry about your human body and you might say, oh, what's that little pain? Or what about this symptom? And I'm worried about that and I'm worried about this. And then Jesus is saying listen, put yourselves into the hands of the heavenly father. He is more obsessive about the details of your body than you could ever be, than you could ever be. He cares more about your body than you could ever do. So just entrust yourself into his hands, cast your care on him, because he cares for you more than you could ever imagine.
Speaker 1:I like that in Isaiah 46, verse 4 as well, because even in old age, when our hair goes thin and grey and there's little, it says he still looks after us, even when there's not a lot of hair left, when how Jesus deals with her, his own her. He obviously is taking a lifelong Nazarite vow because he grows up in the town of Nazareth, the town of the Nazarites, and he wants to grow up in a town of people who have this Nazarite obsession, wild people who are dedicated to the Lord, and maybe people would go and live there while they were on a Nazarite vow for a few years and then they go back and live wherever they were going to live. But Nazareth is the town of the Nazarites, a town full of long-heard, wild-looking people who have this zany, crazy dedication to the living God and don't mind looking mad for it and out of their minds and so on. And Jesus says I want to grow up, I must grow up in such a town, surrounded with people that have that kind of obsession, that don't care about blending in with the pagan cultures of the world. And so he has that long hair, long beard, all of that. But it comes to our attention his long hair and long beard when it's being pulled out.
Speaker 1:In 2 Samuel 10, verse 4, we're told that people are punished and shamed by cutting off their hair when it's an involuntary thing and it's done to you, the pulling out of your hair and the cutting off of a beard, and all that, that is shaming and it's something to belittle a person. So the world wanted to shame the Lord Jesus. They wanted to belittle the living God and so they pulled out his beard. The living God, and so they pulled out his beard and it says Isaiah 50, verses 6 to 7, says this I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks, to those who pulled out my beard. I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting, because the lord helps me. I will not be disgraced. Therefore, I set my face like flint and I know I will not be put to shame.
Speaker 1:So there it's, like the world does what it can to shame him, to take away his glory and authority by ripping out his beard and spitting on him and mocking him. And he accepts that. He doesn't, he doesn't try to avoid it, he allows them to do it. He didn't hide his face or his head away from this act of shaming him and trying to take away his glory and authority. But he just says, look, you can't do this. You cannot shame me, you cannot take away my glory and authority. Whatever you do to my beard or my hair or the hair on my head, you can't do it because the Lord will not. He helps me, he honors me.
Speaker 1:So that's an incredibly powerful lesson that he teaches us on how to that. He teaches us on how to see our her and not to allow our not to look to our heavenly father for that security. He numbers all the hers on our head and it's to him we look for that glory and security so that we cannot be put to shame, no matter what happens to our body, no matter what people do to us. If he is our rock and our security and our confidence, we cannot actually be ashamed. People may try to shame us, but we cannot be put to shame, we cannot be made shameful if our confidence is in that father who loves us so much and I love the little detail given and with this we sort of close that in Revelation 1.14, the father in heaven is her is described.
Speaker 1:In Revelation 1.14, the Father in heaven his hair is described I love that little detail, revelation 1.14, in heaven his head and hair are white like wool. This hair and beard that he's got white like wool. What does that tell us? Well, it's something to do with the idea of being the ancient of days. What does that tell us? Well, it's something to do with the idea of being the ancient of days, that as we become ancient we get that white appearance of our hair.
Speaker 1:And the idea is that as we age we are supposed to be growing ever more like our heavenly father, not just in the color of our hair but in our entire demeanor, and that glory and authority that is represented with the hair on our head or embodied in the hair on our head.
Speaker 1:That should correlate to our character, the glory and authority of our character that's ever more like our father in heaven. He's pure and the first thing that strikes us is this purity of him and he is to be trusted. So that's where we started with our examination of the human body and the human head. We began with really quite a difficult subject that people find it always find it very controversial. People get very upset, I find, when we attempt to just kind of understand the meaning of the hair on our head, and really what I'm after in this episode is to provoke us to think biblically about the hair on our head and to recognize how much of our identity we put into that and rightly so in many ways, biblically speaking but also that it cannot be where all our identity rests. We must in fact look to the one who counts our hers as the one who really has our true identity in his hands.