The Church, the
Body of Christ. Colossians
1:24
Colossians 1:24 NASB “Now
I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on
behalf of His body, which is the church, in filling up what is lacking in
Christ’s afflictions.”
We will look at the last two clauses
in this verse, which brings our focus into Paul’s expression of one of the
purposes for adversity, specifically the adversity that he is facing in hi own
life. We see that this explanation as to why Paul rejoices is a recognition
that the suffering that he goes through in terms of his own life and
ministry—all the rejection that he faced, the fact that he was arrested
on numerous occasions, was beaten, whipped, shipwrecked on several occasions;
he went through a variety of sufferings, adversity and rejection—“for
your sake,” referring specifically to the Colossian congregation. The idea of
filling up in his flesh what is lacking means that he is continuing to be an
example, as the Lord Jesus Christ was an example, of how to apply doctrine in
the midst of adversity. Then he expands the reason for this in these last two
clauses: “on behalf of His body.” Earlier he said he rejoiced in his sufferings
“for your sake” because he is applying it specifically to the Colossian congregation.
But now he expands it and it is not just the Colossians congregation but on
behalf of all the believers in all of history: “on behalf of His body, which is
the church.”
Introduction to the doctrine of the
church, a summary. The terminology for the church is
the Greek word ekklesia. It is a
compound word comprised of a root klesia which is a noun formed from the cognate verb kaleo which means to call. The
preposition that is attached is the prefix ek
[e)k] which means out
of or from. So the etymology of the word means literally to call out a group.
Some people stop there, which means that they are guilty of what is called
etymological fallacy. A word meaning is never based on its etymology because
when you take different words and combine them together they often mean
something more than just the sum of the parts; sometimes they means something a
little different to the sum of the parts. Word meaning is ultimately determined
by usage. But etymology generally gives us a sense of the meaning of a word.
This word ekklesia is a word that is found far back into classical
Greek literature. In the fifth century BC
the word referred to just an assembly of the citizens who would come together
in order to make decisions within the democracy of Athens.
That was its root meaning. It just as a meaning of a gathering together of
people, there is nothing special or spiritual about the meaning of ekklesia. It is used, in fact, in this
way in the New Testament in Acts 19:39 simply to refer to a gathering of people
together. But as happens so many times in the study of Scripture the apostle
Paul under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit will take a common word and will
bring it into the New Testament literature and assign it a little bit of a
special meaning. ekklesia is also
used in the Septuagint [LXX] to refer to the congregation or
the community of Israel, but it is not used with this technical meaning of the
word “church,” because it is not until we get into the New Testament that there
is revelation given about this new body of God’s people, believers, that comes
into existence on the day of Pentecost. It is only with this ministry of the
apostle Paul and others that we begin to see this new word that is called the
“church.”
We understand that the church comes
in to existence in Acts chapter two as a result of the fact that Israel
as a nation in terms of the leadership and the people rejected the claims of
Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. If it had been predicted in the Old Testament
that there would be a new entity in the future that God would bless and a new
people of God called the church, then that would sort of indicate that there
was going to be some problem with Israel. So in order to set up Jesus’ ministry
and offer of the kingdom as legitimate without giving any indication from the
Old Testament of what the consequences would be the entire church age is left
undisclosed, unmentioned, unrevealed in the Old Testament. We do not have a
mention of the church or an indication that there is going to be a shift away
from Israel in the New Testament until Matthew chapter sixteen where there is
the first use of the word “church” by the Lord Jesus Christ. There it is
indicative of something changing in the future, and He doesn’t mention it until
after the events of chapter twelve which is when the
leadership of the nation of Israel rejects His claim to be the Messiah. From
chapter thirteen on is where we see Jesus beginning to teach that things will
change and he begins to reach about the postponement of the kingdom and the
nature of something new that is coming in to existence. Ultimately it is left
to the ministry of the apostle Paul to reach and to develop this mystery
doctrine, which relates to this new organism that came into existence on the
day of Pentecost in AD 33.
The word “church” or ekklesia is used in two different senses
in the New Testament. The first sense has to do with the universal church,
sometimes referred to as the invisible church because we don’t see it. The
universal church is composed of every believer in the church age, from the
initial believers on the day of Pentecost all the way up to the Rapture, which
ends the days of the church. Everyone who believes in Jesus Christ during that
time is a member of the body of Christ, which is called the church. It is
invisible. But the word is also used with a local church or visible church
connotation. Then local church is any individual manifestation or gathering of
a group of believers for the purpose of worshipping God on the basis of His
Word. The local or visible church is not composed solely of believers; it may
have members who are not believers.
The church is distinct from Israel
in God’s plan and purpose, not only historically but also in terms of our
future destiny. In the Old Testament God called out a special people in Genesis
chapter twelve. Before that at the tower of Babel the human race was still
united in one language and probably just one ethnicity. The tower of Babel is
the precursor of many different international types and organizations, many
different attempts by man, to bring peace upon the earth apart from God, and at
that point, because of what they were doing, God brought a judgment upon those
at the tower of Babel. The judgment was that He was going to give them separate
languages, forcing them to break apart into distinct groups based on language.
As different groups became isolated on the basis of language certain
characteristics began to dominate developing different racial characteristics
and the breaking into different nations and tribal groups, etc. Up to that
point God was working through the human race as a whole, but as a response to
what happened at the tower of Babel God called out Abram in Genesis chapter
twelve as a counter movement to the internationalism that was presented in
Genesis chapters ten and eleven. God was to restrict Himself to working through
Abraham and his descendants through his sons Isaac and Jacob. It would be
through that group that God would reveal Himself and the Jewish people would be
the custodians of the Word of God and they would be the ones to whom God
reveals Himself and gives His Word. They would be responsible for writing it
down and preserving it. And it is through them that God would send the Messiah.
That was the mission for Israel. Jesus was not recognized or accepted and
because of that national rejection by Israel God hit the pause button on His
plan for Israel and began to work through a second group of people that He is
calling out for His name as an international missionary organization—the
church.
Within the church universal there is
an organization, and Christ is the head, the authority that directs the body.
Colossians 1:18 NASB “He is also head of the body, the church; and
He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come
to have first place in everything.” In Ephesians 1:22, 23 we have a parallel
idea. The first “he,” the first 3rd person singular pronoun
reference is God the Father, the second reference is
God the Son. NASB “And He put all things in subjection under His
feet [under the authority of Jesus], and gave Him as head over all things to
the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.”
When we think about this metaphor,
the church being the body of Christ, we should think about is in this manner:
that the second person of the Trinity, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
entered into human history as a human being through the virgin conception and
birth. His eternal deity took on or added to itself true humanity. Because of
the virgin conception and birth there is no transmission of the sin nature and
so He is born without a sin nature and lives His life without sin. He lives it
in a physical body. That body that is the home of the person of the second
person of the Trinity in hypostatic union went to the cross, and on the cross
He bore our sin. That penalty is borne by the Lord Jesus Christ between the
hours of twelve noon and 3pm and at that time darkness covered the land so that
what was happening on the cross was shrouded in darkness as God the Father is
imputing to God the Son the sins of all humanity. It was during that time
period that Jesus Christ paid the penalty in His body. Then His body was placed
in the grave. Three days later when Mary and Martha come to the grave they
discover that the stone has been rolled back and the tomb is empty. The
physical body that was there is no longer there, it has been transformed into a
new body identified as a resurrection body. The resurrection body still had
continuity with His previous mortal body.
Forty days later that body is the
body that ascended into heaven and in hypostatic union there is a resurrected
human body sitting at the right hand of God the Father. When that body was on
the earth the Gospel of John tells us that the way in which we knew God was
expressed through that physical body, finite though it was. That
body has gone to heaven but it is replaced on the earth by another body, the
“body of Christ,” the church, the aggregate of all the members of Christ by
virtue of their salvation. So just as through the incarnation Jesus
revealed the Father to mankind, so too, one of the functions of the church is
to be a manifestation of God—by looking at the church the idea is that we
should be able to learn about God. The church hasn’t done too good a job of
that down through the centuries for a variety of different reasons, but that is
what our calling is. As we learn from Scripture, in every dispensation the
people that are called out by God fail because of sin. It doesn’t mean they are
unsaved, it just recognizes that until we have the second Adam living upon the
earth, ruling upon the earth, there will be no ultimate fulfillment of God’s
original plan and purpose for mankind. So the church is called the body of
Christ. That term never applies to any other people in history, it is
restricted to those who are believers in Jesus Christ between the day of
Pentecost and the Rapture.
Our entry into the body of Christ
occurs at the instant that we believe that Jesus died on the cross for our
sins: when we trust in Him is the instant that we become members of the body of
Christ. There are a number of different things that happen to us simultaneously
at the moment we trust in Christ as savior, but they are not
experiential—we don’t feel anything, there is no necessary experience,
physical or emotional that identifies that. In fact, we don’t know that most of
these things even happened until we study the Word of God over time and learn about
what God did at that particular instant. One of the things that occurs is referred to as the baptism of [by means of] the
Holy Spirit but this, again, is a non-experiential event that occurs at the
instant of our faith and trust in Jesus Christ. Romans 6:1-3 tells us that in
this baptism we are identified with the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus
Christ. The significance of baptism as it is used in numerous situations is of
identification of one thing with something new. There is a transfer from one status
to another status. Through the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit we are
placed within the body of Christ and so through the New Testament the church is
described as those who are “in Christ.” That is a phrase that is not used of
anyone else.
As we enter into the body of Christ,
just as a physical body has many members—arms, legs, hands, eyes, ears,
nose, mouth—there are also many members that comprise the spiritual body
of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is in terms of these members that we come to understand
the significance of our individual role because we are thought of and described
as members of the body of Christ. In 1 Corinthians chapter twelve where the
apostle talks about spiritual gifts he uses that analogy: that some people are
like an ear, others like a hand or a foot; we all play a different role and
function within the picture of the body. Another way we could try to describe
that is that we are all part of a team.
Passages that use the analogy of
“members” are found in Romans 12:4, 5; 1 Corinthians
12:12-14. Romans 12:4 NASB “For just as we have many members in one
body and all the members do not have the same function, [5] so we, who are
many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.” There
is a tendency to disregard that last phrase. This is one way in which our
culture plays a negative role in helping us understand the Scripture. The body
of Christ is not a picture of individual members that are atomized—broken
down into the smallest component and unrelated to one another—isolated
and functioning on their own. It is not about your spiritual life: put those blinders
on, and as long as I am studying the Word in terms of my own spiritual life,
and I’m growing, then I am successful in that spiritual life. That is a view
that has been fed and shaped by the ideal of rugged individualism in our
culture. It doesn’t mean that is a wrong ideal but that is not the model for
understanding the body of Christ.
The body of Christ means that we are
“members of one another.” We are individually responsible for our own spiritual
life but there is also a function of our own spiritual life that is related to
and dependent upon and serves one another. There is an
interdependency between the members of the body of Christ. 1 Corinthians
12:12 NASB “For even as the body is one and {yet}
has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are
one body, so also is Christ… [14] For the body is not one member, but many.” So
we hold two things that have to be held together: the significance of the unity
of the body, which is never a unity at the expense of doctrine but a unity of
the faith; but it is a real organic unity of all believers in the body of
Christ. Yet there are distinctions in terms of the distribution of spiritual
gifts, and some have more of the gifts, some less of the gifts, so that there
are real differences. But everybody is crucial to the function of the team.
So we see that within the body the
Holy Spirit gives these gifts, which are basically spiritual enhancements for
capabilities, provided for each believer in terms of their ministry to other
believers. There are no spiritual gifts that function in isolation from the
body of Christ because the gifts aren’t given so that we can use them at work, at
school, in terms of some social organization outside the body of Christ. That
is not what Paul says. They may be used in some other areas outside of the body
of Christ but that is not why they are given, they are given so that we can
serve one another. Even the gift of evangelism, according the
Ephesians 4:11, 12, just like the gift of pastor-teacher is for equipping or
training of the saints to do the work of ministry. We think of the gift
of evangelism in terms of people like Billy Graham who preaches the gospel and
there is a great response. He is an evangelist and that is the gift of
evangelism working. It is, but that is not why he is given the gift according
to Ephesians 4:11, 12. The evangelist is given the gift to equip the other
members of the body of Christ so that they can be effective in evangelism. So
our gifts are given primarily for utilization within the body of Christ, which
means that there has to be a coming together and a gathering together of the
body of Christ so that as a local body grows and develops and matures these
gifts are developed and they operate first and foremost towards one an other
within the body of Christ. All of the gifts function for the health of the body
of Christ. They could have secondary application to others outside the body of
Christ but if they are not functioning to believers they are not functioning
legitimately according to the primary purpose of Scripture.
What are some of the things that
should characterize a healthy congregation? If WHBC
has a reputation among the Christian community or at large it is that we are
known for the fact that we love the Lord Jesus Christ, what He taught us and
how He expects us to live. To love the Lord Jesus Christ biblically means that
we have to know Him. We can’t love Him if we don’t know Him. How do we
demonstrate that we know Him and love Him, according to Scripture? We keep His
commandments—that is not a reference to the Ten Commandments—and
that refers to all of the mandates and prohibitions in the New Testament for
the church age believer. In passages such as John 14 & 15 Jesus said: “If
you love me, keep my commandments.”
To love Jesus means that it is
exhibited by action, and that action is to keep His commandments, and to keep
His commandments means we have to know His commandments, so there is a focus
there on the Word. But we don’t want to be known just as a church that knows
the Word because knowing the Word is a means to an end. The end is that we are
to develop a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ that profoundly impacts
our life—obedience to Christ and application. John 15:10
NASB “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just
as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.” We have to know
them to keep them, so keeping them implies that we have a focus on knowing the
Bible. That means we need to be a congregation who is known as people who know
the Scriptures. We know the Bible, which leads us to an understanding and
knowing doctrine. We don’t just have a theology class where we know a lot of
principles; we need to know the Word of God. As the Psalmist said, we need to
hide the Word in our heart.
1 John 2:3 NASB “By this
we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments.” On the
alternate side in his letter to Titus Paul said about false teachers, they
profess to know God but in works they deny Him. We can’t make a distinction
between what we know doctrinally and what how we live our life—how we
think and how we live. We can’t create a compartmentalization
between the two, they go together. Knowing the
Word without applying the Word is as useless as applying the Word without
knowing the Word, because applying the Word without knowing the Word is just a
system of ethics and morality but it has nothing to do with applying the
Word—because we don’t know it, we are just applying a system of ethics or
application.
So the first thing that should
characterize us is that we love the Lord Jesus Christ, what He taught us and
how He expects us to live. The second thing is to be known as a church that has
a genuine care and concern for one another. Having a practical care and concern
for one another is a product of knowing the Word. It comes from you as an
individual learning the Word, and it drives you to a relationship with the Lord
Jesus Christ, and the by-product of that is that as you grow your spiritual
gift—whether you know it or not—becomes manifest and you serve the
body of Christ. Every one of us has a role in that, it doesn’t matter what our
gift is ultimately because we are all expected to function in different areas
of giftedness. But some have special giftedness—the gift of evangelism so
that they can train you to be an evangelist. Other passages of Scripture
indicate that we should be able to teach one another, that we should admonish
one another, and that we should pray for one another. All of these one another
ministries relate to utilization or application of areas that are connected to
spiritual gifts, but there are some within the congregation who excel in those
areas and they help the rest of us understand how to function in those areas.
So as a church we need to have this genuine care and concern for one another
and that is the consequence of being in the Word, walking by the Holy Spirit,
and growing to maturity.
It is not what we see in many
congregations: an artificially manufactured system that is developed from the
top down, i.e. the leadership down. For example, there have been a lot of
churches where there has been an emphasis on evangelism. They say, we need to
be a church that is known for evangelism so we are starting and evangelism
class every Wednesday night for the next twelve weeks and we are going to go
through some system or another and learn to evangelize, then we are going out
and be evangelists. It usually doesn’t work; it is an artificial manufacture of
a top-down program because the people are not in love with the Lord Jesus
Christ through His Word with an internal motivation from their spiritual growth
to go out and give the gospel to people. So it is artificial and it is
superficial. The biblical ideal is that as we learn the Word and we choose to
apply it in our life as our relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ matures
then these things will be the fruit, the product that comes from that in our
life. If it is manufactured by a top-down program then it is artificial; it is
not a result of our spiritual life, it is a result of the church leadership
coming down and making us feel guilty and putting us into some kind of a
program.
We need to grow in our relationship
and this is manifested in a number of ways. One of the ways we see this is that
we have believers who recognize the needs in other believers’ lives. That means
we have to know each other. We have to walk a fine line between individuals’
right to privacy and getting to know them and caring for them. People are
really different. There are some who like come into a church and really are
shy, quiet, reserved. That is just their personality and they don’t want to be
known but be relatively anonymous. Hopefully they will one day realize that
they need to get to know people in the local church so that they can minister
to people in the local church just as they are ministered to within the context
of the local church. But we can’t force that on anybody, it has to come as a
product of their natural spiritual life and spiritual
growth. But we have to recognize that as believers we have these
responsibilities toward one another. Other folks, on the other hand, are just
as gregarious and love to get to know people. They come in a church door and
within five minutes they are introducing themselves to people and want to know
what is going on in this church and they get to know people, it is just part of
their personality and the way that has developed. So we have to understand that
as a body of believers there are people at different levels of growth and
people with different personalities. But if we are to fulfill these one another
commands that are in Scripture we have to get to know one another.
We have the emphasis on loving one
another, and this is found again and again mentioned in the
Scripture—thirteen times. We need to minister to one another. It is not
just about coming to Bible class and learning the Word; that is simply the means
to the end of building a healthy congregation that ministers in a umber of
different areas but ministers, above all, to one another.