The Church as the People of God

What is the church?

I grew up in a Christian family, and so the language of the church was all around me. And as far I understood it the church was a building, and it was a service. It was a literal place I went to and a weekly event I attended. This definition served me well up until eventually I started to look through scripture and realized that were no mentions of church strictly as a service or a building. Obviously, this realization was perplexing, and so I searched the scriptures even more, asking, “Well ok, what is the church then if not a service and a building?” But this new question brought me another realization, that the Bible actually never says, “This is the Church…” A clear definition is never given. Though that is not say that God is silent on the church. He is anything but silent. He just speaks about in ways that are slightly more hidden or that require a closer look.

There are really two main ways that God speaks about His church in the New Testament: marks and metaphors; this is what the Church is like, and these are the marks or the fingerprints that church must have. So, I want to look briefly at some of those marks and metaphors, though before I do that I will try to give a simple and biblical definition of the church. The New Testament word that we translate as church is the Greek word ekklesia, which just means assembly or legislative body. It is a people or group with shared beliefs and/or a common identity. When it comes to the Christian body then, we ought to ask “What is the common identity? What is it that unites these people?”

In Ephesians chapter 5, speaking to husbands about the treatment of their wives, Paul brings up the church for his analogy and he says, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” If we are looking for what unites Christians, there it is, Christs sacrificial love. In other words, the church is a gathering of people who have received what Christ gave up, namely himself. Or to say it another way, the church is the community of the redeemed.

If that is an accurate description, which I am convinced it is, then the church is even bigger than we could imagine. It is everyone who has been redeemed over all places and all time. It is a universal community. Still God seemed to have in mind that this community of redeemed people would also exist in smaller, local contexts. So, in Romans as Paul is giving his final greetings, he tells his recipients to greet Prisca and Aquila, and the church that meets “in their house” (Romans 16.5). Likewise, in his letter to the Colossians he says, “Give my greetings to the brothers3 at Laodicea, and to Nympha and the church in her house” (Colossians 4.15). Clearly, from the beginning then the church was a universal group of believers, and a local gathering of believers. Christians were spiritually connected as brothers and sisters across the known world and yet they also belonged to a local group of Christians with whom they could live out the metaphors and marks of the church.

The People of God

There are at least 96 metaphors in the New Testament saying essentially, “This is what the Church is like.” From those 96 just take one, The People of God.

Listen to the language of 1 Peter, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2.9-10). What stands out to me as I read that passage is the claim God makes upon Christians. He calls them, “A people for his own possession,” and then ends by telling them directly, “You are God’s people.” It stands out particularly because I have heard the language spoken before, but spoken about Israel.

In Exodus 19 God gives this conditional promise to Israel, “If you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine” (Exodus 19.5). In Deuteronomy Moses says something similar to them, saying “For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth” (Deuteronomy 7.6). In both references God’s promised blessing to Israel, if they would walk in obedience to Him, is that they would be His people. Now stop for a second and think of what that means, that they would be His people. It does not mean that He was going to make a bunch of individuals that belong to Him separately. No, it means that He was going to make them into a community that belonged to him, into a people group that was His, like a tribe or a nation. God was going to make Israel into a tribe or a nation that would be for His own treasured possession.

Think also about what it means that they would be His people. What does it mean to belong to God? Don’t overthink it. What does it mean for a husband to say to his wife, “You are mine.” It is not suppose to be an oppressive or objectifying statement. Instead, it says, “I will be your home. I will protect you. I will care for a nurture you.” It is a statement of cherishing. When God promises Israel that they will be His own people that is exactly what He is expressing. If you doubt that just listen to how God speaks of Israel in other places in the Old Testament. “But you shall be called, ‘My delight is in Her’” (Isaiah 62.4). “He kept them as the apple of His eye” (Deuteronomy 32.10). What a thing then to be called God’s people!

As it would happen Israel disobeyed and failed over and over to keep God’s covenant, and so judgement comes. Still, even in the midst of judgement, God does not forget about His people. He promises them through the prophets that He will have mercy and that He will one day restore them. Jeremiah 31 reads like this, “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31.33).

The New People of God

And then Christ comes, and He dies on the cross. And in His death, He wipes away sin. He brings forgiveness. But it is not just to make a bunch of individually forgiven and separated people. He substitutes Himself in the place of sinners to recreate and reclaim His people, and this time in a way that their failure will never cut them off from Him again. So then out of Christ and through the cross comes this renewal of Israel as God’s own people again, only this time it doesn’t stop with Israel, it is worldwide. It is everyone, every tribe, tongue and nation who trusts in Christ’s sacrifice. They are incorporate into God’s people, so that the apostle Paul, referring to the gentiles, can quote the prophet Hosea, ““Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people’” (Romans 9.25).

This is the Church then, the fulfillment of the promise that Israel would be His people again. This is what Christ died to create, a new Israel. A people who can once again be called the apple of God’s eye.

Now isn’t that so different then the idea that the church is a building or a service?

The Church - Why Bother Studying It?

There is a tragically interesting situation in western Christian culture right now, and it is this: an increasing number of people who are not only leaving the church, but who are leaving behind any religious affiliation whatsoever. They have grown tired of religion in general (at least as they understand it) and they no longer want to be connected to it or with it in anyway. And so they are departing. This group has come to be labelled as the nones; those who belong to nothing; those who are no longer identified with any organized religion.

The nones are on a staggering rise. Today, for every one person that had no religious affiliation and now does, four people leave the church and become a none. Just between 2007 and 2014, while Christianity in America was declining, the number of nones rose literally by millions. The largest portion of them were millennials (22–37-year-olds), but it wasn’t limited to just that demographic. The rise also included baby boomers and those in generation X. In other words, the nones were and are crossing all generational boundaries.

At the same time that this exodus of nones is occurring, there is also this group who wants to continue to embrace Jesus and to identify as Christians but like the nones, they don’t want the church. They argue, and maybe rightly at times, that the Christian church has become politicized by agendas and sides and has been infiltrated by televangelist like preachers seeking to make gains off the backs of religion and religious people. The only way forward is to liberate themselves from the church and get back to the simplicity of Jesus and His Word. No creeds; no traditions; no buildings; no religiously infused positions; just Jesus.

Add to that this group as well: those who identify as Christians and who are remaining as participants in and of the church but who don’t see it is as a primary priority or necessity for the Christian life. They are the products of an individualistic age and culture, where there is a primacy of the individual over and above the corporate, where everything is about personal freedoms, personal experiences, self-interest and self-help. To them (which is probably all of us to some degree), church is great if you want it, but it’s a voluntary choice. In the list of priorities, church comes after one’s personal experience and relationship with Jesus.

Don’t we see this priority of the individual even in our evangelism? We say everything about making a decision for Jesus and almost nothing about being incorporated into a church, because that’s secondary to the personal experience and ultimately optional.

The Situation

So here we are then. We have professing nones leaving the church; professing Christians leaving the church and professing Christians staying in the church but not seeing its importance. All of that tells me that we need not to develop more strategic programs to attract people and keep them, but rather to develop and share a right theological understanding of the church. We need people who understand what they are apart, or what they are being invited into. I am convinced that if we could see the church even a sliver of how God sees it, we wouldn’t run from it no matter how hurt or offended we got.

Did you know that in all the areas of theological study over the last two-thousand years, one of the least studied areas or subjects has been the church? Scholars speak of ecclesiology (the study of the church) as being in its “pre-theological phase.” And it shows, doesn’t it? We don’t know if the church is a building, a service or a group of people. We are not sure where a bible study stops being a bible study and becomes a church. We don’t want to be members of the church because that doesn’t seem right to us. Still, many of us are dedicated Sunday attenders, unless there is a special event. On snowy days many make statements like, “Church for is on the ski hill.” One group says the primary function of the church is worship, while another group says its social justice. When it comes to understanding the church, we are so confused!

If you go to a Christian bookstore today you will find lots of writing on the church, but almost all of it will be practical: how to plant a church; how to attract people to church; how to lead a church; how to be a missional church. There is a big concern for how to do church and a seemingly little concern for understanding it biblically. That means for the average Christian and maybe even the average pastor, there is little biblical knowledge of who and what the church truly is according to God’s Word. This makes it very easy to not care about the church, and very hard to promote the church. It makes it very easy for the church to become whatever humans think it should be, and very hard to see when it has actually stopped being a biblical church.

The Hope

All of that to say, in this short series I want to ask the theological questions: What is the church? What is its mission? What is its structure? Etc. And I want to look to the Bible for the answers to those questions. My hope is that, God willing, by the end of this little mini-series you will not simply have more knowledge about the church but will have a new and invigorating love for God and His church, as well as an unrelenting desire and conviction to be a part of it. Whatever category you land in right now in your relationship with and opinion of the Christian church, I pray that you will come to see it as Christ sees it, as something beautiful and essential.

Before the Foundation of the World

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him (Ephesians 1.3-4).

Lately I have been reading Ephesians chapter one over and over and I just cannot shake the wonder that comes over me every time I read verse 4 in particular, that God chose to save us, to make us blameless in Him before the foundation of the world. I think it hits especially hard because I can actually go and read about the foundation of the world. Just turn to Genesis 1 and you get the account of God laying out the earth’s foundations. He speaks everything into existence. He creates night and day. He separates the water from the heavens. He makes the mountains rise up out of the sea. He shapes the first man and woman out of the dust. He creates the entire universe and before all of that takes place Paul is telling me that God was thinking about me and my salvation. Before all of that happened, however many thousands of years ago, He knew me and knew that I would one day be found in Him.

What an insane concept, that God’s knowledge of us, His love for us and His concern for us began before the world began! If we ever think that God doesn’t care about us, Ephesians 1.4 should blow those thoughts out of the water. We have been on his mind since before there was an earth to stand on. And if we ever think that we are not worthy of His love or that somehow we need to earn His love, again this verse should lay those thoughts in their grave. He foreknew our redemption before we took our first breath, which means His love could not have been based on anything we did or didn’t do, but solely based upon His sovereign and ageless love.

Before the foundations of the world. Think about that.

The Good Portion

I find Scripture to be quite clear on what is supposed to be the primary pursuit of the Christian life. Verses like John 17.3 don’t leave much up to the imagination: “And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Or how about the story of Mary and Martha? Mary sits at Jesus’ feet while Martha runs around serving, and who does Jesus commend? “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10.41-42).

It is hard to read even a page from the Bible without being confronted with the simple but shocking reality that God wants us to know Him and to know Him deeply. It is what were created for, and it is what Jesus died to secure; it is the epitome of joy and the true source all peace and rest, to know God and to be known by Him. And yet, how quickly we forget.

You would think weekly sermon preparation would equal extra communion with God for me, but that is not always the case. Instead, I find myself far too often in that preparation focused on knowing more about God from the Scriptures, instead of on knowing more deeply the God that the Scriptures are about. It sounds crazy, even as I type it, but its the snare I continually fall into. I exchange the pursuit of knowing God for knowing about Him. Thankfully though, again, the Bible is not lacking in verses to remind me of what is primary, and to re-calibrate my aim.

J. I. Packer once wrote, “Knowing God is a relationship calculated to thrill a man’s heart.” There is nothing that will ever compare to knowing Him. God forgive us for ever letting anything compete with that pursuit.

May we daily and continually choose the good portion.

If we preach, may it be out of the overflow of knowing God through His Word.

“Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3.8).

People of the Book or the Person

I used to think that the early church must have came into being with the Bible in its hands. I just assumed that they had, at least after a few short years of existence, a finished Old and New Testament compiled into one book just like we have today; all books completed and agreed upon as God’s divinely inspired and authoritative Word. The reality seems to be that it took a little big longer that.

Old Testament Variation

When it comes to the Old Testament there are those who would argue that the OT as we know it, the OT of the protestant church, had come together and found its final form as early 300-165 BCE.[1] The biggest problem with such early dating is the early church itself who’s collections of sacred writings seemed to be quite a bit broader than what we have today. While there was clearly some OT literature that the whole Christian church was agreed upon from the beginning as being authoritative (i.e., the Pentateuch), there was still some fluidity in terms of a complete and fixed list of sacred OT books.

Take for example Origen of Alexandria, a Christian scholar from the 2nd century. While Origen recognized the majority of our OT books as authoritative, he also states in his writing that it is not good to set before the reader either Numbers or Leviticus,[2] and at the same time recommends a number of deuterocanonical (or apocryphal) books for the Christian’s diet.[3] Or look at Augustine, who is arguably still the most influential voice in the church since the apostle Paul. Augustine’s OT list was made up of 44 books total, including (like Origen) deuterocanonical books such as Sirach, Tobias, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees and so forth.

There are many more examples that could be given, but maybe these two are sufficient to show that while the church Fathers generally agreed that there were inspired and authoritative OT books, there remained through the early centuries variation as to which books those were exactly.[4] As Lee McDonald writes in his classic study, The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, “If there was a precise list of authoritative and inspired OT books handed on by the apostles stemming from Jesus, then the early church has lost it. There are simply no references to it anywhere.”[5]

New Testament Was Not Much Different

When it comes to the New Testament, as early as NT books were composed and beginning to be placed alongside the OT Scriptures the similar kind of variation or fluidity showed up. Marcion, a Christian theologian in the 1st century, is the first person known to have published a list of NT books. His list included the Gospel of Luke, Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians Philippians, Colossians, 1–2 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Of course, Marcion’s list must be taken with a grain of salt given the fact his anti-Jewish ambition was to separate Christianity from any OT and Jewish influence and/or tradition. Nevertheless, he produced the first known NT list of books for the church. In response to Marcion and the damage that his biblical list did, Justin martyr, a 2nd century Christian apologist, worked to recover the OT to the status of Scripture and as a Christian book, while also in his writings paving the way for the gospels to be recognized as Scripture as well. Picking up where Justin left off, Irenaeus, a 2nd century Greek Bishop, made the first clear designation of Christian writings being Scripture and of being a separate collection from the Old Testament. Though even in doing so he never quite defined precisely what the boundaries of that New Testament were.

While Marcion was arguably the first to produce a list of NT books, a 3rd century Bishop named Eusebius was the first to set forth a list of authoritative NT books closest to the 27-book list that we have today. In an attempt to give an account of which NT writings were being used in churches in his time, Esusebius produced his NT list, made up of what he called 1) universally acknowledged books 2) disputed books, and 3) spurious books.[6] Acknowledged/accepted books were the four gospels, Acts and fourteen epistles of Paul, 1 Peter, 1 John and Revelation. In the disputed category were Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 peter, 2 and 3 john and Revelation again. Finally, listed as spurious were several NT apocryphal books like the Acts of Paul, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Didache and then again Revelation.

Again, to quote McDonald, this time regarding the NT scriptures, “The Christian books that eventually received this normative status were not the same for all the churches and even when there was general agreement the authority of the literature was not acknowledged at the same time by every church.”[7]

Life Without a Finished Bible

Much, much more could be said about the process and timeline of the OT and NT books coming together to take the final form of the Christian Bible that we know and cherish today. Nevertheless, one thing is hopefully clear enough from this small collection of examples: that the early church did not immediately have a fixed and closed list of authoritative Scriptures. Now, to Christians who have had the finished form of the Bible in their hands their whole lives, this fact can be a little bit mind boggling. For many of us it is hard to imagine following Christ without the full and complete Bible as we know it. We feel like we would be lost without it. But for the early church, this was their reality.

Of course, it’s not that in those first few centuries that the church had no authoritative texts, but again that there was fluidity or variation in terms of which books were authoritative. Still, this begs the question for 21st century western Christians whose faith is built upon the Scriptures, how did the early church function without a completed Bible?

Well on the one hand, you don’t miss what you never had. It is probably safe to say that the early church was not consciously longing for the finished Bible. And in fact, it doesn’t even appear that the early church was that worried about or interested in figuring out which books belonged in the Bible until heresies began to emerge.[8] But on the other hand, and more importantly the early church as a whole seemed to understand well that final authority rested in the person of Christ. Their foundation was the news of his life, death, and resurrection as well as his teachings which were already being orally taught and passed on. Hans Von Campenhausen rightly states that early Christianity was not “a religion of the book,” because they didn’t have a precise and finished book. Instead, he writes, early Christianity was “the religion of the Spirit and the living Christ.”[9]

People of the Person

I say all of that to say this: there is a lesson there that I believe the modern-day church needs to continually be reminded of. With the unparalleled privilege of having the Bible in our hands comes the unseen temptation to elevate the bible higher than Jesus himself. We can foster such a passion for His Word and become so focused on His Word, that at times we can miss Jesus and become a people of a book instead of a person.

But the value of Scripture is never just Scripture in and of itself. Rather it is that it proclaims to us through both the OT and NT, the life death, resurrection and teachings of Jesus, the son of God, in whom eternal life is found. Without that, our Bible is just books and letters. And to the degree that we study the Scriptures without Jesus as the interpretive lens and the final goal, we remain like the Pharisees to whom Jesus said, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5.39-40).

Please don’t mishear me, I am not trying to encourage you to be less passionate about Scripture. Actually, I hope I am encouraging you to be even more passionate and devoted to Scripture. But in that passion and devotion may we never lose sight of who the Scriptures are about. May we love the Bible; cherish the Bible; study the Bible and always thank God for the unbelievable privilege of having His words and revelation preserved for us in the Bible. But may we never forget the aim of the Bible, that is to take us to Jesus in whom all ultimate authority truly rests.

[1] William Sanford LaSor, David Allan Hubbard, and Frederic Wm. Bush Old Testament Survey (Grand Rapids: Eardmans, 1983); David N. Freedman, “The Earliest bible,” in Backgrounds for the Bible (ed. M. P. O’Connor and D. F. Freedman; Winona Lake, Ind,: Eisenbrauns, 1987); Roger. T. Beckwith The Old Testament canon of the New Testament Church and its Background in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985).

[2] See: Homily 27 on Numbers.

[3] Lee. M. McDonald The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995), 111.

[4] To some degree this variation remains to this day, particularly between the canons of the Protestants and Eastern Orthodox.

[5] McDonald, Christian Biblical Canon, 129.

[6] Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica

[7] McDonald, Christian Biblical Canon, 9.

[8] Exploring the Origins of the Bible (Edited by Craig A. Evans and Emanuel Tov; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 204.

[9] Hans, Von Campenhausen. The Formation of the Christian Bible (Translated by J. A. Baker. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), 62-63.