An ecclesia
The Schofield Bible interestingly heads Matthew 16 — “First Mention Of The Church”:
“And Jesus answered and said unto him, blessed art thou Simon Bar Jonah for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And 1 say also unto thee that thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt 16:17-18).
“On this rock I will build my church” — we can argue, if you like, whether Jesus meant that the church was to be built on the foundation statement of Peter: “Thou art the Christ the son of the living God.” On this rock, this confession of thy faith which the Father hath made known unto thee, “I will build my church.” Or there are those who feel that Jesus is saying that Peter himself was the one to whom the keys of the Kingdom would be committed, as indeed they were, and that on this “moveable rock” of Peter the “immoveable rock” of the church would be established. Personally, I incline to the view that it is the statement of Peter, this rock of confession, on which the church was to be built.
In any case, here is the first use of the word “ecclesia.” Not a peculiarly Christian word, in fact. The Jews were familiar with it, and so were the Gentiles. It was the Greek equivalent of the word “assembly.” Stephen used it in his famous speech in the 7th chapter of Acts of “the church in the wilderness”, the Jewish congregation in the wilderness, gathered together about the Tabernacle. Interestingly, I found, the same word was used by the Town Clerk of Ephesus when he said: “If, then, Demetrius and his fellow craftsmen have a grievance against anybody, the courts are open and there are proconsuls. They can press charges. If there is anything further you want to bring up, it must be settled in a legal assembly” (Acts 19:38-39 NIV). (Assembly = Ecclesia — the same word!)
Our word “meeting” is a very good equivalent to this word ecclesia. When we say, “You are going to the meeting tonight,” we know what we mean. You are going to the ecclesia. You are going to the place where the ecclesia meets. You are going to the worship of the brethren — the meeting — and that’s really what the ecclesia was. Jesus says he is going to build his church, his ecclesia, on this foundation that Peter has stated. So you see Jesus clearly saw his disciples, his future disciples, as a people called out to be an assembly, or an ecclesia, or a meeting together of believers.
In other words, Christian living was not to be in a vacuum; it was not going on for ever as just a band of vagrant preachers going about sowing seeds, leaving the place behind. The church would grow like a building, on a foundation of rock. “On this rock I will build my church [ecclesia]; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt 16:18).
Matthew 18
We know this chapter very well because it is the one that is incorporated in most ecclesial constitutions to deal with difficulties that arise between brethren and is cited as the law of Christ on the matter. And so of course it is. We read there:
“Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother. But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as a heathen man and a publican” (Matt 18:15-17).
Now where was the church? When Jesus spoke these words he was probably somewhere out in the wilderness, or on some grassy slope of Galilee, or in the Temple court. I do not know exactly where he was delivering this message, but there was not a church. They had not yet been formed into groups. Esoteric groups of this kind, in which you could take one or two brethren and “tell it to the church,” the brother presenting his case before the Ecclesia as a Body, had not at that time been established. But it shows that Jesus had in mind that the believers would one day be organized in some way as a group, as a community, and that they would have community rules and recognizable membership. “Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven,” he goes on to say, “And whatsoever thou shalt loose one earth shall be loosed in heaven,” suggesting a divine authority in the decisions that should be taken by the community of believers, which we would probably, and rightly, I think, disclaim for ourselves today.
Not many of us would be prepared to say that when the ecclesia meets together, and puts up its hand about any matter, and the majority prevails, that this is the decision of heaven. So here is another difference between the church as Jesus envisaged it in New Testament times, and the way in which we organize ourselves today. “Tell it to the church,” he says, implying a corporate responsibility, which we will look at again later. Here Jesus is clearly not saying, “Tell it to an Apostle, or tell it to one of the leaders of the community.” He is saying that the whole community of believers are responsible for the decisions that are arrived at, and if the aggrieved brother will not hear the church gathered together in solemn conclave, which is clearly in the vision of Jesus, then he is to “be unto thee as a heathen man and a publican,” which implies that there would be a definite membership, and that if the man should neglect to abide by the decision of the ecclesia, then he would necessarily find himself outside that ecclesia. So that the final authority, in the view of Jesus here, is vested in the whole membership, embodied in the phrase, “Tell it to the church.” I suppose it could be likened to our own business meetings, and as already stated, we write these procedures into the constitution of Christadelphian ecclesias.
But I want you to notice in passing that Jesus does not leave it there. He does not just say, “If he won’t hear the church, out him.” He goes on to speak about love, and about forgiveness. He tells us that love of one another is to be the hallmark of this church. “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35). And note the immediate context here in Matthew 18: Peter immediately goes on to say: “How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seven times?” (Matt 18:21). Jesus replies by taking up, I think, the account of Lamech, who boasted to his two wives: “If Cain shall be avenged seven fold, truly Lamech seventy and seven fold” (Gen 4:24). “I’ll show what I’ll do to them,” Lamech says. Jesus takes up that thought — not “seven times” forgiveness, but “seventy times seven.” Forgiveness, not vengeance! Not demanding rights and seeking vengeance!
He goes on to speak about the two debtors, one who owed an enormous sum, the other one who owed a little amount; and the one man wouldn’t forgive his brother. So, if you demand justice, Jesus says, if you demand from your brother, be careful, you might get it. “So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your heart forgive not everyone his brother their trespass” (Matt 18:35).
It puts a rather different light on what we call the law regarding personal offences. Of course it is the law. This is the way to go on. If you want to write something into your constitution about how brethren are to go on when they fall out with one another, Matthew 18 is a good text to write in. But let us also write alongside it the rest of the chapter; write it in our minds and in our hearts; don’t demand justice, but show mercy.
The growth of the church
Here is another example that came to me as something new: it may do to you, or you may say it is “old hat,”:
“Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh. Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing. Verily I say unto you, That he shall make him ruler over all his goods. But and if that evil servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming; And shall begin to smite his fellow servants, and to eat and drink with the drunken; The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of, And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt 24:44-51).
What has that to do, you might say, with our thesis that we have incipient mentions of the church in the gospels? It implies, does it not, some kind of recognized leadership of a community, or of a household. Here is Jesus speaking to a scattered mass of people, presumably sitting around the hillside on the grass, with no formation, no community life, no organization, no church, no meeting place, and he is saying, “Who is the faithful and wise steward, whom the Lord hath made ruler over the house to give meat unto his fellow servants?” (Luke 12:42). And when the Lord comes will he find him doing this job for which he has been appointed?
It leads us, surely, to expect the growth of some kind of organization of believers; to see men appointed to have authority in the Church, to be “rulers” over God’s house; and there will be leaders and led, there will be shepherds and sheep; developed in the apostate church in the second century into “clergy” and “laity.” That was a wrong development of this thought. But we have to recognize from the teaching of Jesus here, which is more fully developed in the next study, that the church in the beginning was not to be without some kind of organized leadership; that it was not going to be “all chiefs and no Indians.” There would be those who had the duty and responsibility of leading a household, of feeding the flock of God, of tending the sheep. And if that is to be so, then there must be some kind of organized community life. And this, I think, Jesus is envisaging in this parable; seeing the stretching out of time until the end, when he shall come, he says, “who is going to be this faithful and wise steward in the house, of God, to give meat to the household in due season?”
Now these are some of the scattered hints that we have in the Gospel records that Jesus did not intend his followers to remain a disorganized group of vagrant preachers. The work would go on and would become established, not among the Jews only but among Gentiles also. Jesus said: “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd” (John 10:16).
He saw groups of disciples forming organized ecclesias, or churches, to forward the work of preaching, with recognized membership and rules of behavior (Matthew 18). A “household” with a structured leadership (Matthew 24) with himself, Jesus the Christ, the foundation, the life, the soul and the heart of it all. And yet he did nothing to organize this in his own lifetime here on earth, apart, perhaps, from appointing Peter as the leader of the future church.
The church period
We have to wait until after his resurrection, and the pouring out of the spirit at Pentecost, to see the church emerge as a living entity. So we turn finally to the Acts, going out of the Gospels now, and into the church period. “The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach, until the day in which he was taken up, after that he through the Holy Spirit had given commandments unto the apostles whom he had chosen” (Acts 1:1).
Dr. Blunt, who is quite familiar to us as the author of the book about Scripture Coincidences, has suggested in another work1, that here is an indication that Jesus was instructing the Apostles on how they were to go about the work of transforming the vagrant preaching of the Gospels into the established church of Acts, “after that he through the Holy Spirit had given commandments unto the apostles whom he had chosen” (Acts 1:2). He makes the point rather cogently, that the commandments of Jesus had already been given clearly to the Apostles in his teaching. They had heard all Jesus had to say — the Sermon on the Mount, all his private teaching to them. This was no new thing for him to tell them how they ought to behave, what his commandments about Christian conduct were; but Blunt suggests that here Jesus is clearly telling the Apostles how they should go about organizing the church, and building up this “body of Christ,” which was to be his ecclesia, “the fulness of him that filleth all in all” (Eph 1:23).
Clearly a new development is envisaged in this first chapter of Acts, for we read: “And being assembled together with them, he commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me” (Acts 1:4). So here they were, eleven close disciples, apostles of Jesus, Judas having fallen by the wayside, and they were waiting. The Gospel period was over, the vagrant preaching was past, and they were now assembled in Jerusalem waiting. For what? For the promise of the Father, the Holy Spirit, to be poured upon them from on high. The embryonic church of the Gospels was about to be born of the Spirit in Acts.
Finally, let us think of one or two conclusions that we may draw from this, for the benefit of the church of the twentieth century. Questions we must ask ourselves. Do we preach Jesus? He went about calling men to be disciples of himself. “Come unto me all ye that labor” “He that loveth me, him shall my father honor.” Is Jesus the center and soul of our teaching? Is “the Kingdom of God” in the Gospels a wider phrase than our normal lectures on the subject? It represented in the teaching of Jesus not just a theological conception, but a way of life. The “sovereignty” of God! (Some of the new translations actually use this phrase to translate the Kingdom of God.) In some sense I think they are right. It is indeed the sovereignty of God, or the reign of heaven.
Jesus was not only, or perhaps chiefly, concerned with the divine political content of the future Kingdom, though that underlay his teaching. There was clearly this ultimate purpose always in view. What is called the eschatological content of the preaching is always there; but he was more concerned with a man’s response to God, witnessed by his willingness to commit himself to discipleship to Jesus.
So, perhaps we ought to make our message more relevant to the daily life of man. I am not saying that we ought to stop giving typical Christadelphian lectures on the Kingdom of God. I am not saying that at all. But it may be that looking at the teaching of Jesus in the Gospel, we shall see that there is a larger content than the divine political kingdom. That the message of Jesus has a relevance to man’s living. We are right to talk of the last days, of course, and the ultimate purpose of God, but Luke 21 need not be the only chapter in the Gospels that we refer to, need it!
Jesus should be the center of our preaching, not as a figure of theological strife, but as a leader, to love, and to follow. A personalization of all that God wants us to be. So that we should not be religious know-as who can throw texts at people to prove that we are right and they are wrong, but disciples of Jesus who follow the Lamb with who ever he goes.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One