by Mark Horne
One of the Apostle Paul’s most famous descriptions of the
church involves an individual human body:
For just as the
body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many,
are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into
one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one
Spirit.
For the body does
not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am
not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a
part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not
belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the
whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body
were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the
members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single
member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.
The eye cannot say
to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have
no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker
are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable
we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with
greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has
so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that
there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same
care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member
is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the
body of Christ and individually members of it. (1 Corinthians 12:12-27, ESV)
One could easily think that Paul is arguing from the premise
that every human person is a unified body. In a biological sense that seems self-evident.
But the Bible can speak of people as driven or controlled by various body
parts. Paul must be arguing here from the ideal human person–the one who has
matured. Paul himself is a large part of the Scriptural witness that affirms
that human beings are often bodies in which the parts are at war with one
another. Thus:
Let not sin
therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not
present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present
yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your
members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion
over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
What then? Are we
to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not
know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are
slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of
obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that you who
were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of
teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have
become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms, because of your
natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to
impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your
members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification. (Romans 6:12-19,
ESV)
Also:
So I do not run
aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I pummel my body and make
it a slave, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. (1
Corinthians 9:26-27, ESV)
Likewise, James compares controlling one’s speech as “taming
the tongue” and further compares such discipline to that of domesticating wild
animals (James 3). Notably, James calls such rule or dominion over one’s tongue
a form of wisdom, reminding us of Lady Wisdom’s declaration, “by me kings
reign” (Proverbs 8.15).
Jesus himself warned of how one part of oneself could
mislead the rest:
If your right eye
causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you
lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if
your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is
better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into
hell. (Matthew 5:29-30, ESV)
So it seems that while the human person should function as a
unity, a person can, in a sense, be a cluster of warring members. While this
should not be so, it nevertheless is often true.
One way to think of what is going on is to differentiate
between the de jure and the de facto–legal terms for what is
officially true and what is true in reality. While we owe much to others, we
are each, once we reach maturity (viewed as a legal age) de jure owners of ourselves. But are we de facto masters of
ourselves? The concept of self-ownership is a foundation, but it must be used
to build self-mastery–from de jure to
de facto.
Furthering us in this process is one of the purposes and
benefits of regular Church worship. To show how this follows from Scripture, we
need to get some basic points about the worship system or sacrificial system
that was given by God through Moses.
WORSHIP AS TRANSFORMATION
As we follow Paul’s admonition in Romans 6 and master
ourselves into a single whole intent on serving God, we can more and more fully
respond to Paul’s summons to worship in chapter 12:
I appeal to you
therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living
sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not
be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,
that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and
acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:1, 2;
ESV)
Sacrifices were cut up by the offerer (not the priest, he
simply took the pieces and fed them to the fire). All the appropriate parts had
to be offered. (Some were also cut off and thrown away, just as Jesus advised.
My working assumption for now is that, in the New Covenant, we are liberated
from sin to an extent that we can offer all our parts. Jesus was using an
analogy for struggling with sin from the Old Covenant sacrifices but didn’t
want a literal application to our body parts).
I may be wrong, but I think many Evangelicals believe that
the fire on the altar that consumed the sacrifices represents God’s fiery wrath
on sinners. This is a mistake. The fire on God’s altar represents God himself
and his glory and presence. It is true that unrepentant, unforgiven sinners
find God’s presence to be torment (thus the imagery from Revelation 14.9-11).
But that makes no sense for sacrificial animals that have been washed and had
the unclean parts cut away. The sacrificial meat, remember, is treated as holy,
not as defiled.
In the sacrificial system established under Moses, the animal
takes the curse of sin for the offerer when the offerer kills it. The blood is
carried near to God’s presence on the altar to display the evidence that death
has taken place and there is no further judgment to come. Then the animal goes
up into the altar where it is turned to smoke and goes further up into
heaven–into God’s glory cloud like the cloud that came down on Mt. Sinai or
that later filled the Tabernacle and still later entered Solomon’s Temple. The cloud that
Ezekiel saw and, in a vision, penetrated to see God’s throne carried by
Levitical angels.
This, after all, is exactly what happened to Jesus. He is
killed. His blood pours out on the ground for all to see. Then he is
transformed by the Spirit. He is raised from the dead and then ascends to His
Father in a cloud.
One more piece of evidence that burning the sacrifice
represents transformation and elevation or ascension, is that the items put in
the fire with the animal (incense, cake of bread) is also what is kept inside
the Holy Place. The altar was set up outside the doorway of the Tabernacle. The
Holy place was the first room on the other side of the entrance where only
priests could pass through. So putting the animal on the altar seems to
correspond with a priest approaching God’s presence in the Tabernacle. The
second room where no one could go but the high priest represented the highest
heavens and there were two golden statues of angels representing the Guards in
God’s own throne room. So it is no surprise that, when Jesus was taken up in a
cloud, two men in white were seen as well.
And by going through this process, Jesus became to us, among
other things, “wisdom from God” (First Corinthians 1.30). He was made our
Greater Solomon.
Before killing the animal and then putting it through this
transformation, the offerer was to place his hands on the animal to appoint it
as his representative. So the animal's death and “resurrection” are supposed to
apply to the worshiper. We are supposed to be transformed by God’s presence in
worship. Our minds are to be renewed in wisdom and torn away from the folly of
the world’s alleged “wisdom.”
SUMMONING EVERY ONE OF US & ALL OF US
Many times in the Bible God’s people are summoned to gather
as one before the Lord’s presence. But what is odd is that we also see in the
Bible sometimes a person summons all of himself in the same way he would summon
a group of people to gather together.
Bless the Lord, O
my soul,
and all that is
within me,
bless his holy
name!
Bless the Lord, O
my soul,
and forget not all
his benefits… (Psalm 103.1b, 2; ESV).
David here summons his soul, and then summons more: “all
that is within me.”
When God calls us to worship, he calls us altogether
(all-together) to gather as a single whole. Just as we are affirmed as one body
with fellow Christians as we listen to God’s word, pray to him, sing psalms and
hymns, and eat and drink bread and wine together when we “come together as a
church” (First Corinthians 11.18), so we are each taken apart by the word of
God (Hebrews 4.12) and put back together as new whole person, glorified by
contact with the glory of God.
We are, if you will, disintegrated in worship and then
re-integrated better than before. And in that transformation, you learn to rule
yourself and everything else better by a true wisdom. You are renewed in your
mind.
One final comment. I don’t know that we can reduce this
transformation process to understanding new truths or some other intellectual
process. While hearing good preaching and learning new things is important, it
might not happen every week. Does that mean going to church was a waste of
time? I have to say no. Even though church can be “done wrong,” we should
expect that meeting with God in a special way has power that affects us even if
we don’t learn anything new or feel inspired by some aspect of the service.
