We are going to look at the church for the next few days. Somebody might ask: What does the church have to do with a biblical worldview? It has a lot of things to do with the biblical worldview because a biblical worldview is simply thinking as God thinks. How does God think? When we come to the New Testament, the Lord puts a lot of premium on the church. The church is a vital part of the Christian life. There is no one in the New Testament that was not a part of a body of Christ. Much of the revelation in the New Testament would be inconceivable without the understanding of a local church and then there is a great deal of instruction on how to run the local church. The church is very important to God and therefore should be very important to us if we are Christians. I want to talk about that just a little bit for the next few days.
The Lord has given us three basic institutions in this world. We have the government to run our society and take care of various laws and protections and so forth. The Lord instituted that. Secondly, we have the family itself. We have our unit of people in our family and that is where we have our domestic life. Finally, we have the institution of the church which is the family of God which is the coming together of God’s people. We see that universally the church is all Christians of all times. That would be the universal church, but most of the revelation of Scripture has to do with the local church and how the local church is to function. It is very important in how we think about life and how we function.
We are talking about the church, the word ecclesia in the Greek is a word that is translated church in the New Testament. It means a called-out group of people. It can be used of other groups of people, like some kind of an assembly of some sort, but when used in the context of the people of God, it speaks of a local church, of people coming together, a called-out group of people that know Christ as their Savior who have come together for various reasons.
There are a number of metaphors in the New Testament dealing with the church that helps us get a handle on the understanding of what God wants it to be and how God understands it. The church for example is called the bride of Christ. We see a very intimate relationship between God and His people. It is also called the flock of God. So, we see this picture of the Lord being our Shepherd and guiding and protecting His flock, His people.
It is also called the temple. So, we are a sanctuary. The church in essence has God within us and among us. We are the sanctuary, the very temple of God.
Probably the most important metaphor is that of the body. The church is a body of Christ. It is the coming together of this body. Colossians 1:18 says that Christ is the head of the church, “And He is the head of the body, the church, Who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything.” He is the head in this particular metaphor. The members of the church, God’s people, constitute the body of the church . . .
