Jesus’ Only Program: The Rock’s Testimony “As living stones, [you] are being built up as a spiritual house.” 1 Peter 2:5 1 Peter 2:4-5 If you want to get the straight scoop, go to the source. That’s what we’ve been trying to do since we started this study on the Church. I referred to the fact that Matthew 16 has been one of the most dissected and disputed passages in the entire Bible, mainly because of disagreements over the role Jesus assigned to Peter in the building of Hid Church. Well, it’s not hard to establish that Jesus was not giving Peter an exclusive ruling authority in the Church that no other apostle had. Peter was the leader, to be sure. Peter was the spokesman, the “Rock,” without a doubt. But, remember, Jesus was speaking to all twelve of His disciples that day in Caesarea Philippi. The authority to bind and loose, for example, was not given to Peter alone. Now Peter did use the keys of the kingdom to open the Church to the Jews on the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2 and to Gentiles in the house of Cornelius in Acts 10, but he drops out of the narrative in Acts after the Jerusalem council (Acts 15:7). We have said that Jesus’ purpose in building the Church was to use many stones coming together to form one mighty slab and that Peter was simply one stone in that slab. But why not ask peter what he understood Jesus to be saying? After all, Peter was there in Matthew 16. Other than Jesus Himself, Peter is the best interpreter of that event. Well, we do have Peter’s interpretation in today’s text. He pictures the Church as a “spiritual house” made up of many living stones…which, by the way, includes believers like you and me today. Here, I believe, is the imagery we talked about earlier in the study of a mighty slab of stone made up of many individual stones, forming the foundation of the Church. Now if Peter alone were the rock upon which the Church was built, this would have been a perfect opportunity for him to declare his supremacy once and for all. But under the inspiration of the Spirit, Peter testified to the truth. And for that we can be eternally grateful! Since you are designed by God to be a living part of His living Church, if you’re a church dropout, you’re tearing something that was meant to be a unified whole. One of the things you notice right off when you start talking about the Church is how clear the Bible is meant to be a unified single organism. Think about the biblical images used of the church: a body, a spiritual house, a family. Those are singular even though a body, a house, and a family are made up of individual members. But the call is always for oneness in heart and purpose. That’s what the Head of the Church wants for us, in fact. In John 17:21, Jesus prayed for the unity of His people. He was about to die on the cross, so this is His last will and testament for the Church, if you will. But there is someone else in the universe who is intensely interested in the Church’s ministry and particularly in seeing to it that the unity Jesus prayed for doesn’t happen. The Church is the biggest threat Satan has on his hands right now. When the church is functioning the way it’s designed to function, we’ve got a force that can bulldoze the gates of hell flat. So if you’re Satan, your primary goal has to be to smash the mighty slab of the Church into a bunch of bickering pebbles, to disable the body by getting the eyes fighting with the feet and the hands mad at the ears. To collapse the house by getting the stones in the walls to say, “I’m tired of supporting this mess.” You get the point? The unity of the church is what Jesus wants you and me to cherish and maintain. Are we going to deny Him His will for us? Posted by David Coleman of The DC Ministry “Sharing The Gospel.”
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 11:13:12 +0000
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