Session Review-The Church as God’s Presence

The Big Picture

You can’t run from God is a good lesson we can learn from the book of Jonah. The book’s critical lesson, however, and the one that Jonah struggled to understand while watching Nineveh avoid divine punishment, is that God loves Gentiles too. Jews struggled mightily to understand that their God’s grace was big enough for the entire world. This is why the stories of Rahab, Ruth, and the people of Nineveh were so important in the Old Testament, and why Peter and Paul viewed their ministries as so important in the New Testament. The “good news” is that Jesus Christ has become Lord of both heaven and earth through his death and resurrection, and thereby the Lord of the Gentile nations as well. Continuing to serve other gods would not only be senseless, but wicked. Jesus was coming back to judge the world for its disloyalty to God.

The summons of the gospel, or the action it requires us to take, involves one simple word: faith. We need to believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that every god now submits to him. This is what Jesus meant when he said “All authority is now given to me in heaven and on earth” as he was about to ascend (). The disciples had learned of this authority over the past three years, watching numerous demonic exorcisms. But they were not expecting his next words: “Go and make disciples of all the nations” (28:19). As Jewish disciples of a Jewish messiah, they were prepared to hear, “make disciples of your Jewish countrymen.” But it was the Gentiles they were to go after, just like Jonah, they realized. In short, the disciples would have interpreted Jesus as declaring a kind of cosmic war. They were commanded by their messiah to invade Gentile cities (the world was 93 percent Gentile at this time) and proclaim the news, the “gospel,” that Jesus was Lord. And this meant that Caesar was not.

The Main Idea

The church was intended to become God’s new physical presence in the world. What we mean by physical presence needs clarification, however. Most people think that a church is a building on a corner, something designed and built for large groups of people to meet and worship in. But this was not what church meant in the New Testament. “Church” referred to people—believers. Listen to one of the first letters that the Apostle Paul wrote to a Christian group, in this case in Thessalonica:

Your faith has gone out, so that we do not need to say anything. For they themselves [other believers in the area] declare … how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come ( nkjv adapted).

Imagining what Paul might have meant by the physical presence of God in a local city, picture this scene: A man and his wife set out from their home to meet with others who have come to believe that Jesus Christ is the true Son of God and Lord of the world. The coins in their pocket said that Caesar Augustus was “The Son of God,” but they knew this wasn’t true. They walk past a statue of the city deity and do not bow. They are invited to join a festival dedicated to the god of a rich man’s estate and turn away. They carry with them no idols or religious trinkets. When they buy a loaf of bread the merchant asks which god they will be praying to that evening. “Jesus,” they say. “And since you asked, he is the Nazarene who died, was buried, and who was raised by God in order to prove that he is the King of the world and the guarantee of our own resurrection in the future.”

Establishing this kind of physical presence in every town was God’s intention for a missionary such as Paul. This church would not be judged by size or by wealth, but by cosmic power displayed in Jesus-directed loyalty. God predicted how the church would look when he commissioned Paul to spread the gospel: “[I am sending you] to open [the Gentiles’] eyes, and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God” ( nkjv). Whenever this happened, wherever this happened, the physical presence of God was made very, very real.

Digging Deeper

Taking the news of Jesus’ lordship into the Gentile world certainly drew a strong reaction. Resistance was everywhere, coming from all directions. Nonbelieving Gentiles certainly didn’t like hearing that a crucified Jew had ascended to a position of lordship over their own gods (this sometimes resulted in stoning; e.g., ). Many pagans did not believe in the idea of physical resurrection (see ) and therefore rejected the apostles’ message outright. Even Jews who accepted Jesus struggled in sharing his lordship with Gentiles. This was because all non-Jews were considered ritually unclean and thus unable to approach the God of Israel unless they converted to Judaism (). In combining all these forces, we can see why Paul said that the gospel was a “stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks” ().

So why were missionaries such as Paul persecuted? Modern Christianity has a difficult time imagining what caused this phenomenon in the New Testament era, as we are used to a live-and-let-live religious climate. Once again we need to read the Bible as it was meant to be read, believing with its original audience that the gods were very real and very active. Imagine for a moment that someone came into town teaching that your pagan deity, the god that your ancestors prayed to for generations, was now bowing in reverence to a crucified and resurrected Nazarene you had never heard of. This was no small matter. Changing your worship patterns meant tempting your fate. Your wife may become barren if you worshiped the wrong god, or even the right god in the wrong way. To convert to Christianity was tantamount to upsetting the natural and spiritual order of everything you knew and depended upon. It would be safer, thus better, to beat and even torture the person who suggested worshiping another god.

With the above in mind, we should also take a moment to understand why baptism was so important to the first-century world, and why this ritual was so important to the pagan world of gods and deities. While we often think of baptism as a biblical tradition, we are not sure when and where the physical display of dunking in water originated. It seems to have started after Malachi and before Matthew. One thing is for sure, however: When a person was baptized in the ancient world, they were advertising to the watching world their spiritual loyalties, and all that went along with this. Lydia, for example, was baptized immediately after (as the text so beautifully says) God had opened her heart to believe what Paul was telling her about Jesus (). She seems to have been a Gentile who worshiped the God of Israel before coming to believe in Jesus. Baptized just hours later was the Philippian jailer, who placed his loyalties in the “Lord Jesus Messiah” () that very evening. What’s important to visualize is what is implied but not explicitly stated: As Lydia and the jailer resumed their daily lives after baptism, they were now “outed” in their communities as Christ-followers. They could no longer hide behind their faith in Jesus, and persecution may have followed. Baptism seems to have been the most powerful conversion statement in the early church, and we can only imagine the hostilities it caused in this idol-crazed pagan world.

Knowledge in Action

Let’s pause and ask our leading question once again: Are the gods of the Old Testament real spiritual beings? Yes, we have argued, the evidence of Scripture leads us to this conclusion. It is only when the gods are real that the first commandment retains its original meaning. The problem of spiritual disloyalty also becomes very dangerous, just as the Bible describes. God’s jealousy can be very real, even proper or expected. The demons that met Jesus can be real and powerful. The punishment promised to the world for following after these gods can be real as well. And, as we have noticed above, the ministry of the apostles in the book of Acts can be meaningful. A few more practical thoughts on this idea are warranted.

The final commission of Jesus in bears remarkable solidarity to the story that begins in Genesis. This is because Jesus came to solve the problem which the Old Testament had so carefully set out to describe: “Now I say that Jesus Christ has become a servant to the circumcision [Jews] for the truth of God, to confirm the promises made to the fathers, and that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy” ( nkjv). There we have it—as succinct an explanation of why Jesus came to earth as we may ever read in the Bible: He came to keep a promise for one group of people, and to surprise another group of people. The promise kept was for the Jew, who had been chosen by God but had become a nation of idolaters. The surprise was for the Gentiles, who had been delegated to live under the authority of evil spiritual powers. In defeating these powers, whether during his ministry or at the crucifixion, Jesus demonstrated mercy to the Gentiles.

The opening commission of the apostles in also bears remarkable similarity to the situation described in . As Supernatural noted, God’s allotment of physical territory to evil gods in (as rehearsed in and elsewhere) led to the migration of the problem of god-worship over the entire world. So it is fitting that the solution to the problem migrates as well. “Everyone heard the disciples speak in their own language … we hear them telling the wonderful works of God” (, ). The comparison is hard to ignore: The common language spoken by the people at Babel () helped them unite against God and build a structure designed to worship other gods. The distinct languages of reverses this original “babel” (a Hebrew term that means confusion). In this way, the Spirit empowered Jews at Pentecost to hear about Jesus, believe the gospel, and then go back to their distant homes. Pagans would now hear about Jesus.

In trying to understand the relationship of and , some have wondered if a “map” of demonic strongholds is able to be found in the biblical narrative. Supernatural details some possibilities that seem to surface in the Old Testament, and it is possible that some stories hint to a cosmic geography that is beyond our knowledge (some commentators have wondered, for example, if Jacob crossed a divine boundary of some kind when crossing the Jabbok River and meeting the angel who fought him; see ). Whatever the case, the New Testament seems to purposely quell our curiosities about demonic strongholds by withholding any kind of map of demonic activity. Indeed, Paul seems to broaden Satan’s territorial influence by calling him “the prince and power of the air” (), and the writer of 1 John seems to agree that we should see Satan’s power as worldwide, not subjected to political or natural boundaries (, “the whole world lays under the authority of the wicked one”).

Discussion Questions

• We have made much of the biblical story of God including the Gentile into the family of Abraham through Jesus Christ. How might this story apply to you? In other words, who is the Gentile in your own life, and what are you to do about it?

• God wants his presence “felt” in our world, even though he is spirit. How can your faith in Jesus’ lordship over the gods of the world become something that is visible, even physical?

• From what you are learning, and from what you know about Paul’s personality, why do you think Paul enjoyed going where “Christ had not been previously named” ()?

• When we consider what God wants the church to be in any given community, why might five small churches be better than one large one?[1]

[1] Johnson, R. (2015). Supernatural (A Study Guide). Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.