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THE CHURCH - GOD’S DISPLAY CASE!

One of my neighbors, or it could be one of your neighbors, has no interest in attending any church. In fact, if I’m reading him correctly, he appears to have a rather low opinion of the church. Perhaps he’s been wounded by the church in the past and would rather not risk being wounded a second time. Or maybe, he feels that the church is simply filled with a bunch of hypocrites, phonies. Whatever the case, he has no use for the church.

Like it or not, we must admit that there is some legitimacy to how my neighbor, or your neighbor, feels about the church. At times the church does appear to be a mess. But it would be nice for them to see the other side of the coin. For when we’re first introduced to the church in Acts, chapter two, we see believers sincerely devoted to God. And we see this being played out in their devotion to the teaching of the apostles, in the joy of their fellowship, and in their sacrificial care for each other.

Three chapters later, in Acts 5, we discover that God has one primary expectation for the church. A married couple, who had evidently made a commitment to sell some land and give the proceeds to the church, chose to lie about the price they received for the said land. In this way, they could keep some of the money for themselves. It, as you know, was a decision that cost them their lives. It was also a decision that taught the early church an invaluable lesson.

Keeping some of the money for themselves was not the problem. The money was theirs and they had the right to dispose of it as they saw fit. The problem was that they misrepresented themselves before the Holy Spirit and the church. Now God can and does forgive sin and he can handle any spiritual condition. We fall down, we get up, we confess our sins, and God dusts us off and puts us back into place. But, God does require honesty. For when we misrepresent ourselves before God, when we’re not open with him, we close our hands to his grace.

After that little episode, the church, for the most part, picked up where it left off as the apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders among the people. But now, even though many were still coming to the Lord, outsiders thought twice about joining the local church. I guess they weren’t sure that it was safe.

I mean if God can bypass the security system and strike two people dead, church may be the last place you want to find yourself. Or, another way to put it, two dead bodies resulted is some serious body odor that made people think twice about getting too close. Nevertheless, the church continued to grow numerically and in its depth of commitment to God and others.

When Paul wrote I Corinthians, the letter that probably predates every other letter in the New Testament, he struggled with how to describe the church to those who were experiencing chaos week after week. He could have said, you know church is like going to the Driver’s License Bureau to get your chariot license renewed and discovering that there is no system for seeing one of the clerks. It’s simply a matter of who can shove the hardest or shout the loudest.

But, he didn’t describe the church in that manner. Instead, he worked at giving them a higher view of the church. In chapter 3 he told them you are God’s field and he briefly explored that metaphor. He said, “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.”

Then, in the same chapter, really the same verse, he shifted to the idea that the church was God’s building. Using this metaphor, he said, “By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. . .”
And later on in the same chapter he referred to the believers in Corinth as God’s temple. He said, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.”
But, by the time Paul hit chapter 12, or what we call chapter 12, he landed upon a metaphor that appears to have made the most sense to him. The one that seemed to him to be the most accurate description of the church. He saw the church as God’s body and spent the entire chapter exploring the parallels between our body and this body called the church. In part, in vv. 12 - 18, he said:
The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. 13 For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body--whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free--and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. 14 Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. 15* If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. 16 And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? 18 But in fact . . .
You’d think that with this metaphor Paul would have exhausted his list of metaphors for the church. Not so, for in Ephesians Paul, though he doesn’t spell it out fully, gives us another metaphor for the church.

Remember, for the encouragement of the saints, Paul, in Ephesians 3 shared with the recipients of this letter his role in God’s great plan of salvation. He told them that it was his role to “make plain” to everyone the outworking of this secret plan of God whereby the Gentiles, through Christ, are received into the fellowship of Christ on an equal footing with Jewish Christians.
In other words, through Christ, the secret that God had kept hidden from the world, from angels, from the patriarchs, and from the prophets of old is that there was to be a new creation, a new temple, a new body, a body consisting of both Jewish and Gentile believers, called the church. This was the startling truth that Paul was called to “make plain” to everyone.

Now what makes the Ephesian passage interesting, from the standpoint of this new creation, from the standpoint of another metaphor, is that the church has a role to play in demonstrating God’s wisdom to the angels. In Ephesians 3:10 - 11 we read:
His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, 11 according to his eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Wow! Here the church is viewed as God’s display case. We display God’s manifold, multicolored, multifaceted wisdom to the “rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.” What the angels haven’t learned by being in the heavenly realms, what they didn’t learn at the dawn of creation, what they failed to learn in the Lord’s interaction with Abraham and his dealings with Lot, what they missed on Mt. Sinai in the giving of the law, and what they failed to grasp by fluttering around the throne like hummingbirds around a feeder, they learn from the church.

Angels are observing the church, you and I, and are learning something they haven’t been able to fully comprehend in all the historical events of the past. What are they learning? Well, a Canadian scientist by the name of Dr. Authur Custance put it this way:
“ The key to the existence of such a universe as this lies, I believe, in the fact that God wished to show forth that aspect of his being which the angels have never comprehended, namely his love, without surrendering that part of his being which they do comprehend, namely his holiness.”
Within this universe, within the Roman Empire, within this world in which we live, this aspect of the plan whereby God reveals his love, without sacrificing any of his other attributes, is seen within the church.

The Greek word translated “manifold” is a poetical adjective meaning “very varied.” Euripides used it of multicolored cloth and Eubulus of flowers. Here, which is the only place it is used in the New Testament, it refers to the various aspects under which the wisdom of God is displayed in the redemption of fallen man. One person comes to know God through the efforts of AA, another finds Christ at a summer camp, and still another comes to know the Messiah through the Jews for Jesus ministry. In the manifold wisdom of God people from every tribe and every nation are drawn in every way to the foot of the cross.

The angels see that the great cornerstone of this new creation is not Michael, Gabriel, or even one of the patriarchs. It is the God-man Himself, Christ Jesus. And as the living stones are added they all lean on the cornerstone and find their strength in Him.
Why? Why does the church become a display case for the angelic world? Well, there are two reasons. When angels observe the church, when they see us praising God in any and every circumstance, when they see how we care for one another, when they see God’s strength within us, when we say “no” when the rest of the world is saying “yes” to the world system, they too are encouraged. For remember, discouragement is one of Satan’s most effective weapons as we saw in last week’s lesson.
Second, and more importantly, this display case has the potential to bring glory to God, not only through the angels, but within our neighborhoods. Granted, some of our neighbors have no use for the church, but they are still curious. And they are as observant as the angels. When they see the love we have for one another, they will be attracted to the display case.

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