Sanctified People, Sanctified Space

Cultural anthropologists have studied this phenomenon that is true of human beings in cultures and nations all over the world.

That wherever people are religious, whatever religion they embrace and they practice, they somehow find a way to establish sacred buildings. Why? Welcome to Renewing Your Mind. I'm Lee Webb and thank you for being with us. We emphasize at every turn here at Ligonier Ministries that the church is not an option for us as Christians.

It's essential, and that's one of the reasons Dr. R.C. Sproul taught the series we're featuring this week, Communion of Saints. He's going to address the question he just posed at the beginning of the program along with several others, like what is the church? Is it a building or a people? If the church is people, what kind of people? Let's get started.

Here's R.C. Recently I heard a minister give a sermon that was somewhat unusual. The title of the sermon was simply a question, Who Loves the Church?

And it was a poignant experience for me to listen to that sermon because I realized that in this day and age, in our culture and in our nation, there are many people who have expressed a serious disenchantment with the visible church, with the institutional church. And many people feel that somehow in these days the church has let them down, and the church has not met their expectations, and we don't find people very often who are jumping up and down in elation and excitement saying, Oh, how I love the church. But if no one of us loves the church, we know with certainty that Christ loves the church.

And indeed, if we are of Christ, we can't possibly despise what is so lovable to Him. What I want to do in this brief series on the church is explore the question basically, What is the church? What is the church comprised of? What is the church's vocation?

What is the church's mission? And often when we say the word church, we think in the first instance of a building, a building that looks something like the scene that appears behind me even now. I remember a few years ago I went to the Holy Land and we visited Jerusalem, and of course one of the most important tourist sites in Jerusalem is the famous mosque that is found there that is called the Dome of the Rock. It is one of the most important Islamic shrines in the world. And I was intrigued as we approached the entrance to the Dome of the Rock and our guide spent five to ten minutes giving us careful instructions on the proper protocol for someone entering into this sacred place. We were told, for example, that we would not be permitted to escort our wives by holding onto their arms because that gesture itself was deemed inappropriate for such a holy place.

And then of course we had to take our shoes off as we entered that holy shrine. I thought, isn't it strange that religions of all sorts, of all places in this world, all have their sacred sites, their holy places. And again, we think of the church so often as a building, as a structure, as a place where people come and gather for worship and for religious activities.

Well, let's think about that for just a second. I think we will discover very soon through our study of Scripture that in the first instance the church is people. It's not a building. Yet even in the Scriptures the church building, at least in the Old Testament, was very important to the religion of Israel. If you recall, the tabernacle was built by the expressed detailed provisions and commandments of God. The articles that were placed in that building were crafted by men who were uniquely endowed, charismatically endowed, if you will, by the Holy Spirit to perform their tasks. And of course we remember the garments of the priesthood of Aaron, how intricately they were designed by God's command.

And after the tabernacle gave way to the temple, the same kind of detailed consideration was articulated by God for the building of this particular edifice. Well again, if the church is not a building, why should buildings mean anything to us? And we've lost so much of the mystique of former ages and former generations regarding church buildings. Church architecture has changed. It's rare that we see a church built today in the Gothic style of the vaulted ceilings and the lofty sense of transcendence that is communicated by the very building itself. Most of our buildings today are designed in a more functional way. They're built to facilitate fellowship.

In many cases they hardly differ at all from civic meeting houses. Yet if you go down the main street of any city in the United States of America and you come upon a church, you will be able to recognize it immediately. There's something different about the building. Cultural anthropologists who carry no brief for Christianity have studied this phenomenon that is true of human beings in cultures and nations all over the world. That wherever people are religious, whatever religion they embrace and they practice, they somehow find a way to establish sacred buildings.

Why? Again, according to the anthropologists, they say that there is an insatiable hunger that is in the heart of every human being somehow, somewhere, sometime in this world to make contact with the Holy. And all religions and all cultures throughout the world have their individual examples of what we call technically Hierophanes. Now that's probably a word that most of you have never heard in your life. How many have never heard that term before?

I hear, okay, I was right that it is a majority report saying I've never heard such a word. All that a Hierophane is, is an outward, visible manifestation of the sacred. And we notice this difference somehow about the church building that we want to see in the building itself a distinction between the secular and the sacred, between the profane and the holy. Again, one theologian, Mircea Eliade, once made the following observation that the front door of every church in America has a symbolic significance for people.

It is a threshold. It is a line of demarcation that once you step over that threshold you are leaving behind you the secular and the profane. And you are entering now into the presence of the holy, of the sacred, of the transcendence. Now we have to be extremely careful with that because we remember Jesus teaching to the woman of Samaria how she wanted to engage Jesus in a theological dispute about the proper place of worshiping God. Is God in this mountain, she said, pointing to Jerusalem, or is He residing in Jerusalem? And Jesus had to free this woman of her narrow conception of the localization of God. And she had to instruct her that God is never contained in buildings made by hands, that God cannot be captured within defined boundaries, that God's presence is as much in the secular realm as it is in what we call the sacred realm.

In spite of that warning that we have from Jesus, we cannot ignore how basic it is to our humanity that for each person among us there is a desire to set apart certain times, certain places for special significance and holiness. Because through the Bible, wherever God intersects the sphere of history, it is a holy place where the patriarchs, when they would encounter God, would take a rock and anoint it with oil and build an altar there. Because here God manifested His presence.

Here was a hierophany. And that's what we try to do with churches. We try to make a building that is different, that will open the door for us into that realm where we can sense the presence of God. Because as I said, the church isn't a building.

The church is people. The word for church that we find in the Bible comes from the Greek word akklesia. We get the English word akklesiastical from it. But this simple word, which is the Greek word for church, is built upon a root with a prefix. This akklesia or ek up here comes from the Greek word ex or ex, which means what? If you're in a building and you see a little red sign at the top that says exit, what does that tell you?

That's how you leave the building if you need to leave the building because ex, the prefix, means out of or from. And akklesia, the root of the word, comes from the Greek koleo, which means simply to call. So that in the first instance, the rudimentary meaning of the word church in terms of its etymology is that the church is something or someone that is called out of something else.

The akklesia are those who have been called by God out of the world. The church are those people whom God has given a divine summons, a sacred vocation or calling by which He has commanded them to cross that line that I was mentioning, to tread into the inner sanctum, to cross the threshold into the area of the holy. This was symbolized and illustrated in Israelite worship in the Old Testament for when the people were summoned by God to gather for corporate worship. So often this occasion was signaled by the blowing of the shofar or the ram's horn that was a signal like a bugle call to the people that now the time has come, the moment is here that you are to leave your daily tasks, you are to leave your commonplace activities and assemble now in the presence of God. And so often that solemn assembly would be initiated again by a prophetic summons. Hear, O Israel, listen, for the Lord your God is present in your midst and He is about to speak. And so even in today's church service we begin with a summons, a call to worship, because the church in the first place is an institution that is called to worship.

It is an institution called out of the world, and its members are those who have been called by God for a vocation, which the word simply means calling, for a destiny to be His people, to be holy even as He is holy. Now that leads me in the time that I have left in this session to one of the most important images that we have for the church in the Bible, and that is the church is called the Bride of Christ. The Bride of Christ.

What a fascinating figure or metaphor, isn't it? Obviously the roots of that idea are found deeply established in the Old Testament, where when God takes a people to Himself, He makes a vow. He enters into a solemn covenant with Israel.

He pledges His everlasting faithfulness to His people, and in response the people enter into an agreement with Him, and they recite their vows. And so a contractual union is affected in Israel, and the image of marriage is found throughout, that God is betrothed to Israel. And when Israel is unfaithful to God, the sin of her disobedience is couched in the language of harlotry and of adultery in Israel, following this metaphor of the bride.

But no matter how deeply that concept is found in the Old Testament, it doesn't begin to approximate the idea as it is elicited in the New Testament, because in the New Testament, beloved, there is a whole new dimension to the marriage. Just in my seminary class the other day, I was reading the beginning verses of Exodus chapter 21, which is the beginning of the so-called holiness code. If you remember the book of Exodus, you know that Exodus 20 is the landmark chapter because it contains what? The Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, and so on.

Well, Exodus 21 begins the broader exposition of the law of God into what is called the holiness code, but it begins with some strange and foreign teaching to our ears in our culture. It talks about the laws and the rules governing the handling of indentured servants or slaves, and it says that if a man goes into slavery, if a man purchases a slave, that after six years when the sabbatical year comes, that slave must be freed. And the text says that if the servant, when he entered into his indentured servitude, brought his wife with him, then when he goes free, she goes free as well. But then it goes on to say, if, however, he was single when he entered into his period of slavery, and his master provides a wife for him, and the wife bears children to the slave, at the end of the sixth year what happens? The slave is freed, but the wife and the children stay with the master. Whoa, we read that at first blush, and we scramble in front of that text, not only because of the whole concept of indentured servitude, but how cruel it seems that when the slave is freed, the master keeps the wife and the baby.

Why? Because in Israel, ladies and gentlemen, when a husband wanted to marry a woman, and often received a nice dowry from the bride's family and so on, but before he could marry a Jewish woman, he had to pay what was called the bride's price. He had to pay a fee, and it was a substantive fee, and that fee proved and demonstrated that he had the wherewithal to take care of his bride and whatever offspring they would have. And so the father would not grant the hand of his daughter until the bride price was paid.

Now in the case of Hebrew servants, the Hebrew master had the responsibility of saying to it that that bride and that those children were taken care of. The reason why the slave became owned by the master in the first place was why. He couldn't pay his debts. He had no money. He's working off his debts. He certainly doesn't have the money to take care of his wife and his children in the event of his liberation. And so the law of God required that the master would still be responsible for caring for the wife and the children until such time as the husband could get on his feet, be financially solvent, and have the wherewithal to buy and to pay the bride's price.

Now I just take that little track for this reason. We have to understand that concept if we're to understand the image of the church as the bride of Christ. Because the primary reason why the church is called the bride of Christ, beloved, is because Jesus purchased his bride. He paid the ultimate bridal price with nothing less than his own blood. But we also see in the imagery of the New Testament that this bride whom he purchased was damaged goods. And in the Old Testament if a woman pretended she was a virgin at marriage and it was discovered that she was not, there were severe penalties that were meted out. But our Lord bought a bride who was not pure. He died for that bride who was damaged, but He has promised to the Father that He would present His bride at His final wedding feast in heaven without spot and without wrinkle because He loves His bride. Who loves the church? Christ loves the church and purchased it by His death. Well I don't know about you, but that puts additional wind in my sails as I look forward to attending church this coming Sunday.

I hope it does for you as well. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Monday and a portion of Dr. R.C. Sproul's series, Communion of Saints. And we'll see as the week progresses that God has given us very clear instructions for how the body of Christ should be ordered. Looking around us today we see confusion regarding the church and so our resource offer today is an attempt to right the ship so to speak. It's Dr. Robert Godfrey's series, The Necessity of Reforming the Church. Dr. Godfrey is a Ligonier teaching fellow and the chairman of the board here at Ligonier Ministries. He's observed trends in the church for decades, and in this series he provides tools to bring reform.

You're welcome to contact us and request all six messages. We'll send the DVD to you when you give a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. Again, it's called The Necessity of Reforming the Church.

You can reach us at 800-435-4343, or you can go online to give your gift at renewingyourmind.org. When it comes to understanding the church, it's comforting, I think, to realize that Scripture has a fixed true meaning. God has spoken, and it's our responsibility to regulate our thoughts with His thoughts. And that's what Dr. Godfrey's series does for us. It reminds us of God's unchanging plan for His church. So again, request The Necessity of Reforming the Church when you call us at 800-435-4343, or when you go online to renewingyourmind.org. Well, as we look ahead to Dr. Sproul's message tomorrow, there is a refrain that we hear throughout the culture.

My religion is personal and private, and I don't need to go to church to have a personal relationship with God. Have you heard that? If you say that, it is possible that you are a Christian. It's possible that I can shoot 63 in the golf course, too, but it's not very likely. R.C. 's humor coming through there, but on a very serious matter. We hope you'll join us tomorrow for Renewing Your Mind. .