All in the family

Go to the religious section of Barnes & Noble and you’ll find shelf after shelf of books on the New Age, Wicca, Eastern religions, etc.

In Acts 19, Luke writes about the Jews and Greeks living in Ephesus who, when they heard the gospel through Paul’s evangelism there, became Believers and immediately collected up all their pagan literature and burned it for everyone to see.

Verses 19-20 report, “Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. [20] So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.”

Jordan explains, “Here are people in what we would call the occult, in spiritism, paganism. And they go bring their sacred books, their bibles if you will, and their instruction books and burn them. They don’t need them anymore. Paul said, ‘All these people heard the gospel and got saved.’ They never heard of Christ before!

“The gospel will do its job if you preach it and it has free course. You never have to fear truth and error sitting at the same table. If truth gets an opportunity to speak, it will take care of itself. What happens in the world out there is they muzzle the truth.

“The Adversary tries to confound people with the truth so they don’t preach the truth. The first policy of the Adversary against the church is to get you to compromise the truth, change the message. He attacks the message. If you don’t change the message, he’ll attack the messenger. Those are the two tactics.

*****

“When Paul wrote to Timothy at Ephesus, there was a church of a dead goddess named Diana. In Paul’s day, there were seven wonders of the ancient world and one of those wonders, over a period of 3-400 years, was the Temple of Diana at Ephesus.

“The Temple of Diana had big pillars, fashioned like the stuff in Daniel 3 that Nebuchadnezzar set up. That temple had the entire city cowed. She was called ‘the queen of heaven’ just like Israel, in Jeremiah 34, is said to be worshipping; the Baal worship. It was said that the image of Diana fell down from Jupiter. And that dead god, the one people prayed to and got nothing . . .

“Paul is at Ephesus for a long period of time. He sets up a teaching, preaching, evangelistic center in Ephesus and the Word of God goes out, not just around Ephesus, but all of that whole territory.

“In the Bible, the title the ‘living God’ is used seven times by Paul, more than by any other writer in the Bible. He wants you to be sure you understand that God is alive and personally, actively involved in the local church in the lives of Believers; He’s just not doing it the way He did it with Israel in the physical, external intervention program.

“He writes in I Timothy 4:10, ‘For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.’

“The primary vehicle, the hub, the center ground around which what God is doing today in the dispensation of grace focuses around the work the Body of Christ does through the work of the ministry. That’s why the local assembly is so important. That’s why it gets attacked in such vicious ways by the Adversary. That’s why some people can’t stand to be in it and be involved in it.

“The local church is designed to be not the reflection of the culture around it, but the reflection of the work of the Body of Christ IN that culture.

*****

“One of the great mistakes Western missionaries made in the last three centuries was to think that if they brought people to salvation, it meant that those people needed to be inculcated with Western culture in their clothing, mannerisms and so forth.

“Sometimes people needed to have their culture elevated out of barbarianism, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they had to be Westernized. What the gospel is to do is go into whatever the culture is and purify it, and bring out of that culture how Christ would live in THAT culture. That’s a high calling and a high-thinking process, but that’s what Paul’s talking about in I Timothy 3.

*****

“In our day, management techniques and skills have invaded the ministry, and if you go back into the ‘90s, there was this great push that said you couldn’t have an organization unless you had a delineated purpose statement, mission statement and vision statement. But the purpose statement that God gives is, ‘God, our Savior, who would have all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.’

“When Paul says we’re the ‘pillar and ground of the truth,’ that’s the relationship between the church and the truth that we’re designed to proclaim. A pillar holds things up and makes it visible, supports it. The ground, that’s the foundation upon which that pillar resides.

“You don’t have to come here to go to heaven; that’s not the purpose of the local church. We keep a testimony in a community like this alive, not so you can come here to go to church, but so that you can know that the truth is still available and we can hold up a flag and say, ‘The truth is available if you’re interested. Here’s how to find it.’

*****

“The household of God is not a building; it’s a family. It’s the Body of Christ manifested in this location at Ephesus; in our case, in this location in Chicagoland.

“The Hebrew term for the ‘house of God’ is Bethel. Paul’s literally using Jewish terminology here. God resided in the nation Israel to make Israel the people He chose them to be, but now in the Body of Christ, people who were barred from being a part of the house of God are now made participants in the house of God.

“Paul never calls the church a business. People say you need to have business principles in your ministry. He never calls it a business but he calls it a body. He calls it a building. He calls it a house and a household. We don’t operate on the rudiments of the world that businesses operate on.

“Ephesians 3:14-15 says, ‘For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
[15] Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.’

“What people who aren’t dispensationalists do with that verse is they say there’s the family who’ve died and gone on to heaven, the ‘Church Triumphant,’ and then there’s the ‘Church Militant,’ or Believers who are still down here.

“But if you studied the Book of Ephesians instead of theology books, you’d never have come up with that idea. Because, starting in Ephesians 1, he’s talking about the government God established in the heavens and the government God established in the earth, and the fact that He has an agency to reclaim that government in the earth, the nation Israel, and now He’s forming the Body of Christ as the agency to reclaim that government in the heavens.

“Now, you and I are made fellow citizens with the saints and we’re in the household of God, which is heaven and earth. He’s the Father of that whole household, the whole family, and He’s the one who’s the head of it.

“Paul explains in Ephesians 2, ‘[19] Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God;
[20] And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone;
[21] In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord:
[22] In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.

“The temple’s not made of hands (‘God doesn’t dwell in temples made with men’s hands’); it’s a temple made out of people.

“When God gave Moses the pattern for the tabernacle, it was a tent that God was going to dwell in, but it was made out of skin. Amos 9 calls it the ‘tabernacle of David’ and that’s that little Believing Remnant in Israel where God’s going to live in the flesh-and-blood lives of some Israelis.

“This temple that God is building, putting people together in as a habitation--God’s the builder, He’s the architect, He lives there, He provides for it; it’s where He’s honored and it’s where the family is.

*****

“That expression, the church of the living God (I Timothy 3), that’s a fun expression.

“II Corinthians 6:16, ‘And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’

“You see, we’re the dwelling place of the LIVING God. That term has a very special emphasis to it. He’s not a dead god; not an inactive god who’s a phony but the real thing.

“I Thessalonians 1:9 says, ‘For they themselves shew of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.’

“The living God is in contrast with the dead gods of the idols and that’s the way it is all through the Bible.

“The Apostle Paul before he got saved was a rabbinical scholar and when he uses terms like that that come out of his thinking process, you can go back in the Old Testament and find the meanings to these terms.

“The first time that description occurs in the Bible is in Deuteronomy 5:26. 4:16. They know about idols. They saw them in Egypt. They’re aware of all that and Moses says to them, ‘Where is there any nation out there with all their gods that’s like us who’ve been in touch with the real thing; the living God?’

“Joshua picks up on this when they go in to cross the Jordan River to go in to take the Promised Land. God gathers them all together, He puts the ark out front and the priests and they’re going to walk in—go across Jordan.

“Joshua 3: 9-10 says, [9] And Joshua said unto the children of Israel, Come hither, and hear the words of the LORD your God.
[10] And Joshua said, Hereby ye shall know that the living God is among you, and that he will without fail drive out from before you the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Hivites, and the Perizzites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Jebusites.

“There’s the ark of the living God—watch what He does. Every time you see that term occur through here, what He’s saying is, ‘Watch the living God go to work!’ He’s a God who does things and takes action.

“Look at Joshua 2. You remember Rahab. Some spies come in and she says something to the spies she’s going to hide that’s quite interesting. Joshua 2:9-10:  ‘And she said unto the men, I know that the LORD hath given you the land, and that your terror is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land faint because of you.
[10] For we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red sea for you, when ye came out of Egypt; and what ye did unto the two kings of the Amorites, that were on the other side Jordan, Sihon and Og, whom ye utterly destroyed..

“Notice that’s past tense. You know what she’s saying to those spies: ‘You know, forty years ago we heard what God did when He brought you out of Egypt and we’ve been sitting over here trembling in our boots waiting for you to come take us out too. We know God has already given you this land. What you been waiting on?!’

“Of course, it was Israel’s unbelief that caused them to wait that 38 years. The Gentile knows it. You know, what they heard about the living God. That’s what Moses said: ‘Who’s ever heard about the living God like us?’

“When the Gentiles up there in Jericho heard about it, they said, ‘Whoa, they got the living God on their side and our hearts melted knowing we were dead meat!’

“I Samuel 17:26 says, ‘And David spake to the men that stood by him, saying, What shall be done to the man that killeth this Philistine, and taketh away the reproach from Israel? for who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?’

“David said, ‘All I need right here is what I’ve got in my hand. My sling.’ He goes out and gets him five smooth stones because Goliath’s got four brothers, and he says, ‘The living God will take care of us,’ and he was befuddled that Israel wasn’t believing that.

“Daniel’s in the lion’s den in Daniel 6:26. You know who Daniel’s God is? He went over there and gave Leo lockjaw and God delivered him; He’s the living God. Darius knew all his gods were dead gods."