The Body Of Christ

The first in a six-part series on the Church by Dick York

There was a gathering of believers in Ephesus, a town in what, in the past, was referred to as Asia Minor, but is now known as Turkey. Paul was the apostle to that assembly, and he wrote them an epistle specifically to enlighten them as to the nature of the Church––not just of their local assembly, but of the Church as God sees it.

This became a very important letter because it is foundational to our perception of the Church, and our perception governs how we behave as a corporate body of believers. There is much reason to believe that a great percentage of Christians do not see the Church in the light that the apostle Paul shines upon it. To begin this study of the Church, we need to consider two key portions of Scripture from Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians. The first is Ephesians 1:22,23, which read as follows:

“[God] hath put all things under [Christ’s] feet, and gave Him to be the head over all things to the Church, which is His body, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.”

God inspired this writing, so it is obvious that this is how God sees the Church. Christ is the head. The Church is the body. This is a very biological description, not just an organizational one. This is the description of a human body, not a corporation. Jesus, therefore, is the head of His body in the same way that your head is the head of your body. He is not the CEO of a company as Lee Iacoca was the head of Chrysler Corporation. Therefore in the Church, we, the members, are the body of the head in the same way your body is the torso of your head, not a body in the sense of a committee or a company.

Verse 23 takes us a little further into the equation. It describes the Church as “the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.” This adds more weight to the importance of the Church. This same apostle Paul, in his letter to the Colossians, tells us that

“[Jesus] is the head of the body, the Church: [He] is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things He might have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell” 1 . And, “In Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” 2

When we say, the Church is the body of Christ, that might not carry the same implication for many of us as does the fact that the Church is the fullness of Him in whom dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily. Some of us may need a new view of the significance of the Church.

The second Scripture portion is Ephesians 3:20,21, which reads:

“Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto Him be glory in the Church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.”

The Lord, in this text, is said to be able to do, not only above, but exceeding abundantly above, all that we ask or think. But notice that He does it according to the power that works in us––“us” being the Church, over which Christ is the head. The power that works in “us” is His power. Christ works in and through His Church. That is what verse 21 affirms. Christ does now, and has in the past, glorified the Father in His Church throughout all ages––that is all the ages past and all that are to come. God, therefore, has been able to identify His Church in every age.

As a youngster in school, the reason for learning history escaped me. My position was, Who cares about what happened a long time ago? Such a shortsighted view was the result of my immaturity, my failure to understand that insight into the present is predicated on understanding the past. They are connected.

Perhaps the failure by many of God’s people to grasp the nature of the Church has its roots in a similar disregard for the history of God’s unfolding purpose. The Church is not a recent happening. The apostle Paul has told us that it is a mystery that has been hid in God since the foundation of the world 3 . It was not made known to the sons of men in other ages, Paul says, as it is now (in Paul’s generation) revealed unto the apostles and prophets by the Spirit. 4 So, since the Church is what God had in mind from the beginning of creation, it is obvious that our understanding of it must begin there.

When God had finished creating the ambience of the Garden of Eden with its vegetation and animal life, He said, Let us make man in our image; and so He did. The Bible says, In the image of God created He them. Nothing else in all of God’s creation was referred to as ‘His Image’––only man. In man was to be the revelation of the invisible, omnipresent God, whom no man can see. The man, then, was to be led by the Spirit so that his actions would visibly demonstrate the will of God.

When Adam yielded to Satan’s temptation to be like God instead of an instrument of God, his new independence aborted that relationship. He was no longer led by the Spirit and no longer able to demonstrate, or even determine, God’s will. As far as God’s purpose was concerned, he was dead. It was then that God revealed His redemptive plan, which was ultimately to make mankind become something that he could never have been in Adam. God promised a Savior, the Seed of the woman, who would crush the head of the serpent, and in doing so, would himself be bruised––the first promise of the coming Messiah 5 . The apostle Paul described this promised Savior as the ‘last Adam’ and also as the ‘second man.’ As the last Adam, He would terminate, in God’s view, the Adamic race. As the second man, He would be the progenitor of a new race.

Before the fall of Adam, there had been no evidence of “religion”––everything pertaining to the relationship of man to God was simply the norm. There was no life apart from God, no activity that did not reflect the will of God. God and man were one––God, the Lord, and man, His image. After the fall, religion became an addition to man’s fallen life-style, an effort to reconnect. Religion, then, and the activities that comprise it, is not synonymous with righteousness; it is, rather, an evidence of the disconnect. The apostle Paul explained to us that, “… as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men for that all have sinned.” 6 He explains further that “it is written, There is none righteous, no not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.” 7

Adam, in his fallen state, produced offspring in his own image. The result was a corrupted race that was no longer man as God meant him to be, reflecting the image of God. Now he had become a fallen race in need of a savior. However, this did not frustrate God’s purpose for mankind. On the contrary, having foreseen these events, God formulated His redemptive plan before the creation of the world. In His wisdom, God used even the fall of man to further reveal His character and His manifold wisdom to the principalities and powers in heavenly places by the Church, 8 the ones He was to call out of the fallen world.

What was understood about the character of God through the fall of man? Many things that could have been revealed in no other way. The revelation of God’s grace required human weakness. The revelation of God’s mercy required human failure. The revealing of His forgiveness required transgression on man’s part. The demonstration of His compassion required human helplessness and suffering, which was precipitated by the fall. Nothing was wasted. All of history is His story.

How long Adam remained in the Garden undefiled, we don’t know. But what we do know is that through the temptation to be like God through the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve desired independence from their Creator, which would remove them from the purpose for which God had created them. Their offspring, with their inherited fallen nature, began to populate the earth. Sin and rebellion characterized this fallen race. But, as we later learn in the New Testament, “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” 9

As soon as sin became apparent, God set forth the promise of the Savior. Redeemed man had been the focus of God’s vision from before the first incident of creation. God began to call out those who would seek to do His will. All through history are recorded the names of those who, through repentance and faith, trusted the Lord and called upon His name. The list begins in Genesis: Abel, Seth, Enos, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, David, and many others not listed here, and goes on to the end of the Bible. These make up the Church throughout all ages in whom Christ has glorified the Father.

There are those who will object to this premise on the ground that, in their understanding of Scripture, the “church age” is defined as from the day of Pentecost in Acts 2 until the rapture. We have no quarrel with that. But let us make a distinction between “The Church,” which Paul says has existed through all ages, and the “church age,” which is a period in which the Church has been a distinct and visible entity separated from both Jew and Gentile. Before the day of Pentecost, at which time the Holy Spirit was poured out upon all flesh, baptizing the believers into one distinguishable body, the Church was a mystery. Paul said that, and we have already commented on it.

The word “Church” is translated from the Greek word “Eklesia,” which literally means “called out.” They were men and women in all ages that responded to the voice of God’s Spirit and obeyed Him. Some of them we know because their names and deeds are recorded: Abel, Noah, Samuel, Elijah, and Isaiah, to name a few. Others we will never know until we meet in glory because neither their names nor their deeds are public record. But “the Lord knoweth them that are His.” 10 Their membership in the Church, as ours, is not predicated on having joined something or done something or signed something.

“[God] hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began, but is now made manifest by the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel.” 11

As Paul explained to Timothy in the preceding verse, although everything was accomplished in Christ before the world began, it was made manifest in the appearing of our Savior. Adam failed in his role as the first man. He was created with the potential to sin and die. He was given the power to choose, without which he would have been incapable of love or obedience. He was also given the opportunity to choose, which was necessary for him to exercise free-will, which, in turn, was an essential part of being in the image of God. Until Adam failed, his was the body in which God worked and revealed Himself. Now there needed to be a new creature.

“When the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.” 12

What kind of a man was Jesus? He was a man as God intended man to be. He was a descendant of Adam through his mother, Mary. He was authentically human. He had a human will, which was free. And He had the opportunity to choose, which was essential to his being tempted as we are tempted. He came into the world as the same kind of man as Adam had been before the fall. Now it was in the body of Jesus that God would work and reveal Himself. Jesus was described as the image of the invisible God 13 , and as the express image of God’s person 14 . He was to be tempted, as Adam was tempted, in the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. Whereas Adam had fallen, Jesus would stand. He would fulfill the law’s requirements in two ways: first, he would live perfectly in all of its demands; and second, he would submit Himself to the full penalty of the law as though He had not kept it. His life qualified Him to die for the sins of others; His death qualified the others to gain eternal life 15 because their sin penalty was paid.

The life that God (the Word) lived in the Flesh of the Lord Jesus revealed perfectly the nature and character of God. Jesus, the Man, went everywhere doing what only God can do. Jesus, in His prayer to the Father, said, “I have glorified thee in the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do…I have manifested thy name to the men which thou gavest me out of the world.” 16

When His disciples could not understand what they were witnessing in the life of the Lord Jesus, Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father.”

Jesus responded, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father…believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself; but the Father that dwelleth in me, He doeth the works.”

The body of Jesus was the humanity in which the Father dwelt and worked. Jesus’ body was “the body of Christ.” That body was to be sacrificed for the redemption of whomsoever in Adam’s race would submit to the drawing of God. It paid the penalty for all. This is the reason Jesus is described as the “last Adam.” When He went to the cross, He carried with him the entire race. “If one died for all, then were all dead.” 17

At the end of each of the Gospels we have the account of Jesus’ physical resurrection from the dead. Had we no such account, if Jesus had not risen, we would have no hope. Without the resurrection there would be no Gospel, only the specter of eternal death. The body of Christ would be forever in the tomb and everlasting life would be an impossible wish. But because Christ did rise from the dead as the firstfruit of the resurrection, the body of Christ is alive.

Jesus is not only called the last Adam, He is also called the second man. Adam was the first man, the head of a fallen race. Jesus terminated that first man’s race by being the last (terminal) Adam and taking that race to the cross. In His resurrection, He became the Second Man, the head of a new race. If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed away, behold all things are become new. 18

The apostle Paul called this new creation “the new man.” And he compared it indirectly to the creation of Eve. Adam, he said, was a figure of Christ. In the story of Eve’s beginning, we are told that God, in order to find a help suitable for Adam, put him into a deep sleep, wounded his side and brought forth a rib of which He made a woman. She was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, actually a member of his body. Paul said the same thing about the Church. He said it was created in Christ. He also said it is bone of Christ’s bone, and flesh of His flesh. 19

Jesus, from His birth to His death was literally the body of Christ. He lived as such, He died as such and He rose from the dead as such. But when He ascended into heaven, the glorious reality was that He was the Head of the Body of Christ. The body of the Head remained in the earth to do what He is doing. God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself. That reconciling work is finished, and Jesus sits now at the right hand of the Father, making intercession for us. Now God is working in the Church, Christ’s Body, to will and to do of His good pleasure. 20

1. Colossians 1:18,19
2. Colossians 2:9
3. Ephesians 3:9
4. Ephesians 3:5
5. Genesis 3:15
6. Romans 5:12
7. Romans 3:10-12
8. Ephesians 3:10
9. Romans 5:20
10. 2 Timothy 2:19
11. 2 Timothy 1: 9,10
12. Galatians 4:4,5
13. Colossians 1:15
14. Hebrews 1:3
15. Romans 4:25
16. John 17:4,6
17. 2 Corinthians 5:14
18. 2 Corinthians 5:17
19. Ephesians 2:10; 5:30-32
20. Philippians 2:13