We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

jesus

Giant Jesus

Yesterday’s post featured a video of Greg sharing about the role of the church in manifesting God’s character to the world. Here are some follow-up thoughts on that topic.


The NT often uses the metaphor of “the body of Christ” to describe the church. When Jesus walked the earth, he did so in an ordinary body, beginning with his birth in Bethlehem. Now he does not physically walk the earth, but the Church is his hands, mouth, and feet operating in the world today. The same life that was in his first body is in us, his second body. And we who belong to this second body take our marching order from the same “head” as Jesus’ first body.

This is why Luke begins Acts, which is a basic history of the early church, by reminding us that he wrote about Jesus in his gospel by saying “I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven (Acts 1:1). To say that Jesus “began” to do certain things in his incarnate form implies that Jesus is now continuing to do certain things in a corporate form—through his Church.

In Luke’s mind, his Gospel was about what Jesus did through his first body, while the book of Acts is about what Jesus continued to do through his second, corporate body.

Luke sees the Church as a kind of giant Jesus.

In the book of Acts you can also see that Jesus identified with his corporate body. When Jesus knocked Paul off his horse on the road to Damascus, he identified himself as “Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Acts 9:4). Since Jesus had ascended to heaven several years earlier, how could Paul be persecuting him? Clearly, he was doing so by persecuting the Church. Jesus apparently considered whatever happened to the Church as happening to him. Pain inflicted on his Church is pain inflicted on his body, as much as when spikes were driven into his hands and feet on the cross.

Paul wrote that we are to be “imitators of God” (Eph 5:1). The word for “imitate” (mimetai) literally means to “mimic” or to “shadow.” We are to imitate God’s every move, just as Jesus did.

Paul then fleshes out what this mimicking looks like in the following verse: “Live in love … as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.” The body of Christ is to love others just as Christ loved in his own body, dying on Calvary for sinners.

The call to imitate Jesus is not something we can carry out with our own efforts. It’s a call to yield to the Spirit and thereby manifest the truth that Christ himself is working through us. He is transforming us into his image. He is working through his corporate body to carry out the work he began when he walked the earth.

In this way, we are a giant Jesus.

—Adapted from The Myth of a Christian Religion, pages 18-19.

Photo credit: iko via VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND

Category:
Tags: , ,
Topics:

Related Reading

Podcast: Who has the Authority to Baptize Others?

Grab a bucket for this no-holds barred baptism episode.  http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0342.mp3

A Cross-Like Church

When God’s church loves like God loves—which means valuing the other at cost to self—it will puzzle those outside the church. While such love might cause the religious to rail with outrage, it will cause the searching and the hungry to ask, “how can people love like this?” In God’s plan, this puzzle is what…

The Purpose of the Church

Concerning the preaching of the Gospel, Paul wrote that God’s intent was that “through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places … in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord”…

Sermon Clip: Don’t Be A Butthead

  With so many people claiming to hold the truth, it can be easy to get lost in all the noise. We can be tempted to make our voice heard by shouting the loudest or we can stay quiet and turn a blind eye to those who think differently. How do we find the balance?…

Podcast: What Causes Personal Transformation?

In this episode Greg talks about the important role of imagination in our prayer life and in our thought life. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0005.mp3

Isn’t it contradictory to say Jesus is “fully God” and “fully human”?

READER: God is, by definition, eternal, having neither beginning nor end. Human beings are, by definition, finite, beginning at a certain point in time. How, then, can Jesus be both God (eternal) and human (finite)? Isn’t that a contradiction? Similarly, while God is omniscient, humans aren’t. How could Jesus be both omniscient God and non-omniscient…