THE ONE BODY AS PRESENTED IN SCRIPTURE
[p. 21] THE ONE BODY AS PRESENTED IN SCRIPTURE
Romans 12; 1 Corinthians 12; Colossians 1; Ephesians 1
I desire to bring under the attention of the readers of the Voice the teaching of the word in regard to the “one body”, which I judge all will allow to be Christ’s body. The thought of the body is referred to in four epistles, namely Romans (chapter 12), 1 Corinthians (chapter 12), Colossians (chapter 1), and Ephesians (chapter 1), though in the first two it is only just touched for certain purposes.
Before going into the subject in detail I must make one or two prefatory remarks; and at the outset I assume that the truth of the body is “the mystery of the gospel”. Paul refers to this in Romans 16: 25, 26, and in Ephesians 6: 19, and no one can fail to see the great importance that the subject had in his mind, and the responsibility which he felt to make manifest the mystery. I do not think that I should go too far in saying that the body is the great end of God in the gospel, and that until our souls are in the truth of it we do not fully answer to the thought of God in regard of us. It appears to me that many of us stop short at the gospel, and never reach the clear knowledge of the mystery. And this is the more to be deplored because that while the gospel unfolds the whole extent of our blessing in Christ according to the purpose of God, the mystery shows us what the church is as a vessel for Christ, the body in which He was to be set forth in the world from which He had been personally rejected. The ministry of the mystery is evidently distinct from that of the gospel (see Colossians 1: 23 - 26), but the mystery is the mystery of the gospel. And though we cannot understand the mystery by the gospel, yet it is evident that the mystery is [p. 22] involved in the gospel. The importance of this is that it makes evident that all we receive from God we receive through the gospel, and that the ministry of the assembly as Christ’s body adds nothing to the gifts of God, but leads our souls into the light of God’s thought in the assembly, as I have said, into what the body was to be as the vessel in which Christ was to be portrayed here, Christ among the Gentiles the hope of glory.
I come now to the teaching of the epistles in detail; and I remark a distinction of importance between the four passages, namely, that in Romans and 1 Corinthians, though the truth of the one body is introduced, there is no allusion to the Head save that it may possibly be involved in the expression “the Christ” in 1 Corinthians 12: 12. If we desire to find the Head we have to go to Colossians and Ephesians. Now it is evident that without knowing the Head no one can possibly have any intelligent apprehension of the body. And I do not think that such apprehension is supposed in 1 Corinthians or in Romans, for it appears to me that the statement of our being one body by the baptism of the Spirit is introduced in 1 Corinthians simply as a check to clericalism in the assembly. All the gifts were the working of the Spirit dividing severally to every one as He would, and hence one gift was not to be set against another; doing it would be an offence to the one Spirit; and the truth of the saints being one body by the Spirit is introduced to give force to this. Many results in the human body flow from that action of the heart, but these consequences are not discordant but harmonious. The source is one and the body one, requiring the co-operation of every member, and no member is redundant. Evidently clericalism is the opposite of this, and I imagine that it was to check the tendency to this that the light of the one body is brought into 1 Corinthians.
In Romans the truth of our being one body in [p. 23] Christ, and every one members one of another, is introduced to give force to the exhortation that every man should think soberly as to himself according as God had dealt to every man the measure of faith. If the saints had, in the sovereignty of God’s will, been constituted one body in Christ, it was evident that any right thought of themselves must be, not according to nature, but according to grace — the first were last and the last first.
Thus the reference to the body in these two epistles may be said to be by the way. There is no mention of the Head, nor any unfolding of the divine thought in the body. The object is to set the saints in their right bearing both in the assembly and in their individual path.
But when we come to the Colossians we learn another truth of the greatest moment, namely, first that Christ is the Head of the body, the assembly, and consequent on this that the assembly is the vessel in which He is to be displayed among the Gentiles, the hope of glory. This is the mystery of the gospel. Evidently this display was to be moral in the saints, and thus the body was necessarily co-extensive with the work of the Spirit in them. But nothing could be more wonderful than that Christ, who had been rejected by the Jew, should be seen in the Gentiles in moral suitability to the scene in which the body is. Hence the anxiety of the apostle in his preaching of Christ that he might present every man full grown in Christ. It is in this epistle especially that the truth of the Head and the body are prominent, and the divine idea in the body is reached. In Ephesians we have the thought of the bride predominant, and in connection with this the truth of union, that is, the setting of the saints in Christ where He is in the heavenlies. But we have the additional truth as to the body that it is “the fulness of him that filleth all in all”. Christ is set personally at God’s right hand far above [p. 24] all principality and power and might and dominion and every name that is named not only in this age but in that to come. All things are put under His feet (Psalm 8), and He is given as Head over all things to the assembly which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all. In the divine counsel the body is sufficient for Christ even as filling all in all, and being His fulness not a trait of Christ is deficient. May God give us some estimation of the greatness of His thought, and use the above, though it be but a bare outline, to this end.