The Unity of the Church

The Church is uniquely related to Christ and its members to each other. The NT speaks of the Church as a single organism, receiving life from Christ (John 14:19; John 15:1-8). Jesus referred to the Church as Himself when He said to Saul, “why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4). The Church is the very body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:12-14):

For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free—and have all been made to drink into one Spirit. For in fact the body is not one member but many. . . Now you are the body of Christ, and members individually.

Ephesians 5:25-32 connects the Body of Christ metaphor to a marriage, calling the Church the bride of Christ (cf. 2 Cor. 11:2; Rev. 21:2, 9, 22:17), saying “this is a great mystery.”

The intimate connection of the Head to the Body extends to the individual members, connecting the Church saints to each other. “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:4-5). The NT is full of commands for the Church to be united in fellowship despite class and cultural differences. The Church is called to lay aside (or put up with) the natural, ethnic, or societal identity markers when they hinder the unity of the body (Acts 15, Rom. 14, 1 Cor. 8). Paul zealously confronted Peter on this matter: “If you, being a Jew, live in the manner of Gentiles and not as the Jews, why do you compel Gentiles to live as Jews?” (Gal. 2:14). Here he implies that Peter, when walking in the Spirit as he should, lived as if there were no cultural distinctions between him and other Church saints. The “middle wall of separation” is torn down; that is, the law that kept Jew and Gentile separate (Eph. 2:14-15). Even the boundaries erected by God in the past should not be so between those in Christ.

The Uniqueness of the Church

Within the Church, “there is neither Jew nor Greek… barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all” (Col. 3:11). Outside the Church, these categories remain, and the NT distinguishes the Church from both Israel and Gentiles. It is as if members of the Church are formerly Jew or Gentile. Paul says to his Gentile Christian audience that they were Gentiles (1 Cor. 12:2). He implores, “give no offense, either to the Jews or to the Greeks or to the church of God” (1 Cor. 10:32). One theologian said of this verse, “in place of the former twofold division of mankind there thus arises a threefold division (1 Cor. 10:32), and to Israel and the peoples of the world there is added the church as a ‘third race.’”[1] Peter calls the Church, “a chosen generation [race – ESV], a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people,” pleading with them to live “as sojourners and pilgrims… among the Gentiles” (1 Peter 2:9-12). The Ephesian believers are called “once Gentiles in the flesh” (Eph. 2:11). The exceptions, where Christians are called Gentiles (or Jews), are in the context of discussing the race from which they came. The general posture of the NT, however, is that Christians are contrasted with the natural categories of mankind.[2]

“in place of the former twofold division of mankind there thus arises a threefold division (1 Cor. 10:32), and to Israel and the peoples of the world there is added the church as a ‘third race.’” — Erich Sauer

The Connection of the Church to Heaven

Unlike Israel’s earthly blessings, the Church is given blessings in the heavenly places (Rom. 9:4; Eph. 1:3). Her citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20). The inheritance of the Church is in heaven (1 Pet. 1:4). Even her battlefield is heavenly (Eph. 3:10, 6:12). The writer of Hebrews calls upon Jewish Christians tempted to go back to Judaism to look to the example of the Patriarchs who lived as strangers and pilgrims on the earth. “But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country” (Heb. 11:13-15). He exhorts them to leave behind their ties to the earthly Jerusalem and embrace the heavenly city. He calls them partakers of the heavenly calling, telling them to be like the OT saints inasmuch as they were ones of whom the world was not worthy (Heb. 3:1, 11:38). Entering the Church, they “have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (Heb. 12:22).  He concludes: “Therefore let us go forth to Him, outside the camp, bearing His reproach. For here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come” (Heb. 13:10-14).

Scripture distinguishes the destiny and inheritance (the hope, that for which we are told to look forward to) of the Church from that of Israel.[3] What this means for the eternal state is mostly speculation, but the distinction has one significance, if nothing else. The Church is not promised a geographical region on the earth, like Israel is. Like the Levites, who did not receive an allotment of the promised land (Josh. 14:3) but cities to dwell in (Num. 35:2) and had a special relationship to God (Num. 3:12; Josh. 18:7), the Church is not given an earthly inheritance, but blessings in the heavenly places, a heavenly city, and a unique relationship to Christ.[4]

What does this mean for the rapture? This will affect the interpretation of passages that describe saints in the tribulation, and it will also affect the character of the rapture event which has implication for how those passages should be understood. The next part of the series will present an argument for the rapture.

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[1] Erich Sauer, The Triumph of the Crucified (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994), 58.

[2] See also, 1 Cor. 5:1, 10:20; 2 Cor. 11:26; 1 Pet. 4:3; 3 John 1:7; Rom. 9:3; Gal. 2:15.

[3] The common hope and inheritance is Christ, but Christ as bridegroom vs. Christ as King is a distinction. As Geisler says, “having one large family does not mean all live in the same house or have the same occupation… there need not be only one heavenly and earthly destiny within the one family of God.” Norman Geisler, Systematic Theology. Vol. 4, Church, Last Things (Bloomington: Bethany House Publishers, 2005), 434.

[4] “There is one Savior, one plan of redemption, and one family of all the redeemed people who will worship God in [the eternal state]. Spiritually, [all] God’s people share a redemptive inheritance, even though there are functional differences between Israel and the church.” Geisler, Systematic Theology. Vol. 4, 537.