Thursday, July 2, 2020

Moses and Israel, Christ and His "my church": Not in Isolation, but Parts of His Whole Body

1 Corinthians 10:11 "Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come."

Learning from true history is a quest of the wise, otherwise, we force ourselves to repeat past errors. 

There is a cancerous doctrine growing in the body of Christ. It attacks the interrelation of Christ's local temporal embodiment and His eternal body. That local-only error claims each local assembly of believers is the whole body of our Lord and Savior, but not an interrelated part of other assemblies or of His greater eternal spiritual whole. Yet, despite their attack on the body of Christ, God wants us united with Him, as Jesus prayed in John 17, and Paul says of all interrelated body parts (Romans & Corinthians).

The Holy Spirit teaches willing believers as God promises to His children (1 Jn 2:27). God shows us, in the OT and NT, that the whole of Scripture is to teach us, whether from the types or illustrations of things in the OT or the fulfillment of those things in the NT. Born again believers who rest on all the promises of the LORD know that the OT and NT deal with the church of the living God, in God's types and pictures. 

Biblically, Moses is a type of the forthcoming Christ and Israel is a type of the forthcoming "my church", of which Christ speaks in Mt 18:16, or the "one fold" of which Jesus speaks in John 10:14-16. The Bible says there is one Israel of God. His Israel prevails until all believers in Christ (God's Messiah) are all united in Christ (after the 1,000 year reign of Christ, that follows the seven year tribulation, called Jacob's Trouble). 

Biblically, the Israel of God is always comprised of twelve tribes, and of a myriad of Jewish souls that God numbers, "as the sand of the sea". God's OT picture foretells how He sees, planned, and builds His "my church". He gave those OT examples so we'd make no mistake about what He wants us to believe about His assembly of believers, His, "my church"; His whole body that we are to discern when communing (lest we think too much of ourselves and ignore that we are His parts within His whole). 

As there is one Israel of God, locally manifested as families, tribes, and cities, but, still, in Him, God's Israel is scattered around the world. Likewise, God says believers in Christ are one in faith and of one eternal body, of "one fold" no matter what local biblical church we are part of (which has nothing to do with denominations, ecumenicism, external hierarchies, or prelates). Local church parts of Christ's body are all that we can see naturally, temporally, visibly, yet, only one church is raptured before the tribulation; only one bride of Christ is at the marriage of God's Lamb. Our natural, fleshly, inclinations are to only admit what is perceivable, but God says we cannot please Him if we do not believe and act in faith. Therefore, biblically, based on the whole counsel of God's Word, both OT and NT, we must see by faith that the church, the eternal body of Christ, is only one body and that He definitely doesn't have multiple brides. Christ Jesus is both the Head and the Cornerstone of the church. His "my church" is built between those two solid facts. Christ, faith, and His body are NOT a religion.

Local-church-only-isolation doctrine does not begin with God's Israel, where God begins. Nor does that error abide by the OT form that God portrays for the church, of many parts making up the whole of the Israel of God: God's biblical picture of the body of Christ. The false local-only doctrine does not allow for the one-ness and unity to which God calls all Jews in His Israel, or to which He calls all believers in John 17. The errant doctrine speaks, as if, the promoters of it were to say that the one Jewish city of Jerusalem were the whole of all the twelve tribes of Israel, in that one location. Such a claim fails to recognize any of the interrelated actions and functions that the tribes of God's Israel play in their proper biblical context, just as that false doctrine fails to accept the spiritual one-ness and wholeness of the body of Christ.

Though scattered around the world and through the ages, individual Jews, their families, and the twelve tribes, altogether, are still the body of God's Israel. Though local churches arise and disappear temporally, as at Jerusalem, yet, Christ's body parts, as local assemblies, are eternally interrelated parts of Jesus' "my church". 

His body, His "my church", never fails.

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