The pages of history are littered with the sobering fact that God is no longer present in the places He once visited…He was allowed to visit, but He was not permitted to be Head (Ps. 127:1)…That is, He was not granted the right to make the decisions…Practically, this means that the members of a church should respond to their Head, Christ, through the other members, rather than to a few human beings who happen to be in positions of note…if the Headship of Jesus Christ is not fully yielded to in a given place, the best the Lord can do is visit. He cannot take up residency…A homeowner doesn’t visit his own home. He lives in it…Jesus Christ did not die and rise again just to forgive you of your sins. He died in order that His Father could obtain a home…
-Frank Viola (@frankviola), From Eternity to Here
We simply don’t know how to live with God calling the shots. Like Israel of old, we still clamor for a visible king (I Samuel 8). The idea that our King and Head is invisible is unrealistic and impractical to most. Why? Maybe it’s a lack of faith, a lack of training, a lack of experience, or a mixture of each to some extent. But, we have a heap of trouble not promoting humans into the position of Head. It’s an epidemic. We fear being equal but different parts of a perfect body controlled by a perfect Head (Eph. 1:22; 4:15; 5:23). So we elevate someone to the position that only Christ should hold. To make matters worse, our standards for those who we promote here are not very high at all.
And how do we decide how we will fill the perfect Head’s role with an imperfect Head? We bring them in for interviews, look at the letters after their name, grade them on how entertaining their verbal rhetoric will be and what kind of effect they’ll have on attendance. Character? Emotional health? We don’t live with or around them, so this is basically a non-issue until it’s forced to become an issue. All the while, the Lord is looking for groups that will give Him his rightful place.
God doesn’t elevate humans into special classes of Christians to create hierarchical structures. This would deny His whole eternal purpose. It flies in the face of the New Covenant. It tells us that we can’t be led by God directly. It tells us that someone else is responsible for our spirituality. It’s time we learned how to take unfiltered orders directly from Him.
Your turn…what do you have to add? Questions? Learn anything new?
*The first post for this book is here. The next post is here.
Michael Fleming lives near Canton, Ohio with his wife Kristin. Michael is involved as a teacher with the Soul Care Center, a non-profit school in Canton that provides Christian counseling, teaching and coaching to the Stark County area. He also writes and records music for his pop alternative music project (also called 2nd man united) that can be heard in the sidebar of the site.
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The issue is that Christians don’t understand Christ being in them. The old covenant leven of God being behind the curtain and serogate mediators are still the norm.