Reconciliation

My good friend Ace hooked me up with this awesome 56-page PDF entitled Believers, the Spirit & the Ekklesia by David H. J. Gay. Highly recommended, and the PDF is available here. It’s well worth a read, especially since most Christians don’t like each other.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:16-21).

Christ appears six times in that extract on reconciliation. Yes, the fundamental reconciliation at issue is that which Christ, by his death, accomplished between God and his elect (Rom. 5:10-11; Eph. 2:14-17; Col. 1:19-20). No question of it! But since every believer is reconciled to God by Christ, every believer must be reconciled to every other believer. This is the standard. And it is more. By the Spirit, Christ himself, in the believer, is the power which enables believers to be reconciled to each other. Christ! Christ! Christ!

Take the experience of Philemon and Onesimus as another classic example. To bring about an effective reconciliation between two believers who were in serious dispute, is it not significant that, in his short letter to Philemon, Paul referred ten times to the Lord Jesus Christ? Paul didn’t, as so many ‘pastors’ do, nag Philemon and Onesimus; nor did he do as so many Reformed ‘pastors’ do, and reach for what has become known as Calvin’s whip of the law, and lash them with that. No! It was Christ all the way! Christ! Christ! Christ!

And new-covenant unity, unity in Christ, has massive, far-reaching benefits extending far beyond the ekklēsia – even to unbelievers, convincing them that believers really do belong to Christ, that Christ really was sent by God the Father, that he – Christ – and believers are one in being loved of the Father. As Christ declared to his disciples:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:34-35).

And as he expressed it in his mediatorial prayer:

I do not ask for these [that is, the apostles] only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me (John 17:20-23).

To state the obvious, disunity among believers is tragic – both internally (in the ekklēsia) and externally (in the world), and, above all, it robs the triune God of his glory.

Think of all the trouble which ‘Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free’ could have caused if it had not been for ‘but Christ is all, and in all’. Think of the troubled areas of the world, even as I write: the Middle East, for example. Politicians do not have the answer. They, perhaps, can produce a temporary cessation of open warfare, but it is Christ and Christ alone, by his Spirit changing men’s hearts, who can actually bring about such concord as this passage of Scripture is describing.

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