There is great significance to the theme of a new man drawn out in the New Testament. The bringing together of the Jew and Gentile under one body is a proclamation that the Church is Israel. In Romans 11, Paul masterfully demonstrates how the gentiles are grafted into the covenant promises contrary to nature. In line with this theme, Paul teaches that distinctions between Jew and Gentile, ethnicity and social standing are subsumed by the new man’s identity in Christ (Col 3:11). This doesn’t indicate that these distinctions are wiped out in the present age but that they are not categories of eternal significance and we shouldn’t be consumed by them, even while accepting their existence for a time (Eph 6:1-9, 1 Pet 2:18).
Tag: Church
The New Covenant and Antithesis: Part 3 – The Church as an Assembly of God’s Divine Council
A lot of these issues in worship stem from a misunderstanding of what the church of God really is. Some of it can be attributed to the Greek Word ekklesia translated as Church in the English language. The word church has institutional connotations and often represents a formal structure that gathers in a building or as a reference to the building itself. It doesn’t accurately represent what the apostles meant when they used ekklesia. Some have understood the term ekklesia to be a sum of two different words. The prefix ex meaning out of and the verb kaleo meaning to call. This they understand to mean called out ones. Now this could be a legitimate understanding of the term. However, when the apostles used the term ekklesia, it already had a colloquial usage in the Koine Greek of the time. Moreover, it is often used in the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, which the apostles used. Therefore, to understand this term, it is good to look into its colloquial usage and its usage in the Septuagint.
Deo Vicit Mundum 