Dennis Tuuri

in our series of talks on the government of the church going through the confessional statement of Reformation Covenant Church and that particular portion of the confessional statement that talks about the person’s and the families covenanting into a submission to the leadership of the church participation in the government of the church also and we’ve been spending a long time on this and we hopefully have it’s been beneficial to us to review and look over the offices of the old covenant community and then see the implications for the new covenant community and we’ve done that over the last few weeks.

It has specific implications for this church. Of course, we’re growing in number. We believe the Old Testament strongly taught that the pattern of tens, 50s, hundreds and thousands is a godly pattern. It was seen throughout the judges. It was seen in the military. It was seen in the priests as well in the courses of the priests. And so it is the basic pattern then for government that God has given us. And we would be foolish as well as disobedient not to be in obedience to that pattern as we grow as a church.

We have 20 households now, a little bit more perhaps and certainly more with the visitors that haven’t come in yet. And so we have to look at adding eldership, another elder into the church. And of course we recognize that what we had talked about at the beginning of this series is true. There are aspects of all the old testament offices, aspects of those offices which are culminate in the office of the elder.

The elder of the old covenant of course was a head of a household and we have talked about how the church is a household of God. We’ll talk about that a lot more this morning. Now we have an institutional officer in that church, the new Testament talks about in terms of eldership, and so there’s some continuity there with the Old Testament term of elder and giving guidance to the family as well. We’ve talked about the elders of each household are the pool of men from which all the other officers are taken.

And so that’s certainly true of the new covenant as well. We talked about the appointment of judges in the old covenant and how that has implications for the eldership in terms of them being having judicial authority over the church, the institutional church and the necessity of that in terms of guarding that church from heresy and from error. We’ve talked about the implications of the rulers of the old covenant, representative rulers of the people, how in the two trumpets were blown in the in the community in the wilderness, there were two groups of people that were gathered very similar in political form to our representatives and senators.

And so we have the idea of representational government at various levels. And we saw we talked last week about the implications of graded systems of elders in the churches. That’s also taught of course by the judges, the heads of 10, 50s, hundreds, and thousands. And the same thing is true of the representational nature of the Old Testament rulers. Both those things teach that the elders would have a series of graded elders as it were, heads of tens, 50s, hundreds, and thousands, again, representing groups as they go along.

Talked with the Old Testament offices of prophet, priest, and king, and how all of them really have implications for the office of the elder in terms of teaching the word of God as a prophet and as a corrective to people both individually, corporately, and also to the state around us. The teaching elders of the church have that responsibility to be a prophetic voice as it were.

And I haven’t read the article yet, but on the bulletin board downstairs, there’s an article on abortion and how the prophetic nature of the pastor requires a response to abortion in this land. And that’s certainly true. The priest, we talked about the priest in the old covenant doing two things primarily. His responsibilities were one to offer up sacrifices and two to teach the law. And of course, the elders are said also to the apostles who devoted themselves to the teaching of the word and prayer.

Those same two functions of the Old Testament priest. And of course the elders we talked about being inheriting as it were the basic function of the apostles in terms of the institutional church having that same functions. And the king, the idea of ruling or governing and of course the elders rule in the church. So there’s many of the old testament offices that implications for the new testament offices and for this church specifically as we move toward the selection of people to fill those offices.

We also talked about another continuity from the Old Testament to the deacons and it is worthwhile to point out again that some people believe, and we didn’t take this position, but some people do believe that deacons are a training ground for the eldership. And while I haven’t seen any strong evidence in scripture to suggest the truth of that, the fact that all the old testament offices save one, the chorekim, find their new institutional church equivalent in the office of elder does perhaps provide a form of support for that idea.

I don’t believe that’s necessarily the case but I’m just saying that you might want to continue to study that out yourself and look at the implications of that possibility. But in any event, we talked about the fact that the deacons, even if they are in training, which I don’t believe is the case, but it’s possibly the case that their specific function while they are deacons is to minister in terms of the service of tables or the administration of the church. They show were administrators with the real authority and the filling of the Holy Spirit for that task.

Now, the elders then are ministers of the word and so you have the word administration of the covenant community being fulfilled by the elders and deacons. That has implications as well because as we grow as a church both numerically and in other ways in this church we have a growing need also for administration of the church. When administrative details of the church could take away time from the eldership from studying and devoting themselves to the teaching of the word and prayer then it’s probably time to add a deacon and we’ll have to watch that as we go into the next few months as well.

Well, we spent a lot of time on this. I don’t know. It’s probably been five or six months, I would guess, maybe more that we spent in the offices of the church. Why have we done that? Why have we spent so much time on the offices of the church? It’s just one institution among many that God gives us. The family is important. The civil government is important, of course. Why have we spent so much time talking about church government? Well, this morning we’re going to conclude it by looking at a couple of verses that we just read out of 1 Timothy 3 that I think tell us why we spent so much time and why it is important to consider the institutional church.

This verse tells us that the church is three things. The church is the household of God. The church is the pillar of the truth. And the church is the support of the truth.

Now, we said we’ve talked about this verse a little bit in the weeks past. We said that this verse is kind of like the key verse of the book. We’ve talked about the first three chapters of the book so far. And all those chapters relate to the way Timothy was to conduct himself in the household of God. Paul is writing a letter to an elder Timothy to instruct him in the household of God and the way things are to be run in that household.

Now, we know the household of God has broader implications than just the institutional church. Nonetheless, the guardianship function that Paul talks to Timothy about in chapter 1, the public prayers for leaders in chapter 2, and the prohibition against women teaching and having authority in the church in chapter 2, then the delineation of the requirements for deacons and elders in chapter 3. All of these things had to do with the institutional church and so this verse instructs us in that and it also reminds us this verse itself then has primary application to the institutional church.

Okay. If the book is written to give instructions for how the church is to be run institutionally then this chapter which is this verse which is the key to the whole thing also should be understood in that way. Although of course it has implications for the household of God at large as well and individually and through families and the civil government as well. But the point is that this verse then stresses the institutional directions that are found throughout the rest of the book.

And so when we read these things, the church is the household of God, the pillar of the truth, and the support of the truth. I believe that what it’s talking about here is primarily the institution of the church that God has established.

Well, let’s look at those three functions now then. First of all, the church is the household of God. The house of God rather. Now, the term house there is translated household in some places and house in other places. And the word is oikos. Since we’re all have been exposed to the teaching of theonomy, we know that nomos means law. Oikos means oikos means house or family. And so you have economy being the combination of those two Greek words, eco coming from oikos and the last part coming from nomos or law. Economy is the law of the house or the law of the household, which is an interesting thing to keep in mind when you study economics. But the point I’m trying to make is that term oikos is what we read here as well. That same term it can be used in the New Testament to speak of the physical place where a church met, for instance the church that meets in her house, the physical house itself, or it can refer to the whole family that lives in the house or the extended family as well, the whole household taken together. And so it isn’t necessarily one or the other; it’s talking about the whole household as it were.

Since this talks about the institutional church, then reminded me of when I first got really serious about Christianity and came back to Oregon and went to a church that really was a very good church in terms of teaching me the basics in terms of how to study the scriptures and everything, but I’ve always thought at the time that it didn’t well, I’ve always been given the illustration then and I’ve heard since then that the church is kind of like Noah’s ark. We’re talking about the structure of the church, the institutional house of the church. It’s kind of like Noah’s ark. And that’s where salvation is inside the ark. And outside of the ark, of course, is the waters of death and destruction. And that the church may be quite smelly inside and may be quite uncomfortable on the ark. But after all, we can put up with that because it’s so much better than what’s outside.

And I’m sure you’ve heard that illustration as well. I was also told that’s really just the way it is. You know, the church has always been kind of like Noah’s ark, smelly and everything, but tolerable in light of the outside world. It’s pointed out that the first century church for instance had lots of problems and we know that they did. We know that many of the letters that were written in the New Testament were written as corrective letters to particular errors of the church.

So there’s some truth to that. But on the basis of that we’re given the illustration the church is Noah’s ark, smelly always going to be smelly and kind of uncomfortable and you have to come up with funny people. But after all you have to have patience which is demanded of us in scripture. You have to be longsuffering. You have to kind of grin and bear it. And that’s the picture that the church as a structure that many of us have been given in the churches we’ve gone to in the past.

Well, I don’t think that’s true. In fact, I think that is a terrible characterization of the church of God. I don’t see where that’s based upon the scriptures. That’s based upon the experience of people in the world today and various churches. Probably many of them do stink to high heaven. But there’s reasons for that. But that is not to say that the church is characterized then now and forever as being a smelly uncomfortable place tolerable only because the world outside is worse.

When you consider the fact that this verse tells the institutional church is the house of God and by that we know that the institutional church is the dwelling place of God. Okay, first and foremost and that’s our first point under this point. The church is the dwelling place of God. We’ll look at Ephesians 2 for verses that talk about that a little bit. Ephesians 2:21 and 22. I’ll start at verse 20.

“Are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth into an holy temple in the Lord, in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God through the Spirit.”

The church institutionally is called a habitation of God in the Spirit. Now, that same term in terms of the temple of God refers to the individual believer, but now we’re talking about the institutional church. And the institutional church, this verse tells us in Ephesians reinforces to us, is the dwelling place of God.

Now, God is holy and righteous. God’s dwelling place would not be some sort of cramped, stinky little place that’s simply tolerable. That’s not the picture that the scriptures would give us. The dwelling place of God, remember, in the old covenant, of course, and what reference to we have here in Ephesians 2, was the temple. The temple of God was a beautiful place, a spacious place, high ceilings in that place, okay? Not cramped quarters, greatly adorned with beauty in the temple. Well, that’s only fit and right. After all, the temple was the palace of the king. The palace where the king resided and not just the king of Israel, the king of all the world. God himself resided in that temple in a very special way.

If the church today is analogous to the temple in that sense as being habitation of God then it is blasphemous to call the church a smelly little place and simply tolerable. The church is the dwelling place of God and as such it has high reverence should be paid to it in the scriptures and is and we should respond to that by understanding the nature of God’s dwelling place as being a holy and sanctified place as well.

We should never think of the institutional church as somehow something uncomfortable or bad or simply tolerable. We should think of it as God’s dwelling place and as a place of honor and glory and the place where God chooses to build his special habitation. The church is God’s building. He puts it together. He founds it upon Jesus Christ the chief cornerstone and it’s a beautiful work even though we may not see that at the time.

The church is the dwelling place of God and as such it is to be kept sanctified. In John 2:16 and 17 we have an application of this sanctification process. There are references in the old covenant to the fact that holiness befits the temple of God and of course that would be true if that’s the place where God takes up his special residence on the earth then certainly the habitation of God should be kept holy or sanctified.

In John 2, verses 16 and 17 there’s an application of that to a specific problem in verse 15. Jesus makes a scourge of small cords he drives them out of the temple the money changers that is and the sheep and the auction and poured out the changers money and overthrow the tables. And he said unto them that sold doves, “Take these things hence, make not my father’s house a house of merchandise.” And his disciples remembered that it was written, “The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.”

Now the church institutionally is compared to the temple. But remember, we’ve talked also about the fact that the temple was not primarily a place of instruction in the old covenant. The temple was a place of worship. Remember we said the priest had two functions. The priestly group, the Levites and the priest had two functions: offer sacrifices and teach the word.

The teaching of the word took place primarily in synagogues from the oldest days. And the worship of God in terms of offerings took place in the temple. The church is the culmination of both of those lines. The temple and the synagogue. And we read we read many months ago in Hebrews that the church was a super synagogue, an even better synagogue than the Old Testament synagogue. And the church is the temple of God as well.

Now Jesus here in other places says his house was to be a house of prayer and they made it into a house of merchandise. Well, remember that’s that side of it, the worship side of it. And the church, the institutional church does have that component as well. The institutional church has a worship side to it. And that worship must be kept holy and pure.

The habitation of God is holy and should be sanctified to God. And so an application of this was found when Jesus drove out the money changers from the house of God. Would that we today had that same zeal for God’s house, the desire to keep it sanctified and clean. It would have tremendous implications for how we function as institutional churches in this land.

The church is the dwelling place of God and as such is the household of God rather and as such the dwelling place of God must be kept sanctified. That means then that participation in that dwelling place is conditional. In Hebrews 3:6 and 7 we read that Christ is the son over his own house whose house are we, if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end.

So we see in this verse that the church is the dwelling place of God is conditional. Our participation in the household of God is conditional upon keeping the faith of Jesus Christ, the hope of our faith firm unto the end and holding fast the confidence that we have to cling to the gospel. The implication of the gospel in one’s life is a necessary requirement for participation in the household of God.

And if people fall away from that participation, they should also therefore be kicked out of the institutional church. If God’s word says the church institutions are dwelling place of God to be kept holy and if people are in the church who do not see themselves as sanctified to God, who lose sight of the glory of the hope that’s been placed in us, who turn away from the gospel of Jesus Christ, they also then should be thrust out of the institutional church the way the money changers were thrust out when Jesus sought to cleanse his father’s house as well.

Now these things—the dwelling place of God to be kept sanctified and participation in to be limited or conditional—have tremendous implications of course for the church today. I suppose you know that lots of people these days, and the media I suppose got us going at it, but lots of people are talking about Jim and Tammy Bakker. And if think about Jim and Tammy Bakker as part of the church of Jesus Christ and then think of the implications of these verses we have before us, you’ll see the implications rather obviously.

Jim and Tammy Bakker and what they did to the church has that stench that we have talked about earlier in terms of Noah’s ark. But that’s not supposed to be characteristic of God and his church. People that turn the church into a marketplace for personal gain and profit are to be thrust out of that institutional church and there of course God does that anyway whether or not the institutional church they’re members of do it or not. That’s a church problem. But God has no place in his dwelling place where people like that are. The institutional church today is many times seen as a place of stench and odor but that’s because those churches have allowed ungodly practices to take part in them.

If a church continues in that fashion the scriptures tell us that’s no church of God. The church is to be the dwelling place of God kept sanctified and people who deny that are supposed to be expunged from the church. Now, it’s easy to look at a couple like Jim and Tammy Bakker and see their mistakes and see that they then are denying the truth of the church, but what about churches that market the gospel the way that Jim and Tammy Bakker would market their show and make money?

And I’m not talking about here necessarily for financial gain, although that may be part of it as well. What about churches that take the gospel, try to package it into a nice little format, reduce out the uncomfortable elements of it so that they then can build membership or status in the community. Are those people really any different than a person who takes the truth that they’ve been entrusted with, perverts that truth for financial gain?

Is there any really difference between perverting the church for financial gain or for status? I don’t think so. And so we have in our country today many churches, institutional churches that have taken the truth and perverted it as well through the marketing of the gospel for status in the community or for simple growth.

The churches in America of course are in very bad shape then if we take this requirement of being a household of God as an indication. The churches in America don’t meet those qualifications, do they? By and large. You know, I was as I was thinking about this, you know, most of us or most of you, many of you were there when we moved into the house that we’re in today. And the house that we started to rent out in Aloa. If you were there that morning when we first were going to move in, the house hadn’t been cleaned. It was quite a mess.

The house has been let run down for many years. It’s really not a very good-looking place. And it would be easy to look at that place and then walk away from it and say, “This is a terrible place, so we should just not have anything to do with it.” But, you know, in a way that house is kind of analogous to what the institutional church is like in America today, isn’t it? The institutional church today have Jim and Tammy Bakers in the system. They have people that market the gospel and take it down to its lowest common denominator, which is to say to pervert the gospel.

It’s overgrown with weeds. It doesn’t look it’s no longer a beautiful place of God’s dwelling place. But I think that what we have to do is what we’re trying to do with the house we’re in now. We see the beauty that was once there and we attempt to recapture that beauty. That couple of days ago, I noticed some steps in our yard and I kind of prodded around with the shovel a little bit and there were these stone steps underneath the lawn as it were leading up around a bush up to the pool that we have.

And they’ve been so overgrown you couldn’t even see them anymore. And we just happened to see one of them. I assume there might be more steps. Starting with the shovel and we dug them out. And now we’ve uncovered all those steps. We’ve recovered some of the beauty of that house back to what it had been prior to people letting the house go downhill. I think the same is true of the institutional church today.

If God says it’s to be a habitation of his, a holy dwelling place sanctified and one of the responsibilities we have as members of the institutional church is to make church, this church recovers that past beauty as it were that God tells us about in the scriptures. But it’s not simply a looking back at the past we want to do. We look at our house out in Maloa. We look back to what it used to be like but we also think forward to what it might be if there are more improvements made to it.

And the same is true of the church. We don’t want to just look back at what the church used to be in history although that’s encouraging to us and certainly a good place to start. We want to recognize that God and the expansion of the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the implications of that in so many more areas will continue to manifest to us the areas that we are falling short in. And so we don’t just look back at the past experience of our house in Maloa. We look forward to what it can be as well.

Recovering the beauty of the past, but looking forward to the beauty of the present as well. The same thing is true of the institutional church. If we understand the church is the house of God, we’re going to try to recover the aspects of that beauty of that house of God in the institutional churches we have. We’re going to try to take them forward then into an even greater sanctification and a growth and sanctification for the institutional church as well.

The church is the dwelling place of God and as such is a place of beauty, holiness and sanctification. But this scripture tells us the church is also the pillar of the truth. In 1 Timothy 3:15 that’s the second phrase that’s used as the pillar and support of the truth. We’ll take those two things separately.

Now the pillar of the truth refers to, I believe, the architecture of the temple. We’re told in Revelation 3:12 the following: “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out. And I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is New Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God and I will write upon him my new name.”

So God says here in the Revelation that him that overcomes will I make a pillar in the temple of my God. Now that is interesting imagery that we have in this verse as well. The church being the habitation of God but also a pillar of the truth and that’s this imagery then should drive us back to consideration of the temple and those pillars in the temple. The pillars were part of the temple. That’s our first point.

But secondly those pillars manifested God. If you turn your scriptures to 1 Kings 7, we’re going to look at a few verses there in terms of the pillars that were found in the temple. 1 Kings 7:21 talking now about the work of Hiram of Tyre who came in to do the brass work in the temple, the reconstruction of the temple that occurred here. Verse 21: “He set up the pillars in the porch of the temple. He set up the right pillar and called the name thereof Jachin and he set at the left pillar and called the name thereof Boaz.”

Jachin means “He shall establish.” Boaz means “In him is strength.” And then verse 20, that’s my comments. Verse 22: “And upon the top of the pillars was lily work so is the work of the pillars finished.”

And if you look at the verses that lead up to that later this afternoon you’ll see that those pillars were very large massive pillars and they had caps on them as it were that were also large and beautiful as well. Tremendous ornamentation upon the pillar the top of the pillars fine lacy work, wire work, stylized pomegranates hanging upon these two great pillars. And these two pillars were then indicative then a manifestation of God and his attributes. Upon the name of the one pillar was Jachin which means as I said, “He shall establish.” The name of the other pillar was Boaz, “In him is strength.”

These pillars in the temple of course as well, but now the pillars actually holding up the entire well, manifesting as it were the glory of the whole temple. The pillars manifested the beauty of God in the midst of that setting. And they taught about God as well, didn’t they? But the fact that God has to establish the house and that in God and in his house then is strength. These two pillars should remind us of two other pillars that we sang about a little while ago in the song we just sang.

Remember we talked before about how in the wilderness, God led the people with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Two pillars. And these pillars then remind us of God’s manifesting himself in those pillars to the people of God. And remember we talked about those verses several months ago, several weeks ago about those pillars. We read the passage of scripture where those pillars are talked about.

And remember throughout that passage of the fact that God would lead at those pillars and the people would follow. The pillars would lead them. The people would obey and follow the pillars. It’s repeated time after time in that chapter talking about the pillar of cloud, the pillar of fire. The pillar then manifests the truth of God to the world and it also manifests the leadership of God and the need to obey God in everything.

Those two pillars are combined into one pillar in a reference in Exodus 14:24. In Exodus 14:24, the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire are combined actually into a description of one pillar. “And it came to pass, that in morning watch the Lord looked unto the host of the Egyptians through the pillar of fire and of the cloud and troubled the host of the Egyptians.”

So here the Egyptians are pursuing the people of Israel into the Red Sea. God in the morning looks down through a single pillar of fire and cloud. He looks down through that pillar, sees the Egyptians, and then throws the Egyptians into confusion. So you’ve got this picture of God at the top of one pillar of fire and cloud. Now that’s the picture that we have before us in Ephesians here. The church is the pillar of the truth.

The truth of course is Jesus Christ or God himself in terms of his covenant law, his truthfulness. The pillar is the pillar of the truth. The same imagery is pictured here in the old covenant. We had the single pillar of fire and cloud and God at the top of that pillar looking down through the pillar. So if the church is to be the pillar of God, the church must manifest God’s beauty as that portion of the temple did and the church must also manifest in the necessity to obey God as well the same way that the two pillars of cloud and fire and then the pillars in the temple that stylized those two pillars did as well.

So the pillars manifest God. They manifest God in, as I said before, in the strength envisioned in one of the pillars in the stability of the other pillar and the need for obedience. In the theological workbook of the Old Testament, these comments about the pillars make are quite appropriate. Speaking now of the pillar of fire and cloud or rather, I’m sorry, speaking of the two pillars in the temple, in any event, the pillars with their strength, beauty and symbolic dimensions were likely represented the presence of the Lord and the permanence of the Davidic house. In the same way the two pillars combined into one pillar in Exodus 14:24 says that these dual tokens of the presence of Yahweh in leading, directing and protecting his people were designed for the comfort of Israel and for the consternation of his enemies.

God manifests himself through those pillars and he manifested his strength, his permanence and his requirement for obedience in terms of following him. Now that means that the church, the institutional church, if it is a pillar of the truth, must do those same things. Does the institutional church today manifest the strength of God?

As I was thinking about this week, I thought, well, you know, my perception of the institutional church is far from one of strength. The institutional church is seen as anemic and weak today, isn’t it? It’s not a pillar of strength anymore in the world. It’s not a pillar of truth. It’s let itself be run down and broken up as it were. Stability, we don’t see that in the church either. And certainly, the church has forsaken its requirement to demonstrate the necessity of obeying God’s law as well.

The church has neglected its importance in these areas, the institutional churches have, and so turned their back upon the very things that God uses to characterize them in this passage before us.

The verse goes on to tell us that the church is the support of the truth. Now, I don’t think the support here has to be thought of somehow separately than the pillar. This talks about the implications of the pillar, which was we’ve now talked about. The symbolic importance of that pillar in manifesting God’s glory and God’s beauty. But now we’re talking about the functionality of that pillar is that it supports the truth. Okay? It’s the support or bulwark of the truth.

That’s a tremendous thing to think about for a minute, isn’t it? How does the church support the truth or hold it up or make sure that it continues to be manifested in the world around us? Well, I think it does it at least by no questions. Good. Okay. In that case, I think Steve Samson has a couple of prayer requests.

First of all, in 1 Timothy 1:3, we have the following: “As I besought thee to abide still at Ephesus, when I went into Macedonia, that thou mightest charge some that they teach no other doctrine.”

And we looked at various other verses in 1 Timothy and Titus where the institutional officers of the church, the eldership, are required to charge people to teach the truth. And if they don’t do it they’re to take action against them. They’re teaching heresy and they’re to be stopped. And in no uncertain way there we looked at the use of the terms there for command, the dictates of God, etc. The institutional office of the church are responsible for guarding the truth and defending the truth and the church then, if it follows its responsibility in terms of doing that and defending the truth becomes a support then of the truth.

Secondly, the church is the support of the truth when it propagates the gospel. In Romans 10:17 we read that faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Paul says then that if people don’t go out, if the gospel isn’t preached, then there’ll be no faith. God uses the secondary means of the church as the means of propagating the gospel. And because he does that, the church then becomes the support of the truth.

Well, here again, the institutional churches that we may look at in our country today have not really done too good by the measure of the standard of God’s word. They have taught a minimalistic gospel as we said earlier and as a result there’s no discipline in the church. There’s no defense of the truth and as a result the truth is not supported in the institutional churches today. To the extent that the church has not propagated the gospel and not propagated the whole truth, they’ve also denied the responsibility or walked in disobedience to it to support the truth.

By the way, when we read here that the institutional church is the pillar in support of the truth, it goes on in the passage in verse 16 to talk about without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness. “God is manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.”

The gospel is talked about there. And so, I think that when it talks about the truth in these passages, it’s talking about all the gospel of Jesus Christ and the truth of God.

Well, in any event, we see then that the church is required institutionally to be the dwelling place of God and as a result, holy and sanctified. The church is portrayed as the pillar of the truth manifesting God’s beauty in the earth manifesting God’s stability and strength and the necessity of obedience to God and his direction and the church is to be the support of the truth defending the truth and propagating the gospel in the world around it.

That’s the call for the church and that then is why we have taken so many months here to talk about the institutional church. Two reasons. First of all because the institutional church is given great importance in the scriptures in the verses that we’ve just read before us. It is really incredible if you read this verse and start to think of the implications of this for the institutional church. The institutional church now in this passage is said to be the dwelling place of God, the pillar and support of the truth. That’s a tremendous title to give to any institution on earth. And yet when God gives it to the church, it becomes it should have tremendous implications for us in terms of the importance of the church.

If the church is that important in terms of supporting and manifesting the truth of God in the world and of being his dwelling place in a special way that the rest of the world isn’t, then we should spend a lot of time talking about the government of that church. That’s one reason. But there’s a second reason as well. We spent so much time on it in the last six months and that is because, as we’ve recognized time after time again in the scriptures, with the increased responsibility or with increased duty given to the church, the church has a tremendous obligation to walk in obedience to it.

To the extent that the institutional church is given a tremendous place of priority in God’s ordering of things, to that extent that the church fails in her role, her judgment will be greater. And so we see a little more now why when judgment is talked about in the scriptures, it says the judgment must begin at the household of God. They have a tremendous blessing in terms of being given this responsibility by God, but they also have a tremendous obligation then to walk in obedience to it and an heightened sense of accountability and judgment should they fail in that process.

Now, it’s the second point that primarily has led to our need to rediscover what the scriptures say about church government. The church, as we said earlier, instead of being a household of God cleaned up at beautiful dwelling place of his is overgrown with weeds and it’s almost falling down like the house we moved into. Big problems with it. And so because of those problems, we have to today begin to reconstruct our understanding of the church as an institution of God.

And that’s why we spent so much time with the government of the church. We’re trying very hard in this church to dig out as it were the weeds to uncover the steps as it were that God has told us to walk in terms of the institutional church. When I talked a little bit earlier about the order of worship that we’ve used, that didn’t just, we didn’t just decide well this looks good to us let’s do it. Over a period of time we tried to say what does God require in terms of worship? What’s the patterns of worship that God sets up? What are his tiles look like underneath all the grass and dirt that the ages, the last couple hundred years in this country have allowed to grow over the institutional church?

Try to dig that back, see God’s pattern for how the institutional churches to be governed and then walk in obedience to it. And so we talked about church government and when we began a series six months ago the necessity to talk about eldership and deacons in the church. We didn’t just want to say, well, this is what the church teaches today. Let’s go with that. We recognized that what so many institutional churches teach today is not the truth of God. Is not that manifestation of the pillar, the magnificence and the strength of God, but something else.

And so, we had to be corrective about it. Now, I was watching Ted Koppel had a special Nightline Friday night about AIDS, national town hall meeting. It went on for four hours. I only watched maybe an hour of it or so. But it was interesting. He had a panel of maybe 20 people on there or more. And they had one clergyman. Of course, they always have to have a clergyman. They had on some Catholic priest from Southern California, I believe, to speak for the church.

And the man just sat there most of the time. And I believe it was after a they had a lady there representing prostitutes, you know, which was interesting too that they would be, you know, given that kind of place in terms of representation of the needs of the country. The prostitutes speak now, you know, and everybody has a great amount of reverence for them and everything. Well, after this prostitute spoke on what she saw some of the problems with AIDS and the public misperceptions of it, they asked the clergyman to respond.

And now think about what I’ve just said in terms of the church being the dwelling place of God and supporting and upholding the truth and manifesting the truth of God. That clergyman got up. I took some notes. Where are they? He said, “Well,” he said, “I think that the churches today have to listen more to what Jesus said. Now, Jesus didn’t really talk about sex. He said, he said, I don’t think he used the word sex once.”

Well, of course, that obviously isn’t true to begin with. He said, “When Jesus said we shouldn’t stand in judgment of other people. Jesus said, if you’re he who’s without sin, let him cast the first stone. You know, we shouldn’t judge people at all. Jesus says that we should love unconditionally. Jesus said,” he said, “this Catholic priest said that we should love those most who are most vulnerable.”

This priest representing the truth of God, part of the institutional church which is called to do these things said that we should learn to love unconditionally and love primarily those who are most vulnerable. What’s he saying in the context of that show? He’s saying if there’s anybody at all we’re going to love today, it ought to be the homosexuals. They have this tremendous problem with AIDS. And that’s the message of the church is portrayed on national TV. And of course, people applauded a lot. You know, they liked that a lot.

But was that holding up the truth of God as a pillar of the truth? Well, no, it wasn’t. Now, it’s interesting that occurred for a couple reasons. One reason is that this passage of scripture that I just read has been used historically by the Roman Catholic Church as saying that it is the sole repository of the truth. It is the church and it’s the pillar and foundation of the truth. It relies on these verses to say, “We’re the institutional church, therefore, we are these things,” as if the institution of the form itself is what’s stressed in these verses.

But you know, Paul uses the same word of pillar of the church when he talks about Peter, Cephas, and James and John and Peter in Galatians 2. Let’s just look there for just a second. It’s kind of interesting. Galatians 2, verse 9: “When James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, received the grace that was given unto me, perceived the grace was given unto me…”

He’s talking about these three men who seemed to be pillars. He said, now it’s interesting because up in verse 5 and 6 he says talking again about the leaders of the church to whom he gave place by subjection, no not for an hour that the truth of the gospel might continue with you. Verse six: “But of these who seem to be somewhat, whatsoever they were, maketh no matter to me. God perceiveth not man’s person. For they who seemed to be somewhat in conference added nothing to me.”

What Paul is saying here is that if these three men who seemed to be pillars of the truth had denied the truth of the gospel in this conversation, in this meeting, they had by rejecting the truth of the word, they were no longer pillars of the church. If Paul thought that simple placement in the form of the institution guaranteed them a participation in terms of being pillars, he wouldn’t have said these men seem to be pillars. They would have been pillars.

But Paul said, “No, no, these men seem to be pillars and they are pillars of the truth if they abide by the truth of the gospel.” Well, the Catholic Church then is in big problems when they have men such as this man. And by the way, he wasn’t just representing himself. He was representing a pastoral letter that was produced, I believe, by the bishops of Southern California on this subject. So the institutional church itself here is saying unconditional love. Love most those who are homosexuals infected with AIDS.

Now the Roman Catholic Church is in great trouble then and denies the truth of this passage before us. But and that’s easy, that’s an easy shot to make, isn’t it? But you know, there’s another way to deny the responsibilities that these verses talk about other than outright lying about them. What that man, of course, did. He twisted the truth of God into a lie, told a lie, representing the truth, and so demonstrated his non-participation in the real church of Jesus Christ.

But there’s another way to do that. Calvin in writing in this verse says the following: “Accordingly, in reference to men, the church maintains the truth because by preaching the gospel, excuse me, by preaching the church proclaims it because she keeps it pure and entire because she transmits it to posterity. And if the instruction of the gospel be not proclaimed, if there are no godly ministers who by their preaching rescue truth from darkness and forgetfulness, instantly falsehoods, errors, impostures, superstitions, and every kind of corruption will reign. In short, silence in the church is the banishment and crushing of the truth.”

Is there anything at all forced in this explanation? I don’t think there is. You see, you don’t have to actually lie about what God says in his word the way that Catholic priest did on that TV show. But to simply be silent is a denial of responsibilities the institutional church has according to these scriptures before us. To be silent opens the door then to all the superstitions, errors, lies that Calvin talked about in his commentary.