“Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:”
With the church as she is today, it is impossible for us to leave this most explicit verse that commands that the church should not be as she now does appear to be, that is, living in absolute chaos and discord in a man made kingdom of God; which is not a kingdom, but an invention of not so clever minds aided by the inspiration of the devil himself. Grammatically speaking, and there is no controversy here, our verse can be better understood as saying this; Until we all come in the unity of the faith of the Son of God, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:. It will be most profitable for us to grasp exactly what the apostle is saying in this verse.
In our last article we showed how the unity of the faith has specific reference to Christian teaching and of Christian doctrine. But, it would be amiss to not address the two terms more succinctly. Now whereas the unity of faith of the Son of God and the knowledge of the Son of God are both applicable to the fact that christian doctrine and the understanding of this doctrine is essential to the knowledge of Christ, and Christ Himself is the centre of the entirety of the Christian faith. Thus we can generalize the statement like this, that Christ is the centre and object of the faith and knowledge of Christ is the substance of this very same faith. And, the fact that all Christians will eventually achieve this unity is proof in fact that we must be diligent in protecting the doctrines and how they are taught. It is what our great apostle was diligent in doing and we can read in his epistles of how he went to great length of pains to correct the churches when they were led or went astray on their own. How much more should we?
Our verse begins with “Until we all come”. This shows us that God has a plan and is engaged with His creation in time. God Himself is the creator of time and though He is not subject to time, He has in His eternal decrees and judgments found it righteous, holy, and good to work out His plan of salvation and redemption on this cosmic stage of time whence we now all exist. It might seem as though God has left our stage, but history and the bible bear witness that God is indeed very longsuffering and providential. And, that no matter what our opinion of the times that we are now living might be, God is working and has been working out His plan. He tells Abram, before his name is changed to Abraham, that Abram’s progeny would inherit the land of Canaan. When Abram asked how this would be known the Lord foretold of His plan, that Abram’s seed would be four hundred years in a foreign land and that for the last four generations would be in bondage and oppressed; which they were. Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers, became a high ruler in Egypt. He later brought his family to Egypt to preserve them from a great famine, and everyone lived in a prosperous state for awhile. Then a new Pharaoh ascended and the Israelites were now put to hard labour for four generations. And then the Lord says this to Abram, concerning the promised land, He says “…in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.” Well, when the Israelites finally did enter the promised land under the leadership of Joshua the Amorites iniquity had become full to the brim and God passed judgment against them in the form of Joshua’s conquering army (Joshua 10). In fact, we are told that the Lord God Himself, in judgment, slew more Amorites with hailstones from the sky than did Joshua and the armies of Israel. And, to make the absolute slaughter of judgment perfect, Joshua commanded the sun and the moon to stand still; and for the span of a day the sun and moon stood motionless in the heavens whilst the judgment of the Amorites was completed, “And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the LORD hearkened unto the voice of a man: for the LORD fought for Israel.”(Jos 10:14) God told Joshua ” Fear them not: for I have delivered them into thine hand;”(verse 8) and Joshua believed God, and commanded the sun not to go down until all that God had promised was accomplished. In Amos we are told that God was the author of the Amorites destruction. “Yet destroyed I the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars, and he was strong as the oaks; yet I destroyed his fruit from above, and his roots from beneath.”(Amos 2;9) So, the bible shows us that God has a plan and our very own history of His church shows the same.
Look at how the middle, or dark ages as they are called, produced a most miserable godless Roman Catholic church institution that had so long ago left the unity of the faith of Christ and had embarked on their very own man made kingdom; not too dissimilar to today! And, history shows us God Almighty raising up His saints, men like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus as pre cursors some one hundred and fifty years before what He would accomplish in His men like Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox and others. God reformed the doctrines of the church in these saints of His and then went on to reform the worship of the church in subsequent generations of His saints.
And then, about one hundred and fifty years ago, there began a great unravelling of God’s reformation. Men, like Old Testament Israel on so many occasions, have again turned to their own devices. They no longer worship God directly, but they have made a golden calf and claim to be worshipping God. They say Jesus Christ and hold up their idols and invite the heathen to worship Yahweh God in manners that even an ancient Egyptian could acquiesce too. We are in the age of the ‘Deformation’ as it were, and except that God has reserved unto Himself seven thousand that will not bow the knee to man’s idea of the church of God we would, of all peoples, be entirely defeated. But, God has a plan!
And, His plan, of a part as it is revealed in our scripture, includes the fact that all the saints will be made perfect. This plan is also centred in Christ, and it is here, in Christ, that we all come. Now, of course, we all refers to christians only, Paul never wrote anything to the unbelievers, only to the church. In fact there is nothing in all the epistles of the New Testament, Paul, Peter, James, John, Jude, or Hebrews, that is written to anyone but christians. Paul tells us that even if the unbeliever were to read the scripture that it would be most unprofitable and confusing to them “natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God”(1 Cor 2;14) In our verse here, the apostle then goes on to expound, that what the final goal is that God will accomplish is that we all, by coming to this unity of faith of Christ and the knowledge of Christ, will become a perfect man. We should have no problem with this word perfect, it means mature, complete and whole, full grown as it were. And the next statement “…unto the measure of the stature (or age) of the fulness of Christ:” Tells us how we all will become perfected, complete that is.
Now, at this point we must point out a fact of what this perfect man is, it is not us as individual Christians, there was some confusion in the past due to the fact that the word for ‘man’ in this sentence is that of a male and not mankind in general. So, obviously the perfect man cannot represent us as individual christians, for what of all the women in the church then? No, the perfect man here is the church, and the church is the body of Christ and our Lord Christ is the head. This body of Christ illustration is by far Pauls favourite analogy for describing the church. And, this is not the only instance in which Paul describes the church as Christ as we see in this passage here, “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. “(1Cor 12;12) So we are agreed that the “perfect man” is the church in a mature grown up state of which is complete and whole and measures up to the “stature of the fulness of Christ:”. This perfect man will not have arrived until every part, no matter great or small, has become fully mature and can grow no further.
Now obviously not all parts are equal or identical, the illustration of the body makes that impossible. Eyes, toes, fingers, arms, torso, these are all parts, but they are not the same; neither are christians. But, when this body is complete it will be like unto Christ, glorious! Many of the body have gone on to that glory and are with our Lord now. They cry “How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” “As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.”(Rom 8;36) Is this perhaps what is meant in Revelation chapter 20? “…the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.” We don’t claim to know, but we do know that Christ will present a perfect church, complete and whole, when “in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him:”. No one save God knows when this perfect man will be complete, but when it is it can be said that the “fulness of the gentiles has come in” and that “all Israel has been saved”.
So, how does God fill His saints with faith and knowledge? Our Lord Jesus Christ has provided the way, the truth and the life that should bring His sheep to their fulness, by giving “some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers;”. This is what Paul tells us, that it is Christ Himself that ordains the men of these offices. Not man or man’s institutions, only Christ can call and equip a pastor and teacher. It is God that justifies, not man. Does the scripture not prove that God calls His prophets, and does history not show that it has been God providentially moving through Christ by the Holy Spirit in men like Augustine, Luther, and Spurgeon that has made them and all saints like them, great and small, the great heralds of His truth? From the mighty John Bunyan to the unknown preacher of no place in particular, Christ gave that man to the church “For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ:”(vs 12)
Without “the unity of the faith of the Son of God, and of the knowledge of the Son of God,” being preached and taught by God’s men of His calling the church is in a most desperate state of want. When Paul makes his general statement in verse 3 “Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” He is addressing these christians with his first exhortation of the epistle. And what we have previously shown is that “the unity of the Spirit” means an agreement of views. What views you may ask? The views that comprise the unity of the Spirit are the first three chapters of the apostles epistle. The first word of chapter four is “therefore”, as in now that I’ve taught you all the great doctrines that flow outward from the reality that is Christ, i.e. the faith of the Son of God, and the knowledge of the Son of God, now, says the apostle keep it! I’ve given you the truth that is Christ and Christianity, I’ve been the herald that God has made me to be, and as he tells these elders of this church in Acts 20 “I kept back nothing that was profitable unto you, but have shewed you, and have taught you publickly, and from house to house, Testifying both to the Jews, and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.”(vss 20,21). This is the unity of the faith!
The church has forgotten this fundamental truth of faith and knowledge and dove headlong into the depths of the ‘Deformation’. The term ‘Reformation’ has been prostituted and dressed up as an harlot that parades herself as modern bandstand worship and preaching with doctrine as loose as her virtue. Men have given God’s offices to whomever they please. They have invited the world philosophers and psychologists to instruct them how to appeal to the heathen so that the pews might be full. And many of these heathen call themselves Christians and seemingly make up the majority of those who profess the name of Christ as Lord and fill these pews and the pulpits.
Missionary work has been made into an industry, both at home and abroad. Thousands graduate from schools that then proclaim them fit to teach and to preach. These institutions require nothing more than money and the passing of a curriculum in order to qualify a man, or in some instances a woman, as being fit for ministry. We must point out a significant fact at this point and that being that these institutions are profit based, financially speaking that is. And, we have as yet not found that scripture acknowledge that God should ordain for profit institutions to do such work, for this work is God’s and His alone. Many a saint has education and this is not a problem, the problem is that the education is the qualification and not God’s using of that man, with or without a formal education. So many examples could be cited here, but simply using the apostle Paul as our highest educated preacher and the apostle Peter as our lowest should suffice. One a graduate of the highest religeous school, the other an ignorant fisherman! It was God who ordained these men and this has not changed.
Modern culture has now become the norm for these so called preachers to illustrate whatever it is that they believe they are teaching from God’s word. Expository preaching, where it claims to exist, is nothing more than taking a scripture and then elaborating the world through it, and this is at best, at worst these expositors are twisting God’s revelation into a philosophy held by the Greeks or of a political movement de jour.
The gospel of Jesus Christ has one thousand and one different meanings and approaches in these times. The devil is never mentioned in any seriousness if at all. Scripture has become a matter of opinion and not fact. Others have dogmatized scripture to be so literal that black has become white and white become black. Churches will schism over the slightest of differences. Dispensationalism is tolerated as orthodox by some. Not only that, but there are cults that are regarded as christian denominations. There are sexually immoral criminals, standing in pulpits teaching something that claims christianity. Others that are preaching social justice either for fear of persecution or for profit. There is a new generation of theonomy advocates who talk politics more that Christ. There are people who truly believe that God wrote the bible in the English tongue of AD 1611. Arminianism in its most extreme anti biblical form is tolerated and applauded by some of those who claim to be Protestants. There are people claiming Christ who are playing in death metal bands, performing rap music, selling rock music, and making money hand over fist whilst doing so. And my list could go on and on.
These are but a few of the symptoms of the visible church that show how sick she truly is. And worst of all of these symptoms is this, there are professing Christians that when asked would say that they are biblically reformed and have no problem mentioning Luther or Calvin or Knox. It is a disgrace and a shame to the name christian.
My dear reader, what the church needs more than anything else is “the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God”. We find it impossible to accept anything less than perfect doctrine concerning our Lord Christ and His work. And, you may say “O but this or that person, or this and that denomination is right on the gospel”, and we say what the apostle Paul said in Galatians chapter 1, “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.” This is how serious it is my dear reader. We’ve had the Scripture revealed to us and in our own language for over five hundred years, there is absolutely no excuse to be wrong on anything that God has made foundational to the faith. It was once and for all delivered to the apostles, and God has suspired into the writings of these men that we should be throughly equipped and without schism in regards to the foundational doctrines of the faith. We also have the witness of the saints down the annuls of time as God has provided that we should have able guides and not be setting out as infants crawling on our hands and our knees, but as men and as women who have desired the sincere milk of the word and have grown and matured into Christians worthy of our calling.
Scripture Alone 