p. 6 | The Head of the Church

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Aug 10, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 32.

The Head of the Church.

The church of Christ is confined to no one age or dispensation in the development of God's plan.

The church of Christ is continuous from the time that God called out some from the slavery of sin, and they responded to His call.

When John saw her in glorious symbol at the beginning of the Christian era, for five hundred years she had been travailing and longing for the conquering Son. That church brought Him forth, and rejoiced in His victories.

The very word rendered “church,” ekklesia, means the “citizens regularly summoned” in the Greek Old Testament as well as the New.

The One who calls is the “God of all grace” through Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ uses angels of light, uses His messengers among men, sends the Holy Spirit; but all of these abide by the faithful Word, and summon God’s children by its Gospel of warning and invitation.

He calls from sin to righteousness; from selfishness to unselfishness; from lust to love; from Babylon to Jerusalem; from this world to the heavenly; from Satan to Christ; from the bondslaves of sin to the free service of God; the children of death to be sons and daughters of God. And he who yields to that call with all his heart, in the clearest light he sees, is a member of the called-out ones, the church of Christ. All this, and more, we have learned in former studies.

Her Glorious Head.

While the church is in the world she is not of the world. Her warfare is not with flesh and blood. Eph. 6:12. The weapons of her warfare are not carnal. 2 Cor. 10:4. While she herself is in the flesh, she fights with spiritual foes. “For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Eph. 6:12. Therefore is the church represented symbolically in heaven, indicating her origin and the nature of her field of labor and conflict.

She must have a head. Everybody, every organization, to do effective work, must have a head. Every organization must have a head fitted to its needs. It would be unwise to take one all his life a monk, and place him at the head of an army. It would be folly to take a sailor, and place him as foreman over a printing establishment. It would be suicidal to place the operations and discipline of a regular army in active, strenuous warfare in the absolute control of a farmer. Men demand trained leaders, successful leaders, skilled leaders, fitted by nature, by discipline, by service, to lead, to command, to instruct, to be the head.

Such a leader, in the superlative degree, has the church militant, even Jesus Christ. “Behold,” says Jehovah, “I have given Him for a witness to the peoples, a Leader [“Prince,” margin] and Commander to the peoples.” Isa. 55:4.

And what a Leader! He was with the Eternal Father before the world was; through Him the creative acts went forth: “Let there be worlds,” “Let there be light,” “Let there be a firmament;” He was made in the likeness of sinful flesh, fought man’s spiritual battles in the flesh, died in man’s behalf, and rose a triumphant Conqueror, the God-man forever. For thus is it written of Him, “the Son of His love!” “In whom we have our redemption, the forgiveness of our sins; who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in Him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through Him, and unto Him; and He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. And He is the Head of the body, the church; who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things He might have the pre-eminence. For it was the good pleasure of the Father that in Him should all the fulness dwell.” Col. 1:14–19.

This is the Head of the church, both militant and triumphant. It is not His plan that a cordon of ecclesiastical police, a string of intermediaries, shall separate between Himself and His church, or Himself and each one of His children. For not only is

He the Head of His church; “but,” says an apostle, “I would have you know, that the Head of every man is Christ.” 1 Cor. 11:3. His headship is not alone with the congregate mass, but with the individual soul.

A Life-Union.

The union between the head and the body is life-union. The head is bound to the body by living bone and flesh and cord and tendon and muscle and nerve and vein and artery. There is life-union, there is working union, there is sympathetic union.

Even so is the union between Christ and His church. Out in the great world, unresponsive to his call, unregenerate men are “separate from Christ, . . . having no hope and without God in the world,” “alienated from the life of God.” Eph. 2:12; 4:18. But in Christ Jesus they “are made nigh” into life-union with Him. Eph. 2:13–22.

This life-union and its results are beautifully expressed in the wonderful prayer of our Lord’s, recorded in John 17. Its very opening is vibrant with life: “Father, the hour is come; glorify Thy Son, that the Son may glorify Thee: even as Thou gavest Him authority over all flesh, that to all whom Thou hast given Him, He should give eternal life. And this is life eternal, that they should know Thee the only true God, and Him whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.” He tells the Father that He had revealed to them God’s character, that He had taught them His Word. He declares that they are not of the world, and prays that they may be kept from its evil by being sanctified through the Word of truth, even as was He. And this life-union, this sanctification through God’s truth, is the basis, the essential, of the union He prays for, and the blessed results which are sure to follow: “That they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us; that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me. And the glory which Thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one as We are one: I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that Thou didst send Me, and lovedst them as Thou lovedst Me.”

Not by Creed or Council,

not by human law or ordinance, not by pope or priest or order, not by confederation or association or statute law, are God’s true children bound together. No human, fallible head is designed of Him to sit in His temple to direct its worship, to dole out blessings for pay, and curses at will. No, a thousand times, no. The “Head of the church,” “of every man,” is Christ Jesus our Lord, whose word alone is supreme, whose life only is power; who is in living touch and sympathy and life-relationship with every child of His.

[Of the Gifts Bestowed upon His Church, and the Test of the Church, will we speak next.]