Faithbase

Hello and welcome to Thinking About the Bible. Today we are thinking about the word church. Very common. We all go to church on Sundays and we read about the church in the New Testament, but the term Ekklesia in the Greek actually didn't have any particularly special meaning. It was just a gathering of citizens called out to some public assembly. It could mean anything, even a throng of people assembled by chance in the Greek language. But what's interesting is that in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures that were put together about 200 years before the time of Jesus Christ, the Hebrew word for assembly of Israel, the assembly of the Israelites, was translated in the Greek Ekklesia. And so in the Jewish community anyway, that term Ekklesia became special, like I said, because it was referring to the assembled people of God, the assembly of Israel. Now what's interesting is that that term Ekklesia, church, assembly, was, I won't say co-opted, but began to be used right away, even by Jesus. When, for instance, Matthew 16 18, when he tells Peter that on this rock I will build my church, he uses that term Ekklesia. And so right away Jesus, who is a Jew, and his disciples of course were Jews, he used a very familiar term for them. And the way they would have thought of that, I believe, is that they would have simply thought, well yeah, this is this is Jesus our Messiah, we're Jews, and of course we're the assembly of Israel, because the assembly of Israel are the true followers of Yahweh, who of course would rally around the Messiah. So when Jesus began to use that term, he was referring to Jewish people, and they wouldn't have thought much about it, as far as it having a now a more updated meaning, I guess you'd say. It's later, when Paul begins to use that term in his letters, that he uses Ekklesia, or assembly, or church, to refer to Jew and Gentile alike. And if you know, if you know your New Testament, you realize that the primary conflict in the New Testament era was this question of how Jewish are we supposed to be as a church, because we are grafted into the to the stock and and trunk of Israel. We're not replacing Israel, we become part of the true Israel in Jesus Christ. In fact, Jesus is the true Israel. And so the question that arose was, well, is the church Jew and Gentile alike in Jesus Christ, or is it Jew and Gentile who have been made to be Jews through the process of circumcision and the other some other rituals that they would go through. Paul made a very clear book of Galatians specifically, that the church is simply those who have faith in Jesus Christ. The church is the assembly of God, the bride of Jesus Christ, and we're not not going to get into the whole doctrine of the activities and so forth of the church, and what the church is supposed to do in this age, and etc. But the main thing is that the church, to define the church, it is all those who have placed faith in Jesus Christ. We are the assembly of Israel, in the sense that we are the assembly of Jesus, the true Israel, Jesus the Christ. So that's who the church is, that's what the church is, Ekklesia, Jew and Gentile alike having placed faith in Jesus Christ. We are the bride of the Christ, and we serve him here as his true people of God.