God's Sabbath

430

E NTERING INTO G OD ’ S S ABBATH R EST

great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Mark 10:42–45. In the church, which is His body, there are many members but only one Head. No member can be the head of another member. The human organism illustrates this truth well. After Paul has described different aspects of the physical body (see 1 Corinthi ans 12:12–26), he draws this parallel: “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” 1 Corinthians 12:27. All the believers in the church are the members of this body, while Christ is the one Head who guides, directs, and dissemi nates the divine orders to the listening members. “For the hus band is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour.” Ephesians 5:23. The responsibility to direct the various members, by giving them general and specific orders about how things should be done, belongs to the Head alone. Christ does this in a very dif ferent way from how we usually think of and experience “heads” of companies, churches, families, and other groups. One member cannot give specific orders to another member. Members cannot direct each other or play the role of the one true Head. In order to steer the fledgling movement away from ship wreck, God had to be the sole Plan Maker back in Christ’s day as now. The traditional evil thinking and training, which the leaders of the early Christian church had inherited from their former church system, had to be rooted out. It is not surprising that when the leaders in Jerusalem emerged from the Jewish organization, they did not leave all they had acquired behind them. We are not delivered instantly from all wrong ideas and theories inculcated by the educational influences of the background from which we come. The only kind of organization known to those men while they had been mem bers of the Jewish church was human dominated. Christ had no place in it. Therefore, they had to be taught the very different operational principles which were to be established in the Chris tian church. Such learning did not come easily. Old ideas and habits strove for the mastery, especially when it required great faith to abandon them in favor of God’s principles of operation.