Visualizing the Church
Having something important to say is like landing a private jet in a jungle. You need a nice long runway to land your plane safely. You don’t want to crash!
That’s what Paul is doing in Ephesians. From the start of Ch. 1 to the end of Ch. 2, he prepares the way for an extraordinary subject – the church. So, he begins his runway in eternity past and describes all that God has done bring the church into existence today.
In Ch. 2, he proves that God alone receives the credit for putting the church together. By grace alone, he has rescued rebellious people like us from our sins. Through Christ alone, he has given us peace with both with him and with one another.
Until now, we know the church is a widespread group of people delivered from sin and united by faith in Christ. Yet there’s so much more to learn. That’s why Paul gives us three analogies to help us visualize the church in our minds (Eph 2:19-22). The church is like a city, a family, and a building.
Through these analogies (or word pictures), Paul makes his runway even longer, so we will understand the church as clearly as possible. He wants us to understand that through the church, God is spreading his personal presence throughout the world.
The church is like a city.
Paul writes, “You are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints” (Eph 2:19). In this explanation, he uses social and political terms to illustrate first what people in the church are not like and second what they are like.
- Strangers describes people from a foreign country who live outside your own country and are just passing through.
- Foreigners describes people who originate in a foreign country but are living in your country now.
Both words refer to people from somewhere else who don’t belong in your country, even if they’re living there now. Because of their foreign status, they had limited legal rights, also limiting their access to social privileges and benefits.
But there are no strangers and foreigners in the church. Everyone who believes on Christ becomes a fellow citizen. This word describes a person who enjoys all the legal rights and social benefits of being a natural-born citizen.
To put this in perspective, when Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus, the city had about 250,000 – 300,000 people living there. Yet most of these people were foreign residents (“foreigners”), not citizens. In fact, evidence suggests that less than 1,000 people were actual citizens.1
This statistic reveals how special it was to be a citizen. No matter what your ethnic background may be and no matter how bad a person you once were, if you’ve believed on Christ as your God and Savior, you’re in elite company.
There are no resident aliens in the church. We are all citizens with VIP status. We’re all saints, a term that Paul used at the start of his letter to describe the Christians in Ephesus as “holy people in an unholy city” (Eph 1:1).
To be saints means God has chosen us for his own special purpose. It also shows that God doesn’t elevate one ethnicity over another. We’re not converted Israelites nor are we second-class people in God’s plan. We’re all saints with equal value in God’s sight and purpose in his plan. None of us are more holy than another. We’re all holy through Christ.
The church is like a family.
To ensure we understand how special it is to be in the church, Paul said we’re also “members of the household of God” (Eph 2:19). Being citizens emphasizes the exclusive privileges of being in the church but being members of God’s family emphasizes “a sense of belonging and closeness” that only family members enjoy.2
From a spiritual standpoint, we’re all born as spiritual orphans, abandoned and alone. We embrace mottos like “survival of the fittest,” “each for his own,” and, “may the best man win.” We say things like, “It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” and we treat each other that way.
When you believe on Christ as God and Savior, this sorry outlook goes away. You no longer live like a dog on the street.
- You become a citizen of God’s city and a member of his family.
- You get your own home within the city walls and your own room within his house.
- You get a passport to the city and keys to his house.
No matter who you were or where you came from before, you’re in. In the church, we’re all saints and children of God. We’re all brothers and sisters to one another, too.
Knowing this is the key to acting like this. To live like a saint, you need to know that you are one first. To treat one another as brothers and sisters, we need to know that we are brothers and sisters first – and in the church, that’s what we are.
The church is like a building.
Before moving on, Paul tells us the church is like one more thing. From a view of God’s city, he zooms in to a view of God’s family. Then he zooms in to the house itself – the building. The church is like a city, a family, and a building. Can you see that in your mind?
Paul says, “Having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit” (Eph 2:20-22).
This is a fascinating word picture to use here because Paul recently described God’s demolition project when he “tore down the wall” that separated Jews from Gentiles (and both from God, Eph 2:14). Now here we discover that though Christ demolished this wall, he is now constructing something entirely new in its place – the church.
This building is not a physical structure. After all, the church is not a building, it’s people. Still, thinking about a building helps us visualize the church more clearly. In fact, Paul describes a building made of people.
As members of the church, we are the building materials of the church.
We are the wooden beams, electrical wires, insulation, and drywall – the windows and the doors. As the building materials of the church, there’s one thing we are not, however – the foundation. The foundation of the church began and finished in the first century.
Can you see the difference between “having been built” (v. 20), and then “being fitted together” (v. 21) and “are being built together” (v. 22)? “Having been” describes something that happened in the past, but “being” describes something happening today.
The foundation of the church began and finished in the first century AD and happened through the “apostles and prophets” (v. 20). Paul pairs these people together throughout this letter to the Ephesians.
- Ephesians 3:5 says, “Which in other ages was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to his holy apostles and prophets.”
- Ephesians 4:11 says, “He himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers.”
Apostles were people who had seen the resurrected Christ and commissioned by him to reveal the teaching we needed from God. Old Testament teaching was good but not enough, so through the apostles, God revealed more teaching for the church in the New Testament.
Prophets were people who hadn’t necessarily seen Christ resurrected, but who gave important teaching from God until the NT was available. With the completion of the NT, apostles and prophets went away. They laid the foundation that we’re building on today.
That’s why Faith Baptist Church teaches from the Bible. No members give new revelation or visions, insights, or messages from God. Instead, we go back to the foundation – the Word of God given to us by the apostles (Acts 2:42; 2 Tim 3:16-17; 2 Tim 4:2).
The foundation had one other builder, besides the apostles and prophets. This person is Jesus Christ.
Christ is the cornerstone, the most important person of all.
“The cornerstone – the most significant part of the foundation of the temple. This large stone bore much of the weight of the building and tied the walls firmly together.”3
By saying, “Jesus Christ himself,” and not just, “Jesus Christ,” Paul announces that Christ, Christ alone, is the centerpiece of the church. Without him, the foundation would be no good. The church would be nothing.
That’s why membership in the church begins with believing the truth about Jesus (Matt 16:18; Acts 2:41; 8:37). He is the foundation of the foundation. The apostles and prophets just taught us about Christ and said what Christ wanted them to say.
The foundation has been laid, but the church building project continues.
It’s a building project that’s been going on for over 2,000 years. It is being “fitted together” and “built together” today – and it’s growing. That’s the main verb in these verses!
These two words are construction words.
- One describes the way that God joins a husband and wife together in marriage or how the different parts of our bodies join together with tendons, ligaments, and so on.
- The other describes the careful placement of each part, putting each member into the right church so that his or her gifts, abilities, personality, and resources will help build up the church in a strategic, necessary way.
That’s what God is doing for the church today – building it one piece, one member at a time. That’s how you became a part of your church. God put you there, just as a master architect assigns important pieces to a skyscraper or bridge under construction.
God isn’t building a bridge or a skyscraper, he’s building a temple.
It is a “holy temple,” which means it’s a building (a spiritual building, that is) with a special purpose from God. It is the “dwelling place” for God in this world. It’s where his personal presence, the Holy Spirit, resides.
Today, God doesn’t walk around in a garden, as he did at the beginning in the Garden of Eden. Nor does he place his presence in Moses’ tabernacle or Solomon’s Temple. What’s more, he doesn’t dwell in shrines, temples, mosques, cathedrals, or sacred spaces of any kind … but in the people of God spread throughout the nations of the world.
So as the church continues to grow, God’s true temple expands throughout the world. It (ahem, we) brings more people into contact with the personal presence of God.
Through this ever-expanding building project, God is spreading his personal presence throughout the world and becoming a neighbor to more people who need the salvation that Christ alone provides.
Think about it this way. Other religions make us go on pilgrimages to visit their holy sites, whether a temple or shrine on the other side of the world or a graveyard outside the city. But the temple of God is always expanding and coming to a neighborhood near you. It grows and travels through its members, through the Christians who live next door.
- The church is a city where we enjoy the privileges of first-class citizens.
- It is a family where we enjoy the benefits of being God’s children.
- The church is a building – an ever-expanding Temple where the Holy Spirit dwells, bringing more people into personal contact with God.
According to Politico, New York State posted new guidelines on Friday that would halt all “non-essential” construction work to fight the spread of the coronavirus. Only “essential” projects would continue, like hospitals, affordable housing, and homeless shelters.
But what about the church? Though we’re not able to gather in person and do our Saturday gospel tract outreach, has God halted the growth of the church and the expansion of his temple in our city? He has not.
Of God’s spiritual building project – the church – Christ himself said this, “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it” (Matt 16:18). With these words, Christ assures us that he is building the church today.
Just as persecution, world wars, natural disasters, even epidemics have threatened the church’s progress for centuries, these “counsels of death” cannot halt Christ’s construction of his church.
So, the question for you today is twofold:
First, are you in? Are you a member of the church and a part of God’s spiritual building project in the world? If not, then our current pandemic outbreak should cause you to fear. If you die, you will go into an eternity without God destined for wrath because of your sin (Eph 2:3). If that’s you today, then will you believe on Christ alone as your God and Savior to receive his mercy and salvation (Eph 2:4, 8-9).
Second, to the saved, how are you contributing to the construction of the church? What are you doing to help it grow stronger and expand during this challenging pandemic? Christ builds the church through its members, not apart from them.
When Christ adds you to the church, he intends to add others too through you. Who is he working on through you? These are the “good works” he has created you to accomplish (Eph 2:10). How will you expand his personal presence in the world this week ahead?
Thomas Overmiller serves as pastor for Faith Baptist Church in Corona, NY and blogs at Shepherd Thoughts. This article first appeared at Shepherd Thoughts, used here with permission.
Photo by Ben White on Unsplash
- S. M. Baugh, Ephesians: Evangelical Exegetical Commentary, ed. Wayne H. House, Hall W. Harris III, and Andrew W. Pitts, Evangelical Exegetical Commentary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015), 199-200. [↩]
- Clinton E. Arnold, Ephesians, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 169. [↩]
- Arnold, Ephesians, 171. [↩]