Are we the Church?

So, I'm not going to talk about Christmas, by the way. We're going to go through Luke in the autumn. We're going to look at Luke 2 in the autumn. I've got nine months to prepare for that sermon, but we're not going to look at it now. We'll look at it probably around the time he probably was born. Talk about what Christians should be doing, not what they're doing today.

Almost 2,000 years ago, Jesus said to his disciples, I will build my church. And today, there are more than 2 billion people who call themselves Christian. It's the largest religion on the planet. More than a third of the planet refers to themselves as Christian. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, World Christianity consists of six major ecclesiastical groups, divided into 300 ecclesiastical traditions, which then encompasses about 33,000 denominations. There's a bit of controversy about this 33,000 number in the blogosphere.

If you go out and look that up, that's volume one, page 16, by the way, of the World Christian Encyclopedia. But even if you reduce that number by 50% or 60%, we're talking about 10,000 denominations of Christianity. The question is, how do you and I know that we are part of the church that Jesus built? Because he says, I will build my church. So, if you're Christian, you want to be part of the church that Jesus built. How do you know that you are part of the church that Jesus built? Because there are 11,000 other denominations out there of churches who recognize Jesus Christ as the Messiah, as the Son of God.

Recently, I received a question from someone interested in the United Church of God to that effect. I want to just read the question to you, because I think it's beneficial for all of us to consider. He says, Which do you consider yourselves? A church in the sense of a priesthood that God takes notice of? Or do you see yourselves as a nice, honest group of people who are simply trying your best to understand God's teachings?

If it is the first, that is, you consider yourself a priesthood, a group that God takes notice of, then how do you prove that position? Where does Christ validate your existence and your authority? I think that's a great question. Where does Christ validate our existence and our authority as a church?

I think that every single member of this congregation should know how to answer that question. Today, I want to go through some scriptures that will hopefully help you bring that more top of mind. Because we're not here as a nice group of people doing our best to understand God's teachings. We are in that sense, but we're more than that. We're part of the church that Jesus built. God takes notice of the church, and there's authority in the church.

There's authority in the ministry. There's authority among the deacons. There's authority that each of you have as members of God's church, not just a group that rents a hall here in Oakland and gets together and talks about the Bible. That's not what we're doing here. I want to go through some of these key scriptures, because I think this goes to the very heart of why we believe that this is God's church. How could so many people be wrong? This is what Mr. Herbert Armstrong said years ago. How could there be so many churches and all those people be wrong?

I mean, that sounds kind of arrogant, doesn't it? Doesn't that sound almost kind of, almost, oh yeah, all of you are wrong. Well, no, we don't want to have that approach. As we've talked about, we didn't choose this, right? God chose us. God drew us to Him through Jesus Christ. So this is not about arrogance or putting other people down.

This is just sort of what the Bible says. How can we know and have a surety of that? Let's start our examination of Matthew 16, verse 18. Matthew 16, verse 18 is really the definitive verse that the Catholic Church will go to. And the verse right after it will be the church that most Protestant denominations go to. So let's look at this verse. Many of you probably studied this verse in some detail. Matthew 16, verse 18. He says, I also say to you that you are Peter.

And he's breaking into a thought. I think many of you have read this passage before where he asked Peter, you know, who do people say I am? And they say, well, you're a prophet, you're Elijah, you're John the Baptist and so forth. And he says, well, who do you say I am? And he says, you are the son of the living God. And so in this context, then, which is a focus on Jesus Christ as the son of living God, where he says, no, flesh and blood is not revealed this to you, Peter, but God is revealed this to you.

He's now going to make a statement about where he's going to build his church. And it's going to be on Jesus Christ. And he says, I also say to you, verse 18, that you are Peter. And on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. And this is the verse that mainstream Catholicism uses to describe the fact that they derive their authority directly from Peter. Peter, according to them, was the first pope. And the church was founded on the rock of Peter.

That's what they say. I'm going to read you. This is from the Catholic Answers. This is an online blog. This is called Origins of Peter as Pope. And I think we've heard this argument before, and I think we think about what the alternatives are to that argument. But let me just read this here.

Some have tried to argue that Jesus did not mean that his church would be built on Peter, but on something else. I'm quoting this is from Catholic Answers. Origins of Peter as Pope. Some argue that in this passage there is a minor difference between the Greek term for Peter, petros, and the term rock, petra.

And that is, in fact, the case. If you look in Matthew 16 verse 18, the word Peter is the word petros, P-E-T-R-O-S. And the word right after it for rock is petra, P-E-T-R-A. They are two different Greek words. So some argue that this passage, there's a minor difference between the Greek term for Peter and the term for rock. Yet they ignore the obvious explanation, petra is a feminine noun. Indeed, it is. It's a feminine noun.

Has simply been modified to have a masculine ending since one would not refer to a man, Peter, as feminine. The change in gender is purely for stylistic reasons. And so the Catholic Church argues that in actual fact, yes, there are two different words. One is masculine, one is feminine. Peter is a masculine person and therefore it's masculine, whereas church is feminine and therefore it has to be feminine. And therefore that's why there's two different words. And they mean the same thing. And so when Jesus said he would build the church on Peter as the rock, he meant Peter as the rock and Peter as the first pope.

And then there's this session of popes all the way down to Francis the first today. And therefore the Catholic Church is the only authority that can do anything or represent Jesus Christ. They go on to say these critics also neglect the fact that Jesus spoke Aramaic. And as John 1, verse 42, we'll go there in a moment, tells us in everyday life, he actually referred to Peter as Kepha or Kephas, depending on how it's translatorated. And that term was translated then as Petros. And that's what Jesus actually said to Peter in Aramaic was, you are Kepha, and on this very Kepha, I will build my church.

And then they go on to describe how the church fathers, Tertullian, Origen, Augustine and others also reinforced this idea that the church was founded on Peter. And therefore that is the only way that you can have authority is through Peter. So what is it? I think we in the Church of God have explained for years that actually know there are two different words and they do mean two different things.

If you want to take your notes there, you can write down Strong's 4074. 4074 is the word Petros, and it is a masculine noun and it is defined in Strong's as a stone, a rock, and it is the word that or the nickname that Jesus used for Simon. Whereas the second word here, rock, is 4073, Petra. It is a feminine noun, and it also refers to a rock or a cliff or a ledge. And we've typically defined that as a larger rock as opposed to a stone. So which is it?

Is it what the Catholics say? Or is it this? How do we know? How can we be sure? Well, let's look at a few scriptures that we should have in mind. And by the way, these are great scriptures if you want to chain reference your Bible tonight later to kind of put in your margins. They're very helpful. 1 Corinthians 10 verse 4. 1 Corinthians 10 and verse 4. We see another reference to this Petra, which is the rock that the church was founded on.

1 Corinthians 10 verse 4 says, And they all drank from that same spiritual drink, for they drank of that spiritual Petra, rock. That was the Petra that the church was founded on that followed them, and that Petra was Christ. Okay, so the word here, 407-3, Petra, is the same word in 1 Corinthians 4 that we see that though the congregation in the wilderness drank from.

So Petra is referred to as Jesus Christ in 1 Corinthians 10 verse 4. Let's look over to Ephesians 2 verse 19. Ephesians 2 verse 19 says, Now therefore you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. So he's describing the church.

The household of God. That's who we are. We are the household of God. What is a household? It's a family, right? It's the family of God. Having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone. Now this word cornerstone is not the word Petra. It's a different word. Litho or Lithon. And it means a cornerstone. It's the stone that holds the whole thing together. This is the key piece of architecture upon which the building is built. Now the foundation includes the apostles, plural, and prophets, plural. But Jesus Christ is the chief cornerstone. And that's what Paul describes here.

In whom the whole building being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. That's the church. In whom you also are being built together for a habitation of God in the Spirit. So what Paul is describing is the church. He's describing the household of God, the temple being grown and built together based upon the chief cornerstone. Now let's look over in 1 Peter 2, verse 4 through 8. Let's see what the apostle Peter himself says about what the church is founded on. Because you would think Peter would have understood this if the church was going to be founded on him, and he was going to be the rock on which the church was founded. Then you would think Peter might describe this eloquently himself. 1 Peter 2, verse 4. Peter says, Coming to him as to a living stone, this is that same word, lithon, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious. That is this. And he's going to describe who Jesus Christ is as the stone. You also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house. Here we're back to this concept of family, a household. This is the church he's describing. A holy priesthood, the church is a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Therefore, it is also contained in the Scripture. Verse 6. Behold, I lay in Zion a chief cornerstone. Elect, precious, and he who believes on him will by no means be put to shame.

Verse 7. Therefore, to you who believe, he is precious, but to those who are disobedient. The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. He is that chief cornerstone of the church, and a stone of stumbling, and a petra of offense, a rock of offense. And now we have that same word, petra, again described. If Peter felt that the church was built on himself, he's certainly not doing a very good job of describing it. And you know, some people will go as far as to say that Peter and Paul, Reza Aslan says this, he's a very well-known Christian scholar, who by the way is Muslim, which is hard to compute, but a very well-known Christian scholar, Reza Aslan, says Peter and Paul were actually of two different religions.

Peter was part of this sort of Jewish Christian faith that eventually died out, and the Christianity we have today was that of Paul. And Paul took forward this new way of thinking. Peter and Paul, according to Reza Aslan, were different part of different religions. And yet, if you read 1 Peter, we just read, and Ephesians written by Paul, they seem to be saying the same thing, don't they?

The church was founded on the chief cornerstone of Jesus Christ. How can we say the church is founded on Peter? I mean, this is absurd. And yet, this is where the Catholics take their authority. The church is founded upon the chief cornerstone, the rock, Petra of offense, that people rejected. And if we go back to Matthew 16, we'll go back there for a moment. The whole context of Matthew 16 in that passage is, who is Jesus Christ? That's where the whole thing started, in Matthew 16, verse 18, if you go back there. The whole thing started when Jesus asked Peter in verse 13, who do men say that I am? That's what this is about. The church is founded upon Jesus Christ. And so, if we want to be part of God's church, the church that Jesus built, we have to be followers of Jesus Christ, because that's where the church is founded.

Now, did Jesus celebrate his birthday? Did Jesus worship God on the first day of the week?

Did any of the apostles worship God on the first day of the week?

Did Jesus teach that he was one of three parts of a Godhead, later called the Trinity?

Did Jesus come to reveal that his father's laws were harsh and unfair and had to be abolished?

Because this is what you hear, right? God's law. No, Jesus came. He didn't teach any of those things.

When Jesus comes back and he returns, is he going to embrace churches that teach those things? Oh, thank you for clarifying my laws. Thank you for clarifying the teachings that were contained in the Gospels through progressive revelation. Thank you so much, because this just wasn't good enough to clarify what I was teaching. No, he's not going to say that. He's going to come back to a group of people who are following his teachings. He's going to come back to people who are doing the same things that he did. If you listen to mainstream Protestant teaching, they'll say that at the moment of his death, everything changed. And you can't go by what Jesus did. You can't follow what he did in his life. You can't follow what he taught in his life because it had to be changed upon his death. I can't find that in the book. I can't find that scripture in the book.

This is what they say. Look over in Matthew 7, verse 21. Does that mean that these 33,000 or whatever that number is are not sincere, wonderful people? No.

I mean, I have friends who are not in the United Church of God, who are not in the Church of God. And you know what? They're wonderful people. I don't know everything about their lives, but I'm not going to sit there and judge them. But in terms of being part of the Church that Jesus built, we have to look at Matthew 7, verse 21. He's talking about people who say they're followers of Jesus Christ. That's who he's talking about.

And you know, there are people who do amazing things in the name of Jesus Christ, who put themselves at personal risk. And here it says, This should send shivers up our spine. Even for us, are we truly practicing lawful behavior in God's eyes? Are we doing the will of the Father who sent us? Are we doing God's will? You know, people who are not part of the Church of God are sincere people.

And it's not for us to judge where God is working. But we have to look at what the Scripture says. And the Scripture says that the Church was built on Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ taught in the Gospels, we can see certain things. And Paul continued those practices, and Peter continued those practices. And the New Testament Church practiced a certain way of teaching. And that's not mainstream Christian teaching today. So what happened? What happened? Well, what happened was that there were these things called Christian councils. They began with the Council of Nicaea in 8325. Constantine, who by the way, wasn't even baptized at the time, presided over that council. And they got together and they decided they were going to make some changes. Because the Jews had rejected the Roman Empire and nobody wanted to be associated with the Jews. That was not a good thing. And so they wanted to put as much distance. You can read the early Church Fathers. They wanted to put as much distance as they could between themselves and those Jewish practices. And so they made a bunch of changes. They changed, obviously, Sabbath to Sunday. They changed Passover to Easter. They went through and they made all these changes. And that is something that is called progressive revelation. Maybe people have heard that term progressive revelation. And when you apply progressive revelation, what it means, and this was a heresy that crept into God's Church in the 1990s, where progressive revelation says you cannot understand the Old Testament unless you read the Gospels. And you cannot understand the Gospels unless you read Paul. And you can't understand Paul unless, and then you fill in something after that. Like you understand the Council of Nicaea. Or you understand Joseph Smith's revelation that he received on these golden tablets. That's called progressive revelation. That God reveals things over time, and so the Church changes because God provides more revelation.

But the issue is that we cannot confuse progressive revelation with Jesus Christ revealing the Father. Because people who support progressive revelation will say, well, you see, Jesus came and he revealed things to us, and so we see progressive revelation. And why don't we turn to John 17 verse 6, and we'll see an example here.

See, Jesus came to reveal the Father, and through that he came and taught us things about the law that we didn't understand before. John 17 verse 6, I have manifested your name to the men you have given me out of the world. They were yours. You gave them to me, and they have kept your word.

Now they have known that all things which you have given me are from you. See, Jesus came to reveal the Father, and he revealed the Father to his disciples, and he's revealed the Father to us through the pages of the Gospels. And so Jesus would say, for example, in Matthew 5, he would say, you have heard it said, right, you shall not murder, but I say to you, and then he's now going to expand on what it means to murder, right? He revealed the true intent, the spiritual intent, of God's law. That doesn't mean that there's progressive revelation. That doesn't mean that you can't understand the Gospels unless you read Paul. They all fit together. The problem with progressive revelation is that it ignores Hebrews 13 verse 8. Let's look at Hebrews 13 verse 8.

And we're talking about the rock, right, that the church is founded on. Hebrews 13 verse 8 says, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Yesterday, today, and forever. So when we read that he was the rock, that the spiritual rock that the congregation of Israel drank from, and he is the rock that the church is founded on in Matthew 16. So that's yesterday, today.

That means that that's the same rock that will be forever. It's not a different rock.

So his practices, his teachings have not changed. He did not sort of keep something kind of secret and set aside, and then after he died, things are suddenly going to change. The church is based upon his teachings, and he is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

And so we derive our authority based upon the fact that we are followers of Jesus Christ.

We are followers of the doctrines which he taught to his disciples, and which his disciples then carried through and taught to the disciples that came after them. The United Church of God draws its authority through doctrine based upon the teachings of Jesus Christ. Look over in Matthew 28, verse 20. Matthew 28, verse 20. Our doctrines are consistent with what we see in Scripture, and we see here that in the final words here in the book of Matthew, we read, we'll pick it up in 19, go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you. That's the Great Commission, to teach all things that I have commanded you. And so under progressive revelation, you see what you'd say is, well, yes, we understood that in the Old Testament you didn't, you know, you had to abstain from eating pork. But we understand in the Gospels that Jesus said that it's not food that counts. And then we understand that later from Paul. That's progressive revelation. When in actual fact there were clean and unclean animals on the ark, right, there were clean and unclean animals in Israel, and five or ten years after the death of Jesus Christ, Peter still says, I have never eaten anything unclean. So Peter must have just somehow missed that three and a half years of teaching with Jesus where he said that all things were, you know, good to eat, right? And that he had been teaching that for all those years and then suddenly something changed, right? There's no progression. It's the same. It's the same teaching throughout.

We are to teach those things that he taught. The Catholic claimed that Peter was the first pope, or that Luther's sola scriptura, if you've heard that term before, only scripture, are untrue.

Historically, it's very dubious that Peter was the first pope. And Luther, for all his sola scriptura, the great scholar that he was, God did not reveal to him the fact that he had taken these 1200 years of Catholic councils and incorporated many of those things into what eventually became the Lutheran Church. And then from that, many other churches sprang.

Now, where does all this come from then? So let's go back to Matthew 16 verse 19, because once you understand that Jesus is the rock upon which the Church is founded, then you have to go to the next verse, which is also used to claim various changes, which is Matthew 16 verse 19. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

All right. So if you're Catholic, what this means is the pope speaks what's called ex cathedra.

Ex cathedra means from the chair. It's a Latin term, meaning that the pope is speaking in the place of God, and therefore he has the power to bind and to loose. And so the Catholics convene these councils, and this is what is bound and loose and so forth. If you're Protestant, and you don't subscribe to the fact that the Church was built on Peter, but it was built on Jesus Christ, you then go to verse 19 and you say, well, the Church has the authority to make changes as God reveals those changes. Again, progressive revelation. I'm going to read to you something from John Gill's exposition of the Bible, which represents mainstream Protestant teaching. I'm quoting now. But Christ gave a greater power of binding and loosening to His disciples than these men had, and which they used to better purpose. The sense of the words is this, that Peter and so the rest of the apostles should be empowered with authority from Him, that is from Christ, and so directed by Christ, by His Holy Spirit, and whatever they bound that is declared to be forbidden and unlawful should be so. And whatever they loosed that is declared to be lawful and free of use should be so. They bound or forbid the observance of days, months, times, and years, the keeping of holy days, new moons, and sabbaths, which had been used in the Jewish Church for ages past, such as the first day of the new year and of every month, and the day of atonement, and the feasts of the Passover, Pentecost, and tabernacles, the Jubilee year, the sabbatical year, and the seventh year, and the Sabbath. So they changed that. They had that power, is what He's saying. They also loosed or pronounced lawfully eating of any sort of food without distinction, even that which was before counted common and unclean, being persuaded by the Lord Jesus Christ by the words He said. So they changed the laws, unclean and unclean meats, and they changed the laws concerning the Sabbath, and they changed the whole, and they had that power. That's the mainstream Protestant teaching. But what is actually being spoken here? Did they have the power to do that? If they had said it is okay to murder, would it be okay to murder? That's one of the Ten Commandments. If it's okay to work on the Sabbath on the seventh day, that's okay. Did they have the power to change whatever they wanted, and then it would be changed in heaven?

Now, let's look at this here. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.

Now, keys here, you can make a note of Isaiah 22 verse 22. Keys is a symbol of authority.

Isaiah 22 verse 22. Let's just take a quick look at that. We'll see that that's the key in biblical terms is a symbol of authority. So if you've been given a key, you've been given a certain amount of authority to exercise something, to have access to something. Isaiah 22, it says, The key of the house of David I will lay on his shoulder, so he shall open, and no one shall shut, and he shall shut, and no one shall open. See, that's a symbol of authority and of power.

So they were given a certain symbol of authority or a symbol of power.

I won't take the time to turn there, but Revelation 3 verse 7 says as well that Jesus was given the key of David. He was given that symbol and authority. In ancient Israel, the human king was in fact the steward of God. So what that's describing is Jesus is acting on God the Father's behalf to lead. So what it says is Jesus is going to give you, and the you you can look up here, by the way, is when we say, I could say, what do you think about that? Well, there's more than one you here in this room. I'm referring to many people. Or I could be looking over here at Dr. Orth and I say, well, what do you think about that? And I'd be referring to one person. You can mean one or it can mean many in English. And here he's referring to you, the apostles. This is a plural. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. Now, you can look this up in a Bible commentary. You can look this up in any sort of reference. You'll see that the reference here is to a specific grammatical tense called the future perfect passive. And what that means is essentially, and I'll quote the New American Standard Bible here. This gives a sense of it. You can look that up. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven. Shall have been bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven. That is to say that God's law, His perfect law of liberty, has a certain understanding and spiritual significance. And that what they would have would be the ability to understand what that was. They would understand what was in heaven and what was there and that they would be able to follow that. It wasn't for them to go about making a whole bunch of changes. It was as Jesus explained, you have heard it said, you know, thou shalt not murder. Well, let me tell you murder is much more than just shooting somebody and killing them physically. Murder is also slandering them by calling them a fool. Right? He's expanded that definition. And so what this is explaining here is that they will have the keys to the kingdom of heaven. That will, they have the authority and they will actually understand the intent and purpose of God's law as it was originally given. And that they will be able then to teach that.

That's what's being described here. In other words, Christ would lead the church leadership to decisions that had already been bound in heaven, not vice versa. Therefore, Christ's statement in Matthew 16 verse 19, as well as the places, show that the apostles had authority to represent him. So they do have authority, but they don't have the ability to start changing days. Right? They don't have the ability to say, well, you know, the seventh day isn't really the day that matters anymore. It's the first day because that was the day that Jesus was resurrected. And of course, it wasn't the day that he was resurrected and that was created afterwards. Or, you know, we need to figure out who this Jesus person was. So what we're going to do is we're going to come up with this notion of God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit as being three hypostases. And that is the closed circuit of God. And nobody else can be part of that as opposed to the household of God, right? The spiritual family of God and so forth. So they couldn't go beyond those types of things.

So the church has authority to understand and to teach God's law. That's what it says, the keys of the kingdom. And that authority is given based upon following the doctrines of Jesus Christ. And that's where the United Church of God draws its authority. I can't get up here and tell you something unless I can back it up with Scripture because I'm representing the church that Jesus built. I'm not representing my own opinions. That's why we look to the Word. So if I get up here and say, you know, it's really okay if you work on Saturday afternoons as long as you come to church on Saturday morning, right? You'd say, well, does the Bible say that? If I say, well, you know, actually we're not going to count sunset to sunset anymore. We're going to use midnight to midnight. Say, well, that's where you come up with that, right? I don't have authority to say that.

I have authority to say things that are here in Scripture. And when we come to certain sort of nuances of Scripture and administrative matters, well, that's where you have the keys to the kingdom that are described here because somebody has to make a call. And so the church makes those calls on those points of, okay, what, you know, what are we supposed to do? But it's not though these are not talking about wholesale changes of establishing. Well, let's go ahead and define the soul as something that's going to be immortal because the Greeks had a really good idea on that. And we're going to borrow that from the Greeks and we're going to get this great solstice party. And even though it was really something that was long before, we're going to call that the birth of Christ.

And by the way, New Year's is part of that. Just so I just want to make sure I put that out. I said I wasn't straining Christmas, so I'll just say one thing.

Saturday, I began with Christmas and ended with New Year's. Okay. I mean, that's what we would call it today, but it began and it was a week-long celebration. So just sort of if anybody wants to go to New Year's Eve party, that's part of Saturday and earlier, too, right? So New Year's Eve is part of that same thing. And I don't have the authority to say, yeah, that's okay. That's okay. As long as you do it for Christ, it's okay. I don't have that authority. And the Protestants have that authority. And the Protestants and the Catholics don't have the authority from Peter. I hope this has been helpful. I hope you understand that we're more than just a group of people who are just trying to do our best to understand God's law. We are part of the church that Jesus built because we follow the doctrines that Jesus Christ established when He established Himself as the chief cornerstone of the Church of God.