Living by Faith - Romans

One Body in Christ

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Living by Faith

Lesson: 49-64

Genre: Talk

Track: 049

Dictation Name: RR311Z49

Location/Venue:

Year: ?

Let us worship God. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon Him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of them that fear Him, He also will hear their cry, and will save them. Where two or three are gathered together in my name, saith the Lord Jesus Christ, there am I in the midst of them. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we give thanks unto Thee that according to Thy word Thou art ever with us; that Thou wilt never leave us nor forsake us. and so we come to Thee in the midst of a troubled world to rejoice in Thy government, to feast on the glory and victory of Thy word, to be filled with the confidence that Thou dost give, that all things work together for good to them that love Thee, to them who are the called according to Thy purpose. Feed us by Thy word and by Thy Spirit, make us strong in faith, resolute in action, and victorious in the struggle. In Jesus name, Amen.

Our scripture is Romans 12:1-5, Romans 12:1-5. Our subject: One Body in Christ. Romans 12:1-5.

“12 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.

2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.

3 For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.

4 For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office:

5 So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.”

As we begin Romans 12, we come to a point in Romans which modern commentators tells us begins the practical application of what previously was theological. Is this true? Certainly Paul develops some very far reaching doctrines in this chapter and elsewhere. One of our problems today is that the church has men in the pulpit who are seminary trained, and the seminary goes in for academic specialization. That is normal and natural in any academic routine, college or university, and seminaries and professional schools. In the academic community you separate things, you have for example in the medical profession specialization; some men who confine themselves to the eyes, others to other organs, heart specialists and so on. To a degree that has its merits, but in life we are a unity, and everything in our being is interrelated and essentially connected.

Thus, when you train people endlessly in specialization, they approach the Bible with what is a dissectionist perspective, rather than the perspective of God as He gave the word. Paul did not say as he sat down: “Go to now, I will deal with theology, and then with practical theology, and so on.” No, it was the one word of God.

This therefore has created problems in the life of faith and in the life of the church, because men seem to think that they must confine themselves to purely devotional and spiritual things on the level of the people, as though it depended on the peoples intellect, great or small, or their intellect great or small, rather than the fact that the same Spirit who gave it is able to make us understand.

So, Paul is not shifting gears, he is going on with the same, total word of God. As we saw previously, he deals with the fact of predestination, that against an elite people, God is creating an elect people. And now Paul is working to enable the elect people self consciously to see what that means. And so he begins by saying that: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”

He tells them what is the reasonable service of the elect; he goes on later to tell them not to divide themselves into an elite leadership as against the masses, the vulgar mob, but to be one body in Christ. And he begins as he develops this by saying: “We are to present our bodies as a living sacrifice to God.”

Now at this point again, some commentators tell us: “Now we present a living sacrifice, but in the Old Testament it was a dead sacrifice.” And that is nonsense. He is not talking about a sacrificial lamb, we don’t make atonement when we present ourselves as a living sacrifice. This is compared to thank offerings, such as a leavened offering, and the closest relationship of this living sacrifice is to the leavened offering. A leavened offering was something that a worshiper gave in thanks to God; he took it there, he gave it. He sacrificed it. A leavened offering is something with leaven in it, it means it can in time corrupt; which is to say that anything we give to God is a leavened offering and corruptible. We pass away, our works in time pass away, the churches we build pass away, all our offerings are leavened offerings, but God requires them; and we are to give ourselves in spite of our frailties, our weaknesses, our problems, as a leavened offering to God. He requires it.

The word ‘present’ is in the Greek a word used for presenting a sacrifice or an offering, it is used in the New Testament for the presentation of Christ in the temple, for Paul presenting his converts to God, and Christ presenting the church to God. It is a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. “Offer unto God thanksgiving and pay thy vows unto the most high,” we are told by the Psalmist. This is what Paul requires of us.

Elsewhere he has more to say on the subject, for example in Roman 6:13 “Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, but yield yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.” Again in Romans 6:16 “Know ye no that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey, whether of sin unto death or of obedience unto righteousness.” Again, in 1 Corinthians 6:13 “Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.” And then finally in 1 Corinthians 6:20 “For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.”

There is a very important point here which is routinely overlooked or perverted by pietistic preachers. “I beseech ye therefore brethren by the mercies of God that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice.” Bodies. The word is ‘somata.’ It refers to the body as a whole, everything inclusive of us in our physical existence. So you can say in modern parlance: “Body and soul” with the emphasis on the fact that we are a physical, this worldly creature.

Thus, Paul does not say: “This means we are summoned to spiritual exercises, far from it; we are summoned to the offering of our total life to God’s service wherever we are, and in our respective callings.” Paul speaks of our bodies here, and later he speaks of the body of Christ in the same passage, we are one soma, one body in Christ.

So much has been said of the mystical body of Christ with the emphasis on mystical, that we tend to forget that it is spoken of with respect to the life of Christ’s living body here; men, women and children in Christ, in this life.

Paul is still telling us, as at the very beginning of Romans, how to live by faith. And he tells us what is our reasonable, or it can be translated our logical, service. And the service is not limited to the church nor the state, but is inclusive of every area of life; and we are told that the mercies of God should prompt this response in us.

As a result, he goes on in verse 2 to say: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”

The word ‘conformed’ is very interesting, because it is a word that had reference to responding to the currents of our particular age, the fashions of thinking, the fashions of living; its flowing with the stream. That is what Paul is talking about. ‘Don’t flow with the stream of the world, with the currents of your time; do not be assimilated, do not live in terms of accommodation to the temper of this world, but be ye transformed.’ Transformed.

Well, the word transformed is also very interesting, because it is used in the gospels to refer to the transfiguration of Christ. It can be translated as ‘transfigured.’ Our whole life is to be changed, to be altered, so that we have a different motivation, a different purpose; we are transfigured, we are a new creation.

So that, this verse is a key one. We are to be transformed so that we may understand and know what the will of God is and how to conform ourselves to it. Moffat in his version has a telling rendering of this verse and I quote: “Instead of being molded to this world, have your minds renewed; and so be transformed in nature, able to make out what the will of God is.”

Until we allow the Spirit to transform us, we are not going to be able to make out the will of God, because we are going to resist it. What is the will of God? Well, at this point John Murray gives the clearest explanation. He says and I quote: “The will of God is the law of God, and the law is holy, and just, and good. We may never fear that the standard God has prescribed for us is only relatively good or acceptable or perfect, that it is an accommodative norm adapted to our present condition, and not measuring up to the standard of God’s perfection. The will of God is the transcript of God’s perfection and is the perfect reflection of His holiness, justice and goodness.”

So that, Murray says, if you want to know the will of God, here it is in the Bible. And it is not an accommodation to our shortcomings and sins, nor to the primitive condition of the Hebrews; it reveals the will of God.

So, we do not find the will of God by meditation or by pietistic experience, but by reading His word in the Spirit. Faith is thus not merely a private and a spiritual concern, but a public and private expression, both, of God’s life and law through us.

At this point, Kasemann’s comment on this verse and its implications is superb. I quote: “Since he, Paul, is concerned with service in daily life in the secular world, he is unable to see in Christian existence a private matter. It has a public or eschatological character which is important for the world. When God claims our bodies, in and with them He reaches after His creation” (in other words through us) “only in existence oriented to the world does justice to His will to rule. If this will is denied of course, this life is one of conformity to the cosmos, which is according to 1 Corinthians 7:31, destined to perish. Christian existence, publicly offered to God corporally as a sacrifice, is in all circumstances a pointer to the new world which has come in Christ to the kingdom of God. It will be in fact taking form according to the particular situation, a demonstration against the present world.”

In other words, God transfigures us, and through us transfigures the world. So if we treat our faith as a private matter, then we are in trouble. John Lofton interviewed someone a while back, in fact someone on the Whitehouse staff, who had made some outrageous statements, and he questioned the validity of those statements, given the fact that she was supposed to be a Christian; and the response was: “Well, my faith is a private matter.” And John made clear that the faith is a public concern. If it is only a private matter it is a dead faith, incapable of expressing itself.

It is interesting to note in passing, that Paul’s words in verse 2 are in the present, passive, imperative. They are a command. It is not: ‘and be not conformed’ but: “Stop being conformed.” It is an order, God’s order through Paul. What is required is a radical reversal of values of our total life.

In verse 3 he has more to say on this reversal: “For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.”

We are not to be governed by our self evaluation, or by our opinions, but in terms of faith in God’s standards. Our self opinion is likely to be very wrong; we are to see ourselves as God sees us, and we are therefore better able according to the measure of faith that we have.

Thus we do not judge ourselves in terms of our gifts and abilities as against others, but in terms of grace. Paul is again undercutting elitism. He is saying that if you think you are better than other people, there is something wrong with you. We are not to use our own opinions, but we are to see that all that we have is of grace. As he makes clear in Corinthians: “What are we that we have not received? And if we have received it, then why should we boast or glory therein?” And So Paul is emphatic. No elitism. Our talents, our gifts, are from the Lord and to be used for Him. We are to be grateful for what we have and are, and not proud. The greater the measure of our faith, the saner and more grateful is our opinion of ourselves. We are then governed not by pride, but by grace; and we see ourselves not in our self importance, but as priests unto God, and a priest is a priest unto God only because of God’s appointing, not because of his merit.

Paul says ‘through the grace given unto me,’ and we are to think and act under grace, the purpose of the gifts unto us is not self glorification, but the kingdom of God.

Luther in his commentary on Romans, defined faith thus and I quote: “Faith is nothing else than obedience to the Spirit.” And as he said, there are differing degrees of obedience to the Spirit and the word.

Then in verses 4-5, Paul brings this to its conclusion: “For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.”

Our body has many members, internal and external organs, hands, feet, eyes, ears, nose; everything has its purpose, it makes up one body. But, we are to recognize that the head is Christ. As a result, we are to see ourselves in terms of this unity, the one body.

Now here again commentators have said: “Paul has borrowed a familiar simile from Roman thought and used it to describe the church.” Did he? It is true; Roman political theory did use the simile of the body as an organism and the political entity as an organism. Not all Roman thinkers thought so, but many did; and even more non Roman thinkers, pagan thinking of the time did so. Did Paul simply adapt that? No.

In all the non Christian expressions of the idea of the body politic as a body, we still speak of it so; elitism governed the concept. An elite group, where the head, the head was always an elite group, and the rest were duty bound to obey; Plato’s Republic is a great expression of this.

Now Paul takes a familiar image and turns it upside down, because the head is Christ; so that instead of being an elite group, it is a group made up of grace only, they are the elect. It is not a question of merit, so that before he comes to the simile of the body he has laid the groundwork of grace, of election, of the fact that we are in this by grace only; and we must never think of it as anything but grace. The pagan concept was used to justify all kinds of things; the fact that the plebes or the common people always had to be in submission, or the slaves had to be there because in the body some had to be slaves; the pagan concept was elitist, always. The Biblical concept is anti-elitist.

We are members of Christ, He is the head of the body, not elite rulers. He also is the head of all principality and power, Colossians 2:10 tells us. We are members of one body, and we are members one of another, with differing functions.

So that, Paul tells us, the head is Christ and we are members of Him, but we are also members one of another. It is not a purely solitary association, the believer with Christ; it is the believer in Christ, and therefore a member of the body; having responsibility towards all others.

Now, in pagan concepts, the elitists saw themselves as the head, as in effect the messiah of the social order. As Paul uses it, there is only one head, Christ; and we are a fellowship in Him, a community.

At this point it is important to recognize something; Paul is talking here about the life of faith, not the institution of faith; that while this has reference secondarily to the institutional life as in the church, primarily it is to the life of faith and the community of faith, and we cannot see it as primarily or essentially institutional.

Thus, it is more than a unity in a church, and it is the antithesis as well as the death of the pagan concepts of organic society. We are a group made into a new humanity by Jesus Christ. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank Thee that Thou hast chosen us and made us Thy people, members of Thy body. Give us grace to study Thy will, and to know Thy will always and to be faithful to it, and to be transfigured by Thy word and by Thy Spirit, that we might truly serve the head with joy and with gladness. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now, about our lesson? Yes John?

[John] You know, it never ceases to amaze me that in spite of the falsity and pietism with the rapture fever eschatology and everything else that goes along with it, it is amazing how that position can take what is an ordinary… a verse that means obviously something very simple and very direct, and change it. This being renewed for example is an internal function only in pietism, and you don’t have to be renewed in how you function other than wearing a happy face six days a week or something; and so they remain conformed to the world, and never conform to the word of God.

[Rushdoony] Yes by internalizing conforming and transforming, they render it null and void. I recall vividly the sense of embarrassment and shame a very prominent California Pastor whose name is still remembered, he was one of the more outstanding men in this state in the twenties and early thirties; he used to go up into the high sierras and spend a week camping and fishing alone, and there was a man there who would act as his guide, and they would go out on the lake day after day, fishing. And about the last year of his ministry, he happened to mention that he had to go back and take care of something a day early, a funeral in the church; and the guide said: “I didn’t know you were a Christian.” He had been with him for a week, summer after summer, most of his life, and that fact had never come through. He was an old fashioned pietist. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience Member] In verse 1 you made a comment about our bodies as a living sacrifice, the nature of our bodies being that which dies, and a part of this world that decays and so forth; isn’t there a sense also though that that sacrifice when it is performed as our reasonable service as God’s people unto God, really follows after us in the sense that it is not only done to God, but John in Revelation reminds us that our works do follow us. How…?...There is a sense that both is valid.

[Rushdoony] Yes, but Paul’s concern here is action in our time. It is not that he is ruling out anything else, it is that he wants their reasonable or logical service here and now. They are to be transfigured, and through them the world is to be transfigured. So that is his emphasis; it isn’t that the other is not true, it is that this is his immediate concern. Yes?

[Otto Scott] On the question of whether somebody is better than others, I think it is unquestionable that some people have different skills than others; what we are running into today is the argument that since everybody is equal, or nobody is any better than anybody else, that those who have particular skills have no particular right to apply those skills; that any ignoramus can argue with any expert with equal validity.

[Rushdoony] Yes, you have today both egalitarianism and elitism, both of which are not Biblical. The Biblical answer is the one body, and diverse gifts; because as we continue next week we shall see that this is very definitely stressed. So Paul speaks out against anarchy particularly in the verses that follow, since there were some that were ready to turn the church into an anarchistic scene. So both aspects are clearly in mind, neither elitism or equality. We will see what he says about the equalitarian attitude next week.

Any other questions or comments?

If not, let us bow our heads in prayer. Lord, Thy word is truth, a lamp and a light unto our feet, a joy unto our hearts, the way wherein we should go. We give thanks unto Thee for the glory of Thy word, for the joy of salvation, and for the privilege of being Thy people. Bless us ever and prosper us in Thy service.

And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, amen.