Sabbath School Today
With the 1888 Message Dynamic
The Least of These:
Ministering to Those in Need
Lesson 13: A Community of Servants
Our final lesson in this series, "The Least of These," is suggestive of some important themes highlighted by the 1888 message.
For example, in Monday's lesson entitled, "A Servant Remnant," we find an encouraging example of self-emptying love. God's agape love is a possibility for sinful man through Christ. Christ can dwell in human hearts by faith, and we can learn to serve Him from love and not from selfish motives. But has anyone ever done so?
One was Moses. Israel had "committed a great sin" in that they had made and worshipped a golden calf. The Lord proposed to Moses that he step aside. "Let Me alone," He said, "that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven; and I will make of you a nation mightier and greater than they" (Deut. 9:14). To take the place of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as the progenitor of the "chosen people"! What a great honor! This proposal would guarantee Moses' salvation and his everlasting honor.
Naturally, it was a severe temptation to him. So far as Israel was concerned, he could reason that he had no obligation toward them, for they had sinned and deserved to perish. But Moses did something totally contrary to our natural human nature.
He proposed that someone else's name be blotted out from under heaven--his own, if Israel could not be forgiven: "If You will forgive their sin--but if not, I pray, blot me out of Your book which You have written" (Ex. 32:32). Moses' love was stronger than his desire for personal security in heaven, or for eternal life and honor. Can you imagine?
Another man who knew that same self-emptying love was Paul: "I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen [relatives] according to the flesh, who are Israelites" (Rom. 9:3, 4).
So long as our predominant motive for following Christ is our own desire for personal security, we will fail of receiving the "mind of Christ" and thus come short of bearing the cross. Christ was no "opportunist;" neither were Moses nor Paul. Neither are His people who "follow the Lamb wherever He goes."
Millions of Christians are encouraged in Sunday's lesson to review Paul's brilliant chapter on the church and its members being united with Christ, the church is "the body of Christ," "not one member but many." "As the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ." (1 Cor. 12:12-14)
There is no English word to describe the idea of "body." There is the Latin idea of corporate, which comes from corpus, "body." It is impossible to appreciate what mature union with Christ or reconciliation with Him means (the "final atonement," in other words) without grasping Paul's idea. "All the members ... being many, are one body" means they bear a corporate relationship to one another. "We were all baptized into one body" describes the corporate unity of the church.
But there is more than unity: "the foot, ... the ear, ... an eye, ... God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just as He pleased." Here is corporate diversity. "The eye cannot say to the hand. 'I have no need of you.'" Here is corporate need. No one member can despise another.
God has built something else into the body: "God composed the body, having given greater honor to that part which lacks it, that there should be no schism in the body." Here is corporate balance. The purpose? "That the members should have the same care for one another" as the parts of a human body have a corporate concern. "If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it." Here is corporate pain. "If one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it." Here is corporate joy (1 Cor. 12:15-26).
The whole functions as "the body of Christ," He being the head. A paralyzed body does not obey the impulses of the head, for it is sick. If the corporate body of Christ does not carry out the will of its Head, its sickness is what the Bible calls sin. It is both an individual and a corporate guilt. The remedy has to be both individual and corporate repentance. Christ's call to Laodicea to repent is the last in the Bible; it is the focal point of Revelation. All the victories that follow assume an overcoming, repentant, reconciled remnant church at-one-with Him in a heart and life commitment that is complete. It is a growing up into Christ that is symbolized by the Bride making herself "ready," no longer content to remain the self-centered child she was (Rev. 19:6-9). It is no secret that Satan would like to sabotage such a vindication of Christ.
The human body illustrates this inspired corporate relationship. If you stub your toe on a sharp rock, your whole body feels the pain and sympathizes with the injured member. If it could speak, the leg would share the guilt of projecting the toe against the stone; the other leg wishes it had taken more of the weight so as to lessen the injury; the eye wishes it had been more observant; the hands cooperate by rubbing the wounded toe; the whole body halts to care for its injured member.
A disease-carrying mosquito bites the finger. The resultant disease of malaria affects more than the finger, because the blood stream carries the parasites throughout the body. One comes down with a corporate disease.The medicine prescribed provides a corporate healing. Sin is a corporate disease of the human race which is represented in Scripture as "one man" infected by it, for "in Adam all die" (1 Cor. 15:22). "By the one man's offense death reigned" (Rom. 5:17). Apart from Christ, no human being is intrinsically better than another for "all alike have sinned" (Rom. 3:23, The Revised English Bible).
We need the imputed and imparted righteousness of Christ 100%. But we instinctively recoil against this, for we feel that surely we have something good in us. But Scripture is emphatic: "In me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells" (Rom 7:18). This means that the sin that another human has committed, anyone could commit if Christ had not saved us from it. The righteousness of Christ cannot be a mere add-on to our own good works, a slight push to get us over the top. Our righteousness is all of Him, or it is nothing. This was the stumbling-block in 1888 and still scandalizes many today. Apart from the grace of a Savior, the sins of the whole world could be mine if I had the "opportunity" to be in the shoes of other people, to be tempted as they in their circumstances.
We are thankful for such practical Christianity brought to our attention by this quarter's Sabbath School lessons. Next quarter we turn our attention to the Old Testament books of Ezra and Nehemiah.
--Paul E. Penno
Notes:
Pastor Paul Penno's video of this lesson is on the Internet at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmpD3j5xBL0
"Sabbath School Today" is on the Internet at: http://1888message.org/sst.htm
