THE ARMY OF GOD

                                                                 The Army of God 

You know I heard this term batted around the “Church” today the Army of God and often wonder what does that mean? It seems we take a military flare to evangelism from songs like “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “Stay on the Firing Line,” and others. And hear of this great end-time revival promised by the preachers and teachers of today, how the ranks of God’s Army will swell and we shall overrun the enemy, well, that is not what the Bible says. The Bible I read talks about a “falling away.” Paul in 2 Thessalonians shares, “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;” (2 Thessalonians 2:3) By this verse it sounds like there is going to be great deception on every hand and many Christians will fall away from the faith, then they will be deceived. This does not sound like the making of a great Army of God to sweep the earth. At this point in my article I must ask this question: What happened to the Army of God? There is something wrong with the Army of God or what the New Testament calls the Body of Christ today. Now I will NOT call it the “church” because we, you and I, are the church not some building or given denominational name. But, something is terribly wrong. What is it? The answer is not hard to discover. In fact, it is as clear as a bell. The Body of Christ has lost it's focus. It has forsaken the basic Truths of Christianity. Or, to be even more direct about it, the Body of Christ has left it's first Love, Jesus Christ, and has become centered in other things. What are some of these other things? Well, for one thing, the church has become focused on itself as an organization. This has been going on for two-thousand years. Another thing we, who make up the church, get focused on is the serving we do FOR Christ, rather than on Christ Himself. And thirdly, many of us simply settle for a religion centered around Christ, instead of a relationship in Him. God did not intend things to be this way. The early church was not like that. And, if we look back at this early church, we may discover the true intention of God for His Body, and an example for us today. Over two thousand years ago, a group of disciples, exhausted and frightened, huddled together in an upper room, waiting for what they were told would be “the promise of the Father.” What was this “promise of the Father?” And what impact would it have on their lives? The last three and one-half years had seen these disciples experience possibly every emotion on the spectrum. They had, at first, curiously followed a man named Jesus of Nazareth. Later, He would specifically call them to be His apostles and disciples. What an adventure they were in for! These disciples had seen Jesus perform miracles beyond anything they could have imagined. And His preaching! It was such a radical departure from anything they had ever heard before. They did not fully understand many of the things He had spoken to them. But, rather than be a cause for apprehension, this was a source of hope. For they had come to understand the most important thing of all: Jesus was God who became man. The Son of God. The Word of Life. And He had chosen them to be His messengers. In the last seven weeks, these disciples had seen Jesus crucified, buried, and raised from the dead. He had spent forty days opening the scriptures to them. And after seemingly only a few days they had seen Him taken bodily up into the heavens. Even before the crucifixion they had recognized that Jesus was “the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” (Matthew. 16:18) But, only now was it beginning to dawn on them what all of that meant. Only now were they beginning to see that their Messiah had come to redeem the entire world. So, they waited. They waited for this “promise of the Father,” which, said Jesus, you have heard of Me. “For John truly baptized with water; but you shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.” (Acts 1:4-5) There is nothing recorded in the Gospels or the Book of Acts to indicate that Jesus explained to these disciples any more than that. There is no indication that they knew what to expect, or how to act. They were simply told to stay in Jerusalem and to wait. To wait for this “promise of the Father.” Now, it is so easy to fall into the mistake of placing ourselves in that upper room with the disciples with our frame of reference for Christianity, thinking that it was their frame of reference. But doing so is nonsense for we must remember that these disciples had no frame of reference for Christianity. To this point, there WAS no Christianity. On the day before Pentecost, there were no churches. Only synagogues. There were no ministries. No one was preaching Christ. In fact, the Bible, as we know it, did not yet exist. The New Testament was not yet written. The Old Testament was available, but mostly in those synagogues. With few exceptions, scripture was communicated orally. Rarely were copies carried around by the common man. When they were, usually what was carried was some portion of the Old Testament, rather than the entire work. So, if we place ourselves in the upper room, we must first erase everything we know about Christianity. We must pretend we have never been to church. We must imagine that we have never read a word of the New Testament. We must forget how a Christian is supposed to act, and how a Christian is supposed to talk. We must push away every religious tradition we have learned, and we must forget every religious bias we have acquired. Our entire vocabulary regarding the things of God must be altered. Now, of course, the adjustment we must pass through to be in that upper room involves more than just the things we must erase. There are likewise many things we must add. First of all, we must replace everything we have learned “about Christ” with something better: A personal experience with Jesus Christ Himself. After all these disciples knew Him as a human being. They had walked and talked with Him. So instead of only believing that Jesus died and was raised, we must imagine what it must have been like to have witnessed these facts first-hand. The disciples in that upper room had seen their lives shattered, their deeply rooted religious traditions overthrown, and their Master crucified. And then they had seen it all somehow made right through the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Now they were waiting for “the promise of the Father.” Here is the question: If we could start all over again, and erase the last two-thousand years of Christian history and experience, and get back into that upper room, waiting for “the promise of the Father,” if we could do that, would the result of our Pentecost be something we would recognize as the Christianity of today? Or has the Christianity of today, indeed, the Christianity of the last two-thousand years, strayed so far off course, that it barely resembles what God began that first Pentecost? Would the disciples recognize today’s Body of Christ as being the offspring of the church of their day? Written by David Stahl