The “word” that makes Christian ordinances valid, is not the past utterance of God alone, which may remain a dead letter, preserved in the oracles of Scripture or the official forms of the Church, but that word alive and active, re-spoken and transmitted from soul to soul by the breath of the Holy Spirit. Without this animating word of faith, baptism is but the pouring or sprinkling of so much water on the body; the Lord’s Supper is only the consumption of so much bread and wine.
All the nations will at last, in obedience to Christ’s command, be baptized into the thrice-holy Name; and the work of baptism will be complete. Then the Church will issue from her bath, cleansed more effectually than the old world that emerged with Noah from the deluge. Every “spot and wrinkle” will pass from her face: the worldly passions that stained her features, the fears and anxieties that knit her brow or furrowed her cheek, will vanish away. In her radiant beauty, in her chaste and spotless love, Christ will lead forth His Church before His Father and the holy angels, “as a bride adorned for her husband.” From eternity He set His love upon her; on the cross He won her back from her infidelity at the price of His blood. Through the ages He has been wooing her to Himself, and schooling her in wise and manifold ways that she might be fit for her heavenly calling. Now the end of this long task of redemption has arrived. The message goes forth to Christ’s friends in all the worlds: “Come, gather yourselves to the great supper of God! The marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife hath made herself ready! He hath given her fine linen bright and pure, that she may array herself. Let us rejoice and exult, and give to Him the glory!” Through what cleansing fires, through what baptisms even of blood she has still to pass ere the consummation is reached, He only knows who loved her and gave Himself for her. He will spare to His Church nothing, either of bounty or of trial, that her perfection needs.
II. Concerning Christ’s lordly authority over His Church we have had occasion to speak already in other places. A word or two may be added here.
We acknowledge the Church to be “subject to Christ in everything.” We proclaim ourselves, like the apostle, “slaves of Christ Jesus.” But this subjection is too often a form rather than a fact. In protesting our independence of Popish and priestly lords of God’s heritage, we are sometimes in danger of ignoring our dependence upon Him, and of dethroning, in effect, the one Lord Jesus Christ. Christian communities act and speak too much in the style of political republics. They assume the attitude of self-directing and self-responsible bodies.
The Church is no democracy, any more than it is an aristocracy or a sacerdotal absolutism: it is a Christocracy. The people are not rulers in the house of God; they are the ruled, laity and ministers alike. “One is your Master, even the Christ; and all ye are brethren.” We acknowledge this in theory; but our language and spirit would oftentimes be other than they are, if we were penetrated by the sense of the continual presence and majesty of the Lord Christ in our assemblies. Royalties and nobilities, and the holders of popular power—all whose “names are named in this world,” along with the principalities in heavenly places, when they come into the precincts of the Church must lay aside their robes and forget their titles, and speak humbly as in the Master’s presence. What is it to the glorious Church of Jesus Christ that Lord So-and-so wears a coronet and owns half a county? or that Midas can fill her coffers, if he is pleased and humoured? or that this or that orator guides at his will the fierce democracy? He is no more than a man who will die, and appear before the judgement-seat of Christ. The Church’s protection from human tyranny, from schemes of ambition, from the intrusion of political methods and designs, lies in her sense of the splendour and reality of Christ’s dominion, and of her own eternal life in Him.
III. We come now to the profound mystery disclosed, or half-disclosed at the end of this section, that of the origination of the Church from Christ, which accounts for His love to the Church and His authority over her. He nourishes and cherishes the Church, we are told in verses 29, 30, “because we are members of His body.”
Now, this membership is, in its origin, as old as creation. God “chose us in Christ before the world’s foundation” (i. 4). We were created in the Son of God’s love, antecedently to our redemption by Him. Such is the teaching of this and the companion epistle (Col. i. 14–18). Christ recovers through the cross that which pertains inherently to Him, which belonged to Him by nature and is as a part of Himself. From this standpoint the connexion of verses 30 and 31 becomes intelligible.[145] It is not, strictly speaking, “on account of this”; but “in correspondence with this”[146] says the apostle, suiting the original phrase to his purpose. The derivation of Eve from the body of Adam, as that is affirmed in the mysterious words of Genesis, is analogous to the derivation of the Church from Christ. The latter relationship existed in its ideal, and as conceived in the purpose of God, prior to the appearance of the human race. In St Paul’s theory, the origin of woman in man which forms the basis of marriage in Scripture, looked further back to the origin of humanity in Christ Himself.
The train of thought that the apostle resumes here he followed in 1 Corinthians xi. 3–12: “I would have you know that the head of every man is the Christ, and the head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God.... Man is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man.” So it is with Christ and His bride the Church.
“The Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof: and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man, made He a woman, and brought her to the man. And the man said,
This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh:
She shall be called Woman [Isshah], because she was taken out of Man [Ish].
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife:
And they shall be one flesh” (Gen. ii. 21–24).