We saw, in Psalm 132, that God deals with His people through covenants, and that He doesn’t deal with us as autonomous individuals but as members of a body. He leads us to Himself individually, calling us by name; but when we turn to Him we become part of His covenant community, the body of Christ. When we turn to Him, He places us in the Church. But our attitude toward the Church is seriously affected by the spirit of individualism that dominates our culture at the present time. We read this quote from Thomas Reeves on the prevailing spirit in American churches: “Religious individualism seems to be at the core of American Christianity. This is a characteristic in harmony with our historic sense of personal independence as well as the considerable socioeconomic mobility we have long enjoyed. Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney concluded, ‘Typically Americans view religious congregations as gatherings of individuals who have chosen to be together, in institutions of their own making and over which they hold control–fostering what sometimes, in the eyes of observers from other countries, appears as “churchless Christianity.”’ For Americans, ‘religious authority lies in the believer–not in the church, not in the Bible, despite occasional claims of infallibility and inerrancy on the part of some’” (Thomas Reeves, “Not So Christian America,” in First Things, October 1996, p. 19).
This spirit of individualism seriously undermines the unity of the church, because when we see the church as a gathering of individuals who have chosen to be together, in an institution of our own making and over which we hold control, our commitment to the body is conditional and tentative. If the church is going in a way that pleases us, we’ll stay. But if anything happens that we disagree with, we’ll move somewhere else. Reeves goes on: “What we now have might best be labeled consumer Christianity. The psychologist Paul C. Vitz has observed, ‘The “divine right” of the consumer to choose as he or she pleases has become so common an idea that it operates in millions of Americans like an unconscious tropism.’ Millions of Americans today feel free to buy as much of the full Christian faith as seems desirable. The cost is low and consumer satisfaction seems guaranteed” (p. 21). If our relationship to the church is dominated by a consumer mentality, we’re going to maintain our distance. We’re here primarily to get something for ourselves–that’s the way we approach the marketplace, and it’s appropriate in that setting. When we were living in Elizabethtown there were three grocery stores to choose from. I was in the habit of going to one of them, and I went there for the first few years; even when I wasn’t altogether happy with it, I continued going, because I knew where to find things. But then the employees became increasingly rude and unhelpful, so after this happened to me a few times I quit going and went to the store across the street. The prices were comparable, and they were polite. I had no commitment to the other store. I was only there to buy what I needed, so there was no reason for me to stay there when I was unhappy with their service. This is an acceptable approach to the market place.
But the Church is not a business enterprise. We’re not selling a product. We’re not seeking to enlist people in our cause. Church is not a place where we go to get something for ourselves. The Church is a body of people with whom God has entered into a covenant relationship. In the Church we’re part of a community that has its roots in what God has done in the past and which is dependent on His promises for the future. God is at the center, and His purposes are primary. We’re not in charge here; God is. The Church is not “individuals who have chosen to be together, in institutions of their own making and over which they hold control.” The Church is a body of people whom God has called together, in an institution which He ordained from eternity and over which He exercises sovereign lordship. We’re not in charge here. The Church doesn’t belong to us, and we’re placed here because of His lordship, not because of our own selfish whims.
Remember that these are pilgrim songs. The people of Israel were expected to travel to Jerusalem three times each year to worship at the Temple. They usually traveled in groups, because of the danger from bandits. And worshiping in Jerusalem was a high point in their spiritual lives. In Psalm 133 the psalmist is in Jerusalem worshiping and he looks around at his fellow-worshipers and cries out: “How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity!” Those who are gathered with him are “brothers.” They’re part of the same family. They’re not just people who by a happy coincidence have found that their felt needs are all being met in the same place. They’re bound together as part of God’s family, and they are living in unity.
But unity is not something that comes naturally to us. Notice the psalmist’s attitude in this opening verse: “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along!” (The Message). As he looks around at the worshiping crowd, the experience of unity takes him by surprise and he cries out with joy. He’s reveling in the experience of oneness. This series of pilgrim songs begins with a complaint: “Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech, that I live among the tents of Kedar! Too long have I lived among those who hate peace. I am a man of peace; but when I speak, they are for war” (Psalm 120:5-7). His experience in this world has not led him to expect that kind of unity, so when he experiences it in Jerusalem, it catches him by surprise. We set out on pilgrimage from this world, sick of the hatred and strife that are all around us, and we find to our surprise and delight that we are not alone. We are part of a large body; we’ve been included in something that God has been doing for many centuries. And at times, worshiping with these people, we get glimpses into the unity that exists around God’s eternal throne and we cry out in wonder: “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along!”
Thomas Hobbes, was a 17th century philosopher. After observing human behavior and studying history, he concluded that “Out of civil states, there is always war of every one against every one” (Leviathan, p. 100). He concluded that people are naturally at war with one another, that unless there was an external power to restrain them, this state of war would repeatedly break out into actual violence. He would have agreed with the statement that unity does not come naturally to us. He would have said that our natural tendency is in the opposite direction. Was Hobbes just a cynical, crotchety old academic? A few years ago I heard a woman lecturer who seemed embarrassed that there were once people in the world who thought such things (and she specifically singled out Hobbes, although she misspelled his name and I suspected she was reacting to something she'd heard about him). But when we look around at the condition of the world, when we look at places like Afghanistan or Iraq or parts of the former Soviet Union, when we see how easily the fabric of society disintegrates and the horrible things people do to one another, Hobbes’ assumptions don’t seem so far-fetched. He was more in touch with the observable behavior of humans than those are who think people are basically good and that what they need is just more education.
The psalmist is excited to see brothers getting along with each other. The Bible doesn’t paint a very positive picture about relationships between siblings. The first two brothers we read about in the Bible, Abel and Cain, did not live together in unity. Cain became jealous of his brother’s relationship with God and murdered him. Joseph’s brothers were jealous of his relationship with their father, so they sold him into slavery. And the later historical books of the Old Testament are full of stories about brothers in the royal family fighting for power and killing one another as rivals.
In fact, whenever power is at stake we find unity dissolving. Karl Barth said this about the desire for power: “Where the will for power is present, as it always is, there it is always questionable, and the likelihood is–this is the tragic mistake–that the relativity of creaturely power will be forgotten and secretly or openly the battle [will be] joined for an absolute power–a battle in which man on a small scale or a great can only finally rush into disaster” (Ethics, p. 137). As creatures, we only have the right to a very limited degree of power, but the temptation is always to push for absolute power. The temptation is to be like God, the temptation of Eve in the garden. How many church splits in reality have very little to do with theological differences, and everything to do with the desire for power!
Sin isolates us from one another. We’re all trying to be like God, and living in this way leads to increasing fragmentation in every relationship. Sin separates us from God, because we’re rebelling against His sovereign lordship and seeking to be little gods ourselves. But it also separates us from one another. J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, revolves around a quest to destroy a great ring of power. Sauron, the dark lord, is wholly evil and if he captures the ring the whole world will come under his reign. The fellowship of the ring, those who set out to destroy it, is led by a wizard named Gandalf, the most powerful enemy of Sauron. At one point, a member of the company asks Gandalf to take the ring and use it for good, to destroy Sauron. But he refuses. Using the ring would corrupt him, would turn him into a new dark lord. It would isolate him from the whole company, because they would become rivals, rather than companions. If he used the ring to destroy Sauron, he would become evil himself. Grasping after power, even with the intention of using it for good, would corrupt him. The temptation to be like God turns everyone into a potential rival. Sin separates us from one another (and then, finally, even from ourselves).
And this lust for power, this desire to be in control, frequently enters into the life of the church. The apostle John complains in his third letter about Diotrophes, who “loves to be first,” and is wreaking havoc in the church (3 John 9-10). George Whitefield, the great evangelist of the 18th century, said: “O that I may learn from all I see, to desire to be nothing! And to think it my highest privilege to be an assistant to all, but the head of none. I find a love of power sometimes intoxicates even God’s own dear children, and makes them to mistake passion for zeal and an overbearing spirit for an authority given them from above. For my own part, I find it much easier to obey than govern, and that it is much safer to be trodden under foot than to have it in one’s power to serve others so” (George Whitefield, by Arnold Dallimore, vol. 2, p. 339). Sin separates us from one another, and it frequently deceives us into thinking we’re serving God when we are only serving ourselves. Our natural condition as sinners is not unity. Unity doesn’t come naturally to us.
But even though unity doesn’t come naturally to us, and even though we even seem to enjoy some measure of discord and discontent, when we experience true unity we recognize it as what we’ve been longing for. We began our pilgrimage crying out “too long have I lived among those who hate peace.” Unity in the Church is both precious and refreshing. It’s a foretaste of the life of heaven.
The psalmist uses two images to describe the experience of unity among God’s people. First, it’s “like precious oil poured on the head.” He’s speaking here about the anointing oil that was used to ordain the high priest. Eugene Peterson has a good description of the way oil is used in Scripture: “Oil, throughout Scripture, is a sign of God’s presence, a symbol of the Spirit of God.... There is a quality of warmth and ease in God’s community which contrasts with the icy coldness and hard surfaces of people who jostle each other in mobs and crowds. But more particularly here the oil is an anointing oil, marking the person as a priest.... When we see the other as God’s anointed, our relationships are profoundly affected” (A Long Obedience, pp. 174-75). These other people in the church are not our competition. We are anointed as priests to serve one another. We are each anointed with the Spirit and called to exercise our gifts for the good of the body.
The second image is the dew from Mt. Hermon. In Palestine, dew and rain are equally important. It seldom rains between April and October, and during this period vegetation is dependent on the heavy dews which are common there. “The dews are so heavy that the plants and trees are literally soaked with water at night” (ISBE, vol. 1, p. 941). We can see the importance of dew in that society from passages like Hosea 14:5: “I will be like the dew to Israel; he will blossom like a lily.” Or Micah 4:5: “The remnant of Jacob will be in the midst of many peoples like dew from the Lord, like showers on the grass....” The dew gave life and refreshment to an otherwise parched land. The dews were especially heavy on Mt. Hermon, the highest mountain in the region, so the psalmist imagines this dew falling on Mount Zion, as a picture of the experience of unity among God’s people. “The oil flowing down Aaron’s beard communicates a sense of warm, priestly relationship. The dew descending down Hermon’s slopes communicates a sense of fresh and expectant newness” (Peterson, p. 176). Both of these emphasize God’s presence among His people.
These two images point to the fact that we experience true unity in the Church only through God’s transforming power in our midst. The anointing oil symbolizes the Holy Spirit, and dew of Hermon points to God’s refreshing, renewing presence. Unity is not natural to us; we experience it only through the transforming power of God in our midst.
Of course, there have been many attempts to create organizational unity in the past century. There’s nothing wrong with this–although in most cases it hasn’t been successful. But organizational unity, even when it does succeed, is less than what the psalmist is talking about here. In attempting to create unity, we’re often tempted to do one of two things. We either reduce the content of our faith, or we reduce the number of people who, in our estimation, hold to the true faith. In reducing the content of our faith, we’re trying to lay aside our differences in the interest of our more basic unity. There’s wisdom in this, but there’s also a temptation to go too far, to lay aside things that are truly essential to the gospel. That was what happened in many of the mainline churches in the early 20th century. Gresham Machen, the founder of Westminster Theological Seminary, wrote a book entitled Christianity and Liberalism in which he argued that liberalism had become a different religion; it had gone so far in its attempts to accommodate that it was no longer Christian.
But there’s also a temptation to become sectarian, to say that all those people who aren’t organizationally tied to us are not true believers anyway (or that maybe they are true believers, but their faith is deficient in some way). When I was in graduate school, my New Testament professor said “you could fit into a thimble the scholars who believe Paul wrote the book of Ephesians.” He was able to say that, not because there aren’t any scholars who believe Paul wrote Ephesians, but because most biblical scholars from the German schools didn’t believe he wrote it, and those who didn’t follow the German schools didn’t count as true scholars. He created a strong majority by excluding all the dissenters.
A couple of years ago I was talking to a friend who had left the Orthodox Presbyterian church because, in his words, “they weren’t faithful to the Westminster Confession” (the Westminster Confession of Faith is the doctrinal statement that Presbyterians–at least conservative Presbyterians–use to define their theological position). As far as I can tell, the Orthodox Presbyterians are as serious about the Westminster Confession as anyone around. (In my view they’re too faithful to the confession). But there were some minor points that this friend wasn’t happy about, and he found a small group of people on the Internet who felt the same way and they formed their own church, a church that really takes the confession seriously (the only one in the area). But if that church lasts for any length of time, they’ll experience other splits, because there will always be some areas where we can’t come to complete unanimity. When we try to create unity by reducing the number of true believers, we set up a process of increasing fragmentation as we continue to separate over our disagreements. I had a friend in graduate school who had so many doctrinal peculiarities–none of them involved him in heresy; he just combined views that usually aren’t seen together in the same person, or even the same denomination–that it was difficult for him to worship anywhere. Even when he was able to get past the differences himself, if he opened his mouth it got him into trouble. People might acknowledge him as a true believer (which he was) but they didn’t think he belonged in their church. And the difficulty was that he didn’t exactly fit in any church.
For the sake of living together in the church we do need to make some concessions with those who don’t fully agree with us. We all have some mixture of truth and error in our theological understanding, and in those areas where God’s people have had centuries of disagreement, we need to allow people the freedom to think differently than we do. Thinking differently in this way will not exclude them from the true Church. We don’t have the right to make the boundaries more strict than God has chosen to make them.
But it’s not this kind of organizational unity that the psalmist is so excited about. This kind of unity is good and desirable, but this psalm is talking about something more. Notice the second half of verse 3: “for there the Lord bestows his blessing.” What is he referring to here? Mt. Zion, which he just mentioned in the previous phrase? Yes, but he’s not thinking primarily about the city of Jerusalem. Mt. Zion, as it’s used in the psalms, usually refers to the dwelling-place of God, the place where God has chosen to make Himself known (Prevost, A Short Dictionary of the Psalms, p. 80). Verse 1 and this closing phrase are closely tied together. Notice that this psalm consists of an opening statement and a conclusion, with two illustrations sandwiched in the middle. The conclusion is tied to the end of the second illustration–there refers to Mt. Zion. But it’s also tied to the opening statement. “How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity.... For there the Lord bestows his blessing, even life forevermore.” The place where God bestows His blessing of eternal life is Mt. Zion, the place where He makes Himself known, the place where His people unite together in His presence. It’s Mt. Zion, the place where God’s people come together in His name, where “brothers live together in unity.”
So how do we achieve this kind of unity? We recognize our oneness in God’s presence. We come together regularly to worship, not worshiping for what we can get for ourselves, but offering worship and praise to God our Lord and Creator, because He is worthy. And we pray that the oneness we experience in His presence might increasingly become a reality in our daily lives. Paul describes the process in Galatians 5. Christ has set us free from the tyranny of sin and the burden of trying to live under the Law (Galatians 5:1). But that doesn’t mean we just do whatever we want. “You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ If you keep on biting and devouring one another, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other” (vv. 13-15). They can use their freedom to indulge the sinful nature, or they can use their freedom to serve one another in love. If they indulge their sinful nature they’ll end up destroying one another.
He goes on to present another contrast. They can either live by the Spirit, or they can live by their old, sinful nature. They can follow their old, sinful way of life, indulging whatever desires they have, and certain things will result. If they live in this way, their lives will be characterized by the works of the flesh, or works of the sinful nature, which will drive them further and further apart: things like hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy (vv. 20-21). But they’re not powerless victims of their old desires. They’ve been given the Holy Spirit, and as they cultivate His presence, as they seek to walk in obedience to God’s Word, trusting in His transforming power, the fruit of the Spirit will become increasingly evident in their lives. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (vv. 22-23).
The more our lives are characterized by the fruit of the Spirit, the more we’ll be living together in unity. Paul concludes his discussion in this way: “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have nailed the passions and desires of their sinful nature to his cross and crucified them there. If we are living now by the Holy Spirit, let us follow the Holy Spirit’s leading in every part of our lives. Let us not become conceited, or irritate one another, or be jealous of one another” (vv. 24-26, NLT). Through the Spirit we’ve been given eternal life; we’re living by His power. So we need to follow His leading in every part of our lives. As we trust in His transforming power within us, and seek to live in obedience to God’s Word, we’ll be able to say increasingly, “How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters live together in unity!”
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