The keeping of the unity calls into exercise four great moral characteristics: —
1. Lowliness. That mind which is the exact opposite of the mind of Adam. He would exalt himself; the lowly mind goes down as Philippians 2 shows. This is most essential, and particularly important for the Gentile in his dealings with the Jewish saint. The remembrance, to which the apostle called them in Philippians 2:11, 12, was calculated to produce it.
2. Meekness. The opposite of the pushful self-assertive spirit. Again very important for the Gentile since there was the divine order even in connection with the gospel, of "to the Jew first and also to the Greek."
3. Longsuffering. The patient and long-continued acceptance of personal discomforts or even wrongs, a thing only possible to one of a lowly and meek spirit.
4. Forbearing in love. Intimately connected with the third, and its complement — the love that bears with that which might offend in others, instead of seeking redress by violent methods.
All these things would be much called for on the part of the Gentile in his dealings with the Jew. By legal training and the hereditary instinct of centuries the latter carried within himself the tendency to take the narrow, self-centred, legal view of things; the matters mentioned in Acts 15 and in Romans 14 show this. Nothing but long-suffering coupled with the love that heareth all things would enable them to abide together in peace.
That the Jew would equally need these things in his relations with his Gentile brethren goes without saying. Indeed, experience shows that the disposition to push things to extremes and let go the unity of the Spirit is more deeply ingrained in the narrow Jewish type of mind than in the broad Gentile type. These four excellent features were indispensable on both sides.
They are not less indispensable for us today but more so, if it were possible. At the present moment difficulties and points of cleavage as between Jew and Gentile do not exist, yet with the lapse of centuries the very fact that the church is a unity established by God is largely lost sight of, whilst the essential character of that unity as set forth in chapter 2:9-18 is recognized in even less degree. Never did we need in deeper measure the apostolic affirmation that "there is one body and one Spirit" and the exhortation "to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace."
Some of our readers who have for long been "gathered on the ground of the one body" may regard such remarks as superfluous as far as they are concerned, but we are persuaded that they are not so. The tendency to overlook the fact of one body and one Spirit reaches our minds in many subtle forms.
Take a case in point: — Certain believers, and therefore members of Christ's body, become awakened by the Spirit of God through the Scriptures to those parts of the circle of truth that concerns the church, its position, privileges, and destiny, together with its responsibilities as the witness on earth for Christ during the period of His rejection and absence; and in order to practise what they have learned they withdraw from many religious organizations of purely human origin, and revert to the simplicity of that divinely instituted through the apostles. All this is done in simple fidelity to the Word of God without thinking of themselves at all, but as the years pass and the energy of faith somewhat declines, self-occupation re-appears, and the question of what position they themselves now hold as a result of so acting is raised in many minds. Nothing now will be easier than to assume that by their forsaking a man-made position and occupying the ground of the church according to the Scriptures they have thereby acquired a renewed corporate status, which is all their own and in which other Christians do not share.
The subtlety of this idea may be seen in the fact that it is very possible to entertain it whilst strongly insisting on the truth of "one body." This latter may be proclaimed and contended for, and yet people may so idealise it in their minds as to see nothing inconsistent with it in the idea of another "body" — especially when this other "body" lies within the true "one body" which the Spirit originally formed.
Thus very easily we may take for granted in our minds what has no existence in God's mind as revealed to us in His Word. After all there is one body and one only. It therefore should go without saying that we should have nothing corporate outside the one corpus, and even the fact that certain members of the one corpus revert to the truth of that one corpus, after centuries of diversion from it, does not reincorporate them as a small inner corpus within the one corpus. ONE body God has made, and never more than one will He entertain whatever we may do.
We pursue this no further, but merely remark two things: First; we have not been combating a mere notion, an abstract idea of no practical consequence. This thought, if entertained, leads to consequences in conduct, and especially what we may call assembly conduct, of great gravity. Second; we emphasise the fact that we have been speaking of that which is corporate and not that which is collective. God does indeed entertain the idea of a collective life and testimony and that in days of failure and ruin, and He clearly sets it before us in such a Scripture as 2 Timothy 2:22. The gist of the foregoing remarks is that when those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart, are most ardently following righteousness, faith, love, and peace, they acquire no special corporate status by doing so. They have a corporate status truly, but it is that of members of the "one body" originally instituted by God. Having thus briefly considered our present day need of the Apostle's affirmation "there is one body and one Spirit" it only remains to point out the exhortation which the Apostle founded upon it. In religious circles unity is all the rage, yet the "unity of the Spirit" is unthought of, and to come closer home — how shall we keep the unity of the Spirit if we have in our minds this second lesser unity of which we have spoken? To say the least there will be some occasion when the claims of the two unities will clash, with the almost certain result that we yield to the claims of the smaller, yet more tangible, "body" of our own creating, as against the claims of the larger and less realisable "body" of God's creating.
And then the spirit and manner in which the unity is to be kept! Here is the mind of Christ, and it is to be exhibited in the members of His body. These are not things to be passed on in a hurry so as to meet some disuniting crisis, but things to be wrought into the fibre of our souls by the Holy Ghost. We need them always. They are as necessary in carrying out a solemn Scripturally ordained act of excommunication, or of departure from the iniquity of a Hymenaeus or Philetus, as in confirming Christian love to a once sinning but now repentant saint.
LOWLINESS, MEEKNESS, LONGSUFFERING, FORBEARANCE IN LOVE. Surely a marvellous quartet of Christ-like graces! Almost, we might say, a condensed summary of 1 Corinthians 13. Possible for us only as LOVE, the divine nature, is produced in our hearts. We stand convicted. Here has been the failure. Here must be the recovery. May God work it in us by His Spirit.
F. B. Hole