“THE ETERNAL PURPOSE”

Hugo McCord

I. THE EKKLESIA

Angels were present when God created the heavens and the earth: “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (Job 38:7). However, “before the founding of the universe,” the One, whose “understanding is infinite” and who is “love,” had already planned through his “Son” to build with “living stones” the “temple of the living God” (Psalm 2:7; 147:5; 2 Corinthians 6:16; Ephesians 3:10-11; 1 Peter 1:20; 1 John 4:8). This spiritual temple he would call an ekklesia (ek, “out,” and kaleo, “call”), a “called-out” people.

Those “living stones,” now saved sinners, were and are Christians (Acts 11:26), “partakers of the heavenly calling” (Hebrews 3:1). In the construction of the ekklesia, a spiritual temple, “the manifold (polupoikilos, “many-sided”) wisdom of God” was to be displayed (Ephesians 3:10-11). Long before Jesus came to the earth to build the ekklesia, the angels knew that something marvelous was coming, and they “longed for a clear look” (parakupto, “bent forward,” “stooped,” 1 Peter 1:12) to see what God had planned.

However, neither to angels nor to the prophets had the divine purpose been fully revealed. It was styled “the mystery which” had “been hidden for ages in God who created all things” {Ephesians 3:9). No eye had seen, no ear had heard, and no heart had imagined “the things God” had “prepared for those who love him” (Isaiah 64:4; 1 Corinthians 2:9-10).

But in “the fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4), according to the divine computer that sets “the hour and day and month and year” (Revelation 9:15), “the eternal purpose” of God became a reality when the ekklesia was established (Ephesians 3:11, 21). Since that “hour,” which was nine o’clock on Sunday morning, May 28, A.D.30 (Acts 2:15), “to him is the glory in the ekklesia, and in Christ Jesus, for all generations, forever and ever. Amen!” (Ephesians 3:21).

All people in all the nations who respond to Jesus’ call through “the gospel” to come out of sin and to live in a “holy calling” are the ekklesia, his “called-out” people (Matthew 11:28; 16:18; 2 Thessalonians 2:14; 2 Timothy 1:9). Sinners, formerly drunkards and street-walkers, now “washed” in “the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:14), are living exhibits of “the eternal purpose” of a loving Creator (Ephesians 3:10).

The word “church” as a translation of ekklesia is a mistake. William Tyndale knew this fact, and in his English translation of the New Testament in 1525 (the first ever from the Greek) he excluded the word “church” in favor of “congregation.” King James I, being the head of the Church of England, wanted the word “church” retained. Consequently, he ordered the 54 translators of the King James Version (1611) to use “the old ecclesiastical words,” specifying particularly that “the word church” was “not to be translated congregation” (quoted in THE CHRISTIAN BAPTIST, II, 4, November 1, 1824). As a result, most English Bibles today have 112 instances of ekklesia mistranslated as “church.”

However, though the word “church” is unscriptural, it is not antiscriptural, unless it leads people to think that the New Testament ekklesia is “an edifice consecrated to public worship” (Webster). The New Testament ekklesia is people. It is “the household (oikeios) of the faith” (Galatians 6:10), It is the “family (oikos) of God,” the “called-out people (ekklesia) of the living God” (1 Timothy 3:15).

II. THE SUNAGOGE

When God’s “called-out” people, his ekklesia, come together in various locations, the Holy Spirit calls them a synagogue, which means “a leading together,” “a congregation,” “an assembly” (James 2:2). From the assembly those who love the Lord and their fellow Christians do not willingly stay away (Hebrews 10:25). They exhort “one another, and so much more as” they “see the day” for their assembly (episunagoge) “approaching,” “the first day of every week” (Acts 20:7; 1 Corinthians 16:1-2, NRSV). Joyously they come together to sing, to pray, to give, to partake of the Lord’s Supper, and to edify one another (Acts 2:42; Hebrews 13:15; 1 Thessalonians 5:11).

III. THE PANEGURIS

The “manifold wisdom of God” (Ephesians 3:10) used the words ekklesia and sunagoge to set forth the two things needed for man’s salvation: (1) a calling out of sin and (2) a coming together for edification. The end-objective, indeed, the climax, of God’s eternal purpose is to to bring together in a universal assembly, a festal gathering, the spirits of Old Testament heroes along with faithful New Testament Christians, plus an uncountable company of angels (Hebrews 11:40; 12:23). What a gathering!

That gathering is described by a word appearing only once in the New Testament: a paneguris, “a public festal assembly” (Hebrews 12:22). Among the Greeks a paneguris was a celebration at the Olympic games. Among Christians the one paneguris of all time is an unending joyous heavenly celebration with all the redeemed of all ages, the whole family of God, human and angelic! (Ephesians 3:15).

In some sense, since the writer of the book of Hebrews uses the past tense, Christians already are experiencing the paneguris, the general assembly. Though spatially separated, Christians even now are in spiritual company with God and with all those on God’s side, living and dead. But in the fullest sense, until Christians “sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 8:11), until they see the “great white throne and the one sitting on it” (Revelation 20:11), the paneguris is yet future.

However, one preacher, grasping for some Bible support for hand-clapping, body swaying, and shouted words “Praise the Lord” in a worship assembly, says he has found it in the paneguris, the “joyful assembly,” of Hebrews 12:22. But to call a present day earthly assembly the paneguris of Hebrew 12:22 is a misuse of Scripture. Certainly every assembly, a synagogue, of loving Christians is joyful, but the paneguris of Hebrews 12:22 is one continuous gathering including the Old Testament patriarchs and Gabriel and Michael and all the angels.