Exhortation, August 8

Roman Catholics and Protestants have both appealed to Kings to explore the significance of their divisions, and to defend their claims over against each other. For Roman Catholics, Rome is Jerusalem, maintaining the true worship of the temple while Protestants go after golden calves in places like Geneva and Wittenberg. For Protestants, the Catholics are the idolaters, and the pure faith is found in the Protestant churches. These divergent interpretations of Kings provide one perspective on the larger conflicts between Protestant and Catholic.

That is an important discussion, at least historically. But I want to draw your attention to the end of the history recorded in Kings. Kings ends with the destruction of both Israel and Judah, with both Israel and Judah in exile. This is a disaster for Israel, but the prophets tell us that the exile was the means of restoring the unity of Israel and Judah. The two sticks of Israel and Judah will be tied together in exile, and the furnace of Babylon will melt down the divisions. It works: When the people return from exile, they are no longer divided into two nations. They are simply ?Jews,?Ea shortened form of ?Judahite.?E

This gives us some insight into the solution to our present ecclesiastical divisions. First, the unity of Israel is not viewed by the OT as something confined to a pure and inaccessible edenic past. We can imagine the prophets adjusting their expectations to the reality of a divided nation: Sure, Israel was one nation under Solomon, but that was a golden age, long gone, and never to be recovered. But they did not adjust their hopes, but hoped in God. They were confident that the God who called and made Israel could remake her, and they proclaimed that Yahweh would restore one people under one shepherd.

Nor, second, they did not see this reunion as something that would take place in another world, outside of space and time, in a sinlessly perfect world. Rather, they held out the hope that Israel would be reunited within her own history, in the future but also in the midst of history, in the midst of a world still full of strife and sin.

We must grasp these insights: Christian unity is not locked away in a past that can never be recovered, nor is it locked away in a future that is beyond this world. God alone can bring unity to the church, but the one Lord of the one church expects and demands that we pursue unity now, filled with the certain hope that it has been and will be achieved.

But, third and most important, Israel was reunited only by the death of Israel. Only after Samaria and Jerusalem were both in ruins, only after both Israel and Judah had suffered the humiliation of defeat and conquest, only after they had been scattered to the four winds were they reunited. It may be the church will be reunited only after disintegration; she will be raised only after she has sunk into Sheol.

But this does not mean that we should simply sit and wait for God to tear down and raise up. Rather, it reminds us that the call to unity is a call to death, and this means essentially death to self. As JJ von Allmen, a French Reformed theologian, put it in the middle of the last century: ?The [denominations] will perhaps [say] that they are very much interested in unity, and that they sincerely desire it, and that they are even ready to devote a portion of their resources, that is, of their money, to this end; but that it is out of the question that one expect them to engage in a self-renunciation, a full gift of the self, in order to restore unity . . . . Now if [denominations] were tempted to respond in this way to their vocation for, and duty to, unity, they should remember that Jesus, at Gethsemane, could well have fled the Cross in order to pursue his ministry as prophet and wonder-worker. He did not do this, because opus proprium (proper work) was to die for unity.?E

If Jesus Himself gave Himself to gather the scattered people of God, surely He calls His church to do the same.