A spiritual Gilgal
Faustino de Jesús Zamora Vargas
SUMMARY: The church is like Gilgal, a place of the supernatural where God works miracles. The New Testament tells the story of the Church, which is the body of believers in Christ. The Church is not perfect, but God still loves and believes in it. We need to focus on Christ as Lord of the Church and not on our own ego. Despite its imperfections, the Church points to eternity where believers will have a home.
Gilgal means 'stone circle'. It is mentioned more than 30 times in the Old Testament. The Gilgal that I compare with the church of Jesus Christ is that place that in the time of Joshua became the first camp and center of operations of Israel in the conquest of Canaan, the place where God sent Joshua to restore the Hebrew ceremony of circumcision for all Hebrews born in the desert for 40 years and the celebration of Passover; the site where the 12 tribes of Israel built a 12-stone altar as a reminder of the crossing of the Jordan (Joshua 4.12), the Gilgal which became an important religious plaza in the time of Samuel and Saul. Gilgal is the place of the supernatural. There God decided that the manna would stop falling from the sky, procuring for his people a better food supply; at Gilgal the "commander of the Lord's army" appeared to Joshua to encourage him in battle. The Gilgal that would witness the rapture of the prophet Elijah to heaven by the miraculous work of God. The church of Christ resembles that Gilgal.
Yes, definitely, the New Testament is the history of the Church. Christ gallops energetically and meekly from the gospels and lowers the curtain of our understanding thus exposing the walls of our ignorance to reveal to us the coming glory of his beautiful bride, from the Book of Acts to the everlasting nuptials of Revelation. Christ challenges us from eternity to share his inordinate love for the church, which is in turn the vulnerable and articulate body that all believers make up. He casts a sad look at us from the side when we fleshed out his courts and trill of holy joy when we glorify him by showing the lost and unredeemed world our ecclesial vocation in love for one another. The promise of eternal life is for your church. The Iglesia del Señor de Señores is the exclusive travel agency that promotes heaven (salvation and eternal life) in its catalog of redemption as the only destination of encounter with the incomparable Christ.
Oh church of the Lord, how we need you and how we forget you! Why do we all have the unhappy tendency to focus on ourselves and blur from our Savior? Why does this ego behind the scenes of our lives often become the main protagonist of the play in our walk with Christ? If we looked more to Christ as Lord of his church and from within its courts, our sorrows would be less. We would more often experience God's grace poured out for her (ourselves).
The church is not perfect; neither was Gilgal. If the church were a perfect organism, Paul's epistles to the Corinthians would have no place in the New Testament, nor would his preaching to the Galatian brothers, nor his advice to his son Timothy. James would not have been so resounding in his universal letter and Peter and John would not have composed such beautiful hymns of exhortation and love for all believers. The disorders of the church translated into dissensions, immoralities, disputes between brothers, improper conduct, misunderstandings around doctrinal aspects, envy, backbiting, exclusivism, favoritism, protagonism and many other evils that appear in today's church, are exactly the same or worse) than those that were recurrent in the church of the first centuries. They will disappear from the Church as we are able to understand the "madness of the Cross" that is the source of all our wisdom as Children of God.
We are comforted by the fact that God thinks that his church, despite its imperfections, is still worthy of his goodness, of his mercy. He has mercy on your mistakes. He believes in his church enough to call her his girlfriend, his own body, his spiritual agency. Christ knows it well, what does the Maker of his work not know? The Lord's church, that Gilgal of spiritual rest, workshop where armor and broken hearts are restored, continues to point to eternity where those redeemed by faith in Jesus Christ will one day have a home.
God bless your Word!
Yes, definitely, the New Testament is the history of the Church. Christ gallops energetically and meekly from the gospels and lowers the curtain of our understanding thus exposing the walls of our ignorance to reveal to us the coming glory of his beautiful bride, from the Book of Acts to the everlasting nuptials of Revelation. Christ challenges us from eternity to share his inordinate love for the church, which is in turn the vulnerable and articulate body that all believers make up. He casts a sad look at us from the side when we fleshed out his courts and trill of holy joy when we glorify him by showing the lost and unredeemed world our ecclesial vocation in love for one another. The promise of eternal life is for your church. The Iglesia del Señor de Señores is the exclusive travel agency that promotes heaven (salvation and eternal life) in its catalog of redemption as the only destination of encounter with the incomparable Christ.
Oh church of the Lord, how we need you and how we forget you! Why do we all have the unhappy tendency to focus on ourselves and blur from our Savior? Why does this ego behind the scenes of our lives often become the main protagonist of the play in our walk with Christ? If we looked more to Christ as Lord of his church and from within its courts, our sorrows would be less. We would more often experience God's grace poured out for her (ourselves).
The church is not perfect; neither was Gilgal. If the church were a perfect organism, Paul's epistles to the Corinthians would have no place in the New Testament, nor would his preaching to the Galatian brothers, nor his advice to his son Timothy. James would not have been so resounding in his universal letter and Peter and John would not have composed such beautiful hymns of exhortation and love for all believers. The disorders of the church translated into dissensions, immoralities, disputes between brothers, improper conduct, misunderstandings around doctrinal aspects, envy, backbiting, exclusivism, favoritism, protagonism and many other evils that appear in today's church, are exactly the same or worse) than those that were recurrent in the church of the first centuries. They will disappear from the Church as we are able to understand the "madness of the Cross" that is the source of all our wisdom as Children of God.
We are comforted by the fact that God thinks that his church, despite its imperfections, is still worthy of his goodness, of his mercy. He has mercy on your mistakes. He believes in his church enough to call her his girlfriend, his own body, his spiritual agency. Christ knows it well, what does the Maker of his work not know? The Lord's church, that Gilgal of spiritual rest, workshop where armor and broken hearts are restored, continues to point to eternity where those redeemed by faith in Jesus Christ will one day have a home.
God bless your Word!
