The Lord appointed the church to be His representative on earth, so He gave her great authority.
1. “Whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you retain, they are retained” (John 20:23).
The authority given by the Lord to the church includes determining whether a person’s sins have been forgiven or not. If a person does not believe in the Lord, he is a sinner and has no relationship with the kingdom of God. Once he repents and believes in the Lord, the church has the authority to determine whether his sins were forgiven and to receive him, confessing that he is one who has been forgiven and received by God. The church has been given this authority because she has received the Holy Spirit (v. 22). Therefore, the church can determine by the Holy Spirit whether a person’s sins have been forgiven and whether he can be received. The Holy Spirit lets the church know whether a person’s sins have been forgiven, whether God has received him, and whether the church can receive him. The church must exercise authority to receive people by the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit, the exercise of this authority would be a problem.
2. “If he refuses to hear the church also, let him be to you just like the Gentile and the tax collector...Whatever you bind on the earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on the earth shall have been loosed in heaven” (Matt. 18:17-18).
The Lord has given the church the authority to deal with sinning believers. If a brother sins, we should exhort him. If he will not listen, we should go with one or two other brothers to exhort him again. If he still does not listen, we should tell the matter to the church. If he will not listen to the church, the church has the authority to deal with him, bind him, and regard him as a Gentile. According to the verses immediately following this word in Matthew 18, the church’s authority to deal with a sinning brother is in the Lord’s name (v. 20). To be in the Lord’s name means to be in the Lord. Therefore, the church does not deal with a sinning brother by herself but in the Lord and in His name. The Lord’s name is the authority. To deal with someone in the Lord’s name is to deal with him by the Lord’s authority. If a local church is in a proper condition, she has this authority, and the Spirit of the Lord will confirm the church’s dealing. Although the church does not have human, earthly authority of this age, she has spiritual, heavenly authority to cause unrepentant believers to lose the blessing of the church, lose the presence of the Lord, and to fall into darkness like worldly people who do not have the Lord.
3. “Do you not judge those who are within the church?...Remove the evil man from among yourselves” (1 Cor. 5:12-13).
The Lord also gives the church the authority to judge and remove believers from the fellowship of the church. If some believers continuously commit the gross sins mentioned in 1 Corinthians 5 and if they refuse to repent, the church has the authority to condemn their sins and to remove them. This kind of removal is not for the purpose of rejection but in the hope of reconciliation.
4. “Do you not know that the saints will judge the world?...Are you unworthy of the smallest judgments? Do you not know that we will judge angels, not to mention things of this life?” (1 Cor. 6:2-3).
When the Lord comes again, the believers will have the authority to judge the world and the angels. Therefore, believers can judge disputes among brothers today. This authority has been given by the Lord to the church. The Lord does not want believers to take their disputes to unbelievers. The Lord wants the church to judge disputes among the brothers. Thus, the Lord gave the church the authority to judge.
The different kinds of authority that the Lord has given the church speak of the importance of the church in the Lord’s eyes. The church is very important.
See chapter 30, entitled “Meeting,” in Crucial Truths in the Holy Scriptures, vol. 3.
The Lord treasures the church and desires to obtain the church; Satan envies the church and desires to damage the church. The Lord builds up the church, but Satan tears down the church. The church that the Lord created on the cross and brought forth on Pentecost was spiritual and heavenly, overcoming sin and the world, and was holy and without blemish. However, she quickly became corrupted and desolate because of Satan’s damaging work. Not long after the church began, Satan mixed false believers, tares, into the church (Matt. 13:25) so that the church became mixed and impure. At the same time, he worked in the church to cause people to deceive the Holy Spirit (Acts 5:1-11), to murmur concerning their physical needs (6:1), and to covet glory in spiritual matters (8:18-24) in order to corrupt the intrinsic element of the church. At the time of the church in Corinth, he caused people to create divisions and become puffed up in their flesh (1 Cor. 1:10-13; 3:1-5; 4:6-8), to commit adultery in wanton lust (ch. 5), to sue each other (6:1-8), to willfully eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols (ch. 8; 10:19-22), to doubt the authority of the apostle (9:1-15), to argue about head covering (11:2-16), to eat the Lord’s supper improperly (vv. 17-34), to confuse the order in the church by the abuse of the spiritual gifts and the lack of love (chs. 12—14), to not believe in the future resurrection of the dead (15:12-19), and to be dissimilarly yoked with unbelievers (2 Cor. 6:14-18). Satan also worked to bring the church back under the law of Judaism, including the practice of circumcision (Gal. 2:4, 11-19; 3:1-5; 4:21; 5:1-12; 6:12-15), so that she would lose the New Testament grace of life, the power of the gospel, and the purity in the Holy Spirit. Satan also brought Gentile philosophy into the church (Col. 2:8, 20-23) so that the element of human thought and philosophical reasoning would be mixed into the church. By the time Paul wrote the Epistles to Timothy, Satan’s corruption of the church was even stronger. He caused people to thrust away a good conscience and to blaspheme (1 Tim. 1:19-20), to do evil things to the apostle (2 Tim. 4:14-15), and to overthrow the faith of many by saying that the resurrection had already taken place (2:17-18). Satan did this in order to cause people to depart from the faith, to give heed to deceiving spirits and teachings of demons (1 Tim. 4:1-3; 6:20-21), and to teach heresies and to regard godliness as a means for gain (vv. 3-5). This made people lovers of self, lovers of money, and lovers of pleasure, having an outward form of godliness, though denying its power (2 Tim. 3:1-8). It caused the servants of the Lord to love the present age and to leave their co-workers (4:10). Furthermore, it caused the churches to turn away from the apostles (1:15; 4:16), which means to leave the teaching and fellowship of the apostles. By the time Peter wrote his second Epistle and Jude wrote his Epistle, Satan had caused the church to have false teachers who brought in destructive heresies and even denied the Master who bought them in order to cause the people to follow the way of Balaam, which is to love the wages of unrighteousness (2 Pet. 2:1-3, 15; Jude 11). By the time John wrote his Epistles, Satan had caused antichrists to appear in the church who did not believe that the Lord was God incarnate and who went beyond the teaching concerning the person of the Lord to teach heresies that are reflected in today’s modern schools of unbelieving theology (1 John 2:18, 22; 4:3; 2 John 7-11). He had also caused those in the church to love to be first, to babble evil words against the apostles, to rampantly defy authority, to do evil, and to deal with the brothers as they pleased (3 John 9-11). By the time of the Lord’s last seven epistles (about A.D. 90), not only had some of the churches left their first love toward the Lord (Rev. 2:4), but some also dwelt where the throne of Satan is and held the teachings of Balaam and the Nicolaitans (vv. 13-15). There were churches who held the teaching of Jezebel, committed adultery, ate idol sacrifices, and knew the deep things of Satan (vv. 20-24). There were churches who had a name that they were living but were dead and weak in all things (3:1-2). There were also churches who were lukewarm and self-satisfied to the extent that the Lord was completely shut out (vv. 15-17, 20). Since the church was corrupt and desolate, she could not satisfy the Lord’s heart’s desire, and the Lord was forced to call out some to do what the church was incapable of doing. Therefore, the Lord sent forth a call for believers to be overcomers (2:7, 11, 17, 26; 3:5, 12, 21). The man-child that the woman brings forth in Revelation 12 is the overcomers whom the Lord gains in the church. They carry out the church’s function to deal with and defeat God’s enemy Satan to bring in the kingdom of God.
The corruption and degradation of the church on earth has never ceased. In the first part of the fourth century, the Roman emperor Constantine accepted Christianity and made it the official religion of his worldly empire. This caused the church to be wholly joined to the world. She lost her nature of being separated from the world and was instead joined to the world. The Lord referred to this matter in the parable of the mustard seed in Matthew 13 and in the epistle to the church in Pergamos in Revelation 2. In the sixth century the Roman Catholic Church was officially established, causing the church to become inwardly filled with all kinds of heresies and evils and to lose her pure spiritual nature. The Lord spoke of this matter in the parable of the leaven in Matthew 13 and in the epistle to the church in Thyatira in Revelation 2. Today the “church” is in a condition of corruption and degradation such as has never been seen before. According to the Holy Spirit’s prophecy, the corruption and degradation of the church will continue until the day the Lord returns; only then will it cease.