Christ is the Head, and the church is His Body. Together they are one person. The Bible, from its first page to its last, reveals this person. The head and the body are not two separate entities. When the Lord said, “I am the vine, you are the branches” (John 15:5), He was saying that He and we are one living item. The stem and the branches are included in each other. The meaning of this oneness of the vine and the branches is the focus of the entire divine revelation in the Bible.
Human history has already passed through six thousand years. This is not a short time. All of history testifies to one thing. That one thing is the need of Christ. Why, for example, was religion invented? It was because man lacked Christ. He was short of God.
Genesis 4 makes this quite plain. When Cain was driven out of the presence of God and thus lost God, he and his descendants began to invent things (vv. 16, 20-22). Jubal, for example, was “the father of all such as handle the harp and organ.” The invention of music includes entertainment, like dancing, singing, and sports. Why is it that people are so attracted to nightclubs, concerts, and such? It is because they lack Christ.
For us God is our entertainment. He is our joy. He is our enjoyment. The Lord is our song. Moses said, “The Lord is my strength and song” (Exo. 15:2).
Another invention arising out of mankind’s loss of God was cattle-raising (Gen. 4:20). Jabal was a nomad, dwelling in tents. Because the land would not yield its strength to him, he was forced to be a wanderer and to keep cattle in order to make a living.
The making of weaponry was yet another invention to fill the loss of God (4:22). Modern weapons may be more highly developed, but their beginning was soon after Cain “went out from the presence of the Lord” (v. 16).
In Genesis 11 another invention was brought in, that of religion. At Babel idol worship was introduced. All idols are a replacement of God. If you have God, you do not need idols. God wants man to have only Himself, a living Person.
Another replacement for God is ethics. Even one thousand years before Christ was born, the Chinese people had the ethical teachings of Confucius. Ethics may be desirable from society’s point of view, but such teachings are simply one more invention to fill the shortage in mankind.
The jars of humanity are empty because God has been lost. All these inventions are attempts to fill that void.
Are you an empty jar? I am no longer empty because I am filled with Christ. I have no need of religion; I have a living Person. I have no need of ethics; I have the living Christ.
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