God’s Script: History Unfolds Like a Screenplay

Life is confusing. It’s part of the human experience not to understand entirely what’s happening to oneself, around oneself, or in oneself.

Imagine for a moment that you’re a character in the middle of a novel, film, or play. Neither at the beginning, nor at the end, you might be in the middle of unintelligible action, or in the middle of a long expanse of actionless waiting. You're not sure about the purpose of the action; you don’t know for what you’re waiting.

You can be frustrated or disappointed with what’s going on around you. You can be even more frustrated or disappointed with yourself.

Yet God remains the screenwriter. He knew and knows what you’ll do before you do it, and He’s already incorporated it into his script.

Yes, we’re frustrated with ourselves, but God has accounted for our shortcomings and integrated them into His plot, as Zach Zehnder writes:

God sent Jesus not because He expected perfection from us, but simply because He loves us. However, God sent Jesus knowing that even after His death and resurrection we would fail Him.

The life we live is one of surrender. We surrender to God. We surrender our ideas and ideals, our plans and projects, our vision of the way things ought to be. We want to be perfect - for both good reasons and bad reasons. But we must surrender that ambition.

God uses us to carry out His will and His plans. Ironically, He uses us best and most when we’re not trying to be perfect. What makes His followers effective and attractive is not their perfection. It is their peace.

We want to be perfect so that we can be more effective as God’s people. But His plan is to work in our imperfections. He uses flawed people as His instruments on earth.

Shortly before his death in 2013, Byron Porisch marked the following passage in a book co-written by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay:

God has always wanted a ­people that would be exclusive to him holy, set apart, distinct, and beautiful to the world he is trying to redeem.

It’s a bit counterintuitive to realize that what makes the church amazing is not that it’s filled with such perfect people, but rather that it manages to communicate God’s love best by communicating through broken people.

As we “boast” about our weakness, God’s powerful intervention becomes more clear to those watching us (II Corinthians 12:9).

It seems odd to say that it is our brokenness which makes us “holy, set apart, distinct, and beautiful.” Yet we see this in Scripture: people like Jeremiah and Jonah were both broken and yet powerful prophets.

Byron also marked this passage in the book:

Church is something everyone should be a part of, but it’s different than being a faith community. Church happens when a group of ­people decide to go on mission with God together.

The authors are making a distinction between “church” and “faith community.” You might make the same distinction with other words, but here’s what it boils down to this: On the one hand, there’s the gathering of believers, those who share a creed, who meet to encourage one another, to worship and pray, and to study Scripture together. On the other hand, there are task-oriented groups who meet to go into action.

Both are good. Both are necessary. Both are important. Halter and Smay point to a cycle of gathering and sending, sending and gathering - a sort of dialectic.

Jesus gathers broken, sinful, flawed people together as His church. He’s under no illusions about our continued imperfections. He gathers us, blesses us, and builds a community of mutual support among us. Then He gives us assignments. He sends us on missions.

When we come back from our missions, we are still broken people, and we gather to worship Him and receive from Him, and the cycle begins again.

Lifestyles in the Early Church: Domestic Arrangements Among Early Believers

The initial generation of Jesus followers remains a perennial object of study. The earliest believers, during the first century, scattered in towns and cities around Mediterranean world, left hints about their activities in the New Testament.

One question which is sometime posed is a question about how they lived, where they resided, and what their homes may have been like.

In Acts 2:46, the believers “went to” the temple, i.e., they lived elsewhere. They apparently had their own individual houses, inasmuch as they visited “each other’s homes.” Some translators offer that they “attended” the temple.

These earliest followers of Jesus would have been a subset of the large crowd worshiping at the temple. Temple worship included singing of Psalms, and there is a possibility - even a probability - that these first believers joined in with the larger crowd, singing the Psalms together.

If they slept and ate at their own homes, and did their daily work, either at home or at some workplace, the time for worship at the temple would be limited, especially in light of the fact that workdays were not limited eight hours and workweeks were not limited to five days.

The believers had a single purpose and went to the temple every day. They were joyful and humble as they ate at each other’s homes and shared their food.

In Acts 8:3, Saul is in the business of persecuting the earliest followers of Jesus. He is operating in Jerusalem, with sorties in the surrounding countryside of Judea and Samaria. In hunting and finding these believers, Saul goes “from house to house,” indicating many houses, one after another. This would, in turn, indicate that the believers did not live together in some communal arrangement:

He dragged men and women out of one home after another and threw them into prison.

After Saul had changed his name to Paul, he refers, in his letters, formulaically to various groups of early believers. He writes that they “meet” in a certain person’s house, not that they live there. The language is precise, e.g., in Romans 16:5:

Greet Prisca and Aquila, my coworkers in the service of Christ Jesus. They risked their lives to save me. I’m thankful to them and so are all the churches among the nations. Also greet the church that meets in their house. Greet my dear friend Epaenetus. He was the first person in the province of Asia to become a believer in Christ.

Notice that the house is described as being the property of Prisca and Aquila. It was a privately-owned residence, and the owners freely allowed the church’s members, who lived in their own various homes, to gather there.

Paul uses the formula again in I Corinthians 16:19, where Prisca and Aquila are listed separately, followed by “and,” indicating their independent agency. Prisca and Aquila sent greetings, and others also sent greetings.

The churches in the province of Asia greet you. Aquila and Prisca and the church that meets in their house send their warmest Christian greetings.

In his letter to the Colossians, Paul uses the formula again:

Greet our brothers and sisters in Laodicea, especially Nympha and the church that meets in her house.

Paul also uses the formula in his salutation at the beginning of his letter to Philemon:

Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother, To Philemon our beloved fellow worker and Apphia our sister and Archippus our fellow soldier, and the church that meets in your house.

In his rebuke to the Corinthians, Paul articulates, first, that the followers of Jesus “gather,” indicating that they each had their own variously-located homes. Second, he indicates that for ordinary meals, they should remain home and dine there; the gatherings were for celebrating the Lord’s Supper and other feasts and festivals.

When you gather in the same place, you can’t possibly be eating the Lord’s Supper. Each of you eats his own supper without waiting for each other. So one person goes hungry and another gets drunk. Don’t you have homes in which to eat and drink?

These texts, and others, constitute a lifestyle in which the first believers lived largely, if not exclusively, in ordinary homes, and met on various occasions for worship and fellowship.

This is in direct contradiction to those who argue that people who follow Jesus should or must engage in a communal lifestyle.

While the ethics of New Testament allow for the possibility that some might choose communal living arrangements, it is in no way set forth as a paradigm for believers. It is one option among many, and in the textual evidence, an option that was rarely if ever chosen.