…useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training righteousness, that the person dedicated to God may be capable and equipped for every good work. – 2 Timothy 3:16b-17 (NET)
Our Scriptures exist for the purpose of representing God to His covenant people. Though we tend to look to Scripture, grabbing a verse or a story, in order to find an application to a situation in which we find ourselves, this may be a matter of getting things out of order. The traditions of the covenant people of God, the prophetic utterances, the wisdom literature, and the theologizing about the meaning of the Resurrection that helped to shape the church community in the years following the Christ-event, do not exist primarily to serve man and to inform man how to live; but rather, they exist primarily to reveal God, and in that revealing, to bring Him glory. This revelation for the purpose of knowing God is given so that those who are supposed to bear His image might be able to do so rightly. This, of course, is why we undertake and so highly value theology, for we cannot serve our Creator God, with a knowledge of His purposes for us, if we do not know Him as revealed through the book that we ascribe to the influence and inspiration of His life-giving Spirit.
We do not approach the Scriptures so as to first learn about ourselves, or to gain encouragement for ourselves, or to find out what God has for us. All of these things take place as secondary results. We approach the Scriptures in order to learn about God. Because we are made in His image, it is in learning about God that we learn about ourselves. This is encouraging because we learn that God has a purpose for us as His image-bearers, and the Scriptures provide us with a hope that He is at work, quite faithfully, to bring about those purposes in us, for us, and through us. If we ever take a moment to consider why it is that we gather together as Christians, in what we refer to as our “church” or “worship” services, it is in this that we find the answer. The author of the letter to the Hebrews is adamant about the regular gathering together of those that call Jesus Lord, as he writes, “And let us take thought of how to spur one another on to love and good works, not abandoning our own meetings…encouraging each other” (10:24-25a).
When looked at on the surface and from the outside, by those that do not yet call Jesus Lord, we would have to be compelled to admit that our regular (predominantly Sunday) gatherings as individual bodies in representation of the kingdom of God, is quite the peculiar practice. Naturally, it is as peculiar as the very message upon which the church is built, which is that of an eminently shameful and ghastly crucifixion, the extraordinarily ridiculous notion of a man’s resurrection from the dead, and the somewhat ludicrous idea that those two things, taken together and then punctuated by an ascension, prove that the crucified man was the very embodiment of the Creator God and is the sovereign and ruling Lord of all in a kingdom that has been inaugurated on earth and awaits its final consummation in the coming together of God’s realm of existence (heaven) and man’s realm of existence (earth).
So why do we do it? What is the primary function of “going to church”? Is it for ourselves? Of course it is. Why? We do so for a variety of reasons. We gather together as a community of faith so as to escape the pressures of the world for an hour, as something akin to a temporary rescue from the exile (keeping us in historical continuity with Israel) represented by the looming specter of death and its accoutrements. This temporary rescue takes place inside our eschatological rescue, which has been promised to God’s people because of the Resurrection of Jesus. We gather to be encouraged by a message of God’s love in Christ. We come together to sing songs of praise as a correct response to the grace of God. We gather to learn about the needs of our community and the wider world, giving in response to the sacrificial demands that have been placed upon us by the cross.
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