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The Power of Oneness.

By Mrs Jessie Penn-Lewis. 

 

“The Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the  men were building. The Lord said ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them’.” (Genesis 11 v5-6).

 

This testimony to the power of oneness from the mouth of the Lord is very suggestive in the light of Jesus’ High Priestly prayer, recorded in John 17, before He went to the Cross, where through His death He would slay all enmity and break down all walls of partition.

 

When men set to work to build the city and the tower which were afterwards named “Babel”, or confusion, we are told that the  “whole world had one language” and such was the force in this unity of word and of purpose that the Lord Himself said that nothing would be impossible for them. Since this meant a power in the hands of the fallen creation, which would end in rebellion against God, the Lord by one master-stroke defeated the danger by confounding their language so that they could not understand each other. Thus did God make void the “oneness” which had meant limitless power to the fallen creation.

 

The Aim of Federations

People have not ceased to seek that power of union of word and purpose which the Lord destroyed at Babel and we see the truth of the words when He said that from people with one purpose and one language nothing would be impossible. Federations of all kinds are to be seen throughout the world, but the divisions caused by language still frustrate a worldwide combination which would again seek to unite, as they did at Babel, to make themselves a “name”, instead of acknowledging God as King and Ruler of the universe.

 

God does not love confusion and division and He would never have caused it at Babel had it not been a stern necessity in order to save the fallen creation from greater sin against the Creator.  Jesus came to heal and to remove the effects of the curse by becoming a curse on the Cross.  Hence His High Priestly prayer on the eve of His passion. At Babel the oneness of the fallen creation in rebellion against the Creator was destroyed, at Calvary the “oneness” is restored in a “new creation”“That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me, and I am in you. May they also be one in us” (John 17 v21), and of the finished work on Calvary it is written, “That He might create in Himself . . . one new man”, Christ and His members making Head and Body with one name - CHRIST The oneness of the race of the first Adam, which was destroyed at Babel by the confounding of their speech, is to be restored in another “creation”, the race of the Second Adam, Christ. All who have died in the Person of the Second Adam, as the Representative Man upon the cross, have died in Him to the recognition of their old head, Adam, should understand that the supreme condition of power to accomplish greater works lies in unity. 

 

Unity is Power. “Nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them”, spoken at Babel, would also be true of the Body of Christ if it were united with one language and one purpose, and would mean unlimited power for blessing in the world. One people speaking the same language is Jesus’ purpose for the Christ-race, brought into being by the flood of judgment upon the first Adam - Representative hanging upon the cross.

 

Shall we act and speak as descendants of the race of the first Adam, who were confounded at Babel, or as “one people” having “one language” and “one purpose” in accord with our Risen Head upon the Throne of power, members of the Christ-race brought into union with Him in life, through sharing in His death?

 

Christ’s Ideal 

That this is Christ’s ideal for His Church we see in Paul’s entreaty to the Corinthians, when he wrote, “I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought” (1Cor. 1 v10). Here is pictured oneness of word, of mind and of judgment. Are we to say that any pattern or standard put before us in the Scriptures is impossible? No! The Spirit of God is able to do the perfecting together of the members of Christ’s Body, but they must intelligently seek His will, so as to co-operate with Him. They must understand the power of the oneness of the Body as being greater and of more supreme importance to Christ than the power of the one member, and therefore pray for oneness between the members of Christ and seek it with more intensity than personal blessing alone.

 

This perfecting together of the members of Christ’s Body, so that it may become “full-grown” to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ, is the objective of the Spirit of God. Hence the ceaseless tactics of the adversary to divide the members of the Body. “There should be no division in the Body”, wrote Paul to the Corinthians as he pictured to those who were spiritual, the heavenly Body of Christ, and how all living members of Christ were “in one Spirit” baptised “into one body”, all drinking of one Spirit! To the Ephesians the apostle wrote still more fully and showed how the Cross was the foundation place of union, how circumcised Jew and uncircumcised Gentile were reconciled not only to God but to each other by both being in Christ’s earthly body crucified on the tree (Eph. 2 v16), the death of the Cross slaying Jew and Gentile, so that through the Cross they may enter the sphere of the new man, Christ.

 

How the mystery of the heavenly Body of Christ came to him by revelation, the Apostle proceeds to show in Ephesians 3, and then in Ephesians 4 he teaches the line of action for the actual producing of the oneness of the Body. “Lowliness”“meekness”“long-suffering”“forbearing one another in love”“giving diligence to keep the unity of the Spirit . . . till we attain to the unity of the faith” (Eph. 4 v3-13), for “there is one Spirit . . . one hope . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” he writes. Here are the facts we need to recognise so that we may give diligence to keep the unity of the Spirit. Then as each member of the Body fulfils its office, “through that which every joint supplies, according to the working in due measure of each several part”, we shall “attain” in due season the “unity of the faith”, we shall “speak the same thing”, and reach “oneness of mind” and oneness of judgment.

 

All this undoubtedly emphasises the fact that the Oneness of the Body of Christ is of more importance than the individual benefit of each member, that unity is power, rather than the unit having “power”“Nothing will be impossible for them to do”