The Bible Study Hour

Dr. James Boice: Unity sometimes seems to be a virtue of the past. It's been replaced by the fractured and even hostile desire of groups and individuals to advance their own agenda. And sadly, the disunity of the culture has spilled over into the church of Jesus Christ.

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Dr. James Boice: Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically.

Dr. James Boice: The great theme of the 133rd Psalm is the unity of those who live together as brothers, but is such a unity possible in our modern world? Can a true sense of Christian community still be found in our churches?

Dr. James Boice: Join Dr. Boice as he explores a beautiful psalm on the unity of God's people and the ingredients necessary to achieve it.

Dr. James Boice: Not many of us today have Latin as a second language, but we do know some Latin phrases. At least some of us do, if you are old enough to have been taught Latin back in high school.

Dr. James Boice: We know et cetera. Lawyers use the term pro bono.

Dr. James Boice: One Latin phrase all of us should know as Americans is one we find in some of our coinage. It has three words, and it goes like this: E Pluribus Unum. Unum means one, Pluribus means many.

Dr. James Boice: E Pluribus means from many. So E Pluribus Unum means one from many, or out of many, one. That's the American ideal, or at least it used to be. One great culture formed out of many diverse cultures.

Dr. James Boice: The melting pot, unity, community, all of those things that we were taught were good when we were young, but it doesn't exist anymore. We do not have that kind of unity anymore. We certainly do not have it as an ideal.

Dr. James Boice: What we have is a fracturing, self-conscious, competing, and even hostile desire of groups and individuals to advance their own way. We'd like to think that this ideal still remains in the church. Unfortunately, the same thing we see in the secular world has impacted the church too.

Dr. James Boice: We sometimes think about it. We say, we are not divided. All one body. We, but we really are divided. And sometimes even individual congregations are deeply fractured.

Dr. James Boice: Now, Psalm 133 is about unity. The unity of those who live together as brothers. The title says it's by David, a leader who aspired to this great blessing for his kingdom. But even David, great as he was, didn't achieve it.

Dr. James Boice: The latest years of his reign, as we well know, were marked by rancorous divisions and even internal strife and civil war. You have to ask then, is unity possible?

Dr. James Boice: The answer is yes, it is possible. It's the fruit of genuine community. But genuine community can only be established by Jesus Christ through the power of his kingdom.

Dr. James Boice: This important fact makes Psalm 133 an important psalm to follow Psalm 132, which touched on the blessings of the Messianic reign.

Dr. James Boice: We begin to look forward to the reign of Jesus Christ. We begin to touch on things like unity and realize to the extent that Jesus Christ reigns among his people here, that unity actually is attainable.

Dr. James Boice: This Psalm is beautiful poetry. It's sometimes quoted by people who do not even believe the Bible because it seems to have a certain poetic ring about it as it touches on things that we generally believe are good.

Dr. James Boice: It's so beautiful, this little poem, that it's really a pity to try to analyze it. Sometimes beautiful things are broken apart by analysis. And yet we're not just to have sentimental thoughts about unity.

Dr. James Boice: This, like all other portions of Scripture, is meant to teach us something. So, it's worth looking at it at least briefly to say, what does this really teach us about unity? There are four points here, even in this short Psalm, that are rather hard to miss.

Dr. James Boice: First of all, unity is a gift from God. It's something I've already said, but it comes out very strongly in the Psalm.

Dr. James Boice: It's the point of the first of the Psalm's two metaphors for unity, that it's compared with anointing with oil, especially the anointing of Aaron, who was the high priest.

Dr. James Boice: Anointing is something that's done at God's direction, in his way and with his authority. So any blessing that it confers comes from God.

Dr. James Boice: In this Psalm, you get that carried on in the imagery because there's a threefold repetition of the words running down, running down and down. All in verse two, it's the same word in Hebrew.

Dr. James Boice: It's emphasizing the same thing, coming down that is from above. It comes from God, and then the blessing proceeds to us, who are his people. It's that way with unity.

Dr. James Boice: We are all sinners, and one of the problems with sin is that sin divides. It's the exact opposite of what we're talking about here. Sin always ruptures. It produces hard feelings and divisions, and hatred and strife, and sometimes open warfare. But that which comes from God unites.

Dr. James Boice: God is the only one who is actually able to bring people together. Any real unity, any real lasting unity is from him.

Dr. James Boice: Secondly, it teaches that unity is for the small and the great alike. This is the chief point of the second of these images of the Psalm, in which the dew of Mount Hermon is imagined to be falling on Mount Zion.

Dr. James Boice: Hermon was the highest mountain in Israel. It was located about 200 miles north of Jerusalem, and it was proverbial for the dew, which fell on its lofty heights. It was also often covered with snow. A lot of the fresh water for the land came from Mount Hermon.

Dr. James Boice: Here in this Psalm, this dew that is said to fall on Hermon is also said to fall on Mount Zion, which is not very high.

Dr. James Boice: Like the preceding metaphor, dew comes down from heaven, oil comes down from God. This stresses that all unity is from God. But the chief idea here is that it falls on Zion as well as on Mount Hermon.

Dr. James Boice: When a country, or a church, or even a family is at peace, that blessing is a blessing for the smallest or least member of the community as it is for the greatest. All are blessed, especially the small, especially the insignificant. And by contrast, disharmony, strife, or warfare hurts everybody.

Dr. James Boice: Thirdly, the blessing of unity flows from one person to another. The first of these images, the anointing of Aaron, was a blessing from God for him. But Aaron, of course, was the high priest, and it was his duty to bless other people.

Dr. James Boice: We have in the Old Testament, the so-called Aaronic blessing, by which he blessed the whole people of Israel. That's what happens with unity. It spreads.

Dr. James Boice: The description of the oil running down from his beard upon the collar of his robes probably suggests this too, because there's the hint here that since this oil was precious oil, we're told in the Old Testament, all of the things that were mingled with it, it was actually an aromatic perfume. It's described, for example, as perfume in Exodus 30:33.

Dr. James Boice: So, when Aaron was anointed, the fragrance of the blessing would spread to other people. It's that way with unity. A person who is at peace with himself, or herself, or a people who are blessed by unity, are blessings to others wherever they go. They tend to win people to their unity and spread it.

Dr. James Boice: Finally, unity is a foretaste of heaven. This comes across in the very last of these three verses, which speaks of life forevermore.

Dr. James Boice: That's what the Psalm teaches. Let's go back, however, to what I was saying at the beginning of this study and talk about this lack of unity today, because it's certainly more noticeable by its absence than by its presence.

Dr. James Boice: I spoke of America and the fact that unity was once an American ideal and the fact that it's gone. We no longer think of ourselves as the melting pot where everybody blends together.

Dr. James Boice: Instead, a competing pluralism is the ideal. People no longer work for harmony. Instead, they struggle with each other for group advantages and individual rights.

Dr. James Boice: All of this has its roots in our current understanding of what it means to be an individual, and there has been a tremendous change here within our lifetimes.

Dr. James Boice: In the last 20 or 30 years, something terrible has happened to Americans in the way they relate to other people. Before that time, there was really something of an ideal that said, well, we are here to help others.

Dr. James Boice: Parents were certainly here to help their children, because we had the ideal that each generation would advance over the one preceding. It was the parents who were largely responsible for that. Moreover, as the parents got old, the children had the ideal that they were here to help their parents. They weren't here merely to live for themselves.

Dr. James Boice: Neighbors helped neighbors. One of the great American ideals is the barn raising where somebody has trouble, his barn burns down, and so all the neighbors get together to help him put it up again. It's not something he can do alone, he needs others. But as I say, all of that has changed.

Dr. James Boice: Today, the majority of people in a profound deep way focus on themselves and deal with others only for what they can get out of them.

Dr. James Boice: The sociologists have documented that. Let me share some of it with you. In 1981, a sociologist named Daniel Yankelovich published a study of the 1970s by the title New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down.

Dr. James Boice: What that book did was document a tidal shift in values by which many and then eventually the great majority of Americans began to seek personal fulfillment and pleasure as the chief end of life. They weren't thinking about others anymore. They were thinking about themselves.

Dr. James Boice: Yankelovich found that by the late 1970s, 72% of all Americans spent much time thinking about themselves and their inner lives.

Dr. James Boice: This is so pervasive, so obvious, that in 1976, Thomas Wolf coined a phrase to describe the entire decade in an article that he published in the New York magazine, calling it the Me Decade. A phrase that's still with us.

Dr. James Boice: Well, we say, isn't that a good thing? Shouldn't thinking about ourselves all the time make us happy? If we just redirect our energy toward the time that we're wasting on other people, and instead concentrate on fulfilling ourselves, shouldn't we find fulfillment and joy? It doesn't work that way, as we're beginning to find out.

Dr. James Boice: All it does is make us miserable. It fails on the personal level and it fails on our relationship with other people too.

Dr. James Boice: In spite of what humanism seems to promise, that if we just concentrate on ourselves, we'll be happy, it actually makes our world inhuman. And a failure to relate to other people actually hurts ourselves as well.

Dr. James Boice: Charles Reich is another sociologist. He wrote a book called The Greening of America, the coming of a new consciousness, a rebirth of a future. It was published in 1971. He anticipated a lot of the things that were coming.

Dr. James Boice: Listen, this is what he wrote. See if it doesn't describe the world you live in now. Modern living, Reich says, has obliterated place, locality, and neighborhood, and given us the anonymous separateness of our existence.

Dr. James Boice: The family, the most basic social system, has been ruthlessly stripped to its functional essentials. Friendship has been coated over with a layer of impenetrable artificiality as men and women strive to live roles designed for them.

Dr. James Boice: Protocol, competition, hostility, and fear have replaced the warmth of the circle of affection which might sustain men against a hostile environment. He said that America has become one vast, terrifying, anti-community.

Dr. James Boice: Well, we say, that's the world out there. Certainly the churches are exempt. But unfortunately, the churches are not always exempt, at least not everywhere, not at all times.

Dr. James Boice: Here's what Michael Scott Horton writes about the churches. Our churches are one of the last bastions of community, and yet they do not escape this kind of individualism.

Dr. James Boice: Many of us drive to church, listen to the sermon, say hello to our circle of friends and return home without ever having really experienced community.

Dr. James Boice: Earlier, evangelicalism was so focused on corporate spirituality that communion was taken with a common cup. We hear endless sermons on spiritual gifts and how the body of Christ is supposed to operate in concert. And yet our services are often made up of the professionals who entertain us and the individual separate believers who are being entertained.

Dr. James Boice: Sadly, I think that's not only a description of what's out there, but a description of the direction in which many evangelical churches are moving. And what a pity it is, because it means we miss the opportunity to demonstrate the reality of something which the world, for all its ignorance of God, nevertheless desperately seeks and knows it lacks.

Dr. James Boice: Now I want to move back to something positive. Here we talked about the Psalm. Then we talked about the lack of unity in the world and the church. Let's ask the question, where does unity come from then, and can we find it again once it has been lost?

Dr. James Boice: We already gave the answer to the first question: unity comes from God. The answer to the second is that yes, unity can be rediscovered and re-established. But only as men and women get outside of themselves and submit their own selfish individualism to a higher and more worthy cause than self-indulgence.

Dr. James Boice: The Bible shows the way. I want to go through it. Go back to the early chapters of Genesis, back in Eden. Here you find God looking at the world that he had made and seeing something that he didn't think is good. He said, it's not good that the man should be alone.

Dr. James Boice: God wanted the man to live with relationships and in harmony, so he created a woman with whom the man would be able to share God's bounty and the joys of the work God gave to our first parents. So Adam did until sin entered in and caused mutual accusations and disharmony.

Dr. James Boice: We find the same thing in the New Testament. When Jesus is talking about what he came to do, namely to establish a new community in the reality of his church. This is what he said. He said, I am going to build my church. Matthew 16:18. Not only that, he prayed for the church.

Dr. James Boice: One thing he prayed for is that God's people might have unity. He did it in John 17. Listen, my prayer is not for the original disciples alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

Dr. James Boice: I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

Dr. James Boice: That's not an enforced or artificial unity. It's not something imposed from without. It's based on a common participation in Christ and his gospel. It's analogous to the unity in the Godhead.

Dr. James Boice: When we pass beyond the gospels to the Book of Acts, to the history of the early church. We find that this ideal was realized to a very large extent in that first Christian community in Jerusalem.

Dr. James Boice: Because it's said in Acts two of this community, that there they devoted themselves to the apostle's teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

Dr. James Boice: That's what we're interested in, because we want to see this in our church and churches. So let's think about that church. It's the New Testament counterpart, I suppose, to what we have been seeing in Psalm 133.

Dr. James Boice: What about that church? Well, for one thing, it was an inner city church, and a pretty big city at that. Secondly, it was a large church, and it had a multiple staff ministry.

Dr. James Boice: It started out with 120, and they had a couple disciples there, apostles, who were in charge. But after Peter preached at Pentecost, 3,000 were added to the church all in one day. So at that point, if we take the numbers at face value, you had 3,120 people in the congregation. They soon found the 12 apostles were not enough.

Dr. James Boice: So they elected a bunch of deacons to supplement what they had. They elected seven of them, so now they had 19 officers in order to handle this particular church.

Dr. James Boice: A large church has its problems, of course, and so did this one. It wasn't a perfect church. It was the church that had hypocrites, it had doctrinal errors. It was full of sinful human beings of all types. And yet, it was a model church in many respects.

Dr. James Boice: One of the striking things about it is this emphasis upon fellowship or unity. Fellowship has to do with holding something in common. It literally means a common participation in God, and it's this that had drawn the early Christians together.

Dr. James Boice: Someone has said, the stronger your fellowship on the vertical dimension is, the stronger your fellowship will be on the horizontal dimension. This is true. The closer you are to God, the closer you will be to other people, and this is what they had found in Jerusalem.

Dr. James Boice: Here are the things that are mentioned. First of all, notice, the apostolic teaching. They devoted themselves to the apostolic teaching. Real unity or community can be established only around a common set of convictions and beliefs.

Dr. James Boice: That's what drew these early believers together. It was their devotion to the teaching that was being given to them by the apostles. It's the first thing Luke mentions. He stresses that in these early days, in spite of that marvelous experience of the power of God that they had witnessed at Pentecost, which might have caused them to focus on their experiences instead, the disciples actually devoted themselves first of all to the apostolic teaching.

Dr. James Boice: It could have been a temptation for them to think back to Pentecost and focus on that entirely, and wish that they might somehow experience that again. They might have remembered the way the Holy Spirit came and used them to speak so that people in Jerusalem each heard them in his or her own language. They might have said, oh, that's what we need to have again.

Dr. James Boice: They might have remembered the miraculous and said, what we need are more miracles. Please do something miraculous again. But that's not what we find. What we find instead is that they are not reveling in past experiences, but reveling in the word of God.

Dr. James Boice: I want to suggest that this is always the first mark of a spirit-filled and therefore a united church. A church which is filled by the spirit always devotes itself to the apostolic teaching. It's a learning church that grounds its experiences in Scripture and then tests them by the word of God.

Dr. James Boice: Secondly, there's the fellowship. Love of the Scriptures led these believers also to love one another, which meant that they had genuine unity as God's people.

Dr. James Boice: The most important thing about them, both individually and as a communion, was their devotion to the teaching. And because of it, they cared for one another. That paragraph at the end of Acts two shows that they actually shared their possessions with one another. Because they cared about one another so much they didn't want anyone to be in material need.

Dr. James Boice: Then here's a third characteristic of the church: it was characterized by worship. That's what's involved in those phrases, the breaking of bread and prayer. Breaking of bread, of course, stands for the communion service.

Dr. James Boice: Prayer, although it's something that can and should be done individually and at different times, in this passage actually refers to corporate worship because in the Greek language, it has the definite article before the word prayers. It doesn't merely say they devoted themselves to prayer, but to the prayers. That is formal worship.

Dr. James Boice: This means that when they got together, they observed the Lord's Supper, they prayed, and they praised God. Where did they do it? Well, it says that they did it in the Temple courts. The only large area in Jerusalem in those days where you could get a great group of people together was the enclosure around the Temple. It could hold perhaps 200,000 people. There was plenty of room for them to grow.

Dr. James Boice: Then you read in the same paragraph that not only did they worship in this formal setting, they worshipped informally as well, because the very next phrase says that they broke bread in their homes. That's a deliberate repetition. You see, in verse 42, they devoted themselves to the breaking of bread. Then in verse 46, they broke bread in their homes. It means they did both.

Dr. James Boice: They worshipped formally when they came together, and they also worshipped informally together in smaller groups.

Dr. James Boice: We've followed this biblical idea of unity from Genesis through Psalm 133, the teaching of Jesus Christ and his prayer, and then his realization in the early church. Let's complete it by looking the whole way through to the very end, to the church as it emerges in the last book of the Bible in Revelation.

Dr. James Boice: We're encouraged to do that by Psalm 133, because that Psalm talks toward the end about life forevermore, as God bestows his blessing from Mount Zion.

Dr. James Boice: Earthly Zion is a type of heavenly Zion. Hebrews speaks of it as the joyful assembly, or an enduring city. Revelation calls it a New Jerusalem, in which there will be no sin, or evil, or pain, or death, all of which disrupt, in which there will be no disharmony because the desire of every one of God's redeemed people will be for his glory and for the glory of the Lamb, who is Jesus Christ.

Dr. James Boice: We sing and did it earlier in our service, Blessed be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love, the fellowship of kindred minds is like to that above. And that's it exactly.

Dr. James Boice: It's an anticipation of that perfect future unity that causes us to seek and maintain our unity now. And when we do that, as the people of God, we have something unique to offer to a very divided world.

Dr. James Boice: One commentator says if we dwell together in loving unity now, we have already begun the enjoyments of eternity, which are forevermore and can never be taken away from us.

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Dr. James Boice: And God's people say, Amen.

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