“What happened to them is a warning to keep us from wanting to do the same evil things.”
(1 Cor 10:6, CEV)
The crisis of handling rebellion in the Body is not a simple task. The nature of the church has been forced into such an unbiblical format that it perpetually feeds rebellion. If we want to examine the history of Korah we need to do so on the basis of 1 Cor 10:11 – “Now all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages have come.” All Old Testament events thus act as case studies from which we, in the New Covenant, learn. Through centuries of church history many practices and ‘truths’ have become acceptable, to such an extent that we often attempt fighting evil with evil. A large part of our rebellious problem – which literally spreads like a cancer in the community of believers (2 Tim 2:17) – can be found in the functioning of the modern day church. We are now going to get slightly sidetracked in scrutinizing Korah’s three main objections, to correlate it with the inherent flaws of the current church system.
The first objection we examine from Num 16:3 is – “All the members of the community belong to the LORD, and the LORD is with all of us.” Most will agree that the church has accumulated all the characteristics of a social club. Belonging to a church has become a social measure of acceptability, and most of its members are part of that particular faith system because they were born into it, and because they consider it to be “the right thing to do”. As many covenant churches also baptise young children into the covenant and acknowledge them as members of the church through all kinds of rituals (like catechism, confirmation and communion), without them being born again, the church is often full of people who are not truly ecclesia, a called out people. For this reason the fear of the Lord is no longer in the church.
In the times of the Acts church this was not the case – unbelievers or social believers that were not born again and did not walk in holiness before the Lord, avoided the church. “Nobody outside the group dared join them, even though the people spoke highly of them.” (Acts 5:13, GNB).
This group of believers emanated so much of God’s light that those who were unsure of where they stood with Him did not even dare come close.
The story of Ananias and Sapphira, recounted in Acts 5, acts as a good example of why the fear of the Lord should be present in any church that prides themselves on the fact that “the Lord is with us”. The measure in which judgement is visible in the house of God (1 Pet 4:17) in an ekklesia, is the measure in which it can pride itself as being part of the “Body”.
- Sela: Measure yourself and your church to this teaching.
- Read: 2 Kings 1; Jer 7; 1 Cor 6
- Memorise: 1 Cor 6:19 & 20
