The church in Jerusalem lived under an rule of discipline and order most of us would hardly recognize. This was not an organization; it was a family. It was probably quite raucous at times, and voting would be extremely rare. Disagreements were family discussions, and in the end, the elder had the final say. Every step of the way was subject to negotiation, because efficiency was hardly a consideration. Nor was it a matter of rights, but entirely a matter of loving care and a burden for genuine welfare.
Even in our nuclear family households, we seldom come any where close to a first century Hebrew family. For the most part, females and anyone under 30 talked among themselves, but seldom spoke out. It was not a matter of having no say, but in how it was done. They always spoke through their immediate family relations, in which the father figure polled his family. Leaders were burdened with the responsibility for selling, as it were, the priorities which the others didn’t always see. But any time the families gathered, the adult men led the discussion and negotiated between them the various concerns.
Again, none of this has to do with efficiency, nor protecting some patriarchal privilege. It would be like that in the West, but not in Ancient Near Eastern societies. Our Western sense of logic and propriety have no place, and certainly no grounds for judging something we can’t understand. The whole point of this was things being the in the order God commanded.
God made the men responsible for the way things turn out. They take the heat for not asserting their divine mandate for protecting the flock. When people reject this ancient order of things, they surrender God’s promised protection and support. God allows a lot of things, but actively supports what He commanded.
So we don’t just relinquish our rights to become slaves of the men-over-thirty. Yes, by the time Jesus was born His own nation had almost lost the original feel for tribal living, with a great many men taking themselves and their prerogatives entirely too seriously. We all recognize that when we see it, but we tend to see it when it’s not there. The men in charge are obliged to know what God says is in everyone’s best interest, not cater to whims — whether their own or those of anyone else. Those men were placed under a very heavy responsibility.
With all the weaknesses inherent in such a thing, it is the least dangerous of all the possible structures men have tried. That something else seems good in theory, and seems to work well over several generations does not make it right. God established a model, and it is our responsibility to adopt it, to bring ourselves up to His standards. You don’t even get to understand it until you have spent quite some time desiring to know what pleases Him. Pure intelligence, logic, energy, talent — those things don’t impress God. God is impressed when we persist in seeking to please Him.
The church is a spiritual institution, but its operations are under the Laws of God. Grace is the divine dynamic of the Spirit Realm, but the body in a fallen world, in flesh which is yet fallen, has to observe Laws as the basic structure of what Spirit-led living looks like. Regular readers realize I’m not talking about the Talmud, nor specifically the Law of Moses, but the proper spiritual understanding of what the Law Covenants pointed out to us about God’s ways.
