Jew and Gentile eating together, working together, greeting one another with a holy kiss, raising their children together, taking care of one another, marrying one another and burying one another.
This fact blew the circuitry of every person living in Century One. It shook the Roman Empire to its very foundations.
The church of Jesus Christ was a classless society. Its members didn’t regard social status, color or position. For them, there was no Jew or Greek in the body of Christ. There was no slave or free. There was no rich or poor.
Here, there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. —Colossians 3:11
For the first two hundred years, the Christians only addressed each other by their first names. The reason? Because their last names indicated their social position in society.
Here was a classless, raceless society where all social distinctions were erased.
To their minds, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, rich and poor no longer existed. The early believers saw themselves as part of the same family. They were a new race … a colony from another realm, not of or from this earth. Yet for this earth.
How Did This Happen?
Enter Jesus, a prophet from the ill-starred town of Nazareth.
In His humanity, Jesus was Jewish.
But take another look. He was something other …
“I am not of this world.”
“The Father sent me.”
“I came from the Father and I will return to Him.”
To borrow the language of Arthur Custance, Jesus Christ was a new species on the planet, a new creation, a new kind of human.
Jesus of Nazareth was the first child ever to break open the womb of a woman who would be part of a new creation. A human being after God’s original thought. A creature who lived by divine life, expressing God’s image in the earth.
And He had a holy intention that was shrouded in a mystery for ages (Colossians 1:25-28; Ephesians 3:2-6).
What was that intention? It was to take over the planet by establishing a colony of His own species on the earth. And He would do it in a way unthinkable to humans and angels.
He would die, rise again and reproduce Himself, becoming the head of a new race, a new humanity, a new creation.
Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. —John 12:24
In His death, Jesus took all social distinction, all racial tensions, all forms of human separation and He crucified them.
But that’s not all.
