Seeing the Forest…and the Trees
My Oikos Story, by Scott Mercer
I grew up attending the largest church in Indiana, where the weekly average was 15,000 congregants. We had a beautiful building, a vibrant choir, powerful congregational singing, and fiery preaching. Nothing was emphasized more than the Great Commission. The mantra was simple yet bold: “Go. Win. Baptize. Teach.” From the moment someone joined our assembly, they were placed in a training class on how to share the gospel with a stranger. That’s right! We called it “door-to-door soul-winning.” This strategy came from Acts 5:42 where we read, “And every day, in the Temple and from house to house, they continued to teach and preach this message: Jesus is the Messiah.”
The intentions of door-to-door soul-winning were good, to spread the message that Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah. Unfortunately, this strategy does not often work with strangers. In the ancient Roman world, everyone in a community knew each other. So, spreading a message house to house meant telling the people you already knew. It should be no surprise that our mega-church was not built by these soul-winning efforts. The people whose doors we knocked on were not receptive to the good news we delivered. Most of them slammed the door in our faces. The few who allowed us to share what we wanted to share may have even received the good news with gladness, but there was hardly any lasting fruit from these endeavors.
Much later in my life, I was introduced to the idea of oikos, the idea that Jesus’ strategy to spread His good news was through relationships. It didn’t take long for me to embrace this strategy, because I realized, not only is it all throughout the Bible, but it actually works. (Certainly, Jesus would not give us a strategy to build His church that didn’t work.) I came to the idea of oikos long after my time at the mega-church. By the time I discovered this Greek word, I had already been practicing the strategy. But when I was shown clearly that this was Jesus’ strategy, it gave me the fuel I needed to go further to make a lasting impact in the lives of others who are on the front row of my life. As a Bible student, I have discovered that this strategy didn’t start during Jesus’s life. No, it goes all the way back to Genesis. Oikos was God’s plan from the beginning. Let’s jump in and see how.
Oikos in the Septuagint
First, I need to explain how I did my research. If I am claiming that the idea of oikos goes back to Genesis and the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, how can we know that the authors of the New Testament were continuing an idea that was already present in the Old Testament? The answer is that the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew into Greek some time before Jesus. This Greek translation of the Old Testament is known as the Septuagint. The Septuagint is extremely valuable to us today, because we can trace words and phrases from New Testament back into the Old Testament to see when the later authors were carrying forward ideas from previous authors. This practice of tracing themes from the beginning of the Bible to the end is called Biblical Theology. Biblical scholars insist that this is the way the Bible is meant to be read, as a unified story that leads to Jesus. I am convinced that they are correct. The Bible has history, instruction, songs, wisdom, prophecy, and more; but all of these collectively tell one unified story, the story of Israel and their God, and how their God stepped into humanity and became their King by dying and rising from the grave.
As a student in Biblical Theology, my first reaction after hearing the idea of oikos was to begin digging in the Septuagint. Would I even find the word there? I could hardly wait to find out. Can you believe the word oikos is found 1,743 times in the Septuagint? In the Old Testament, oikos can mean, house, household, family, dynasty, or temple. To be more specific, oikos can mean the house of Israel or the household of God. When it comes to Biblical Theology, one of the most important themes in the Bible is that of the temple. The theme of the temple can be traced from the first pages of the Bible all the way to the end. To my utter amazement, I found that oikos is the Greek word used in the Septuagint to describe the house that Solomon built for God. The temple was God’s oikos! Wow! I don’t know if you can feel the excitement coming through the keyboard right now, but this excites me so much. I have come to believe that oikos is more than just something humans have. God has an oikos. As Tom Mercer once said, “God did not just hardwire us with oikos, He is hardwired with oikos.” Let’s jump into Genesis and see God’s oikos.
Oikos in Genesis
I want to argue that the idea of oikos was God’s plan from the beginning to fill the earth with humans, God’s image bearers. On the first page of Genesis, we read that human beings were created as the image of God to rule on God’s behalf. Many have missed the significance of this and have instead spent much time in debate over other things in the first few pages of the Bible. Humans as the image of God should be the focal point of our studies in Genesis.
As biblical scholar Carmen Imes said, “Genesis 1 insists that humans are the climax of God‘s creative work, and the crown of creation.” Carmen is correct. And we can see this more clearly with a little help from our friends who know the original languages along with those who are historians. The word “image” in the phrase “image of God” comes from the Hebrew word tselem. Tselem can be translated as “image,” but it can also be translated as “statue” or “idol.” In the ancient world, tselem were found in pagan temples. They were idols, and it was believed that the gods would manifest themselves through these statues. This is why they would carve so many of these idols by hand with wood. They believed that, anywhere an idol existed, the gods could be present and bless the human.
But it was different for the Israelites. Their God, Yahweh, forbade them from carving such idols. Why? Because Yahweh had already made tselem. The tselem of Yahweh were human beings, male and female. And the very first command that God gave his image bearers was to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth. God’s plan from the beginning was for the whole earth to be filled with His representatives, who carried out His will in the world. Before we jump ahead in the story to what went wrong, it’s important for us to imagine a world where God’s presence flooded the earth in and through His tselem. It’s also important for us to play this original plan out in our minds. If the earth is filled with people and Yahweh is their God, then there is no need for kings. In Eden, every person was to rule alongside one another, not over one another. Humans were designed with limited capacity for relationships and influence. In God’s ideal Eden, there would be no heroes. As the people expanded and covered the earth, so would Eden, the place where heaven and earth were one. So, humans were the oikos of God, that is, the family and dynasty and dwelling place where God would live in and rule through them—and God was their King and Father.
The Aspen Tree
Recently, I was introduced to a fascinating fact about an Aspen tree forest. In the forest of Aspen trees, all of the trees are connected to the same root system. In fact, Aspen trees can only live for about 100 years, but the root system can last over 1,000 years. When I heard that, I immediately thought of oikos. God’s design from the beginning was for humans to spread out over the globe so that everyone would be connected to one another, one family with one God. Like the Aspen tree forest, all humans would be connected with the same source of nutrients. But if one tree became corrupted, the whole forest would be corrupted. And this is exactly what happened through Adam’s sin. This analogy helps us to see why Israel, even though they were chosen to fix the mess Adam made, were destined to be unsuccessful, simply because they too were contaminated.
Now we are ready to hear the good news about Jesus. Jesus was an Israelite. But He didn’t enter the forest by way of human descent. He was conceived by the Spirit of God. Uncontaminated by human sin, Jesus was the God who made the forest. Yet He stooped into the world He made to rescue the forest. He didn’t come into the world to condemn the world (see John 3). The world was already condemned because of human sin. Jesus came into the world to save us and restore us to our purpose—the image (tselem) of God created to house God.
God created humans as His image to live in us, so He could rule through us.
Jesus allowed the humans he created, contaminated by their own sin and rebellion, to put Him on a cross and kill Him. But this was the plan to break the curse of sin and death. Now the whole world could see God’s love, their own sinfulness, and the lie of the Devil.
Jesus and Oikos
Jesus’ strategy to spread His message, to renew humans to their purpose, and to restore the entire cosmos is oikos. If we go back to the illustration of the Aspen tree forest, we can see that Jesus wanted to spread His healing grace through the ecosystem of the forest through those who had been made right by Jesus. Jesus was so confident in oikos that His plan was to visibly leave us and then send His Spirit to indwell us. We have the plan and the power to complete it. But without Jesus physically with us, we must depend on faith. Faith is the ability to trust in God, despite our uncertainty. And faith gives way to more faith. We can think of faith as the human initiative that God uses to expand His grace through the forest. What’s more, in the family of God there are no shortcuts and no heroes. Let me explain more.
No Shortcuts and No Heroes
Remember God’s plan from Eden, to fill the earth with His representatives to rule over creation? That’s what Jesus is restoring us to re-engage. And, if that’s the case, then we all have an important role. The Apostle Paul uses the illustration of a body. Every person in the family of God is a body part. No body part is more important than another. This means we all need each other. Listen to this next statement carefully. Jesus is the only hero in the story of the Bible. Each and every one of us are important, but we are not more important than any other. This is what Paul means when he wrote:
“Because of the privilege and authority God has given me, I give each of you this warning: Don’t think you are better than you really are. Be honest in your evaluation of yourselves, measuring yourselves by the faith God has given us. Just as our bodies have many parts and each part has a special function, so it is with Christ’s body. We are many parts of one body, and we all belong to each other.” (Romans 12:3-5 NLT)
When we think we are the hero of the story, we will try to do too much. And, when it doesn’t work, we will take shortcuts to accomplish God’s plan. I think this is what the mega-church I grew up at was doing. They were focused on reaching the whole world with the Gospel. But that is not what God wanted them to do. God wanted everyone at my church to focus on the 8 to 15 people on the front rows of their lives. But since my church missed this part of the story, they tried to be the hero. This led to coming up with strategies to win the whole world to Jesus. But these strategies did more harm than good.
In closing, I believe what Tom Mercer discovered in his study of the Bible was there for us to see all along. We must not miss it. Oikos is Jesus’ strategy not just for evangelism, but to restore the whole earth to be His garden-temple, a dwelling place for Yahweh with His family. Since I can’t say it better, I will let my favorite New Testament scholar N.T. Wright say it for me:
“God is in the process of putting the world right; and He is now recruiting by His Spirit, through the proclamation of Jesus, people who will join in this project where they have to be put right themselves in order to be part of God’s putting-right-movement for the world. And this obviously involves believing; it involves joining and being plunged into the family of Jesus’ followers. And it involves then, inevitably, having one’s life turned upside-down, inside-out by the Holy Spirit working in someone’s life.”
I hope that God will use us to be His image-bearers, sharing the saving work of Jesus with those who remain hopeless, through our oikos, spreading the truth of Jesus through the forest, one tree, one soul at a time.
(Scott Mercer is a former Bible college professor and church planter. He is currently the Spiritual Formation Pastor at Hamilton Hills Church in Fishers, Indiana. He just returned from India, serving as part of an OM team sent to equip pastors with an understanding of the oikos principle. While he and Tom Mercer are great friends, they are not related.)