What Does One Call A Bunch of Christians? A Gaggle? A Flock? Something else?

1 Peter 2:9

⁹But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Today, the church understands that the power of God, given through Jesus Christ, is a light to the world, extended to all corners of the globe, drawing together all people regardless of color, ethnicity, race, or gender.  But if we read back that attitude onto the Bible, we could be left wanting.  While there are promises from Abraham forward that the worship of God is for all people, the reality is that, up until the time of the Romans, the worship of God was a provincial thing.  One people, the Jews, in one small part of the world, a strip of land along the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean, that was the center of the Godly world as we know it.  Other places had their own gods and goddesses, not real, but idols of wood and stone from our point of view, but real enough from their points of view. 

We are a “chosen race”.  God did this a few times.  He picked Adam and Eve, which fizzled, Seth after Abel was murdered by Cain, Noah and Mrs. Noah (not named in Genesis) after the flood, but finally settled on one couple, Abram and Sarai.  He called them out of a foreign land, marched them off to Israel as we know it today, changed their names to Abraham and Sarah, and made big promises of lots of descendants.  This was the Race that God Chose for Himself.  Jews claim descent through the line of Isaac, Muslims through the line of Ishmael, Christians through the Jewish tradition.

We are a “royal priesthood”.  God divided the human power running the land of Israel.  There was the high priest, a direct intermediary with God, and later, at the insistence of the people, a King, the ‘civil’ authority.  The original conception of the Promised Land was that God was in charge, that, through Jesus, the priesthood has been extended to all believers.

We are a “holy nation”.  In the Old Testament, the Promised Land was given to the people by God, a gift from the Almighty, thus Holy in its inception.  Through Jesus, this idea has been extended from the Promised Land to Creation itself, that all may come under the holiness and glory of God.

We are “God’s own people”.  God chose Abraham and his descendants to be God’s own people.  But that was one people among many, at first.  At first, it was just a barren couple who did not have their first child until they were both the ages of grandparents-maybe even great grandparents.  But God’s own people predates the choosing of Abraham.  It returns to the first Adam, whom God created, and was renewed in the Second Adam, our Lord Jesus, who brought us all back to Him.