There are things known as expediencies (or expedients). An expedient is something advantageous, helpful, profitable, or gainful in a given situation (1 Cor. 6:12 1 Cor. 10:23). Though matters of expediency have to do with matters of judgement, it is not to say that this isn’t a critical area. That is, they are to be ways of carrying out the Lord’s commands without adding to or taking away from the commandments of the Lord. (Deut. 4:2; Prov.30:6; Rev. 22:18,19) So expedients need to be sure they are expedients and not changes to the Lord’s will. For example, some things regarded as expedients actually add to what the Lord has said:- eg. instrumental music in worship is actually the addition of a type of music in worship that God hasn’t authorised. Other things take away from what the Lord has said: eg. What if Noah had included only two decks on the ark believing this to be more cost-and-space-efficient? (Gen. 6:16).
We might think that the safe answer would be not to mess with expedients, but we cannot escape them. For example, could Noah have built the ark without using woodworking tools of some sort? I would suggest not. Could he have built such a giant boat (300 cubits long) without the help and expertise of others? I don’t know for sure but I would think not.
Many things done in the operational life of a congregation are expedients. We usually gather in a building which is an expedient. An expedient to what? Heb. 10:24,25; John 4:24. A church building is a solution to fulfilling the command to assemble and worship much like the Jewish synagogue. But we could rent a building, meet in a home or under a shady tree. The fact is the Lord did not specify any sort of building in which worship was to take place, allowing His children to work out for themselves what was best in each individual circumstance. The early church used the temple precincts (Acts 2), but other congregations met in homes etc. By way of contrast this was not so of the temple (Heb. 8:5). Any expedient is legitimate in carrying out a specific command as long as it does not violate any other command. For example , when Jesus said go into all the world and preach the gospel, He did not say how, but it would not be right to hijack a plane to do so.
There is a balance, whether it would be fair to call it a fine balance I don’t know, but there is a balance between man’s autonomy and his dependence upon God. This has always been a problem area: eg. Satan’s inducement in Gen. 3:5 for man to overstep the boundary and disobey God (you shall be as gods). I was watching a program on the discovery of DNA, and James Watson, one of the discoverers of the doublehelix arrangement, in response to a question about playing God in genetic research, said, If we don’t play God who will? He thought that was a bit cute, but I thought it foolish and arrogant.
Yet in Ps. 82:6 (quoted by Jesus in John 10:34) God calls the children of Israel, gods. How so? Ps. 82 deals with the responsibility given to men to be honest and fair judges. In making judgements man plays God. Ex. 21:6 has in the N.I.V. then his master must take him before the judges. If you have a N.A.S.V. it will read his master shall bring him to god. Why? One is a translation and the other is an interpretation or deduction. The Septuagint has, his master shall bring him to the judgement seat of God. Ex. 22:8,9 in the N.I.V. is rendered the owner of the house must appear before the judges, but the Septuagint has, the master of the house shall come forward before god.
So men acted as judges in the application of the law of God. It’s one thing to have a law, it’s another to apply it. God gave men the right to do that. We see Jesus doing that with the woman taken in adultery: there was the law and then there was justice. Men are not gods in the strictest sense, but possess a derived, and therefore qualified, divinity. We are made in the image of God and we are to realise that we possess wonderful powers. We must not go beyond the boundaries God has set for us, but we must not underrate ourselves either, but be willing to take up the challenges of life that God has set for us. Take, for example, Gen. 1:28. What about Mark 16:15 – God left it to us to figure out how to do that – why? Because we are gods and possess the capacity to accept that challenge. God doesn’t treat us like imbeciles.
In Deut. 1:9-17 men were appointed as an expedient to taking care of the judicial workload that fell to Moses. We see a similiar thing in the New Testament in Acts 6 What was the church doing? It’s so easy to get a set on a particular thing. Most times we ask that question we answer, suffering from racial prejudice. That’s true, to a point – it could have been deliberate or it could have been an unthinking oversight. We are not told and we make our own guess on it. But the answer to the question, what was the church doing? is quite simple and quite praiseworthy – they were practicing benevolence. They believed in programs. In an age of no pensions and no social security or pensions, they had a program implemented to take care of widows on a daily basis. In some of the debates in the 50’s and 60’s when people argued about what the church could or could not do, they lost sight of this.
How did they carry out this program? We don’t know. God never spelled out how the church should do its benevolence because we are gods and have the capacity to work out a way of getting the job done without violating any law of God. What we do know is there were deficiencies in the program and some people fell through the cracks. However, what we do see is they came up with a solution to remedy the shortcomings of their existing program.