flesh so that he could be with us (John 1:14). And he promised to build his church—a word that, translated literally, means “assembly” (Matt. 16:18). Maybe you’ve never wondered why Jesus chose the word “church.” The Jews of Jesus’s day gathered in synagogues, but Jesus didn’t use the word “synagogue.” He used the word “church.” Why? We can answer this by looking backward and forward in the storyline of the Bible. Looking backward, we learn that it was prophesied that Jesus would assemble a people