2012 A.D.: 6th Day Series: the Thymus - a Department of Defense Academy for the Human Body!
The Thymus is a little gland that sits on the top part of the heart, on the front, and it's shaped somewhat like a white butterfly in some depictions and looks more like a tongue in others. There's a lobe on the right, and another on the left. If you click on the thumbnail at the bottom of this article you will find a drawing showing how I think it resembles a defense academy for our body, in a way. But to explain the notion, it receives certain cells from the blood and within a few days it has trained them, modified them, or however you wish to think of it, making them into lymphocyte cells known as t-cells. The 't' in t-cell actually stands for thymus, the organ responsible for creating them. The thymus is a gland that grows to a large relative size in our younger years, then starting in our teenage years, it shrinks away, becoming almost vestigial in us when we are older persons.
Have you heard that 'Jesus dwells in the hearts of His people'? So, the heart is sometimes spoken of as the dwelling place of Jesus. So, this Thymus gland is like a school, in a sense, because it trains cells in how to defend the rest of the body's cells. These t-cells learn to recognize invaders and help organize defenses against them. It is a 'military training school' that is literally attached to the dwelling place of Jesus (the human heart).
So, the 'students' are very close to 'Christ', and they learn how to alert their fellow cells about dangers, and to combat those dangers both personally and by mobilizing a larger organization of defense mechanisms that the body possesses.
This is sort of like a school for pastors, priests, or ministers, if you think about it. Such spiritual leaders even spend their lives wearing a Christian cross on their chests - that's very typical, anyway, and a cross even looks like a sub-case 't'. t-cells. Pastors, ministers, and priests were very important in the church in its early years, but once the Bible began to be available in printed form that every individual person could read, then the pastors, ministers, and priests had gained a very powerful helper - the written word of God. Before that, preaching was about the only way to hear Jesus' teachings, as only priests carried the scriptures with them.
Oddly, I read that the thymus also releases cells which locate to various parts of the body and produce t-cells on their own. That is almost analogous to the Bible being released to all parts of the world, to produce converts directly, and to steer them clear of error and help those believers to recognize and oppose false teachings about Christ.
Different t-cells are specialized to recognize and combat different sorts of antigens. That seems true of the clergy, also. Different pastors seem especially sensitive to particular heresies!
To summarize it, I think that the thymus seems to serve much the same purpose for our fleshly body as the full-time clergy serves for the body of Christ! Combatting the enemy, protecting the turf of Christ, reclaiming sickened areas that are under attack.
And as for young Christians, they may need to be straightened out or corrected on various fine points quite often in their early development, but they should learn to be a pretty accurate gauge of right and wrong once they are well taught and spiritually experienced, and then their need for constant support from the clergy should diminish. The 'heart' can teach them directly at that point!
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