Revelation
SARDIS - continued
Doubtless the division may separate between true Christians
themselves; and this is in itself an evil, that true Christians should be
separated; but the responsibility rests with those who are not quick-eared
enough to hear God's call when it comes, - not single-eyed enough to discern
the path in which the Lord is leading His own. We are bound, by the honour we
owe to Him, to maintain that He cannot possibly be leading His own in
contradictory paths - cannot possibly refuse the needed light to walk aright,
however simple or ignorant the soul may be. No one strays and no one stumbles
because God denies him light. But "the light of the body" practically is the
eye the inlet of it, and there the hinderance is. Thus a severance, sorrowfully
enough, is made between real Christians; but the sin of it is not with those
who separate from that which God has shown them to be evil, but with those who
remain associated with the evil which is forcing out the true in heart.
Separation from evil, so far from being a principle of division, would, if
honestly followed, make for unity and peace, as leading upon a path where
God’s Spirit, ungrieved, could really unite and strengthen His people.
With evil He cannot unite; and this, indeed, therefore, wherever admitted, is a
principle of division.
I am not, therefore, upholding or making light
of schism. The divisions of Protestantism are its shame, and to glory in them
is to glory in one’s shame. Error is manifold, contradictory, schismatic.
Truth, however many-sided, is but one. Sects, in their multiplicity, may
accommodate, no doubt, the religious tastes of man; but that only would show
how purely human they are, how little divine.
The unity of the Spirit
may be maintained, and allow indeed for growth in knowledge, and in unity of
judgment as to many things. The Church of God has room for all that are
God’s, of whatever stature - fathers, young men, and babes. It can allow
of - nay, insists upon - the largest charity for those who differ from us in
aught that would not link the name of Christ with His dishonour. But that is a
very different thing from what is implied in a creed, and indeed I may say, is
its fundamental opposite. For the creed defines, in a way that, if rigidly
adhered to, shuts out toleration as to points of confessedly minor importance,
where the Spirit of God would teach, not indifference, indeed, but the largest
charity, - forcing its definitions upon all in a way most felt by the most
conscientious. It is as necessary, as far as the creed goes, to believe in a
child’s being regenerate when baptized as it is to believe in the Son of
God Himself. I grant there may be practical laxity, but for a soul before God
that does not do. For such an one, with his eyes open, the subjection to human
institutions in the things of God is just what he cannot and dare not
yield.
"Schism in the body," then, is always wrong. Separation from
evil, at all costs, is a necessity, and always right. And from this have been
gathered the freshness and power which have plainly characterized so many
movements of this kind at the beginning. They began in self-judgment and
devotedness. The evil at least they saw, and were exercised about, and the
measure of truth they had was held in power. It was soon systematized, and in
that proportion its power began to fail. The founders, if you look at their
lives, were men of faith and power, suffering and enduring. The manners of the
adherents were chastened, simple, primitive. Organized, popularized, with a
large following, the freshness waned; and in the third or fourth generation,
another sect had taken its place among the many, boasting of a history which it
did not discern to be a satire upon its present condition.
The
organization, the creed, are to preserve the truth. But did these give them the
truth they are anxious to preserve? Surely not, as they must own. God in His
love, God in His power, has given what man had proved his incompetency to
retain. They cannot trust Him to retain it for them, after He has given it. He
has used His Word to minister it; they turn round and use, for that blessed
Word of His, a creed of their own manufacture to preserve it. The generations
after follow their fathers’ creed, and not the Word. The truth popularized
is gone as "Spirit and Life." God has to work afresh and outside of what a
little while ago He had Himself produced.
And the spiritual life of the
time has come more and more to manifest itself in "revivals," which, so far as
they are really such, are the protests of the Spirit of God against prevailing
death continually creeping over every thing; and oftentimes connected with
fresh statements of truth, when the old have lost their power. The Lord’s
warning to Sardis points out this constant tendency to death. "Be watchful, and
strengthen the things that remain, which are ready to die." "Remember therefore
how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast and repent." It is scarcely too
much to say that every true revival, whatever the blessing for individuals, -
nay, I might even say, in proportion to the blessing for individuals, - weakens
the national system; and this for reasons we have been considering. The Spirit
of God must needs work in opposition to the death produced by the system, and
therefore against the system which produces the death. Souls quickened by the
Spirit of God cannot go on contentedly under deadly and unchristian teaching,
comforting themselves with the assurance of the article that "the evil" who
sometimes "have chief authority in the ministration of the Word and sacraments"
do yet "minister by Christ’s commission and authority;" nor will they
always be able to accept the ecclesiastical "yoke with unbelievers," because
the system requires "every parishioner" to communicate, irrespective of any
other security as to his conversion than his baptism and confirmation may
imply.
It will be no marvel, then, to find, what any one with spiritual
understanding must own, that at least the large proportion of those who could
be said to "have not defiled their garments" in the history of Protestantism
have been in some way or other dissenters from the national system. The first
generation of English reformers were dissenters from Rome, and Rome did her
best to keep them pure, in the fires she kindled for them. In the second and
third generation from these, a people began to be separated, who from their
honest endeavor to be right with God were nick-named "Puritans." I need not
tell you what great names, which after-generations have learnt to love and
honour, are found among this class, - a class with whom fine and pillory and
imprisonment were familiar things. Every body knows that Bedford gaol was the
"den" in which John Bunyan dreamed his memorable dream. In Scotland, the
attempted enforcement of prelacy gave a succession of martyrs and confessors to
the Presbyterian name, with whom, as elsewhere, their time of persecution was
their time of real blessing, while the Episcopalianism which was riding
rough-shod over them had gone already more than half way back to Rome.
With the movement under Wesley and Whitefield, nearer to our own times, we are
naturally still more familiar; and that which issued in the Free Church of
Scotland is still within the memory of a generation not yet passed away. All
these, and many others, will exemplify the truth of what I have been saying;
until, in our own days, the national systems are showing evident signs of
decrepitude and breaking up; and Romanists and infidels are beginning their
peons on the downfall of Protestantism. We who are able to see it all in the
light of Scripture can easily understand why all this is, and see only the
truth of God’s Word more and more manifested in it. Christianity flung as
a cloak over a corpse can surely not warm it into life. Corruption will go on
underneath, eating away the form of life, the only thing it ever had, until at
last the cloak will more or less fall off, and what was all along true become
apparent. When the Protestant churches shall be gone altogether, or gone as
such, their protest will not be gone, but only transferred to another court.
Heaven will take up what they have dropped. Babylon the Great will fall under
divine judgment; and apostles and prophets, and God’s people every where,
will rejoice at her fall.
A few words now about another thing. If the
Church reigns in the absence of Christ, what then? Why, then there must be
something representing Him down here; - He must have a vicar. He is not
present (even the world cannot mistake that), except spiritually. He is at
God’s right hand. That is the common faith of Christianity, and it is the
faith even of Rome. Although, in spite of that, her altars are continually
proclaiming Him corporally present, the faith of Christianity is that Christ is
away.
But a visible kingdom requires a visible head; and I need not
tell you that such they have given it. The pope is, for Rome, Christ’s
vicar; and this is only the natural development of the thought of
church-government which historically preceded and led on to it, and which
extends far beyond Rome. Presbyterianism, prelacy, popery, are but three steps
in the same direction. Apostles are no more; and the Church is orphaned, if not
governed in a visible manner. Hierarchial government in some form is a
necessity to it. Now the Lord has indeed a Vicar during His absence - a
perfect, infallible Guide for His people, as well as a guide-book absolutely
perfect. The Church has not only a perfect body of discipline, but One also who
is the Interpreter and Administrator of it. It is the characteristic of
God’s people that "as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the
sons of God." So distinctive and so wonderful a blessing is the presence of the
Holy Ghost with us now, that, although the disciples in our Lord’s day
~were blessed, by the fact of His presence with them, beyond all the
generations previous, yet He could say to them, "It is expedient for you that I
go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I
depart, I will send Him unto you."
His presence in the believer makes
even his body the temple of the Holy Ghost. So His presence in the church
makes it also "the temple of the living God." Looking at the Church, again, as
the body of Christ, He is the one Spirit animating the body. As all the members
move under the control of the spirit in the natural body, so in the body of
Christ also: if the members do not understand and move in harmonious subjection
to the spirct, we speak of it as disease; and it is not less, but more truly,
so in the body of Christ.
If we open the Acts, we shall find every
where His presence - greater than apostles, higher than the highest there. From
the day of His descent at Pentecost, He is supreme over all; and that supremacy
becomes the harmony of action, the unity of spirit in the lower sense.
Sovereignly, He calls instruments as He will, and as sovereignly uses whom He
calls. "Separate Me Barnabas and Saul," He says to the prophets and teachers at
Antioch, "to the work whereunto I have called them. .
And they, being
sent forth by the Holy Ghost, departed into Seleucia." How strange to read as
power conferred on man to convey office what is really the naming of
individuals by the Spirit Himself, as called and sent forth by Him: one of them
being the man who asserts his own apostleship to be, "not of men, nor by
man"!
"Now when they had gone throughout Phrygia and the region of
Galatia, and were forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the Word in Asia, . .
they assayed to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit suffered them not." "And
finding disciples, we tarried there seven days; who said to Paul by the Spirit
that he should not go up to Jerusalem." Not ordinarily, indeed, perhaps not
often, was the bidding of the Spirit expressed as audibly; but the manner of
communication was but circumstantial, and not of the essence of the matter. He
was present, Comforter, Guide, Teacher, Witness; Spirit of the body, "dividing
to every man severally as He will;" a divine Person, with divine power and
divine authority.
Yet unseen! I grant the fatal flaw in all this for
most. The Bible they can see, but it is not definite enough. The Spirit of God
they cannot see, and, alas! cannot believe in, in a practical way. "Whom the
world cannot receive," says the Lord Himself, of the Holy Ghost, "because it
seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him." And when the line between the Church and
the world is gone, who can wonder that this unbelief should be permeating the
mass of what is professedly Christ’s? It is not only Rome that refuses to
the blessed Spirit the place He has come to fill. The unbelief which has denied
the sufficiency of Scripture, and supplemented it by creeds which come soon to
supplant it, has denied in the same way the sufficiency of the Holy Ghost, and
supplemented His authority with hierarchical governments to which (whatever the
theory) He is practically unnecessary. If you ask people what they mean by
"church-government," you will get various answers, no doubt; but they will all
agree substantially in one thing. That one thing is, in an omission of what is,
indeed, the key-stone of the arch. They will tell you, some, that they believe
in an episcopal form of government, some a presbyterian, some a congregational.
And if you ask them further, Where do they put the Holy Ghost? you will find
the mass of people even denying any special presence of the Holy Ghost as
characterizing this dispensation. They will tell you (so far, truly,) that the
Spirit of God has always been acting in the world, from the creation of it;
that the new birth has always been His work, from Abel, or from Adam, to this
time. They believe, too, in certain special gifts at the day of Pentecost, and
for some time thereafter. A distinctive "coming" in the place of Christ, a
coming so important in character that it was expedient for Christ to go away
that we might have it, they do not understand and do not believe in. One
well-known man, an evangelical divine, Dr. Hugh McNeile, of Liverpool, when he
had to admit that a personal "coming" of the Holy Ghost after the ascension of
Christ was taught in the Word, could only account for it by the supposition
that during the Lord’s lifetime upon earth all the operation of the Spirit
was limited to Himself alone, so that the three and thirty years of our
Lord’s presence were years in which no conversions could take place at
all, - a barren time in the world’s history, a unique and utter desolation
otherwise of spiritual influences!
And thus you will find that the
practical faith in the Holy Ghost’s presence now is scarcely faith in a
Person. It is "influence," like rain, or dew, or gentle breeze, - and these are
true and scriptural figures so far, but quite impersonal. They talk of a
"measure of the Spirit," and every fresh stirring of heart they find is a fresh
"baptism" of the Spirit. The evident and necessary result is that they lose the
first requisite for faith in Him as One come down to take charge for Christ on
earth, to dwell as God in the house of God, to animate and govern the body of
Christ, as the spirit in man guides and governs the natural body.
Hence church-government, in people’s minds, has nothing to do really with
His presence here. Bishops, priests, and deacons may need, and of course do
need, His influences. So, in theory, does the pope. But practically the
ordering of things is (within certain limits, whether of church-tradition or of
Scripture, so far as Scripture is supposed to serve,) in human hands, and
subject to human wills. "The Church has power to decree rites and ceremonies,
and authority in controversies of faith." "And those [ministers] we ought to
judge lawfully called and sent which be chosen and called to this work BY MEN
who have public authority given unto them in the congregation to call and send
ministers into the Lord’s vineyard." But the Holy Ghost may not have
"called or sent" them! Well, that, of course; and that is provided for: for
"although in the visible church the evil be ever mingled with the good, and
sometimes the evil have chief authority in the ministration of the Word and
sacraments, yet forasmuch as they do not the same in their own name, but in
Christ’s, and DO MINISTER BY His COMMISSION AND AUTHORITY, we may use
their ministry both in hearing of the Word of God and receiving of the
sacraments"!!
Thus they may have Christ’s commission although the
Holy Ghost hath not "called or sent" them: Christ and the Holy Ghost are made
to be at issue, and the Church can go on ordering and ordaining in despite of
the Spirit Himself!
And this is order; while those who desire to yield
subjection to the Word and Spirit of God alone are convicted of being rebels
against proper authority, and sure to end in confusion and (as some have said,)
in "atoms"! Yet faith will follow where God leads, owning indeed that in His
path all will be confusion that is not subjection; and that, leave Him out, we
at least have no resource. Let it be so: we will abide the issue. But let us
contemplate a little while now the other side of things. We have had before us
what is intensely sorrowful, more provocative of tears than Jezebel’s
corruption. There, the very malignity of the evil roused the whole soul against
it: here, there is the fruit of what was in the beginning a movement of God. He
can speak of what they had seen and heard, and exhort to hold it fast. There
are still "things that remain," although "ready to die." And how can we but
sorrow intensely over what was so fair in its earliest promise, and received
its baptism in the blood of martyrs?
Yet the word to the overcomer,
once again recurring here, comforts us with its recurrence. It links us, if we
have ears to hear, with the same little remnant that has ever been finding its
way, through storm and flood, to Him from whose love neither tribulation, nor
distress, nor persecution, nor famine, nor nakedness, nor peril, nor sword can
separate, and in which they have approved themselves, through Him, more than
conquerors. The overcoming may be now in a new sphere, and separation may have
to be from brethren, in some sense, of a common faith, heirs of great names in
faith’s records. Yet, in the overcoming, only overcorners are their true
successors. Not those who, in our Lord’s days, built the sepulchres of the
prophets, represented them, or were linked with them, in His account, but those
whom He sent forth to be persecuted by these same admirers of
antiquity.
And God must teach us independence, even of one another, -
that rightful independence which springs from real and lowly dependence upon
Him. In His presence, what were even the greatest of His followers? How can I
say to another, "Rabbi, Rabbi," when I must take the honour from Him that I
deck another with? If I had not Him, it were lowliness; if I have Him, it is
dishonour to Him.
It is not schism, this separate path, when not my own
will leads me, but His Word and Spirit! It is not separation in heart from
brethren, if Christ be dearer to me still than they. Nay, love to them approves
itself only thus, as the apostle teaches us, "when we love God and keep His
commandments." (i Jno. v. 2.)
Faith’s victories are not in
applause wrung from a multitude, but in the path of One, true Joseph, separated
from His brethren; and God has overruled the presence of evil (which, I need
not say, He has not caused) to the giving us a path, at least in its
circumstances, the more Christlike. We are not left to the subjection to evil:
He calls us to rise above it. The difficulties of the path are only to carry us
through them all. Every encouragement throughout these epistles is held out
simply to the overcomer. The Lord give us only the needed energy. The time is
short: the end is at hand. The grace that is now sufficient for all daily need
will soon be manifested in the crowning of the conquerors. Then those that are
poor shall have the kingdom; the mourners shall be comforted; the meek shall
have the inheritance; the hungerers and thirsters after righteousness shall be
filled; above all, the pure in heart shall see God - the God whom sin for the
time has banished from the earth He made.
Continued - Philadelphia
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