Bible Exposition Fellowship

2005-10-25T19:13:00.000+01:00

Pentecostalism Examined

By Chas. D. Alexander

As the age approaches its inevitable doom the evangelical finds himself increasingly involved in a downward spiral of false remedies and dubious experiments. These arise inevitably from the haziness with which we evangelicals view our own history. We fail to see how much of our evangelicalism has lost touch with its own roots in the great Reformation.
The Reformation came about through the recovery and the radical restatement of the Bible teaching on God, man, grace, redemption and faith: our evangelical world today, however, no longer speaks quite the same language as the Reformers or their great successors in the following two centuries.

A growing emphasis on the sovereignty of Man has developed in our preaching, with a consequent obscuring of the idea of a sovereign and all-wise Creator, and (the very latest phase) there is a subtle swing towards a critical view of Holy Scripture; Evangelicalism is at last becoming infected by the very thing it has fought against for several generations - the modifying of the doctrine of a fully inspired Bible. The rot is detected in our evangelical press, in its tolerant reviews of dangerous and subversive books, and the increasing tendency to tamper with the ecumenical heresy. We are living, in it, in the days of EVANGELICAL REVISIONISM, and even some of our Bible Colleges have contracted the contagion.

The Man-centered evangelism, which is now the vogue, exalts the salvation of the sinner to a place of primacy in the scale of values in such a manner as to cloud over the glory of God, in His divine prerogatives and authority, and His all-wise unchangeable and unchallengeable purposes. These recede into the wings, while the stage is increasingly dominated by an evangelism that has little use for solid exposition. In the Race for Results, everything else is jettisoned.

All methods are bent to the one great end of accumulating decisions. Hence there is a rising tide of new, and ever more daring techniques - the dazzling lights, the spotlight on personality, the “delayed entrance” as the great man comes on last of all, the high-powered, streamlined organization geared up behind the facade at enormous expense. Then there is the last and latest development, the dawning of the age of “Pop-evangelism”, of “Beat-session” decisionism, and the avalanche of erotic religious lyrics setting out the Most Holy in sensual language scarcely distinguishable from the suggestive lines of the latest L.P. [remember this is before CD’s, an L.P. is a Long Playing phonograph record] - set to music which is steadily growing wilder and more savage, in deliberate imitation of the rhythms which are cosseting whole generations of young people to the confines of hell.

The situation is getting out of hand, and it is time for someone to call a halt, and for evangelicals everywhere to stop, think, and consider.

Not unexpectedly there has been induced by these conditions an appetite for the sensational and the pseudo-supernatural. The recrudescence of so-called “Charismatic” gifts is not the least of the alarming portents.

With the decline in the sense of the divine, a cult of revivalism has become endemic, even amongst the more staid of evangelicals.

In a word, EVANGELICISM IS SICK.

In the search for a solution, let us begin by discarding false remedies.

1. EVANGELICAL CAMPAIGNISM IS NO REMEDY.

Since the end of the last war [WWII] this form of evangelical enterprise has been developed enormously and has earned the support of very many excellent men who sincerely expect that by this means the evangelical problem will best be met.

There has, however, been time enough during the last 20 years and particularly during the last ten years, [remember the reference is about 1969] to determine the value of this method. No one can honestly say that it has even begun to touch our real problems. Whatever good may incidentally have been done, the great glacier of spiritual death continues to slither down the slope of the English-speaking world, with gathering momentum. Even in United States, the tide of church attendance, so high ten years ago, has begun to recede rapidly, despite the sweeping (numerical) successes of campaigns, some of which are claimed to have had a million or more conversions. These efforts are offering only barriers of sand to the modernistic, rationalistic, and agnostic tides.

It is to be feared that so far from arresting the process of doubt and intellectual revisionism now gnawing at the vitals of the evangelical body itself, campaignism is having a diversionary tendency by creating a false hope and turning attention away from the real remedy.

Celluloid evangelism has also come to stay. The talkie film, with its dramatic plot, its “stars”, its heroes and heroines, and its thrilling situations, has made its appearance. We now have the era of the Conversion-thriller, the power-packed drama of cine-camera salvation, calculated to throw into the shade all the one-track methods which the Holy Spirit has been pleased to use during the last two-thousand years of the church’s history. [What would Mr. Alexander think of Mel Gibson’s, The Passion of the Christ?]

2. THE CHARISMATIC REVIVAL IS NO REMEDY.

The idea is spreading that gifts of tongues, miracle healings and even hints of raising the dead, are going to transform the scene end give us the answer.

This movement, however sincerely based, is really the consequence of the decline of Reformation doctrine, and the rise of superficial Bible teaching. It should be clearly observed that the supernatural manifestations of New Testament times were the Holy Spirit’s endorsement of the apostolic testimony to the Resurrection of Christ. They demonstrated the passing of the Old Covenant and the inauguration of the New. Charismatic gifts were transmitted only through direct apostolic agency. There is nothing in Holy Scripture to suggest that these gifts were to be transmitted, and nothing in history to show that they were in fact transmitted to the successors of the apostles. There can be no resuscitation of apostolic gifts from apostolic hands. There are no apostles; therefore there are no supernatural gifts.

The appetite for the recovery and exercise of these gifts today, is, to put it at its mildest, unhealthy. It may well prove a snare and an obstruction to real progress. The world was never conquered, and never will be, by the miraculous. The miracles performed by the Saviour led to His rejection and crucifixion. The miraculous element that pervaded the apostolic days did not conquer the world. It was part of the establishment of the Kingdom of God; the conquering power lay in the spoken word of truth. ‘It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe”. The enthusiasm of good people, who look for the transformation of the evangelical scene by recourse to supernatural gifts, is a pathetic clutching at straws. The result will be bitter disillusionment - if not something worse.

3. REVIVALISM IS NO REMEMDY.

All our lifetime the accent has been on a great Revival. A flurry here and there sends many earnest people hurrying to see or to spread the excitement. The all-night prayer meeting re-appears, in the belief that this is the grand specific for revival. The centenary of some 19th century movement is duly and enthusiastically observed, as though the Holy Spirit has a special regard for the calendar. All in vain: There is no revival.

Unfortunately what most people have in mind in this much overworked word “revival” is a period of evangelical excitement and success on the grand scale, comparable with the great evangelical experiences of the “Revival century” - that period of exactly one hundred years which extended, curiously enough, from the termination of the Napoleonic wars at Waterloo in 1815, to the expiry of the old world in the mud and blood of Flanders in 1914. The spontaneous evangelical awakenings, which were common in that long century of world peace, were the last flowering of the Reformation, Puritan, and Methodist periods when the evangelical cause was still living on the unexpended capital of the 16th and 17th centuries. After that the bank broke. The mistake most of us evangelicals have been making is in thinking that there can be a revival of a like order today, regardless of the fact that the comparative soundness of the churches upon which the “revival century” fed, now no longer exists. Christendom at large has moved over to unbelief on the one hand, and papal superstition on the other, and the evangelical voice has become dumb between the two extremes. The conditions no longer exist for revival after the expected pattern, hence all the well-meant and earnest strivings of good people for a recurrence of the experience, have ended disappointingly in shoal water. There has been no depth to float the ship - mighty preaching founded upon faithfulness to the inspired Word, and wedded to an exegetical knowledge adequate to the presentation of divine truth, no longer exists on a sufficient scale.

4. THE REMEDY LIES IN THE FORGOTTEN FACTOR.

The forgotten factor is the treasure of deep evangelical truth bequeathed at the Reformation, but now more or less overlaid by an evangelicalism given more and more to an emphasis on man rather than upon God. No one strove for revival or planned it in the 16th century. The Reformation was prepared by God over at least two earlier centuries. That was preceded by the awakening of the human mind at the time of the Italian Renaissance. Science, art, and re1igion prepared themselves to throw off the shackles of a thousand years of darkness. The Reformation itse1f came, not as the work of one man or any group of men, but as the consummation of God ‘s purpose through generations of movement in the human mind. The invention of printing shortly before the birth of Luther was a factor of incalculable importance in the divine plan for the emancipation of the soul of man.

Now, the very fires which fed the reformation, have devoured its child. Infidel philosophy, art, and science, have flourished -with the emancipation of man, and have at last succeeded in well-nigh overthrowing organized Christianity, by polluting the streams from which the church’s intellectual and spiritual life proceed. The Holy Scriptures have been discredited An infidel scientific theory has banished God from Creation. The way is opened up for the last Satanic assault upon the soul of man. Only the evangelical holds the key to the present disaster. But the one weapon he seems incapable of drawing from the scabbard, or, having drawn it, being skilled to wield the same, is the very weapon without which he cannot win - the weapon of the Word of God.

It was by this Word alone that in the days of Luther kings were overthrown, history changed, and the world filled with light. But with the Reformers the Word was something more than a message about conversion, slickly presented and garnished with entertaining story and humor. To a man, the reformers were scholars. They labored year by year, sometimes with the assassin at the door, to understand the Word and grapple with its mysteries. They brought up from the deepest depths, water from the well of Bethlehem. They saw God in His word as the sovereign Creator who in awful majesty and unsearchable wisdom laid the foundations of His redemptive work in the eternal counsels of His Godhead to be worked out in time according to the incomprehensible pattern of His own foreknowledge and foreordination. “God foreknows because He predestinates” thundered Luther when destroying the sophistries of Erasmus, the greatest scholar of the age. “The doctrine God’s predestination is so necessary to the church of God that without the same faith can neither be truly taught nor surely established”, declared John Knox the greatest figure in Scottish history.

As God is sovereign, so is His grace, these men declared. Their evangelical exhortations, just as free and far more sea: thing and effective than anything heard nowadays in the evangelical pulpit, took a somber hue. Men knew themse1ves to be but men, under this sort of preaching. Conversion was a solemn and awful thing, not to be lightly and easily professed. Sinners found themselves in the hand of an angry God and fled for refuge to Christ. The Holy Spirit was His own Counselor and the wind of grace blew where He listed. Sanctification became the outcome of earnest and patient discipline under the hand of God, not a sudden hound over the altar of consecration; bye-passing the problem of sin within.

In a word, God used, as He always has used, mighty preaching based on adequate knowledge of His Word, and commensurate skill in the presentation of the fullness of Divine Truth.

Where do those conditions obtain today? How may they be discovered? ? Have those ancient skills gone forever, or is there a means for their restoration? What must an earnest young man do about entering on such a ministry as this? Is there sufficient help for him, and where is it to be found? Is there hope in the present situation; has God a special message for today?

These are the questions which are fundament to the present situation.

All talk of revival is irrelevant unless these issues are faced and given the priority. The situation is far more serious than most of suppose - and already it is later than most of us think.

We are witnessing the collapse of Christianity as a force in our country [England]. The atheistic spirit of science, philosophy, education, and art is doing its work, and is being adopted
shamelessly and openly by theologians in our leading denominations. The evangelical testimony also is being undermined by years of decline of the Reformed doctrines, yet nothing can ultimately stand against error except the clear and full Biblical knowledge which was reestablished in the world by the reformers and their immediate successors.

In this connection it is impossible to ignore the adverse effect which the recent phenomenal outburst of what is known as the Tongues Movement may exert upon the study and restatement of that Reformed testimony without which evangelicalism cannot be saved. We freely acknowledge the Christian standing of many friends in the “Pentecostal” movement, and it grieves us to have to say or write anything which may grieve them, but our duty is clear in the light of the damage which is being done, and the greater evils likely to follow unless someone utters a warning voice. We beg the support of all men of like mind who are concerned for the cause of God and truth. Likewise we earnestly plead with our “Pentecostal” friends to reconsider their position in the light of what is contained herein.

TONGUES – HEALINGS – EXORCISMS

TWELVE PROPOSITIONS ON THE PENTECOSTAL QUESTION

1. It is a grave error to suppose that New Testament signs and wonders, in the shape of Tongues, Healings, and Exorcisms are intended for the church today.

The Pentecostal baptism of Acts 2 was the visible and audible inauguration of the New Covenant. The outward signs were necessary t express in evidential form the removal of the Old Covenant and the establishment of the New under the authority of the apostles. The mighty signs and wonders, extending even to the raising of the dead, showed the nature and power of the new dispensation.

The transmission of the Pentecostal gifts to those who were not resent at the first outpouring or who were converted subsequently was entirely an apostolic prerogative. Pentecostalists in their books and speeches never refer to the fact that only by the apostles in person were the gifts ever transmitted to others. See Acts 8:14-18, Acts 10:1-45 (while Peter was ministering the Word), Acts 19:6. There is no recorded instance of a non-apostle exercising this right. Even the case of Ananias in Acts 9 carefully avoids any statement that Paul received the manifestation at this man’s hands. His sight was restored but it is not said that he there and then received the Pentecostal manifestation. On the contrary he tells us in Galatians that his apostleship - the greatest of all the gifts of the Spirit - was not of men, neither by man, hut (directly) by Christ Himself.

In Hebrews 2:3-4 we are told that the signs, wonders, and divers gifts of the Holy Spirit were God’s attestation of the testimony of those who had heard” the Lord Jesus (i.e., in the flesh); or in other words, who were direct witnesses of His life, death and resurrection, If this was the purpose of the outward signs - to attest the authenticity of the apostolic witness - then the signs could not outlive those who had seen our Lord in the flesh and who were competent witnesses of the events which inaugurated the Everlasting Covenant. All history proves that the signs did not in fact outlive the generation of living witnesses, and all attempts to recover them since have ended in disappointment, and sometimes even in charlatanry and moral dilemma.

Those who today (sometimes earnest believers) lay hands on others that they might receive these apostolic gifts are in grievous error. They had better ascertain first whether they be themselves apostles, and those who submit to their ministrations should likewise have a care, for these gifts are “the signs of an apostle” (2 Cor 12:12).

2. There is no Baptism of the Spirit subsequent to a true Evangelical Conversion.

The rule is laid down by Christ himself in John 7: 37-39 where He clearly teaches that the only condition for receiving the New Testament baptism of the Spirit is a saving faith in Himself - (“This spake He of the Spirit which they that believe on Him should receive”). Peter on the same day of Pentecost (Acts 2:38) lays down that the only condition for receiving the Spirit is repentance and confession of the name of Christ in baptism - that is, the evangelical act of faith for the remission of sins. We should be indebted to any friend who can point out for us any scripture which tells us we receive the Spirit on any other condition.

Paul teaches in Romans 8:9, that if any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of His. Beware, reader, of the error of some that the Spirit of Christ means something other than the Holy Spirit, no one taught of the Holy Spirit would ever dare to utter such a blasphemy as this.

3. It is a great mistake therefore to suppose there is a time lag between Regeneration and the Gift or Baptism of the Holy Spirit.

True exegesis distinguishes between the sign and the thing signified. The thing signified by the Pentecostal signs was the inauguration of the New Covenant of Grace in the heart of the sinner. This is regeneration (see Jeremiah 31:31-34; Ezekiel 36:25-28; John 16:13-15).

The sign, that is the outward gifts of the spirit, followed the thing signified, sometimes immediately, and sometimes, for special purposes, at some distance of time, as in the case of the Samaritan believers of Acts 8 who had to await the coming of the apost1es. (Note: Even the agency of a New Testament deacon was not enough - how then do their modern imitators hope to confer upon others the Pentecostal gift?) As the gifts faded out of the Church’s life through the gradual dying out of the living witnesses to the resurrection the full significance of the New Covenant of Grace was left unimpaired. The signs receded, but the thing signified remained. Therefore since the apostolic era we have had the inward baptism of regeneration without the signs, which are now irrelevant.

4. Those who teach that the Pentecostal outpouring depended on the obedience of the apostles in “tarrying” for ten days in the upper room and that Christians today must do the same, have a dangerous misconception of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

This teaching implies that the entire climax of God’s eternal plan of redemption
depended upon the obedience of man, rather than upon the obedience of Christ. The infinite merit of Christ, His atoning death and His glorious Resurrection and Ascension to God’s right hand were, and could be, the only possible conditions of the Pentecostal outpouring. No significant event of Christ s work ever did or could depend upon human volition, interference or failure. Our redemption does not depend upon fortuitous, casual, or fallible processes, but Christ’s Nativity, Atoning Death, Resurrection, Ascension, and Outpouring of the Divine Spirit were entirely, exclusively and absolutely divine, sovereign, and unthwartable by any power, human or spiritual else, where were our redemption?

It argues much for the low state of Biblical knowledge amongst us, and especially amongst those who make the loudest claim to be filled and baptized with the Spirit, that this blunder of a humanistic interpretation of Pentecost is so rife. The very word “Pentecost’ should have been warning enough. The word means “The Feast of the Fifty Days”. God’s calendar was unalterably fixed from the beginning. It was determined in the promise of the Old Testament types that on the fiftieth day after the resurrection the gifts which Christ by His merits alone ‘received for men” (Psalm 68:18; Ephesians 4:8-12) should be outpoured. The “tarrying” of the disciples at Jerusalem for ten days was no more a condition of that outpouring, than the entire redemption of man was dependent upon the consent of the Virgin to the nativity of Christ. The only purpose of “tarrying” was to complete the time “When the day of Pentecost was fully come”.

Those earnest people, who now ‘tarry’ in the hope of some specia1 enduement of the Holy Spirit, are 2,000 years too late. They may imagine they receive some spiritual power but they mistake mental states for spiritual experiences - a common failing in these days when the Word of God is subordinated so often to “experience.”

5. The prophecy of Joel 2:28-32, quoted by Peter in his sermon on the day of Pentecost was fulfilled in the setting up o f the New Covenant and has no further fulfillment either now or in the future except in the inward fruits of sanctification common to all believers.

Peter indicates the time of fulfillment in the words “This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel...” (Acts 2:16). In other words, he quotes Joel as proof of the divine nature of what was then taking place in the Church. The idea entertained by many who have made no proper study of God’s method of prophecy, that Peter meant there was a partial fulfillment in his own day and another, much more powerful and complete at the end of the age, play right into the hands of the Judaizers, and put a grave question mark over Peter’s inspiration.

An adequate study of prophecy would soon teach that the figures used in this prophecy - signs in heaven and earth, the darkening of sun and moon, blood, fire and vapor of smoke, have nothing to do with the end of the world, but with the end of the Old Covenant and of its earthly administration in the Jewish State. The same figures are frequently used in the Old Testament to denote the removal or overthrow of kingdoms, powers, and ordinances (see Isaiah 13 for example, where the same figures are used for the overthrow of Babylon). Peter’s quotation was a warning to the Jewish people of his own day that the time of the removal of their order had come; their kingdom and State were about to go down in blood, and their sun was about to set - as took place in A.D. 70 when nation and Temple were destroyed by the Romans.

6. They who begin with tongues will find they cannot stop there but must go on to incorporate the entire program of Signs and Wonders, including the Raising of the Dead.

The concluding verses of Mark 16 are frequently quoted as proof that charismatic gifts are the expected norm for the entire Christian age. If this be so the entire program outlined in these verses must be reckoned with. All Christians (not merely the platform practitioners) must practice exorcism and consider themselves to be immune to deadly serpents and poisons. Healing powers are to be exercised by all. If this be so it cannot be denied that the Holy Spirit has managed very well without these signs for nearly 2,000 years. Nor can the omission be accounted for by the unfaithfulness or ignorance of Christian men. God has been pleased to use His servants in far more potent and vital ministries than any which appear to be in exercise today, despite flamboyant claims by some Pentecostalists.

Mark 16 seems to be regarded by many Pentecostalists as decisive of their position. They fail to see that it is only another indication given in advance, of the imminent setting up of the New Kingdom or Covenant of Grace, and as such falls under the interpretation given in the Acts, and outlined above, that the signs were apostolic and could not be transmitted to later generations because there were no apostles to transmit them. The dilemma of the Pentecostalists is very great in his interpretation of this passage. He must recognize that for 2,000 years these signs have NOT followed those who believe, and as Christ annexes to this promise no condition except that of saving faith, the Pentecostalists must either commit the blasphemy of declaring that Christ’s word of promise has utterly failed, or he must accept the interpretation that the signs were apostolic and inaugural.

7. The claim made by many that they converse with God in an ‘unknown” tongue - by which they mean a tongue not known on earth, but presumably in Heaven, is false and is founded on a complete misunderstanding of 1Corinthians 14.

The word “unknown” in this chapter is in italics in the Authorized Version (it is dropped in the Revised Version), and does not occur in The Greek original. It was supplied by the translators to indicate that the tongue used was unknown to the hearer and therefore required interpretation. The idea that people may converse with God in prayer and praise in a language not belonging to this world at all is quite fanciful, and represents an elementary mistake of reading which it is difficult to imagine anyone claiming to be led by the Holy Spirit, would make.

8. The modern experience of “Speaking in Tongues” enjoyed by so many earnest people is not what they suppose and is to be explained on entirely natural grounds.

The emission of unintelligible sounds from the voice box as a sign of the supernatural has been practiced for thousands of years by pagan devotees. The sounds are the product of a condition of hysteria well known in the medical world. Any excitement or emotion, spiritual or otherwise, can cause the same stuttering sounds to be produced in the larynx. Dr. French Oliver, in his searching book, “Healings: Human and Divine” writes from the abundance of his experience in many lands:

“The source of these inarticulate noises, which are identical in all nations, and have been so in Pagan lands for the past 3,000 years, where only devil worship and whirling demoniacs have engaged in the sex orgies of the licentious Phallic cults: is in the Ganglionic or Vegetative nerve center, located near the pit of the stomach, and so definitely connected with the entire visceral nervous system these psycho-physical phenomena can be explained strictly on the basis of known scientific and scriptural facts. The “ecstatic feelings”, “electric shocks”, “warm baths”, “angelic singing”, and other psycho-physical experiences producing pseudo-miracles in the realm of the emotions, are partly chemical and partly nervous, partly muscular and partly mental; but are in no wise produced by the Holy Spirit”.

Again: “The cerebro-spinal nerve center, when we are awake may, under emotional excitation, or excessive glandular stimulation, drop its control as a belt slips from a wheel in a factory; and when the cerebro-spinal control is relinquished, the ganglionic or vegetative nerve center which controls the subconscious mind, takes control … the loss of control of one’s faculties by the cerebro-spinal nerve center is tremendously dangerous, nervously, mentally and physically. A person will do things under the ganglionic subconscious control which he would not think of doing when normally conscious …” -

The psychological and spiritual damage, which may be caused by surrendering the will to those emotional-hysterical experiences scarcely, needs enlargement here.

9. Even sincere Pentecostalists people admit the dangers and delusions which await those who give themselves to these experiences.

The editor of “A Voice of Faith” which freely circulates in Britain amongst Pentecostalists writes in his issue for Spring 1965, “Much which purports to he the operation of a gift of the Spirit is in fact merely a routine copy of something which may or may not have been originally born of the Holy Spirit ... The outcome of this situation is absolutely appalling … it is possible sincerely to simulate the reality of speaking in tongues. One has only to listen carefully to much that goes for this spiritual exercise to hear; week after week, the same repetitive phrases time and time again. Somewhere along the line (such a person) has either remembered the utterance or it has gone into his subconscious, or something - I don’t know what. So it continues in the realm of the mind, no doubt with a little flutter in the emotion at the same time to give the carnal impression of being in the Spirit, coupled not infrequently with a pleasurable feeling of pride”.

An American Pentecostalist is much more brutal, and writes in his journal (“The Witness”), “Among those who call themselves Christians there are none so wickedly sensual as those who cavort, dance, scream, and give themselves over to familiar spirits. By the use of syncopated music, the clapping of hands and the stomping of feet whole congregations of people work up an atmosphere that is akin to the enchantments of the snake-handlers of India. - In many of these spirit shindigs people have jerked until the bones in their necks and backs have been heard to snap in their sockets. Shivering and screaming under the power, all manner of dancing, jumping end cavorting is indulged in. So violent are some of these antics that permanent injury is often sustained ... people have been heard to hiss like snakes and bark like dogs.
Numbers of Pentecostal people have finished their course in an insane asylum.

These warnings from writers favorable to Pentecostalism are highly significant.

10. Healing “miracles” claimed today lack the four essential characteristics of New Testament miracles. These characteristics are:

(1) All who came were healed;
(2) All kinds of diseases were healed;
(3) They were healed completely;
(4) They were healed permanently.

It is undisputed that in present day ‘healing” campaigns and practices, only a very small minority of cases even claim to receive benefit, and these are usually accounted for on psychological, emotional, or functional grounds. It is noteworthy that Rome makes the same claims at Lourdes, and can show a similar array of discarded crutches and spinal jackets, but there is this difference - Rome makes no official claim until a panel of doctors has investigated the case. The kind of healing which is claimed in Pentecostal circles is of the same category as that claimed by Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, and other anti-Christian sects. Sincere Pentecostalists try to argue that “healing is in atonement” on the ground of a false exegesis of Matthew 8:17 - which is to be understood of Christ’s compassionate identification with our infirmities. That “healing” is not in the atonement is cleat from Romans 8, which tells us that the redemption of the body is not affected till the resurrection (verse 23). If “healing” were in the atonement all our ailments would disappear forever the moment we believed for the forgiveness of sins. Death also would be excluded by the atonement but no Pentecostalists has dared to claim that it is a sin of unbelief for Christians to die The body remains mortal and infirm till death, and then awaits the resurrection when at last the creature itself shall he delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God (Romans 8:21).

11. The modern practice of Exorcisms has features which are a gross libel on Christian sanity.
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Exorcisms are getting more grotesque every year, The American exorcist, Branham, whose example is followed by most of the present exorcists, claimed to have received a visit from the angel Gabriel who conferred on him the gift of diagnosis - of which the New Testament knows nothing. The change in the color of his hand as he placed it over a ‘possessed” person, showing him what kind of “demon” he was dealing with. When cast out, these demons would often be seen flying through doorway or window. Every human ailment, apparently, has its own particular demon - and cancer demons seem to he particularly prolific,

Modern Pentecostal exorcism goes far beyond anything ever heard of in the New Testament. The discovery that demons give off an offensive smell, and can actually be seen as they take their departure, is not Christianity but paganism.
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12. Bewildered Evangelicals who compromise with this movement are playing a dangerous game which at the very least will set back that spiritual awakening for which they wistfully hope and pray.
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There can no longer be any compromise with this delusive thing, which threatens to engulf the evangelical cause just at a time when the healthiest tokens of this century have begun to appear amongst us. The charismatic revival may well be part of Satan’s counter attack on the purifying tendencies that have been proceeding in evange1ica doctrine and practice. There is no substitute, in the end, for a return to the doctrines and standards of the Reformation, it is the departure from these standards, and the consequent lack of Sound, biblical teaching, that has exposed evangelicalism to the present evils. Men will continue to be led away, and clutch at the straws offered to them by the plausibilities and fantasies of Pentecosta1ism so long as they remain ignorant of, or impervious to, the fundamental Reformation teachings on God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, Redemption, and Holiness.
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One of the saddest features of Pentecostalism is its irreverence in the use of the name of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. He is almost always addressed as “Jesus” without His title of Lord. “Wonderful Jesus”, the cry so often heard in Pentecostal assemblies, is no substitute for “Christ” and “the Lord”, so beloved of the apostle Paul. The irreverent and emotional use of the Lord’s human name, particularly in “honky-tonk” choruses and rhythms, is a frightful commentary on the state of religion in these latter days.

ADDENDUM: We repeat our statement that “evangelicalism is sick”. Pentecostalism is one of the symptoms of this sickness, and our appeal is to all men who have the true welfare of Christ’s cause at heart, to stand fearlessly with us against this great deviation from truth.

2005-10-13T18:26:00.000+01:00

Profundity of the Atonement.

Chas. D. Alexander

John Ch. 17 v 1, “These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to Heaven, and said, Father the hour is come. Glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee.
These profound words indicate the dividing of time and the dividing even eternity itself. The hour is come; what hour? The hour of His death. The hour of atonement. He had given to His disciples the symbols of the bread and the wine in remembrance of what He was about to do, the symbols of His death and passion, to be celebrated and observed until He should come again, as the most important thing, representing or pointing to the most important event of all events, the meaning of all history and the dividing point of the whole human race.
You will notice as that it is the atonement, of which He speaks, and for which He is preparing Himself and His disciples by this last audible dedicatory prayer of Himself. You will observe that He speaks about the glory of God, which was about to be achieved. “Father the hour is come,” the hour to which the great life of God had been moving from all eternity, the hour in which the full revelation of God would be made. That would be done in that hour for which all creation waited, and without which being has no meaning at all. In the events of this hour, God would glorify His Son, and by glorifying His Son, the Son would be able to glorify the Father. In accordance with the eternal purpose of God, the Son would be glorified in death, and in the overcoming of death in the rising again from the dead, and the ascension to the eternal throne.
The throne from which He came, He returns to, but not in the same condition as when He left it, for He left it as God. He returns as God and man, raising in Himself our humanity to the eternal throne of God, and thus fulfilling, as Paul elsewhere tells us in the second chapter of Hebrews, the whole design of God in the creation of man, that is the creation of all things, that man should have dominion over the works of the divine hand. It was to thwart this that Satan, in his hated of God and man, intervened in the Garden of Eden, and was so permitted to intervene.
There is a profound saying on the part of one of the great men of poetic history, that evil, strangely, mysteriously, is necessary to God, in the working out of the divine purpose and the expression of the divine life. Bold and tremendous words, which we can only utter with bated breath, but they are true We may not be able to comprehend the whole mystery of evil, anymore than we can comprehend the wisdom of God, or the being of God, but one day we shall, and it shall be the theme of heaven and the point that we shall be exploring throughout all eternity. If there is any occupation in heaven we know it must be this that eternally we shall be probing the depths of Christ and His unsearchable riches, the meaning of the life of God.
We have the formula of all things, the formula of creation, and the formula of the atonement in these opening words of the Saviour in His prayer, “Father the hour has come. Glorify thy Son, that thy Son also might glorify thee.” When we have understood that, there is nothing more remaining to be understood, in time or in eternity regarding the being and nature and purpose of God, the movement of His great life, the design and end which He has in view. The reason why we are here, is all summarised in these few words, “The hour is come, glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee,” for it is in the glorification of the Son, that is victory over death and the grave, that is over the totality of evil, that God himself is manifest, and made known at last to all creation. That there is a veil over this mystery, we see only the glimmerings of the ultimate truth, it must surely be self- evident.
We have long esteemed the great darkness which fell over the earth at the sixth hour of the atonement. Christ was crucified at the third hour. At the sixth hour which was midday according to the time then calculated, darkness came over all the earth until the ninth hour. Three hours of darkness. At the ninth hour, there was that succession of four cries to heaven, four cries which in themselves summarise the whole meaning of the atonement, two of which at least can be found in Psalm twenty two. That this darkness was a prophetic darkness, an actual darkness, sent by God for a prophetic purpose there could be no shadow of doubt. I don’t think anyone has expressed it as well as Mr.Spurgeon. This is him at his highest and best. In his entire wonderful ministry he never said anything so profound and so powerful, so weighty, so far reaching as this. He says “This darkness tells us all that the passion is a great mystery. I have tried to explain it as a substitution, and I feel that where the language is explicit I may and must be explicit too. But yet I feel that the idea of substitution does not cover the whole of the dread mystery, and that no human conception can grasp the whole. Tell me the death of the Lord Jesus was a grand example of self sacrifice, I can see that, and much more. Tell me it was a wondrous obedience to the will of God, I can see that, and much more. Tell me it was the bearing, of what ought to have been borne by myriads of sinners of the human race, and the chastisement of their sin, I can see that, and found my best hopes upon it. But do not tell me that this is all that there is in the cross. No, great as this would be, there is much more in the redeemer’s death. God veiled the cross in darkness, and in darkness much of the deep meaning lies, not because God would not reveal it, but because we have not the capacity to discern it all.” So far Mr Spurgeon in that great statement he made. His great mind was confronted with the dark mystery of the cross, where our Saviour died.
Too often the cross has been represented as a kind of a court scene, God is the judge and there is the sinner, someone steps in and intervenes, the mediator, to take the offence upon Himself, and God the Father is too often represented as an angry God, menacing the sinner with his eternal fate, and the Son stepping in to avert the anger of God. But this is entirely a false meaning of the atonement, because one of the greatest texts upon the matter says “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." So the cross is the greatest example of all, of the love of God. The surrender of his own Son to death, the great heart of God burdened and rent by the view, a view we can never behold ourselves, not in this world anyway, because we do not see, what God sees, the whole mystery of evil, the whole question mark which hangs over all creation, settled in one tremendous moment, in the only way that it could be settled. The only way of destroying evil is by evil, there is no other way, and there's no other one to assume evil but God Himself, and therefore you cannot understand the atonement, without understanding somewhat the mystery of the Holy Trinity. This is central to the whole understanding of the atonement, to know that God is One, yet three persons, not three Gods but One God, in three modes of being, as the early church theologians so correctly put it; God revealed in the person of the Father, in the person of the Son, in the person of the Holy Spirit Three persons not to be confused, one God not to be divided, and it is impossible to separate the persons in all their activity. You say what about the cross? It was the Son who hung dying there, but the Father loved the world He had made, and gave the Son. It was the Father's love you see there pinioned upon the tree, and “Christ through the eternal spirit offered Himself without spot to God.” The mystery of the Holy Spirit, in the one Spirit of the Godhead, there present to offer as in burning flame, the sacrifice of love and obedience to the Almighty Father. Nor could you have the atonement unless the persons of the Godhead were so related, it must be Father, Son and Holy Spirit and in that order. The Father eternal, The Son eternal, The Holy Ghost eternal, yet there are not three eternals but one eternal, as the Athanasian creed so profoundly tells us. It is only as we perceive this, that the Godhead moves always in unity, in its grand design, to the great and dramatic conclusion, in which God, will reveal Himself finally, in all His perfection, glory, beauty and eternity, to the whole assembled creation. Now this is the intention of God in creation, this is why he made the heaven and the earth, the heaven first, the heaven of angels, Those bright celestial spirits in all their vast innumerable circles of living light, and then, the lower world our three dimensional world,, with sky and the firmament, earth and sea, and all that therein is. It was not in heaven, but upon earth, this lowly passing frail earth in which we live, it was here, that God designed to work out the meaning and purpose of His own life
Let us remember this, when foolish men, scientists some of them, speculate about intelligent life being found somewhere else in the universe; they will never find it, they cannot find it even in the solar system. Only one planet, only one spot in the entire Universe could contain man, because here the most important events of all time and eternity happened, and it could not happen twice. It may not happen anywhere else and if evil is here, it is throughout all creation, and therefore God would have to die a thousand times upon some other cross, in some other world in order to bring all to His feet. The cross determines all scientific questions, my friend, make no mistake about that, it is the answer to all questions and all mystery, the happenings on this earth could happen nowhere else. This was the stage; lowly as it may seem to scientists, in comparison to the vastness of the universe. Why is the universe so vast? Not that it might contain other forms of life, but that you and I, through true science might have a yardstick, by which we can measure the eternity and the Almightiness of God, and see how great a God He was, and is, how unsearchable is His wisdom. “The Heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament showeth His handiwork, day unto day uttereth speech, night unto night showeth knowledge.” This is the purpose of creation, so far as it shows forth the wisdom, and the providence, the Almightiness of our great God and Saviour, the cross answers this question, it puts everything in right proportions. The intention of God in creation therefore, was to reveal and to prove Himself. What do we mean by to prove Himself? He didn't need to prove Himself to Himself, but to creation, he had to show forth, that He was worthy to be creator, He was worthy to bear rule over all things. That is the whole point of sin; the meaning of sin lies just there, that was the original sin. Satan refused this acknowledgement of God's absolute right to create, and to create what He did, and as He did, is beyond question. The original sin in heaven, was the mystery that was revealed to the angels, at what point of their existence we cannot tell, that God's purposes were not to be fulfilled in them, except in a secondary sense, that they were to be the servants of another creation, of a feeble, frail creature called man, whose destiny was to be higher than the angels, who should be subject to time, and all that that means, as angels are not subject to it, and even to death itself. But through this means, man would be exalted to the eternal throne, to reign over all the works of God, and Satan in the midst of the stones of Holy fire, pondered upon this, and in his heart rebelled against it. That he should be a servant of such a creature as this, and deprived of the ultimate crown, which he thought was his due, and with the thought, the light went out in his spirit and he became darkness. As Milton so eloquently puts it, Satan discovers Hell. But what is that Hell he discovered? I am Hell he says, I am Hell. I am Hell. Some of the early divines used to say, that the bottomless pit is the soul of impenitent man, there is far more truth in that perhaps, than in the ideas which have survived from the middle ages, and the Spanish inquisition, of the kind of Hell which might be suitable for a body indeed, but certainly would not be suitable for a mind.
Now how would God deal with such a situation as this? The fall of angels was without remedy, because they sinned against total light; there is no redemption for fallen angels, there cannot be. There is for fallen man, because he is a limited creature, they weren't. Man depends upon those who have gone before him, father, son, and grandson and so on, it goes on and on. A short life compassed about with trials, and questions, difficulties and problems and enigmas; man only sees the little world that is around him, he has light for very little more. He is a limited creature and therefore the possibility of redemption arises in man. When the Lord Jesus was revealed, when as the Son came forth from the bosom of the Father, bearing the Father’s credentials, to bring all creation back to Himself, then we read,”verily He took not on him the seed of angels, but He took on Him the seed of Abraham, to be made in all points like unto His brethren.”
Oh the glory and the wonder of the incarnation. The babe of Bethlehem. Where was the Godhead, when it lay an unconscious embryo in the womb of the virgin, or hung upon that maiden’s breast, where was the Godhead then? Oh the mystery, as the hymn writer said, “Our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly, made man.” He, who was the Godhead, in whom the whole Godhead resided, the second person thereof, became the nursemaid of the human race, the second man. There have only been two men, the first was Adam, the second is the Lord from heaven in whom mankind is renewed, and creation is made again without evil, without the possibility of evil because now God is in it. Whereas before he presided over it, now He enters into His own creation, as a helpless babe at Bethlehem, and gives Himself to the death of the cross. At the appointed hour, at the appointed moment, He renders up His life. And we approach the meaning of the atonement and the profundity of it. When we go back to the original sin and see what it is that sin does, sin denies the purpose of creation, it denies the wisdom of God, it denies the right of God to act, according to His own wisdom, which is always according to perfect love, and perfect love is the only dimension upon which creation can exist. So Satan whatever his original name was, moved through the holy stones of fire, and covered as a cherub the very throne of God, denied his own being and was a traitor to his own nature, and to perfect love, when he heard the news and knew the wisdom, that a lesser creature would be made who would be exalted at last above the angels to the very throne of God, and would be one, with God in his eternal reign. He did not know, of course, for it was hidden from him, that it would only be realised through the Son. It would have been no test to Satan and to the fallen angels, if they had known beforehand all the details, for they have to be saved eternally by faith, and eternal and perfect love, just as we are saved by faith, strange that, isn't it? Faith in heaven? Yes there's a place for it, even in Heaven, the kind of faith, which relies upon the wisdom of God, even when it does not see to the end of it, and says, if there is a purpose that some should be exalted above us, we should love them the more on that account because perfect love seeketh not her own. I don't know what passed through the soul of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, I don't know what burden it was that crushed Him there, and caused him to say even at this late hour “O Father, if it be possible,” if there is another way, “let this cup pass from me, nevertheless not what I will, but thy will be done." Without Gethsemane, there would not have been that extremity of dedication, which we find in the Saviour, when He discarded all possibility finally and fully, as man of any alternative and said thy will be done.
That is the answer to sin, because Satan had revolted against the will of God, He did not assent or consent to the divine wisdom, he regarded himself as a creation that had the right and title to be independent of the eternal God, else God had no right to create him. You hear the same thing echoing in many a man’s heart and mouth in these days, I didn't ask to come here, I didn't ask to be put in this world. Whereas life itself, is so infinite a treasure, that we ought to bow in deep thankfulness before God every day of our lives, and thank him that it pleased Him to create us, and grant unto us the joy and the fullness of life and the promise of the glory that is to be. So that if Christ, bore all the evil of all the universe, and answered the great question which hangs over all creation, both in Heaven and in earth, and by this means proved Himself, in perfect love and absolute sacrifice, and self negation to be worthy of the eternal rule, to be worthy of being Creator, that all creation henceforth might worship Him, not simply because He was wise and Almighty, but because He was humble and meek, and because He became the lowest of all. Because He had shown us what perfect love was, which is the element of all heaven, and of the being of God, and so provided for us the certainty, the sureness of that destiny which awaits.
Hence in this sense, the atonement is cosmic. There is a theological term that is very much in evidence in these days, we call it the doctrine of the limited atonement, personally I never use that term. If I want a term that expresses what this is supposed to represent, I always use the term particular redemption. I think it’s safer and is more understandable, because there's a sense in which the atonement cannot be limited, it affects not only all men, but it affects all angels, it affects all Hell, it affects the devil himself. It has to do with the final answer to the evil that is in the Universe, so that evil can never again rise up, and even in hell there will be unanimity amongst fallen angels and impenitent men. For all eternity there will be unanimity as to the worthiness of Christ to rule. Does not Paul say that at the name of Jesus every knee must bow to him, of things in Heaven, things in earth and things under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
Let us remember this, there will be no sin in hell, there will be no possibility of sin ever being committed anymore, Satan will just bear eternally the consequences of his own evil, in the silence and the dumbness of his final assent, to the glory of God and the name of Christ, and along with him every soul cast away into the blackness of that darkness for ever, that darkness that descends upon spirits, takes possession of spirits, which were once light, but have now departed from light. There will be unanimity in all creation, and never again will sin rise up a second time to disturb the peace and the state of perfect love in the regions of the divine triumph. So we perceive that the atonement is cosmic, it affects all being therefore it cannot be limited, accept as to its application to the penitent, and the believing. For in order to enjoy the benefits of Christ's atonement, it is perfectly obvious that we too in a great act of self surrender which we call faith and repentance, we turn from our own sins, we acknowledge the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus, and in an instant that righteousness becomes ours. As a justifying righteousness we enter into a great new birth, into the new creation and we begin to learn the lesson of perfect love
So we see that the salvation of the sinner is not an end in itself, it is only the beginning of the glory of God, the first step that we take on the road back, which shall end at the throne of God, when this word shall be completely understood.
“To him that overcometh, will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I overcame, and I am sat down with my Father in His throne,” or again in the 17th. Chapter of John, where He so wonderfully says “That they all might be one.” That's not the ecumenical oneness in this world, this is the eternal oneness of the redeemed in Heaven, with the eternal Father. It Is a wonderful oneness, “That they all might be one, as thou Father art in me, and I in thee, that they might be one in us, that the whole creation might know, that I am thine, and thou art mine, and these are mine.” The final word must ever be, that which penetrated the soul of John the divine, when there was given to him the vision of the Revelation,”Every creature which was in heaven, and earth and under the earth heard I saying, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, to receive power and glory and riches and honour and blessing forever and forever”. Amen.

2005-07-07T18:20:00.000+01:00

THE MILLENIAL MYTH

A Reply to Mr. Toplady & Others

By Chas. D. Alexander

The confused thinking which exists on the subject of the so called Millennium – the Thousand Golden Years of peace and plenty which are supposed to be coming upon the earth at the end of the present age (whenever that may be), is very well illustrated in an article in a British prophetical magazine “Watching & Waiting” (May - June 1968). The editor, like his magazine, is enthusiastically committed to the idea of a Thousand Years of personal reign of Christ on the earth in the midst of His resurrected people, and in pursuance of this vision and expectation of the Latter Day Glory has reprinted an article from the pen of the excellent Augustus M. Toplady (author of the hymn, “Rock of Ages”) who lived more than two centuries ago - an article in which Mr. Toplady describes the splendours and privileges of the coming great Millennium, with burning eloquence.

The statement is based, of course, on the passage in Revelation 20, the only passage in the Bible in which the term “a thousand years” (that is, a millennium of years) is given to the age which many expect to mark the close of the history of this planet. At the end of that period the planet, and indeed the entire universe will, despite the age of gold, be given up to the flames. According to Mr. Toplady, and many more Millenarians, this will actually be the second time the planet will be consumed by fire, as we shall presently see.

Unhappily, like most Millenarians, Mr. Toplady in this article makes no mention of that most unpleasant part of chapter 20 of Revelation, which describes the frightful apostasy foreshadowed at the END of this Millennium - an apostasy known as The Little Season, or the time of the Loosing of Satan. Or has the editor carefully suppressed this disturbing fact? Or has he not noticed the inconsistency of Mr. Toplady’s interpretation - namely, that despite the fact (according to the author) that the world. as we now know it has been consumed in a general conflagration in which presumably all the wicked inhabitants of the globe have perished, and. the world is purified and exalted. in its physical state to accommodate during the ensuing Millennium the RESURRECTED AMD IMORTALISED SAINTS OF ALL AGES - despite this charming situation, somehow there are vast hordes of potential ungodly concealed somewhere during Christ’s personal reign, ready at a notice to spring to arms as soon as their master the devil gives the signal?

This awful and embarrassing apostasy is not so much as mentioned in Mr. Toplady’s article. It is passed over in silence — an ominous silence — as well it might, for after his glowing description of the Golden Millenary Years when (according to him) the only inhabitants of the earth will be the immortalised saints, it would be highly embarrassing even to hint at the possibility that as soon as Satan was granted the liberty he could fill the earth in a moment with bloodthirsty nations, panting for the destruction of immortals who anyway cannot die, seeing they have already died once and been resurrected!

He would have to tell us where these nations come from seeing the world has been already burned up once (“the preceding general conflagration’ – Toplady), been renovated and cleansed (“this terraqueous globe and its circumambient atmosphere will be so purified s.... as to be totally changed in their qualities and entirely divested of. everything noxious or that can cause disgust or pain), and been re-peopled with the righteous dead specially come down from their rest in paradise, to be joined with those other immortalised saints who have survived (by being caught up into the clouds) the destruction of the old world.

Mr. Toplady would also have to tell us (provided ho came to terms with the sudden emergence of the multitudes of Gog and Magog at the end of the Thousand Years) what the said Gogians and Magogians expect to do with swords and spears, or even nuclear weapons, against immortals who, like the angels, can never die or suffer pain or hurt.

More important still, he would have to explain the failure of Christ’s personal reign upon the earth, seeing that after a Thousand Years of visible reigning in glory and power the entire chapter should be dissolved in so vast and hideous and universal a revolt. And what kind of a Christ is this who is said to be reigning visibly on the earth, seeing that even the ineffable glory of His Godhead inspires no fear and smiths no-one dead? Or does He, despite the Millennial Glory, look just like an ordinary mortal man?

For this, Reader, is the problem posed by Mr. Toplady’s Millennium as his own words indicate:

“He will occupy the Millennial Throne as head of all
principality and power.”

Mr. Toplady proceeds to describe the inhabitants of the Millennial earth in the exalted language of Isaiah 35:

“No, lion shall be there, no unregenerate person, none who is a stranger to the meekness and gentleness of Christ: no man in his natural state, no avaricious harpies, or sensualised worldlings... shall participate in the first resurrection.... but the redeemed shall walk there.’

Mr. Toplady is not here to answer our questions, but we still have to ‘reckon with those who, at the end of the Twentieth Century, publish his views on this mythical millennium and who evidently see no inconsistency or confusion about this extraordinary reappearance on the earth of non-existing nations, dead and forgotten for a Thousand Years, ready and equipped for war, and on their bloody march to destroy a camp of indestructible and immortalised saints.

It is, of course, typical of the theory of an earthly Millennium that there are as many varying descriptions and adjustable arrangements propounded about it as there are preachers and writers who discourse upon it. It is virtually impossible to pin down any particular writer, for as soon as any inconsistency is indicated the theory under examination is promptly discarded or otherwise adjusted so as to meet the difficulty, even though ten fresh contradictions spring up in place of one.
Some hold that the earth is not renovated at all to prepare for the Millennium; that at Christ’s Second Coming the heaven and the earth do not flee away. That is an event reserved for the end of the Millennium following the public and ghastly failure of the Thousand Golden Years of righteous rule. The ungodly are there all the time, held down by Christ’s iron rule. According to this theory, during the Thousand Years, Missionaries (chiefly the Jews) are said to go out from Jerusalem to the farthest extent of the globe and convert myriads of people through whatever gospel it is that they are supposed to preach.

The Millennial converts however do not appear to be any more stable than the converts of the modern high-powered American evangelistic crusades. The fallout rate must be appallingly high. After a thousand years of a world swept by continuous revival under the personal reign of Christ Himself on a visible throne in Jerusalem; at one flick of Satan’s eyelids the earthly multitudes throw off all allegiance to Christ and somehow find weapons to hand (a thousand years after all swords have been beaten into ploughshares and all spears into pruning hooks neither shall they learn war any more). With one worldwide, concentred conspiracy they emerge and come from. North, South, East and West, like the sands of the sea for multitude, to besiege in Jerusalem (or wherever) the few immortalised saints who are all that are left from thousands of years of human history, and who, in any event, are not subject to death (see Revelation 20 verses 7—9).

In fleeing from Toplady, therefore, our modern Millenarians run into even more hopeless contradictions.

Yet somehow the doctrine of a future Millennium holds its own, and those who challenge it are subject to obloquy and contempt, as cranks and fools, if not as heretics and unbelievers.

The confusion into which the excellent Toplady plunges in his reckless quest for an earthly Millennium is really incredible when one considers how sound a mind he had when it came to expounding the evangelical doctrines of grace. Readers will scarcely believe that he actually takes the opening verses of Rev. 21 (the chapter succeeding the description of the ending of the Millennium at the Final Judgment) as anticipating the Millennium:

“The next chapter (21) opens with acquainting us that prior to the commencement of the Millennium, a new heaven and a new earth shall be prepared for the residence of
Christ and the elect.”

Evidently the editor of the Magazine from which we are quoting did not detect this, for he says nothing about it — unless indeed he approve of these methods of interpretation.

Readers may wonder why we should spend time on exposing these theories. Is it not much more important to get on with the preaching of the Word in these evil times in which we live? We are in much sympathy with this view but would point out that not we, but our Millennial friends are the persons who are obtruding the Millennium upon us and forcing us to make a plea for consistent Bible interpretation. We have not sought the battle, but we are prepared to contend for every yard of ground if in the issue, what is at stake is not just a prophetical theory, but an entire system of interpretation which removes from us vast areas of the Bible and forbids us to present therefrom the doctrine of the true gospel Kingdom of Christ.

In Mr. Toplady’s time, they could afford the luxury of these inconsistent and embarrassing prophetical views. This is no longer the case. In earlier times the Millennial theory, and prophecy generally, were not great issues. With glorious inconsistency preachers and expositors could talk of some kind of restoration of earthly Israel as a regathered people, fully rehabilitated into their old special and privileged position among the nations, yet at the same time, they could use the scriptures which appear to teach this theory, in a totally different sense, namely, as describing the setting up of the gospel Kingdom of Christ.

Hence the scorn which the modern Millenarian pours upon his older brethren for having seen ‘the Church’ in Old Testament scriptures where only the Jew is in view.

Today we are not allowed that luxury of holding the dual interpretation of the prophecies. Prophetical theory has been so elaborated during the last 150 years that we now have the Word of God being carved up into water-tight divisions. And woe be unto the preacher who ventures into these forbidden parts to expound the glory of Christ in His spiritual reign with His saints during all gospel times. ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’ is the sign erected before many a chapter and many a book, to deter the hapless expositor who thinks in his innocence that Christ is there in the power of the gospel, whereas it is the preserve of a future race of Jewish farmers. We must not take from the landed gentry of Israel what belongs peculiarly to them, even though what is left of the Old Testament prophetical books scarcely affords material for a six-month's supply Of sermons.

It is to no purpose that we point out that the Old Testament was the only Bible which Christ and the apostles and the New Testament Church had; that the theories of earthly glory held by the Sadducees and Pharisees were consistently and methodically destroyed by the apostles; that the interview of Christ with Nicodemus was specially arranged in the wisdom of God to indicate that the only passport to the Kingdom of God which Christ came to establish was not a Jewish birth certificate but regeneration by the Spirit; and that they only had the right to be called the sons of God who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

The interpretations of the scribes and pharisees cling like limpets to the minds of our modern evangelical expositors, and the Church of Christ is hunted and hounded out of the Law, the Writings and the Prophets with the same diligence shown by Saul of Tarsus in his unconverted days when he harried and destroyed the Church of God.

Our battle is not just to establish or refute a Millenary theory but to defend the Church and preserve for her a whole Bible, to every part of which she may have the freest access. We refuse to be driven out of our inheritance by the merciless theories of the Sadducees or the proud boasting of the Pharisees, who said (and still say) that the Kingdom of Christ is an earthly thing and belongs to the earthly Jew as being the only rightful heir of Abraham - as though Paul had never lived and fought that battle at Galatia, Ephesus and Rome, as witness his epistles to those places.

On the contrary we say, “We (that is, all believing Jews and gentiles) are the Israel of God; they who are of faith - and these alone are blessed with faithful Abraham; we are the adoption who have received the spirit of adoption; we are the heirs of promise and of the covenant made with Abraham. For “if ye are Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed and heirs according to promise” (Galatians 3: 29).

As for Israel after the flesh (that is, the natural descendants of Abraham), these are not the children of the promise at all, as Paul says (Romans 9:8): “They which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted for the seed”.

Again, “They are not all Israel which are of Israel” (Romans 9:6) then Paul says in Romans 11:26, “And so all Israel shall be saved” this is what ho means by ‘all Israel’ - the Israel of God in all ages, whether Jew or gentile — the spiritual Israel who are become Sons of God through Faith in Christ.

The Kingdom of God as foretold in the prophets is not an earthly, Jewish or Millennial thing. Against all the national theories of the Jews of His day, Christ declares, “The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation (that is, it is not a visible kingdom) neither shall they say, Lo here, or Lo there; for the Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20—2l)

Let us not therefore, brethren, be deceived or mesmerised by the prospect of a kingdom of God on earth - a visible Throne at Jerusalem on which a visible Christ reigns, or another visible Temple (which He died to abolish), or a visible sacrificing priesthood re-established to insult the one sufficient priesthood and sacrifice of Himself — that sacrifice which was once for all, and that priesthood which is eternal and abolishes all priests and their service, which went before Him.

It is an essential part of most Millennial theories that a Temple must be erected again at Jerusalem, and blood sacrifices of beasts be offered in the very presence and with the approval, of the One who died to put away all this, and who, when the Temple veil was rent in twain at the moment of His atoning death, abolished Temple, Priesthood and Law in principle, as He did in historical and literal fact one generation later when the Roman Legions carried out the divine decree against a sinful nation and a seed of evil-doers.

Let us, my brethren, have no further mockery of Christ and His Word by these doctrines of the Sadducees. Because Christ presented Himself as the Son of God, the Messiah, yet did not bring with Him the expected earthly glory for Israel, they rejected and crucified Him - and to this day the Jewish nation ratifies the deed by refusing to recognise the One, who did not confer upon thorn the national glory and privilege they lusted after.

Let us not repeat their mistake. Let us hold fast to a whole, complete and undivided Bible in which from beginning to end there are only two peoples — the people of God and the children of the devil; two covenants — that which is unto life and that which is unto death; two dispensations — that of Grace and that of Law: and that these are not chronologically in sequence, but contemporaneous, from the beginning to the end of time.

Let us hold fast to the Bible doctrine that the people of God are one end the same in Old Testament and in New, be they Jew or gentile, bond or free, Greek or Barbarian. Those who are outside the fold of natural Israel by birth are in the fold of the spiritual Israel if they are true believers in Christ; those who are of natural Israel and boast of having Abraham to their father are nonetheless children of their father the devil unless they repent and believe the gospel (John 8:44).

There are no promises to Israel save those made to faith. Israel as a nation, even in her most favoured times, was never a nation of believers. At all times the words of Isaiah applied, “Except the. Lord had left us a very small remnant we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah” (Isa. 1:9). In every generation they slew the prophets and murdered the messengers of God, and finally said (when Christ appeared) “This is the heir, come, let us kill him and the inheritance shall be ours” (Mark 12:7).

WHAT THEN IS THE TRUTH ABOUT THE MILLENIUM?

It is just this, that the Thousand Years of Rev. 20 are none other than the time of the reign of the saints of Christ with Him in heaven (verse 4) while the gospel is preached on the earth to all the nations, adding in each generation its quota of martyrs and faithful witnesses to join the ransomed host mustering in glory. In other words, we believe in a spiritual, gospel Millennium, not a future, material and earthly one.

WHAT THEN IS THE BINDING OF SATAN FOR A THOUSAND YEARS?

The binding is the restriction of Satan’s power over the nations, in order that the elect in every clime and nation, language and people, in every age, should be delivered - for so is the word of Christ in Matt. 12:29 - “Or else how can one enter into a strong man’s house and spoil his goods except he first bind the strong man and then he will spoil his house.” The context shows that it is Satan who is in view, and who was 'bound' at the beginning of the gospel era.

A needless mystery is made over the capacity of Satan to tempt and destroy despite the fact that he is ‘bound.’ As John Owen so well puts it (Hebrews, vol. 2, page 52):

"Christ has made a conquest over the evil powers, prevailing absolutely against them, and they are put in subjection to Him for ever. They are subjected to Him as to their present actings and future condition. He now rules them and will hereafter finally judge them. And insofar as in His holiness and wisdom He suffers them to act in temptations, seductions and persecutions, He bounds and limits their rage, malice and actings; He orders and disposes these events to His own Holy and righteous ends, and keeps them under chains for the judgment of the last day.”

See also Jude 6. Evil angels are already ‘in chains’ though they are never so active as now.

Ebrard suggests no locality is intended by the ‘bottomless pit’ but the words are a cymbal of the limits assigned by God to Satan’s power from the date of his fall to the last judgment. Satan is now permitted to wield his full influence on men, but only to the extent that the hand that binds him also looses him for the purposes of God’s providential rule.

Augustine: “The Bottomless Pit is the innumerable multitude of the wicked.”

For four thousand years Satan claimed the nations of the world as his territory while purposes were engaged in the preservation of the godly seed in the family of Abraham. Now in one shattering blow at the Cross his dominion over the nations was broken and his area of rule was confined to those limits which God prescribed until Christ should have finished His work in the gathering out of His elect from every nation and language.

Satan’s dragon power (Rev. 20, verse 2) as usurping the crowns of the nations, was smitten and bound by Christ’s victory over sin and death, so that he was not able to hinder the calling out of Christ’s predestined and eternally elected flock. He can menace and threaten and tempt, and even destroy the body, but cannot touch the soul of the elect, or prevent the effectual calling of those whom the Father has given to the Son (John 17).

WHAT THEN IS THE LOOSING OF SATAN?

This takes place at the end of gospel times, and is for a “Little Season” immediately prior to the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world. For a comparatively short time (though it could last a century or more) Satan is permitted his ancient liberty to mobilise the nations and lead them against God and truth.

Gog and Magog reappear from Genesis 10, verse 2, and the 38th and 59th chapters of Ezekiel. ‘Gog and Magog’ are symbolic terms gathered from the pages of history to represent the limits of heathen power in Satan’s ancient empire.

On they come, lured by the Prince of Hell, for the last conflict with truth and light. God will exhibit the fact that Satan has power to act only as divine Sovereignty permits and ordains - a wholesome doctrine to which most of our shallow evangelicalism today is a stranger. What Satan has not been able to do for the entire Christian era he is now permitted to do, for God will demonstrate thereby, in preparation for the Last Judgment, that the heart of man does not change, but is ever ready to fill up the measure of iniquity as soon as restraints are off.

In vain do the nations march. They march to their own destruction. They think to devour the people of God and banish the name of God from the earth - but in fact they march only to the Judgment Seat. The fire of God’s wrath falls from heaven and. devours them.

“This quick and great apostasy proves that the Millennium is no triumphant and universal, reign of righteousness, and it disproves the supposition that during its course Christ is reigning visibly on the earth.” J. Agar Beet.

ARE THERE ANY SIGNS THAT THIS TIME IN WHICH WE LIVE, AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, IS SUCH A TIME AS SATAN’S UNLOOSING - THE TIME OF HIS LITTLE SEASON?

Indeed there are signs, which might be so interpreted.

We see these signs in the casting off by the nations of the world, of all semblance of restraint and the fear of God. An American prospective presidential candidate, Governor Romney, spoke in 1968 of America’s moral decay. Who needs to speak about Great Britain’s moral decay?

Five years have seen in Britain the placing on the Statute Book of enactments for the legalising of unnatural vice, the loosing of the great gambling avalanche, easier divorce, the Great Birth Pill (founded on the atheistic and materialistic notion that the increase of the human family is an evolutionary evil which God - if there is a God - ought to have foreseen but didn’t), the abolition of capital punishment, the raising of the restraints on crime, the restriction of the activities of the police, the raising of the censorship so that James Joyce’s vile, unexpurgated 'Ulysees' in all its moral rottenness and filth, and the equally vile book by D. H. Lawrence, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ might be put out to debauch the minds of youth and reopen the doors of ancient dirt to the aged; the licensing of a film which portrays the most unmentionable type of female turpitude; the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship over the live stage so that London might immediately have performance a of the unspeakable Broadway musical, 'Hair' with Hippy free-love in portrayal, naked men and women exhibiting themselves in public, and four-letter songs in which the only word heard is one of the vilest in the language.

Here is the rending of the veil to make sin familiar and easy, and rob it of its horror so that men and women will no longer feel shame as they abandon themselves to the last excesses of those sins which brought about the doom of Sodom.

THE PRIMEVAL ANARCHY TAKING OVER

God has been banished from science. The god of Evolution is up and the God of the Bible is out. The world made itself (says the devil) and all men believe the lie, and much more the corollary of the falsehood, that there can be no morality, no law, no absolute standards of behaviour. No longer can there be law or decency, right or wrong. Expediency is the only rule. The primeval anarchy is taking over. Gog and Magog have pranced out from their ancient fastnesses, Art and music have become heathen and godless. Church leaders make their peace with false and antichristian dictatorships masquerading as the Christian Church. The Reformation liquidates itself. Protestantism abdicates in favour of the Bishop of Rome. Even evangelical religion goes over to high-power salesmanship or to song and dance, pops and films, fast music and tom-toms, gowned choirs, flickering lights, trumpets and guitars, while the sermon becomes a story-telling, flimsy, superficial nausea.

The spirit of heathenism is moving in before our eyes — at immense speed — crushing everything in its path. If God did not shorten the days the very elect would be deceived. Even the new Calvinism, the Reformed Movement, the healthiest sign on the evangelical horizon for a century, is sinking into scholasticism and intellectualism, and dreamy, unrealistic speculation about 'Latter Day Glory' - the name fondly given to the idea that the world is really going too get better and better until all are converted and Christ’s Kingdom will be REALLY begun.
Bible criticism which destroyed Protestantism is now being studied as a 'must' in most British Bible Colleges (evangelical) as the only means of getting Government-recognised ‘degrees.’ The old poison bottles have been brought out of the academic cupboard to paralyse what is left of the evangelical testimony after dollar evangelism has done its worst.

It was Bible criticism which made way for Nordic Neo-Paganism and the rise of Hitler’s Germany. It has now cleared the decks for the last Satanism in Church, State, Society and Culture.

How good evangelical people can still endure the Millennial Myth and talk of future earthly glory while all the stark signs are round about, of the sinking of civilisation and the imminent crash upon us of Satanic hostility and open persecution, baffles and disturbs. Pulpit and pew should be reaching for its Bible with a new sense of urgency, and crowding into preaching service and prayer meeting to hear what God the Lord will speak in the hour of crisis new upon us. Alas for the most part we no longer have prophets. We see not our signs, neither is there any among us that can tell us, How long? (Psalm 74).

“Lift up thy feet unto the perpetual desolations even all that the enemy hath done wickedly in the sanctuary. Thine enemies roar in the midst of thy congregations; they have set up their ensigns for signs. A man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees (for the building of the Temple). But now they break down the carved work thereof (sound doctrine and true worship) with axes and hammers…” (see Psalm 74).

BRITAIN & U.S.A

What intelligent Christian acquainted with the true situation can now believe there can be any return to the old Christian civilisation of the West? Great Britain has committed suicide as a nation, and our American counterpart (with whom, for weal or woe, we must live together or hang together) has been busy for years past doing the same. The bloody fields of Vietnam have drained her lifeblood in a ruinous war which she could win and dared not lose; could not win, because despite the greatest army the world has ever seen, equipped with the most scientific means of destruction ever fabricated by human ingenuity, America has already lost the war at home against the powers of hell, which are systematically destroying home, religion, decency and law. And what is thorn left to fight for when these already lie dead on the battlefield as the first casualties?

Rome and atheism are dividing the world between them in the mutual respect which power has for power. The old order in Church and State, the legacy of the glorious Reformation, has been overwhelmed totally by the forces of atheism and superstition.

Nothing like this crash of the nations, institutions, culture, law and decency has been seen in the world since the gospel came in — or, for that matter, since the days before the Flood. The gathering speed of this movement to violence and moral anarchy is colossal. The purpose is obvious - to crush out the name of God from the earth. The only protesters left will be the believing remnant of the Lord’s elect, against whom Satan's spite is principally directed. We evangelical believers will survive the conflict because we only have the answer - the Bible and the God of the Bible. Only to us do the Name of God and His Sovereign rights and prerogatives mean a thing.

AND NOW THE DEVIL’S BIBLE

Another enormity to emerge is one of the most terrifying of all - THE DEVIL’S BIBLE. This is not the name given to it but this is what it is. It is a pictorialised edition of the Bible (with apocrypha) illustrated by modern “artists” who have illuminated the pages of Holy Writ with disgusting, pornographic drawings. At the time of writing, the thing has been out only a week, and the Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr. Michael Ramsey) at a pre-view thereof, has described the blasphemy as ‘quite exciting.’ We happen to know that most of the ‘artists’ are atheists.

THE ELECTION OF GRACE

If we ever had any doubt about the doctrine of the Election of Grace, let us now perceive after 2,000 years of gospel mercy what man will do if left to himself. So far from the world seeking conversion, it taking the bit between its teeth and racing on to its own destruction.

We are surely living in the days of the last repudiation of the gospel, of the Word of God, and of Christ.

Though dare not finally assert, we may have every justification to point to the signs, and say, “This is the time, Brethren; here is the Loosing of Satan. The Judge is at the gate. Let us look up, for our redemption draweth nigh.”

“Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another: and the Lord hearkened and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord and that thought upon his name. And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels…” (Malachi 3: 16—17)

“O, Blessed Saviour, what strange variety of conceits do I find concerning thy thousand years reign? What riddles there are in that prophecy which no human tongue can read. Where to fix the beginning of that marvellous Millenary, and where the end, and what manner of reign it shall be — whether temporal or spiritual, on earth or in heaven - undergoes as many constrictions as there are pens that have undertaken it; and yet when all is done I see thine apostle speaks only of the souls of the martyrs reigning so long with thee, not of thy reigning so long on earth with those martyrs. How busy are the tongues of men - how are their brains taken up with the indeterminable construction of this enigmatical truth, when in the meantime the care of thy spiritual reign in their hearts is neglected. O my Saviour, while others weary themselves with the disquisition of Thy personal reign here on earth for a thousand years, let it be the whole bent end study of my soul the make sure of my personal reign with thee in heaven to all eternity.” Bishop Joseph Hall (1574 - 1656,).

2005-07-07T16:46:00.000+01:00

Revelation Spiritually Understood

By Charles D. Alexander

Chapter 2

Christ – Hero of the Church's Welfare

The vision of Christ in the first chapter of the Book of Revelation is the final proof that the Book was written for the Church; It is her suffering and preservation throughout history to her final glorious triumph which is the theme of the entire Book. The vision of Christ seen by John at Patmos represents the Lord as the head of the Church, and it is in this character that He engages throughout the Book to sustain and preserve His people in their trials. He appears in the midst of the Seven Golden Candlesticks which in verse 20 are interpreted to mean the Seven Churches to which the Book is directed.
Those who maintain that the Church disappears from the record after chapter 3, and that the remainder of Revelation concerns the earthly nation of Israel, have an insoluble problem on their hands. They must find the Church's consolation exclusively in the first three chapters, and particularly in the messages to the Churches in chapters 2 and 3. But these messages are not in any sense messages of consolation but largely of warning, admonition, and call to repentance. Smyrna and Philadelphia are the only Churches spared from this judgment.
In short, the appearance of Christ in Chapter I fails of its purpose under any theory which deprives the Church of any part in this Book after the third chapter. The Futurist theory does violence to the unity of the Book, for as we have seen, the Book as such (not the mere introduction to it) was directed to the Church under the figure of the Seven Churches of Asia - which we intend to prove when we come to chapters 2 and 3 means the Church throughout all the ages of her testimony. The ascription of verse 4: "JOHN, to the seven churches which are in Asia......" is not withdrawn in any part of the Book, as would be required if the Futurist theory was valid.
This exclusive prerogative of the Church in her access to the entire Book is further endorsed by the contents of verses 4-8 which declare the continuous outpouring of grace and peace from the Triune Godhead, through the atoning blood of Christ, to those who have been made "kings and priests unto God". No-one has yet been found among the opponents of the spiritual interpretation of Revelation, bold enough to suggest that these words apply to any other institution than the Church, or that I after the Church is removed' (as they speak) there will be yet another institution of kings and priests to whom this Book may apply.
The bringing in at this point of a description of the Holy Trinity is thoroughly Johannine in its majestic conception.

GOD THE FATHER ("from him which is and which was and which is to come");
GOD THE HOLY GHOST ("and from the seven Spirits" i.e. , the sevenfold Spirit "which are before the throne");
GOD THE SON ("and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness and the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the king s of the earth").

Christ in His character as ruler overall the kings and powers of this world is a suitable introduction to a Book which has to do with the age long conflict of the Church with the opposing power of this world. Likewise, her royal and priestly character in relation to the Eternal Father (v. 6) gives the Church on earth a dignity of which no earthly power can rob her and which assures her that whatever suffering and shame she may endure at the hands of a wicked world, she is in the sight of God the most distinguished object upon earth. Her members are the kings of creation and the priests to whom God commits all worship and service of the mystic Sanctuary.
Now through the eyes of John, the Church beholds her Lord (v. 13) walking in the midst of her Seven Golden Candlesticks, and holding in His right hand (the hand of omnipotence) the Seven Stars which represent the rule and authority which He has vested in the Seven Angels of the Churches -that is, the Messengers or Servants He has appointed for the rule and guidance of His Church on earth.

SEVERING THE HEAD FROM THE BODY

We now come more particularly to consider the symbolism of John's vision of Christ which is the prelude to the entire Book. The vision sets the style of interpretation for the whole of Revelation, for it is symbolic, being made up of figures designed to represent the various offices and prerogatives of Christ as the Head of the Church, the Defender of His people, and the One who restrains and overcomes the powers of evil which work for the overthrow of the Church and Kingdom of Christ.
The Book is one and indivisible. It does not and cannot have two historical subjects, first the Church and then the Jews. This artificial division of the Book as to its subject has resulted in the present disarray amongst evangelical expositors. The entire object of the vision of Christ is to reassure the Church as she was then about to be launched on the age long story of her trial and proving in the furnace of persecution, beginning with the exile of John on the isle of Patmos. To sever these opening chapters from the remainder of the Book and allocate them to the Church, and award all the remaining chapters to the Jewish people at the end of the age is to sever the head from the body, and leave the Church without the very consolation which the Book was written to supply.
The Church is assured by this great monarchical vision of Christ in the midst of His Church, holding in His right hand those symbolic stars which relate to the guidance of the Church through the dark night of her earthly trials, that it is for her, the Church, and none other, that Christ appears to John on that glorious and most notable day of the Lord on the isle of Patmos.
The appearance of Christ is symbolic, not actual. That is, Christ was there in Person, but it was not the Person of Christ which John saw, but materialization in symbol of what Christ is in His offices and sovereignty in relation to the Church. Hence the language of John, "I saw one LIKE UNTO the Son of man . . . " As the Church to the candlesticks, and as the stars to her earthly guides and rulers, so is Christ to this symbolic representation of Himself.

THE BROKEN BRIDGE

As Daniel wrote the apocalypse of the Old Testament for the comfort and guidance of the Church of the Old Testament during the long centuries when no prophet should arise in Israel and no king reign in Jerusalem, so John, the Daniel of the New Testament, wrote the apocalypse for the guidance of the Church in the long ages (now nearly 2,000 years in duration) during which there should be no further word from God - a bridge over which the people of God would safely and surely pass over the chasm of time. Futurism breaks down that bridge and leaves the Church without a guiding light through the incredible suffering and darkness through which she must pass - and has passed - since the Apocalypse was written.
The symbolic vision of Christ seen by John is after the pattern described by Daniel who saw Christ in a similar appearance thus:
"A certain man clothed in linen, whose loins were girded with fine gold of Uphaz. His body also was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and feet like in colour to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude" (Daniel 10. 5-6).
It is certain that linen and gold have no place in the eternal world; only what these materials and substances represent is to be found there.
Nevertheless, the voice, the words, the presence of the Lord were so powerful a reality that John (like Daniel) falls down as one dead, the mortal frame being unable to endure the manifest presence of the Eternal One.
Prophetically this is the starting point of the great drama of the Apocalypse. After such an unendurable yet rapturous vision who can any longer fear the power of a Roman Caesar who within another twelve months was fated to perish from the earth? Or Satan himself for that matter, whose existence is derived, and his power limited and only tolerated by the glorious One standing before John? Let history produce its long succession of tyrants and empires, governments and systems, rising up to destroy the Church of Christ, Let 2, 000 years roll by during which the full power and malice of Satan, whether in cruel persecution or in masquerade and subtle subversion, should be turned against the Church: the end is just the same - the power of Christ must outlive and overwhelm the foe.
And let the Church return to Patmos whenever she is assailed by the powers of evil, and let her receive again from John, her brother and companion in tribulation and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, the words of this vision; let her see through his eyes and hear through his ears, faith's answer to all the power which may come against her, and she must always overcome.
Let Satan assail the Church with error and counterfeit 'revelation' and delusive imitations of the Bride of Christ. Let him raise up antichrist and his false church. Let a harlot church arise and let all the world acclaim her as the true Church of Christ. Let all the venom and cruelty of the great Adversary be let loose upon the weak and helpless bride as she goes out into the night to seek her Beloved - what can HE boast who can only destroy the body and after that have no more that he can do? Here is One who has conquered death and the grave and whose eyes search through all eternity discover if there is any foe remaining or to come who can challenge His power, and who declares verily that He finds none and knows not of any:
"Fear ye not neither be afraid. Have not I told thee from that time, and have declared it? Ye are even my witnesses. Is there a God beside me? Yea, there is no God. I know not any. "
- Isaiah 44.8.
We have maintained that the cause of most of the confusion existing in attempts to explain the Book of Revelation is that so many writers and preachers have not first established a valid principle of interpretation. We have endeavoured to prove that such a principle is found precisely where we should expect to find it in the first chapter. The Book is written for all time, and for all readers, commencing from the very time of its first promulgation. We find in chapter I that the first confrontation of the Church with the full power and envy of this world, represented in the first universal persecution of the people of God by the emperor Domitian, had then begun. The time was already 'at hand', that is, the time was already upon the people of God. Christ appears to the last apostle of the church and shows Himself symbolically as the master of creation, the arbiter of all time, the ruler of the ages, the Logos, the Word of God, the power and wisdom of God, the Second Person of the Godhead to whom was committed the task of subduing all rule, authority and power, the conqueror of hell and death and the grave, the peerless One who finds not in all creation any to compete with Him, no power which can assail Him, no kingdom which is not already vassal to His throne.

THE CHURCH IS FINAL

The New Testament Church is the full and final manifestation of the Kingdom of God in time, the means by which God's eternal purposes are realized, and through which is displayed that 'manifold wisdom' (the unveiling of His own nature and Name) which is His eternal purpose:
"To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known BY THE CHURCH the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord".
-Ephesians 3.10-11.
There can be nothing after the Church. She is the completion of the revelation of God. In the Book of Revelation she is not supplanted by any other institution or order, Jewish or otherwise. God has said all He ever will say, in time or in eternity, in that glorious Church in which is invested the entire stock of His wisdom, love, grace and power. She IS His eternal purpose, and she occupies the scene as long as time shall last until her Beloved returns in the clouds of heaven to take her for ever into His eternal glory.

THE VISION: (1) The GARMENT and the GIRDLE

Let us see therefore who and what He is who so introduces Himself to John for the comfort and strengthening and assurance of His Church.
Verse 13: He is "clothed with a garment down to the foot and girt about the paps with a golden girdle".
This garment is the sign of His royal dignity as King of Creation, King of the Ages and Lord of all. It is the same garment as that in which He appears to Isaiah (chapter 6): "In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord high and lifted up and his train filled the temple". The 'train' of Christ is His royal garment and is symbolic of the divine glory which belongs to Him alone as ruler of His Church. That His glory fills the temple signifies that all worship, honour, power and blessing belong to Him. As the brightness of His Father's glory and the express image of His Person (Hebrews 1. 3) it is given to Him to receive in Himself all worship and praise due to the Godhead, and it is through Him and in Him therefore that we worship the Father. John is careful in his gospel to assure us that Isaiah's vision was of Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity (John 12.41).
He who in Isaiah's vision filled the temple with His train, here in Revelation fills the Church, the true temple of God, which is the temple of His body. He who in Isaiah is acclaimed by the six-winged seraphim as the Lord of Hosts who fills the whole earth with His glory, is the same who now appears to John and proclaims, "I am He that liveth and was dead and behold I am alive for evermore".
Christ, the defender and Lord of the Church is therefore none other than Jehovah the Lord of Hosts. This is the One who likewise appeared to Daniel as Michael the archangel (for the scripture knows of only one archangel - the Son of God); He who rules over the Church as Jesus the Saviour is the same who rules over angels under His angelic name of Michael, which means THE LIKENESS or THE IMAGE of God. See Hebrews 1. 3. Michael is the LOGOS, the eternal Word, the wisdom and power of God. In the next word, "Girt about the paps with a golden girdle" we see again the correspondence of the vision at Patmos with that which Daniel saw by the banks of the great river Hiddekel. There the Logos was girt about the loins with a girdle of fine gold of Uphaz, here in Revelation plainly 'a golden girdle'. We agree with Samuel Lee, that fine authority, seldom quoted, on the Hebrew, who takes Uphaz not as a place name, nor yet a modification of Ophir famous for its gold, but a simple epithet meaning refined or pure. The altered position of the girdle (round the breast in Revelation, round the loins in Daniel), signifies the difference between activity and 'dignified repose' (Bengel). Loins girded is synonymous with service to be rendered. The flowing garment down to the foot, with the girdle high upon the breast shows that His work is ended. As John sees the Saviour in this vision it is as One whose mission is accomplished, redemption's price has been paid, suffering and humiliation are ended, the Servant's task has been perfectly and gloriously finished to the satisfaction of the Father. Christ has pronounced upon His own works the words, "It is finished".
Henceforth He reigns at the Father's right hand henceforth expecting till His foes are made His footstool in accordance with David's great prophecy in Psalm 110:
"The Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool".
The reign of Christ is not a cessation of activity for He is engaged at all times in an intense unwearied acting on behalf of His people, but His own conflict is ended; He has completed the will of the Father who sent Him into the world. There are no more foes for Him to overcome (see Rev. 3.21).

THE VISION: (2) HIS HEAD

v. 14- "His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow. "
In Daniel 7 the Almighty appears as "the ancient of days " whose garment is white as snow and His hair as pure wool (i.e., pure, shining whiteness). What is in view is the holiness, majesty, and glory of GOD.
Majesty and eternity rest upon CHRIST. The whiteness is that of dazzling light as in the transfiguration (Matt. 17.2), when it is recorded that "His face did shine as the sun and his raiment was white as the light". Mark says His raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow, so as no fuller on earth can white them. Luke says the fashion of His countenance was altered and His raiment was white and glistering. Luke also records that the three disciples fell into a deep sleep, unable to bear the glory of the sight. This is in accordance with Daniel's experience: "There remained no strength in me ... then was I in a deep sleep on my face, and my face toward the ground". John records (Rev. 1. 17) "When I saw Him I fell at his feet as one dead. And he laid his right hand upon me saying unto me, Fear not . . . " So also with Daniel, "Behold an hand touched me which set me upon my knees and upon the palms of my hands ... Then said he unto me, Fear not, Daniel . . . " (Dan. 10. 9 -12).
In his first epistle John has this in mind no doubt when he writes, "God is light and in him Is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth" (I Jn. 1.5-6). God is pure Spirit. He clothes Himself with light as with a garment (Psalm 104.2).
Light is the first principle of the natural creation. "God said, Let there be light. And there was light." Light is that mysterious and indefinable force or energy without which there is no life, order or form. It is a parable of the divine glory and essence which permeates all things and is fitly presented as the garment in which the ineffable Lord envelopes Himself, in a sense entirely spiritual. That which is not of God is dark and forbidding, a symbol of death and the grave, fittingly presented in Scripture as symbolic of the eternal fate of the impenitent. Hell is a sphere from which all light is excluded and darkness reigns, yet perhaps we should be more correct if we regard that darkness of the soul as being something inherent to itself. The soul is not so much in darkness as darkness is in the soul, that is, it becomes the eternal state of the soul. Paul says of believers, "Ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord" (Eph. 5. 8).
Light is synonymous with truth, purity, holiness, and if we were asked to define what we mean by God, we might well answer, "He is light, life, love". So John saw in this vision of Christ, the dazzling splendour of the Son. The crown He wears is not of earthly treasure or sub- stance, but His own eternity, purity, truth, love. He makes the Godhead visible in His glorified Manhood for He will for ever wear that nature which He took from man in the womb of the Virgin. In the dazzling whiteness of His head it is not old age that we see, but eternal, unchangeable youth. Of all the sons of men, this One outshines them all, and lightens all creation by His central presence. All other light Is darkness when He is there, and we shall have eyes only for His glory in that day when, fashioned anew in the likeness of His glorious body, we shall behold without fear, that light which otherwise would smite us to the ground as it did Daniel, and John, and as it did to the three disciples on the mount of transfiguration.

THE VISION: (3) HIS EYES

v. 14 (cont): "His eyes were as a flame of fire". See Daniel 10. 6: "His eyes as lamps of fire".
Despite Hengstenberg's caution to the contrary, we prefer to regard this description as referring to the omnipotence and the omniscience of Christ. It is true, as Hengstenberg writes, that fire in Scripture is a symbol of the holy wrath and punitive righteousness of God, but we have here the fire associated with vision, and this surely allows for a more extensive meaning. Eyes of fire search and try the hidden things of the heart and mind of man, nor can anything in heaven or earth withstand the fiery glance of omniscience which sees all and knows all for the purpose of judging all.
Omniscience - knowing and perceiving all, understanding all things, vision with which there is no past or future but all things comprehensively present with the One who is eternal - this is something which belongs to God alone and can never be Imparted to the creature. The omniscience of Christ is declared in His "Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the ending" (Rev. 1. 11; 17. Chap. 22.13). All that is true of the Father as to His attributes is true of the Son and of the Spirit. "The Spirit searcheth all things, yea the deep things of God" (I Cor. 2. 10). He who scrutinizes and understands and comprehends the divine wisdom must be that wisdom, that mind, that Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Third Person in the glorious Trinity, coequal, co-eternal, and He is the Spirit of the Father and the Son (Romans 8. 9). In the one Spirit therefore the Father and the Son contemplate each the other. The Father sees Himself in the Son and loves and comprehends what He sees. The Son possesses and in fact IS, the wisdom and power of God, and in the One Spirit there is an eternal exchange of love, and a perfect subordination of the Son to the Father's will which is always and ever must be His own will also.
"The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good" says Solomon (Prov. 15.2). Elihu. (the Elijah of the Book of job) declares, "He withdraweth not his eyes from the righteous, but with kings are they on the throne; yea he doth establish them for ever and they are exalted. " Job 36.7). "The Lord is in his holy temple, the Lord's throne is in heaven. His eyes behold, his eyelids try the children of men" says David in Psalm 11. 4-5, and goes on to say that though the Lord looks upon the righteous only to try them, upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, and a burning tempest (same psalm, see margin).
In the Song of Songs Solomon's inspiration puts into the mouth of the bride (the Church) this description of her Beloved (Christ) - "His eyes are the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk and fitly set (margin, sitting in fullness)" Song 5.12.
According to the object upon which they are set, the eyes of the Lord therefore behold in love or in punitive justice. In this sense Hengstenberg is right to regard the verse in Rev. 1. 14 as showing Christ's fiery judgment against the enemies of the Church,- yet that judgment rests upon His all-knowing, His omnipotence, and includes His tender regard for His Church in the energy of His wrath against her traducers and persecutors.
That Christ's eyes should appear to John in his vision as flames of fire develops the OT. visions of the Lord so as to emphasise His care for His people. Christ sees all, in His all-knowingness. Nothing escapes His vision in His watchful care over His Church. He sees from the beginning all that the enemy will seek to do, and writes in advance the history of the conflicts of His people against all the power of this world. For the Book of Revelation is just that-the inner history of the Church in her warfare against the powers of evil. That it is written in advance of the conflict, shows that all history is in the hands of Christ. The outcome is decreed just as much as the conflict itself. Through it, the Church will be refined. She will take up the cross daily to follow her lord. She will be often cast down but never destroyed. The record of her warfare was engraven upon the everlasting marble of heaven before the world was, and as sure as the conflict must take place, so surely must the outcome be victorious. Hence Paul:
But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. For we which live are alway delivered unto death for Jesus'. sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh.
2 Cor. 4.7-11.
The enemy raises himself up in vain. He cannot escape the wrath of the Lamb, from whose flaming eyes nothing is hid. All history will prove His righteousness, and will silence all who would traduce. Kings or kingdoms, rulers or empires, Rome, Babylon, the mysterious kingdom of antichrist - whatever arises to destroy or oppose the Church must be destroyed at last before the punitive justice of Christ - So that we ourselves glory in you in the churches of God for your patience and faith in all your persecutions and tribulations that ye endure:
Which is a manifest token of the righteous judgment of God, that ye may be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which ye also suffer:
Seeing it is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you; And to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ:
2 Thess. 2.4-8.
Then shall that Wicked be revealed whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth and destroy with the brightness of his coming.
2 Thess. 2.8.
How then say some that there is a "great tribulation" to come, through which the Church will not pass? The Church has always been passing through tribulation as part of her appointed testimony to the glory of Christ?
But (say our friends) there is a special tribulation to come eclipsing all other tribulations. And, say they, it will last no longer than three and a half years. We may be pardoned for saying that some of our forefathers In the faith would have dismissed with a gesture so short-lived a tribulation, seeing some of them endured the awful oppression of the foe sometimes for a generation - like our covenanting forefathers in Scotland; or for SIX CENTURIES as did the witness for Christ In the Vaudois Alps and the Waldensian valleys before, during, and after the Reformation, till the strong arm of Cromwell and his commanding voice compelled the Roman antichrist to call off his hell-hounds. Have our friends never heard of the ten persecutions of the Church by successive Caesars - of the catacombs - of the arena and the lions - of the torture chambers of the Inquisition in which countless thousands and tens of thousands suffered for Christ's dear sake?
It is to be doubted whether some writers and preachers have ever made a serious study of Church history, or in particular of the Reformation period.

THE VISION: (4) TREADING DOWN HIS ENEMIES

v. 15: "His feet like unto fine brass as if they burned in a furnace".
Bengel writes, "This has respect to His great power with which He brings all under Him. Oh, how will He tread down all His enemies! ".
Much comment has been expended on John's word here translated "fine brass". In the Greek the word is CHALKOLIBANOS which in fact is not Greek at all, but Greek-Hebrew, CHALOO being Greek for copper and LIBANOS (LIBANAH) being Hebrew for "white". It is an enigmatical word, probably formed by John himself, for it is not found anywhere else, like his word SYCHAR for SYCHEM (John 4. 5) there being no place so named as SYCHAR but John altered a letter to make the word mean "a lie", to show the lying vanity of the Samaritan religion, and prepare us for the inner prophetic meaning of Christ's action at the well of Samaria. As we have shown in our commentary on that chapter (in our series on John's Gospel), the prophetic intention of the narrative was to show the lying vanity of all religion based on geographical location. Hence, "Neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem ... but the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth" (John 4. 21-24). And away goes the vanity of supposing that God will some day turn back the clock of prophecy and centralize true worship once more at some new temple built at Jerusalem - a vanity which has confused the minds of good Christian men for several generations past, and deprived the Church of much wholesome instruction in the Word of God.
The prophetic play upon names appears also in the title of the traitor, Judas Iscariot. There is no such place as Iscariot, nor is the designation a surname of Judas. It is a title like the name Sychar. Both come from the same root, as is obvious from a glance at the spelling. Iscariot means 'the man of lies' as Sychar means 'the place of lies'.
John's word, CHALOOLIBANUS is an enigmatical term immediately explained by John in the next phrase, "as if they burned in a furnace" . It is composed by John on the pattern of Ezk. 1. 7 ("Their feet sparkled like the colour of burnished brass") and Daniel 10.6 ("His arms and his feet like in colour to polished brass").
But why should John have made such play upon the word? There seems no reason to doubt that Hengstenberg has correctly divined the intention: "In the formation of the word we are presented with a small image of the innermost nature of the Apocalypse". In other words, John, as in the case of SYCHAR is giving us a key to interpretation. As his Gospel can only be understood prophetically, that is, spiritually, so the Book of Revelation. Words are but the framework of ideas, and in the prophetical books they become symbols of depths of meaning lying beneath the ordinary usages of language. Hence because the Jewish teachers did not understand that the Old Testament prophets wrote in parables, the coming of Christ was hidden from them, and the nature of His kingdom was totally mistaken. So they rejected Him and called for His crucifixion. In doing so they in fact fulfilled the Scriptures without the intention of doing so. Hence Paul proclaims in the synagogue of Antioch:
"They that dwell at Jerusalem and their rulers, because they knew him not, nor yet the voices of the prophets which are read every Sabbath day, THEY HAVE FULFILLED THEM IN CONDEMNING HIM"
Acts 13.27.
Isaiah had written long before,
The Saviour quotes these very words from Isaiah when answering the question of the disciples, "My speakest thou unto them' in parables?" "Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given ....In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah . . . " and He proceeds to recite the very words of Isaiah as quoted above (see Matt. 13.10-16).
It is a disquieting thought that so many good Christian men today follow the same method of prophetical interpretation as the rabbis of old - and come to the same conclusion that the Jews were after all right in their expectation that the Kingdom of God can only be a kingdom on earth, a visible empire in which the Jews will rule the world.
They have not come to terms with the enigmatical nature of prophecy which requires a spiritual mind for it to be understood.
What John sees in this enigmatical word is copper (or its alloy, brass), in a glow heat, a white heat - therefore, "as though glowing in a furnace." 11
The thought is carried back to Isaiah's vision of Christ as a majestic figure striding from Edom, His garments sprinkled with the blood of His foes, and declaring, "I have trodden the winepress alone, and of the people there was none with me; for I will tread them in mine anger and trample them in my fury; and their blood will be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment. For the day of vengeance is in my heart, and the year of my redeemed is come". Isa. 63.1-4.
The picture is one of complete and absolute triumph, achieved throughout history by our solitary champion, who in His onward march for the deliverance of His people tramples underfoot all Satanic opposition. This should be set against the over-emphasis today upon the agency of man in the promotion of the divine purposes in the gospel. Personality and method loom large in the modern evangelical world, and more is said about doing than worshipping. We shall do better if we worship more. Belief in the divine prerogative and sovereignty does not discourage true service, but to ignore the supremacy of Christ in all things leads to the pitiful expedients so rife today when in the evangelical world it appears that man moves God and not that God moves man; that man determines whither and when the Spirit of God shall work.
"Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord, or being his counsellor hath taught him ? " - is the question God asks in Isaiah 40.13. Paul takes up this word in Romans 11.34-36 where he asks, "Who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been his counsellor? Or who hath first given to him and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and to him are all things, to whom be glory for ever. Amen". Let that "Amen" silence all the preaching and the writing which for too long have placed man before God in the weak evangelical theology of today.
In short the triumph is Christ's and not ours. Alone He bore the curse which lay heavy upon all creation. Alone He died and carried our condemnation with Him down to the tomb. Alone he has led and still leads His Church through the historic avenue of time. We are a passing few, here today and gone tomorrow; he alone carries on His work in the invisibility, treading down principalities and powers and dominations and oppositions, staining His garments with the blood of His foes as He marches on to the ultimate triumph when He shall have put down all rule, authority and power.

THE VISION: (5) HIS VOICE

v. 15: "His voice as the sound of many waters".
See Daniel 10. 6: "The voice of His words like the voice of a multitude" -
Ezekiel 43-2: "And behold, the glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the east and his voice was like a noise of many waters, and the earth shined with his glory".
The Ezekiel quotation is of special value as it occurs in the chapter which describes the return of the glory of God to the mystical temple (the New Testament Church). There was no temple existing in Jerusalem at the time of Ezekiel's temple vision. The earthly temple had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, prior to which Ezekiel had his first visions of the glory of God leaving the sanctuary at Jerusalem on account of the sin of the people. He sees the temple restored-but it is a prophetical temple, the reality of which is the mystical temple of Christ, the Church - let all the world cry to the contrary, for God will never permit the restoring of animal sacrifices which Christ died to abolish. Nor will He centralize His kingdom in an earthly Jerusalem which Christ declared would never again be the centre of the true worship of the Father (John 4. 21-24).
Hence the return of the glory of the Lord seen by Ezekiel can only mean the establishment of the New Covenant with its kingly priests (Rev. 1. 6), its mystic candlesticks, and its heavenly worshippers. The glory of the God of Israel comes from the east (that is, from the sun rising, a token of the new gospel day which was inaugurated with the death and rising again of the Saviour). Ezekiel hears His voice - as the sound of many waters. This is the sense in which the same words are used by John. Drowning all the discordant sounds of earth, asserting the divine prerogative, filling with the terror of His power the enemies of the Church, inaugurating that mystical reign of Christ described by David (Psalm 110, so oft quoted in the NT) , "The Lord said unto my Lord, sit at my right hand till I make thy foes thy footstool".
Here is a kingdom which cannot fail, because it is in its nature eternal, as He is eternal who proclaims it. This is the kingdom to outlast all other kingdoms and grind them to powder, and thank God the believer does not have to wait for the dawn of some earthly millennium in order to enter upon the enjoyment of it, for it is already here, its foundation the empty tomb, its King One who has conquered death and the grave and has therefore no more enemies to overcome. There are not any who can speak against that mighty voice which rolls through the heavens, proclaims salvation from sin, hell and death, and overwhelms like the noise of some stupendous waterflood all the discordant sounds of earth: as though all the oceans of earth were suddenly released from their ancient bounds, and in one tumultuous, irresistible tide rolled over the kingdoms of this earth, the terrifying voice thereof shaking the firmament, so that nothing else can be heard for the majesty of it.
So is the voice of Him who bears, and who is, in Himself, the glory of the Lord -

THE VISION: (6) THE GUIDING PRINCIPLE of the CHURCH

v. 16- "And he had in his right hand seven stars".
This has already been explained for us in the last verse of the chapter: The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches". The Church is not a democracy; it is ruled from the throne above. All history of the Church has proven that there is no ideal form of Church government on earth. All forms of Church government have succeeded - and all have failed.
We do not propose to enter the lists, but only to observe that perhaps Martin Luther was right when he declared that the Church is wherever the Word of God is preached. God has been pleased to use robed Bishops and gowned nonconformists, men in working class attire with or without the advantages of a formal education, preachers who in unorthodox style but burning with holy passion for the glory of Christ and the souls of men have found in their independency the means of promoting the gospel, or others tramping through the bush, establishing in kraals and compounds among the uneducated and debased tribes of primitive men, living chains of primitive piety without formal order at all.
We make these observations without any intention of decrying what others see as a vital necessity, or a precise scriptural procedure. We have our own mind on the matter in any case. One thing only we would plead amongst Christian men everywhere - that the Word of Life should be preached with the maximum competency attainable; that men's gifts of ministry should be recognized and conscientiously supported by all material means, and that the golden rule - in all things charity - should be paramount. It is possible to have what some may think to be the most scriptural procedure of all, yet ruin all for lack of love.
Let the Word of God therefore be fully preached. Let that be the first thing. Let men who preach prove themselves in the discipline of the study, spending their years in hard work at their books and at prayer and in the homes of the people. Let them labour to be examples to the flock to feed whom is their calling. Let them eschew ambition - except it be ambition to be useful just where they are. Let them not lightly flit from place to place in search of better living or higher distinction, but let humility and the interests of the sheep prevail with them. Christ lays down no rules except the rule of love. He leaves one command only to Peter - "Feed my lambs". It is thus He holds the Seven Stars in his hand.
The Seven Churches of Asia are the universal Church of all ages. Many of them are in a state of danger. Most of them need repentance. Some are worthy of commendation. Always, by whatever means, it is Christ who moves amongst the candlesticks. He is concerned about the decline of love, the rise of dangerous error, empty profession, pride and luxury. If we give ourselves to the encounter with these evils we shall do well. Perfection is in heaven alone, and in the imperfections of earth, Christ rules by faith, hope and love in pulpit and pew.

THE VISION, (7) THE TWO-EDGED SWORD

v. 16 - "and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword".
The fundamental prophecy from which this description is taken is Isaiah 11.4- "But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth- and HE SHALL SMITE THE EARTH WITH THE ROD OF HIS MOUTH, AND WITH THE BREATH OF HIS LIPS SHALL HE SLAY THE WICKED".
Isaiah sees Christ coming in the full power and authority of His gospel kingdom. He is the rod coming forth from the stem of Jesse upon whom rests the sevenfold Spirit. His kingdom consists of 'the poor and the meek' whom it is His office to defend and exalt. Christ has this prophecy in mind in the opening words of His ministry in the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are the poor in spirit .... Blessed are the meek . . . . " His kingdom therefore is not one of national prerogative or of millennial glory imposed upon a crushed and sullen world, but one in which humility and meekness are the distinguishing features. His people are at the mercy of a cruel and persecuting world. Their defence rests upon the puissance of their redeeming Lord and Saviour who takes up their cause against their persecutors and smites the earth with the rod of His mouth, and slays with the breath of His lips.
Again, in Isaiah 49.2 Christ speaks and declares "He hath made my mouth like a sharp sword". That the entire chapter deals, with gospel times is fixed for us by Paul's use of verse 8 in his second letter to Corinth where he quotes this verse and adds the words, "Now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation" (2 Cor. 6. 2). Israel is rejected in this chapter of Isaiah (v. 5) and the gentile world brought to salvation in her place (v. 6).
The sharp sword therefore in Isaiah's prophecy signifies the Judgment which Christ executes upon the enemies of His kingdom, and the defence He affords to His true Church. It is in this sense that Christ appears to John in our passage in Revelation. It is a sword which is not wielded by the hand, but which proceeds from the mouth and therefore consists of the words and righteous decrees which He utters against the foe. One word from Christ can make or unmake the entire creation. One word is enough to scatter the armies of the wicked. John had already seen an example of the power of Christ's word, when in Gethsemane the officers of the temple came with a band of armed men to arrest Him. "Whom seek ye?" He asked. "Jesus of Nazareth" was the response. "I AM HE" ("I AM" in the original) declared the Son of God. At this word they 'went backward and fell to the ground' John 18.4-6). All the armed might of this world, urged on by the powers of hell, has no power over the Son of God except that which He permits to them. He imperiously cautions those who came to Gethsemane to arrest Him, "If therefore ye seek me, let these go their way" - an order which John recognized was a foreshadowing of Christ's worldwide commission to defend and save His people in accordance with His prayer in the upper room that same night, "Those whom thou gavest me I have kept and none of them is lost save the son of perdition that the scripture might be fulfilled" (John 17. 12).
John perceived that the action of Christ in the Garden in defence of His disciples was the token of His age long defence of the Church for whose final deliverance He had prayed that night in that most remarkable of all prayers.
So the enemies of Christ and the Church are scattered and destroyed, restrained and humbled, by His all-commanding Word, With the breath of His lips He slays the wicked, whether they be visible or invisible.
Near the end of Revelation the sword is again seen in triumphant execution against the combined might of earth and hell arrayed against the Church. This is the so-called ARMAGEDDON about which so much noise is made nowadays (chap. 19.11-21). A caution is implied here against the literalistic and futuristic conceptions now so popular in relation to this subject. Even amongst persons well-disposed to the right view of prophecy there is much confusion concerning this 'battle'. The idea persists of an actual battle to be fought at Megiddo in northern Palestine on the site where Deborah and Barak destroyed the host of Sisera in the days of the judges. We are even asked to believe that the army of the wicked (mainly Russians of course! ) will number 200,000,000, a figure taken from Revelation 9 and which relates not to the army which shall assail the Jews just prior to the return of Christ (as the futuristic theory runs), but to the armies of heaven, the entire company of the angels, assembled for the defence of the Lord's people and the entire destruction of the armies of the Evil One.
In Revelation the armies of heaven (Rev. 19.14) follow the Redeemer on white horses, arrayed in pure linen, and Christ smite the rebellious nations with the sword which proceeds out of His mouth (verses 15 and 21).
Our readers must make their choice between an impossible Armageddon fought in northern Palestine between the angelic host on the one side and a motley army on the other armed with ancient weaponry - shields and bucklers, bows and arrows, javelins and spears (see Ezekiel 39.9, quoted In aid, with much enthusiasm, by the sponsors of a material Armageddon) - they must choose between that, and the warfare in the spirit in which the whole Church Is now and always engaged, and ever will be till He speaks the final word of victory who is the Word of God, the Eternal Logos, the Wisdom and the Power of God incarnate.
That victory will be won by one weapon only - the sword which proceeds out of the mouth of our great Champion and Hero, Christ Jesus. For Armageddon is not some afternoon battle fought somewhere in the Middle East between immense armies which could not be accommodated, supplied and fed on so limited a terrain as the tiny field of Esdraelon beside the ancient river of Kishon. It must be and is, the continual conflict now raging, and which always has raged, between the forces of light and darkness, in the invisibility of the spirit. Are we not assured by Paul that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of satanic strongholds; that we war not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high (that is, heavenly) places? (2 Cor. 10.4; Eph. 6.12).
The entire Book of Revelation deals with this warfare of the Church against the powers of darkness, and the battle of chapter 19 is only the last phase of that battle which is always being waged and which we are fighting now. It is a battle of faith, and the last word is with Christ, from whose mouth proceeds that sharp sword with two edges with which He smites the nations. He rides into the unearthly conflict on His white horse of imperial and unchallengeable power, dipping his garment in the blood of His foes (and ours), and destroying them by His creative Word.
This is what John sees on our behalf on the isle of Patmos; this is the assurance the Church has of complete victory - and if ever a commentary were needed upon so magnificent a picture as this, we surely have it in the words of Martin Luther, so vigorously translated for us by Thomas Carlyle:

A safe stronghold our God is still,
A trusty shield and weapon;
He'll help us clear from all the ill
That hath us now o'er taken.
The ancient prince of hell
Hath risen with purpose fell;
Strong mail of craft and power
He weareth in this hour,
On earth is not his fellow.

With force of arms we nothing can,
Full soon were we down-ridden;
But for us fights the proper Man,
Whom God Himself hath bidden.
Ask ye, Who is this same?
Christ Jesus Is His name,
The Lord Sabaoth's Son;
He, and no other one,
Shall conquer in the battle.

And were this world all devils o'er,
And watching to devour us,
We lay it not to heart so sore;
Not they can overpower us.
And let the prince of ill
Look grim as e'er he will,
He harms us not a whit:
For why? His doom is writ;
A word shall quickly slay him.

God's word, for all their craft and force,
One moment will not linger,
But, spite of hell, shall have its course,
'Tis written by His finger.
And though they take our life,
Goods, honour, children, wife,
Yet is their profit small;
These things shall vanish all,
The city of God remaineth

THE VISION: (8) HIS FACE AS THE SUN

v. 16: "and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength".
These words close the vivid description which John gives of the appearance of Christ. It is the midday sun, the sun in its zenith, shining from a clear sky without interruption of cloud, to which John compares the face of Christ. It is the last word in proof of His deity, and is the complete and final assurance to the suffering Church that she is not deserted by her Lord; that He is fully capable of meeting every situation; that with unchallengeable omnipotence He is risen up to save her and to pour contempt and destruction upon her oppressors.
The apostle Paul speaks of "The light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" in contrast with the heavily veiled lesser light of the Law in the face of Moses (2 Cor. 4.6).
Daniel sees His face "as the appearance of lightning" (Dan, 10. 6) - a vivid impression this, of that righteous judgment which He hurls, in the hot thunderbolts of His divine indignation, against the foe. This is the face before which heaven and earth flee away, and there is no longer found any place for them (Rev. 2 0. 11). Creation Itself is dissolved when He sits for the Judgment; day and night cease, every voice is stilled, hell has no word to say; earth is speechless; except in the universal confession that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2.11). As the sun is the centre of our world (so far as our natural observation is concerned) and all life is regulated by that glorious orb, and is impossible without it - so is Christ in the spiritual firmament. He is that sun of righteousness which riseth with healing in His wings (Malachi 4. 1); He clothes with His splendour that mystic woman of Rev. 12 who so fitly represents His Church in Old and New Testaments.

2005-07-07T16:13:00.000+01:00

‘Revelation Spiritually Understood’ is Rev. Alexander’s Commentary on Revelation.
Originally a series of pamphlets it has now been brought into book form. (Edited by John C. Lowery) It has been published by K & M Books on behalf of the Bible Exposition Fellowship.

Enquiries for copies to: sales@tentmaker.org.uk

Free sample here.

2005-07-07T13:57:00.000+01:00

The Great Protestant Landslide

– and the Pagan Revival in a Crumbling Age

An address by the late Rev. Charles D. Alexander, of Liverpool, at Caxton Hall, Westminster, organised by the National Union of Protestants, under the chairmanship of the Rt. Hon. Earl Alexander of Hillsborough, LL.D., P.C., C.H.

Protestantism is more than just a protest against the pretensions of Rome: it is a positive assertion of the truth. Its divine calling is not merely to denounce Rome and its errors, but to assert and reassert the truth of the Word of God, especially concerning the times through which we are passing.

The present Vatican Council looks to be going the same way as the last. It is over 100 years since the last Vatican Council met to define the dogma of the Infallibility of the Pope, and broke up in disorder to the accompaniment of terrifying signs of God’s judgements in heaven and on earth. As the Cardinals and Bishops gave their individual assent to the blasphemy, there was a violent thunderstorm; the vast auditorium was reduced to candlelight, and as each obedient formula of assent was repeated by the subservient prelates, it was punctuated from heaven by hot thunderbolts and the clash of thunder. Then war was declared between France and Prussia, and the rickety regime of Napoleon III, on whose bayonets the temporal power of the papacy was held up, came crashing to the ground.

The council of 1962 has since broken up without agreement, and no one knows if these prelates will ever meet again to resume their debates.

Meanwhile, all is not well at home with us, and we are facing the effects of the frightful Protestant landslide – about which more a little later on.

CRAZE FOR UNITY

The present craze for Church Unity is completely fallacious in its conceptions. Denominational divisions are not the evil they are made out to be. They are the ordinance of God for the preservation of truth and liberty. The divine strategy is the reverse of man’s. Military strategy divides in order to destroy. God divides in order to preserve, and to create a true mystical unity. He hates monopoly and uniformity, for in this very imperfect world, monopoly always spells tyranny. God will not tolerate a universal rule on earth; that is why there is no danger that a Soviet Russia, or a Hitler, will ever be able to dominate the earth. The Lord reigns! Let the earth keep silence before Him. In the Second Psalm it is revealed that the nations of the world have been given to the Son of God for the working out of the purposes of redemption, and when it pleases Him, He dashes them to pieces like a potter’s vessel, and He rules them with a rod of iron.

Denominations are necessary the one to the other, to keep human pride within bounds, so that the corruptibility of man even in his best state may not banish truth from the earth. Hence the ecumenical movement is bound to fail, for its very success would be its own destruction. The creation of a universal church today, would be followed tomorrow by the rise of a new nonconformity.
Enthusiasts for ecumenicalism forget that the experiment of a universal church has already been tried, and has proved a ghastly failure. Let them read the story of Rome.

Two things stand against the ‘unity’ of the churches so far as the evangelical is concerned. One is, THE FACT OF ROME; the other, THE STATE OF PROTESTANTISM.

ROME’S BLOODY RECORD

Why is it that in this land we instinctively shrink from the very idea of collaboration with the Church of Rome? Is it not because of the effect upon the national consciousness of three things: Rome’s History; her Doctrine; her place in the Bible?

It is certainly no exaggeration to say that her history constitutes the most frightful chapter of lust, violence, cruelty, hate and greed in the entire story of mankind. If ever there was an institution of which it could be said with justice that the gates of hell had prevailed against it, that institution is the Church of Rome. She is the greatest blight that ever fell upon the human mind. Consider how full she is of the blood of the saints and of all the martyrs who have witnessed for the truth. Here is part of the programme:

1. Pope Julian was responsible for the deaths of 200,000 victims;

2. The Bartholomew massacre in France slew 100,000 Protestants;

3. The Waldensian massacres over the period of six centuries accounted for at least one million innocent victims.

4. In their first 40 years, up to 1580, the Jesuits slew 900,000;

5. In the Low Countries the Duke of Alva, by the hangman alone, slew 36,000 Protestants;

6. The Holy Inquisition in 30 years slew 150,000 Christians and Jews.

In the Irish uprising a few years before Cromwell’s divine mission of vengeance, there were piked to death, burned, driven in nakedness into the cold sea in the depth of winter and drowned, a Protestant population numbering anything up to 300,000 victims, men, women and children.

We hear much of the so-called massacre of Drogheda, when Cromwell’s men put to the sword two or three thousand fighting men who had refused honourable terms of surrender, but our history books are ominously silent about the foul extermination of Protestantism over much of Ireland in the frightful atrocities of the Great Massacre. Cromwell, that good and gracious man, when he had it in his power to wreak a just vengeance against all who had played a part therein, declared that none should be punished except the ringleaders of the crime. The rest were to be left in peace and not disturbed.

Cromwell! Who under God made this country the last citadel of evangelical light against the satanic conspiracy of Rome!

Cromwell! The greatest Englishman who ever lived, whose body was torn from its resting place in Westminster Abbey by the minions of that foul monarch Charles II and whose noble remains were desecrated, and the man whom they feared in life became the subject of a cowards triumph in death. Cromwell! That earnest and enlightened man, whom now in spite and in ignorance is only remembered to be foully slandered. But we must not complain. They do the same with the apostle Paul, but as Dean Inge said (a man with whom we do not usually agree, but who occasionally touched greatness in his verdicts): “There are very few men who, after 2.000 years, are alive enough to be hated! And did not they do the same with the Lord of Glory Himself?—”Behold, an evil man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.”

THE VILENESS OF IT!

We shrink from Rome because of her false and antichristian doctrine. We are horrified by her worship of Mary. On earth Rome has put a man in the place of God, and in heaven a woman in the place of the one Mediator and Redeemer. Oh, the vileness of it!

Instead of One God in the Mystery of the Three Persons, Rome has established an entire Pantheon of major and minor deities, gods and goddesses, suspiciously resembling the paganism which Papal Rome supplanted. Only the names are changed. We shrink from the enormity of the Mass, and the scandal of the Confessional and priestly Absolution. We shrink too from Rome’s denial of free grace and justifying faith; her mingling of human merit with the former, and dead works with the latter, and we are not surprised in view of this overthrow of the very basis of the gospel, that there is no room in the Roman dogma for evangelical assurance of salvation.

Likewise we shrink from Rome because of her place in the Bible. If ever an historic system in its special character and history has been portrayed in the Sacred Pages of Inspiration, that system is the Church of Rome. Some evangelicals, with a peculiar system of interpretation which throws all prophetic events into the yet unreached future, may imagine that the events of 2 Thessalonians 2, and of Revelation chapters 13 to 18, will arise suddenly, and as suddenly be terminated in the space of some three and a half years (or seven at the outside), in some coming day when the Christian Church may not even be here to witness it, but our fathers would have laughed at such an “unexampled period of tribulation”; they had to suffer the cruelty and tyranny of Rome for a whole lifetime. Rome did not take a mere three years to develop its antichristian character; it took six centuries for the devil himself to create this masterpiece of religious subterfuge and colossal deceit; and—we say it reverently—if God had not warned us about it somewhere in His Word, then He ought to have done so.

In fact God has done so, but where, if not in those passages already referred to, which many of our friends, who have never had to live with Rome’s intolerance and persecution on their doorstep, are pleased to relegate to the vague and problematic future? No wonder Rome is not recognised today for what she is. It does not seem to occur to some of our friends that there just isn’t time, in their system, for the entire tyranny of antichrist and the rule of the Man of Sin to develop and pass through its prophetic phases in the ridiculous period of three and a half years. The pathetic theory topples and falls under its own weight.

When the French bayonets were removed in 1870, and the Papal temporal power fell before the Risorgimento of Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel; when to the tumultuous applause and delight of its inhabitants, the triple-crowned and mitred head of those Papal States (described even by sober historians of the time as “the worst-governed states in Europe”—for it is a settled principle of both political and ecclesiastical rule, that ‘Satan cannot cast out Satan,’ and therefore Vatican rule never was anything else but monstrous)—when, as we say, that wretched and scandalous temporal rule of the Pope came to an end in 1870, a point in prophecy was reached, of surpassing significance. In that hour 1260 years of horrid pride and Satanic usurpation came to an ignominious end. The mystery of iniquity which was to endure for a time, times, and the dividing of time surrendered the crown of paganism which it had wrested twelve centuries before from the head of the Caesars, and conceded the dominion of the antichristian cause to that last and ultimate phase of Satan’s warfare against the Cross, that naked and open Rationalism which is now in process of devouring both Rome and its natural enemy, Protestantism, from the tail upwards. So comes into being that last limited season of Satan’s unloosing, when the deceived world, like a riderless horse, plunges headlong into the very paganism from which it was once delivered by the power of the gospel.

The Age of Faith passes into the Age of Reason, and THIS CRUMBLING AGE NOW RACES AT BREAKNECK SPEED TO THE CONCLUSION OF ALL THINGS AT THE GREAT JUDGMENT SEAT.

PROTESTANTISM IS SICK

Nothing can hide the fact that Protestantism is sick. To transform its denominational divisions into an ecumenical lump of figs and slap it on the boil will not raise Hezekiah from the bed he now lies on. A united carcase may present, by the art of sepulture, a pretty picture in death, but divided life in the mystical unity of the Spirit is better than the calm inertia of a decorated corpse.

The world and the Church face a new thing, which has never been known before, no, not since the foundation of the earth.

It is the enthronement of Unbelief in the very centre and heart of the Church Visible; the setting up of the last Great Baal of Rationalism n the House of Almighty God. This they begin to do, and now nothing will be withheld from them—and they ask us to unite with THIS THING! Let us be very sure of this, that he who begins by denying the sacredness of the Bible, and in place of its divine inerrancy in every particular sets up his own standard of judgment as to what is or is not true, is on the highroad to complete and final atheism or of invincible doubt. Let the state of some of our nonconformist colleges answer for that. We have reached the stage when a young man scarcely dare venture foot within those precincts once dedicated to solemn preparation for the Ministry of the Divine Word, without danger of losing what faith he may have had before the evil day when the seminary doors closed with him on the inside.

A prophet of their own choosing, Professor C. H. Dodd, of “New English Bible” illfame, is the spokesman for them all when he speaks in his book. “The Authority of the Bible,” of ‘the outworn morality of parts of the Old Testament.’ and of the traditional evangelical view of the Holy Scriptures becoming ‘a danger to religion and public morals.’ Moses is a ‘Medicine Man,’ Jacob has a night of terror at a haunted ford, Ezekiel displays definite symptoms of abnormality; some of the Sayings of Jesus are either not true or are unacceptable to conscience or reason; Jesus Himself had views regarding the Old Testament which we cannot accept without violence to our sense of truth.

Having thus made themselves wiser than God and more righteous than His Law, it is not surprising that leading exponents of this upsurge of rationalistic revolt in the very vitals of the Christian Church, should openly advocate the blue-pencilling of the Bible so as to excoriate the Sacred Volume of everything which makes it unique, and which raises it above the level of mere human documents.

Satan is waxing bold. Never since the Garden of Eden has he been in such a paradise. He has the ear of humanity, and no lie, no conceit, and no daring blasphemy is now withheld from a generation which in other fields beside that of religion exhibits the most alarming symptoms that humanity has lost its soul. The Age of Faith had its triumphs in every field of human culture, as it spread its beneficent influence over the minds of men and created a climate in which beauty and harmony were raised to the highest pitch in human history.

But for over a century the Western World has been departing from the ground of faith. What Rationalism has done for Protestantism, its twin, Materialism, has done for science and culture. We have a creation without a Creator, and a universe without a meaning, purpose or plan. Evolutionary hypotheses explain all—all, that is except the two most vital facts of all— LIFE itself, and the SOUL OF MAN. Political science finds its logical exponent in the poor communist with his dialectical materialism, who only trades in the market which has been opened for him by materialistic science and humanistic theology.

ART IN THE DITCH

Even art and music is now degraded and brought down to the ditch of heathenism by the fading of the light of faith in the soul of man. The air vibrates with the rhythm of the tom-tom, and the endless cacophony and discord of a jungle culture. The frightful daubs and meaningless twisted and distorted forms which are purveyed in the salons of the Western world at enormous prices, indicate a condition in the minds of men which can only have arisen as the heathenish spirit moves into the vacuum created by the agnosticism of the age. Poetry and literature have gone the same way. We have few great writers, and of those few the majority have no reverence for the Christian revelation or Christian morality. Poetry is written for the most part to shock and injure the purity of the mind, as the ‘poet’ in search of inspiration dredges the sewers of human depravity for words and thoughts deemed sufficient to display the cult of anti-art. Greatness has gone out of painting and musical composition. The soul of man has become dumb.

OUR EVANGELICAL NAKEDNESS

Alas for our beloved evangelicalism. We too have suffered in this darkening of the mind. Protestantism has become inarticulate. We have no voice. As a community we no longer count. Press and radio treat us with contempt except when we can furnish them with sensations. Time was when governments shook at the pronouncement of some nonconformist divine, but since British nonconformity became a Temple of Unitarianism, the Moderator of the Free Church Federal Council limps along a lame third to the Archbishop and the Cardinal.

Our evangelical forces are scattered, and harrowed by evangelistic techniques, and superficial sermonising at which Satan himself must often laugh, and angels weep. It is generally agreed amongst us that an evangelical revival is needed, but it is not so readily recognised that the conditions do not exist for such a revival in England today. Why? Because of the lack of expository power in the preaching of the Word of God. How can there be a revival without great and sound preaching? Yet we live in a time when we have no great theologians, while the number of men in the land who can preach with the expository power regarded as the usual and not the unique in the days of the former divines, may be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Oh, the nakedness of our evangelicalism today!

But the cause is not yet lost though the hour is late. There is time yet to rouse the latent evangelical forces of our beloved land for the last great conflict with the powers of darkness brooding over us. But that time is short, for it is to be feared that He who judges the nations may in righteousness abandon to the evils they have chosen, and to the gods their own hands have made, nations like our own which have despised their evangelical inheritance and sold out to the devil.

So let it be in our day. Let us strike one last blow on behalf of the Crown Rights of our glorious Redeemer; and let us look for one last demonstration of the Sovereign Power and Saving Grace of Him who is fairer than all the sons of men, to whom be all our fealty and worship, our adoration and exulting praise:

They call Him the sweet Rose of Sharon;
They call Him the Lily so fair;
They call Him the blest Rock of Ages;
They call Him the Bright Morning Star.
He’s Prophet and Priest and Redeemer;
As King of all kings He shall reign;
He’s coming in power and in glory!
Oh tell me His Name again.

2005-07-06T17:58:00.000+01:00

The Creation, the Fall and the Flood

By Charles D. Alexander

The daring hazards of modern science when alleging to compute the supposed vast antiquity of the material creation, and especially in the bold, almost reckless habit which has been contracted of estimating in the terms of millions of years the age of a fossil, a fragment of bone, or a section of exposed strata, are characteristic of an age which is marked for its loose thinking and its appetite for the novel and the sensational. The absurdity of these fictional dates which with such abandon are appended to material objects of God’s creation is only equalled by the startling contradictions which exist between the computation of this expert or that. Without the flicker of an eyelid, one scientist will speak airily of ‘five million years.’ Another, handling the same object will learnedly and modestly reduce the estimate to a mere quarter of a million! Millions of years, epochs, aeons – these are mere playthings to the up-to-date professor. “There is plenty of time,” boldly asserts Sir Oliver Lodge, echoing the cry of many a sinner on the brink of eternity. The only ground which the experts share, is the disregard which they pay to the only authentic record of creation, and the only reliable guide to geology, which has come down to man from the earliest times – the scriptures of truth.

It is the object of this article briefly and plainly to suggest, that the humble believer in the Word of God will find in the inspired record of that most dreadful physical catastrophe in the dark history of our globe – the universal Flood – the complete answer to all the theories of science on the antiquity of the earth, and the only reasonable explanation of the ‘Story of the Rocks.’

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“I expect to see physical development and LONG CHRONOLOGY involving repeated alternate new creations and destructions of living creatures wither also on this earth now that their ROOT (the nebular hypothesis) has at length been eradicated from the sky.”

The writer of this quotation has been dead for more than a generation, and unhappily his hope has not yet been realised. If the great geological fallacy against which for a lifetime he contended almost alone, can be effectively banished from the evangelical world, however, there will be cause for thankful praise to that great God who created all things in their time good, and very good.

It is due to Patrick M’Farlane of Comrie, Perthshire, Scotland (the writer referred to), that at this late hour his name be rescued from the obscurity into which it was interred by the indifference of an unworthy generation. Up until as late as 1871, he struck shattering and learned blows at the GREAT GEOLOGICAL HERESY of which the High Priest in those days was Hugh Miller. In the year mentioned he accumulated into one volume material which poured at white heat from his pen over many preceding years, and issued it to the public, as his last master stroke against the scientific enormity of the ‘day age’ and the ‘pre-Adamite’ theories, in a book curiously intituled, “Antidote against the unscriptural and unscientific tendency of modern geology.”

He demonstrated with an eloquence worthy of the subject, that the turmoil and confusion, the tumultuous and frightful geological derangement of the earth’s crust, with all the fossilised remains of its former natural order churned up and distributed throughout its immense and disordered stratification (which geologists seize upon as the basis for their creed of a gradual process of creation, as opposed to a summary formation of the whole pit of nothing in six days of twenty-four hours each) is accounted for with ridiculous ease by the awful catastrophe of that universal Flood, which at its full tide buried the tops of the highest mountains, rarefied the superincumbent atmosphere, realised physical and electrical energies of stupendous potency, petrifying, consuming, burying, and devastating, with inconceivable prodigality. The memory of this dreadful event endured with the descendants of righteous Noah when they overspread the silent wastes of the depopulated orb, carrying with them the records of it which still remain in the legends of Sumeria and Babylonia, the traditions of the ancient Maya, and the writings of the Chinese. One mighty overwhelming stroke hurled the primeval perfection into universal ruin. Not the spasmodic and distributed upheavals of a ‘gradually cooling planet,’ but an immense stroke of judgement for sin, threw the physical order into dislocation and ruin. Thus the divine order – the Creation, the Fall (with its concomitant, the universal depravity of mankind), and the Flood.
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Unhappy there has been a vain endeavour on the part of certain otherwise excellent evangelical leaders, to reconcile the imagined antiquity of geological phenomena with the Mosaic account of a Creation which took place well within the last 6,000 years. They have spoken of ‘the dateless past’ which they have supposed lurks in the first clause of Genesis 1:1, and have imagined that there was an order preceding our own – pre-Adamite! – which fell under the divine judgement, and that between the wreck of the past world, and the beginning of the new one (i.e., the world we now live in) there is scope for all the geological ‘ages.’

But what if there never were any geologic ages? What if there were no ‘dateless past,’ nor yet any previous divine judgement? What if the Fall and the Flood account for every phenomenon upon which they rely who believe in the dateless antiquity of the globe? Did light take a geologic age in the process of its formation, or did God merely say, Let there be light, – and there was light, and the evening and the morning were the first day?

It is further supposed that only animal life perished in the ‘primitive creation’ and that when light and dry land were ‘restored’ the seeds sprang to life again, and the earth brought forth plants and trees. Alas for the stability of that theory, Genesis 2 records that there was full grown vegetation on the THIRD DAY of Creation, before ever God sent the first shower of rain! The plants were created ‘before they were in the earth,’ and every herb of the field ‘before it grew.’ The fiction that the solar system belonged to some primordial economy at the end of which our earth was destroyed for some unknown cause, and that it existed for millions of years ere our present order was invoked, and that the sun, moon and stars were only ‘made to appear’ on the fourth day of creation, seems to be a plain departure from the simplicity of Genesis 1: 4-19. Appeals to the Hebrew Lexicon are unavailing. It is said that the verb ‘made’ in verse sixteen is not a creative word, but merely declares function. The same verb, עשה (Asah) however, is used in verses 25 and 26 for the creation of the beasts and of man, and if its use be studied in these verses and also in Genesis 2:2-3, it will be found to have the identical force and meaning of בךא (BARA = he created). In short, light, and the earth, existed before the sun. Calvin writes on this point:- “It did not happen from inconsideration or by accident that the light preceded the sun and the moon. To nothing are we more prone that to tie down the power of God to those instruments, the agency of which he employs. The Lord by the very order of Creation bears witness that he holds in his hand the light, which he is able to impart to us without the sun and the moon… It did not happen fortuitously that herbs and trees were created before the sun and moon… How few there are who ascend higher than the sun when they treat of the fecundity of the earth?... No other cause will be found (for the fruitfulness of the earth) but that the earth and all things proceeding from it yield obedience to the command of God which they always hear.”

The very order of creation is a stern rebuke to the impiety of men, who would banish God not only from the work of creation, but the equally almighty task of sustaining the whole order of nature. “Upholding all things by the word of his power.”
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In a word, as M’Farlane points out, creation involved neither a long drawn out process of ‘Physical development’ nor yet ‘long chronology.’ The figment of a series of creations successively overwhelmed in appalling destruction; of pre-Adamite worlds, supplying each heir quota of fossils as evidence of divine experimentations in ‘scientific development’ (the first cousin of evolution), and the frightful failure of each as they successively crashed into turbulent disorder and catastrophic ruin, is not only a vain and fallacious fancy, but a serious impeachment of the wisdom and perfection of the Most High.

Thus M’Farlane:- “Instead of the crude and Creator-degrading process too generally alleged to have been used, that selected by the all-perfect Creator, as might have been expected, was in all respects possible for gaining the glorious and benevolent end in view; in short that at the first PERFECT OPTIMY reigned throughout the whole stellar and mundane economy. But by the same divine communication (the scriptures), we are equally explicitly informed that this world, though at first participating in the same exquisite organisation with the rest, has since, in consequence of certain untoward circumstances fully detailed in the revelation, became the mere wreck of what she once had been. And that moreover, man, in consequence of the same untoward circumstance, has fallen from his original exalted niche in the scale of being, and become exposed to all the miseries of his now fallen home, to death itself (not in the original scheme), and worst of all to the pains of hell forever.”
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It would, methinks, be easy to prove from the very fact of the atonement – the greatest event in time or in eternity, and an event for which the whole creation has its being – that not only is our present economy the only natural order which has ever been, but that our planet IS THE ONLY INHABITED SPOT IN THE UNIVERSE. It was on this small and supposedly insignificant planet that it has pleased God to locate the greatest event in the whole of his infinite plan. The sub and the stars were clearly (from Genesis 1) created for the service of the earth, and of those who dwell thereon, and in this appears the greater folly of the heathen, who worship the host of heaven, when that very host only exists to serve, and not to rule them.
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But we shall let M’Farlane speak for himself. He writes thus in criticism of the doctrine of an imperfect creation, developing by slow graduations from chaos to cosmos:- “The Bible teaches us that all derangements in nature, both moral and physical, both on and in the earth, nay, even in the case of the fallen angels, were occasioned by sin. How directly in the face of this truthful doctrine are modern geological tenets, which would have us believe that the physical derangements of the world we are in were in existence long before this their cause entered into the world – nay, that these derangements were in the course of gradually improving nature. How apt are such dogmas to lead the mind into the false but analogous conclusion, that moral disorder may be of the same kind!”

With fine satire he thus disposes if Hugh Miller:- “Geologic destructions we admit he can produce in sufficient plenty, but not a single instance of ‘geological creation’ either in this or in any other of the orbs of our system, saving always and excepting those planetary orbs alluded to as containing the only known manufactories of the kind, namely, the heads of modern geologists!” Their heads were in the clouds!

The immensity of the Flood, as described by M’Farlane, should satisfy every reasonable inquirer as to the capacity of that awesome event to account for the state of the earth’s geological structure as observed today. He judges from the expression ‘the windows of heaven were opened’ that ‘foreign water’ in vast quantity was poured by God upon the earth, and, answering the sceptics who would inquire where such supplies were procured, adds, “Bearing constantly in mind the Being who avowedly brought this judgement on the earth, and his relation to that earth and all on it, we consider such objections of no more weight than the following illustration: The proprietor of an extensive estate picked up an apple that he found lying in the mud under one of the trees of his orchid, and flinging it into a basin of water, there thoroughly washed it. We refuse to believe this story till it is explained how this gentleman contrived to provide the necessary quantity of water, and how he managed to overcome the ‘vis inertiae’ of the apple and the gravitation of the earth, by raising the fruit out of the mud, into the basin. Reader, your smile should not be confined to our scepticism.”

Bearing specially in mind the bulk and the depth of the dislocation of our strata, he embarks upon this description of the Flood itself:- “A single robust navvy will, with a good shovel and plenty of materials, rear a cone of sand in one minute that a colony of ants would require months, if not years to raise. The depth (of the derangement of the earth’s crust) claimed (by geologists), at most a few miles, is but a mere superficial film compared with what we, while maintaining that the whole is the result of one dreadful cataclysm, are ready to yield to geology. What bulky, what deep results might not be expected from a catastrophe that we assuredly know consisted of foreign water, conjoined with home supplies, being poured over the devoted orb till its highest peak was buried fifteen cubits below the surface of the shoreless ocean; while simultaneously from below, central fires belching up their own peculiar flood of molten lava through the awfully yawning rents in the submerged and shaking planet? Who would set narrow limits to the consequences of a catastrophe which must have occasionally acted with tumultuous and irresistible force, and which must have extended simultaneously upwards, several miles all over the globe, and to its very centre downwards – in depth 4,000 miles, and laterally, many millions of miles. To such a cataclysm, all muddy with the wreck of a submerged world, the plastering hurriedly up, or laying calmly down of a few miles of thick stratification, commingled as we now find it to be with plutonic intrusions and the carcasses of its organised victims all round the earth – to such an agent we say, the effecting of such results would be, so to speak, mere pastime.”

The interesting question is raised as to whether the moon may not have suffered simultaneously in the same convulsions which shook us, her primacy. Her enormous extinct volcanoes may have evacuated her internal fires at the same time as her atmosphere and seas disappeared. “Why were those volcanoes in action?” asks Brewster. M’Farlane is not sure, but adds, “Of this we are certain, as assured that the cannons before the Sebastopol were not the instruments employed in constructing its now shattered fortifications, that such agencies were never used for the purpose indicated by Brewster. They were well fitted to demolish, but totally incapable of constructing a world.”
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In that dreadful year, without parallel in this dark world’s history, when the waters of the Flood destroyed the old world, and drowned and effaced its iniquity in awful judgement, the strata and the fossilised remains from which science so-called contrives its boastful theories of ‘vast and unsummed antiquity,’ were laid where now they are to be observed. It was ever the plan of the Prince of Darkness to banish from the minds of men the memory of a past judgement and the apprehension of a coming one. Hence the ‘scientific’ inference from a supposed dateless past, that the end of all things will be equally remote. Alas, just so surely as the world that then was, being overflowed with water perished, so surely the earth and the heavens which are now, are reserved unto fire against the day of judgement and perdition of ungodly men. The Lord is not slack as some men count slackness. The judge is at the gate. They who are wise will flee to the only shelter of the Cross for refuge, lest that day overtake them as a thief.

2005-07-05T18:35:00.000+01:00

Moses or Christ?

Paul's Reply To Dispensational Error

By Charles D. Alexander

He who would understand the prophets had better begin with Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, where he will find that the Church is one in the Old Testament and New, and the New Testament Church is the fulfillment of all prophecy, the very last phase of God's redemptive work on earth.
He will discover in Galatians who the true Israel is, to whom the promises are made and that there is no other Israel, and no further fulfillment of prophecy.
The problem of the Galatian believers was the conspiracy to impose upon them Jewish interpretations of prophecy, and to claim over them a Jewish priority or privilege. Paul repulses this conspiracy with unparalleled severity.
On this question it was "Paul contra mundum" (Paul against the world) as later it was to be, on another vital question, "Athanasius contra mundum." Even Peter came under his lash- "I withstood him to the face because he was to be blamed" (Gal. 2:1 1). Great men were temporarily swept away by the Jewish pretensions to perpetual privilege and priority-- "Even Bamabas was carried away with their dissimulation" (Gal. 2:13).
Here Paul placed his foot, the last man on earth to stand between Judaistic heresy and the safety of the church: "To whom we gave place by subjection, no, not for an hour, that the truth of the gospel might continue with you" (Gal. 2:5).
In our day the same Jewish heresies have well-nigh crushed the theology of the evangelical churches and destroyed effective preaching of the Word. The error has taken different forms in our time, but springs from the same Judaistic root whose fundamental ground is that Jewish privilege and priority are perpetual and that the New Testament Church at best is only a makeshift arrangement of providence to tide over the time until the resources of a baffled and well-nigh impotent Godhead are assembled in sufficient force to compel at last a Jewish solution of the problem of redemption.
A glance at any average missionary magazine dedicated to Jewish evangelisation will clearly show this. Sayings of present Jewish leaders are eagerly quoted in justification of 2,000 years of Jewish unbelief, as showing that the Jewish expectation of a Messianic kingdom on earth, with restoration of temple, sacrifices, and priesthood, is a true interpretation of prophecy, whereas it was because John the Baptist and Christ did not proclaim such a kingdom of earthly and visible Jewish glory and privilege that the one was betrayed to Herod and the other was crucified by Pilate.
Let the martyrdom of John and the crucifixion of the Saviour stand for ever as the final answer to that interpretation of prophecy which displaces the church, relegates the gospel, and establishes for "Israel after the flesh" an earthly empire and a national economy falsely regarded as "the kingdom of Heaven."
The fact that some (but by no means all) earlier Reformed theologians and expositors have given some countenance to the error is neither here nor there; for to a man, they all lived before that final dispensational arrangement of prophecy which has turned error into a heresy.
With happy lack of consistency, the earlier theologians held their post-millennial teachings alongside a truly spiritual interpretation of prophecy, not perceiving that the two were mutually exclusive. Their hearers at least got the benefit of both worlds even though one had to be proved false by the other.
Today, we are not permitted that luxury. The theory has become sinister and subversive through its elaboration into a succession of "ages" to which belong certain well-defined segments of Holy Scripture, all combining to exclude "the church" from all but a fragment of the Divine Word. The Jewish theory predominates. A variety of second comings and last judgments has been invented. The abolition of the gospel has been proclaimed with great enthusiasm for it is fundamental to pre-millennialism that another gospel known as "the gospel of the kingdom" will take the place of the gospel of grace when "the church" is safety removed out of the way.
Paul has a word for those who proclaim "another gospel," or who even proclaim there will ever be another-"Let him be accursed ... though he be an angel from Heaven" (Gal. 1:8).

Another Gospel

This perversion of Holy Scripture, now so destructively rife, is significantly at the root of all the modem "cults" which have sprung out of evangelicalism in the last 15O years, all proclaiming "another gospel" which is invariably a thinly concealed doctrine of "works" presented in more orthodox circles under the well-sounding title"Gospel of the Kingdom."
This title occurs very blessedly v in the New Testament, of course, but nowhere is it separable from the gospel "kingdom" which is neither here nor there, neither in Jerusalem, nor Samaria, nor Rome, but is "within you" (Luke 17:20-21). The "Gospel of the Kingdom" as described by our pre-millennialist is suspiciously like that which the sect known as "Jehovah's Witnesses" proclaims.
The inconsistency of former (but otherwise sound) theologians who pursued the millennialist fantasy is testified by our dispensationalists today who indignantly strike from the chapter headings of the Authorized Version of the Bible any reference to "the church" found in those headings throughout the Old Testament prophets.
We are on common ground therefore in acknowledging that the millennialism of the older theologians was inconsistent with modem dispensationalism or even with more moderate post-millennialism. These men cannot be quoted as experts on prophetical interpretation, but we have every ground for asserting that if they had lived after the invention of the dispensational heresy, they would have fled in dismay from their millennial house and cried havoc!
That Mr. Spurgeon did not appear to perceive this, can only be attributed to the fact that he lived too near the onset of the new error and was too engrossed (rightly so.) with the challenge of the new Bible criticism, to perceive the other "downgrade" which after his death became a landslide, and in two generations overwhelmed the evangelical testimony and destroyed theology and divinity, leaving evangelicalism powerless and without nerve or sinew to meet the challenge of world-wide atheism and Satanic unloosing.
We have begun by stating that the key to prophetic understanding of the Old Testament promises lies in the epistle to the Galatians, an epistle specially written to defend the church against all judaising errors and interpretations.
The Galatian church was the Most Gentile of all the churches of the New Testament, as the name suggests. The inhabitants of that province in Asia Minor were a segment of the great Gaelic-Gautic-Celtic race from which the English-speaking peoples take most of their blood. It is sad to see that the Judaic-dispensational heresy has found only too congenial ground in this race, as it did in their Asiatic brethren in the days of Paul the apostle. It seems that our race is peculiarly prone to Casting away its great privileges and placing its mind in pawn to Judaistic doctrines. "O foolish Galatians! Who hath bewitched you" (Gal. 3:1).
In Paul's day men came from Judea to Galatia teaching that God had set aside neither the Jewish nation nor Jewish privilege, and unless the Gentiles became as Jews they could not be saved. They even insisted that Gentiles become circumcised as Jews. Against this Paul thundered,"I testify again to every man that is circumcised that he is a debtor to do the whole law, Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace" (Gal. 5:3-4).
It is useless for our friends to tell us that this is not their error, for their interpretations require that in their so-called millennial age Gentiles must be circumcised according to the laws of Ezekiel's "temple." Hence our Savior Christ, supposedly reigning in person in Jerusalem, must preside over the subversion of His own gospel, the undoing of His work of redemption on the Cross and the dismantling of that kingdom of grace and truth which was the sole purpose of His coming into the world. In other words, the "Second Coming" according to the dispensational scheme will undo the whole purpose of the First Coming, and the Law will supplant the gospel.
Those who reject the true spiritual interpretation of Ezekiel 44:6-9 must teach that "the stranger" (that is, the Gentile) is to be excluded from God's sanctuary unless he is circumcised. This passage occurs in that portion of Ezekiel in which the New Testament temple is described but which our friends take to mean an actual temple restoration in Jerusalem during the so-called millennial reign of Christ on earth. As they insist that Ezekiel's temple is to be literally constructed they cannot escape the conclusion that circumcision is to be reestablished in their millennium, on a far more extensive scale than ever before; Gentiles must be circumcised as well as Jews if they are to have access to divine worship.
And who is now the heretic~we who plead for a spiritual and gospel interpretation of prophecy, or our friends who reestablish circumcision, the temple, the sacrifice, the Levitical priesthood, and abolish the church and the gospel, and put Moses in the place of Christ'? When we say that the epistle to the Galatians was written to destroy this Judiastic error, we do not overstate the truth, as we shall now attempt to prove.
The third and fourth chapters of Galatians are crucial to the interpretation of prophecy. Three things are shown therein: (1) The Church is one continuing body in the Old Testament and the New Testament. (2) The New Testament Church is the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy concerning Israel (3) Therefore, prophecy concerning the promised kingdom is to be understood in spiritual, not in natural terms .
In the first chapter of Galatians, Paul proves his competence to speak with authority showing that the gospel which he preached and from which the Galatians were in danger of being subverted, was received by him as a direct and specific revelation from God, by- passing all human means, so that his apostleship was not derived from the Jerusalem apostolate with which he had only the flimsiest contact. It was three years after his conversion before he visited Jerusalem, and even then he lived with Peter for only fifteen days, seeing no other apostle save James (the relative of the Lord). His apostleship came direct from Heaven and his knowledge of the gospel from the same exalted source.
He was the man who (whether in spirit or body, he could not say) had been caught up to Heaven and in a personal interview with the glorified Redeemer received that inner knowledge of the divine wisdom in the plan of redemption that exceeded what he was permitted to teach or write (2 Cor.12).
In chap. 2 he records his visit to the great council of the church at Jerusalem called to deal with the Judaistic dispute-a dispute satisfactorily settled in favor of Gentile liberty under the gospel: a liberty unhindered by those Jewish observances which continued amongst the early Jewish believers during the appointed 40 years of Jewish probation terminating with the abolition of the temple, the Mosaic code, the priesthood, sacrifices and the synagogue connection in the Roman war of A. D. 70. In this account of the evangelical council at Jerusalem under the superintendence of the apostle James (Acts 15), the position of the church in relation to the Mosaic Law is clinched by an appeal to the verdict of the prophets themselves. Amos is being quoted as representative of all the, prophets (note the use of the plural)-Acts 15:15. That Quotation governs the right use of all prophecies related thereto, in reference to thee kingdom which Christ came to establish at His first coming, and shows that the kingdom is spiritual and not Jewish, of Heaven and not of earth, and that the rebuilding of David's house has been fulfilled in the perpetual reign of Christ, beginning with the resurrection and the ascension into Heaven.
Though Paul does not recapitulate the history of this great council, he records this result affecting the Gentiles. It was established that Gentile salvation outside the law and outside the Jewish camp was valid, scriptural and eternally binding, though (as Paul declares to his Galatian friends) it would not have mattered to him if the council had gone against him~."God accepteth no man's person" (Gal. 2:6).
Later on Peter came to Antioch and because of fear of the opinion of judaising emissaries from James at Jerusalem, compromised with the synagogue faction and separated himself from the Gentiles. Poor Peter! The same Peter who denied his Lord still denies him despite the artificial theories of conference men who declare that Peter was a different man after Pentecost than he was before.
What grandeur in Paul's argument! The final answer to the judaising heresy is that the Cross of Christ has abolished the earthly and temporal Jewish economy and set up in its place an economy of the Spirit which transcends the national, the carnal and the external. "I through the law am dead to the law that I might live unto God. I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live..." (Gal. 2:19-20).

No Break Between Old Testament and New Testament

There follows the Pauline analysis of the nature and history of the true church, as contained in chapters 3 and 4, The first great conclusion Paul presents to the Galatians is that the only true children of Abraham, the heirs to the Abrahamic covenant, blessing and promise, are true believers, whether Jew or Gentile: "Know ye therefore that they which be of faith, the same are the children of Abraham" (Gal. 3:7).
There can be no appeal from this fundamental statement. In one sentence Paul destroys the entire dispensational, pre-millennial and post-millennial edifice. It is foundational to all three systems that Jewish privilege and a special Jewish future must be maintained on the basis that the Abrahamic covenant was exclusive to the natural (i.e. Jewish) seed of Abraham.
But Paul shows in these two chapters that the "seed of Abraham" is Christ, and that they who are Christ's (and no one else) are "Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise"; that this "seed" abolishes all distinction of birth or privilege, for "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for all are one in Christ Jesus" (See Gal. 3:16,2819). Moreover, the promise (of redemption in Christ took -precedence over the law by 430 years - the time lapse between Abraham and Moses. The Law itself, with its apparatus of temple, priest and sacrifice, was only added "because of transgression" to bridge the gap till Christ came~Gal. 3:17-19.
How say our literalists therefore that the temple and Levitical priesthood and sacrifice, are to be restored in the "Millennium"? If they were only established as a discipline to hold iniquity in check until gospel times, who will re-establish them save at the cost of recalling the sin and transgression which they were fitted only to restrain? And who now is the heretic?
Paul goes further and shows by the nature and history of the true church that no break has occurred between the Old Testament and New Testament Church. The Church of the New Testament is the legitimate successor of the church of the Old Testament.
Few chapters of Scripture have been so maltreated and distorted as the third chapter of Galatians. Evangelical expositors have sought to show from the word: "The Law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ," that the Holy Spirit uses the Law in evangelical conver sion to drive us through conviction of sin into the arms of Christ. Now whatever experimental truth there may be in this, it is not the subject of Paul's argument. The Galatians were never under "the schoolmaster." The "schoolmaster" is the regime of the Law over Old Testament Israel to preserve the nation in its function as the Church of God in the Old Testament till the "fullness of times" when Christ came at His first advent~"Before faith came we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed" (v.23).
This can only mean that the church was under legal restraints and administration till the time of gospel faith, that is, till the time when the fulfillment of the promise in Christ should release the people of God from all earthly and legal restraints and set them free without priest, sacrifice, temple, washings, outward observances or any such "rudiments of the world," to serve God in the spirit.
Christ said to the woman of Samaria: "Neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, shall men worship the Father, but the hour is coming and now is when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth..." (John 4:21-24). In these words Christ abolishes temple, priesthood, sacrifice, circumcision and the entire apparatus of the Mosaic Covenant. Though for another 40 years of probation these "rudiments" were permitted to continue (though without legal enforcement) among pious Jews still attached to the nation and the synagogue, the judgment of the Roman war brought all to an end.
Among Gentile believers no such regulations and requirements were to be tolerated. The attempt to impose them was subversive to the gospel itself~the belief so current now among sincere Christians that the "rudiments" of the Mosaic code will actually, after 2,000 years, be reimposed not only on the Jew but on the Gentile also, is a heresy which baffles credence.
The thunders of the Galatian epistle notwithstanding, this subversive doctrine has obtained a stranglehold on theological thought and under the form of "dispensationalism" has vindicated 2,000 years of Jewish unbelief. It must be repelled and repudiated with the utmost vigor if preaching and exposition of the Word of God is to be restored to the church, and in this exercise the Epistle to the Galatians is crucial.

The Church "Comes of Age"

"But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a "schoolmaster" (v.25). The "coming" of faith in the apostle's argument denotes the passage of the church from the Mosaic to the New Testament economy. It is not an individual experience of the sinner coming to the Savior, but a moment in history when the regime of law gave way to the regime of faith, and the "schoolmaster" (the apparatus of the law summarized under the term "circumcision") handed over his office to Christ, and the church passed from its minority" to its "majority."
The conclusion of this chapter (vv. 26-29) is the charter of the New Testament Church and the ground of her invincible claim to be the lawful successor of Abraham, the true Israel, the true circumcision (not in the flesh but in the spirit), the inheritor of the promises and privileges and hope of Old Testament Israel. Hence-"If ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise" (v.29). This glorious sentence winds up the Old Covenant, abolishes the law, the temple, and circumcision, terminates the mission of the Jewish nation, ends their exclusive rights and privileges, and provides the key to the understanding of the Law, the Writings, and the Prophets of the Old Testament.
This one sentence is the death-knell of that dispensational heresy which has filled the Church with the rubbish of a dismantled legalism and aims to reimpose in an age yet to come all those temporalities and restrictions which Christ died once and for all to abolish. The subtle doctrine that the gospel of Christ's free grace is going to give away to an imagined millennium of reimposed Jewish privileges, is reinforced by the teaching that there will be in that "golden age" another "gospel" preached, the so-called "gospel of the kingdom" which, whatever way we look at it, becomes a gospel of works and not of grace.
We beg our readers to consider that every false cult or sect which has sprung from the evangelical body in the last century and a half, is dispensational in nature and carries to its logical conclusion this Jewish and rabbinical principle of a gospel of works. It is proclaimed by the "Jehovah's Witnesses" in their significantly named "Kingdom Halls," by Christadelphians and Adventists, and by the newly developed cult launched by Mr. Herbert Armstrong, a financial wizard who claims to be the only man or organization on earth to be proclaiming the truth, and therefore entitled to all the legalistic "tithes" of the Lord's people. Aptly he has been called, "Mr. Ten Percent."
These outrageous impositions are evangelical in their origin and are only variations of that dispensationalism which began in the early 19th century, became standardized by Dr. C. I. Scofield in his "reference Bible" and has ever since dominated the evangelical scene.
We cannot proclaim too strongly the dangers of this subtle and incredible movement which now shackles the evangelical mind and destroys all true Bible exposition. It is one of the principal tasks of the movement in our day towards sound Biblical and "Reformed" exposition, to destroy this error. In that task one principal weapon must be the epistle to the Galatians.

The Final Form of Israel

If we can demonstrate and prove that the Galatian epistle establishes beyond all cavil that the Church is one, a unity, in Old Testament and New Testament, and that therefore the New Testament Church is the final form of "Israel," the inheritor of all the promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the fulfillment of the prophecies of the kingdom which Messiah came to establish, and did in fact establish-our task will have been completed and our readers must do the rest.
It is our deliberate contention that this is the very position established in the next chapter (the fourth) of our Galatian epistle, established with such force that it can only be avoided by a blindness or an ignorance culpable in its nature.
Chapter four contains Paul's final argument, proving these two things: (1) That the work of "adoption" performed in the hearts of all true believers demonstrates that they are the legitimate successors of the Israelitish church of the Old Testament. (2) He reinforces this by an allegory built upon Abraham's history, showing that the natural Jew is not Israel at all but Ishmael; and that the church of Jew and Gentile believers is the true and only and exclusive Israel of God.
This being so, the promises to Israel in the Old Testament prophecies are to be spiritually understood even when they speak apparently of literal and material restoration of "Israel and Judah. This is the key the only key, to prophetical interpretation. We proceed therefore: Gal. 4:l~"Now I say that the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant though he be lord of all."
Paul is saying that in Old Testament times the true church, the true people of God, were in a state of minority. Not having "come of age," they were treated as a child in a rich man's household, the heir to all the father's estates and privileges, but not yet at that age when that inheritance could properly be bestowed. Therefore, the child-heir finds himself fenced about with restrictions and officers who regulate his life so that he has no liberty to enjoy his privileges but must await "the time appointed of the Father." This is expressed by Paul in the words, "But is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father" (Gal. 4:2).
The tutors and governors of the church in the Old Testament were the regulations of the Mosaic code. Paul deliberately transfers the figure of the child-heir to the church in her Old Testament minority in the words- "Even so we, when we were children, were in bond age under the elements [margin - rudiments] of the world" (Gal. 4:3). The childhood of the church was in Israelitish form under the Old Testament. The "bondage" was the subjection of the people of God to those earthly "rudiments" of visible temple, sacrifices, circumcision, and all other legal observances "in the flesh" which constituted the preparatory condition of the people of God before the coming of Christ.
Of that glorious event when the church obtained her release and passed from under the law to the full liberty of gospel faith, Paul now speaks- "But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons" (Gal. 4:4-5).
"The fullness of the time" means the times of prophetical fulfillment of all the purposes and promises of God in redemption. That Paul should call the gospel times "the fullness of the time" means that the gospel age is the age of fulfillment of all things which God spake by His holy prophets since the world began-Luke 1:70.
These are "the last days" described by Paul in Hebrews 1:2, "the end of the world" (Heb. 9:26), "the last time" (1 John 2:18). If these are the last days and the last time, and the end of the world, how say the dispensationalists that there is a "time" after "the last time," another kingdom to come after the "kingdom of God" has run its course, another age after the gospel age? We await with confidence their reply.
In this "fullness of time" God's Son was sent forth, born of the virgin, born under the law, that as One obliged by His true humanity and the time at which He appeared, to keep the whole law, did so in the perfection of His mediatorial office, redeeming "those who were under the law" that they with us Gentiles might receive together that "adoption of sons" which sets us beyond the servitude of the law and introduces us to the full inheritance of the sons of God. "And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts crying Abba, Father" (v.6).
This is the difference between the experience of the people of God in the Old Testament and those in the New Testament. The difference is not one of the quality of salvation or the nature of faith, but in the status and privilege enjoyed. Living after the sacrifice of Christ which procured the full restoration of the soul to direct communion with God, the believer now receives the full witness of sonship and is released from the service of outward forms and ceremonies.

Sarah And Hagar

After remonstrating with the Galatians for yielding so easily to the subversions of Judaistic teachers, Paul resumes his argument in the famous allegory of Sarah and Hagar. This occupies verse 21-31 of our chapter and is the final word to end all argument of prophetical interpretation.
Abraham had two sons-Ishmael and Isaac. The former, who was the son of the bondwoman, Hagar the Egyptian, was rejected by God as not being the true heir. The other, Isaac, was the son of Sarah the true wife, and this was the true seed through whom the promise of God would come. Then, in the apostle's argument, comes the most startling reversal in the entire history of prophecy. Hagar, the Egyptian bondmaid, is identified with Jerusalem and Jewry. Sarah is identified with the true Church~"the heavenly Jerusalem."
The allegory thus declares that earthly Israel (the twelve tribes) is to be regarded as Ishmael because they are in bondage to the law and not free. The true Church of Gentile and Jew (in which all distinctions of race, degree and privilege are abolished~this is the true Israel to whom the promises made to Abraham apply.
Hagar and Ishmael stand for Jerusalem "which now is" (that is, the earthly Jerusalem standing with temple and sacrifice at the time of Paul's writing). Sarah and Isaac stand for the true gospel church, the "Jerusalem which is from above." The covenant made with Abraham is the promise of the gospel, and from that promise every Jew alive or who ever will be alive, is excluded except insofar as he comes by the same road of repentance, faith and regeneration which the Gentile believer treads.
Paul reinforces his allegory with a quotation from Isaiah 54:1 "Rejoice thou barren [Sarah] that barest not; break forth and cry thou that travailest not: for the desolate [the New Covenant] hath many more children than she that hath an husband [the Old Covenant]." The abolition of the Old Covenant means the abolition of Israel (Jewry) from all her privileges, and the emergence of the New Testament Church is the rise of the new "Israel of God," Jew and Gentile, with all distinctions obliterated, to whom alone the Abrahamic promises belong.
This is tersely and categorically expressed by the apostle in the words, "Now we, brethren [i.e., the church of the N. T.] as Isaac was, are the children of promise." Paul touches in v.29 upon the persecuting envy of the Jews against the church to whom their privileges have passed, and likens it to the hatred of Ishmael against Isaac and concludes his argument by quoting against the Jew the very words originally spoken against Hagar and her son Ishmael~"Nevertheless what saith the Scripture? Cast out the bondwoman with her son [i.e., the Old Covenant and the earthly Israel]: for the son of the bondwoman [Israel] shall not be heir with the children of the free woman [that is, the N. T. Church]" (v.30).
The dreadful judgment of these words is unmistakable: Israel is cast off and cast off forever as a nation. Paul gives no hint of any "restoration" though here would be the place to state it, if restoration there is to be. Jewish privilege is ended for all time. The covenant has passed to the New Testament Church in which Israel has no part except as individual believers.
This "casting off' is not anywhere modified by Paul. We have elsewhere shown that in Rom. 11 Paul is speaking of individual Jews and not the nation, when he writes, "If the casting away of them be the riches of the Gentiles, what shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead?"
His last word to the Galatians is, "So then brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free" (Gal. 4:3 1 ). This he writes to the most Gentile of all the churches, showing that to the Gentile church has passed the covenant, the glory, the birthright, the privilege and the redemption hope.
The consequences are most far-reaching. They extend to every prophecy of the Old Testament in which the New Covenant is foretold, even though the words of the prophets are addressed to "Israel and Judah." That "Israel and Judah" is the New Testament Church, and though the prophecies are couched in terms of the land of Israel and employ topographical and geographical details drawn from the earthly territory of the twelve tribes, these are "figures of the true" just as temple, sacrifice and priesthood, passover and feasts were "figures of the true," designed to portray gospel truths to those whose ears are open to hear. It is greatly to be feared that to very few of our prophetical teachers today those words could be addressed: "Blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear" (Matt. 13:16).
It might well be asked of our dispensational friends today-What was it that the Lord hid from the wise and prudent Jews of His day and revealed only to "babes" (Matt. 11:25)? If it were "the things" pertaining to His kingdom which He had come to establish on the ruins of Satan's empire of sin and death, then the "kingdom" which he "offered" to the Jews was entirely spiritual and not natural, and this is the reason why it was concealed from all except those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
The reason why the Jews rejected Christ is the same as that for which they still reject Him today-namely, because they expected an earthly kingdom, and Christ did not bring them this. The prevailing prophetical theories, however, insist that Christ did in fact "offer" this kingdom to the Jews and because they rejected the offer, the gospel was brought in as an afterthought or a substitute. What the dispensational theory is saying is that Christ offered to the Jews the very kingdom which they expected, but they rejected Him and it! At the last, says this extraordinary theory, Christ will relent and will in fact give the Jews the very kingdom which they crucified Him for not establishing at His first coming. The dispensational theory therefore vindicates the Jew for 2,000 years of unbelief and at the same time contradicts itself by alleging that the kingdom which the Jews rejected was the very kingdom which they crucified Him for not offering but which will be gratuitously conferred upon them in the near future as the fulfillment of what God promised to Abraham.
If our friends cannot see the hopeless dilemma in which their theory involves them, we can only marvel at the success of that error of dispensationalism by which evil powers have succeeded in well nigh destroying scriptural exposition and understanding.
The truth is that there is not a breath of suggestion that Christ ever offered" to the Jews any other "kingdom" but the gospel: that this was in fact the kingdom which John the Baptist came to present under the keyword "repent," which Christ Himself presented with the same keyword "repent," that the Sermon on the Mount with which He formally introduced His mission was in fact an exposition of the text- "Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand." In that great sermon Christ promised or offered nothing to anyone except "the poor in spirit," the "mourner for sin," the "meek," the "brokenhearted," and those who "hungered and thirsted" for true righteousness.
Dispensationalism, faced with the embarrassment that these dispositions of soul are noticeably absent in the Jewish occupation of Palestine today, had to descend to the device that the Jew must go back to Palestine in unbelief though this was the very reason for which the Jew was cast out of Palestine. The theory teaches that the Second Coming of Christ will convert the Jews "in a day" despite the fact that they do not need to be converted to the conceptions of an earthly kingdom of Christ, seeing they crucified the Savior for not setting up this very thing.
The dispensational theory today is jubilantly hailing the prospect of an early fulfillment of Jewish expectation of an earthly kingdom of Messiah. The theorists exceed the rabbis in this enthusiasm, though it is from rabbinical sources that their theory has been contrived. They actually tell the Jews that their present occupation of Palestine, in a state of bitter hostility to Christ and the Christian gospel, is the fulfillment of prophecy and that their ungodly zeal against Christ and truth will be rewarded shortly by God with an instant faith and that this extraordinary act of God will be a fulfilling of the promises made to Abraham.
But Paul in Galatians has already told us who Abraham's seed are, to whom these promises are made, and he mentions not a word about restoration to Palestine, but builds it all on the nature of the Church. He maintains, as we have shown, that the Church is the lawful continuation of Old Testament Israel and the inheritor of the Abrahamic covenant and promises.
We ask our dispensational friends to consider what their position will be if the present Jewish occupation ends in disaster. While they are forming their reply, we would point out to readers that so far from converting Israel and establishing them in the land, the second coming of Christ will overtake them (and all the world) "as a thief in the night," in the which the heavens will pass away with a great noise and the elements melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up (2 Peter 3: 1 0).
Peter knows of no other "second coming" save that which abolishes the heavens and the earth in one stupendous conflagration. Where then is the earthly kingdom which Christ is to bring to the Jew, and where is the "kingdom" of the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Christadelphians, the Adventists and the Armstrongites? We fear for the company which our dispensationalists keep and earnestly entreat them to consider Paul's interpretation of who Israel is, what are "the two covenants" and what is the nature of "the promise" made to Abraham?
Our last word is that of Paul, significantly found in the conclusion of that epistle specifically written to deliver the Church from Jewish error and Jewish pride:
"God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creature. And as many as walk according to this rule, peace be on them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God." (Gal. 6:14-16).