We now approach—God grant that it may be with unshod feet—the holy ground of what in Holy Writ is called “the house of the living God,” I mean the church which is the body of Christ, His Son. The principalities of heaven study the manifold wisdom of God, made known by it. They may desire to look into those things that concern the gospel of our salvation, which had been a mystery to God's holy prophets of old, even whilst testifying of it. But when the time had come for the revelation of that mystery, “which from the beginning of the world had been hid in God” from angels and prophets alike, and the Holy Ghost had been sent down from glory to preach the first gospel of salvation through Jesus, and to unite its first-fruits, even those three thousand saved and baptized precious units into one body, the body of Christ, then it was that a more marvelous building than Solomon's temple arose before the wondering eyes of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. The Stone, which their builders had rejected, was to be the foundation stone of that building, laid by the divine Master-Builder sent down from heaven.
But where God is at work, the enemy is not idle. What God has made for blessing, Satan, the adversary; seeks to spoil and to destroy. Such always has been and is and will be his character since his own fall until his final doom in the place prepared for him and his angels. But above all, the wiles and fury of the Serpent-Dragon have been and are directed against the divinely instituted union of God's children, and against the divinely appointed place where God was to be worshipped by His own. The instigator of the builders of Babel's tower and founder of “Babylon the great” has at all times, in his character as the “Accuser of the brethren,” sought to divide the people of God, be it the earthly or the heavenly, and to defile the place where God was to be glorified, be it the tabernacle or the temple or the church. Let it be the tabernacle in the wilderness, the temple at Jerusalem in the times of the kings, or in the days of Ezekiel and of Ezra and Nehemiah and Malachi, or in the days of the Messiah Himself, or finally in the days of the false Messiah, when that defilement will come to its climax in the setting up of “the abomination that maketh desolate” in the temple of God—it has been always the same. Satan's efforts have not been in vain, whatever the overruling grace of our faithful God may have been and is still and will be right on to the end, blessed be His Name! But nowhere have those destructive effects of his efforts in dividing, corrupting, and defiling, or in producing lukewarmness and indifference, become more sadly manifest than in that which is, so to say, the masterpiece of God's counsels, if one may speak thus about that which is all perfect in itself, and in every part.
PENTECOSTAL TIMES.
A feeling entirely peculiar in its kind comes over the Christian reader, when reading, in God's presence, that portion of Holy Writ which most inappropriately is called the “Acts of the Apostles,” but in fact is the divinely inspired record of the building of the church of God under the guidance and in the power of the Holy Ghost through the instrumentality of the apostles. It is a feeling akin to that produced in the beholder of this visible scene at the passing away of that which was noble, fair, and good. Only in the Christian this impression has not the character of a mere poetic, elegiacal, transient sentiment as in the case of a naturally tender and well-ordered mind. It is sorrow mingled with humbled and chastened joy, sorrow and shame that bows us down in the dust before God, when we reflect what has become of the “house of the living God” under the hands of man (2 Tim. 2:2020But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some to honor, and some to dishonor. (2 Timothy 2:20)). Yet the heart turns with joyful praise and confidence to God, when looking at the divine side (Matt. 16; Eph. 2:20-2220And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; 21In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: 22In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit. (Ephesians 2:20‑22)), which can be reached and defiled by our sins, or impeded in its progress, as little as the sun can be by the mists and fogs of this world.
But this feeling of calm and joyful confidence in Him Who is faithful above our unfaithfulness, does not, if genuine, weaken in us the consciousness nor restrain the confession of our own humbling share in the general ruin of the church of God, so touchingly expressed in Daniel and Nehemiah as to Israel's sins and ruin. Remembering the incomparably higher order of blessing and privileges granted to us, we have incomparably greater reason than those far more faithful and humble men of God to bow down before God in dust and ashes, “remembering from whence we have fallen,” and to say, “O Lord, to us belongeth confusion of face, because we have sinned against Thee.” But then we also like them may continue, “To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against Him". First the “because” then the “although". The latter without the former preceding would be simple antinomianism (comp. 1 John 2:11My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: (1 John 2:1)). David “encouraged himself in the Lord his God” amidst the ruins of Ziklag. But he must have been down on his face previously before the Lord his God, or he could not have “encouraged himself in the Lord his God.” For grievously as David had sinned before the battle of Gilboa (the lowest moral point in his whole course of life), yet afterward, the way he humbles himself under the chastening hand of God (comp. Psa. 32; 51) showed that he certainly was no antinomian.
And ought not the ruins of that which was once so glorious and beautiful, and an object of study for the angels—ruins of which we ourselves form a part—speak to our hearts and consciences with a louder voice than the silent ruins of Ziklag to David's? Surely, if their effect upon our souls is that which it ought to be, it will not be a kind of Laodicean boastfulness as to outward gospel success, and at the same time lukewarmness as to that sublime portion of divine truth, the zeal for which once characterized those early Christians, gathered by the Holy Ghost to the name of Him Who is the foundation, chief corner, and topmost stone, “in Whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord, in Whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God in the Spirit.” Soon the last stone will be added to this wondrous edifice, the divine side of which, whatever Satan or man may have done, can as little be impaired in the divinely perfect beauty and harmony of its structure, as it can be impeded in its “growing unto an holy temple in the Lord.” May the Lord grant us all a deeper and more real sense of our most humbling individual share in its outward ruins when reading such portions of His word as the “Acts.”
SIMILAR EFFECTS OF READING THE “ACTS” AND “EZRA.”
We read in the book of Ezra (when at the laying of the foundation of the Temple, the priests with their trumpets and the Levites with their cymbals sounded forth praises to the Lord, “and sang together by course in praising and giving thanks, because He is good and His mercy endureth forever”) that all the people shouted with a great shout, when they praised the Lord because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. But many of the priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, ancient men that had seen the first house, when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice; whilst those of the younger generation, who had not known Solomon's temple, “shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the noise of the weeping of the people: for the people shouted. with a loud shout, and the noise was heard afar off.”
Both those that wept and those that rejoiced were justified in their sentiments—those weeping, when thinking of the past, and the rejoicing ones, because they connected with the new Temple the prospect of a new and happier era for Israel. The weeping and the shouting ascended to Jehovah, perhaps equally acceptable.
A similar impression the spiritual Christian reader experiences when reading that precious portion of Holy Writ, called the “Acts of the Apostles,” Only there is this difference, that at the laying of the foundation of the. temple at Jerusalem, they that had known the magnificent temple of Solomon, on remembering the glorious past, could not refrain from weeping; whereas the rising generation at the sight of the rise of the present temple rejoiced. The effect produced in us on reading the “Acts” is the opposite. When carried back in spirit to. those happy days when the building of a more glorious temple than that of Solomon began at Jerusalem, under the direction of a wiser master-builder than Solomon—a building consisting of living stones, which not only were being built, but building up one another on their great foundation stone, and when the multitude of them that believed were one heart and one soul, as they had been baptized by the Holy Spirit into one body, the body of Christ—when carried back in spirit, I say, to those happy and wonderful Pentecostal days, the believer's heart becomes filled and warmed with the glow of a holy and divine joy.
But again, on awaking from that happy “trance,” so to speak, one finds one's self in the sorrowful reality of the present, amidst the ruins of what once was in every respect the house of the living God, and can but exclaim with the prophet when amidst the ruins of Jerusalem, “Mine eyes fail with tears...for the destruction of the daughter of my people.” Let us now enter more fully, under God's help, on the all-important subject of these meditations. We may divide it simply under the following heads;
What is the origin of the church?
What is its ground or foundation?
What is its character and position?
What is its hope and calling