IN the second chapter of the first Epistle of John we read (ver. 18), " Little children, it is the last time: and as we have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists, whereby we know that it is the last time."
Antichrist, or the antichrist, is spoken of here as being expected by those to whom John wrote as one that was to come, and as distinguishable from the many antichrists. This is to be taken notice of; so also is the fact that the mention of both the one antichrist and the many is found in an epistle which treats upon the subject of the life of God's children displayed down here, in the interval between Pentecost and their removal to the Father's house on high. He is then, I judge, a power which will rise in connection with the corruption of true worship,-the worshippers in spirit and in truth sought by the Father, rather than in connection with the kingdoms of the world and with God as the ruler over them. When the evil is come to the full, it will be the lamb-like prophet, not the beast-like king.
But again, in the fourth chapter and the third verse, we read-
" And every spirit that confesseth not [that] Jesus. Christ [is] come in [the] flesh is not of God: and this is that [spirit] of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world."
I give the verse in full as it occurs in the English authorized version; but there can be no doubt whatever that the sense is obscured, if not changed, by the introduction into it of the words [that], [is], [the]. Insert them and the meaning of the passage then is, that no false spirit can assent to the fact that Christ is come in the flesh: but demons did own to Christ that He was come in the flesh, in the days of the Lord's sojourn upon earth; and since too: see Matt. 8:2929And, behold, they cried out, saying, What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time? (Matthew 8:29); Mark 5:77And cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God, that thou torment me not. (Mark 5:7); Luke 8:2626And they arrived at the country of the Gadarenes, which is over against Galilee. (Luke 8:26); Acts 16:1717The same followed Paul and us, and cried, saying, These men are the servants of the most high God, which show unto us the way of salvation. (Acts 16:17), etc. Leave these words out and then not the fact of Jesus Christ having come in flesh is in question, but the confession of Himself, which is quite another thing. As an illustration of this, the spirit which led and guided Paul in the life and scenes which he describes in writing to the Philippians in chap. 1., was but the same spirit and mind which he says (in chap. 2.) Christ Himself had displayed. The true Christ of God and the true Spirit of God and of Christ go ton-ether. If you have and hold by faith the true Christ of God, then you have the true Spirit of God and of Christ, and your life will be accordingly. On the other hand, if you have and hold to another Christ than the true One, then you will have another spirit than the Spirit of God and of Christ, and your life will be accordingly. This is a very solemn truth, and we shall do well to take heed to it as to our own selves: as John says in this same epistle (chap. 4. 1), " Beloved, believe not every spirit, but TRY the spirits whether they are of God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
The word antichrist means "a substitute for-Christ ": but, from the very nature of the subject, a substitute for Christ must be an antagonist to Him. There is but One who is the Anointed of God. Any one who pretends to assume His place, to substitute himself for Him, is an enemy of His; and every one whom we, even unconsciously, may substitute for Him, will be found to be antagonistic to Him.
The Galatian Churches got another Christ and another spirit and another life, through judaizing, than they had had; and Paul insists upon it that the true Christ had sonship for all that believed in Him, and also the Spirit of adoption and of liberty. The Hebrews also were in danger of doing the same thing.
It will I think be found, if people will look down the line of time from the days of the true Christ and the Spirit given on the day of Pentecost, that there have been many false Christs substituted by man for the true at various times, and that another spirit than the Holy Spirit has thus been let in and the character of the individual disciple thus altogether changed, and the character of the assembly of disciples spoiled.
I am persuaded that the object before the mind and upon which we stay ourselves, the motive power connected therewith, and the character which is produced on us, either individually or in a company, are inseparable.
The true Christ in heaven, seen by faith, has the action of the Holy Ghost accompanying the faith; and free service flows from this into the individual and fellowship of life hence into the body. Another Christ than the true will not be witnessed to by the Holy Ghost, though there is a spirit who will witness to such and produce a character consistent with himself, in the individual professor and on the company. The Galatian Churches, the Hebrews, the Colossians, the Ephesians, in the respective epistles to them show it.
And do not the Papist Church, and the Greek Church, and the Protestant Churches show the same thing? In these cases there is, at least, such a MIXTURE of evil with good, of the human with the divine, that the character of the individual disciple is altogether other than what it should be; yes, and another character is set up as a standard than what Paul set up,-and the assembly is likewise all spoiled; at Rome and among Romanists, and in the various parts of the Greek Church too, it is so. The rationale of this is evident and easy to trace. Let us take a case or two.
1. A man preaches and teaches a gospel which supposes a Christ who had sin in himself, who, therefore, had to overcome sin in himself. Such an one not being holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sin himself, of course could not be the sinner's perfect substitute in bearing the wrath due to sin; could not be made sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in him. If such a gospel were mooted and were not the result of mere stupidity in man, but of the immediate work of Satan, a false spirit would accompany the preaching of it. The believer in it could not be saved by it, get rest
before God, or peace, or holiness. An assembly formed upon it would not be the letter of Christ, known and read of all; and various would be the marks and signs of an evil power present and at work. The mold of the golden coin called "a sovereign" could not form a one pound note; nor are the processes by which the two are formed the same or similar.
2. Again, a gospel which teaches a Christ born under guilt, and necessarily under guilt from his association with His people, presents that which substitutes a different Christ from Him, who, Son of God as well as Son of man, voluntarily and of His own accord, took up the guilt of His people, and undertook to take away the sin of the world. The counterfeit, here, is a reproach to the true Christ, is an antichrist. If the Holy Ghost works in holy energy in the case of testimony to the Christ of God-certainly He will not work in connection with an antichrist. is there a spirit at work? It must be from beneath. And as is the object proposed to faith, and as is the power that works with that object, so is the life of the individual that receives the testimony, and so is the company connected with it. The royal arms of one country stamped uniformly in ink, cannot be mistaken for the royal arms of another country stamped uniformly in lead. The armorial bearings, the processes of imposing them, would readily suggest two classes, and not one; and under these two classes all the respective individual specimens should be arranged.
3. The same might be said if as has often been the case in history, such a one was preached as the Christ as had but part of the character of Christ love without holiness; or love and holiness without heavenly mindedness; who had only pardon to give and not eternal life, as a present gift, leading the disciples to walk as He walked, and through the presence of the Holy Ghost dwelling in the body, setting His own people clean outside the world and in communion with the Father and the Son in heaven, waiting for the Son from heaven.
In this case, I am aware, the evil being much more one of deficiency as to formative truth than of positive antagonistic evil, the result might be more difficult to judge than in-the preceding cases which have been supposed. But God in heaven and the Spirit of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ dwelling on earth in God's people, would discern how far the results down here were in accordance with the discipleship and the assembly of God as displayed on the day of Pentecost.
The principles of truth as presented on the day of Pentecost, the power accompanying that truth, The believer in it could not be the character issuing thence in individuals and in the assembly of individuals, remain just what they were. No other Christ than He who was then preached (as having been raised from the dead and placed at God's right hand in heaven, sender down of the Holy Ghost) is the Christ of God. No other gospel is the gospel than the gospel of God's thoughts concerning Him, the Son of His love. If He is the truth, He, certainly, is not changed, and His power is not changed. Does a sinner now want less, to satisfy his soul and heart and mind, than he wanted eighteen hundred years ago? Why then is another gospel to be preached now than then? This question is a solemn one to every lover of Christ as the truth. Is He preached now in the same way in which He was preached then? I cannot say Yes. I know indeed that God's grace has brought out afresh, through one man and through another, portions of truth, the truth. Adoringly, I bless His name who has restored in measure what man had 'wholly let slip; but to say that the gospel as preached at Pentecost is preached now would be (not to recognize God's grace in spite of man's failure, but) to cover over man's wants, by naming that very grace, the re-gift of which, on God's part, was meant to awaken the sense in man of His failure and deficiency before God. I bless God that the least ray of the light of Christ is unto eternal salvation. For that light, where received, brings with it the blessing for eternity of all that God sees Christ to be or to have for His people. But if the blessing of being Christ's -for eternity is mine as much as it was Peter's or John's, why am I not to have, too, all the blessing of being Christ's in time, which they had?
This naturally brings one to the question of the difference between Pentecostal blessing and the Reformation in every Dart of it.
God's mind about His assembly is not changed. Still does it live in His counsels and mind and plan, that His assembly is to be the Bride of Christ in the glory. Alas! nor in the earlier fruits of the (so called) Reformation, viz., the national churches, nor in the after-crop, viz., the Nonconformist bodies, nor in the bastard produce from the one and the other, is that to be found which can bear the test of being tried by such questions as, Is Christ preached in the same way now as then? Is the motive power now unique as then? Is the path traced for the individual and for the company the same now as then.?
Alas! at Pentecost faith recognized that the Christ in heaven was the treasury, even He who had carried off the hearts of His people with Him. From the world they were shut out; on earth they were pilgrims and strangers. They enjoyed His and the Father's love, and awaited His return. Satan, before the Greek or the Roman Churches existed, had got men's minds out of heaven down to earth as the, seat of the mind and heart too. This could not have been had the Christ in heaven been the object of their faith, and the power of the Holy Ghost the alone power. It was the second not the first step in evil, to teach that the Church was queen of the earth and world. So Greek and so Roman Churches did teach. It was a third step for Emperors and Kings to say, and to act upon it. " The civil power is head of the Church." Nonconformity saw, everywhere I can sup- pose, that the sword of Caesar under God and the Holy Ghost under an earth-rejected heaven-honored Christ, were powers of a very different nature and could not be mixed. But in no case, so far as I know, have Nonconformists known how to " render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's." It is difficult to take forth the precious from that which is vile. But it must be done, if ever, in such a state of things as that of to-day, we are to get full blessing. I bless God -for all the good.—Wherever I can say, " That is of God," I must own it. But the pool of Bethesda with its five porches, "in which lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water, because an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water, and whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in, was made whole of whatsoever disease he had" (see John 5), blessed as it was, was in principle opposed to two other things-God's promise to Israel if obedient on the one hand, and the healing power of Christ on the other. These were the promises to obedience: " Ye shall serve the Lord your God, and he shall bless thy bread, and thy water; and I will take sickness away from the midst of thee. There shall nothing cast their young, nor be barren, in thy land; the number of thy days 1 will fulfill" (Ex. 23:25,2625And ye shall serve the Lord your God, and he shall bless thy bread, and thy water; and I will take sickness away from the midst of thee. 26There shall nothing cast their young, nor be barren, in thy land: the number of thy days I will fulfil. (Exodus 23:25‑26)); and the Lord will take away from thee all sickness, and will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which thou knowest, upon thee (Deut. 7:1515And the Lord will take away from thee all sickness, and will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which thou knowest, upon thee; but will lay them upon all them that hate thee. (Deuteronomy 7:15), comp. chap. 28.)
The virtue of the Lord, on the other hand, was that Himself was the spring and source from which, in His own divine power and grace, the stream flowed to those that had no strength in themselves whatsoever.
Bethesda stood in Providence, and had its upbraidings and its limitations, and its requirements; yet was a witness for the God of Israel. But Christ's virtue was in Himself, without upbraiding, without limitation, and presupposed no virtue in those that He blessed. Absence of all need if obedient, limited and conditional help after failure, and unlimited unconditional help- are three very different things. I own to the five porches, each one, perhaps, a differently shaped one, of the Blethesda of our day. I deny not the virtue that is there displayed, but can it satisfy a divinely taught heart? Surely no more so than that Pool of Bethesda could satisfy the cravings of the heart of Messiah when He had entered it. And He uses, remarkably enough, that incident of His healing an impotent body as the basis of His teaching in the rest of the same chapter about Himself, as the Resurrection and the Life for eternity of those that hear His word and believe on Him that sent Him (v. 24).
The first energy and blessing under the Reformation has always been of God. But what afterward? Has there been a growing up into Christ? Has there been an abiding in Him so that we may become indeed His disciples? Certainly not. I say certainly not, because the world-wide feeling of need of reformation, from the Pope of to-day down to the lowest seed of nonconformity run-wild, all proclaims the felt need of reformation. " If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me," still remains true; and where it is the vital principle of any, then there must be purpose of heart to follow Him. I do not charge Protestants with having set out with a false Christ at first, but I must charge many in this day with not going on with the true Christ; and it is not doctrinal truth, which is the only question; there is also the question, Have you the energy and purpose of life? Are you with that which God is leading on? If you are connected with an antichrist, necessarily all is over with you as to any true confession here on earth as an individual, or in the ranks of the Lord's people. But if you 'are not connected with anything doctrinally unsound, in which another spirit than Christ's is practically owned and is working, what of the aim and purpose and object of your living while down here? What as to your being in company there where the shelter and energy and guidance of God is?
I commenced with the one final antichrist and the many historic ones; I would close with an exhortation to my reader to compare the assembly of God as set up at Pentecost, and as illustrated by Paul in his letter to the Ephesians, with the gospel on which it was formed, and the Spirit who wrought with the gospel; and let him, after so doing, compare what man now boasts in as being the church with its essential principles, and with the energy which works in it. And let each man see whereabouts he himself is as to his position and walk. G.
God substituted Christ His Son, who knew no sin, in place of the sinner on the cross: man will substitute any one else in place of the true Christ, and in the end will substitute a devil-inspired antichrist in place of Him who was The Truth.