There is a fresh, reason which the apostle now puts forward for urgent and assiduous seal in every possible way, another grievous feature of the grievous times of the last days.
“For the time will be when they will not endure sound teaching; but according to their own lusts they will heap up to themselves teachers, having an itching ear; and from the truth they will turn away their ear, and will be turned aside unto fables”(ver. 3, 4).
It is not here the leaders whose fault is in the foreground, but the people. Elsewhere we see false teachers, and self-willed chiefs, misleading such as put their trust in them. Here, though the time was not yet come for so widespread evil, the Spirit of God speaks of it as imminent. For the time will be when they will not endure the sound teaching.” This is clearly descriptive of the prevalent state to overspread Christendom, not among Jews or heathens. It supposes those who were used to hear the truth. But now the truth becomes unpalatable, and “the sound teaching” of it cannot be endured: a truly frightful time for men bearing the name of the Lord. For it is evident that out of an impure heart they must call on Him. Sound teaching is ever welcome to those whose desire is to grow in grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; and this that all may issue in a life of increasing obedience and devotedness.
How deep and bold then the enmity of heart when those who have every motive to love the truth, far beyond those of old, will not endure it! “Oh, how I love Thy law! it is my meditation all the day.” “How sweet are Thy words unto my taste, yea sweeter than honey to my mouth.” “It is time for the LORD to work: they have made void Thy law. Therefore I love Thy commandments like gold, yea above fine gold. Therefore I esteem all Thy precepts concerning all things to be right: I hate every false way.” “Thy testimonies are wonderful: therefore doth my soul keep them. The opening of Thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple. I opened wide my mouth and panted, for I longed for Thy commandments.” “Thy word is very pure; therefore Thy servant loveth it. I am small and despised, yet do I not forget Thy precepts. Thy righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and Thy law is truth. Trouble and anguish have taken hold on me; yet Thy commandments are my delight. Thy testimonies are righteous forever: give me understanding, and I shall live.” These are but a few extracts from a psalm devoted as a whole to setting forth the characteristic virtues of divine revelation as possessed by the house of Israel before Christ, and therefore very short of the later and yet more profound communications since redemption, and Christ's ascension, and the personal presence of the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven, all of which incalculably blessed facts enhance what God has revealed since. Yet we can see, and especially as in a composition which by the Spirit expresses the feelings of the heart, how deeply the sound teaching of that early day was valued; as it will be as much or more when God in the latter day stirs the godly remnant to say in heart, “Blessed is He that cometh in the name of Jehovah.” The full Christian testimony comes between the advents of the Lord, and so yet more after the early days of Jewish enjoyment before the children relish the word beyond what their fathers did. In that interval comes Christianity, as well as the corruption of it in Christendom, one of the direct symptoms of which is the disgust at, and intolerance of, “the sound teaching” here announced.
But there is positive evil, as well as the dislike of what is divine. And whilst both evils have long verified the solemn warning of the apostle, it is easy to understand that the dark sketch of a time then at hand becomes more and more dismal as the Lord tarries and lawlessness acquires audacity and force. The prevalence of education in modern times leads to a great deal of reading even in the humblest class; so that the desire to hear what pleases the mind, the taste, and the natural aspirations of man, modified as all is by the governing spirit of the age, becomes even more active and pretentious. “According to their own lusts they will heap up to themselves teachers, having an itching ear.” Can there be a more graphic anticipation of what is found everywhere in our day, at least where the Bible is universally circulated? Even this is sometimes openly left out by men calling themselves Christians. But Satan can, and does, sadly neutralize it where it is nominally in use as a mere suggester of themes for the adventuresome and profane wit of man Indeed no other book is so fertile in raising and satisfying the most profound inquiries as to God and man and all things. And the intellect can readily cast aside its authority while it enters on its flight of universal discussion, as doubtful of the divine as credulous of the human. Christ, the center and expression of grace and truth; is practically lost, and the more guiltily because it is in the sphere where He once was all.
What becomes of those who, having once known, turn their back on His glory? First, as we have seen, according to their own lusts they heap up to themselves teachers, having an itching ear. The full revelation of God, though no longer held in faith, leaves a craving to bear something new; and for this end heaps of teachers are resorted to in profound unbelief of the word of God, and the power of the Spirit to guide into all the truth. The efficacy of neither can be enjoyed, where redemption does not purge the conscience, and where Christ Himself is not the object and rest of the heart. God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap; because he that soweth unto his own flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth unto the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life eternal. If openly unrighteous man give himself up to pleasure, religiously unrighteous man occupies himself zealously with teachers, both in default of having Christ. In Him alone can God or man find life, objects, and satisfaction; in Him faith finds all fully. Without this all is a waste for one's own lusts to heap up what can never satisfy; and the less if there be departure in heart from Him known ever so slightly: an itching ear can aggravate but never remedy.
“Heaping up teachers” is but the excessive carrying out of an evil principle which prevails in evangelicals of all sorts, established as well as dissenting. It passes as a maxim among them that one is as free to choose one's teacher, or minister, as one's doctor, lawyer, or any other professional help; and this, on the ground that they are paid for their services. No wonder that superstition revolted from ideas so gross in spiritual things and clothed ministry with mystic rites in order to elevate it above matters of every-day life, and retain it within a strictly clerical enclosure; as others fell back on patronage to redeem it from the vulgar and keep it as much as possible within more refined hands directly or indirectly.
But scripture rises far above these earthly and contending schemes of men, and shows us that Christ is the source of ministry, not merely at the starting-point, when He chose the twelve and the seventy, sending them forth on their respective missions, but as the risen, glorified, and ever living Head, Who gave some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, for the perfecting of the saints, unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of the body of Christ.
It is in vain to argue that this mode of working could only be when He was here upon earth. The remarkable fact is, that the grand revelation just referred to in Eph. 4 ignores all action of this kind on the earth, and speaks only of ministerial gifts conferred on the church by our Lord, since He ascended up on high. Now this is to set them on a ground which cannot change till our Lord comes again. Till then He never ceases to be the unfailing spring of supply; and, as if to make this certain and clear even to reluctant ears, it is added, “till we all attain unto the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,” &c. Scripture allows of no other source, and assures of this one for every need of saints now on earth. But we must always bear in mind, what the same Epistle distinguishes, that the apostles and prophets constitute the foundation on which we are built; the evangelists, pastors, and teachers, are those gifts which carry on the work. As this is the unforced and unequivocal intimation of God's word, faith reckons on Christ's faithfulness to the wants of souls and love to the church which is His body.
Hence there is no room for men's own lasts in choosing, any more than in rejecting, those whom Christ has given to do ministerial work. The gift is proved by the energy of the Spirit in effecting what it is given for: the evangelist by winning the unconverted to God; the pastor and teacher (not always, though often, united) by leading on and instructing the saints. It is on the same principle as a believer is recognized by his good confession of Christ, not in word only, but in deed and truth. Neither crown nor congregation, neither bishop nor patron, have anything to do with the choice. All such human gifts or calls are wholly irregular, not unscriptural only, but anti-scriptural, whatever pleas good men may have set up for each of them. Those whom Christ gives for spiritual service the Christian is bound to own, as he has to beware of all whom Christ did not so give. The sheep know His voice in His servants; and they know not the voice of strangers. Assuredly the sheep may err in this case or in that; for they are in no sense infallible, and they have to act responsibly by grace. But the Lord's eye is on all, and He honors His own word, as He loves His own sheep. The sad and shameful fact is that for centuries they have let slip looking to Him in this matter, and have accepted one or other of those human ways which ignore His giving the needed supply spiritually. And as some have sinned by the unwarrantable system of one man concentrating all gifts in his person or authority, so others by heaping up to themselves teachers after their own lusts.
The only remedy is looking in faith to Him, and to the word of His grace, which furnishes the true key to the facts, that the gifts still abide, rarely indeed concentrated, as the rule distributed in no small variety and measure of spiritual power. In the present state of God's church they are, like the saints, painfully scattered as well as shrouded and hindered. But no change of circumstances alters the vital constitution of the church, any more than the principle of those members of it, so important for its extension and well-being, the gifts before us. What the faithful ought to do is to judge themselves by God's word; how far they have departed, and in order to submit themselves to His will, knowing that he who does it abides forever. None but Christ's gifts have His title and competency in the Spirit; and no saint can justify himself in refusing such or in accepting other men whom He has not so given; for either way is to deny His rights and to prefer man's will against Him. But heaping up to themselves teachers (and is it conceivable that these could be His gifts consenting to His dishonor?) is fielding to men's own lusts, the excess of self-will in despite of Christ.
But there is more still. “And from the truth they will turn away their ear, and will be turned aside unto fables.” Here is the fatal result. Who can measure the dishonor thus done to God and His word? who tell the loss to their own souls, not only by their alienation from the truth, but by their actual appetite for imaginative falsehood? So Satan would have it, who likes no one thing so much as a direct affront put on Christ, which all this implies. Thereby evil ensues in every way. The conscience is no longer governed by the sense of God's presence. Grace is unfelt, and thus the constraining power of Christ's love no longer operates. The holy fear of displeasing God vanishes. There is no consciousness of being set apart by the Spirit to the obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ. As He is altogether a nullity to such, so the god of this world blinds their thoughts that the radiancy of the gospel of Christ should not shine forth. There is no treasure consequently in the earthen vessels, any more than ever bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be manifested in the body, still less is there exposure to death on account of Jesus, that His life also might be manifested in their mortal flesh, so that death should work in them but life in the objects of divine love.
Hence present things fail not to rush in and fill the void according to Satan's pleasure. The age asserts its influence, and the world is loved and the things that are in it. On the one hand, the poor saints seem vulgar and forward; and the trials of the assembly become odious and contemptible. On the other, how much there is in the world that begins to look fair and pleasant! Then excuses sound plausible for the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. How narrow-minded and weak appear the once decided grounds to stand aloof! Thus as the word of truth is the means of practical sanctification, so the fabrications of the enemy undermine and supplant till there is nothing that the Holy Spirit can use to warn the soul or deliver from this corrupting and malignant power.
The “fables” here are not qualified as “Jewish,” as in Titus 1:1414Not giving heed to Jewish fables, and commandments of men, that turn from the truth. (Titus 1:14), nor are they connected with “genealogies” as in 1 Tim. 1:44Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do. (1 Timothy 1:4), which points in the same direction. It seems a sound deduction therefore to regard them as of a larger character, and open to the workings of Gentile fancy no less than Jewish. But it is vain to speculate on what was then impending. Suffice it for us to know that they are here unlimited and the sure accompaniment of turning away from the truth. One of admirable judgment infers from the structure of the phrase that their being already turned aside to fables leads them to turn away their ear from the truth.