There is a very common mistake as to the sense of the word heresy in scripture. It may be something definite; it may be truth, it may be error. But no just apprehension can be arrived at as to what it really is, except by looking to the essential meaning of the word. It simply means "choice;" and thus it will not be difficult to see how this transgresses against God. and against the place we should hold towards Him, and in respect of all that we are to receive from Him. As to ourselves, we know the word of the Lord, " You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you." So also in all revelation made to man, it stood in God's good pleasure to reveal what He pleased; in His divine wisdom giving such relations between truth and truth as was necessary to make Himself duly known. To reverse this order is heresy. Man a sinner, (and if such be the mercy vouchsafed,) recovered to God by grace, is himself the choice of God; and grace forms the place and rule of subjection and dependence. Treating it, however, as confined to truth revealed, it is the duty of the believer humbly to be subject to it, rightly dividing it; since the word, according to the Spirit, teaches those who are obedient to Christ. The separation of truth from Christ Himself must prevent blessing and growth, and is often the cause of the endeavor to combine in a formal creed the truth necessary to the child of God and the Lord's servant.
There is another source of this evil, viz., that however needful one portion of the truth may be at this or that season, there is, (notwithstanding a succession of revelation) a need of every part for the work of God; for His husbandry and for the building up of the saints. However the spirit of apostasy may work, inasmuch as the promises are made to the overcoming of the corruption of the day and time in Christianity, those Christians are the most " thoroughly furnished" who respect the whole canon of truth as given to complete them in Christ. Truth will not be found in parceling it out and in balancing it. Such a course would make us think that souls, in conscience towards God, were not the intended objects of it; whereas, as seen in God, all is perfect, and each part is a whole; but so a whole as to be in perfect relation to the rest, and without the exclusion of any. Christ is what we receive of God; and if any portion of truth be taken, as in Christ, it will never exclude any other portion, and it will ever have its proportions fitted to Christ, and to which every other part can attach.
If there are particular times and seasons when some portion of truth is specially called for, so there are times and seasons when some portion, which may be highly necessary and important is, either through ignorance or corruption, omitted. Or, if what is material being omitted, a sickly demand of one truth occur in minds from defect of another-all this is, or borders on, heresy.
No truth and no order promulgated of God is needless. Hurrying forth when we discover some revealed truth, instead of waiting on God for its certainty and its place, or founding anything merely on the contradiction to falsehood, is in likelihood an approach to this sin.
What shall we say then? Conscience before a holy God is the needed condition of the soul; and, in subjection to Christ, a simple acceptance of the word-even if that word appears unusual-giving time to the soul in the presence of God, will keep it in the safe path.
These considerations are the more needful because apostasy, or all that prepares for it, makes such strides; and the dissolution of all that imposed any wholesome fear on man progresses so rapidly that a distinctive view of what constitutes "a good confession " will call on souls, desirous of walking with God, to enter earnestly on the question of the "canon of truth."
What is intended is not the canon of scripture, (that has its own various ground and evidence,) hut. the canon of truth, as needed in confession, and for the enjoyment of the peace and the power of God; and for practical ends, as a sequel to them, in the knowledge of His will, in wisdom and spiritual understanding. The value of this must be apparent.
The principle of faith, excluding every object that could come between us and the Lord, is the point on which he who had been in the third heaven made an unrelenting stand in the power of the Holy Ghost.
Faith is towards the future, because the future is towards that which is unseen; and it accepts its rule from God. Nothing could he more righteous than the demand of faith from man, as the road of return afforded by God to one who had sinned, and who continued in insubjection through sin, and had become subject to another, even to the enemy, the revolted one. Distrust of God was the door by which he left God, and the door of entrance to his lost and estranged condition. He had eaten of the fruit of the tree, and was shut out thenceforth from the tree of life in the garden. God now plants the tree of life outside the garden, and outside the camp too, and calls on man to eat of it. Because in this tree of God's planting is found sin and death undone, and life restored and unassailable. Here was faith, as the reverse of man's departure from God, and restoration thereby. Wonderful and righteous are the ways of God, full of grace and mercy and truth! This then is the way of "repentance towards God, and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ." And, this being accomplished, it is given to man to wait for his being taken in again to a higher paradise; and therefore it is said, "to wait for the Son from heaven." To as many as receive him he gives power to become the sons of God; even to as many as believe on that name-the name of' the only begotten Son of God.
Now, being sons, it is needful, in order to obedience, to know what confession we are called to as waiting for the Son from heaven. All the remainder of the canon of truth lies here. The Lord is coming to take to Himself His great power and reign; in which time the earth shall be subject, and a king shall rule in righteousness, and princes in judgment, and we as sons of God, and therefore heirs with Christ, shall reign with Him. It is nothing therefore but the present knowledge of His will, in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, that will afford a rule of confession and obedience. For the whole frame of the world, its order and objects, can be no guide, since it is in independence still, and not returned to God; and under its present rule never to return. The believer is in Christ and the world is not. The child of God waits for the Son from heaven-who is Lord of all: and the world awaits but the doom of its final-departure from Him. " The iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full," therefore God did not bring His people into their inheritance. So it is with the world now. We see Him at the right hand of God, as Lord of all, according to the will of the Father; though the time is not yet of all things being made subject to Him. The external form of our obedience is in acknowledgment of Him there, and to come: sanctified, or separated, not only out of our once lost state, but sanctified to Him and justified in the grace of our God, out of the world which lieth in condemnation and in the power of the wicked one. It is not a question of being morally better than the world around us (though this is the case essentially by grace) in an external respect: but of being separate as subject to Christ, who is at the right hand of God: -and subject for suffering in obeying Christ; and in the intelligence of Christ, subject to the authorities that be, yet taking no part, in ordering the world, which is in disobedience, as are all that connect themselves with the world. We are "called unto the kingdom and glory" to be revealed. I speak of the regenerate, by the faith of the Son of God.
To these things the gospel of the grace and the gospel of the kingdom are the introduction. For, though the proclamation must be grace, it is the kingdom of God that is specifically preached. God now establishes the way of grace, and it is by faith, that it may be by grace. This would conduct us through the epistle to the Romans; the church being only touched upon at the very close; and it is to a considerable extent the force of those to the Thessalonians, though not exclusively, as the interest of the saints in heavenly places is appealed to. The epistle to the Hebrews, of Jude, and James and Peter are confined to it. The specialty of the Church in heavenly places, and her union with Christ by faith of His name, as Son of God, and the revelation of the power of resurrection to the believer was reserved to Paul. The character of the grace is everlasting and indefeasible; its place the place of communion; and its hope the being taken before the trial; walking with God in the judgment of the world and loving the coming of the Lord. The divine life, and the practical result in blessing given to communion, is the department given to John. The canon of truth can bear no omission but with damage to the perfecting of the saint in his relation to God, and to his confession in the world of Christ and His glory.
To lay stress on any of these things to the exclusion of the other, is an evil choice in order to clothe oneself with the peculiarity of the doctrine, and it is not subjection to truth. If I take the kingdom, and leave out the Church, I deprive the saint of the highest consolations, and lower the ground of his affections, and alter injuriously the character of his hope. If I leave out the kingdom, and take the Church as my exclusive theme, I render the walk of the saint unstable on the earth, and cut off all the doctrine of godliness, to be exercised while in the body, in subjection to the Lord. If I adopt the divine life as the sole relict of truth, I leave the saint to be absorbed by the frame of the world and to a defective conscience, which sanctification to God in the world can alone sustain.
If the character of the service of the divine life was revealed last, it has, nevertheless, without doubt, its appropriate fullness within itself; but I speak of the evil of the heresy of excluding what preceded it, and is necessary to complete the chosen one in Christ. The divine life and attraction to it creates a fund to the soul in an evil day, which the ruin around makes needful, and God, in the wonders of His grace, has not left us without. But "there must be heresies that those who are approved may be made manifest."
The internal man is not the same as the external man as confessor of the Lord. The new man is the risen man, the healed leper of the eighth day. Where the blood has cleansed there the Spirit can follow. When death has worked there is life; and the saint becomes the living sacrifice, and by faith advancing continually in the divine character lives in the atmosphere of the love in which God lives, and bears testimony of it.
Part of the "canon of truth," and indeed very much, may be at times in the world in abeyance, by ignorance and corruption, and the revival of truth (which is the work of the power of God) makes the saint very responsible; as also the preaching of the good tidings makes the world so.
The knowledge of righteousness, before the reformation, and the peace wrought for the believer, were forgotten, and were brought to light amid the darkness. The truth of the Church and of the functions of the Holy Ghost were not reached by the reformation. The truth of the kingdom has been perceived; but its place and importance for practical ends in the saints, being heirs in a country not yet their own, but strangers in it, though under their Lord, has been but little apprehended. It is a kingdom of which the saints are expectant heirs; and where they receive the reward of present faithful confession, and reward of service and duty, at the coming forth of their Lord in glory. I believe this confession is often referred to under the name of "the faith." See the end of l Timothy; and " the good confession of Christ that His kingdom was not of this (present) world, else would His servants fight. To wait thus-serving the Lord that is looked for-severed from the order of the world, and returned to God and dependent upon Him, is "the faith" in this respect. (The Gentile Church neither stands in goodness nor in faith in the living God by faith.) Christianity either says, " Lord, Lord," and does not; or denies the Lord to whom glory alone belongeth. Nations are, often, a mock Israel; but they shall come into the tribulation and judgment; and the Lord will be magnified with His saints in the day of His appearing.
The kingdom of our Lord which, with the virtues and grace that are appropriate to it, is the distinctive confession of the saints on earth, forms the conscience on earth, keeping them for the Lord. The affections as well as the knowledge of the risen Jesus cast a gloom on any part the saints take in the world. Whereas the place given them as expectant heirs marks easily the present things (except as immediately ordered by the Lord) as in the hand of the enemy; while the love of God shed abroad in their hearts glorifies Jesus as Lord and Savior, and, in a good confession they overcome by His blood and their testimony, and shall sit on His throne as He overcame and sits on His Father's throne.