At all times it has been a well-known stratagem of the enemy, when he cannot prevent the promulgation of divine truth, to advance some portion of it at the expense and to the neglect of other much higher and more blessed truths, in order to confine the attention of believers to such as are of secondary import—however precious they may be in themselves—and to keep out of sight, or at least in the background, truths of primary and deepest importance.
What more precious portion of divine truth than the gospel? And what more blessed service than that of the evangelist? Paul, the apostle of the gospel and of the church, writes that he is “not ashamed of the gospel; for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.”
But the same apostle writes, “If ye have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God, which is given me to you-ward: how that by revelation he made known unto me the mystery which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit, that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel, whereof I was made a minister,” &c.
The gospel then, as we learn from the apostle, is the means for forming the church, which is the body of Christ, composed of Jews and Gentiles. The same apostle calls himself “minister of the gospel,” and “minister of the church” (Col. 1:23-2523If ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel, which ye have heard, and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven; whereof I Paul am made a minister; 24Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body's sake, which is the church: 25Whereof I am made a minister, according to the dispensation of God which is given to me for you, to fulfil the word of God; (Colossians 1:23‑25)). The gospel is to the church what the recruiting officer is to the army. The army could not subsist without the recruiting officer. Without him it would soon die out. Neither can the church do without the evangelist. The gospel then is the means of founding the church, and the evangelist is a minister or servant of the gospel and of the church, as we learn from the apostle (Eph. 4:11, 1211And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; 12For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: (Ephesians 4:11‑12)); “for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.”
Now it is beyond dispute that that which is merely instrumental, however blessedly instrumental, cannot hold the same place of importance as that for which it is instrumental. We know from God's own word through His apostle of the gospel of the church, that next to Christ there is nothing so near and dear to God as His church, the body of Christ and the habitation of God in the Spirit. Christ and the church form the very center of the counsels of God! What a sad thing then to assign a secondary or subordinate place to that which in God's sight is of primary importance!
There is joy indeed before God and His angels over one sinner that repenteth. The heavenly joy does not wait until the sinner finds “joy and peace in believing.” But the divine joy of Him Who knows the end from the beginning begins as soon as His divine work in the sinner's soul begins in repentance toward God. Wondrous indeed, yet but natural to those unenvious blessed angelic ministers of God's good pleasure, were those heavenly acclamations on the night of our Savior's nativity, which accompanied the first proclamation of the “good tidings of great joy.”
“ How rightly rose the praises
Of heaven that wondrous night,
When shepherds hid their faces
In brightest angel light!
“ More just those acclamations
Than when the glorious band
Chanted earth's deep foundations,
Just laid by God's right hand.
“ Come now and view that manger:
The Lord of glory see,
A houseless, homeless stranger
In this poor world for thee.
“ To God in th' highest glory,
And peace on earth to find,
And learn that wondrous story—
Good pleasure in mankind.”
But the time is not very distant when another glorious song, equally if not more glorious still, will be heard at the outburst of the joyful heavenly Allelujah. “Praise our God, all ye His servants, and ye that fear Him, both small and great. Allelujah, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honor to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. And to her was granted, that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white; for the fine linen is the righteousnesses of saints.”
It is true, what the chief apostle of the circumcision wrote—after our precious Savior had accomplished His glorious work of an eternal redemption, and as a risen and ascended Savior and Head of the church had taken His seat on high, and the Holy Ghost had been sent down from heaven— “which things the angels desire to look into.”
But it is no less true, what the same Spirit says through Paul the apostle of grace and glory, viz., “To make all see what is the dispensation of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, Who created all things by Jesus Christ; to the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in the heavenlies might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose, which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
And is that from which the angels derive their lessons in studying the wisdom of God to be a matter of minor importance to you and me, fellow-believer, who are living stones in that wonderful divine building, and members of the body of Christ? Jesus died “not for that (Jewish) nation only, but that also he should gather into one (i.e., into one body) the children of God that were scattered abroad” (i.e., those of the Gentiles) John 11:5252And not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad. (John 11:52). He died not merely to get a certain number—however great—of saved individuals or units, but that those units should be united into one body, the church, of which He is the glorious, Head.
What then could be more injurious to the individual believer than to neglect and to slight that marvelous privilege which God in His wondrous grace has bestowed upon us, to be members of Christ, members of His body, the church? None can treat such divine blessings lightly without serious damage to the soul. The evangelist who neglects the church and his place in the church, will soon take a low ground in the preaching of the gospel, and the believer who grows cold in his interest in the gospel, thus failing to get the heart established by grace, and stores up church truths in the head, instead of treasuring them up in the heart, will soon become a more or less useless member of the body, a kind of withered branch, besides the grave danger resulting from either, of falling into the snare of evil doctrine or practice. These “latter days” constantly furnish us with solemn instances of both. Alas! how sadly do we fail to realize even in our little measure the immensity of God's blessings connected with His gospel and His church! The greatness of our salvation is but too much neglected, though generally not so much as the greatness of God's blessings connected with that wondrous mystery revealed to His apostle of the church, and, through him, to us.
Whilst in that blessed Gospel-Epistle to the Romans the gospel most properly holds the first, and the church, being its result, appears in secondary; in that grand Church-Epistle of the same apostle to the Ephesians, we find the first place by the Spirit of God assigned to the church, whereas the gospel, being only the means for accomplishing God's wonderful counsels and purposes as to the church, appears in the second line (Eph. 1:77In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace; (Ephesians 1:7)). Those counsels of divine sovereign grace and infinite love in which God predestinated us for the adoption of children to Himself, could not flow out and abound towards us when those wounds had been opened and the precious blood been shed on the cross, which alone could procure their accomplishment. When Jesus was on earth He said, “I have a baptism to be baptized with [even His sufferings and death upon the cross], and how am I straitened until it be accomplished.” All those stores of divine love and grace and wisdom, treasured up in Him, in Whom the whole fullness of the Godhead was pleased to dwell, Who was the center of all those divine counsels of blessing, however precious and wonderful in themselves, could never have flown out towards their objects, but would have remained pent up in Christ, till the spear of man's wickedness drew forth the blood to save. No sooner is that precious fountain mentioned (ver. 7) when at once those inexhaustible tides of grace and every blessing flow forth “towards us” without let or hindrance, “according to the riches of His grace, wherein He hath abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence; having made known unto us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure, which He hath purposed in Himself.”
Beloved brethren in Christ and fellow-members of His body, the church, are we going to make that which, next to and with Christ, is nearest and dearest to God's mind and heart, for which Christ gave Himself, that we might be members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones—that which He has bought at the cost of His cross, “that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the Word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish” —are we going, I say, to make all this a secondary object of our Christian meditations, pursuits, and service?
As already observed at the beginning, it is, and has been throughout the Christian era, one of the subterfuges of the adversary of everything divine, whenever he cannot entirely prevent the promulgation of divine truth, to subvert the order of it by putting that which in God's word and mind is of primary importance into the background, if he cannot entirely put it out of sight or pervert and corrupt it; and by giving a vantage ground to that which, according to God's order, is secondary (however glorious and blessed in itself), being only the means for the accomplishment of that which is of primary importance. For he knows well that where this divine order is subverted, those who suffer themselves thus to be duped and robbed by the enemy will in consequence lower the standard of the gospel truth, for which the apostle of the gospel and of the church endured such opposition in endeavoring to keep up the gospel to that height of divine truth, which had been delivered to him by the Lord.
The preaching of evangelists who, contrary to the truth they had been instructed in, devote all their energy to preaching, to the neglect of the church, will sooner or later assume the character of that soft, sentimental, and humanitarian gospel preaching of the day, which produces slight wounds, if any; and slight healing, if any, with antinomian tendencies and twofold hardening of conscience in its wake. “Trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots;” Gibeonites, trimmed lamps without oil. One of the Revivalists said, “It is a glorious sight to see ten thousand standing up, confessing Christ!” Alas! what has become of them?
It is solemnly instructive to see how soon after the days of Paul, and ever since, the wily adversary of the truth has sought, and alas! succeeded but too much, to keep the truth of the church of God, as revealed in His Word, in the background, thus robbing the saints of God of that spiritual wealth and strength connected with conscious entering of the soul upon that portion of divine truth. And not only so. Satan, whose character since the days of Paradise has ever been to mar and corrupt what God had established in and for blessing, has succeeded to lower and corrupt both the church and the gospel—the means of forming the church. But the first thing he did in undertaking his mischievous work was to turn that wondrous revelation of the great divine mystery of Christ and the church to a mystery again, by putting and keeping it in the darkest and farthest background possible.
Christ; the glorious Head of the church, His body, Who had sent His Holy Spirit, a heavenly Eliezer, to conduct His heavenly bride through this wilderness to her heavenly Bridegroom, has awakened by His Spirit from time to time faithful witnesses of the truth, especially with regard to His gospel, which like the written word of God itself, had been almost lost beneath the rubbish of the corrupting religious ordinances of the Roman Church. But those witnesses, faithful though they were in the proclamation of the truth of a faller and purer gospel (whose heavenly side in resurrection, deliverance by and union with Christ was but imperfectly known even to them), had but little, if any light about the true character of the church as the “habitation of God in the Spirit,” nor about its heavenly position, calling, and hope. That defect is but too apparent even in the best of the Reformers of the sixteenth century.
After the Thirty Years' War, so ruinous in its religious as well as in its moral and temporal effects, the so-called Protestant church relapsed into spiritual slumber and worldliness, and the prophetic word as to “tares” found its sad accomplishment. God in His longsuffering mercy towards the end of the last century again raised several faithful witnesses, especially in this country, to arouse the Protestant church from her sinful sleep. But even the testimony of such men as Berridge, Hill, J. and C. Wesley, and Whitefield was chiefly confined to the preaching of the gospel. And though one of the chief blessings of the Reformation, the unimpeded circulation of Holy Writ, continued to exist and the Bible had become accessible even to the poorest, it seemed as if the glorious truth of the church, so long buried under the religious rubbish of centuries, was farther to remain unheeded and neglected.
But our blessed Lord Jesus Christ, Who is not only the Savior of sinners, but above all the Head of His body, the church, composed of saved sinners, would not permit the enemy now, when His coming for His saints is so near at hand, to obscure or keep in the background any longer the precious truth as to Christ and the church, the real center of the counsels of God.
During the third decade of this century (from 1825-30) the Lord raised in England several eminently gifted witnesses of the truth. One of these, in an especial way endowed by God, was used by the Lord for recovering the full truth of the gospel in a purity and fullness which had not been known since the days of the apostles. But not only for the recovery of the truths of the gospel did the Lord use that honored instrument of His gracious designs. The light of the pure scriptural truth of the church, which appears to have been altogether lost during the lapse of so many dark centuries, was by that distinguished servant of the Lord placed again upon the bushel, and shone with a brightness of scriptural simplicity unknown since the days of the apostles. What characterized that movement was especially the practical acknowledgment of the presence and authority and guidance of the Holy Ghost in the church or assembly, and the authority of the word of God, which is “truth,” written by the “Spirit of truth.” In those days that wholesome principle prevailed, “Never the word without the Spirit, nor the Spirit without the word.”
The Holy Ghost, Who glorifies Christ, receives of His and shows it to us, being thus practically owned in His presence in the assemblies of those Christians, His blessed activity among them as well as in them was realized in its own unimpeded power in spiritual joy and liberty. It almost seemed as if the blissful days of Pentecost were about to be experienced afresh amongst those simple believers. They realized their dependence upon the glorious Head, and under Him of their mutual dependence as members of Christ's body. Their evangelists did not consider themselves to be independent beings, who went whither they would, and did what seemed good in their own eyes, under plea of their sole dependence upon the Lord; but they entered upon their work from the bosom of the church, commended to the Lord by the church, as did Paul and Barnabas (though the former was not only a preacher but an apostle), and after the completion of their service they returned to the church and “rehearsed all that God had done with them,” and “there abode a long time with the disciples.” Neither did they who were pastors and teachers in the church make themselves the starting-point and terminus of all that was carried on, nor the center of the assembly, saying (like Louis XIV.) “The assembly, that is, me;" but they considered themselves to be servants of the church for Jesus' sake (2 Cor. 4:55For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake. (2 Corinthians 4:5)).
“But the church is in ruins,” some will say, “and as we cannot rebuild it, the only thing that remains is the gospel. There remains nothing therefore for the faithful and zealous Christian laborer but to devote all one's energy to the blessed work of the gospel, that precious souls may be saved, before the saints and every evangelist be removed and the sudden awful judgments of God break in upon this world.” I can only say that such reasoning is based on altogether false premises.
It is sadly true that the church is in ruins, and he must be blind indeed who would deny it. Yea, I make bold to say that the labors and testimony of a servant of Christ will in the same measure lack the savor of that grace and love which is never without truth, and the fragrance and freshness of the Spirit, as he has failed to realize in his own soul the rain of the church in the spirit of a Daniel and Nehemiah, having far more reason than they to “remember from whence we are fallen.” Not being truly humbled before the Lord do not say about himself and his own failures, but about his share in the common ruin and shame of the church) his ministry, be it in the gospel or in the church, will lack, if not the outward energy, yet the savor of the grace and freshness and unction of the testimony of those honored men of God of old, not being the result of true and deep brokenness of heart and spirit. David could “encourage himself in the Lord” amidst the rains of Ziklag, whilst his men thought of stoning him. And why could he do so? Because he must have been down in the dust before the Lord about those silently eloquent ruins around him, they being the sorrowful and humiliating result of not only his little faith but of his faithlessness to God and His people. How graciously the Lord restored after that, all the lost ones to David!
“ Who shall despise the day of small things?” was the prophet's encouraging word in the days of the rebuilding of Jerusalem, when the enemy taunted the builders with the mocking words, that a fox could leap over their walls. Those days of small things were just God's opportunity for doing great things. But let us, beloved, beware of attempting to do great things in a day of small things. It would be pretty much like the language of those Ephraimites and Samaritans in the days of Isaiah the prophet, who said in their pride and stubbornness of heart, “The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones; the sycamores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars” (Isa. ix. 9, 10).
I do not say this to discourage any true-hearted evangelist in his zeal for, and labor in the gospel of our blessed God. God forbid! Surely the fields are white for the harvest and the laborers few. Let us pray the Lord of the harvest to raise and send more of them, but such as do not disconnect, in a spirit of independency, their labors from the church of God, the body of Christ, whose members they are, pleading the ruin of the church as an excuse for self-will and independency. Has the church (Ephes.) as to its divine side fallen into ruins, because the human side (2 Tim.) as to man's responsibility has become a wreck and fallen into ruins? Has the Lord been unfaithful, because we have been unfaithful? No, blessed be God, He Who when on earth as the faithful Witness was faithful amidst unfaithfulness all around, is now faithful above our unfaithfulness.
Does the Spirit of God in the Epistle of Jude, which was written in a day of low tide, tell the saints to strike the flag, or even to lower the standard of truth on account of the low tide all around? Does he tell them to leave the ruins behind and go on with the gospel? On the contrary, he had intended when sitting down to write his Epistle, to speak to them about our common salvation in the sense of the gospel, but the increasing dangers and corruption in the church, far from making him indifferent or used to it, made him, inspired writer as he was, turn aside from the (however blessed) subject of the gospel to a still higher subject of paramount importance in the sight of God, even the church of God, fast declining toward a ruinous condition, as it then already was, but no less, nay even all the more on God's and His and our Christ's heart on that account, even as a mother cooes and nurses her sick child all the more just because of its bad health. Does the apostle tell the saints to be less careful as to the “assembling of ourselves together,” on account of the low condition of the church? No, he enjoins them all the more to “build up themselves on their most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost,” and to “keep themselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.”
It is a truly wretched thing to make the low and ruined condition of the church a plea for neglectful indifference as to the precious divine truths of God's word, as if the authority of God's word concerning His church were less binding on our consciences because of our having failed as to our responsibility under such privileges. Shall we go on sinning because we have sinned? Certainly every true Christian would with horror recoil from such a thought, most repulsive even to any honest natural man.
Nay, beloved, our responsibility under such grace not only as to our common salvation, but still more as to our common privileges as members of the body of Christ, even the church of God, is in these very last of the “last days” greater than ever for faithful adherence to God's written word, and faithfulness in testimony both in the church and the gospel. The assembly is a divine institution, and we cannot neglect a divine institution without damage to our souls and to our testimony. It is God's nursery for His saints, and especially for His servants not only a nursery but, as it were, a divine drilling-place, for their outfit for service in the gospel. If the evangelist neglects that place, his ministry will lack the unction of the grieved Holy Spirit, Who dwells in the assembly no less than within the evangelist individually, and his ministry of the gospel will gradually have a more or less profane, often so-called popular, character, pleasing the multitude and the great, and despising the small and the few.
May the Lord send more laborers into His gospel field, but such who, like Paul and Barnabas, start from the bosom of the church, borne up by its prayers, and return to it when their labor is finished for common praises and joyful thanksgiving to God from Whom all blessings flow and to Whom all power belongs.
In my next paper I propose, if the Lord will, to offer a few remarks as to the origin, character, and subject of the gospel in its ministry. J. A. v. P.