The devil and the Church # 3

The devil and the Church # 3

The very heart of this disgraceful apostasy, this dethroning Christ and enthroning the devil - is to remove the Holy Spirit from His leadership in the Church, and put in unspiritual men as leaders to plan for and direct the Church. The strong hands of men of great ability and men with the powers of leadership - have often displaced God's leadership. The ambition for, and the enthronement of worldly leadership - is the doom and seal of apostasy. There is no true leadership in God's Church but the leadership of the Holy Spirit. The man who has the most of God's Spirit is God's chosen leader, ambitious and zealous for the Spirit's sovereignty, ambitious to be the least, the slave of all.

There are two ways of directing the Church - God's way and the devil's way. God's way and man's way of running the Church are entirely opposite. Man's wise plans, happy expedients and easy solutions, are satan's devices. The Cross is retired and the world comes in. Self-denial is eliminated - and all seems bright, cheerful and prosperous. But satan's hand is on the ark, men's schemes prevail, the Church fails under these attractive devices of men, and the church's spiritual bankruptcy is complete.

All God's plans have the mark of the Cross on them, and all His plans have death to self in them. All God's plans have crucifixion to the world in them. But men's plans ignore the offense of the Cross - or despise it. Men's plans have no profound, stern or self-immolating denial in them. Their gain is of the world. How much of these destructive elements, esteemed by men, does the devil bring into the Church, until all the high, unworldly and holy aims, and heavenly objects of the church are retired and forgotten?

One of these attractive, man-savoring, satanic devices - is to pervert the aims of the Church so that the main object of the Church is not so much to save individuals out of society - as to save society; not to save souls - so much as to save the community. The world, not the individual, is the subject of redemption.

This popular, seductive and deadly fallacy, entirely subverts the very foundation of Christ's Church. Its materializing trend is so strong that it will sweep away every vestige of the spiritual and eternal - if we do not watch, work and speak with sleepless vigilance, tireless energy, and fearless boldness. The attitude and open declaration of much of the religious teaching we now hear, is in the same strain and spirit which characterized Unitarian, Jewish, or rationalistic utterances half a century ago.

To save society is a kind of religious fad to which much enterprising, lauded church work is committed. Advanced thinkers and discoverers have elaborated the same idea. They entomb religion in the grave where Judaism has been buried all these centuries.

The phrase "to save the world," is pompous sounding; and it is appealing to flesh and blood, for the Church to apply itself to better the temporal surroundings  of the individual, and improve his sanitary conditions; to lessen the bad smells  that greet his nose, to diminish the bacteria in his water, and to put granite in the pavement for him to walk on instead of wood or brick. All this sounds finely, and agrees well with a material age, and becomes practical in operation and evident and imposing in results.

But does this agree with the sublime dignity and essential aim of the Church? It needs no church, no Bible, no Christ, no personal holiness, to secure these ends - and this is the point to which all this vaunted advance tends. If the ends of the Church are directed to those results which can be as well or better secured by other agencies - then the Church will soon be regarded as a nuisance, a thing to be abated by the most summary process.

The purposes of the Church  rise in sublime grandeur above these childish dreams and decadent philosophies. Its purpose is to regenerate and sanctify the individual, to make him holy and  prepare him by a course of purifying and training, for the high pursuits of an eternal life. The Church is like the net cast into the sea. The purpose is not to change the sea - so much as to catch the fishes out of the sea. Let the sea roll on in its essential nature, but the net catches its fishes.

No bigger fools would ever be found than fishermen who were spending all their force trying by some chemical process to change the essential elements of the sea, vainly hoping thereby to improve the stock of the fish that they had not and never could catch. By this method, personal holiness, the great desideratum for church operation and ends, would be impossible, and Heaven would be stricken from creed and life and hope.

To save the world and ignore the individual, is not only foolishly utopian, but every way damaging. It is the process, fair and laudable in name, to save the world, but in results it is to lose the Church, or, which amounts to the same, making the Church worldly - and thereby unfitting her for her holy and sublime mission. Christ said that gaining the world and saving the man, are antagonistic ends. Christ teaches Peter that his satanic device would gain the world to and for the Church - but would lose the soul.  Everything would seem thrifty to the worldly cause - when in reality all was death.

The Church is distinctly, preeminently and absolutely a spiritual institution - that is, an institution created, vitalized, possessed and directed by the Spirit of God. Her machinery, rites, forms, services and officers have no loveliness, no pertinency, no power - except as they are channels of the Holy Spirit. It is His indwelling and inspiration, which make its divine being and secure its divine end. If the devil can by any methods  shut the Holy Spirit out from the Church - he has effectually barred the church from being God's Church on earth. He accomplishes this by retiring from the Church, the agencies or agents which the Holy Spirit uses - and displaces them by the natural, which are rarely if ever the media of His energy. Christ announced the universal and invariable law when He said, "That which is born of the flesh, is flesh; that which is born of the Spirit is spirit."

Imagine a church with the leadership of holy men, not highly cultured, but well-versed in the deep things of God, and strong in devotion to Christ and His cause, not wealthy, nor of high social position. Now change these officers and put in men who are every way decent in morality, but not given or noted for prayer and piety, men of high social position and fine financiers, and the Church scarcely realizes the change - except marked improvement in finances. But an invisible and mighty change has taken place in the Church, which is radical. It has changed from a spiritual Church to a worldly one. The change noonday to midnight, is not more extreme than that. At this point satan is doing his deadliest and most damning work - the more deadly and damning because it is unnoticed, unseen, producing no shock and exciting no alarm.

It is not by overt, conspicuous evil that satan perverts the Church - but by quiet displacement and by unnoticed substitution. The spiritual gives place to the social - and  the divine is eliminated, because it is made secondary.

~E. M. Bounds~

(continued with # 4)