What a marvellous expression of divine goodness was seen when God became Man (John 1:14)!
What an awful expression of man’s wickedness will be seen when man claims to be God (2 Thess. 2)!
The former was seen in a lowly Christ.
The latter will be seen in Antichrist.
The former is the expression of God’s love.
The latter will be the expression of Satan’s hate.
The moral effects of the one and the principles that are at work to produce the other are the two great forces in the world today. They can never blend. Sooner will oil and water mix, sooner will love and hate embrace, sooner will the light of noonday and the darkness of midnight exist side by side as that Christian and anti-Christian influences can work in harmony together.
Satan knows they can never unite. Nor does he wish it. His aim is that the evil should overcome the good, the darkness should expel the light, that error should strangle truth. There is no quarter given nor asked for by him.
Mighty as Satan’s power is, enormous as his resources are, he knows full well that he is on tether. His first victory in the Garden of Eden was clouded over by the prophecy of his defeat. Aye, and the very Seed of the frail woman be had just succeeded in overcoming was to become the instrument of effecting its fulfilment. He utterly failed in tempting Christ in the wilderness. He (the Seed of the woman) could say, “The prince of this world comes, and has nothing in Me.” In the resurrection of Jesus Satan beheld the earnest of the fulfilment of his doom. And it can be said of a poor weak believer, “he that is begotten of God s himself, and that wicked one touches Him not.”
It may be asked, If Christian and anti-Christian influences never and cannot blend, as totally opposite qualities cannot, how does Satan work his own ends, for work them he does to a large extent? His persistent effort is to lower the character and thus destroy in measure that which bears the name of Christ in this world. The woman putting leaven into the three measures of meal; the great tree, with birds of the air lodging in its branches, springing from the grain of mustard-seed; the tares sown among the wheat by the enemy—all illustrate methods that have, alas! been all too successful (Matt. 13).
Satan’s effort is aimed at Christians. It is only through persons he can work. He seeks to persuade them to adopt lower ground than the Scriptures give them. He does this on very specious grounds. Only consent to be friendly with the world, and this in the teeth of the scripture, “Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God” (James 4:4), and the world will be won for Christ. Only take up its politics, and this in spite of the scripture, “Our conversation” (citizenship, politics, as illustrated by the full citizenship that obtained in the Greek free cities of that day) “is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Phil. 3:20), and politics will become Christian.
But has the world been won for Christ by such methods? As a matter of fact there are more heathen today than there were ten years ago. The British Empire is more religious, and less Christian. Have politics of any shade become more really Christian in this land, for instance?
What matters it if men are better off in mere material comforts if they go to hell in the end? What is the good of the blue ribbon, if it satisfies men apart from Christ, which it does so often? I do not say a word against temperance. It is a virtue enjoined in Scripture. But I do say, “Preach Christ.” A Christian man will, if consistent be a temperate man. But to “put on Christ” is better than resolutions, however praiseworthy. Conversion, not reformation, is needed. It embraces more, and lasts longer; one is for time, the other is for eternity. There is no comparison between them.
Men are bending all their energies to the accomplishment of their design of making the world happy without God. Alas! how blind they are, for all their efforts are only making the world more intolerable to live in.
The first step man took in that direction is significant as evidencing the power behind his desires, and the real effects of that step. It is in principle similar to the aim of the Antichrist to become God. Our first parents wished to be as gods. It was, indeed, the first step, which will culminate in the avowal of the Antichrist in a day not far future.
The moving force in the temptation in the Garden of Eden was SATAN. The temptation was powerful in the glittering prize he held out—“Ye shall be as gods.” Satan holds out the same prize before the ambition of men today; and he will be the animating power of the coming Antichrist.
Further, Adam, in attempting to rise, fell. They got the knowledge of good in contradistinction to evil, because having the good, all they acquired by their sin was the knowledge of evil. They lost the power of the pursuit of good, and acquired the power to do evil—evil that brought its own punishment, toil, sweat, sorrow in conception, death, judgment. Could wreck be more lamentable or fall be deeper?
And from that sad moment in Eden’s garden, when man was driven out to a cursed earth, to thorns and thistles, to toil and sorrow, man with an unconquerable conceit has refused to learn his lesson and find his good in submitting to God.
Passing over Old Testament times, throughout which the spirit of fallen man ever moved him along the road of which the first disobedience was the gate, we come to the times of the Church. Early troubles came through men seeking importance in the church. “I am of Paul. I am of Cephas” tells its own tale. Diotrephes stands as a byword as a man who loved to have pre-eminence, and who was ruthless as to his method of obtaining it. The Papacy, with its awful history of blood and intrigue, is Diotrephesian
The result of departure from the truth is that the church has been secularized. Instead of being unworldly she is worldly and political, her spiritual power has gone, and she is driven to expedients more and more desperate as time goes on to keep up even the semblance of being listened to. The full effects of Christians tampering with worldly ways and means were not seen all at once, but now Christians are beginning to wake up from their slumber in a fools’ paradise. The definite invoking of the world’s patronage, the embarking upon worldly methods, did not bear all its bitter fruits at once. As a few drops of water trickling through a tiny crack in the dykes of Holland, which a child’s hand might have stayed, but which, unnoticed and unchecked, increases, until the sullen waters sweep away every obstacle, and at one mad rush spoils the industry of centuries.
So were the beginnings of worldliness in the church, but now we are on the verge of a mighty moral cataclysm. Higher criticism, high churchism, in other words, rationalism and ritualism; indifference and infidelity among the masses; indolence, too, and lack of faithfulness on the part of God’s people seem to threaten the total destruction of vital Christianity.
Thank God, we know that He will maintain His truth, and a witness to it in the world, until the coming of the Lord. The question is, how may we be steady in the place of witnesses.
I believe that a due appreciation of the Incarnation of our Lord will greatly help us to avoid the snares of Satan. He was the eternal Word, the Son of God, God, the Son, the Creator and Sustainer of all things, yet He stooped and became man. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.” He never ceased to be God. He became man. He will never cease to be God, He will never cease to be man—One Person. The inscrutability of His Person is complete. We mortals may never know that mystery. “No man knows the Son but the Father,” places a barrier to the workings of the natural mind.
We can bow before Him as Thomas of old did, and exclaim in deepest worship, “My Lord and my God.”
And as we behold the moral grandeur of His stoop, and as we see the design of it, that He came to die, that His death should enable God in righteousness to meet our desperate need, and set Him free to work in the bright designs of His purpose and love in making Him the Head of a new race, “the Captain of our salvation,” the Head, too, of the church, His body, thus bringing us into association with Him as the blessed risen Man at His right hand; as we mark the effects of it, setting aside man of the old order, man after the flesh, and condemning the world, we are freed, in the measure in which we apprehend it, from the effort to rise in selfish rebellious pride out of our God-appointed place, which is, in short, the very essence of what is anti-Christian, and will be seen, in all its full effect, in Antichrist himself.
We are men, we shall never be anything else; but the true appreciation of this marvellous stoop of the blessed Lord, with all that it means, will keep us in our place, deliver us from the self-seeking spirit of the age, and produce in us those qualities of meekness, humility, grace, and patience, which are so foreign to us naturally, but which well become those who are lifted to such a plane of blessing as is involved by being “in Christ.”
Philippians 2:1-11 shows us how the Spirit of God would use the stoop of the Lord Jesus to effect our minds and practice. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”
What shall we do? We need not despair. The intelligent Christian is bound to be optimistic. impressed by the awful power of Satan he sees the mightier power of God. The power of evil is finite; the power of good is infinite. Antichrist rears his head in vain; Satan knows his ultimate doom. It shall yet be said, “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and He shall reign for ever and ever.” But in the meanwhile, what? I answer in one word—SEPARATION.
The Old Testament warns against wearing a garment made of linen and woolen; of sowing a field of mingled seed; of harnessing an ox and ass together; the New Testament tells us of the folly of patching an old garment with a piece of new cloth, or of putting new wine into old bottles. The linen of the Christian need not be woven with the woollen of the world, the seed of the kingdom must not be mingled with the seed of the enemy, the worn-out garment of “the old man” must not be patched by the piece of cloth of “the new man;” the new wine of joy in the Holy Ghost cannot be put into the old bottles of “the flesh.” In other words, SEPARATION is the keynote of divine life in all dispensations.
SEPARATION from the world and a worldly church becomes our safety and happiness. “Come out from among them and touch not the unclean thing, and I will receive you, and will be a Father to you, and ye shall be My sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty” (2 Cor. 6). “Let him that names the name of Christ depart from iniquity” (2 Tim. 2:20). Shall we respond? Can we trust His wisdom, His power, and His care? Dare we refuse? Oh! for a mighty Spirit-given movement on such lines in these dark closing days. And in being separate in heart and ways from the world and worldly religion, we shall be the more truly available for the needs of the world. Never was there a day when the gospel was so needed to be constantly and fearlessly proclaimed. Never was these a phase in the church’s history when there was more necessity for sound words to be placed before the Lord’s people. May we be up and doing. May we be devoted and consecrated. May we be divinely optimistic. The Lord comes quickly and then our path of separation shall be vindicated as being for his glory and the true blessing of the world.