Ritualism and Rationalism: Their Characteristics and Cure

An address on Matthew 16:1-20

Both Ritualism and Rationalism are the fruits of the fleshly mind, on the one hand taking refuge in forms and ceremonies, the attempt to get into touch with God through sensuous means—proof that the true vital knowledge of God and of His revelation in Christ are unknown; on the other hand refusing to believe anything that the fleshly mind cannot grasp. How true it is “that the natural man understands not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).

Such a statement as this will lead us to understand how men of strong intellect, university education, and culture can commit themselves to all the empty forms of ritualism on the one hand, and on the other hand to all the blank negations of rationalism.

Of course both these extremes unite, as extremes always do, in opposing the truth. In truth they move in different directions to the same point.

So in this Scripture we get the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the Ritualists and Rationalists, of their day, uniting in the attempt to tempt the Lord with their request for a sign. These rival sects among the Jews were fiercely antagonistic, but their hatred of the truth was deeper than their hatred of each other. Hence their uniting in this attack.

We have said that these extremes move on to the same terminus. That terminus is the rejection of the Son of God. We shall see that the only cure for these departures from the truth is the true knowledge of the Person of the Son of God.

The great German Professor Delitzsch was once addressing his students at the time when Modernism was just beginning to gain ground. He said, “Young gentlemen, the battle is now raging round the Old Testament. Soon it will pass into the New Testament field—it is already beginning. Finally it will pass forward to the citadel of your faith—the Person of Jesus Christ. There the last struggle will occur.” How truly prophetic was his utterance. Well might he call the truth as the Person of the Son of God—“the citadel of your faith.” The attacks have proceeded on the lines he indicated. We are in the last struggle today.

Just as the rival sects in the Lord’s day united in tempting the Lord, so we see prelates in the church on the one hand going in for forms and ceremonies of the most elaborate nature, believing that by some magic power spiritual gift is imparted by what Mr. Spurgeon aptly described as “the laying of empty hands on empty heads,” believing that the pronouncing of a few words by the priest over the emblems of the Lord’s supper has power to change the elements into the very flesh and blood of the Lord, and on the other hand publicly and without shame giving up the very fundamentals of the Christian faith, and these two extremes leading on to the same point of attack.

Ritual is largely copied from that of the Old Testament, which was divinely ordained, but connected with an earthly system, and therefore elaborate and ornate. There were a number of ordinances in the service of the gorgeous temple, which were shadows of the coming of Christ, of His Person and His work. He was the glorious Substance. Now if religious men revive the shadows, is that not a clear proof that they do not understand the Substance? If men light tiny tapers when strong sunlight is flooding hill and dale, would we not suppose they were mentally afflicted or something of that sort? Is not this mimicry, of vestments and millinery in the same way a very travesty of the truth—a lighting of the tapers in the light of the sun?

And when we come to rationalism, we come to something even worse. Why should men gird at the miraculous? Is not Christ Himself the greatest of all miracles to us mortals? If there were no miraculous, no insoluble mysteries in the Christian faith, it would not command our belief. In truth the rationalist believes more incredible things, as men speak, than the Christian. He believes in mighty effects flowing from utterly inadequate causes. How can men deny the virgin birth, the sinlessness of the Lord, attribute to Him the limitations of ordinary men, deny even the resurrection, and yet account for Christianity? It has been well said: “Do you deny that Jesus existed? Who then invented Jesus? It would take a Jesus to invent a Jesus.”

The Pharisees and Sadducees asked for a sign. The Lord would give them none, wicked and adulterous generation as they were, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. But what a sign was that to give. Imagine the unwilling sailors throwing the runaway prophet into the boiling sea. That surely was an end to him. And in those days news of a sensational nature had a way of quickly spreading over large tracts of country, and becoming the gossip of the bazaars. Such an occurrence as the storm that would not abate till the prophet was flung overboard was just one that would spread from mouth to mouth. How the angry waves leaped to overwhelm their victim, and then as if satisfied dropped to rest. How this must have startled those who witnessed it.

And then suddenly, they hear that Jonah has reappeared on dry land. What a miracle! No wonder that the Ninevites repented when they listened to a messenger who had reached them by such miraculous means.

And this was the sign given, a sign that was to foreshadow—dimly, indeed—a far greater miracle, even the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. It is the failure to see the stupendous miracle of the resurrection that is at the bottom of the rationalist’s unbelief.

True, the resurrection of the Lord was at the time He spoke in the future, for He had not then died. But we pass on. If the Son of God was what He claimed to be, then the resurrection is easily understood. If religious rationalists fail to understand who He is, and reduce him in their minds to the level of a man, it may be the very best of men, even the very flower of the human race, if they get no further than that, how can they understand the resurrection?

So after the Lord had warned His disciples against the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees, we find Him asking His disciples what men said of Him. They replied that some thought that He was John the Baptist. That surely showed that they were hard put to to account for the unique personality of Jesus. To resort to the supposition that a distinguished servant of God, such as the Forerunner was, had risen from the dead, showed that they recognized the greatness of Christ. Others went further back, and said He was Elias or Jeremias or one of the prophets. But though they could not deny the greatness of Christ, they had not a ghost of an idea of His true greatness.

But all this was immeasurably short of the truth of the matter. So the Lord turned to His disciples with the pointed question, “But whom say ye that I am?”

Simon Peter answered, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

The Christ!—The Anointed of God, the One who was called of God to carry out all His will, and who was competent to do it, nay more, the Son of the living God, a Divine Person, “the mighty God, the everlasting Father,” as Isaiah prophesied, was the answer that the erstwhile fisherman from Galilee gave. What an answer to give as He stood face to face with Christ! As men speak, here was a Man, His Godhead glory veiled, nothing outwardly to mark Him from His fellows, and yet here is Peter confessing Him in His true Person.

No wonder that the Lord replied, “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood has not revealed it to thee, but My Father which is in heaven.” Please note how the Lord addressed him, not by the new name, Peter, that He had conferred upon him, but by the old name, Simon, son of Jona.

It was as much as to say, Simon, you did not learn this by what you were naturally, neither did you get it through your father, Jona. It might be elaborated into present-day language, the halls of Oxford and Cambridge did not, and could not, furnish you with this knowledge, intellect, education, the dead languages, nothing human ever taught you this, Simon. This knowledge only came through REVELATION, the revelation of the Father to your soul.

Nay, more, you cannot get this knowledge through the mere reading of the Scriptures. True it is that we must read the Scriptures. But it is when the letter of the Scripture becomes spirit to us that it will be really ours, and command our souls.

Nay, further, the Lord now addresses Peter, by the name He had conferred upon him. “And I say also to thee, That thou art Peter (petros, the stone), and upon this rock (petra, the great rock foundation), I will build My church; and the gates of hell (the machinations and plottings of Hades, in this case of the underworld) shall not prevail against it.”

The Lord never said that the church would be built on Peter. What an unstable foundation that would have been. The foundation is on the confession of the truth of Christ’s Person, in other words on Christ Himself. One sees that the knowledge of the Son of God in His own proper Person will give us a corresponding appreciation of the character and value of His work. We shall only in this way understand the true meaning of His resurrection.

From the human side how sad is the contemplation of the history of the church, but on the divine side how glorious is the prospect! When Nehemiah was building the wall of Jerusalem, the enemies came along, and wanted under the plea of assisting in the good work to help to build the walls. When their offer was refused, they came out in their true colours, and Tobiah, the Ammonite, taunted the godly with the sarcastic words, “Even that which they build, if a fox go up, he shall even break down their stone wall” (Neh. 4:3). Nothing looked more feeble on the human side.

Even so with the church on the human side. But on the divine side how wonderful is the outlook. It is what the Son of God is building, and what He builds can never be assailed, it is indestructible. What a comfort this is amidst all the wreck of things in Christendom today. We see men covering up their real poverty in the things of God by organizations that set aside the Spirit of God, by the multiplication of forms and ceremonies, and we find all this insufficient to hold the mind of man, and seeing things are so weak and poverty-stricken they drift into rationalism, the denying of the very verities of the Christian faith.

But what is the remedy for all this? The enemy is very astute. Patiently he has engineered the attack on the outer ramparts, but he had the citadel in view, as Professor Delitzsch described it, even the truth as to the Person of the Son of God. Satan sees well that that is an impregnable fortress, and the soul who once gets into its mighty recesses is safe. That truth understood in the soul is the cure for both Ritualism and Rationalism. How tawdry and childish does the former appear in the light of the knowledge of the glorious Person of the Son of God. And in that same knowledge how puerile and contemptible are the vapourings of Rationalism.

We have just heard a good deal about the church. I would like every young Christian to take a deep interest in this subject. “Christ loved the church.” Say to yourself, “And I am part of it.” “And gave Himself for it.” Say to yourself, “And I am part of it.” He is going to present it to Himself, and how soon that may be. Say to yourself, “And I am part of it.” The gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.” “And I am part of it.”