03/10/2024
WHAT THE CHURCH MUST DO TO BE SAVED?
Foy E. Wallace, Jr.
“For the hurt of the daughter of my people am I hurt: I mourn; dismay hath taken hold on me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?” (Jer. 8:21-22).
The prophet Jeremiah in these words pictures the condition of Israel in a lurid light. Doubtless he was regarded a pessimist; soured on society; a disgruntled prophet. But the fact remains that the trouble was in Israel, not in the prophet. His burning words describe the people of God today. The church is sick. And the sad part is, as with Israel, without reason; because the Physician of Gilead and the healing remedy are available. “Why then is not the health of my people recovered?” Because they will not come to the physician and they will not take his remedy.
Elements of Strength and Weakness
The health and strength of the church are to be found in the truth and the defense of it; its infirmity and weakness are manifest in compromise. Of the mighty host of Old Testament valiants a New Testament writer remarked, “Out of weakness they were made strong.” Through the fewest and weakest of all nations on earth, God made Israel the strongest, and through them he
championed the cause of universal righteousness against empires of iniquity and defeated the most powerful nations of antiquity. Standing for the truth, the church has nothing to fear. But when we compromise with error, we become of all people the most vulnerable.
The history of Israel repeats itself in the church today. Observe what the strength of the church was a few generations ago and compare it with the present. Their plea was the Bible itself. Today we hear much of “what the church believes and teaches.” The church was brought to us in an undenominational, non-denominational, anti-denominational spirit. The spirit of the early Gospel crusaders was antagonistic to denominationalism. The attitude toward error was consistent—all error looked exactly alike. Bishop Purcell’s Roman Catholicism looked to Alexander Campbell about like Robert Dale Owen’s socialistic atheism—he debated and defeated them both. But Nathan L. Rice’s denominationalism did not look any better; he debated and defeated it. Nor did error within the church receive more toleration, he squelched the menacing speculative movement of Jesse B. Ferguson in the church.
The strength of the church has ever been in the maintenance of distinctive, New Testament principles. It loses its strength and is reduced to utter weakness when it loses sight of these things, raises the white flag to the foe and signs truce with error.
The Principle of Peculiarity
Israel was a peculiar people—a separate people. They had a separate origin. God called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees that he might raise up a separate family. Get thee out, God said. Later when the posterity of Abraham settled in the land of Egypt God demanded that Pharoah should let the people go “that they may worship me.” He required of Israel a separate nation. Today God demands a separate church—“be ye separate, saith the Lord.” A separate family in Abraham; a separate nation in Israel; a separate church in Christ.
The Church Must Be Kept Separate.
We must keep the church separate in speech. The nomenclature of the denominations can have no place among Christians—such as “our church,” “our pastor,” “Doctor Blank, LL.D,” “our institutions,” “our organizations,” “our Young People,” and “Lord, may Brother Eloquent ‘bring us a message’,” ad infinitum's string of borrowed sectarian Ashdodic language, which is fast becoming the common vernacular of professed Christians.
We must keep the church separate in doctrine. It is not a matter of what “the church believes and teaches”—it is wholly and solely a question of what the Bible teaches, the all and only divine creed. There is a crying need for Bible preaching today, instead of “canned sermons” filched from sectarian sources.
We must keep the church separate in worship. Unscriptural innovations are sinful and invalidate the worship. If it is wrong to use instrumental music in worship, it is wrong to worship where it is used. In fact, in so doing the effort would be in vain—“in vain do they worship me, teaching as their doctrine the commandments of men.”
Between Christians and innovators there is no basis of fellowship, nor even negotiation. Nehemiah refused Sanballat’s unity-meeting proposal which he wanted to hold on the plains on Ono. He wanted to stop Nehemiah’s work. [Denominations] today are modern Samaritan Sanballats—that is all. They would love to lure us to let the sound of the hammer cease and come to the plains of Ono...and talk unity. To do so is to virtually sign temporary armistice. Nehemiah knew exactly what to do with Sanballat and his wily proposition but a few brethren recently have let [denominations] modern Samaritans get them into conference.
No matter if a few strong speeches have been made—Nehemiah could have made a strong speech. The affiliation itself is wrong, the negotiations are wrong; it can only weaken the church and serve to dim the lines which should be the tauter drawn. All the advantages in such meetings, even if some loyal preacher “tears the rag off the bush,” are gained by the denominations—and they know it. We have neither time nor place for pseudo-unity conferences.
The Church Must be Kept Evangelistic.
There has been over-emphasis on missions and missionaries and an under-emphasis on New Testament evangelistic work. Let a Gospel preacher announce this week that he sails to Japan, China or Timbuctoo, and he is no longer a preacher, all at once he has become a missionary! The apostles did not establish missions—they preached the Gospel; people obeyed it, and in doing so became Christians, and that is the church. “Once a mission always a mission.”
Scripturally speaking, the “missionary” abroad is an evangelist of the gospel, so why not call them foreign evangelists, and send the word “missionary” back to the Catholics, from whence it was borrowed. It is significant that the word missionary is not in the Bible, nor is there a corresponding word in the Greek text. But one preacher said that the word missionary is derived from the same original textual word as the term apostle, and is therefore scriptural. When he was asked if he would be willing to call the missionaries by the name apostle, he had not thought of that! The preachers of the Gospel in any country, clime or language are evangelists, so why not call them that—it is a Bible word, which may be the reason some would want to call them something else!
The Church Must Be Kept Militant.
The spirit of pacificism (pa-cif-i-cism) is taking the fight out of the church. But the conflict between truth and error is unending. Victory does not come by truce. God’s terms are unconditional surrender. A questionnaire and survey, to determine what kind of writing and preaching a “brotherhood” wants, bear on the face of them a total lack of knowledge of the spirit and genius of the Gospel, or else a gross disregard for it on the part of the promoters. To receive such a thing is an insult to a Gospel preacher; and its circulation in the name of Gospel preaching and writing is a travesty on the spirit of Christ, Peter and John, Stephen and Paul.
The church grew when the fight was waged and the battles raged. When the let-up came in the fight, the let down came in the church. It is said that the denominations do not fight any more. That is because the church has quit fighting and they have nothing to fight. If Gospel preachers will fight now as Gospel preachers fought then, the denominations will fight now as they fought then and truth will triumph now as it triumphed then. Shall we yield to the line of least resistance, or shall we challenge error in its strongholds and citadels?
From The WATCHMAN, Volume 1, No. 4, April 2023. Editor: Jerry Brewer.
