The Devil and the Church # 3

The Devil and the Church # 3

Men who sit in apostolic seats often through a marvelous blindness, sometimes through a false attachment to what they deem truth, and for what they consider the honor of Christ - are found trying to eliminate from the system of Christ those painful, offensive, unpopular, and self-denying features to which it owes all its saving efficacy, and beauty and power, and which stamp it as divine.

We have a painful illustration most instructive and warning in Peter, recorded thus: "From that time on Jesus began to explain to His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that He must be killed and on the third day be raised to life. Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him. "Never, Lord!" he said. "This shall never happen to You!" Jesus turned and said to Peter, "Get behind Me, satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; you do not have in mind the things of God but the things of men." Then Jesus said to His disciples, "If anyone would come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for Me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in His Father's glory with His angels, and then He will reward each person according to what he has done!" (Matthew 16:21-27).

Here is a lesson most suggestive, a lesson for all times, a warning for each man, for all men, for church men, for saintly men and for apostolic men. An apostle has become the mouthpiece of satan! Alarming, horrible, unnatural and revolting picture! An apostle, zealous for his Master's glory, advocating with fire and force a scheme which would forever destroy that glory! An apostle, the apostle Peter - satan's vice-regent! The apostle who had but just made that inspired confession, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God," which placed him in highest honor and commendation with Christ and the Church! Before the words of that divine and marvelous confession had died from his lips, this same apostle is the inflamed and self-willed advocate of views and plans which will render his confession void, and raze the impregnable and eternal foundations of the Church.

Peter, a chief apostle, fathering and advocating schemes which would discrown Christ of His Messiahship, and bring Heaven's favorite plan to a most disastrous and shameful end!

How did this come about? What baneful impulse impels Peter? satan has entered his and for the time being, has mastered his purposes, and so Christ reproves Peter, but in the reproof strikes a crushing blow at satan. "Get behind me, satan," a reminder and duplicate of the wilderness temptation. "You are a stumbling block to me." The devil's trigger to catch Christ in the devil's trap, "You do not have in mind the things of God - but the things of men."

The devil is not in sight. Man appears and his views are pressed to the front. The things which man savor in church plans and church life, are against God's plan. The high and holy principles of self-denial, of unworldliness of life, and of self-surrender to Christ - are all against men's view of religion, a losing thing with them. The devil does not seek to destroy the Church directly. Men's views would eliminate all these unpopular principles of the Cross, self-denial, life surrender and world surrender. But when this is done, the devil runs the Church. Then it becomes popular, cheery, flesh-pleasing, modern and progressive.

But it is the devil's church - founded on principles pleasing in every way to flesh and blood! No Christ is in it, no crucifixion of self, no crucifixion of the world, no eternal judgment, no everlasting hell, no eternal Heaven. Nothing is in it that savors of God - but all that savors of men. Man makes the devil's church, by turning Christ's Church over to worldly leaders. The world is sought and gained in the devil's church - but the man, the soul, Heaven, are all lost - lost to all eternity.

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 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.

~E. M. Bounds~

(continued with # 4)