There is a striking parallel between the period that terminated with
the rejection of Christ by Israel, and the
period that ends with the judgments which will attend the public
return of the Lord from heaven. Now seeing how near this last
named event must be (without pretending to fix dates), consideration
of this parallel becomes an exceedingly solemn matter for all who
have ears to hear. Let us turn then to the instruction of God’s Word
about it.
Israel
as a nation was peculiarly favoured by God. This was not a product
of their own imagination but a certainty based upon a divine
revelation: “For thou art a holy people unto Jehovah thy God, and
thee hath Jehovah chosen for a people of possession unto himself,
out of all the peoples that are upon the face of earth” (Deut. 14:
2; see also 7: 7). God had made Himself known to them (see Exod. 6:
2–8). As such it could not be said of the Jews that they were
without the truth or destitute of divine light. There was no nation
on earth like Israel, and nor will there ever be.
As Paul says of them: “whose [is] the adoption, and the glory, and
the covenants, and the law–giving, and the service, and the
promises; whose [are] the fathers; and of whom, as according to
flesh, [is] the Christ, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen”
(Rom. 9: 4–5). Despite this, event
after event in the OT told of their rebellion against this divine
light and their lusting after other gods. Though God bore long with
His people’s unfaithfulness, eventually He allowed first the
Assyrians and then the Babylonians to carry them away into
captivity. When a chastened and feeble remnant returned many years
later, the curse of idolatry had been banished from their midst. The
house of Israel
was, in the language of the parable, “swept, and adorned” (Matt. 12:
44). Thus in the NT period, though surrounded by the idolatries of
the ruling Roman power, the Jewish nation remained steadfast in its
adherence to the worship of the one true God. Moses was read in the
synagogues every sabbath day (see Acts 15: 21), and many were “as to
righteousness which [is] in [the] law, found blameless” (Phil. 3:
6). It was into this favoured nation that the Christ was born.
Yet there was something badly amiss with the Jewish religion. If it
was to the house of Israel alone that the Messiah came
(see Matt. 15: 24), the greatest faith He found was
among the Gentiles (see Matt. 8: 10). The Lord Jesus
testified to one who would lay claim to what was not properly hers
that “salvation is of the Jews” (John 4: 22), but He was scathing in
his denunciation of what He found among His own people: “But woe
unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for ye shut up the
kingdom of the heavens before men; for
ye do not enter, nor do ye
suffer those that are entering to go in. Woe to you, scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites, for ye compass the sea and the dry [land] to
make one proselyte, and when he is become [such], ye make him
twofold more [the] son of hell than yourselves … Woe to you, scribes
and Pharisees, hypocrites, for ye pay tithes of mint and anise and
cummin, and ye have left aside the weightier matters of the law,
judgement and mercy and faith: these ye ought to have done and not
left those aside. Blind guides, who strain out the gnat, but drink
down the camel. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for
ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but within
they are full of rapine and intemperance …Thus also
ye, outwardly ye appear
righteous to men, but within are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness …
Serpents, offspring of vipers, how should ye escape the judgment of
hell?” (Matt. 23: 13, 15, 23–25, 28, 33). So the Lord addressed the
religious hierarchy of Judaism. It was not that they did not have
the light—no, they had that in abundance in the sense that they knew
the Scriptures. They held the revelation of God in their hands but
they resisted its claims on their hearts and so rejected the more
wonderful revelation of God in their midst. As He
Himself said “Ye search the scriptures, for ye think that in them ye
have life eternal, and they it is which bear witness concerning me;
and ye will not come to me that ye might have life” (John 5: 39,
40). The house of Israel in the
Lord’s day might have been “swept, and adorned” but it had no place
for Him. Indeed, the “last condition” of that “wicked generation”
will be “worse than the first” (Matt. 12: 44, 45) for they will
receive a false Messiah “come in his own name” (John 5: 43). Such
were the conditions among God’s earthly people at the Lord’s first
coming into this world.
“We are disciples of Moses” (John 9: 28) was the Jews’ boast, and
yet they rejected Him of whom Moses had written (see John 5: 46).
“Away with this [man]” and “Crucify, crucify him” they cried. Even
after the message of grace went out to the world “beginning at
Jerusalem”, the divine entreaty was rejected, and with the murder of
Stephen a message was sent up to heaven reiterating that “We will
not that this [man] should reign over us” (Luke 23: 18, 21;24: 47;
19: 14). God’s earthly people were given up to spiritual blindness
(see John 9: 39; Rom. 11: 7). As already demonstrated, none of this
was on account of an absence of truth deposited with the nation, but
nor was it on account of a formal denial of the truth either. By and
large the Jewish people were thoroughly orthodox. What brought on
their judicial blindness was the
twisting of truth—the
changing it into a lie—to sanction their rejection of God’s Christ.
“We have a law” they said “and according to [our] law he ought to
die, because he made himself Son of God” (John 19: 7). An unlearned
heathen would shortly exclaim that “Truly this [man] was Son
of God” (Matt. 27: 54), but these so–called doctors of the law were
“Fools and blind” (Matt. 23: 17). This dreadful state of affairs had
been long predicted: “Well spoke the Holy Spirit through Esaias the
prophet to our fathers, saying, Go to this people, and say, Hearing
ye shall hear and not understand, and seeing ye shall see, and not
perceive … lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their
ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted, and I
should heal them” (Acts 28: 25–27). And so, in the wisdom and
judgement of God, “wrath has come upon them to the uttermost” (1
Thess. 2: 16) and the Jews have been given “a spirit of slumber,
eyes not to see, and ears not to hear”, not just in the day of
visitation, but “unto this day” (Rom. 11: 8).
As a result of the rejection of God’s testimony by the Jews, the
Gospel went out to the Gentiles: “Be it known to you therefore, that
this salvation of God has been sent to the nations;
they also will hear [it]”
(Acts 28: 28). Yet it was this transfer of the testimony to the
Gentiles (the Jews being left to the blindness they had chosen) that
imposed responsibilities on Christendom which distinguish it from
mere pagan tribes. It may come as a surprise to some, but in
Europe
we are not simply Gentiles. We
are Gentiles, of
course, as distinguished from the Jews, but we
also have distinct
responsibilities that other Gentiles do not share. These
responsibilities flow from the testimony of God to us and among us
for many years which distinguish us from the nations which have
scarcely heard the Gospel until recently. Christendom has a
knowledge of God. There is a remarkable passage in Romans 1 which
will help illustrate what I mean.
In verses 19, 20 Paul speaks of the witness of creation, for which
light all the heathen are responsible. In verse 21 however, he
leaves aside what is “known of God … through the things that are
made”, and speaks expressly of some who actually
knew God: “Because,
knowing God …” (v21). He is referring to those who lived in the
years immediately following the flood. The immediate descendants of
Noah were not ignorant of God in the sense in which the heathen
nations are now ignorant—they had inherited a knowledge of the truth
from those who had witnessed God’s hand in judgement. They thus had
a higher responsibility—just as Christendom has a higher
responsibility today. Of course these inhabitants of the ancient
world did not know God as Saviour any more than the thousands of
professors know Him as Saviour now, but just as these know many of
the external facts of Christianity from others, so Noah’s
descendants knew God through the instructions and traditions of
their forefathers. But what did they do with this knowledge? They
did not rest until they had “changed the truth of God into
falsehood” for “they did not think good to have God in [their]
knowledge” (vs 25, 28)! To a much greater degree,
Christendom—meaning the sphere in which Christianity has long been
nominally recognised—has had a rich inheritance of truth deposited
with it, and is correspondingly responsible for what it has done
with that knowledge. Without question, Christendom has a knowledge
of God!
And what do we find foretold as to Christendom at the close? The old
adage says that history is forever repeating itself and thus the
state of Judaism at the Lord’s first coming is matched by the state
of the Christian profession at His second coming. We have seen that
the Jews, when they had the testimony of Moses and the prophets to
the Messiah which they expected, made “void the word of God” (Mark
7: 13), and chose a Messiah according to their own thoughts and
wishes, and rejected the Christ of God. So Christendom,
favoured with immeasurably greater
light, will in the end follow the same course, and like
Israel, be given up to judicial blindness. Is it not noteworthy that
the last of the seven assemblies in Revelation (which surely
corresponds to the end of the present dispensation) is told that she
is “poor, and blind, and naked” (Rev. 3:
17, my emphasis)? The Jews of the Lord’s day were rebuked with “This
people honour me with their lips, but their heart is far away from
me; ... teaching [as] teachings commandments of men” (Matt. 15: 8).
In the Christian era the time has surely come “when they will not
bear sound teaching; but according to their own lusts will heap up
to themselves teachers, having an itching ear; and they will turn
away their ear from the truth, and will have turned aside to fables”
(2 Tim. 4: 3, 4). The Jews in the NT were dominated by three schools
of thinking: the Herodians, the Sadducees, and the Pharisees (see
Matt. 22). The Herodians accommodated themselves to the political
situation of the day—Christendom is likewise marked by an adulterous
“friendship with the world” (James 4: 4). The Sadducees denied both
the supernatural and most of Scripture. This is precisely what is
preached in the majority of our pulpits today. The Pharisees were
the ritualists of their time, “which appear beautiful outwardly, but
within are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness” (Matt. 23:
27). And, brethren, do we not have to admit that there is now a
frightening amount of outward show and false profession abroad in
that which professes Christ’s name?
Things are moving rapidly on, and the day hastens when the Lord will
spue Christendom out of His mouth (see Rev. 3: 16). Of course before
that happens every true child of God will have been caught away to
meet the Lord in the air (see 1 Thess. 4: 17), for such are “not set
... for wrath” (1 Thess. 5: 9). What is left behind for judgment is
but a shell of empty profession. Yet soon even that veneer of
profession will be cast off. Rejection of God’s Man leads to
acceptance of the Devil’s man “whose coming is according to the
working of Satan and in all power and signs and wonders of
falsehood, and in all deceit of unrighteousness to them that perish, because they have not received not the love of the truth that
they might be saved” (2 Thess. 2: 9, 10, my emphasis). Notice that
is not because they are destitute of the truth, or because they have
not nominally received it, that men will travel on their
doomed course, but because they have not received the
love of the truth. For
this reason God shall send them “a working of error, that they
should believe what is false, that all might be judged who have not
believed the truth, but have found pleasure in unrighteousness” (vs.
11, 12.) This is the fearful secret in every case: a heart that has
pleasure in unrighteousness, and loves to practice it under shelter
of religious forms and pretensions, and so perverts the truth of God
to this end. If the Jew had “the
form of knowledge and of
truth in the law” (Rom. 2: 20, my emphasis), so these have “a
form of piety but
denying the power of it” (2 Tim. 3: 5, my emphasis). The word
translated form is the
same in both passages, and it occurs nowhere else. The parallel is
striking.
Thus as the Jews would have a messiah according to their own minds,
so now and hereafter men will have a Christianity according to their
own proud thoughts, and
God will let it be so.
He will send delusion to those who love to be deluded! Brethren,
these things are very close. While multitudes in China and Africa turn to Christ, the light in Europe is going out—and yet this is nominally a Christian
continent! And
England, favoured as the land of an
open Bible perhaps more than any other, leads the way—and
she loves to have it so. The Lord give us to tremble at His
word, and be faithful to it in these dark and closing days!
