Feb 26
25
Is. 35:10 And the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
A hundred doctrines floating in the head
By five minutes real communion with the Lord—we learn more, we know more, we receive more, we feel more, and we experience more than by a thousand years of merely studying the Scriptures, or using external forms, rites, and ceremonies. One truth written by the Spirit in the heart, will bring forth more fruit in the life, than a hundred doctrines floating in the head.
J.C.Philpot
Saving faith is not based upon one’s feelings but upon God’s faithfulness. It is able to embrace and rejoice in the promises of God. It needs no evidence or proof, only a word from the living God; being “Fully persuaded that what God has promised, He is able also to perform” (Romans 4:21); and realising that the only difference between God’s faithful promise and its perfect fulfilment is just a bit of time…. His appointed time!
Maurice Montgomery
More about the Infiltrators
Jude 4
False prophets are cunning infiltrators. Jude identifies apostate preachers as men who slither into churches “in unawares.” Their plan is to subtly infiltrate the kingdom of Christ. The Greek verb translated “crept” is never used anywhere else in the New Testament. It is a very rare word that has to do with cunning speech and clever debaters.
For instance, the word is used in extrabiblical literature in a legal sense to speak of someone who pleads a case very cleverly, with guile. It is used to represent a lawyer who plants a thought in the minds of a judge or a jury by trickery. It is used to describe a criminal who secretly slips back into the country after being exiled from it.
The word “crept’ means “entered in secretly.” That is precisely what false prophets do. Deceivers have a real problem with truthfulness, openness, and honesty. They never come in announcing, “I am a messenger of Satan, and I would like to join your church.” This word “crept” literally means, “to go down into and alongside.” False prophets go down into the church and get alongside believers. They pretend to believe; but they are Satan’s counterfeit prophets. As his servants, it is their determination to destroy the work of God. Such infiltration had already begun in Jude’s day. False prophets had moved into the church and were beginning to sow lies about who Christ is, what he has accomplished, and how he saves sinners. That form of attack is nothing new. It has gone on through the centuries, is still going on today, and will continue to go on until Christ comes again. The Puritan Thomas Manton wrote…
“When the Christian church began…there were adverse powers without ready to crush it, and Libertines who, like worms bred within the body, sought to devour the entrails and eat the very bowels of it. The first ringleader was Simon Magus, and there followed many…who, being once turned aside from the truth and the fellowship of the faithful, lost all awe of God, and were given up to a sottish judgment to believe all kinds of fables and fancies….In succeeding ages the devil hath often played over the old game, sometimes oppressing the church by the tyranny of pseudo-Christians…at other times corrupting the truth by error, or rendering it suspicious by the divisions about it. Heresies revolve as fashions, and in the course of a few years antiquated errors revive again.”
They are like those adversaries of Israel described in Ezra 4:2, who came to Zerubbabel saying, “Let us build with you: for we seek your God, as ye do; and we do sacrifice unto him,” though it was their intent to disrupt the work. They are like Simon Magus in Acts 8, who wanted to be baptized and acknowledged as a follower of Christ, though he was an enemy to Christ. Peter’s words have come to pass. — “There were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction” (2 Peter 2:1).
Don Fortner
Their
religion is hollow, unsubstantial, and unreal
(From Winslow’s, “Christ’s Intercession for Tried
Faith”)
The most beautiful ritual,
the most accurate creed,
the most costly religion,
the most splendid profession,
without Christ in the heart,
is but as fuel preparing for the
final and eternal conflagration.
What, my reader, if your religion
should prove to be nothing but chaff?
Does the bare probability startle you?
Ah! there are multitudes whom it might well
startle; for multitudes are thus deceived.
Not a grain of saving grace is found in their souls.
There is….
no vitality in their faith,
no solidity in their profession,
no substance in their religion.
Before every wind of false doctrine they bend, and
by each blast of temptation they are carried away.
The stubble of the field, and the chaff of the
threshing floor (fit emblems of their profession),
are not more unsubstantial and fleeting than it.
All is woeful deception!
They have substituted….
a form of godliness for its power;
union to the church for union to Christ;
the baptism of water for the regeneration of the Spirit;
gospel ordinances for sanctifying grace;
works of benevolence for faith in the Lord Jesus.
And thus their
religion is hollow, unsubstantial, and
unreal; possessing a “name to
live, they are dead.”
And what will be the end of such?
Departing into eternity in this state of soul deception;
building their hope of heaven upon this false foundation;
in their sad experience must be realized the awful
description which the evangelist gives of the judgment
power of Christ; “whose fan is in his hand, and he will
thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into his
barn; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable
fire.”
Thus will perish….
all human religions,
all false hopes,
all hollow professions,
all soul destroying doctrines;
the ‘wood, the hay, the stubble,’ of a
form of godliness, destitute of the power.
The
serpent’s poison taints infant veins
(Henry Law, “Numbers” 1858)
Alas! what broods of vileness nestle in man’s heart! As wave
succeeds to wave, sin presses on the heels of sin. If a brief calm seems to
give peace, a fiercer storm soon rises. The seeds of evil, for a while
concealed, revive as weeds in spring. All human history proves this.
We are pilgrims journeying through a wild wilderness. It is
infested with the old serpent and his brood. At every step, at every turn, we
meet some forked attack. Each day the mischief taints our veins. Satan’s least
touch is fatal venom. In Eden he began his murderous work. And still his fiery
darts fly round.
No mother’s son escapes.
The serpent’s poison taints infant veins.
All earth is perishing, but earth brings no relief.
SELF has no help.
The LAW is no physician. Its glance detects disease. Its voice
proclaims the hopeless state. But it holds no cordial remedy in its stores . It
denounces the leprous spots. It sternly sentences, and leaves the wounded to
expire.
MAN cannot help himself; or save his brother.
No rites,
no forms,
no services,
can suck out sin’s poison.
All are surely lost, unless God had decreed to heal. So all the
‘serpent-wounded’ upon earth must surely have sunk down to hell, unless free
mercy had most freely pitied. But He who said, ‘Raise up a serpent on the
pole’, said also, ‘Lift up My Son upon the accursed tree.
“And as Moses lifted up the serpent on a pole in the
wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up: that whosoever
believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” John 3:14-15
Morality
will keep you out of jail
(C.H.Spurgeon)
Morality will keep you out of jail —
but only the blood of Jesus will keep you out of Hell!
“He that believeth on
the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see
life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.” John
3:36
This
is one of the most foolish of all lies!
(Spurgeon, “Life’s Ever Springing Well” #864)
Some of you think, perhaps, because you have been to a place of worship from your youth up, and have
been doing your best to
lead reputable and respectable lives, that
perhaps you shall obtain salvation as a
matter of course; but it is not so.
You must learn that saving grace can only come
to you as the gift of mercy.
I have heard it said, and I have been horrified when
I have heard so gross a falsehood,
that there is in man something good,
noble, spiritual; and that the object of
the Christian minister in delivering the gospel
is to take away the ignorance and folly
that may overlay this innate nobility,
and so to bring out and train up the precious
vital spiritual life which lays latent
within the human heart.
This is one of the most foolish of all lies!
There is nothing spiritually good in man whatever by nature. The carnal mind is at enmity against God. We might rake the
ash heap of human nature a long time
before we found the priceless jewel
of spiritual life concealed within it.
Man is dead in sin.
How long will you search the sepulcher before you shall discover life within the
ribs of death?
Long enough may you ransack yonder mouldering
bones in the cemetery, before you
shall discover the germs of immortality within
the ashes of the departed.
If man were but faint, we might, perhaps, by a sort of ‘spiritual friction’ or electricity, arouse him to life.
If he were lying in a state of coma, we might, by some ‘gracious surgery’, at length rekindle the embers, and make the
life burn forth in its strength.
But when we are informed, over and over
again, by the Holy Spirit himself, that
man is not only dead, but that he is corrupt,
where is the hope of finding spiritual
life within him?
The living and incorruptible seed of grace
is not produced in men, by efforts of
their own, through the imitation of good
example, or through early instruction, or
through gradual reform.
Though for centuries the dead should be located in the neighbourhood of the living, they will not thereby come to life. For many a day might you read a homily upon life in the ears of the corpse before you shall thereby cause the skeleton to make any effort towards vitality.
Spiritual life is a gift, wholly a gift. It is given according to the good will and purpose of God. If the Lord gives this spiritual life to some and not to others, he is perfectly free to do as he wills with his own.
God will be debtor to no man. He
owes nothing to sinful man but wrath! Justice
awards me nothing but death. Sovereign
grace alone can bring me life. If
God chooses according to his good pleasure
to give a new and spiritual life to his chosen, none shall dare to question him.
“Ordained of God”
Jude 4 For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.
When we read such a passage as this and see it fulfilled before our eyes, we often ask, — “How could this have happened?” That is because we fail to give proper consideration to the most significant words in Jude 4 concerning the heretics who infiltrate gospel churches.
Divinely Purposed
Jude tells us that these serpentine preachers “were before of old ordained to this condemnation.” Their infiltration is by divine design. They could not find their way into Zion if the Lord our God did not wisely ordain it for good reasons. One of those reasons is stated plainly in 1 Corinthians 11:19. When heretics come among us, the Lord makes manifest who are his. His sheep hear the Good Shepherd’s voice and follow him. They hear not the voice of strangers.
They creep into the church and worm their way into people’s affections by pretense and insinuation (2 Timothy 3:1-7). They claim to promote righteousness and truth. Yet their doctrine is so corrupt and their motives so vile that they know their success depends entirely upon deceit. It is no marvel that Paul wrote as he did in 2 Corinthians 11, warning us to mark those who seek to destroy our souls with their beguiling doctrines.
Our most dangerous enemies are not godless politicians, but godless preachers, subtle enemies inside the church (2 Peter 2:1; 1 Timothy 4:1-3). In the night, when men sleep, Satan sows his tares among the wheat, that he might corrupt the church. His messengers creep into the church unsuspected, under falsely professed faith (Matthew 7:15; 2 Corinthians 11:13-15).
No Harm Done
Yet, there is no cause for alarm. They shall cause no real harm. The church and kingdom of Christ, God’s elect, are kept safe and secure. God’s purpose is not overthrown, or even hindered by our foes, but only served. Everything about them, including their work and their end, is according to the determinate counsel and eternal purpose of our all-wise and sovereign God.
Jude tells us that these false prophets “were before of old ordained to this condemnation.” Heresies and errors do not fall out by chance, but according to the certain and eternal purpose of our God. Nothing can come to pass without his will; and nothing can come to pass against his will. And nothing will injure his church and kingdom.
“Zion stands with hills surrounded;
Zion, kept by pow’r divine.
All her foes shall be confounded,
Though the world in arms combine.
Happy Zion, Happy Zion,
What a favoured lot is thine!
Don Fortner