01.09. Leaving the First Principles
Chapter 9 LEAVING THE FIRST PRINCIPLES. In the middle of the first century, Paul wrote to a church, and through it to all Christian churches, to leave first principles and go on to perfection.
He did not say "grow" to perfection, but "go." He did not say "towards perfection," which would mean a kind of approximation or camping in the neighborhood, but the command was to "go on TO perfection." Here was an arrival a getting somewhere; in other words, a definite experience.
Dr. Adam Clark says that a better translation is "Let us be borne on immediately into perfection." The first among the "principles" that the apostle mentioned was repentance. His idea was not to destroy a cardinal doctrine or an essential experience of the heart and mind in coming to God, but leaving repentance as something not to be done over again, we should sweep on to an establishing grace called holiness, or perfection, wherein the affections, will, and the whole life would be so bound to God that repentance in the old passed away sense would not be needed.
We were to leave it as the boy at school quits the alphabet for higher literature; and the multiplication table for advanced mathematics. Neither letters nor figures are despised or set aside, but they were simply means to a higher end, and having learned them as an opening lesson, a principle of knowledge, the boy now goes on to the culminating and crowning study and mental possession in logic and trigonometry. To see a school boy in the alphabet, and stalled in the multiplication table for years, would indicate beyond all doubt that the lad was a mental weakling or idiot.
Physicians pronounce such instances to be cases of "arrested development." It is always a melancholy object, and we find ourselves wondering as we see the outward physical shape all right, what could have happened to the mental mechanism within, that has led to this clogging of the wheels and permanent halt of the intellectual life before us. There he is in the alphabet, and laboring on the first division of the multiplication table, with no sign whatever of advancement. He has stopped at the first principles.
We have known boys who were not idiots, and yet could not get out of the preparatory or freshman classes at college. We knew a preacher who was five or six years on the first year’s course of study in theology in the itinerancy of the M. E. Church South. The report was that he would not study, he would not go on; in other words, he camped, in a scholastic sense, by the first principles.
Paul, in the first century, was trying to get a body of believers away from the primer and first reader of repentance to a salvation that needed not to be repented of, and that would deliver them from the up and down life and zigzag course of a mere beginner; and yet here, lo and behold, in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and ten, nearly two thousand years later, the great body of the preachers and members of the Christian church have their eyes fixed on what Paul regarded as first principles, and insist on going back to repentance.
Doubtless many of them do need repentance for the way they have treated "perfection," or holiness, and we question not there is a demand for godly sorrow on other lines, among the clergy and laity; but the point we are making is the wonder that after twenty centuries, multiplied thousands of Christian churches will not listen to the doctrine of holiness, but insist on having a preaching that properly belongs to the unillumined, unsaved and lost classes of humanity. In arranging for meetings, in calling evangelists, the condition exacted more and more is that holiness shall not be preached, but repentance instead shall be presented. The church ignores the Divine command to press on to the highest experience of the Christian life, and would return to the lower plane, uncertain light and gloomy camping place of a sinner getting ready to be saved. The proof of what we say is in the character of the evangelist and the subject matter of his discourse admitted into our large churches in the cities and towns of the land. He has to leave Perfection and go to Repentance, reversing Paul’s command, in order to get his call to and permission to stay through the meeting.
Some of them insist that they do preach holiness at certain times in these services, but it is noticeable that no one gets the blessing under them, and it is presented as a doctrine in such a vague way, so often confounded with growth, and there is such an utter dropping out of the definite seeking for the blessing and dying out at the altar, that no one needs to wonder that the people do not obtain the pearl of great price, the experience of entire sanctification.
Even at conferences and at some so-called holiness camp grounds, the brother who leads the camp meeting, or conducts the Pentecostal services, as they term it, must be famous, not for going to the bottom and top of the subject, but be well known for his careful avoidance of the life and death issue, and if handled at all, yet so delicately, carefully and ambiguously, that "everybody" will be pleased with the cautious speaker, who fails to put the audience under conviction and was never known to lead a soul into the genuine, unquestionable experience of entire sanctification.
One of these brethren told us once that he preached the doctrine and experience "with exceeding wisdom." He repeated the three words three times, laying great stress on the two concluding ones, "exceeding wisdom."
We asked him if any one ever obtained the blessing under this style of preaching. With decided embarrassment he replied: "No." We rejoined that we did not preach with "exceeding wisdom," for we did not possess that mental endowment, but with a full and overflowing heart we tried to make plain "the whole counsel of God," about this work of sanctifying grace, and had beheld thousands obtain the "blessing." Our style may not have pleased certain boards and committees, but it certainly had the endorsement of heaven and the constant approving smile and presence of God.
According to the divine plan laid down in the Bible, judgment must begin at the house of God; Zion must shine and burn, and then nations will flock to the light of her burning; the work must begin at Jerusalem and in the Upper Room with Christ’s own disciples. The church must obtain "perfection," and the world will sweep into "repentance." The people of God must receive the Baptism with the Holy Ghost, which "purifies" as well as "endues with power," and although only one hundred and twenty in number they will so awe, move, convict and reprove the world of sin when the Spirit comes to them, that three thousand sinners will be converted in the streets one day, five thousand the next, and after that daily such as shall be saved.
It makes the heart sad to see the time of the world’s salvation hindered and postponed by this mistake of the people. The world will never be taken for God by a church needing repentance, but by one filled with the Holy Ghost. So said the prophets; and so said Christ. In the prayer of the Saviour in the seventeenth chapter of John, He pleads for the sanctification of His disciples then and of those to follow thereafter, that the world might "believe" and "know" His great salvation, while in the sixteenth chapter of the same book the Lord distinctly states that the world would be reproved of sin after He had sent the Spirit upon them, His own disciples.
Somehow the Adversary has got the church to reverse God’s plan, and instead of leaving the first principles and going on to Perfection, they have ignored perfection, or holiness, and gone back to repentance. The congregations all over the land are kept in the alphabet until the great majority of the membership are but spiritual weaklings, and the house of God filled with moral dwarfs, who were brought into this condition by a case of arrested development.
Meantime the annual protracted meeting is held, and an evangelist secured with the full understanding that holiness as a work of grace, received instantaneously through consecration and faith in the blood of Christ, must not be preached, and only messages delivered that will bring a lot of half-awakened sinners into the church, and keep the church itself down in this same spiritual plane or condition, where these latest accessions dwell.
What a blow that is to the church of Christ, in the revelation that they bask in the same lesser light and feed on the same weaker food that is given to the unconverted and the newly regenerated, or "babes in Christ." Think of it! Members of the church converted ten, twenty and thirty years ago, turning from the "strong meat" that God wants them to have, and begging for the milk bottle of infants just born into the Kingdom!
Two questions we would ask here, that surely will be brought forth on the Final Day: First, to the churches of the land -- why do you insist that the evangelist and pastor reverse God’s order of saving men, and silence them in the main commission given them? Are such people wise above God? Turn to Ephesians 4:11-16 , where we are told that Christ gave evangelists, pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the saints! (regenerated people) for the edifying of the body of Christ, for their solid establishment, and then ultimately as a result, "the increase of the body."
Again is their throttling of the pastor and evangelist a dread of the light that comes by the preaching of holiness, the cost of obtaining the blessing, the sacrifices to be made, the giving up of reputation, talent, time and self? How contemptible such a crowd will be at the Judgment, where it will appear that they clamored for a preaching to outsiders and sinners, to save themselves from messages of God that would have laid their own proud heads and bodies in the dust. A second question is to all those pastors and evangelists who permit themselves to be cheated out of the highest results in works of grace by taking their orders from men, councils and sanhedrins instead of obeying God. Many do not, but some do.
Why do they allow themselves to be gagged and choked off in this way? Is it fear of man? Is it desire for popularity? Is it dread of a real Gospel battle? Is it lust for position and appointment? Is it love of money? What about this reversal of God’s method? What about the divine commission of the evangelist and pastor, changed and regulated to please man? What about the starving flocks, the unfed sheep, the powerless congregations that fill the land, and sinners going to hell by the drove in the face of a church spiritually helpless and unable to save them? And, finally, what about the death bed, and the Day of Judgment to a being who had the light, who knew his duty to God and man in these things, yet would not do it? And behold! the fallen, unjust steward said to the equally unfaithful tenants, "How much owest thou my Lord? So much? Well, sit down and write thirty for sixty, and fifty for one hundred, and especially write Repentance instead of Perfect Consecration and Full Salvation."
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