When The Church Becomes A Whore

 

January 6, 2021

 

I wrote this a few days ago, but then thought maybe it was too strong and I put it aside. Now it isn’t strong enough. Shame, shame, shame on so many “professing Christians” who have abandoned the Way of the Prince of Peace.

 

What sacrilege, what idolatry. What a disgrace of the Gospel.

 

It seems we’ve traded the white linen of Christ for the brownshirts of the “man of lawlessness.”

 

Robert L. Withers

 

The Price of Infidelity – When the Church Becomes a Whore

 

How can we explain the alignment of professing Christians with people who engage in vitriol, weave webs of lies, and advocate lawlessness and violence? How can we explain the adoption of these sins by professing Christians?

 

How is it that those who purport to be followers of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, the Prince of Peace, engage in verbal and physical violence and intimidation; idolizing and defending the narcissistic and indefensible?

 

How is it that knowing that the devil is the accuser and slanderer, that professing Christians propagate accusations and slander?

 

Let’s remember that the primary Biblical image for idolatry is adultery, spiritual promiscuity. With this in mind, consider Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 6:15 – 20:

 

“Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Far from it! Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her? For He says, “The two shall become one flesh.” But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him. Flee sexual immorality. Every other sin that a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought for a price: therefore glorify God in your body.” (NASB)

 

While the immediate context of this passage is physical promiscuity, note the introduction of the spiritual in, “But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him.” As we see throughout the Bible, we become what we worship; we take on the characteristics of that which we join ourselves to – and no amount of rationalization can alter this fact. In 2 Corinthians 6:14 – 7:1 Paul writes:

 

“Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? Or what harmony has Christ with Belial, or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever? Or what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; just as God said,

 

“I will dwell in them and walk among them; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people, says the Lord. And do not touch the unclean; and I will welcome you. And I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to Me, says the Lord Almighty.

 

“Therefore, having these promises, believed, let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness n the fear of God.” (NASB)

 

So then, how do we account for the fact that so many professing Christians are manifesting the spirit of lawlessness and violence, rather than fulfilling their calling in Christ Jesus to be peacemakers (Matthew 5:9; Hebrews 12:14; James 3:13 – 18)?

 

It is because rather than being faithful to Christ as a pure virgin (2 Corinthians 11:1 – 3), much of His Bride as believed the, “Has God really said?” of the serpent. Having believed that, they have engaged in adultery with those elements which war against our Lord Jesus (Psalm 2) to the point where they take on the characteristics of these elements…forgetting that they are called to be the sons and daughters of the living God.

 

When God’s people join themselves to prostitutes, they take on the characteristics of prostitutes. Though as the Lord says concerning His people in Ezekiel 16:32 – 34:

 

“You adulteress wife, who takes strangers instead of her husband! Men give gifts to all harlots, but you give your gifts to all your lovers to bribe them to come to you from every direction for your harlotries. Thus you are different from those women in your harlotries, in that no one plays the harlot as you do, because you give money and no money is given you; thus you are different.”

 

 

 

Reflections on Hebrews with Andrew Murray (10)

 

“Who, when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.” Hebrews 1:3.

 

In considering this verse, Murray wants us to see that the work of Christ “…consists in two parts: the one on earth, the other in heaven.” The purification of sins speaks to us of Christ’s work on earth, the Crucifixion and all that it entails; the sitting down at the right hand of the Majesty directs our attention to Christ’s work in heaven. Murray writes that, “In a healthy Christian life we must know and hold fast both parts of Christ’s work.”

 

My own sense is that it is better to view the work of Christ as seamless in heaven and earth, and in earth and heaven; but the merit in Murray’s pastoral approach is to try to get us to ponder not only what Christ has done on earth, but also what Christ is doing in heaven. Murray continues:

 

“The work He did upon earth was but a beginning of the work He was to do in heaven; in the latter the work on earth finds its perfection and its glory. As Priest He completed the cleansing of sins here below; as Priest-King He sits on the right hand of the throne to apply His work, in heavenly power to dispense its blessings, and maintain within us the heavenly life.” Note Murray’s continued emphasis on the heavenly life within us. We will see how Christ applies His work as we progress through Hebrews.

 

Murray writes, “The full acceptance of the cleansing of sins…will be to us…the entrance into the heavenly life.” Murray tells us that God’s desire to cleanse us from our sins is “so intense that He gave His Son to die…”

 

While the glory of Christ’s perfect work unfolds in our progression through Hebrews, I’d like us to note the words ”full acceptance”, for it seems to me that many of us struggle with fully accepting the fact that Jesus Christ has indeed fully cleansed us of our sins.

 

I still recall a Sunday morning message that I preached many years ago on 1 John 1:1 – 2:2. Included in this passage is:

 

“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness…And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins…”

 

After the service various people in the congregation came up to me to tell me that they had never realized there were these precious promises of God in Christ. This struck me because many of these people had been in the church for years, some were leaders; and I knew that the pastor before me, and at least one pastor before him, were committed to Christ and His Gospel. Since then I have encountered this reaction many times, in various settings, including in settings which purport to emphasize the fundamentals of the Gospel.

 

In some settings people know the right things to say about forgiveness of sins, but their lives do not manifest the assurance of what they say, for they continue to functionally frame life in terms of their forgiveness and salvation being contingent upon themselves. In other settings preachers and teachers may preach the above passage from First John, or passages such as Romans 5:1 – 11, but then they undermine Christ’s perfect work of salvation by creating salvific insecurities in people by making them think that there is still something that a man or woman can add to “seal the salvific deal.” Perhaps there is a “higher” revelation, a greater teaching, a consummating experience, that a person must have to be fully accepted by God in Christ.

 

I can’t pretend to understand why this failure to accept the work of Christ is so, but I do know that I constantly encounter it among people who should know better. I agree with Murray that we must fully accept the glory, in Christ, of the forgiveness of our sins if we are to know the glorious heavenly life of Jesus Christ. Murray tells us that God’s love for us, and His desire to cleanse us of our sins, was “so intense that He gave His Son to die.”

 

Can we glimpse this intensity in Romans 5:8 – 10?

 

“But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.”

 

Why cannot we live securely in the love of our Great and Wonderful God? What can we possibly add to such a glorious and wondrous and passionate and intense love?

 

It is our Father’s deep desire that in Christ the life of heaven would live in us. O the treasures that are ours in Jesus Christ (Colossians 2:2 – 3).

 

May I gently ask, have you fully accepted the cleansing of your sins in Jesus Christ? Is the heavenly life of Jesus Christ now living within you? Please ponder Romans 5:1 – 11 and 1 John 1:1 – 2:2. Where are you in these passages?

 

Never ever forget the intense love that God has for you in and through Jesus Christ.

Two Psalms; Two Ways

 

Over the past several weeks, as I have dealt with my own fatigue regarding the chaos surrounding us; from the pandemic, to the suffering of the world and the people in my own country, to a failure of political leadership which fiddles while its citizens suffer and its national security rots, to much of the white “Evangelical” church trading the Lamb of Revelation Chapter 14 for the political and economic beast of Revelation Chapter 13, I have faced the temptation to just “go fishing.”

 

What I mean by “go fishing” is to hang a sign on the shop door which says, “Closed, gone fishing,” meaning that I’ll shut down for a while and come back in a few weeks or months and see how the world and church are doing. But, life is a marathon and when we hit our heartbreak hills the importance of patient endurance becomes more apparent than ever – we continue in faithfulness to Christ and others, we continue in intercessory prayer and living, we continue in desiring to serve people in Jesus Christ; we remain on the course no matter how painful it is to put one foot in front of another. We do this because we love Jesus Christ and we love people – we do not do this primarily for ourselves; this is not about me (or you), it is about Christ and others (Hebrews 12:1-3; 1 John 3:16; 2 Timothy 2:10).

 

I’m reminded of a book that Bishop Fulton Sheen wrote, The Priest Is Not His Own, in which Sheen’s central thrust is that the priest is both priest and sacrifice, which of course speaks to us of our Lord Jesus. If we are indeed a priesthood in Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:9; Revelation 1:6), then our calling to be priest and sacrifice is clear – no matter what “Christian” self-centered heresies may teach.  

 

No doubt there have been times when you’ve seen photos or video of the aftermath of earthquakes in nations with shoddy and unscrupulous building practices. Multistory apartment buildings lie in rubble, beneath which are lifeless bodies whose lives were snatched from them in what they thought was a secure home. The morning of the tragedy it is unlikely that any of the deceased wondered, “Will my home crumble today, will it fail to withstand the shock of an earthquake?”

 

When watching such scenes have you ever thought, “That would never happen in the United States because our building codes are better than other most nations and they are enforced”?

 

Paul writes that we, as God’s People, are to grow up in the unity of the faith, becoming a mature corporate Man, “to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fulness of Christ. So that we will no longer be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming…” (Ephesians 4:13b – 14).

 

One of the things that the present chaos has revealed, to those who care to “see”, is that the professing church in the United States is childish, and that our insatiable desire to be entertained, to have our egos stroked, to be fascinated by talking heads and political events, to be excited by eschatological fancies that require nothing of us but imagination and gullibility; has led to us being buried beneath piles of rubble. In our drunkenness we cannot see the rubble, we cannot feel it, for we are blinded and desensitized.

 

I do not think it hyperbole to consider that we are seeing a great apostasy in the professing church (2 Thess. 2:3) in which we would rather have Barabbas than Jesus, in which we would rather be imprinted with the mark of the beast than of the Lamb (Rev. chapters 13 and 14). I am not saying that this is “the” “falling away/apostasy” of 2 Thessalonians, but whatever it is, we see the working of the “man of lawlessness” when we see professing Christians abandon fidelity to Christ for fidelity to political, national, cultural, and economic agendas. There is a reason the Apostle John discusses the world and the antichrist in the same breath (1 John 2:15 – 17).

 

There are no better passages with which to begin the new year than Psalms 1 and 2. In Psalm 1 we have two ways, sinful man’s way and God’s Way. In Psalm 2 we have two kingdoms, the kingdom of this present age and the Kingdom of God; we can either align ourselves with the rulers of this world (Ephesians 6:12) or we can live under the dominion of the King of kings and Lord of lords, Jesus Christ.

 

Every day of this new year we will either be living in the “way of the wicked” or the “Way of the Righteous” (Psalm 1:6).

 

Every day of this new year we will either be living as citizens and subjects of the nations and rulers of this age, or as citizens of the Kingdom of God and subjects of the King of that kingdom, the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

Which shall it be in my life?

 

What about your life?

 

Perhaps you might consider making these two psalms a focus of meditation for January?