Mere Profession
Another period of declension follows, and another deliverer. We saw that in Moab you have the bondage to a kinsman according to the flesh, but who has no spiritual relationship to the people of God. Moab was one of the children of Lot, and represents in that way an outward relationship without an inward reality, which you know is profession. Profession is a great and terrible enemy who settles down upon the people of God. Alas, the Church has many and many a time been under the fearful incubus of a barren, empty, Christless profession. The forms of orthodoxy may have been used, everything of that kind may have been quite according to the letter of Scripture, and yet there has been no power, no spiritual joy, nothing to answer to the living reality. The children of Israel, the true people of God, have been held down in bondage to this inert mass of profession that robs us of every enjoyment that we have. It is not Christ. Christ, beloved, is not profession, He is the very opposite of that. To know Christ is not even to be religious; to know Christ surely is not to make a profession. To have Christ before the soul is the very opposite of all that; it is to have in living reality communion with the Father and with the Son.
How profession sets Christ aside; how you will find that it can make itself a comfortable place in the world, it can rear its religious buildings, have its religious services; have its philanthropic work, and yet everything be icy cold, because it is profession without the living reality of Christ. You may be a Church member, a worker and all that, with an empty heart. Not profession, but Christ must be our portion.
What is the remedy for mere profession? What is the remedy for this incubus of Moab? This that is not Christ, but simply the profession of Christ? Ehud, the deliverer from the power of profession, is the "Confessor," as his name means. With the knife, which speaks of the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, he delivers the people of God from mere profession. To confess Christ! Ah, Christ Himself is the real Ehud in all his fullness. He was the Faithful Witness, One who ever confessed God, and because He confessed God in this world was put out of it. He is the true Confessor, and, beloved brethren, the power of the enemy that would bring us into mere profession, is overthrown by the confession of what Christ is, the enjoyment of the Lord Jesus in the soul.
God's own people are in danger of profession. If you are dwelling with your past experiences, instead of in present communion, you are under the power of Moab, for Moab dwells in the past in that way. You are having your past experiences, and making yourself a professor on the ground of past experiences. There must be the living enjoyment of Christ which, as it were, forces today's confession out of our lips.
And may there not be a further suggestion in this man's name? He is the confessor, he confesses the real state of things. He acknowledges, as it were, that this profession is nothing, that it is an absolute enemy to God; he confesses that. So in the power of the confession of our failure, the confession of the nothingness and emptiness of profession, you will have the power of Christ coming in to set us free from mere profession. Do you shrink with horror at the thought of being a professor? Then confess the fact; own it before God; open up the whole heart, the whole state of things, and there will be reality at least; and where there is reality Christ will come in.
You will remember that we saw a resemblance between the bondage to Moab and the state of the Church as described in Pergamos.