Part 2
There are many spirits abroad at present, “gone out into the world.” The old “unclean spirit” is abroad in growing vigor, the spirit of idolatry or superstition. The infidel spirit is abroad. The worldly spirit is abroad – that energy which, with its ten thousand arts, is embellishing and furnishing its native place, using refinement of all sorts, morals, religion, intellectual culture and intellectual delights, science and music, books and pictures, everything that can set off and recommend the world, and linking “the million” with nobles in the enjoyment of it.
Thus is it in the history of this present hour. The affecting truth that Jesus is the rejected Jesus in this world, is practically forgotten in all this. That mystery is scorned by some, denied by others, slighted by others, and but coldly, carelessly, and feebly acted on by us who thoroughly and entirely own it among the deep and precious things of God. For we say, How could God meet anything in this world but rejection? The world had already departed from Him, ere He came into it. It had set up for itself long before, even from the days of Cain and the city of Enoch. But how deep-seated its enmity must be, when it refused to know such a one as Jesus!
This enmity of the world was as the enmity of the Jews, who could forget all their hatred of the Gentile, settled and rooted as that hatred was in the very heart of the nation, and say, in the desire to rid themselves of Him, “We have no king but Caesar.” They refused the waters of Shiloh that flowed softly, and rejoiced in Rezin and Remaliah’s son.
But confederacy has not closed its history, or spent all its energy yet. Far otherwise. It must be witnessed in full action at the end, as it was at the beginning. We have seen it in the early days of Babel, and in the matured meridian days of the Lord Jesus, and are still to see it in the declining days of the Apocalypse. And the “old Serpent” will be the life and instigator of confederacies at the end, as he was at the beginning, and hitherto. The book of the Apocalypse witnesses this, specially in the mysteries or symbols of the “Woman” and the “Beast.”
The Woman sits on many waters. Multitudes, tongues, nations, and peoples, all receive the cup of fornication at her hand. Kings of the earth, merchants of the earth, every shipmaster and sailor, and such as trade in the sea, are subject to her.
The Beast has the whole world wondering after him. In himself he combines the lion and the bear and the leopard, and he has ten horns and seven heads. The False Prophet ministers to him, and the kings, by one consent, give their power to him. All that dwell on the earth worship him. Small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, receive his mark in their forehead.
There are awful tokens of confederated energies of evil. And in them we see the beginning reproduced at the end. For confederacy is the mode or form in which man makes display of his natural pride and apostasy.
And in that form of confederation God will judge the revolted children of men speedily, as He has already done in early days. At the beginning, it was the alliance between the woman and the serpent that He broke, saying to the serpent, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman.”
It was those who were gathered in the rebel plain of Shinar that He scattered over the face of the whole earth.
And so it is the body of the Apocalyptic Woman in her pride, He will give to the burning flame; and His supper, “the supper of the Great God,” shall celebrate the doom and ruin of the Beast and his associates.
Our present victory, beloved, is by separation. Separation is holiness if it be separation to the place and character which the calling of God suggests.
The purpose of the serpent in the garden was to withdraw Eve from the condition in which the Lord God had put her. She was to sacrifice that, and get advancement from him. She consented; and at once as a “chaste virgin” she was ruined. Her purity was lost. Whatever she gained, she lost that. She lost what God had made her.
The church, like the Eve of Genesis 2, should be what the hand of God has made her, taking, as it has done in this age, the cross of Christ as its instrument or material. And that cross has brought her nigh to God, but estranged her from the world, and when the principles of the world propose to cultivate and advance the church, and such proposal is listened to, we see again, what of old we saw in Genesis 3, the mystic Eve has lost her virgin purity.
The proposal to advance the church by such means is attractive. But so was the proposal of the Serpent at the beginning, “Ye shall be as gods.” This was an angel of light, a minister of righteousness, in the judgment of flesh and blood. But it worked corruption and utter moral ruin, for it beguiled her from the state in which God had left her.
And this generation is doing its best to commend the world to the church, the tree to the woman again. It speaks as though the world were now a very different thing from what the cross of Christ has declared it and proved it to be. It speaks as if Christ were no longer a rejected Christ. But if the saint listen, as of old Eve did, he is so far corrupted – for he is surrendering the place, the condition, and the character, which the cross of Christ has given him and made him.
The serpent would fain give man a garden again. And a happier garden it shall be than God once gave him. He shall have every tree in it. The world shall be a wise world, a religious world, a cultivated world, a delight full place, and still advancing. The man of benevolence, the man of morals, the religious and the intellectual man, the man of refined pleasures, all will find their home in it. And this shall be the world’s oneness. And all who desire their fellow-creatures’ happiness, and the common rest after so many centuries of confusion and trouble, will surely not refuse to join this honorable and happy confederacy.
Nothing will withstand all this but “the love of the truth” – nothing but faith in that Word which gathers a sinner to Jesus and His blood, and the hopes of a poor world-wearied believer to Jesus and His kingdom. Come what may to you, beloved, though it be moral and refined, or religious in its hearing, it is “unrighteousness,” if it be not of “the truth.” (2 Thess. 2).
(To be continued)