These solemn warnings given by the Lord Jesus come to us with renewed force, because of the times in which we live. We hear of God and of Christ, of the Gospel, and of the Atonement from many a pulpit, but then we hear much else from the lips of those who speak which forces us to the conclusion that these words do not mean to them what they mean to the true Christian.

The air must be cleared – hence the need of controversy. The church was founded in controversy. We have only to read the Book of Acts and the Epistles to see that this is true.

When the apostles preached Jesus and the Resurrection, the religious leaders said: “Ye have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.” The Apostolic preachers were described as men “who turned the world upside down,” and men “who exceedingly trouble the city.” A great part of the New Testament was born in controversy, much of it being written to set someone or other right. Paul was “set for the defence of the Gospel.” He engaged in controversy and “gave place, no, not for an hour; that the truth of the Gospel might continue with you.”

In every hour of crisis, the truth has been preserved, because of “God-raised” men who dared to stand alone. Athanasius and Luther were accused of being “troublers in Israel,” but then the Lord’s messengers have ever been troublers of sinful men.

In our day too there are many who decry controversy. Now, if a burglar comes into my house or into the premises where I work, I am forced to take a very personal interest in his operations. Is it true then that I am more interested in my personal property, i.e., in material things, than in things which are eternal, and upon which depend my soul’s salvation? God forbid!

When men who come in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves, seek to destroy the things in which I believe, and to lead others astray, I would be a contemptible coward if I kept silent. Yet many sit in silence and in attitude if not in word, by penny in the plate or pew rent, seek peace in their beloved church, where peace means victory for the enemies of Christ.

In commenting on the passage: “Take heed what ye hear; with what measure ye mete it shall be measured unto you; and more shall be given unto you” (Mark 4:24), Morison says:

There is a warning against hearing what should not be heard. If we hear, concerning others what we should not hear, others will in all likelihood hear concerning us what we would not like them to hear; there will be retribution – retribution with a surplus. We will be paid back with interest.

Charles Hodge, who strange to say, is quoted on both sides of the ocean just at present, by ecclesiastical politicians in support of views he would have regarded with the utmost abhorrence, says; “The exhortation in Mark 4:24, may be understood as including an exhortation to be careful as to what we hear. Salvation does not come from hearing error. It is of the last importance, therefore, that we take heed what we hear. Never go where error is taught. This is as foolish as going into places of dissipation and debauchery, or profanity: or as foolish as going into pestiferous regions, unless in either case on errands of mercy. If from curiosity or amusement the result will be evil in the one case or the other.”

If there is to be retribution when we hear things concerning others which we should not hear, how much greater shall the retribution be for those who hear Lord’s Day after Lord’s Day things concerning the Person and Work of the Lord Jesus Christ which they should not hear.

Here we arrive at what is the root of the whole matter. Have Christian people of today any clear conception of what is included in the phrase: The Person and Work of the Lord Jesus Christ? In other words, have they any clear conception of what the Gospel really is? It is to be feared that in very many cases they have not. If they had things would not be as they are.

Before stating what the Gospel really is, we would speak of what may be called the “Presuppositions” of the Gospel. The first of these is the Holiness of God.

The Holiness of God⤒🔗

In the Old Testament times the inspired Prophets warned the people of Israel that God had punished, and would punish them severely for their sins because He had sworn by His Holiness, and when they refused to return, though warned by the just judgements of the Holy One of Israel, the word of the Lord to them was: “Therefore thus will I do unto thee O Israel; and because I will do this unto thee, prepare to meet thy God, O Israel” (Amos 4). The warning, “Prepare to meet thy God” derives its force from the fact that God is a Holy God.

The New Testament, too, speaks of God as One who is a consuming fire.

Very different is the God preached from the moderns pulpit. He is an easy going sort of character. His heaven will be full, and His hell empty – if there is hell at all, for with the moderns minister the topography of the unseen world is very uncertain.

He prefers not to mention that dread word – Hell – at all, as it is, he would tell you, so bound up with the awful horrors of the old theology. He scoffs at what he calls the burning hell and the angry God of preachers of generations past and of some still. He will find it hard to produce more awful words about hell and future punishment than those which fell from the lips of the Lord himself, and so in scoffing, he scoffs at the One to whose “spirit” he professes to be so loyal.

I have heard a Professor of Systematic Theology deride the preaching of one now in glory who warned men to flee from the wrath to come, and I have listened to the jeer of the student at the reading of the 20^th chapter of Revelation.

Those whom they deride – like Jonathan Edwards and Murray McCheyne – saw men and women trembling on the brink of a lost eternity, and with this vision before them they preached the Word, and cried to God for souls. Jonathan Edwards preached on the subject of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and the influence was so great on the congregation that strong men and women cried and screamed for mercy, and even grabbed the seats for fear they would slide into hell that very moment.

There is little such tone in the pulpit today. The heaven of the moderns preacher would be full – but full of sin.

The natural man will, of course, find it easier to trust in the God whom modern men set before him – but then is he worth trusting in? It is only through the work of the Holy Spirit that we come to faith in the God of awful holiness of whom Scripture speaks, but then when we are brought to trust him, we can go through the waters and through the fire.

The Separateness of Sinful Man←⤒🔗

The second presupposition of the Gospel is the separateness of sinful man from a Holy God. Today we often hear the appeal made to the latent forces within a man: “Be a man, not a mutt or a molly coddle.” “Hold up your head, throw back your shoulders, look the world straight in the eye, and make your decision for Christ.”

This advice does not exactly tally with God’s account of man, his fallen state, and inability to remedy that state.

It was the close of a service (not in a Presbyterian Church). The speaker had explained to the congregation how much more advanced and enlightened a conception of human nature we now had than that which was drawn by many from these passages he was reading – Isaiah 1 – “From head to foot no soundness – full of wounds, bruises, putrefying sores.” He greeted the old man at the door, I think, with outstretched hand, and said, “How are you brother?” There was no response, but, “Where did you get that?” “Get what?” said the preacher. “That – what you said this morning about the state of man. Why, man, that was just my picture – full of wounds, bruises, putrefying sores, and see here! ye’re nae brother o’ mine.”

Human nature is not so bad after all, saith the moderns pulpit. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,” saith the Word of God.

Now in all the foregoing there is not a word of Gospel. Let me repeat that nothing is more amazing than the ignorance among even those whom we believe to be Christians of what the Gospel really is. But there certainly is no Gospel or “good-news” in the awful holiness of God. It brings but the cry, “Woe is me for I am undone.” There is no Gospel in the separateness of sinful man from a holy God, for it is not good news to tell a man that he is in “a pit and miry clay.” A great many people think that if they have heard that little word “God” and some Scripture verses quoted they have heard the Gospel. They forget that there is no particular virtue in the use of the word “God”, unless you know what conception the individual in question has of God. The speaker may even have said nothing but what was absolutely true, and yet as a setting forth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, it was absolutely false. What is the Gospel? It is not of works, for “to him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness.”

When we speak of faith, someone asks, do we not speak of something that we do and is it not because we exercise faith that we merit salvation? To this we reply that the meritorious ground of our salvation is to be found in the work of Christ on Calvary and in that work alone. We are saved not through merit of our own or anything that we do, but through the precious blood of the Lord Jesus. Faith is simply the hand outstretched to take the gift. There is no merit in stretching forth the hand. The merit lies elsewhere – in the gift, or rather in the giver. The Gospel is not a Gospel of faith plus works for “the ox of mercy and the ass of merit cannot be yoked together” and the best that we can do will only undo us. The man who speaks of doing and believing in the same mouthful has little inkling of what the Gospel of Christ really is, for “if it is by grace, it is no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace.”

It is not of ourselves. We are told to be Christ-like and all shall be well. There is no “good-news” in such advice to a “world of sinners lost and ruined by the fall.” It is simply no use bidding birds with broken wings soar above the clouds. The only message for a sinner is that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners – not to induce or help or enable them to save themselves, for to prepare a way of salvation for them, but to finish the work.

If the Gospel message is that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” then the questions “Who Jesus was” and “What he did” are of vast importance.

Now there are many who go round today saying that Modernists do not believe in the deity of Christ. That may be true, but we confess that we have the feeling that it is scarcely wise sometimes to put it that way. Very few Modernists would be sufficiently candid to say so. Many of them are quite willing to affirm their belief in the Deity of Christ. This affirmation, however, is of small value – though it is of some value as a means of satisfying many who are only too willing to have dust thrown in their eyes. Alongside of their affirmation of the Deity of Christ, we place such things as their emphatic denial: “He was not a Deity stalking through life omnipotent, omniscient” (Record of Trial p99) and their affirmation that “the suffering and agony in Gethsemane and on Calvary was simply the suffering and agony of a human being, save so far as God is in all suffering.” The Saviour of whom they speak did not understand Himself or His mission to earth even in the closing scenes of His life, and his views on many questions are not acceptable to the modern minds. Can one take such a Saviour to his heart in that unqualified sense which constitutes the glory of religious trust?

Not long since, the teaching of the Epistles of Paul was the great rock of offense to these men and they cried “Not Paul but Jesus.” Now they are forced to acknowledge (the more honest of them, at least) that in the consciousness and teaching of Jesus there is a solid pre-formation or anticipation, as it were, of Pauline doctrine. The question has now become “which Jesus?” – the historical Jesus of the Scriptures or the popular figure of the man of Galilee who appeals to the moderns mind.

How then can a Modernist affirm, as we have heard them do, that “there are three Persons in the Godhead: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory”?

Observe First,←↰⤒🔗

that he bases his faith in these “useful conceptions” in great part on “experience”. For ourselves we prefer the solid rock of the teaching of Holy Writ. In a dream of the night the devil affirmed to Dr Henry Cooke, “I have more experience than you; I have seen what you never saw; I have heard what you could never hear; I have been in heaven where you never were; and I now affirm on indisputable authority – the authority of my own personal knowledge – that Jesus Christ is not God.” “And I affirm” said Cooke, with such vehemence that he awoke from his sleep, “I affirm on the infallible testimony of God’s own Word that when the devil speaketh a lie, which this is, he speaketh of his own; for he is a liar and the father of it.” The devil is not quite so candid nowadays, but he is still trying to get men away from the Word of God, on to the “sinking sands” of experience.

Observe Second,←↰⤒🔗

that from the professor’s chair we have been told that the old distinctions between the divine and human we no longer hold, and that the human was from the beginning capable of expressing the divine. So we need a definition of terms. A licentiate not long since was honest enough to acknowledge the fundamental difference between us was a difference about God. Exactly – and could you have a more fundamental difference than a difference about God?

But why be so anxious about the Person or Deity of Christ? Why not stop all this argument and unite in simple love to Jesus and the service of humanity? This sounds very nice, but suppose, as Dr Machen puts it, I have a sum of money to invest. A friend tells me that the man with whom I intend to invest the money is not all he claimed to be – is not perfectly trustworthy. I say, “Oh, well, there may be a difference of opinion as to this man’s character but let’s have no unpleasant controversy; let’s simply trust him” My friend, if he were a wise man, would soon see to it that I was under proper guardianship and control.

I have what is infinitely more precious than the whole world – a never dying soul. As I am brought under conviction of sin, and see the awful holiness of God and my own undone state, how can I ever be brought to say with all my soul of One who is more or less trustworthy, and to Whose person I am more or less indifferent: “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have entrusted unto Him against that day”?

Then again they tell us “There is the fact of salvation, but many theories about it. We believe in the fact of the Atonement. Why quarrel about the theories of the Atonement?”

A bare fact is something that happened, and the bare fact of history is, that a Jew was lifted up on a cross some 1900 years ago. That bare fact will save no-one.

But praise the Lord, He has not left us thus in the dark, for He does not love darkness rather than light. He has given us not merely the fact, but the explanation of the fact, for the Word of God teaches us that He died “to satisfy divine justice and reconcile us to God.” O how crude an idea this is, we are immediately told. This is the picture of an angry God waiting to be appeased or placated by sacrifice. What a barbarous conception of God! Would that those who say this would read their Bibles a little. There they would see that it was God in the Person of the Father who sent His only begotten Son, it was God in the Person of the Son who gave himself a sacrifice for sin, and it is God in the Person of the Holy Spirit who applies the work of Christ. Is this a barbarous conception? Nay, it is infinite love – costly love. He died to satisfy divine justice and reconcile us to God. This is the Gospel, and the curse of God is upon every other.

The differences then being so fundamental how can the believer abide under such an unequal yoke with those who are worshippers of another God, preach another Gospel, and have another seat of authority than the Word of God?

We ask people to face plain facts – e.g. – that the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland voted by an overwhelming majority in favour of such teaching, and that such doctrine is taught from many a pulpit today. No pleas of orthodoxy or strokes of policy (such as the abandonment at present to change the formula of subscription) should be allowed to blind the eyes of the Lord’s people to the facts that those who are supposed to train young men for the ministry – and we testify that which we have seen and know – deny the reliability of God’s Word, that some of these same men are conveners of most of the Mission Boards of the Church, and with them in the church courts and in their attitude to the record which God has given us in His Son, are ranged in the great majority of the ministers of the Church. In view of these facts, what is the evident will of God? We refer those content to abide under the unequal yoke in hope of some future landslide to such scriptures as Haggai 2:11-14; 2 Cor. 6:14-18; 2 Jn. 10-11; Rev. 18:4.

It has long been our conviction that however wise and useful it may be to remain in a church in the first stages of her declension, after the church has become corrupt there remains but one course in accord with the Word of God – to come out of her.