THE LOST DOCTRINE--Part VI The Lost Practice of Separation (continued)

There is a doctrine that Modern Evangelicalism has purposely stolen and hidden from the folks. It is the doctrine of holiness and this is the sixth installment in a series on holiness here. Don't believe it? Do this (I know I've suggested this before, but it's really worth trying--really--DO IT!!): Go to your neighborhood ME bookstore. Ask for books on personal finances. Ask for the section on marriage. Even ask for specific books that will spice up your sex life. You'll find them. The clerk will know exactly which shelf they're on unless he/she is a newbie. Then ask for the section on holiness. For best results use the term "sanctification". When the clerk can't find the section, ask him/her if he/she knows what "sanctification" means. Especially if he/she is under forty, he/she won't even know what the word means.

I recently spoke with a man who wanted me to teach him Greek. I'll call him Gil. I refused because he only thinks he's a believer and because he refuses to learn Hebrew, which tells me he isn't all that into the Bible. Our conversation turned to holiness. (Imagine that!) I quoted Hebrews 12:14 to him. He considers himself a Christian, but unknown to Gil, he hates the Bible. He doesn't think so. Gil thinks he loves the Bible. Gil says so. He doesn't and I know that two ways. First, I quoted a very old memory verse to him. No only did he not know it, he didn't know the content. Now, not knowing a verse I know doesn't mean anything. I'm sure he knows verses I don't. The shocking thing he didn't know was the content. "Pursue peace with all men and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord."--NASB. He actually started arguing with a Bible verse! I told him it was a quote. He STILL argued! Which brings me to the second way I know he hates the Bible. He had actual scorn for the idea that holiness/sanctification was so integral to God's people that you couldn't be one of God's people if you don't practice holiness.

The hatred flashed and his mind was off to the no-holiness races. He had a ready argument against this concept and he had already started rattling off his debate points, spittle flying.

He hated it.

Which brings me to another thing I think is amazing. Namely, I get that same reaction a lot from people who would be considered Christians. Their friends consider them Christians. They consider themselves Christians yet they VISCERALLY and INSTINCTIVELY HATE the doctrine of holiness!

They aren't and can't be Christians. (Unless Hebrews 12:14 is wrong!!!)

Let me relate just one more short story before we actually get down to the levy on brass (brass tax--get it? Yeah, I know--it's tacks.) There's a pastor in this town. I'll call him Todd. I seriously considered joining his church. After this experience, I won't even consider it. We had talked a lot to each other. He is solid in the doctrines of grace. He is knowledgable in theology. He is smart and he seems to really base everything he does on Scripture. I had sought his advice on a number of things. I respected him. Until that afternoon. I forgot exactly what the conversation was about, but I mentioned "separation". That was the trigger. Todd's a soft-spoken, gentle, even-tempered guy. You might even call him mild. What I admired about him was his ability to be firm without being mean or emotional. A characteristic I lack at times.

You shoud have seen it. "Separation" was all it took. Todd's face scrunched up, his voice got tense and angry like I've never seen, and he told me in stark terms that separation was just an awful thing and he'd have nothing to do with it.

NEVER had I seen him ejaculate venom like this.

How do you explain this sort of hatred of a doctrine? Well let's take a look at some of those brass tacks.

In the fifth installment I gave a list of four corollary doctrines that have been lost along with The Lost Doctine of Holiness. Because holiness isn't appreciated, these other doctrines have been ignored, too. Here they are:

1. WE HAVE NO ANSWER TO THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. (The Lost Doctrine of the Ownership of God) Covered in the fifth installment.

2. WE DON'T UNDERSTAND THE SINFULNESS OF OUR SIN. (The Lost Doctrine of Our Moral Filth and Our Spiritual Hopelessness)
This is also called the doctrine of human depravity and flies in the face of much of MEism.

I know that I often refer to things from my youth. I don't mean to bore you or to talk to you like your grandpa who yearns for the good old days. I don't. On the other hand, I've been blessed and, perhaps, especially equipped to minister at this time because not only do I see these things in Scripture, but I also have seen the changes as these doctrines were declared outdated, stupid, too stodgy, and irrelevant. I lived through it.

I was there in Evangelical churches when we decided that we must learn to love ourselves. I was there when we decided that "hellfire" preaching was the reason unsaved folks hated us. I was there when we decided to believe the doctrine that doctrine was the problem. I was there when we decided to seek unity by forgetting doctrine.

I was there. I know by experience. This is partly personal testimony, a witness to what I've seen and lived.

One of the first things to go overboard was all the sin talk. I remember going around "witnessing" to folks with a Campus Crusade for a Very Effeminate Christ staff member using The Four Spiritual But Not Totally Biblical Laws. One of his very favorite lines, his opening line to segue the conversation from small talk to the little book that was going to save this guy, was this: "We're not here to talk to you about the terrible ten, the naughty nine, the dirty dozen..." This was usually followed by laughter from the staff member. He certainly wanted to assure our victim that we weren't there to point out his sin. Then we started with Law One, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

That's a lie on three levels.

First, it's simply wrong to say carte blanche to people on the street that God has a wonderful plan for their lives. The Scripture doesn't say any such thing. Starting in Genesis, God's plan for individuals varied. Read the blessing of Israel for his sons. It wasn't all wonderful and they were the chosen people. The first book of Samuel tells us that God's plan for Saul was an ingominious end. And even for the saints headed for heaven, God's plan for our earthly lives could be suffering and rejection. Oh, wait........I was wrong on that. God's plan for the saints IS persecution. Philippians 3, II Timothy 3:12.

Why are we lying to folks? Aren't we supposed to be telling them about the God of Truth? Does this make sense? And what if this guy does get saved despite the ham-headed misrepresentation of the gospel? What do you tell the guy when he reads in Scripture that he is heading for earthly misery because he's a Christian? Worse yet, what are you going to tell him when he EXPERIENCES it? (And he will experience it.) Unscrupulous salesmen lie about what they're selling. Christians aren't supposed to.

Second, this implies that God's plan needs your approval. The Four Spiritual Laws says that to get God's plan on track you have pray the magic prayer in the back of the tract. The Scripture has another opinion. Psalm 135:6 says, "Whatever the LORD pleases, He does, In heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps."--NASB. Hummmm....who's Brighter? (Pun intended.)

Third, to represent the first "Spiritual Law" as part of the Gospel is false. Jesus said that God hates people and plans eternal judgment for most of them. Where did Jesus say that? Pretty much all over the gospels. Read 'em, I dare ya'. Find all the passages where Jesus proclaimed God's love for sinners. Wait...I'll help you. John 3:16. That's pretty much it as far as I can see. If you know of another passage or two, please leave a comment. I want to be right. In Luke we read that He felt compassion for the rich young man and He spoke a lot about love. Other than John 3:16, though, the passages can be split into two categories, commands to love God and people and declarations of God's love for the saints.

When Jesus evangelized He always spoke of the wrath to come and the need to repent and believe. In other words, God hates sin and sinners and has a terrifying plan to punish both forever.

Here's another story. A few months ago a co-worker wanted to talk Bible and God. He said he believed in a loving god. The God of the Old Testament who killed all sorts of folks was just not right. I reminded him of the story of the whore and the other whore. The whore came into the other whore's house. The other whore was entertaining Jesus. The other whore thought he was acceptable to Jesus and God and when the first whore I mentioned came in anointing Jesus' feet with her tears and kisses and wiping His feet with her hair, the other whore got mad. He was upset that Jesus even talked to the first whore. Luke 7.

What was the difference between the two whores? HOLINESS. The crying, kissing, and hair-wiping whore knew about the galactic difference (holiness) between her and God!!!! The other whore didn't. As a result one was so thankful she couldn't express it in words and had to resort to abject self-humiliation at Jesus' feet to come close and the other one.......well, the other whore, the Pharisee, was just......smug.

For us today, we have a very odd message, this gospel. I told my friend to remember this story from Luke 7. He was familiar with it. I told him that the Scripture tells of both the love and the hatred God has for His sinful creatures. We're on a knife edge. On one side, without repentance, there is hell and God's hatred for evil forever. On the other side, there is mercy forever. BOTH are there. And Jesus emphasized the first side because that's what we must act upon. We're all headed for hell unless we act now and repent. Ephesians 2:3.

Take the Luke 7 analogy back in time. Just as those who realize something of their sinfulness are more thankful for God's grace, those who come to realize their filth in God's eyes and the hell to come are much more likely to repent.

Notice the repentance she wore that day. Men paid to kiss her lips. She kissed His feet. Men paid to run their hands through her hair. She wiped Jesus' feet with it. The very things once thought of as precious and used for self are now abased and used to worship God!




Be like the wise woman who came to repentance at Jesus' feet. Know that you're not the snow. Can that other stuff become snow? Can it smell like snow? Can it taste like snow? Offensive? Yes. I am more offensive to God! I need His mercy and I need it now and I need it deeply!

3. WE ARE NOT HOLY. (The Lost Doctrine of Personal Holiness)
This is the start of the brassiest of the brass tacks. Here, the rubber of holiness hits the road. God willing, I will take this on in the next installment.

4. WE FAIL TO SEPARATE FROM FALSE TEACHERS. (The Lost Doctrine of Corporate Holiness)
This is the raging hypocrisy that is the lie that defined MEism from the beginning in the middle of last century. But first things first.

A CHALLENGE: Speaking of the Lost Doctrine of Holiness and how it contrasts with the Modern Evangelical "gospel", go here. Here you will find a commercial that leads to a "gospel" presentation that has been applauded by the ME church profusely. Watch the commercial and then go to all the links. Thoughtfully evaluate it. Is it the biblical gospel? Why or why not? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Worshipping the Holy One of Israel,
Phil Perkins.

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THE LOST DOCTRINE--Part V The Lost Practice of Separation

REMEMBERING
For new readers, I was in the middle of a series I called The Lost Doctrine and was interrupted by a nasty work schedule last April. I had done four installments and you can read them here. If you pick up this series here without reading the first four installments, you won't get the entire picture. So please read the first four. Pay particular attention to the definition of holiness and how that affects the definition of God.

WHAT'S A COROLLARY?
The Bible is a miraculous book. Written by dozens of authors over centuries, it is nonetheless logically consistent, a seamless whole. The doctrines presented in Scripture don't stand alone like stalks of wheat so that one may be pulled and the others remain. They aren't independent ideas that can be mixed and matched. If you change grace, you change sin or the nature of God. If you change sin, you change the atonement. If you change the atonement and sin, you change the sin nature and, therefore, regeneration. And the doctrine of holiness isn't any different. The octrine of dholiness has a direct affect on what we believe and how we behave in the here and now.

So far, we've looked at the doctrine of holiness, a doctrine purposely abandoned and lost to most church goers in today's churches. And so far, we've primarily looked at the holiness of God. And the holiness of God, like all other doctrines, has logical consequences that can't really be avoided. If God is truly unique, radically other, completely separate, how can we be His progeny and still be just like our neighbors, but simply go to a particular place we call "church" one day a week.

In this installment I'd like to begin explaining four doctrines that are corollaries of the doctrine of the holiness of God. Because these four doctrines are logical outcomes of the doctrine of the holiness of God, and because we have abandoned the holiness of God in my generation we have four corresponding deficiencies in our lives.

1. WE HAVE NO ANSWER TO THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. (The Lost Doctrine of the Ownership of God)
The problem of evil can be succinctly stated this way: If your God is good and if He is all powerful, then evil things shouldn't happen to us. Or, why do bad things happen to good people?

As I often hear or watch "Christian " leaders in the media being asked questions and responding to situations, I am alarmed and saddened by how little they know of God. For instance, I recently read in my local paper an article written by an ME (Modern Evangelical) college professor who claimed that Jesus healed everyone He met who was sick or lame. Did he read the gospels? Or you will hear ME preachers on the national stage say that God could not possibly have meant some disaster as a judgment on an evil people. Why? Why does the world have to ask the church if God might be judging them when calamity comes? Don't they already know? They certainly already know what answer they want. And if, in their hearts, they didn't already know that it's likely that human evil just might be a cause for God's wrath, they wouldn't be asking. After all, the whole point of asking an expert is to get the comforting answer they already decided upon. And if the expert gives the wrong answer, we'll just ridicule him and ask another who, by now, certainly understands that to please us he'd better say God doesn't send disaster anymore.

There's a technical theological term for this sort of thing:


HOKEY, HOKEY HOGWASH!

I won't take time to get into this right here, but let me say that this is so unbiblical that it's actually heretical and it wasn't preached that way by Evangelicals even 50 years ago. Folks were actually told to be scared of God's wrath. Not now. In fact, it's official. Their god has purchased and donned a brand new poodle dress.

Recalling what I wrote in the previous installments, God's holiness is His uniquesness, His apartness, His otherness, and here is the reason we have no answer to the problem of evil: Going back we saw that on the holiness of God was a major theme of Genesis 1:1. Remember that? When the Scripture introduced God as the Creator, and the rest of all things as created, it was also a claim of differentness, apartness. Some of thoses differences include non-contingency vs. a completely contingent and dependent creation, Author of all that is vs. small beings that can only discover what is, Be-er of good because good is what He is vs. small beings that must be told moral principle and follow it or suffer the consequences, Owner vs. the owned, eternal vs. small beings closed into and dependent upon the space-time God created graciously for us.

There are two ways a Christian can answer the unbeliever when the objection to God is the problem of evil. One is to defend God. He didn't cause the evil...He caused the evil but for very good reasons...etc. Arguments of this first type may or may not be valid. In particular, the argument that God didn't cause the evil can be dangerous. Currently most of our leaders have opted to defend God. (I'm sure He's glad to have us on His side!) That would be okay if it was combined with the second type of argument, and if it was a biblical defense. It's often neither. The defense is often simply that God doesn't send judgment anymore.

Really? Where do you find He stopped hating and punishing evil in Scripture?

The second type of argument is foreign to us but is common in the Bible and Jewish thought. This second type is basically just one argument. In a nutshell this is it:

God owns you, so get used to it. After all He created you and lends you the air you breathe.

Until the last few decades and the appearance of MEism (Modern Evangelicalism or the New Evangelicalism) we preached a God who was a consuming fire. We preached a God so different from ourselves that the very idea that God should be measured by the same moral code we measure ourselves would be considered ridiculous. I contend it is ridiculous and the problem of evil, rather than being insightful and profound, is just whining in a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches.

In the Scripture we have the common analogy of the potter vs. the clay. The clay simply has no right to complain. Every decision is the prerogative of the potter. Any decision the clay is allowed is a gift, not an obligation on God's part. The clay has no standing to sue the potter.

The Scripture is a Jewish book. The Messiah is the Jewish Messiah. The One True God is the Jewish God. So how do (or did) the Jews see God and His relationship to men?

Let's finish with a passage of Jewish tradition written hundreds of years after Christ. This is oral tradition called Midrash, or exposition of Scripture, not recorded in writing until at least the second century. It comes out of the Jewish idea that God owned the creation, Israel, and each individual. Here it is:

"The Holy One, blessed be He, created days, and took to Himself the Sabbath; He created the months, and took to Himself the festivals; He created the years, and chose for Himself the Sabbatical Year; He created the Sabbatical Years, and chose for Himself the Jubilee Year; He created the nations, and chose for Himself Israel...He created the lands, and chose for Himself the land of Israel as a heave-offering from among all the other lands, as it is written: 'The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof.'"--Midrash Tehellim 24:3. (1)

Please notice a number of things. First, notice the title "Holy One". Imagine going to church and talking about "the Holy One of Israel"! Your peers would, no doubt, think something was wrong with you. You'd not be welcome. Yet, the unsaved Jews have traditionally thought this way. Why don't we? Second, notice that even before modern physics, the Jews saw time as finite and created, just like Augustine. All other worldviews have seen time as circular and infinite in duration. Some theories of modern physics and the Scripture agree that time had a beginning. God even owns time. That means He owns our lives.

God, then, has the right to end your life when He is pleased to do so and you have no right to call it evil.

That is the lost doctrine of God's ownership of each and everyone of us. The lost doctrine of the holiness of God effects everything. It is the cause for us losing God's ownership and explains why so many of us have no answer to "the problem of evil".

The next installment, God willing, will start dealing with three more lost doctrines that are the direct results of our sinful abandonment of the doctrine of the holiness of God.

In Christ,
Phil Perkins.

(1) Johnson, Paul; A History of the Jews; Harper and Rowe; New York, NY; 1987; pp. 18-19.

NEXT TIME:

2. WE DON'T UNDERSTAND THE SINFULNESS OF OUR SIN. (The Lost Doctrine of Our Moral Filth and Our Spiritual Hopelessness)

3.WE ARE NOT HOLY. (The Lost Doctrine of Personal Holiness)

4. WE FAIL TO SEPARATE FROM FALSE TEACHERS. (The Lost Doctrine of Corporate Holiness)

PASSING AN IMPORTANT BILL

Here's a logical chain for your consideration:

1. Bill is very religious, but he doesn't know much Scritpure.

2. Scripture is God's word to us as a group and to each one of us personally.

3. When one person loves another, the first listens to what the second has to say and reads his/her letters with great interest.

4. Scripture says the saints are new creatures, including a great love for God.

5. Because of point 1, we know Bill must not read much Scripture.

6. Because of point 5, we know Bill doesn't love God.

7. Because of points 4 and 6, we know Bill isn't regenerate.

Don't be a Bill.