Confronting Apostasy

“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.” -MARTIN LUTHER

Introduction

There is a battle to be waged. Contending for the Faith once for all delivered unto the saints, is to be engaged in that battle. I am not talking about prayer walks, reconciliation walks, or national days of prayer and intercession. When the battle is raging and there is something to be lost, I mean really lost, or something to be regained then those other things are nothing more than religious hobby-craft carried out by self important purveyors of popular religion. Once the light comes on in your spirit, then you are enlisted, then you either join the resistance or join the enemy. There is no middle ground that must be held, that is the ground where cowards die. It is either fight or flight. Those who weep, and grieve, and remember, long for the fight; it is a fight to remove the reproach that has been attached to their God, His Son, and the Sons Bride.

But, where is this battle to be fought, on what front? On the front of FAITH and repentance. The kind of Spiritual warfare that we are talking about here is where a person simply and only, because of love for God; simply and only, because of what the Bible says, takes his life in his teeth and goes to war against everything and everyone around him that is a contradiction of that Faith in the Living God. If this means loss of family affection, so be it. If it means loss of job and profits, career and respect, deal with it. It could mean ending up alone and rejected, misunderstood and hated; “rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for so persecuted they the Prophets which were before you.”

It seems that everyone who recognizes that the battle is on has one goal, and that is to tell everyone else that the battle is on. There work is very convincing. I have read and re-read much of it and am convinced, so now what do I do? Are we to just run off in any direction and sound alarms without a plan; is this the way the Lord wants us to wage this spiritual warfare? Well, even this method has merit over doing nothing. But, many will fall without proper preparation. As Shakespeare once wrote “’Though this be madness yet there is method in it”. The Remnant has always been out numbered and out gunned, but God will show forth His glory, and it will not come by way of man’s magnificence or of his efforts. As Nehemiah showed in the rebuilding of the wall around Jerusalem, what may look like “madness” to the uninitiated is the power of God in restoration. I am not here talking about restoring all that the Church has become, back to its former glory, but rather allowing God to taking what remains, in the face of impossible odds, and to secure it unto Himself, for His glory. Many will see some former glory of Reformation years and despise these “days of small beginnings,” but smallness and insignificance in the hands of the Almighty means He receives the glory.

What is our Motivation?

“I am doing a great work….” Neh 6:3

Nehemiah said that he was doing a great work and that God had put it into his heart. Our motivation is with the great work of Nehemiah that is its spiritual equivalent. To understand that great work we must understand what the “wall” illustrates and what it is that God is doing in our time. That wall represents the spiritual condition of the Lord’s people at that time and this. To see the condition of the wall was to see the condition of the people themselves (the Church). When we look at the condition of the wall we have no trouble making the transition from that time to our own time and seeing what needs to be done.

To understand this great work of Nehemiah is to grasp the principle that drove him, that propelled him, and maintained his focus, against a devastating resistance. All the real greatness of America was not based on a principle of something worth living for, but rather on something worth dying for. For America that something was Liberty, and all that it encompassed. In these rapidly waning days of that Liberty it is once again necessary to lay hold of the true meaning of Liberty, not for the sake of a nation, but for the sake of our God. What the restoration of the wall represents for us today is a recovering of the Lord’s Testimony in all of its fullness: the proof of our faith, and the evidence of His faithfulness through obedience, in the face of ever mounting odds, to recover something worth dying for, the Living God.

What the Condition of the Wall Represents

They were bankrupt and in bondage and the death knell had been sounded. Very often a business will look strong and vibrant just before the doors close, because it was all a front to appear to be something it wasn’t. A last ditch effort is made to pull itself out of a nose dive that nearly always ends in bankruptcy. What was meant to show a profit ends in a great loss because of being misguided or its leaders just plain ignorant; the truth is that people perish because of the lack of knowledge, both in this world and the next.

“And there was a great outcry of the people and their wives against their Jewish brethren. For there were those who said, ‘We, our sons, and our daughters are many; therefore let us get grain, that we may eat and live.’ There were also some who said, ‘We have mortgaged our lands and vineyards and houses, that we might buy grain because of the famine.’ There were also those who said, ‘We have borrowed money for the king’s tax on our lands and vineyards. Yet now our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children as their children; and indeed we are forcing our sons and our daughters to be slaves, and some of our daughters have been brought into slavery. It is not in our power to redeem them, for other men have our lands and vineyards.’” (Neh 5:1-5)

If you could have looked at that wall, the neglect and decay, you would say that that is a fairly good picture of the present condition of the Church, bankrupt, decaying, ignorant, searching for an identity in the house of horrors, dressing up like a prostitute, trying to be somebody, selling its birthright for a cup of stew. It’s walls are down and the gates burnt and has become the dwelling place for every foul bird. Today the Church could even be said to have sex appeal, imagine that, really it is only making a last ditch effort, but it is bankrupt.

There are many other questions that need to be addressed:

Am I part of the remnant or part of the crowd?

How do we Identify the Remnant?

Is it Time to Expose Error?

What is the Problem?

The questions are many, the answer is One.