From Acts to Axe

I’m currently reading, Biblical Church by Beresford Job and came across this gem I wanted to share. I added a second excerpt from the book and you can read it here.

This is radical stuff! I don’t, however, mean in the sense of how the word gets used to describe something as being new or different, but rather its more accurate meaning of going to the root of a thing. When Jesus told the religious leaders of the day that the axe was being laid to the root of the tree, he meant that their fundamental problem, their plight at the foundational level, was the belief they held that they were right with God, and therefore Heaven-bound, simply by virtue of being Jews. However, believing what they did virtually guaranteed that they would reject their very own Messiah and end up with the opposite. Jesus confronted the root causes and, therefore, got right to the heart of the matter. It is also what we must do regarding the issue of church life.

It is, however, going to be somewhat of a rough ride. Whenever Christian thinking and practice is challenged at a fundamental level, church history sadly demonstrates that those believers who are unwilling to honestly look at whatever is being addressed will rather just seek to attack, vilify and discredit those doing the challenging. And of course this must not just be put down purely to failures of approach, lack of wisdom or graciousness, or anything else for that matter, on the part of the dissenters. Those issuing the challenge may, or may not, present their case well. They may, or may not, raise the necessary issues lovingly and humbly. Anyone swimming against the tide of Christian opinion does indeed need to greatly attend to the importance of so doing in a Christ-like manner and gracious spirit: but the truth of the matter is that there nevertheless does seem to be a principle at work in Christian history whereby believers in the last reformatory move of God strenuously resist those in any current such move quite irrespective of other factors.

The Reformation is itself a case in point, although one does need to bear in mind that those who did the resisting in that particular instance weren’t actually believers. However, the principle remains the same. So-called ‘Christian’ thinking was challenged at a fundamental level, the issue then being the very nature of salvation, and of course all hell soon broke loose against the challengers from those who wanted the existing status quo to prevail. Far more pertinent to us here, though, is that even the Reformers, who were undoubtedly genuine believers, persecuted other genuine Christians whose only crime was to want to go even further in the implementation of newly recovered biblical truth. The Anabaptists, for instance, taught that the baptism of infants was wrong and that only believers should be baptized. They further maintained that there should be a separation between church and state, and purity not just of doctrine, but of practice as well. In short, they wanted to live in accordance with the teaching of the New Testament somewhat more comprehensively than did the Reformers who, having understood that salvation is through faith in Jesus alone, were happy to leave things there and not go much further.

Another example would be the advent of Pentecostalism at the turn of the last century and the retrieval of the experience of the baptism with the Holy Spirit and the miraculous spiritual gifts. Again, Christian thinking was challenged at a fundamental level and, once more, all hell broke loose against genuine believers at the hands of other genuine believers who saw them as nothing more than dangerous tongues-speaking maniacs and deceivers. But now, keeping the strands of church history in dynamic motion, there are those of us who are saying that it is time to move on to the next area of biblical truth that has been lost and ignored down the ages: church practice! Acknowledging with great gratitude how the Reformers regained the truth of salvation (whilst mourning their treatment of those who wanted to go further), and how the Pentecostals rediscovered the power and ministry of the Holy Spirit, the cry is now going up that we need to go full circle and put in place what may well be the last piece of the Reformatory jigsaw puzzle: biblical church practice!

However, those who labor to teach and implement such truths and practices, far from being heralded as ‘prophets at the cutting edge of what the Holy Spirit is doing’, are rather more likely to be seen as subversive and divisive troublemakers of the first order. At the very least and I thank God that here in the West in the 21st Century we live in reasonably civilized times where public executions at the behest of established church authorities, such as befell the Anabaptists at the hands of the Reformers, cannot happen-we will be badly spoken of and rejected as being undesirable, weird, or even a new and dangerous cult. Even in the most promising of scenarios where brothers and sisters do take us seriously, we are nevertheless still going to be bombarded with both strident and deeply felt objections to what we are saying. However, this should not be seen as a negative problem, but rather something we should positively welcome. It isn’t easy, of course, but any opportunity to get this issue on the agenda with Christians must be considered a bonus.

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