The Two Great Foes

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     "When the fulness of the times was come God sent forth His Son."

     The universal message of the crucified Christ burst upon the world of mankind at a time foreseen by God to be the most propitious in the whole history of the human race. That race, both by divine and human calculation, was divided into two great ethnic groups--Jew and Gentile. The apostle Paul uses the expression, "Every soul of man...the Jew first and also the Gentile" (Romans 2:9, 10). In the same context it is declared that "the gospel is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first and also to the Greek" (Romans 1:16).

     It was neither expected nor ordained that the gospel should accomplish its purpose without opposition. The word of God is a sword and a weapon of conquest. It is mighty through God, to the pulling down of strongholds. When the simple message of the cross is brought to bear upon any alien concept or culture it must first battle for a beachhead and then continue to fight for survival. The arch-fiend against whom we struggle is clever beyond description. His is a policy of containment and compromise. He knows our weaknesses better than we know them ourselves and he can gain by attrition what he cannot secure in open combat.

     The natural time limitations upon such an occasion as this make it imperative that I come directly to the point. It will be my thesis herein, that regardless of the generation in which the Good News is proclaimed, and regardless of the people to whom it is announced, the opposition to it always grows out of the background and experiences of those whom it encounters, and falls into one of two categories. These diverse facets of opposition sometime appear in one guise, and sometime in another; occasionally they may join forces in a confusing manner, but in the final analysis their true nature can be seen and it will again be revealed that what appeared to be a strange and new foe was but one of the two age-old enemies of the cross.

     It is our personal conviction that the wisdom of God ordained that these two should be met in face-to-face combat in all of their power and strength during the very lifetime of the apostles of our Lord. This would provide for all succeeding generations an inspired example of the proper use of the divine manual of arms in gaining the victory. It is essential to remember that these opposing forces had to be exemplified in the ultimate of their might, else it might be reasoned that the success in their overthrow by the envoys of the Master was accomplished, not by the superiority of the weapon employed, but by reason of the weakness and inability of the opponents.

     That we may be even more direct in laying our foundation, let us be specific.

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The two great foes to the preaching of the cross in all ages are Legalism and Liberalism. "When the fulness of the times had come" the stage was set for these to reach their zenith. In its encounter with the Jews the Message clashed head on with legalism in its most virulent form and propagated by the most ruthless and relentless proponents. All legalistic programs since that day have been but weak and watered-down versions of the one advanced by the Judaizers of the first century. In the same fashion, the confrontation with the Gentiles brought the Message into direct opposition to human philosophy in its most exalted, and therefore, most deadly and sinister form. It is no exaggeration to say that liberalism in every century has been but Gnosticism attired in a garb attractive to the time and place.

     Since the Message has not changed, and since our real foes are the same, it would seem that the tactics used by the original messengers are the ones we must employ in every age to triumph. Unfortunately, the passing of the centuries has dulled our sensibilities and blunted our discernment until few are able either to correctly identify the enemy or properly direct their weapons against the foe. The result is that we frequently kill off those who are allies, or cripple ourselves by turning our weapons in the wrong direction. It is my purpose in this little talk to help us orient ourselves on the field of combat so we may be able to use all of the strength available to us in our present time of crisis.

     The gospel was preached to the Jew first and it had to contend with legalism as its first opposition force. For fifteen hundred years the law of Moses had served as a fence around the vineyard of Judah and Jerusalem. It hemmed God's people in and hedged all others out. It was designed as an instrument of separation and segregation. Its sacred ordinances and festal occasions were reserved only for the circumcised. The inauguration of the Passover at the very threshold of national identity was accompanied by the divine fiat, "No uncircumcised person shall eat thereof," and by the divine instruction, "If any stranger will eat thereof, let him and his males first be circumcised, then let them come near and keep it." Circumcision of the flesh was the external mark of the covenant people.

     The original concept of many of the Jewish converts to the gospel was that the called out ones were to constitute merely a synagogue of Messianic Jews. There was no thought of discarding Judaism. Those who accepted Jesus were expected first to come into covenant relationship with God through circumcision. In their favor was the fact that Jesus had declared that he had come, not to destroy but to fulfill the law. The law had been given by God. It was admittedly holy and just and good. They regarded any offer of justification upon any other basis than deeds of law as being an affront to God and inimical to all they had been taught in the past.

     What they could not comprehend was that the law was a child-conductor to bring men to Christ. Having fulfilled its mission it had also fulfilled its destiny. When God broke through the flesh curtain, a new covenant was inaugurated which involved a person rather than a code of precepts. They failed to grasp the significance of the prophetic utterance, "I will give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles." "The law came by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." The grace of God is not contrary to the law of God. It simply operates upon a higher plane, the level of the Spirit. Upon this level there is no law but that of love. "For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" (Gal. 5:14).

     The advocates of legalism were fervent and untiring. They had firmly resolved not to surrender an inch of uncontested ground to those who offered eternal life as a gift instead of as a wage. Firm in their contention that man must earn the right to glory by works of righteousness which he performed, they bitterly resisted every attempt to exalt divine grace above human efforts. In this great emergency God

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raised up a man to spearhead His forces. A legal student in the great Hillel school, brilliant above all the contemporaries of his own age, Saul of Tarsus, who began as a persecutor of the saints, was called to the task. More than any other man, he deserves credit for preserving the primitive church from division into Jewish and Gentile segments. In personal confrontation, in oral discussion, and in written documentation, he met the Pharisaical party throughout the world. The record of his victory remains for all of us to read and share.

     What method of reasoning was employed to offset the inroads of the legalistic spirit with its deadening influence and its cold intemperance? To reply in full would be to analyze in detail such letters as the ones written to the Romans, Galatians, and Philippians. Since we cannot do this, let us summarize in seven propositions, the points essential to our recapture of the will of the Spirit.

     (1) All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. (2) By deeds of law there shall no flesh be justified in God's sight. (3) We are justified fully by God's grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. (4) Access into that grace wherein we stand is gained by faith. (5) In Christ Jesus nothing avails anything except faith which works by love. (6) There is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. (7) You are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God dwells in you.

     Wherever legalism rears its ugly head, the most effective antidote to its toxic poison which paralyzes the body, is the re-affirmation of the basis of justification and the sign or seal of relationship with God. Justification by faith and the possession of the indwelling Spirit, not in a sectarian or creedal interpretation, but in the fulness of their meaning as found in the sacred oracles, these are the principles which strike deep at the very heart of all legalistic tendencies. And these great truths need to be again examined in all of their glorious possibilities by the heirs of the restoration movement, many of whom have been unconsciously betrayed into creating tests of fellowship where God has made none, and who have frequently driven out those whom God has called in. Every person in whom the Spirit of God dwells is a child of God and wherever God has a child I have a brother. And I have brethren who may never even have heard of the restoration movement.

     The legalist constantly warns about the danger of the broad road and this is well. But we must not overlook the fact that to narrow and restrict the road of life to confines which God has not made is just as dangerous. Liberalism seeks to remove the bounds which God has placed and thus encourages men to walk where God has not ordained; legalism seeks to create undue restraints and thus discourages men from trying to walk where God has ordained. The first allows no place for the grace of God to function; the second provides no place for the mercy of God to function. All legalism overlooks the divine dictum, "The man who makes no allowances for others will find none made for him. 'It is still true that mercy smiles in the face of judgment'" (James 2:13--J. B. Phillips). We are not to destroy fences which God has constructed, but neither are we to erect fences of our own. The greatest weapon against legalism to be found in the divine arsenal is that of "justification by faith" as the Spirit uses the expression.

     In A. D. 70 Jerusalem was destroyed after a lengthy and harrowing siege by the Roman army under Titus. Long before, Jesus had prepared his disciples for this fearful event by giving them instructions for evacuation of the city and the establishment of refugee camps in the mountains. Among those who probably abandoned the city when news came of the advancing invasion forces, was the apostle John. This aged saint transferred his residence to Ephesus. I choose to believe he was providentially directed to this site as the chosen vessel of God to meet the next great threat to the Message.

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     Before the aged John, only survivor of the twelve, was allowed to meet a merciful death, a boon which had long been withheld from him despite cruel persecution, an enemy had arisen within the bosom of the church, which threatened its existence, and was far more subtle than Judaism. The word Gnosticism has been used to designate that system of thought which acted like a cancer in the body of the Lord. It must not be thought by the historical researchist that the use of this single term implied a unified code of belief. The Gnostics were both divided and divisive, but they all held certain things in common. It is both impossible and foreign to our present purpose to discuss the philosophic deficiencies in the various schools of rationalists. We would like to mention some of the things common to most of them.

     The forerunner of Gnosticism was probably Philo, a Jew who lived while Jesus was on the earth. He laid the foundation for the inroad of this synthetic philosophy into the Christian domain by his interpretation of the old covenant scriptures. Acknowledging the beauty of the language and the lofty imagery of the prophets, he substituted salvation by means of knowledge and the contemplative life, for the moral reconciliation with God to be accomplished through the Messiah. With the extension of the Message to the pagan world, those philosophers who had long sought after wisdom, wove a pattern of four strands of thought--Judaism, Hellenism, Orientalism and Christianity. They soon began to contend that pagan poets as well as Jewish prophets were mouthpieces of Deity, and in many cases, were superior to them in their contention for higher idealism.

     Running like a recurrent note through their divergent views was the thought that all matter is evil, and that God could not have revealed himself in human flesh. Two things had to be rejected at the very outset--neither the incarnation nor crucifixion of the Son of God could be accepted as actual fact. These had to be explained away to sustain their theory, and the resurrection denied, except as a figment in the minds of the sorrowing disciples whose grief brought images to their minds which, because of poignant longing, came to be proclaimed as reality. The idea of the pre-existence of the Logos, who made an advent in the flesh, was repugnant to these aristocrats of the intellect.

     Those who clung to the testimony of the chosen witnesses that Jesus was corporeal, were airily dismissed as being uninitiated into the real mystery of the faith. Since sin was not a reality there was no room for sacrifice. Illumination, or enlightenment, became the goal, instead of redemption. Man could think himself out of his predicament by sheer use of logic and the employment of his rational powers. The fall of man was simply an obscuration, produced by matter, so salvation is merely a return to the light. Matter was darkness, spirit was light, so to "walk in the light" was to attain unto superior knowledge, to be "in the know."

     Because there was an apparent conflict between the Messiah revealed in the old covenant scriptures and Jesus who came, one of the Gnostic leaders, Marcion, drew up a list of antitheses between the God of the old covenant scriptures, and the God of the new. The God of the old covenant was national and local, a sort of tribal deity, while Jesus was universal in his appeal. The old covenant promised only earthly rewards of accumulating wealth and victory over enemies, while the new covenant speaks of heavenly

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blessings for those who endure hardships and persecution on earth. The old covenant allowed the fleeing Israelites to carry away the treasures and jewels of Egypt, while Jesus told his disciples not to take an extra staff. The God of the old covenant sent bears to devour the children who mocked Elisha, and called down fire from heaven upon the enemies, whereas the Good News is a message of kindness and forgiveness.

     The old covenant God was presented as an instrument of vengeful wrath, the new covenant God as one of great love. The modern theologian, taking a cue from Marcion, and who called the God of the old covenant "a bloody butcher" was neither modern nor a theologian. He was a twentieth century Gnostic and his invective against the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, was not, as some of the critics hailed it, "a fresh breath for this age." It was but the expelling again of the fetid breath of the cynics and schismatics of yesteryear.

     When John arrived in Ephesus, he was in the very center of the dissemination of Gnostic propaganda in Asia Minor. This was the home of Gerinthus, a Jew who had studied philosophy at Alexandria, and who had already gained a reputation as an advocate of the idea that Jesus was begotten by Joseph and born of Mary, and did not become the Messiah until the Holy Spirit descended upon him at baptism. So widespread was the acceptance of this and related ideas that many congregations were in an upheaval and turmoil. Religious strife was the order of the day.

     It becomes our duty now to examine the means by which the aged apostle sought to save the church from disintegration under the impact of the synthetic wisdom of the pseudo-intellectuals. I hold that the gospel record of John, as well as his first and second epistles, were all written primarily to accomplish this task. There was a condition which had to be met and they were written to meet that condition. This will serve to explain the great difference in nature between the gospel record of John and those written by Matthew, Mark and Luke. This is the reason for the great assertion that "The Logos became flesh and dwelled among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the father, full of grace and truth."

     But it is in his epistles that John demonstrates the means by which the church in all ages, must rescue itself from the clutches of those who deny the foundation truths upon which we must be built if we are to survive. He identifies the real enemy. It is not those who are honestly mistaken as the result of earnest study of revelation. The enemy is composed of those who are antichrists and whose false philosophy, if adopted universally, would mean the end of all that belongs to faith. When the church confronts antichrists, it is facing its final hour if the wrong decision is made. "My children, this is the last hour! You were told that Antichrist was to come, and now many antichrists have appeared; which proves to us that this is indeed the last hour" (1 John 2:18).

     The antichrists were first infiltrators and then schismatics. "They went out from our company, but never really belonged to us; if they had, they would have stayed with us. They went out, so that it might be clear that not all in our company truly belong to it." They were liars. "Who is the liar? Who but he that denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is Antichrist for he denies both the Father and the Son: to deny the Son is to be without the Father; to acknowledge the Son is to have the Father also." They were deceivers. "Many deceivers have gone out into the world, who do not acknowledge Jesus as coming in the flesh. These are the persons described as the Antichrist) the arch-deceiver."

     What is the remedy when the church is confronted with such a problem? There must be a re-affirmation of the testimony of the witnesses upon which faith is predicated and life is enjoyed. But even before this, the credibility of the witnesses must be established. John begins by

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showing how he knew Jesus was not a phantom. He demonstrates how ridiculous is the surmising of the Docetics. The apostles had visual, audible and manual proof of the reality of Jesus. They heard the Word of life, saw him with their eyes, scrutinized him intently, and handled him with their hands. They were as sure of Jesus as of their own existence. Note that it was eternal life which they saw, heard and handled, because it was manifested. Eternal life is not an extension of time. It is not a prolongation of existence. Eternal life is a person, the Son of God. "And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life."

     The purpose of this testimony is to produce fellowship. "That which we have seen and heard, declare we unto you, that you also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ." A correct understanding of fellowship is the most important thing when the very foundations of the faith are threatened. When the liberalistic philosophy of his day threatened to sweep away the saints from their moorings, John addressed to them a letter urging fellowship, and literally filled with admonitions to practice brotherly love. So long as the people of God walk in the light of love as God is love, they have fellowship one with another. They share in the common life of the Spirit. They are joint heirs with God. The blood of Jesus goes on cleansing them from their sins.

     In our days of present crisis nothing is more important than a recapture of that sense of fellowship which is ours because we are in Christ Jesus together. We have been raised up together and made to sit together, but we have allowed ourselves to become alienated because we have confused community with conformity, fellowship with endorsement, and have exalted opinions above the cross of Calvary. We have slugged it out toe-to-toe when we should have been fighting shoulder-to-shoulder. We have specialized in partisan debate when we ought to have engaged in precious dialogue. We have been more concerned about flinging challenges at one another than in flinging down the gauntlet to Satan!

     Because we have forgotten that we have a common enemy we have forgotten that we have a common faith. That faith is to be our test of fellowship because it is the medium by which we come into the relationship with the Godhood which produces life. John has written, "Many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book, but these are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life through his name." This is the divine foundation for all Christian unity. When the apostle Paul rebuked the sin of factionalism in Corinth, he declared, "For other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, even Jesus Christ." Our hope of peace lies not in a plan, a program or a precept, but in a person. "He is our peace who has made both one and broken down the middle wall of partition."

     The Gospel is the Good News of what God has done for us in and through Jesus. The Message is one of victory in Jesus. Wherever the Message is announced and men believe in his name and are immersed in it, they become children of God. He who instructed the envoys to preach the gospel in all the world, said quite simply, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved." I accept that statement without reservation just as he made it. In spite of the conflicting theories of systematic theology, the complexities of creeds and confessions, the confusion created by strife and schism, it is still true that every sincere believer who accepts the Messiahship and Sonship of Jesus in faith and by obedience, is born again, and I am akin to him through the Spirit. He is my brother! We are in the fellowship. Both of us may be ignorant about many things and wrong about a lot of them, but we are one because of faith and not because of superior knowledge. If a man is right about Jesus he may be wrong about

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many other things and still be saved; if he is wrong about Jesus he may be right about everything else and still be lost.

     Sometimes I think that in spite of the warning of Jesus we have majored in the science of gnat-straining and the fine art of camel-swallowing. I do not deny that we have had, and still have, serious problems of interpretation. I do not minimize our differences nor suggest that we ignore them. I do not affirm that our doctrinal discussions are unnecessary or unwarranted. I do assert that when we split and sever, when we fragment and fractionalize the body into splinters and segments, and thus weaken our mutual testimony, we are "disobedient unto the heavenly vision" and we do "despite unto the Spirit of grace." Nothing which is not of sufficient importance to sever us from God should ever separate us from each other.

     In the darkest days of the American Revolution, when it appeared that the cause of freedom would be lost due to the selfish jealousy among the bickering colonies, the venerable Benjamin Franklin sounded the warning, "We must either hang together or we shall all hang separately." How much longer can we afford the luxury of factionalism while surrounded by a ruthless enemy which would rob us even of a recognition of God? I freely acknowledge that all truths are equally true but not all truths are equally important at a given time. And no problem which confronts us as humble seekers after truth is as important as the blood of Jesus which cleanses us from all sin and welds us together in the body of Christ.

     Before we even approach many of our questions in the fellowship we must first settle the question of fellowship itself. That fellowship is not conditioned upon conformity of opinion, unanimity in every interpretation, or equality in knowledge. We are not brothers because we see everything alike but because we have the same Father. Fellowship is based upon sonship, brotherhood is based upon fatherhood, fraternity results from paternity. Unless we recognize this we will expend our energies and dissipate our strength upon things which, though they may be virile, are not vital, until "the overflowing scourge" sweeps over and destroys us all. It is no time to be critical of a haircut during an Indian raid in which we may all be scalped. It is no time to tack a stray shingle on the garage roof when the house is on fire. It is no time to clean a sparkplug when your automobile is stalled on the tracks and an express train is bearing down upon you.

     Factionalism is not the answer to legalism and liberalism. Faith and fellowship constitute the only satisfactory refutation to both. The faith that brings us together in Christ and the fellowship which holds us together in him--these constitute our only real hope of victory. If we allow faith to erode under presumption and fellowship to explode under pressure, we have little left to do but to pick up the pieces and bemoan the wreck of a once glorious movement.

     It will help us to realize that legalism and liberalism are more closely akin than most of us realize. They have the same father although they were conceived by different mothers. Both have been sired by pride, but legalism is the offspring of fear while liberalism is the child of fallacy. Their relationship is revealed by their nature. Both limit the efficacy of the blood of Jesus and both deny that they do. But legalism seeks to lift man up to the level of God by his own bootstraps, while liberalism seeks to pull Jesus down to the level of man by its own bookstraps. Neither one really respects the authority of Jesus. Liberalism denies that he has any authority, and legalism interposes its own as a substitute for it. In both instances man eventually becomes his own God.

     We are the heirs of a noble movement, but we have inherited the feuds and divisions by which our fathers thought to preserve truth and perpetuate purity of doctrine. We now know that the methods they adopted will not accomplish the desired end. It is time for us to reverse the process before we divide ourselves out of existence as we have already divided our-

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selves out of influence in a great many places. We must avoid the extremes of legalism and liberalism, but we must also avoid the extreme of factionalism. It is an unscriptural and an anti-scriptural approach to our differences. Our first task is to restore a true sense of brotherhood as a framework in which to labor at lessening our differences. The restoration of fellowship will not remove our differences but it will make it possible for us to correctly evaluate them and to labor toward more harmonious relationship.

     It is not necessary that we be in harmony upon every matter to be in the fellowship; it is necessary that we be in the fellowship if we are ever to achieve harmony. Not a single admonition to agree with one another, or to live in harmony, was ever given to bring brethren into fellowship. All such commands were given to those in the fellowship and because they were in it. We need not sacrifice or compromise a single truth that any of us has ever held to restore a proper sense of brotherhood, and this is the place for us to begin. The way to have unity is to unite and not have a debate. Our foes are mutual foes. We cannot overcome them by acting as mutual enemies. If we can ever attain to the crucified life so that our partisan pride with its snobbery and arrogance can be replaced by that genuine humility which loves a brother more than it loves the things we cling to, a brighter day will dawn for the restoration movement.

     It is my firm conviction that we face such an era. Tomorrow will be better than today. We are beginning to face our problems with a greater sense of maturity. Lines of communication are being repaired. Your graciousness in inviting me to address you, your hospitality while I am among you, coming as I do from a divergent segment of the restoration brotherhood than that in which the majority of you were reared--these are signs of the times which betoken that the fierce fires of partisanship are burning themselves out. I am grateful to you for your generosity and magnanimity of spirit and "I commend you unto God and the word of his grace which is able to build you up and to give you an inheritance among those who are sanctified." I am happy to be your brother in Him who died for the sins of us all.