Beware of Gribbles
W. Carl Ketcherside
[Page 55] |
It is very unlikely that the restoration movement, of which most of our readers are heirs, will ever sustain great loss through a direct frontal assault of those three philosophic rebels--atheism, skepticism, and agnosticism-- although they may capture an occasional straggler who is lagging behind in the march and throwing rocks at his brethren.
Our greatest danger, as I see it, comes from what I call "spiritual gribbles." Real gribbles are little marine crustaceans who are first cousins to the wood louse. The gribble has no shell and is only about a half inch long, but a family of gribbles can do untold damage. These insignificant creatures bore into and gnaw away at piers and other underwater wooden installations until the whole structure is undermined and weakened and eventually falls.
I always think of gribbles when I read some of the papers published by brethren who "major in minors." There is no question in my mind that the Father wanted a family more than anything else, for only a family can make the term "father" relevant. He was willing to sacrifice the best that heaven had in order to make that family possible. Jesus shed his blood to make us blood-brothers!
The Father loves all of His children in spite of their foibles and weaknesses. He created only one body so it must be big enough to include intellectuals and uninformed, strong and weak, wise and unwise. God's children would have come from both sides of the tracks, except for the fact that Jesus removed the tracks. There is no "other side" in Christ.
Many brethren have not caught the spirit of the Spirit! They bore away on such matters as fermented wine in the Lord's Supper, the method of breaking the bread, the nature of the second coming, the teaching of the Bible in classes, and a score of other controversial matters, and build parties and sects around their views
[Page 56] |
The restoration ideal has not been successfully attacked by its enemies. It has only been made to appear ridiculous by its friends. That a movement begun as "a project to unite the Christians in all of the sects" should fragment over the question of teaching the Bible in classes is just as absurd as it looks to a cynical world. The same thing holds true for the millennium or instrumental music.
The depth of love a man has for God may be measured by the nature of the thing which he allows to separate him from his brothers. If a man thinks more of his views on instrumental music (either for or against) than he does the blood shed on the cross, which makes us one, he will divide the brethren and relegate the cross to a secondary place. From that day forward the test will no longer be what one thinks of Christ, or whose Son he may be. The burning question will be where he stands on the music issue. Heaven and earth will be summoned to await with bated breath the expression of his views on this universe-shaking question But if the cross is the supreme thing in life its arms will be allowed to reach out and embrace those whose views are utterly divergent on many things!
The tragedy of our present predicament is that in the midst of an age when throbbing drums betoken the rise of new nations of primitive peoples in the parliaments of the world, when millions are threatened by the torture of starvation in India, when the great questions of the population explosion and of birth control rock the congresses of the earth, when Communism stalks the free world like a hungry wolf-pack, our brethren are debating wheher it is a sin against God to sit down and eat together in the meetinghouse. The gribbles are gnawing away at our piers in a day when we need all of the strength we can muster in a united front against evil!