FOES IN GOD'S HOUSEHOLD.
By C. M. S.
Our Lord, in foreshowing the dissensions which should exist in the world because of the teaching of the truth, declared to His disciples, and thru them to us, that “a man’s foes shall be those of his own household.” There are no more bitter or disheartening feuds than those which spring up in one’s own family. There is no one who can so soon and so disastrously undermine the good name and influence of a family as one brought up under the family roof. We know this to be true of earthly families. It is equally true of the family or household of God. Foes in the family of heaven caused a multitude of the heavenly host to be thrown under chains of darkness and sentence of death. The key-note of that dissension, that enmity, was pride and the passing of creature judgment upon creative words and works. The creature exalted himself to the place of judge, and in the presence of his associates sat in judgment upon the Creator and Judge of all the universe. He created dissension by calling in question the righteousness and truth (infallibility) of God. Then came in swift succession the fall of the angels, the fall of man, and the launching of God’s plan for man’s redemption. But now eminent men, bearing the name Christian, declare to us, “Man is not fallen nor falling.” The Bible is “the masterpiece of ancient literature, inspired, but not infallible.” Here is a flat contradiction of God’s whole work and purpose concerning man. If man is not fallen, he needs no Saviour. Consequently, Emmanuel, who was to “save His people from their sins,” becomes to them a historical myth, and the story of His sufferings for man’s redemption, a sad, sweet fable. He who will not believe that he has fallen from the high estate in which God placed him, can not see the necessity for the deep heart-work required to make him a child of God, nor for the intercession in his behalf of the great Mediator between God and man. The declaration that man is not fallen, strikes at the very root of the Gospel work, and that is the purpose of him who inspires men to make it. And that other declaration that the Word of God is “inspired, but not infallible,” is the reiteration on earth of Satan’s challenge to God in heaven. When man sets himself up as a judge of the words and works of God, the rebellion in heaven is reproduced in the earth. It is a sorrowful spectacle to see fallible mortals, finite wisdom, sitting in sober criticism upon the wisdom and infallibility of the wonderful Counselor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace, and taking upon themselves the task of sifting the Word to separate its chaff from its wheat. Is it too much to say, then, that here are foes in the household of God? Is it too much to say that the work which such are doing is not the work of God? It is a solemn thing to make the charge. It is a more solemn thing to be doing that work. The true child of God, whose heart has been touched and regenerated by the hand of God, till all rebellion has been taken out of it, will not allow the work of his foe to sever him from the true family of God. C. M. S.