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The following is chapter 4 from a small book we are serializing. It was written in 1938 by the British-Israel minister, Rev. Rupert Thomas. It seems entirely applicable today as it was some 90 years ago.
We have not edited the author’s material except for style—such as adding a comma here and there for clarity, or breaking up large paragraphs for legibility purposes on our modern, 2 inch-wide screens. All boldface and underlined portions indicate my emphasis. Italics are either by the author or from quoting the KJV, wherein italics indicates words supplied by the KJV translators. All comments in [brackets] and {braces} are mine. QUOTE:
Order is the keynote of the Universe. God is not the Author of confusion but of peace. This characteristic of the Divine nature marks not only His material realm but also the spiritual realm.
The one realm is subject to the other, and the processes of the material realm are governed by the spiritual realm. Yet to mix these two realms is utterly impossible, so the Lord says:
“That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the spirit is spirit.” John 3: 6.
In other words, natural is natural, and spiritual is spiritual. It is no more possible to intermix these two elements, flesh and spirit, in organization, than it is possible to mix them in essence.
Either one or the other will dominate, and that domination will cause the other to cease to exist as anything but a servant or channel of expression.
Either that which is spiritual is all but obliterated by the natural, or else the spiritual subjects the natural to its own will. This is a fundamental principle of the Lord Jesus and His teaching, as of all Scripture.
It was and is the object of the work of Christ to make known, by practical demonstration, the reality of this fundamental principle, and to prove the superiority of life in and under the control of the Spirit as compared with the purely natural life. Hence all that He did, or ordained, all that He is doing, or will do, is based on the principle that the Spirit quickeneth, but the flesh profiteth nothing.
In these days of vaunted materialism such principles are unpopular, because the enemy of mankind knows that, if they are forgotten, he has little to fear for the progress of his own kingdom, and is certain of retarded progress in God’s Kingdom. The reversal of this principle has been the cause of most, if not all, the errors and failures of the nominal Church.
It is not a question of denomination, but of the Church universal. The failure of the Galatian Church is the failure of the latest denomination of the Church to-day.
Having begun in the Spirit, they desire to continue and end in the flesh.
Intellectualism, without the [holy] spirit, is void—a mere shell. Spirit must have spirit to comprehend itself. It can neither be comprehended nor that which pertains to it practiced without [holy] spirit.
The true revelation is not found in Jerusalem nor in Samaria, neither in Rome nor Constantinople. It will not be found in formal creed or system. It is in this, that God seeks spiritual worshippers, and Jesus Christ came with that revelation.
The Church of Jesus Christ is meant to be a body of Divinely-born, Divinely-controlled, Divinely-organized people, whose object first and last is a spiritual worship of the Divine Being, the God Who has been perfectly revealed in the life of the supernaturally possessed man, Christ Jesus.
The whole economy of God’s purposes in the midst of men, in its principles and beginnings, is supernatural. The units of the Church are supernaturally born people. They are:
“born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” John 1: 13.
They are born of the Spirit. The appointed organization of the Church is to be found in supernaturally gifted people. The appointed worship of the Church is through supernaturally born people, supernaturally possessed. The testimony and service of the Church should be confirmed by supernatural signs.
The Church, in the purpose of God, is meant to demonstrate the value of that vital unity with God and the supernatural or spiritual realm. It is meant to prove in a practical way the supreme value of the control of the supernatural over the natural.
It is meant, both in the individual members of the Church and in the collective body of individuals, to prove that a life or an organization of lives, abandoned to the control of God by His Spirit, is by far the higher and more successful manner of life.
In other words, partakers of the New Covenant in Christ are meant to demonstrate to the Nation its fulness and to the world its value. The man born of the Spirit of God, controlled and built up by the Spirit of God, formed and fashioned like to the image of God, by the Spirit, will have had brought into his nature the very essence of God’s nature and character. Such are “made partakers of the Divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.” 2 Peter 1: 4.
Those lasting qualities, because they are born of God, will stand, when that which is natural falls and vanishes away.
Individual Christians have failed to demonstrate lives lived in complete abandonment to God. They have not, therefore, demonstrated the realities and powers of a life filled with the Spirit, ordering and governing, controlling and bringing into subjection, the natural elements of everyday life.
So also has the Church, as a united body of Spirit-born men and women, failed to demonstrate the power of such a body, filled and controlled by the Spirit of God.
In like manner, also, the nation has resorted to human experiments [socialism-communism, fascism, all forms of man’s governments, plus ecumenism {syncretism of multiple religions}] which have supplanted the principles of the Divinely-given law and national system.
In consequence of this, the perfect order which characterizes all God’s works, the perfect rhythm and symphony of all His ways, is lost; and instead, whether in individual or in the Church or in the nation, there has been and still is, alas, disorder and confusion. [I.e., the Mystery Babylonian system in all its ways]
To make confusion worse, confounded endeavours are made to cope with problems in the nation, by natural and unspiritual means. And in the midst of the nation the Church seems to be possessed of the greatest confusion of all. The Church, that should be the pulsating heart, the sensitive conscience of the nation, is the greatest offender. END QUOTE
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