The Battle for the Church
by Dick York - May/June 2007

There has always been a conflict between the church and the world. But, as is made evident in scripture, that conflict will increase in the last days.

We understand that fact from the many warnings issued by the apostles and by Jesus himself. Paul told us that in the last days evil men and seducers would wax worse and worse. He made it clear that professing believers would no longer endure sound doctrine but, having itching ears, would heap to themselves teachers who would tell them what they want to hear.

The apostle John prophesied of a day when the whole world would run after the Antichrist, blaspheming God and those who worship him.1 Peter told us that there would be false prophets that, through covetousness, would make merchandise of the saints.2 Jesus himself told us the same things before any of these men had spoken anything––before Paul was even converted. Why would we not believe it and be warned by it? Well, we may claim to believe it, but the evidence is that many of us fail to take the warning seriously; therefore we do not apply it to what we experience on a day-to-day basis. It seems that we are still relegating to the future those warnings that apply to what is happening today. So subtle has been the encroachment that it is like the boiling of the proverbial frog or termite damage that isn’t obvious until the structure begins to sag.

Observing recently the presence of several teen-aged youth in the assembly, I was impressed by a sudden realization: here is a generation that has never seen the “norm.” On the secular side, they have never seen an America that was not “socialist” and multi-cultural. So, in essence, they have never experienced the America that the framers envisioned. On the spiritual side, they have never seen a church that revered the authority of one Bible. They have never known a time when adultery, fornication and homosexuality were not considered acceptable behavior by the society around them or when the Bible was read in public schools and the United States was considered a “Christian” nation. None of these things are in their memory banks. The things that their grandparents’ and great grandparents’ generation remember, and of which they lament the passing, were never in their foundations. Outside of the Scriptures there is nothing in our present society to anchor them to any of these stable foundations; and relatively few in this modern age, even within the church, spend much time reading or studying the Bible, much less applying its message to their daily lives.

One of the reasons for that is because the authority of scripture has been seriously undermined by constant revision and challenged by intellectual compromise with “science,” falsely so called.3 Consequently, the Bible has been relegated to a place of questionable significance; it now competes with opposing literature of “comparable authority.”

A further realization startled me. Humanly speaking, I and others approaching the octogenarian mark are the last connection between the present benighted genera¬tion and the spark of normalcy that still existed before 1950. Anyone that is 60-years-old or younger is on the other side of the mountain – the mountain being a great divide that rose up between the generations.

Where does that leave the present generation? It is as though they were in a canoe in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a dark and starless night. There are no visual reference points, nothing to indicate direction or location. With secular history rewritten and the authority of the Bible diminished and questioned, it is a dark time indeed. Where would one go for the truth?

None of this implies that there was no challenge to the truth before 1950; the battle has been raging for centuries, but in modern history it has escalated at an astonishing rate.

In 1946 the Revised Standard Version New Testa¬ment was published, followed by the whole Bible in 1952. Of course there had been many versions before that: The Berkley version, Williams translation, Phillips, The Amplified Bible and numerous others, including the English revised version in 1885 and the American Standard Edition in 1901. But none of them were serious contenders to replace the Authorized Version in Evangelical and Fundamental churches. But with the coming of the RSV, a serious campaign began to displace the time-honored version. From that point on, congregational reading and the memorizing of scripture began to suffer. The Bible began to lose its authority among professing believers. Arguments about “which Bible” began to undermine the credibility of its message.

Other things began to surface in the evangelical community. Ministers of the Word, great and small, began to sound alarms as the atmosphere of “worship” and the attitude within the church began to change. The church began to be an evangelistic tool that needed to adjust in order to be more attractive and entertaining in order to get uninterested sinners into the church.

One of the prominent men that began to sound the alarm was A.W. Tozer, editor of the Alliance Weekly and “pastor” of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Toronto, Canada––a man esteemed by many in evangelical circles as a prophet of his time. He died May 12, 1963.

“All unannounced and mostly undetected,” Tozer wrote, “there has come in modern times a new cross into popular evangelical churches. It is like the old cross, but different; the likenesses are superficial; the differences fundamental.

“From this new cross has sprung a new philosophy of the Christian life, and from that new philosophy has come a new evangelical technique––a new type of meet¬ing and a new kind of preaching. This new evangelism employs the same language as the old, but its content is not the same and its emphasis not as before.

“The old cross would have no truck with the world. For Adam’s proud flesh it meant the end of the journey. It carried into effect the sentence imposed by the law of Sinai. The new cross is not opposed to the human race; rather it is a friendly pal, and if understood aright, it is the source of oceans of good clean fun and innocent enjoyment. It lets Adam live without interference. His life motivation is unchanged; he still lives for his own pleasure, only now he takes delight in singing choruses and watching religious movies instead of singing bawdy songs and drinking hard liquor. The accent is still on enjoyment, though the fun is now on a higher plane mor¬ally if not intellectually.” 4

Tozer wrote those words before there were rock bands in the church, before there was an inordinate amount of preaching about how to succeed in the world and become wealthy. He and many others saw it coming, and they sounded the alarm before Bible stores became paraphernalia markets and evangelistic events became theatrical productions entertaining the flesh, rather than calling sinners to repentance.

Those men alerted us as to the times that have come upon us––the times of which Jesus warned us and about which Paul preached. The church is the body of Christ. It is, as one preacher aptly said, the clothes God wears to work. He made that statement because “It is God that worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.”5 God promised that he would be our God and that we would be his people, that he would dwell in us and walk in us 6 so that the principalities and powers would see in us the wisdom of God.7 What is the practical outworking of that if the church embraces the world’s philosophies, shares its values and aspires to the same goals?
If vows are to be sacrosanct, why, when Christian marriages encounter rough times, do believers, who have vowed “until death do us part,” escape through divorce in even greater numbers than the world when they know, or should know, that God hates divorce? How can they find Christian “pastors” to remarry them to other Christians’ divorced spouses when Jesus himself clearly stated, “Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery?” 8 Why should this not be preached from the pulpits of evangelical churches as it once was?

Sin of all sorts is tolerated in perhaps a majority of evangelical churches today where people can come and be lost in the crowd with no questions asked even when they practice obvious disregard for the teachings of scripture.

Paul instructed Timothy that in the last days––our days––perilous times should come. It is the attitude of professing believers that would make those times perilous. Self-love, covetousness, pride, disobedience to parents, unthankfulness, and unholiness were some of the earmarks of our age of which he warned us. He said there would be a form of godliness that would deny the power thereof. 9

In his instructions to Timothy Paul said, “I charge thee therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuf¬fering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts will they heap to themselves teachers [because they] have itching ears. And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.” 10

The church is to prepare the saints for heaven, not simply to live successfully and comfortably here. But heaven seems a secondary goal to many of those who profess to know God; living well here seems to be the priority. Jesus asked the question, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” 11 It is not wisdom when men, who profess to be believ¬ers of God’s word, spend their lives and their energy pursuing that which God has already promised them if they would simply seek first the kingdom of God.12 In their pursuit they have little time for the kingdom of God; and, in many cases, the churches they attend do not see the importance of steering them aright accord¬ing to God’s word in order that their priorities might be adjusted.

Very often our children are confused because of the discrepancy between what we say we believe and the way we live our lives. We confess to believe the scrip¬tures to be the word of God; but we seem only mildly upset, if at all, when our children are taught by those to whom we send them for education that atheism is true science and the Bible is myth. In some cases, even their “pastors” give credence to “the¬istic evolution.”

There was a time, in the 1400s, when “science” said that the world was flat. The Bible has always said it is round. Those who went along with “science” were the “flat earth” crowd that was esteemed to be learned. Even some professing Christians capitulated to that belief in spite of what the scriptures declared to the contrary. Eventually science could no longer deny that the Bible was right. Now the flat earth crowd is back; this time declaring that the earth created itself, that everything upon it evolved and that there is no God to whom we must give account. Many professing believers are ready to capitulate by finding ways to compromise the word of God with the postulations of “science,” falsely so called.13 But the word of God is forever settled in heaven.14 Those who stand upon it will find themselves on a firm foundation when the stream beats upon their house.

But believing the word is more than just believing the facts that it proclaims about the creation; it means believing God’s word about everything and obeying it in the way we live our daily lives. It is agreeing with the Psalmist who wrote, “Therefore I esteem all of thy precepts concerning all things to be right; and I hate every false way.” 15

What was Jesus teaching us when he said, “Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” 16 He said, “And why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? He that heareth my sayings and doeth them not is like a man that, without a foundation built an house upon the earth; against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great.” 17

The battle for the church is hot and getting hotter. The future, referred to by the prophets and the apostles, is upon us.

(Endnotes)
1 Revelation 13: 3-8
2 2 Peter 2: 1,2
3 1 Timothy 6: 20
4 The Old Cross and the New (from Man: The Dwelling Place of God.)
5 Philippians 2:13
6 2 Corinthians 6: 16
7 Ephesians 3:10
8 Mark 10: 11,12
9 2 Timothy 3: 1-5
10 2 Timothy 4:1-4
11 Mark 8: 36
12 Matthew 6:33
13 1 Timothy 6: 20
14 Psalm 119: 89
15 Psalm 119: 128
16 Matthew 7: 21
17 Luke 6: 46-49

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