Thoughts On Separation

by W. Elliott | Category: General | Jul 1962

The work of winning souls for the Lord is very important. It is a great work in which each redeemed one can profitably engage himself. However, the Scriptures make it perfectly clear that for those who are divinely gathered together there are other avenues of service which the Lord requires of them. Our ambition should be to live so as to glorify God. If it be asked how this can be done, the answer is by implicit obedience to His will as revealed in His word. The apostle John has declared, "Greater joy have I none than this, to hear of my children walking in the truth" (8 John 4). This, of course, will include the service of soul-winning, but it also includes much more. It is here, we fear, that many err. They think that blessing upon evangelical work regardless of how or by whom it is conducted, is quite sufficient grounds to justify them in identifying themselves with it. They overlook the fact that God, in His sovereignty, can and does bless His own word. Repeatedly the Holy Spirit has shed abroad the light of salvation through texts of Scripture.

When the people of Israel thirsted on a second occasion, God told Moses to assemble the congregation, and to speak unto the rock. But Moses, when he had assembled the people, struck the rock twice, and said, " Ye rebels; shall we bring you forth water out of this rock?" It is true that "water came forth abundantly," but Moses, by his failure to sanctify the LORD in the eyes of the children of Israel, had forfeited his privilege of leading the nation into the land. The presence of rich blessing was no excuse in his case, nor is it any ground for our associating in the work of the Lord with those who are not obedient to His will. In spite of his act of disobedience the waters of life flowed to the vast multitude, but the incident shows what importance God attaches to a type. (See Numbers 20.7-12). God attaches great importance to the pattern which He has given us in His word, and it can be ignored or marred only to our ultimate loss, although there may be blessing at the time.

Let us therefore, in all humility, keep to the divine pattern, as revealed in His word. No wilful departure from this pattern can possibly have upon it the permanent blessing of God, whatever present appearances may be.

The individual who would be a vessel meet for the Master's use must purge himself out from all whose doctrine and conduct are wrong (2 Timothy 2.21). An assembly of God must be free from every system whose principles and practices are not true to the teaching of the Scriptures. It is far from the Lord's will that saints without the camp should maintain links with the camp which they have professedly left (see Hebrews 13. 13). Attendance of individual saints at evangelical meetings, conducted by those not in the Fellowship of the Son of God, is forging a link or forming a bridge between sects and systems of men and those gathered without the camp.

The word of God affords examples of men who lived to contradict, by their later conduct, what they had said and done for God in an earlier day. Gideon, for example, stood nobly for the abolition of idolatry in Israel, as a young man (see Judges 6), but before he died he introduced the golden ephod, "and all Israel went a whoring after it there (even in Ophrah): and it became a snare unto Gideon, and to his house " (Judges 8.24-27).

King Saul put away those that had familiar spirits (1 Samuel 28.3), yet in the hour of distress, he afterwards had recourse himself to a witch at Endor.

Peter, having learned that there was no difference between saved Gentiles and saved Jews (Acts 15.9), ate with the Gentile Christians at Antioch (Galatians 2.12), yet out of fear, he, a little later, withdrew and separated himself from them, wrongly.

These men all acted so as to contradict the very cause which in earlier days they had defended. Let us cite Paul's words to Peter upon the occasion referred to, "For if I build up again those things which I destroyed, I prove myself a transgressor" (Galatians 2.18). When we came into the Fellowship we did so because we had learned that it was scripturally constituted, and that the various sects were unscriptural. If then we can link up with these sects, we proclaim that we were wrong in leaving them; the one action contradicts the other. If the truth of God has brought us out, can it be that the truth would lead us back? Our very presence at their meetings would help to build them up.

Peter's action had serious effects, it not only swayed the Jews, but it so influenced Barnabas, the companion of the apostle Paul, that he also was carried away with their dissimulation.

W. Elliott | Jul 1962
General