In yesterday’s post, I pointed out that there are some very negative things that are said about the future Church in some parts of the New Testament. There are also some very positive things said about the Church. In fact, we tend to concentrate so much on the positive things that we forget or minimize the negative things. This puts us in a dangerous position. If we miss the negative prophetic warnings, we unwittingly set ourselves up to have an unbalanced view of the Church. And, when we have an unbalanced view of the Church, it is so much the easier for us to be disappointed when we see the negative parts, or worse, to even decide that what we have learned was not the Truth, but rather a false belief. Add a little encouragement from Satan, the father of lies, and people end up leaving the faith or simply being neutralized and becoming unfruitful Christians.
So, what warnings are there? One comes from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew:
Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.
“The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’
“‘An enemy did this,’ he replied.
“The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’
“‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’”
What is the prophecy? Until the Lord returns, the Church is going to be a mixed society with some people in her so thoroughly evil that it can be said that they were planted there by Satan in order to destroy the Church from within. Please note that both the wheat and the tares are within the field. I am not an Anabaptist about the Church, but that discussion can wait for another time. Just please notice that there is no picture here of a well-behaved Church of called-out people, but rather of a Church filled with both saints and devious, dangerous, unbelievers. And, here is the problem. The saints will not be so saintly that you can differentiate them from the evil. And, that is the reality of the Church we see today. If we are honest, many of the “saints” are ever so significantly less than saintly!
Then there is Saint Paul’s warning to the elders at Ephesus as he was on his way to Jerusalem:
“Now I know that none of you among whom I have gone about preaching the kingdom will ever see me again. Therefore, I declare to you today that I am innocent of the blood of any of you. For I have not hesitated to proclaim to you the whole will of God. Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood. I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them. So be on your guard!
Saint Paul again pictures a Church that is anything but perfect or well-behaved. In fact, there are among them people who are so evil that they are compared to ravening wolves. Worse, some of the wolves are found among the very elders and apostles, among the very people whom today we call priests and bishops. And so it has turned out to this day. Some of the scandals, and some of the evil that has most hurt the Church has come from within her very leaders.
Let’s look at a final Scripture, from Saint John’s First Epistle:
Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.
Not only will there be evil people who are members of the Church, not only will there be evil leaders in the Church, but worse, oh ever so much worse, those people will even lead whatever People of God that they can deceive outside the safety of the Church, outside the sheepfold, into places where they can be despoiled, they can be neutralized, and in which they may even be turned from a true following of God to a false following. If you look at Church history, this is precisely what has happened. And, it has happened to the point that Truth itself has been called into question. It has happened to the point that there are thousands of denominations, each one claiming the truth of their falsity.
You see, we are a Church at war with an awful enemy. He may be defeated, but he still goes about as a roaring lion, deceiving whom he might. Our war may not be against flesh and blood, but there will certainly be flesh and blood casualties, and even flesh and blood wolves and anti-Christs whom we must oppose.
Padre, you’ve mentioned the anabaptists a couple of times in these two recent posts, and that “that discussion can wait for another time.” Will there be a third post in the series?
From yesterday’s post: “Sadly, the strong Anabaptist emphasis in this country has given us a type of blindness towards what both Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Apostles said about what would happen in the future of the Church.” Also from yesterday’s post: “The Anabaptist theology of the Pure Church has led to both splits and to a failure to understand what the prophesized reality of the Church would be.”
And so the anabaptists are blind toward sin, yet also the cause of much of it, as in schism?
Clearly, we need “===MORE TO COME===”
I, too, noticed the period at the end of the post. 🙂