WHO IS A DISSENTER OR A DIVISIONIST?

WHO IS A DISSENTER OR A DIVISIONIST?

In order to be able to determine who is a dissenter it is necessary first to know what the right thing is from which he dissents or has departed.

Ever since the course of faith began there have been dissenters, or those who had not faith to adhere to the course. Hence the course must be known before you can condemn or accuse any one for abandoning it.

I suppose every one will admit that since the call of Abram, since election came in, God has had a distinct calling, or course of action, in which every faithful one was upheld as he clung to it. God always has had a defined course of action to which His power and resources were committed, and every one, however feebly, following in that course was supported therein like a ship in the line of the trade winds.

^[p. 154] Lot then, I may say, was the first dissenter. He departed from the course laid down by God, and though he had not left the land, nor had he ceased to be a righteous man, he was no longer in the course of God’s action; he sought advantages for himself, and reaped the consequences; while the man in the divine course, though stumbling, is set up again to walk on more vigorously than before. We see remarkably in Jacob the tendency to dissent, the insubjection of the natural mind to the course of faith. After he returned from Syria, after the night of wrestling, when we might hope that he was established, he drops out of the path he was called to; he buys a parcel of a field at Shalem. It is not that land as a property is worse than any other, but in buying the field Jacob became a dissenter; he dropped out of the calling wherewith he was called of God, and yet, like all godly dissenters, he had his altar; and this described his real state. El-elohe-Israel betrayed the fact that he was occupied with himself as the object of blessing, instead of with Him who had blessed him; as one who in his delight with the suns rays would limit them to his own garden.

The more distinctly we ascertain God’s course at any time, in which all the weight of His power and grace are moving, the better we shall detect the variety of phases in which dissent shows itself. How sadly, more than once, Aaron dissents from the path in which his brother Moses was borne along by God. With, I might say, equal advantages, how the dissenter comes out in the one, while the other is carried on and above all the opposition, to the glory of God. Again, we see the same carnal working in the twelve spies; and it is to be noted that it is after they had the clearest evidence of the goodness of the land, and had been in it, and had brought of the fruits of it, that the unbelief of their hearts came out. They were then dissenters; they could not follow in the course to which God had called them. Caleb and Joshua only could believe that God’s power was available in all its might in the course appointed by Him.

^[p. 155] As we think of them we may be ready to be amazed at their unbelief, and their dissent from the true path, but the more we know our own hearts, and observe the dissent in our own day, the more tolerant we shall be. Doubtless the ten dissenters were specially deluded, and they were therefore signally judged; they were slain. They “died by the plague before the Lord”.

I need not speak of the two and a half tribes who settled on this side Jordan. They were dissenters if they adopted any other place but Jerusalem for the observance of the feasts of the Lord. In a word, a dissenter is one who adopts another line, however blameless in itself, instead of the one appointed by God. Hence Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, was an arch-dissenter; he deliberately invented an order contrary to God, while accepting the word of God as it had been given. A dissenter proper is not by any means an avowed unbeliever in the word of God; on the contrary, he declares that he is a true believer, but he supplements the word of God to suit his own views of things, or the necessity of the times.

The returned captives in Haggai’s time were dissenters. They had, at great risk to themselves and after many sacrifices, returned to the true place. For a while they went on laboriously maintaining the name of the Lord, rebuilding His house; but when the opposition became very great, they discontinued, and devoted themselves to their own personal blessings, and thus they were dissenters. They forfeited the support and countenance of the Lord when they departed from His course; they lost the trade winds, and instead of their own blessings increasing, they were declining.

Now in our Lord’s own time we find some who “walked no more with him”; they were dissenters. We find the germs of future dissenters in the contention between Paul and Peter. Peter walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel — — a solemn warning ^[p. 156] to us, for if this chief of the apostles could depart under pressure from the course of God’s action at the time, and become a dissenter, how necessary for us to have no confidence in ourselves! Barnabas also was carried away at a moment when one would have least expected it. It was a peculiarly bright moment for the church — a settling of the decrees. Then the judaising flaw was exposed in this man of God, and he took his own course (see Acts 15: 39), and that is always the way of the dissenter. The apostle, in Acts 20, warns the elders of Ephesus — the church the most highly endowed with divine light — that of themselves should men arise speaking perverse things to draw away disciples after them. There would be dissenters. The apostle reminds them of what he had taught them, and his own life among them — two things which must ever go together if there be divine power with the teacher.

Now in the epistles to the Corinthians we see the formation of sects; there were contentions among them. (1 Corinthians 1: 11). “It hath been declared unto me of you, my brethren, by them which are of the house of Chloe, that there are contentions among you”. It is not so much the matter of contention as the fact. Further on in the epistle he says “there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest” — a remarkable statement — so that the dissenter would become a foil for the display of the perfectness of the truth in the approved. The one great thing is to “continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them”, 2 Timothy 3: 14. “Let that therefore abide in you, which ye have heard from the beginning”, 1 John 2: 24. To adhere to the course of God as it was at the beginning when it first came from His hand, before it had suffered from any human intermixture, is the path in which the Spirit of God leads, and where all the resources of His power are, for it is His own course. That is the way in which He is going, and where else could there be ^[p. 157] His power but where He is moving Himself? Many a one becomes a dissenter in his attempt to reform the state of things with which he is connected. Here Luther failed, and many others. The one simple thing is first to learn Christ as He is revealed in Scripture, then as consciously united to him in glory, so will His CIRCLE OF INTEREST become ours, and any deflection from the order or manner which He set forth at the beginning will be refused, simply because He is the same now as He was then, to carry on with two or three what He introduced at the beginning. The dissent in the present hour resembles very much in character the dissent as spoken of in Scripture. I do not speak of the systems of men and the dissenters from them, but the character of dissent which one comes in contact with where there has been at least a profession of the truths revived amongst us. The dissenter of the Lot character is, alas! sometimes met with: one here and there turns away from the course of God’s Spirit to the good things of this world, and he is taught some day what a fool he has been. The dissenter of the Jacob type is more common, and though it brings less reproach, it is not less dishonouring to the Lord. With a great deal of piety the testimony is overlooked in the attempt to secure a little rest in this world. These dilute the truth, both in their writings and speakings, and obtain a popularity in consequence, which is not a real furtherance of the gospel of God. Lot’s dissent was open; this is disguised because of the retention of the true ground and the right truth. Very many are here, but their sin is sure to find them out; in this dissent the world socially is admitted, to the great damage of the family, as detailed in Genesis 34.

The dissenter after the character of the ten spies is rare, I am happy to say, but is to be found when one, after having clearly seen the heavenly truth, departs from it, and promotes in others the same unbelief,

^[p. 158] running directly contrary to the course of the Spirit; but they meet with signal judgment.

One class more only I shall allude to, even to that represented by Israel in the days of Haggai. Here the dissenter is one who had been diligently engaged in the testimony — the house of God in that day; now the church of the living God in which the only vital thing is the body of Christ: but because of the power of the enemy he has abandoned it, and devoted himself to his own spiritual gain and acquisition. The consequences will be with him as with Israel in that day, “Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes”, Haggai 1: 6. To what a melancholy diminutive the most ardent and advanced may be reduced!

Finally, let us note that of whatever type the dissenter may be, the underlying principle of dissent is self-will. It may be more patent in some forms than in others, but in one and all it is the will of man causing a divergence from the course marked out by God; and the only preservative from it is faith. Faith in God keeps one in dependence on Him, and preserves from the independence from which dissent springs, and ensures the feeblest being led by the Spirit of God in the path which is pleasing to Him.

May the Lord preserve us from dissent and keep us true to Himself according to the beginning.