NOTE BY THE "MINISTRY FOR THE DIFFICULT LAST DAYS" PUBLISHER

NOTE BY THE “MINISTRY FOR THE DIFFICULT LAST DAYS” PUBLISHER

On page 29 the idea is submitted that the 12 tribes of Israel would represent to us spiritually the local assemblies in the Church. If we begin to draw such conclusions from the Scriptures, we have to pursue them all the way. In the Scriptures the 12 tribes were instructed not to intermarry, lest their inheritance and distinctiveness be lost. If we spiritualize this as well, we end up with memberships in local assemblies. (Exactly this line of carnal reasoning has been put to the writer by a member of the Tight Brethren to justify their God opposing autonomous local assembly principles and the memberships within them.) It is for this reason that we have to refuse that particular line of thought. We think very highly of the ministry of W.J.H., and it is for that very reason that we republish his writings, but we are still enjoined to “prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” Even a W.J.H. could be carried away with his own reasonings and the errors of his party. We do not read in the Scriptures that Christ “loves local assemblies and would each have maintained in its own distinctive character;” but it is written, “Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for it.” Such reasoning is the outcome of a very subtle type of collective self — centeredness and such teaching will inevitably lead in a partisan direction. Also, there is in the ministry of W.J.H. (as in the ministry of other Exclusives) some optimistic notion that God, at the end of church history, will have some local assemblies that are in accord with the mind and ways of God. Of course, W.J.H. had in mind the line of meetings he belonged to. (Just as all the different lines of Exclusives have, not the whole Church, but their line of meetings as the centre of all their thoughts and reasonings.) The exceptional ruin and failure of that particular line of meetings, the extreme upheavals within the party, the errors, the spiritual deviations, and the cult mentality that have developed out of that specific line of things, should by now have destroyed any illusions or high opinions that those Brethren had about themselves and their much vaunted “Testimony”. Their views about the final condition of the Church at the Lord’s coming for His people should by now be more in line with the plain and not so promising statements found in the unerring Word of God.