SPURIOUS HOLINESS
For some time past we have been painfully made aware that spurious holiness is largely on the increase. When examined in the light of God's Word, the experience of thousands who profess this great blessing does not measure up to justification; and a large number of them are not so much as "truly awakened." Some time ago a sister wrote for us her experience, in which she stated that, previous to her obtaining holiness, she was troubled with snuff-taking, novel-reading, and light talking, but that holiness had brought her deliverance from these things. We immediately replied, and told her that if she had been indulging in those sins up to the time of her attainment of that blessing, she was mistaken in supposing it was holiness; it was simply justification, or perhaps only a state of conviction. A writer in the Banner of Holiness says: "It was quite a number of years after I had sought and obtained a pure heart before I received the light and conviction that God required me to stop using tobacco." Just imagine a man sanctified by the blood of Christ, and his body a temple of the Holy Ghost, indulging in the wasteful, filthy, ill-scented habit of tobacco-using! What a deception! Again he says: "When light came, then it became sin for me to use it." Of course it did. But previous to this moral change, the abstract act was wrong, and a conscious guilt must have been felt, proportionate to the degree of light possessed. Does the brother think that God would justify and sanctify soul, and allow him to go on for years, before showing him the sin of such a habit? Such an idea is preposterous. According to this theory, God would be justifying a person in sin one minute, and condemning him for it the next. This brother is greatly mistaken in supposing that he had no light, all that time, on the subject of tobacco-using. He had all the light he needed, and that light was in God's Word. That Book told him, "Cleanse yourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit." "Whether, therefore, ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God." "Glorify God in your bodies and spirits, which are his." "Defile not the temple of God." To say, in the face of all these plain commands, that he had no light, during all those years, revealing the uncleanness in which he indulged, is to affirm what is not truth, and it reveals his terrible darkness and deception. Another writer in the same paper says: "I then laid all on God's altar -- pipes, tobacco, gold chains, foolish talking and jesting -- with many other things and habits by which I had been conforming to the world." Two points in this experience deserve to be
noticed:--
1. Notice the sins in which he indulged, previous to his obtaining holiness, "tobacco, gold chains, foolish talking and jesting." See 1 Peter 3:3-4; 1 Timothy 2:9; Eph. 5:4. Here you see that the wearing of gold, and foolish talking and jesting, are expressly forbidden, as well as all conformity to the world. It is simply impossible for any one to remain justified who lives in disobedience to God's plain commands. At the very threshold of a religious life all such disobedience must be renounced. Thousands of Christians testify that before God pardoned them they had to abandon all the sins mentioned above, as well as wickedness in general. Now, does God offer salvation on easier terms to some than to others? Does He show partiality to some, by allowing them to hold on to a few of their idols He does, if this brother's experience is true; but the whole company of prophets and apostles say NO. The unerring Book declares that "God is no respecter of persons." "He that saith I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him." -- 1 John 2:4. "Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." The conditions of salvation are the same to one as to another. All have to take the humbling, self-denying, cross-bearing road, if they would gain eternal life. This brother's justification, previous to his obtainment of that blessing, was certainly not the kind taught in the Bible.
2. Our brother says that he put all these things upon the altar! If he did, then God sanctified a heap of sin -- uncleanness, pride, and worldly conformity; for "whatsoever toucheth the altar shall be holy." We are bold to say that God never took this offering; it would be blasphemy to say He did. He takes what belongs to Him, and what He can use, and nothing else. "Render, therefore, unto CÊsar the things that are CÊsar's, and unto God the things that are God's." God will not take sin; it belongs to the Devil. All that is sinful and worldly in our conduct must be put away, and not consecrated. If this is the extent of the brother's consecration, he made no consecration at all. He simply gave up his sins and received justification.
Another writer in the same paper stated some time ago that he consecrated his "prejudice," and another says that he consecrated his "unbelief." Just think of "unbelief" and "prejudice" being sanctified! The broth of swine on a Jewish altar would have been just as appropriate.
In these testimonies the writers show clearly: (1) That they are greatly ignorant of the nature and conditions of full salvation; (2) that they are woefully deceived.
Rev. G. D. Watson says: "If God should let a red-hot, sanctified, John Brown sort of a man burst upon society -- a man that would strike as much terror into the dead pulpits of the Church as into the dens of iniquity -- it would be the thing we need." You ask, "Was not Moody such a man?" I answer "No." Moody's work was entirely too shallow; it did not possess the earthquake attribute. We have had for years a Y. M. C. A. surface revival work that has consisted mostly in loose theological truth -- bouncing up for prayers, and retiring to a private room and simply professing Christ died for you. God did the best He could with the kind of doctrine used. Many of these revivalists held the ruinous error that depravity is never extirpated from the soul, but only covered up by the imputed robe of Christ's personal holiness. That doctrine has no earthquake power in it; it is a poetical device of the Devil; for he loves to be covered over with the borrowed costume of Christ, provided he can retain a niche in the heart. O, no; in the revival I mean, the carnal mind is never repressed under borrowed garments, but torn out root and branch; a revival in which no one ever rises for prayers, but where they fall and pray for themselves, and weep and mourn, and make the doctor think they are insane; a revival that will make preachers forget their manuscripts and burst out and weep in the pulpit. I declare, in the presence of God and His hosts, I am ready for just such a moral scene. Nothing is so alarming as the utter absence of alarm in the churches. Nothing is so dreadfully terrific to my mind as that sinners have no terror! O that God would so baptize with fire a thousand people, as to make them incomprehensible amazements of power! O for a few men so dead to all things but God, and so filled with Him, as to make them more than a match for the rest of mankind! O thou Triune God of Sinai, Calvary, and Pentecost! art thou not now nursing, under the horizon, the lightning and thunder and rain of an amazing holiness revival? Lord, let it come! Let it strike our nation, though it may blow the steeples of our abominable church pride in the dust; though it may thrust our philanthropic fairs and festivals in the gutter, blow the French music out of our choirs, and the feathers out of our bonnets; though it should confound all the wise ones, and be understood by no one but Thy divine self -- let it come! Thou art the master of Thine own tempests. O send us a storm from the Holy Ghost before Thou sendest the storm of the Judgment!
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