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3 JACKALS AMONG RUINS a Charge to the Seminary Community

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3 JACKALS AMONG RUINS a Charge to the Seminary Community 3 JACKALS AMONG RUINS A Charge to the Seminary Community of Reformed Theological Seminary INTRODUCTION TO THE READING There is a quiet killer roaming our land. In our day, many ministers of the Gospel, and many Christians in general, have fallen. Mostly they fall from sexual sin. Some fall from love of money. But a tragically innumerable sum of them will fall from the quiet killer of ministry. What is it? We turn to the inerrant and infallible Word of the living God for our answer. Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 13:1-4 The word of the LORD came to me: Ezekiel 13. “Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel, who are prophesying, and say to those who prophesy from their own hearts: 'Hear the word of the LORD!’” Thus says the Lord God, Woe to the foolish prophets who follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing! Your prophets have been like jackals among ruins, O Israel. 1 Timothy 4:6-16 If you put these things before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed. Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. For to this end we toil and strive because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe. Command and teach these things. Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity. Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you. Practice these things, devote yourself to them, so that all may see your progress. Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever. (1 Peter 1:24-25 ESV) On this Convocation Day, I want to bring a message of warning and a message of hope for our seminary community, which I am entitling “Jackals Among Ruins.” First, let us pray: Spirit of the Living God, illumine Thy Word before the eyes of our spirits, that seeing You by faith, we may believe, and believing, we may follow. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. INTRODUCTION TO THE SERMON The quiet killer of the prophets of old who were judged by God was, according to Ezekiel, their choice of curriculum. They taught what was in their own spirit. Thus the people were being fed ideas and being given images that were formed not from the mind of God but from that place that Calvin called the factory of idols, the mind of man without God. Thus they were, according to Ezekiel, jackals among ruins. These were the figures of dog-like creatures, alone, separated from the blessing of God and His Word, and laughing and barking and foaming at the mouth over the carcass of a kingdom which was no more. Like savage beasts, they ripped the last vestiges of men’s souls from them through teaching that came not from heaven but from earth. This is a devastating image of the false prophets. Thus Calvin would write of this episode in Israel’s history, referring to the jackals also as foxes: “But when the Israelites were wandering exiles, and attention to the law no longer flourished among them, it came to pass that foxes, meaning their false prophets, easily entered.” One can only imagine Ezekiel, who began his book by declaring that it was “the thirtieth year,” no doubt referring to the year that he would have begun service as a priest, feeling the pain of all of this. How much better it would be if the people were being fed the Word of God, worshipping in the familiar courts of the Temple of God. But it was also the “fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin” who was taken by Nebuchadnezzar’s unstoppable forces in 597 B.C. (2 Kings 24:8-12). Thus, Ezekiel, instead of serving God in the temple at the time of his ordination, instead of serving God’s proposes in the place where God’s presence was solemnly commemorated, sat with the other prisoners in exile, along an irrigation canal southeast of Babylon called the Chebar, far from the city called holy. But as he would learn, he was not far from God. For God came to Him in a whirlwind. And God ordained him to be a prophet to the rebellious people of Israel. But this holy man of God had a “Word from Another World,” as Robert L. Reymond has termed a phrase. And he spoke that Word, not his Word but God’s, not only to the rebellious people-at-large, but specifically, here, to the beastly preachers of Israel. They had forfeited their ministries by preaching what they wanted, what arose from their own spirits, their hobby horses, their causes, not God’s. And so, too, St. Paul, in his epistle to Pastor Timothy, who was to carry on the church planting and church revitalization work at Ephesus, warned against the preachers who would “depart from the faith.” And in doing so, the Great Apostle warned Timothy to having nothing to do with “irreverent, silly myths.” What were these? They were surely the Judaizing myths of a rabbinic religion that had nothing to do with the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but were manmade impositions on the consciences of human beings which brought Babylonian-like bondage to human beings, not freedom and new life. The killer of truth in Ephesus would not be as much the public scandals involving the deacon running off with the Director of Music’s wife, but irreverent rabbis running off with their mouths! The quiet killer of Ephesus would be preachers who were, if we were to take just the opposite of Paul’s warnings, untrained in godliness (v. 8), lazy in the ministry (v. 9), and whose hope was set on things other than the “living God,” the Savior Jesus Christ (v. 10). The quiet killer of ministry is preaching and teaching the things that are not of God and His Word. The quiet killer of ministry is putting our efforts into causes and movements which do not promote that which will save ourselves as well as our people. And when we have neglected the ordinary means of grace—Word, Sacrament, and Prayer—then our people will languish, our churches be weakened, the unconverted neglected, the Great Commission ignored. In short, our people will fall into ruin. And the leaders of such churches will become like Jackals among those ruins. Few would deny that Western secularized Europe, Britain, and sadly we must say, the United States, look like the spiritual ruins of a faith that once was. And today we know of scandals and scandalous spiritual leaders who are jackals among the ruins. Some of us might call the jackals antinomianism or legalism, or perhaps Mormonism or the new Mysticism, or, following Paul who named Hymenaeus and Philetus as famous heretics, we might call the jackals by more personal names like Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, Charles Taze Russell, or Jim Jones. And you would be right, I think. But could such religious beasts arise from our ilk? Could these roaming hounds of Hell begin to sniff out human souls in evangelical seminaries? And if so could they then reproduce their pups and let them loose in our day to bay senseless words in the pulpits of our land and wander upon the already Babylonian-like spiritual landscape of our nation? It happened in the Golden Age. When was that? Many of us in the Reformed and Presbyterian faith think of seventeenth-century English Puritanism as the golden age of Christianity. And in many ways it most certainly was! It was the day of the Westminster Assembly of Divines who produced in their 1,163 numbered sessions what are surely the crowning confessional statements of the Word of God since the days of the Apostles: The Westminster Confession of Faith, a Larger Catechism, and a Shorter Catechism, a Directory for Public Worship, as well as the lesser studied Form of Government. And it was not only their doctrine but their lives which would cause us to agree with the saintly Robert Murray M’Cheyne (1813-1843): Oh for the grace of the Westminster divines to be poured out upon this generation of lesser men.[262] This was the time of Richard Baxter (1615-1691) at Kidderminster and John Owen (1616-1683) at Oxford. This was the productive time when Emmanuel College at Cambridge was a veritable factory of Puritan divines whose hearts and minds were aflame with the glories of Christ and His Word. The doctrines of grace flowed like the oil over Aaron’s beard and could be heard in the preaching of Scots like Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661), Welshmen like Christopher Love (1618-1651), and Englishmen like John Bunyan (1628-1688), the famous Baptist of Bedford, as well as long-serving, faithful English pastor in the fins, William Gurnall (1617-1679) the Anglican rector of Lavenham.
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