A friend tells the story of growing up in a home filled with tension, heated arguments, door slamming, and tears, as his parents fought to free his sister from her drug addiction. She rejected their help and they refused to abandon her to the drugs, so the struggle continued. It was a weary, unhappy home in which to grow up. One day things changed when his sister ran away from home. He was relieved to finally have the fighting cease and peace fill the house. He was glad that his sister had left, until one night when he woke up and in the dark and silence, he heard his father sobbing for his lost child. In the same way, God the Father weeps for the lost and rejoices when the son returns or the sheep is found.
False teachers disrupt the church today. Yet it is not a new or unique situation. Peter encourages the church in Asia Minor that is assaulted by false teachers by reminding them of the false teachers in the OT.
There were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them…. Many will follow their shameful ways and will bring the way of truth into disrepute. (2 Pet. 2:1)
Calvin elaborates in his commentary on 2 Peter that the church in every age will be assaulted by false teachers,
He [Peter] encourages and strengthens those to whom he writes with the argument that God has always disciplined His Church with this kind of trial so that their hearts may not be disturbed by its novelty. He says that the condition of the Church under the Gospel will be no different from what it was under the Law; false prophets upset the old Church, and we must expect the same. It was necessary to say this specifically because there were many who thought that the state of the Church under the reign of Christ would be peaceful.… Let us, therefore, remember that the Spirit of God has declared once and for all that the Church will never be free from this internal trouble, and let this image be kept in mind that the trial of faith is common both to us and to our fathers, because it has the same purpose, namely to make clear by this means whether we truly love God, as is written in Deuteronomy 13:3.
Calvin asks the question that is on all of our minds, “…if the Lord wants to keep His people unspotted, why does He not gather them all together into some corner of the earth where they can encourage each other in holiness? Why does He mix them in with the wicked, by whom they are defiled?” Calvin’s answer may not please everyone, “When God appropriates to Himself the responsibility for helping and protecting His own, so they do not fail in the struggle, we take heart to fight the harder.”
God has a heart for the lost. He sent prophet after prophet for centuries to Israel to call the people to repentance. The church however, rejected, persecuted and killed the ones he sent. Then he sent his only begotten Son and the church killed her Savior. Both the OT and the NT describe a war but not between the world and the church. The battle is within the believing community. The problem was Israel’s own faithlessness. Paul’s letters too are written to churches torn apart by false teachings. The church at Corinth was so deceived by false teaching that they were proud of their sexual immorality. Paul admonishes them to repent and goes on to say that their relationship with one another within the church should be love. Not a love that ignores or exalts sin, but self-giving agape love that rejoices in the truth and—always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Perhaps as Calvin claims, God has allowed turmoil in the church to make clear whether we truly love God. Do we have the Father’s heart for the lost that causes us to sacrifice our hearts, time, energy and money to pick up our cross and follow where Jesus led—to love again and again, to reach out with the truth again and again and again—knowing that we will not fail in the struggle because God has promised his aid?
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Sep/Oct 2008).
