God’s Voice Must Never Be Confused
With the Voice of an Ecclesiastical Structure

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“The Jews based their hope of salvation on the fact of their connection with Israel. But Jesus says, I am the real Vine. Think not that through a connection with Israel you may become partakers of the life of God, and inheritors of His promise. Through Me alone, is spiritual life received.” DA 675

 

“Whenever a group, be it large or small, prevents us from standing alone before Christ, wherever such a group raise a claim of immediacy it must be hated for the sake of Christ. For every immediacy, whether we realize it or not, means hatred of Christ, and this is especially true where such relationships claim the sanction of Christian principles.”  Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959, 95.

 

The Church Can Substitute Itself for Christ

 

The Church can interpose itself between the soul and Christ. The Church can substitute itself for Christ. When the Church substitutes itself for Christ, it becomes antichrist. One of the meanings of the Greek word antiis “instead of.” This is exactly what happened with Rome. This is exactly what happened with the Jewish Structure in the time of Christ on earth. This is what happens whenever the Church substitutes itself for Christ.

 

Once Martin Luther was asked, If you take away all these things that the Church offers the people, what will you give them to replace it? Luther said, “I will give them Christ.”

 

The False Idea That the Voice of the Church and the Voice of Christ are Identical

 

“That these men (leaders) should stand in a sacred place, to be as the voice of God to the people, as we once believed the General Conference to be, in the past. – General Conference Bulletin 1901 page 25.” Paulson Collection, 422.

 

“It has been some years since I have considered the General Conference as the voice of God. 17 MR 216 (1898).” LDE 50.

 

‘The voice from Battle Creek, which has been regarded as authority in counseling how the work should be done, is no longer the voice of God. 17 MR 185 (1896).” LDE 50.

 

Another fatal concept is that since it is “the Church,” it automatically speaks for Christ-its voice is identical to that of Christ. This can be a very subtle danger. This happened in Rome with the concept of the vicar of Christ, the pope. I have heard ministers who believed that if they received several calls to minister, and the calls came in close proximity of time, that the first call was the call that God wanted them to take. This position cuts the struggle of praying and seeking God’s will, but it can hardly be considered to be a be considered to be a Biblical concept. It, like so much else, is simply spiritual laziness. It requires effort to distinguish the voice of God and the voice of the church.

Substituting the “Fellowship of the Church” for Entering the Strait Gate

 

Then shall ye begin to say, We have eaten and drunk in Thy presence, and Thou hast taught in the streets. But He shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are; depart from Me, all ye workers of iniquity.” Luke 13: 26,27.

 

One of the greatest threats to the clarity of Christ’s personal, individual, call to discipleship and the personal following of the person of Christ Himselfcan be a blurring of that call, or even a substitution of the “fellowship of the church” for the call of Christ, so that the call of Christ, “Come, follow Me” is never heard, or answered, personally and individually. 

 

Many things can be substituted for the actual meeting of the conditions of discipleship laid down in Luke 14: 26, 27. Many things can be substituted for the actual following of Christ. We have even seen souls who, when spoken to about following Christ, will say, “I believe in the Spirit of Prophecy,” as if an intellectual assent to the validity of the Spirit of Prophecy can substitute for true discipleship of Christ, which is what the Spirit of Prophecy is all about.

 

When  “the Church” Offers False Christs

 

False Christ’s, such as the Christ of self-esteem, the pantheistic Christ, the rapper Christ, the Christ of the Jesuit Spiritual Formation, are all being offered by the churches today.

 

When “the Church” Mutates

 

The danger is compounded when the Structure involves itself in cultural adaptation, or “cultural relativism” to the culture of nihilism, pantheism, relativism, paganism, and gnosticism, morphing itself into a new mutation bearing the image of the beast.

 

God Must Be Seen as Completely Separate From the Structure

 

Both John the Baptist and Jesus by the testimony of their lives, testify to us that if we would be saved, if we would know God, if we would know the voice of Christ, we must be careful as they were to separate the voice of God in our soul from all other voices, especially from the voice of the Structure.   

 

John Took Radical Measures to Guard the Voice of God in His Soul

 

So careful was John about guarding this distinction of influence over his soul that he, at a very early age, left society and even his family and lived alone with God in the desert wilderness, cutting off every influence over his soul except for that of God and nature, providence and the Word. The result was that Jesus said of John that he was the greatest that he had ever been born of women.

 

The Only Way We Can Evaluate the Voice of the Structure is to Know the Voice of God First and Separate From the Structure

 

A Structure can either speak with one voice with God or be hostile to the voice of God, but if we would be able to discern how it is speaking we must first know the voice of God, or we have no basis for evaluating the voice of the Structure.

 

I remember my father, as I was growing up, describing the force of the truth he witnessed. He grew up on horseback on the open range in Alberta, Canada. There on horseback, day after day, isolated from the face of man, out on the vast, illimitable northern Canadian prairie, he communed with God. There was an abandoned, broken down house out on the prairie, where, under floorboards, he hid the books Alone With God and Steps to Christ. When, in his herding of the cattle on the open range, he chanced to pass by this abandoned house, he would go inside, lift up the floorboard, and retrieve these books, and read them, pondering their meaning, and communing with God.

 

Then, at one with the Creator, and the Creator’s sky, clouds, and prairie, he would go to Camp Meeting, he recognized that the voice of the living preacher, preaching the truth of the Word, was in harmony with the voice of God he had heard, that voice he had heard communing with God on horseback, reading Alone With God and Steps to Christ. The voice of God, nature’s God, and the preacher, were all one at that time in the late twenties and thirties.    

 

“Though No One Join Me, Still I Will Follow”

 

Even when I was a boy, sitting around the massive camp fire at night with the sparks rising toward the stars, not far from the lake at Junior camp, while aged eight and eleven, I still remember a few good men who knew God and sought to teach us how to hear and follow the voice of God. One of the memorable songs we sang was

 

I have decided to follow Jesus,

I have decided to follow Jesus,

I have decided to follow Jesus,

No turning back, no turning back.

 

Then the chorus of the voices would swell:

 

Though no one join me, still I will follow,

Though no one join me, still I will follow,

Though no one join me, still I will follow,

No turning back, no turning back.

 

If only that generation, growing up, had followed that song’s message! However, by the time they were in their late teens the Jesuit-created Hippie movement struck the Structure’s youth ministry in force, like a tsunami. The Jesuits, ordered to renew efforts to infiltrate Protestantism, especially Seventh-day Adventism, at the close of GC31 and Vatican II, using Catholic Youth Action, Legion of Mary, and Knights of Columbus, a new wave of ministers began coming out of the Structure.

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