2.

Los apstoles de Cristo Jess 1:1 The Apostles Of Christ Jesus

Ephesians 1:1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God.
The letter to the Ephesians begins with a claim that is utterly staggering, and which is
foundational for any understanding of what the Christian faith is. The Son of God, the Lord
Jesus, had some apostles who wrote gospels and letters and a couple of other small books, by
which the world has been given the entire information it needs or will ever receive about Christ.
So let us begin with some facts:

1. THERE WERE APOSTLES

There have been men who walked on this earth, breathed its air, and spoke freely to other men
and women. They also wrote certain documents, and these men (there were no women amongst
them), were apostles of the only-begotten Son of God. These Twelve were his commissioned
ones; Jesus Christs sent ones. It was Gods will not only for his beloved Son to become
incarnate and live and teach and die and rise as the worlds only Saviour, but that his Son
should appoint twelve men to speak and to write for him. The office of the apostles is part of
our redemption. Our Lord himself never wrote a book. There is one reference to him writing
something in the sand when an accused woman was dragged before him, so Jesus was not
illiterate, but he left the work of writing about his life, his deeds and teachings to his apostles.
They are our exclusive links to him. The apostles are like an indestructible golden chain that
unites every single member of the body of Christ to its head. Becoming an apostle was not their
personal chosen vocation, and their staggering accomplishment was because of their own wits.
This was Gods will for them, and the written New Testament was achieved by Gods enabling.

2. TWELVE APOSTLES WERE CHOSEN

To become an apostle of Jesus Christ a man had to be chosen by him personally. The Gospel
narratives all begin with accounts of our Lord summoning men to follow him as his very own
disciples fishermen, a tax-collector and a zealot, and so on. These men are all listed and
named and they were twelve, no more than that. Twelve was a symbolic number; it represented
the new Israel of God, as the old Israel had become hopelessly corrupt. In fact its chief priests
orchestrated the execution by crucifixion of Israels long promised Messiah. So the apostles
were always referred to as the Twelve even when Judas apostatised and betrayed the Messiah.
We find Paul writing that the risen Christ appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve (I Cor.
15:5). We know that Judas was dead, but that is still how Paul refers to them. Then the early
church sought Gods will, and Matthias became an apostle, and also, as one born out of due
time, within the next year, Paul was made another apostle. But they were never called the
Thirteen. You can say the Apostles and you can say the Twelve. The words are
interchangeable. We are speaking about a unique and defined office held by just this group of
men who were appointed and sent by Christ the Twelve.

There was a group of Strict Baptist ministers in England who came together forty years ago
concerned with the future of their denomination. There happened to be twenty-two men who
gathered together at the initial meeting to pray and plan, and they found themselves in
substantial agreement in their convictions and desires for the way ahead. So that group called
themselves the Twenty-two Committee and even when some men moved away or died it was
still referred to as the Twenty-two Committee because what it stood for and the influence it
had was more important than the actual number of men who belonged to it. There were seven
proto-deacons chosen by the church (Acts 6:1-6), but they were never known as the Seven.
But these apostles appointed by Christ were the Twelve this number occurs nine times in
the book of Revelation. The wall surrounding the heavenly Jerusalem (which is to contain all
the vast number of the true Israel of God) has twelve foundations and on them are the names of
the twelve apostles (Rev. 21:21).

So here is a defined and limited group of men chosen by Christ while others were passed by.
He would remind this elite group that they owed their office to his choice: have I not chosen
you, the Twelve (Jn. 6:70). You think how the book of the Acts of the Apostles begins with a
reference in the very second verse to Jesus Christ giving the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had
chosen (Acts 1:2). They were witnesses of the very beginning of his public ministry when
John baptized him, and Christ was the one who commissioned them. Johns gospel comes to an
end with the risen Lord Jesus saying to these men, As the father has sent me, I am sending
you (Jn. 20:21). So the apostles were chosen by Christ no one else but them. What a honour
that is. Consider the most desirable boy in school, handsome, courteous, sensitive, thoughtful.
Every girl dreams of him, but he chooses you and tells you that he loves you and wants you to
be his wife. How wonderful for these men that they were told several times by the Son of God
that he had chosen them to be his apostles. But there is more:

3. THE APOSTLES WERE GIVEN GOD THE HOLY SPIRIT FOR THEIR WORK

They were commissioned and given authority by Christ in a unique way as the Twelve, and
they were also given the Holy Spirit by Christ in a special way: The Counsellor, the Holy
Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of
everything that I have said to you (Jn. 14:25). The apostle John lived to a great age, but his
gospel and his letters would not suffer because of failing memory. God the Holy Spirit would
remind John of everything that he had heard from the lips of the Lord Jesus that he would need
in writing his gospel. Do you see that it was not that Jesus told the apostle to have a go, and do
their best who can criticise you if you have done your best? Go ahead and put things
together in your own words. No, it was not like that at all. God would come upon them in
preparing their personalities, and bringing influences to bear upon them. The Holy Spirit would
indwell them and help them to fight against remaining sin. Then in a special gift of inspiration
he would assist them in speaking and in writing so that what they expressed would be exactly
what he wanted them to say. So it was with Peter preaching in Jerusalem at Pentecost, and Paul
speaking in Athens, and for Matthew when he wrote his account of Jesus Sermon on the
Mount in his gospel. The Spirit of truth would be there in them as they spoke and wrote. Here is
the key promise of the Lord Jesus to them in the Upper Room: But when he, the Spirit of truth,
comes, he will guide you into all truth . . . The Spirit will take from what is mine and make it
known to you (Jn.16: 13 & 16).

What a sense of wonder appears in their writings at what God in his grace has done in choosing
and using them. The apostle Peter says something very significant. He acknowledges that the
Scriptures of the Old Testament were composed by holy men being borne along by the Spirit,
but he goes on to say that what his friend and fellow apostle Paul had written in his letters was
identical Scriptures (2 Peter 3:16). Even in the first century the apostolic writings were
recognised as Scripture. They did not have to wait for a century or two before the church
pronounced, We have decided that Johns gospel is Scripture. We have decided that the letter
of Paul to the Romans is Scripture and so on. What nonsense! From the beginning the
apostles writings were accepted as Scripture. They had their own innate authority because the
apostles had written them, not because a church council voted and bestowed it upon them years
later. Their letters and gospels had no need of the approval of sinners to make them the Word of
God. The gift and enabling of the Holy Ghost did that. So we find that how Paul begins this
letter to the Ephesians the other writers amongst the Twelve characteristically commence their
letters too, declaring their heaven-appointed office. That is why the churches should heed and
obey what is written in them Peter an apostle, Paul an apostle sent not from men nor by
man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead (Gals. 1:1).

4. THE APOSTLES WERE SPECIALLY PRAYED FOR BY CHRIST

So the Twelve were chosen by Christ, commissioned and gifted by Christ, and now another
fact, and it is this: the apostles were also particularly prayed for by Christ, in Johns gospel,
chapter 17, his high priestly prayer. He prays in particular for the apostles and he does so at
length from verse 6 to verse 19, and then he goes on to pray more briefly for you and me for
those who will believe in him through the message of the apostles. Our Lord is always making
this careful distinction between the apostles with their foundational ministry and all the
Christians who will later believe because of the apostolic testimony. What does he say to his
Father when he intercedes for the apostles? I have revealed you to those whom you gave me
out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word. Now
they know that everything you have given me comes from you. For I gave them the words you
gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they
believed that you sent me (Jn. 17:6-8). Jesus acknowledges that these apostles first belonged
to God and were given in a donation of grace to Christs stewardship and training. He assures
his Father that he has not failed in the task, that the words that the Father gave him he has
passed on exactly to the apostles. There is the closest unity between Christ and his apostles.
What they teach he teaches. He stands behind every word they say. You cannot put a leaf of
Indian paper between him and them. They are one. They have different expressions and
personalities, and so we can say, Matthew puts it like this, or that John puts it in this way, or
that Paul expresses it with this characteristic phrase, but they are all reflecting the one heart
and mind of their Lord. What was the distinctive feature of an apostle according to this prayer
of our Lord? Total confidence in Jesus Christ, obedience to Gods word, certainty that God had
sent Christ, and that Jesus words were Gods words. That distinguished every apostle, and that
was the result of the Saviours intercession, the harmony and unity of those he prayed for.

5. THE APOSTLES WERE FOUNDATIONAL GIFTS IN THE CHURCH

So what was the calling of the apostles? To be the foundation of the entire Christian church.
The true church had to be built on the apostles. We find it so clearly in the next chapter of this
letter to the Ephesians where we are told that Christians are, built on the foundation of the
apostles and prophets (2:20). Contractors have knocked down the old chapel that used to be in
Skinner Street, Aberystwyth, and as I was walking past there last week I saw the foundations
that have been laid for the building that is to go up on that site. I knew immediately that
whatever it was going to be it is not going to be a rival to the Millennium Stadium. The
foundations prescribe the building. A stadium in not going to fit onto that foundation. So it is
for Christs congregations, every one of them must build on the foundation the apostles have
laid for them. Islam wont fit on this foundation. Humanism will not fit, nor will Hinduism, nor
Evolutionism. But I tell you something more important than that. Modernism will not fit onto
the apostolic foundation because it is a Trinitarian, and a supernatural and redemptive
foundation. These are the specific dimensions of the faith, the foundations are saying .
Believe this and build on it! they say. Live like this! Let your marriages be like this! Let
your church be governed like this! Let your gospel be this, and let it be preached in this
manner! Raise your children like this! And so on. That is the foundation for your life and for
my preaching. God permits no one to lay any other foundation. It is a ruined life that is built on
the sand. Every congregation, all over the world today, has to ransack the Bible and make sure
that its beliefs and behaviour are apostolic. You must test every pulpit and every broadcast and
every church by whether it fits onto this foundation or not. You can inquire, Do you have a
biblical foundation for believing and living as you do? That is the question that determines
whether something is Christian or not. We may build only upon that foundation that Christ has
laid. The task of building the church will never end until the day of judgment.

Could anyone else become an apostle? Could you aspire to be one? Could you volunteer?
Could you put your name forward for the church to vote on you? How did the church go about
finding a replacement for Judas? Lets read the words of Peter; it is necessary to chose one of
the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us,
beginning from Johns baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these
must become with us a witness of his resurrection (Acts 1:21&22). What were the criteria for
the apostleship? To have been with Christ during his ministry, and to have been a witness of his
resurrection, so that you could say when you saw him in the Upper Room on the third day after
the crucifixion, That is the very same Jesus who called Levi from the tax-office whom I saw
raised from the dead, and meeting with me and the others for those forty days. So it is
impossible for there to be an apostolic succession, because the Lord Jesus is now in heaven. No
one has see him bodily for 1900 years.

You ask, But what of the apostle Paul? He didnt see the risen Jesus Christ did he? Yes, he
did. That is his great claim: Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? (I Cor.
9:1). It was not a vision that Paul saw on the road to Damascus, it was the real, living, glorified
Jesus who stepped through the veil of death and met with Paul there. So there can be no more
apostles. They ceased because their work was a foundation-laying work. The gospel church has
always been a cessationist church in its view of the gift of the apostles and prophets. There was
this office given at one time in the history of redemption and it was not intended to be a
constant coming of similar identical gifts into the life of the church ever after like pastors,
preachers, elders and deacons. The apostleship was a one-off foundational gift. The Bible the
apostles completed is the permanent feature.

I was reading this week Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Joness book called Authority (Banner of Truth).
How he insists on the finality and perfection of the apostleship. He says, It is the only
authority; it is the final authority. There can be no addition to it. It cannot be added to because
there cannot be any successors to the apostles. By definition they cannot have successors. We
assert this as against Roman Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism, and all who teach the
spurious doctrine of apostolic succession. If an apostle is a man who must have seen the risen
Lord and who is therefore able to witness to the fact of the resurrection, there cannot be
successors. Those originally chosen have had no successors. There have been no others who
have been especially called and endowed and inspired to speak and to teach authoritatively by
the risen Lord himself directly. The thing is impossible. There is to be no fresh revelation.
There is no need of any. It was given and given finally to the apostles (see Jude 3).

The church is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets. We must therefore reject
every supposed new revelation, every addition to doctrine. We must assert that all teaching and
all truth and all doctrine must be tested in the light of the Scriptures. Here is Gods revelation of
himself, given in parts and portions in the Old Testament with an increasing clarity and with a
culminating finality, coming eventually in the fulness of times to the perfect, absolute, final
revelation in God the Son. He in turn enlightens and reveals his will and teaching to those
apostles, endows them with a unique authority, fills them with the needed ability and power,
and gives them the teaching that is essential to the well-being of the church and Gods people.
We can build only upon this one, unique authority (D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Authority,
Banner of Truth, Edinburgh, pp 59&61). That is biblical cessationism, declared by one of its
most eloquent spokesmen

6. THERE IS HUMANIST OPPOSITION TO THE AUTHORITY OF THE APOSTLESHIP

One vociferous voice of protest to all this comes from the mass of contemporary men and
women living in the past Enlightenment Western world. The post-modernist man says, My
authority for what I believe, my values and how I choose to live comes from myself alone. He
must say that; having rejected God all he has is man. The humanism of the Renaissance that
accompanied the Reformation led its followers to try to ground their certainties in man himself
not in any alleged apostolic revelation from God. Descartes is the most famous product of that
tradition. He sought a sure ground of certainty within experience, and he claimed that he had
found it in the fact of doubt itself. Man can doubt everything, but he cannot doubt the fact that
he is doubting. I think, therefore I am. Descartes thought that the ground of absolute authority
could be found within himself. This conviction has been reiterated in many different ways in
the centuries since, especially in the prevailing rationalism and existentialism of our own
humanistic age. The burden of modern mans beliefs is always the same, that man is the centre
and measure of things, and that ultimate truth is to be found within his own experience. What
the writings of the apostles and the Bible does, the humanist says, is to confirm that point of
view, that men can discover their own truth within themselves, in their own thinking and
decisions. So modern man asserts his autonomy, his independence of any imagined god and his
apostles. He affirms that ultimate authority is found in his own heart. Search for the saviour
inside yourself. What we all must do is to share together our experiences. That is the way
ahead, says the natural man today. There is no place any longer for Messianic figures coming
from heaven. All that has gone.

The latest fashionable guru to promote this is 55-year-old Eckhart Tolle whose first book, The
Power of Now, has sold more than a million copies in North America and 130,000 copies in
the United Kingdom. I say it is fashionable because it is Hollywood that is promoting it. The
film star Cher says that it changed her life. Gillian Anderson of The X Files claims she has
received enlightenment through it. Meg Ryan, another film star, introduced it to Oprah Winfrey
who promoted it on her show in the year 2002 telling millions of viewers that she had read it
eight times and that she keeps it on her bedside table. Little wonder with that endorsement Mr
Tolle has become a rich man. What does he teach? The present moment is the most meaningful
moment in life. By aligning with the now you are also aligned with life itself. he says,
People still think spirituality is having certain belief systems in God or angels but
spiritual means to be able to step beyond the conceptual reality in your head. In other words
accessing the dimension of stillness within yourself. In other words by going in and into your
self you find your own redemption. We save ourselves. When he discovered this Mr Tolle went
to live in Glastonbury the nexus of alternative living in England and there he gave formal
weekly group sessions in his philosophy. From there the next natural step was to California
where he wrote his best-seller. He now lives in a high-rise in Vancouver. O brave new world
that hath such spirits in it!
That spirit which drives people away from Jesus Christ and into themselves is demonic,
because man is usurping the enlightenment and authority of the word of Jesus Christ. That
philosophy sends men to look for the assurance of redemption in an individuals peak
experiences. Such individualism leads to anarchy. It is another corrosive in society and results
in its steady disintegration. It sets man against man. What are marriage vows when you have
been taught that the present moment is the most meaningful moment of your life? This is the
reason for the moral decline of our society today; the situation ethic declares that if you have
obtained the dimension of stillness within yourself then all is well; how can something that
feels so right be wrong? The ultimate arbiter is how a person feels. The authority appealed to
by such a 21st century man is not the apostles of Christ but something within him. He is his
own final authority. He accepts as a fact the idea that he has a right to do whatever he wants;
whenever, and however he pleases. This is making a net to catch the wind. Both the Christian
and the non-Christian live by faith in their presuppositions; however, those presuppositions are
exactly opposite to one another.

Most people do not realize that all men without exception are deeply committed belivers, and
all men live their lives by absolute faith in their beliefs. Everyone in Aberystwyth is a believer
and lives by faith in his beliefs or presuppositions. The vast majority of them believe lies, and
live their entire lives in rebellion against the truths of the apostles of Jesus Christ. Mans
problem is not his lack of faith. He has plenty of faith, but it is misplaced; his faith is in himself
instead of the word of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter and Paul.

7. THERE IS RELIGIOUS OPPOSITION TO THE EXCLUSIVE AUTHORITY OF THE

APOSTLES

Another voice of protest is aimed not so much at the claim that there can be divinely appointed
apostles but at their exclusive authority. No, people protest, there are many other prophets
whove come from God, and there are vicars of Christ, and also messengers who come to us
from Jesus. Even during the life of the apostles a few men stood up in different churches and
they claimed that they also had the apostolic gift. Paul writes of them; For such men are false
apostles . . . masquerading as apostles of Christ (2 Cors. 11:13). The Lord Jesus himself
speaks later to this very church at Ephesus who were bothered by false apostles: you have
tested those who claim to be apostles, but are not, and have found them false (Rev. 2:2).

Some of you might feel that all the professing churches should unite, but until the churches are
agreed on what is truth, and what must a man do to be saved, and even what is a Christian,
there can be no unity in the churches. For example, where does Rome get her justification for
the institution of the papacy? You wont find that in the Bible, nor will you read in the New
Testament of the office of the priesthood, nor the sacrifice of the mass, nor purgatory, nor a
confessional, nor a redeeming role for Mary, nor an account of her immaculate conception, nor
her bodily assumption at her death, nor prayers for the dead? None of those teachings is found
in the apostolic writings of the New Testament are they? Rome will generally agree that they
are not there, and that in itself is a very significant concession. Doctrines which are so central to
all we understand of Roman Catholicism were not written down by the apostles in the New
Testament. Yet today they are believed by over a thousand million Roman Catholics.

Then why does Rome believe them? She will say this, that Christ and his apostles taught many
things that were not committed to writing, but there was an apostolic tradition which went
underground and thus preserved them, handing them on to succeeding generations, and in the
fulness of time these teachings re-emerged in the history of the church. They popped up, say, in
certain writings in the early centuries and again in the Middle Ages. They can be found in the
decrees of church councils, and they have also reappeared in the rescripts of various popes. For
example on 1 November 1950 Pope Pius XII declared that the ever Virgin Mary, having
completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory. One
of the pleas made in defence of the apostolicity of that was an appeal to a comment made by a
man called John of Damascus who was born in the year 676; It was fitting that Gods Mother
should possess what belongs to her Son. The claim was thus made that this man of the seventh
century was merely stating what the apostles had always taught though not written in the New
Testament.

Our objection to our Roman Catholic friends is that such ideas are not endorsed by the
Scriptures. They may indeed be found in what some men have written across the centuries
amongst millions of religious books, and also they can be found in the conclusions of certain
church gatherings in 1900 years of Roman teaching, but our alarm is that they actually
contradict what the apostles have written about the perfection and completion of the work the
Son of god accomplished all by himself. For example, far from the need of a perpetual re-
enactment of the sacrifice of the death of Christ by a man dressed up as a priest on a stone altar
with a wafer believed to be turned into the body of Christ when it is raised and a certain
formula is repeated, the apostles wrote to the contrary: Christ has appeared once for all at the
end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. Just as man is destined to die
once, and after that that to face the judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the
sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those
who are waiting for him (Hebs. 9:26-28). And again, By one sacrifice he has made perfect for
ever those who are being made holy (Hebs 10:14). In his death our sin has been
comprehensively dealt with. By entrusting ourselves to him Just as I am without one plea
divine pardon becomes ours.

Romes claims to present what is true cannot be apostolic truth at all if the claims oppose what
we know without any doubt the Twelve themselves wrote down. You can claim you believe
something because 300 years after Christ or 1900 years later for that matter someone taught
it, but, men and women, please consider this, how unreliable an authority is the teaching of
different theologians and church gatherings. The church can go through centuries of declension
and ignorance. Bishops can make the most erroneous comments. The history of the Old
Testament church shows us that it was exceptional for that church to remain faithful for more
than three successive generations. What happens at such times? When such a decline occurs
then God raises up leaders who cry to the people, Let us go back to the Bible. Let us return to
what God has written in Scripture. This is what Huss and Wycliffe and Tyndale and the
Lollards and Luther were doing in the 16th century. They preached telling the people, There is
pervasive corruption and ungodliness in the professing church. Let us return to the
fountainhead of Jesus Christ and his apostles, and let us see what they said. Perhaps we have
gone astray from the Scripture. Let us translate the Bible into the language of the people and
encourage them to read it and preach and live it. They didnt say, Lets find comfort that in
other ages of the church they lived as decadently as today, and they believed strange doctrines
then too. They called the church back to the apostolic revelation. In every century this needs to
be done, and never more so than today. So I have pointed out to you that there is religious
opposition to the exclusive authority of the written words of the apostles in the New Testament.

8. THERE IS THE REJECTION OF THE APOSTLES BY ISLAM

The greatest threats to the church in the past have come from men who have claimed to have
been sent into the world by God, that is, apostles bearing a new message from him. Six
centuries after the life of Christ a man was born named Mohammed. The year of his birth was
AD 570 and it occurred in Mecca in Saudi Arabia. His father died before he was born and by
the age of six Mohammed was an orphan. He lived with his grandfather for a couple of years
and the remainder of his childhood was spent with an uncle who was a tailor. At 25 he married
a rich widow who was fifteen years older than himself. This gave him financial security and
time to spend in meditation, preaching and dictation he never learned to read and write. His
preaching was at first opposed, and he had to flee to Medina, but then he gathered supporters
around him and in the year 630 he returned to Mecca with an army of 10,000 and he took the
city in a bloodless victory. He died two years later.

Mohammed claimed that he had ecstatic visions of Allah and he preached extensively about
how to serve him especially by five daily recitations of prayers facing Mecca, and fasting
during the daylight hours of the month of Ramaden, and going on a pilgrimage to Mecca once
in your lifetime. For Mohammed the Lord Jesus was just another prophet in a line of twenty-
five culminating in Mohammed. Jesus Christ did not die on the cross for our redemption, said
this apostle, that was Barabbas. So neither did Christ rise from the dead. Mohammed claimed
that he was the last of the prophets, and with him revelations had ceased. The revelations he
had had from God superseded all others. Today there are 1,300 million people who follow his
teaching. When his followers are in control in a country then life is very difficult for Christians.
If Moslems are converted so that they come to trust in Christ then in many parts of the world
their very lives are in danger and they must flee. No free and open evangelism is permitted in
most of the Middle East, and there is continual threat of destruction expressed against our own
country. One is filled with forebodings about our future since the events of 9/11. What lies
before us? It looks rather threatening. Where did all of this start? With a man who said that
Jesus Christ was simply one person through whom God had spoken, but that God also spoke
through him too. Mohammed claimed to be Gods apostle.

9. THE CULTS REJECT THE FINALITY AND PERFECTION OF THE APOSTLES

All through history a claim has been repeatedly made by both men and women that they are the
channels of brand new revelation from heaven, and they have become the messengers of Jesus
Christ. This has always been utterly disastrous. Think of a couple of those cults that came out
of America in the 19th century. There was a man called Joseph Smith who lived in a small
town in New York state, and in the year 1820 he claimed to have had a vision of God in the
woods, to be followed three years later, he claimed, by a visitation from an angel called
Moroni. Four years later Joseph Smith further claimed that he dug up a book of golden plates
and began to translate it into English. During this time the apostles Peter, James and John, so he
said, sent John the Baptist to visit and ordain him. To his followers Joseph Smith was heralded
as a 19th century apostle. The Book of Mormon was published in 1830. It claims equality
with the Bible. Today Mormonism with all its fantasies and its slender connection with
Christianity is said to be one of the fastest growing religions in the world with 11 million
followers. Once you claim to have the authority of a written revelation from God your
influence over people is considerably increased.

There was another person named Ellen G. White of the state of Maine, who in the year 1844
started having visions. In the first she claimed she saw Jesus guiding Seventh Day Adventist
followers to the City of God, and in another vision she claimed that he told her she must tell
other people what God was saying to her. In 23 years she claimed that she had almost 200
visions. She wrote incessantly, and out of these writings of hers the distinctive teachings of
Seventh Day Adventism came, that the holy day was Saturday, that there was no hell, that Old
Testament food laws should be kept, that there will be three resurrections and so on.
Conservative in many ways, that is, Trinitarian and believing in the deity of Christ, yet this
teaching is a confusing blend of law and grace. Today there are 25 million Seventh Day
Adventists in the world. It is a fearful thing to claim to be the spokesman for fresh revelation
from God. You think of how the New Testament ends. In the last verses of the last chapter of
the book of Revelation there is a solemn warning; I warn everyone who hears the words of the
prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues
described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will
take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this
book (Rev. 22:18&19). The Bible ends by saying, This is it. This is Gods final word,
because the glorious Lord Jesus is Gods perfect Word become flesh. He didnt forget to say
anything men need to know. So dont add anything to this, and dont take anything away from
it either.

10. WHAT A PRIVILEGE TO HAVE THE APOSTOLIC WRITINGS.

So I am holding a piece of apostolic writing. It is the letter of the apostle Paul to the Ephesians.
It has had an extraordinary influence on the history of the world. How can it make us strong?
How do they help us resist and overcome the hosts of false apostles and the voices that say
there are no apostles at all, and they are not needed?

As I study the history of the church in times like our own the more I am convinced that the
source of our fathers strength was the felt authority of the Word of God, in other words, the
Bible is not something academic, remote from life, and purely objective. Consider the voice of
your conscience: the reality and authority of conscience is something which is experienced,
something which is felt by the individual when he does right or wrong, as Paul wrote of the
heathen their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or
else excusing one another (Romans 2:15). It is not merely a matter of knowing with the mind
the difference between right and wrong, but its impact on your affections, bringing the truth of
these things into the activity of everyday life. That is the authority your conscience has, to
make you smart for your sins. It is a felt authority. Shakespeare says that conscience doth
make cowards of us all.

The experience of the authority of the apostles was a felt authority. Consider Peter at Pentecost,
how people were cut to the heart by the apostolic word. Paul reminds the Thessalonians that the
gospel came to them not in word only but in power, and the Holy Spirit and with much
assurance. Those congregations had experienced in their hearts and minds the impact of the
truths which Paul, Peter and John spoke. This word of the Gospel (and of the Law) had been
brought home to their lives in the most powerful way by experiencing so much of what it
meant. They had felt the condemnation of the Law of God, and the utter inability of the sinner
to save himself. They had felt the truth of the Gospel, that Christ Jesus died for sinners. They
knew by faith that they were justified by his perfect righteousness. This was something as real
to them as their own personal existence. They could no more doubt its truth than they could
doubt that they were alive. And it was that, the felt authority of the apostolic Word, that
enabled Luther to oppose the authority, the doctrines, the traditions, the might and the ugly
muddle of the papacy. He couldnt have done it on any other ground at all.
For example, what if Luther had known the Bible only as many people in the church then and
today know it, namely, as a holy book; as a history of the people of God; as an account of the
life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; but without any experience of the Gospel of
justification by faith? On that basis he couldnt have opposed the authority of Rome. However
much he might have said he believed in the authority of the Bible, however many theories he
may have been acquainted with relating to its authenticity and inerrancy, without the inward
conviction of its truth he wouldnt have been able to take the stand he did. But the Word of God
had been so indelibly written into his experience that he couldnt deny its divine truth. His own
words convey that, Here I stand. I can do no other. He knew that this Word had saved him
just as certainly as he knew that he existed. Therefore he could do no other. You cannot, and do
not, talk like that about theories, propositions, arguments. If you are dealing in these you may
be wrong, there is always the possibility of doubt and uncertainty, of some new fact emerging,
and so on. So you may be wrong. But the felt authority and truth of the apostolic Gospel, like
the truth of existence, admits of no doubt. This authority is sealed upon the heart. I can do no
other.

Now this is the truth by which true Christianity lives. It is not merely objective authority, based
upon arguments and theories about the authority of the apostles. This is not, of course, to
suggest that such arguments do not have an important place in Christian apologetic. They most
certainly do. But without the experience of the salvation of which the Bible speaks they are
impotent. They do not and cannot give evangelicalism the authority that it needs today, any
more than they could have given birth to the Reformation. This authority is not purely
subjective, arising from mans own experience, because that is ultimately delusory. It is the
fusion of the two things the objective truth of the apostolic writings becoming real in the
experience of the individual by the Holy Ghost so that his own existence is transformed and
determined by it. My conscience is taken captive by the Word of God. I can do no other. Or
as Paul put it, The life which I now live I live by faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and
gave himself for me (Galatians 2:20). My life is now so conditioned and penetrated by the
truth of Gods Word in the Gospel of Christ, that I cannot deny it any more than I can deny
myself that I am. When I hear error exalted as the truth then I am conscience bound to sound
an alarm and point out its mistakes. That is the unique authority of evangelicalism, because it is
the unique authority of authentic Christianity, and anything else, every substitute, is spurious,
and a delusion, which is ultimately demonic, because it pretends to an authority which belongs
only to God and his Word.

Papal power, like Islamic authority, and the grip which the cults have over their adherents is all
ultimately demonic because those different and opposing forces all represent the absolute
objectification of power. They call for the complete surrender of the mind and will of the
individual to what these different structures claim. They call on the individual to abdicate his
responsibilities as an individual and accept the mind and will of another in his place. The
individual must assent to everything that the infallible papacy, or the Koran, or the cult leaders
teach, even though he may not even know what that teaching is most Roman Catholics have
the faintest knowledge of what their church believes. This is why such authorities are demonic
and ultimately destructive. They are akin to the authority of dictatorship in the political sphere,
where individuals and a nation submit themselves to the will and judgment of a dictator, a
leader who claims to embody the will and mind of the people. That is why Roman Catholic
countries have been breeding grounds for political dictatorship. That is why there are no
Muslim democracies. The authority of Pope or Islam, if conceded, represents the rape of the
individual conscience, and the substitution for it of a power that is external to it. The surrender
of the conscience in this way can only be attended by perilous consequences. To say, I am
commanded to do it, and have no alternative but to obey, has, as we have seen in the history of
the last war, produced terrible and disastrous results. Yet that is the kind of authority both the
papacy (with its anathemas on all who resist its claims), and Islam in its essence represents. It is
of that genre or type of external, objective authority which overrides and overrules the
individual conscience and is hence demonic.

How different is Gods way. He comes to us in the form of a letter written by a servant of his
whom he has made Christ-like for this very purpose. Two thousand years later Christians in
distant Wales will need these counsels and comforts. Thus the Lord comes to us where two or
three gather together in his name, and he is the one who teaches, exhorts, rebukes and displays
the beauty of God. We grow in our love for him and so it becomes our delight to understand
and obey his Word. Just one book he has given to us, and the grace in discovering its truths and
blessing in doing what it says. That is Gods way of preparing people to share his heaven.

31st August 2003 GEOFF THOMAS