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Recently, I read the following in a church Bible study guide:
For forty years did unbelief, murmuring, and rebellion shut out ancient Israel from the land of Canaan. The same sins have delayed the entrance of modern Israel into the heavenly Canaan. In neither case were the promises of God at fault. It is the unbelief, the worldliness, unconsecration, and strife among the Lord’s professed people that have kept us in this world of sin and sorrow so many years. Had the church of Christ done her appointed work as the Lord ordained, the whole world would before this have been warned and the Lord Jesus would have come to our earth in power and great glory (E.G. White, Last Day Events, p. 38).
The comparison of Israel entering the promise land and the saints entering heaven is a solid biblical object lesson and many Christian leaders throughout history have found valuable lessons from this illustration. So I found that the paragraph above merited thoughtful reflection and consideration—what are the lessons, if any, that are applicable to us today?
The key indictment of this paragraph is that “the unbelief, the worldliness, unconsecration, and strife among the Lord’s professed people” have infected Christianity and prevented the church from fulfilling her mission of taking the gospel to the world.
I considered: What does this mean in practical terms? What does this unbelief, worldliness, unconsecration, and strife look like today?
Is this a reference to not correctly understanding certain doctrines? In other words, believing errors about fundamental beliefs, such as the Sabbath, the Trinity, and the state of the dead?
No, unbelief here is not referencing failure to believe a correct doctrine; it is referencing disbelief or distrust in God, a failure to actually turn one’s life, heart, and mind over to Him, a failure to trust God and be willing to follow where He leads. The reborn Christian, with a humble heart, will love God and, therefore, love truth, for God is truth, and, therefore, they will be willing to have errors corrected. They will be eager to have their ideas, thoughts, and beliefs reviewed and cleansed from all misunderstanding and error. They love to grow in truth because they acknowledge they are finite and don’t know all truth. They are willing to give up old beliefs and replace them with new ones as they are able to comprehend and appreciate them.
And when Ellen G. White (EGW) wrote this, there were serious doctrinal disagreements within the SDA Church leadership. She was a Trinitarian who believed in the full divinity of Jesus, who had life original to Himself, unborrowed, underived from another. But Uriah Smith, who was editor of the Review and Herald (and others), did not believe in the full divinity of Jesus, seeing Him as an offspring of the Father. But this disagreement on a doctrine did not cause the strife or division to which EGW was referring. Because both groups trusted God and were willing to follow truth as they could comprehend it.
Is the worldliness being referred to about things like worldly entertainments—music, movies, gaming, drinking, drugs, and sexual infidelity? These are certainly forms of worldliness, and for all my life in the church, I have heard this is the manifestation of worldliness. But in my view, this form of worldliness is not the core problem; it is not the root of the worldliness that causes unbelief or distrust in God.
The worldliness or world-like-ness that is the primary problem for the church is believing that God’s law functions like the laws of this world—imposed rules that require God to inflict imposed punishments for law-breaking. The worldliness that corrupts Christianity is the penal/legal theologies that are based upon the lie that God’s law is like that of the world’s, that God’s justice is the justice of the world, that God’s use of power is like the world uses power, and that God’s wrath is that of the world’s.
In other words, the true worldliness that has infected the church is the penal/legal theologies that make God out to be worldly in character, the source of inflicted pain, suffering, and death. And it is this legal worldliness that claims to seek “justice” through inflicting punishment, which causes the distrust or unbelief in the church. Why? Because in this legal theology, people are taught not to trust in God directly, not to enter boldly into His presence by faith, but to trust in all the various legal mechanics designed to hide us and protect us from Him. Christians are taught to place trust in a blood payment of a human sacrifice made to the Father to propitiate His wrath; to trust in the robe of Christ’s righteousness to cover over our sinfulness so the Father cannot see our wickedness because, if He saw it, He would be required to kill us; to trust in obtaining a legal pardon entered into a legal registry in heaven; to trust in mediators of various kinds—Jesus, Mary, the saints—to go the Father on our behalf to protect us from His wrath and justice.
All of this legal worldliness directly causes people who believe it to distrust God, to not believe in His goodness, mercy, and love; they don’t trust Him—they trust something being done to Him to protect them from Him. And that leads directly to their unconsecration, which means they are not cleansed in heart, renewed, reborn, purified, to become righteous as the Bible teaches (2 Corinthians 5:21). Instead, they are taught that when they place their faith in the legal payment, God declares them to be righteous while they remain, in reality, unrighteous. Because they believe the legal lies and believe God is the source of inflicted death, they keep their hearts closed behind their legal mechanisms because they really don’t trust God and don’t want Him examining them in truth, because they believe if He saw them, He would be offended, get angry, and be required by law to kill them.
And all of these distorted beliefs prevent hearts from being reborn, so these religious people continue to live motivated by the spirit of fear and selfishness they inherited from Adam rather than being reborn with a new spirit of love and trust. They become just like the legalistic Pharisees in Christ’s day, and that leads to the infighting and strife in the church, the constant theological arguments, rulemaking, policing, enforcing, and the subsequent divisions of various groups who don’t agree with one’s legal interpretations.
If the church is to be sanctified, if the Bride of Christ is to be cleansed, purified, and made ready to meet Jesus, her Groom, then the church must rid itself of worldliness, it must reject the world’s system of law and law enforcement, and it must return to worshiping God as Creator, He who made the heavens, earth, sea, and fountains of water. And that requires we reject the imposed-law lies and recognize all of God’s laws as design laws. We must stop judging God to be like a creature, for the hour of God’s judgment has come, the hour in history for people to stop judging God to be like a Roman Caesar and start worshiping Him in truth; only then will we be cleansed, only then will trust be reestablished, only then will hearts and minds open and the people be cleansed, the church be purified and empowered to take the eternal gospel to the world.
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