New Book: Where Rome Is Wrong (Part One)

This is a day of battle, a battle from which there is no discharge, “There is no discharge in that war”.  Ecc 8:8

In every age there is room for men of peace but in no age is there room for men of peace at any price.

In the day of the toughest of battles when the great cardinalities of the gospel are under the most bitter assaults the work of the gospel must be in a state of constant belligerence.  God has a controversy with the people.  He who is not enlisted in the Lord’s battle and is not fighting in a “no surrender” spirit has practically gone over to the enemy.

The men of Church history like the Reformers were all men of war from their youth up.

They were not deceived by those who speak of the Kingdom of God as the cultivation of ‘the quiet life’ religion.  There is no such thing as a quiet life Kingdom of God tranquillity.  The times of the battles in the Church are the times of the cauldron.

The tonic for the gospel war is the battle for revival, the garments rolled in blood and the spirit of the baptism of blood.

The idea of cultivating a friendly feeling all round is simply not true Christianity.  The truth has no friendly feeling towards the lie.  Supernatural light has no friendly feeling to satanic darkness.  Evangelisation has no friendly spirit to stagnation, and what is more, stagnation is never good.

Revival must always be a resurrection of new life poured out upon the church.

Sympathy for evil is nothing more than the bartering of principle.

There is something even worse than the passions let loose in the field of controversy.  There are those who are not prepared for righteous controversy.  There are those who shake off their responsibility to know and to defend the truth under the sway of selfish interests.

The greatest controversies of all history have something to leave to the church, something which enriches it forever.

We can well ask ourselves, ‘What was the direct result of the reformation?’

What was the result?  Was it something new?  No sir!  Rather it was something as old as eternity, yet reborn and renewed in glorious Resurrection in Reformation Times.

What engrossed the attention of Luther also engrossed the attention of the Apostle Paul.  What engrossed the attention of the Apostle Paul also engrossed the attention of King David and what engrossed the attention of David also engrossed the attention of Abraham.

Well, what was it?  How can a sinful man be justified before a Thrice Holy God?

Again that question is the great gospel question, the colossal evangelical precept.  It is the Gospel, the whole Gospel and nothing but the Gospel.

The Church of the Popes, the Roman Antichrists, talks about the Reformation Settlement; that the only self-pronounced true church has settled the question of the Gospel, by the settlement the church has made.

There is no such settlement in the way which Rome teaches.  Rather, by the true gospel Rome has been unsettled and unsettled forever until it settles down in the flames of the eternal conscious retribution of the lake of fire.  Rev 19:20 ‘And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshipped his image. These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone.’

The Reformation was not the settlement it was the beginning of the overturning of the false, wrongly called, Catholic Church, until its final overturning in hell forever.

Tiny men may make tiny conflict.  Dwarfs may dwarf the subject.  This doctrine is not national but international.  It is the way of God’s Truth against the Devil’s Lie, the battle of angels, saints, apostles and prophets.  Christians, play the man for the apostolic faith of Christ’s glorious gospel.

There are many who are rightly alarmed at what is happening today.  The Church of Rome has had a revival, wedded to the false power of Ecumenical Charismaticism. 

Rome has slowly but surely been healed from the deadly wound she received at the Reformation.

The battle for the Free Gospel of Sovereign Grace has been robbed from the people.  The Churches of the Reformation have largely laid aside the Bible, the sole ruler of faith and practice, and revived popery marches through the nation with a devilish pride and demonic audacity.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is as Popish as the Clerical Bachelor on the edge of the Tiber any day.

It was only when the Reformation movement was chained to the Bible that nothing could stop the prevalence of Biblical Doctrine.

Forsaking the Bible, the God of the Bible has forsaken us.  The fight is on in the nation against the increasing political plots and treacheries of Rome.  The potsherd of the world striving with the potsherd only destroy one another and establish no truth whatsoever.

But there is another sphere to the ecclesiastical sphere today and that is the European sphere.

Europe, shattered at its heart at the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, is seeking to rebuild its tower of Babel confounded at the Reformation.  Satan cannot cast out Satan so Church and State will come together and join one another to continue what was begun many centuries ago.  A united Europe is the theme, the Order of both the political Europe and the ecclesiastical Europe.  This united Europe is anti-biblical, anti-God’s law and anti-Christ.

The final Apostasy of Rome is demonstrated in the steps which she took after the Reformation.

THE COUNCIL OF TRENT

This was a council which was different from all others.  It was a finalising Council sealing the brand mark of total apostasy onto the Church of the Popes.

The spiritual and moral leadership of the Reformers had rightly seceded from the putrid ecclesiastical body.   All that would arise from the ghastly corpse was a stench.  The Pope reigned supreme in the Council of Trent and ever since.

The deification of the Pope is the final act that can well be called the apostasy of popery.  The Papalising of the Church of Rome in the Second Century through the monarchical Pope was the FIRST ACT toward the spiritual and irreversible tragedy of Rome.  This was caused by the deification of the monarchical BISHOP.

THE SECOND ACT was the Deification of the Reigning EMPEROR, the association with the throne of the Roman Emperor Constantine.

THE THIRD ACT was the final adoption of the Babylonian Harlotry of Transubstantiation.  The mass was described as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the living and the dead.

It was by this that the awful power of the sacrificing PRIEST was locked around the throat of the Church.

THE FOURTH ACT was the promulgation of the Immaculate Conception of Mary and her sinlessness which came about in the nineteenth century.  HERE WE HAVE A FALSE GODDESS FIXED INTO THE WORSHIP OF THE CHURCH.

THE FIFTH ACT IS THE PROMULGATION OF THE INFALLIBILITY OF THE POPE.  Here we have fastened to the throat of the Church the fallible hand of so called infallible Pope.

No wonder we say God has removed Himself from the Church of Rome.  She is now no true Church but the Church of the Great Abomination, Babylon revived and the final apostasy. Having forsaken God forever, God has forsaken her forever. 

The Great Armageddon is her Doom and certain Damnation her never-ending end.

It has been well said that the Bible has more to say to the Church than the Church has to say to the Bible and that the Bible can explain the Church as the Church can never explain the Bible.

WHAT IS BEHIND THE REFORMATION?

So often today Rome invites us to go behind the Reformation and discover and consider what we will find there.

So be it.  I will go behind Roman Catholicism; I will examine its origin.  I will examine its history and I will examine what is presented as proof that Rome is pure undefiled primitive Christianity.

To go behind the Reformation, to get right behind it we must go to the New Testament, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles and the Revelation.

To get behind the Reformation we get to Christ, Christ as persented in the Gospels and Epistles.

The Reformation, remember, was not a new religion.  The Reformation was a rediscovery of the old religion.  The Gospel of the New Testament is the real Gospel of the Church of antiquity.

The New Testament Church is viewed in the New Testament in its ideal sense and its local sense.  There is no mention in the New Testament of the high religious state as the Church.  In fact such an organisation is mentioned only in the Book of Revelation in the setting of Apostasy.

Roman Catholicism as the State Religion as we know it had developed in 320AD and was connected by the international religion of the Roman Emperor Constantine.

The so-called Roman Catholic Church arose as distinct from the unified New Testament Church which was a visible number of communities, holding ‘One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism’.

Let me say that, at the Reformation, the Lord broke Roman Catholicism.  Remember, that it was in the Second Century that there came into being, what developed into the Roman Church distinct from the local New Testament Churches.

If we want to know what was behind the Reformation there was the New Testament.  With the apostles dead the apostle’s ministry was still available in the New Testament.  It was, above all, not so much Reformation Truth or Reformation Zeal or Reformation practice but Reformation Faith, ‘The just shall live by faith’ – the mystery of Reformation.

That faith is summarised in Romans 10:4 ‘For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth’.

If we go behind the Reformation we cannot stop at the first century of the early church, nor at the second century.

We must rather go right back to Christ Himself, to His Advent, Incarnation, Life, Words, Miracles and Mystery and especially to His Cross work and Blood shedding, Death and Ascension for sinners.  To His Prophethood, His Priesthood and His Kingship and to His present ministry in the Holiest of all and to His Second Advent, Reformation Truth is ‘We preach Christ crucified’.  This is the Gospel, which brings about such revivals as the Glorious Reformation of the 16th Century.

‘Being justified by Faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’

Pope Pius IX, the Pope who proclaimed himself ‘infallible’ was the victim of a self-idolatry which seems hardly sane, and which reminds us of some phases of another career.  The German Emperor allows himself to be referred to in an expression like “the Gospel of your sacred majesty.” And Pius would use phrases like this “Keep, my Jesus, the flock which God has committed to Thee and me.”  He would apply to himself, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”  He regarded his troubles as a renewal of the sufferings of Christ.  One of his cardinals spoke of him in 1866 as the living incarnation of the authority of Christ.  Veuillot (1866) identified the crucified of Jerusalem and the crucified of Rome, as far as to say to both alike, “I believe in thee, I adore thee.”  In 1868 the great Catholic Newspaper of Rome said, “When the Pope thinks, it is God thinking in him.”  Faber proposed an act of devotion to the Pope as a supreme test of Christian sanctity.  In 1874 a Jesuit paper applied to Pius the words, “Which of you convinceth me of sin?”  And there was a hymn sung by the German Catholics celebrating his priestly jubilee in 1869, “Pius, priest, our sinful age, wondering, finds no sin in thee.”’