I've heard
the verse on Romans 10 used a few times to explain that Protestant ministers
are sent by God to preach the Gospel, verse 15 says: "How shall they preach unless they be sent?"
My question
to those individuals is which Protestant ministers? Lutherans, Calvinist, Amish, Anglicans,
Methodist, Church of God, Church of Christ, Quakers, Episcopalian, Salvation
Army, Adventis, Presbytarian, Shakers, Wesleyan, Brethren, Church of Nazarene,
or one of hundreds of splinter denominations from these?
The
splintering of so many different denominations believing differently on key
salvific issues is an important factor in showing the most obvious problems of
finding the one who is truly speaking God's Word (Issues like "what kind
of faith saves? Is baptism necessary? Needed? Is baptism for infants? Must
baptism be by immersion only? Can one lose salvation? How? Can it be gotten
back? How? Is the Real Presence true? Are spiritual gifts like tongues and
healing for today? For everyone? What about predestination? What about free
will?).
There seems
to be two possible solutions to this dilemma, one is to be sent by
extraordinary means and the other by ordinary means. Let's look at the extraordinary means. This method entails the individual to be sent
by God personally. Seeing as there is a
definite possibility that many will be deceived into believing they were sent
by God there must be a way to verify their 'pedigree' as you can appreciate the difficulty in finding
someone teaching God's Word amidst a sea of different ideologies and
beliefs. Indeed, we find many instances
in the Bible where these individuals sent directly by God performing
supernatural signs to prove they were speaking God's Word (Exo 8:16-19;
13:7-16; 1 King 18:36-39; 2 Kings 4:15-17; Acts 13:6-11; Acts 3:5…). Most notably in John (3:2; 9:16; 11:47;
12:37), even Jesus admitted "Do not believe me, then, if I am not doing
the things my Father wants me to do. But
if I do them, even though you do not believe me, you should at least believe my
deeds, in order that you may know once and for all that the Father is in me and
that I am in the Father." (John 10:37-38).
But what
about false teachers? They too will
perform miracles. There's the problem,
how can we discriminate between a true prophet and a false one? How are you to decide that question? The person who authenticates that prophet
needs to be authenticated himself, and this authenticator needs to be
authenticated as well all the way down the line. So who can decide whether a prophet is true
or false? Well, the answer to that
question is pretty straightforward: It's
those who are placed in the ordinary capacity as God's teachers. To understand how this came to be, we need to
look back at John 21:15-17
Three times
Jesus asks Peter if he loves Him: "Simon
son of John, do you love me?" And a third time Peter answers Him:
"Lord, you know everything; you know
that I love you!" And for the third time Jesus says to him, "Feed my sheep."
"Feed my sheep." These words are full of profound
meaning. All through His Passion and up
to His Ascension, Jesus seems to be acutely concerned of the future of His
fragile little flock. On the night of His betrayal we find Jesus "deeply
troubled", He lifted His eyes to heaven and called out a great
high-priestly prayer for this ragged band of working men: "While I was with them, I kept them in thy
name…But now I am coming to thee…Sanctify them in the truth." (John
17:13a, 17)
Sanctify them
in the truth. Jesus has come to give
humanity the words of truth given to Him by His Father. But now that the Son is going back to the
Father, how will the world know that He was ever here? And that He really was sent by God? How will His work be preserved and
continued? Would He commission His
Apostles to write letters and collect them into a book, the Bible? No.
"I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep,
and I will find them a place to rest. I, the Sovereign LORD, have spoken. "I will look for those that are lost,
bring back those that wander off, bandage those that are hurt, and heal those
that are sick … I will rescue my sheep and not let them be mistreated any more.
I will judge each of my sheep and separate the good from the bad. I will give them a king like my servant David
to be their one shepherd, and he will take care of them. I, the LORD, will be
their God, and a king like my servant David will be their ruler. I have spoken." (Eze 34:15, 16, 22-24) It was in this context that we find Jesus, the
humble carpenter, saying :
"I am
the good shepherd, who is willing
to die for the sheep. When the hired
man, who is not a shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees a wolf coming, he
leaves the sheep and runs away; so the wolf snatches the sheep and scatters
them. … And I am willing to die for
them. There are other sheep which belong
to me that are not in this sheep pen. I must bring them, too; they will listen
to my voice, and they will become one flock with one shepherd." (John 10:14-16)
But what happens
to the flock once the shepherd returns to the Father? "I did come from the Father, and I came into
the world; and now I am leaving the world and going to the Father"
(John 16:28). As we wondered before, how
will Christ's work be continued? If God's
sheep starved for truth at the hands of false religious teachers under the Old
Covenant, will not His New Testament flock again be defenseless after the
Shepherd ascends back "to my Father and your Father, to my God and your
God" (John 20:17)
The answer,
according to the testimony of the early Church, lies in these words, spoken of
the Good Shepherd to Simon Peter, representative of a simple band of Galilean
fishermen: "Feed my sheep."
And what
about a few years down the road, when there were wolves in sheeps clothing
preaching in Jesus' name a different Gospel?
In the years of Peter we find another shepherd tirelessly working among
God's lost sheep. Like Peter, his given
name is Simon, Simon Magus, he is the founder of the ancient heresy called
Gnosticism, Christianity's oldest and most obstinate rival. Former disciple of Philip the evangelist,
Simon apostatized to become the first person in recorded history to teach
falsehood in the holy name of Jesus. He
was in fact, the original fulfillment of one of Christ's darkest warnings:
"Be on your guard against false
prophets; they come to you looking like sheep on the outside, but on the inside
they are really like wild wolves. You
will know them by what they do." (Matt 7:15)
But what
about the ordinary believers, how would they have reacted to a second set of
"Christian" apostles preaching on their streets? Would it have been obvious that there was a
wolf under the sheepskin? Yes. Jesus had said that we would know them by
their fruits – but what if the fruits themselves can be counterfeited? Recall that Simon Magus had many
"miracles" to his credit and a large number on converts as well. The Apostle Paul seems to be addressing this
very dilemma when he wrote: "false
apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises
himself as an angel of light" (2 Cor 11:15)
The
predicament was very real, if the prospective shepherds all look like angels
how are they to choose between them? How
on earth does a common Roman laymen in AD 50 – only just hearing of Jesus
Himself for the first time – supposed to know which are the true disciples of
Christ and which are the false? Do not
underestimate this problem, we may casually imagine that these early believers
had only to pull out their pocket New Testament to send these dangerous
pretenders packing, tails between their legs.
This was completely impossible; the Church had been preaching the gospel
for at least 10 years before a single line of the New Testament was
written. She had been doing these things
for over fifty years before the final line was completed. And even then some may have been introduced
to Matthew's Gospel and perhaps one or two letters from Paul – but even these
would have been circulating as loose individual works; over 300 years would
pass before they ever came to be bound together in one authoritative canon in a
book we call our Holy Bible.
The solution
is quite simple. When confronted with
two conflicting stories, all one needed to do was find the "…man [that]
was with Jesus of Nazareth" (Mat 26:71).
He had simply to ask to traditional question: Which men had been with Jesus? That fact alone, once truly established,
banished all doubt.
Jesus Christ
appointed twelve apostles to teach His doctrines and exercise His authority
once He ascended into heaven (Matt 28:16-20).
He gave them specific authority to speak and teach what He taught (Eph
2:19-20, 1 Thess 4:2, 2 Pet 3:2), and He warned all of His followers of the
consequences of private teaching outside of the Church (Matt 18:16-17, 1 Cor
5:5, 1 Tim 2:20, 2 Pet 1:20-21). Most
importantly, however, Jesus promised the Holy Spirit to guide the Apostles in the
truth (John 14:16-17), which would distinguish them from the false prophets who
would later introduce false doctrines and heresies (2 Pet 2:1). This is the reason why St Paul described the
Church as the 'pillar and foundation of
truth' (1 Tim 3:15), and not the bible which can be twisted by the untaught
and unstable (2 Pet 3:16). The only way
that any group can claim to have the truth is if they teach what the Apostles
taught, either written or oral (2 Thess 2:15).
But this begs
the question: what happens after the original Apostles die? Is the Church not to continue the way Jesus
established it in its hierarchical structure?
If Jesus' words were not meant eternally and were to be understood
simply in His time, then the authority of the Apostles which Christ instituted
would have died with the last Apostle.
This would leave the Church without leadership and in total confusion
when serious doctrinal questions and problems occurred, which, inevitably, they
did. (No point in relying on Scripture
since many of the heretics used Scripture to defend their positions.) The other option, the much more likely and
divinely consistent one, is that the Apostles would choose successors, passing
on to them what they learned from the Lord, and in turn giving them not only
the authority to teach but also the divine promise to correctly interpret God's
written and inspired word. We know that
this is the way it was done from the beginning by reading some of the Early
Church Fathers.
God Bless
Nathan
