Editorial
Dr. Robert Baird McClure, the first lay Moderator of the United Church of Canada, has spent most of his life as a medical missionary. He has been in China, the Gaza strip and India. We admire men of his calibre who accept voluntarily the rigour and privation of foreign missionary work, men who give their all for suffering humanity. What we do not understand is why he would consent to be the head of a professedly Christian Church, and yet deny the very fundamentals of the Christian faith.
When asked at Kingston, Ontario, if he believed that Christ rose from the dead on the third day, he answered, “No.” When also asked if Jesus was conceived by a human father, he replied, “I don’t know.”
The physical resurrection of the Lord Jesus is the keystone of Christianity. The Apostle Paul said, “If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17).
To deny the resurrection of Christ is to deny the veracity of many eye witnesses (1 Cor. 15:1-8), to deny the authenticity of the Bible, and to deny the possibility of divine forgiveness and acceptance with God.
The Anglican Bishop of Cariboo, B.C. Dr. Dean, might well lament over Christendom. His emotional outburst, “I’m not sure I believe in the Church any more … So far as the world is concerned, it is too late,” and his prediction that the Church would be dead in ten years, should be interpreted as a reference to the professing, apostate Church. Of the true Church, the Church of the Living God, the Lord Jesus said, “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
The Word of God predicts a “falling away first,” before the manifestation of the anti-Christ (2 Thess. 2:3). That there is a general defection from the Biblical tenets of the “faith once for all delivered unto the saints,” is obvious (Jude 3).
Jude says concerning those who repudiate New Testament Christianity, “These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit” (V. 19). Without doubt this implies that they separate themselves from the true Church by their heresies and apostasy. They assume a superior intellectual attitude, “and their mouth speaketh great swelling words, having men’s persons in admiration because of advantage.”
How essential it is to recall the words of the same New Testament author: “But, beloved, remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ; how that they told you there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts.”
“But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life” (Jude 17-21).