Strangers and Pilgrims

Throughout Scripture we are reminded that we are here on earth as “strangers and pilgrims”.
Even in the Old Testament, where God promised His people a physical country, even then: “These all died in faith… confessing that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” (Heb 11:1)
Similarly, in the New Testament: “Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul.” (1 Pet 2:11)

And yet, when I was growing up (in the 50s and 60s) I never thought of myself very much as a pilgrim. I felt quite comfortable living in this part of the world, as part of this part of the world.
Even after I came to the Lord, in my mid-teens, I confess I still felt at home here. I didn’t feel like a stranger in a strange land.
But now I do!

I think part of that is because the appearance of the world I live in has changed.
When I was growing up there was a veneer of Christianity that covered my world, that kept me from seeing it as it really was:

• More than 90% of the population professed to be Christian.
• Nearly all the children I knew in my younger years went to Sunday School.
• Divorce was rare, marriages kept up appearances, homosexuality wasn’t even mentioned.
• Laws, by and large, reflected the standard of God’s law.

Of course I felt at home; to my eyes, at least, there was nothing alien about the world that I lived in.

But, from the mid 60s that veneer began to be stripped away.
Not just here. But in those other bastions of Christianity – like the United States and the UK.
The hostility of a world in rebellion against God became more apparent.

One way or another it always has been like this.
2,000 years ago Jesus warned: “If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”
We have always been strangers and pilgrims in this world.
It’s just that, at least while I was growing up, there was enough of a veneer of Christianity that this world didn’t seem all that strange or alien.

What happens, though, when Christians suddenly wake up to find themselves seriously, even dangerously, out of step within an alien culture?

The Great Apostasy

In 2 Thessalonians ch 2, Paul spoke of a Great Apostasy that was to come: “That Day [the Second Coming] will not come unless the Falling Away [Gk: apostasia] comes first.” (2:3)
“Apostasy” describes what happens when those who profess to be Christians fall away from the faith, and fall in step with the godless world around them.
Like Demas: “Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present world.” (2 Tim 4:9) He loved the world. He didn’t want to offend the world. He forsook Paul.

Why does this happen? Because of peer pressure! It is not just teenagers that suffer peer pressure. We all are subject to peer pressure, all of the time!
Paul identifies some of those pressures in 2 Thes ch 2:

• In vv 7-8 he says “the mystery of lawlessness is already at work”. There is constant pressure to join in with the world in rebellion against the Law of God.
• In vv 9-10 he refers to religious (see v 4) “deception” through demonstrations of “power, signs, and lying wonders.” Dazzling lights and displays of power in so-called “worship” will carry people away into error.
• Why will people be deceived into believing a lie? Because “they did not receive the love of the truth” (v 10).

This is what is happening today.
This is what has been happening especially in the last 100 years.
A hundred years ago, leading churchmen were already letting go of the truth:

• “The infallibility of Scripture? The world won’t swallow that. We can let it go.”
• “Creation in six days? Everyone believes in evolution now. We can let it go.”
• “The Virgin Birth? You can be saved without believing in the Virgin Birth. Let it go.”
• “Miracles? They’re not the gospel. Let them go!”

“Let it go, let it go, let it go.”
Forget Elsa: for a hundred years now, apostate theologians have been singing that song.

This is where it begins: with leaders in the churches who “do not receive the love of the truth”. To accommodate the world, they “let go” of whatever the world says it cannot accept.
But it is not where it ends. The current moral confusion among many professing “Christians” today began with theological apostasy among many church leaders over the last 100 years.

Not long ago Martin Iles talked about a dozen or so high profile “Christians” that in recent years have “de-converted” (apparently they don’t like to use the word “apostasy”), among whom were Josh Harris, along with his (now ex-) wife Shannon.
At the same time, we are witnessing massive moral confusion among “Christians” (especially in the West).

• According to the latest pew research half of all professing Christians in the U.S. (including one third of all evangelical Protestants!) now say there is nothing wrong with casual sex between consenting adults outside of marriage.
• In just the last 20 years (that’s how recent it is!) the world embraced same-sex marriage. Many professing “Christians” since then have fallen over themselves to accommodate the world around them: “I mean, how are we going to reach the world if we upset the world. The most important thing is the gospel, not morality.”

But I’m not writing this to tell you that. You already know that.
Nor am I writing this to bemoan the state of things today, by focusing on the “good ol’ days” when things were so much better. Because things were not “so much better” back then. It’s just that a veneer of Christianity covered this land and made it appear so.
But it has always been so:

• The spirit of lawlessness has been at work since the days of the apostle.
• Even a thousand years before that the world seethed in its rebellion “against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying, ‘Let us break Their bonds in pieces and cast away Their cords from us.’” (Psa 2:1-3)
• And before that, in the rebellion of the Tower of Babel.
• Indeed, right back to Eden itself.

Stand firm, hold fast

How are we going to guard against apostasy in our own souls?
“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; prone to leave the God I love…”

The good news?
“The Lord is faithful, who will establish you and guard you from the evil one. And we have confidence in the Lord concerning you.” (2 Thes 3:3-4)

1. Remember who the Lord is

Paul’s confidence that the Christians in Thessalonica would not fall away was in the Lord.
Our ultimate hope for stability is in the triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

• God, the Father, has “chosen [us] from the beginning for salvation.” (2 Thes 2:13) If that is His purpose, how will it not be fulfilled? God, the Father, “called” us by the gospel: He must complete that work to which He has called us.
• God, the Son, has obtained “salvation”, even “the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ”, for all those who truly “believe the truth of the gospel”.
• God, the Spirit, sanctified us by setting us apart. And now, He continues to sanctify us by enabling us to grow in holiness. We were saved “through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth.”

For this reason Paul prays confidently:
“May our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and our God and Father, who has loved us and given us everlasting consolation and good hope by grace, comfort your hearts and establish you in every good word and work.” (2:16)

That is what we need: stability, to be established.
Our stability comes from the triune God.

2. Remember who you are, where you belong

“Brethren beloved by the Lord.” (2:13)
That’s who we are:
– We are “brethren”, brothers and sisters in Christ.
– You are “beloved by the Lord” – if you have “believed the truth of the gospel”.

Grasp that, and as John says (in 1 John ch 3), you will not fall away.
“Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!”
What will this mean? John says: “Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.” Jesus said, the world doesn’t just “not know” you; the world “hates” you: “If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” You are not part of this world. You are a stranger and a pilgrim in this world.
You are part of a world where, “it has not yet been revealed what we shall be”; and yet “we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” That is the world to which we belong. That is our identity.
If you know that you will not fall away, because: “Everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.”

The problem comes when we forget who we are, and we start to identify with the world around us.

Some years ago, serving as missionaries, we lived in Western Kenya, not far from Lake Victoria – a day’s drive from the capital, Nairobi.
Travelling from Nairobi, about a third of the way there, you descend the Rift Valley and pass through the town of Naivasha. Around here was a region, known locally as “Happy Valley”.
Here, many wealthy English and Anglo Irish settled in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Drawn mostly from the upper crust, the so-called “nobility” of society in England, back there they had behaved with outward decorum.

But once they were away from their home, all that fell apart.
Happy Valley became a hotbed of debauchery, drugs, drunken parties, brawls, wife swapping and sexual deviancy – as well as one or two very high profile murder cases.
What came over them?
They were no longer in an environment where they had to keep up appearances. They lost their identity and descended into debauchery.

Similarly, when Christians forget who they are supposed to be and where their real homeland is, they begin to accommodate the world around them – the world that “hates” them, said Jesus. They begin to identify with the world.
Someone like Josh Harris forgets who he once claimed to be, and identifies instead with the LGBT community that he so desperately doesn’t want to offend.

3. Stick close to the Word of God

When Paul reminds us (2 Thes 2:13-14) that it is God who chose us for “salvation” and called us for “the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ”, he concludes: “Therefore…”
“Therefore…” what?
Relax? You don’t have to do anything? God does it all? It’s all good?
That’s the conclusion some would draw.

But that is not the conclusion Paul draws.
“Therefore, brethren, stand firm and hold fast”.

“Stand firm”
A word related to this appears in 2 Thes 3:3, “The Lord is faithful, who will establish you”. God is the One who gives stability.
Paul’s conclusion is: “Therefore” you have a responsibility to practise stability in your Christian life; you have a responsibility to “stand firm”.

How?
“Hold fast…to the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle.”
He is referring there to the Scriptures.

He is not talking about man-made traditions.
Not all man-made traditions are wrong. Some are neutral, neither good nor bad. Some are positively helpful. You don’t reject a tradition just for the sake of rejecting it.
But where a tradition runs contrary to the Word of God, there that tradition must be rejected. Jesus condemned the Pharisees for “laying aside the commandment of God, that you may hold fast the tradition of men.”
The Word of God must have priority.

Paul was referring to the Word of God when he referred to “the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle”. By these he meant his own words and those handed on by the other apostles, which are the words of Scripture. (2 Pet 3:15-16)

John says much the same thing in 1 John ch 4.
He warns us “not to believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”
How can we know truth from error?
John says: “We [who are Christ’s apostles] are of God. He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God does not hear us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.”

Hold fast to the words of the apostles. Hold fast to the words of Scripture.
If you want to stand firm, you must “hold fast” to what is written in the Bible.
This means “to seize” (Matt 26:48), “to cling to” (Acts 3:11). If you are going to stand firm, in this day of the Great Apostasy, you must cling to the Word of God, you must hold it fast.

That’s where the Josh Harris’s of the world lose their way. They don’t cling to the Word of God.
They may have once believed homosexuality is a sin – as long as they were surrounded by others who believed the same thing. They lived in an echo chamber where they heard only their own voice.
But once they start to hear other voices, it dawns upon them that there is a world out there that hates them as long as they continue to believe what the Word of God plainly says.
They start to lose their grip on the Word of God.

They begin to listen to those who identify themselves as “gay Christians”. (Really? I mean, can one also identify himself as an “adulterous-inclined Christian”, or a “lying-inclined Christian” etc? Our identity is in Christ, not in our sinful attractions.)
Then they hear the devil saying (what he said to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden): “Has God really said, did God actually say… homosexuality is a sin? I mean, look at all these people who are going to hate you if you keep believing that.”
They then stumble across an obscure commentator from Absurdistan who suggests: “When the Bible says homosexuality is a sin, what it really means is homosexuality is good.” “Ah, ha,” they think, “here’s someone who agrees with me. I’ll go along with that and I won’t have to cop all this flak from the world.”

That is what happens when you start to lose your grip on the Word of God. You start to lose stability in your Christian life.
I understand that: “All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves” (WCF ch 1, § VII).
But where a teacher, a preacher, a pastor does not stick closely to what is plainly taught in the Word of God, then the Word of God’s teaching is equally plain:

“Withdraw from every brother who walks disorderly and not according to the tradition which he received from us.” (2 Thes 3:6)

4. Pray that the Word of God will “run swiftly”

If you want to see stability in the Christian world, if you want revival to come to the church, then pray!
Pray that “the word of the Lord may run swiftly and be glorified.” (2 Thes 3:1)

As we stick closely to the Word of God, we must also actively seek to spread the Word of God.
That means, especially, to pray – whether coming together, or privately in our own devotions.
And it means taking any opportunity the Lord gives you to share the Word of God with those around you.

That is how the kingdom of God spreads.
That is how the kingdom of God took root in your heart, didn’t it? Someone shared with you the Word of God.
How will the kingdom of God come to anyone else except through the Word of God?
And then, how will they be established except by clinging to the Word of God?

You pray to God: “Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven”.
Well, it won’t come, unless you are also praying “that the word of the Lord may run swiftly and be glorified, just as it is already with you.”
That is our best hope; that is our ultimate hope.

It is great that we have some godly politicians. It’s great, the work that movements like ACL are doing. Let’s pray for them.
It’s great when Christians are given clout in the political arena.
But these are not our best hope. This is not what we ultimately hope in.

When Jesus was about to ascend into heaven, the disciples asked Him: “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”
Jesus had taught them to pray: “Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven”. So, fair enough: they wanted the kingdom to come. They wanted it to come “on earth.” Only they had their eyes set on an earthly kingdom in which they would have political clout.
But Jesus told them not to be concerned with such. Rather: “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me:  in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

That is the kingdom Jesus wants us to pray for.
That is how His kingdom spreads.

“May the Lord direct our hearts into the love of God and into the patience of Christ.”

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The audio of this post can be found here.