Jackals Among Ruins

How many in our generation have been equally tricked into laying aside the divinely ordained means of grace for human concocted means that can never save a soul, much less build a church? There are jackals among ruins who need to repent. But how many times have I felt in recent days that my work was so urgent that I skipped prayer in order to think through some problem or challenge? Sometimes seminary presidents look not to God’s Word but to our own resources for help. This, too, will save neither ourselves nor our hearers.

I think about these passages today, and the illustration of the life of a preacher who believed and preached the theology and faith of Westminster, and I come away with two words to charge us with today:

1. Focus: Focus your ministry on the Word of God, not this movement or that movement, or political involvement or speculative theological ideas or academic or professional peer groups. As we would learn from reading about the false prophets in Ezekiel, we must not “follow our own spirit” or our own vision, but God’s. Moreover, we must be prepared to announce the truth of Christ and His gospel to the whole world, and this was the indictment of the Lord for Israel:

But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand (Ezek. 33:6, ESV).

This is a most solemn warning to seminarians and ministers as well as to all of God’s people. To be given the Word of God is a great responsibility that involves not only our own souls but also the souls of all of those who would hear us.

For our seminary, let us focus on the central vision of the coming Kingdom of God and the need to pray for laborers for God’s harvest. Let us focus on preparing men for the pastorate and men and women to become missionaries and other Christian leaders. In all things let us focus on doing it with a sound methodology given to us in the Word of God, of faithful men teaching faithful men who will be able to teach others also. We must see ourselves as a mission of Christ, the repository of 2,000 years of study and preaching invested in our godly faculty, and being entrusted to a rising generation of pastors and missionaries who will join in the single minded work of declaring the Word of the Lord to the entire earth, from the sea to the city. Focus.

2. Avoid: St. Paul teaches that we must avoid the irreverent, silly myths that sometimes attach themselves to the true, good old ship of the gospel. As we make our way through a world where truth and error are often being mixed, where those who would seek to minister to people in post modernity may be prone to become one with the bad ideas they intended at first to confront, or those who would seek to recover the good traditions of the past become entangled in ritualism which ruined them, we must be all the more prayerful.