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My Last Message To The Church 

by Otto Bolds 

What has denominationalism done for the world? 

But before I begin the answer to this question, may I pause to explain that there is a marked difference between the workings of the true spirit of Christianity within the hearts and through the activities of those individuals who are truly saved and who for want of better understanding are working within the confines of denominations, some in this and some in that one, and the workings of the spirit of denominationalism itself. 

It is true that vital Christianity is the most vital and strongest civilizing power in the world. And this power and influence being exercised through saved individuals who are working in connection with denominationalism has caused credit to be given to denominationalism, which does not belong to her. 

Now back to the question and I proceed to answer. Denominationalism has flooded the world with a multiplicity of varied and conflicting doctrines differing in so much and providing such a variety of faiths, all labeled "Christian," that every person who has any tendency toward becoming a Christian may find a faith that suits him. Any and all of these faiths hold out to the individual who embraces them the hope that if he will faithfully hold on to the end he will gain a home in heaven. 

There is but one Lord Jesus Christ (1st Corinthians 8:6) who is the only mediator between God and men (1st Timothy 2:5). This Christ has given us one faith (Ephesians 4:5); this faith is contained in the gospel (Philippians 1:27). Therefore, every faith, other than that of the gospel of which Jesus Christ is author, which proposes a way by which men and women may reach heaven is a counterfeit of the New Testament, which Christ has given us and which teaches us how to get saved and how to live so that we may gain heaven beyond this life. The faith of the gospel teaches that "Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God (John 3:3). 

Many church members, under the influence of some of these false and deceptive faiths, have been led into a profession of Christianity without even learning that it is necessary to be born again. They have merely been catechized and confirmed into some religious faith. Multitudes of others, who have learned more about an experience of salvation through conversion or regeneration but have not learned that this salvation saves them and keeps them from sin and enables them to live a victorious life of freedom from sin, soon become a prey to their own weakness and surrounding influences, and their religion becomes a mere form. Thus the world is flooded with lifeless, formal professors, who instead of showing forth the glories and benefits of the Christian religion, drag its banner into the dust of worldliness, gloominess, grumbling, sensuality, pride, divisions, etc., until multitudes who make no profession of religion have lost confidence in the Christian faith, and as a result Christian Science, atheism, and materialism, are rapidly gaining influence over the multitudes. 

Among the sins of denominationalism there is no greater than the sin of division and sect making. What right has any man or set of men to establish a religious faith, differing in any respect from the New Testament, then offering the souls of men a hope of heaven by conforming to that faith? Where, when, and by whom did that kind of work begin? Every Bible student knows that the very first proposition of the serpent after opening his conversation with Eve was to call in question the Word of God and even dispute it and to offer a substitute instead; he is still at that kind of business and is using human instrumentality to accomplish his diabolical work. 

Just as Christ, and those who are born of Him, which is his church, constitute the seed of the woman, (Genesis 3:15), so also every religious body, whether Christian or non-Christian, established upon false doctrine--that is, doctrine that denies the Word of God or any portion of it--is the seed of the serpent. And there is, always has been since the time of God's declaration recorded in Genesis 3:15, and always will be until the time when the beast and false prophet and those that worshipped his image are cast into a lake of fire burning with brimstone (Revelation 19:20) enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. 

Besides flooding the world with false doctrines and with deceived and lifeless professors, denominationalism has divided the Christians in the world into hundreds of divisional bodies so that they cannot practice the unity taught by Jesus Christ; even the few religious bodies which embrace the doctrine of holiness cannot live it in their sectarian denominations, because holiness, as an attribute of God, contains within itself the elements of unity and will not admit division. 

All who are filled with the holiness of God must see and flow together. As the early church was a unit, were all of one heart and of one soul, so must the gathered church in the evening time be of one heart and of one soul. 

No humanly organized denomination can stand upon the Word of God; it must have a creed of its own. That creed must offer some future hope to those who conform to it, otherwise there is nothing to induce people to subscribe to it. And when people are offered a future hope of heaven by subscribing to a creed, that creed is offered as a substitute for the Word of God and thus becomes the enemy of the Word of God. 

Denominationalism cannot endorse the whole Word of God without destroying itself, because the Word of God teaches holiness and unity, which destroys denominationalism. 

Neither can the church of God acknowledge denominationalism as being Scriptural without bringing destruction upon itself. 

Remember, God has placed enmity between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman, and as above stated all false religion is the seed of the serpent, as the true church of God is the seed of the woman. It is true that Christ directly is the seed of the woman, but all who are in him are heirs with him and share with him the glorious triumph over the serpent. As he himself said to his disciples, "Satan shall be bruised under your feet shortly," referring to the coming of the Holy Ghost, which would make them more than conquerors. Also, Jesus said to his Father, "The glory which thou gavest me I have given them." Thus the body of Christ, the church, constitutes with him the seed of the woman. 

I will here quote the words of D. S. Warner from the book Cleansing of the Sanctuary, page 265, topic "Exclusiveness." 

"The use of this term conveys the idea that all who are not in the church that Jesus founded are excluded from salvation and the Christian's hope. If any person is not disposed to comply with the conditions of membership in God's church, he cannot turn aside and join some other church that presents a wider door; for there is no other. There is but one Savior for all men: 'There is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved.' But all who are saved by him are 'baptized (or inducted) by one Spirit into one body;' so all who are outside of this one body are excluded from the grace of God. Christ is an exclusive Christ; there is none other beside him. The faith that he gave us is an exclusive faith; no other saves the soul. The truth of God is exclusive in its nature; everything contrary to it is false. The kingdom of Christ is exclusive. It is a stone that breaks everything else to pieces. The one church which Jesus founded and named, and which is his own body, is also exclusive, for there is only 'one body in Christ.' 

During the reign of pagan persecution the rulers offered to stop the bloody martyrdom and allow the Christians to worship God in freedom, if they would confess that the pagan idols were also real Gods. This they could not do, but chose rather to die. And on this very point of exclusiveness is the present offense of the cross. 

People would not seriously object to God's ministers setting forth the church as contained in the Scriptures, if we would recognize their earth-born institutions as being also God's churches. But this we cannot do and be honest before God, and faithful to His Word. 

There is but one household of faith. Christ does not have a plurality of wives. He has but one bride, and she has no sisters. Thus saith her husband, 'My dove, my undefiled is but one: she is the only one of her mother' (Song of Solomon 6:9). 

"It is true there is in these last days a large sisterhood of Protestant bodies calling themselves churches, but the Lamb's wife owns no kin to them. They are of an entirely different family. Their mother is 'Mystery, Babylon, the mother of harlots.'" As "God is not the author of confusion" his church cannot be a spilt-up and confused lot of rival institutions. He recognizes no sisterhood of churches. If, therefore, there is but one church that emanated from God, whence come the rest? Martin Luther would answer, "Whatever is not of God is of the devil." 

Men come to us and say just what the devil besought of Christ, "Let us alone." "Go on and preach what you believe but let everybody else alone." This is great blindness. If the true God would reign, Dagon and all other gods must fall down and have their heads broken off. If Christ be lifted up, antichrist must be demolished. 

The kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness cannot jointly flourish, nor even coexist in the same heart. No man can preach the truth without knocking down error any more than darkness can yet hold sway after light has come. "So likewise, the church of the living God which is the pillar and ground of the truth" must utterly exclude and antagonize every counterfeit church. Hence, in the present evening light that reveals the true fold, every founder is confounded by the graven image, for his molten image is falsehood and there is no breath in them. They are vanity and the work of errors; in the time of their visitation they shall perish" (Jeremiah 1:14-15). 

That time has now come, for the preaching of the "Pillar and ground of the truth" demolishes "the work of error." God's church is exclusive like himself. He who is not willing to commit himself exclusively to God and to the church that Jesus purchased with his own blood, but for the friendship of the world and the masses of sectarians yet endorses the great wicked fables of Isms and by so doing avoids persecutions, is not fit for the kingdom. 

While men have held a place both in God's church and man's creeds through ignorance, yet when the true light comes they have no cloak for their ignorance and must cut loose from the one or the other. If they then refuse to walk in the light, "it shall be taken away from them that which they have." Or if they have a form, only "seem to be religious," that which they "seem to have shall be taken away." 

The spirit of this age is to place Christ and Belial on an equality; to call everything that has a name to be religious, God's church; and thus try to palm off upon the Almighty the corrupt works of the devil and insult his holiness by classifying with his heaven-born seed all the hypocrites and abominable characters that have been taken into the various branches of Babylon. But "the Lord knoweth them that are his." 

The great congress of all religions held in Chicago at the World's Fair, A.D. 1893, was a perfect selling out of Christ. They claimed to meet in one great brotherhood, forcing fellowship between light and darkness, Christ and Belial, God and Idols, heaven and hell. Heathen, idolaters, Shintoists, and worshippers of all the ridiculous gods that hell has invented met on one common level, as one great family, which virtually denied the exclusiveness of the God of the Bible and placed Christ on a level with heathen idols. This, we say, was an abominable slander on the name of Christ and wicked blasphemy in the sight of God. It virtually proves the whole business of Roman and Protestant babel have left Christ and have gone over to the gods of Baal. "For surely Christ is separate from all such and the God of the Bible He only is God and His church the one and only true and saving fold, and the faith of Christ is alone from heaven." 

Some of the above quotation may seem a little strong to some, but it is nevertheless true. Souls cannot be delivered from denominationalism until they see the wickedness of it. Some plead for the spirit of "live and let live." Agag would have preferred that, but it was not God's way; Achin, no doubt, would have pled the principle of "live and let live," but God ordered Joshua to do otherwise. One cannot accomplish anything in the way of delivering God's people from Babylon by using what some have been pleased to call the "soft pedal" in their preaching. 

You may preach the Church of God all you like just as the Methodist preaches the Methodist Church or the United Brethren preach the United Brethren Church, and there will be little or no objection to your preaching. You could even preach it in their pulpit--in fact, some have recently exchanged pulpits with sect preachers, but when you begin to show sectarian denominationalism up in its true light, that the whole Institution belongs to the serpent and is the devil's strongest instrument against the cause of God, that its end will be the lake of fire, etc., you will find yourself not so warmly received. 

Someone may be thinking, "but by that attitude and method I fear we could not win them." Perhaps we could come as near winning them in that way as Jesus did those whom he addressed as "scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, and whited sepulchers, full of dead men's bones." The plain facts, delivered in a spirit of confidence and fearlessness, will always go farther toward convincing and winning people than will a sort of apologetic style of preaching with a sort of cowardly spirit, as though we would rather leave them in delusion than lose their friendship or a little popularity or suffer a little persecution. 

Remember it is the subtle spirit of the serpent seeking to outwit you and to induce you to put on "the soft pedal." God calls upon his ministers to "Put yourselves in array against Babylon round about." "Shoot at her, spare no arrows" (Jeremiah 50:14). And in verse 29, "Recompense her according to her work; according to all that she hath done, do unto her." Then turning to Revelation 18:5-6, "For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled, fill to her double." 

Then we find them "that had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his image, and over his mark, and over the number of his name, stand on the sea of glass (mingled with fire), having the harps of God. And they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb" (Revelation 15:2, 3). 

In the work of the salvation of sinners God seeks to save all who are lost, and he wants us to join him to that end--or in other words, work with him to accomplish that end. But in the work of gathering his people out of sectism he only seeks to gather those who are truly his. All the rest must come by the way of the cross or the way of salvation. His sheep, using a Scriptural term, will hear the call and obey, but the goats will rebel, then we can preach salvation to them. 

May God give us clear vision and grace to do the work of today.