Blackest darkness is reserved for them

“Blackest darkness is reserved for them.”

(In Response)

Should we obey the authorities that God has given for our personal good and the harmonious interaction of society? Well of course. For the Christian I think that should go without argument.

If the worry were that some might use that authority in an abusive or over-reaching way, well again I would say, of course. Any due authority given can be a due authority abused. But that doesn’t mean that the essential authority is not a good in itself, just that the due authority has been used in a way that is out of proper alignment with its God given intent.

There are three basic God created “institutions of authority”: The Church, the State, and the Family. Each have a real and divinely established authority for the good of those under that authority, and we have seen each of them severally and together abused horribly for profit and selfish interest, made destructive through neglect of the duties inherent to them, or made a tool of lust and power. Still, they as institutions are good, and are to be respected out of respect for God, because He ordained them.

We do not need to be so anti-establishment that we lose all reasonable accommodation to authority so as to harm our neighbor and ourselves. We do need to be so mature in our understanding of human nature and the limited abilities of our leaders that we measure carefully the difference between legitimate and illegitimate uses of that authority and have the courage to speak and act when such abuse causes harm.

It would be like using the fact that policemen sometimes abuse their authority to abolish the practice of law enforcement; or that some men are oppressive to their families to abolish all fatherhood; or that some Presidents act beyond the measurement of their Constitutional authority to abolish all government. It just goes too far; it says too much.

The cure for this kind of thing seems to be to have a clear and scripturally secure grasp upon both the freedoms and the obligations of the Christian life, and the powers and limitations upon those who hold Offices of God given authority, so that we develop the ability to identify ungodly exercises of power beyond that which has been given for the common good. Is it inherent to the office of Pastoral staff to withhold communion from a man that is known to be cheating on his wife, or beating her, until he repents and resigns his heart to God and his actions to the community? Of course… that is one of the reasons Pastors give communion in the first place; to include and exclude; and so it is within the very nature of the office.

Do they have the authority to tell you how to live your life? Well that would depend on what you mean by it. By definition, the Pastor should be telling you how to live your life every Sunday, from God’s perspective and through biblical example, so it kind of goes with the territory. But can that be over-reached into an undue exercise of personal intrusion that pierces the veil between the institutions and acts and a transgression of the sanctity of the institutional Family by the institutional Church? That happens all the time, because it is common that neither the clergy nor the laity have a sufficient grasp of God’s “central planning” for the separate but dependant institutions and their beneficial limitations.

Now granted, the most common problem today is the under-reaching of the Church in respect to authority. It’s like a parent that refuses to do what the nature of being a parent calls for, and so their children run about in rags of neglect uncared for and untutored in personal and social goods. By the Church being unwilling to be the Church, we create analogous disorders particular to the Church itself; those things that the Church was created to cure being left to themselves to fester and spoil. Most Ministers these days live in a “holy fear”, not of God, but of their congregations and Deacon’s boards, having sworn an oath of allegiance to the retirement fund. The conflict of interest between the professional Minister as CEO and Shepherd of a flock is impossible to reconcile; and in the end all of them choose how to define their ministry.

But even worse than this, both ministerially and in its effects, is “over-powering” by the clergy. When a Church thinks of itself institutionally as a set of Kings set by God to rule the people, they take upon themselves the sins of the Nicolatians and can grind those unfortunates to powder. They can destroy families, businesses, denominations, nations and occasionally… minds. The corrupt use of power is continually called out in Holy Scripture for special scrutiny as an offence against God by the inordinate use of His graces toward men, and He holds those graces as something holy and their perversion as intolerable.

Quite simply, there is nothing that God hates more than a corrupt Priest or a craven Prophet. Thus Peter taught… “Blackest darkness is reserved for them”.

Neiswonger

2 Peter 2:17
“These men are springs without water and mists driven by a storm. Blackest darkness is reserved for them.”

Micah 3:11
“Her leaders judge for a bribe,
her priests teach for a price,
and her prophets tell fortunes for money.
Yet they lean upon the LORD and say,
“Is not the LORD among us?
No disaster will come upon us.”
Therefore because of you,
Zion will be plowed like a field,
Jerusalem will become a heap of rubble”

Jeremiah 14:14
“Then the LORD said unto me, The prophets prophesy lies in my name: I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spake unto them: they prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a thing of nought, and the deceit of their heart Therefore thus saith the LORD concerning the prophets that prophesy in my name, and I sent them not, yet they say, Sword and famine shall not be in this land; By sword and famine shall those prophets be consumed. And the people to whom they prophesy shall be cast out in the streets of Jerusalem because of the famine and the sword; and they shall have none to bury them, them, their wives, nor their sons, nor their daughters: for I will pour their wickedness upon them.”