Dear Brother

Dear Brother,

I can tell that you are dying.

That may have caught you off guard. After all, your letter to me indicated that you have quite a vibrant life. You have a lively family, and you are busy with a great deal of activity. Your children are playing, learning, dating, musicking, traveling, graduating, and working. Your family is exchanging gifts, sending cards to one another, feasting, marrying, and giving in marriage. Your wife is planning, working, organizing, and mothering. You are living life to the fullest. As in the days of Noah.

Yet with all this, there is evidence that what is actually working is death.

The preaching of the gospel is life and is necessary for the soul. The gospel brings Christ as the bread and water of life. However, in the Protestant Reformed Churches (PRC), the preaching brings death. The preaching of the PRC substitutes man for Christ at every turn. As I have warned you before,

the PRC denies the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Specifically, the PRC denies justification by faith alone by redefining faith, so that the essence of faith becomes the activity of believing. The PRC denies justification by teaching that the way of obedience, repentance, believing, or any combination of these are necessary to experience fellowship with God. The PRC denies justification by faith alone by requiring the activity of repentance prior to being forgiven by God.¹

The preaching of the gospel works life. The preaching in the PRC is working death.

You may try to treat this as an intellectual exercise. Perhaps you will think, “I will compare my sermons with your sermons and judge who teaches the truth.” Well and good. We have shown you the evil in your sermons and speeches. We have written the truth of the gospel. When will you start judging? Are you able to judge spiritually? Are you willing to judge regardless of the outcome to your life on this earth? Or have you delayed, fearing the outcome? I know God’s judgment; I await yours.

While you are delaying, another week brings more evidence that death is working in Protestant Reformed pews. The legalism taught from Protestant Reformed pulpits must work sin in Protestant Reformed members. The preaching of legalism does this by bringing soul-crushing misery to the members who then try and fail to find solace by going deeper in sin. You know that. You see its effect. And the legalism taught from Protestant Reformed pulpits affects an even more wicked, God-hating pride that does not understand the corruption of one’s own nature but says “I will do better than that; I will try harder.”

We have warned you about this before. We have warned you that the only stance possible for a Christian in your current place is one of all-out warfare—warfare against your denomination, against your consistory and minister, against your church, even against your family and your own flesh, all of whom are actively embracing and running in the lie that is against Christ. If you would battle just for a moment against any aspect of the lie, as that lie has overtaken your church, you will see who now rules there. It is not Christ. Behold! Christ stands outside the door and knocks.

We have also shown you the joy and rest that can be found only under the pure preaching of the gospel. Under the preaching of the gospel, we and our children are well. We have found rest, true rest that can come only from renouncing our wills and seeking after God’s will. We have come to enjoy and appreciate the picture of covenant life that God gives us in our family. We have learned also that when this picture crowds out the reality of God’s covenant with us, even that covenant life in the family becomes an idol. There is no rest in idolatry. We have learned that while the gospel comes with great loss—sometimes a loss like Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac but sometimes like David’s loss of Absalom—in those losses God always restores many times over, as with Job.

God restores us by giving us himself and his truth. He makes that truth so important to us that we can suffer the loss of all things for that truth. He shows to us that what is done with his truth is done to God himself, because God himself is identified as truth.

What happens when God restores his truth? That truth surpasses everything else in value. As with the parable of the pearl of great price, a man will sell all his possessions so that he may have the truth. He hates everything that loves and makes a lie, counting such as “dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters” (Rev. 22:15). He understands also that falling from God’s truth is not a mere indiscretion, but straying one iota from that truth carries with it damning consequences. Notwithstanding the false ecumenism within the PRC that seeks to unite with every brand of false doctrine, Christ says such is wickedness and “if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life” (v. 19).

This emphasis on the truth probably sounds very strange to you, since postmodernism has taken fast hold on the Protestant Reformed Churches. In the PRC your Double-Standard Bearer attempts to hold together teachings from yesteryear against common grace² alongside promotion of and participation with the churches of the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council (NAPARC), who love that devilish doctrine. In the PRC professors and ministers imagine and teach that truth is relative by allowing contradictory doctrines to be taught from their pulpits. Even within the same sermon, sovereign grace is served as a cliché garnish that lends some contrast to the main dish, the “way of your obedience.” In the PRC you may not dare to judge the very words spoken by the ministers! Rather, you must assume that they are “solid Reformed men,”³ and what they mean therefore must be sound. Postmodernism!

Over against this wicked, postmodernist thought, God makes his truth so important to us that we may not—indeed, cannot—dwell with those who corrupt his truth. This does not apply merely to members of the Protestant Reformed Churches, but this is a universal truth. Our God hates the lie. When he regenerates a man, he makes that man the dwelling of the Spirit of Christ, and that man will also hate the lie. Wherever that man sees corruption and denial of God and his truth, he cannot help but speak out. And when his friends stubbornly live in the lie and refuse to turn from it, it becomes impossible to dwell in friendship with them anymore. Trying to do so is yoking oneself unequally with an unbeliever and is attempting the impossible: to be friends with God and with mammon. Ye cannot!

If the truth of God is the name of God, then a refusal to love and follow after the truth but instead to dwell with the lie is blasphemy against God’s name. 

Perhaps you are thinking, why cannot we pick the lowest common denominator of the truth that pitches a tent over both of us and use that to determine with whom we dwell? Must we be so particular about doctrine? Yes. Because God is God. As Reverend Ophoff recently preached,

The name of God is the revelation of who he is in all of his perfections, in all of his words and all of his works, in all of his glorious perfections. The name of God is this: It’s the whole truth of God. You can just say this, too: The name of God is the truth.⁴

This is not any new doctrine. The truth of God’s simplicity demands that all God’s attributes are one in him, as we learned in our Essentials of Reformed Doctrine catechism class. If the truth of God is the name of God, then a refusal to love and follow after the truth but instead to dwell with the lie is blasphemy against God’s name. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” (Ex. 20:7).

Dear brother, in the face of all this witness, you show evidence that this death is also having its effect on you. 

You respond. In response to our warning and rebuke…you ignore everything we said? Instead, you ask about our life and if we can send pictures?

How carnal! We pointed you to the impending judgment that is coming toward you like a dark storm cloud and called you to seek after heavenly things, and instead you root around in the dirt like a pig. Are you so much now a naturalized citizen of John Bunyan’s Vanity Fair? In both ignoring the important questions and asking the carnal ones, you show that you do not have interest in life. You show that you despise life and love death. As in the days of Noah.

It is not that your letter did not have an effect. The devil is working hard through your carnal letter. The devil works in your dying flesh to find every opportunity to remind us of the pleasures of our formerly carnal life. He sticks it in our noses, tempts us with it, and reminds us how good it was. “It could be that way again,” he hisses!

And there is more in your letter that shows that you are dying. The devil, it seems, has taken your spiritually lifeless corpse and is using it for his nefarious purposes. You ask why we cannot have an earthly relationship. After all, God made us an earthly family. And others of my ilk are living in unbelief, secreting away to spend time with their Protestant Reformed families; why can’t we spend time together?

It appears that you are still getting advice from Uncle Screwtape. He recommended that the Christian should be

taught to enjoy kneeling besides the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he [the Christian] inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a “deeper”, “spiritual” world within him which they cannot understand…Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of shame, a continual undercurrent of self-satisfaction.⁵

I do not know what you think the antithesis means. Reverend McGeown recently attempted to explain the antithesis, but he contradicted himself and also mutilated Christ’s speech in Luke 14:25–26 by claiming that Christ does not bring any practical division in the family. Do you also make to be nothing the division that Christ brings in the family? I leave you to Reverend Ophoff’s demonstration of the wickedness of McGeown’s teaching.⁶

Christ came to set us—you and I, brother—at variance. The variance has been well documented. Now, what should we do with this variance that Christ has set in our relationship? Let us search the scriptures and judge! The plain reading of the following passages insists that I may no longer dwell in fellowship with you while you are living in the unbelief and false gospel of the Protestant Reformed Churches; my calling, rather, is to speak the truth against your lie.

Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them. (Eph. 5:11)

I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. (1 Cor. 10:20)

Now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat. (1 Cor. 5:11)

If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha. (1 Cor. 16:22)

If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth.
(1 John 1:6)

Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? (2 Cor. 6:14)

Now it is high time to awake out of sleep!

What have I said that is hateful? What have I said that is untrue? Will you shake your head sadly and say that I have been deceived and am under the grips of the devil or wicked men (meanwhile giving the lie to that idea by not trying to save me from it)? Will you call me a devil? I suppose it should be expected. The Jews railed against my Lord when he spoke against them, and he taught me that “if they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household?” (Matt. 10:25).

Call me what you will. Brother, I love you. And loving you, I consider this a warning or an attempted roadblock on your full-tilt run toward the cliff. And when I remember how “we took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company” (Ps. 55:14), I pray that God in his mercy will preserve you, pulling you out of the fire and corruption of death where I see you running.

We all must die. We all will die. Death in this life, however, has two forms. You appear to have chosen this form: to be dead to the truth in order to save your carnal life.

I submit to you a different form of death. Particularly, crucifixion.

“They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts” (Gal. 5:24).

Sincerely,

Michael Vermeer