No Continuing City: Reformed and Reproached

Antithetical from the Start

In the year 2021 the early congregations of the Reformed Protestant Churches were formed when members of the Protestant Reformed Churches signed various acts of separation, following the pattern of Hendrik de Cock and his fellow reformers in the Netherlands in 1834. For the most part the Afscheiding Act of Separation provided the structure and many of the phrases found in the various acts that were adopted and signed to formalize the signatories’ separation from the Protestant Reformed Churches of America (PRC), the doctrinal nature of their separation, and marking their stance with the historical Reformed faith.

The relationship between the covenant and the antithesis has been evident from the beginning of the Reformed Protestant Churches. The signatories were mocked for signing these acts of separation, for what the acts declared, and for the grave weight with which the acts were treated. The mockery was no great surprise since in the formulation of their acts of separation, the officebearers had included some version of God’s call to his church to go without the camp and bear the reproach of Christ (Heb. 13:13). The Spirit put the words of verse 14 into the hearts and mouths of many of God’s people on those days: “For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come.”

Reformation is inherently antithetical. The acts that constituted Reformed Protestant churches were acts of separation. As clearly as baptism, and circumcision before it, is a sign of God’s separating his own out of the world and the false church, those early actions of the signatories were God’s work to separate out his own. God is not the great synthesizer; he is the one who unites the elect to himself in Spirit and truth, and he carries out his judgment against every unbeliever. Christ is a great warrior who leads his people to the great city and whose sword flashes in the heat of battle and cleaves a way through the foe.

Those who remained in the PRC despite God’s command to come out wasted no time in scorning and mocking the acts of separation and those who signed them. No sooner had the acts been announced and signed than various Protestant Reformed congregations celebrated their so-called unity and the departure of the Reformed with praise evenings and parties. These were cruel and evil gatherings, confederacies of wickedness, carnal celebrations of their attempts to silence the Word. Their unity was decidedly negative, as remains evident from their persistent doctrinal divisions. Although they have no unity in truth or shared confession, they certainly have a unity against the Reformed Protestant Churches and her doctrine. Faithful to none of her many idol gods, the PRC is nevertheless united in provoking Jehovah by her faithless harlotry.

Under God’s hardening the PRC immediately understood and behaved according to the antithetical separation that God had established. How could she do otherwise? God would expose her as false: “As for the false church, she…persecutes those who live holily according to the Word of God, and rebuke her for her errors, covetousness, and idolatry” (Belgic Confession 29, in Confessions and Church Order, 64). The PRC identified her enemy and proceeded in enmity against that enemy, for she was completely opposed to the gospel. Even before the separation was formal, she identified the leaders of the reformation and did her utmost to destroy them and by hook or by crook to remove their voices from her midst, resembling so much her mother before her. The PRC was brutal, a characteristic she easily forgets in her own fabricated history of the controversy. And her judgment, if it can be called that, was godless.

What a revealing juxtaposition our mother manifests! As zealous and eager as she is now to make common cause with the broader church world, minimizing every distinctive that ought to separate her from it, she was even more eager to do away with the gospel and those who would not be silent in its proclamation and defense.

Clear it is, then, that the enemy quickly accepts the reality of the antithesis and acts according to it. Why then have some in the Reformed Protestant Churches wrestled with the doctrine of the antithesis almost from the beginning of her existence? Why does that doctrine chafe the most, even to those who signed their names to the above-described acts of separation?

As a fellow pilgrim on the way, I urge all my brothers and sisters in Christ to truly consider the traitor that is within: Our old man of the flesh. The following are a number of ways in which my flesh has chafed at the antithesis, and I hope I may aid you by exposing a few techniques that our threefold enemy employs to make us despair of the covenant and despise the antithesis. And in the end I hope I may encourage you to carry on, with hope and joy in your heart, to run with patience the race God has set before you in the world.

“Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them [the antichristian spirits]: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world” (1 John 4:4).

No Stomach for Scorning: Shimei

Why does God will that his church be beset with reproaches and cursing? Why is it our place to be afflicted and rejected in the world? What is God’s purpose in it?

It is true that the reproach of the wicked can come in many forms, some more acutely painful than others. The hatred of former friends and estranged family is one kind of pain—quite different from the more general hatred of the world.

Both forms of hatred are bitter, and both are real hatred. That being said, the Reformed Protestant Churches are hardly of any note to the broader world today, and the world has taken little, if any, notice of her existence and the word that Jehovah has placed in her pulpits. That is God’s apparent will in her immediate time in history, though her members know that the time fast approaches when they shall be delivered up for persecution at the world’s hands.

What of the false church, then? Oh no, we see no such indifference from her. She stands at the ready, verily panting with the desire to deliver us up for death. She prepares the most venomous evils on her lips, lying in wait to ambush and to ridicule, wielding an insider’s knowledge of all the most cunning traps to lay. She is well-versed in the sounds and phrases of the Reformed faith, and she knows how to make her barbs dig deep, to cut and to maim, and to target our most vulnerable members with her insidious lies. She seeks our despair, so that it may echo her own.

It is easy to develop tunnel vision when it comes to your loss or suffering. “No one else has suffered what God has required me to suffer,” you say. You imagine that your experience is an entirely novel one, giving place to a subtle arrogance that infiltrates your suffering and makes it even more miserable, for you block your ears from the witness of the church that has gone before you and from the fellow pilgrims at your side.

Let me remind you of David, the man after God’s own heart, when he bore the reproaches and cursings of Shimei of Benjamin, an Israelite.

5. When king David came to Bahurim, behold, thence came out a man of the family of the house of Saul, whose name was Shimei, the son of Gera: he came forth, and cursed still as he came.

6. And he cast stones at David, and at all the servants of king David: and all the people and all the mighty men were on his right hand and on his left.

7. And thus said Shimei when he cursed, Come out, come out, thou bloody man, and thou man of Belial:

8. The Lord hath returned upon thee all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose stead thou hast reigned; and the Lord hath delivered the kingdom into the hand of Absalom thy son: and, behold, thou art taken in thy mischief, because thou art a bloody man. (2 Sam. 16:5–8)

Over the last five years, we have endured much mocking and cursing in the spirit of Shimei. For a while he was very loud, his stones whizzing by our ears almost daily. His evil spirit is very much evident in the PRC and in her spiritual children who infiltrated our ranks: the exclusive psalmodists, worship law-wranglers, covenant-haters, school-scorners, and antithesis-deniers. Some post internet mockery of us and our God, others cast stones from a once-noble magazine, and still others harangue us even in the courts of law, bringing us before magistrates because they are infuriated by God’s own word against them.

At the time of Shimei’s slander, King David stood for righteousness and God’s promise to his chosen people, even while being rejected and despised in Israel and his silver-tongued traitor-son being anointed with men’s favor. That being said, David was a sinner as we are—his wickedness against Uriah and Bathsheba was not a long-distant memory when Shimei cursed David. Yet he stood firm and hopeful, not in his own working and doing but in his anointing—that is, in God’s promise to his people in Christ Jesus, especially as that promise was delivered to them in relation to David (2 Sam. 7).

The simple, wonderful, covenantal truth of this moment and all its circumstances was that God was with David-the-sinner, and God was not with Shimei-the-false-accuser. God’s sovereignty was David’s refuge in the face of the knowledge of his sin and of Shimei’s cursing. God’s word of judgment over David was his defense and vindication in the face of all those in Israel who with Shimei cursed David and wished him dead.

Note that Shimei’s cursing was an enormous and wicked lie, designed to turn David’s faith against him. Shimei’s wicked claim against David was literally the opposite of the truth and a vicious slander: He claimed that God was judging David for David’s alleged rebellion against Saul, that Absalom’s rebellion was God’s just judgment against David and proof of Shimei’s false claim against him. This was a malicious lie, dipped in hellish poison and shot at David’s humbled heart. It turned the very work of God into a sinful act of man.

The truth is that David had not rebelled against Saul but had steadfastly refused to lay a hand on the Lord’s anointed, which was astounding in the face of Saul’s murderous hatred for David. David had not destroyed Saul’s house, but the Lord had visited judgment on Saul by Saul’s own hand and the hands of other wicked men. And when a young Amalekite appeared before David, seeking to curry favor with the claim that he had taken Saul’s life, David justly put the man to death. Grieving for Israel’s sake, David penned the great lament regarding Saul and his house: “The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!” Cut to his heart by the loss of his dearest friend Jonathan, David wept in his deep distress and bade all Israel to weep with him (2 Sam. 1).

And then Shimei dared to curse David. When pressed by Abishai to permit him to kill Shimei, David’s faith concluded instead: “It may be that the Lord will look on mine affliction, and that the Lord will requite me good for his cursing this day” (2 Sam. 16:12). David carried on his way, not choosing vengeance but trusting in God’s will, knowing that Jehovah would bless him for all Shimei’s cursing, that Jehovah’s sovereign will to bless David was the ultimate purpose for Shimei’s cursing. Though weary, David continued on his way out of the city, came to a place where he might rest, and waited on the Lord’s deliverance. By faith David did not despair of God’s mercy nor cave before Shimei’s rebellious and craven mockery.

Shimei is cursing now—do you hear him? Do you entertain the idea that perhaps God’s reformation of his church was really an ugly thing, a gross thing, a perverse thing, a thing of man and no wonder of grace? Do Shimei’s curses make you wilt and doubt God’s wonderful word of promise to you in Christ? Do you forget the token of his word, which is preached faithfully to you week by week?

If you do wilt, know that it is the weakness of your flesh and that this wilting is not born of faith. Be encouraged that God, by the gift of faith that he has given to you, will strengthen you to regard the mockery and hatred of men as nothing. Be confident in God’s sovereignty, that the stones that are thrown to maim and destroy must instead serve God’s purpose to bless you. Be reminded of God’s faithfulness, his promises, and his power to keep them. Resting in him, go without the camp, bearing Christ’s reproach and treasuring his intimate fellowship over the cruel kindnesses of the wicked. Remember the words of David in the psalm he composed as he fled from Absalom:

1. Lord, how are they increased that trouble me! many are they that rise up against me.

2. Many there be which say of my soul, There is no help for him in God. Selah.

3. But thou, O Lord, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.

4. I cried unto the Lord with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill. Selah.

5. I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustained me.

6. I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people, that have set themselves against me round about.

7. Arise, O Lord; save me, O my God: for thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone; thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly.

8. Salvation belongeth unto the Lord: thy blessing is upon thy people. Selah. (Ps. 3)

 

No Earthly Kingdom: Pilgrims

13. These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

14. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country.

15. And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned.

16. But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city. (Heb. 11:13–16)

Who does not often call to mind the comforting truth that we are pilgrims and strangers in the world? Indeed, it seems that every day we are reminded of that fact by some new and outrageous development in the world. Moreover, as the church is forged by God in times of reformation, this truth takes on new depths of understanding and comfort. God is pleased through reformation to make the place of his people in the earth exceedingly narrow. And what is more, he makes them happy in it and for it.

Make no mistake—the flesh craves an earthly kingdom. Sometimes this particular strain of unbelief manifests by demanding that earthly circumstances verify spiritual realities. We have heard that, have we not? If we have not heard it from the mouth of some other person, the thought has frittered its way across our minds.

“If only we were bigger, more numerous, and overwhelmingly successful in persuading others—that would be proof of the righteousness of our cause.”

“If only we were bigger, it would be easier to maintain our witness against the lie.”

“If only we had a demonstration of our prosperity—a large, luxurious school or a breathtakingly beautiful church building—then we would have something for people to hold onto, something for people to believe in.”

It is hard to write these phrases down, so contrary to God’s word as they are. But I do not doubt that we and members of God’s true church in the past have uttered or thought such words in weakness. I do not doubt it because scripture repeatedly addresses the temptation, pierces through its lie, and equips us with hope. I do not doubt it because many are the writings of our Reformed fathers on the topic; sometimes it seems that there was no nearer and dearer topic to their souls than God’s preservation of his pilgrim people.

I have no better way of encouraging you than to quote from Rev. Herman Hoeksema, who knew the pilgrim’s way most intimately and wrote of it in 1924, at the dawn of God’s reforming work to free him and our fathers from the Christian Reformed Church:

The reason for this sojourner-attitude and pilgrim-spirit is that they are citizens of another country, the heavenly. For they are born from above, they have been begotten again unto a lively hope thru the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Of the life of the Risen Lord they partake. That new life is not of this world. Neither [is] it a resuscitation of a life in days of yore, in Paradise Lost. But it is the life of a New City, of the heavenly Jerusalem, of the eternal Kingdom, still to be revealed in the full splendor of its beauty. It is a life, not from below but from above, not earthy but heavenly. It is not mournfully glancing back upon a lost estate, but hopefully looking forward to an eternal inheritance. It is decidedly other-worldly. Not by any external method of naturalization but by the inner process of spiritual renewal, they became citizens of another country. And thus they became strangers and sojourners on the earth, pilgrims with their faces set toward the City that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.

Of these strangers on the earth the author of Ps. 105 affirms that in their earthly pilgrimage they always were well protected and safely guarded. For God “suffered no man to do them wrong.” And as it was in days of hoary antiquity and of patriarchal fame thus it is with these pilgrims throughout the epochs of history and thus it will be till the last one of them shall have appeared in Zion before God.

Sojourners they are, travelling safely!

How wonderful is this safety of God’s children in the world.¹

The craving of our flesh for an earthly kingdom is at least a twofold unbelief: It denies that we are safe in our pilgrimage, and—in preferring the earthly over the heavenly and our present earthly lives over our destination—it denies the resurrection and ascension of Christ.

Do you feel safe? You have never been safer. You are not safe because you have done enough. You are not safe in the way of your obedience. You are not safe because you are a repentant and good person. But you are safe in Christ Jesus, the risen and ascended Lord, who is our flesh in heaven and our mediator and covenantal head. Keep your eyes forward, then, and look up. These are the last days, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Dear pilgrim, Christ suffers no man to do you harm (Ps. 105:14–15).

No Family but Christ

Finally, we come to perhaps the most stubborn chafing of them all. The antithesis in the family is, in a way, a combination of the implications of the first two ways that our flesh chafes against the antithesis but with a rather pointed and narrow application.

Of course, it is true that the family is pictured after God’s intimate fellowship and communion within himself, and it is also true that “the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call” (Acts 2:39). It is true that God loves the marriages of his people in his name, gives fruit to those marriages in the bearing of children, and loves to call many of his own unto himself in the line of continued generations through the covenant home and its place in the church under the preaching of the gospel.

But I have heard from some that they are mystified by the reality of the antithesis in their earthly, flesh-and-blood family. At times it has mystified me as well. I was raised in a home with nine siblings—four of us children remain in the truth, by God’s grace alone. There is for many, perhaps rooted in some generational sentimentalism, the expectation that everyone in their families will see and know and love the truth as they do, that enemies of the gospel and antichrists may come from some families in the church but never from their families.

Those expectations, however, are not rooted in scripture but in the foolishness of our flesh. For in his word God repeatedly draws our attention to exactly this context—the family—as the place where both the covenant and the antithesis are clearly manifested.

The examples are as plain and numerous in scripture as the leaves on the ground in autumn: Did not faithful Abel’s sacrifice testify against his brother Cain’s wicked sacrifice, and did not Cain slay Abel for that testimony (Gen. 4)? Did not Noah pronounce a curse on his grandson Canaan for his wickedness (Gen. 9)? Did not Jacob strive against Esau in the womb and all his life, and did not Esau seek to kill Jacob, driving him into decades of contention with his wretched and unbelieving uncle Laban (Gen. 27)? Did not Joseph’s brothers strive against him in jealousy and envy, plotting to kill and later to sell him into slavery (Gen. 37)? Did not Athaliah seek to end David’s line by murdering her grandchildren (2 Kings 11)? Did not our Lord’s flesh-and-blood family oppose him in unbelief, despite their knowledge of his wonders (John 7:5)?

Oh yes, the family is a wonderful context in which to see the covenant. And that is precisely why we see there, too, the keenest and most treacherous betrayals, the most distressing confrontations, and the most tempting of sibilant whispers of the serpent to set down the heavy cross and to take up the heady wine of indifference and blood loyalty.

“But what about my home life?” one asks. Do not forget, dear brother, our savior had no home: “Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head” (Matt. 8:20).

“But what about my family?” Do not forget, dear sister, our savior founded his family in election:

48. He answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?

49. And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!

50. For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother. (Matt. 12:48–50)

Indeed, Christ addressed the matter of the family frequently in his earthly ministry, which is striking given that such divisions of family likely would have been very rare in the context of the theocratic nationalism of Israel. Such divisions would not be rare for his people in the years to come, however, and they frequently would be one of the first tests of his people’s faith. Especially when it came to those seeking discipleship under him (which is really about whether one is truly united to Christ by faith), Jesus did not hesitate to bring the gospel-light to shine on family ties, and he did so bluntly, with very little care for persuasion:

21. Another of his disciples said unto him, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father.

22. But Jesus said unto him, Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead. (Matt. 8:21–22)

In Matthew 10 Christ further developed this doctrine:

34. Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

35. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

36. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

37. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. (Matt: 10:34–37)

Do not misunderstand—the antithesis is not a faucet that one can turn on and off. But rather, as we have heard in sermon after sermon, the antithesis is a reality that is revealed, a battle that is manifested between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, between believer and unbeliever, between Christ and Belial. Christ teaches us here in Matthew 10 that there is a mark of those who are in Christ, one that can be clearly seen in the context of the family: The believer is marked as one who will lose all things—all things—for Christ’s sake. The unbeliever will not—will not—lose all things for Christ’s sake.

Lest we think it is all loss and sorrow, and lest we think our God does not care for the suffering that we endure as members of Christ’s party in the world, our savior’s teaching on this antithetical reality does not end with its implications for our families. No, he has more to say. In Matthew 19:27–30, we have the inspired word to pilgrims and strangers such as we are, a word that is more than enough to lift our heads and cheer our hearts.

27. Then answered Peter and said unto him, Behold, we have forsaken all, and followed thee; what shall we have therefore?

28. And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

29. And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.

30. But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.

Dear brethren and fellow footmen, in this new year that lies before you, set your eyes on that reality.

And, when you are stricken with your own weakness and troubled by the chafing of your own flesh, remember that lovely and hopeful word that Christ gives us only a verse earlier in the same chapter: “Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26).

Glory be to God alone; glory to the Lamb, who establishes, maintains, and keeps his covenant; who gathers, defends, and preserves his church; who alone is able to keep us from falling and presents us faultless before the presence of his glory. Yea, “to the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever” (Jude 24–25).

“Faithful is he that calleth you, who will also do it” (1 Thess. 5:24).

The congregation of Cornerstone Reformed Protestant Church