PAUL said to the believers in Galatia, “Ye did run well; who did hinder you that ye should not obey the truth?” True believers desire so to conduct themselves that they will not deserve so solemn a rebuke. They know that only he who endures to the end shall be saved, and their prayerful determination is to persevere in the narrow way to life eternal.
However, they have to learn many hard lessons about the opposition they have to overcome, if they are to win through to the end and obtain the prize. Christian, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, was making good progress in his pilgrimage until Apollyon attacked him, “and wrestling with him, gave him a dreadful fall; and with that, Christian’s sword flew out of his hand. Then said Apollyon, ‘I am sure of thee now’.” But Christian overcame his enemy. As Bunyan graphically says, Christian “made at him again, saying, ‘Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors, through Him that loved us’. And with that Apollyon . . . sped him away.” So Christian continued his pilgrimage, endured to the end, and entered the Celestial City.
The Lord’s pilgrims today have the same enemy to contend with. Satan comes at them with his lying accusations, fiery darts, subtle temptations, and even uses Scripture itself to achieve his ends. As Gurnall says, “The devil sometimes borrows God’s bow to shoot his arrows from.” They who are truly running the race heavenwards will not be ignorant of the devil’s devices. But it is their high privilege to have none less than the divine Leader and Commander of the church — He who is stronger than the strong man armed — as their defender; as their shield and their strength. Shall they not then overcome?
There is another kind of opposition. How many who profess the name of Christ, we may ask, really regard the world as an enemy which is to be overcome if they are to arrive in heaven? It is one of the signs of the times that in the professing church there are many who are walking arm in arm with the world, living for what good John Trapp calls the “worldling’s trinity” — “pleasure, profit, preferment.” The Rev. John Kennedy,
preaching in 1881 at Fearn, said that one of the indications of divine judgement coming upon the church would be a spirit of worldliness filling the minds of the people, and that the worldliness entering in would grieve the Most High, and cause His Holy Spirit to be withheld. Has this not come upon us already? And how can they “who mind earthly things” be described as ascending to the Celestial City? On the other hand we can be sure that the person who has turned his back on the world and set his “affection on things above”, is on his way to this glorious destination. He who is watching and praying as he strives to advance in the way of holiness, and is heeding the warning. “If any man love the world, the love of the father is not in him”, may entertain the hope of persevering to the end. He has learned that “nothing more unbecomes a heavenly hope than an earthly heart.”
Persevering to the end often results in persecution, for “all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution”. Some believers, having begun to “run the race”, suffer persecution in the family circle, or from ungodly neighbours, or colleagues at work. Some of those who endure to the end have at times to suffer, like the persecuted Hebrew believers of long ago, “a great fight of afflictions”, but they pray to be kept from being like the children of Ephraim, who “turned back in the day of battle.” The godly man is not like those who, although they receive the word with gladness, “have no root in themselves, and so endure but for a time: afterward, when affliction or persecution ariseth for the word’s sake, immediately they are offended,” Mark 4:17.
Of course, the believer will often be painfully aware of another kind of opposition — the sinfulness he finds within himself. What is this great business of proceeding along the narrow way but “dying unto sin and living unto righteousness,” as the Shorter Catechism describes the work of sanctification? But sanctification is not the work of a day, let alone of a moment. It is a comforting truth that the justification of the believer — his being pardoned and accepted by God — is an act which is done in a moment by God. Not so sanctification. It is a process; ordinarily a protracted process. As Ralph Erskine has written with regard to justification and sanctification:
The former’s instantaneous,
The moment that I first believe:
The latter is, as Heaven allows,
Progressive while on earth I live.
Just as it takes some time, maybe a very long time, for foul air to clear from a room when the window has been opened, so it takes nothing less than the whole of the believer’s life after conversion for the remaining inward corruption of sin to be removed. Meantime he must battle against that corruption; he must “mortify the flesh with its affections and lusts.”
At the same time the weary pilgrim gets comfort from the promise: “He
which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.” “This perseverance of the saints,” says The Westminster Confession of Faith, “depends not upon their own free will, but upon the immutability of the decree of election, flowing from the free and unchangeable love of God the Father; upon the efficacy of the merit and intercession of Jesus Christ; the abiding of the Spirit, and of the seed of God within them; and the nature of the covenant of grace: from all which ariseth the certainty and infallibility thereof.” It cannot be otherwise when their divine Head and never-failing Intercessor, has prayed, “Father, I will that they also whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory.” They shall endure to the end.
“But I fear,” says a tempted child of God, “that I shall yet sustain such a fall as will debar me from heaven.” “I have gone back so shamefully,” says a backslidden believer, “that I fear there will be no enduring to the end for me.” “And what are we conclude,” asks another, “from, for example, the solemn words of Hebrews 6:4-6, which say that ‘it is impossible for those who were once enlightened . . . if they shall fall away, to renew them again to repentance’?”
It is sadly true, as again our Confession states, that believers may, “through the temptations of Satan and of the world, the prevalency of corruption remaining in them, and the neglect of the means of their preservation, fall into grievous sins; and for a time continue therein . . .” But the falls of some of the saints, and the doubts of others, can never disannul the divine promise to preserve them to the end, nor thwart the divine purpose that nothing shall separate them from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
And with regard to such passages as Hebrews 6:4-6, Hebrews 10:26-29 (which says that there is no more sacrifice for sins if we sin wilfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth), and 2 Peter 2:20-22 (which speaks of the awful end of those who have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of Christ, but have been overcome by them again), we cannot but conclude that they speak of those, who although they had attained to much in the sphere of religion, did not have the root of the matter in them and “did not close in with Christ on gospel terms,” as Plumer says. “The best they did in fruitfulness,” he continues, “was to bring forth thorns and briers,” Hebrews 6:8. And in any case, the passage in Hebrews 6 goes on to speak to others — to those who are truly the subjects of saving grace; it says, “But, beloved, we are persuaded better things of you, and things that accompany salvation,” that is, not only salvation commenced but also salvation brought to its glorious climax and consummation. “He that endureth to the end shall be saved.” And, most certainly, “the path of the righteous is as the shining light, that shineth more and more, unto the perfect day.” He shall endure the end.