Extract from Sermon on “Christ the Resurrection and the Life,”
BY THE REV. EBENEZER ERSKINE, IN 1738.
THE following extract was quoted at the time when the Free Presbyterian testimony was first raised for the truth, as containing many statements descriptive of the situation, by an eminent servant of Christ, who lived long before. It is worthy of perusal still.
“Christians are called ‘the Lord’s witnesses.’ Why do they get that name? Because they confess His truths, they confess His cause, they confess His members, they confess His ministers, and everything that belongs to Him. It is not a private owning of Him that will do in such a day as this. He is publicly affronted; the crown is taken off His head; He is injured by civil and ecclesiastical courts; He is injured in His doctrine, worship, discipline, and government; He is injured in His members; He is injured in His supreme Deity; He is injured in His headship and sovereignty over this Church. Now, I say, when He is thus publicly injured, He ought also to be publicly confessed. A public testimony hath been emitted, in a judicial way, by a handful of ministers who, by the peculiar providence of God, have been brought to a particular situation; that testimony has come abroad, and it torments the men that dwell upon the earth, who attempt to bury His testimony and to bury His witnesses. A cry has come abroad of a dangerous schism in the Church, and of schismatics rending the seamless coat of Christ. That is just the old cant of the Papists when the Protestants came off from them, saying, ‘O, by your doing so, you cause divisions in the Church, and rend the seamless coat.’ I would ask such—Who are the causes of it? Whether they that endeavour to maintain and contend for the truths of Christ, or those that tread His truths under their feet? Whether those that endeavour to maintain the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, or those that are trampling the sacred privileges of the Church of Christ under their feet? All that is demanded by us is that they return to the Lord; that they rectify these things that are wrong in doctrine, worship, discipline, and government. This is what God requires: He commands all men everywhere to repent.
“What is the reason that men in a judicative capacity do not purge out the leaven of error or scandals in a Church? What is the reason? It is either because they will not, or they cannot. If they will not, by this they proclaim to the world that they are a set of wicked men; or it is because they cannot, and it says the Master hath taken away the keys from them. And what a ridiculous thing it would be to accede to them from whom the keys of the house are taken away by the Master of the house! It is easy, then, to know what course to steer. If the rights of Christ as King in His holy hill of Sion be maintained in the judicatories of the establishment, then it is a sin to withdraw from them; but if they be trampling under foot the authority of the Son of God, by enacting laws in His house which are inconsistent with His laws and with the liberties wherewith He had made His people free—if they be worming out a faithful ministry, screening the erroneous, casting ministers out of their communion for faithful witnessing against errors and corruptions—then we ought not to continue with them, especially when a public testimony is lifted up. Wherever His cause is displayed, and His truths are maintained by doctrine, worship, or discipline, there should the accession be, for the gathering of the people should be there. If it be within the camp, stand there; if it be in the fields and city of the wood, it concerns us to follow Him there, though reproach and persecution should follow. Says the Apostle (Heb. xiii. 13), ‘Let us go, therefore, without the camp, bearing his reproach.’
“When the Christian Church was first erected by the Apostles, and the Jewish Church was unhinged, a cry was raised after them that they were schismatics, and rending the true and only Church of God. Says the Apostle, ‘He has been reproached for us; and it is good our common to go without the camp to him, bearing his reproach.’ However ye may fear at reproach for Christ, Moses was of another opinion, for he ‘accounted the reproach of Christ greater riches than all the treasures of Egypt.’ What is the hazard though reproach should follow? Cleave to Him. Let us study to confess Him and follow Him in all hazards. ‘He that loseth his life for my sake (says Christ) shall find it.’ He that loseth a good name for Christ, he shall find it again. There will be a resurrection of names as well as of persons, ere all be done.”