One bright candle against the rising of the dark

"The dike gave way"

The Reverand Dr. J.I. Packer, theologian and principal of Regent College boldly spoke to an international audience at the Metropolitan Club in New York. Anglicans, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians shivered at his words of rebuke and calls for repentance. Sadly, they were not the oblivious souls rushing the respective denominations into the abyss. Nevertheless, the warnings were apt, the metaphors sound, and the truths pointed, though sad.

"From outside the dike, there came those who called for another way of doing what they called 'theology,'" noted Packer. "All of this was an attempt to verbalize their 'religious experience,' not the revealed truth of God. Religious feelings replaced Jesus Christ, making him to be someone who is not what the Scriptures say he is. When the liberals – I use the word many of them claim for themselves – reduced Christianity to a religion of the self, the dike gave way, the prayer book was set aside, the floods came, and the Anglican Church of Britain, Canada and the United States has been inundated."

"Packer concluded his remarks with a dire warning: 'The Episcopal Church (USA) must repent and hold fast to the gospel that it has so flagrantly abandoned. It must return to that communion of the saints from which it has walked away or, in the far country into which it has drifted, it will surely die.'"

This pronouncement holds true for the Presbyterian Church and other denominations also. Heed it well, for the the Holy Scriptures remind in Matthew 7:13, "...for wide the gate, and broad the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat."

And there are many racing to an end they do not anticipate.