When churchmen defile the church

 Posted at Reformation Scotland:

Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has recently resigned over failures in his handling of one of the Church of England’s worst child abuse scandals. A damning report found a conspiracy of silence around the sadistic abuse of young boys both in the UK and in Africa, perpetrated by John Smyth, a prominent evangelical in the Church of England, and left unchallenged by bishops and others in church leadership. Several commentators have noted how church leaders can remain aloof from on-the-ground pastoral concerns and instead use their platforms for airing their own views on issues of little concern to local congregations. The daily spiritual needs of people’s souls are low in their priorities and when genuine wrongs are perpetrated, victims are easy to ignore. In perhaps less heinous cases, this picture is very recognisable in other churches too. When we drill down to the essential features of this situation, we find that God has already spoken His utter opposition to this kind of wickedness in the church. Long ago, He expressed His disgust at the prophets who brought defilement into His church by their conspiracy of cruelty and selfishness. Westminster Assembly member William Greenhill explains in the following updated extract from his commentary on Ezekiel.

Multi-faceted wickedness

Taking together the 25th and 28th verses of Ezekiel 22, you have expressed the sins of the prophets which defiled the land, making it to be called “The Uncleansed Land.” These sins are: conspiracy, cruelty, soul-murder, covetousness, inhumanity, and flattery.

Jerusalem was the holy city, the city of God, the place where God’s name was recorded, a type of the church of God in all ages. Yet there, even there, were wicked and false prophets. It shows us clearly that there will always be false prophets in the church of God. They were there in Christ’s time: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing” (Matt. 7:15). They were there in Paul’s time: “there was one Bar-Jesus, a Jew, and a false prophet” (Acts 13:6). They were there in John’s time: “Many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). So many have gone out that there is a generation of them here to this day, and they will not cease as long as the Lord has His church in the world. There will be false prophets around even at doomsday.

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