In the opening verses of the chapter, God had pronounced a woe on unfaithful pastors—referring probably to rulers, both civil and ecclesiastical—who had destroyed and scattered the sheep of his pasture. He had promised to gather his flock in due time together, and set up faithful shepherds over them. Then he passes, at the fifth verse, by a natural and beautiful transition, to that prediction of Messiah, the great Shepherd of the sheep—King and Priest of his church both—of which the text forms a part: “Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. In his days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely; and this is his name whereby he shall be called, THE LORD”—(Jehovah)—“OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.”
When a country is invaded by some foreign foe, when the armies of the aggressor have overspread the land, when a blighted surface marks the progress of their ravages, when the chains of unoffending victims display the relentless cruelty of their revenge, when the active movements of hostile squadrons are discerned, and the voice of the trumpet that hitherto has sounded the certain note of battle and defeat is heard from the watchtowers of the fortress, that forms the last and lingering hope of a once flourishing, but now greatly diminished power; when it is dreaded that within are many faithless men, whose treacherous machinations are concealed under the mask of friendship, and who only await the critical moment of disaster or despair, to strengthen the hands of those who have laid bare many an altar, and left many a city smoking in its ruins—shall he be hailed as a patriot citizen, who whispers in softest accents that danger is far distant; who circulates and foments the ruinous suggestion to relax those efforts that might yet render resistance successful, and, turning the tide of conquest, lay prostrate the insulting foe; who encourages the thousands around him to banish idle cares and silence unfounded alarms, and speedily betake themselves to gay and luxurious delights, and loll in the lap of voluptuous ease, and run the round of lawless revelry? No. He is pronounced a traitor to his country’s cause; to him is awarded a traitor’s doom; and over his remains are raised the insignia of a traitor’s grave.
He is crying unto us, “Sing, O heaven”—that is, “Sing, O Church; and rejoice, O earth. Sing, O State: sing both Church and State of Scotland.” Oh! how should we sing? Hath not the Lord forsaken and forgotten us? Nay, though it appears so, yet it is not really so. “A woman may forget her sucking child, but the Lord cannot forget his people.” The purpose of God is pregnant and about to bring forth a great deliverance unto the Church and State of Scotland. If we saw the days that our Lord is to bestow upon us in Scotland, and had a view of the ministers that shall be in it, it would make us sing. Ye think now that the ministers are gone. Indeed a great part of them are so, and the magistrates are rejected by us. We declare before sun, moon, and stars that this is the case. But the Lord hath yet ministers that shall be polished shafts in His quiver; and He will yet give us rulers, and will make out that promise: “And kings shall be thy nursing fathers;” so that if we saw the good days that are coming upon the back of these troubles, we would not get men and women kept from dancing for joy. Ye would all go home with gladness, rejoicing as if ye were frantic for joy. But you may say, “How can this be?” For there are two things to be objected against it:
In Volume 8 of the Master’s Trumpet, we considered the relation of noncommunicant, baptized members to the discipline of the church. Should such members be subject to the formal judicial process of ecclesiastical discipline up to and including excommunication? After noting that this question is essentially a practical application of Covenant Theology to church order, we surveyed the arguments against the formal discipline of baptized members and responded to each of these in turn, to establish the view that baptized members are under the whole discipline of the church, up to and including the censure of excommunication. Having established this principle, we proceed in this article to deal with some practical questions of how this discipline might be implemented, at what age formal process should become relevant, and for what judicial discipline might be instigated.
The circumstances which led to this statement were briefly as follows. For some time past the writer’s mind was much drawn towards foreign missionary work. The knowledge of this circumstance led the Committee of the General Assembly on Missions to inquire into his willingness to enter upon their missionary service in India. This communication from the representative body of the Church, as a Presbyter he laid before his brethren for counsel: and after full procedure, in the course of which his Congregation presented a Memorial expressive of their interests and feelings, and the Presbytery delivered their mind both on the Call and the Memorial, he was led to the decision recorded in the following document. In a day when, on the one hand a carnal fanaticism would counterfeit, and on the other an earthly intellectualism would supplant, the self-evidencing and personal operations of the Holy Spirit, Christian men, however timid, ought not to shrink from avowing their grounds of spiritual judgment.
The most immediate, and to this audience, the most impressive suggestion conveyed in this half sentence is, that a preacher of the Divine Law and Christian Gospel may be a castaway. Nay, when we remember who was the “I myself ” that wrote these lines, we perceive that even an Apostle, an inspired preacher, was not, on that account, beyond the peril. We have the still more positive confirmation of fact; for an older Apostle than Paul, one of the original twelve, called and endowed with power by Christ himself, fell by transgression from “this ministry and apostleship,” perished by suicide in the field he had purchased with the reward of iniquity, and went from Aceldama to what was, in a more fearful sense, “his own place,” a castaway.
From the outset, the sixteenth-century Scottish Reformed Church was firm in its pursuit of tutoring and examining communicants, and this preparation intensified in the weeks leading up to the administration of the Lord’s Supper. The First Book of Discipline (1560) enjoined, “All ministers must be admonished to be more careful to instruct the ignorant than ready to serve their appetite and to use more sharp examination than indulgence in admitting to that great Mystery such as be ignorant of the use and virtue of the same. And therefore we think that the administration of the Table ought never to be without examination passing before and specially of them whose knowledge is suspect.”
We often pray for unction on the preaching of god’s word but we seldom pause to define what we mean by this term. We know instinctively as Christians that for preaching to be effective it needs something from above to enhance and empower the spoken word. This need which we feel, and which moves us to pray, does not imply any defect in the word of God. Rather, it recognises that there is inadequacy in those who preach that word and also a profound deficiency in the heart of those who hear it preached. Consequently, when we pray, as we should pray, for unction in preaching we are rightly confessing to God that something supernatural is necessary if His word is to have its proper effect on our hearers.
We may consider three senses in which the Scottish Presbyterian tradition has employed the term constitution. George Gillespie, writing in 1641, frequently alludes to individual laws and regulations of the church as constitutions. The same sense of the word is found in the Church of Scotland’s Barrier Act of 1697. Alexander Henderson, also writing in 1641, uses the word to designate the characteristic form, composition and membership of the church’s superior courts. From these and similar usages, the modern meaning of the term, signifying a body of fundamental principles with which all other legislation must harmonize, gradually emerged during the years between the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and and drafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1789.
My dear christian friends, you have been witnesses this day of one of the most solemn scenes presented to view on this sinful earth—the ministerial induction of a servant of Jesus Christ into a congregation of his church. Nay more, ye yourselves have been this day parties in this very transaction, and sharers in all its awful responsibilities. Even as your pastor, so ye also will have to give account in this matter; and as he has received the usual address, stirring him up to the diligent fulfilment of his duties, so do ye now receive the word of exhortation, which, by the appointment of my presbyters, I am delegated to address unto you. May the Lord help us all to improve this solemn occasion!
