There is, in the Book of Jeremiah, an arresting word spoken by the enemies of the heroic prophet. "Come," they said, "and let us smite him with the tongue" (Jer. 18:18). On the surface the threat is absurd. A man would have a hard time killing a fly with his tongue! In actuality, however, that threat of Jeremiah's enemies expressed a terribly real danger. With the tongue, a career may be smashed, a reputation blasted as by a charge of high explosive, or a life withered, shriveled, and finally killed.
It is a terrible thing to be executed - more terrible when God Himself is the executioner. Among the many stories found in the Bible, there are several which tell of men whom God struck dead. In none of the instances recorded where God visited punishment of death upon one of His own was the sentence passed for any moral sin. No violation of what we call the Ten Commandments has ever been followed by death imposed by God.
We cannot on our own help God, but we may be employed by Him. One of the greatest mistakes men make is in thinking that their energetic fussing will aid God in the accomplishment of His plans. He is the Eternal; we are creatures of time. Even when we have been born again, and the supernatural, eternal life of the Lord Jesus has been planted within us by that miraculous work of regeneration, the friction of the presence of our old nature still ties us to a framework of time, and tends to give us man's viewpoint instead of that of God.
Many writers, secular and religious, talk about the failure of the church. But since the church is made up of the totality of its members, the failure of the church is the failure of its members. Let us leave out of our consideration, for the moment, the question of the mixture of tares in the midst of the wheat. It is simple to explain the failure of the church on the basis of the mingling of the unregenerate with those who have been born again.
There is no doubt of the fact that Christians often indulge in sin. God has told us that if any of us deny the existence of the old nature we are deceiving ourselves, while if we admit the presence of the old nature but believe that the incurable sins are curable, "we make him a liar, and his word is not in us" (1 John 1:8, 10). Those two searching statements found in the First Epistle of John are like the darkest of settings to bring out the precious stone of grace that lies embedded between them.
