An Alien Wisdom

Bur shun profane and vain babblings: for they will increase unto more ungodliness. And their word will eat as doth a canker: of whom is Hymeneus and Philetus; who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some. Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his. And, Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.:

But the current profane babblings avoid, for they will advance to more and more of impiety; and their word like a gangrene will eat yet further in. Among these teachers are Hymeneus and Philetus, men who in respect of the truth have gone wrong, saying that resurrection has already taken place, and so upset the faith of some. However, the solid foundation of God standeth ever, with this seal upon it, ‘The Lord knoweth those who are His own,’ and, ‘Let him depart from iniquity, whoever nameth the name of the Lord.’

IT is at once most mournful and yet suggestive of a solemn encouragement to read sentences like these, written in that early morning of the Christian day. A man is writing who was actually contemporary, for a good part of his younger life, with the Lord Jesus. And he addresses a friend who also in all likelihood had often talked with those who had walked and companied with the great Redeemer, and could recall His very accent, and describe His features, and recount wonder-works of His which their own eyes had seen. Yet the Householder’s field is already thick with tares among the wheat;

An Alien Wisdom

heresy is all abroad; the most patent and outstand- 2 Tim. ii. ing teachings of the Master and His messengers are 16-19. denied or travestied, right and left. It was a mystery

of iniquity indeed. Yes, but in that trying scene

‘grace did more abound’; the suffering truth lived

down the parody in that difficult time; and it can,

and it will, live down still, even to the end, the

parodies or denials of these later days, overcoming

them by its inborn immortality.

Of Hymenzeus and Philetus we know practically Hymenzus nothing, except that the Hymeneus of 1 Tim. i. 20 erie is probably one with him we have before us here.

What their ‘profane,’ secular, unspiritual, ‘babblings’ were, we can only guess, but the reference to a ‘resurrection past already’ helps us in guessing. It is likely that we have here one of the earliest allusions to a type of thought known later as Gnosticism, or the ‘ Gnésis’; the religion of ‘ Know- The Gnosis. ledge’ rather than of Faith; a teaching which claimed to lead its disciple past the common herd of mere believers to a superior and gifted circle who should know the mysteries of being, and who by such knowing should live emancipated from the slavery of matter, ranging at liberty in the world of spirit.

More than probably such was the sense in which, according to this school, ‘resurrection had already taken place.’ The initiated soul, immaterial and therefore pure, by the ‘knowledge’ — not of self, or sin, or of a holy God, but — of a mystic secret, was held to have soared aloft out of the bondage of matter into a transcendental upper air; not to be partaker there of the bliss of sanctity and love, but —

16-19.

Our Need of
Warning.

The Antidote. to be released from limitations. Some disciples of the school put their theory into practice by turning fiercely on the body and punishing it as evil, because material. And too many took the opposite line from the same point; they let the body go its way in sensual sin, while the sublime soul, forsooth, enjoyed its transcendental liberty.

So these ‘advanced’ thinkers ‘advanced to more and more of impiety,’ on principle. So ‘their word did eat yet further in, like a gangrene,’ creeping from limb to limb of the moral being. ‘Their God was their belly, their end was destruction, — glory was in their shame’ (Phil. iii. 19).

Is the beacon-fire of that experience unneeded now? Never perhaps since Christianity dawned upon the world was the mental and moral air so thick as it is to-day with thoughts which claim to ‘emancipate’ man from the low level and the narrow views of the Gospel of the Cross. Philosophies which, equipped with the newest knowledge of nature, only go back to pagan types of speculation; dark teachings, mainly conveyed in secret, about unseen powers, and about a life other than that shewn to us in Scripture, beyond the veil of death; these things in a thousand forms are everywhere about us. Let us draw only the closer to the LorD, as men who know themselves, and Him; and let us hold fast the Word.

So doing, we now, like the faithful then, shall abide and remain, however far both thought and

* morals may drift around us; and so we shall help

others to be steadfast too. We shall experience

An Alien Wisdom

something of what it is to be ‘known by the Lord 2 Tim. ii. as His own,’ as only the penitent and believing can 16-19. experience it. We shall know Him so that our inmost being will ‘depart from iniquity,’ with a conscience kept sensitive by Jesus, through the Sprrit, and with a will animated and kept erect by

Him. So we shall have the sacred privilege of being ‘living stones’ in that ‘solid foundation of God,’

the true Church of the Firstborn. And so many a restless and unhappy spirit will come to learn the secret of purity and peace, and to be built in its

turn into the stedfast yet expanding structure of the spiritual temple.

2 Tim. ii.
20, 21.

The Great
House,