Acts 2:39

FOR ALL AGES AND NATIONS

39. “For the promise is to you and to your children, and to you who are afar off, so many as the Lord our God may call.” This verse is positive, unequivocal and unmistakable, confirmatory of the great New Testament truth that the promise of the personal incarnated Holy Ghost appertains to every human being on the globe whom the Lord may call by His Word, Spirit and Providence to come and participate in the glorious gospel feast, now ready and free to every fallen son or daughter of Adam's ruined race. While the concession of God's pardoning mercy, extended to all, is generally conceded, ecclesiastical autocrats and theological heretics pertinaciously repudiate the second great work of grace, i. e., the reception of the personal Holy Ghost as an indwelling Sanctifier and Comforter. Not only is this verse clear and unequivocal, but Peter at the house of Cornelius and in his testimony before the apostles at Jerusalem most unequivocally certifies that the Gentiles received the same identical spiritual enduement which the apostles received on the day of Pentecost. While these Scriptures are so positive, clear and conclusive as to preclude the possibility of misapprehension and leave no conceivable apology for cavil; yet it is a significant fact that bold heretics this day from Dan to Beersheba are persistently and indefatigably laboring to convince the people that no one but the apostles ever did receive the Holy Ghost, whereas a hundred and eight of the original disciples who received Him on the first morning of Pentecost were not apostles, and a number of them were women. Why do these bold heretics labor so hard and so persistently to flatly and positively contradict and refute the plain and unmistakable Word of God? Brother Godbey, what is heresy? And who is a heretic? The original meaning of heresy is to separate; thence a heretic is one who separates himself from God and takes issue with God; while heresy is doctrine dissimilar to God's Word and out of harmony with it. The martyrs were all stigmatized heretics and burnt for heresy, because they separated from the corrupt clergy and the fallen church. If you will retain in your mind the definition of heresy, i. e., separation from something, the analysis is plain and easy. When a church becomes corrupt and heretical because it is separated from God, it invariably falls into the hands of carnal ecclesiastical autocrats and despots who are ready to persecute all who dare to separate from them. You must not forget that Satan is the great counterfeiter and counterfeits all truth. He calls evil good and good evil; hell, heaven, and heaven, hell; and calls himself God, and he is the god of this poor fallen world (2 Corinthians 4:4). His intelligence so far transcends that of every human being as to enable him to cunningly manipulate the greatest intellectualists and the most profound scholars. He has but one available competitor, and that is God.

So infinite is the devil's intellectual perspicacity above that of all human beings that he has no trouble to radically and completely deceive all classes from the simpleton to the philosopher, from the barbarian to the most scholarly theologian on the globe. Hence the only possible availability against his devices is to receive the light, wisdom, word and personal incarnation of the Holy Ghost. So long as He dwells in you, though you be an illiterate Hottentot, you will prove more than a match for an army of devils. If you let God conquer you, capture and move into you, you can then conquer “the world, the flesh and the devil.” If you do not let God conquer you, you can be conquered by most insignificant things, e. g., a filthy old cigar, the sickening quid or the nauseating old pipe, or almost any other silly and senseless device of the devil. As an independency, man never has stood and never will. The devil puffs him up with egotism and inflates him with the silly delusion of personal independency, merely that he may gouge his eyes out, wrap him around his black fingers, toss him for a foot-ball, the sport of demoniacal millions to kick around the black walls of hell through all eternity. Since the Fall, Satan has been “the god of this world,” and so few people have been acquainted with God that the leaders of church and state, blinded by the fogs of hell and led away by the sophistries of the pit, have literally developed a general tergiversation of the maxims and dogmata of all ages and nations, political and ecclesiastical.

The devil takes the very phraseology of the Bible, radically perverting and cunningly manipulating it to the damnation of the superstitious votaries of religion. Consequently the devil's deluded ecclesiastical tyrants in all ages have hounded, persecuted and martyred the children of God under the vociferous and odious imputation of heresy. As heresy means separation, and the saints of God could not be true to Him without separating from the wicked rulers of fallen ecclesiasticisms, of course they were heretics from their standpoint but not in the sight of God and the light of His Word. With the above exposition of Satan's counterfeit applications and interpretations of heresy and heretics, you are prepared to put your eye on Jesus and His Word and receive the true interpretation of heresy and see who the actual heretic is. God alone is true and right. Hence all spiritual leaders who separate from Him are heretics in the divine estimation and in the light of all Christian intelligence. Since the Bible is the only book of truth in all the world, other books only being true so far as they harmonize with it, therefore all departure from God's revealed Word is heresy. During the first three centuries, while martyrdom was the order of the day, the expectation of every Christian and the glory of the church, there never was a schism. When the Emperor Constantine professed the Christian religion and suddenly elevated the despised, down-trodden, persecuted church from the lion's mouth and the burning stake to the palace of the Caesars, they immediately assembled in the council at Nice, Bythinia, the Emperor Constantine presiding over the council, sitting in a golden chair. They proceeded to make a human creed, thus formulating the celebrated Nicene Creed, the prolific mother of all the creeds of Christendom, which have multiplied upon the face of the earth like the Grecian warriors springing up from the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus. The martyrs were burnt for disharmony with the creed interpreted by the sinister policy of a corrupt clergy. When the holiness people go into creed-making the shroud of the grand movement is ready for her interment. Every deflection from the plain Word of God is heresy. The Old Testament abounds in beautiful and instructive symbolisms, all of which are literalized in the New. Hence the New Testament, in whose dispensation we live and which really contains all the truth of the Old, focalized, literalized, verified and elucidated, is the creed of Christendom. It is plainer and more easily understood than any of the human creeds. Hence there is no apology for their existence. If your creed is in harmony with the Bible you can well afford to drop it and use the Bible. If it is out of harmony with the Bible, throw it away quickly or the devil will get you. A sectarian is the devotee of a human creed, whether written or unwritten. He is a poor, deluded idolater, worshipping a silly, pusillanimous human dogma, hatched in the bottomless pit and propagated on earth for the delusion and damnation of souls. Any man will die for his god, whether he be a Christian martyr, worshipping the true God in heaven and earth, or a bloodthirsty Mussulman, worshipping the false prophet, or the Pagan devotee of Brahma, Buddha, Grand Llama or Foh. The present age is awfully cursed with human heresies. Our Savior describes them, “compassing sea and land to make one proselyte, simultaneously making him two-fold more the child of hell!” Well said, because they have no power to take away his old sins: all they can do is to administer to him the rites and ceremonies of theirs, persuading him that he is a Christian when he is not, thus making him a hypocrite as well as a sinner, and doubling the mess for devils to devour in the barbecues of hell. We would all do well to emulate the zeal and perseverance of the devil. Oh how his preachers run to the ends of the earth, undergo hardships and surmount difficulties to propagate their heresies and make proselytes. Now, reader, I hope henceforth you will know no authority but God's Word, taking it as it is, zealous least any one explain it away. Paul calls it a two-edged sword. If you give it a chance it will cut the heads off your idols till not one survive, and thus you will have nothing left but God and His sweet precious Word. Why do preachers with fine collegiate educations hold on weeks together preaching themselves hoarse to convince the people that they can not receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, thus flatly contradicting God's plain and unmistakable Word? There is but one possible solution, and that is, that these are verifying Paul

“For such are false apostles, deceitful workers transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no wonder: for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore, it is no surprise if indeed his ministers are transformed as ministers of righteousness, whose end shall be according to their works.” (2 Corinthians 11:13-14)

The world is thronged with the devil's preachers, as the Holy Ghost through Paul so faithfully warns us. They tell you, you can not receive the Holy Ghost, and that no one has received him since the apostles. Why? Because they are personally ignorant of the Holy Ghost in His regenerating and sanctifying power as a personal indwelling Illuminator and Comforter; they judge all others by themselves. They are like the African king who said that all the people in the world were black, from the simple fact that he had never seen a white man. Now, reader, will you be stupid enough to follow Satan's ignorance instead of the blessed Savior and God's infallible Word, which, as you see here, positively certifies this promise of God to bestow upon His children the gift of the Holy Ghost, “is to you and to your children, and to you who are afar off, so many as the Lord our God may call”? If you are puzzled amid the clamor of contradictory sectarian shibboleths, just get on your knees and ask the blessed Holy Spirit, while you open your Bible and read it, to reveal it to you. If you are truly honest, your creeds and idols all dead, and yourself dead to everything but God and His Word, you will have no trouble, but always receive the needed light. The reason why the masses of religious people are so easily manipulated by the devil's preachers is because they know so little about God's Word. The blessed Holy Spirit will invariably shed the light on His precious Word, necessary to guide the honest, humble soul in the way of all truth and righteousness. If you are truly walking with God in the light of His Spirit shining on His Word you can detect heretics at once, because they bend the Bible to their creed, thus incurring the awful woe pronounced on the man who “handles the Word of God deceitfully.” It is awfully wicked to tinker with God's Word and bend it to your creed, whether written or unwritten. The Bible, like God, bends to nothing, while everything in all the world is to bend to it. How blessedly consolatory that the way to heaven is so plain, “that wayfaring men though fools may not err therein.”