Acts 5:17,18

HIGH PRIEST AND OFFICIAL BOARD

17, 18. “And the high priest and all those with him, being of the sect of the Sadducees, were filled with envy, jealousy and prejudice, and laid hands on the apostles and put them in the common prison.” Tell me not that the high priest did not, in all good conscience, sign the death-warrant of Jesus Christ, believing that he was doing God service. We have no right to impeach the honesty of these leading preachers and official members at Jerusalem. You have nothing to do but look at their successors at the present day. Their name is legion. They doubtless feel it to be their duty to crush out the Holiness Movement, whose votaries are preaching the Incarnation of the Holy Ghost, the Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire, Entire sanctification, Divine Healing, and the Coming of the Lord. We are preaching precisely the doctrines which the apostles preached in Jerusalem. This can not be denied. We prove it constantly with an open Bible. Why do they oppose and interdict us, forbidding us to preach in their jurisdiction? While we have no right to impeach the candor of the high priest and his coadjutors, we know they did the work of Satan, believing they were obeying God. We have the same phenomena throughout Christendom this day. The logical sequence is irresistible. Just as the leaders of Judaism blindly resisted the Holy Ghost, so the leaders of fallen Christianity at the present day ostracize and interdict the holiness people, who are preaching just what the apostles preached. I am willing to preach in any of their churches, with the understanding that I am to be put out the moment I deflect from the New Testament. We challenge all of the anti-holiness preachers and officers to convict us of departure from the Word of God. But they do not charge us with antagonism to God's Word, but simply forbid us to preach in their territory, when God has commanded us to “preach the gospel to every creature.” Of course, we are not going into their houses uninvited; but how dare they mark off a certain territory, and let drunkards; harlots, thieves, murderers and the devil into it, and then order God's gospel herald out of it! We come to wage war with the devil and sin, and nothing else. Why forbid us thus, protecting the devil and sin in said territory, while they drag the people into hell by the wholesale? No doubt but these very preachers and church officers who antagonized the apostles at Jerusalem are down in hell. Look out! The Judgment Day is coming, when God will call the holiness evangelist to stand on the witness block and testify that he went, responsive to Jehovah's bidding, to that wicked town to preach the gospel and warn those wicked people to flee from the wrath to come, and a certain clergyman ran him away. Will not that man be guilty of the blood of those souls? Better for him that he had never been born. Remember, there will be no dignitaries at the Judgment bar, but every tub will stand on its own bottom.

THE PEOPLE TRUER THAN THE PREACHERS

The preachers in charge of the orthodox Jewish Church at Jerusalem, availing themselves of the acquiescent civil arm, imprison the apostles. God sends His angel to open the prison and let them out. Having convened the Sanhedrin in the judgment hall on Mt. Zion and failed to find them in the jail, upon notification that they are standing in the temple and teaching the people,

25, 26 . “The captain of the temple guards along with officers, goes and brings them out by force, because they feared the people, lest they may be stoned.” When the church is in the kingdom of God, the leaders as a rule are better than the people, living nearer God, and thus leading the people on to grander achievements in the divine life. Et, vice versa, when the church is fallen and preachers and people out of the heavenly road and on a downward trend, as is true in case of apostasy, then the preachers are worse than the people. During all the martyr ages the preachers led the bloody persecutions. From Stephen, the first, when Saul of Tarsus, the top of the clergy, led the mob that stoned him, to the anti-holiness rally of the present day, the preachers have opposed and persecuted the holy people. Here doubtless they would have killed the apostles if they had not feared the people.