Matthew 12:43-45

AWFUL STATE OF THE BACKSLIDER

Matthew 12:43-45. “When the unclean spirit may go out from a man, he goeth through dry places seeking rest, and findeth none.” Here we see the man is converted; this unclean spirit licentiousness, drunkenness, or profanity, his besetting sin having evanesced with this filthy demon, which had long polluted his soul by his slimy tread. Now that the demon is cast out, he goes tramping about, hunting a human soul to enter; meanwhile the elements around are dry, uninteresting, and affording him no sustenance, and giving him no satisfaction. “Then he says, I will return to my own house whence I came out.” Now the camp-meeting is over, and his victim has gone back home, exposed to the contaminating influence of his old companions in vice and folly; so this demon, weary and disconsolate of his tramp life around through dry and dreary places, resolves to give up his quest after others, and go back to the soul out of which he was ejected, when the Power fell on that crowded altar. “And having come, he finds it empty, having been swept and beautified.” The man has been genuinely and gloriously converted, the filthy demon cast out, and vast cart-loads of dead frogs, snakes, and immense debris swept away by the mighty bosom of pardoning love, the incoming tide of regenerating grace embellishing every chamber of his soul with the beauty and brightness of the heaven-born life. But there is no inhabitant, as the man has not yet received the second work of grace, in which the blessed Holy Spirit comes and takes up His abode in this beautiful new mansion of His own creation, simultaneously administering a deeper expurgation, eliminating out of the heart the old, sinful trend, transmitted from Adam the First, and always keeping the door ajar for every tramping demon that may chance to pass that way, not only saluting him “Welcome!” but making his quarters exceedingly comfortable. “Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and having come in, they dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first.” This ejected demon, coming back, reconnoiters the situation of his old home, and finds that it has been swept and beautified; i.e., a great and wonderful change has taken place since he was driven out, all of which was much against him; yet there is one thing decisively in his favor, and ‘that is, the house is empty. If the young convert had only pressed on into sanctification, and been filled with the Holy Ghost, this old demon, recognizing the house so wonderfully renewed, beautified, and purified, and then the Prince of Glory dwelling in it, his courage utterly failing, he would have skedaddled away, and gone in quest of an easier subject. But now that the house is empty, he is much encouraged, rendezvouses his forces, taking with him seven desperate and formidable demons. They effect an entrance; old habits are resumed; and the poor backslider not only floats on the very wave of vice, but rides the topmost billow, as his comrades now are not simply those impure demons, such as he had before he was converted, but the more formidable devils of skepticism and infidelity carry him away in a tornado, precipitating him far away into the bleak wilds of unbelief, contempt, and mockery, turning on him an avalanche of black darkness, and plunging him into hell. “So it shall be to this generation.” These wonderful deliverances of our Savior have not only a personal, but a social, collective, and ecclesiastical interpretation. The besetting sin of the Jewish Church, through all the intervening centuries, was idolatry. They got worse and worse, and seemed utterly incorrigible, till they were carried into Babylonian captivity. That terrible ordeal cast out the demon idolatry. Consequently, after the return from captivity, the Jews never again went into the idolatries of the Gentile world. But what was their history? They retrogressed into cold, dead formality and bleak, hollow hypocrisy, which were seven times worse than their old idolatry. Consequently they rejected their own Christ, and put Him to death, imputing all of His mighty works to the devil, thus grieving away the Holy Spirit, committing the unpardonable sin, provoking the righteous indignation of the Almighty, bringing on them the Roman armies, precipitating their own swift destruction.

Do not the prophecies reveal a similar course and doom appertaining to the Gentiles? So long as the Apostolic Church held fast to the glorious experience of entire sanctification, she remained pure, despite the burning stake and the ferocious lion. After the Emperor Constantine promoted her from martyr fires and the lion's mouth to Caesar's palace, she became worldly, plunging headlong into the idolatries of Romanism. The Lutheran Reformation cast out the demon of idolatry, so the Protestant Churches have never gone into image worship, Mariolatry, or the adoration of saints and angels; but she has drifted away into the same dead formality, cold ritualism, human ecclesiasticism, and lifeless, empty hypocrisy, which expedited the ruin of Judaism, and which is doubtless more abominable in the sight of God than papistical idolatry, thus ripening for the terrible fate of the foolish virgins.