George E. Fifield • January 17, 1895 • American Sentinel, Vol. 10, No. 3
CHRIST came to set men free. He said, "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me . . . to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound." Isa. 61:1. Perfect liberty is found only in Christ. God's law is called the law of liberty. The inspired Word calls that law a hedge. It marks out those unchangeable boundary lines of right, between man and God, and between man and man, which must be recognized, else liberty is impossible to intelligent beings. All slavery, physical, moral, and intellectual, came from breaking that law. Liberty is found only in obedience to it. Still there is a sort of slavery in the futile attempt to keep it in our own strength. But Christ, through the new covenant, writes that law in the heart, so we not only have power to keep it, but his will becomes ours; so we, with Christ, delight to do his will, because his law is in our hearts. Here is perfect liberty. The perfectly saved will be perfectly free. Throughout eternity they will do just what they please, because they please to do just what makes liberty and joy possible.
Now, as to the relation of the State to the conscience of man. Christ found men enslaved to kings and to priests. He set them free from both. He taught that all men are brothers, sons of one father, and therefore equal before the law,—equal in civil rights. Rulers were therefore, only their servants, chosen under God to protect them in the enjoyment of their rights. He freed us from the chains of priestcraft, by teaching the absolute independence of the individual soul in matters religious, and by promising the Spirit of Truth to guide each one into all truth.
It is true, all liberty comes through keeping God's law; but God himself who wrote that law in the hearts of men in the beginning, who spake it amid the thunders of Sinai that all might hear and obey, writing it, not on perishable parchment to pass away, but on the fleshly adamant, to last forever, who waits through the new covenant to re-write it in every trusting soul,—God himself who did all this, still made man as free to disobey these precepts as to obey them. That men might be made thus free, God ran the risk of sin, and because God ran such risk, sin exists to-day. Why did God run the risk of all this fearful iniquity that man might be made free? To this there can be but one answer. It was because he knew the worthlessness of all forced obedience, and that, therefore, the freedom to sin was absolutely necessary to the possibility of righteousness.
After having at such infinite risk made men free to sin, that the internal principle of love might work itself out in outward acts of righteousness unhindered by force,—after having made men thus, has God given to any human authority the right to take away that freedom, and so thwart his plans? He has commanded all men to worship him and obey his precepts, and this command applies to each individual personally; but has he ever commanded any man or set of men to compel others to worship him, or to act even outwardly as if they worshiped him? To ask these questions is to answer them emphatically in the negative.
The civil power is the power of arbitrary force to compel men who will not be righteous, to at least be civil, that men may live together in peace and quietness. The true power of the Church, is the power of divine love manifest in human flesh, to win men to lead righteous lives. The two powers are entirely separate, and Jesus so taught when he said, "Render to Caesar [the civil power] the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." When Peter, as a member of the Christian Church, sought to defend the truth by the sword, Jesus, pointing to his Father as the Church's only source of power, said, "Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword [i.e., in religious matters] shall perish with the sword." The tares were to be allowed to grow with the wheat until the harvest. Then God would send forth his angels and gather out the tares and burn them. No human effort of arbitrary force was to be used in rooting them out, lest in the act the wheat should be uprooted instead. Again, Jesus said: "My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight." Every civil law has the power of the sword back of it. If it is right to make a law, then it is right to enforce it. In denying to the Church the power of the sword, Jesus therefore forbade the Church to ask the State for laws enforcing religious beliefs and observances. Paul understood this when he said, "The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds."
The early Church, strong only in the power of God, triumphed grandly, even over the opposing force of a false religion, upheld by a false State. Only when she allied herself with that State, seeking its aid, did she deny her God, lose her power, and darken the world down into a night of a thousand years. The present effort of the Church to get the State to enforce the observance of Sunday, and to introduce the teaching of Christianity into the State schools, is but a revival of the pagan and papal doctrine of force in religious things, and as such, it is anti-Christian.
GEO. E. FIFIELD.
"Love and love only sacrifices; that is, gives itself freely, thinking not of any return; gives for the joy of giving because it is love." - George Fifield from the Sermon Christ our Sacrifice
Nothing is clearer than that the Bible teaches that a separation of true Christianity from the false, so-called Christianity will take place prior to Christ’s return to this earth. Some people believe this separation will take place over the day that will be observed as the Sabbath; and, so they go about devoting almost their entire effort to getting people to observe the right day, and necessarily paying little attention to getting people to experience the spiritual meaning of the Sabbath, since they have not had that experience themselves. In other words, they put the sign before the experience signified, just as the later Jews did with the sign of circumcision, and just the opposite from the way in which, it is clearly stated, God gave circumcision to Abraham. This inevitably puts the Sabbath into the Old Covenant, just as the Jews put circumcision there, and teaches the people to seek their righteousness through obedience, instead of seeking to be made righteous by the divine indwelling, so they can truly and spiritually obey.