Stand Alone

“It shall be for the priests that are sanctified of the sons of Zadok; which have kept my charge, which went not astray when the children of Israel went astray, as the Levites went astray.” (Eze 48:11 AV)

That is no small feat!  The entire nation other than the sons of Zadok and the sons of Jonadab went after false Gods.  Talk about a minority.  That was not an easy thing to do.  These two families vowed to follow the LORD even if they were the last ones to do so.  This reminds me of Noah and his family.  Only eight souls on the entire planet left who loved the LORD and who were worth saving from a flood.  One wonders if that is how the LORD will find His church.  This question is quite straightforward this morning.  How faithful will we be to the word of God and to His presence?  It is one thing to be doctrinally faithful.  There isn’t much of a cost to believe the right things.  What is difficult is to remain practically faithful.  The sons of Zadok did more than hold faithful to the teaching of the word of God.  They performed them among a nation that treated the things of God as expendable.  The sons of Jonadab lived a life of complete separation.  This had to be a challenge.  They had neither homes nor fields.  No farm to till.  No crops to harvest.  Nothing to trade among their brethren.  The sons of Jonadab disengaged from society because society was corrupt.  What the sons of Zadok this was a bit harder.  They had to minister to and for a populace that wanted nothing to do with the laws of God.  They came to worship on Saturday but lived like the heathen the rest of the week.  No wonder God set them apart for special recognition and reward.

When I was a senior in High School, our English teacher assigned a theme paper for an end-of-the-year project.  It had to be rather lengthy.  This wasn’t a ten-page paper.  It had to be a project that took the better part of a half-year to complete.  Being newly saved in March of that year, I choose to do a paper based on the small booklet, Trail of Blood.  It was a small booklet that briefly followed the history of Bible believers through the history of Christianity.  When I got to Martin Luther, I kind of stalled.  Martin Luther fascinated me.  He struck me as a profoundly honest man who could not deny himself, his conscience, or the word of God.  As a monk, he was tormented by the conflict between the church and the word of God.  His church taught a system of works to either gain or keep salvation.  The word of God clearly taught salvation was by faith alone.  Shutting himself in his monastic cell for days and months on end, he finally surrendered to true salvation by faith alone.  This started a life of standing against the abuses and false doctrine of his former church.  He is famously quoted as saying, “Here I stand.  I cannot do otherwise.”  The statement regards the challenge of his former church fathers questioning the authority of the word of God over all other church authorities, specifically as applied to salvation and indulgences.  Martin Luther stood in the middle of a court.  He stood alone.  It was him against all of Europe.  And, he takes this famous stand.

There are few people like Martin Luther.  In any given age there are those who will stand for the right against all odds.  The question becomes, will we be that person?  In a day when God is hated among the world's population and those who claim the name of Christ are slowly abandoning Biblical authority, being in the minority is not easy.  It is beginning to become difficult to go to fellowships.  All one has to do is stand on the veracity of a single translation and you are marked as a radical.  Stand up for decent standards of separation and you are tagged as ‘one of those fundamentalists’.  Stick with the orthodox doctrine handed down by our forefathers and you are ostracised and an ignorant simpleton who needs to get himself a real education.  It is not easy to stand on truth when the numbers of those who seem to be shrinking.  But stand we must.  God honored the sons of Zadok and the sons of Jonadab because they defied the odds.  They beat back criticism.  They stood fast and used the attacks of those who would not ally themselves as a motive to double down on the truth.  This is where the child of God must be.  He or she must stand even if they are the last ones left.  One cannot live with oneself if he or she does not.