In the 19th century most churches that were say Baptist churches would have not been only Bible believing, but most of them would have been Calvinistic also and very firm in the faith. Whatever happened to cause so many churches, several thousands of them in our land, to lose their moorings so that today the vast majority of churches designated as Baptist churches would not be evangelical Bible-believing churches, preaching salvation through Christ alone. This church left the Baptist Union initially in the year 1887 when Spurgeon took it out because of the error that was just coming in. Wrong doctrines were coming in to the denomination which undermined the Word of God and the doctrines of Scripture. It is the same with the church of England. It has never been pure, but at the Reformation, out went the high altars; in came proper pulpits and preaching of the word of God. But it did not last all that long. Error soon came in, and fogged it and clouded it. So now what have you got? I read in a paper somebody describing the church of England as mainly a quasi-Marxist movement. There are Bible-believers in it, but they are a minority. Ideas that are harmful. How did it happen? Well, individual believers stopped testing, stopped proving.
I remember back in the early 90s when the first seeker sensitive church started in America. It was in the Chicago area and it became one of the world’s biggest churches. And the idea of the preacher behind it was this – oh, you put out a questionnaire in the neighbourhood and you say to people who were not church goers, what do you want your church to be like? What do you want? So unconverted people, worldlings, filled in the questionnaire and said what they would like church to be like. Well, we do not want worship, serious worship and hearing the Word of God. What we want is do-as-you-like church, church where you can saunter in and saunter out, where there will be drama and acting and entertainment and all the rest of it. Right, said the preacher, that is what we will give you. So the so-called seeker sensitive movement was born. The church was moulded to give people to give exactly what they wanted. High decibel, high pitched, high rhythm entertainment, actors and drama and everything else, and everything was done as little like church as you could possibly make it. It was a great success: that is, in terms of drawing numbers, and the hundreds and the thousands came.
Hold fast, hold away, you could translate it. There is a deliberate, a conscious opposing of these things. ‘Prove all things; hold fast.’ Our translators have chosen in verse 22 to say ‘Abstain from all appearance of evil.’ But ideally, as in the Greek, it should be the opposite action to that in verse 21. Hold fast that which is good; hold away from all appearance of evil. The two things balance in the Greek, and ideally they should in our translation. But anyway, we understand it. ‘Hold fast that which is good. Abstain from all appearance of evil.’
There are two particular words translated ‘evil’ in the New Testament. One comes from a Greek term which means moral evil, badness. The other comes from a Greek term which means evil in the sense of harmful, damaging, destructive; that is the word used here. It is evil, but what is in mind particularly is that it is damaging, it is harmful, destructive to the Gospel, destructive to souls, destructive in the church.