What is the overall purpose of the passage? The disciples are being prepared for the future. They are going to be taught in much more detail and by the Holy Spirit, how to organise churches. When Christ has ascended and, after the day of Pentecost, they are going to be those along with Paul, who will give the inspired instructions as to how the churches should be ordered, and what will be the pattern of the ordering of churches in the New Testament. It will be individual congregations that are autonomous like the seven churches of Asia in the Book of Revelation. There are the lampstands or the candlesticks of the churches, and Christ is in the midst, dealing with each one individually. There will be no Church of England, church of here, church of there, not in the New Testament. There is no sign of a denomination. Every church is an autonomous church, directly accountable to Christ, and obedience to the word of God. The disciples are being prepared for this even back here. They are being prepared for the gospel age, when, ‘This is our church, but there's another over yonder. Those people are in an individual, independent, autonomous congregation, accountable to God, but they are not actually of us. We may have friendly relationships, but they are not under our jurisdiction, or discipline, or teaching. It doesn't make them any less Christian. The New Testament church will be a vast number, worldwide, of individual congregations all accountable to God.
Can't we nowadays see the wisdom of why God never created a denomination, and Christ never founded a denomination, because we, at the latter end of history, see what happens to all the denominations. You get a denomination with a kind of pyramid structure of authority, and one person or one group of people at the top. That just makes life easy for the devil. He just corrupts the leader, or the leaders, and he has won the whole denomination. He just corrupts the seminary or their council, and he’s got it all. That is what has happened to denomination after denomination. They started with good intentions – ‘Oh, we have got strength in numbers, and together we will proclaim the gospel and win the community’, but they had an awful weakness: a single authority or council. Corrupt that, and you have in time won it all, says the devil. So Christ never did it that way. He established individual congregations. And if an individual congregation swerves from Christ and loses its way, and becomes theologically liberal and wayward, in time it self-destructs. It loses its power, it disappears or collapses. Perfect! But if it's a denomination, it goes on spreading falsehood and error and confusion. ‘He that is not against us is on our part.’ Do away with that spirit, John: ‘If he is not one of the twelve or one of the seventy with us, actually present, he is out of court; he’s not of us.’ That is not how it's going to be arranged. That is not the plan. That is not what the church will look like – the preparation for autonomy.
Supposing this man was one of those who, when Christ comes, will say, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? And he turns out to be a phony, and he is rejected by the Lord. How would the disciples know that? Ah but the people who Christ will reject in the last days, though they say, ‘Did we not cast out devils in thy name’, they didn't cast out devils in his name. They only pretended to, or convinced themselves they were doing so, in their sinfulness. They always were phonies. And it is so today. We know there are many, many people in the Charismatic Movement who truly believe in the Lord; they are true Christians, and they love the Lord and follow him. But when their leaders perform miracles, they don't achieve anything really. Most of it is smoke and mirrors, and pretence and exaggeration. Most of it is the healing of conditions which are not deep organic conditions. They are conditions which will respond – for a time, at any rate – to powerful suggestion and so-called healers, and seem to improve, but not for long. The healing of people who come into a meeting in wheelchairs is invariably phony, and not real. No, the people who come to Christ and say, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not do this and that’, who are rejected by him, because he never knew them, are phonies. Their claims are only claims. But this man: his miracles were genuine, and he believed in the Lord.