In the past two chapters we have seen the positive items of the divine economy and of the Divine Trinity’s operation. In this chapter we want to see an item that is altogether negative. We need to compare what is seen in the Bible with what is seen today in Christianity. I have to use two words to describe today’s Christianity: deformed and degraded. If we are not careful, we might become something that is deformed and degraded. All of Christianity is deformed from the form of the revelation in the holy Word and is also degraded. We need to know the real situation and see a clear picture of today’s Christianity. When we talk about Christianity in such a way, this does not mean that we do not love all Christians. We love all of our brothers and sisters in the Lord, yet we have to admit that today’s Christendom is absolutely far off from God’s eternal plan.
This deformed and degraded religious system is fully covered by the Lord in a prophetic way in three parables in Matthew 13. The first four parables of this chapter form one group, and the last three form another group. Three of these first four parables give us a picture of today’s Christendom. One parable shows us that while the wheat is growing, the enemy of the Lord comes and sows tares amidst the wheat (vv. 24-30). This means that the false believers, the nominal Christians, were sown into the so-called church. In degraded Christianity there are many false or nominal Christians. Only about twenty percent of the members of the denomination in which my mother was a member were genuine Christians. Even though my mother attended that denomination and loved Christianity, she was not saved until the Lord used me to raise up a local church in our town.
In today’s Christianity there are also modernists, who do not recognize the inspiration of the holy Word and deny the Lord’s incarnation through the virgin Mary. They say that the Lord’s death was not for redemption but only a kind of martyrdom. They believe that the Lord was martyred on the cross for His teachings which were different from the Jewish traditional religion. They also deny the resurrection of Christ and all the miracles in the Bible. This modernistic teaching spread even to China, and fifty years ago it was prevailing on the college campuses. We had to fight against this teaching in mainland China, and eventually the Lord gained the victory. Today there are hardly any modernists among the Christians on the mainland of China. Second Peter 2:1 says that such modernists are degraded to such an extent that they even deny the Master who bought them. The false teachers at Peter’s time, like today’s modernists in their apostasy, denied both the Lord’s person as the Master and His redemption, by which the Lord purchased the believers.
Another parable in Matthew 13 describes today’s Christendom as a great tree with great branches that become a lodging place for birds (vv. 31-32). This is the parable of the mustard seed. The mustard is an annual herb, which shows that the church should be like an herb to produce food. Instead it became a tree, a lodge for birds, having its nature and function changed. These birds refer to Satan’s evil spirits with the evil persons and things motivated by them (13:4, 19). They lodge in the branches of the great tree, that is, in the enterprises of Christendom. Today’s Catholic Church is full of all kinds of evils. Evil persons, evil practices, and evil things are lodging there. In this great organization there is much darkness.
Another parable describing the situation of Christendom is the parable of the woman who took the leaven and put it into the fine flour (13:33-35). This woman, prophesied by the Lord in Matthew 13:33, is mentioned in Revelation 2:20. She was typified by Jezebel in the Old Testament and fulfilled by the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church became such an adulterous woman who added leaven (signifying evil, heretical, and pagan things) into the fine flour (signifying Christ as the meal offering for the satisfaction of God and man). The Catholic Church took in all kinds of pagan practices. G. H. Pember pointed out that Catholicism even took in Buddha under the name of Saint Josaphat. The story of this saint named Josaphat is actually that of Buddha.
Roman Catholicism is depicted in Revelation 17 as a great prostitute and as “The Mother of the Prostitutes” (vv. 1, 5). Since The Mother of the Prostitutes is the apostate church, the prostitutes, her daughters, should be all the different sects and groups in Christianity who hold to some extent the teaching, practices, and traditions of the apostate Roman Church. The Two Babylons is a book that gives a full documentation of the deformation and degradation of this evil religious system. G. H. Pember in his book, The Great Prophecies, also points out the abominations of the apostate Roman Catholic Church. The Brethren also saw the real situation of Catholicism, and we received much help from them. The entire Christianity is the totality of deformation and degradation.
In the 1920s on mainland China a number of us young people left this deformed religion. We thank the Lord for sending the western missionaries to China to bring us the gospel. They told people that Jesus is the Son of God who became a man and died on the cross for our sins. They said that if we believe in Him we would receive the forgiveness of our sins. We heard the proper preaching of Christ being our Savior. These missionaries also brought us the real name of Jesus Christ, and we treasured this. They also brought the Bible with them, providing us with one of the best Chinese translations of the Bible. We thank God for these three things: the gospel, the name of Jesus, and the Bible. We young people who came out of Christendom made a decision just to keep these three things. We would not have anything to do with the remaining unscriptural things in Christianity. We came out of this deformed system, and the Lord led us to begin the church life for the first time in Brother Nee’s hometown. From that time we have been suffering persecution, not mainly from the unbelievers, but from Christianity.
We love all our Christian brothers and respect them, yet we cannot agree with the religious system they are in. There are many genuine believers even in the Catholic Church, and some of them are seeking and devout. Yet the Catholic Church itself is full of idolatry. In some cathedrals the ones who enter buy a candle and select an idol to pray to. They do not call these statues idols but saints. A certain Catholic cathedral in Manila has a statue of a “black Jesus,” and all the people who go into this cathedral touch the feet of that statue. I watched the people buy candles and go in to worship the idols, and I read some of the inscriptions on the wall, which said that if you pray to a certain saint for a period of time, your relatives would be rescued from purgatory. This shows that Catholicism is full of superstition. This fellowship should give us a glimpse of the practice in today’s degraded Christianity.