We need to abolish the intermediary class. In order for us to abolish this class, we all have to become part of it. When all of us become a part of that class, the hierarchy is gone. How can we make the three groups two groups? How can we turn three-way traffic into two-way traffic? How can these three—God, the priesthood, and the people—become two? There is no other way except to kneel down before the Lord and say, “Lord, I am willing to serve You. I am willing to be a priest.” When all of God’s children become His priests, the three parties will be reduced to two.
Hierarchy comes from the world, the flesh, idol worship, and the love of the world. If all the brothers deny the world and reject idolatry from the beginning, they will all offer themselves up to God. They will say, “From this day forward, I will live on earth for the sole purpose of serving God.” Then hierarchy will disappear spontaneously. If all the brothers realize that their sole occupation is to serve God and if all of them will serve God in coordination, the intermediary class will disappear!
I hope you will not allow any intermediary class to come in. Uphold this from the very beginning. Only among the fallen and backslidden ones and among those who walk according to their own way could there be the resurgence of an intermediary class. Among those defeated ones, it is natural for some to serve the Lord and some not to serve the Lord. Those who do not serve the Lord attend to their own affairs, while those who serve the Lord take care of spiritual affairs. Those who do not serve the Lord, at most, offer some money to support those who serve. They may be businessmen, teachers, or doctors, but they all attend to their own affairs and walk their own way. They do not seem to have anything to do with God’s service. In this kind of setting, what does a person need to do to qualify to be a good Christian? He only needs to set aside a little time every week to attend a worship service. If he has some money, he only needs to offer a small portion of it. But this clearly makes God’s people and His priests two classes of people! Today we should realize that either we are not Christians at all or we have to be those who consecrate everything to the Lord. As long as we are Christians, we have to be priests to God.
The danger that haunted the nation of Israel is the same problem that has confronted the church over the past two thousand years. From the time of the Lord’s departure until the time of the writing of Revelation and a little beyond that point, all of God’s children were priests. Everyone who considered himself a child of God was a priest of God. There was no problem then. There was no problem from the first century up through the third century. Individually, there were isolated problems here and there, but as a whole there was no problem. Here and there some of God’s children refused to be priests, but as a whole we did not see any problem. As long as a person was a child of God, he was a priest of God.
When the Roman Empire endorsed Christianity, many people began to creep in. There were material benefits in believing in the Lord; one became a fellow believer of the emperor and a brother of Caesar. Originally, the Lord’s charge was, “Render then the things that are Caesar’s to Caesar and the things that are God’s to God” (Matt. 22:21). Now both the things of Caesar and the things of God were rendered to God. This indeed was a big victory for Christianity. Constantine was converted to Christ. The result was a gradual but significant shift for the church. Believers were no longer the same as those who professed their faith at an earlier age. During the ten periods of persecution under the reign of Rome, tens of thousands of Christians suffered martyrdom. It was not easy to pretend to be a Christian. But then the situation totally changed. It became fashionable to be a believer and to share the same faith as the emperor and to call him one’s brother. When this shift occurred, many decided to join Christianity. As a result, the number of people increased, while the number of priests remained the same. It is easy to creep into the Christian fold, but it is absolutely impossible to creep into God’s service.