Page 61 - The Divine Unfolding of God's Plan of Redemption

ruthlessness failed to accomplish its purpose, for again Jehovah intervened
miraculously to preserve the life of the infant incarnate Son.

The warfare did not cease with the resurrection and ascension of the Lord Jesus
Christ. Far from it. Some of its most gory chapters were yet to be written during the
dispensation of the grace of God.

From the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost the corporate vehicle of the
earthly testimony of the living God to the accomplished redemption of the world
through the death of His Son and of His future coming to reign over the kingdom that
He has bought with His blood, was vested, not in the Jewish people but in the church.

Israel was not permanently cut off but temporarily set aside. The viciousness of the
serpent and his seed seemed in no way diminished but rather increased toward the
bearers of the testimony of Christ‟s completed work and coming reign. It is said that
eight of the Twelve Apostles were slain for the Word of God and testimony of Jesus

Christ, and we know that John was exiled for this reason to the Isle of Patmos. Church
history is a record of attacks from without to try and destroy it and the fomenting of
controversies within to vitiate it. The awful persecutions of the early church under the
ten emperors of Rome are known to all students, and yet the testimony was not

destroyed, but rather strengthened and spread abroad.

Again the serpent found the mixture plan better than the murder method. He
injured the church far more by the friendship of Constantine than by the persecution of

Diocletian.

It was after the period of popularity that the church experienced under Constantine
that she settled down to an alliance with the harlot system of Romanism, which was

nothing more than a warmed-over edition of the Babylonian mysteries. This lengthy
period, commonly known as the Dark Ages, lasted for a millennium, until the Lord
raised up a series of new deliverers of His testimony in the persons of the Reformers.
The seed of the serpent, who had held God‟s testimony in this thralldom, resisted this

renaissance of the truth with the same sort of vigor that Pharaoh resisted Israel‟s
deliverance from Egypt, and for the same reason. History has no records of bloodshed
and violence to equal the orgies of cruelty that took place under Bloody Mary in

England, the massacre of St. Bartholomew‟s Eve in France, the Spanish Inquisition,
and the persecutions in the Netherlands. But God‟s hour had come to uncover His
truth from the accumulation of papist debris and it was done.

Since the Reformation (especially in the last century) the gospel of the death and

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