A Call to (Major) Repentance
By John Gavazzoni

The Lord Jesus, after His resurrection, declared to His disciples, "ye shall be witnesses unto me." However one understands the nature of "the great commission," this statement by our Lord was one, not of command in this case, but of a declaration of identity as He knew them, and appointed them, and most importantly, as they were His Father's workmanship created in Him unto good works. His witnesses they would be, because of the power of His identifying word. They would not earn that identification by the virtue of their ministries faithfully carried out up to that point and into the future, but rather their ministries would quite supernaturally manifest what Jesus had declared of them. Similarly He had called them to follow Him, and follow Him they did by the power of the word of His call.

None of them would later claim that it was their agreement to the call that made the call effective. His word would not, and did not, return to Him void. This principle is traced back to the nature of Jesus' own ministry, for BEFORE He set forth to fulfill His mission, He heard IN ADVANCE of what He was sent to do, "this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." By the power of that identifying word, He bore witness to the faithfulness of His Father's love for all humanity flawlessly in word and action, even to, and by, His death on the cross, because of who He was, and who God declared Him to be beforehand. Please understand: When God identifies, that identification will out. All who would serve the Lord ought to go forth as His Spirit bears with their spirit, that they are the children of God. Such a witness, not as a mere theological concept, but as a living word in the depths of our hearts, will not permit us to speak as if we are children of the devil.

With the above in mind, we go to the command of God to Israel: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." Here, true witness is the issue regarding a man's relationship to his neighbor, an issue so morally fundamental, that few things are more important to the creation, maintenance and preservation of justice within any structure of human relationship. Terrible would be the resultant situation within any family, tribe, society, or nation, where the sin of false witness would be at all pervasive.

BUT WHAT ABOUT FALSE WITNESS AGAINST GOD? Most terrible is the result when men bear false witness against their Heavenly Father and Creator, and that, especially on the part of those who claim an apportionment of Christian ministry to the body of Christ and beyond. How sad it is, when such false witness strikes even to the heart of the Divine Nature, to the very character of God. There exists within the professing church, beliefs from the pulpit to the pew, that darken the face of God and the mind of the believer, causing many outside the church to find the God of "orthodoxy" repellant rather than attractive. We have a situation in the institutional church where God's spokesman are guilty of the character assassination of their Lord! In contrast, a dear saint of my acquaintance was often heard to say of the Lord Jesus when He is presented as He truly is: "Christ is so attractive."

Distorting concepts of God, like parasites, have attached themselves to the minds and hearts of believers who naively accept whatever is prefaced by "the Bible says." In the case of many doctrines, close examination of the text of scripture, especially carefully translated without bias, finds that the Bible, in fact, often does not teach what they've been told. The projection of even heathenish concepts of God onto the text is not uncommon by Bible teachers, pastors, and evangelists. Yet I hasten to add that, even with such distortion of message, there can exist that little bit of gospel that the Spirit can use to draw men to Christ.

Breaking into my thus-far harsh indictment is the truth of the overruling mercy of God. Saul of Tarsus received mercy in the face of persecuting the church of God, because he had done it in ignorance. Though, in many ways, a false witness against God has crept into the empirical church's message dating back centuries into millennia, Our Father, Savior, and Lord, is understanding. We (and I have been complicit) have veritably distorted the face of God by our vain imaginations out from the darkness and ignorance of our hearts. But the ongoing effectiveness of the word which "commandeth all men everywhere to repent," will continue working until God presents to His Son a bride without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing, and to the world, His Son, as indeed its Savior, and that, without qualification.

Several have been the times when I was confronted by the Lord in my own ministry, that things I was preaching did not really resonate with my own spirit, but I allowed myself to be intimidated by tradition and the opinions of men considered to be authoritative. On one of those occasions, the Lord asked me, "do you really believe that about me?" Amazingly, my almost immediate and spontaneous response was, "no Lord, I really don't." It seems that in the depths of my spirit, I already really knew what the Lord was confronting me about.

There can exist a controversy between the intuition of our spirit, and what our minds have concluded we ought to believe. When God comes to us with a delivering word, we're put in touch with the intuition of our spirit, and we realize that our inner man has never agreed with the matter in question. Deep within us, we know the truth by the "anointing that (we) have from the Holy One." The objective word comes to us, to release from our spirit the subjective word that has always been there. Until that deliverance, we suffer a kind of draining conflict between spirit and mind.

Of what elements of false witness against God do I have in mind? Specifics will follow in a series as the Lord leads.