J.N. Darby on Responsibility for the State of the Church

John Nelson Darby wrote:

"But we have no need to insist on this scriptural notion of the unity of the whole system from its beginning to its end. The question is very simple and of the greatest solemnity. Is the church responsible for the state in which it is found, or can it say, like Jeremiah 31:29: 'The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge'? An infidel, speaking of himself, may say: If I have inherited the bad condition of Adam, it is no fault of mine: I suffer from it, but I am not responsible for it. God, in the government of the worl and of His people, does not judge thus; He treats man as responsible, and He acts towards His people, as considering them to be responsible for the state in which they are found. They have been themselves in the evil; they are partakers in it. His grace may deliver one individual or another from the eternal consequences of sin, but those consequences are none the less certain for the human race. Grace may deliver children of God from the order of things which is going to be judged, so that they be gathered into the barn at the time of harvest (Matt 13:30); but they are taken away from the coming judgment, because the church is responsible.

The church is in a state of ruin; it has ceased to bear testimony to the glory of Christ, as it ought to have done, and as it did indeed at the beginning. When I come to the discovery of this sad and overwhelming truth, I feel my responsibility; and I think it is enougth to put the qustion thus, in order to reach the conscience of those whose ear is open to the voice of the Holy Spirit, and who have at heart the glory of Christ. To abide faithful, under the conviction, is the means of being able to enjoy a safe shelter in Him who keeps His own for glory, whatever be withal the circumstances in which they may be found. Nevertheless, this will not prevent God from manifesting that He has looked upon this dispensation as being responsible, when He will put an end to it by judgment. And if God has given a testimony as to this (and He has done so), does not the responsibility already lie on us? Here it is that Romans 11 finds an important application.

Are we responsible, and are we to be judged as such, if after having been warned we are walking in that which the Lord is going to judge? The solution of this question must of necessity act upon those who entertain the hope of re-establishing the church; for they deny at the very same time both its unity and its responsibility, in order to satisfy those few small bodies they have formed. Hence these two questions are very closely connected, and I attach importance to the question of the formation of churches, because it is linked with that of our common responsibility.

My desire is that we may indeed remember that we are responsible for the state in which we are found, and not for the acts of the Christians before us, although these acts may have helped in bringing on that state of things. The church as a body has been placed on earth to glorify the Son of God. Alas! it must be owned with confusion of face, that the church does not glorify Him now. The word of God shews us that there is a solidarity or rather an accumulation of responsibility, and that we inherit the sin of those who have gone before us in a corse of departure from God, when it is a question of His government with respect to a dispensation. 'Thy first father hath sinned,' says Isaiah (Isa. 43:27). 'Yeah, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch,' says Stephen (Acts 7:43), alluding to the sin of Israel in the wilderness, 'and I will carry you away beyond Babylon.' The Jews undergo to this day the consequences of the sin which they committed in the wilderness, of all those which they have sice added thereto, and the measure of which they have filled up by putting to death the Lord Jesus."

Taken from Remarks on the State of the Church in Collected Writings of J.N. Darby, volume 1, p.237-238

Key words: J.N. Darby, church, ecclesiology, Plymouth Brethren, Exclusive, Exclusivism, Ruin of the Church, apostasy, dispensation, Dispensationalism