Although without formal theological training, there is no
question but that the late Dr. Lloyd-Jones had an impressive preaching career. After
a pastorate in Wales, he became assistant to Dr. G. Campbell Morgan at Westminster Chapel
in London, from 1938 to 1943. Upon Dr. Morgan’s retirement he was the pastor
until his own retirement in 1968.
There are those who claim that Dr. Lloyd-Jones was the
greatest preacher of the English-speaking world in his generation. Others have
compared him to Charles Spurgeon. He certainly was comparable to Spurgeon in his
dogged and outspoken stand for the divine authority and inerrancy of the Word of God.
While Dr. Lloyd-Jones was admirably strong in his
position for the Word, he was at the same time woefully weak concerning his failure to rightly
divide that Word. He was a Covenant-Calvinist, and his ministry was
anti-dispensational and law-oriented as
a result.
To make matter worse, he was also an eradicationist, teaching that the believer has but one
nature, similar to others who hold the same error, such as Dr. John MacArthur, Jr., Dr.
Charles Solomon, and Dr. David Needham, to mention but a few.
Dr. Lloyd-Jones states that "the
old man" of Romans 6:6 is the manner of life he lived before he was saved.
And since the old man has been crucified, it is gone--eradicated.
The "old man" is that man I
used to be in Adam. The old man that I was in Adam is the one that
was crucified with Christ. It is my old humanity. It is not
my carnal nature. That is still here, but the old man is gone, he
was crucified (Romans 6, p. 63).
The cause of this eradication error
is in making Romans 6:1-10 the believer's actual condition, instead
of his judicial position.
When Paul says "put off the
old man" (Col. 3:9), he means that we must put off the characteristics
of the life of the old man. It cannot mean anything else. I
cannot be told to "put off" something that has already been crucified
(Ibid., p. 64)
On the contrary, Paul says to "put
off the old man," the source; rather than the characteristics, which
are the symptoms. One cannot be exhorted to put off that which
is not there!
According to Dr. Lloyd-Jones, since the believer's old man
is gone, and he is a new creature in Christ, he is required to live at
once all that is true of him in Christ. This is the
Wesleyan-Holiness error of combining justification with sanctification--the
same merging that causes Dr. MacArthur's Lordship salvation error.
"But of him are ye in Christ
Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and
sanctification, and redemption" (1 Cor. 1:30). If you are "in Christ"
all these things become true of you immediately (Ibid., p. 226).
From the moment we are
regenerated it is true to say of us that we are no longer slaves of sin;
we are slaves of righteousness. How utterly wrong and unscriptural it
is, therefore, to separate justification and sanctification, or to say
that a man can be justified and perhaps years later go on and receive
his sanctification. According to the Apostle's argument, this is not
only wrong, it is impossible (Ibid., p. 225).
Dr. Lloyd-Jones' single Covenant theory blinds him to the
difference between position and condition. The sad result is Moses' law for
the believer, instead of Christ's risen grace-life.
The Apostle is justified in
saying that the law, and each individual commandment, is thoroughly
good. Nothing can be better for us than the keeping of the law. "The law
of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul," as Psalm 19 tells us
(Romans 7, p. 164).
We now come to the last Covenant straw. A hardness
permeates those who would attempt to superimpose Israel's earthly law upon
heaven-positioned, ascended saints.
"Yield your members as slaves o f righteousness. "
Yes, righteousness, to conformity to God's standard, conformity to God's
holy law, and to what man was originally. [Back to Adam!]
What the Apostle says is that as you yield your
members as slaves to righteousness [he loves to use that term,
"slaves."], and as you go on living this righteous life, and practicing
it with all your might and energy, and all of your time, and everything
else, you will find that you will become cleaner and cleaner, and purer
and purer, and holier and holier
But, you ask, "Where do I get the power to do it?"
You have already received "all things that pertain unto life and
godliness" (2 Pet. 1:3). You do not need another experience. You do not
need some new gift. You have been given everything in Christ, you are
"in Him" from the very beginning of your Christian life.
You are just a slacker and a cad, just lazy and
indolent, indeed a liar, if you are not living this life. This is the NT
way of preaching holiness and sanctification (Ibid., p. 269).
As John Nelson Darby used to say to the would-be
law-keeper, "Try away, try away!"
Dr. Roger Congdon reviewed Dr. Lloyd-Jones' book, The
Unsearchable Riches of Christ, in the September '81 issue of Moody
Monthly. The anti-dispensationalism of Dr. Lloyd-Jones was brought out
clearly.
In his pages gunning at
dispensationalists he makes some strong but unverifiable assertions. He
says, "What the Jewish nation was in the OT the Church is now."
[Replacement Theology] This
is logical anti-dispensationalism, but it is far from logical Bible
truth.
He further says, "All the promises of God made to
the Jewish people in the OT are now open to the Gentiles" (p. 49). "All"
means promises of curses as well as blessings. Even a child reading
Deuteronomy 27-31, 1 Chronicles 17 or Ezekiel 40-48, could see that this
assertion must be false.
Dr. Lloyd-Jones goes on to say that a special place of
the Jewish people in God's plan is "finished forever" (p. 50). In
further condemning dispensationalists, he accuses them of teaching that
"the Christian Church was a mere after-thought in the mind of God,
that He had never really intended it in eternity" (p. 86) !
Since Dr. Lloyd-Jones failed to
scripturally differentiate between Israel and the Church, law and grace, he
sought
to apply to believers truth that belongs exclusively to Israel--and misapplied truth
results in error. When one traffics in error, he becomes vulnerable to accelerating
deviation. The crash-course curve. And the inevitable finally caught up with him in the
latter years
of his illustrious ministry. Dr. Russell Hitt shared the following in the March 1986
issue of Eternity magazine.
There is another factor to Lloyd-Jones’s ministry
besides the almost stern Puritanism of his preaching. In the latter years of his
life particularly, he began to emphasize the need for a heaven-sent revival. [When
all else fails....] He eschewed the methodology of American mass evangelism and even
refused to identify with Billy Graham’s several British crusades. No doubt he
was conditioned by being reared in the atmosphere of the Welsh Revival of 1904–05.
Christians, he began to teach, should experience the
baptism of the Holy Spirit. [!] His teaching on “the baptism” was similar to
that advocated by Dr. R. A. Torrey, and Dr. A. J. Gordon, who also departed from the
mainstream of evangelical teaching on the subject.
Lloyd-Jones also opposed the standard-brand Reformed teaching that the
gifts of the Spirit have in large measure ceased after the apostolic
age. He was quite blunt about it, saying,
“The Scriptures never anywhere say that these things were only
temporary--never! All the gifts are under the sovereignty of the
Spirit. He decides when and how and where.”
Yes, the Holy Spirit decided. The sign gifts, all of
them, were for Israel in the past dispensation, and will be to some extent renewed for the
coming millennial kingdom dispensation. But not for the present Church
dispensation [Heavenly Parenthesis]--the dispensation of faith.
It is sad to note that this slippage from faith to
feelings developed in the latter part of his ministry, just as in that of other non-dispensational leaders such as Dr. Harold Lindsell, and Dr. C. Peter Wagner.
No
matter how firm one is concerning the inerrancy of the Bible--and all of the other basic
truths, for that matter--if that Word is not rightly divided, it will result in errant
teaching, and ultimate shame. As Paul admonishes, “Study to show thyself
approved of God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of
truth” (2 Tim. 2:15).
It is difficult to imagine how the
staunchly Covenant Dr. D. Martin Lloyd-Jones
could contribute to the charismatic error. I am sure that he had no intention
of doing such a thing, nor did he ever realize that he did in any way whatsoever.
But when you emulate the erroneous teachings of Dr. Torrey and Dr. Gordon
concerning the baptism of the Spirit, you are doing just that. The well-known
evangelist, the late Dr. George T. B. Davis wrote:
Dr. R. A. Torrey is cited by Pentecostals with
particular frequency and is of unusual significance to Pentecostalism in connection with
the Spirit’s baptism. Through a world-wide evangelistic tour with Charles
Alexander in 1904 Torrey, then president of the evangelically influential Moody Bible
Institute, spread among believers in many places the message of the Spirit’s
subsequent baptism, and hence served as a kind of John the Baptist figure for later
international Pentecostalism. Judging from the movement’s literature, Dr.
Torrey was, after John Wesley and Charles Finney, the most influential figure in the
pre-history of Pentecostalism.
Pentecostalism found in Torrey’s theology of the
Spirit a special affinity. Dr. Donald Gee, one of Pentecostalism’s foremost
theologians, says that “it was, perhaps, Dr. R. A. Torrey who first gave the teaching
of the baptism of the Holy Ghost a new, and certainly more scriptural and doctrinally
correct, emphasis on the line of ‘power from on high,’ especially for service
and witness.”
As for Dr. A. J. Gordon, in his book
The Ministry of
the Holy Spirit (Forwarded by Dr. F. B. Meyer), he wrote,
It seems clear from the Scriptures that it is still
the duty and privilege of believers to receive the Holy Spirit by a conscious, definite
act of appropriating faith, just as we receive Jesus Christ.
Dr.
Torrey, Dr. Gordon, Dr. Lloyd-Jones. Great names, great ministries.
But deviant doctrine destroyed much of the good that they accomplished--and
continues to do so to this day by means of their writings. "For all
flesh is like grass, and all the glory of man like the flower of grass.
The grass withereth, and its flower falleth away, but the Word of the
Lord endureth forever" (1 Peter 1:24,25).
Dr.
Lloyd-Jones' ministry binds the believer to the Law, rather than frees him
by the Life. William Kelly supplies the answer:
The effect of the law upon the believer is that he never rises by his
own confession above the feelings and experiences of a sinner. He
is always in that condition--always crying, "O wretched man that
I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Romans 7:24).
Whereas, when he enters into the glorious position that he has in
the glorified Lord Jesus Christ, he is wont to say, "The law of the
Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of
sin and death" (Romans 8:2).
(Expanded version: October 1990)