W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest

morn to dusky eve. All this that they might hang spell-bound upon the lips of the paradoxical prophet of the
wilderness.
You find at least an approximate solution of the problem in the fact that when Herod sent the soldiers to murder
the babes of Bethlehem, Zachariah and Elizabeth took their son and fled into the wilderness and never came
back. They reared him up in rural simplicity among the Essenes, the poor holiness people who lived there for the
sake of room, peace and solitary communion with God.
Oh, how all of our Sunday School teachers need awakening to the blessed feasibility of having their pupils
converted before they forfeit their infantile justification and then sanctified before they backslide, and do you
not know that this is the very way to bring in the Millennium? You need this booklet to give you light and help
you to study these glorious realities so delectably revealed in the precious Word.
(24.) ”THEOLOGY VERSUS CREEDOLOGY” Our lands abound in theological schools. They are all
misnamed, unless it is some of the Bible Schools conducted by the holiness people. They should be called
“Creedological Schools,” from the simple fact that they study the Bible in view of bending it to their creed,
which is an awful mistake; it should be the reverse, I. e., bending their creed to the Bible. There never was a
creed made on earth I ill after the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, when, A. D. 325, they called the
ecumenical Council to Nice in Bithynia, over which the Emperor presided, sitting in a golden chair. The sudden
promotion of the Christians from the lion's mouth and the burning stake to the royal palace and the first places in
the empire, revived carnality and superinduced the desire for a human creed. So long as they burnt them at the
stake, and used them to fatten their lions, tigers and bears, they never thought of any creed but the New
Testament, nor any doctrine but “Holiness to the Lord.” The Council at Nice proved to be the prolific mother of
all the creeds of Christendom and is still used in the Roman Catholic Church, the Episcopal being a
modification and the Methodist an abstraction from that. There is no reason why every church in the world
should not drop her creed this day and adopt the New Testament; not that we have any criticism for the Old, but
we are not under that dispensation.
Theology is from two Greek words, Theos, God, and logue, speech; therefore it simply means the word of God.
The Bible Schools, in the literal sense, are the only theological institutions we have, as all of the so-called
theological colleges of the denominations really conserve their creed to which they are committed, making it the
end in view to bend the Bible to it in order to bolster it up and sustain it, instead of bending their creed to the
Bible, the thing pre-eminently reasonable and proper.
If all denominations would drop their creeds and make the Bible their text book, perfectly independent of their
creed, you would soon see a felicitous approximation either to other. These creeds have done more to sunder and
alienate the body of Christ than any other influence. In heathen lands we now see an auspicious trend on the part
of all denominations either to other. In great India, where I preached three months, I everywhere found an
earnest call and a hearty welcome. You need this booklet to edify and post you in this great and important truth,
I. e., the absolute supremacy and sovereign independency of God's Word.
(25.) ”THE SEVEN CHURCHES” You find them catalogued and described in the first three chapters of
Revelation. These Churches consecutively represent Christendom, down to the glorious coming of the Lord. The
Church at Ephesus represents the backslidden Apostolic institution. A whole generation had passed away into
eternity after it was established by the labors of Paul, as John did his writing sixty-five years after our Lord's
ascension; consequently the Pauline converts had mostly exchanged the battlefield for the mount of victory,
whereas the new membership perhaps had never been so spiritual and zealous as their predecessors, while
doubtless some of them had never been converted and others, though saved, had never received the Holy Ghost.
We here have the sad revelation that they had lost their first love; consequently the Holy Ghost commands them
to repent and do their first work over lest He come and take away their candlestick, I. e., lest they actually lose
their organization. This has been signally verified and that great and magnificent city of Ephesus has long ago
become a heap of ruins.
Smyrna represents the Martyr Church during the first three hundred years, when, it is estimated, one hundred
millions sealed their faith with their blood. If you read this scripture you will find that there is not a solitary
charge against Smyrna. History says that they actually carried the Gospel to all nations, pushing the battle so