Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

day; they are full of idolatry. They worship water-gods, day-gods, creed-gods, sect-gods, moneygods,
gods of wood and stone in the form of a fine edifice, and gods of flesh and blood in the form
of big preachers and other phases of human leadership. The Holiness Movement is God’s call to the
people to forsake idolatry. Oh, how perniciously the popular clergy fight for their sectarian gods! As
we see here in Israel the awful ultimatum of persistent idolatry was Babylonian captivity, even so
this day the masses of Christendom are captured and enslaved in spiritual Babylon.
45. Jesus, E.V., in this verse, should read Joshua, as in R.V. The solution consists in the fact that
Joshua is a Hebrew word, which means Jesus in Greek. The great general reason why Moses could
not lead Israel into the promised land was because of his symbolic character as the law-giver of
Israel. [To be sure, he blurred his experience of sanctification by impatience at the waters of
Meribah, but soon regained lost ground.] If Moses had led Israel into Canaan, it would typically
involve the conclusion that we can be sanctified by good works, i.e., through the law, which is utterly
impossible; hence it would not do for Moses to lead them in. As Aaron, the high priest stood at the
head of the officiating clergy, he could not enter the land lest the dogma of sanctification by church
rites, loyalty and obedience to the ruling ministers could not sanctify you. Miriam, the prophetess,
represents the fire-baptized holiness evangelists. If she had entered the land, it would have involved
the conclusion that red-hot holiness preachers can sanctify you, which is utterly untrue. As none but
Joshua, which means Jesus, could lead them in, it settles the matter in the symbolic theology of the
Old Testament, that none but Jesus can sanctify a soul.
CHURCH EDIFICES.
44-50. Here Stephen alludes to the grand spiritual meaning of the portable tabernacle which God
dictated to Moses on Sinai and the beautiful symbolic significance of Solomon’s temple. As the great
majority of the Christian church at the present day, preachers and people, are living in the old
dispensation, three thousand years behind the age, they awfully grieve the Holy Spirit by wasting the
Lord’s money in costly spires, Gothic domes, memorial windows and other needless expenditures
connected with their church edifices; e.g., St. Peter’s church at Rome cost two hundred millions of
dollars, money enough to put the Bible in every home on the earth. It is the greatest monument of
idolatry beneath the skies. How strange that Protestants are all doing their best to imitate the Roman
Catholics in their needless expenditure and ornamentation of fine edifices. John Wesley said,
“Whenever the Methodists get to building fine houses they are a ruined people.” One hundred
thousand dollars of the Lord’s money are spent on a church edifice, while ten thousand are all we
could possibly need, if pride were dead [and it must die before we go to heaven], leaving ninety
thousand which would build a hundred churches for the poor heathens. Oh! what a victory for Jesus!
No wonder the Holy Spirit has left the fine edifices. How strange that leading preachers will allude
to Solomon’s temple as an argument for expenditure and ornamentation in a church edifice. In so
doing they betray their ignorance and attitude, demonstrating to all luminous people that they are not
only living away back in the dispensation of Moses, but shamefully ignorant of the beautiful
symbolic truth revealed in the Bible. The reason Solomon’s temple contains so much gold and
artistic ornamentation was because, belonging to the symbolic dispensation, it typified the sanctified
heart of the Pentecostal age. So all of that gold and splendor do not mean that we are to have it
unless we are stupid enough, like the crab, to go backward instead of forward; but it does mean