This sermon is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison sermon archive, part of the “Genesis 1-4” series, and was preached at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sewickley, PA, during a worship service on Sunday, February 7, 1993.

Tonight we begin our reading in 1 Corinthians chapter 5. 1 Corinthians chapter 5. Beginning with verse 1 then, hear the word of God. It is actually reported that there is immorality among you. and immorality of such a kind as does not exist even among the Gentiles, that someone has his father’s wife. And you have become arrogant and have not mourned instead in order that the one who has done this deed might be removed from your midst. For I, on my part, though absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged him who has so committed this as though I were present.” In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled and I with you in spirit with the power of our Lord Jesus, I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened, for Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the feast not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

I wrote you in my letter not to associate with the immoral people. I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world. But actually I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother that he should be an immoral person, or a covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler, not even to eat with such a one. have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? But those who are outside God’s judgments, remove the wicked man from among yourselves.”

Genesis 4, beginning at verse 8. And Cain spoke to Abel, his brother, and it came about when they were in the field that Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, Where is Abel, your brother? And he said, I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper? And he said, What have you done?

The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground. Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you cultivate the ground, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. You shall be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth.

Cain said to the Lord, My punishment is too great to bear. Behold, thou hast driven me this day from the face of the ground, and from my face I shall be hidden. And I shall be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth, and it shall come about that whoever finds me will kill me.

So the Lord said to him, Therefore, whoever kills Cain, vengeance will be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord appointed a sign for Cain, lest anyone finding him should slay him.” Then Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

Our Father, we would have our worship refined by you. May your word be effectual to that end, that we would hear what you say and then find, Lord, that our worship would be in keeping with what we have heard. Our God, may the order for this assembly be in keeping with your word. Do in fact, Lord, keep us from self-righteousness, for we know our sin, and such grace, even in the formalities of worship, comes from you that we might not boast in ourselves. Therefore, our God, even as we worship here tonight, we give you all praise, knowing that because of you we are assembled, and because of you and your word, we worship the way we do. Keep us, Father. Be gracious to us. We ask in Christ’s name. Amen.

My first congregation was an independent congregation in southern New Jersey. It was a church, however, that had a long history of Presbyterian commitment. It dated from 1680. And from the early days of the 1700s, it was within the Presbyterian fold. It had left the mainline church in the early seventies and it called me as its first pastor in its new status. Shortly after I arrived to pastor that church, I was compelled to make a very painful visit. That visit was to one of my trustees. He was a middle-aged man. quite successful, but living not with his wife, but with his secretary.

Now this was the sort of thing that my new congregation, at least before I arrived, ignored. Not that they didn’t talk a lot about it. Gossip in that community abounded. There was a lot of discussion. But when it came to doing anything, and that is anything responsible about the situation, the Church did absolutely nothing. do feel somewhat sorry for that trustee. See, I was a young, energetic pastor in my first congregation, and I was out to slay dragons and every form of evil that I could lay my hands on. As I say, I do feel somewhat sorry for that trustee, for he was hardly prepared by that meeting, he was hardly prepared for that meeting we had that day.

You see, South Jersey was no different than any other place in this country. All in all, effective church discipline had died out many years before my arrival. And as far as the life of that church was concerned, church discipline played no role whatsoever. We can go so far as to say that church discipline within the mainline churches of Protestantism in this nation disappeared before the turn of the century.

And the church began to operate, by and large, on the basis of some sort of unwritten gentleman’s code. The church, as far as its public life was concerned, was no longer interested in what we would call holiness, but it was very much concerned with what we call etiquette. And proper etiquette precluded church discipline.

Consider the situation. The last trial of any weight in the Presbyterian Church was conducted in the last decade of the last century. It involved Charles Briggs, a professor at Union Theological Seminary. That was a doctrinal case. Following that case in 1893, doctrinal discipline was shelved altogether. Latham himself was not disciplined because of aberrant doctrine. He was disciplined because he went against church order. It was a polity question, not a doctrinal question. So doctrinal discipline was shelved altogether in the church. When it came to moral questions, the way in which you handled those was to, in effect, publicly, that is, hush them up and hide them. These morality issues, however, were never resolved in any conclusive or public fashion. Now, you might think that your heritage as Orthodox Presbyterians is a little better. Well, let me disabuse you of that.

Machen himself was party to all of this business, as sad as it is to say. A number of years ago, we in Calvin Forum were reading through Machen’s classic book, the one he wrote in 1923, Christianity and Liberalism. I do in fact commend that book to you if you haven’t read it. But everyone in the group was moving along in fine fashion through the chapters of that book until they arrived at a later chapter, a chapter that dealt with the Church. Now, Machen was facing a monumental Church crisis, even in 1923.

But his arguments in that chapter were not simply weak, they were wrong. In the previous chapters, he had argued so forcefully that liberalism was such a departure from historical Christianity that it was not Christianity at all, but an entirely different religion. But then when he came to the subject of the Church, He argued that the liberals should voluntarily withdraw from the Church, since they no longer in all honesty could subscribe to the tenets of historic Christianity.

Now, as has been suggested by Jim Gidley recently, that’s like asking the wolves to voluntarily stop attacking the sheep. In that chapter on the Church in Christianity and Liberalism, Machen does not deal with the question of discipline, bringing these then who have departed from the truth of the gospel to ecclesiastical justice. And in Machen’s failure to do that, it becomes clear to us that the notion of church discipline no longer had a part in church consciousness, not even in the consciousness of one as fine as J. Gresham Machen. Now, I am glad to say that Machen later repented of this position.

Before his death, he said that the responsible thing to have done earlier would have been to bring charges against the liberals who were denying the essentials of the faith. But even though Machen did say that later in his life, that is not to say that Machen was seeing things as clearly as they ought to be seen. He may well have moved well where doctrinal matters were concerned, but he did not move well where moral matters were concerned. How do I know this?

During the summer months before his death, That would have been the summer of 1936, and shortly after the founding of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in June of that year, it was discovered that Machen’s right-hand man, the Reverend H. McAllister Griffiths, a man who held no lesser position than editor of the Presbyterian Guardian, had compromised himself and was involved in gross immorality. Griffith was, of course, immediately relieved of his position as editor of the Presbyterian Guardian. His contact with Machen seemed to come to an end. Some letters exchanged between them, basically Griffiths then being without employment, asking Machen for money to carry him through.

But the man was never formally disciplined in the church, and the case was hushed up. Not only was he never formally dealt with, he retained his credentials. He remained a minister in good standing in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and he retained his position in the board of that organization that Machen had organized in 1933, the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, an organization in which Machen served as president. But Machen, who kept this whole matter quiet, who was party to hushing it up, who was party to the cover-up in the name of that gentleman’s code of ecclesiastical etiquette, in the end got his own comeuppance.

The independent board of which Machen was the president met in November 1936, in the fall following that summer. Now at this meeting, there was to be the re-election of all of the officers of the board, and Machen was standing for the office of president again. nation was not reelected.

He was removed by the margin of one vote. Guess who cast that deciding vote? None other than H. McAllister Griffiths. Paul Machen’s eyes seemingly were clear with respect to the doctrinal issue. He was prepared to pursue doctrinal discipline within the church, but he was not yet prepared to pursue moral matters in the church. Had he lived longer? lived only a month and a half after that election took place in November, maybe things would have been righted. But as they stand now, the record reads that they were not. So O.P.s cannot claim that they have everything right by virtue of the heritage they claim.

We can stand in amazement of the state of affairs that I have just described for you, especially as it comes to expression among those like Machen, for two reasons. First, because of the devotion of people like Machen to the Bible. And secondly, because of the devotion of people like Machen to the principles of Reformed, Calvinistic, Presbyterian ecclesiology.

With respect to the former, devotion to the Bible, We are face-to-face with that issue, you see, in Genesis 4, and the Lord’s dealings with Cain. I want you to keep in mind here my major contention as we have been working our way through this fourth chapter of Genesis. I want you to keep in mind that contention that I have made as we have been working our way through the fourth chapter of Genesis. Laid out here in front of us is, albeit in primitive form, structure, order, with respect to the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church of God. Laid out in front of us here in primitive form is the structure and the order that the Church, in fact, is to reflect. God himself plays the role of pastor in this fourth chapter.

He comes to Cain and he approaches him earnestly, seriously, issuing warning to Cain, but doing so in love and with entreaty. Why are you angry? Why has your countenance fallen? Then we hear of Cain’s response. The conference that he holds with his brother. The fact that when they are alone, he rises up against his brother and he kills him. thus burning the counsel of God, rejecting his word. And now the Lord comes once more, this time to adjudicate a case with respect to this crime that has been committed. He conducts his investigation, he asks Abel about his brother’s whereabouts. Cain’s response is one of contentiousness and bitterness. I don’t know. You should read that response by Cain as utterly flippant. Am I my brother’s keeper? Am I the shepherd’s shepherd?

As caustic and as sarcastic as you can imagine. and that in the face of God. That is all that the Lord needs to indict the man. He judges not only the words, but the heart that generates those words. The Lord then calls his witnesses Babel’s blood. The ground itself, which has received that blood, these now standing together with the Lord to testify concerning the guilt of Cain. The sentence is pronounced.

The earth, the earth which Cain thought was his The earth, which he thought belonged to him, does not belong to him at all. The earth itself tells himself it belongs to the Lord, and ultimately its hostility to him will bring ruin upon him. He has become an alien in the final analysis. In that which he has set his love upon, he loses that which he hoped to gain, for in the end, the ables will inherit the earth. And even more immediately to the matter we are addressing, Cain is excommunicated from that church east of Eden.

The Lord’s sentence is discipline of the most extreme kind, but it includes in it all discipline of lower level. And this discipline is in place, you see, in the church from the very beginning. And this discipline is consistently and constantly expressed with respect to the church throughout the entirety of Scripture.

Does it matter whether we are in the Old Testament or the New? Haven’t I read to you tonight a passage from the new 1 Corinthians 5 that speaks about a discipline case within the church at Corinth? Discipline is not an Old Testament issue. It is a biblical issue. And it is a biblical issue from the very beginning.

It’s as if in a fallen world there cannot be a church without discipline. If you want a church without discipline, then you do not want the church of God. You want something else. The question then becomes, how could those like Machen miss this fact? They were devoted to the Bible, weren’t they? They read their Bibles, didn’t they? How is it possible for them to miss the obvious?

From the very beginning, discipline in a fallen world belongs to the definition of what the church is, and God himself leads the way in discipline, giving us example with respect to the entire matter. I’ll make a suggestion to you. Church discipline disappeared because there was a secularism even in men as fine as nature. If there was discipline to be carried out, with respect to moral matters, it would be carried out by the state, not by the church. It will be carried out by the state only.

But secondly, we asked how could these white nation claimed to be representatives of the great reformed Presbyterian tradition and missed the obvious. The reformed tradition, the Presbyterian tradition, held discipline as one of the marks of the true Church. Discipline being then an outworking of a conclusion of the other two indispensable marks, namely the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments. Therefore, if there was to be an expression of orthodoxy in its Presbyterian form, it would have to include discipline. To the extent that it did not, to that extent, it too lacked the full reflection of what it purported to be. The LPC, from the beginning, was in need of improvement.

And we who are a part of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church should insist that she improve herself. We doing what we can in the interests of that improvement. Living holy lives ourselves and also holding others to the standard of holiness that we profess. May we not flinch at our duty to Christ at this point. Let us pray.

Father, you set before us the example of yourself, the one who came in discipline in the church early on to deal with the matter of Cain’s crime. Lord, may we be reminded of the consistency of your word with respect to the church, discipline always then being part and parcel of the church’s identity. We ask, Lord, that we would not then recoil at the thought of discipline within the church, that we would even welcome it with respect to ourselves, knowing that it is for our good and your glory. and for the honor of Christ. But Father, where discipline is pursued in that you would be pleased to revive it in your church, Lord, may it be pursued with meekness and humility, so that all who would bring sin to another’s attention would do so with kindness and forbearance and in the hope of the restoration of the sinner. We all then looking to ourselves lest we too be tempted.

Father may it please you now to grant to your church a full reflection of those marks which are essential to her. glorious preaching of your word, right administration of the sacraments, proper exercise of church discipline. We ask this in Jesus’ name.

The sermon text provided above is derived from the sermon audio recording making use of generative tools. It has not been manually edited. While transcription tools have a high degree of accuracy, the output may include generative textual, punctuation, and/or formatting errors.