Baptist DISTINCTIVE: An Adam Mykonos Mystery (The Adam Myknonos Mystries) (8 page)

“Eshtë miku im.” I said finishing the old adage,
in what my Father had always told me was its original language Albanian.

Glover tilted his head. “You speak A-Rab?”

I laughed “No Sir that was Albanian. Armiku
i armikut tim është miku im, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

“With a gift for languages like that you
should consider the mission field Brother Adam” said Mrs. Glover with a smile.

“It is not so much a gift as a necessity,
my father spoke Albanian, as did all my uncles and cousins, and it was learn or
be left out.”

She laughed. “Still the mission field could
use you.”

“Well, Mother.” Said Pastor Glover. “That
may be, but right now we need him more. “

“How so?” I asked.

“We may have been on opposite sides when
you stood by Joshua during the divorce, but I took your measure this morning,
you really believe our daughter had nothing to do with this nonsense.”

Truth was I was not willing to go so far as
‘nothing to do with ‘but I did not believe Ivy killed Josh and Mac so I fudged
a little “That is the case Sir.”

“So our common enemy is the man who did
this.”

I nodded. “If it was a man.”

“Oh Brother Adam do you really think a
woman could be so vile?” asked Mrs. Glover

Vile? What century was this lady from I
wondered. “I’m afraid so Mrs. Glover. “

She shook so I thought she had the
vapors.
 
Then I paused to wonder just
what the vapors were.

“We could not help but over hear your
conversation with Attorney Hallman.” Glover stated.

“Most of the joint heard it.”

Glover nodded. “He was over simplifying the
history of our movement. Rice and Jones were not the enemies he seemed to make
them.”

That was not my understanding, especially since
W.A.Criswell had once called Bob Jones Sr. a senile old fool. I would not
consider anyone who invited someone who called me an Old Fool to speak at a
conference with me to be my friend but in the interest of time I let Glover’s
statement roll.

“It seems to me” I said leaning back a
little in my chair. “That the Independent portion of our name tends to breed
disagreements between ourselves. Hard to be both independent and avoid
conflicting with someone else’s independence.”

“There is truth to that Sir.” Pastor Glover
said sadly.

“I imagine that Doug Hallman and Ryder Mathewson
are both colleagues and friends but will now be on opposite sides of the coin
when it comes to Dr. Longstreet contesting Joshua’s will, in regards to the
Greencastle Property.”

“Yes, I do not understand all of that
stuff. Ryder is a good man of business though and as long as this ‘Singing
Pastor” can keep right on lifting his Voice to the Glory of God and winning
souls to Jesus, then I really am not all that concerned with the business end
of things.”

“And your granddaughter’s custody?”

He waved his hand towards his wife. “Mother
and I had a discussion about that before you came in; truth is we really do not
see a problem. Ivy will be home soon and so all this talk of where Miriam will
live is silly. She will live with her mother. Who will in turn live with us.”

“You intend to move Ivy and Miriam back to Louisiana?”
I asked.

“Yes.”
 
He said flatly. The he added “Once you clear her name of course.”

“Of course.”

We sat for a moment in time and then I
asked “Do either of you have any idea who may have wanted to do this terrible
thing?”

Mrs. Glover visible shrunk in her seat as
she muttered a no. Pastor Glover however sat straighter than before and shook
his head.

“One thing that Doug said to you that was true.
There are a lot of people who do not like the Lexington-Blaine’s.
 
I will be the first to admit that I was among
them.”

“Why is that?”

He pushed his chair back and then pressed
his back hard against it, as if trying to crack a kink out of his spine.
 
“What do you know about Andrew Blaine and Jethro
Lexington?”

I shrugged. “I know that Dr. Lexington
passed away relatively young, 55 or so and that his widow married Pastor
Blaine, who was himself a widower, his wife died having their second child,
Luke.”

“There only boy.”

I nodded “Yes. Carrie Lexington and Jethro
had a son Joshua, but there is an age difference between him and Luke and their
sister….Gina, ten years or more.”

Glover nodded “Correct. Jethro was
considerably older than Carrie; she was only 25 when he passed.”

“Then just three years ago both Carrie and
Andrew were killed in a car accident.”

Glover nodded “That my friend is the basic
story. There is a more complicated one however.”

“I’m listening.”

I watched him shift to preacher mode. “Now,
we hold in our movement that all sin is equal and that there are any number of
things which are an offense to God, but I sometimes think, that there are only
two sins: One of them is a sin in the eyes of God and the other is a Sin in the
eyes of man.
 
Pride is the sin that God
sees and which He hates. It was the Pride of your earliest namesake which
caused the fall, it was David’s pride, not his lust which caused him to pursue Bathsheba,
it was Saul’s pride which cost him the kingdom and it was of course Lucifer’s
Pride which swept one third of the angels into rebellion. Pride Brother Adam
goeth before the fall.
 
All other sin is
an outgrowth of Man’s pride.”

I nodded in agreement.

“Pride. The Lexington Family has pride in abundance.
Jethro was a proud man. “

He took a sip of his coke and went on. “Now
man sees things different than God does. Man sees the world though his own sin
nature. Man’s vision is unclear and corrupt. Have you ever considered that
without Christ in your heart, everything you see would be tinged by sin, you
would see your wife or another man’s wife differently, you would see yourself
different, and you would see the world different?
 
Now the Holy Spirit indwelling in a saved man
helps him see what God sees, guides him to see as God sees, but the fact is
that Man is a sinner by birth and our pride hinders the spirit if we let it and
we see with our old sin eye. Now the so-called sin that man hates is the
success of others.
 
The worldly man hates
all success that others achieve. Oh, he may outwardly cheer but in his heart of
hearts he hates that others have things better than he does, he hates that they
have a better car, a better job, more money, a prettier wife, he hates it. The
saved man is no different, except that he discounts the unsaved that have
success. He chalks that up to Satan’s work and he knows that God will have the
final say on the unsaved yet worldly successful man. So the saved man turns his
sin-eyes on his fellow saved man, and oh low and behold does he hate it when
his fellow Christian is successful. He hates it when the Lord blesses someone
other than himself.”

He paused again for effect. “Andrew Blaine
and more to the point his father Old Drew before him, was that thing that saved
man hate most, a successful saved man.
 
A
Man who walked the walked and talked the talked and still managed to be worldly
successful, still managed to make money, lots of money, still managed to
provide for his children, and Old Drew had ten kids mind you, still managed to
tithe and beyond to his church, still managed to do all that and to accept the
Gifts of God with Grace.”

Another sip of coke.
 
“So when Carrie Lexington married Andrew
Blaine a prefect storm of sin was created around her boy Joshua. He had his
Father’s pride, a sin in the sight of God, and he inherited his step-father’s
money, wealth, power, success, a sin in the sight of his fellow Christians. I
disliked Joshua Lexington for many years, but God’s honest truth by the time he
died, I pitied him.”

Coda
Three

So to say that my marriage was unhappy would be
woefully accurate. Still Ivy and I tried to make the best of it and the Lord
blessed that effort with children. But we were never what I would call happy,
the best we ever reached was content, and that feeling was rare. Mostly we
existed in a storm. Fights were frequent. Ivy loved a good argument. I never
liked them and thought it was best for the children to avoid fighting with
their mother.

With my home life in a shambles I threw myself into
my professional life. I had seen my father work for many years as an evangelist
and I for a time felt that call as well, but upon further reflection and prayer
it became clear to me that the Lord had gifted me to be a Pastor and so that
was where I set my sights. Ivy too was pleased with this, though not with the
first church I pastored. I was a small church in a farming area of Iowa. We
were there for five years and while there I developed the style and techniques
I could use to build a ministry, if only I could get to a place where there
were enough people to put what I knew to be the Lord’s plan into action. Then
from out of the blue I received a call from Dr. Longstreet telling me he was
planning on retiring and asking me to come and serve as his Associate for two
years and then to take over the ministry.

Ivy would have preferred that we return to the Deep
South, but Maryland was at least below the Mason-Dixon Line and while
Hagerstown is not large she could comfortably say that we were within the
DC-Baltimore Metro Area. By the time we came to Maryland I had learned things
about my marriage and learned foremost that in order to keep peace, in order
not to have screaming matches and to have glasses, pictures and other items
hurdled at me, that it was easiest for me to buy whatever it was that Ivy
wanted. And so I spent money that my Step-Father had given me in ways he never
intended, to give my wife the worldly material possessions that he and my
natural father had so distained.

At Calvary I had the chance to put my plans for
building a church into action. And it is here we encounter one of those wheels of
which we have spoken

I am not sure how much of the history of our
movement you are familiar with. I know that you know that Baptist do not
consider themselves Protestants as we were not part of the reformation. In fact
many in both the Independent and Southern movements maintain that we have existed
since the time of John the Baptist. I am not sure that I would go that far, but
certainly we are and have been for a long time a separated people.

Historians trace the earliest church labeled
"Baptist" back to 1609 in Amsterdam, with English Separatist John
Smyth as the first pastor. In accordance with his reading of the New Testament,
he rejected baptism of infants and instituted baptism only of believing adults.
Baptist practice spread to England, where the General Baptists considered
Christ's atonement to extend to all people, while the Particular Baptists
believed that it extended only to the elect. In 1638, Roger Williams
established the first Baptist congregation in the North American colonies. In
the mid-18th century, the First Great Awakening increased Baptist growth in
both New England and the South. The Second Great Awakening in the South in the
early 19th century increased church membership, as did the preachers' lessening
of support for abolition and manumission of slavery, which had been part of the
18th-century teachings. Baptist missionaries have spread the church to every
continent. As the movement grew in the United States one of the great conflicts
within its borders arose from the battle between Calvinism and Arminianism. To
simplify the conflict a Calvinist would be a Particular Baptist whose belief
would be that a man is predestined to be saved or to die unsaved and that no
amount of soul winning can change that. In other words if you were (and
apparently you were.) destined to be saved then it did not matter that your
sister lead you to the Lord, you would have gotten there any way. On the other
hand if you were not destined to be saved then no one could have lead you to
the Lord. On the opposite side is the Arminianist these would be the General
Baptist, who believe in the absolute free will of man. In other words all
people have the chance to be saved at it is the mission of the saved to seek
and find them. Independent Baptist have traditionally fallen into the Arminist
or General Baptist camp, but, and here we hit our wheel, there is another
problem and that is the Separatist movement.

The idea that we are a separated people, apart and designed
to be apart. This was the concept over which Bob Jones who was actually a
Methodist (though his Mother was a Primitive Baptist) and John R Rice fell out.
The Rice camp who opposed total Separation was then and is to a greater or
lesser extent is still represented by the
Sword of the Lord Magazine
, seemed
to have emerged victorious. But there remains that strain within each
Independent Baptist church that cries for “We four and no more” as they say. All
Independent Baptist hold to the belief that we are somehow set aside, and yet
they also believe that all souls can be saved and being the smart man you are I
am sure you can see the tension created by that. If we are separated how do we
reach the world? And if we reach the world how can we remain separated?