The Physician Who Served the Great Physician
by Rev. David T. Myers

None of our subscribers would fail to see who the Great Physician is in our title of this post. It is none other than the Lord Jesus Christ, who continually healed the sick during his three year ministry on earth. But we may not immediately come up with the name of Vijaykumar M. Gaikwad as the physician who served this Lord and Savior during his life time of service. And yet that is what this Presbyterian missionary did in several countries of the world.

Dr. Gaikwad was born on October 12, 1941 in India. He had the Christian example of a grandfather who was born again through the instrumentality of American Presbyterian missionaries. The grandfather evidenced his gratitude to the Author of his salvation by serving as a preacher of the gospel in India. And his grandson Vijay, who is the feature of this post, followed in his grandfather’s steps by dedicating himself to the Lord’s work as a missionary doctor.

Experiencing vital experience in India at two missionary hospitals first, he went nest to Nigeria to serve the Great Physician there. Yet whenever effectual Christian work is being done, you can expect Satan to rear his ugly head. And so he did when the government took over the medical facility and brought an end to Dr. Gaikwad’s ministry there.

Spending some educational time in America next, he heard of the need of an doctor in Kenya. They answered that need, only to find yet another socialist government taking over the Mwingi, Kenya mission hospital. That drove him back to his own country where he set up his medical services at what later on became the Louisa Lee Memorial Hospital. To this local med center, there was added a new clinic building twenty miles away, with a mobile outreach center being added, with a church of elect souls to present the good news of eternal life to the patients and their relatives.

Dr. Gaikwad was called to rewards in heaven when he died on this day, November 4, 2018, leaving his wife of 40 years, a daughter, and a son. Like his grandfather before him, he had served the Lord Jesus faithfully and earnestly.

Words to Live By:
Whatever is your calling in life, dear reader, we urge you to consider serving in it, first and foremost, the Lord Jesus, who loved you and gave Himself for you. Only one life on earth will soon be past; Only what’s done for Christ will last.

THE SCHOOL & FAMILY CATECHIST
by Rev. William Smith

The Westminster Shorter Catechism, Questions 57-58

Q.57. Which is the fourth commandment?

A. The fourth commandment is, “Remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work : but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God : in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates ; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day : wherefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath-day, and hallowed it,” Exod. xx. 8-11.

EXPLICATION.

Sabbath-day. –The day of holy rest.

Blessed the Sabbath-day. –Appointed it to be a day on which mankind would be blessed or made happy, in a particular manner, by God’s favor, if they continued to observe the Sabbath to keep it holy.

Hallowed it. –Distinguished it from all the other days of the week, by setting it apart for holy uses.

Q.58. What is required in the fourth commandment?

A. The fourth commandment requireth the keeping holy to God, such set times as he hath appointed in his word, expressly one whole day in seven, to be a holy Sabbath to himself.

EXPLICATION.

A holy Sabbath to himself. –A day in which mankind were to rest from worldly labors, and to direct all their attention to the holy duties of the immediate service of God.

ANALYSIS.

The duties required in the fourth commandment are twofold :

1. The keeping holy to God such set times as he hath appointed in his word. –Lev. xxiii. 37,38. These are the easts [sic: ed.; feasts] of the Lord which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations, –beasts the Sabbaths of the Lord.

2.The keeping holy, expressly, of one whole day in seven. –Lev. xix. 30. Ye shall keep my Sabbath and reverence my sanctuary, I am the Lord. Deut. v. 14. The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.

CHURCH OVER ONE HUNDRED YEARS OLD GETS ITS FIRST FULL-TIME PASTOR.

Center Point Presbyterian Church, in Moore, South Carolina, established in 1875, had its first full-time minister installed on the evening of this day, November 2, in 1980, by a commission of the Calvary Presbytery. Their new minister, the Rev. John David Love, was a native of York, South Carolina, and was married to Molly Plexico Love, of Sharon, SC. They had two daughters, Mary Bratton and Caroline Jane. Rev. Love was a graduate of Presbyterian College and Columbia Theological Seminary, having served churches in McConnells and Woodruff, SC. Prior to coming to the Center Point pulpit, his most recent ministry and most fruitful work had been with the management of Camp Eva Good at Cedar Mountain, North Carolina, where he served for many years. There he served both as manager of the property and as counselor and minister to all who had the privilege of coming in contact with him.

Concurrent with a portion of his years as pastor of the Center Point church, Rev. Love also served as pastor of the Reidville Presbyterian church, in Reidville, South Carolina, 1987-1989. His final years of pastoral ministry were spend as Stated Supply for the historic Bullock Creek Presbyterian church of Sharon, South Carolina, 1996-1997. Pastor Love was honorably retired in 1998 and but a few years later, entered into the presence of his Lord and Savior, on September 16, 2002.

Source: The Calvary Link. Published by the Mission to the U.S. Committee of Calvary Presbytery (PCA), Vol. 3, No. 7 (November 1980).

(“Exploring Avenues Of Acquaintance And Co-operation”)
By Chalmers W. Alexander
Jackson, Mississippi
[The Southern Presbyterian Journal 8.11 (1 October 1949): 13-18.]

We are presenting today a portion of a longer work by Chalmers W. Alexander, a very capable ruling elder of the First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi. In this portion presented today, he writes of the effort by modernists to drastically reconfigure the mission work of the Church.

II: MODERNISM IN THE FOREIGN MISSIONS WORK

In order to understand why Dr. Machen was booted out of the ministry of the Northern Presbyterian Church in 1936, it is necessary to turn our attention to some events which took place only a few years before that.

“Re-Thinking Missions”

In November of 1932, a book entitled Re-Thinking Missions was issued as the report of the “Commission of Appraisal” of the “Laymen’s Inquiry after One Hundred Years.” This report, which was about foreign missions work, was the product of an inter-denominational committee. The Northern Presbyterian Church’s one representative on the Commission of Appraisal was Dr. William P. Merrill, of New York City, a signer of the heretical Auburn Affirmation.

As Dr. Machen pointed out in a 110-page book which will be mentioned presently: “The work of the Commission was financed, to the extent of some half-million dollars, largely by a Modernist layman, Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who in 1918 wrote for the Saturday Evening Post an article which was afterwards circulated in pamphlet form advocating admission to the Church without any profession of belief whatever.”

The Theme Of “Re-Thinking Missions”

Dr. Machen gave this clear analysis of Re-Thinking Missions’ theme and teachings: “The resulting book constitutes from beginning to end an attack upon the historic Christian Faith. It presents as the aim of missions that of seeking truth together with adherents of other religions rather than that of presenting the truth which God has supernaturally recorded in the Bible. ‘The relation between religions,’ it says, ‘must take increasingly hereafter the form of a common search for truth.’ It deprecates the distinction between Christians and non-Christians; it belittles the Bible and inveighs against Christian doctrine; it dismisses the doctrine of eternal punishment as a doctrine antiquated even in Christendom; it presents Jesus as a great Teacher and Example, as Christianity’s ‘highest expression of the religious life,’ but certainly not as very God of very God; it belittles evangelism, definite conversions, open profession of faith in Christ, membership in the Christian Church, and substitutes ‘the dissemination of spiritual influences’ and ‘the permeation of the community with Christian ideals and principles’ for the new birth.”

Re-Thinking Missions revealed clearly that its authors had no conception at all of the finality and the exclusiveness of the Christian Faith as it was revealed by the Lord Jesus Christ when He said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but to me.”

Now two members of the official Board of Foreign Missions of the Northern Presbyterian Church were members of the original Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry, which appointed the Commission of Appraisal which, in turn, produced Re-Thinking Missions. When this book, which was the official report of the Commission, was issued by the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry, and when it presented a clear-cut view of what missions are and what the Christian religion is, the members of the Northern Presbyterian Church had a right to know whether its Board of Foreign Missions rejected or accepted that view. The Board issued a statement, which was vague in nature, about “the evangelical basis of missions,” on November 21, 1932, after Re-Thinking Missionsappeared. The Board, however, did not let the people know that it considered the book as being hostile to the very roots of the Christian religion, and nothing was done to remove from the Board the two members of it who were members of the original Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry.

Our own Southern Presbyterian denomination, on the other hand, expressed itself in no uncertain terms regarding Re-Thinking Missions. Our General Assembly of 1935 declared it to be “a monumental folly” miscalled Rethinking Missions and stated that “its true title should rather be rejecting missions and crucifying our Lord afresh.”

Re-Thinking Missions did serve one good purpose. It immediately aroused countless thousands of Bible-believing Christians who felt that something should be done at once to stem the fast-rising tide of unbelief in the Christian Church. And the leader among those who shared this feeling was Dr. Machen.

Dr. Machen Proposes An Overture

Accordingly, in 1933, the year following the publication of Re-Thinking Missions, Dr. Machen proposed to the presibytery of which he was a member, the Presbytery of New Brunswick, an Overture which was to be presented to the General Assembly of the Northern Presbyterian Church at its next meeting.

This Overture asked the General Assembly to see to it that members of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Northern Presbyterian Church be believers, in the absolute exclusiveness of Christianity and, that they be persons “who are determined to insist upon such verities as the full truthfulness of Scripture, the virgin birth of our Lord, His substitutionary death as a sacrifice to satisfy Divine justice, His bodily resurrection and His miracles, as being essential to the Word of God and our Standards and as being necessary to the message which every missionary under our Church shall proclaim.”

The points of doctrine set forth in this Overture were the well-known “Five Points” of doctrine which had been declared as essential by the General Assembly of 1923, and which had been declared not to be essential at all by the heretical Auburn Affirmation in 1924.

Dr. Machen’s 110-Page Book

In connection with this proposed Overture, Dr. Machen very carefully prepared an Argument to accompany it; and this Argument named names and cited specific instances of Modernism in the foreign missions work. Both the Overture and this Argument were published in the form of a book 110 pages in length entitled Modernism and the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. This book, which was issued in the early part of 1933, was widely distributed, free of charge, throughout the Northern Presbyterian Church. In its opening pages, Dr. Machen began his Argument by discussing Re-Thinking Missions.

Words to Live By:
The Church has one commission from her Lord and Savior, to faithfully declare the Gospel of salvation by Christ alone, through faith alone. When we fall away from that sacred obligation and duty, we suffer and the Church suffers.

“The first and chief article is this: Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, died for our sins and was raised again for our justification (Romans 3:24-25). He alone is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29), and God has laid on Him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6). All have sinned and are justified freely, without their own works and merits, by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, in His blood (Romans 3:23-25). This is necessary to believe. This cannot be otherwise acquired or grasped by any work, law, or merit. Therefore, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us…Nothing of this article can be yielded or surrendered, even though heaven and earth and everything else falls (Mark 13:31).”
—Martin Luther

First Martyr of the Modernist Controversy

So claimed Rev. Harry Rimmer. In his book Crossed Fingers, Dr. Gary North notes that on the day J. Gresham Machen died, the funeral for Rev. Arthur Perkins was held in Wisconsin. Perkins had died just three days prior to Machen’s passing. A year prior he had been in good health.

The Rev. Leslie A. Dunn, converted under the ministry of Rev. Perkins, paid tribute to him and told the story of his ministry, his conflict, and his death:

One who has for many years taken an uncompromising stand for the truths of the Gospel has gone to his reward. The Rev. Arthur F. Perkins, who was born on this day, October 23rd, in 1887, did not enter the ministry until he was almost thirty years of age. Following conversion, he immediately gave up his former occupation and entered Christian service, witnessing to the saving and keeping power of the Lord Jesus Christ in out-of-the-way places in Central Wisconsin, where many found Jesus Christ as personal Savior through his tireless efforts and challenging messages.

[Following a first pastorate in Milwaukee], Mr. Perkins was called by the largest Presbytery in Wisconsin to become Field Director of that Presbytery, ministering to pastorless churches and working among unordained missionaries in twenty-one counties of central and northern Wisconsin. Hundreds found in Christ their salvation through Mr. Perkins, and many struggling churches under his supervision took on new life and became independent of Presbytery for their financial support.

Because Mr. Perkins always vigorously opposed Modernism and any kind of compromise with error or worldliness, he had much opposition. Because he encouraged young people to attend Wheaton College instead of the Presbyterian College nearby, he was criticized severely by the powers that be.

Because of his faithfulness to his Lord in these stewardship matters, there were those who sought to oust Mr. Perkins from his field directorship, even though it had never thrived as it had under his leadership. When Mr. Perkins opposed the ordination of two men who denied the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, he made his enemies more determined to oust him.

That he was not a seminary trained man was one pretext given for seeking his release from the responsible position he held. Other pretexts failed until he organized the Crescent Lake Bible Fellowship, where young people were enabled to attend a strictly sound summer conference at less than half the cost advertised by the other two conferences in the state. Although there was no Presbyterian conference in his Presbytery, still they insisted he disorganize this independent camp and disown it altogether. He refused to do so and brought much opposition against himself, resulting in his trial for insubordination. Presbytery’s judicial commission suspended him from the ministry for two years. Although he appealed the case to Synod and to General Assembly, he observed his suspension, and for months refrained from preaching and exercising the prerogatives of a minister. It was a long, hard strain, with added financial burdens because of the ecclesiastical trials. Dr. Harry Rimmer was his counsel and labored much for him. His people in the Merrill, Wisconsin congregation stood by him courageously with their sympathy, prayers and financial help.

When the General Assembly ousted him, with others, from the ministry last June (1936), he came back to Philadelphia and was one among thirty-five ministers who organized the Presbyterian Church of America [later renamed Orthodox Presbyterian Church]. He then returned to Wisconsin, and in Merrill a large number of people renounced the jurisdiction of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and asked him to minister to them. The work in Merrill progressed; and Mr. Perkins spoke in many surrounding towns on the doctrinal crisis in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. It was then that he had a nervous breakdown that resulted finally in his death on December 29.

The Lord has wonderfully used this man of God who refused to compromise with worldliness or error, or to soften his message to please men, and refused to listen to the counsels of men in order to win their votes in the councils of the Church, when it meant a denial of his Lord. May God’s sustaining grace be with his widow and three children surviving him!

Words to Live By:

The Rev. John J. DeWaard, of Cedar Grove, Wisconsin, brought the sermon at the funeral of Rev. Perkins. His concluding words drove home the abiding heart concern of Perkins’s ministry:

To be saved is so great a thing that no man can earn it whatever he might do, and certainly no sinner could earn it. For the sinner by nature cannot do anything well pleasing unto God. I need only remind you that the word “save” means healing. It is a healing of body and soul alike. To be saved is to be delivered from this world of sin; to be saved is to be translated into our Father’s House with its many mansions. Salvation is the redemption of soul and body from the guilt and power of sin. The saved soul rejoices in the blessed assurance that all sin is forgiven for the Saviour’s sake, and the saved body, “being still united to Christ does rest in the grave until the resurrection.” Comprehensively, but simply, the Bible defines salvation in the terms, “I will be your God, and ye shall be my people.” God is not a God of the dead but of the living. Such is the promise of the Bible, and God’s Word cannot be broken. Such is the promise of our Lord who died on the cross that this promise might become a reality to those who trust only in His name.
Mr. Perkins would want me to ask you a serious question: Are you saved? Will you by the strength of the Lord endure to the end, and keep the faith?

Of Archival Interest:

Through the generous donation of Rev. Robert Smallman, former pastor of the Bible Presbyterian Church, Merrill, Wisconsin, where Rev. Perkins was the organizing pastor, the PCA Historical Center holds what constitutes the papers of the Rev. Arthur Perkins. The collection is small, consisting of 27 folders, with about half the materials concerning the ecclesiastical trial brought against Perkins by the Winnebago Presbytery.