Evan
Roberts believed and taught many other ideas denied in or absent from the
Bible.  Following Boardman, Murray, and
many other Keswick leaders and exponents, Roberts taught that believers could
escape physical death and become immune to disease by faith.  The “missionary who is in a district where
there is malarial fever . . . becomes immune by recognizing that he must not be
a victim to the enemy—death. . . . He goes into the midst of it, but in faith
it cannot touch him.”[1]  While living with the Penn-Lewis household,
Jessie and Evan practiced “binding Satan,”[2]
while “Evan Roberts . . . spent about eighteen sleepless hours a day in
prayer.”[3]  Mr. Roberts’s “prayers,” out of which were
birthed the book The War On The Saints,
“were,” they claimed, “Divinely inspired.”[4]  The doctrines in War on the Saints show how a believer who has experienced an
alleged post-conversion Spirit baptism “can have the authority to bind Satan”
and even “co-work with God in the last defeat of Satan and all his hosts.”[5]

Thus,
after Evan Roberts and Jessie Penn-Lewis had, they affirmed, bound Satan, and
while practicing Throne Life prayer and experiencing a great mystic Higher
Life, as Evan Roberts allegedly “entered into the sufferings of the
Saviour/High Priest” and thus obtained a “position” from “which he could intercede
continually for Christ’s servants and witnesses who were exposed to deception,”[6]
Roberts received in a vision “the Translation Message given in October, 1913,”[7] in
which he predicted “The Coming of Christ . . . the descent of the Lord to meet
His Bride . . . the great procession of the King Bridegroom, the Son of the
Most High, the Lord of Hosts . . . in 1914.”[8]  This prophecy came after Roberts heard
Penn-Lewis preach that Revelation 12:4 was about “Satan’s all-out attack on the
‘Man-Child Church,’ which would occur just before
Christ’s coming to rapture His people away from this last warfare.”[9]  Or, more accurately, according to Jessie
Penn-Lewis, Evan Roberts, Otto Stockmayer, and other Keswick leaders, the
Rapture would be partial, taking away only those who had taken the third step
of conquering death by faith.  Those who merely
believed in justification by faith alone and had trusted Christ would certainly
be left behind.  Indeed, even those who
had received post-conversion Spirit baptism and the second blessing of
sanctification would not be ascend in the Rapture.  Not only the new birth and the Second
Blessing, but a Third Blessing was necessary to partake of the Rapture.  The doctrine of these Keswick leaders was the
Ratpure only of the “‘man-child’ born of the church”:

By the simple expectation
that the Lord may come any day to take away the Church, whether ready or
unready, we shall never come to be translated. 
That is not the way.  Justification
is by faith, and is received by faith; sanctification is by faith, and is
received by faith; and equally TRANSLATION CAN BE OBTAINED BY FAITH.  Believe then . . . [that] Christ . . . is
able, by the Spirit, to form a group of those to whom the Lord can manifest His
salvation, full and entire, and whom He may take away before others, without
dying, to His throne.[10]

After all, at
the heart of the Keswick theology is the idea the blessings of Christ’s death
are inactive until they are especially appropriated by a distinct act of
faith.  Thus, since “all the fruits of the sufferings of Christ ought to be obtained by
faith,” the believer who has entered into the Highest Life of the Higher Life
rises up and is “CONQUERING DEATH BY FAITH,” guaranteed not to suffer physical
death but to be raptured by a specific act of faith to that end.[11]  Only when, being already justified, one
exercises a specific act of faith to activate sanctification does he receive
this second blessing.  (To affirm
otherwise is to return to the despised orthodox, non-Higher Life doctrine.)  In exactly the same fashion, one will not
partake of the Rapture without a specific, post-sanctification act of faith
toward that end.

            Indeed, on this Keswick view, God is
so unable to Rapture those who do not specifically exercise faith in this
regard, that after the first group ascends, other groups will be left for
Tribulation-period Rapture—but only as they enter into the Translation plane of
the Throne Life.  First, at the initial
Rapture, those with the Highest Life will rise “in the air just above our
planet,” where they will be judged while the Tribulation proceeds on
earth.  Those believers who were left
behind would then “ascend to Him” in little “after companies” as they finally
grasped, as the Tribulation period continued, the truths taught in the inspired
writings of Mrs. Penn-Lewis, and were purified enough to ascend to join their
brethren in the air above the planet.  A
group would go here, and a group there. 
As one explanatory article in The Overcomer
magazine relates, the “Parousia of Christ means His Presence in the air just
above our planet, where His saints will gather unto Him . . . in successive
Translations during the period of Tribulation on earth which will culminate in
Armageddon.”[12]  That is, as believers who missed the initial
Translation enter into the Throne Life, “[f]rom time to time various companies
of saints who were not ready for the first Rapture [will] disappear from the
earth and join their fellows.”[13]  Since to be raptured it was essential to have
the Translation Faith truths taught by Mrs. Penn-Lewis, and nobody could
discover these truths simply by reading the Bible, Mrs. Penn-Lewis wrote an
article describing how one was to enter into the blessing of Translation
faith.  In it she described “how to get
it, use it, and keep it,” so that Highest Life Keswick Christians do not fall
back to the lower plain of the non-elite people of God, all of whom miss the
Rapture.[14]

            It was also essential to note that the
Translation Message was only for those “who understood that, like Enoch,” Evan
Roberts “walked daily with God.”[15]  People like Jessie Penn-Lewis and other
followers of the Higher Life “find the witness in their own spirit” to Evan
Roberts’s prophecy, so that “they believe his message.”[16]  When “his family [did] not believe his
present messages,” he “did not want to meet [them] anymore,” and so he
“rejected every attempt by [his] family” at restoration, recognizing that his
“special vision and . . . burden message”[17]
required “the absolute isolation of his spirit from those who d[id] not believe
his testimony.”[18]  He refused “to meet or correspond with his
closest relatives,” and when “his father went up to see him . . . Evan . . .
would not talk.”[19]  His “family [was] shown the door” so that he
could, every moment, give himself to prayer.[20]  He persisted in this rejection of his family
to the extent that he did not even attend his mother’s funeral.[21]  Believing that the world would end in 1914,
Roberts and Penn-Lewis ceased to publish the Overcomer magazine in that year—there would be no more need of it
once the return of Christ took place.[22]  As Roberts and Penn-Lewis knew from the
spirit world, “the End-Age of the Son of Man was dawning,”[23]
and The Overcomer would no longer be
necessary; for as Evan Roberts prophesied, “Translation is at hand!  We know in the spirit that our ministration
to the Church is ended! . . . WE AWAIT TRANSLATION.”[24]  However, a permanent literature trust was set
up, since Mrs. Penn-Lewis’s writings would be “needed by others after the departure
of the watching believers”; that is, those Christians who missed the partial
Rapture would need her works to find out what went wrong.[25]  Penn-Lewis, Roberts, and others “were all in
high spirits . . . and decided to celebrate the end of the spiritual warfare[.]
. . . All went out in raincoats and galoshes to the rocks where Mrs. Penn-Lewis
dashed a bottle of eau-de-cologne on the rock, saying, ‘In the Name of the
Triune God I dash this bottle against the rocks in honour of the finished
warfare with the Prince of Death.’”[26]

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