by Theodore
Austin-Sparks
Four Greatnesses of Divine Revelation
Chapter 1 - Part 1: The Greatness of Christ
The Greatness of Christ as King
His Moral and Spiritual Kingship
Chapter 2 - The Greatness of Christ in His Possessions
(a) To display the Glory of
God
(b) For the Enrichment of His
People
(c) For Distribution by His
People
(a) The Satisfaction of His
People
(b) The Maturing of His
People
(a) Divine Principles
Disclosed
(b) Divine Secrets
Apprehended
Chapter 3 - The Greatness of Christ as Son
Son on the Principle of Eternity
Chapter 4 - Part 2: The Greatness of the Cross
The Greatness of the One Offering
Myriads of Sacrifices Unavailing
The Cross - One Offering Availing For Ever
God Vindicated in Choosing Israel
Heavenly Powers of Evil Overcome
The Physical Creation Redeemed
Chapter 5 - The Greatness of the Death of Christ
God’s Eternal Thought of Sonship Secured in Christ
God’s Eternal Thought Secured in the Cross
The Greatness of the Love of God
Chapter 6 - The Greatness of the Resurrection
Christ Exalted the Perfect Representative Man
Christ Risen Dispels All Limitations
The Church the Expression of Christ Risen and Exalted
The Literal, the Consummation of the Spiritual
Chapter 7 - The Greatness of Christ's Enthronement
The Results of Christ’s Enthronement
(b) Enemies Reduced to
Helplessness
(c) Abundant Wealth for the
People of God
(d) The Enlargement of the
Kingdom
The Way to Christ’s Enthronement
Chapter 8 - Part 3: The Greatness of the Church
Features of Christ Taken up in the Church
(b) The Mystery of His
Heavenliness
(c) Manifesting the Features
of the Divine Person
(d) A Vocation for a Day to
Come
Chapter 9 - Part 4 - The Greatness of the Word of God
The Identity between the Divine Person and the Divine
Word
The Word of God the Unique Language of God
The Impact of God through the Word
The Word of God the Cause of all Being
Being Maintained by the Word of God
The Word of God Requires Divine, Not Human,
Interpretation
Faith Must Accompany the Word of God
Foreword
The value of these messages will be greatly increased if the Scriptures at the
head of each chapter are read first. Also it will help the reader if it is
remembered that the spoken form has been retained, and to that form literary conciseness
and precision have been surrendered; you are listening to a speaker rather than
reading a book.
T. AUSTIN-SPARKS
Read: 1 Chronicles 28 and 29
These
chapters bring into view something which, in its realization, is the solution
to all our problems and the deliverance from all our difficulties. In a word,
that ‘something’ is spiritual enlargement. Most of our troubles are due to our
smallness. Paul recognized that enlargement was the solution to those very
great problems at Corinth, and you know what the problems were and the
difficulties which confronted him. At length he gathered all up in one
full-hearted outburst: “Our mouth is open
unto you, O Corinthians, our heart is enlarged. Ye are not straitened in us,
but ye are straitened in your own affections. Now for a
recompense in like kind... be ye also enlarged”
(2 Corinthians 6:11-13). That was only an inclusive and
comprehensive way of saying: ‘All these things which are such troubles amongst
you, such problems, such difficulties, are due to your smallness; if only you
were bigger people so many of these things would disappear altogether. The way
out is enlargement!’ It is true so often that the collapse of things in
different realms has been because there was no one big enough to cope with
them. If only there had been someone of adequate measure to grapple with it,
the situation would have been saved. This is a day when all sorts of maladies
are troubling the Church and upsetting Christianity. We need not mention them,
for we are conscious of them, but they are mainly due to a lack of spiritual
greatness, or, to put it again the other way, they are due to pettiness and
smallness. The only way out is enlargement, a new horizon, and a new sense of
the greatness of that into which we, as Christians, are brought. But
unfortunately today, in so many directions, the only bigness amongst Christians
is that which is according to the world’s standards of bigness, and not the
Lord’s standards.
Now,
in these Scriptures there are four great things. We might call them: ‘The Four
Pillars of the Faith,’ ‘The Four Greatnesses,’ and we
have covered them all in the two chapters which we have just read. In type and
principle they are:
* the Greatness of Christ, David’s
greater Son;
* the Greatness of the Cross, as
suggested by the altar and the immensity of the collective sacrifice;
* the Greatness of the Church, the House
of God; and
* the Greatness of the Word of God,
indicated in these chapters at two points.
Firstly,
Solomon’s greatness was said to depend entirely upon his faithfulness to the
Word of God; and, secondly, David, in committing the pattern of the House to
Solomon, said that he had received it all in writing from the Lord - it was the
Word of God governing.
Those
are the four great things of the Scriptures.
We begin now with the first - the Greatness of Christ. He is
brought into view by the foreshadowing in Solomon, whose name, as you know, was
alternatively Jedidiah: ‘Beloved of God’ (2 Samuel
12:25). How Solomon was chosen is a very remarkable and very wonderful thing,
and we shall say something about that presently. But you remember the statement
made at Solomon’s birth: “David comforted Bathsheba his wife... and she bare a son, and he called his name Solomon. And the Lord loved him;
and He sent by the hand of Nathan the prophet; and He called his name Jedidiah, for the Lord’s sake” (2 Samuel 12:24, 25; ASV).
Just store that up for a little while.
But as we approach Christ through Solomon, there are several
fairly general things which lead us on. Solomon, in the first place, was the
one in whom the full thought of kingship according to God’s mind is set forth,
in principle and type. We know that his reign was the peak of Israel’s history.
Although David is always referred to as Israel’s greatest king, and rightly so,
nevertheless Solomon brings out all the glory of David; he is the full, ripe
fruit of David’s kingship, and he comes into his place as at the very top of
all kingship in Israel on one spiritual principle, and that principle is
sonship. Sonship is the full, ripe fruit of Divine thought. There is no higher
thought in the Divine mind, and no possibility greater and higher for any
being, than that of sonship in the Divine sense. The calling to sonship is the
greatest thing that ever God has extended to anyone. In Christ sonship is full,
and Solomon represents that truth and principle of sonship. “Solomon... shall
be My son, and I will be his father” (1 Chronicles
22:10). “Of all my sons, (for the Lord hath given me many sons,) He hath chosen
Solomon” (1 Chronicles 28:5). It is the gathering up of sonship in a full sense
and full measure in him, and that is a pointer to Christ. That gives us a very full
indication of what kingship is according to the Divine mind; it is sonship.
All that is true of Solomon and is recorded of him is just a
shadow of what Christ is spiritually. You begin at the top stone in the fullest
sense, the full and the final revelation of God, God’s speech. “God, having of
old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in
divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in His Son”
(Hebrews 1:1, 2), or, literally, “hath spoken Son-wise.” You cannot go further
than that. He has reached the end of all parts, and found inclusiveness and
finality in His Son. That, then, is why Solomon occupies the place that he does
occupy as at the very peak of kingship; it is the principle of sonship
embodied. He, then, is the ripe fruit, or full expression, of the Divine idea -
kingship. For kingship is a Divine idea, a thought in the mind of God.
But now, in relation to what we have just said about sonship, that
Divine thought concerning kingship is not just of an office nor
of a position. Kingship, in God’s mind, is a matter of a kind of person
- but not any person. God does not make anybody a king; it is a kind of
person. It is moral and spiritual. Moral
and spiritual factors support the Divine Throne, and God’s king must be the
full expression of moral and spiritual features. With God, a king is only a
king when he is of kingly character, and not because he comes in a line of
succession, nor on any other ground of choice and selection at all. With God,
kingship is kingly character, and Solomon, marvellous
to say, is brought, in the sovereignty of God, to that place where kingship
reaches its full expression, so far as the type is concerned, though that, of
course, always falls short of reality.
When you pass from Solomon to Christ, then you have this very
thing in pre-eminence. “I have set My king upon My
holy hill” (Psalm 2:6). Why? Because He is kingly. In
the fullest, most complete sense, He is the embodiment of all those high thoughts
of God, both morally and spiritually. When we speak about Jesus Christ as being
Lord, and when we think of Him in terms of kingship, lordship, rulership, and of His kingdom, we are not thinking of
temporal things. We are thinking of spiritual things. He holds His position in
virtue of His character, and what He is in person. There is none like Him.
But then note another thing. Here is this Divine thought and idea
about kingship which is represented by Solomon in such a full way, but where
you have a Divine thought carrying a Divine intention, you will always have
another thought, something which is intended to take the place of the Divine
thought. So in the matter of kingship you have to go back in the history of
Israel, and you find the Divine thought subverted. The first of the line of
actual, temporal kings was Saul, and Saul was not God’s thought, but the
embodiment of man’s thought. At a point when the spiritual life of Israel was
very low, and spiritual matters were not dominant, Satan found his opportunity
- as he always does when the spiritual life gets low. He rushed in, took
advantage of the spiritual condition, and suggested the idea of kingship to men
of low and poor spirituality, which meant that, not having God’s thoughts and
God’s mind (because they were not men of the Spirit) they accepted the
suggestion and found a king after their own mind. Thus they precipitated this
matter, forestalled God’s thought, and pushed Saul in.
Do you notice how that has happened again and again - a Divine
thought carrying a Divine intention, and then the enemy seeking to forestall
and putting in something on the same principle, but of a different kind? It
nearly happened with Solomon himself. Solomon was chosen and David had given
his word about him; then Adonijah, his brother,
worked subtly and gathered leaders around himself. He
made a feast and was proclaimed king, in order to carry away the throne from
Solomon. Thank God, it did not work, but you can see what took place, and how
exactly this is in keeping with something that commonly happens. It is going to
happen in the supreme way. God is about to bring in, finally and fully, His
King - His Son - and Satan will have Anti-christ, the
embodiment of all human thoughts about kingship, pushed to the fore to try and
anticipate God.
Let us note that, not only in these great ways, but in every way,
a low state of spiritual life is always Satan’s opportunity for giving
something on a Divine principle, but which is itself
false. The only safety is in a fulness of spiritual
life. That is what came out in Solomon - safety when things were at fulness in Israel. There was no chance for anything else to
come in. Safety is not along the line of suspicion, watching like dogs for
every bit of heresy, and seeing whether things are sound. Safety is in the
absolute lordship of Jesus Christ, and all that that means. If the people of
God get there, they need not worry about the success of these other things at
all. I said at the beginning that there are all kinds of maladies afflicting
the Church which are due to this smallness of spiritual life, and these
maladies are suspicions, prejudices, fears, all this which is going about and
which is deadening and crippling and paralysing the
life of the Church. If we were only in the full flood of spiritual life and all
that Christ in His place means, we would be delivered from all these things and
would be getting on with the work of building the House, instead of all the
time being taken up with the question: ‘Is this quite safe, quite sound?’ Well,
Saul was the embodiment of man’s idea, not God’s, and he was the attempted fore-stalling
of that Divine thought, as Antichrist will be; but it is doomed, as are all
man’s ideas when they get in the way of God’s. Ultimately, they are doomed.
One further thing about Solomon: he came to his place, and held
it, by Divine sovereignty because he was beloved of God. Those two things must
always be kept together. Sovereignty, yes, but because he was
beloved of God. There is the mystery of Solomon’s birth. We know who
Bathsheba was and what happened, the tragedy and the breakdown in relation to
Solomon’s birth, and if we begin to ask questions we get into difficulties; but
we have to see a sovereignty at work behind this. And,
while we do not link that with the Lord Jesus, there is a line, even in His
case, which carries this wonderful principle. It is sovereign grace. Oh, if
anybody is the embodiment of sovereign grace in full expression, it is Solomon.
Do you remember the genealogy of the Lord Jesus at the opening of the Gospels
and some of the people mentioned in it? Rahab the
harlot - and Christ came of her. And Ruth the Moabitess:
you say that these are dark steps leading up to Christ. But are they? It
depends upon how you look at it. They lead right up to Him Who
is the embodiment of sovereign grace, and that is all you have to say about it.
Grace to Rahab!
Ought she to be in the Divine line? And ought Ruth to be here? A Moabitess, concerning which people and nation the word had
been uttered: “A Moabite shall not enter into the assembly of the Lord; even to
the tenth generation shall none belonging to them enter into the assembly of
the Lord for ever” (Deuteronomy 23:3)! What has gone
wrong? Grace has triumphed over law - that is all! “Where sin abounded, grace
did abound more exceedingly” (Romans 5:20), and in Christ that is gathered up.
And, mark you, it was at that place where in type He had fulfilled all the work
of grace for us in death, burial and resurrection - at Jordan - that the
heavens were cleft, and the voice was heard: “This is My beloved Son” (Matthew
3:17) - beloved of God. On the other hand, belovedness
is all on the ground of grace: “He hath made us accepted in the beloved”
(Ephesians 1:6); “Who delivered us out of the power of darkness, and translated
us into the kingdom of the Son of His love” (Colossians 1:13). So Solomon has his place in sovereignty, but only because he is
beloved of the Lord. Of course, I am not touching upon the Divine rights
of the Lord Jesus as equal with God, on His rights to reign, or to be Lord; for
what I see is that the Bible is not, in the first place, occupied with what God
and Christ are in Themselves, outside of this universe
and remote from us. The Bible is concerned with how They
have come into our life, into our world, and the ground upon which They have
adopted this world, this creation - and that is grace. And sonship, so far as
the New Testament is concerned, is always linked with Divine grace. You find
sonship in redemption, reconciliation, justification. It is a spiritual, not an
official, matter, through the grace of God.
Why did God act so lavishly and unrestrainedly with Solomon? It
takes a lot of room in the books of Samuel, the Kings and the Chronicles, far
more than I shall be able to give you as a background even for what I have to
say, but it seems, as you read, that the Lord was just falling over Himself
where Solomon was concerned to lavish good things upon him - give, give, give!
The Lord gave him riches and honour (2 Chronicles
1:12), and it seems that He found no restraint whatever in just letting go to
Solomon. Why? Because He was seeing through Solomon to the One Whom He intended
Solomon to represent as fully as ever one can be a representation of the Lord
Jesus. God was saying, in effect: ‘If we are going to have a representation of
the real thing, we will have a real representation and do it thoroughly.’ He
went as far as He could go with a man who was not His Son in reality in this
spiritual sense, because He saw the other Son all the time.
Dear friends, does that not come right back to us with this: that
a true apprehension and appreciation of the Lord Jesus is the way right into
the countenance of God? Do you want spiritual fulness?
Do you want to know all this wealth of which we shall speak as possessed by,
and given to, Solomon? Do you want to know where God’s smile can rest upon you,
and He be without restraint in your spiritual
enlargement? How can it be? Not by straining, nor searching, nor any kind of
inward scrutiny, struggle, or effort, but by appreciating His Son rightly,
being occupied with Christ, seeing and apprehending God’s Son in reality by the
Holy Spirit. The way to walk in the light of the Divine countenance where God
can give to you, can lead and teach, and can enrich and enlarge you, is an
adequate apprehension of the Lord Jesus. Be occupied with Him and the strain
goes out. You notice that in those days when Solomon was in his place there was
rest round about (1 Kings 4:24); the land had rest
and the people had rest - they found rest unto their souls. It is just like
that when the Lord Jesus has His place and we, by the Spirit, are seeing Him.
The strain goes out, rest enters in, and the inward civil war stops. Yes, it is
all bound up with God’s Son having His full place, with our being occupied with
Him and seeing Him by the Spirit.
This is only a glimpse, a fragment, of the greatness of Christ,
but, oh! it is so true that if conditions spiritually are to be in the Church
again as they were typically in Israel in the days of Solomon, we shall have to
get away from the littleness of our apprehension of truth and have a great
enlargement of heart. May the Lord grant us eyes to see a larger Christ than
ever we had imagined, a larger Cross, a larger Church,
and a larger Word of God!
Read: 1 Kings 10
In
this chapter Solomon sets forth the greatness of Christ in three respects - in
his riches, his food and his wisdom. Again we are brought back to this
governing consideration: why all this detail and elaboration? Why is all this
space in the three books - Samuel, Kings and Chronicles - occupied with setting
out in a very minute and thorough way the greatness of Solomon, and especially
in these three directions? There is a double answer. The first part is that
which we have already suggested: that he was sovereignly chosen to bring into
view Divine thoughts concerning the greater Son of David, and the real meaning
of sonship according to God’s heart. The second is not another, but only a part
of the first: that the purpose was to bring the glory of God into view; in
other words, to glorify God.
You
remember how David led up to this. He gathered together all the wealth, the
gold for the things of gold, the silver for the things of silver, the metals
and the precious stones, and then he added his own great treasure - and great
treasure it was! - and passed it over to the Lord for
His house (1 Chronicles 28 and 29). It is a great description, very full and
almost overwhelming. But then David suddenly seems to collapse before it all,
and as you read you feel something of an anticlimax. After having risen in
eloquence about the dedicating of it all to the Lord and the joy in doing it,
suddenly, in another voice, soft, hushed, subdued, he says: ‘But, after all,
what have we done? Of Thine own have we given Thee. It is all Thine own; it is
not our wealth, it is Thine.’ “Thine,
O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory,
and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine.” After all, it is the Lord’s glory, not ours. And
David passed that all on to Solomon his son; the son took it all up and brought
that glory of God, that wealth of God, into an embodiment of expression - the
house of God for the glory of God; for the house “is not for man, but for the
Lord God,” and “it must be exceeding magnifical” (1
Chronicles 29:1, and 22:5).
The
thing which is governing all this description, and explains the care taken to
give every detail in fulness, is the glory of God. So
the riches are the riches of His glory. Solomon’s riches and glory have passed
and are gone; but with the greater Son, the Only-begotten of the Father, the
true riches - the imperishable wealth that never passes - are stored up and
brought over, as we shall see later, for setting forth in the Church. But for
the present we note that they are firstly gathered up into Christ.
So
the answer to our opening enquiry is this, finally and supremely: this great,
full presentation of Solomon’s wealth is to lead us to glorify God, to lead on
to a worshipping people. For that is exactly what happened - the
revelation of the glory of God in a man (but what a man!) resulted in a
worshipping people.
The
Queen of Sheba came to see because of the Name of the Lord (1 Kings 10:1); and
the Name of the Lord is that which is involved in this. The Name of the Lord is
bound up with the fulness of Christ, and the glory of
God depends upon how Christ is seen and known as the Divine fulness.
It must come to this - we cannot keep away from it - that the Lord is only
glorified as His real fulness is brought into
practical revelation in Christ in the house of God. While the first and
all-governing thing is this glorifying of God - and it all traces back to God,
for God gave Solomon riches and power and wisdom - the thing which
immediately issues is the enrichment of God’s people. The Divine bounty was
never intended to be limited to Solomon as a solitary individual, for there to
be this one man walking by himself as an isolated unit in his kingdom, spending
all his wealth upon himself, and, like one of his peacocks, strutting about in
his own glory, turned in upon himself - like Nebuchadnezzar: “Is not this great
Babylon, which I have built...” (Daniel 4:30). There is nothing like
that here! You notice that immediately it turns out to the people of God and it
is for them, for their enrichment. It is not for personal and self-centred interests but for Israel; and the Queen of
Sheba puts her finger upon that: “Because the Lord loved Israel for ever,
therefore made he thee king” (1 Kings 10:9).
When
we turn to the Letter to the Ephesians we have that remarkable and mysterious
little phrase in Paul’s prayer for a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the
knowledge of Christ - “that ye may know... the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the
saints” (Ephesians 1:18). What does that mean? Well, in the mystery of God it
may mean that Christ has something in the saints which is His inheritance,
something which He - and He alone knows how it can be - regards as worth
having, something for His own satisfaction, by which He Himself is enriched. I
do not know how that can be, but I do see this: that Christ’s inheritance is
received from the Father, all the fulness of God is
lavished upon Him and stored up in Him, and He brings it into the Church - His
inheritance is brought into the saints. Whether that is a true exegesis or not
I do not know absolutely; but I believe that there is truth in this - that Christ brings into the Church the wealth which He has
inherited as the Son, just as Solomon brought into the house of God and into
Israel this great wealth which had been given by God. It was Christ’s
inheritance in the saints, not for Himself. He had it without ever coming here:
“...the glory which I had with Thee before the world was...” (John 17:5). He
had it all, for He created all things, but now He has brought His fulness here, and “of His fulness
we all received, and grace for grace” (John 1:16); “In Him ye are made full”
(Colossians 2:10). It is wealth for His people. So the glory of God works round
that way.
Dear
friends, it is not to the glory of God that any child of His should be in
spiritual poverty, or that His Church should be lacking in spiritual
wealth. God’s thought, and what He is anxious to do, is to make His
Church wealthy beyond its own dreams in the riches of Christ. Paul saw and knew
something of this: “O the depth of the riches...” (Romans 11:33); and again:
“The riches of His grace” (Ephesians 1:7). It would take a long time to dwell
upon the separate riches of Christ, on all the riches of grace. We can only
make the statement. My difficulty is to keep these things apart. I see that the
greatness of the Church is something which has to be dealt with by itself, but
here we overlap at once. The fulness, the riches, the
bounty of Christ, all that is stored up in Christ, is Churchwise,
not individualwise; it is corporate, collective. It
will take the whole Body to be the adequate vessel of the fulness
of Christ. Having said that, let us come back here. The glory of God is to be
found in a people who have come into, and are daily living in, the good of the
riches of Christ.
That
wealth is for their stewardship and distribution - that they have enough, and
plenty to give away. Have you plenty to give away? What about your stewardship?
Is it a hard, hard labour of collecting enough to
meet demand, or have you a margin for others? We are thinking in the realm of
the Letter to the Ephesians - the “stewardship of the mystery” (Ephesians 3:9),
something committed to us. But we have to see, ‘the eyes of our heart must be
enlightened, that we may know the hope of His calling, the riches of the glory
of His inheritance in the saints, the exceeding greatness of His power to usward who believe’ (Ephesians 1:18,19). We have to see and
know, for in order to fulfil a stewardship it has to
come from the inside. All this was in Solomon for his household and for the
nation, and the fulness of Christ is for His people,
for the Church, as a stewardship. I trust that this is not something that is
strange to you and you do not understand, but, even if it is, let it be stated
with great emphasis that this is God’s thought and intention for us: that we
should fulfil a stewardship of the riches of Christ.
And that will be our vindication, our justification for existence, the Divine
certificate for our ministry. There is no other ground. Have we got the goods?
Can we meet spiritual need? Will what we have solve the problem of spiritual
weakness and limitation? The test of our stewardship is when people are in
desperation, and when people become conscious of their need, then should be the
vindication of all our claims. Have we what is needed? This is the will of God
concerning us, for it is all for us in Christ, the greater than Solomon.
We
touch on this matter of food - Solomon’s provision for one day. Living daily in
an apprehension, a consciousness, a realization, of how full Christ is - that
is where God’s glory is. This is not just a statement of fact, but God’s
thought and will. Those who have really come to the place where Christ occupies
the position which God has appointed for Him - have come there individually and
in relationship with other believers - know very well that they have been
delivered from spiritual limitation, and there is plenty, there is wealth,
there is abundance, there is an open heaven, and the Lord is not restrained. He
is giving and giving and giving. These things of Christ are all of a piece and
cannot really be isolated. You have to have the greatness of the Cross in order
to know the wealth of Christ. You have to have the greatness of the Church in
order to express the wealth of Christ. But, given that the Cross has a large
enough place objectively and subjectively, the heavens are open. Jordan is
accomplished, and the heavens are opened upon Him Who
is the beloved of God, this greater Jedidiah,
“Beloved of the Lord,” and the attestation is made: “My beloved...” (Matthew
3:17). And “He hath made us accepted in the beloved” (Ephesians 1:6). It is all
of a piece. Jordan, the Cross, is very necessary; but, given that, the Lord’s
thought for you and for all is that you should be in the land of plenty, not
struggling to make ends meet spiritually and worrying about where the next bit
is coming from. One thing that the Lord would teach us is that we can count
upon His supplies. It is wonderful! We may seem to have come to an end very
often, but that is just the Lord’s way of telling us that it is a new beginning
and there is more yet. These are not just statements: they are facts. I do not
know how much you really know of this. Those of us who minister considerably do
know something about it. There seems to be nothing left; then comes a new demand and a new fulness;
and it goes on. The Lord would have it like that in His Church. Oh, the
spiritual starvation! There are people going about saying: ‘I cannot find any
spiritual food. There is no meat and everything is so poor!’ Oh, how dishonouring that is to the Lord, and how contrary to His
mind! How it sets Christ at nought! What a little Christ
that implies! No! God is glorified when the experience of His people is Christ
in His fulness, just as Israel were
experiencing the wealth of Solomon.
Food
is intended to result in a satisfied people. Solomon’s food was for the
satisfaction, not only of himself, but of those dependent upon him. And this
wealth of Christ, this fulness of Christ, this food
that is in Christ, is firstly to make us satisfied people. I suppose that, in
the days of Solomon’s glory, to have walked up and down the land would have
been to see people who were well content; and God is glorified when He has a people content with Himself and with His Son. Is that true
of us? If it is not so, there is something wrong. We have no testimony and no
challenge whatever unless that is true. We have no power and no authority. When
others look upon our faces as Christians, what do they see? Starvation?
Or do they see satisfied people? Are we talking to people out of doctrine and
out of Scripture, or out of our own hearts and experience? Dear friends, this
is one practical challenge of the Word of God to us. Are you contented deep
down in your heart with the Lord? Are you satisfied? Is He all that you want,
and more? That is simple, but it is testing. The glory of God is bound up with
our being satisfied.
Secondly,
food is for growth unto maturity. Are you growing? The proof of growth is this:
that the fulness to you is something inexhaustible,
and beyond your present immediate need. It has met you here, but you realize
that there is something very much more. You have come into the realm where you
need not go and glean in any other field, for you have all you want here and
you are appropriating it and growing thereby. Is that true? A
people growing is a people that glorifies God, for they are attaining
unto all the fulness and the stature of a man in
Christ.
There
are several passages that speak of the wisdom of
Solomon. There is that one which tells us that “he spake
of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall” (1 Kings 4:33). How did he speak
of trees? Was he just a naturalist, describing trees and flowers, their beauty
and so on? No, he showed that trees were symbols. It was not just botany.
Certain men of education will make anybody wise in that respect, but not in the
sense that Solomon was wise. God gave him wisdom, and he saw Divine
principles through the trees. What is the cedar which is in Lebanon? It is the
very symbol of nobility, of spiritual greatness. In the Old Testament, trees
are types of men, and here in the trees there are characteristics hidden and Divine thoughts embodied. Solomon was getting through the
outer structure to the inner meaning and was unveiling the wisdom of God in the
creation. In a word, Solomon was showing that everything that God makes is not
just something made and something in itself, but that it embodies a Divine
thought. All the ordinances of the heavens, all the heavenly bodies and all the
forms of nature embody some Divine thought and principle, and the wisdom of Solomon was in disclosing the Divine principles in
nature.
“He
spake three thousand proverbs: and his songs were a
thousand and five” (1 Kings 4:32). What are proverbs? Well, they are statements
with a hidden meaning. The same word is used of the speech of the Lord Jesus.
Our word ‘parable’ is only another
word for ‘proverb.’ “He spake... in parables” (Matthew 13:3, etc.), that is,
statements with hidden meanings; and the wisdom of
Solomon was in bringing out hidden meanings. And songs - instruments
of worshipping and exaltation. You remember what the Apostle says about
the Lord Jesus: “...in Whom are hid...”
(Colossians 2:3). The Lord Jesus does not talk to us merely about trees and
nature in parables, but He says: “It is given to you to know the mysteries of
the kingdom” (Matthew 13:11). In the Lord Jesus there is, by the Holy Spirit,
the disclosing of Divine secrets by which the very creation will realize its
destiny. Do you see that the way to the realization of God’s eternal purpose is
the way of discovering the secrets of the Lord? Take the inclusive thing, the
Church. The word “mystery” relates to it (Ephesians 3:3, etc.). It is God’s mystery,
His secret. Before the world was, God conceived it and projected its eternal
vocation to serve Him in high purpose through the ages of the ages. It is the
deep secret of God.
How,
then, will you and I realize our very destiny according to God’s eternal
choosing and appointing? Only as the Holy Spirit reveals to
us the secrets of God. “Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, and
which entered not into the heart of man, whatsoever things God prepared for
them that love Him. But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit” (1
Corinthians 2:9, 10). What I am getting at is this: it is not good enough just
to read the Bible and take it as it stands on the surface. It is necessary for
the Holy Spirit to disclose to us God’s hidden things as they are summed up in
Christ. Christ is the wisdom of God, the fulness of
Divine knowledge, the embodiment of all that by which we are coming to the
realization of that great destiny and purpose for which we are chosen in
Christ, but there has to be a work of the Holy Spirit to disclose what is in
Christ to our hearts. It has to be along this line and after this kind - that the Spirit shows us something in Christ and we say: ‘I
have never seen that before!’ It comes with the power of a revelation which
changes us from that time and makes all the difference to us. There is
something more in that than just reading a passage of Scripture. You may read a
passage a thousand times and know it by heart, and then the Spirit says
something and that old familiar portion lights up, and you are brought to a new
place in consequence.
But
remember that all this must be practically expressed. I know that it is said
that the Queen of Sheba heard
of the wisdom of Solomon, and the Lord Jesus said that she came to hear
his wisdom, but it also says that she saw the wisdom of Solomon:
“And when the Queen of Sheba had seen all the wisdom of Solomon, and the house
that he had built, and the meat of his table, and the sitting of his servants,
and the attendance of his ministers, and their apparel, and his cupbearers, and
the ascent by which he went up into the house of the Lord...” (1 Kings 10:4, 5).
This was wisdom to be seen, and not only to be heard. The greatness of Christ
is not just something to be listened to; it is something to be seen, to be
manifested, in those who circle round Him. The Church is to show forth the excellencies of Him Who called you out of darkness into His
marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9); to show forth the
wisdom, and to make the wealth to be seen. We have already spoken of the need
for manifesting the satisfaction which we have in Christ. Let us see to it also
that our apprehension of the Divine thoughts does not remain only in the realm
of our understanding. And even if, after all that we have been saying about the
greatness of Christ, you do not really grasp its significance and have nothing
more than just the impression that Christ is much greater than ever you thought
He was, that will do to begin with. But ask for something more than that: that
this may become an inward reality and a working factor in your life. “Oh,
what a Christ have I!”
We
shall now consider more fully this one particular thing at the heart of this
whole matter of the greatness of Christ, lying beneath the choice of Solomon
and summing up his significance, and this one thing is his sonship. We are
passing as quickly as we can from Solomon to Christ, and perhaps we might
remind ourselves of the words said about him in this connection. The Lord said
to David: “Solomon thy son, he shall build My house
and My courts; for I have chosen him to be My son, and I will be his father” (1
Chronicles 28:6).
Now
that, as the first fragment in that connection, gives us the key to the basis
of this matter of sonship. Let me say again this general word - before we come
to the particular - that the significance of Solomon lies in that word
‘sonship,’ for, while Solomon’s kingship did represent the very peak of
Israel’s history in the matter of the monarchy, David is always, in the Word of
God, kept to the fore as the greatest of Israel’s kings. David certainly was a
very much greater man than Solomon when it comes to personalities; and it might
be wondered at that things did not end with David, seeing that he was what he
was in the Divine thought and was going for ever after to be kept by God in the
first place of Israel’s kings. Why did the history not stop with David? For
this reason: that a spiritual principle is being held to by God in a sovereign
way, and the principle is that everything is gathered up in sonship.
Ultimately, it is sonship which represents and embodies all God’s thought. So
the one thing that is constantly reiterated about Solomon is sonship. “Thy son... my son.” David said: “Of all my sons (for the
Lord hath given me many sons,) He hath chosen Solomon my son” (1 Chronicles
28:5) - the inclusiveness of sonship, and in a certain sense, the exclusiveness
also. It is this word ‘son’ that rules where Solomon is concerned. And when we
come over to Christ, to the greater Son of David, we find that everything heads
up to, and takes its character and its meaning from, His Sonship. Well, that is
a general statement of fact which you will do well to remember and to ponder,
for reasons which will become apparent as we go on.
We
find that John and Paul are the great exponents in this matter. John presents
Christ pre-eminently as the Son. He sums up all his Gospel in a statement that
everything written therein was with one object: that the readers might believe
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing they might
have life in His Name (John 20:31). John, then, presents Christ as the Son; it
is the Person that he has in view.
Paul
also represents Christ as the Son, but he goes further. I have just said that there
was nothing further, but what I mean is this: that Paul goes on to open up the
content of sonship, and to show that there is an aspect of it which is a
related matter. By the Holy Spirit we are sons. Christ is a first one, the
Firstborn; and (leaving out the factor of deity) sonship as a relationship is
something into which we are called. And the meaning of sonship is Paul’s great
theme; the content, the explanation, the relatedness and the inclusiveness of
it.
Now
it is with these two things that we shall be occupied for a little while at
this time, and here we must make some links in the Word:
“Moreover the Lord telleth thee that the Lord will make thee a house. When thy
days are fulfilled, and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy
seed after thee, that shall proceed out of thy bowels,
and I will establish his kindgom. He shall build a
house for My name, and I will establish the throne of
his kingdom for ever. I will be his father, and he
shall be My son” (2 Samuel 7:11–14).
“He shall build a house
for My name; and he shall be My son, and I will be his
father; and I will establish the throne of his kingdom over Israel for ever” (1 Chronicles 22:10).
“Solomon thy son, he shall
build My house and My courts; for I have chosen him to
be My son, and I will be his father. And I will establish his kindgom for ever” (1 Chronicles 28:6,7).
“And we bring you good
tidings of the promise made unto the fathers, that God hath fulfilled the same
unto our children, in that He raised up Jesus; as also it is written in the
second psalm, Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee. And as
concerning that He raised Him up from the dead, now no more to return to
corruption, He hath spoken on this wise, I will give you the holy and sure
blessings of David” (Acts 13:32–34).
“Unto which of the angels
said He at any time, Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee? and again, I will be to Him a Father, and He shall be to Me
a Son? ...But of the Son He saith, Thy throne, O God,
is for ever and ever; and the sceptre of uprightness
is the sceptre of Thy kingdom” (Hebrews 1:5,8).
I
think it is quite patent that the things said by God to and concerning Solomon
were not meant to be fulfilled in their entirety and fulness
in him. The Lord was speaking with a further thought, with a mind beyond
Solomon. He was really, in His own mind, speaking about the Lord Jesus. Solomon
would be but a temporary, partial fulfilment of what
God said about sonship, and about the kingdom and the house. God was thinking
further on. (That is our manner of speaking as men. God does not speak in past,
present and future; everything is present with Him, an eternal Now, and, when He
spoke, Christ was present in mind and intention with Him. But so far as we are
concerned, as children of time, the completeness of the statement related to
the future, to the Lord Jesus.) “I will be to Him a Father, and he shall be to
Me a Son;” “I will establish his kingdom” - these words were spoken of Solomon,
but it is not difficult to see that, in the case of the Lord Jesus, there is an
infinite transcendence. There is something here in connection with Him which goes far beyond anything that was possible in the case
of Solomon, and the one thing which proves that is the very language that the
Lord uses: "I will establish his throne for ever.”
That was not true of Solomon, nor of Israel, but it is
true of the Lord Jesus.
What
I am stressing in the first place is this: that John and Paul bring Christ into
view as Son on the principle of eternity. You know how John seeks to press that
home in his Gospel in a number of very impressive ways. He opens: “In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,”
clearly intending to emphasize the eternity of this sonship, for He very soon
comes into time: “And the Word became flesh, and tabernacled
among us;” that is the time aspect, the Now;
the other is timeless. He seeks to emphasize the eternity of the Son in other
ways, but there is one way which is tremendously impressive throughout John’s
Gospel, and that is his use of the title “I
am.” That title comes out specifically, and I think supremely, in John 18,
in the narrative of the guard, led by Judas, coming to take Jesus. There He was
with His disciples, and the band with lanterns and torches and weapons arrived.
He quietly said: “Whom seek ye?” They said: “Jesus of
Nazareth.” He said: “I am,” and they
went backward, and fell to the ground. And He said again: “Whom
seek ye?” “Jesus of Nazareth.” “I told you that I am.” (There is no ‘He’ there, as you know. ‘I
am He’ is not in the text at all.) “I
AM!” You are at once taken right back to Moses. “And Moses said unto God,
Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The
God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is His name? what shall I say
unto them? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and He said, Thus shalt
thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you” (Exodus 3:13,
14). You remember the other occasion when the Lord Jesus used that title for
Himself: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). What a mix-up of tenses!
“Before Abraham was, I am.” That takes us outside of our language altogether,
right out of time and of natural sense, into God’s realm. I AM is not time at
all. I AM is not this world at all. I AM is from everlasting to everlasting.
John brings in Christ as Son on that basis of eternity.
But
Paul not only brings Christ in in His eternity: he begins to build the Church
upon that eternity. In the Letters to the Ephesians and Colossians, which are
in my mind just now, we have Christ in His eternity, and then: “He chose us in
Him before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4). From that eternal
election and foreordination and predestination Paul builds the Church. He says:
‘This is nothing of time or of earth. This is a thing which has its roots and
its foundation away back in eternity, and it goes on unto the ages of the ages.
Time is a mere fragment in this thing.’ Paul is building upon the eternity of
Christ. What has that to say to us? Well, of course, it bears out our first and
all-governing point - the transcendence of Christ over Solomon. This greater
than Solomon that is here, this Son - how infinitely more He is than that son!
What
is sonship? In accordance with God’s full thought (not His partial thought in
Solomon - that is only representation and type and figure and shadow), it is
something which takes its rise out of eternity and goes on when time shall be
no more. That is sonship in God’s thought. But what more does
it say to us? Chosen in Him before the world was,
foreknown, foreordained, predestinated before time was - what does it convey?
Well, I AM is the synonym for stability: “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and
ever” - the stability of Christ, the stability of the Church, and the stability
of saints. Oh, what an assurance, what a strength and
what an immense thing for faith is this matter of the sovereign grace of God!
Grace working hand in hand with sovereignty! As we have pointed out before,
there is no accounting for Solomon, seeing what happened in relation to his
birth, except for the sovereign grace of God, and that is the message of
sonship. Yes, sovereignty and grace: how vast! how
great!
We
have said before that emancipation from all our difficulties and problems will
be along the line of spiritual enlargement, and spiritual enlargement will be
by way of a new and a far greater apprehension of Christ; and here it is. Look
at Him! What is the object of telling us all this about Christ? Do we just want
information that Christ is God’s Son, and that He was one with the Father in
eternity, and will be for ever and ever? I am quite reverent in asking that
question, and in saying that, as a purely objective matter somewhere out in
God’s universe, it does not matter to me very much. But when you say that God
has revealed this to men, then I want to know why.
What is in the Divine mind in revealing it? And the answer is here - you and I
are concerned in it, we were chosen in relation to it before the world was, and
in Him we are bound up with it. Oh, then, what an immense thing it is to be
receiving eternal life, age-abiding life, and being linked with the eternal Son
of God! Sonship goes beyond anything that is merely temporary and transient.
Our union with Christ brings us right into the roots of His eternity, not only
in duration but in character, in nature; for eternal life is not merely endless
duration, it is the glory of God in nature, in essence. So Paul builds
everything upon this fact of eternity, and brings us in. What a wonderful
revelation! As a mere presentation of truth it is fascinating, captivating,
bewildering. But brought home by the Holy Spirit, how transforming it can be,
how establishing and how emancipating! Oh, if only the Church lived in the good
of that, how all these petty, temporary factors would go out! After all, what
does this and that matter? It is only for a time, and for this world at most,
but the thing that matters is what God is doing above and beyond this world
altogether.
Well,
that is the first thing which comes in here through John and through Paul:
Christ as the Son, and then the content and nature of sonship.
Then
John brings in Christ as Son as Sovereign King. He brings Him in in a strange
way, but how deep and terrific is its significance:
“Pilate therefore entered
again into the Praetorium, and called Jesus, and said
unto Him, Art Thou the King of the Jews? Jesus answered, Sayest
thou this of thyself, or did others tell it concerning Me?
Pilate answered, Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the
chief priests delivered Thee unto me: what hast Thou done? Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if My kingdom were of this
world, then would My servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the
Jews: but now is My kingdom not from hence. Pilate therefore said unto Him, Art
Thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end have I been born, and
to this end am I come into the world, that I should bear witness unto the
truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth My voice” (John 18:33–37; ASV).
A
strange way of bringing in the Son in terms of sovereignty! There is a
statement here: “My kingdom is not of
this world.” It is just a naked statement, made in the presence of none who
could understand it, but it is recorded by John with a purpose, for it links
sonship and kingship. But Paul not only takes up the fact; he explains and
opens out the statement.
“My kingdom is not of this
world.”
What has Paul to say about that?
“...He raised Him from the
dead, and made Him to sit at His right hand in the heavenlies, far above all
rule, and authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is named, not
only in this world, but also in that which is to come: and He put all things in
subjection under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things...” (Ephesians 1:20–22).
There
we stop, for the next words take us to the greatness of the Church, and we are
dealing with the greatness of Christ. That is Paul’s explanation of Christ’s
statement: “My kingdom is not of this world”; “...at His right hand in the
heavenlies, far above all rule, and authority.” You cannot say that of Solomon!
Great as Solomon was - and the statement about Solomon is that he was vastly
superior in every sense to every other king that was known - here is One Who
leaves Solomon altogether in the shade! He is far above all rule and authority,
not only on this earth, but in every realm. He is over all things. That is the
greatness of Christ the Son in terms of kingship.
But
then what about His kingdom? “I will establish his kingdom for
ever” (1 Chronicles 28:7). Oh, that has its full fulfilment
in Christ, in His kingdom. Paul takes this up in Colossians:
“...Who delivered us out
of the power of darkness, and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His
love”
(Colossians 1:13).
How I would like to stop there, by way of parenthesis, to try and
disentangle the situation into which Christianity has got today through mixing
up the idea of the Kingdom and the Church - a tangle which is entirely the
cause of its weakness and defeat. What I mean is this: that today the Lord’s people - yes, even
evangelical Christianity - are trying to run the Church on the Solomon-kingdom
line, that is, an earthly thing, something of this world, to be seen, known,
heard of, taken account of by and in this world; bigness to impress, to write
up; to gain place and influence by names, titles and all the things that belong
to this world; and they call it: ‘Extending the Kingdom.’ They have a false
idea of the Kingdom. Here Paul links these two things for this dispensation - Church
and Kingdom - and says it is heavenly and not of this world at all. Immediately
after this he goes on:
“If then ye were raised
together with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated
on the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things that
are above, not on the things that are upon the earth” (Colossians 3:1, 2; ASV).
No, not even in a religious way. “My kingdom is not of this world,” said the Lord, and Paul explains
it. The Church in this dispensation is the embodiment of the Kingship and
Kingdom principles of Christ in a spiritual way, and they lift the Church clean
out of this world and make it a heavenly thing. Immediately we begin to get a
church with its own orders and forms and means which belong to this earth, in
architecture, vestments and all that sort of thing, we are back on a Solomon
basis of the Kingdom, and we have left the heavenly basis of the Church.
“My kingdom is not of this
world,”
said John as to this Son, and Paul explains: “...seated at His right hand in the heavenlies, far above all rule,”
“all things in subjection under His feet,” “Head over all things.” But
where is it? Go over the world and see where you can find it, and the only
thing you will find is that ghastly caricature of it, the Pope and the Roman
Church - a false presentation of this “Head over all things to the church,” a
temporal thing. With Paul it is a spiritual thing. In union with Christ we are
not only lifted out of time into eternity, but out of earth into the heavens;
and all now is of a spiritual and heavenly order in this dispensation. “My kingdom is not of this world: if My kingdom were of this world, then would My servants
fight.” That is the statement, putting it in one way. Put it the other way:
‘Because My Kingdom is not of this world, My servants
do not fight with flesh and blood for its establishment.’ Paul tells us what
that means: “Our wrestling is not against
flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against
the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in
the heavenlies” (Ephesians 6:12). That is what Christ meant! Here it is
Christ speaking and explaining Himself through Paul, explaining what He said to
Pilate when there was no one who could understand. Now it is possible to
explain. The Spirit has come and formed a company of people who, by the Spirit,
are capable of understanding things the Lord said when no one did understand
and He had to say: “I have yet many
things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when He, the
Spirit of truth, is come, He shall guide you into all the truth” (John
16:12,13); and here it is. Not with flesh and blood,
for it is spiritual. It has gone out into a vast realm, so much greater than
the realm of Solomon, and it is in and from that realm that everything is being
governed. Do not make any mistake about it! This world, and
the kingdoms of this world, are not taking their own course, and they
are not ultimately taking the devil’s course. Yes, the world-rulers of this
darkness - that is the immediate scene, the devil’s work, but behind there is
One Who is using the devil and his work, Whose servant Satan is, Who is
Sovereign Lord, far above all rule and dominion, authority and name, whatever
that name may be, man or devil. He is over all. Either the Scripture is not
true, or that is a fact.
How
tremendous is this sovereignty of the Lord Jesus! So many of our problems will
begin to dissolve when we get a true conception of the greatness of Christ! Why
this? Why that? Why the other? Why does Satan seem to have it all his own way?
Why does Satan score and win? Are you sure he does? Look beyond, and see if
that very work of Satan is not going to be taken up into the sovereignty of our
Lord and made eventually to serve Divine ends. “I would have you know,
brethren, that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto
the progress of the gospel” (Philippians 1:12). The sufferings of the Church at
the hands of devils and men have, in the end, resulted in the furtherance of
the work of God.
John,
then, presents Him as King; yes, in humiliation and in suffering, but King. Oh,
there is a marvellous secret and mystery there which
it would take me too long to deal with now. I see it there but dimly, but I see
it in that outstanding incident in the life of Solomon, selected as an isolated
example of his wisdom. No doubt there were many others, but this was taken out
of them all and recorded as an example - the two women and the two babes. They
were living and sleeping together, and in the night one of the babes was
overlaid and died. The woman, whose babe that was, quietly
put her dead child over by the other mother, and took the living baby to
herself. In the morning the rightful mother saw that her child was gone
and this dead one was not hers, and she went to Solomon about it. The two women
were arraigned before Solomon and the whole problem was presented to him.
Solomon, with that insight, discernment and wisdom which God had given - and remember, wisdom is always the means by which problems are
solved - decided on a very radical course. He called for a sword and said:
‘Divide the living child in two, and give half to each of the women.’ That
settled it! The false mother stood as a spectator, coldly unmoved by this
procedure. The rightful mother let go; she let go herself, let go her own
rights, for the life of that child. “Oh,” she said, “give her the living child,
and in no wise slay it.” In effect: ‘Do not kill my child, even if I must part
with it. I let go all that is dear to me. If it costs me everything, let the
child live!’ Solomon said: ‘That is the mother. Give her the child.’
Do
you remember the Lord Jesus saying: “He
that is a hireling and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, beholdeth the wolf coming, and leaveth
the sheep, and fleeth, and the wolf snatcheth them, and scattereth
them: he fleeth because he is a hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good shepherd; ...and I
lay down My life for the sheep” (John 10:12–14)?
Have you got the principle in the two things? You have to solve this problem of
life and death. How is it going to be solved? By yielding up
your own life. This is true of Christ. He could only solve this problem
and establish His right, His claim and His ownership by letting go. “Whosoever would save his life shall lose
it: and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake
shall find it” (Matthew 16:25). It would take much longer than that to
investigate the matter properly, but I see dimly a kingship here. A greater than Solomon is here, and He is dealing with a much
greater problem and situation.
His
right and His ownership have to be established. How will He do it? By grasping,
or by fighting in the flesh, or by asserting Himself? No, by
giving His life a ransom for many (Matthew 20:28). There He deals with
the whole problem of life and death, and that is what John brings out.
What
I am seeing here is this: John records what the Lord Jesus says - “Father... glorify Thy Son, that the Son may
glorify Thee: even as Thou gavest Him authority over
all flesh, that to all whom Thou hast given Him, He should give eternal life”
(John 17:1,2). “As
the Father hath life in Himself, even so gave He to the Son also to have life
in Himself: and He gave Him authority to execute judgment, because He is a Son
of man” (John 5:26, 27). Here is sonship brought out in a third aspect, and
in this He comes immediately into vital relationship with mankind. The Son of
Man is a racial title: it speaks of relatedness to man. But how does He find
man? In death. How is He to redeem man? As the Redeeming Kinsman, the Son of Man. How is He to
exercise the authority which He has been given to raise man from the dead? He
will lay down His life, He will let go His own right, He will yield up His own
claims, He will set His own personal interests aside, He
will die for that which He has come to redeem. “I am the good shepherd... I lay down My life
for the sheep.” The Son of Man redeems. How? In that infinite wisdom of the
Cross; “Christ crucified... the wisdom of
God” (1 Corinthians 1:23, 24); that infinite wisdom of laying down the
life, of letting go. That woman let go what was her right. The Lord Jesus, “existing in the form of God, counted not
the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself,
taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being
found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient even into
death, yea, the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:5–8). In that letting go
He redeemed us unto God, He saved the flock. Solomon was very wise, and that
story is very impressive and beautiful, but he could not do this. He could not
go right out into that vast realm of redeeming kinship with a whole race, and,
on the principle of becoming obedient unto death, redeem the race.
That
is the greatness of Christ. Son, Eternal Son in Sovereign
Kingship, Son as Redeeming Kinsman. Paul opens that up to bring the
Church right into the full stature of a man in Christ - but that is another
subject.
Read: 1 Chronicles
29:21, 22; 1 Kings 8:62, 63; 2 Chronicles 4:1; 7:1, 4, 5, 9; Ephesians 1:6–8;
3:17–19; 5:27
In
those chapters of the Book of Chronicles we have already seen Solomon so
lavishly and overflowingly dealt with by God because
He had in view One greater than Solomon whom He was seeking to interpret to men
by way of illustration; so also in the different records of Solomon’s reign we
find the intimation of the greatness of the Cross given by God by the same
means of illustration. The great altar, pointing to the Cross, is brought into
view, and then in the double connection - the exaltation of the king and the
consecration of the house of God - the greatness of the significance of that
altar is intimated by the immensity of the sacrifice.
We but glance, in passing, at that double connection of the Cross. Its greatness is seen
firstly related to the enthronement of the king. There is a good deal about
that in the New Testament - that enthronement, that exaltation being because of
that immense work which was accomplished in the Cross.
“...
obedient unto death, yea, the death of the cross.
Wherefore also God highly exalted Him, and gave unto Him the name which is
above every name; that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in
heaven and things on earth and things under the earth” (Philippians 2:8–10).
Then
secondly we see how the house of God is established upon the greatness of the
Cross, and how the Church takes its significance from the Cross. We have read
something about that in the Ephesian Letter, which has more to do with the
Church than any other letter or any other part of the Bible. You find that the
very foundations of the Church are in the Cross of the Lord Jesus.
We
leave that for the moment, and seek to speak for this time solely about the
greatness of the Cross.
We
are impressed when we read of this sacrifice which was made by Solomon. It is
almost bewildering to think of it - battalions upon battalions of oxen! The
highways must have been thronged with cattle and with sheep during those days,
for there were thousands upon thousands! It does not do to let our imagination
dwell upon that! And there must have been literally rivers of blood. It is a
terrible picture, and but for the moral support which was found in the meaning
and spiritual value of it, I am quite sure the priests, during those days, must
have been overwhelmed by the ghastliness of it. They could only have gone
through the slaying of those thousands and thousands of oxen, sheep and lambs,
with the support given by the realization of what it meant. All that which is
beyond our imagination - and we do not want to dwell upon it too much - is
indicative in the type of how great is the Cross of the Lord Jesus. It should
lead us to think again. If that is a type of the Cross, a type of Christ the
Offering for sin, and if it is true that types are always far less than that
which they typify, how great must the Cross be! By mere logical deduction, the
Cross in the Divine mind must be immense. And yet we are distinctly and definitely
told that all that offering in Solomon’s day, both at his enthronement and at
the dedication of the temple, and all that had led up to it through many
generations from the first recorded sacrifice (the offering of Abel), and every
subsequent sacrifice, aggregating millions in number, was unavailing in any
sense of finality.
It
was unavailing in two ways. First, because it never reached a final end; it had
to be repeated again and again. There was no end to this thing. Yes, this
morning the sacrifice has been offered, and perhaps for the moment it has
secured a kind of ceremonial adjustment to God, an acknowledgment of God which
is taken account of by Him; but it has to be repeated this evening, and again
tomorrow, and every morning and evening throughout all life; and when life at
its longest is finished the thing is not concluded; the next generation must
take it up and go on, and then the next.
And
in this second and included sense it was unavailing, in that it never really
dealt with conscience; that is, it never rolled the burden of sin from the
conscience. It was merely external and ceremonial; it was religion which,
though very thorough going, had really no relatedness to the inner life.
“...gifts and sacrifices that cannot, as touching the conscience, make the
worshipper perfect” (Hebrews 9:9). Positively and definitely it was unavailing.
And
look at the immensity of it! I say again that it is overpowering to contemplate
all that tremendous offering made by Solomon. But then gather up the
generations! Then come to these simple but marvellous
statements: “...once at the end of the ages hath He been manifested to put away
sin by the sacrifice of Himself” (Hebrews 9:26); “...the offering of the body
of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10); “...when He had offered one
sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right
hand of God” (Hebrews 10:12). One offering, and only
one! What a work that must be if in one single act it does what all this other,
in its immensity through generations, has never been able to accomplish! “By
one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are
sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14). All the other, it says, could never make the
worshippers perfect; but He, by one offering, perfected for
ever. What a sacrifice! What a Cross! Twenty and two thousand oxen, and all the thousands of sheep and lambs, yes; but one
single offering did it once for all! There is no harm in reiteration, in
dwelling upon it, that we may really register the significance of this. One
single offering, just one, and all that other is
swallowed up!
Why
one, and once and for all? Well, surely there is present in the one thing that
which was absent in all the others. What was that? Simply the
full satisfaction of God in the matter of a perfect nature. Although
these animal sacrifices were ceremonially perfect, typically without spot or
blemish, actually that related only to the physical side. They were selected
sacrifices which were of a special breed and pedigree, and from which there
were absent certain flaws of mixture, but this was merely external. If you got
right into the bloodstream you would find the old creation there. Those oxen
could fight as well as any others! It was there in the blood, for it was
nature, the old creation. Only in a sort of ceremonial way were they perfect.
But He - not ceremonially, but actually, intrinsically perfect - offered
Himself - not ceremonially, but actually - without spot unto God. In His blood
there was no corruption. Somewhere, in the mystery of God, there was a clean
cutting in between His inheritance from His earthly mother, and His own Divine
nature; the tainted thing was cut off, and in Him there was none of the Adam
corruption. “The prince of the world cometh: and he hath nothing in Me” (John 14:30). It was the essential, intrinsic perfection
of nature in the one offering which was not found in all the others. That was
what God was looking for: a perfect being, a perfect human being, a
perfect specimen of creation, one who in essential nature fully satisfied the
thought of God in making man. God found that in Him; and that being offered
unto God, there need be no more offering. It was once and for all and for ever. It is finished, for God is satisfied. That is the
great foundation of our faith; the greatness of the Cross in the light of Who
it is that is on that Cross; for it is the greatness of Christ which gives the
greatness to the Cross.
The greatness of the Cross in such terms is the basis of
our salvation, our hope, our justification, our righteousness. Then let us once
and for all cease to look for perfection anywhere else, in ourselves or in
others, and keep our eyes on the object which satisfies God - the sole and
final object of His satisfaction.
We have to see the Cross, then, in those Divine terms, in
its four dimensions - breadth and length and height and depth - and until we
have so seen it our salvation is still lacking in essential qualities, and we,
as saved people, will not be the people that God means us to be.
The next thing that I want to say is that the Cross of
our Lord Jesus is different from all that foreshadowing and typifying in the
Old Testament, and different from this immense representation in the days of
Solomon, in this second respect - that it is super-historical. That sounds
technical, but what I mean is that it is something bigger than time, and time is only another word for history. I wonder if
you have noticed that in the earliest Christian literature, that is, the
epistles of the New Testament (not the Gospels, for they were written after the
epistles - bear that clearly in mind, for it will make a lot of difference!) Calvary
is never once mentioned. The story of the crucifixion, of the Cross, is never
referred to in the earliest Christian literature. Reference is always made to
the death of Christ; not to the crucifixion, nor Calvary, but to the death. There
is a vast deal of difference. One is just historical, a fact, something that
took place at a certain time in a certain place in the history of this world;
that is the crucifixion, and it is historical.
The death of Christ is not that. The Apostles, when they
wrote their epistles, were occupied with something spiritual and not
historical; universal and not local; eternal and not just in time; they dealt
with the death of Christ, and it is set in an immense setting, against an
immense background. The death is referred to a very great deal, and yet the
story of the death is never once told in the epistles. That is not without significance,
and is because in the epistles we have got away into the real realm of the
meaning of the Cross. The crucifixion was less than forty years old when the
epistles were written. I venture to think that if something like that had
happened in our lifetime and we were writing within forty years of the event,
we should tell the story, giving all the details and saying what had happened,
and where, and who was present. We should give the details that we have in the
Gospels. And yet the Apostles, when they wrote their epistles, left all that
out, although they were writing on what happened. But with them it was
spiritual, it was in another realm altogether, for it was inner. The Cross of
the Lord Jesus was to them something infinitely greater than an historical
happening on a hill outside Jerusalem. The way in which the death of Christ is
introduced is simply: “Once at the end of the ages hath He been manifested to
put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself” (Hebrews 9:26). Simple, but, you see, it goes far beyond anything of time and anything local. Is
it not remarkable that, in their writings, they never make it a date in the
calendar? It never was a date in their calendar naturally, and yet it was the
thing that had changed all calendars. To them it was not just something
historical; it was spiritual and much bigger than an event to be marked upon
the calendar.
Now let us get to something of the meaning of that. In
the first place, in the Cross of the Lord Jesus all history is gathered up and
transcended, and we are brought into the great realm of the Divine sovereignty.
Oh, I find such a tremendous uplift and release and emancipation as I
contemplate more and more the sovereignty of God, especially working through
grace! Here in the Cross of the Lord Jesus we have the vindication of God in
His choice of Israel. The story of Israel is history, but there is something
behind that. There is the choice of Israel, for they were chosen from among all
the nations and separated unto God, a sovereign act for a sovereign purpose. What
was the purpose? Why did God choose Israel and separate them as a people unto
Himself? With one object - that by means of them He might reveal Himself to all
the nations and make them a blessing to all. That was God’s purpose, and in
order that they might fulfil that great elect purpose
they must be a separated people, cut off from the nations, and having no
communication with them. They must be a holy people, separated, distinguished,
completely isolated in their moral and spiritual life from the nations, a
people wholly for God’s possession, in order that they might bring God in
revelation to all the nations. You see how essential their separation was for
that! It is a principle, a law. If you are going to be an instrument, a
channel, a vessel of Divine revelation and blessing, you have to be
consecrated, sanctified, wholly cut off and separated unto God. Hence Satan’s
persistent and continuous effort and labour to break
down that distinctiveness and to get Israel mixed up with the other peoples
round about.
The whole history of Israel is the history of that effort
of Satan to spoil their consecration; and when Israel in decline lost the
vision of their elect calling and purpose, and that great Divine intention
concerning them faded from their view, then they became mixed up with the
nations, they intermarried, and the wall of distinctiveness was broken down. And
the prophets came in and proclaimed Israel’s holy and elect calling in order to
remind them of how God separated them unto Himself from the beginning, and to
bring again into view the great thing which God had done in choosing them, and
accordingly appealing to them to separate themselves again unto God and to
destroy all this spiritual fornication - a very prominent idea in the language
of the prophets - to get rid of it and again be holy. You know that the
prophets are full of that! And what did Israel do with the prophets who
preached their holy vocation and appealed for their return? They persecuted and
killed them; and that is how we find things at the end of the Old Testament. And
then He appeared, born of the seed of David, born under the law, a Jew; so far
as things here on the earth are concerned, He was a Jew, of Israel; holy,
undefiled, separate from sinners. You see the wide setting. He has taken up in
Himself all that which Israel was called and chosen to do and to be. He is all
that, and in offering that to God, what does He do? He fulfils
Israel’s whole destiny and brings God and the blessing to all
the world. He is Israel in fulfilment. In this
One God is vindicated in the choice of Israel. In the Cross of the Lord Jesus,
the Messiah, the sovereignty of God is vindicated. He has fulfilled all and God
has been justified. That is why He came of the seed of Abraham, and of the seed
of David - to vindicate God’s choice of Israel, to bring a blessing to all the
nations; and in the Cross of Christ, not only Israel but all the peoples of the
earth receive the Divine blessing, which was ever God’s thought for them. Nothing
like that was possible in Jewish sacrifices. How great is this Cross, and how
wonderful is the Divine sovereignty!
I wonder if you are drawing comfort from that wide
application of the principle that, in the sovereignty of God, all the tragedy
and failure is met and overcome in Jesus Christ, and all the going wrong is
accounted for in Him! The Lord has simply swallowed it up; and now, not at this
moment to Israel as a nation, but to every member of that race as to other
races, God says: ‘The tragedy of Jew and Gentile is taken up in the Cross, and
by means of that Cross I am vindicated after all in ever having created man.’ Men
reason about this creation and say: ‘Tragedy! God’s defeat! God’s failure! God’s
mistake! Look at it! Why did God ever make this world, and man? Did He not know
what would happen? Seeing how it has gone, He is not justified in having
created this world!’ But as in Israel, so in the whole race, the Cross of the
Lord Jesus is the vindication of God, and that is the meaning of such words as:
“the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8). It means
that God, in the Cross of the Lord Jesus, took the whole history of this world
and swallowed it up. For now, while the world is as it is, the sovereignty of
God through the Cross of the Lord Jesus would turn the tragedy to good account,
the suffering to value; and then afterward He would deliver the whole creation
from its present condition.
That leads us to the closing word. The Cross of the Lord
Jesus is not only super-historical, it is
extra-terrestrial in its range. The Word of God reveals to us that this world
is not something in itself, and what is happening on this earth is not limited
to the earth. What is revealed is that there is an immense struggle going on
over, around and outside this world for the government, the mastery, of the
universe. Intimations are given in such passages of Scripture as Ephesians
6:12: “world-rulers of this darkness... spiritual hosts of wickedness in the
heavenlies.” There is a conflict going on. We have intimations of it in the
Book of Daniel - spiritual princes withstanding the archangel in relation to
the Lord’s interests as wrapped up in this world (Daniel 10:13,20). Over and
around this world the struggle goes on for the mastery of the universe. The
Cross of the Lord Jesus had its meaning in that realm. In His
Cross He moved right out into those circumferences of spiritual conflict and
contention when He stripped off from Himself the principalities and the powers
and “made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15).
Yes, right out in that realm the Cross of the Lord Jesus had its ultimate and
supreme meaning, and the issue of the lordship of this universe was settled in
the Cross. So, in this letter to the Ephesians, which we are holding all the
time in the background of our mind, we have it inclusively and comprehensively
stated: “...when He raised Him from the dead, and made Him to sit at His right
hand in the heavenlies, far above all rule, and authority, and power, and
dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in
that which is to come: and He put all things in subjection under His feet”
(Ephesians 1:20–22). That is the triumph of the Cross! That is the range of the
meaning and value of the death of Christ! He, in dying, slew death; in being
delivered to Satan, He overcame him; in going to the grave, He robbed the grave
of its sting for ever. Here is the sovereignty of
God! How great it is - super-historical, extra-terrestrial! How great is the
Cross of the Lord Jesus! Who can describe it, and who can reach unto it?
But, dear friends, while we contemplate it in that way,
let it not remain merely as wonderful language and ideas. Oh, what this Cross
says in the language of hope and of certainty for us! Have you despaired of
yourself, of others, or of this world? The Cross of the Lord Jesus answers all
your despair. There is nothing impossible since Jesus died and rose again. You
and I are not so impossible as we may have thought. No,
everything is possible since Jesus rose from the dead. In the resurrection the
seal of His universal triumph was given by God. Ours is a Gospel of hope since
Jesus died. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who
according to His great mercy begat us again unto a living hope by the
resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto an inheritance incorruptible,
and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in
heaven for you, who by the power of God are guarded through faith unto a
salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Peter 1:3–5).
I have said nothing about the Cross and the redemption of
this creation. Between Israel and God’s vindication in relation to Israel on
the one hand, and the universe, that extra-terrestrial realm, on the other
hand, there comes the earth, and in the Cross the redemption of this very
physical creation is secured. The vanity under which it lies,
the curse and the corruption which are in it, have all been met in the Cross of
the Lord Jesus and overcome, and in Him there will be an incorruptible creation
- our bodies as a part thereof, but more than they - a whole creation. What a
day that will be when this whole creation is delivered from the bondage of
corruption, when the groan that is now in it gives place to a shout of
deliverance and emancipation, when it will be glorified! He will make the place
of His feet glorious (Isaiah 60:13),and that refers to
a new earth under His feet.
And then later there will be “new heavens and a new
earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2 Peter
3:13). That is the hope of the Cross of the Lord Jesus. It is a great Cross,
and, with all our struggles to describe it, we cannot compass it. The Lord give
us a new heart appreciation of how great was that one offering made once and
for all!
“The bread of God is
that which cometh down out of heaven, and giveth life
unto the world... I am the bread of life... I am come down from heaven... I am
the living bread which came down out of heaven: if any man
eat of this bread, he shall live for ever; yea
and the bread which I will give is My flesh, for the life of the world...
Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, ye have not life
in yourselves... My flesh is true meat, and My blood
is true drink... This is the bread which came down out of heaven” (John
6:33, 35, 38, 51, 53, 55, 58).
“That Christ may
dwell in your hearts through faith; to the end that ye, being rooted and
grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the
breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God” (Ephesians 3:17–19).
As the Lord enables, we shall now seek to recognize the
link and the transition from Christ through the Cross to ourselves - that is,
to the Lord’s people. As we have been thinking of the greatness of Christ there
have been some things which have come out as to His Person. Firstly, in
connection with sonship, we thought about His eternity - the eternal Sonship;
then, at the other end, we thought of Him as the Son of Man. Son of God
eternal, Son of Man in time; Son of God in heaven, Son of Man on earth; and we
have been trying to understand the greatness contained in those capacities. We
have thought about the greatness of the Cross. One thing we have said about
Christ is that He does not stand in solitary isolation outside our universe,
but the revelation of Him - even in His eternal Sonship, as well as in every
other capacity - is intended to show that He stands closely associated with us,
with man. You will remember that we have said that the eternal Sonship of
Christ is no matter of concern to us if it is something in itself; we are not
very interested if it is not going to affect us in any way. Therefore
the fact that it is the very substance of revelation to man shows that God is
interested that man should know, and that with a great purpose. God does
not show us these things just for the sake of letting us have a look at
something very wonderful. He reveals with an object in view, a big, but very
practical object, and He says, in effect: ‘Now, this concerns you. You are
bound up with this and related to it.’ So that the greatness of Christ as Son,
both of God and of man, is brought by the New Testament down to a practical
living relationship with us. He, the Son, is going to bring many sons to glory.
He, the Son of Man, is the firstborn of a new creation, and in His manhood,
after His likeness, a new creation is coming back to God, to be presented to
God in Him. Well, that is all common ground, but we must get to the inner,
practical meaning of it all.
We have spoken about the eternity of the Son and of our
participation in the eternal life which is His. What does that mean really? Does
it just convey to your minds the idea of endless duration, something without
beginning and without end? That is vague, and hardly helpful. What is the real,
practical meaning and value of that as a revelation, as something brought to
us? Well, what it means is that sonship is a thought, a conception, in the mind
of God before we were made, that which was to be transferred to a creation. That
is, it goes before time, and for us, time simply means this present material
world order. Time for us begins when God made a material creation and put the
heavenly bodies in their place to govern years and months and days and the
seasons of the year, and so on. That is time for us, and it belongs, therefore,
to the material creation; but get back behind time and you come to God's
thought, which is outside of time. Call it timeless, if you like, or eternal. It
is outside of time, before time was, and it was to give character to time, give
nature to creation. That which He would make would, in His intention, take its
character from this and would, therefore, in its conception, in its idea, as
well as in its nature, be something related to the timeless thought of God. Now,
Christ is that.
But what, again, is the practical meaning of that to us
now? It is that Christ has perfected that eternal pre-time thought of God;
Christ stands to govern everything created, and to see that time has no power
to destroy it. Nothing which can come into time can eventually dismiss that,
because that is eternal and stands there governing all time. Eventually things
are bound, with the timelessness of God, to come back to that original idea. The
creation in time may go leagues and leagues further from God’s idea and may
move completely out of its orbit, but time shall be no more; time has no power
finally to dismiss that. In Christ it is secured before ever time was, and
eventually it is bound to be realized. The creation will come back to the
timeless thought of God, and it will be shown that nothing that has ever
entered into time has had power finally to change that. That is tremendous -
and that is the practical value of sonship. Sonship is an eternal idea, and
eventually the creation will come to sonship. There will be that eventually
which will be sonship embodied in creation, in a people, and that will be what
God ever thought and determined.
But how can that be? There is the eternal fact - and here
is time; here are conditions of time; and here are we as found in this
creation. We are far from that eternal thought, so how can that be realized? Between the eternal thought as perfected in
that Son and the ultimate realization of that thought stands the Cross. The
Cross with one arm reaches back to eternity, to that thought, to that purpose
of God; with the other arm it reaches on to eternity yet to be, the consummation
of that thought. The Cross is the bridge through all time between the
eternities, to take up the purpose on the one hand, and to secure it as a
realization on the other hand. It is in the Cross that the eternal thought of
God concerning the Son and the sons is made possible and is secured, and here
is the greatness of the Cross in the sense of the eternity of the Cross. That
is the meaning of such a phrase as “the Lamb... slain from the foundation of
the world” (Revelation 13:8). Time is anticipated, and all that could and would
come in with time which is so contrary to that eternal thought, is anticipated
in the Lamb slain in the thought of God from the foundation of the world. The
Cross bridges it all. So, when we come into a faith union with Christ as
crucified to all that has come in with time - the change of man’s nature and
character, the change of the world, and the change of the character of
creation; when we stand on the one side of that Cross in a faith identification
with Him in death to that change, to all that disruption and denial and
contradiction of the Divine conception, and we stand on the other side in a
faith identification with Him as risen triumphant over all that has come in
with time, we receive the gift of timeless life, eternal life, in Jesus Christ
our Lord. Or, to put it this way, we are then found in Christ, that Christ,
from eternity. We have been lifted out of time and what time means now - for
time now means disruption, disorder, corruption, and is only another word for
the reign of death which puts a limit to life and begins at once to say: ‘So
far, and no farther.’ That is death, and that is time. In His death He has
destroyed all the conditions which time represents, He has taken it all away,
and we are linked with Him in His eternity. Sonship - received potentially
through the Holy Spirit in new birth, and realized through the Holy Spirit’s
continual operation in our maturing - is something which is the fulfilment of an eternal thought of God, the realization of
all that God ever thought about us; and the Cross is the point at which all
that is made possible - nay, is already secured in Christ. How great is the
Cross!
Following that (and it is only saying the same thing
again, putting the emphasis on another word), we have here in this Gospel by
John: “I am the living bread which came
down out of heaven”: “I am come down
from heaven.” Here is a phrase reiterated almost monotonously. Eternal, yes
- that is the reach backward. Now “from heaven” - that is the reach upward. But
what does: “I am come down from heaven” mean? Christ said things which are
completely mysterious until the Holy Spirit interprets them to the heart! He
speaks about the Son of Man Who is in heaven (John
3:13). While He is saying the very words He is on the earth, yet He says: “The
Son of man, Who is in heaven.” What does He mean? He
simply means, as the later New Testament shows us, that He is not of this
creation, He is not produced by the ordinary racial means on this earth and does
not come into being along the ordinary line of generation in Adam. “I am come
down from heaven.” The essential and deepest reality about Christ is that He is
of a different order. Yes, He is born of Mary, but He is born of the Holy
Spirit, in a unique way. Something has operated so that it can be said of Him
before His birth: “The holy Thing Which is begotton of Thee...” (Luke 1:35) - a
completeness of holiness which is the product of the intervention of God the
Holy Spirit, cutting off from the inheritance of this fallen creation. So it is
true that, by the Holy Spirit come down from heaven, He has come down from
heaven. In a word, He is of another order of human beings; there is that about
Him which is unique and different from all other men; there is not another like
Him. “I am come down from heaven.”
That, again, is God’s thought - a certain kind of
humanity which is not found in time and on this earth as we know it, a mankind
which is not the one familiar to us; a different order, something outside of
this realm and this race of mankind altogether. We are “foreordained to be
conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29). You and I are to be of a
different order altogether from the one to which we belong by nature. This
order to which we belong now in this creation is not God’s thought at all. It
has gone wrong, and has fallen right out of the Divine recognition and
acceptance. It is something other, it is confused,
contaminated, tangled and poisoned.
THIS ONE from heaven is the representation, the embodiment
and the inclusiveness of what God intended man to be. There is this creation at
one end, and at the other end - “conformed to the image of His Son,” made like
Him in resurrection, made different, spiritually, within. Yes, but only in
embryo now. You know what an embryo is: something that has life, but
undeveloped and not fully conscious life. Development will take place and
consciousness will grow, but it is not there to begin with. That is what we are
when we are born again. We have life, but how much consciousness and
understanding of the meaning of that life is there? Very little! How many of
the Lord’s people, of all the millions on this earth, are conscious of what
they are saved unto, of what the great object is that God has in view in saving
them? They have life because they are born again, but the life is only
embryonic life in the sense that the consciousness of the meaning of it is very
limited. But as that life develops, so there grows the consciousness of the
object for which we have been born again. There may be a good deal of
enthusiasm, activity and energy about young Christians, but if they stay in
that place of having only energy and not understanding, they are not growing. Any
little babe will wear you out in the course of a few hours! Try and do what a
child does and see how long you can keep it up! There is plenty of life and
energy, but not much intelligence. The real mark of growth is not energy alone,
but intelligence. So the true course of the development of spiritual life is in
seeing and knowing more and more what we are called unto, what we are saved for, and what is the Divine meaning in that which has taken
place in us. There are comparatively few who are growing up like that!
Well, in the end there will be the full-grown man, the fulness of the stature of Christ, and sonship fully
attained, for it is secure in Christ, and was secured in Him away back in the
Cross.
But between what God has eternally secured and projected
in His Son, and that ultimate realization, there is what we are by nature. We
are not that which is God’s thought, and, what is more, it is not in us to be
that, whatever the humanists may say, and whatever may be the widespread false
doctrine of the universal Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and the
power of man to be his own saviour if only he is
cultivated and educated, and all the rest. In spite of all that, it is not in
us to become what God eternally intended us to be. How blind men are, in the
light of recent history, to hold to the belief that, after thousands of years,
we are nearer to God! We are no nearer to God than we were in the beginning.
God is surely spoiling all that sort of thing, but men are blind and still
cling to it; they are die-hards in this realm of total depravity. However,
where is the hope? There, between the two, stands the Cross,
and the Cross takes up not only the eternal, but the heavenly, the altogether
‘other.’ With one hand it possesses what we are, and with the other hand it
secures the realization of the Divine intention and brings them both together
in that Man crucified - a Man Who in resurrection becomes the first of the kind
of man that is to be. There He is in the Cross. The Cross of the Lord Jesus,
Christ crucified, secures another kind of man, and (as we were saying) when we
are born again we receive the embryonic life of that new order. If only we will
be obedient to the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus we shall be
changed into the same image, we shall be transformed, we shall grow up into Him
in all things, we shall become progressively like Him, and then, in the great
day of His final intervention for us, “we shall be like Him; for we shall see
Him as He is” (1 John 3:2). We shall all be changed, and this corruptible shall
put on incorruption, and death shall be swallowed up in victory (1 Corinthians
15:53,54). The Cross accomplishes that. How great it
is!
You see, that is why the Lord Jesus speaks in this
symbolic way about Himself: “I am the bread of life... I came down from
heaven.” “He that eateth Me...”;
“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, ye have not
life in yourselves.” Clearly that means that the bread must be broken. He
speaks those words, not just to individuals, but to the whole company of
believers: “He that believeth on Me.” The bread has to
be distributed. You notice that, leading up to this, was the feeding of the
multitude, and it was out of the breaking of the bread for the feeding of the
multitude that this wonderful revelation of Himself as the bread of life took
its rise. Where was the broken bread to be distributed? It was at the Cross. The
Cross is the breaking of the loaf, so that we might receive Christ. Paul
explains it all, getting right into the mystery of it, in this matchless
passage in Ephesians 3:17 and 18: “That Christ may dwell in your hearts through
faith.” How does Christ dwell in our hearts? He has been broken and given to
faith; faith has reached out, and the broken, distributed Christ, Who still
remains whole while yet broken, is come to dwell in our hearts. “...that Christ
may dwell in your hearts through faith; to the end that ye, being rooted and
grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints...”; “we, who
are many, are one loaf, one body” (1 Corinthians 10:17), made so by Christ
dwelling in all our hearts through faith. “...may be strong to apprehend with
all the saints what is the breadth and length and
height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth
knowledge, that ye may be filled unto all the fulness
of God.” That is simply gathering up what we have been saying in one
comprehensive statement.
We close with a fresh emphasis upon the fourfold
dimensions of the love of Christ. Love, in Ephesians, goes hand in hand with
the great word ‘grace.’ Grace and love in Ephesians are twins - or shall I put
it this way: grace is love in action. When we come to grace in Ephesians, it is
not just the grace of God towards us to save us from hell and to give us some
assurance of heaven. It is the grace of God to save us unto that high and full
and perfect thought of His. It is all this that is in view - this vast, eternal
thing, all brought into relation to the Church. That is the grace of God in
this Letter. Then grace is shown to be because of the love of God: “Christ...
loved the church, and gave Himself up for it” (Ephesians 5:25) - the broken
bread. That love springs out of the Cross. The Cross is first brought into view
here. “In Whom we have redemption” (Ephesians 1:7). “You
did He make alive, when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins, wherein
ye once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince
of the power of the air, of the spirit that now worketh
in the sons of disobedience; among whom we also all once lived in the lusts of
our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature
children of wrath, even as the rest: but
God, being rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even
when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ”
(Ephesians 2:1–5; ASV). There is the great love of God, as shown in the Cross,
raising us from that awful death through the Cross.
And then that love is seen in its four dimensions - breadth,
length, height and depth. What is that? It is the Cross reaching out in its
expansiveness. The breadth of the Cross - and, oh! how
broad the Cross is! How broad the love of God is! You can afford to be a whole-hearted
‘Broad Churchman’ in the love of God! Oh, the love of God is much bigger, much
broader than our conception of it, and, oh! for more
of this love that will broaden us! We are so small, so contemptible, so petty. Do not let us be afraid of thinking of the love of
God in broad terms. The Lord will surprise some of us with what His love has
done, and whom His love has saved. Oh, the breadth of His love! It brings us
back to the exhortation of Paul to the Corinthians: “Be ye also enlarged.”
That is the breadth, the outward reach; and now the length
of His love - the backward and forward reach, going back beyond time, beyond
the Fall, beyond all that has happened. The love of
the Cross reaches beyond that and outstrips it. Thank God, it outstrips all
that has come in with this creation through Satan and through Adam, and it goes
on when time shall be no more. The Cross, the love of God, extends backward and
forward over the eternities.
“...What is the breadth and length and height” - Oh, the
height of the love of God, of the Cross of our Lord Jesus! To what heights it
can bring us! “...and made us to sit with Him in the heavenly places”
(Ephesians 2:6). The heights of the power of the Cross! The reach of the Cross
to lift us! We have no conception of what we are going to be. John says:
“Beloved, now are we the children of God, and it is
not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if He shall be
manifested, we shall be like Him” (1 John 3:2). Look at Him on the Mount of
Transfiguration! Look at Him in the brightness above that of the noon day sun
over the road to Damascus! Look at Him as John saw Him, as recorded at the
beginning of the Book of the Revelation: “And when I saw Him, I fell at His
feet as one dead” (Revelation 1:17; ASV). We shall be like Him! We cannot describe it, but that is the height of the
Cross, the height of the love of God. Oh, what an uplift
there is in the Cross! What an uplift in the love of
God! This is practical, and not just doctrine. When
the love of God really does get hold of a life, it lifts. There is lift in the
love of God. Oh, if only God Almighty were to come alongside you now in a
personal form, and you knew Him to be God Almighty, the Eternal, and He said to
you: ‘I do love you!’, you would be lifted clean off
the earth at once. The Cross is the great revelation that God loves us. “God so
loved... that He gave His only begotten Son” (John 3:16). Oh, for that love to
be in us so that the effect of our being here would be to lift others! I am
afraid it is the other way so often - we cast down, we oppress, and our effect
is not lifting. Oh, God save us into more
of His love that lifts!
And
the depth of the love of God, of the Cross! We sing:
“Oh,
teach me what it meaneth:
Thy
love beyond compare,
The
love that reacheth deeper
Than depths of self-despair!”
That is one depth some of us know - the depth of
self-despair. He took all the despair of all men, that abyss of hopelessness,
of shame, of sin, right down to the bottom; and the Cross, the love of God,
reaches down there to lift up. What is the depth? Well might the Apostle go
back upon himself when he comes into touch with that love and talk nonsense:
“...to know the love of Christ which passeth
knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19). You are outside of human language! Ephesians is
the Letter of superlatives. Paul just cannot cope with language in that Letter,
because he has got altogether outside of this life, this world, this creation. He
has got into touch with eternity, heaven, God, with the magnitudes, and human
language falls over itself in trying to describe that! “The
exceeding greatness of His power” (Ephesians 1:19). “...able to do
exceeding abundantly above all...” (Ephesians 3:20). Language cannot describe
it. Here is love in its four dimensions, but it passes knowledge. That may
sound like mere words. It is; but, oh, what I trust is that through the words
there will be a registration in our hearts of the Spirit of God to tell us that
“the love of God is broader than the measures of man’s mind.” IT is deeper than
the depths of the world’s despair and shame and sin. IT is higher than the
highest thoughts of which we are capable as to what it can do, and IT anchors
us outside of time and in eternity.
“...the exceeding
greatness of His power to us-ward who believe, according to that working of the
strength of His might which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the
dead, and made Him to sit at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above
all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is named,
not only in this world, but also in that which is to come”
(Ephesians 1:19–21; ASV).
Our object now, for the attaining of which we are so
completely dependent upon the Lord, is to get inside those words and see and
feel something of what they mean. If you read the whole passage thoughtfully,
it will be recognized that this setting of Christ at God’s right hand was with
the object of installing Him as the inclusive representative of all of us who
believe - “to us-ward who believe.” It is a related thing. He “made Him to sit
at His right hand,” which was the final step in the exercise of that exceeding
great power in raising Him from the dead: and it is said at the end of the
statement that He “gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is
His body.” He was not set there as one by Himself - as the exalted but isolated
Christ, the honoured Lord - but, in the thought and
intention of God, in a related way to us-ward who believe, to the Church which
is His Body. The all-governing presentation of Christ in the Word of God is of
Him in the position and capacity of representative
Man.
That is the thing which governs supremely in the full
revelation of Jesus Christ. He is the incarnation of the Divine idea of
humanity, but, strangely enough, that representation is ultimately projected
into a region altogether beyond human experience. He is placed where no other
man has ever been. Christ is set forth fully and finally as representative in
an experience and position through and beyond death. I say that no other man
has ever been there in all the history of men. At the first view, that very
fact would seem to shatter the conception of Him as representative. If He is
representative in a realm and on a ground that no other man has ever known, how
can He be representative of all men? And yet, when you come to think about it
more carefully, it is just the opposite. That is why and how He can be the
representative, because perfect representation in any realm or connection
demands the perfect realization of all the intentions and possibilities of that
realm. If you take a flower and say: ‘That is the perfect specimen of its own
kind!’, then it is requisite that that flower should embody all that ever that
species was intended to be and all the possibilities that were within it in its
creation. It cannot be a perfect specimen until it has gone right through unto
the full end of its own inherent and Divinely-appointed destiny. And Christ risen is - may I use the word? - the perfect specimen of all
the Divine thought in man’s creation, so He must have gone through into that
realm which is beyond anything that any other man has known. He must be in a
position and in a fulness which fully answers to the
original thought of God for man.
But we must get down to that! In the Bible we have other
people who were raised from the dead, both in the Old Testament and in the New.
Lazarus is an outstanding example. But we know, without much discussion, that
there is a very great difference between Lazarus after his resurrection and
Christ after His. Lazarus, although raised from the dead, was still the same
man. There is nothing to indicate that he was changed in any way, and he came
back just as he was before. His was not, in this Divine sense, a resurrection,
but a resuscitation, and there is a vast difference
between resuscitation and resurrection. In the Lord Jesus we find that which is
unique in this matter. The uniqueness of Christ is found in His nature, in what
He was after His resurrection. There are so many differences, and they are so
real that you find that even those who had had the closest association with Him
and companied with Him in the most intimate way were not able to recognize Him
except by a special, Divinely-given enablement. He was not accepting them on
the old basis. He would allow none of the old affectionate human caresses and
touches - “Touch Me not” (John 20:17) - for those were the gestures of the old
level of natural life. On the other hand, He did allow Himself to be touched,
but it was to be the touch of faith. He invited one who was doubting to touch
Him - “Reach hither thy hand, and put it into My side”
(John 20:27; ASV) - but this was the invitation to faith to overcome doubt and
unbelief. It is a different kind of relationship, for He has gone out of one
realm and into another.
Now the old limitations and ties obtain no more. Space
has gone, and time has gone; He does not depart - He disappears; He does not come
- He is there. There are new powers, new capacities and new abilities now. Everything
is in a different realm, and yet so real. He is enforcing the reality of it,
and necessarily so, because they are between two worlds - the world of what has
been and the world which now is - and they have to learn the difference. It is
the revelation of a new kind of life and a new order of things altogether. There
is no pandering on His part to curiosity about the other world and the unseen,
but just the mighty impress of spiritual reality, and
that is what He is seeking to bring home. And if we can see Christ risen and
perceive the nature of this Man on the resurrection side, we see in Him the end
for which man was made, the representative of God’s full thought for man -
altogether outside and beyond the mere limitations of life as we know it,
outside of the control of space and time, with powers of which we know very
little and capacities for which we all long but discern very dimly.
What has Christ done? He has got rid of all that which
led to death and which death involved. Death is that which puts a limit upon
everything, which comes in between heaven and earth, which brings man into
bondage, which places a mighty ‘No!’ over man’s development, and spells vanity
- vanity to all his struggles and efforts. Christ has dealt with that and put
it out of the way, making possible that mighty fulfilment
of all that God ever intended for man. He has reversed the course of death and
removed it as a barrier in the way of man’s fulness,
and in His resurrection He has brought life and incorruption - incorruptibility
- to light.
Hence, one of the first things that He did after His
resurrection was to take up the Scriptures and indicate Himself in them all,
from Moses, the beginning of the Scriptures, right to
the end of them as they existed at that time. All the Scriptures - what is
that? That is history. The Scriptures are human history with God ever in view,
and human history is the history of failure where God’s thought is concerned;
but now in resurrection Christ can take up the whole history of failure and
impossibility and show how right through it there has been present that which
was saying: ‘This failure, this impossibility, is not for
ever, is not inevitable, and is not the final factor. I am here!’ We
know from the record of the raising of Lazarus just how the Lord used that
particular truth. “Thy brother shall rise again.” “Yes,” said Martha, “I know
that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” He broke in:
‘The last day! When I am present the last day is here. Time is gone and there
is no yesterday, today and tomorrow’ - “I am the resurrection and the life.” ‘All
time is encompassed and embraced and dismissed when I am here.’ “I am” - we
have heard that before! The Eternal One is the resurrection and the life
because time goes out when eternity comes in. And all the Scriptures, having
Him in view, have that which says: ‘Yes, history on the earth may be what it
is, but I am here, and in the end it will all change.’ That is, in effect, what
He said on the day of His resurrection: ‘I am alive, I have fulfilled all the
Scriptures. I have gathered up all the Scriptures, all the history of man in
his relationship with God, and have fulfilled it. Here I am,
the realization of all that God intended, and all that history has seemed to
say is impossible.’
Now the New Testament shows us two things in relation to
Christ risen and seated at the right hand of God. It
shows us - and this is what is here particularly in this passage in Ephesians,
as we have indicated - that the Church, which is His Body in the Spirit now corresponds to Christ risen. “...gave Him to be
head over all things to the church, which is His body.” This is not a Body
without a Head, and this is not a Head without a Body; it is one. In the same
letter it is said that we, in the thought of God, are seated together with Him
in the heavenlies. The Church, when on spiritual ground, corresponds to Christ risen. That is the first great thing that the New Testament
teaches us, and that came particularly through Paul by revelation of the
Spirit; and, even if the Church is only represented by a small company in one
place on the earth, and that company is truly on the ground of Christ, time and
space and all limitations are dismissed, and the uttermost bounds of the earth
are touched in one moment. If there is a little company here on the ground of
Christ risen, by regeneration, by the mighty operation of that same Spirit
Which raised Him from the dead, in their innermost being most truly risen
together with Christ on new creation ground and being governed by the Spirit,
as that company functions in the Holy Spirit, space is dismissed, all geography
goes out, the ends of the earth are touched from that point, and in a moment
anything, anywhere, can happen. It is not a matter of having to wait for weeks
or months or years. If the Lord wills it, the Church can effect
it in a moment, for time does not govern at all. You are outside that realm
when you are in the Spirit. Praying in the Holy Spirit is simply bringing into
operation what Christ is at the right hand of God; it is the risen Christ
functioning. So He says: “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.”
“All authority hath been given unto Me in heaven and
on earth. Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew
28:18–20).
But who is to go? It is the Church, and His irreducible
nucleus of the Church is two. It is a corporate thing, the bringing of the
significance of the Body into view. When there is a functioning in the Spirit,
it is nothing less than Christ risen, ascended and exalted, going on with His
work through His Body, with all those limitations dismissed. That is tremendous!
Of course, it does not sound so extraordinary to us because we have heard it
before and know something about it in terms of teaching, but take that sort of
thing out into a world that has never heard it, and it sounds ridiculous,
fantastic, presumptuous. But that is where we have a Christianity that makes
such tremendous demands upon faith. It is either true, or it is not true. If it
is true, it is an immense thing. If it is not, well, what fools we are! But
here it is, and, oh! that the Church might learn more
of what it means to be in living union with a risen Christ! That there should
be a company, two or three or more, though limited physically here on this
earth by time and space, yet really functioning in the Holy Spirit, so that the
universal Christ - all that it means that He is there at God’s right hand - is
having some expression! I would to God
that this could come home to you by the Spirit and that you could grasp it,
for what differences it would make! We have a long way to go yet before this is
appreciated adequately. But it is true!
We have said that Christ in resurrection at God’s right
hand is the representation of man collectively, according to God’s mind. What
does His presence there imply? What do the forty days after His resurrection
say? They say that He is in another realm and on other ground altogether. The
old human, natural things have passed out, and He does not allow them. Everything
is new - new powers, relationships, capacity, understanding.
There is a whole new state of things which transcends the old and goes far
beyond it; and what is possible now is beyond our ability to comprehend. This
is the meaning of 2 Corinthians 5:17: “...in Christ, there is a new creation:
the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new” (ASV).
When you touch these things, human language is a vain
instrument for expression. “The exceeding greatness of His power” - the
superlatives in this realm! Oh, for this enlargement by a new apprehension of
the greatness of Christ in His Person, in His death, in His resurrection!
Well, then, the supreme thing the New Testament shows is
that the Church on its true, spiritual basis corresponds to Christ risen. Not
‘the Church’ that we know here on earth, for it does not. But God’s thought
about the Church is not an impossible and merely idealistic one. It is a
practical thing. Two saints, simple, humble and unimportant in this world, but
really meeting together in the Spirit, can be a functioning instrument of Him
to whom has been committed all authority in heaven and
on earth. With them all these old limitations can be dismissed and they can at
one moment touch all the ends of the earth. Do you believe that? That is really
the meaning of our glorying in Christ risen. It has to
be something more than emotion, and more than glorious doctrine; yes, more than
a truth to which we give some assent. It has to be very practical. Christ risen is the most practical proposition for the Church. When
He was risen He said: “All authority” - and the
literal is - “has just been given
unto Me in heaven and on earth. Go ye therefore...”
- spoken to the Church - “and lo, I am with you” - with all authority in heaven
and on earth - “even unto the consummation of the age.” We have not grasped the
real meaning and value of that! We have simply selected fragments of it and
made it a basis of worldwide evangelization or missionary enterprise. We have
not gathered into it the mighty implications of Christ risen.
Another thing - which I will only mention - that is shown
to us in the New Testament in this connection is that the consummation of the
spiritual will be the literal. This correspondence to Christ now is a spiritual
matter. It is a thing of the spiritual life, the Spirit in us, and of our being
in the Spirit; but there is the counterpart of that in the literal, in the
consummation of the spiritual. The consummation of the spiritual is that this
body of humiliation, of corruption, shall be changed to be made like unto His
glorious body, both individually and collectively. It will be an individual
thing, for that is what 1 Corinthians 15 means. It will also be a collective
thing, for the whole Body will be changed; the Church will be a glorious
Church, a Church of glory, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing
(Ephesians 5:27), no touch of corruption, and no possibility of being
corrupted; like unto His body of glory. That is the consummation of the
spiritual, and the Apostle says that we have the earnest of that already in the
Holy Spirit.
May the Lord give us some fresh glimpse of what His
resurrection is intended to mean as a practical thing, and, if the practical
meaning is to be pressed to some action, then let us apprehend it first by
faith and then begin to act upon it. When we come
together, let it not be just to say prayers and make all sorts of petitions,
but to give the living Lord by His Spirit an opportunity to function beyond the
range of locations and space and time, and Himself from the Throne through the
Church be able to touch all realms on earth and in heaven and do the thing He
has indicated to be His will. Why not now, seeing He is outside of time? Why
accept delays if the Lord wills a thing? We want to be very much more
practical. If it is true that we are one with a risen, enthroned Lord, it ought
to have tremendous repercussions. May it
be so!
“Then Solomon sat on
the throne of the Lord as king” (1 Chronicles 29:23).
“Then the house was
filled with a cloud, even the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not
stand to minister by reason of the cloud: for the glory of the Lord filled the
house of God” (2 Chronicles 5:13, 14; ASV).
The words which we have read throw us forward again to
our New Testament: “Solomon sat upon the
throne of Jehovah as king.” Of course, that can only be said in a typical,
limited, sense. The throne of David, the throne of the house of Israel, was
indeed rightly God’s throne, but comparatively only in a very limited sense.
What we come to concerning the Lord Jesus - again in the Letter to the
Ephesians, which has so largely interpreted that part of the Old Testament for
us - is that God
“raised
Him from the dead, and made Him to sit at His right hand in the heavenlies, far
above all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is
named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: and He put
all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all
things to the church, which is His body, the fulness
of Him That filleth all in all” (Ephesians
1:20–23).
There we have the non-comparative, the absolute, and that
of which Solomon’s throne was but a poor shadow. We can say that Jesus sat, in
that full sense, upon the throne of Jehovah as King.
The other fragment about the glory of the Lord filling
the house is seen in two ways in the New Testament. Here again in Ephesians,
after this vast comprehensive survey of Christ and His Church in the heavenlies
according to the eternal counsels of God, the great summing up of the Apostle
is in these words:
“Now
unto Him That is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or
think, according to the power that worketh in us,
unto Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all generations
for ever and ever” (Ephesians 3:20,21; ASV). “The glory of the Lord filled the
house.”
We know that a spiritual beginning of that very thing was
made on the Day of Pentecost. The Lord Jesus having been exalted to the right
hand of the Majesty in the heavens and having taken His seat on the throne of
Jehovah as King, on the Day of Pentecost the glory filled the house. There we
have some indication of the Lord’s intention, both for His Son and for His
people.
Now I want to bring all that into a small compass of
application. The all-governing thing is Christ enthroned. Everything takes its
rise and flows out from that - Christ enthroned in the very throne of Jehovah. He
comes into the place of God Himself, and there is no room for any other. Even
the priests could not minister, because there was no place for them. The glory
of the Lord filled the house. When
the Lord has His place, there is no place for any other, for He holds it alone.
When the Lord Jesus is really Lord, everything else goes out. That is what we
shall come to more fully later. That is where we begin, and that is the secret
of, and the key to, everything else - Christ in His place, the place of Divine
assignment, the place for which God ever intended Him.
“That in all things He might have the pre-eminence”
(Colossians 1:18). You never have the secret of spiritual fulness until Christ has the place which God has appointed
for Him, and there is no room for us or anything else.
That is simple, but it is the sort of thing that lies
beneath all our troubles, and in regard to which there is a great deal of
difficulty in making it actual, even with the Lord’s own people. It is really
all a matter of the Lord having His place. When He does, then we have the
secret of the filling of the house of the Lord with the glory of the Lord. We
have the secret of fulness.
Now, when you look at Solomon and see him taking his
place upon the throne of Jehovah as king, and look to see what the issues,
consequences and effects of that were, you find several things quite simply
indicated. One is that Israel came into a time of wonderful rest. Solomon sat
upon the throne of Jehovah as king, and Israel had rest round about on every
side (1 Kings 4:24, 25).
Of course (by way of parenthesis) we are remembering that
all this points very largely to the future age, but Scripture always has a
double aspect, the dispensational and the spiritual. We have indicated what
happened on the day of Pentecost. But the Church, in an outward, earthly way,
did not have rest from the day of Pentecost. It had anything but rest outwardly
- but a wonderful rest entered into the Church. You cannot fail to see how
things changed even for the Apostles, from that time, for there was a wonderful
assurance, a wonderful confidence, a wonderful courage and boldness, and
wonderful effectiveness in witness, and all because they had come to rest,
inward rest, born of the knowledge that Christ was Lord. ‘Whatever happens,
Christ is Lord!’ is their message, their note. ‘Whatever rulers and people do,
Christ is Lord! However things go, favourably or
contrarily, Christ is Lord!’ You see them moving through the Book of the Acts
on that basis, and they met not a little difficulty, opposition and trial; but
their message all the time was: ‘Christ is Lord!’ And as they affirmed it, so
it worked out. The very things which were against them worked out to prove it;
not Satan, not man, not circumstances, not forces, but Christ was Lord! And
there was a deep, quiet assurance and confidence and rest.
We know by numerous small experiences, as well as in the
great crises of controversy with the will of God, that it is only when we yield
to His absolute Lordship, when our wills, our desires, our preferences, our
likes have been subjected and submitted to Him and we bow - not rebelliously,
not under compulsion, but gladly, willingly, responsively - to His Lordship,
then a wonderful rest comes into our hearts; and there can be no glory until
there is rest. That is the word that governs this house. “Arise, O Jehovah God,
into Thy resting-place, Thou, and the ark of Thy strength” (2 Chronicles 6:41).
‘Enter into Thy rest in the house.’ Until there is rest in the house, there is
no glory. They brought the ark in, and they drew out the staves - the staves
which always suggested movement, progress, restless going on - and said: ‘This
is the end. We have come to the end of the journey.’ And the glory of the Lord
filled the house.
It is all a picture of the rest of faith, of which the
Letter to the Hebrews speaks so much; and that rest of faith comes from a real
heart apprehension of Him as in the throne, both as King and High Priest.
We must not stay too long with each fragment. The first
thing, then, resultant from Solomon’s exaltation was rest unto the people of
God.
The next thing - and a part of the former - was that all
the enemies who had been asserting themselves for so long, and whom David had
been continuously fighting, were helpless. It seems that this exaltation of
Solomon set up a mighty, paralyzing awe over all those enemies so that they
were helpless, and that also has a spiritual counterpart. The New Testament
shows perfectly well that the enemies were actively working, and doing all in
their power to assail and destroy, but what was the result? Well, they were
helpless in bringing this thing to a standstill, and absolutely incapable of
destroying the glory. They were helpless in a very real sense. That is the
story of the Book of the Acts. There were plenty of enemies, and they did not
cease to exist, but how helpless they were against this Name and this
testimony, and against this Christ! What they did not only turned upon themselves, but was made to serve the Lord’s purpose, so in
that double sense they were helpless. When Christ really is in His place there
may be enemies and they may be active and seem to be doing a lot of harm, and
having much their own way; but when Christ is Lord His sovereignty opposes them
and renders them incapable of accomplishing their purpose and carrying through
their designs. “...to them that love God all things work together for good,
even to them that are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28; ASV), and
the “all things” cover very largely the enemy’s activities - they are turned to
good by the sovereign activity of the Lord and the enemy is unable to triumph.
The next thing which resulted from Solomon’s enthronement
was the abundance of wealth for God’s people. We have said in earlier chapters
that the wealth of Solomon given to him by God was great. “Jehovah magnified
Solomon exceedingly in the sight of all Israel, and bestowed upon him such
royal majesty as had not been on any king before him in Israel” (1 Chronicles
29:25). We have said that it was not for himself, and
not to be spent on himself for his own gratification. It was for Israel, and
Israel came into the good of Solomon’s wealth when he was enthroned.
We are told here in this Ephesian letter, and its
companion letter to the Colossians, that God has filled the Lord Jesus; God has
caused that in Him all fulness should dwell. “It was
the good pleasure of the Father that in Him should all the fulness
dwell” (Colossians 1:19). There is a favourite
passage of ours in Philippians - “My God shall supply every need of yours
according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19). Well,
He is filled full, and the wealth is for you. Israel came into the good of
God’s lavish hand upon Solomon, for when Solomon was in his place Israel shared
the good. Oh, I am not just using language! I am not trying to be eloquent! I
believe it is of such practical moment that we know the riches of Christ, and
that the people of God everywhere should know how full Christ is for them. How
the people of God today need to be saved from this awful tragedy of going about
in starvation, looking for spiritual food and finding none, and, by their
weakness, ineffectiveness and the lack of an impact of God through them upon
the world, showing that they have not enough and to spare, are not a people
with a competence! That is how it is very largely today, and it should not be. It
is God’s thought that His people should be in the good of the wealth that He
has stored up in His Son for them. When Christ is in His place we begin to know
what we inherit in Him.
The next thing resulting from Solomon’s
being enthroned was the enlargement of the kingdom. God had promised
that, and you find that Solomon began to expand, take in and build. His kingdom
increased. And we do not need to argue that out so far as the New Testament is
concerned. When the Lord Jesus was enthroned, the enlargement of His kingdom
commenced immediately and it was that spiritual kingdom into which we have been
translated, the kingdom of the Son of God’s love.
Now my point is this. What is the key to - what shall we
call it? - the growth of the Church, the expansion and
enlargement of the work of God? What is the key to increase, world increase, of
that which is of Christ? It is Christ being apprehended in His glory, in His
Lordship, in His enthronement in the throne of Jehovah. It is along these
lines: firstly that He is Lord and He is in His place, and then, as the result,
that we are a people who have rest. If we go about with haggard faces and
worried looks, as people who carry an awful burden of sorrow and trouble and
bear it before the world, there will not be much increase, growth or spiritual
expansion. When we can carry with us the testimony of a heart
that has found rest on the ground that Jesus is Lord, the world watches.
Here is a Christian going through deep trial. Things have all gone wrong for
that life, for they are hard and difficult, and no one has greater reason to
question the love, the power and the sovereignty of God. The world watches, and
what do they see and hear? ‘Save, Lord, we perish!’? or:
‘It is all right! The Lord is on the throne, and things are not as they appear.
We are coming out, and we are coming out triumphantly. This is not the end!’
A quiet, restful assurance through stress and strain,
trial, adversity and contradiction is how the kingdom increases. The rest of
faith is a mighty power of testimony unto increase. When others know that we
have, not only enough to get on with, but plenty: that we are not all the time
having to go down to Egypt - the world - to find something to make up what is
lacking in our Christianity, but we have enough: that we have not only as much
as the world has, but a very great deal more: that we are completely
independent of this world for our satisfaction and have a new source of
complete satisfaction: then there is a testimony that counts. I am afraid that
so many of us have given the other impression - that to be a Christian is
almost to lose everything, and we give that impression not only by our looks
and ways and influence, but by what we do. We hunger after this and that and
the other: we must have this, and we must have that, because the Lord has not
filled everything. But when He is really in His place there is that moving into
His wealth which will result in others wanting to know the secret.
I must gather up and close, and for the final word I come
to this. How is all this really made possible and brought into experience? We
want this rest, we want this wealth, we want this spiritual fulness,
we want the enemy to be rendered incapable of finally achieving his end, and we
want the enlargement of what is the Lord’s on this earth, but how is it to be? We
say - and it is the inclusive truth - it is when Christ is Lord and He is on
the Throne. Yes, but how is He to get there? This is not something official and
objective - that God has chosen Jesus Christ and put Him on the Throne, and
that is the sovereign, official act of God. This is something spiritual, and
has an immediate application and meaning inside of us. This enthronement of
Christ has to have an inward meaning, and that cannot be until other inward
things are dealt with; so that the realization of Christ’s enthronement, with
all that it means for us of victory, of rest, of wealth, and of expansion, or
enlargement, rests upon the altar, the Cross. We have tried to see how great
that Cross is, but here you can see its greatness inasmuch as the practical
results of the exaltation of Christ depend upon it. What I mean is this: Christ
cannot be Lord, with all the beneficent results thereof, until all other
lordships are subdued under Him, and by that I mean the lordships within the
kingdom of our own hearts.
You can work that out, and see that is what is being
applied in every letter of the New Testament. What is brought into view is the
rightful place of Jesus as Lord; and then the Apostle gets down to this
business and says, for example to the Corinthians: ‘You are spoiling your
testimony. You are not knowing spiritual wealth, and
you know nothing about real rest. Everything is limited and marred because you
are not a crucified people and your natural life is in the way of Jesus Christ.
He cannot be Lord because you, in the strength of your natural life, are lord,
and that has to come to the Cross, you Corinthians.’ ‘You Galatians, you are
allowing an Old Testament, typical régime to come in again and dominate you;
the law has returned and you have got on to another basis altogether. You have
put Christ, Who has fulfilled all the law, out of His place, and you have
fallen from grace and gone back to the law.’ Galatians 2:20, in its immediate
sense, must be an actuality: “I have been crucified with Christ.” You notice
the connection. The immediate context is with regard to the law, the reign of
the law. Paul is saying how he was under the law, how the law had dominion over
him, how it brought him under bondage and limited his whole life. Then he says:
‘I got out of it by being crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I that
live, but Christ. The law was in the way; I was in the way in the sense of this
legalism in my life.’ Any Christian who is bound by legalism is an obstruction
to the Lord Jesus, and will limit the expression of His power.
You find the same note in principle in every letter.
Something of the old natural life is in the way, and it is limiting, spoiling,
and causing everything to come into a state of contradiction; and whatever it
is it must all come to the Cross.
You and I, in all that we are by nature, have to come
under the power of that Cross. The Cross has to get us out of the way in order
that Christ may fill all things. That is the meaning here. I see that the
altar, the great altar, was set up by Solomon, and a mighty, all-inclusive
sacrifice to God’s satisfaction was offered in type, and then the king had his
place and all these blessed results followed.
Dear friends, we are in the way, we are our own plague
and our own limitation. It is this natural life that is the real bane - but
there is a mighty Cross. It is still possible for us to say: “I have been
crucified with Christ.” It is still possible to enter into the meaning of that
and to know that fundamental breaking of self-life, self-strength, self-centredness, that real breaking of the very backbone
of our natural life - even our religious natural life, our devoted natural
life, or whatever it is that is the natural life - so that its strength is gone
and there is room for the King and for Him to fill all things. In the practical
outworking, we know, by a very little spiritual history, that not until that
spiritual life, at some point or other, is dealt with, brought down and broken
can we enter upon a life of spiritual rest, spiritual growth and spiritual
wealth. The Cross governs it, for it is the Cross that leads to the Throne -
from the altar to the Throne, and from the Throne to the glories of Christ.
May the Lord Himself
apply the word and speak through it, and may the result be that He gets His
full place, His unquestioned place, and we come into all the blessings of
Christ in His place.
Read: 1 Chronicles
28:2–7,11–13,19; 29:3–5; 2 Chronicles 2:1, 2; Ephesians 1:4–6, 11, 12, 17–23;
2:7, 19–22; 3:10, 11, 20, 21; 4:1, 4, 5, 13–15; 5:25–27.
So we come to the third of those greatnesses
of Divine revelation - the greatness of the Church; a greatness which, it is
regrettable to think, so very few of the people of God have seen. There is a
painful slowness amongst Christians to apprehend the great purpose and intent
of their salvation, to know and to understand the nature of their high calling;
and it is in this connection that there is a great divide between the people of
God. Christianity at its best has very largely become a general thing, a matter
of being saved and of going on in a general way as Christians, but not
recognizing that in God’s mind we are saved with a mighty purpose, which is not
just to be saved and then to be occupied with getting others saved, and
stopping there. Both of those things are good. They are fundamental and
essential, but they are only the beginning. From that point something quite
different begins - what Paul refers to here when he says: “I... beseech you to
walk worthily of the calling wherewith ye were called”; and around that phrase:
“the calling wherewith ye were called” he gathers all these immense things
about the Church which, as to the backward aspect, reach far back over the
ages; as to the upward aspect - “in the heavenlies,” with a vocation which is
now heavenly; and then the onward aspect - “the ages to come.” These are
phrases which indicate the calling wherewith we are called, but how few of us
have really apprehended it! We could say very much about the tragedy of the
loss of that vision and Divine revelation, and of the building up of something
which has made it well nigh impossible for multitudes
now to move into that calling, bound hand and foot as they are by a tradition
and by a system which leaves responsible people not free and too much involved,
for their very livelihood, to move into God’s full thought. We shall not pursue
that line. It is better for us to keep to this positive presentation of the thought
of God and to use our time in seeking to approach - for it will hardly be more
than that - this matter of the greatness of the Church.
We have been thinking about the greatness of Christ and
took several chapters over contemplating that greatness; then came the
greatness of the Cross - the range and the content of the death and
resurrection of Christ. When we come to consider the greatness of the Church,
we find that greatness is because the Church takes up those other two greatnesses; that is, the greatness of the Church is the
greatness of Christ and the greatness of His Cross. They give the Church its
real character. We took the type, with its magnificence and fulness
of presentation, its redundance of wealth - Solomon,
as bringing Christ into view typically, remembering the Lord’s own word: “a
greater than Solomon is here” (Matthew 12:42). But we need to remember also
that Solomon came forward and into view in relation to the house of God. That
was really what brought him to light, and was the reason, the occasion, of
Solomon’s prominence. David had it in his heart that a house should be built,
and that was a Divine thought: “Thou didst well that it was in thine heart” (1 Kings 8:18). It was in his heart from the
Lord, and so much so that the Lord entrusted him with a revelation, in fulness, completeness and detail, of that house. David made
a remarkable statement: “All this have I been made to
understand in writing from the hand of the Lord” (1 Chronicles 28:19). You
cannot explain that! It was clearly a Divine intention, and it was out of that Divine implanting and unfolding that Solomon came on the
scene at all. He was to be the one to whom it was entrusted for fulfilment. His glory was intended to be a related glory,
his greatness a related greatness. In other words, the house which he would
build would be the embodiment and presentation of his own glory and splendour. What Solomon gathered, and was given by the Lord
in every way, would come and find its central embodiment and manifestation in
the house which he would build.
Of course, we at once leap over to that superlative
utterance of the Apostle: “...unto Him be the glory in the church and in Christ
Jesus unto all generations for ever and ever” (Ephesians 3:21; ASV). This
letter to the Ephesians is the counterpart of this narrative in Chronicles in
showing that the Church, as the Body of Christ, is the vessel chosen of God,
and appointed and revealed by Him, to be the embodiment of the glory and
greatness of Christ. It is the vessel, the vehicle, by which all that Christ is
will be made known through the ages of the ages; and there is a true sense in
which the revelation of Jesus Christ and the bringing of Him into view by God
is a related thing. The reason for it is to get this elect, foreknown and
foreordained company in which God in Christ would be made known to a wondering
universe. “...now unto the principalities and powers... through the church...”
(Ephesians 3:10). So, as the house was the manifestation of Solomon’s
greatness, the Church is conceived by God to be the manifestation of the
greatness of Christ.
Having said that as giving just a glimpse of this
greatness (and, of course, for anything like an adequate appreciation it
requires all that we have been saying about the greatness of Christ), we
remember also the greatness of the altar and the sacrifice which came into view
with Solomon - the immensity of the offering made to God at that time. The
greatness of the work of Christ in His Cross indicates how great the Church
must be. If Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for it, and if that was a
sacrifice, an offering, compared with which the tens of thousands of bullocks
and sheep offered by Solomon are as nothing, a sacrifice so great that the type
pales in comparison; if the work of the Cross of the Lord Jesus was so great,
is not that a further indication of how great the Church must be? It has, by
His own parable, been called a “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:46), and to
secure it He, the Divine Merchantman, let go all that He had - and He had an
‘all’ which no merchantman in the history of this world has ever possessed, a
wealth and a fulness, a glory which He had with God
before the world was, something indestructible, great and wonderful. Seeking
goodly pearls, when He had found one of great price He sold all to get it. We
cannot understand that, for it is beyond us, but there it is; it is Divine
revelation. And the Cross was the price of the Church. For some unspeakable
reason, the Church stands related to God in value like that. Christ loved the
Church, “the Church of God which He purchased with His own blood.” It is
evidently a very great and wonderful thing.
Now we must look at some of those features of Christ
which are taken up in the Church, in order that we may know what this Church is
that we are talking about. What is it? Well, if it takes up the things which
are true of Christ, then what is true of Him is, in the mind of God, to be true
of the Church; and it is true of the Church which is in God’s eye.
And the first feature of Christ upon which we dwelt when
we were considering Him was His eternal being, the eternal conception. We need
not go again over the ground of the eternal Sonship of Christ. All we need say
about that is that He was before the world was; He was before the order of time
was instituted in the establishment of those heavenly bodies by the government
of which time exists - years and months, day and night, summer and winter. These
are all governed by heavenly bodies, and these are time factors. Before they
were, He was, for He created all things. This word ‘eternal’ in our usage
simply means that going back and going on beyond time, beyond marked periods,
beyond history. That is true of Christ. The letter to the Ephesians says that in the mind of God the Church existed
before the foundation of the world. It does not necessarily mean that the
Church actually existed as Christ did in eternity past, but it was “foreknown.”
“He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world... having foreordained
us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto Himself” (Ephesians 1:4,5). As we have pointed out before, this letter to the
Ephesians is not set in time; it will have its effect upon time matters, the
practical matters of every-day life, of our walk and conduct here on this
earth; but it is set in the timeless realm. It goes back, and it goes on; it
bridges all time in the Divine conception. That is where this letter is set,
and, until we recognize the implications of that, we have no real apprehension
of the Church; and when we do recognize that, what nonsense all this ‘churchianity’
becomes, how small and petty, and how we feel that from God’s standpoint we are
just playing at some game of churches when we make so much of what has
traditionally come to be called ‘the Church!’ If we have one real Divine
glimpse of the Church, all that other becomes paltry, petty, foolish, and a
mighty emancipation takes place inside us - but it requires illumination.
The Church takes the feature of the absolute stability of
Christ. It is something outside of time, chosen in Him before the world was. The
stability of the true Church, according to God’s mind, is the stability of
Christ Himself. This thing, on God’s basis and in His realm, is an immovable
and undestructible thing. That is not true of
anything else. Oh, the stability of being there in God’s thought! Survival is
certain, and, indeed, more than survival. We sometimes sing the old hymn:
“Crowns
and thrones may perish,
Kingdoms
rise and wane;
But
the Church of Jesus
Constant
will remain.
Gates
of hell can never
‘Gainst that Church prevail.”
“I will build My church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against
it”
(Matthew 16:18). The Church embodies the eternity and indestructibility of
Christ’s very life.
Next we spoke of Christ in His heavenliness. “I came down
from heaven” (John 6:38). Again you need to gather up that constantly
reiterated statement which He made about His heavenly origin. Here in this
letter the Church is set forth so strongly, with such emphasis, as being like
that. “Raised us up with Him, and made us to sit with Him in the heavenlies, in
Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6). We spoke about Christ’s word to Pilate - “My
kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). I was struck by the last few words
of 1 Chronicles 28:5: “He hath chosen Solomon my son to sit upon the throne of
the kingdom of the Lord over Israel.” It was not the kingdom of Israel; it was
the Kingdom of God over Israel. “My kingdom is not of this world.” In other
words, ‘My Kingdom is God’s Kingdom - much bigger than this and beyond this:
not of this world, that is, not merely temporal.’
We sought to point out the perfect ‘otherness’
of Christ from everyone else in this race. How utterly other He was, and is;
out from another realm altogether! And that is true of the Church. It is quite
other, something altogether different from that with which we are familiar. Our
word about Christ is true of the true Church - that He passed through this
world unrecognized, unknown, making the positive affirmation that “no one knoweth the Son, save the Father” (Matthew 11:27). There is
a mystery here. That word ‘mystery,’
used so much by the Apostle, particularly in this letter, is a most difficult
word to explain. We have to resort to a paradox whenever we try to explain it,
for mystery - ‘mysterium’
- simply means manifestation in a hidden way. That is a contradiction, a
paradox, but that is the essence of the word. God is manifested, but in a
hidden way. “No one knoweth the Son, save the
Father,” and yet: “He that hath seen Me hath seen the
Father.” He is manifested as God in Christ, but in such a hidden way that it
demands an act of God in specific revelation to see Jesus Christ. You cannot
truly see who Jesus Christ is unless God acts sovereignly and opens the eyes of
your heart. That has been demonstrated by His whole life here on this earth.
When one Apostle was able, in a moment of revelation, to say: “Thou art the
Christ, the Son of the living God,” the rejoinder was: “Blessed art thou, Simon
Bar-Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father”
(Matthew 16:17). But the moment passed, for not long afterward the man who had
had the revelation was found denying that One with
oaths and with curses, and that three times. If the revelation had been an
abiding one, how could he have done that? It was a moment of Divine, sovereign
action when the mystery was disclosed and he saw. God was manifested in a
hidden way while that instant lasted; but then the veil fell again, and the
mystery continued.
And what is true of Christ is true of the Church. It is heavenly, it is unrecognized and unknown unless God reveals
it. I want you really to grasp this. I know in what a realm of helplessness it
places us on the one side, and it is well that this should be so; and therefore
what it makes necessary on the other side is that God should have a Church
which exists on the basis of His own sovereign act of revelation. The purity of
it demands that. If everybody could see and understand and comprehend, and the
Church could be brought right down to the limited compass of human
apprehension, what sort of Church would it be? That is exactly what the devil
has sought to do - to bring the Church within the compass of anybody’s range of
comprehension, so that anybody can be in it, or think they are in it. What
havoc the devil has made by getting rid of this great fact! They have done it
with Christ, and made Him the Jesus of history, with unspeakable loss.
Very largely, Christianity is in its appalling state
today because of this mishandling of the Person of Christ, this trying to
constitute everything upon the basis of the Jesus of history. The cry: ‘Back to
Jesus!’ (meaning, away from Paul) is simply to try to
bring things down to this earthly, human level which everybody can understand
and grasp. ‘We cannot follow Paul. He is so mysterious, otherworldly, remote. Let us get back to the simple Jesus of history, the
Jesus of the Gospels!’ This is simply jettisoning the thing which is essential
for bringing to God that upon which His heart is set. “No man can come unto Me, except it be given unto him of the Father” (John 6:65),
said the Lord Jesus. “No man can come unto Me.” It
demands a Divine, a sovereign, act on God’s part to bring any man or woman
really to Christ. You cannot just choose or decide to come. It is not with
anybody to say that they are going to be a Christian. God has to do something
in every case, and it is His own sovereign act. Do not cheapen the Gospel! If
we do, we shall open the door so wide that we shall be glad after a time to get
rid of that which has come in. The Church, in its heavenly character taken from
Christ, is something that can only be entered by revelation, because it can
only be known by revelation. “No one knoweth....” We
can only state these facts. No teaching can accomplish it, and we are powerless
in the matter. All that is given to us is to state Divine facts, and it is for
God to reveal. But, thanks be unto God, He has
revealed and He does reveal. Some of us can say that He has shined into our
hearts in this matter, and the revelation of Christ and of the Church has made
an immense difference in every way. Of course, this faculty of ‘seeing’ is
inherent in the new birth by the indwelling Holy Spirit.
The revelation of God in Christ is carried on in the
Church in exactly the same way as with Him, in this sense - that God has
revealed Himself Person-wise. The Letter to the Hebrews opens with: “God...
hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in a Son” - Son-wise, and that is
only another way of saying ‘Person-wise.’ The only adequate revelation of God
is personal. God cannot be really known by the things which He says, however
many they may be. There is such a difference between a mental, intellectual
apprehension and conception of God, and a living, heart-transforming
apprehension. God must come to us Himself in a living, personal way if we are
to know Him livingly and actually. You may read a biography or an
autobiography, and you may afterward say that you thereby know the person
concerned; but how often it is true that, when you actually meet that person,
there is something that was not there in the book and which makes all the
difference. You were not really changed and transformed by reading the book. You
had impressions, but they did not make any difference to you actually in your
very life and nature; but you meet the person, and the impact of that person
makes a deep impression and has a great effect. That is so often the case; but
it is a poor illustration. God’s revelation unto life has had to be
Person-wise. He has come in the Person of His Son, incarnate, and if you really
touch the reality of Christ in the Spirit there is a tremendous result. You
know how this is borne out in the accounts in the Gospels. There were times
when crowds thronged Him and pressed upon Him in closest touch, but nothing
happened to the crowds. But in the crowd there was an individual in deep and
desperate need who had faith, and said: “If I do but
touch His garment, I shall be made whole” (Matthew 9:21). There was some
spiritual link between that one and Him which did not exist between Him and the
rest of the crowd thronging Him, and that one by the touch found, not the Jesus
of history, but the Christ of God, not merely the Man of Galilee, but the real
Divine Person. It is difficult to explain and define, but you can see there is
a difference. That is the only sufficient revelation of God - Person-wise.
That is taken up in the Church and is the real meaning of
this definition of the Church: “the church, which is His body”; “gave Him to be
head over all things” - not: ‘of the
church,’ though that is true - but “to
the church.” The Church, coming under that Headship, into that vital
relationship with Him as Head, comes into the ‘all things’ that are in Christ,
and, as His Body, it embodies Him.
Now, the greatness of the Church is here: that God has
ordained and appointed that the Church now, in this dispensation, should be
where He can be found, where He can be met, where He can be touched, where He
makes self-manifestation. “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). God
can be met, found and touched there. There is the vehicle of His manifestation.
So the Church is called to be here in this dispensation,
and in the ages to come to be the very Body through which God in Christ
manifests Himself and makes Himself known. Is that the
Church that we know, that is commonly called the Church? Oh no! But that is
God’s thought.
I have been reading a book by Adolph Keller, a man who
travelled all over the world to visit all churches and see what could be done
along the line of church union. I came on something like this in his book: “I
must admit,” he says, “that ofttimes when I sat in
magnificent church buildings, with their stained glass windows and carved
organs, I was less conscious of being in the church of Christ than when, for
instance, I was in one of those Ukrainian peasant-rooms crowded with men and
women who had come barefoot from afar to hear the Word of God. These poor
little congregations and churches, widely scattered in the hills of Jugoslavia, in the lonely villages of Wolhynia,
in the coal-mining districts of Belgium, in the taverns and barns of
Czechoslovakia - these churches truly humble us, because they show us again and
again the true poverty and the true riches of Christ, and that in a way
impossible in the securely established, self-sufficient church that we know
today.” Then he makes this statement: “The entire Church no longer represents
its nature as originally intended, neither is it able to do so.” How different
from the Church of God’s thought! The true Church is nothing less, in the
intention of God, than Christ Himself present and going on with His work
without those earthly limitations of His life before His death and
resurrection. The Christ risen, ascended and exalted
in all the fulness which God has put in is in the
true Church. I say that you cannot identify it. You can only see where two or
three are gathered. You cannot say of this, or that, or some other thing called
‘the Church’ that is the Church. No, the true Church is still this mysterious
thing. It is Christ in active expression. How great is the Church if it is
Christ!
I say that we can only state the facts, and there they
are. What we have to do next is to pray to the Lord: ‘O Lord, reveal the true Church!’
There is one last word just now. It concerns that
always-present and always-governing factor about Christ which is not taken
sufficient account of, I think, in its meaning. You notice that when Christ was
here His aspect was always the forward one. He was always thinking and talking
of a time to come. That is a governing factor and feature of Christ. “In that day...” (Matthew 7:22, etc.). He
is looking on to and talking about a coming day. All the time His eyes are upon
the distant horizon and He speaks of what will then be: ‘Then you shall know,
then you shall see, then all will be manifested, then all that has been so
hidden and mysterious will be perfectly clear.’ That related, in the first
instance, to the coming Holy Spirit, but when you pass into the Epistles you
find the same thing dominant in the case of the Church. There are mighty things
now, big possibilities now, big issues and responsibilities now, and the Church
is now, even now, unto principalities and powers an instrument of the
revelation of the manifold wisdom of God (Ephesians 3:10). But the onward look
is prominent and governs everything. “...that we should be unto the praise of
His glory” (Ephesians 1:12); “that in the ages to come He might show the
exceeding riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians
2:7); “...unto Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all the
generations of the age of the ages” (Ephesians 3:21).
I am only bringing that in here at this moment with this
object: to remind you of the tremendous end to which the Church is called. How
great the Church is in the light of the vocation which it is to fulfil! What a great vocation! We might spend much time
considering what the calling of the Church is, or is going to be in the coming
ages, but we must be satisfied for the present with making this one
observation. It is one thing to be a citizen, and a blessed citizen, of a noble
country and of a noble king. There may be many blessings in that for which to
be grateful, but it is an infinitely greater thing to be a member of the king’s
household and family, a member of the reigning house. And that is the calling
of the Church: not only to be inhabitants of the land, but to be members of the
reigning family. We are called with that calling, to be in that inner circle. “The
nations... shall walk in the light of it” (Revelation 21:24) is a way of
putting it. The Church is this specific company, elect from all eternity to all
eternity, not just to be something in itself and to know satisfaction and
gratification, but to be instrumental in the hands of God in serving Him in His
universe throughout all the coming ages, in close relationship with His Throne.
How great the Church is! Well might the Apostle, in seeing far more than we
have ever seen, say: “I... beseech you to walk worthily of the calling
wherewith ye were called, with all lowliness and meekness” (Ephesians 4:1,2). Then he brings that walk into touch with common things
of every-day life, and says: ‘If you are a true member of the Church and have a
true apprehension of it, you will not be a bad father or mother, a bad husband
or wife; you will not be a bad master or mistress or servant. All this will be
affected by your spiritual apprehension.’ How practical it is! There are so
many people who have high doctrine, and they are poor
Christians; who have all the truth, but they are bad employers. That is not the
Church.
May the Lord Himself
open our hearts and give us that touch of sovereign grace, that we may see the
truth and be conformed to it.
Read: John 1:1, 14;
Revelation 19:13; John 6:63; John 8:47; 14:10.
We come to the fourth of those four greatnesses
of Divine revelation - the greatness of the Word of God. Let me say at once
that it is not my intention to argue that the Word of God is great. We might
gather all kinds of evidences to build up an argument for the place of the Word
of God, but what we are concerned about just now is the nature of the greatness.
By way of introduction, let me say that in this matter,
as in the other three which have engaged our hearts, there is tremendous need
for a new understanding. I do not think we get very far in real spiritual value
when we launch out in arguments for the inspiration of Scripture. To be taken
up with a ‘fundamental’ movement simply to seek to prove that the Bible is the
Word of God from cover to cover and that it is inspired (whether it be verbal
or plenary) does not get us very far spiritually. It does not mean that we make
little of that, but the important thing is that by the Word of God we should be
brought into all the mind and purpose of God; and that is not done by theories,
or interpretations of inspiration. It can only be as we really know what the
Word of God is, for the Word of God is much more than something written.
Having said that, we find ourselves immediately at the
point which gives the indication of what is the greatness of the Word of God,
and it is found inside that very first statement in the Gospel by John. “In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” As
you know, a particular Greek word is used there, while another word is used in
the other passage: “The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are
life” (John 6:63; ASV). And in between those two statements we put this: “He
that is of God heareth the words of God: for this
cause ye hear them not, because ye are not of God” (John 8:47) - and yet the
Lord was speaking these very words in the hearing of those concerned. They
heard just as much as anybody else His actual words and statements, but He said
they did not hear - indeed, He said more: “Ye cannot hear My
word” (John 8:43). Here we have the identity between the Divine Person and the
Divine Word. In that matter, the same is true of the Word of God as we have
seen to be true of Christ Himself and of the Church. We have seen that Christ
was a complete mystery to the natural man, and to this world as He passed up
and down in the midst of men - men of ordinary intelligence and men of unusual
intelligence, men of no learning and men of great learning, men who naturally
may have had great sagacity and natural understanding, and good judgment and
perception. He moved amongst such continually and they knew Him not. As we have
said, God passed incognito, unrecognized, through this world. “No one knoweth the Son, save the Father” (Matthew 11:27; ASV). It
was the mystery of God incarnate.
In our previous meditation we passed that on to the
Church. The true Church, according to God’s mind and according to revelation,
is not a thing that you can recognize or identify here on this earth. It is
something hidden, something heavenly, a mystery; even while here on the earth
it is a mystery. Its true nature and identity are hidden even from the wise and
prudent, and from the best faculties and brains and intelligence of men. To try
to make the Church to be recognized or bring it within the apprehension and
understanding and knowledge of men is to rob it of its essential Divine nature,
and to bring it down to a level where it will be stripped and shorn of its
power. A great deal of history hangs upon that fact, and it explains much of
the weakness and futility today in what is called ‘the Church.’
Now, what is true of Christ and of the Church is true of
the Word of God. It is a mystery. God manifest in a hidden way - a
contradiction, a paradox; but that is the meaning of mystery.
The Word of God is firstly God’s language, which is not
the Hebrew language, nor the Greek language, nor any language known to us on
this earth. It is God’s language, a language which no one knows and which no
one can learn with any human faculty at all. In what is being said now you are
hearing a lot of things which I trust are true - and I trust they are the
truths of God - but you will go away and will pass some kind of judgment upon
what has been said, and that is all there will be to it, unless something else
happens in and through the hearing, and deeper and further back than the mere
listening with your natural ears. Something must come to you as from God
Himself, and unless that happens, whatever you have heard will remain for just
a few hours or a few days, and then it will fail altogether, and leave you with
your own verdict and judgment upon what has been said. The Word of God is
something very much other than what I am saying about it and about Him, though
I trust I am speaking the truth. The Word of God is a mystery; it is God’s
language, and you have to have some kind of God-given faculty for understanding
His language. It is outside this world and outside all the nations and
languages and tongues of this world. It is something different and something
other, and you have to receive a heavenly faculty, by a new birth from heaven,
and to learn an entirely new language from the very alphabet, the A.B.C. of
heaven.
You can know the Bible from cover to cover and not know a
word of God’s language. God’s language may be inside the Bible, and it is; but
it is not that which is in the actual letters and words. It is something beyond
that, and is the deeper language of God. You may read this Book with all its
sacredness and preciousness, and not hear God speaking at all. To hear God’s
language a sovereign act of God is necessary. As we said before about the
recognition and identification of the Son of God in Jesus Christ, it had to be
so. “Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father” (Matthew
16:17). So He, Who is the Word, demands for identification this sovereign act
of Divine revelation as the Word. The perception may be but for an instant, as
with Peter on the occasion cited above, and then depart until something permanent
has been done inside the recipient. The fact that it is God’s act does not
remove man’s responsibility, for we can control our prejudices. Preparedness
and eagerness to hear and receive are essential factors in the Divine
communication and quickening.
You see, the essence of the Word of God is its
spirituality, its spiritual nature, and not its naturalness. The Jesus of
history will never save you; only the Christ risen,
ascended, and coming in the power of the Holy Spirit, will effect anything. The
Word as an historical document will never save you and never accomplish
anything. It has to come in the power of the life of the risen Lord, in the
power of the Holy Spirit, to effect its purpose. The
spiritual is the real Word of God. “The words that I have spoken unto you are
spirit, and are life” (John 6:63). “...not of the letter, but of the spirit:
for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). They may be spoken, but
apart from an act of God you will not hear them; all will be in vain. Hence it
is possible to preach Christ and the Cross and make them of none effect because
they are preached in the wisdom of men.
Further, we have seen that Christ is the personal impact
of God. When Christ really does touch, or is really touched in a spiritual way,
God is found. We sought to show this in our previous meditation by indicating
that even when the multitude thronged and pressed Him, hemming Him in on every
side, they did not register anything; He was to them but as any other man in a
crowd. But one woman was in a different realm altogether from the multitude. She
had faith, the essential link with God, and said: “If I touch but His garments,
I shall be made whole” (Mark 5:28; ASV). And she pressed her way through and
touched, and was made whole that very moment, finding that in that One from Whom the multitude were deriving nothing, though in closest
proximity, she met God. Hers was a testimony which stood in contrast to that of
the whole multitude. They had all seen Him and heard Him, and He had been with
them all, but one alone made the discovery, that is, only one met the impact of
God.
And what is true of Him personally is true of Him as the
Word, and true of the Word of God.
You see, God’s Word is always an act. Do not forget that!
The Bible as written is not always an act. How many times do you read your
Bible and come away with nothing? Many tell me: ‘I do not know the Bible as
really alive. I read it, but I do not seem to get anything.’ Is that not a
common experience? Ah, yes. The Word of God is something that is more inward
than the framework, than its channel, and the real Word of God is God’s act. “He
spake, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood
fast” (Psalm 33:9; ASV). “By faith we understand that the worlds have been
framed by the word of God” (Hebrews 11:3). Did you notice in that fragment from
John 14: “The words that I say unto you I speak not from Myself:
but the Father abiding in Me doeth His works”?
You would expect Him to keep His full statement on the same line and make the
second half correspond to the first: ‘The words that I say unto you I speak not
from Myself; but the Father abiding in Me speaketh
the words.’ But He did not say so. ‘Words . . . works’; and the works of the
Lord Jesus were largely done by His Word. There was an utterance and something
happened. “I say unto you...” God’s word is an act.
The Bible, if we knew it aright, is not just a book at
all. It is a Person. It is not a collection of truths and doctrines, laws,
commandments and technicalities. It is just a Person, and the Bible will miss
its purpose unless it is all the time bringing us into touch with the Person -
and that Person is the Lord Jesus Christ. There is only one system in the whole
Bible, and that is a personal one - Christ. You may not quite grasp that, but
think about it. The Word of God is creative; something happens, and something
results. *
* All that we have said above does not mean that the
written Word in itself has no value or purpose. The fact that we have the Bible
at all is going to be a basis of judgment. We are responsible to God just by
having His written revelation; but its power to effect
anything in our lives is through faith, and, apart from a combination of the Spirit’s
action upon faith in quickening us to “know,” the Word itself remains but the
verbal statement, and not “life.”
Let me try to get at it in this way. What is the object
of God’s speaking? What is the object of all Divine revelation? What is the
object of the Word of God? There is only one object, and that is to bring back
the lost relationship with Himself. From beginning to
end, the one object of the Word of God is to recover, to restore, to secure again a relationship with Himself personally which
has been lost. How is that done? How can that be done
by the human language of words? It can only be done in a personal way, so it is
a relationship with a living Person. But how can man have a living relationship
with the living God? That is utterly impossible as man is. God is a Spirit, and
only spirit can have a vital relationship with God. If, then, the object of the
Word of God is to recover relatedness with God, something spiritual has to come
about in the persons concerned to link them with God, Who is Spirit; and the
Word of God, the Word which Christ has spoken, is spirit and is life. Then the
effect of the Word of God should ever and always be to quicken our spirits and
make us live by Divine life.
If this is true, I am sure you agree with my opening
statement: that a new understanding of the Word of God is very necessary today,
and the failure to understand this about the Word of God accounts for so much
weakness and loss. We can be fundamental to the utmost limit, arguing for the
authority and inspiration of the Scriptures, and still be spiritually dead and
ineffective. The Word of God is something more than that.
Now you see, in order to destroy the Word of God, you
have to destroy the Person of Jesus Christ, and so also the other way round. That
is exactly what the devil has sought to do. You cannot separate these two; they
go together. If Christ is the Son of God, if He is God incarnate, then the Word
of God stands supreme. Now, to get rid of the authority and the supremacy of
the Word of God, you have to undermine the Person of Jesus Christ, and you
notice that is exactly what is happening in Modernism. Why does the devil seek
to take away His essential Deity from Christ and make Him the Jesus of history?
It is in order to get rid of His mighty impact as the Word of God for the
quickening and making alive of others. So the Word always goes with the Person.
Modernism must logically follow up the reducing of Christ to the level of a
great man by reducing the Word of God to the word of man. They stand or fall
together.
Then if this is true we are led to this further fact:
that the Word of God, being God’s language and God’s act, is the very occasion
and cause and explanation of our being. “By faith we understand that the worlds
have been framed by the word of God.” He commanded and He spoke; it was His
act. The existence of the world, or the ages, then, is because God spoke and
something happened. Dear friends, as the Lord’s new creation we are
attributable to God’s having spoken in this sense of very being. We are
begotten again by the Word of God. It is not simply our taking the letter of
the Word and trying to give some response to it, and making some decision. Oh,
I do not want to be misunderstood or to be thought critical, for God knows how
we value and appreciate anything and everything that is of Him and can be used
by Him, but we have said before in these meditations that the great peril of
our time in evangelical Christianity is the cheapening of everything and making
it so easy by flinging open the widest door possible for anyone to come in on
the easiest lines. While it is not desired to make things difficult, I do think
there is a need in this matter to realize that it requires something altogether
beyond the natural to bring someone back into that restored relatedness with
God. It requires nothing less than this Word-act of God which brings into
being, and without which there is no existence, so far as relationship with God
is concerned. We can only have a being as members of the new creation if God
has spoken and it is done. Do not let us deceive ourselves. It must be like
that. God, Who said:
‘Let light be!’ must shine in our hearts (2 Corinthians 4:6).
And when it is like that, as we have been saying about
Christ and the Church, eternity has broken into time; the advent of eternity
has simply swept time out of existence, and we are linked with the eternal God.
Something has happened - “I give unto them eternal life” (John 10:28). New birth
is the activity of the Word which produces a new creation in which there is a
new life linking with eternity. What a tremendous thing the Word of God is! It
is a matter of very being!
And it is not only that. The Lord Jesus said things which
had to be opened up later on through His Apostles when the Holy Spirit was
come. He said: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Not only
is man’s being to be attributable to this Word of God of which we are speaking,
but his very maintenance is on that basis. The maintenance of that imparted
spiritual life, and its sustenance throughout, is by the Word of God, and that
is something more than reading the Bible. Let me ask you again, and let us be
quite honest (and there is room and need for honesty: I know I am open to
misunderstanding, but I am taking the risk in order to get right to the heart
of things and save people from deception and a false position, and honesty is
called for here) - do you find always and continually that your spiritual life
is sustained, nourished, built up and maintained by reading the Bible? Do you
always find that you go on and grow spiritually by Bible study? The
universities can make doctors of law and philosophers, but they cannot make, in
the true sense, doctors of the Word of God. Only the Holy Spirit can do that,
for it is a spiritual thing. And honesty must face this. There is a difference
between reading the Bible as a book - yes, the greatest of all books, and a
God-given book - and God coming through it and causing us to say: ‘Oh, I have
read that passage many times, but I never saw that in it! God has now spoken to
me in a text that I have known from my infancy, in a passage of Scripture with
which I am most familiar. God has now spoken in a way in which He never has
before through that Scripture!’ That is what I mean. The Word of God lies
behind the very maintenance of our life in the sense that something from God is
coming from beyond (though it may be coming through this or that channel, or along this or that line). It is coming from
behind, from beyond, as something extra, something
more, and finding us. And when we pass our conclusion upon the matter, we have
to say that we have come, not to some new apprehension of the Scripture, but to
some new knowledge of the Lord by means of that Word. There is such a thing as
Divine sovereignty operating with the written word and making it His
embodiment.
This explains one or two things! In the first place, it
explains why you can have a number of different institutions which all
contradict and exclude one another, and yet all claim to be founded upon the
Bible. There is not a sect or denomination which does not claim the Bible as
the warrant for its existence and its order, and yet they are mostly mutually
exclusive. How do you explain that? And, mark you, in the fact of the existence
of all those things there is spiritual limitation. When the particular order
and constitution and ecclesiastical position and all that belongs thereto are
forgotten for the time being, and the Lord’s people come together in any one
given place, and are there only as the
Lord’s people, you will find a great deal more life and fulness
and consciousness of the Lord than when all are proceeding along the various
lines of their ecclesiastical departmentalism, for the Lord is met. Ought this
state of things to be?
If we had the Word of God in the sense in which we have
just been speaking of it - God coming through in illumination, in quickening,
in His act of new creation - while there would be variety, there would be
essential oneness and unity, and no contradiction. Nature is a great parable of
this. It is strange how in nature, despite all the God-given colors that there
are, you never find any real clash. But if you tried to wear those colors in a
garment, there would be a clash. In a garden, where they are all found, there
is no clash. In God’s realm there may be endless variety, but there is no contradiction nor clash. The Holy Spirit is One and God
is One; and if we get off the ground of human interpretations of the Word of
God, of man’s mental handling and apprehension of the Scriptures, and get God’s
revelation of His meaning, then there will be an absolute oneness, and
contradiction and exclusive expression will go. You have left the earthly
ground and come on to heavenly ground.
So what is true of the Church, according to God’s mind,
as a heavenly thing, altogether other than of this earth, is true of the Word
of God. When you really get on to the ground, not of the letter only, but of
the essential nature of the Word of God - the speaking, the breathing, the
working of God - you get on to another level which is altogether different from
the earthly, and you find that the clash and the
contradiction go out. There is tremendous need for the people of God to get on
to God’s level of things and away from man’s in all these matters; a need to
get right into the heart of God’s thought and mind. It is costly. As we have
said before, Christianity is such a tight system now that it is well-nigh
impossible for many who are in it - and especially those who are in it
officially - to come into God’s full thought, because it means so much in every
way to escape from that system. But, oh! where it does happen and there is
escape: where the price is paid: where there is obedience: where the heavenly
vision is and there is no disobedience to it: where God has spoken, and you
cannot but hear and know that it is God, and your heart gives the answer back
to Him and at all costs you go on: then you come out into a place of tremendous
spiritual enlargement and into a realm of fulness.
To sum up. The
essential nature of God’s Word is akin to the essential nature of God Himself,
which is spirit. God’s Word is spirit because God is spirit. And God’s Word as
a means of communication defines the essential nature of Christ the living
Word, for He can only be known after the Spirit. We have said that although He
was there before people’s eyes, they saw Him not, they
heard Him not and knew Him not. Essentially, it was what He was spiritually
that was His real nature. Paul makes that perfectly clear: “Though we have
known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know Him so no more” (2 Corinthians
5:16; ASV). He does not say so positively, but he clearly indicates that our
knowledge of Christ now is not that of the Jesus of history. We know Him now
after the Spirit. The real nature of the Word of God is what Christ is
essentially, spiritually; so also the essential nature of the Word of God is
what the Church is spiritually. God is spirit; the medium or vehicle of God’s
speaking is Christ known after the Spirit; the vessel receiving the speaking of
God - the Church - is spiritual. As the Church, we are tested by this. Do we
hear more than the Bible as something written in words of men? Are we, as the
Church, hearing through it the more, the extra, which no man can hear unless it
is given him of God? Are we hearing that? Where that is truly found, the Church
is something of spiritual power, spiritual life and spiritual growth. What is
true of the Church, of course, must be true of every part of it; every member
of that Body must be a spiritual person, made so by spiritual birth. “That
which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). In order really to hear the
Word of God continually (though God may in a sovereign act make an unregenerate
man know that he is being spoken to through the Scriptures) something must have
been done inside us, and that something must be continually maintained. What
lies behind everything with God is spiritual. He has bound Himself more with
the spiritual than with the natural. I will not pursue that further.
I wonder if you are able to discern even now, by the
Lord’s help, the great difference, and the great need to know what the Word of
God really is, what its possibilities and its potentialities are, and what is
the nature of its greatness? It is not just a verbal statement. It is the
impact of God Himself, and that impact is sovereign. Therein is the place of
faith in preaching and in coming to read the Scriptures. It is possible to
preach without God coming through, and there is plenty of that, yet God has
ordained to come through preaching, and everyone who preaches can only preach
in faith, declaring the truth of God. He is cast back upon this: that God must
act sovereignly and make this one here and that one there recognize that God is
speaking; not a man only, but God. Hundreds may be gathered, and yet only one
of them hear God speaking. We are cast upon that
sovereignty of God. Blessed be God, it does work like that! People are able to
say, and we ourselves are able to say as we look back over our own spiritual
history: ‘I knew the Bible well enough. I could quote it, analyze it and set it
forth; but one day God came through it and smote me, and from that time the
Scriptures which were so familiar to me became the basis of a new life and an
entirely new position.’ That is the Word of God coming through.
What is really needed today is a recovery of the Word of
God in its essential, intrinsic greatness, and of the fact that the Word is
God, with a personal impact upon us.
Originally published
by Witness and Testimony Publishers in 1947-48
This
selection re-published by: