Books by T. Austin-Sparks

[Shammu]

A Resurrection Seed

That brings in one of the major basic principles and truths of this spiritual seed, that it is a resurrection seed, and that its history is to be characterised by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. I cannot lay enough emphasis upon that. It is not just a truth enunciated, it is the most searching and testing thing that you and I can have to do with - that, if we are the spiritual seed of Abraham in Christ by faith, we are called to have our whole history based upon this fundamental law - the power of His resurrection. It is something stated as a truth, but it is something to be taken hold of by faith. Again and again in the course of our history we shall be at the place where there is no hope but in "God who raiseth the dead" (2 Cor. 1:9) if there is to be any future at all. We shall come there, in our own spiritual history, we shall come there in our own soul life - that we are at an end of our resources, mind, heart and will. We may come ofttimes in our very physical life to the place where, if God does not do something, it is an end. We shall come there in the work of God - where everything seems to declare that this is the finish of the work, there is nothing more possible; but now is the occasion for the God Who raiseth the dead, the God of promise, the God of Isaac, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is not just a Bible teaching. This is searching truth. We have to have our life based upon it and to believe it, and when it begins to work we must remember what is happening. I have no doubt that we have all accepted it as a truth, we believe it as something set forth; but when it begins to work in us, somehow we lose the whole thing. When we really do get to an end and say, This is the finish! we begin to accept it as the finish, we agree that all is finished. Instead of that, we should not trust in ourselves but in God. "Should not trust in ourselves" - that is negative. The positive is - "We ourselves have had the sentence of death within ourselves, that we should... trust... in God who raiseth the dead." That is very practical. It will find us out many times, if we are men and women of the Spirit.

Now, you say: That is extraordinary - I always thought if only I was filled with the Spirit, if I really knew the meaning of Pentecost, I should always be on top in the full flood of life; surely there is a contradiction? Not at all! This resurrection life works primarily and firstly in our spirit, and it is from there that we have got to come up in mind and in body. The real working of the Spirit is like that. You are waiting and crying for the Lord to come and touch you on the outside, to lift you, to quicken you. You are waiting for something to happen that you can sense somewhere in the circumference of life. Death is there in the realm of your soul, your mind, your sensibilities, your body, your surroundings; you are waiting for the Lord to do something there. No, that is natural, that day has passed in the order of God. You have to know a touch of life in your spirit. It may come by a word from the Lord. If you are called to the ministry of the Word you may be completely dry and dark and dead for the next bit of ministry which looms ahead, but when God's moment comes, the word of the Lord comes to you and from that moment the ministry begins to open out and you fulfil it; that is spiritual ministry. Or in any other connection the principle holds good - the power of resurrection begins in our spirit. We have to know it there, and then in faith move on that, and we find that mind and body come into line for all that the Lord wants. "First that which is natural; then that which is spiritual." That is the law of the Lord now; this is the "afterward" day. The day of the natural passed with the day of Pentecost; things were all outward until then.

You know how true that was in Israel's case. They had only to do something outward and God responded. But not now; you cannot get anything by law now. You can observe all the ritual, but you never get anything from God that way. This is the "afterward," it is spiritual; it is now a life in and by the Spirit.

To reinforce what we have been saying, let us remind ourselves of the fact that God never committed Himself in this matter of the promise of Isaac until the thing was utterly impossible naturally. The promise was never given until the whole situation was a natural impossibility. Ishmael - "first that which is natural"; but God is looking on, He has in principle something more in view, He is after the spiritual, and so He gave His promise to Abraham, and with it committed Himself, only when things were absolutely impossible naturally for the realisation of His promise. Are you prepared to accept that as a working principle in life all the way along? You cannot have anything more testing than that. It is very real, it is desperately real, so real that when you are in it you can do any desperate thing. It is so real that if you are not alive to this other side, if you do not believe in God Who raiseth the dead, anything can happen. But the God of resurrection comes in only when resurrection is the only thing possible; and resurrection is God's prerogative alone. This is a matter for Almighty God alone, that is all there is to it. Unless Almighty God comes in, then there is no prospect, no hope, whatsoever. That is a law of life for the spiritual; that is the nature of things in this new age.

[Shammu]

The Sign of Circumcision

Now, God followed this up with a sign, an outward mark of a spiritual significance. He gave to Abraham the sign of circumcision. It became the mark of all the seed of Abraham, distinguishing them from all other peoples, and establishing a law. Let us be sensible about this, even if it is a delicate subject. It established a law that all the fruit of life from that time onward was to be wholly for God. That is the meaning of circumcision - to be wholly separated unto God. God was very meticulous about that. You remember that extraordinary incident in the life of Moses. Moses had met God in the bush, God had spoken to him about His intentions, and then God had commissioned him as the deliverer of His people, and Moses was on his way to fulfil his Divinely-given commission; and then you have this statement - "...the Lord met him and sought to kill him" (Ex. 4:24). An extraordinary thing that the man Divinely called, chosen and commissioned should be met by God with intent to slay him! God was saying, in effect: Yes, but, after all, nothing of it is possible; with all that vision, with all that purpose, with all that intention, it is all suspended until something has happened. And you notice what happened. It was made quite clear what the difficulty was - Moses had not circumcised his son; and when that was done, he went on and fulfilled his task. All the fruit of his life was to be held for God, everything was to be upon this basis, that the flesh is out of the way, and all is of the Spirit, the fruit of the Spirit, not the fruit of the flesh, for God. Oh, what a history is bound up with that! Paul takes that up again in the letter to the Galatians and says in substance: It is not circumcision of the flesh at all in this new day; that all belongs to the natural, that belongs to yesterday; we have come into a new day, and now circumcision is circumcision of the heart where everything is unto God, and the flesh put away. Writing to the Colossians, he explains that when he says we were "buried with him in baptism" (Col. 2:12), and in that connection he says "...ye were circumcised with a circumcision not made with hands, in the putting off of the body of the flesh, in the circumcision of Christ" (Col. 2:11). It is the Cross dealing with that self-life which will come even into the service of God, into a Divine, commission - that uncircumcised Philistine hand that will always be meddling with Divine things, even with the Ark itself. Yes, we are all capable of that. It is the peril that is always nearest to us of bringing our natural life in some kind of impingement upon Divine things, getting into the Lord's work ourselves, doing it ourselves, being interested in the Lord's things ourselves. It takes the Spirit of God in His perfect knowledge and understanding and insight to take the full measure of this self-life; we cannot do it.

But here is the point - this is the day of the Spirit, and those who are the spiritual seed of Abraham, who are now under the power of the Spirit, governed by the Spirit, will be made alive by the Spirit continually to that which is of the Spirit and that which is not. The more we go on with the Lord, the fuller and clearer will become our perception as to what is spiritual and what is natural, even in our Christian life. It is a whole life of education. Things that we thought at one time were quite all right, quite permissible, quite in line with the Lord's will, as we go on we come to find that even those things have come into a realm of question, the Spirit is not agreeing with them now. We have come to discover that He never did agree with them, but we were not enough alive to Him to know His mind about them. He deals with us as with children as long as we are children, but when it is time that we should leave childhood the Spirit begins to deal with us very drastically if we are going on with the Lord. It is this kind of people that the Lord is after in this age. Oh, what a difference it would make if all the Lord's people were really governed by this law of the Spirit of life in Christ, whose hearts were truly circumcised, that all the fruit of life should be wholly unto God; because this law of the Spirit is not outward, but inward.

I wonder if you are feeling the Lord touch your hearts in this matter? I am so anxious not just to heap words upon words and truths upon truths. I do feel the Lord wants to do something, not just to say things, and it does matter above everything else whether we are able to take account of the voice of the Spirit rather than to be actuated and governed by even the Christian and evangelical world around us. Yes, even in the evangelical world Christianity has become a very set thing; it has become fixed as an order, a system of things; you have to conform to it, and if you do not, well, you are not sound or you are in some way heretical. No, we shall not go wrong in being governed by the Spirit; but even there many good Christians may not be able to understand. Are you prepared for that? It is not conformity to a system of teaching or truths that is needed, but to be able to take account of the movement of the Spirit of God. That will not make us independent, a law to ourselves: the Lord will attend to that. But oh, it is more important than anything else in these days the Lord should have a people who know the Spirit, who hear His voice and follow Him; and all who do that will move in the same direction, will flow together. We said earlier that the reason for so much division and conflict is the fact that the Spirit is not Lord. Other things are Lord - Christian interests are Lord, interpretations are Lord, mental appraisements are Lord, all sorts of things have taken Lordship. Where the Spirit is Lord, we shall speak and think the same thing, there will be no mere individualism. I think I must stop there. Let us listen to what the Spirit says. Let us ask the Lord to make very sure in us that we are not being moved in our lives, in the course that we are taking, by what is religiously natural, but that we are really children of the Spirit and know the Spirit and are in conformity to God's thought for this present dispensation, true children of Abraham according to the Spirit.

[Shammu]

Chapter 4 - Spiritual Israel

We are seeking to see what came in with the day of Pentecost, that is, the deeper and fuller meaning of what was introduced into this world on that day. We have been saying that it did mark a new day in this world's history. When we say 'day' we mean 'age,' a 'dispensation.' That is a big and difficult word: it simply means the order of things obtaining at any given time - that is a dispensation. What is the order and nature of things which was introduced on the day of Pentecost, as different from all other ages in the past, and as represented by the book which goes by the title of "The Acts"? Let me say again, that title, was never given to it by its writer. Many, many years after the book was written someone gave it the title of "The Acts of the Apostles," but Luke, who, wrote it, did not call it that. It is a very handy title, but it can be rather misleading, because it tends to confine attention to the things done, without an adequate recognition of the nature of what was happening, which is the important thing. That is what we are concerned with - the nature of things brought in to characterise this new age.

Now just another word. We have said before that this book of The Acts was not written until after all the letters of the Apostle Paul were written and in circulation. That is interesting, and, has a meaning. If you were to arrange the, New Testament in the order in which the books were written, you would have to change the common order completely and put Paul's letters before The Acts. That means something. It means this very thing that we are seeking to show - that all that is in the book of The Acts has spiritual meaning, is explained in the letters of Paul, and in other letters in the New Testament; and it would be very interesting if you could take the letters first and read them, never having looked at Acts - read them carefully until you knew what was in them, and then for the first time pick up the book called Acts and begin to read it. What would be the value, of that? I think it would be this. When you came upon certain things in Acts, right from the beginning, you would say: 'Oh, I understand what that means now - that means what Paul has said here and here in his epistles. I can see that it is not just something that has happened, but it has a meaning and I can see what that meaning, is.' That would be the value of it; and I take it that that was the value to those who got the book of Acts afterwards. They had the epistles and were able in the light of them to say: 'We see the fuller meaning of all that took place at the beginning now, we know what that meant.'

Before we proceed further with that let us say a word to explain why the books of the New Testament are arranged as they are. We say that men decided to put the books of the Bible in their present order, but there is surely another factor to be allowed for. I think the Holy Spirit was behind that. Why, then, is the book called Acts where it is, near the beginning? For this greatest and most impressive of all reasons - that you must have the Person before you can have the doctrine, because all the doctrine comes out of the Person and points to the Person and comes back to the Person. You see, it is the Lord Jesus Who is in full view when you begin to read the book of the Acts - the Lord Jesus risen, ascended, exalted, glorified - and everything has to be seen in the light of Him, as belonging to Him, as revealing Him, as explaining Him. The Person first; everything comes from the Person. And that is why this book is where it is, and we would all agree that the Holy Spirit had a hand in that arrangement. He is always concerned with bringing the Lord Jesus personally into the first place.

Now let us go on to a further opening up of this that is before us. We took at the outset a fragment from one of Paul's letters - 1 Cor. 15:46 - as our key to this whole matter, and we again note that this was written before the Acts. It was written and it was known wherever that letter to the Corinthians may have gone or wherever what was in that letter may have been made known. It was already known that this was said - "That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is spiritual." Now can you not see how, in the light of that, what I have just been saying would be very true? It had been said "first... that which is natural." That belongs to all that is passed, all that has been. God made a material and natural creation - that is first. "Then that which is spiritual" - now a new creation which is spiritual. God did numerous things which could be seen and handled, but He did them with another thought in them which was not always seen. The first creation was in the natural realm. Now it is all in the spiritual realm - "then that which is spiritual" - and if these people who had had the letters picked up this book of The Acts and read it in the light of the letters they would see at once that it expressed that 'afterward' - that God is not doing things now as He did them in past days. He is doing them in a new realm, on a new principle, on a new basis. It is spiritual now; the Holy Spirit has come, and everything is of a spiritual value and significance.

In our previous meditation we got to the point of the spiritual seed of Abraham. In the early chapters of Acts, Abraham has quite a large place, and all that is said of him must be read in the light of the letters. But what is being said in the letters in relation to Abraham is that the true seed of Abraham is not that which is his natural seed, but that which is his seed spiritually by faith. What God is doing in this dispensation is to get a spiritual race. We said before that the seed of Abraham means a new race of people, a race of people taken by God and separated to be a peculiar people unto Himself. We have pointed out that this age sees that natural seed of Abraham set aside so far as concerns what God is immediately doing, but a spiritual seed is brought in, that is, a new race of which Christ (Who is not only the natural seed but also the spiritual seed of Abraham) is the Head, the first. I will not stay with that. I have to say that because it links at once with the next fragment.

[Shammu]

Israel a Royal Nation

You will notice here with the introduction of this book of The Acts that another phrase is used - "Ye men of Israel." That is the word of Peter on the day of Pentecost. Israel comes into the picture; not only Abraham, the seed of Abraham, but Israel. We said before - and this is what we are going to open up a little more fully now - that there is a difference between the seed of Abraham and the children of Israel in this sense, that the seed of Abraham is racial; the term relates to a race; and, while the children of Israel are of that race, the term "the children of Israel" belongs essentially to a nation. In the race sense, the seed of Abraham is Isaac. "In Isaac shall thy seed be called" (Gen. 21:12), and Isaac in type stands for the man of resurrection. By a miracle in a very true sense, Abraham received Isaac back as from the dead, and Isaac stands for resurrection. Now then, Peter says, "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" (1 Pet. 1:3). You see, resurrection is a begetting, we are the children of God on the ground of resurrection union with Christ. That makes a race begotten in resurrection. That has to do with the term "the seed."

But when you come to "the children of Israel" you advance upon that; the term is not racial, it is national, and is connected with Jacob; not with Isaac, but with Jacob now, for it was Jacob whose name was changed to Israel, which name was taken over and given to this nation - "the children of Israel." But what is the particular significance? It is not birth, it is not just race that is involved. Israel is a prince with God. "Thou... hast prevailed," said the angel to Jacob on that night of Jabbok and Peniel. 'Thou hast prevailed as a prince with God' - that is the meaning of Israel. So this nation which includes the seed, which is the seed, means a corporate people - not so many individuals all born of one father but a collective people brought together in nationhood, who stand upon the ground of God's determination that they shall be the people who govern, who rule, who are in dominion. The prophecy concerning them was - "The Lord will make thee the head, and not the tail" (Deut. 28:13), and, while they were in right relationship with God, there was no nation on the earth that could stand before them. The mightiest nation of the then-known world and the mightiest king - Egypt and Pharaoh - simply went down because of God's destiny bound up with these people. No nation could stand before them. They were a royal nation in principle - that was God's thought. The children of Israel, sons of a prince with God who has prevailed - that was God's thought concerning Israel. It meant ascendancy above all the nations.

The Tragedy of a Lost Position

Well now, we do not find it like that in the beginning of the book of the Acts. Although it is - "Ye men of Israel" - there is the tragedy of a lost position and influence, lost spiritual life and power; but the Holy Spirit is come, and with Pentecost a new age is brought in, and with that new age a new house of Israel, a spiritual house of Israel. I am not saying that the Church is a spiritualised Israel. There is a great difference between a spiritualised Israel and the Church. I am not going to take time to explain that difference, but I mention it in case it should be thought that I am implying that. The Church is something unique. In the eternal thought and counsels of God it stands supreme, far above Israel after the flesh. There is, in one sense, no comparison between the Church and Israel. Even in the days of its restoration and glory which are to come, Israel will be but an earthly people; the Church will be something far above that. But what I am saying is this, that God has ever done His works, whatever they have been, with spiritual principles governing; and when He chose Israel after the flesh and constituted Israel a nation, He did so with spiritual principles and thoughts in mind, and it was because Israel never recognised those spiritual principles that the tragedy of their present setting aside took place. That is exactly what the Apostle is saying in the letter to the Hebrews. "Wherefore I was displeased with this generation" (that is, Israel in the wilderness), "and said, They do alway err in their heart: but they did not know my ways." They had not an inner perception of God's meaning, of what He was after, why He was doing this and that. They did not see the spiritual meaning of their deliverance from Egypt, they did not see God's meaning in the passage of the Red Sea, and in His manifold dealings with them in the wilderness. "They did not know, my ways." All they were doing was simply moving in a kind of mechanical way: 'Well, the order today is to march so we march; the order tomorrow is to stop so we stop. Circumstances today are such-and-such; we do not like them, we do not want them... Now things are a little better; we like this; let us have as much of this as we can.' They were governed by how things affected them outwardly, moving according to a programme imposed upon them, with no intelligence, no understanding, no enquiry or perception as to what God meant by it all. "They did not know my ways," they erred in their hearts. That is the statement about their history through those forty years.

Now, God had a meaning, God had thoughts in it all. We have come to see something of those thoughts. It is not my intention to take up all the history of Israel in its typology. I am after one thing - that is, by all these means to try to bring home to you, with the Lord's help, this one fact - that in the day in which you and I live, because the Holy Spirit is the predominant factor, God is after a spiritual state of things in His people, He is after a spiritual people; not just a religious people but a spiritual people. I want to try and show you what that means.

[Shammu]

Recovery Possible through the Grace of God

Well, the children of Israel were, as we know, firstly an elect nation. That word "elect" is used by Peter and by Paul of the Church. "...elect... according to the foreknowledge of God the Father" (1 Pet. 1:1-2); "Put on therefore, as God's elect..." (Col. 3:12). "Elect" - something which exists by the sovereign act of God and in the sovereign grace of God. That is a truth which lies behind Israel's history, but it is missed. It lies behind the Church which, in this dispensation, takes the place of Israel and (because it is a spiritual thing) far transcends the natural Israel. An "elect" something chosen in the sovereign grace of God. That is the foundation of things. We shall never be allowed to get away from this fact: it will be brought home to us increasingly as we go on in the Christian life: however long we may stay here on this earth, however much we may come to know of the Lord and His things, however large may be our spiritual measure, the one thing which God will make us know more and more is that we have our standing with Him on the basis of pure grace; that even after fifty, sixty, or seventy years of the Christian life, it is a poor look-out for us, but for the sovereign grace of God. We are so slow really to get the significance of that. He has given us Israel's history by way of impressing us with this spiritual truth. Israel never saw it, they erred in their hearts in this matter. If they had seen it, they would have been a broken people, but they were a proud, stiff-necked people because they never saw the grace of God in their existence; but the Lord has preserved their history for us. "Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning" (Rom. 15:4). I do not know how you feel when you read the Old Testament. Read the story, the different accounts of the forty years in the wilderness, and then read the prophets. Do you find very much pleasure in reading through the prophets? Do you enjoy Jeremiah? I cannot say that, just reading it as a record, I find very much delight in it. Then Ezekiel; then what are called the Minor Prophets. There is so much there that is not very pleasant to read. It is an awful story. Think of Hosea; there are beautiful things there, but, taking it as a story, an account of Israel's condition, how terrible! It is the most awful unveiling of human nature - the persistence, the inveteracy of human pride and self-will and rebellion. And God has never for one moment sought to cover it up and say, These are my people, hide all that, do not let it be known, it is such a disgrace. He has opened it all up; there it is all gathered up. Stephen recounted to the rulers of Israel the whole course of things from the appearing of the God of glory to Abraham. He went through the history and brought it right up to the slaying of Jesus Christ. He summed it all up in this - "Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Spirit: as your fathers did, so do ye" (Acts 7:51). That has been the story all the way through; and yet what beautiful things come out in the midst of that story, especially in that little book of Hosea! The broken heart of God which is never going to give this people up! "I have loved..." "I have loved...": and that is all there is to be said. 'My love is an everlasting love, when I love it does not matter what happens; I love, I go on loving.' Israel's is an awful story right up to the death of Christ, and it is a tragic story since. We need not romance about it, it still goes on. But there is a day still for Israel in the purpose of God, because He has loved; and love is only grace in action. I say often to myself; If the Lord will bear with so and so, if the Lord will hold on to that, there is hope for me yet! I find that comforting. We may be as bad as Israel; we could hardly be worse. If the Lord can go as far as He has with them, He can go even to our length! It is the grace of God. Remember that.

Grace Basic to Spirituality

And it has always got to be like that, the full consciousness that the grace of God is basic to everything; and that is the very essence of spirituality. Do you want to find a truly spiritual person? You will not find him proud, arrogant, self-sufficient, assertive. If you want to see the grace of God, you will see it in a Barnabas; and the name of Barnabas comes out particularly in connection with his letting everything go for his Lord's sake. "Having a field, sold it, and brought the money and laid it at the apostles' feet" (Acts 4:37). Everything has gone for his Lord's sake; he is holding nothing for himself. Grace is humility, selflessness. It is the result in our hearts of the realisation of how great is God's love, and of how much we owe to His grace - that we have nothing to stand upon but the grace of God. That is true spirituality; we begin there.

It is the great thing about the children of Israel. How will they really come into ascendancy? This is the point. Who is a prince with God? What is the true spiritual house of Israel, to prevail with God? It is that which consciously rests wholly and solely upon the grace of God. Do you want spiritual power and influence? Do you want real spiritual ascendancy? Do you know how it will come about? It will come about by your breaking, as with Jacob. It will come about by your self-emptying. The weakness of so many is their strength; they are not broken, they are not utterly conscious of their dependence upon God for everything. That is the secret of spiritual prevailing. That is very simple, but it is very important. So the Lord would lead spiritual people through very deep ways, emptying and breaking and weakening and undoing, and turning them upside down and inside out so that they do not know where or what they are. All that they can say is - Well, the Lord is gracious, the Lord is faithful, I believe God, and that is my only ground of hope. People who get there are in the way of knowing the power of God resting upon them. This true spiritual Israelite, who had been a natural Israelite - Paul - said, "Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me... for when I am weak, then am I strong" (2 Cor. 12:9-10). That is Jacob translated into spiritual terms. It is important. You feel the Lord is undoing you, breaking you, emptying you. Do not think, as the enemy would have you think, that He is against you; He is for you, He is seeking to do something to lead you on. The way down, is the way up, under the hand of God. Elect according to grace, His sovereign grace.

[Shammu]

The Power of the Name of Jesus

In that connection, do you not think it is rather remarkable that in the Holy Spirit's governing of the arrangement of this record in the book of The Acts, so quickly - in the third chapter - we come upon the lame man lying at the door of the Temple? He had been lame from his birth and had been lying at the door for many years. Why at the door? Well, you say, people going in and out would see and take compassion. I suppose that was the strategy of these who put him there; but there is something else in it. The man was a parable. No lame man was allowed to enter into the privileges of priestly service in the house of God, according to the law of Moses (Lev. 21:16-21). He was under an embargo; he must stay outside. I think it is very wonderful that we come on that so soon, because the appeal is to "ye men of Israel" - that princely people who were called to the position of highest privilege with God; and how are the men of Israel after the flesh, naturally, at the time when those words are addressed to them and when these things are taking place in the midst of them? Oh, they are in the position of that poor man. They may not believe it; they may be thinking very much otherwise about themselves; but actually and truly their position before God is that of a poor lame thing, unable to stand up before God and enter into His presence. Outside - that is their condition. Here is this poor lame man, who is said to be more than forty years old (Acts 4:22), representing Israel still crippled despite their forty years in the wilderness, unable really to walk straight, or to walk in the Spirit at all, helpless, living a life of impotence, spiritual incompetency, still outside. A great psalm was sung when they came out of Egypt, including a reference to entering into God's holy habitation. He had brought them out to bring them in to His holy mountain (Ex. 15:1-18). After long years they are not in yet; they are still outside the door of His holy habitation.

Now it is a new day, but it is a spiritual Israel, and so Peter and John proclaimed the name of Jesus to this man, and then taking him by the hand, said to him, "In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk." Have you got it? The spiritual Israel is that which stands in the authority of the name of Jesus, stands into all the power and virtue of that name. That is where your prince with God is, that is the Israel - one who prevails in the Name. Everything is in that name. We have a lot to learn about the virtue of the name of the Lord Jesus.

    "Jesus, the name high over all,
    In hell, or earth, or sky."

The all-prevailing Name constitutes an Israel after the Spirit indeed in spiritual ascendancy, and so this book of The Acts is just a record of their going forth for the sake of the Name, in the power of the Name. "In what name have ye done this? ...Be it known unto you all... in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth...." It was all "in the name." This is the new spiritual Israel - "in the name"; by the grace of God, in all the meaning of that mighty name.

They are the two first steps into the new age - the grace which hath appeared, and the name of Jesus which is above every name. I can imagine those saints at Philippi receiving Luke's record in The Acts and reading these chapters about the Name, and saying, 'Well, Paul wrote to us some time ago and said, "God... gave unto him the name which is above every name; that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow" (Phil. 2:9-10). Oh yes, we know about that name!'

Deliverance from the Self-Life by the Cross

The spiritual Israel is that which is delivered from its incapacitation through the flesh. It was the flesh predominant in Israel in the wilderness which kept it out of the land. It was the self-life asserting itself in all kinds of ways which simply crippled them. It was living unto their own interests that did it. Believe me, in the measure in which we are actuated at all by personal, natural or worldly considerations, we are spiritually crippled. That is unfortunately the story of the Church today. What is called the Church today has got very largely into the condition of Israel in the wilderness, and that is why Paul takes that very thing and uses it against the flesh that is in the church at Corinth (1 Cor. 10:1-12). There is a warning. It is taken up quite a number of times, as we know, in the letter to the Hebrews. "They failed to enter in..." (Heb. 4:6); the flesh prevailing, the Spirit was quenched, resisted. The truly spiritual people of God are those who have been delivered from that handicap of a predominant self-life through the Cross of the Lord Jesus; who have passed through the Jordan, baptised into His death and into His resurrection. That is the kind of people that the Lord is after - those who can go up and possess, before whom the forces of evil will give way, a people truly crucified to the flesh, a spiritual Israel indeed. This lame man came into the good of that; he rose up and leaped and walked and entered with them into the Temple, leaping and praising God. What a change! Yes, it was a new day, a new dispensation had arrived for him, a dispensation of Jesus Christ known in the power of the Holy Ghost. When we say the Lord is seeking today, in this dispensation, to have a spiritual people, we mean this.

Inward Government by the Spirit

Now, you can be a Christian, you can decide for Christ, you can give your life to Christ, to be His henceforth, and then everything of the Christian life for you may become something outward. A Christian 'goes to Church,' and reads the Bible, and prays; a Christian believes certain things - the inspiration of the Bible, that Jesus is the Son of God, and so on. This is what Christians do, and you may do it all. That is very largely the Christian life for multitudes. It is simply the entering into an already framed and moulded and fixed system of things - what you do or do not do because you are a Christian. That is not what the Lord is after. If you are what the Lord is after, of course you will believe in the inspiration of the Scriptures, and that Jesus is the Son of God, and you will pray and read your Bible; but you will not, by that alone, be what the Lord is seeking. What is He wanting? He is wanting you to have the Holy Spirit dwelling within you as your personal Teacher, to be as real to you as any human adviser or counsellor could be; that you may know in your own heart that the Lord Jesus by the Holy Spirit is telling you this and telling you that, and saying, Yes, to this, and No, to that, and you are increasingly coming to know that the Lord Jesus is not only a living Person in heaven, but a living Person in your own heart, and you are learning from Him inside. He may tell you through His Word, but you know it is more than mere words in a book; there is a living Person Who is saying something to you. You are increasingly coming to understand the mind of that Person, really gaining intelligence about the things of God. That is a spiritual person, and there is all the difference between just being a Christian in the way of things outward, and walking by the knowledge of the Lord in your own heart. I have said that simply for the sake of younger people, but there is not one of us who can do without that reminder. This is the age of the Holy Spirit's government. It is not, What is the thing that is usually done? What is the accepted thing? What do Christians do? What is expected of us? It is not that. Never for a moment are we, in the first place, to take our cue from an established Christian order and system; we have to go to the Lord. If everybody who came into the Church came in on this ground - that every step was something which the Lord Himself had ratified in their own hearts: they had not just taken it and accepted it because they were told they ought to: it was a living issue between themselves and the Lord - what a living Church there would be! That is the heart of what the Lord is trying to bring us to - we live in a spiritual age requiring a spiritual people, which means knowing Christ after the Spirit, by the Spirit, and knowing Him so increasingly.

We leave it there for the time being. The Lord has yet far more light and truth to break forth from His Word than those who know most ever imagined. Do not close yourself up and say that you know all truth, that you have got it all! You do not know anything yet! There is no one on this earth who really knows anything more than the beginnings of what there is to be known of Christ. It is going to take us eternity to know Him in His fulness. But He can give His fuller light to those who are spiritual, who are taught of the Spirit and alive to the Lord for Him to reveal more to them. May we be after this kind, a true spiritual Israel.

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Chapter 5 - The Sovereignty of the Lord in the Spiritual Conflict

"Why do the nations rage, and the peoples meditate a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against Jehovah, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bonds asunder, and cast away their cords from us. He that sitteth in the heavens will laugh: The Lord will have them in derision. Then will he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure: Yet I have set my king upon my holy hill of Zion. I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. Now therefore be wise, O ye kings: Be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve Jehovah with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the son, lest he be angry, and ye perish in the way, for his wrath will soon be kindled. Blessed are all they that take refuge in him." Psalm 2:1-12.

"And they, when they heard it, lifted up their voice to God with one accord, and said, O Lord, thou that didst make the heaven and the earth and the sea, and all that in them is: who by the Holy Spirit, by the mouth of our father David thy servant, didst say, Why did the Gentiles rage, and the peoples imagine vain things? The kings of the earth set themselves in array, and the rulers were gathered together, against the Lord, and against his Anointed: for of a truth in this city against thy holy Servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint..." Acts 4:24-27.

We are taking account of the new nature and order of things, which came in for the age with the advent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost - a new spiritual order, the setting up and the establishing of the Lordship of the Spirit, the supremacy of that which is spiritual; the heart and the sum of the whole matter proving to be a revelation and a knowing of the Lord Jesus in a spiritual way. The initiative was with the Lord in heaven - "the Holy Ghost sent forth from heaven"; it was a movement on the part of God Himself.

But we do not proceed very far in "The Acts" before we can detect the rumblings of a counter-movement from another quarter - the challenging answer to heaven on the part of the forces of evil and darkness. That storm gathers force and breaks with all its might in the seventh chapter, where we have the account of Stephen's testimony and death. The thing of which to take note is that in that chapter, at that point, everything is gathered up and focused upon a two-fold issue. We may say that all that has been implied, all that has been in the Divine thought up to that moment, is there crystallised and brought up as the double issue of the whole matter - heaven's object and hell's counter-attack.

We have earlier indicated how comprehensive was Stephen's survey, starting with Abraham, tracing history down through Joseph, Moses and Israel and the prophets, right up to the end of that dispensation, and finding its heading-up point in the murder of the Lord Jesus; and in that survey two things come out, or two aspects of one inclusive thing. One is that everything points toward the Lord Jesus and His absolute sovereignty, in the purpose of God. The other is the house of God, the sanctuary: it is the place of God's dwelling, where He is to be found. It is very remarkable how those two things are here in Stephen's summing up, and they are the two things which really provoked the trouble in that moment, or caused the storm to burst. In view of the way in which Stephen speaks firstly about the Lord Jesus and then about the temple, you can quite understand that his hearers would be very deeply provoked, and embittered.

The Conflict as to Christ's Lordship

Well, as to the Lord Jesus, what Stephen does is this. He goes right back and says that God in sovereignty moved to secure that which would lead right up to His Son, and in sovereignty He appeared as the God of glory to Abraham. Then it is not long before Stephen comes to Joseph, and what has he to say about him? Well, he tells very briefly the story of Joseph and the famine and Egypt, but what he is underlining is this, that Joseph's brethren were jealous. Then having said it, having touched the thing that he is after, he passes on and soon arrives at Moses, and then speaks of his going to his brethren in Egypt, being turned against and rejected, flying into the wilderness, being met by God in the bush, commissioned, and going back supposing his brethren would receive him. Says Stephen - "our fathers... thrust him from them." They rejected him, repudiated him. Again there rose up this inward antagonism and Moses suffered at the hand of his brethren what Joseph had suffered at the hand of his brethren. So Stephen goes on, and all the time he is underscoring this particular thing, the antagonism of the Lord's people to this and that and that which pointed to Christ. Joseph and Moses pointed to Christ. Stephen quotes a passage from the Old Testament, "A prophet shall God raise up unto you from among your brethren, like unto me" - words used by Moses pointing to Christ; and they cast him out, they would have none of that. Then Stephen goes on and brings into review the rest of that history - Israel in the wilderness - and he says some extraordinary things. I confess that I do not understand some of the things that he says in this address. We will come to them in a minute, not by way of explaining, but because there is something there that is very startling.

But he comes to the prophets - "Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute? and they killed them that showed before of the coming of the Righteous One." These prophets, as he indicates, were all pointing to Christ and what Stephen is saying comprehensively is this - that right from the beginning in the history of Israel there has been something inside Israel which was ground for the Devil to work against Christ and all God's purpose concerning His Son, the Lord Jesus: something there all the time, constantly cropping up, and the forces of evil using it and causing it to work in this way, that wherever the evil powers saw an inference, a suggestion concerning the Lord Jesus, they made their hatred manifest, it came out in expression. That is the awful spiritual history back of religious nature. You can be intensely religious, as religious as the most rabid Jew and Pharisee, and yet when it comes to the real issue of the absolute sovereign Lordship of Jesus Christ there is something that is positively antagonistic. You see the issue in that matter is the issue between the flesh and the Spirit, seeing that this is now the day of the Spirit that has come; and when the day of the Spirit really comes in, then the flesh is dragged out and manifested and shown to be what it really is as something energised and actuated by the very powers of evil, although it may be most religious flesh. It is a most impressive thing that we never know what is in us until we are challenged on some point of the application of the absolute Lordship of Jesus Christ; if you like to put it the other way, of the absolute government of the Holy Spirit.

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The Spiritual Nature of the House of God

Then Stephen touches this other thing - the sanctuary. It is there that he says these extraordinary things which I confess I do not understand. He quotes from Amos 5 - "Ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of the god Rephan," and the question is asked, "Did ye offer unto me slain beasts and sacrifices forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?" Then Stephen adds: "Our fathers, had the tabernacle of the testimony in the wilderness." Is he implying that, while they offered sacrifices outwardly and ostensibly to Jehovah, in their hearts they were alienated and were really worshipping some other god? A terrible suggestion; but I do not know how you are going to explain this, otherwise than that Stephen is saying in connection with the main theme - 'You people, although you appear outwardly, supposedly, as the people of God, in your hearts you are really antagonistic to the Lord, and you always have been.' He sums it all up when he says, "Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Spirit." 'Even back there in the wilderness when you were supposed to be worshipping God, deep down it was not the worship of Jehovah; some foreign thing was in you all the time.' It was a terrific charge to lay against them. You can understand their gnashing their teeth. He passes immediately from the tabernacle to the temple. "But Solomon built him a house" - and that is all Stephen has to say about it, and dismisses the whole thing, seeming to say, 'Yes, but it did not matter, it was not the real thing.' "Howbeit the Most High dwelleth not in houses made with hands; as saith the prophet, The heaven is my throne, and the earth the footstool of my feet; what manner of house will ye build me? saith the Lord." It is remarkable with what brevity Stephen dismisses that great mass of the Old Testament which circles round the temple. What is he saying? 'Because God discerned inside of the people something which was so contrary to His mind, all the outside did not really count with Him; He is after something more than that.' We know quite well that the temple did mean something in the thought of God as a type, but that is another line. Stephen is showing that all that history really deep down was not spiritual history; it was in the realm of men's souls and natural life, and therefore it was not what God was after.

Now he brings the two things out. He brings Christ right out in absolute Lordship, affirms so positively that in spite of all that they had done: in spite of everything, right through their history, of antagonism to God's Son: in spite of all Satan's fury against God's Christ: He is on the Throne, He is exalted; and then by implication he says, 'God has another kind of house, the house He has been after, not made with hands, not the tabernacle in the wilderness nor the temple. But He has something now in which He is worshipped in spirit and in truth, where there really is that which He is after. "God is (a) spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:24), and this house has now been brought in with Pentecost.' That is the implication. It is a mighty twofold issue that comes out with Stephen, and it is a marvellous turning point in the course of things. Everything has been heading up to this. Something is going to happen; you can see that from hell's side things will not be allowed to go on like this much longer, but in the sovereignty of God the bursting of the storm only serves to bring out with clearer and fuller view the two things upon which all is hanging - the Lordship of Christ and the spiritual nature of God's house. I love to see the Holy Spirit's sequence. Well, there are so many details that are fascinating and tremendously inspiring, but we cannot dwell upon them.

Sovereign Outcome of Satanic Activity

(a) Paul the Issue of Stephen's death

Stephen was one of the seven deacons chosen to deal with money matters. The Holy Spirit has other thoughts. When He gets things in hand, He is not finally concerned with money and serving tables. He has the Lord Jesus in view in the fullest possible way. The Holy Spirit lifts Stephen right out of the realm to which he was appointed, because He has bigger thoughts for him. Stephen is slain, with a testimony on his face, and on his lips the cry "I see... the Son of man standing on the right hand of God." The storm breaks, terrific persecution follows. They have tasted blood, and they are going to satiate themselves. The sovereignty of the Lord Jesus is riding upon this furious tempest of hell's outbreak, and in very simple and wonderful ways that sovereignty operates. We know one of the immediate results. That sovereignty of the Lord Jesus came with full impact upon Saul of Tarsus, who was standing by and giving consent to the death of Stephen. "Why do the nations rage, and the peoples meditate a vain thing? The kings of the earth... and the rulers take counsel together...." All that is taken up here in this movement of hell. But, Jesus is Lord! "I have set my king upon my holy hill of Zion." That is not the natural Zion, that is the heavenly, spiritual Zion. "My king." "The Lord shall have them in derision." Here it is working out. Paul is brought in as the immediate issue of Stephen and he is the one who, more than anyone else, brings into view two things - the Lordship of Christ and the spiritual nature of God's dwelling, the Church.

(b) National Enmity Destroyed in Christ

But then in other ways the sovereignty of the Spirit is seen. The next chapter brings into view another of the seven deacons - Philip. Oh, the counter-movement of the Spirit to the movement of hell is now setting in. There is persecution, yes; and by the persecution, the believers have been scattered everywhere. Philip goes down to Samaria, and preaches unto them Jesus; and yet Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans (John 4:9). That was never intended by man, but God is getting His spiritual house in which there is not Jew or Gentile exclusively - nor either of them as such. It is a spiritual house, it is a heavenly house. And so the Spirit moves down to Samaria in this connection, and the Lordship of Jesus is proclaimed and is triumphant; and out from Samaria - think of the history of Ahab, of Jezebel! - out of Samaria members are gathered into the Body of Christ.

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(c) Incapacity Removed by the Spirit

Then when things are going on tremendously in Samaria, the Lord tells Philip to go down to the desert. You know the story of the Ethiopian eunuch. Oh, I think it is grand! It is the underlying thing here that is so fascinating - to see this sovereignty of the Spirit underneath everything. Down to the desert; and then this man of Ethiopia, a eunuch. We are touching a delicate thing, but we are going to be sensible, and we are not going to pass it by because it is delicate. It holds something precious if you keep to the spiritual and leave the natural out. He is a eunuch, an Ethiopian eunuch, and he has been up to Jerusalem to worship God. Evidently he is a proselyte. When he got to Jerusalem, what would happen? He would find the door of the temple shut to him. A eunuch was not allowed to enter the house of the Lord, by the Old Testament command so, having got as far as he could get, a disappointed and dissatisfied man, a man after all still seeking, he has to turn back and go away home to his distant country. And the Lord takes Philip across his path. Why was not a eunuch allowed to enter the house of the Lord? Because there is a spiritual principle involved. A eunuch is an end in himself, a dead tree, one who cannot be fruitful. You cannot have that in the house of God. God's principle says, 'Nothing which is an end in itself has a place in My house; nothing which is unfruitful can have a place before Me. My house is the place of life, continuous life.' You have only to look at Isaiah 56 and you will see there the Lord's promise to the eunuch, "...neither let the eunuch say, I am a dry tree." You see the point. Leave the natural and come to the spiritual. Here was this man who was ruled out, incapacitated, forbidden, having no place in the house of God because of his condition. The Lord Jesus came across his path through His servant Philip. Philip took up Isaiah 53 and preached unto him Jesus. Then the eunuch said, "Behold, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized? ...and they both went down into the water, both Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him" (Acts 8:36-37). He died to his death in the death of Christ; he died to all that he was by nature in the death of Christ, and, rising in the resurrection of Christ, he would be a fruitful branch with a new life, a resurrection life. There is something very precious there.

Why that story? Oh, we are occupied with this movement of the Spirit; the Spirit is saying something here all the time. He is stressing the way of spiritual fruitfulness. "First... that which is natural" - barren, unfruitful, impossible; "then that which, is spiritual," with all the tremendous possibilities of the new life in Christ. That is the inner history of the Ethiopian. "He went on his way rejoicing." Up to that moment he was a disappointed man, feeling his handicap. Is there anyone reading this who knows quite well and is feeling only too deeply that, because of what he is by nature, there is little hope or prospect for him, little chance of spiritual fruitfulness? This story is the story of a great hope for a man who was shut out of the inheritance, shut out of the house of God, for whom there was nothing because of natural condition, but who entered into all the blessed fulness and prospect of a new life, a new world, by identification with the Lord Jesus in death and burial and resurrection. He died to what he was by nature, and he rose to what he was in Christ. It is the story of how the Holy Spirit is making everything fruitful, turning the wilderness and the solitary place into a garden. That is the prospect here.

That is the new age. You are saying, 'Yes, that is very good; that is grand; it is there right enough at the beginning, but we do not see much of that now; why?' And that is the point - why? Why does Satan hold things up? Because he has got ground. Why do people not make spiritual progress? Why is there such limited fruitfulness? Why is there so much barrenness? Because there is ground for arrest. It is the ground of nature, and "the flesh warreth against the Spirit" (Gal. 5:17). "Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost" (Acts 7:51). Now, what Stephen was really saying was this - 'You may not be conscious of it, you may not be deliberately meaning to war against the Spirit of God, but that uncrucified nature is there, at enmity with the Spirit of God, and that is the cause of everything.' We must come to the place where the Spirit really gets the upper hand, where that life of nature is truly subjected to the Spirit of God. Oh, I press this because I know so many people who believe in the Holy Spirit, who have all the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and they can work it all out systematically - the baptism and the filling and all the rest of it - but there is an immense amount of carnality, even in those realms. The point which arises is this, that if there is really going to be this life, this fruitfulness, this enlargement, this progress, this ascendancy over the power of the enemy, it is not going to be merely official and automatic, it is not going to be simply because we believe certain truths, and use certain phraseology and shout certain slogans about Satan being a defeated foe. It is going to be, and only so, as the Holy Spirit transcends our natural life - as our natural life is brought into obedience and subjection to the Spirit of God.

We have all got a strong natural life in some way. It may be in a negative strength, or it may be in a positive strength - and very often the negative is just as powerful as the positive. It may be a feigned kind of humility, an assumed meekness, but it is natural and it is self all the time - self-pity, always wanting to be taken note of because you are such a sorry creature: drawing attention in some way to yourself. That is a negative strength of nature, and it gets in God's way. We have to get this self, whatever it is, out of the way. We have to be occupied with the Lord Jesus Christ and not with ourselves - occupied entirely with Him. The Lord cannot do His work in us until we have a fixed faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and an eye riveted upon Him. Immediately the enemy succeeds in turning us in upon ourselves he has broken our strength, he has the ground that he wants for our undoing and our barrenness. Whatever the form of self-life, it must go. First the Lord Jesus has to come in as Lord; then He can get on with what He is after.

A People Living in the Value of Divine Sovereignty

I have left a lot unsaid, but you will gather from what has been said what is in view - a people who are not merely believers objectively in the Holy Ghost, but who are subjectively under His government, in whose being His Lordship is established; in whom He can have His mind over their minds, His will over their wills, and His desires and feelings over theirs. But even then we may not see what is in the book of the Acts as we read it, because, after all, there we have the cumulative thing in a few chapters of vivid history, and we are impressed. If we had lived in those days we should have been far more continuously conscious of the forces that were against us than we were of the mighty sovereign triumph of the Lord Jesus, we should have had to wait till afterward to see that. And it will be like that with us; we shall be conscious of the enemy at work, difficulties arising, all kinds of sufferings abounding, but in due time we shall see the Lord triumph; we shall go into a deep experience but after a time come out and say, 'The Lord has triumphed in that, He has got something out of it.' That is the story - seeing the Lord getting His end through the very works of the enemy and the sufferings of His children. That is a life in the Spirit. The Lord give us to know more of it in experience.

The end

Up next; The Octave of Redemption

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In keeping with T. Austin-Sparks' wishes that what was freely received should be freely given, his writings are not copyrighted. Therefore you are free to use these writings as you are led, however we ask if you choose to share writings from this site with others, please offer them freely - free of changes, free of charge and free of copyright.

The Octave of Redemption
by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 1 - The Incarnation

As we take up these meditations, let me utter a brief word of caution. We are not just embarking upon some ‘line of truth’—a theme, a subject. The fact is that there is no ‘truth’ apart from the Lord Jesus Himself, and the truth is in Him, not about Him. For the right apprehension, therefore, of the truth, a personal relationship with Himself in life is essential. We cannot know the Truth except by union with the Lord Jesus in a living way. That in turn demands the work of the Holy Spirit upon us and in us, and that means that we must be in a spiritual condition to understand and apprehend the truth, “even as truth is in Jesus” (Eph. 4:21). Our life—all of our life—our hope, our salvation, our way, our assurance—our everything—is centred in the Lord Jesus Himself. It is not centred in some aspect or interpretation of the truth: it is centred in Himself. Everything, therefore, is resolved into a matter of knowing Him, of ‘attaining unto the full knowledge of the Son of God’ (Eph. 4:13); and the value of what the Lord may say to us in the ensuing pages will depend entirely upon our living relationship to Him, Who is the Truth: the Sum of truth, and the Power of the truth.

Introductory

We have called this series of studies ‘The Octave of Redemption’. The word ‘octave’ (from the Latin octavus) means ‘eighth’, and in music it means the interval between the first and last of the eight primary notes which complete the musical scale, since every eighth note repeats the first at a higher (or lower) level. We might equally well have taken as our title ‘The Rainbow of Redemption’, for we have a very similar thought there, with the seven primary colours, and then number eight returning to number one. In such ‘octaves’, we see one series, or phase, or movement, completed, and a new one commenced; the series of seven is never regarded as finished in itself—it must have the next to make the scale complete. We know, if we try it on an instrument, how necessary the ‘eight’ is—how incomplete seven is without eight.

This feature of ‘seven plus one’ is peculiarly a mark of Christianity. Christianity is based upon the day after the Sabbath day, upon the eighth day which became the first day of the week. Judaism remains the religion of the seventh day: we know how incomplete it is, how it has stopped short and never gone on, never moved into taking the eighth day as the first. Christianity rests upon that eighth day which has become the first—the end of a phase of Divine work and the beginning of a new. The word ‘Sabbath’, however, does not mean ‘seventh’; it means ‘rest’. Seven sees a completeness; eight means that God begins again upon something that has been completed. His new beginning is out from something finished—God proceeds from completion. That is Christianity: it rests upon something finished, and that something finished is God’s rest, God’s satisfaction. He begins everything from that point.

As you may know, the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are not only symbols for sounds, but also symbols for numerals; that is, each letter has a numerical value. And that is not only true of the Hebrew language. The name ‘Jesus’, in the Greek form, as used in the New Testament, has six letters, each letter having a numerical value; and when all those letters are put together with their numerical value they add up to 888. ‘Jesus’ = 888. I am not making a great deal of that, or trying to be fanciful, but I think it is impressive—I do not think that is an accident. He is the ‘eighth day’ Man, the One Who has gone beyond, having perfected the work of redemption.

Eight Aspects Of Redemption

Now, redemption may be said to have eight primary notes or aspects. There are, of course, many subsidiary features, but there are eight primary ones. These are:

1. The Incarnation
2. The Earthly Life
3. The Cross and Resurrection
4. The Forty Days after the Resurrection
5. The Ascension and the Glorifying
6. The Advent of the Holy Spirit
7. The Birth, Vocation and Completion of the Church
8. The Coming Again.

Into these everything else is gathered, and there is nothing outside of them; they complete the scale. You will notice that one and eight are the two comings. In principle, eight returns full circle to one: it is the coming of the Lord, representing two completions. The first coming, the Incarnation, was the completion of a phase: “The law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (John 1:17); and it need not be emphasized that the coming again will be likewise the completion of a phase. But each is also the beginning of an entirely new phase. “The hour cometh, and now is...”, said the Lord Jesus (John 4:23), introducing that new phase, and we may indeed thank God that it will be true when He comes again.

One other small technical point by the way. The Hebrew word for ‘seven’ just means ‘satisfaction’ or ‘completion’. We scarcely need comment upon that. God saw all things: they were “very good” (Gen. 1:31); and God rested in His satisfaction, in the completion of His work. But the Hebrew word for ‘eight’ is again a very interesting word. It takes its rise from the root ‘shammah’, which occurs in one of the names of the Lord, ‘Jehovah-Shammah’ (Ezek. 48:35), meaning ‘the Lord super-abundant’, the all-sufficient One. So eight follows seven. Seven signifies completeness, and yet the Lord never stops there—He is super-abundant.

Now we shall approach each of these different aspects—these eight ‘notes’ in the ‘scale’ of redemption —with a question: the question ‘Why?’, and we apply it first to the Incarnation: Why the Incarnation? Why was it necessary that the Son of God should take human form and human nature?

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Why The Incarnation?

Of course, to answer that fully we should be under the obligation to consider the whole of the Divine thought and conception in the creation of man at all. Man’s conception in the mind of God, man’s vocation and man’s destiny—this all represents a very great thing in the thought of God. But we have to allow that to come in at this point in order to lead us further. We might say—and rightly—that the Bible is all about God. That is true. We might go on to say that the Bible is all about God’s interest in His Son, and that is quite true. But when you have taken full account of both these facts, you find that you cannot divorce either of these matters from man. The Bible is all about God—yes, but it is about God and His relationship to man, and man’s relationship to Him. It is all about God’s Son—and yet it is all about the concern of God’s Son for man. When you have said everything, you arrive at man. We should not be interested in a remote God outside of the realm of human life. The truth is that everything has to focus down upon man, and we find that the Bible is the book of God’s interest in man. Somehow God’s interests are inexplicably bound up with man—his vocation and his destiny. All this and what it implies will be gathered into what we are going to say about the Incarnation.

Why the Incarnation? The answer is threefold. Firstly, for the redemption, or reclamation, of man. Secondly, for the reconstruction or re-constitution of man. And thirdly, for the perfecting and glorifying of man.

(1) For The Reclamation Of Man

Firstly, for the redemption or reclamation of man. The common idea about redemption is associated with the slave market—going into the slave market and buying out or buying back, redeeming, that which has been sold into it. There are, indeed, certain fragments of Scripture which lend themselves to that idea. “Sold under sin” (Rom. 7:14) is a scriptural phrase, but we need some clarification of it. You say redemption means the ‘buying out’ of man from the slave market. He has been sold into some kind of slavery and bondage. True; but who sold him? Until you look into that question, and answer it, you have not really got to the meaning of redemption. Who sold him? He sold himself! That puts a new complexion upon things. We speak of a man ‘selling himself to the Devil’. But how did he do it? Well, he did not sell himself objectively, like selling some chattel, some thing, some object, into another’s possession. He sold himself subjectively—he sold himself in his soul. He actually sold his soul to the Devil.

But exactly what happened? Let us put it in this way. There was a day when someone knocked, and he opened the door: and that someone began to speak, and to speak treachery, under cover of beautiful language, and clothed in very appealing terms: and instead of slamming the door in the face of that visitor, he opened it a little wider and listened. Remember—that is always the first step to bondage, that is always the first movement towards a situation calling for redemption— listening to the Devil, and not immediately reacting with a question: Is this true of God, or is this false as to God? Is God a Person like that, or is He other than that? If every Christian would react like that to satanic suggestions and insinuations, what a different situation would obtain in many Christian lives! There are many in awful bondage because they have listened, they have opened the door; they have never confronted themselves with this question: Do you really believe that God is a God like that? Let me urge you to take that question to your present problem—situations and conditions, accusations and condemnations that the enemy is always trying to throw at you, in order to bring you into bondage—and say: Is God really like that?

The Root Sin: Unbelief

When man opened the door of his soul and listened to the enemy, he opened himself to unbelief. And remember—unbelief is the root sin. Let us be quite clear about that. There may be motives behind, but the root sin is unbelief. It is the one thing that God will not have, the one thing that sets God back, holds Him off, makes Him non-committal. Whilst there is any unbelief, God stands back; so long as it persists, the gap grows. God will never commit Himself where there is unbelief. Does that sound elementary? It is a thing that pursues us right to the end. This question of faith in God is the basis of all our education. Let it be said straight away that the measure in which God has ever committed Himself or will ever commit Himself is the measure of our faith in Him. When man opened the door to unbelief, Satan put his foot inside, right into man’s soul, and has never taken it out. He has maintained that foothold in man’s soul ever since. So that now the soul of man, as he is by nature, is linked with the evil powers, and the strength of that link is unbelief. Until that unbelief can be completely broken, shattered, the union between natural man and Satan continues.

Redemption or reclamation begins with faith: that is what we should call the simple Gospel. Faith is the very beginning of redemption. But faith is also the basis of continual redemption, continual recovery or reclamation. Redemption, while in Christ it is completed and perfect, is something that is going on: we are ‘receiving the end of our faith, the salvation of our souls’ (1 Pet. 1:9). This matter is going on continually; it is progressive. While final in the work of Christ, it begins in us with the first exercise of faith—believing God—and proceeds upon that basis right to the end. How true it is that, when we fail to believe God, cease to believe God, have questions about God, we immediately come into some kind of bondage; Satan gets some hold, or has some gain. Immediately any doubt of the Lord comes in, we find ourselves at once locked up, and the only way out is a recovery of faith in God again.

Now, because of his unbelief, Adam brought about and established for the whole race a soul-link with the evil powers, and that is the nature of man’s bondage. He is sold to another. That lays the foundation for the real, true meaning of redemption. Why the Incarnation? ‘A final Adam to the fight and to the rescue came’: another Man came to redeem man. But oh, we shall see as we go on that that was no mere objective activity—it was not just the things that He did. He was in His very being the Redeemer. Let me put that in another way: He was redemption. He not only did something, but He was that. This will become clearer later. But here we see the necessity for a Man of whom none of this is true coming to the rescue: a Man Who, because of His non-implication personally in the entail of Adam’s sin, has a clear and unique advantage. The Incarnation was to provide redemption for man in a Man, and not only for man by a Man. I hope you see the significance of that. It is a tremendous thing to see not only what Jesus did, but what He was to meet the situation.

(2) For The Re-Constitution Of Man

By Adam’s act, as we have seen, man became disordered in his very constitution, deranged, broken, another kind of being from what God had made him and intended him to be. He was robbed, and therefore deficient; deceived, and therefore defrauded. He lost what he had—his innocence. He lost what God meant him to have, and had already provided for him, on the basis of faith in Himself. He became a culpable being. Reading back with our Bible in our hand and the full revelation of Scripture, we are now able to see what man was intended to have. It all becomes clear now. He was intended for two things.

Firstly, he was intended to have the Spirit of God indwelling him. He was intended to be a temple of God. The whole Scripture now makes it perfectly clear that it was God’s original intention that He should dwell in man, that the Spirit of God should be resident within. Secondly, it was intended that he should have within him what is now called in the New Testament “eternal life”—the life of the ages, Divine life, uncreated life. But he missed the intention of God in both respects. The Incarnation was for the express purpose of begetting a ‘new-creation’ man in which those two things could become actualities: man now indwelt by the Spirit of God; man possessing eternal life. That is the answer to the question: Why the Incarnation? And let me repeat that the Lord Jesus not only effected that as some accomplishment, or transaction, or work done: He was Himself the first of that order, to beget another race after that kind.

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(3) For The Perfecting And Glorifying Of Man

And finally, the perfecting and the glorifying of man. Of course, these two things are clearly seen in Jesus, the Son of Man. Some of the more serious things of the Word of God are said in this connection. “Though He was a Son, yet learned [He] obedience by the things which He suffered” (Heb. 5:. He was made “perfect through sufferings” (Heb. 2:10). We will not stop with the theology or the doctrine of that. We can focus it down to the one word which we have used and underlined already. How was He perfected, or completed?

I think, in faith. He had, as Man, accepted voluntarily a basis of faith—to live His life on the principle of faith in God, His Father. And it was concerning that that every trial and testing and ordeal had its meaning—if by any means the enemy could entrap the last Adam, as he had the first. He had succeeded with the first race on one point only, and that point was unbelief. So successful a manoeuver could lead him to believe that there was no better. ‘That is the thing that does it—that is the point upon which to focus’, we can almost hear him say. It opens up the life of the Lord Jesus very much more fully and clearly to recognize that the focal point of all His trials, testings, satanic assaults, every imaginable thing that was working contrary to Him—and we have not got the whole story, by any means—had as its one object the insinuation of some question about His Father. The enemy knew that the devastation of a new creation could be brought about on that one thing. And he knows it today, with you and with me. Then, the Son of Man was made perfect through sufferings. In what way? what were His sufferings? I do not mean His physical sufferings. His physical sufferings were but the ways and means by which the enemy was trying to get at His soul. The real suffering that the Son of God, the Son of Man, knew, was this constant, nagging pressure and assault from every angle, the unceasing efforts of the enemy to get in between Himself and His Father. That was the essence of His supreme agony when He cried: ‘Thou hast forsaken Me!’ I do not believe, and I am sure you do not believe, that His cry in the garden—“If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me”—was the cry of a Man Who was not prepared to die even the kind of death that He was facing. That kind of thing has, of course, given rise to an utterly false doctrine and theology. Jesus knew what He had to face in being made sin: He knew that the ultimate, dire issue lay in that moment when the Father’s face would be turned away, and He would be left, like the scape-goat out in the wilderness, alone, alone, alone—God-forsaken in that one awful moment. That was the point of His suffering, and that was the sum of His suffering.

But through it all, through all the sufferings, He was made perfect—perfect in faith. What meaning that gives to such words as these, so familiar to us, and used so lightly: “The life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, Who loved me, and gave Himself up for me” (Gal. 2:20, A.V.). What a faith to live by! If only that faith could be transmitted to us—if only that faith could be in us in the power of the Holy Spirit! Then we should get through all right. “I live by the faith of the Son of God”—tested, tried, assailed to the last degree, and triumphant. I am glad that the end of the story was not on the note of God-forsakenness, but on the note of triumph: “Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.” It is all over—it is victory! That is faith perfected through suffering, and made complete by obedience—for obedience is always faith’s proof. There is no such thing as faith without obedience.

Why The Transfiguration?

At this point we might put in an extra question: Why the transfiguration? The transfiguration represented the end of His own course, the end of His own road. He had travelled the road of testing and trying, the road of utterness of consecration to His Father. So far as He personally was concerned, He had no further to go. He had been obedient—that was the end of the road for Him. Hence glory could come in then. For Him there is glory—the transfiguration: a Man Who has gone all the way with God in faith’s obedience has been glorified. But as for the rest, that is for us—that is our part in it. He came out of that glory, and, ‘instead of that joy set before Him, He endured the Cross’ (Heb. 12:2). He took our place, in order to bring us to His place—to glory —“many sons to glory” (Heb. 2:10), and He was thereby made “perfect through sufferings.” A Man glorified, through faith, for man—nothing apart from us.

His glorification, as we shall see later, is a part of the redemption. It is a part of the re-constitution, it is the issue of all; and therefore, since the redemption and the re-constitution are for us in Christ, the glorifying is for us in Him also. ‘Glorified together with Him’ (Rom. 8:17). He was able to say at the last: ‘Father, I have glorified Thee upon the earth’; and therefore He could also say: “Father, glorify Thou Me... with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was” (John 17:4–5). The point is that here on this earth the Lord Jesus lived a life of faith, and was as utterly dependent upon God for everything as you or I are. His was as utterly a life of faith as ever you and I are called upon to live. And on that basis, as Man, He went through in such complete satisfaction to God that He could be glorified. But remember, the Incarnation was not for Himself: it was for us, and all that was bound up with the Incarnation is for us. It is our redemption, our re-constitution and our glorification through perfecting in Him.

What Christ Is For Us

Now, all this lays the foundation for believing—it is a pity we have not got the exact translation—‘believing on to, or into, the Lord Jesus’. Just to say: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ”, is weak; it leaves much to be desired. This is positional: it indicates a change of position, a movement: ‘Believe on to the Lord Jesus Christ.’ It really means this: that there is in true faith something that makes Him, so to speak, into ourselves, and ourselves into Him. Do not misunderstand me: I am not talking about Deity—I am talking about the Son of Man. There is something of deep spiritual significance in that word at the Lord’s Table: “My body, Which is for you”. Leaving out the extreme and wrong ideas associated with transubstantiation, and all that, behind it there is something left for the dispensation to recognize, until He comes again. Behind it there is this principle: that faith’s appropriation of the Lord Jesus makes good in us what He is. We are redeemed through faith in Him. We are re-constituted through faith in Him. We are perfected through faith in Him. We are glorified through faith in Him. But it is not just objective—it is a matter of our taking the position that all that is true of Him is true of Him for us.

How impossible it is to explain! But you and I have got to learn what it really means to take our stand, in faith, on the ground of what Jesus Christ is—because then something happens. Our troubles arise out of standing upon the ground of what we are, or upon appearances or arguments—something objective—instead of taking our position upon the ground that the Son of God became incarnate, not only to work out, but Himself to be, my redemption. And by faith on Him there is redemption. He came to be my re-constitution: and, by faith on Him, through the action of the Holy Spirit, something happens, and I am re-constituted. He came to be my perfection: and through faith on Him the Holy Spirit takes up the work of my perfecting. He came to be my glorification: and faith gives the Holy Spirit His requisite, essential, indispensable ground for bringing us also to the glory of Christ, to be glorified together with Him.

Until we believe, and believe on to the Lord Jesus, the Holy Spirit stands back. You may perhaps deceive yourself, but you cannot deceive the Holy Spirit. You cannot have one foot on one ground and one foot on another. If you have got one foot on what you are, and the other foot—you think—on what Christ is, you are a divided person. The Holy Spirit does not commit Himself: He stands back and waits. He says, Put both feet on Christ, and then I will begin to do something.

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Chapter 2 - The Earthly Life Of The Lord Jesus

When we ask the question: Why the earthly life of the Lord Jesus?—it is clear that that question implies and contains within itself other questions. For instance: Why was it necessary for Him to be here for something over thirty-three years? Again: Why was it necessary for by far the greater part of that time to be spent in private, and, so far as we are concerned, in secret? We shall try to answer these, and other, subsidiary questions, to some extent at least, as we go on.

Much has been made of the earthly life of Christ—usually for the purpose of showing that there was such a Person as Jesus of Nazareth, and what a good Person He was, and how much greater He was as a teacher than other teachers; or at most to show that He was more than just a man. There may be other purposes for writing books on the life of Jesus, but these usually comprehend the object. Of course, seeing that Jesus has become a great historical world figure, it is interesting to know where He was born, where and how He was brought up, where He went about in the country, what He taught, the miracles that He performed, and so on. All this has provided material for a great deal of discussion and controversy. The miracles have provided much food for the psychologists, and His teaching for the theologians and the doctrinaires. But when you have said all that you can say and written all that you can write on those matters, you may not have advanced much beyond the human story. The human story, as such, appeals very much to the emotion, to the imagination, but it does not change character. However fascinating, impressive and moving it may be, if you just leave it there you have stopped short of the real meaning of the earthly life of the Lord Jesus.

The earthly life of our Lord was not intended for those purposes. The record of His life was not intended merely to provide us with data and information and interesting matter about a certain man—however great and wonderful—who lived so long ago, in such-and-such a part of the world, and said and did such-and-such. He did not come for that. He was not here for thirty years and a little more for that purpose at all. His life was intended to show—not merely that He was in many respects different from other men, but that He was of a different order of mankind from all the rest, the best included. Until you have clearly recognized that, you have not found the key to the earthly life of the Lord Jesus. He met some of the best types of men of His day, but between Him and them there was a great gulf fixed—there was no passing from the one side to the other.

A Different Order Of Mankind

Jesus was a mystery. He was not just mysterious —He was a mystery. He was not just misunderstood. So many have said about Him, ‘He was an altogether misunderstood Man.’ No, He was not just misunderstood —He was un-understood, and that is very different. Jesus did not conform to any of the principles and methods upon which this world is run. He did not do what He was expected to do, either by the world or by His friends. Often He put that expectation back: He did not instantly fulfil it because He was asked to, or because it was expected of Him. He put a gap between the expectation and whatever He did. And into that gap you must place this uniqueness that there was about Him, as an order of Man—His ‘otherness’ from other men. If you try to fit Him in, try to make Him a part of the established human order, try to show how He did this and did that, in a kindly way, just because He was so kind, you have altogether missed the point.

Why, for instance, when that embarrassing situation arose at the marriage in Cana of Galilee, and it was presented to Him as His opportunity, did He put it back with something that sounded very much like a rebuff? So far as the expectation of people was concerned, nothing might ever have happened—but for something else that belonged to another realm altogether. And we find the same kind of thing repeated in other connections. He did not do what people expected Him to do—He very often did what they never expected Him to do. He did the unexpected—took people, not only completely by surprise, but right out of their depth. They just could not follow Him in some of the things that He did. He did not go where people expected Him to go, and when, and so conform to their order and programme. And He certainly did not say what He was expected to say—far from it. On the contrary, He said many things that He was not expected to say—difficult things, shocking things, offending things.

Now, Jesus was not just being different, being awkward, being singular. There are people who behave like that, but on entirely different grounds. They are merely trying to be singular, exceptional, unusual, to do the unexpected, to be awkward. I knew a Christian man, some years ago, who had gained a great name in this world, and who, by reason of the tremendous amount that had been made of him, had developed an ultra-self-consciousness. On one occasion I was having a talk with him in the garden, and after a little time I suggested that we should come into the house. I took him by the arm to walk up with him, and he instantly drew himself up stiff, stuck his heels in and absolutely refused to budge! ‘Well!’ I thought, ‘What is this?’ I had to wait a minute or two—evidently until he had satisfied himself that it was right to move—and then he relaxed and we walked up together—but not arm-in-arm! I had learnt my lesson. I came to know that he had adopted a manner on this: that he was never going to allow himself to be influenced, or affected, or led, or in any way moved, by another human being. He had come to such an ‘ultra’ place that he would not even walk arm-in-arm with a brother Christian unless the Lord told him to! Ultimately, of course, it developed into quite a serious complex. But you see what I mean. It is possible to act like that on an altogether false basis.

Jesus was not like that. He may have seemed to behave like that at times, but it was not on that basis. We need to be very clear about this—this strange, this unknown way with Him, which often perplexed and mystified, sometimes disappointed, and sometimes even annoyed and angered. But these are facts; these are very clearly recognizable features of the earthly life of the Lord Jesus. They were not of the order of which I have spoken—an ultra-self-consciousness, a deliberate standing apart, trying to be different from others, wearing a strait jacket, unbending, unyielding. There was nothing of that about Him. We have got to explain it, for there is no mistaking it. There He is—an unknown Man.

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The Negative Side: ‘Circumcised In Heart’

Here then, was a Man—with a capital ‘M’—living a human life on a basis different from that of every other man. There was a negative and a positive aspect of that fact. The negative aspect was this: He was, if I may bring in the expression here, ‘circumcised in heart’. That is, He was utterly separated from the self-principle in every way, in His mind, heart and will. He would not use His mind, or think His thoughts, or arrive at His judgments, on the basis of any self-principle whatsoever. Nor had self any place in His feelings or His will. Here is a Man Who has a soul—a mind, a heart and a will— constituting Him a true human being, but in whose soul the self-principle has been put completely aside.

You cannot make Him do anything along the line of ordinary human reasoning, however right or good it may seem to be. ‘They have no wine—therefore...’ An argument comes in, a reasoning. ‘Therefore’ ...this and that and some other thing, constituting a very good case for His intervening and doing something. It could be argued from almost every standpoint as being a thing that He should do: from the standpoint of human kindness, from the standpoint of the vindication of His mission, the establishment of His Divine Person. Yes, you can argue it from any and every standpoint, but He is not moving on a mind that is influenced by any kind of argument. The only consideration with Him is: Does My Father will it? and does My Father will it now? and does My Father will it in this way? Those are the things that influence His mind and His heart and His will—His soul. Until He is sure about that, nothing on this earth or in this world, no argument or appeal or case, will get Him to move. For He is doing something, and we are going to see presently what it is that He is doing.

I have said He was utterly ‘circumcised in heart’. That is a biblical phrase (see Rom. 2:29). We need to understand the meaning of it. It means that in the heart there has taken place an absolute severance between two things. If you like, you can substitute ‘soul’ for ‘heart’; it is the inner man. Something had been done in Him inwardly, and He kept steadfastly to that ground to the end. It was upon that ground, in one form or another, that the fiercest battles in His life were fought. Sometimes the assault came through an innermost friend and disciple: “Be it far from Thee, Lord: this shall never be unto Thee.” “Get thee behind Me, Satan: thou mindest... the things of men” (Matt. 16:22–23). ‘Your outlook is that of men—merely on the level of men. I do not belong to that realm of men in which you move. Other men may listen to your argument, be influenced, persuaded; but as for Myself—no!’ And so it is, right to the end: He steadfastly held to that ground—the ground of what we will content ourselves by calling the ground of inward heart circumcision.

That, as I have said, was the focal point of Satan’s persistent endeavour: reason, argument, as to why He should, or should not, do certain things. It is a matter of argument, sometimes the argument of absolute necessity. ‘Your body demands bread or you will die. Necessity requires that you turn these stones into bread.’ So say men, but not the Divine Son of God, not the Son of Man. Jesus repudiated that argument absolutely.

Yes, Satan’s focal point of every attack was just there—to try to get Him to do, to act, to move, to decide, according to human standards, to be influenced by the ordinary dictates of human life as we know it; and He refused. That being the focal point of all satanic attacks and efforts, that was the realm of His absolute victory over Satan and the world. “The prince of this world cometh: and he hath nothing in Me” (John 14:30). What was he looking for?—the self-principle. If only he could get that moving, if only he could stir that into action, through mind, heart or will, the same thing would happen with the last Adam as happened with the first, and the Kingdom would go again into the hands of the Devil. But he has met a different kind of Man, Who is not coming out to him on that ground at all. Jesus did not just say, ‘The Devil is coming to Me...’ , ‘Satan is coming to Me...’ ; He said: “The prince of this world cometh”—implying the whole principle of this world, as Satan’s Kingdom; the self-principle of the prince of this world. But—“he hath nothing in Me.”

The Positive Side: Committed To The Will Of The Father

That, then, is the negative side of His life. The positive aspect was that He was so utterly committed to the will of His Father. He was not only refusing, resisting, repressing, suppressing, putting away. The motive of it all was His absolute committal to the will of the Father. The will of the Father was the dominant thing, the most positive reality in His life, from beginning to end. And the will of the Father came down to every detail in the most meticulous way. This was established in His whole life on the earth.

It was established first in the thirty years of what we call His private life. Those thirty years were also divided into two. You notice that division in the Gospel by Luke, chapter 2. First, from His dedication in the Temple until He reached the age of twelve years: this is what is said over this section: “And the child grew, and waxed strong, becoming full of wisdom: and the grace of God was upon Him” (v. 40). Then from the age of twelve onwards: “And Jesus advanced in wisdom and stature, and in grace with God and men” (v. 52). We will not now stop to analyze that. It is subject to an analysis which is very profitable, if you care to make it. You see the realms in which this progress was made—physical, mental and spiritual; and over all the verdict is: the grace of God. The grace of God, the Divine approval, Divine satisfaction, was over His life. He was growing up before the Lord as one well-pleasing. Why? Right at the very heart: “Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business?”—or, if you like the alternative translation, “that I must be in My Father’s house?” (v. 49). Whatever that meant, it certainly meant a Father-consciousness above the ordinary, natural relationship. Note that it is set right in the midst of something that caused a good deal of heart-burning and perplexity to his parents after the flesh.

Yes, there was an utter committal to the will of His Father, and it was established for thirty years in the ordinary, common way of life. I think that is a tremendous thing. Why were there thirty years in silence and in secret so far as we are concerned? We have so little light upon it. Why? Just for that same reason. If you want the explanation, go back to the Old Testament. You remember that the Levites commenced their service at the age of thirty years. Luke tells us about Jesus beginning His ministry: “Jesus... when He began... was about thirty years of age...” (Luke 3:23). The Lord Jesus was in type a Levite, although He came of the tribe of Judah. (Compare Heb. 7:13–14). But the official entry of a Levite into his ministry at the age of thirty was never willy-nilly. There was a history lying behind this. The Levite history, the Levite life, the Levite behaviour lay behind it. And, although we have nothing that makes this quite clear to us, perhaps because there was never any occasion for it, I venture to say that, if any young man of the tribe of Levi in that old dispensation had been living a profligate life, he would never have become an officiating Levite upon reaching the age of thirty years. No, the seal had to be set upon those thirty years, that the man had walked before God. And the same principle was brought to bear in the life of Jesus: God tested Him, proved Him, in the ordinary ways of life.

That ought to be taken by us very seriously, as a principle of God’s approval. You may be longing to get out into ministry: God may be longing for you to be fit to be brought out into ministry! In all the ordinary ways of life you are going through it, you are being tested; the eye of God is upon you. Remember that when Jesus, at thirty years of age, came to the Jordan, Heaven was opened and a voice said: “In Thee I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11). I think that covered the thirty years: it spoke of the grace of God in thirty years of ordinary life, and made it possible for Him to take up His ministry. Perhaps we are not so right in saying ‘ordinary life’, seeing how the Devil tried to get Him right at the beginning (Matt. 2:13–18).

But, whatever the thirty years represented, there is no question that the three-and-a-half years public ministry ratified, through intense fires, the fact that He was committed without any reservation to the will of His Father. Those three-and-a-half years were a period of the intensest fires, to make Him deviate a little bit, in personal, self-consideration, from doing His Father’s will. By every bribe of ‘the kingdoms of this world and the glory thereof’, and by every threat of the ignominy of the Cross, Satan sought to bring about this deviation from the will of God. Jesus fought it through to the end.

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The Reality Of His Humanity

Why the earthly life? First of all, to establish the reality of His humanity. You see, in the old dispensation there had been many Divine appearances in human form. No one dare be dogmatic on this matter, but it may well have been that the very Son of God Himself was in some of those so-called ‘theophanies’. God came in human form, so that those visited first spoke of them as men, or a man, and then woke up to the realization: ‘I have seen God—God was here!’ But this earthly life of thirty-three years was no theophany: this was real humanity. This was not a transient guise, a passing form, just a visitation. This was a Man, true humanity, on this earth for over thirty-three years. This was not an angelic visitor. It was a Man. And I think this is one reason or explanation, amongst others, why at His entry into the world He was born as a babe and started from the beginning. He did not arrive as a visitant in full maturity; He began right at the beginning, coming in—although with a difference—yet by the same door as other men, and living here, through infancy, childhood and youth, into Manhood, accepting a life on the basis of absolute dependence on God as other men.

If you think, you will see that there is so much that bears this out. Why must He in infancy be hurried away by Joseph and Mary, out of the country, because His life is sought after? Why does not Heaven come in and assert itself for His absolute protection in miraculous ways, in order to preserve Him and to meet those forces that were against Him? Whereas He had to be taken and run away with, be got out of the way, like any other child! The fact is that He is living our life, He is subject to our experiences. There may be miraculous elements working behind, but on the face of things He is hungry, He is thirsty, He is tired, He is pursued and sought after—He is ‘going through it’, in the same way as you and I. He is living a human life. He has voluntarily accepted the basis of absolute dependence upon His Father. And the Father is not performing a series of miracles—although in truth the whole thing is a miracle.

A Life Of Faith

For this reason, like other men, He has got to overcome by the principle of faith. He has no other life, in principle, than you and I have: it is the life of faith. Faith had to be exercised for Him before He could exercise it for Himself. I have no doubt that Joseph and Mary had considerable exercise about that matter. They had to look it squarely in the face, and either say, ‘Well, we can trust God to look after Him: we will not do anything, we will just trust God’; or else say, ‘We will go, and trust God’. In either case, it was faith—faith for Him. And then the time came for Him to exercise faith for Himself, and everything for Him had to be on the basis of faith, as much as it has for you and for me.

Are you thinking: ‘What about His deity? What about His miraculous powers of knowledge and action? Surely He knew in a supernatural way; He exercised powers quite supernatural. That is not humanity!’ Let us get this very definitely cleared up in our minds. It does not contradict anything that I have said. Note: Jesus never used His miraculous powers of Deity for Himself. There is only one instance which it might be thought could be set over against that statement: the occasion when He had no money to pay His taxes, and sent Peter down to the sea-shore, and there was a fish with a coin in its mouth (Matt. 17:24–27). You might say, ‘It would be very nice to have that power to pay our rates!’ Ah, but be careful—it is not quite as clear as that. It does not really contradict what I have said. He never used supernatural, Godhead powers for Himself, and they never took Him off the ground of dependence upon God and the basis of faith. Note that even in that one instance there was no creative action. It was superior intelligence. There was a fish, and that fish had a coin, and somehow He knew it was there.