Books by T. Austin-Sparks

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Chapter 8 - A Peculiar Treasure

"And the princes of the people dwelt in Jerusalem: the rest of the people also cast lots, to bring one of ten to dwell in Jerusalem the holy city, and nine parts in the other cities. And the people blessed all the men that willingly offered themselves to dwell in Jerusalem. Now these are the chiefs of the province that dwelt in Jerusalem: but in the cities of Judah dwelt every one in his possession in their cities, to wit, Israel, the priests, and the Levites, and the Nethinim, and the children of Solomon's servants" (Nehemiah 11:1-3).

"Then they that feared the Lord spake one with another: and the Lord hearkened, and heard, and a book of remembrance was written before him, for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name. And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in the day that I do make, even a peculiar treasure; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him" (Malachi 3:16,17).

As we come to the last of this series of messages, it is necessary to have the whole background before us in order really to appreciate the setting of this final word. We have been led, as we have considered the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem by Nehemiah and those who were inspired by him, to see again that, as that was a movement of God at the end-time of the old dispensation (Nehemiah being the last historical book of the Old Testament), so there is a corresponding movement in our own time, as we move toward the end of this dispensation: that God would seek to complete, make full, the testimony of His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. We have looked at that testimony, as to what it is; we have taken account of the work, and the workers related to it; and we have also given some consideration to the conflict, the warfare, in which the workers in such a work are involved.

Now for a brief and simple word arising out of the two passages which we have just read. More than once in the course of these messages we have reminded ourselves that Nehemiah and Malachi were contemporary, that what we read of in the book of Nehemiah should be placed alongside of that which we have in the prophecies of Malachi. Malachi tells of the conditions in the days of Nehemiah, and here we come to what may be regarded as a final word in the matter. In this eleventh chapter of the book of Nehemiah, there is mentioned a peculiar offering to the Lord, and in Malachi 3 a peculiar treasure of the Lord.

A Tithe of the People

The peculiar offering, as you notice, was now not a tithe of things. Tithing of things was dealt with, but here was a tithe of the people, a tithe of the whole people, a tenth part of those who had come back and who had engaged in this work of rebuilding the wall, and that tenth part became a peculiar freewill offering to the Lord. Let us put a line under the tenth part for the moment: because, whether we like it or not, whether we are prepared to accept it or not, the fact remains that it always has been, and, so far as the forecast of the New Testament goes, it will be to the end, that there are only a certain few who go the full length with the Lord in His whole purpose. After all the sifting that had taken place - the first great sifting in Babylon when there came back a company, and then a second sifting when a few more came back - after the siftings, here we find ourselves at a kind of final sifting, when the number is still further reduced and it is only a tenth part who will voluntarily abide in Jerusalem by their own choice - just a tenth part. It seems that they correspond to Malachi 3:16,17, that company that feared the Lord, and that thought upon His Name: because you notice that it goes on to say: "They shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in the day that I do make, even a peculiar treasure". and He has made a record of them - "The Lord hearkened and heard, and a book of remembrance was written before him", - a record was kept.

The Lord's Book of Remembrance

Now in Nehemiah 11:4-24 you have the names, the record, of those who were a freewill offering. The Lord kept a record, the Lord composed a "book of remembrance," the Lord entered the names of these, and concerning them He says they are "a peculiar treasure," something He specially treasures. The Lord is looking for some who will be to Him "a kind of firstfruits," a kind who will be in the vanguard, following Him "whithersoever he goeth". He does look for a nucleus who will mean the satisfaction of His heart in the first place and in the essential way. As He looks out on a great multitude - and He has a great multitude who are His in the earth today - it cannot be said that all who bear His Name, all who are the Lord's, are utterly following and wholly going on, or meaning to do so. No, it is not so. But He looks for this tithe of His people, this tenth part representation answering to His own heart desire. They to Him are peculiarly precious. "They shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in the day that I do make, even a peculiar treasure". That is the final issue of this matter of the whole testimony: who will voluntarily go all the way with the Lord, no matter what it costs?

A Freewill Offering

Now it was a freewill offering, this tithe. Each one of the tenth made it voluntarily. They submitted themselves voluntarily to this casting of lots. You might object that if a lot was cast they had no option, they had to accept it whether they liked it or not, but the point is that they willingly committed themselves to that method. That was a willing, a freewill, offering unto the Lord. No compulsion here, no law here, no legality here - it was just willingness. Are you prepared, out of your own heart, to make a response and say, without any bribery, without any fear of the consequences if you do not: 'Yes, I am going all the way with the Lord, I am going to see that the Lord gets all that He wants so far as I am concerned'? That may mean a lot, that may involve a lot. But the Lord does not ask you to do it. He just waits for it - a freewill offering, a peculiar treasure to Him because it is freewill.

But what did it mean, this living at Jerusalem - this living at the very heart of the testimony, in other words? For since the wall represents the testimony, people coming into residence within the wall in Jerusalem really represented a spiritual movement - that there are those who are prepared to live right at the heart of the testimony. It was necessary, and it always is necessary, to the Lord that some do that - come right into the heart of it, to be there in the place of responsibility concerning it. There is a need that the testimony should be taken up with a sense of responsibility for its maintenance, that it shall be kept whole, that it shall be guarded, that it shall be served, that it shall be ministered to. If you look at the details concerning those who came within, you see their various ministries. I cannot take up the detail now, but you will see the various ministries which were represented by those who came into Jerusalem. They came in to fulfil a ministry, a spiritual ministry, on the inside, and take responsibility there. It was a need the testimony required.

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A Great Cost

But there was a great cost attached to it. Not everybody was prepared for that, not at all. There were many who were ready for it, who accepted the method of choice to live inside, who were not called upon to do so, but there were those who, in the sovereign overruling of God, found themselves called upon to do so. The lot fell out in their direction. God sovereignly saw to it that that was how things went for them, and it represented a real cost. It was very much nicer to live outside Jerusalem than inside. These men came into the city, on that day when the lot was to be cast, ready to accept the result as the will of God for them.

And then the lot was cast, and it fell to them to come and live in the city. I can imagine some of those men going back to their suburban dwellings, wondering what the reaction was going to be at home about this; saying to their wives: 'My dear, we have to go and live in the city, we have to move into Jerusalem - the lot has fallen to us.' Well, of course, the right kind of wife would say this: 'My dear, it was a matter of prayer, was it not? We prayed about it, that if it was to come our way the Lord would overrule, that if He wanted us He would let the lot fall on us. It was before the Lord; it is all right, the Lord wants it. Of course, it means giving up our nice little country house and our nice garden. It means losing that circle of friends we have out here. But still the Lord has laid it on us and we do not do it with any murmuring. But there are the children - perhaps that is the hardest part of all, the children. They have to lose so much - this free life out here, this life with all these others out here in the larger scale. They are involved in this.' And then they would turn to the children, and say: 'Listen, children: we have got to go and live in the city. We shall have to leave the country, and the garden, and all these others out here, and go to Jerusalem for the Lord, because the Lord wants it.' They would be very happy parents to whom the children said: 'Yes, we realize that your devotion to the Lord is costing you something, it is meaning a lot for you; and if we are involved in it, well, of course it means a lot to us - but we are with you in this.'

I do not think that is all imagination. I am quite sure that it was a costly thing to move into Jerusalem - and it always is costly to live at the heart of the testimony. Those who do so must forego many things that other people may have. You lose the large circle of friends when you go right to the heart of the Lord's interests. There are many people who do not understand your doing that; they call you foolish, you lose their confidence. They cannot believe that the way you are taking is right, and they would argue, 'Surely that is not the Lord's will for you'. Yes, you lose many friends, and you may lose many other things; you may involve your children too - they may lose much if you are going wholly with the Lord.

But listen - "They shall be... a peculiar treasure". To be a peculiar treasure to the Lord surely balances the account - nay, outweighs that. If you are going on with the Lord, it means that there are many things that you would like to have, many things quite legitimate and right, many things about which there is nothing wrong, but which, because of your utterness for the Lord, you will have to let go. And if you involve others in the suffering and cost of it all, that is a very bitter draught from the cup. There is nothing to indicate that these people who were chosen to move into Jerusalem did not have a bit of a struggle about it, that it did not cost them something, but the fact is that in their willingness to go on with the Lord they triumphed over all.

I think it is a wonderful thing that in the arrangement of the books of the Bible there is such a big gap between Nehemiah and Malachi, and that Malachi comes right at the end with: "They shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in the day that I do make, even a peculiar treasure". It is costly in many ways to live at the heart of the testimony. Again I say, you may be deprived of many things - good things; you may lose a lot of friends; you may lose a larger life of opportunity. Oh, how many have stopped, saying: 'How many doors will be closed to me if I go that way! How much wide influence I shall forfeit! I shall narrow my scope if I go that way.' And many have refused on those grounds, thinking that it was a legitimate argument to hold on to a larger scope and larger influence against the whole mind of the Lord - a wrong way of estimating values, because values are not bigness; they are intrinsic and essential.

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The Intrinsic Value of the Peculiar Treasure

And so the value that the Lord has here, as you see quite clearly, is in just a very few, comparatively. It is a "day of small things"; it is a comparatively small company about which the Lord says, 'My peculiar treasure'. The value is intrinsic. It is there that the Lord finds what His heart desires, and that which, I believe, leads us to the far greater thing. It is not that the Lord's thought ends there in smallness because the Old Testament ends with this day of small things, this little company fearing the Lord: but that is the link between the end of the old dispensation and the beginning of the new - the coming of the Lord Jesus and all that followed. For, in the four hundred years between the Testaments, there was still that little company holding to the Lord's full thought. When you open the New Testament, and begin the record as given by Luke, there you find that link - the little representative handful. Here is Anna, here is Simeon - here in Jerusalem is a company who wait for the promise, for the Messiah, looking for that day. They are linked with those who "feared the Lord". Ah, but this is something that, though outwardly small, has become so intrinsically great, making a way for the Lord to come.

No, it does not end there, but the challenge lies there. How mistaken we are when we measure things by their bigness, by their numbers. That is the way the world does it. And that is where the world has come into the Church - measuring things by numbers, size, extent, what you can see, how you can appraise from natural standpoints. 'Oh, that must be something for God! Look what a big thing it is!' Not necessarily. It has often been that the greatest thing of God has been very small in the eyes of man.

We return for a moment, in closing, to the long list of names in Nehemiah 11. I expect when you have read the book of Nehemiah you have skipped this - those names, those terrible, unpronounceable names! You have said, 'Oh, let us get on to something more interesting than this!' And yet perhaps this is one of the most interesting things in the whole book. The Lord has taken note of each individual who offered himself in this way, and has marked him down by name and put him in the book; and he is not only here in this book, the Bible, and there mentioned by name for all successive generations to recognize, to identify, but he is in the other book in Heaven for all eternity. That is no small thing: to have your name down not only in the Lamb's Book of Life as one born from above, a citizen of Heaven, but in the Lord's "book of remembrance" as one who has 'followed the Lamb whithersoever He goeth', as one of a tabulated company, yes, out of all the saved, all the redeemed - this kind of firstfruits unto God.

Need we say more? What is the appeal of these messages? That is the point at which we arrive. I trust it means comfort to you. We want all the comfort that we can get, but we know something of the cost. How many times recently have people said to me, 'When are you going to retire? So-and-so has retired and so-and-so is retiring' - yes, ministers of the Gospel. There is no discharge in this warfare, no day for retiring, brothers and sisters. I am sorry for you! You are not going to be pensioned off down here and spend the rest of your life vegetating. You have to go on to the last breath, with battle and cost to the end. There is a cost bound up with the full purpose of God, and in many ways we know it.

But oh, the answer! The Lord is taking note; He is putting it down, and He is saying: 'That tithe, that freewill offering people, shall be My peculiar treasure in that day that I do make'. I do not know how that is going to work out, what it is going to mean. Of course, it is a picture statement: that in a great house there is something, amongst all the possessions and all the ornaments, something that is peculiarly precious to the owner, and whenever his friends come he is always showing them that. 'Have you seen this? This is most valuable. I hold it more dear than anything else I have got; indeed it is more to me than all the rest put together - a peculiar treasure.'

That is behind this. How it is going to work out I do not know, but that is what it means. Those who go this way, those who will pay this price, those who will accept these consequences, those who will be after this kind - a freewill offering to the Lord for everything that He desires and His heart is set upon - will be in His House like that. He will be drawing attention to them and saying, 'Look here, have you seen these? These are peculiarly precious to Me. They followed the Lamb whithersoever He went.'

The Lord make us like that.

The End

Up next;  The Representation of the Invisible God

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The Representation of the Invisible God
by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 1 - Representation a Principle with God

Reading: Gen. 1:26; Col. 1:15; 2 Cor. 4:4; Rom. 8:29; Col. 3:10-11; Eph. 4:13,15-16; 5:22-32; John 20:21-23; Acts 1:8.

In the first and second series of passages, there is one word common to them all, as you will have noticed. It is the word "image".

    "And God said, Let us make man in our image."
    "...who is the image of the invisible God."
    "Christ, who is the image of God."
    "...conformed to the image of his Son."
    "...the new man... renewed... after the image of him that created him."

Our English word has behind it in the New Testament two Greek words - idol and ikon. Heb. 1:3 - "the very image of his person". Rotherham translates, "the exact representation of his image" or "of his substance". It is that word "representation" which has taken hold of me, and which seems to be the key to our meditation.

Representation an Eternal Principle

You will at once see that in the passages which we have read, that is the governing idea; firstly as to the Lord Jesus, representation of God. He is said to be the image of God, the image of the invisible God. Then the thought is transferred to the elect, the Church, foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son, a new man renewed after the image of Him that created him; and alongside of that, passages in which the actual word does not occur, but where the thought is still the dominant thought - "the measure of the stature of Christ", "a fullgrown man" (Eph. 4:13). That with reference to the Church, the Lord's people - representation.

Then those final passages bring it into a very practical realm - "As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you" - placing the emphasis upon the "as". Then, with the question which must arise, "Who is sufficient for these things?" the answer is, "Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you: and ye shall be my witnesses", the latter word of which is only another word for representatives.

(a) Before Creation

This, then, is an eternal thought, a thought which has come out of eternity, God purposing to be represented in His universe, to have representation in man, and that eternal thought lies behind everything. It is before creation, before the fall, and therefore before redemption. It is the pure thought of God unclouded at all by sin and sin's consequences and sin's necessities. It stands back there as governing all the thought of God projected into the future. It is as though God decided He would have representation of Himself, the invisible God, in visible form, in man form, that He would be seen, be known, be understood; and, more than that, He would constitute upon a basis of fellowship, living relationship, in terms of representation, that which would represent Him not merely officially but in nature, after His own heart. By that means He would make Himself known, would give Himself, and would bring the creation into something more than mechanical obedience and response to His sovereign will; into agreeable, desired, loving fellowship with Himself, with His own heart, along the line of consent, and not of compulsion. That is what representation means in brief. It is exactly what it means in the case of the Lord Jesus being the image of the invisible God, and exactly what it means that the Church is conformed to the image of His Son. The thought, I say again, lies behind everything, goes before creation, and then governs creation.

(b) In Creation

The creation is brought into being by this one governing thought of God, that the whole creation should, in a variety of ways, express Him, represent Him, speak of Him, and all the ordinances of heaven and earth as established by God, and all the relationships in creation, should in some way represent God's thoughts. If we had eyes to see, we should see Divine thoughts in all that God has done. The whole creation is the embodiment of this desire of God to be represented.

(c) In Redemption

But not only so, for when we come on to the matter of redemption, it is the same thing. Of God's dealing with the necessity which has arisen, representation is at the heart of it, and the representation in redemption is twofold, it has two sides. By reason of what has happened to the creation, and of the judgment pronounced upon it even unto death, there is a nullification of that order of things. If that sentence is carried out nakedly, barely and utterly, creation will be dismissed from God's universe, there will be nothing left. But representation again is the way of redemption, and in the person of His Son a representative position is taken under judgment, condemnation, and death, and in Him representatively the creation passes out, dies. We today surely do come afresh upon this aspect of things with new gratitude, that is, that you and I are saved from the awful fulness of judgment upon the creation because One has been our representative in that judgment. He representatively died as a cursed and judged and doomed creation because of sin. He died for us and as us, and we died in Him. That is a simple and very familiar truth.

But there is the other side in redemption. In resurrection, exaltation in glory, He is our representative. The Divine thought of representation is taken up again, not now in despair but in hope. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again to a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead" (1 Pet. 1:3). In resurrection He is our representative, in glory He is our representative, and just as truly as in His death we died in Him, we were included in death, so now we are included in Him in glory, in exaltation. As the "Captain of our salvation" He is bringing "many sons to glory", where He is as their representative.

Bearing upon that, the leaving out of two words which have been introduced into our translation, but which do not occur in the original, give added emphasis. I mean in Rom. 8:29. "Whom he foreknew, he also foreordained to be conformed to the image of his Son." They have introduced the two little words - "to be". Those words do not occur at all, they ought not to be there. They were put in because it sounds blunt and awkward to leave them out, and just say, foreordained conformed to his Son. Before the world was we were so, in the thought and purpose and power of God Who is not of time. There is no past, present and future with Him. All future is with Him in one moment. When He determined it, it was then done in Him. You and I may be undergoing a process of conforming to the image, but that is only on our side. From God's side it is all finished, it is eternally accomplished before ever we started, These are mighty foundations for faith that, so far as God is concerned, there is no hap or chance about this. It is all an accomplished fact. "Foreordained conformed to the image..." So you see this Divine thought, this eternal thought of representation, does lie behind everything; creation, redemption, death, resurrection, glory.

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(d) In the Church

But it comes right into the very centre of our lives as the Lord's people who have believed. The Divine thought concerning us is just this, that we are here for one purpose in the thought of God - to represent Him. The Church is constituted for that one purpose - to represent Him. All the dealings of God with us have that one thing in view, the perfection of representation. That is but to say in another way that the discipline, the chastening, the dealings of God with us are to perfect our representation of Him; that is, to make us more like Him, not just as a thing in itself, but because He has ordained this to be the agency of His self-revelation, His self-manifestation. "The image of the invisible God". That with reference to Christ. The image, we might say, of the invisible Christ is the Divine thought for the Church and all its members.

It seems to me that is the very essence of this idea - "the church which is his body". Well, there is such a thing, of course, as reading one another's spirit, but even that is exceedingly difficult without their bodies! What we know of one another inwardly, we so largely know through our bodies. Even our personalities are expressed very largely through our bodies. If we are familiar with a person, more or less it is by some physical expression that we know who they are. A little child indoors knows daddy is coming down the road. Why? Because he or she knows daddy's step. You may be in one room and certain people in another, and you hear them speaking and you are able to say, There is so-and-so, I know their voice! There are doubles, perhaps, in that, but you are not often mistaken. You know they are there because that voice is their's. We are known by some physical expression. We watch one another, we touch one another, and we read and register one another's inner life by a look in the eye, a look on the face, a tone of voice, a mere gesture, a mere grunt! Yes, and a history lies in the slightest physical indication if we are alive to one another.

The Church which is His Body stands in relation to Him in that sense, and He, by His Spirit being present, indwelling, is indicated by means of His members. The purpose of the Church as His Body is to represent Him, and this is the very essence, of all - shall we say - missionary work, all ministry, all service. The dominating idea of all service or ministry is representation; not first of all things said, preached, proclaimed, but what we are, what is conveyed of Christ by our being. In the case of the Lord Jesus that was predominant. It was His presence which registered the Divine impact upon this earth; sometimes His silence was more terrible than His words. When He, on that Good Friday, that first Good Friday, was silent, that was an awful silence which men could not bear, under which they writhed and would by any means make Him speak and break that silence. He came into the country of the Gerasenes and, without a word from Him, those possessed with demons cried out. His presence! It is representation.

What a mighty thing this is if it is there in the power of the Holy Spirit. You do not always have to begin to preach. If you are a Spirit-filled man or woman, your presence will make sinners uncomfortable and saints happy. What I am trying for the moment to emphasise is the truth, the principle, the law, that of representation.

With regard to this matter of representation, I would have you pre-eminently occupied with it in relation to the Lord Jesus Himself. He is the sum of all Divine thoughts, and the Incarnation is the supreme expression of this one thought of God to be truly, adequately, fully, perfectly represented; so that it was possible for the Lord Jesus to say, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father"(John 14:9). There is the mystery of Christ.

What is the mystery of Christ? The mystery of Christ is God veiled in this Representative. You say, A representative of God, and yet God veiled? - a contradiction! No, no contradiction; not necessarily veiled, for a New Testament or a Scriptural mystery is not something which cannot be known, but something which, for certain reasons, has not been known but can be known. When those reasons are set aside, this which has been a mystery, a hidden thing, is a mystery no longer, but it remains a mystery while those things obtain.

You can see it in the days of His flesh. Here is God in representation, but how many saw Him? "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father". But I think that word "seen" means something very much more than just looking upon Him as a man. "He that hath seen me..." "Whom do men say that I am?" Some said this and some said that. Peter said, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." And He said, "Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father who is in heaven" (Matt. 16:13-17). That is what it means to see; it is by revelation. It is that which is the mystery. The fact is there, the true representation or representative of God in person, yet unrecognised, unseen. "The God of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them" (2 Cor. 4:4). The mystery is men's inability to see a great fact, or a great fact present still undisclosed.

Now, the Resurrection and Pentecost seem to me to have meant just this one thing - the seeing of Christ. You remember when He was considered dead and buried, even disciples were in black despair and eclipse of faith and hope, and some went on the way to Emmaus very sad indeed, and their words were, "We hoped that it was he who should redeem Israel" (Luke 24:21). But before the end of that episode was reached, we are told that He opened their understanding that they might know the Scriptures. Having taken up the Scriptures right from the beginning and spoken to them things concerning Himself, He opened their understanding, and it was just that that was marking His appearances during the forty days after His resurrection. They were in some altogether new way coming to see Him. Oh no, not now physically merely, that He was alive, that He had a body; it was not merely this that was being borne in upon them very powerfully. They were seeing Him, Who He was; the mystery of His Person was breaking down. They were seeing Him, and the day of Pentecost seemed to bring that through to full birth. The forty days were moving up to that day, and then on that day by the coming of the Holy Spirit the thing was consummated, and in the full blaze of Who He was the Church was born. It seems to me that the Church was born - yes, by the Holy Spirit, but by the Holy Spirit's breaking open to men Who Jesus was after all. It seems to me that is how every one came into the Church. They saw by an operation of the Holy Spirit Who Jesus was. That is how Paul came in on the Damascus road; he saw who Jesus of Nazareth was. On the day of Pentecost, Peter stood up with the eleven, as under the power of the Holy Spirit they opened their mouths, and the spontaneous declaration was all about Who Jesus was, and they are men in a new revelation.

Oh, I know from our fundamentalist standpoint, this is nothing very much. I do not suppose there is one here who does not believe that Jesus was the Son of God, God manifest in the flesh. You all believe that, as a bit of your faith; but what is the effect of it? What was the effect of that at the beginning? The witnessing, the representation, is not just attesting historical facts, nor doctrinal facts. When they went out as witnesses unto Him, it was not just to say things which, while they were true, were only truths. They went out in the power of having seen, having had their eyes opened to the Lord Jesus. It was as though they had been men moving in the shadows during those years, groping, sometimes feeling an assurance, a certain amount of certainty, but then questionings, uncertainties coming in, shadows all the time. But at last the heavens were rent, the blaze broke through, and they saw. It was in the light of that they were constituted witnesses, representatives. It was in the light of that the Church was born. It was in the light of that the Church went on its way so effectively. The fact was that, wherever they came, it was the impact of God in Christ by their presence. Their presence stirred hell, because hell felt anew - God is here! It touched men who were in the grip and under the control and influence of higher intelligences, spiritual intelligences.

We know how true that is now in measure, that the presence of a true child of God, without words, provokes men, annoys men, irritates men, disturbs men. They want you out of the way, they don't like you. They don't know why, but they want to get rid of you. You could almost feel they have a supernatural intelligence about you, though they have not. If you ask them why, they do not know. There is the other deeper thing, they sense something that makes them uncomfortable. It is the presence of God in the child of God, and God is represented by their being there. That is how it was with Christ. "As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you." It is in this way, on this line, on this basis - representation.

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Representation Based Upon Identification

But we must realise that representation stands upon the basis of identification. It was the identity of Christ with God the Father that meant everything. They were identical. It was not that He would say or could say, He that hath seen me hath seen God's representative. That can mean anything. You can send anything and anybody as your representative. But He could say, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father", seen God; not a representative of God, not someone sent as a kind of ambassador, altogether different, two personalities, two natures in a different category, but identical. The presence of Christ is the presence of God and God is present in Christ.

Now, you say, how are you going to work that out in extension to the Church and to the member of the Body? In principle it holds good, and therein is found the whole requirement that you and I should lose our own independent, separate life of self-interest, self-motive, and growingly come to the place where it is "no longer I, but Christ". Oh yes, there will always be those things about us which remain our human features and marks, but the real and essential implication of our presence will not be ourselves, it will be the Lord; that there has come about within us, at the very centre of our being, by the residence of the Spirit of Christ, an identification with Him so that He and we are one; one in life, in motive, in thought, in desire, and whatever people have to say about our frailties, our weaknesses, our imperfections, if they will be honest they will have to say, But despite that, when you meet so-and-so, you do meet the Lord! It is a terrible thing if people are unable to say that, and have to say the contrary: When you meet so-and-so as a professed child of God, there is nothing of the Lord that you touch in him, and you come away grieved at so much that is otherwise. That is a terrible thing.

Does it not occur to us very strongly that it is a denial of our very existence as members of Christ's Body if we can tolerate things which are a contradiction of Christ; such a matter as unforgiveness, harbouring in our hearts an unforgiving attitude or spirit, nursing a grievance, wounded pride, divisions. Oh, dear friends, where are we as Christians, what is the Christian life, what are we for as Christians, what have we taken up, what have we assumed? Have we assumed certain things in the way of doctrines as a kind of professional matter, a business kind of thing altogether out of relation to our own personality, our own nature? Well, that is not the New Testament Christianity, that is not the real Christian life. The fact is if you and I are true Christians (and "if any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of his" - Romans 8:9), if we are true Christians and have the Holy Spirit, this ought to be the truest thing about us, that we can never be unforgiving without having a most miserable time about it, never suffer from wounded pride without being altogether thrown out of gear in our spiritual lives, never be un-Christlike without having a crisis over it. It is a living thing inside. Why? Because of identification in the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ and He has come into us to make us one with Christ, so that we cannot live a detached life from Christ and just go on anyhow indefinitely without being met by the Lord. That is quite impossible on the basis of a life in the Holy Spirit, and there is no other basis for a Christian. Many of us thank the Lord with all our hearts that this is the kind of experience we have, that we have a miserable time because of some un-Christlike thought or attitude. We thank God for that; it shows that things are alive. If you or I could possibly harbour anything un-Christlike in our hearts and not have a bad time, we have reason to question whether we are born again. Every bad time is an evidence that we are alive, for dead people do not suffer.

Identification is basic to representation, and it is a vital, an organic, thing, not a thing of doctrine merely.

Representation Based Upon the Spirit's Sovereignty

Well, that is what Pentecost did. Oh, how we are launched into a realm of things when we recognise that. Peter, standing up with the eleven, what is he saying? Peter has heard the Lord saying, "Ye shall be witnesses unto me in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth". Well, both he and the others are going to come into the good of it. Not so very long before, some of these disciples were saying of these very people to whom they were now to be the representatives of Christ, the messengers of His gospel of grace, "Lord shall we call down fire from heaven upon them?" You cannot go on like that when you come under the power of the Holy Ghost. Burning people up from heaven - that is not a Holy Ghost governed life. You see what I mean.

As to Peter, this is going to carry him a long way further yet he is going to be taken well out of his depth. It is a glorious thing to see what the Holy Spirit does when He is really sovereign. He makes you say things altogether beyond your traditions and your intentions, though you do not recognise it. The Holy Spirit means a great deal more than we do when we say things, that is, when we say things by the Holy Spirit. We say a lot of things by the Holy Spirit's government which will take us a long way beyond what we ourselves mean at the moment.

"Unto the uttermost part of the earth"! Peter will endorse that. Or again in his address on the day of Pentecost, he will use words like these: "The promise is to you and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call" (Acts 2:39). He says that under the power of the Holy Ghost, but he does not mean that. A little while afterwards he will be asked to go to the house of a Gentile in Caesarea. He sees a sheet wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts and creeping things of the earth and birds of the heaven, and a voice says, Rise, Peter; kill and eat! But Peter said, Not so, Lord! This thing was done three times and the sheet was caught up into heaven. Three men stood at the door (Acts 10). Not so, Lord! - "As many as the Lord our God shall call." He said it by the Holy Spirit, but he did not mean it. Now he is up against it. The Holy Ghost will carry him out of his depth, his tradition. That is what the Holy Ghost does when He gets hold of a life. He makes demands far beyond what we at the moment are ready for.

Thus the crisis will test you as to whether you are ready to adjust to the Holy Spirit? If not, your representation of the Lord breaks down. Are you ready to adjust? Is He going to have His way completely? I am keeping close to the Word. "As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you... Receive ye the Holy Spirit."

My point at the moment is that the sending as His representatives was on the basis of the absolute sovereignty of the Holy Spirit, and you and I will individually fully represent Christ only by that sovereignty, the Spirit's sovereignty, because the Spirit alone is big enough to bring Christ in, the Spirit alone is great enough to represent Christ. Can you or I represent Christ? Why, we do not know anything about Christ yet. Our thoughts about Christ would make a very little Christ. Peter, with all the big things that he is saying on the day of Pentecost, in his own interpretation of those things would have narrowed Christ down only to the Jews, but he came to discover that the Holy Spirit meant a great deal more than he, Peter, did about Christ, and what representation of Christ meant. And so it is by the Holy Spirit alone that an adequate representation of Christ can be made.

I do hope that we shall see that for which we are here, what it means. This is a very real thing, this matter of Christ being represented, brought into view, our presence meaning that. Oh, I am sure we all feel that, if things had been kept strictly there all the way along, the impact upon this world would be so infinitely greater than it has been. The thing has become mechanical; we cannot say that the Church in all its parts has really brought an impact of Christ upon this earth. We have to get back somewhere perhaps on this matter. It is not in doctrines, in words, in truths; it is in a mighty work of the Holy Spirit inwardly, which results in our being able to say, "It pleased God to reveal his Son in me that I might preach him among the nations" (Gal. 1:16); the representation within first, the preaching afterward; not the signing of a statement of fundamental doctrines, but a revelation of Christ in the heart.

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Chapter 2 - Representation on the Basis of Identification

Reading: Gen. 1:26; Col. 1:15; 2 Cor. 4:4; Rom. 8:29; Col. 3:10,11; Eph. 4:13,15,16; 5:22-32; John 20:21-23; Matt. 28:18-20; Acts 1:8.

The Identification of the Son with the Father

I think we might take our meditation up at the point where it most immediately relates to the Lord Jesus. At the close of our previous meditation, we were especially emphasizing the principle that representation is upon the basis of identification. The Lord Jesus was very particular and very emphatic when He was here in the matter of His relatedness to the Father. He kept that always in view. Of course, every consequence arose out of that. We will not deal with the consequence for the moment, we remind ourselves of the fact. “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). “I and My Father are one” (John 10:30). “Show us the Father... Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know Me?” (John 14:8,9; ASV). So we might gather up the tremendous amount that there is which bears down upon that identification of the Son with the Father, of Christ with God. Our special point at the moment is this, that we are not dealing with two, we are dealing with one. That is to say, we are not meeting Christ apart from God, apart from the Father. When we meet Him and have dealings with Him, we meet God.

And, what is more, from the other side God refuses to meet us on any other ground but the ground of His Son. “No man cometh to the Father, but by Me” (John 14:6), and any going to God independently of, and apart from, the Son will have but one result: the Father will refer us to the Son, He will not act apart. The oneness is absolute and is divinely, sacredly, jealously safeguarded and preserved. It is identification.

The history of Israel since then can be summed up on that one principle, that one law.  Israel refused to take account of Christ as God’s Son, set Him aside and essayed to approach God, and found a closed door. From that day the door to God has been closed to Israel. The Father has very effectively and forcefully said to Israel, There is no independent way; if it means a thousand or two thousand years, time will not alter this; you will still be at the place where you will have to come by way of the Son if you are going to find Me! That is the position today with Israel. God is jealous over this thing.

Why is this? The answer could be given in quite a number of ways, but, for our present consideration, it is a matter of God’s intention to bring Christ His Son into the inheritance which He has appointed for Him, the dominion. “Adam was a figure of Him That was to come” (Rom. 5:14), and God had said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness: and let them have dominion” (Gen. 1:26). That “them” is very significant. We will not follow it for a moment. “Let them have dominion.”—“A figure of Him That was to come.” Says the writer of the Hebrew letter, “Not unto angels did He subject the world to come, whereof we speak. But one hath somewhere testified, saying, ‘What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? or the Son of Man, that Thou visitest Him? Thou madest Him a little lower than the angels; Thou crownedst Him with glory and honour, and didst set Him over the works of Thy hands: Thou didst put all things in subjection under His feet. But now we see not yet all things subjected to Him. But we behold Him Who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honour'” (Heb. 2:5-9; KJV: ASV). Here is the Antitype, here is the greater than Adam, here is the One of Whom Adam was a figure, eternally destined to have dominion, with all things put under Him, Jesus, and God is keeping very close to His arrangement concerning His Son. The Son is the supreme and all-inclusive representative of God for executive purposes in dominion, and their oneness is absolute. So it is that, if all God’s purposes are bound up with and vested in His Son, He must bring that Son into His place, that must be His supreme business, that the Son shall there be as God.

That thought is an Old Testament thought in type, as well as a New Testament thought in reality. You know right through the Old Testament God had His representatives, and those representatives were in their day as God here. The statement to Moses is a very utter one. When the Lord was sending Moses to Pharaoh, He said to him, “You shall be as God to Pharaoh” (Exodus 7:1), and in effect, in actual outworking, when Pharaoh met Moses, he met God, and was having to do with God. Whether it were the patriarchs, or whether it were the prophets, by reason of their Divine appointment, they were there as God, dealing with them was dealing with God. The very term “Son of Man” as used in the Old Testament implies that representation, God represented; and God not as apart, God standing by, God committed, God involved. No matter how long you may have to wait, the end is absolutely sure.

Jeremiah represents God on the spot. Well, they may do all sorts of things with Jeremiah: they may refuse his word, drop him into the dungeon, well-nigh kill him, so that officials will go to the king, and say, Unless you take that man up, he will die! They may do that, and years may roll by and it may seem that Jeremiah has not been vindicated, but it will be written, Now at a certain given time in the reign of Cyrus that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah the prophet should be fulfilled... (Ezra 1:1). It does not matter, wait as long as you like, do what you like, it is God you are dealing with; representation. Oh, the Old Testament is full of it in principle, but it is all gathered up into Christ; He is the sum and the total of it all.

It is not necessary for me in a company like this to stress this great fact, that we have to deal with God when we touch the Lord Jesus. When we have to do with the Lord Jesus, we are dealing with God in a far greater way than was true with any prophet of the Old Testament, and it was great enough then.

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The Church’s Identification with Christ

But what are we leading to? Well, along this line of representation on a basis of identification, we come to this present dispensation, and the nature of it. This present dispensation is the dispensation of the Church, and the Church is here on this very ground, and if you and I have been baptized into Christ, we have been baptized into His Body. Do not let us think of the Church as something objective and apart from ourselves. We are in this, it has to become a matter of personal application as we speak, not thinking objectively of the Church, but thinking of ourselves as members of Christ.

Well now, this identification with Christ works out in exactly the same way as did Christ’s identification with the Father. That is why I read Ephesians 5:21-32 about husbands and wives and wives and husbands, and why I emphasized that strange word in Genesis—“Let them have dominion:” and you noticed that it is followed out again in Genesis 5:1 and 2. “In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made He him; male and female created He them: and blessed them; and called their name Adam,” called their name Man. That passage in Ephesians 5 about husbands and wives brings out this principle here, and if we could just see that, I am sure it would be tremendously helpful, and lift us away from modern views in this world on this matter. There is this eternal thought, this Divine thought, back of this relationship, this thought of God in representation on a basis of identification, and the phrase to be underlined there is, even as Christ and the Church, the Church and Christ. The oneness here, the identification, is the Divine thought and intent. You are not dealing with two things here, two independent lives, two persons apart. “He made them male and female, and called them Man,” called a plural a singular! And that is what He does with Christ and the Church; that is what He did between Himself and the Son, called a plural a singular, in effect. And He is saying here in other words, that a wife loses her own independent identity when she is married, she loses her own name, she lets go her own separate life. Now her one single idea is the life and vocation of her husband, into which she merges herself, and the twain become one, even as the Church Christ. When we come into the Church, we abandon our own independent separate identity. All that is ours personally and privately is yielded up and we are merged into the Body of Christ, so that the Church and Christ are one flesh, the twain are one: I know that modern views on woman’s place in this world will not accept that, but you are not bothered about modern views: but I hope you are just as strong on these principles. Lift it here.

God has vested in His Son everything, and you inherit everything. The Lord is simply saying about this earthly relationship that it is meant to be a representation of that heavenly thing, that if that relationship between husbands and wives and wives and husbands were as it is meant to be, the husband would be standing for God in this world, as a servant, a minister of God—do not misunderstand that; I do not mean he would put a clerical collar on and go into “the ministry”—he is standing as representative of God in a positive way, and his wife would be working into that, the results of that; not herself apart in independent ministry and life, not pulling another way, but yielding all that is personal to that. That is the Divine idea, and in that way she would come into the Divine endowments, the Divine vocation, the Divine blessing; she would get her portion in that relatedness and, with the loss of what is merely personal and private, in the larger. That is the Divine thought, and the Divine blessing lies in that direction and not in any other direction. Take that, but do not take it as merely a human idea, as the modernist and the people of the world say, That is Paul’s idea about women and we do not accept this! This is a Divine thought going right back, and its vision is Christ and the Church, the Church and Christ.

The point is, it is identification, that on this line where that relationship is right, the effect is this, that when you meet the wife, you meet the husband. I mean this, that she will not act on her own independently, she will express the mind of her husband, she will refer to the husband, and in meeting her you will have to meet the husband. It is no use trying to get round some other way in this kind of woman, to get her to take a line on the quiet when her husband is absent. Oh no, you cannot get her away from her husband; she is bound up there, so one that you cannot meet her apart from him. It is not a matter of whether the husband is present or absent, seen or invisible; you are meeting him all the time. That is the relationship.

The Lord is saying this about Christ and the Church, and He is saying the identification is so one that when you meet the Church, the members of His Body, you are not meeting something apart, you are meeting Him. “Lo, I am with you all the days, even unto the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20). That is the principle. That is not merely an individual thing, that is said to the Church: the nucleus was there and it was said to the Church. “I am with you always, even unto the consummation of the age” (ASV). “I am with you.” How? In the midst, right there in you by the Spirit.

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Identification and Authority

And that is the meaning of these other words, “Receive ye the Holy Spirit: whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them” (John 20:22,23; ASV). That is tremendous: the Church in the position of Christ saying, Thy sins be forgiven thee. Yes, the Church under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, if really filled with the Spirit, if the Church is Spirit-governed, that is its right, its prerogative to say, “Thy sins be forgiven thee;” on the terms, of course, that condition all forgiveness, namely, repentance and faith. “Whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained” (KJV). The Church says, Look here, my brother, my sister, you are violating a Divine principle and putting yourself out of court, and we assure you most solemnly before God that you have no way with God until you put that right: on the authority of the Holy Spirit we say that to you. And God stands by, and it does not matter, you may wait a generation, a lifetime, that brother, that sister, will not get through, apart from obedience to that counsel. They think the day is coming when they are going to be vindicated along their own line. Not at all! They will die unvindicated if they have not recognized that, in a Holy Spirit governed representation of the Church, they are dealing with Christ.

Of course, I know that the Roman Church has taken this very thing, and it is upon this very basis the Roman Church exists and operates, but of course in a temporal realm. They have brought it down from Holy Spirit government and made it purely a priest-craft matter. Wherever you get truth you will get error that simulates truth, a counterfeit of the true. But the truth is here, and it is a tremendous thing to be in the Body of Christ; and it is a tremendous thing to be in a local representation of that Body of Christ, the Church. It brings you on to executive ground, and I do feel so strongly that what is needed in our day, perhaps more than anything else, is for the Church as represented to function, the Church really to function in local representation. There seems to be such a call for a new functioning of the Church in its local expression along the line of prayer, and prayer that is of an executive character.

In Jerusalem there was the Church, and we mark that again and again they are found in prayer. When Peter is in prison, the Church made prayer unto God. It acted over this matter, and it brought the Lord in on the ground of Psalm 2, and Peter was released. Church function—I submit it to you that this is a great need, that the Lord should have locally represented this Body, which is Himself in expression, Himself in effect, Himself in execution, doing it there in them, through them, by the Holy Spirit. It is that which is called for today in a new way, for meeting this tremendous on-drive of the forces of evil. Who amongst the Lord’s people is unconscious of that on-drive of evil forces? What is going on in the world today? You can see the counterpart of this war in the spiritual realm in almost every detail; intense malignancy, evil, poison, hatred, violence and lies and misrepresentation; that the time is short; and a gathering up of every diabolical bit of ingenuity for destruction. And here within the last days we have had a revival of talk about gas, the idea being that the time is short, the day is drawing in; the enemy will resort to any device, however wicked. That is the idea. But look away from this. You see that in the spiritual realm, you feel it. The enemy is out to crush, to cripple, to annihilate the true children of God if he can, and his intensity was never greater. Why? Because his time is short. “The devil is gone down unto you, having great wrath, knowing that he hath but a short time” (Rev. 12:12). The day is drawing in for him.

How is it going to be met?  I again submit it to you that it is the Church that has to meet this. I confess that I cannot meet this alone; you cannot meet it alone. We have to have co-operation, we have to come on to our ground of identification with Christ and let Christ representatively meet this thing. None other but Christ can meet it, but He can. “All authority hath been given unto Me in heaven and on earth... and I am with you” (Matt. 28:18,20). That cannot be just taken for granted. It seems to me that the Church has to come into a faith position on that ground and act with Christ. I submit that to you for what it is worth, but I feel intensely about it myself, that there is a great call and need for the Lord’s children where they are, as representing the Church, even though they be but two or three in any given locality, really to act in this matter executively in the name of the Lord. “In the name of Jesus”—it is only another way of saying, Representatively we say, representatively we act, it is Christ by us; given always that the Holy Spirit has His place. Well, you see, identification means representation. That oneness with the Lord means that the Lord has a way to express Himself. Well, that opens up all those matters of oneness with the Lord, unhindered oneness, unsullied oneness with the Lord, so that He has a free way of expression.

[Shammu]

Identification and Human Relationships

This identification with Christ, and His coming in along that line, if we could see it, if our eyes were open—and I would that our eyes were opened to this—does set up a very real solemn and serious piece of business for the Lord’s people in the matter of human relationships. How can I best pass this on to you and explain what I mean? You know, some of us have been to a number of different countries in this world, among other nations, and one of our greatest difficulties has often been the national character of the people to whom we were ministering. I need not mention different nations and their characteristics, but as you know, different nationalities do differ very much one from another in their constitution, their make-up. They seem to me to represent all the temperaments of humanity. Some are very emotional; others are intensely practical; others mental, in the right sense—I was going to say intellectual, but that is not quite the right word—living always in the realm of the mind. They must have the thing thoroughly threshed out in reason, and they keep yon in that realm. Well, they differ, and our problem has often been this—Oh, we cannot get anywhere here at all, because here is this superficiality, or there is this intellectuality, this intense national disposition! And you might give it up if you accept that and work on that basis alone. But we have come to see that that whole thing has to be relegated to a secondary place and not be allowed to dominate at all. You see, Christ is other than all that, He is different from all that, He is of a peculiar disposition, make-up, constitution. The Holy Spirit is all powerful, and if the Holy Spirit can bring Christ in, introduce Christ into these lives, no matter how they are made, He has introduced that which is going quietly, deeply, surely to work to supersede and transcend all that other. Give Him time and you will find something there that is quite other than the natural disposition, altogether different from the natural make-up. It is something other, and that will hold on its way. That is Christ. Herein is the universality of the Holy Spirit.

Now that is exactly what happened on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem. There were representatives of all nations under heaven; Parthians, Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia, they were all there. That was strategy on the part of the Holy Spirit, and that day He came and so spake through the Apostles as to be understood by them all. That was the thing which amazed them. Here are we, all nations and languages under heaven, and yet as these men speak we hear them, every man in our own tongue wherein we were born, just as though it might be that it was but one language that was being spoken. The universality of Christ, the universality of the Holy Spirit! Just how it was done may not be clear, but there was evidently a miraculous transcending by the Spirit of the curse of confounded speech among men. It sets forth a principle, that Christ simply ignores the differences of nationality and human make-up, and He is Himself one constituent, one basis, Who can come into all and constitute all one in the innermost reality, make all one. That is the meaning of those words which we have cited as one of our passages—“Have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of Him That created him: where there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman: but Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:10,11; ASV). The Holy Spirit can make of all nationalities, temperaments, constitutions, a oneness which is Christ, deeper than what we are in ourselves. We are all different. If we simply met and tried to proceed on a purely and merely human basis, well our differences would be clashing all the time and making immense difficulties. But if we will seek to relegate them to a secondary place and take account of the fact that, being members of Christ’s Body, we all have something in common, and that it is that common something which is to be the basis of our relationship and our going on, which is to be cherished and safeguarded and looked after, then there will be a building up of the Body, and an increase of Christ; and that is the way of representation. Let us deliberately turn our backs on that attitude that says, I cannot get on with so-and-so, I give it up! and say, So-and-so is a child of God, there is something of Christ there and I am going to cling to that. That, beloved, makes for increase, and that too is the way of representation.

I know this, that when there is some real business for the Lord’s children to do, if it is only two of them, husband and wife, or two in a place, some real matter which has to be dealt with corporately together, the enemy works upon all kinds of human conditions to paralyze that. He is out all the time, in advance very often, before we recognize the business that is going to arise, he is out working upon those human elements to get us across one another, to bring strain in relationship, to create phantoms in the mind about one another, and lies. And they seem so true! So-and-so said something and did you notice how they said it, and did you notice how they looked?—and you give an interpretation which has no truth in it! The enemy puts a construction; nothing is too small, too petty for him, and he is trying to get you across one another, a strain in relationships, because there is an issue. Presently you will be required to stand together on some matter, and you cannot; he has seen to that beforehand, by sowing seeds of destruction and discord. These are real things, they are not imaginations; they are the result of experience and observation.

What I am saying is this, that we have to get on to the ground of Christ if Christ is to be expressed, and seek to keep off this ground of what is Jew and Greek, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, and so on. Have that ground where Christ is all, and in all, hold that ground, and then He comes in. Representation of Christ means identification with Christ, and that is the only identification that you and I will ever find here, unless it is identification with the Devil himself. There are only two alternatives, it seems to me.

I do trust you are not confused but are seeing glimmers of light, and that we shall recognize why we are here. We are here on this earth as the Lord’s representative. But it is not that we are here or there and He far away; we are here to be the vessel in which He is, and He is here because we are here. That is to be the implication of our presence. Oh, that this might not just be a theory but more and more a fact, by reason of our living in the Spirit, that our presence may mean to all unseen intelligences, as well as men, Christ is here by His Spirit. The Lord grant it may be so.

[Shammu]

Chapter 3 - Representation by the Holy Spirit

Reading: Luke 24:46-49; John 20:21-23; Acts 1:8; ASV.

“And He said unto them, Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer, and rise again from the dead the third day; and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name unto all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. Ye are witnesses of these things. And behold, I send forth the promise of My Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city, until ye be clothed with power from on high.”

“Jesus therefore said to them again, Peace be unto you: as the Father hath sent Me, even so send I you. And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Spirit: whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them; whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.”

“But ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you: and ye shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judæa, and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.”

Continuing our occupation with the matter of the great Divine thought of representation, we shall now be especially concerned with one simple emphasis on the place of the Holy Spirit in this connection.

In our previous meditations we were seeing this Divine thought as revealed in the Scriptures; firstly, God making man in His Own image, after His Own likeness; and then the thought taken up in fulness in Christ, Who is repeatedly declared to be the image of the invisible God; and finally the thought carried over into the Church, the elect, which is to be conformed to the image of His Son, all speaking so clearly of this intention of God to be represented, to be known by representation.

Christ’s Representative Work by the Spirit

Now, the Holy Spirit has a very vital place in this whole matter. When the Lord Jesus officially took up this particular phase or function of His life and work, you know it was then that the Holy Spirit came specifically into evidence in His life and ministry. It is true that He was begotten of the Holy Spirit, it is true that He was very God, but in the official work for which He came into this world, the work of the Son of Man, which is a representative term or title, He stands to represent man, the race. Luke’s Gospel, as you know, is particularly and peculiarly the Gospel for the race, as Matthew is that for the Jew, and Luke’s particular title for Christ is the Son of Man, representative. He takes the place of man as God intended man to be, to bring man in His own Person inclusively to the Divinely appointed destiny. He, the inclusive Man, will advance by all the stages of man’s course to that Divinely appointed end, and eventually, glorified, exalted even at God’s right hand, He will stand as inclusively representative of that new race, that new creation. I say that, as Son of Man, He will advance by all the stages of man’s progress toward that glorious destiny; for He will be there as the first-fruits, the firstborn among many brethren. That very phrase is linked with this thought of representation. He “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15); representative, firstborn. Just as the first-fruits of the harvest were representative of the whole harvest, and the farmer would take the first-fruits and offer them to God in token of the whole harvest which would follow, so Christ was the first-fruits of all creation, and the firstborn among many brethren, and He occupies that position at God’s right hand now representatively, the token of all to follow. But from the very first step, through every stage of that course to the glory, His way is by the Spirit.

The Cross the First Step

In a sense, a very real and true sense, the Jordan was the first step toward the glory. The Cross is always the first step to glory; there will be no glory if there is no Cross, and the measure of glory will be the measure of the Cross. We will leave that and come back to it again presently. The Jordan was the first step toward that glorifying, not of Christ alone and merely in a personal way, but the glorifying of man, the many sons to be brought to glory by Him, the whole harvest to be brought to glory by Him, the many brethren who come by Him. I say, in a very real sense the Jordan was the first step toward that glory, and in the Jordan, as we have already pointed out, the governing idea is representation. A race which cannot be glorified must be put out of the way, to make room for a race which can be glorified. A mankind which can never come to glory must be put away from occupying the ground of a man that can come to glory. So, representatively in the Jordan in His baptism, His death and burial in type, He takes the place of a race, a mankind, which can never be glorified, and it is got out of the way in Him representatively.

In the reality of the Cross, of which the Jordan was the type, we have that blessed accomplishment. All this that can never be glorified, never come to glory in us, has been put away. Are you worried, obsessed and troubled with all that about you which can never be glorified? Well, if you have accepted Christ as your representative, and have stood right into His representative work for you, everything that will hinder your coming to glory has been dismissed, every bit of it; and God is working on that ground with us. The last phase of that work will have to do with our bodies of death; they shall be changed, and made like unto the body of His glory. We are coming in every part of our redeemed being to glory, because what cannot be glorified has been representatively got out of the way. That is, of course, the ground for our faith.

In His coming up out of the Jordan, type of His coming up from the grave, He occupies the representative position of a man who can be glorified, a mankind that can be glorified, a race that can come to glory, and at a certain point in His life these two things were brought together in one hour. In the Mount of Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah spoke with Him of the death, or exodus, which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem, and in that same hour He was glorified. The death and the glory came together in one hour in Him. That is how it can be with Him because He so perfectly represents God’s thought. It is representation.

But then this new creation, this new man capable of coming to glory, of being glorified, this new race as gathered up into Him as its Head, as its first-fruits, as its first-born, can never come to glory, only as from that very point of standing on the new creation ground, resurrection ground. The Holy Spirit takes charge; and so, coming up out of the water, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit as in the semblance of a dove came and rested upon Him. That is the first thing. The Holy Spirit takes charge, so to speak, of this whole matter of bringing to glory, of perfecting this new creation for glory. It is the Holy Spirit’s work from beginning to end.

What was true in the case of the Lord Jesus as the Head has to be true in the case of the whole Body, and Pentecost must be the counterpart of the resurrection side of Jordan, where the Body, brought on to resurrection ground, is taken charge of by the Holy Spirit, to be brought right through all the course and stages of perfecting unto glory. There is a little phrase in Peter’s writings about “the Spirit of glory resting upon you” (1 Pet. 4:14).

So our emphasis is there, that this is the object of the Holy Spirit, this is the necessity for the Holy Spirit; for nothing is possible of all this Divine thought apart from the Holy Spirit.

[Shammu]

The Father’s Attestation of the Son

But there is a second part, another side or aspect of this. The Spirit certainly comes, the anointing takes place, but upon the anointing, the Divine voice is heard from heaven saying “This is My beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:4). With the anointing there comes the attestation. God is calling attention to this One, is indicating this One, is pointing out this One, and in effect He is saying, This is My representative! You know that on the Mount of Transfiguration, when Peter in his impulsiveness would be found dictating, advising, suggesting what should be done, the voice, that same voice, came again: “This is My beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased; hear ye Him;” referring everything to Him for government, for direction: for dictating. “Hear ye Him.” It is the voice of attestation from heaven at Jordan and on the Mount, singling Him out as God’s representative. It is representation again.

Now those two things go together. They are only two aspects of one thing, because the anointing means that God Himself has committed Himself to this One. That is the meaning of the anointing. As we were saying in our previous meditation, where the anointing is you have to meet and deal with God. “He reproved kings for their sakes, saying, Touch not Mine anointed ones, and do My prophets no harm” (1 Chron. 16:21,22; ASV). It is to meet God if we do touch the anointing or that upon which the anointing rests, or those who are anointed. God has committed Himself in that anointing. Therefore if God is there committed, involved, wrapped up with that, that is God’s representative, and that is as God functioning there. The Holy Spirit has constituted that vessel of representation by His coming and His presence; God is present. That means that all the rights of Divine sovereignty have been taken up by the Holy Spirit and brought into the midst of that which is anointed, that which is indwelt by the Spirit. All the rights of Divine sovereignty are in the Holy Spirit, and if He is present, He is present in all the rights of Divine sovereignty.

I do want you to be able to grasp this, because I feel it is tremendously important for us as members of this Body of Christ, indwelt by the Holy Spirit. We just very faintly touched upon this matter yesterday, and I feel there is something more to be said about it.

[Shammu]

The Sovereignty of the Holy Spirit

When this counterpart of Jordan, death and resurrection and the open heaven and the descent of the Spirit and the anointing, when the counterpart of that took place on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came in terms of Divine sovereignty to be present, and it is a thing which you and I have to recognize, to which we have to bow the knee absolutely. It may be that we have not recognized sufficiently that receiving the Holy Spirit of anointing means that the sovereignty in our lives is taken right out of our hands. Have you asked for the Holy Spirit? Have you prayed to be filled with the Spirit? Have you recognized the tremendous importance of the Holy Spirit indwelling? If you have not, then, of course, that will account for all kinds of weaknesses, failures, slowness of growth, powerlessness in service, ineffectiveness in life, and a host of other things. But if you have seen the tremendous importance of the Holy Spirit’s presence in power, in fulness in the life—and I do trust that you have—then, having sought the Spirit, you have consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally, invited that the whole sovereignty of your life shall be taken out of your own hands, and that it should be entirely transferred to another; and that involves you in far more than you have any idea of. This is the point we were trying to make yesterday.

On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came in terms of sovereignty, and took hold. He took right hold in terms of sovereignty and, in doing so, He made men say things the import of which they accepted within the compass of their own understanding, it is true. Yes, they were not opposed to those things which they were saying, so far as they understood them, but the things which they were saying, while they agreed with them, only went to the range of their appreciation, their understanding of them. But the Holy Spirit meant infinitely more than that, and before long these very men who agreed up to the point of their understanding and appreciation of the things they were saying, were confronted with the fact that the things they said committed them to a great deal more than they had understood. And that is the practical issue of the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit.

Peter quite agreed, according to his understanding, the range of his appreciation, with what the Lord had said about “unto the uttermost part of the earth.” He quite agreed with what he was saying... “to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call” (Acts 2:39). But it will not be many days before Peter will stumble right up against it, the very thing he himself has said, and find it meant far more than he intended it to mean, when it comes to Caesarea and a Gentile house. “All that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call!” Peter says, Not so, Lord; and there is a battle. But you notice that the Holy Spirit, when He gets Peter through, comes right down on that situation in a mighty way. It is a matter of which the Holy Spirit has charge, and the verdict, the conclusion of the whole matter is Peter’s report at Jerusalem—“Who was I, that I could withstand God?” “If God gave unto them the like gift as He did also unto us... who was I, that I could withstand God?” (Acts 11:17). There is a man having to go down before the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit. He has been committed to that from the beginning.

Now, what do we want to get at in this matter? It is this: if you and I really do come to the place where the Holy Spirit as Lord becomes resident in us, we are confronted with this great law of the absolute sovereignty of the Holy Spirit to do as He likes with us and to take us completely beyond our own intentions, right beyond our own prejudices, our own traditions, all our past history, take us beyond our present mental range of what we now conceive to be the right and the wrong. We have all got a fixed mental horizon today. At this moment we would all put a certain limit and bound and hedge to what we consider is right and wrong, what we ought to do and what we ought not to do. We move within our own mental interpretation of things, and that is our range. Are we going to bind the Holy Spirit to that? If so, we will never go on to God’s ultimate purpose and end. What we shall find is that the Holy Spirit will demand from time to time that we get rid of our hedges, and let Him lead us sheer out of our own fixed bounds of acceptance and interpretation. He will demand that, that is His sovereign right, and our progress towards God’s final end, and, mark you, the measure in which we can truly be representative for God here, depends entirely upon that capacity for adjustment to a new revelation or indication by the Holy Spirit, our capacity, our amenability to adjustment to what the Spirit will show us.

It seems to me that very often the Lord hedges our lives up to an emergency, a crisis, a disputed position, in order to bring about something new. The fact is, of course, we will not move into anything more of the Lord unless we are compelled to. That is how it works out, and however good and however great and however precious may have been the Lord’s dealings with us, showings to us, impartations to us, the best that He has ever given to us will have to be brought to the place where it no longer meets our fullest need, in order that we should move on to something more. That is the way of progress. We have had, perhaps, wonderful revelations, wonderful dealings of the Lord with us; things have happened in our lives which have eclipsed all that ever preceded them, and at the time we have felt that we have reached the fulness. We have not; there is something beyond this. Just at the time this is as far as it is possible to go, but our experience and our history is that those things which at the time and for a time were so great, so wonderful, so all-absorbing, have come to be as though they were not, with a growing sense of new need, new demand, and another crisis has arisen in which we have had to know something more than has ever been. And the Lord forces situations like that. It is the way of enlargement, it is the way of growth. It seems to me to be His only practical way of keeping us going on. But it is the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit bringing about those crises and making these demands; and I suppose that will be our experience right to the end. If we really are under the government of the Holy Spirit, we will never have reached finality here, there is still more beyond; but to reach it we have to lose contentment with what we have. One of the tragic features of Christianity is the measure of contentedness with that evangelical Christianity. The great need today is a sense of need everywhere, amongst Christians and in the world, a desperate sense of need. The Church will never grow until it grows by this intense sense of need of something more. Men will never come to Christ until they have a real sense of need.

The New Testament is just full of this work of the Holy Spirit acting sovereignly to precipitate situations in which a new knowing of the Lord becomes indispensable to life, to very existence, and when that is brought about the way is open for the Lord to reveal Himself, and to come in in some new way; and that is the enlargement of representation. The Holy Spirit, in His sovereignty, holds us to His step by step method; He never acts mechanically, He acts only in life. So you see, in the Book of the Acts, the Acts of the Holy Spirit, He always kept the Lord’s servants at very short commons in the matter of what He was going to do. He never put the sovereignty into their hands, He always retained it in His own hands. In the Book of the Acts you cannot have a missionary programme; there is no programme there. Men, of course, now have resolved the New Testament into a missionary programme, though in fact it was not one. Would to God we could get back behind programmes, back to the point where the sovereignty is in the hands of the Holy Spirit entirely.

[Shammu]

The Holy Spirit Directing Service

That is seen in the choice and sending out of the representatives of Christ. You see it in Antioch; Paul and Barnabas are there, and for a whole year men with whom a great destiny is bound up by foreordination must be there under God’s hand, and await God’s time. Especially was this the case with Paul, known of God from all eternity as the man for a tremendous mission. But even so, and although apprised by the Lord from heaven of his mission right from the beginning—“To this end have I appeared unto thee, to appoint thee a minister and a witness” (Acts 26:16)—he cannot take the sovereignty of his missionary calling into his own hands and work it out. He must get into that company at Antioch, that representation of the Body, and wait for the Holy Spirit. He waits twelve months there at Antioch, perhaps a little more, and then the Holy Spirit said, “Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work where­unto I have called them” (Acts 13:2). The Holy Spirit is holding this matter of their life-work in His hands as sovereign. They cannot decide when to take it up, even though they may know in their hearts quite definitely what their life-work is.

Then, as they go, they are not allowed to sit down and draw up a line of action, a scheme, a plan, a time­table. They go under the sovereignty of the Spirit. They reach a certain point and Paul thinks one day of Ephesus, and his natural mind consecrated to the Lord gets to work. Ephesus is a great city, a very influential city. If only he can get to Ephesus and get the Church planted there, get things going there, it will be a tremendous thing! Yes, I think for the Lord’s sake, we ought to go to Ephesus! But they were not suffered of the Holy Spirit to preach the Word in Asia. Well, Bithynia is a good place, a very important place, and it presents a great door of opportunity: we had better go to Bithynia! No, the Holy Spirit suffered them not to go to Bithynia; and while they tarried, not suffered of the Holy Spirit to preach the Word in Asia or Bithynia, a vision appeared to Paul in the night, a man of Macedonia, and Europe is indicated first. Ephesus and Bithynia will come in the order of the Spirit, in the Spirit’s sovereign time, and the sovereign time of the Spirit is not yet in that direction. The sovereign time of the Spirit is just now in this other direction, Europe, Philippi (Acts 16:6–10).

Fruitfulness Vitally Related to the Spirit’s Sovereignty

Now all this is only taking little fragments out to indicate and emphasize this, that the Holy Spirit coming into a vessel comes in terms of absolute Divine sovereignty to take the rule of our lives out of our hands, and that is why the Holy Spirit can never come and do His work until you have been to Jordan. Until the Cross is a fact, an accomplished fact, there can be no sovereign government of the Holy Spirit carrying all the Divine programme; for the Cross means the deposing, not only of the sinful body of the flesh, but of the natural man. Paul is as consecrated to God, to Christ, as ever a man has ever been on this earth, with one exception, and yet even Paul with his utter consecration to the Lord cannot assume this missionary programme and follow it out himself. He has to be a bond­slave of Jesus Christ, he has to be under the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit, he has to recognize when the Spirit suffers not. There would have been, and there would be today, a very great deal more fruitfulness, if the Church were governed in this same way. What has happened is that Mark 16:15— “Go ye into all the world”—has become a missionary programme that anybody may adopt at will. All you have to do is to get saved, and adopt that, and go into all the world, and preach the Gospel. Well, God forbid that I should disparage anything in the way of preaching the Gospel: that is not the point. But what about the effect of it all comparatively after two thousand years? Half the world is not touched yet after two thousand years.  Look at the difference between the few Apostolic years, with the range then covered and the impact registered, and all the centuries which have followed.

Is not that an argument for this one thing, that you cannot adopt the missionary manifesto and commission and go and work it out yourself; that this is a Holy Spirit business; and while what I am saying may seem to be the negative side, I want it to be the positive. When the Holy Spirit gets hold of the situation, He will do it, but He has to be sovereign.

The Cross therefore clears the way for the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit, and the Cross means that even consecrated natural minds have to have something more than their own consecration as the governing factor. So many say or think, If only I am consecrated to the Lord, then I ought to do anything that comes into my head that I think would serve the Lord! Oh no, that may be zeal, but not according to knowledge; and that may be waste.

[Shammu]

The Sovereignty of the Holy Spirit in Relation to His Perfect Knowledge

Now let us not go round the thing any more, but just strike the heart of it. It is this: the Holy Spirit demands absolute sovereign rights in our life, and to take the sovereignty right out of our own hands; and that, of course, progressively. However much we may know, we do not know all that is in the mind of the Spirit, for the Holy Spirit never grows. The Holy Spirit of God never has grown, He never does grow, His mind does not enlarge. You never think of the mind of God enlarging, you never think of God growing. I say that reverently. The Holy Spirit never gets any new knowledge. From the very beginning, the Holy Spirit has all the knowledge that can ever be had, His knowledge is perfect.

That is the significance of that wonderful word in the book of the Revelation, where everything is consummated and brought to its full end: “Saith He that hath the seven Spirits of God” (Rev. 3:1). It is a figurative or symbolic term which means, He that hath perfect knowledge, the perfection of spiritual knowledge. He has that from the beginning, and I say again, the Holy Spirit has never acquired one fragment of new knowledge as He has gone on; He has had it all from the beginning. When He came He had as complete a knowledge of things as ever He will have. The Spirit’s knowledge is absolutely final, but for ourselves what we do not know? At most we know but a mere fragment of what the Holy Spirit knows and means. That means that we are going to get a great deal more knowledge as we go on. We can only get that increase of knowledge as we are prepared to learn things all over again, all anew. You see what I mean. There is no hope whatever unless the Holy Spirit can in sovereignty just show us that we know nothing, and that we have everything to learn, and that His knowledge is infinite and will always be miles ahead of us, and therefore adjustment on our part will be necessary again and again and again. Have you come to a fixed position about truth, about light, about the ways of God, about the mind of the Lord, about what you ought to do and ought not to do, and what you are never going to do? Have you come to a fixed place? If so, you have shut the door on the Holy Spirit. No one who believes in the Holy Spirit could ever possibly say, I shall never do that! Peter said that: Nothing common or unclean has ever passed my lips, and never will! That was his position, but the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit showed that everything of God’s purpose in his apostleship hung upon whether he abandoned that closed position: and he could quote Scripture for his position, too! It does not matter. One of the remarkable things about the New Testament is the unlooked for interpretations it gives to Old Testament Scriptures. No wonder the Jews and the Judaizers who dogged Paul everwhere would say, This man reads a lot into the Old Testament that is not there, this man is putting constructions upon the Old Testament that it will not bear, he has taken out of the Old Testament something that is not there! Look at what Paul says about Old Testament things. I cannot see it means that in the Old Testament. It does look as if he is using the Old Testament and putting a construction on it that was not meant in the Old Testament. It is an extraordinary thing how in the New Testament the Old is given a meaning you could never find without the New Testament. The Holy Spirit knows what He means, and He means a great deal more than ever men have yet seen. The very Scripture you quote may mean more than ever you intended it to mean. I think this is enough to show you how necessary it is for us to be in a position where we are really open to the Lord, and really under the Holy Spirit‘s government, ready to let go our most cherished position, if the Holy Spirit indicates that is the way. To say that, is not to say we are to be unstable and carried about by every wind of doctrine and sleight of men, or that we are just going to follow anything that comes along.

I do not think the Holy Spirit ever denies Himself. What the Holy Spirit has said at one time, He is not going to contradict at another. But what may seem contradiction may be in this form, namely, that the Holy Spirit, transcends what He has already said. Just as a miracle is not necessarily a violation of natural law, but a transcending of natural law, so the Holy Spirit will not contradict or violate anything He has said before, but He will transcend it and, when He does transcend, it may look like a contradiction. It may be you will be able to say, I am quite sure the Lord led me at a certain time and in a certain direction, but He has led me right away from that now! That is not necessarily a contradiction, that is a transcending, a moving on. At that time you could not have gone the further step, He could only get you that far then. But in His own mind that was only a step which was to lead to another, and yet another, and you leave a lot behind in such a process. But oh, the point is that the Holy Spirit shall be able to do what He is after.

Even in the case of the Lord Jesus, it was like that. His was a sinless nature and a sinless natural mind, but He would not use it apart from the Father, and if One with a sinless natural mind will not use it independently, what about us? How much more necessary it is for the Holy Spirit to be sovereign in our case. Everything of power lies in that direction. “Ye shall receive power, the Holy Spirit coming upon you” (Acts 1:.

The Menace of the Natural Mind

I think we can leave it with this one simple emphasis now, namely, this need for the Holy Spirit to be sovereign. He must. There are good people, godly people, who do not see, and who will not agree, and the problem arises: Oh, they are godly, they are consecrated, they have lived for God for many years, and yet they are so opposed to certain things which seem to be so evidently the mind of the Spirit; and they would deny that. What is the explanation? Well, there may be several explanations, but I suggest that this is one possible explanation in a great many cases, namely, that the natural mind has never known the Cross; yes, the consecrated natural mind. I am not talking about the wicked natural mind. The consecrated natural mind has never known the Cross. Our own mind is still our mind, it is our judgment, even after we are saved. What we have said about Paul and Ephesus and Bithynia, and other cases, is true of all the most consecrated people. They still have a mind which they can follow which is not the mind of the Spirit. The mind of the Spirit is acting in another way from their mind. They would go this way for the Lord. Oh, so devoted to the Lord, it is all in the Lord’s interests; they would go that way, but the Spirit is taking another course. Upon what does the whole issue rest at such a time? Upon whether the Cross has been planted sufficiently deeply in that life as to take the sovereignty of mind out of its hands, so that the mind of the Spirit can be sovereign. That is a very important thing. Are you quite sure that the sovereignty of mind has been taken out of your hands into the hands of the Holy Spirit, and that it is the sovereign mind of the Holy Spirit that is governing, and that it is not merely the case that you are sure of yourself, quite fixed and final in your own conviction about a thing, and that your own strength of mind and will, your reason, back of it all has fixed you there? You may be a most devoted child of God, and yet it can be like that with you. It is a terrible possibility for the Spirit not to be sovereign in a most devoted child of God, for their own minds still to be sovereign. There is no way through there; that is deadlock, that is a closed door. If we are going to be here in that growing representation of the Lord, we have to be on the same basis as the Lord was on. That is to say, from the first to the last it is the Spirit Who is to be sovereign, and that by the power of the Cross.

The End

Up next; "The Rights of God"