Books by T. Austin-Sparks

[Shammu]

Let me stay with that. Here is the Lord Jesus. No one will dare to say that the self-life in Christ was like our self-life, polluted, corrupted, sinful. Not at all! And yet He had a self-life, a sinless self-life. For Him the self-life simply meant that He could act and speak and think and judge and move out from Himself. That is all. Not with evil intent, not as motivated or influenced by anything sinful or corrupt, but simply independently. He could have done and said a lot of good things independently. But He took the attitude, the position, that, although there was no sin in Him, He could not and would not at any time act or speak apart from His Father. That would be independence, and give the enemy just the opening that he was working for. But we can leave that.

My point is this, that you and I must not think of the self life only as something manifestly corrupt. There is a great deal done for God with the purest motive that is done out from ourselves. There are many thoughts, ideas, judgments, which are sublime, beautiful, but they are ours, and if we did but know the truth, they are altogether different from God's.

And so, right at the very door of His school the Lord puts something utter. It is Jabbok. Jabbok was a tributary of the Jordan, and the implications of Jordan are right there at the very threshold of the School of Christ. He accepted Jordan in order to enter into that school of the Spirit for three and a half years. You and I will not get into that school of the Anointing in any other way. It has to be like that. If you and I are going to learn Christ, it will only be as the Jacob-nature is smitten. I am not talking to you mere doctrine and technique. Believe me, I know exactly what I am talking about.

I know this thing as the greatest reality in my history. I know what it is to have been labouring with all my might for God and preaching the Gospel out from myself for years. Oh, I know; I know what hard labour it is with the dome over your head. How many times have I stood in the pulpit and in my heart have said, If only somehow or other I could get a cleavage through this dome over my head, and instead of preaching what I have gathered from books and put into my notebooks, and having to study it up, I could scrap the whole thing and, with an opened heaven, speak out what God is saying in my heart! That was a longing for years. I sensed there was something like this, but I had not got it until the great crisis of Romans 6 came, and with it the open heaven. It has been different ever since then, altogether different. "Ye shall see the heaven opened"; and all that strain has gone, all that bondage has gone, that limitation; there is no dome there. That is my glory today. Forgive that personal reference. I must say it, because we are not here to give addresses; we are right down on the reality of this matter of the Holy Ghost directly and immediately revealing Christ to us, and that ever-growingly; and this cannot be until we have come to our Jabbok, until the Jacob-life has been dealt with through that crisis, and the Lord is able to say, An Israelite indeed, in whom is no Jacob; thou shalt see heaven opened! There is that dome, that closed heaven over us by nature, but, blessed be God! the Cross rends the heavens, the veil is rent from top to bottom, and Christ is revealed through the rent veil of His flesh. He is no longer seen as the Man Jesus; He is seen in our hearts in all the fullness of God's consummate thought for man. It is a tremendous thing to see the Lord Jesus, and it is a tremendous thing to go on seeing Him more and more. That is where it begins—Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile, no Jacob! Thou shalt see heaven opened!

A NEW PROSPECT FOR A NEW MAN

That word, "thou shalt see heaven opened" is the new prospect for a new man. A new man, a new prospect! In the Authorized Version, a word is added which has been left out in the Revised Version. I take it for the simple reason that it is implicit in the original, without the word necessarily being introduced. In the Authorized it says, "Hereafter ye shall see heaven open". In the Revised Version, that first word is left out, and it simply reads, "Ye shall see . . .". But "ye shall" is something prospective, it is a tense pointing on to a future day. Not 'ye are seeing', but "ye shall see". It is a new prospect for a new man; and therein lies a new era. It is the era of the Holy Spirit, for by the coming of the Holy Spirit, the open heaven is made a reality. The Cross effects the opening of the heavens for us, but it is the Holy Spirit who makes it good in us, just as was the case in that typical or symbolic death and burial and resurrection of the Lord Jesus in Jordan, when the heavens were opened to Him. Coming up on new, resurrection ground, He had the open heaven. The Spirit then alighted and abode upon Him, and the Spirit became, shall we say, the channel of communication, making the open heaven all that it should be as a matter of communication, intercourse, communion. It is the era of the Spirit, making all the values of Christ real in us. "Ye shall"; and, blessed be God, what was prospective for Nathanael is present for us.

That era has come. We are in the era of the Holy Spirit, of the open heaven.

[Shammu]

THE MARK OF A LIFE ANOINTED BY THE HOLY SPIRIT

Now, what is, then, the mark of a life anointed by the Holy Spirit? You remember when Paul went to Ephesus, he found certain disciples and, without giving us any explanation of the reason for his question, he immediately said, "Did ye receive the Holy Spirit when ye believed?" Their reply was, "We did not so much as hear whether the Holy Spirit was". Then Paul's next question is full of significance, taking us back to Jordan. "Into what then were ye baptized?" 'Baptism is bound up with this vital reality. If you do not know the Holy Spirit, what can your baptism have meant?' Oh, we were baptized with John's baptism; Oh, I see: well, "John baptized with the baptism of repentance, saying unto the people, that they should believe on him that should come after him, that is, on Jesus." Then when they heard that, they were baptized into the Name of the Lord Jesus, they were baptized into Christ, and the Holy Spirit came upon them. Thus they came into the School of Christ; and the mark of a life anointed by the Spirit is that you know Christ in this living and ever-growing way.

Oh, listen to this, this is not so elementary and unnecessary as it may seem. Some of us, of course, are very poor scholars, and we take such a long time to learn. It took decades in my case to come to a true realization of this. We know so much, and we discover that our real personal knowledge of Christ is a poor thing. We are constantly brought up against that. At last, sooner or later, you and I are going to come to the place where we exclaim, 'Oh, it is not doctrines and truths and themes and subjects and Scripture as mere matter that I need to know!' It is all very wonderful when you are taken up with it; but let a man come into the fires, into deep trial, into trouble and perplexity and then what about all your doctrines and all your themes, and all your Bible study? What is the value of it? It does not really solve your problem, it does not get you through. This is a tragedy. It is true of many of us who have got certain doctrines, who have gone through the doctrines of the Bible and worked them out, and who know what is in the Bible on these things; regeneration, redemption, atonement, righteousness by faith, sanctification, and so on; it is true that after we have gone through them all, and have got them all well worked out, and we come into a terrible spiritual experience, the whole thing counts for nothing, and we come to the place where, but for the Lord, we could easily throw the whole thing over and say, This Christianity does not work! Yes, for those who have known the Lord for years, so far as the accumulation of truth is concerned, that is about the value of it in an hour of the deepest spiritual distress. The only thing then that can help you is not your beautiful notebooks full of doctrines, but, What do I know of the Lord personally and livingly in my own heart? What has the Holy Spirit revealed in me and to me, and made a part of me, of Christ? Sooner or later, that is where we are coming to. We are going to be brought back to the living, spiritual knowledge of the Lord; for He alone personally, as revealed in our very being by the Holy Ghost, can save us in the deepest hour. The day will come when we will be stripped of everything but what is spiritually, inwardly known of Christ; stripped of all our mental and intellectual knowledge. Many of those who have been giants in teaching and in doctrine have had a very, very dark hour at the end of their lives, a very dark hour indeed. How they have got through has depended upon the inward knowledge of the Lord as over against mere intellectual knowledge. How can I explain what I mean by that?

Well, for example, you discover something in the realm of food that really does help you. You have gone all round trying everything, all that the food people can provide to help you in a specific malady or weakness, and nothing has helped you. Then suddenly you discover something that really does help you, and the next time you are put to the test you take some of that and find you can go through on that. It is in you, something that gets you through your ordeal. That is what I mean, with reference to this question of how and what Christ is to be to us. He is to be in us, that upon which we can rest back in confidence and assurance, and, doing so, He gets us through. We are to know Him in that way. That is the only way in which to learn Christ, and that is experimental. "Ye shall see the heaven opened." The Holy Spirit has come to make for us an altogether new order of things, so that Christ is being revealed in us as our very life. Ye shall see when the Spirit comes: that is the mark of an anointed life. Ye shall see! And those are great moments when we do see. Some of us have had those great moments in specific connections, and some of us have seen others have their great moments in specific connections. Yet we have known that they knew all about the thing, and have been taught it, and have had it drummed into them for years; and then after years suddenly it has broken upon them, and they have said, Look here, I am now beginning to see what has been said all this time!

I remember a man brought up in a most saintly family, whose father I always used to liken to Charles G. Finney. He was like Charles G. Finney in spirit, soul and body; and one of his sons brought up in that most godly home was a great friend of mine for years. We had real fellowship together, always talking about the things of the Lord. One day —I can see it now right at the corner of Newington Green—I was going to meet him, and as I came toward Newington Green I saw him in the distance. I saw him smile, and we met and shook hands. He was one big smile. Do you know, I have made a discovery, he said. I said, What is your discovery? I have discovered that Christ is in me! "Christ in you, the hope of glory", has become a reality to me. Well, I said, I could have told you that years ago. Ah, that is the difference, he said: I see it now, I know it now.

You see what I mean. It is just that. Oh, that the world were full of Christians like that! Is this not the need? But inasmuch as this was said to Nathanael, it must be for us all. It was not said to Peter, James and John up on the Mount of Transfiguration: it was said to Nathanael, one of the general circle. It is for all; and if that wants strengthening, proving, notice what the Lord Jesus said—"Ye shall see the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man." What has happened? A tremendous transition has taken place in the course of a few sentences. Behold, an Israelite indeed! That is for Israel; for Jacob, yes, the father of Israel; for sons of Jacob, the earthly Israel. Ah, yes, but that is purely within the limitation of earth, purely within the limitation of a people here amongst the nations, and within the limitation of types. Yes, but now for the tremendous transition. The Lord has cancelled out something Nathanael said. "Thou art King of Israel", said he. King of Israel? That is nothing. Thou shalt see greater things than these. Thou shalt see the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man! That is something vastly greater than Israel. Son of Man! That is racial, that is universal; that is for all men who will come in, not just for Israel. Thou shalt see greater things! Heaven opened—and for whom? Not just for Israel, but for all men in Christ. The Son of Man!

That title, Son of Man, simply represents God's thought concerning man. Oh, the great, great thought and intention of God concerning man. The open heaven is for man when he comes into God's thought in Christ. The open heaven is for man: God revealing Himself to man in the Man. It is for all of us. Let no one think that this open heaven, this anointing, is for a certain few. Oh no, it is for everyone. God's desire, God's thought, is that you and I, the most simple, foolish, weak amongst men, the most limited naturally, with the least capacity naturally, should find that our very birthright is an open heaven. In other words, you and I may, in Christ, know this wonderful work of the Holy Spirit in an inward revelation of Christ in ever-growing fullness. That is for us, every one of us. May the most advanced Christian have a new movement toward the Lord in this matter, and all of us really come to this first crisis where the dome over us is cleft, and we know an open heaven, the Spirit revealing Christ in our hearts, for His glory.

[Shammu]

Chapter 7 - Learning Under the Anointing

Reading: Matt 11:29; John 1:51; Matt 3:16; John 1:4; Rom 8:2; 2 Cor 3:16-18.

The School of Christ; that is, the School where Christ is the great Lesson and the Spirit the great Teacher; in the School where the teaching is not objective but subjective, where the teaching is not of things but an inward making of Christ a part of us by experience—that is the nature of this School.

THE MEANING OF THE ANOINTING

"Ye shall see the heaven opened." "He saw the heavens opened and the Spirit of God descending upon him." What is the meaning of the anointing of the Holy Spirit. It is nothing less and nothing other than the Holy Spirit taking His place as absolute Lord. The anointing carries with it the absolute lordship of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit as Lord. That means that all other lordships have been deposed and set aside; the lordship of our own lives; the lordship of our own minds, our own wills, our own desires; the lordship of others. The lordship of every interest and every influence is regarded as having given place to the undivided and unreserved lordship of the Holy Spirit, and the anointing can never be known, enjoyed, unless that has taken place. That is why the Lord Jesus went down into Jordan's waters, into death and burial, in type, taking the place of man in representation, from that moment not to be under the government of His own life in any respect as He worked out the will of God, but to be wholly and utterly subject to the Spirit of God in every detail. Jordan's grave set forth the setting aside of every independent lordship, every other lordship, every other influence, and if you will read the spiritual life of Christ in the Gospels you will see that it was to that position that He was every moment adhering. Many and powerful were the influences which were brought to bear upon Him to affect Him and govern His movements. Sometimes it was the full force of Satan's open assault, to the effect that it was necessary that He should do certain things for His cause, or for His very continuance in life physically. Sometimes it was Satan clothing himself with the arguments and suasions of beloved associates, in their seeking to hold Him back from certain courses, or to influence Him to prolong His life by sparing Himself certain sufferings. In various ways influences were brought to bear upon Him from all directions, and many of the counsels were seemingly so wise and good. For example, with regard to His going up to the feast, it was urged, in effect: It is the thing that everybody is doing: if you do not go up you will prejudice your cause. If you really want to further this cause, you must fall into line with the accepted thing religiously, and you only stand to lose if you do not do that; you will curtail your influence, you will narrow your sphere of usefulness! And what an appeal that is if you have something very much at heart, some cause for God at heart, the success of which is of the greatest importance. Such then were the influences that were beating upon Him. But whether it be Satan coming in all the directness of his cunning, his wit, his insinuation, or whether it be through beloved and most intimate disciples and associates, whatever the kind of argument, that Man cannot be caused to deflect a hairsbreadth from His principle. 'I am under the anointing; I am committed to the absolute sovereignty of the Holy Spirit, and I cannot move, whatever it costs. Cost it my life, cost it my influence, cost it my reputation, cost it everything that I hold dear, I cannot move unless I know from the Holy Spirit that that is the Father's mind and not another mind, the Father's will and not another will, that this thing comes from the Father.' Thus He put back everything until He knew in His spirit what the Spirit of God witnessed. He lived up to this law, this principle, of the absolute authority, government, lordship of the anointing, and it was for that that the anointing had come.

That is the meaning of the anointing. Do you ask for the anointing of the Holy Spirit? Why do you ask for the anointing of the Holy Spirit? Is the anointing something that you crave? To what end? That you may be used, may have power, may have influence, may be able to do a lot of wonderful things? The first and pre-eminent thing the anointing means is that we can do nothing but what the anointing teaches and leads to do. The anointing takes everything out of our hands. The anointing takes charge of the reputation. The anointing takes charge of the very purpose of God. The anointing takes complete control of everything and all is from that moment in the hands of the Holy Spirit, and we must remember that if we are going to learn Christ, that learning Christ is by the Holy Spirit's dealing with us, and that means that we have to go exactly the same way as Christ went in principle and in law.

So we find we are not far into the Gospel of John, which is particularly the Gospel of the spiritual School of Christ, before we hear even such as He saying, "The Son can do nothing of himself". "The words that I say unto you I speak not from myself." The works that I do are not Mine; "the Father abiding in me doeth his works".

"The Son can do nothing out from himself." You see, there is the negative side of the anointing; while the positive side can be summed up in one word—the Father only. Perhaps that is a little different idea of the anointing from what we have had. Oh, to be anointed of the Holy Spirit! What wonders will follow; how wonderful that life will be! The first and the abiding thing about the anointing is that we are imprisoned into the lordship of the Spirit of God, so that there can be nothing if He does not do it. Nothing! That is not a pleasant experience, if the natural life is strong and in any way in the ascendant. Therefore Jordan must be there before there can be an anointing. The putting aside of that natural strength and self-life is a necessity, for the anointing does carry with it essentially the absolute lordship of the Spirit.

You notice the issue of that in 2 Cor 3:16. "When it shall turn to the Lord", when the Lord is the object in view, "the veil is taken away, and we all with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord are transformed into the same image . . . even as from the Lord the Spirit", or "the Spirit which is the Lord". You are in the School and you can see Christ and learn Christ; which is being transformed into the image of Christ under the lordship of the Spirit. "When it shall turn to the Lord", when the Lord is our object in view! But with us, with us Christians, with us very devoted, very earnest Christians, what a long time it takes to get the Lord as the sole object. Is that saying a terrible thing? We say we love the Lord; yes, but we do love to have our own way as well, and we do not love to have our way thwarted. Have any of us yet reached that point of spiritual attainment where we never have a bad time at all with the Lord? Oh no, we are still found at the place where we so often think it is in the interests of the Lord that our hearts go out in a certain direction, and the Lord does not let us do it, and we have a bad time; and that has betrayed us absolutely. Our hearts were in it. It was not easy, absolutely easy and simple for us to say, Very well, Lord, I am just as pleased as though you let me do it, I delight always to do Thy will! We are disappointed the Lord does not let us do it; or if the Lord delays it, what a time we go through. Oh, if we could only get at it and do it! The time is finding us out. Is that not true of most of us? Yes, it is true. We do come into this picture, and that just does mean that, after all, the Lord is not as verily our object as we thought He was. We have another object alongside and associated with the Lord; that is, something that we want to be or to do, somewhere we want to go, something we want to have. It is all there, and the Holy Spirit knows all about it. In this School of Christ, where God's objective is Christ, only Christ, utterly Christ, the very anointing means that it has to be Christ as Lord by the Spirit. The anointing takes that position. Well, so much for the moment for the meaning of the anointing. It was true in Him, and it has to be true in us.

[Shammu]

"LORDSHIP" AND "SUBJECTION"

If we are going to graduate in this School, graduate to the glory, the ultimate full glory of Christ, to be the competent instrument in His Kingdom for government, the one way of learning that spiritual, Divine, heavenly government which is His destiny for the saints, is subjection to the Holy Spirit. That is a very interesting word, that word 'subjection', in the New Testament. I think it has been rather mishandled and given a wrong and unpleasant meaning. The idea of subjection is usually that of being crushed down underneath, being put under all the time, suppression. "Wives, be in subjection to your own husbands." That is now interpreted as, You have to get down underneath; and the word does not mean that at all. How shall we seek to convey what the Greek word for subjection or submission really implies? Well, write down the number 1; and then you are going to write subjection or submission. How are you going to write it? Not by putting another 1 underneath. The word means 'putting alongside it or after it'. No. 1 is the primary number, it stands in front of all that comes after, and governs and gives value to all the rest. Subjection means that He in all things has the pre-eminence. We come after and take our value from Him. It is not being crushed down, but deriving everything from Him as the first one: and you never derive the benefits until you know subjection to Christ. That is to say, you come after, you take second place, take that place by which you derive all the benefit; you get the value by taking a certain place. The Church is not subject to Christ in that repressive sense, not down under His heel or His thumb, but just coming after, alongside, He having the pre-eminence, and the Church, His Bride, deriving all the good from His pre-eminence, from His having the first place. The Church second, yes; but who minds a second place if you are going to get all the values of the first by having second place? That is subjection. The Lord's idea for the Church is that she should have everything. But how will she get it? Not by taking the first place, but by coming alongside the Lord and in all things letting Him have the pre-eminence. That is submission, subjection. The lordship of the Spirit is not something hard that strips us, takes everything from us, and keeps us down there all the time so that we dare not move. The lordship of the Spirit is to bring us into all the fullness of that headship. But we do have to learn what that lordship is before we can come into that fullness. It is of His fullness we receive.

The trouble ever was, from Adam's day till ours, that it is not someone else's fullness that man wants, it is his own; to have it in himself and not in another. The Holy Spirit cuts that ground from under our feet and says, It is His fullness, it is in Him. He must have His place of absolute lordship before we can know of His fullness. That is enough I think, for the moment, on the meaning of the anointing. Do you grasp it? The Lord give us grace to accept the meaning of Jordan in order that we may have the open heaven and, by the open heaven, the anointing which brings in all heaven's fullness for us. But it does mean the absolute lordship of the Spirit. Lesson No. 1 in the School—oh, that is not Lesson No. 1, that is the very ground of coming into the School, that is a preliminary examination. We never get into the School until we accept the lordship of the Holy Spirit. That is why so many do not get on very far in the knowledge of the Lord. They have never accepted the implications of the anointing, never really come down into Jordan. Their progress, their learning, is very slow, very poor. Find a person who really knows the meaning of the Cross, of Jordan, in the clearing of the way for the lordship of the Spirit, and you will find quick growth, you will find spiritual development far ahead of all others. It is very true. That is the preliminary, the entrance examination.

[Shammu]

THE FIRST LESSON IN THE SCHOOL OF CHRIST

But when you are in, Lesson No. 1 begins here. It is but a reiteration of what has been strongly said in earlier meditations. The first lesson in the School of Christ which the Holy Spirit takes up to teach us is what we have called the altogether 'other-ness' of Christ from ourselves. This may be not only the first lesson but a continuous lesson throughout life. But this is the one thing with which the Holy Spirit begins, the altogether 'other-ness' of Christ from what we are. Will you take up the Gospel of John with that one thought in mind and read it again, quietly and steadily. How different Christ is from other people, even from His disciples. You can expand from John's Gospel to all the Gospels with that one thought. It will be an education to you if the Holy Spirit is with you as you read. How utterly different He is! That difference is again and again affirmed. "Ye are from beneath; I am from above" (John 8:23). That is a difference, and that difference becomes a clash all the way along; a clash of judgments, a clash of mentalities, a clash of minds, a clash of ideas, a clash of values; a clash in everything between Him and others, even with His disciples who are with Him in the School. His nature is different. He has a heavenly nature, a Divine nature. No one else has that. He has a heavenly mind, a heavenly mentality. They have an earthly mentality, and the two cannot meet, at any point. When the last word has been said, there is a big, big gap between the two. He is so utterly other.

Now, you say, that being so, we are at a very great disadvantage. He is one thing and we are another. But that is just the nature and meaning of this School. How is that problem going to be resolved? Well, it is just resolved like this, that He is all the time speaking about a time when He will be in them and they will be in Him, and when that time comes, in the innermost and deepest reality of their being, they will be altogether other than what they are in every other part of their being. That is to say, there will be in them that which is Christ, that which is Christ in all that He is as the absolutely Other. Sometimes they will think that the best thing to do is this, but that altogether Other inside will not let them do it. Sometimes they will think that the wise thing is not to do this, and that altogether Other inside keeps saying, in effect, Get on with it! The outer man says, It is madness! I am only courting disaster! The inner Man says, You are to do it! These two cannot be reconciled. He is within and He is altogether other, and our education is to learn to follow Him, to go His way. "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself . . . and follow me." Deny himself: your arguments, your judgments, your common sense sometimes. Follow Me!—and Christ is vindicated every time. Men have done the maddest things from this world's standpoint and have been vindicated. This is no suggestion that you should go and begin to do mad things. I am talking about the authority of Christ within, the difference of Christ from ourselves, and this is the first lesson the Holy Spirit would teach anyone coming into the School of Christ, that there is this great difference, this great cleavage, that He is one thing and we are quite another; and we can never be sure that we are on the right line save as we submit everything to Him.

This is why prayer has to have such a large place in the life of a child of God, and this is why prayer had such a large place in His life when He was here. The prayer life of the Lord Jesus is, in a certain realm and sense, the biggest problem that you can face. He is Christ, He is the Son of God, He is under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and He is without sin in His person, and yet, and yet, He must spend all the night in prayer after a heavy and long day's work. Again and again you come upon Him in prayer. Why must He pray? Because there are other influences at work, there are other things which are seeking to call for consideration and response and obedience, and He must keep all the time in line with the anointing, in harmony with the Spirit under whose government He has placed Himself, because He can decide nothing out from Himself. If He must do that, what of us? We are not even on His sinless level. We have all that in our very natures which works violently against God, God's mind, God's will. How much the more necessary then is it for us to have a prayer life, by which the Spirit is given an opportunity of keeping us straight, keeping us on the line of Divine purpose, keeping us in the ways of the Lord, and in the times of the Lord.

Beloved, if there is one thing that a child of God will learn under the Holy Spirit's lordship, it is this thing, namely, how different He is from us, how different we are from Him, how altogether other. But, blessed be God, now in this dispensation, if we are truly children of God, the altogether Other is not merely objective but within. That is the second phase of this matter of the 'other-ness'. The first phase is the fact of the difference. Will you accept this? Will you now, at this very point, this moment, just settle this? The Lord Jesus is altogether other than I am: even when I think I am most perfectly right, He may still be altogether other, and I can never, never rely upon my own sense of rightness until I have submitted my rightness to Him! That is very utter, but it is very necessary. Many of us have learned these lessons. We are not talking out of a book, we are talking out of our own experience. We have been quite sure at times that we were right and we have gone forward to follow out our rightness in that judgment, and we have come to grief, and we have got into an awful fog of perplexity and bewilderment. We were quite sure we were right, but look where we have been landed! And when we come to think about it, and put it before the Lord, we have to ask ourselves, how much did I wait on the Lord and wait for the Lord about that thing. Were we not a bit precipitate with our own sense of rightness? And that is David and the ark all over again. David's motive was all right and David's sense of God's purpose was all right. That God wanted the ark in Jerusalem was right enough, but David got the thing into his soul as an idea, and it worked itself up as a great enthusiasm within him, and so he made the cart. The motive, the good motive, the good idea, the devout spirit, got him into most awful trouble. The Lord smote Uzzah, and he died before the Lord, and the ark went into the house of Obededom, and tarried there, all because man had a good and right idea, but had not waited on the Lord. You know the sequel. Later on, David said to the heads of the Levites, "Sanctify yourselves, both ye and your brethren, that ye may bring up the ark of the Lord, the God of Israel, unto the place that I have prepared for it. For because ye bare it not at the first, the Lord our God made a breach upon us, for that we sought him not according to the ordinance." The instruction was there all the time, but he had not waited on the Lord. If David had brought his devout enthusiasm quietly before the Lord, He would have directed him to the instruction He had given to Moses, and said, in effect, 'Yes, all right, but, remember, this is how it is to be carried.' There would have been no death, no delay, things would have gone right through.

Yes, we may get a very good idea for the Lord, but we have to submit it to the Lord, to be quite sure it is not our idea for the Lord, but the Lord's mind being born in us. It is very important to learn Christ; He is so other.

You see, this divides Christians very largely into two classes. Christians can be, in the main, divided into these two classes. There is that very large class of Christians whose Christianity is objective, is outward. It is a matter of having adopted a Christian life, that now they do a lot of things which they once would not do. They go to meetings, they go to church, they read the Bible, lots of things that they used not to do; and they now do not do quite a lot of things they once did. That is what holds good more or less in that class. It is now a matter of not doing and doing, not going and going, being a good Christian outwardly. That is a big class with its various degrees of light and shade, a very big class of Christians indeed.

There are others who are in this School of Christ, for whom the Christian life is an inward thing of walking with the Lord and knowing the Lord in the heart, in greater or lesser degree. That is the nature of it, a real inward walk with a living Lord in their own heart. There is a great deal of difference between those two classes.

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THE SPIRIT'S LAW OR INSTRUMENT OF INSTRUCTION

Well now, I must come to a close. The altogether 'other-ness'; by what means does the Spirit make that 'other-ness' known to us?—for the Spirit does not speak to us in audible language and words. We do not hear an outside voice saying, This is the way, walk ye in it! Then how are we to know? Well, it is in what the Apostle Paul calls "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus". "In him was life; and the life was the light." How are we to know, by what means are we to be enlightened on this matter, on the difference between our ways, our thoughts, our feelings, and the Lord's? How are we to have light? The life was the light. "He that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life" (John 8:12). "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death." Then the Spirit's instrument, if I may call it that, of our education is life in Christ. That is to say, we know the mind of the Spirit on matters by quickening, by sensing, discerning life, Divine life, the Spirit of life. Or, on the other hand, if we are alive to the Lord, we know when the Spirit is not in agreement with anything by a sense of death, death in that direction.

That is the thing that no one can teach us by words, by giving us a lesson. But it is a thing we can know. You know it by reactions, violent reactions often. You have taken a course, and you get a bad reaction. You strive in a certain direction to realize a certain thing, and if only you would stop for a moment and look at it, you know that you are trying to bring that about. You know quite well that this thing is not spontaneous, that this lacks the spontaneity which is a mark of the Lord. You know the Lord is not coming through there. You know quite well that you have no sense of spontaneity and peace. It has to be forced, to be driven, to be made to happen. More or less, I think, every one of you who is a true child of God knows what I am talking about. But remember, this is the Spirit's instrument in the School for teaching Christ—life. The mark of a Spirit governed, Spirit-anointed, man or woman is that they move in life, and that they minister life, and that what comes from them means life, and they know by that very law of life where the Lord is, what the Lord is in, what the Lord is after, what the Lord wants. That is how they know. No voice is heard, no objective vision is seen, but deep in the spirit life arbitrates, the Spirit of life.

How necessary it is for us to be alive unto God in Christ Jesus. How necessary it is for us to be all the time laying hold on life. If Satan can only bring his spirits of death to bear upon us and bring our spirit under the wrappings of death, he will cut off the light at once and leave us floundering; we do not know where we are, what to do. He is always seeking to do that, and ours is a continuous battle for life. Everything for the realization of God's purpose is bound up with this "life". This "life" is potentially the sum of all Divine purpose. Just as in the seed there is the life, not only of the seed, but of a great tree, and that life, if but released, will eventuate in that great tree, so in the life given to us in our spiritual infancy, our new birth, there is all the power of God's full and final and consummate thought, and Satan is out, not just to cut off our life, but to prevent God's final interests and concerns in the full display which is in that life which is given to us, that eternal life given to us now. The Spirit is always concerned with that life, and He would say to us, Guard that life: do not allow anything to come to interfere with that life: see that whenever there is something that grieves the Spirit and arrests the operation of that life, you immediately resort to the precious Blood which stands as a witness against all the death, that precious Blood of Jesus, the incorruptible life, the witness in heaven to victory over sin and death, by which you can be delivered from that arresting hand of Satan. That precious Blood is the ground upon which we must stand to deal with everything that grieves the Spirit and checks the operation of life, by which we come to know, and know in this living way, Christ in ever-growing fullness. The Lord help us.

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Chapter 8 - The Governing Law of Divine Love

Reading: John 1:4; 2:3; 3:3; 4:13-14; 5:5-9; 6:33-35; 9:1-7; 11:1-6, 17,21,23,25-26.

A ZERO POINT

ALL these passages which we have read are really a sequence. They are the outflow of the first. "In him was life; and the life was the light of men." And you will notice that they all represent a zero point. The mother of Jesus said unto Him, They have no wine: there is nothing to draw upon! The next chapter is only another way of saying the same thing. Nicodemus came to Jesus and sought to commence at a point which he considered to be a good point from which to begin negotiations with the Lord Jesus, but it was a point far in advance of that which the Lord Jesus could accept: so He took him right back to zero, and said: Ye must be born again. We cannot start at any point beyond that. If you and I are going to come into any kind of living relationship, we must get right back there: we must come to zero and start from zero. "Ye must be born again." For except a man be born anew, he cannot see. It is no use our starting at some point where, after all, we are incapacitated from seeing. Chapter 4 is but another way of setting forth the same truth. The woman after all is found to be bankrupt, at zero. Jesus gradually draws her out and the final expression from her side is, in effect, Well, I don't know anything about that, I have not anything of that; I have been coming here every day, day after day, but I know nothing about what you are talking of! She is down to zero: and then He says, That is where we begin. The water that I shall give is not the drawing upon your own resources at all, not bringing something out of your well, it is not something that you can produce and I improve upon and make better. No, it is something which comes solely and only from Myself; it is a new act altogether apart from you; it is the water that I shall give. We begin all over again in this matter.

Then in chapter 5 the Holy Spirit is careful to make perfectly clear that this poor fellow was in a hopeless state, that every effort was abortive, every hope was disappointed. For thirty and eight years, a lifetime, the man had been in that state, and there is the note of despair in the man. The Lord Jesus does not say to him, Look here, you are a poor cripple; I am going to take you in hand, and after a course of treatment I will have you on your feet, I will make those old limbs over anew, I will improve on your condition. Not at all. In an instant, in a moment, it is a start again. The effect of what He does is as though the man were born again. This is not curing the old man, this is making a new man, in principle. This is something that comes in that was not there before, and could not be produced before, the ground of which was not there, something which was uniquely and solely Christ's doing. It was zero, and He began at zero.

Chapter 6—a great multitude. Whence shall we buy bread enough for this multitude? Well, the situation is quite a hopeless one, but by His own act He meets the situation, and then follows on with His great teaching to interpret what He has done in feeding the multitude. He says, I am the Bread which came down from heaven. There is nothing here on this earth that can meet this need; it has to come out of heaven, Bread out of heaven for the life of the world: otherwise the world is dead. We begin at zero. (The loaves and fishes may represent our small measure of Christ which can be increased.)

Chapter 9—the man born blind. Not a man who has lost his sight and is having his sight recovered. That is not the point at all. The glory of God is not found in improving, the glory of God is found in resurrection. That is what is coming out here. The glory of God is not found in our being able to produce something or put something into God's hands, something of ours, that He can take up and make use of. The glory of God is something solely out from God Himself, and we can contribute nothing. The glory of God comes out of zero. The man was born blind. The Lord Jesus gives him sight; he never had sight before.

Then chapter 11 gathers it all up. If you like to sit down and look at Lazarus, you will find that Lazarus is the embodiment of "They have no wine". He is the embodiment of "Ye must be born again". He is the embodiment of "the water that I shall give shall be in him . . ." He is the embodiment of a bankrupt state; in the grave four days; but the Lord is coming to that. Lazarus is the embodiment of chapter 6: "I am the living bread which came down out of heaven . . . for the life of the world". Lazarus is the embodiment of chapter 9, a man who is without sight, who is given sight by the Lord Jesus. Lazarus gathers it all up. But if you notice, in gathering up everything, the Holy Spirit is very careful to stress and emphasize one thing, namely, that the Lord Jesus will not touch the thing until it is far, far removed from any human remedy. He will not come on to the scene, or into association with it, until from all human standpoints it is bankrupt, it is at zero. And this is not a question of lack of interest, lack of sympathy, or lack of love, for here the Spirit again points out that love was there. But love is bound by a law.

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THE GOVERNING LAW—THE GLORY OF GOD

Divine love is bound by a law. Love has a law where God is concerned. God's love is under a law. God's love is under the law of the glory of God, and He can show His love only in so far as showing His love is going to be to His glory. He is governed by that. In all the showings of His love, His object is that He may be glorified, and the glory of God is bound up with resurrection. "Said I not unto thee, that if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?" "Thy brother shall rise again." The glory of God is in resurrection, and therefore love demands that everything shall come to the place where only resurrection will meet the situation; no curing of things, no remedying of the old man.

Oh, let me start right back at the beginning if it is necessary. There are still a lot of people in this world who think that there is something in man that can contribute to the glory of God and that Christianity is only the bringing up out of man of something that is for the glory of God. That is a long-, long-standing fallacy and lie. It is not true. Call it what you like; it goes by various names, such as 'the inner light' or 'the vital spark'. The Word of God all the way through is coming down tremendously on this thing. I start at zero, and zero for me means that I can contribute nothing. Everything has to come from God. The very fact that the gift of God is eternal life means that you have not got it until it is given to you. You are blind until God gives you the faculty of sight. You are dead until God gives you life. You are a hopeless cripple until God does something for you and in you which you can never do. Unless God does this thing, unless this act takes place, well, there you lie. Spiritually, that is how you are. You can contribute nothing. Nicodemus, you have nothing to give, you must be born again; I cannot take you at the point at which you come to Me! Woman of Samaria, you have nothing, and you know it and confess it: that is where I begin! Man of Bethesda, you can do nothing, and you know it: then it all rests with Me! If ever there is to be anything, it rests with Me! Lazarus, what can you do now, and what can anybody make of you? If I do not come right in as out from heaven and do this thing, then there is nothing but corruption!

This is one of the great lessons that you and I have to learn in the School of Christ, that God begins for His glory at zero, and God will take pains through the Holy Spirit to make us to know that it is zero; that is, to bring us consciously to zero, and make us realize it is all with Him. You see, the end is always governing God, and the end is His glory. Take that word through this Gospel again—the glory of God in relation to Christ. We were saying in a previous meditation that God's great end for us in Christ is glory, fullness of glory. Yes, but then there is this—that no flesh should glory before Him. And where does that come? —"He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord" (1 Cor 1:29-31). And what is that connected with?—He "was made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption: that, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord". It is a question of what He is made to be. No flesh is to glory before Him. "My glory will I not give to another" (Isa 42:8; 48:11). Therefore it is all the Lord's matter and He will retain it in His own hands. "And when he had heard . . . he abode two days . . . where he was" (John 11:6). In love, governed by love, that the glory of God might be revealed, He kept away.

Have we got settled on this? We take so long to learn these basic elementary lessons. We do still cling to some sort of idea that we can produce something, and all our miserable days are simply the result of still hoping that we can in some way provide the Lord with something. Not being able to find it, but breaking down all the time, we get miserable, perfectly miserable. It takes us so long to come to the place where we do fully and finally settle this matter, that if we lived as long as ever man lived on this earth, we shall not be able to contribute one iota which can be acceptable to God, and which He can take and use for our salvation, for our sanctification, for our glorification, not a bit. All that He can use is His Son, and the measure of our ultimate glory will be the measure of Christ in us, just that. There will be differences in glory, as one thing differs from another. One glory of the sun, another of the moon, another of the stars. There will be differences in degree of glory, and the difference in degree of glory ultimately will be according to the measure of Christ that each one of us severally has. That in turn depends upon how much you and I by faith are really making Christ the basis of our life, the very basis of our living, of our being, how much the principle of these familiar words has its application in our case, 'Not what I am, but what Thou art'. Christ is all the glory, 'the Lamb is all the glory in Immanuel's land'.

Beloved friends, whatever you go away with, go away with this, that from God's standpoint, the glory of life depends entirely upon our faith apprehension, appropriation and appreciation of Christ, and there is no glory at all for us now or in the time to come but on that ground and on that line. I know how simple that is, how elementary, but oh, it is such a governing thing. Glory—that the Lord shall be glorified in us. What greater thing could happen than that the Lord should be glorified in us? The glory of God is bound up with the resurrection, and resurrection is God's unique and sole prerogative. So that if God is to be glorified in us, you and I have to live on Him as the resurrection and the life from day to day, and know Him as that as we go through life.

The End

Up next; The Significance of Christ

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The Significance of Christ
by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 1 - In Relation to the Race as it is

"And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever - therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man" (Genesis 3:22-24).

"And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46).

"And there shall be no curse any more: and the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be therein: and his servants shall serve him; and they shall see his face" (Revelation 22:3-4).

THE FACE OF GOD

So, with the book of Genesis and the book of the Revelation, we have the whole bound of human history. And as we read through the Scriptures this whole story of man's creation, calling and destiny, we seem to see that one matter governs the whole long record of human life, and this one matter is that of THE FACE OF GOD. The expulsion from the garden was expulsion from the face of the Lord. From that time the face of God was never again seen by man, except in tokens - such as His mercy, His goodness - and even then only on certain conditions; but His face in reality man did not and could not see.

And throughout this Book, we find that man's greatest blessing, highest good and deepest longing always related to the face of God. How often from the heart of man the cry is heard - "Lift thou up the light of thy countenance" (Ps. 4:6); "Make thy face to shine on thy servant" (Ps. 31:16); 'to walk in the light of his countenance' (Ps. 89:15). The deepest longing in the heart of man is ever for what that means, and his highest good is always seen to be connected with the face of God; while, on the other hand, man's deepest misery and desolation is always when God's face is turned away - when he senses that that countenance is not toward him. To be spiritually alive and sensitive, and to feel that there is a cloud over the face of the Lord, is the most miserable experience of which we are capable, the greatest desolation of heart.

THE ISSUE CENTRED IN THE CROSS OF CHRIST

Now, that great, shall I say, eternal issue of the face of God was brought to a focus in the Cross of Christ. It is, I think it can be said quite safely, the very heart of the Calvary story. At the beginning God drove the man out. The end of the Bible is "they shall see his face". But midway, not in the Bible as a book, but in this human history, the Cross gathers up that great matter of the face of God. On one side, that face is turned away - the man is in desolation. On the other side, that face is turned toward - there is a new hope, new joy, new prospect, all things are new: because once more the light of His countenance is, in the full sense, lifted upon believers. Genesis and Revelation meet at Calvary.

THE WILDERNESS OF THE TURNED-AWAY FACE OF GOD

A wilderness is always a type of desolation and death through the curse. The wilderness came when the Garden was lost. It was the very fruit of the curse. In other words, it was THE outcome of God's face being turned away, and from that time we find the wilderness again and again coming up in the picture of human life. Israel in the wilderness spoke of the curse, desolation and death. In that wilderness, if Heaven had not intervened, they certainly would have perished - and they knew it, too. There was nothing there to assure of life. It was only because there was a Testimony in their midst that they could possibly live in the wilderness; and when their hearts were rightly adjusted to that Testimony, they lived above the wilderness. In the midst of death they were in life: in the midst of desolation they were in plenty: in the midst of the curse they were in blessing. And that Testimony was the Testimony of Jesus.

When, later, they went into the far captivity and knew the desolation again for seventy years, and at last the seventy years' accomplishment came into view, the prophet cried with his gospel of hope - "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished" (Isa. 40:1). The issue of that is that "the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose" (Isa. 35:1). "In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert" (Isa. 35:6).

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THE LORD JESUS IN THE WILDERNESS

But you know quite well that, set there for the real fulfilment - not for the symbolic or partial fulfilment, but for the real fulfilment - Isaiah 53 has its place. "He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed." The Lord Jesus went for forty days into the wilderness - the place of desolation, the place of death, the place of the curse; that wilderness being the place of Satan's power, because he made it. Every wilderness belongs to the Devil. It is in the wilderness that you will always meet the Devil. In that place of Satan's power, that One would not have survived, had He not been a Heavenly Man with no relationship whatever to the wilderness; had He not just before gone to Jordan, and in figure died, and, rising, overcome death.

But it says that He was led "of the Spirit" into the wilderness (Matt. 4:1). When He rose from the waters, when in figure He was risen from the dead triumphant, the Spirit came upon Him. By that Spirit He went into the wilderness, and there, in virtue of a victory already secured, He overcame.

The wilderness is always a symbol of the desolation of death because of the curse. Look back to Israel's life in the wilderness. You remember one of the most poignant of all the figures of the tabernacle ritual - that of the scapegoat. You never read that little account, I am sure, without feeling deeply and desperately sorry for that goat, with all the curse transferred by identifying hands to its head, and then led by a priest to the outer bounds of the camp and beyond, away, till the last sign of human life is out of sight, and then, driven from that last man, alone in the wilderness to die, forsaken of God, desolate, bearing sin.

Well, that is the Cross. That is the meaning, but only a shadow of the meaning, of the words we read in Matthew 27 - "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" 'Why hast Thou turned Thy face away from Me? Why am I in this awful desolation, beside which every other kind of desolation is nothing - the desolation of losing God? Why?' Well, thank God, there is probably no one reading these lines who could not answer that question. But it is not my object at this moment to try to answer it. I am just pointing to two sides of this great matter - the lost face of God and the regained face of God.

So the heavens were closed against that man; so that face was lost as for eternity; so the deep and awful desolation settled down upon his soul; and for ever that orphan soul, that desolated soul, is crying, 'Where can I find Him? Where can I find HIM?' "Oh that I knew where I might find him... Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: on the left hand, when he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him" (Job 23:3, 8-9). And yet there has never been one who has known that desolation, and that sense of forsakenness, in any measure commensurate with what the Lord Jesus knew, in the hour, in the moment, of that cry. That desolation has broken many a soul. Ah, but never in the way in which it broke His heart.

He had sensed what was coming. There have been many arguments about His cup and His exceeding sorrowfulness and His cry - "If it be possible, let this cup pass away from me" (Matt. 26:39). I think the only answer is here: that He sensed what was coming. It was certainly not His physical death and sufferings. He was going, of necessity, to be forsaken of the Father with whom, through those thirty-three years, He had had unbroken fellowship. Favours were shown to Him in His birth; He grew in that favour as a lad; He came out into public life, and the open heavens declared "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matt. 3:17). In the secret of His own heart He was in the favour of the Father. He dwelt in the bosom of the Father every day. And now that was to be withdrawn; He was to know the loss of that. Surely there is nothing to approach it!

We are speaking of facts, and if we were to speak of any experience of our own, it would be almost approaching sacrilege. And yet some of you may have known what it is to have a very blessed time with the Lord - when the Lord has seemed so real, and everything was betokening the Lord's nearness and the Lord's favour - and then it has gone, completely gone: all the tokens seem to have been withdrawn and the Lord seems to have gone out of your world entirely. You will say that there is nothing more miserable than an experience like that. But how small compared with this! How infinitely terrible that He, who had from eternity been in the bosom of the Father, should lose that - not as an act in a play, not as something staged, but as a reality, a terrible soul reality. He was taking the place of all who had lost the face of God, in order to get it back again for them - for you, for me. 5trv

THE LORD JESUS AND THE OPEN HEAVEN OF GOD'S FACE

And you can look at the other side, the open heaven, the face of God. He had it in His birth - all heaven was open. He had it in His childhood. How manifest it was we do not know, but we do know that at the age of twelve He could speak of God as "My Father" (Luke 2:49). This was surely expressive of a lad's life with God in very intimate and affectionate terms. At His baptism, the heavens were opened to Him and a voice was heard saying, "Thou art my beloved Son". To Nathanael He said, "Thou shalt see greater things... Ye shall see the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man" (John 1:50-51). His transfiguration again saw those same heavens opened, that same voice attesting Him as the beloved Son. And after the desolation of the Cross, at His 'receiving up in glory' (1 Tim. 3:16) - I like that better than the word 'ascension'; His 'receiving up', that was how they liked to put it then - the heavens were opened for the great reception. There is no question here; no having to stand at the gates and meet the Apostle Peter to get a passport! No, He was "received up in glory"; the heavens opened. And at Pentecost the heavens were opened, and "he hath poured forth this" (Acts 1:33); and through the heavens which He Himself had opened by His merit, by His Cross, He attested for all who would believe, that God's face was back again in their direction. How could you better express those days of Pentecost and following than in the words that the light of God's countenance was upon them? What joyous days they were, what precious days! - and it was simply because they were in the light of God's countenance.

But there is a still more intimate witness. "Did ye receive the Holy Spirit when ye believed?" (Acts 29:2). The Holy Spirit is given, not only to the Church as a whole, but to every member of that Church to dwell within. And what is the Holy Spirit dwelling in the believer? It is only, in other words, that the Lord is for us and with us again, His face is in our direction. The old invocation which has become a benediction was - "The Lord make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace" (Num. 6:25-26). Is that not just it, that when we come into the good of the work of the Cross and of Pentecost, that is, the coming of the Holy Spirit, that is the light of His countenance, and it is peace? When His face is not toward us there is no peace. The indwelling Spirit is just another way of saying that the face of the Lord is toward them that fear Him, and the great glorious consummation of that is in the words in Revelation: "His servants shall serve him, and they shall see his face" (Rev. 22:3,4) - as though that were the crowning blessing of all, the inclusive blessing of all, in the last chapter of the Bible. "They shall see his face": this is the one thing that has been the great issue through all the ages - the face of God in its towardness being man's greatest blessing, in its loss man's greatest desolation. You are not surprised therefore to read in the same utterance - "there shall be no curse any more". "No more curse... they shall see his face."

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IN CHRIST AN OPEN HEAVEN FOR US

Well, all that is, I know, very simple, but we shall not do ourselves any harm by contemplating what He won for us in that wilderness, how great a thing it was that resulted from that cry. The answer given to that cry - "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" - is our supreme and all-inclusive blessing: it is that we may never know any more forsaking of God. Oh, put your feet down upon that. It is not as simple as it sounds. No more forsaking of God! Have you, a believer, a believer perhaps for many years, in full devotion to the Lord - have you never been tempted to believe that God had forsaken you, God had left you, had given you up, washed His hands of you, parted company with you, withdrawn? If you have never had that temptation, I am not going to say that you ought to, but I will say that I do not think you will get through your course in a really spiritual life without having it, and more than once. As in Adam's case, so with every son of Adam and every child of God, with every member of this human race, the Devil's greatest work is to get between us and God. Once he has done that, if he can establish himself there between us and God, it is an end of all things, it is hopeless. But in the case of a believer he cannot now do that in actuality. He can only do it in effect, by the attitude that a believer takes toward this great thing that happened on the Cross, by the answer that the believer will give in his or her own heart to Christ's question, "Why hast thou forsaken me?" If you really will give the answer, 'In order that I might never be forsaken' - if you give that answer and stay there, you have entered into the value of what the Lord Jesus accomplished in destroying the works of the Devil, especially his supreme work of getting between you and God.

Calvary is always an open door, an open way, to God's face. You know that it was ever by Jordan that the place of God's face was reached - always by Jordan. Of the promised land the Lord said, "The eyes of the Lord thy God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year even unto the end of the year" (Deut. 11:12); His face would be toward it, and so it was described as the land of unspeakable blessing. Israel never arrived there except by the Jordan. When they came back from the captivity to the land again, where God's face was, they had to go across the Jordan again or through the Jordan. When the Lord Jesus went to the Jordan, He passed that way in order to come to the place where the heavens were opened, where the face of God was seen; always by Jordan to the place of God's face - in other words, always by the Cross. It is by the Cross that we come into the light of His countenance.

THE VICTORY OF FAITH

But the point here is that faith is the victory (1 John 5:4). It is faith in one thing. If you pin your faith to this one thing, all other things will come into line, all the other problems will be overcome: if you really will pin your faith to this - that the Lord Jesus, in that terrible moment, lost the face of God in order to secure it for us forever, so that we might never be out of the light of that countenance. He has brought that face back to us - and what blessing there is in that! I am not saying that we may never experience some shadow over His face because of our folly, because of our grieving Him. We have to admit sometimes that there is a shadow between us and the Lord. Ah, but never need it be total eclipse, and never His forsaking. He is behind that shadow, and a thousand times we who have known such shadows, because of either our unbelief or some other grieving Him, when we have adjusted, cleared that matter up, got right with the Lord, we have found Him there just where He was. He is behind the shadows; His word abides - "I will in no wise fail thee, neither will I in any wise forsake thee" (Heb. 13:5).

[Shammu]

THE FALL A FALL INTO THE HANDS OF SATAN

Surely Israel has a many-sided testimony, and this is one side. God has written the story of His willingness to be toward man. That story is written very fully in the life of Israel. If ever a people might have been fully and finally forsaken, Israel might have been. I think there is nothing that proves the fall more than Israel - proves the fall not in a general but in a specific way. We say of Adam that the fall took place, Adam fell. How did he fall? Where did he fall? Into what did he fall? He fell into the hands of Satan, to be used as Satan's instrument against God, and his fall developed in Israel. They fell into Satan's hands. "Ye are of your father the devil" (John 8:44), said the Lord Jesus. They fell into Satan's hands to be his instruments against God to crucify His very Son. There is nothing deeper than to be the instrument of Satan to kill God, to put God out of His place. That is why the record of Israel's spirit and attitude is given us so fully in the Gospels, leading up to Israel's crucifying of Christ. Their attitude is all brought out by Christ, and He focuses upon this - that what they did to Him they did to God. And so in the Cross of the Lord Jesus we see a people, a nation, held by Satan, having sold themselves into the hands of Satan to crucify God and put Him out of His place. That is not too strong, to speak of Satan's instrument against God. That is the fall - into the hands of Satan. That opens up the Word of God in many ways, from many angles. It is a terrible thing.

When the Lord Jesus came, there was one who, looking upon that infant, said, prophetically, "to grant unto us that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies..." (Luke 1:74) - and that went far beyond any earthly enemies. Have you really felt the force of what I have just been saying? Have there not been times when, through duress and suffering and oppression, through spiritual trial to the depths, Satan has got so near to your soul or has been so bound up with your soul that it has seemed he would turn you against God, make you bitter toward the Lord, make you the enemy of God, bring up such feelings in you? These things are real. That is what he is trying to do all the time - to get man back into his power, to get the believer into his power, to use him against God. There is no instrument more useful to Satan against God than a Christian. You expect unbelievers, men of the world, to be against God; but see a Christian revolting against the Lord, and that gives Satan just what he is after - one who is supposed to know the Lord, in rebellion against Him. What a battle there is over that! - but what a triumph our Lord has secured to get us right out of that realm, to destroy all the impingement of Satan's insinuations and suggestions. If you do ever know the cloud, the temptation, remember Calvary: remember that the Lord Jesus has established forever the ground upon which God will never forsake you, never leave you, never withdraw His face from you. Believe that. That is the faith which overcomes and it is a mighty overcoming, going right back to the beginning.

DELIVERANCE BY THE CROSS OF CHRIST

"Why hast thou forsaken me?" I am so glad that the story of the Cross does not end there. The cry, the awful cry, is "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?", but the last words from the Cross are not such. "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46). He is back on the ground of perfect fellowship with the Father and absolute trust. The victory is gained, the work is done, the enemy is defeated, the ground is secured. Whatever Satan says, as he does in our deep hours of spiritual experience, about the Lord having given us up, departed from us - all that sort of thing; whatever he says, it is not true. It may be that you do not feel the full weight of that; but if ever you come, as perhaps some of you have come, to a time, such as many of the most faithful and devoted and greatly-used servants of God have known, when the dark forces spread themselves over, gather around in their hordes, and seek to come between you and your Lord and then begin their whisperings - 'The Lord has given you up, handed you over', or something to that effect - when you come to that place, then I trust you will know that this word is no light word, no unimportant word: for the last depths of Calvary were fathomed in the moment when our Lord cried that bitter cry and gained the answer and came out victorious and into rest. "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." That was not for Himself, that was for us - for you, for me. I feel that that is the Good Friday morning message: the depth of Calvary and the eternal value of His having secured for us the face of God. Never, never is it necessary for anyone to know that desolation of God-forsakenness while they put their trust, their faith, upon His taking up this age-long issue as Man for man - the issue of "the light of thy countenance".

So let us rejoice that we have an open heaven secured for us by our blessed Lord. We have but stated the truth, the fact, of this thing. There is much more bound up with it, which the Lord may show us as we go on, as to what kind of man it is who enjoys that opened heaven, but that is with the Lord. Let us thank Him for the fact that we may have the heaven opened to us. He has done it. But to a Nathanael He will say, "Ye shall see the heaven opened". God grant that we may all be in that blessed position.

[Shammu]

Chapter 2 - In Relation to the Race as God Intends it to be

"And the Lord spake again unto Ahaz, saying, Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God; ask it either in the depth, or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord. And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David: Is it a small thing for you to weary men, that ye will weary my God also? Therefore THE LORD HIMSELF SHALL GIVE YOU A SIGN: behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel" (Isaiah 7:10-14).

In our previous meditation upon the significance of Christ, we were gathered around the Cross and heard the bitter, anguished cry wrung from the breaking heart of our Lord Jesus - "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" - and we sought to understand that in that deepest moment of all the ages the Son of Man was dealing with the deepest cry of the human heart, the cry for fellowship with God, the cry for the face of God. All through the ages that has been the one concern of man: to know that the face of God is toward him. With the garden and what transpired there, followed by man's expulsion, the face of God was lost to the race, and so for ever man has been, as it were, in a wilderness, having lost the face of God. The Lord Jesus took up that state of the withdrawn face of God on behalf of the whole race and bore the sin which brought it about, and recovered the face of God for all men who will believe. The face of God toward man is only another way of saying that heaven is opened again, having been closed fast by God himself.

Now we are going to consider the man of the open heaven. There is a man, we have seen, a man corporately, racially, a humanity of the first Adam who cannot have the face of God, cannot know the open heaven. There is the Man who can, and who has, and we are going to look at these men - the man of the closed heaven and the Man of the opened heaven; the man without the face of God and the Man with the face of God.

NATURAL MAN'S QUEST FOR POWER

We have to ask at the outset - from what was the face of God turned away and why? What was it that lay behind and led to Adam's loss of the light of God's countenance and resulted in the desolation of his soul as of a wilderness? The Bible, of course, is full of the answer. There are various ways in which that question can be answered. Doctrinally, we should use certain words. We should say it was because of sin or unrighteousness, but then we are committed to explain what we mean by sin and unrighteousness. I think the answer nearest to the heart of the whole matter is given more fully when we say that the reason for that lost face, that closed heaven, was and is a nature which is opposed to God, a nature which is sinful and unrighteous, a nature whose sinfulness and unrighteousness is found in its desire to usurp the place of God. That is the heart of it - a nature disposed to usurp the place of God, and when you try to gather that up and express it in a word, it amounts to this - THE QUEST FOR POWER.

It is to that that you trace everything in the fall, in what took place in the garden in Adam's case, and we are informed by the Scriptures that that quest for power, that unholy quest for power which is unrighteousness, which is contrary to what is right, had an earlier history in another realm. We are informed of the one who came to Adam having formerly made such a bid for power to usurp the place of God, and that was the essence of the temptation in the garden. Of course it was not explained to be so. Deception wrapped it around. Adam would probably have fled from that temptation had he seen its nature, perceived its essence. Anyone who does not implicitly obey the word of God because it is the word of God, without any explanation of why He has given it, will be deceived, and, being deceived, will be caught in the deepest trap of evil, of unrighteousness.

The essence of the temptation was to make a bid for power, which would put man in an advantageous position over God, make God unnecessary, put God out of His supreme and exclusive place, and bring man in as equal with God, at least. That is it. It was that that lost the open heaven, the face of God. And we find that that is the very heart, the very root, of the human nature which has sprung from that first Adam. That is the battleground. You might not, indeed, admit, when it is put so glaringly and nakedly and luridly, that that represents yourself. How little we know ourselves, and how little we make our deductions or draw our conclusions from all the things that are happening in human life! Why, this is the very stuff of 'psychology' - of what is happening today in the whole nervous system of the race; it is the reason why people are queueing up to see the nerve specialists - I will not use their technical names - people who can tell them what is the matter with them - because this and that and the other symptom brings such a lot of distress into their lives.

A whole list of new terms has been produced in recent years in that particular realm. 'Frustration' - what a word that is! 'Inferiority complex.' You are beginning to recognize the list. Behind many - not all, but many - of the nervous breakdowns, when the matter is looked into and explored, there is all the time something to do with the selfhood: the selfhood cannot have what it wants, do what it wants, be what it wants, get where it wants. In these various and numerous ways it suffers nervous reaction. The word 'frustration' is a very good one. People are bothered and troubled about themselves, and the matter resolves itself into a clash with the power to do and to be - the defeat of the SOUL. How deeply related to the soul, that is, to the self-conscious life of man, is this question of power - power to be, power to do; power to find one's satisfaction and contentment in being something and doing something, and not being a nobody without significance - the whole soul revolts against that. It is a question of power. As I have said, frustration and the inferiority complex are the very stuff of psychology.

You see, this soul of ours must in some way or other be on top. In order to be on top, it must subject everything and everybody to itself. It must go one better and be one better than the others, and there rise all the jealousies, the rivalries, the competitiveness, the possessiveness, the impatience - to be on top, not to be underneath.

[Shammu]

PRIDE LINKED WITH THE LUST FOR POWER

The lust for power and pride are inseparable. You know why pride is an abomination to God, why God 'beholdeth the proud afar off' (Ps. 138:6). It is because behind the pride is this selfhood which took its rise from the spring of Satan in the human race: the desire to have power. We can see quite clearly how true that is in human life individually. It lies behind the whole world today - power and pride working together to have domination, everyone going one better than the other. You have only got to suggest that some nation or people have made a certain discovery, or produced some invention and it will not be long before some other people or nation will say they have gone one better, and so it goes on. That is the thing that constitutes the root and basic sin of this universe - the quest for power. It is the commencement and the consummation of Antichrist.

This is the human nature of the first Adam, and as with its originator, Satan, so it is always insinuating itself into the things of God and invading His very presence. The whole painful story of the Church's disruption, dissension and failure is the story of this selfhood coming into the realm of the things of God - self-assertion, possessiveness, domination, place in the Church, place in the work of God. What a story is bound up with this inherent lust for power, which, if it does not show itself in the more positive forms of self-assertion, will express itself in a feigned meekness, and is manifest in this inferiority complex. You do not know anything about such a thing as an inferiority complex if you do not suffer: and what is it that you are suffering? You are suffering the mortification of being less than you think you ought to be - and that is simply an expression of the lust for power, I am not going to dwell upon the miserable picture. I am only seeking to come to the main point.

God is not going on with that. He decided right back at the beginning, in the garden, that He was not going any further with that, His face was not toward that, it was turned away; never would that kind of humanity or human nature find His face. No, God will not go on with that kind of humanity.

CHRIST'S UNDERCUTTING OF THE NATURAL MAN

There is another kind, another type, with whom God will go on; but this former has got to be completely undercut; and herein is the significance of Christ, where we reach the more helpful phase of this contemplation. Everything about the Lord Jesus relates to this very thing - on the one hand, the undercutting of a human nature, a human order and kind that can never know the face of God, and, on the other side, the bringing in of a humanity that can have that face, that countenance and that open heaven. I repeat - everything about Christ relates to that issue.

THE SIGN OF THE VIRGIN BIRTH

Now I go back to that passage in Isaiah 7:14 - "The Lord himself shall give you a sign: behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel": the sign of the incarnation; and there are several things about that - connected with the incarnation of the Son of God - which simply, beautifully and clearly bear out the issue we are considering.

Firstly, the sign of the virgin birth - "Behold, a virgin shall conceive". Man is ruled out. What is said about those who through faith have the right to become children of God? - "who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John 1:13). 'Not of the will of A man', it is literally: man in his strength, and his initiative, has no place in this new kind of humanity that knows the face of God. It is man on his weak side. You remember in the beginning He called them - man and woman together - He called them both "Man" (Gen. 5:2), meaning that the race had two sides, a strong and a weak. That woman is the weaker vessel is, of course, not universally acknowledged in these days! But therein lies a reversal of all the glorious Divine thought. Only on his weak side has man a place in this; shall we say, only in his weakness and not in his strength, not in his initiative by deciding: "not... of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man". "A virgin shall conceive." That represents weakness, the weak side of the race, humanity on its weak side.

You will not misunderstand my usage of that word weak. It is a glorious word when rightly related. Do not misinterpret, you sisters who read this, and say you have to be weak in the wrong sense. You have got to be strong in weakness as you have to be weak in strength. When the angel appeared to the virgin and announced what was going to happen, and she got through her perplexity and the battle which would very naturally arise in her, and surmounted the natural human factors, her response was, "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word" (Luke 1:38). A virgin, a handmaid - weakness, humility and subjection. It was along that pathway that the new Heavenly Man came and recovered the face of God for man. That is the very beginning of this humanity, the kind of person who will have the face of God, who will inherit the open heaven: weak, humble, not assertive.

You see, right back even before His birth, His very door into this world was the door which undercuts the whole Adam race, in that nature of unrighteousness which, in its own strength, or in having strength in itself, would usurp the place of God. For "Be it unto me according to thy word" speaks of a disposition that is far removed from usurping the place of God. It was the sign of the virgin, that had been promised: "the Lord himself shall give you a sign". What is the significance of Christ? Here is the answer. Right there, before He is born into this world, He has undercut the human strength of the race, man's will, the strength of the flesh - nay, more than that, has undercut the very work of the devil in the race. He was manifested "that he might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John 3:. While it was by His Cross that He did that, the basis of it was the incorruptible life in Him. The Virgin Birth is a deep thing of God in the undercutting of a fallen nature, the work of the devil.

[Shammu]

THE SIGN OF THE UNIMPORTANT TOWN

"But thou, Beth-lehem Ephrathah, which art little to be among the thousands of Judah, out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel" (Mic. 5:2). Little among the thousands of Judah - the thousands of families, that is, of Judah. The sign of that unimportant town. The Lord is sovereignly keeping to principle. Everything connected with the very birth, incarnation, of the Lord Jesus contains the principle. To be ruler He ought to have been born surely in Jerusalem or some important place, but no. By that time Bethlehem Ephrathah had lost its place of importance. Its importance was spiritual, not natural. it was just there that Rachel died when Benjamin, 'the son of Jacob's right hand' was born (Gen. 35:18,19), and it was said that in him Israel was to find its realization. It was spiritual significance. All natural significance has gone now, and there, where there was no significance, the most significant thing happened and the most significant Person was born. It is very simple. It is not making something of nothing. It is following the working out of a principle.

THE SIGN OF THE MANGER

Listen again to this sign in Luke: "And this is the sign unto you: Ye shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger." "This is the sign unto you." What does it signify? What is the significance of the lowly manger? Well, it is obvious, it is plain. Surely such a One as He ought to have had a more imposing, impressive place for birth, for entering the world? But no: He is undercutting all the importance of this world, all the glory of the flesh, of the old race. He is just undercutting it with every step. Many, many have been the homilies and helpful addresses upon Bethlehem's manger, the place of His birth; but oh, let us see right back behind that manger, behind that humble cattle-trough, right back into hell, right back through the whole depth of a fallen and God-abandoned humanity. That is what it touches. It is related to that.

"A SIGN... SPOKEN AGAINST"

And then in that very same chapter - Luke 2, verse 34 - we have this: "And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the falling and rising up of many in Israel; and for a sign which is spoken against." "This child is set... for a sign which is spoken against." As you know, the reproach which was laid upon Him by His nation was that He was not important enough. He disappointed all their expectations and hopes as to what their Messiah would be. Oh, what a crashing of their castles in the air was the actual fulfilment of the prophecy - "Behold, thy king cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass" (Zech. 9:9). A sign spoken against. If only He had been somebody of greater importance, a personality with power in the temporal realm, they would not have spoken against Him as they did. It was all the time - "Is not this the carpenter?" (Mark 6:3). 'Who is this fellow making Himself out to be? He is a nobody! He is taking far too much on Himself. He really cannot rightly lay claim to all this. Look at Him!' A sign spoken against. What was it for? It was to undercut all that the world looks for and must have in its great ones - strength of their own kind, power of their own. "A sign which is spoken against."

THE SIGN OF NAZARETH

And so we can glance through His life and see the same principle always obtaining. His home was in despised Nazareth. "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" (John 1:46). 'Give a dog a bad name, and hang him!' Nazareth had a bad name, and He lived there. Not much of a prospect, coming from Nazareth. His work? - a carpenter of Nazareth! "Is not this the carpenter's son?" (Matt. 13:55).

THE SIGN OF TWO TURTLE-DOVES

Then consider His poverty. In that chapter, Luke 2, we find that they brought Him to the temple, to offer the offering commanded by Moses, and what was it? - the offering of the poorest people in the land. Some could bring a bullock, some could bring a ram, but the poorest, who could not afford anything like that, could bring two turtle doves; and His parents offered two turtle doves. How poor they were! His life throughout was like that.