Books by T. Austin-Sparks

[Shammu]

Chapter 7 - Recovery of Lost Testimony

As we move into the next and succeeding chapters of Isaiah—being now, as I have said, on the positive, the resurrection side, the constructive side of the Cross—we find that one thing comes very much into view: namely, the recovery of God’s testimony in the City and in the nations. That is the key to this section of Isaiah from chapter 54 onward. You will notice that Zion is much in view here. If you run through and circle the words ‘Zion’ and ‘Jerusalem’, you will see that that is the centre, the focal point of the testimony; but again, the nations are very much in view also. This will come out more fully as we proceed.

We come, then, first, to chapter 55, and we notice two things that mark this chapter.

Abundant Grace, and God’s Sure Word

In verses 1–9, we see the freeness and the abundance of grace released to the people of God on this resurrection ground—free and abundant grace. “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price....” How much of the New Testament could be crowded into that!

Then, from verse 10 to verse 13, we have God’s sure word: “My word... shall not return unto Me void”. Nowadays, we usually claim that promise from the Lord when we are going to give a message, that His word shall not return to Him void. Of course, the principle is of general application; we are not wrong at any time in taking hold of that, provided that it really is the word of the Lord that we have to deliver. But I want to point out that that is not the particular meaning of the statement here. You will notice the sequence in verses 11 and 12: “So shall My word be that goeth forth out of My mouth: it shall not return unto Me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. FOR...” (you must not stop there)— “FOR ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills...”, and so on. The immediate meaning of the promise of the sure and effectual word is: This people had been promised by God deliverance; they had been assured that the Lord was going to bring them back from captivity. (Compare Is. 35:10; 48:20; 52:12). He had given His word that they should go out with joy and in peace, in these conditions. That was the word, and that word was not going to fail.

The House of Prayer, and the Need for Meekness

When you come to chapter 56, you find that everything centres in the House of Prayer for all peoples. “Even them will I bring to My holy mountain, and make them joyful in My house of prayer: their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon My altar: for Mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all peoples” (verse 7). This is still related to the recovery of the Lord’s testimony, and it is to be found in His House—‘My house of prayer’.

In chapter 57, we find some further warnings to the Lord’s people against any recurrence of that which had destroyed the testimony before. It seems always necessary for the Lord to say, and to say again: Be careful of the coming back of those old things which wrecked your testimony in the past; the things which (to use Jeremiah’s phrase from the potter’s house) ‘marred’ the vessel of testimony. (See Jer. 18:4.) So He gives here admonition concerning such ever present perils. Then, in verse 15, the ground of the Lord’s presence and committal is mentioned. “For thus saith the high and lofty One That inhabiteth eternity, Whose name is Holy; I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.” These are the conditions of the Lord’s presence, those in which His testimony will be reconstituted.

Chapters 58 and 59 are full of more warnings, more admonitions, more instructions, by way of clearing the skies of the clouds that would obscure the testimony. Notice chapter 58, verse 8: “Then shall thy light break forth as the morning....” It is the shining out of this testimony that is governing everything with the Lord. These warnings and admonitions are given in order to bring about the removal of the clouds that are lingering about the sky and trying to obscure the clear shining.

A Clear Shining Testimony Recovered

We are thus led into chapter 60. All that has gone before has prepared the way, always with this in view: “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” Here, then, we come to this matter of the recovered testimony; the shining light of the Church in the midst of dark conditions, in a very dark world. “For... darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the peoples: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and His glory shall be seen upon thee.” That is the thing that is uppermost in this last section of Isaiah’s prophecies. When the testimony is restored (verse 1), the nations are affected by it: “Lift up, thine eyes round about, and see: they all gather themselves together, they come to thee; thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be carried in the arms. Then thou shalt see and be lightened, and thine heart shall tremble and be enlarged; because the abundance of the sea shall be turned unto thee, the wealth of the nations shall come unto thee” (verses 4–5).

When the testimony is clear, when the shining is undimmed; when God has in His House, in His people, conditions answering to all that the Cross means, then you have this effect all around: the nations are affected, the peoples are touched; something happens, and a wealth, an enrichment, a fulness comes back to the Church itself. If the Lord has things according to His mind: in other words, if He really has His testimony in fulness, undimmed, without cloud, without shadow, in the midst of His people, in the vessel of His House: then the nations feel the effect, the impact, of it, and the Church itself is greatly enriched. “Surely the isles shall wait for Me, and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring thy sons from far, their silver and their gold with them, for the name of the Lord thy God, and for the Holy One of Israel, because He hath glorified thee” (verse 9).

[Shammu]

The New Testament Counterpart

Now this, we know, is Old Testament prophecy. We recognize that the prophet was saying more than he knew—that his utterances contained and combined two interwoven elements. On the one side, as far as Israel was concerned, there was history in the making; but on the other side, all the way through this, there was (as in chapter 53) a pointing on to the Messiah—to the Lord Himself; to the Cross, and to all that was to follow the Cross in resurrection. There was the temporal and the passing, but there was also the spiritual and the eternal, which the Holy Spirit always saw and had in view in history.

Thus, in every connection, as we have seen, we are so to speak ‘handed on’, by these prophecies, to the New Testament. And the New Testament counterpart of what we have been seeing in Isaiah about the recovered testimony is found particularly in one of Paul’s letters, namely, in his Second Letter to the Corinthians.

Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians

The great issue of both the letters to the Corinthians was that of the testimony of the Church in the city of Corinth and in the world. When we read these letters, of course we become very much taken up with all the details: in the First Letter, with the miserable details; the many things that are being dealt with. It is, for the greater part, not a happy or pleasant letter to read: perhaps you have given it up many times before you have got to the end, not understanding very much, and not liking a good deal more. But we need to stand back from it, and ask: What is it all about, after all? Let us not upset ourselves about all the details, for the moment; they all go to make up some one particular issue. What is the issue?

Well, as I have said, the issue of the letters to the Corinthians is the Lord’s testimony in the Church, in the city and in the nations. Let us be clear about that. In the First Letter, there is, as you know, very much said about the world, and how the church in Corinth was failing to overpower the world, because the world had already overpowered it from the inside. The testimony was destroyed from within, and therefore there was no real impact upon the world. The natural, the carnal man had found his way into the church, and the church had therefore lost its testimony. It will always be like that. If anything of the natural man and the carnal man makes inroads, in any locality, into the church, that will be the end of the testimony in that church, and in that locality, and, so far as that company is concerned, in relation to the world. When the natural man comes in the testimony goes out.

Testimony Destroyed by Carnal Elements

In the First Letter, then, the whole question was one not merely of local conditions, but of the local conditions destroying the testimony of the Church in the city. And therefore all those conditions had to be dealt with, had to be exposed, uncovered, and brought to the Cross of Christ. Of course, what we have in 1 Corinthians is Satan’s second great strategy toward paralyzing the Church’s testimony. His first strategy, his first line with the Church, was open persecution, to try to destroy, to obliterate the Church’s testimony in the city of Jerusalem and in the nation. As we know, it failed! But now Satan comes back along a second line of strategy: that is, he insinuates, into the very ranks of the church, men according to his own mind—carnal elements—the natural man, the carnal man. They serve the Devil’s purpose so well; they effect the very thing he is after. When he finds he cannot succeed by open persecution, he comes round, as it were, to the back entrance, and introduces carnal and natural elements in by that door—and that has done it! The testimony goes out; it is destroyed.

But in between these two letters to the Corinthians, something happened. In chapter 7 of the Second Letter we read: “Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, but that ye were made sorry unto repentance; for ye were made sorry after a godly sort, that ye might suffer loss by us in nothing. For godly sorrow worketh repentance unto salvation, a repentance which bringeth no regret” (7:9–10). The Apostle has a good deal to say about what had evidently taken place after his first letter. There was repentance, there was judging of themselves and of the conditions; there was, as he said, ‘a clearing of themselves’ (v. 11). There was a real distress and exercise about their condition, and this had taken place between the two letters. We may say that they had brought the situation to the Cross, and that had changed everything. And now that things had been dealt with on the inside, the whole matter of the testimony to the world, in the city, could be reconsidered, and a counter attack could be made by the church upon the enemy.

So that is what is in this Second Letter—the recovery of the testimony in the locality and out to the world. It all brings out into very clear relief the constituents of effective testimony—or, to use Isaiah’s figure, the shining forth of the light. Let us look at some of the things that Paul says about this.

The Value of Triumphant Love

“For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you with many tears; not that ye should be made sorry, but that ye might know the love which I have more abundantly unto you” (2 Cor. 2:4).

The first thing that we see is the value of triumphant love. That is a constituent of effective testimony, of clear shining. This clearly had its two sides in the Apostle. If ever a man might have found his love exhausted, the Apostle might well have been that man, as far as these Corinthians were concerned; for he did say: “If I love you more abundantly, am I loved the less?” (12:15). Surely that is enough to put any man off—to find that all his outpouring and outgoing and giving in love only means that love is being withdrawn; that less and less love comes back. What a situation he had to meet! yet his love triumphed. But it seems to have had an effect in them too: something of what he had written in his First Letter, chapter 13, seems to have come about. Yes, the triumph of 1 Corinthians 13 can be traced in this Second Letter to some very real degree—the love that “suffereth long, and is kind”, and so on—the quality of triumphant love.

That, we might very well say, is the first and primary factor in effective testimony. The Lord Jesus said that: “By this shall all men know... if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35). This is the testimony; this is how it will be known—if we have love one for another. It matters very much whether the world is affected by what it sees. We cannot close the doors on ourselves, and say: ‘Oh, well, the world in any case is inimical, it is always hostile, it is always unsympathetic; why take any account of it? Let us shut ourselves in and get on with our job.’ You cannot do that; you cannot ignore the world. We are here to affect the world—that is one of the chief reasons why the Lord leaves us here. We are not just to live here, cloistered and closed in, indifferent to the world, coldly detached from it.

Moreover, the world is going to find out, sooner or later, what is happening inside the church—what is happening in your local assembly! Make no mistake about it. The world will know the condition of the church: you cannot close doors and windows on that, and keep it in! All around will know; it will become known. And I repeat—it is a most important thing that the world should be affected, not by what it hears us say, but by what it sees in us. And the only thing it can really see, that will affect it, will be the mutual love which we have one for another. “By this shall all men know... if ye have love one to another.” One of the most effective ways of testimony is—not preaching, but—loving! If that is there it will do far more than our preaching. But it will at least give a great backing to our preaching. All our preaching must be supported by this one thing—a strong triumphant love in the midst of the Lord’s people.

[Shammu]

The Value of Suffering with Christ

The second thing in testimony is the value of suffering with Christ. There is much about this in the Second Letter to the Corinthians. For instance: “The Father of mercies and God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our affliction, that we may be able to comfort them that are in any affliction, through the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. For as the sufferings of Christ abound unto us, even so our comfort also aboundeth through Christ” (2 Cor. 1:3–5).

First of all, suffering with Christ brings a wonderful return in our discovery of the consolations of Christ.

It is a very important thing, in a world like this, that we should have some comfort to give. Both in the Church and outside of the Church, there is a great need of a ministry of comfort. You come back to Isaiah: “Comfort ye, comfort ye My People, saith your God" (Is. 40:1). But you cannot fulfil a ministry of comfort in mere platitudes; by coming into difficult and troubled situations and just saying nice things. If people are in real trouble, in real distress, and you begin to talk to them, the first thing they have a right to say to you is: ‘Well, what do you know about it? Have you ever been in my position, my condition? have you ever had any deep, deep suffering? What do you know about it?’

Perhaps, therefore, it is one of those sovereign, providential ways of God, that He allows His people to know much suffering, so that they may derive this wonderful value of the consolations of Christ, in order that they may have that with which to comfort or encourage others—the tried, the suffering, the sorrowing. And what have we to give? Well, the word is: “that we may be able to comfort... through the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.” And if there is anyone reading these lines, who is having a painful, suffering time, going through a ‘dark patch’, as we say, might I try to transfigure it for you, in this way. Just look at it like this. Say to yourself: ‘This gives me an opportunity to make a discovery of the Lord which will be stock in trade for future service. In my distress and trouble I can find comfort and help from the Lord, which may be of tremendous value to some others in the future.’

Ministry Made Through Experience of Resurrection

For that is how ministry is made. The man or the woman who is ambitious to be ‘in the ministry’—to be speaking and preaching, going about taking meetings and all that sort of thing—but who has not gone through deep places, and found the Lord there, and brought up some treasure from the depths, some ‘pearl of great price’: that one’s ministry is not real; it is artificial, it is merely professional. The true minister of Jesus Christ will be taken down to the depths, to discover there, right down there, and to bring up thence, these pearls, these precious things, for the sake of the Church. Did you notice that phrase in Isaiah—“the abundance of the sea shall be turned unto thee” (Is. 60:5)? Yes, but the sea can be a very deep place, a very dark place, a very terrible place: and yet there are treasures there. That is the way of testimony.

Notice what Paul writes at the beginning of his letter. “For we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning our affliction which befell us in Asia, that we were weighed down exceedingly, beyond our power, insomuch that we despaired even of life: yea, we ourselves have had the answer of death within ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God Who raiseth the dead” (2 Cor. 1:8–9). This is how ministry is made—when you have a real experience of and testimony to the power of His resurrection. When everything seemed hopeless in your own personal situation; when everything seemed hopeless in your company of believers; and the providence of God led you to make a discovery of the power of His resurrection, ‘that you should not trust in yourself but in God Who raises the dead’: this is a constituting of ministry. If you have gone that way, you are a true ‘minister’; you need not take the name; you need not be set apart or anything. If you have a knowledge of the mighty power of His resurrection, you are a minister; you have something which is most greatly needed.

The Value of Brokenness

The third thing in effective testimony is the value of brokenness and weakness.

“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the exceeding greatness of the power may be of God, and not from ourselves; we are pressed on every side, yet not straitened; perplexed, yet not unto despair; pursued, yet not forsaken; smitten down, yet not destroyed; always bearing about in the body the putting to death of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our body. For we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So then death worketh in us, but life in you” (2 Cor. 4:7–12).

We should continue reading down to verse 18. You will notice that this section has as its real message the tremendous value of the quality of brokenness and weakness. That is a vital thing in effective testimony. We, perhaps, do not naturally put much value on brokenness and weakness; but here, very much value is put upon it. “We have this treasure in vessels of fragile clay.” What the Apostle is saying, in effect, is this: ‘We are broken men; we are weak vessels. The one thing about us, more than anything else, is our capacity for being broken—it seems that we have just been made to be broken.’ And then he is saying that there is an infinite value attached to that.

In the First Letter to the Corinthians, the church was not broken. It was hard; it was trying to hold itself intact; it was proud; it was judging; it was cruel; it was unkind; it was anything but broken. But now, as we read this Second Letter, we find there is about the church a softness. It is soft—it is melted—it is broken! You can talk about ‘ministry’ now; you can talk about ‘testimony’ now; you could not do so before. No: until the vessel is broken, nothing can flow out; if anything is to flow out, it will only do so when the vessel is broken. The Apostle is saying that that was how it was with him personally (and of course he is, by inference, passing it on to the church in Corinth). Our weakness, our brokenness, is of the greatest importance and value, for it is only then that the real treasure can be manifested.

Do you talk about ‘the testimony’? have you got a phraseology of ‘testimony’? Do you talk about ‘ministry’? have you got ideas about ‘ministry’? My dear friend, the Holy Spirit would say, both to you and to me, that testimony and ministry are only real when they come from broken men and women. Let us make no mistake about it. I know it is the hard way, but it is the only way. You and I have no right to minister, no right to talk about ‘the testimony’ or about ‘the Church’ or about ‘the vessel’ or any such things, unless we know something of this brokenness, this weakness.

You see how true this is to what we read in Isaiah. The Lord says: “Mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all peoples” (Is. 56:7); but—“Thus saith the high and lofty One That inhabiteth eternity, Whose name is Holy; ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit’ ” (Is. 57:15). You find Him at humbled Corinth, chastened Corinth. There is something new in this second letter—something that was missing from the first. You feel the unction of the Spirit, the beauty of the Lord. Yes: the Lord is here now, because they are broken. That unction of the Lord is only found with men and women who have really had a weakening, a breaking, an emptying, who have lost all “confidence in the flesh”, whose own self strength has all gone. That is the way of the shining; that is the way of recovered testimony.

[Shammu]

Love the Way of Enlargement

There is one more passage to which I would like to refer you.

“Our mouth is open unto you, O Corinthians, our heart is enlarged. Ye are not straitened in us, but ye are straitened in your own affections. Now for a recompense in like kind (I speak as unto my children), be ye also enlarged” (2 Cor. 6:11–13).

What was the cause of the lost, broken down testimony in Corinth? They were too small; they were too little. Paul said that he had to treat them like babes—they were peevish! Children can be like that, can they not? Trifles have far too much importance. Paul says: ‘Be enlarged, be enlarged! Let your hearts be enlarged! Be bigger people—be too big to come down to all these mean things. Have big thoughts, have big feelings—of course without self importance or self inflation; have a large heart—a heart of love!’

What does love do? Love “rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth”. Love “believeth all things”: it takes a large heart to do that, does it not? It is never ready to believe an unfavourable report, but always ready to believe that there may be something that can be set off against it—that there may be another explanation. Love rejoices not when one who has committed a wrong suffers for it—that is paltry. This is where David is such a rebuke to us. Just consider him: what a life Saul gave him during those years! He hunted him, he said, like a flea, like a partridge (1 Sam. 24:14, 26:20); chased and pursued him from rock to rock, from cave to cave, in the wilderness, if only he might get him and destroy him; gave him no peace day or night. He was determined, implacably determined, that David should die. And the day came when, in one of these pursuits, Saul, with his 3,000 chosen men—an army to catch a man!—arrived in a certain place at night, and lay down to sleep. And, unknown to him, David was very near, right on the spot (I don’t think he would have slept if he had known!); and David came with his men, and looked on him; and David’s men said: ‘Now is your chance—the Lord has given him into your hands!’ (1 Sam. 24: 4).

You know, if only we can imagine we have got Divine support for something, that is all we want. We only want someone to say, ‘It is the Lord’s will’, and, if it is something that serves our own interests, something that we would naturally very much like, how we will go for it! It is a very strong temptation, is it not, when it appears to be supported by the Lord?

But here, David—as on another such occasion, when his companion said: ‘God has delivered your enemy into your hands this day; now is your chance! Let me smite him, and I won’t have to smite him twice! One blow, and I will finish the whole thing for you!’ (1 Sam. 26:—David replied: ‘No, no; God forbid that I should touch the Lord’s anointed!’ Ah, that is bigness; that is real greatness. He forbore, to his own hurt. He knew not how many more years of suffering he would have, but he accepted them. He could have ended all that at one blow, but he said: ‘No, I must not touch the Lord’s anointed. I may be in the right, and the Lord’s anointed may be altogether in the wrong: nevertheless, it is not for me to touch him. I leave him with the Lord; I must not lift my hand against him. God forbid that I should touch the Lord’s anointed.’ I repeat: that is bigness, that is spiritual greatness! And so Paul appeals to the Corinthians: “Now for a recompense in like kind... be ye also enlarged.” The Lord make us big people, in this spiritual sense.

The Constituents of Recovered Testimony

Let us now try to summarize the constituents of recovered testimony, whether that testimony be local or to the world.

It must be born, firstly, as we have seen, out of what we know of Divine comfort in suffering.

Secondly, it must be born out of what we have known of resurrection (whether individual, or collective and local), when all has seemed to be hopeless.

Thirdly, it must be born from what we have learned of Divine love through our own failure. I am sure that this was a great factor in Corinth. How deeply they recognized their failure! They went down, right down in the dust, under the sense of what a miserable failure they had been as a local company. And then, smitten with this realization of their own failure, they discovered that there was love pouring to them, through this Apostle, from the heart of God; and that discovery constituted their new testimony.

Fourthly, it must be born from the brokenness and enlargement of heart that comes through the consciousness of weakness. I suppose, if any people ought to have been conscious of their own weakness, it was those people at Corinth. There are, in fact, indications in this Second Letter that they came almost to the point of despair about themselves. I think this realization of their own fallibility and untrustworthiness just overwhelmed them, overflowed them. But through it they came to this enlargement of heart. If you and I are groaning under the consciousness of our own failure, we are not going to be petty and mean toward the failures of other people; we are going to be very much more patient, very much more understanding—altogether larger of heart. We are going to say: ‘Well, I have had to walk very carefully myself, just there. But for the grace of God, there goes myself!’ That is largeness of heart, true brokenness.

Fifthly, and finally, what utterness for the Lord should result from a sense of responsibility for His honour in the locality and in the world. I think that is what arises here. If that is not present, then all the other means nothing. It must have been brought home to the Corinthians that they were letting the Lord down in the locality. Their condition, the situation among them, was just bringing dishonour to Him. And that provoked a sense of responsibility: ‘Oh, we cannot afford to let the Lord down! For the Lord’s sake, for the sake of the Name of the Lord, we must put things right amongst ourselves, whatever it costs.’ There is much in Isaiah’s later chapters about the Name of the Lord in Zion, when recovered. And so, in the church at Corinth, this sense of responsibility for His Name and for His honour, in that vicinity and in that city and in the world, produced a new utterness for the Lord.

We come back to our question: “To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” Well, to those, such as we have seen, who accept the implications of the Cross. This is all the outcome, the outworking of the Cross. This all comes out of Isaiah 53. Recovered testimony of this kind can only be as the result of the Cross. The Cross is the basis of everything in all testimony.

[Shammu]

Chapter 8 - The Cross and the Holy Spirit

Reading: Isaiah 61:1–62:1a.

We come now to yet a further aspect of this so many-sided fruit of the Cross of the Lord Jesus. We remember that the first three verses of this sixty-first chapter of Isaiah, so full, were taken up by our Lord Jesus Himself. After His baptism the heavens were opened, and the Spirit descended and came upon Him: it was the great moment of His anointing as the Servant, Who had just passed, symbolically, by the way of the Cross, as represented by His baptism. Now, anointed, He meets the enemy in the wilderness, and worsts him completely on all points; then, returning from the wilderness in the power of the Spirit, He comes to Nazareth, where He has been brought up.

On the Sabbath day, He enters into the synagogue, and the Scriptures are handed to Him. He opens them at this point in Isaiah’s prophecies, and reads these verses; and, when He has read them, He hands the roll back to the Ruler of the synagogue and sits down. (This, contrary to our custom, was a sign that He had something to say. If we have something to say, we usually stand up; but in the synagogues, if they had something to say, they sat down.) And it says that ‘the eyes of all’ that were assembled ‘were fastened upon Him’—because He had sat down; they saw He had something to say. “And He began to say unto them, Today hath this scripture been fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:14–21).

We thus see that the Lord Jesus was appropriating this part of Isaiah to Himself. All along we have recognized that there is a relationship of these prophecies to the Lord Jesus and to this dispensation, as well as a connection with the history of Israel. And this is what we now come to.

The Anointing of the Head Flows down to the Members

But notice, as we begin, that this anointing, while resting first of all upon ‘the Lord’s Servant’—for that is the title of Christ in Isaiah: “Behold My Servant” (Is. 42:1)—while this anointing of course rests upon Him and relates, fully and supremely, to Him, as the Head, the language of the prophetic narrative immediately afterwards makes an abrupt transition to ‘they’, ‘them’; ‘ye’, ‘you’, ‘your’. After this declaration concerning the anointing of the Servant, it goes on: “And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations” (61:4). The people of God derive the values, come into the good, of this anointing. It is as though the anointing upon Him, as Head, just flowed down and embraced the whole of His membership—the members of Christ.

That is why we read the first fragment of the next chapter: “For Zion’s sake will I not hold My peace....” As I said in the previous chapter, there is so much, in these later prophecies of Isaiah, about Zion—about the good of the anointing being found in Zion, Zion inheriting all these values. And Zion, as we know, is the Old Testament figure of the Church. We were speaking, in that chapter, about Zion’s light: “Arise, shine, for thy light is come” (60:1)—this is the testimony recovered. Here, in chapter 61, we move into Zion’s life and Zion’s liberty.

“To Proclaim Liberty to the Captives”

You notice, first of all, that this is a message to Zion, to the Church. All this has to have its fulfilment, its realization, in the Lord’s people. Israel, at this time, were in exile in Babylon, in a state of bondage and spiritual death, and the prophecies have to do with their deliverance, their liberation from that bondage, from that death, the bringing of this people out into life and into liberty. Now I have said that Jesus took to Himself this Scripture about the anointing of the Lord being upon Him, “to proclaim liberty to the captives”, and so on. But you remember that the earthly Zion, the earthly Jerusalem—in other words, the Jewish people—never did come into the reality of this liberation. They missed all these values. That Zion did not inherit the values of His anointing. But the Church has inherited it all. This has become the inheritance of the spiritual Israel, the spiritual people of God. Judaism—‘Israel after the flesh’ —was the supreme antagonist of the anointing. By their weapon of legalism, they slew Him. It must be a people who answer to all this that is said about the anointing, who come into these further values of the second part of this chapter.

That is, it must be a people who can appreciate the Good Tidings, because they are meek: that was not true of Israel after the flesh. It must be a people of a broken heart, and that was not true of Israel after the flesh. It must be a people conscious that they really are captives, and that was not true of the Jews in our Lord’s day. They thought, they believed, that of all people on the earth they were the freest, the ones who knew least about bondage: that was one of the points of controversy with them and the Lord Jesus (John 8:33). It must be a people who feel that their state is one of imprisonment, if they are to enjoy the “opening of the prison to them that are bound”; and so on. The values of the anointing can only come to people who realize, all these ways, spiritually, their need of this Servant of the Lord, working, under the anointing, for their good, for their advantage.

The New Testament Counterpart

We now follow the same course as we have followed in every connection. This part of Isaiah’s prophecies, and this chapter in particular, carries us to the New Testament counterpart. We have seen that there are parts of the New Testament which answer distinctly and clearly to the different phases and movements in these prophecies of Isaiah. And the New Testament counterpart of this sixty first chapter is undoubtedly Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. Let us look at a few fragments from that letter. You will see how they bring in Isaiah 61, the anointing of the Spirit.

Paul’s Letter to the Galatians

“This only would I learn from you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now perfected in the flesh? ...He therefore that supplieth to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you, doeth He it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? ...Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law... that upon the Gentiles might come the blessing of Abraham in Christ Jesus; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith” (Gal. 3:2,5,13–14).

“And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father’ ” (4:6).

“For we through the Spirit by faith wait for the hope of righteousness” (5:5).

“But I say, ‘Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other; that ye may not do the things that ye would. But if ye are led by the Spirit, ye are not under the law.... If we live by the Spirit, by the Spirit let us also walk” (5:16–18, 25).

“For he that soweth unto his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth unto the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap eternal life” (6:.

All that, as you notice, has to do with the Spirit— which is, of course, another way of speaking of the anointing. We will now take another brief series, which follows the line of the Cross.

“I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me...” (2:20).

“O foolish Galatians, who did bewitch you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was openly set forth crucified?” (3:1).

“And they that are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with the passions and the lusts thereof” (5:24).

“But far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been crucified unto me, and I unto the world” (6:14).

These two series of extracts from this brief letter “to the churches in Galatia” (1:2) make it clear that two of its major themes are the Cross and the Holy Spirit. It is the bridge that is passed over between Isaiah 53 and Isaiah 61.

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The Essentially Spiritual Nature of Christianity

Now we all know that this Letter to the Galatians contains Paul’s tremendous battle. Yes, Paul was out for a fight when he set himself to write this document. There is no more vehement product of the pen of Paul than that which we have in this letter. But what is the battle over? what is it all about? Of course there are theological and doctrinal answers to that question; but it may be said, with a good deal of support both from the letter itself and from other parts of the New Testament, that this battle of Paul’s all related to the essentially spiritual character of Christianity. The Christianity which is the true Christianity is an essentially spiritual thing. That is what the battle is about. It shows so clearly, in every connection, that the Cross leads to a spiritual position, to a spiritual condition.

The great enemy, who had very useful instruments in the Judaizers, was fighting to make of Christianity something other than a spiritual thing; to bring it on to an other than spiritual basis. Both then, and ever since, he has sought, either to resolve Christianity into a matter of rites and ceremonies—ritual, formalism, earthly and temporal symbols, representations, figures, and so forth; or, failing that, to substitute for it the false spirituality sometimes dignified by the name of ‘mysticism’. That was Satan’s object, and Paul saw that the issue was nothing less than the real meaning, the essential nature, of Christianity—what it is. And Paul was not giving it away, because he had had a tremendous experience on this very matter. He therefore set himself to fight this thing with all the strength at his command, to make it perfectly clear that Christianity is not in any respect an earthly system—it is a heavenly life. Christianity is essentially a life in the Spirit, and the Cross is intended to produce that. If it does not produce it, there is some reason for it in those concerned. It means that the whole nature of Christianity has been changed, and the meaning of the Cross subverted.

So Paul lunges at this subtle move of the enemy with all the force of the Cross, and brings in every weapon to which he can lay his hand. What are some of those weapons?

Paul’s Weapons Against the Debasing of Christianity

(1) His Personal History

Well, first of all—and this is a very powerful weapon, as you will notice from this letter—he brings in the weapon of his own history and his own experience. There are few places in all his writings—perhaps only Second Corinthians—where he refers to himself more than he does in this letter. He brings his own history and his own experience right forward; it is one of his masterstrokes. And he was the man to do it! Just look at Saul of Tarsus: look at his history—what he tells us about himself. Was there ever a man who had put this whole Jewish system more thoroughly to the test than he had? He had committed himself to the observances, to the performance of every part of the Jewish ritual, right up to the hilt; indeed, he tells us that he was far more zealous in this matter than many of his own age. “I advanced in the Jews’ religion beyond many of mine own age... being more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers” (Gal. 1:14). This man had gone all the way with this system, with its ceremonies and rites, its types and figures, its symbols and forms, he had gone the whole way.

What did it do for him? Where did it land him? He had exhausted it most thoroughly, most conscientiously, most sincerely: because one thing that we have to say about Saul of Tarsus is that he was a man who did not believe in half measures—he was a man who meant business, and he was a man who was sincere in what he did. He tells us: “I verily thought... that I ought to do”—‘I thought that I ought to do’—“many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth” (Acts 26:9). It was a matter of conscience with this brilliant young Pharisee, who had climbed so high on the ladder of Judaism. But, where did it land him? We have his own exclamation; he says: ‘This is where it landed me!’—“O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” (Rom. 7:24). You could not get very much lower than that, could you? That is the last word in anything. In his own experience, in his own history, the whole thing had failed. In effect, he says: ‘That is where it landed me; that is all it did for me. And it is not going to do anything better for anybody else, however devoted they may be to it.’

(2) The Meaning of the Cross

But then, having come to that end, to that ignominious end, crying for deliverance—‘O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me? Nothing and nobody, over all this long history, has proved a deliverer for me!’—then he found the Lord Jesus; and the Lord Jesus did for him all that this tremendous sum of things had entirely failed to do. He found the Cross, and he said: “I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20). You notice the change from the thought of ‘death’ to the thought of ‘life’. He is a dead man made alive, come to life. He is a man who has known an altogether new beginning, a new history, a new experience, which has sprung out of the Cross of the Lord Jesus.

Moreover, he found the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit did for him what this vast system of Judaism, to which he had given himself so utterly, could never do. That is why he gives such a large place to the Holy Spirit in this letter. That is why the Cross and the Holy Spirit are here brought together as the ruling lines of this whole testimony. The Holy Spirit, on the ground of the Cross, has reversed the whole experience, changed the whole situation.

(3) The Meaning of Christ

And then—here we could go through the letter with another ruling line—he discovered the real meaning of Christ. The name of Christ occurs forty-three times in this little letter, which can be read in ten minutes or a quarter of an hour. That itself is significant; indeed, it just shouts at us as to what it is all about. Paul is really seeking to show here what is the true meaning of Christ. What is the true meaning of Christ? Just this: that all that system has been—in Himself—completely fulfilled. The vast system of the law and all its ordinances has been fulfilled in and by Christ, in the Cross; all righteousness has been fulfilled. As He came to His baptism in the Jordan, typifying His death on the Cross, Jesus had said: “Suffer it now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness” (Matt. 3:15). That was the question at issue, and it was all fulfilled in the Cross of the Lord Jesus; Christ crucified has fulfilled it all. The Old Testament is fulfilled in Christ. That is what we have been saying about Isaiah; and what is true of Isaiah is true of all the Old Testament. We cannot attempt to show here how the Old Testament is fulfilled in Christ, but that is what Paul is saying. ‘I have been crucified with Christ: and so I am united with Him in that writing of, that fulfilment, of all the requirements of God; and, by the Spirit, I come into the good of all that Jesus is.’

(4) The Meaning of Grace

There is yet another theme in this letter which would repay our study: it is the meaning of grace. That is a great thing in the Letter to the Galatians. Grace puts us on to an entirely new basis. All the ritual, all the forms, all the demands of the law, only served to accentuate the evil conscience. Paul makes that so clear. As we know, this Letter to the Galatians was written before the Letter to the Romans: probably Paul, when he had written to the Galatians, said to himself, ‘I must write something more about this’, and so took the opportunity of enlarging upon it when writing to the Romans. But the point is that the whole thing related to this matter of conscience. “I had not known sin... except the law had said, Thou shalt not...” (Rom. 7:7). ‘The very saying of that thing only gave me a bad conscience: this whole system was only keeping my conscience alive—it was not saving me from an evil conscience. But grace has done that; grace has put me on to an altogether new and different basis, where the evil conscience is dealt with.’ Yes, grace deals with the conscience. It is a wonderful word over against a bad conscience: ‘The Grace of God’.

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(5) The Meaning of the Holy Spirit

Lastly, Paul discovered the meaning of the Holy Spirit. What does Paul say preeminently about the Holy Spirit here? “Because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father’ ” (Gal. 4:6). “Ye received the Spirit of sonship, whereby we cry, ‘Abba, Father’ ” (Rom. 8:15). Paul sets that over against servanthood. And there he gets right to the heart of the matter. For if we recognize, as it is easy to do, the difference between a servant and a son, we have the secret of everything.

A servant is one who simply has to do what he is told: he is told that he must or he must not, and, whether he likes it or not, whether he agrees with it or not, it is for him to obey, that is all. Whatever may be his own reactions, he cannot help himself: he is merely a servant. Inwardly he may be in positive revolt against the whole thing, but he can do nothing about it. I am speaking, of course, about a servant of those days. A servant of the present day would just give up his job and go—that is how it is in our time. But you could not do it there in the Roman Empire in Paul’s day. A bondslave had no power of choice whatever; he could not say: ‘I am resigning; I am going to find another master’—he just could not do it. He was bought, body, soul and spirit; and, though he might be in revolt with every fibre of his being, there was nothing he could do about it. He just was the bondslave of this law.

The Spirit of Sonship

That is a servant, a slave. What is a son? Well, if he is a son in the true meaning of Christian sonship, his service is a delight to him. There is in him the dynamic of love: he delights to do those things that please his Father, and that love gives him the incentive and the power to do them. He has another spirit, the Spirit of Sonship, working in him, making it possible for him to respond to every requirement: for that is the meaning of the Holy Spirit—an inward power, and that of love, which makes everything possible. As we all know, if we have a mighty love for something, nothing is impossible! Would that we had more of this love—the love that does not irk, that does not wait to have things pointed out, to have its attention drawn to them, but is all the time on the alert, anxious and keen, watching to see what needs to be done. We need that spirit, do we not?

That is something that is so impressive in certain companies known to us in the Far East. It is referred to here by way of illustration and example, not by way of condemnation or criticism of others. One great meeting hall, for instance, with its internal capacity of 1,600, and provision all the way round for up to 3,000 more, and with its 1,000 panes of glass, needs, as you can guess, a lot of looking after—what with the cleaning, the care of all the electrical installations, the amplifiers, and so on. There is so much connected with even one centre like that. After every meeting you see an army of men and women, prepared, and getting down to it, sweeping and cleaning and mopping up, adjusting and seeing to things, so that everything is clean and wholesome and in its place, for the next meeting. As you look at these people doing these jobs, perhaps you ask about someone, busily working away in his old clothes: ‘Who is that brother?’ ‘Oh that is Major General So and So!’ You see another younger man getting down to it, really getting down to a dirty job: ‘Who is that young brother?’ ‘He is the Managing Director of the biggest textile factory on this island!’ And so you go on—General, Colonel, Director— but they are all ‘going to it’. One of these high officers has made it his business to clean those one thousand panes of glass once every week!

How do they go about it? Well, before they start on their work, they all meet together and pray and sing. They pray all together, this great army of workers; then they have a good sing; and then they get down to the work. It is all done in a spirit of joy like that. That is the spirit of sonship! That is not bondslavery; it is the true spirit of sonship. We need far more of that. That is the meaning of the Holy Spirit. You are not surprised that these people are radiant, and you are not surprised that the question is answered in their case: “To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” It is indeed revealed there. Suffer the illustration; it is very wholesome to have seen these things really working. They can work; they really can work.

This, then, is the meaning of the Spirit, the meaning of Christ: the real spirit of sonship. That is what Paul is saying here. Satan is against that—Satan just hates that. He will try to break it up; he will try to spoil it, at all costs. That was the battle that Paul was in. He was not just contending with the Judaizers, but with the direct antagonism of the great enemy against a testimony of that kind—against the real fruit of the Cross.

Freedom from Law Means Government by the Spirit

Now, if Satan is thwarted along one line, he does not give up—he tries another. Satan is a great master of strategy, and one of his favourite lines is that of pushing things to extremes. Among the Galatian believers, he had sought to push legalism to an extreme. But now he is thwarted along that line; Paul wins the battle—there is no doubt about it. What is the enemy’s next line of attack? ‘Very well then’, he says, ‘if you won’t have the law, then don’t have any law; discard all law. “You are no longer under law, you are under grace”—you can do as you like! Just behave as you like; just carry on as you like; you must know no limitations, no restrictions. Any kind of restriction is law—repudiate it! Go to the other extreme—licence instead of law!’ I believe that, if Paul were alive to day, he would be just as vehement against this as he was against the other: for here is a work of Satan indeed. If Satan cannot bind by the law, and change the whole nature of things in that way, he will seek to dismiss all law and make us wholly lawless.

But remember, if this Letter to the Galatians is the letter of the liberty of the Spirit, it is also the letter of the government of the Spirit. We are only free when we are governed. In George Matheson’s well known words, that we sometimes sing:
‘Make me a captive, Lord,
And then I shall be free’.

A paradox—but how true. We are not free when we are giving way to licence, when we take liberty that far. No: this Letter, and the Letters to the Romans and to the Hebrews, are not documents of lawlessness. Even if they do set aside the whole of the Jewish system, they do not introduce a regime of lawlessness. But they do most clearly bring in the life and government of the Holy Spirit. Remember—no child of God who is governed by the Holy Spirit, who is really living a life in the Spirit, will infringe any Divine principle. Indeed, a life governed by the Holy Spirit will be the more meticulously careful about spiritual principles.

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No Change in Divine Principles

You see, the change is not in the law; that is where a great mistake has been made. Christ crucified does not alter the law; Christ Himself does not alter the law; the Holy Spirit does not alter the law. The change is not in the law—the change is in the man. Grace does not say that, because you are not under the law, you may now murder, and get away with it; that you can steal now, you are not under law; you can commit adultery now, you are not under law; you can be covetous now, you are not under law. Grace does not say that; you are horrified at the suggestion.

But carry that right through to anything and everything of Divine principle—and remember that the Law of Moses is only the embodiment of Divine principles. Now the Lord Jesus took up that and said: ‘Moses said, Thou shalt not kill; I say to you that if you are angry with your brother, you are not less in danger of judgment’ (Matt. 5:21–22). The Apostle John goes further, and says that if you hate your brother you are a murderer: if you hate him, without taking any step to kill him, you are already a murderer in your heart (1 John 3:15). Take the words of the Lord Jesus again: ‘Moses said, Thou shalt not commit adultery; I say to you, you have only so much as to look with evil intent, and you have broken the commandment’ (Matt. 5:27–28). It is the principle of the thing, you see. This is terribly searching.

No, neither Christ, nor the Holy Spirit, nor the Cross, changes the nature of the law, the principle of the law—it is the man who is changed. That is how the law becomes lifted from us, because we become changed people. The Spirit, Who keeps the law, has now entered into us, and if we walk by the Spirit, in the Spirit, we do not fulfil the lusts of the flesh (Gal. 5:16,25). It is a question of the changed person.

To Walk by the Spirit Is to Keep the Law

So grace does not say: ‘You are not under the law, therefore you need not observe the Sabbath.’ We have to recognize that the Sabbath is the embodiment of a principle: it is not a day—it is a principle. It is a principle upon which God has constituted the creation, in every realm, that there must be a period of rest for something new. In all nature there has to be a period of rest, in order to prepare for something new. In our bodies there has to be a period of rest in order that there may be something new. In spiritual matters, in spiritual service, there have to be periods of rest, during which the Lord can speak and give us something new—that is the principle of the Sabbath. But even there, the Lord has very graciously made it possible for many to have a day a week still, in which to let other things go, to keep it sacred for the Lord, for spiritual renewal.

So, you see, it is the principle that matters, not the outward form. Nothing changes the principle. The principles of all Divine laws are abiding: they are never abrogated, never set aside, never nullified—they still hold good. Jesus went behind the code, and put His finger on the principle of every part of it; and He said: You may not now be governed and ruled by an outward system of ‘Thou shalt’ and ‘Thou shalt not’, you are to be ruled by the Holy Spirit Who observes those things. The Spirit is the Spirit of holiness: no one who lives in the Spirit, therefore, will persistently, habitually, do unholy things, be unholy. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of love: no one who lives in the Spirit will have any other than the Spirit of love, will fail to observe the laws of love, will violate love. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth: no one who lives in and by the Spirit will be untruthful in any sense—and untruthfulness covers not only the saying of things that are not true, but everything in the life that is not absolutely true and real and genuine and honest and transparent. The man or the woman who lives in the Spirit will be a man or a woman of truth, one who is real. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of wisdom, and those who live in the Spirit will have a Divine wisdom governing their lives.

It is life in the Spirit, through the Cross, that is here in view; and it is the crucified man, the crucified woman—or the assembly or the church—who walk and live in the Spirit to whom the Arm of the Lord is revealed. Do we want to know the power of God—God with us, God for us? Then it must be like this—the Cross our ground, the Spirit our life, walking and living as sons of God.

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Chapter 9 - Re-integration of All Things Through the Cross

In this concluding chapter we shall make little further reference to Isaiah’s prophecies. We shall seek first of all to sum up, or review, the whole matter that we have been considering, and then to present a few additional thoughts arising out of the Letters to the Ephesians and Colossians.

I would like you to draw a mental picture. Imagine, first of all, the Letter to the Romans laid down as a background, and then, superimposed upon it, a figure of the Cross. We have seen that the Letter to the Romans sets forth the Cross as God’s instrument for clearing the ground for His building, providing the place for the foundation of that great building which has ever been in His thought and His intention—the Church.

Romans

The Letter to the Romans finds the ground covered at the beginning with very much upon which God will not build—upon which He cannot build. As God surveys the human scene, with a view to laying the foundation for His Church, His glorious Church, He finds a condition of things so tangled, so evil, so false and so wrong, that He says: ‘I cannot lay My foundation on that, we must clear that all out of the way. We must set fire to it, consume it, and make a great clearing for this foundation.’ And so, in the Letter to the Romans, the Cross is brought in and set forth as that which, on the one side, disposes of that whole state of things. And what a state it is! What a terrible condition is presented in the early chapters of that letter! The Cross is placed there to deal with it all, to get rid of it all, to consume it all. It is like the great brazen altar with its consuming fire, bringing everything to judgment, and leaving nothing but a clearing, an emptiness, a barrenness.

But then on the other side, God having laid His foundation, with the remaining chapters of that Letter a new prospect comes into view. Everything now is possible for God. We found in chapter 8 so much said about God’s eternal counsels and foreknowledge, His wonderful thoughts and conceptions in election, in predestination, in adoption, in conformity to the image of His Son; the creation redeemed from corruption, the children of God delivered from bondage. Everything now seems to have come in for realizations, since the Cross has cleared the way.

That, then, is the first thing in the mental picture that I am asking you to draw: the Cross, as God’s means for securing the foundation for everything else.

1 Corinthians

Now, from that Cross you draw radiating lines. The first line reaches to the First Letter to the Corinthians. Here the Cross is applied—not now to conditions in the world, not to those outside of Christ—but to conditions amongst believers that do not tally with the Cross. The Apostle brings the meaning of the Cross to bear upon the natural man, the carnal man, and all his works, upon all that has resulted from his presence amongst the Lord’s people—the divisions, and all the rest of that horrible situation in the Church that is described in the First Letter. He says: ‘When I came to you, I determined to know nothing among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified’ (1 Cor. 2:1–2). So the first ‘radiation’ from Romans is to all conditions inside the church that are not in agreement with the meaning of the Cross. God cannot get on with building until those things are dealt with.

We find the Apostle telling the Corinthians in that First Letter that the foundation is already laid: ‘I laid the foundation, as a wise masterbuilder, and others build thereon; but let every man take heed what he builds thereon’ (1 Cor. 3:10). The things that we find in that letter, as we have pointed out, are the things to which God says: ‘No, you must not put those on My foundation. My foundation is worthy of something better than that. We cannot have those things in our clearing—they will only clutter everything up once more and make it necessary for us to go through the whole business of consuming all over again. Because every man’s work which is not according to the Cross is going up in flames and smoke—there will be nothing left.’

That, then, is the first outreach of the Cross as from Romans, to touch conditions amongst the Lord’s people which are not in accordance with what God means by the Cross. God says ‘No’ to all that. ‘I am not going to use that on My foundation; I am not going to build with that. You get rid of that, and then we will get on with the building.’ As we saw in a previous chapter, those things were dealt with by the Corinthians themselves. The fire did burn among them—the fire of repentance, the fire of self judgment, the fire of clearing, the fire of brokenness of heart (2 Cor. 7:11). Something happened, and they dealt with those things.

2 Corinthians

The second radiating line leads to the Second Letter to the Corinthians. Here you have the great restoration of testimony in the church in Corinth—in the location, in the city and in the world. The testimony that had been marred and spoiled can now be recovered. When God finds that state of heart, that state of spirit—broken, humble, contrite, very low before Him, ‘trembling at His word’ (Is. 66:2)—He can get on with things in relation to testimony in the world. That is, He can now build. When He has that, then things begin to happen outwardly—it does not require a great effort, they just do happen—because here is the expression of the mighty dynamic power of God in the midst.

The Apostle says in that letter: “It is God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness” (or, ‘Let light be’, in the first creation), “Who shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). A few verses previously he says: “We... beholding... the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory” (3:18). That is the testimony: when things inwardly have been dealt with, the outshining is quite spontaneous. It is just the result of a deep, very quiet work of God. When God spoke into the first chaos His fiat: ‘Let light be!’, I do not think that there was a very great noise about it. There never needs to be a great noise when God puts forth His power. There is the ‘hiding of His power’, to use Habakkuk’s phrase (Hab. 3:4). But that is not the minimizing of His power. God only needs to speak, and immense things can happen. He only said: ‘Let light be!’—but look at the force and power of light in this creation. How terrific is the light!—and just from a word. It is symbolic.

But here at Corinth, the light shines out when God has right conditions; and that is how it will be. There need not be the great noise of publicity, of advertisement, of organization, of tremendous excitement and feverish activity. If the testimony is there, people will know it, people will feel it. If the conditions are right, something will happen. And if there is nothing happening, then we had better look to our conditions.

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Galatians

The third line radiating from the Cross, as we saw in our last chapter, takes us to the Letter to the Galatians, where we are shown the resultant life in the Spirit. The Cross produces a life in the Spirit: it brings about a true, spiritual Christianity, as distinct from a merely professional, formal or ritualistic kind of Christianity that is all on the outside. This mighty thing, a true spiritual Christianity—a life in the Spirit: how real, how effective it is! That is what we reach when we come to the Letter to the Galatians. It says that the Cross works out in a life in the Spirit, and that true Christianity is a spiritual thing.

‘Ephesians’ and ‘Colossians’

With that brief resumé of what has gone before, we now turn to a few additional thoughts from the twin letters, ‘To the Ephesians’ (so called), and ‘To the Colossians’. It is quite evident that they are twin letters: you cannot read them without finding that you are covering very largely the same ground, only with a distinctive emphasis in each. And in them you come to some tremendous things.

Notice, first of all, that in these letters, as in all the others, the Cross is the foundation. In Ephesians, we are told that ‘we who were dead in trespasses and sins were quickened and raised together with Him’ (2:1, 5–6): the Cross is there. In the Letter to the Colossians, we read of “...the putting off of the body of the flesh, in the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with Him in baptism” (2:11–12)—here you have the Cross again. The Cross is basic, that is the point. It is the foundation carried over from Romans.

Then, when you recognize that, you come upon what I think we may say are the two greatest things that have ever been disclosed by God. They are such wonderful things, that, if we really see them, not as in the Bible to be read, but as a reality in the heart, something is bound to happen to us.

Have you ever come upon something in the Word of God which has just overwhelmed you, carried you away? Perhaps I can illustrate this by a humorous little incident that occurred during ministry in the Far East. I was speaking in a meeting one day—of course by interpretation—when suddenly the dear brother at my side, who was interpreting for me into Chinese, went off into fits of uncontrollable laughter! There he was—he just could not stop laughing: and then the people caught it, and went off into laughter likewise! Well, this dear brother could not get back, he tried and struggled, but the more he struggled, the more he seemed to lose his control. I was not conscious of having said anything extraordinary—at least, nothing that would occasion such mirth. I had to wait, and wonder what it was all about—wondering what on earth I had said to cause this. And even a little later on, when he had recovered somewhat, and we had got away from that, the thing came back to him, and off he went again; and this happened more than once.

So afterward, when I had got him alone, I said: ‘Look here, brother, what ever did I say? what did I say to cause you to go off like that, and all the people too? Did I say something so outrageous, so terribly funny to you?’ He said: ‘No, brother, no, nothing like that. It was just something we had never seen before, that is all; we had never seen that before!’

The point is this: it is possible to see something in the Word of God which carries you right away—it is so absolutely fresh, so new! The Lord deliver us from becoming so familiar with it all that it never provokes anything, it never stirs anything in us. It ought to be with us as it was with those dear Chinese friends.—But that is by the way. When we come to these letters, if we have our eyes really opened, we come to things that are calculated to take our breath away, really to carry us right out of ourselves: for they are very wonderful things indeed. Perhaps when I mention them they will be so familiar that they will not stir you at all; but I cannot at any time reflect upon them without being tremendously moved. The language of them is indeed familiar, but may the Lord bring home to us something of the real impact and meaning of these words again. Let us, then, see what is the key to and the sum of this letter, that is called the Letter to the Ephesians.

Ephesians: “All Things in Christ”

Amidst all the wonderful fulness which is in this letter—and it is a very full letter indeed; almost every clause carries us out of our depth—there is a small fragment, which gathers the whole of the letter into itself; which really reveals what it is all about, what it all means. It is always very helpful to be able to get hold of something like that which contains everything. Here it is: “...the mystery of His will... which He purposed in Him unto a dispensation of the fulness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth; in Him, I say...” (1:9–10). “To sum up all things in Christ”. That phrase ‘sum up’ does not perhaps fully convey what the Apostle really meant and was saying. It goes as far as it can, but it might be better to say: ‘to gather together (or better still: to subsume) all things in Christ’.

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Human Disintegration

When sin came in through Adam, a great process of disintegration commenced. First of all, it began in the man himself: the man was no longer a single entity, he was a divided personality. And every child and son of Adam is a divided personality; there is civil war in his very nature, in his very constitution. He is a divided man, a man who is in conflict within himself. Is not that true of all of us? We know enough about ourselves to know that there is nothing in our natures, our make up, our constitution, that speaks of complete harmony. There is war within us—war in our make up; war in our temperament; war in our whole constitution. We are broken; we are divided; we are disintegrated. That happened in the man himself.

And then it happened between the first two—the only two—the man and his wife. You can discern the elements of disintegration and disruption between them: the man starts blaming the woman, and that is the beginning of a domestic schism. There had been a wonderful unity and harmony; they were “one flesh”, it says (Gen. 2:24); but now—something has come in, and they are no longer like that. When they were driven out of the garden, they were no doubt blaming each other, saying, ‘This is all your fault!’ We are familiar with that sort of thing—recriminations and so on. Division has come between them; there is a strain in life.

And then what of the family which came through them? Here you have Cain and Abel, the first children, involved in schism, division, disintegration, even to the point of murder. And out from the family, the thing spread to the race, until there ensued the great scattering, the dividing up of the race into its many, many parts, with all its diversity of languages, as we have it today. The whole race is broken to pieces, in a condition of utter disharmony. You pursue that through, and, before you are out of the Old Testament, you find the whole race divided into two irreconcilable sections, Jew and Gentile, hating each other with bitter hatred. The Jew will have nothing to do with the Gentile, calls the Gentiles ‘dogs’—unclean things—and will have nothing to do with them. And the Gentile nations react against the Jews, as we know they have done all along and continue to do today. The present state of the human race is one of brokenness, scatteredness, discord and hatred, quarrels and strife and conflict and war. From centre to circumference it is all in pieces, and all the pieces are against one another. There is no harmony, no unity and no integration in the human race.

God’s Secret

But God had a secret. He knew all about that; He knew what would happen; He knew what would come; and He devised His own way of meeting it. He had a secret in His own heart as to how He would solve this terrible problem. This secret is what Paul, in this and other letters, calls ‘the mystery’. How would God do it? He would ‘sum up’, He would ‘gather together all things in Christ’. He would make His Son the integrating Centre and Sphere of a new creation, in which all these diversities and conflicts would never again be found. That is the sum of this Letter to the Ephesians—to ‘gather together all things in Christ’. I say, surely that is something to send a thrill through us, however often we may have heard it before.

And so, in that connection, three things come into view.

First of all, the Cross of Christ. You notice here that Paul says: ‘the enmity was slain’ (2:16). We have many conceptions and teachings on the Cross, but here is one wonderful thing, that in the Cross this enmity was taken hold of and destroyed. Where there is a true work of the Cross in any of us, that kind of national, or international, or personal, or social, or even Christian division ceases. The Cross is the instrument for dealing with all that—and it will deal with it. If the Cross really gets down to the depths of our being, the whole situation, both in ourselves and between ourselves and others, will change. The Cross does something, so that we no longer meet one another on natural ground at all. We meet one another on heavenly ground, on spiritual ground, on the ground of Christ.
Secondly, Christ Himself is the focal centre and sphere of that. We meet ‘in Christ’—that is the great word: “to sum up all things in Christ”. Notice how often that little phrase ‘in Christ’ occurs: everything is ‘in Christ’. He is the centre and sphere of this wonderful new integration. “In one Spirit”, says the Apostle, “were we all baptized into one body” (1 Cor. 12:13).

Thirdly, as clearly emerges from this letter, the Church is the vessel of all this. God’s secret was not only that His Son would be the focal centre, but that the Church should be the vessel in which this unity should be displayed. What a tragedy that it is not more so! And yet, as I have said, where you get a true expression of the Church, this is what you find—that these disintegrating things are outside and the mighty integration of Divine love is within. You get a real testimony to the Body of Christ.

We are so familiar, of course, with the phrases and terminology. But it is a most wonderful thing to realize that, in the fulness of the times (we have not yet reached ‘the fulness of the times’, but I think we are getting very near to it), God purposes to gather together—not geographically and physically, but into one glorious unity of spirit—all things in Christ. God has determined to do that, and it will be a wonderful day when that purpose is realized.

‘Slaying the enmity by the Cross’ (2:16). Dear brother, dear sister, do give heed to this. If there is any enmity between you and another brother or sister in Christ, that is a denial of the Cross; it is a denial of Christ; and it is a denial of the Church. That is very solemn. Have you any enmity with another brother? or another sister? It says here that in the Cross enmity was destroyed! Where is the Cross—where is Christ—where is the Spirit— where is the Church—if there is still present that which the Cross is supposed to have—yes, and in reality did— put away? It has no place here.

In the great prayer that Paul prays in the third chapter (vv. 14–19), he says: “I bow my knees unto the Father....” Then we are a family! There you have the heart of things. And what is the chief characteristic of a true fatherhood and a true family? It is what Paul says here—it is love. Listen to what he says: “...that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with ALL the saints”—note that—“strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge....” There is a love in such dimensions that can do this thing, that can achieve this end of gathering together all the brokenness in Christ. It is only going to be done by that mighty, mighty love, with its breadth and its length and its height and its depth. That love is great enough to do it; but you and I have got to be strong, with all saints, to apprehend it. Apprehend that love, and God gets His end.

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Colossians: The ‘Fulness’ Restored

We can only look briefly at the second of these ‘twin letters’—the Letter to the Colossians. What is the great word, or statement, in that letter? It is this: “It was the good pleasure of the Father that in Him should all the fulness dwell” (1:19); “and in Him ye are made full” (2:10). What has happened?

First of all, at the beginning of the creation, the great Potter created, moulded, fashioned, shaped, so to speak a beautiful vessel. And as He stood back and looked at it, He said: ‘It is very good.’ And He filled that vessel with His fulness—what fulness He filled into the vessel of this creation! How full is the vessel of this creation, even now in its present condition—how full of the beauty and glory of God! But at the beginning it was filled with unsullied beauty and glory. And then, a great enemy came in and struck a blow at that vessel and shattered it to pieces: all that Divine, spiritual fulness leaked away—it has gone; and in its place you find, by comparison with what once was, only desolation and emptiness.

Now the Great Potter comes back, to ‘make it again another vessel’ as it pleases Him to make it (Jer. 18:4). Here is the vessel—the Church. This is the vessel of the Lord: a beautiful vessel, “a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing” (Eph. 5:27). As He looks at it according to His own thought and His own ideal, pondering all that He intends and all that He will realize through it, He says—‘A glorious Church! It is very good.’ And in this Letter to the Colossians we see the re-made vessel now filled again with all the fulness. The vessel is mended; all the fragments are gathered together; you cannot trace the cracks and the joins; this Church as He has it here is once again a beautiful whole; and now He fills it again with all His fulness. “That ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God” (Eph. 3:19), is the prayer of the Apostle. “In Him dwelleth all the fulness... and in Him ye are made full” (Col. 2:9–10). That is how it is to be.

One thing that must be underlined is this: that, while this is a process which God is seeking to work out, an end to which He is labouring, we must remember that the achievement of this great and glorious thing—this ‘gathering together’ again of all things in Christ, this filling of that ‘gathered together’ vessel with all His fulness—requires, and must have, a continuous work of the Cross. That is the challenge of all that we have been seeing in the foregoing pages: the challenge of the Cross in everything, in relation to the great purpose of God. This re-integration, if the Lord is allowed to have His way, will be effected by means of the Cross. If there is anything contrary to integration, to oneness, it will always be traceable to something which has withstood, or is withstanding, the work of the Cross. That applies in our own lives, and it applies in our assemblies, our fellowships, our companies. If there is something that still represents disintegration, dividedness, schism; if things are broken, are not one entity, not one whole, it can be traced to a failure to allow the Cross to do its work in some direction or other. That is the inclusive, and the only, explanation. If the Cross really does its work, this integration will spontaneously result.

The way of unity is not the way of patching things up from the outside—the way of unity is the work of the Cross in the life. When the Church really allows the Cross to get to work in its very constitution, the problem of division is solved. And if there is spiritual poverty, if there is scarcity, if there is limitation in our spiritual resources, and we are not knowing this fulness, it is for the same reason. If the Cross works, you find that the measure increases, quite spontaneously: it always does so, when you get things out of the way that are contrary to Christ.

Conclusion

And so we finish where we began. “To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” If we have any interest in, or concern for, knowing God with us and for us in power, in support, in protection, in deliverance, in succour, this is the way. The answer to that question in Isaiah 53 is found in that same chapter: it is revealed to this One Who goes to the Cross, Who suffers the Cross; to the One Who lets go all in the Cross; Who goes down into shame and dishonour in the Cross; Who loses all His own in the Cross: to Him the arm of the Lord is revealed. And it is revealed to all those who go that way with Him. History is the great proof of it. Throughout history, God’s arm has been, and ever will be, bared for His Son, and for all those who are with His Son as crucified men and women—crucified churches—a crucified Church.

There is a passage of which we are all very fond: “The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show Himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward Him” (2 Chron. 16:9). The Cross is the instrument for testing whether our hearts are perfect toward the Lord, or whether we have personal interests, or worldly interests, or divided interests in any way. That word ‘perfect’ means ‘complete’ or ‘whole’: the Lord will show Himself mighty on behalf of him whose heart is complete toward Him. And where could we find a greater embodiment of one whose heart was completely, wholly for God, than in the Lord Jesus on that Cross?

The End

Up next: Union With Christ

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

Union With Christ

by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 1 - The Meaning of Christ

1. HIS GREATNESS IN THE SCRIPTURES

He is

(a) The meaning of all things.
(b) The Heir of all things.
(c) The Idea or Nature of all things.
(d) The final test of all things.

2. HIS PLACE - BY THE LOVE OF THE FATHER INFINITE DIVINE LOVE THE MOTIVE AND POWER

This is revealed

(a) In all the Scriptures.
(b) By the opposite of love to all Divine activities.
(c) By the Father's demand that the Son be honored.

3. THE GREATNESS OF CHRIST IS SPIRITUAL AND MORAL

(a) Heaven knows it.
(b) Man senses it.
(c) Hell attests it by attempted corruption.

It is implicit in

(a) His satisfaction to God.
(b) His redemptive work.
(c) The Spirit's operations.

"These things spake Jesus; and lifting up his eyes to heaven, he said, Father..." (John 17:1).
"That they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us" (John 17:21).
"I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one" (John 17:23).

Union with Christ is the heart or center of all that has been revealed of God's thought concerning man and of man's relationship to God. Union with Christ is like the hub of a mighty wheel. There are many spokes to that wheel - election, creation, redemption, salvation, sanctification, glorification; and then, like a series of subsidiary spokes - repentance, faith, justification, conversion, regeneration, and so on. These are the spokes of the wheel, but they all center in Christ and radiate from Christ and reach the rim, which is God. They unite us in Christ with God.

To give all this its true and full value, it is necessary to contemplate or have revealed to us the meaning of Christ, to see what an immense thing has taken place by the Son of God becoming the Son of man, by God becoming incarnate. It is a question of our being taken, not into Godhead or Deity, but into God's Son incarnate.

Now, the first preachers of the Christian evangel preached Christ. They did not, in the first place, preach salvation or sanctification or forgiveness or judgment or heaven. That does not mean that they did not preach those things they did; but not in the first place. They preached Christ, and all those things were included in the preaching of Christ, Christ as inclusive of all and as transcending all; for, after all, such things as salvation and sanctification, forgiveness, justification, are subsidiaries, they come afterward. Christ was before them all and Christ will be after them all. They are inside of Christ, but He vastly outstrips them all.

The Meaning of Christ

We come, then, to consider the meaning of Christ. Understand that we are underlining the title CHRIST. That very title carries the significance of a mission. It is not the title of His essential Godhead. Anointing, which is what the word means, is unto a mission. "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth" (Acts 10:38). Let that govern all that will be said, otherwise it might be easy, if you were so inclined, to raise your eyebrows at different points and scent, as you might think, false doctrine. In our consideration of union with Christ, we are keeping a very distinct line between His Deity and His Christhood as Son of man. Having said that, let us think now for a little while of His greatness.

1. His Greatness in the Scriptures

His greatness as in the Scriptures is seen in several relationships.

(a) In His Relationship with God

Firstly, His greatness is seen in His relationship with God. Here we have only to cite several familiar passages, but always with new inspiration and stirring of heart.

"Who is the image of the invisible God" (Col. 1:15).
"The effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance" (Heb. 1:3). Quite remote from our comprehension and understanding, and certainly from our explanation; sharing the Divine glory before the world was. We commenced to read of it. "Father... glorify thy Son"; and then just a little further on, "Glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was" (John 17:5). I say, we can never begin to understand or evaluate the meaning of union with Christ until we have sensed something of that stupendous thing which has happened in His coming forth out of such a state and, in the form of man, going the way of the Cross. The most amazing thing that has ever happened in the whole history of the universe is found in the combination of the words which I have just quoted from the Scriptures. And then, that this Man who was the effulgence of God's glory, and the very image of His substance, "the image of the invisible God," sharing the Divine glory before the world was, should be spat upon, mocked, jeered at, and meet all that terrible sin. It is wonderful that we should be called into union with Him; not just to be His friends, not just to be fellowworkers or partners in some Divine business, not just to have some kind of formal relationship with Him which we call a Union, but to be one with Him in an utterness which we are going to see later. "We are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones" (Eph. 5:30. A.V.) "Joined to the Lord... one spirit" (1 Cor. 6:17). Something has happened to make that possible, and therein is the whole story and wonder of the infinitude of God's condescending love. Well, the Scriptures, in the first place, set forth His glory, His greatness, in His relationship with God, and many hours could be spent in tracing it out. We pass on.

(b) In His Relationship With All Created Things

Next, His greatness is seen in the Scriptures in His relationship with all created things. Our analysis divides this into four heads.

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(1) The Meaning of All Things

Christ is the meaning of all things.

"All things were made through him" (John 1:3).
"The world was made through him" (John 1:10).
"One Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things" (1 Cor. 8:6).
"In him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him, and unto him" (Col. 1:16).
"Of the Son he saith... Thou, Lord, in the beginning didst lay the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the works of thy hands" (Heb. 1:8,10).
"It became him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things..." (Heb. 2:10).

The meaning of all things; that is, the "why" of all things, the answer to the question, What does it all mean? Go abroad in the earth, plunge down into the ocean, soar into the constellations, compass the created universe, comprehend all celestial intelligences and say, "What does it all mean?" and the answer will be in a perfected universe showing forth and expressing the glory of the Son of God, Son of man, and so you will know what it all means. That is no flight of imagination. That could easily be tested and proved up to a convincing point. Given that we had the ability and a certain mass of data, with Divine enlightenment resting upon it, that is capable of substantiation now. If we knew the inner meaning of the created things, we should see Divine meanings, eternal, spiritual meanings, all of them finding their explanation in Christ. That, of course, is a universe of inexhaustible wonder, but that whole universe, the Scripture says, is going to be filled with Him and manifest Him eventually, and when this universe, redeemed and perfected, reaches the end for which it was brought into being, it will be one mighty, comprehensive and still inexhaustible expression of God's Son. That is the meaning of it. He is the key to everything that is happening.

Oh, that we had eyes to see and understanding to grasp the significance of things that are happening! Christ is the explanation, He is the meaning of all things.

(2) The Heir of All Things

Christ is the heir of all things. "God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things" (Heb. 1:1,2). The question immediately arises, When did God appoint Him heir of all things? Well, if all the former passages are right, Christ was appointed heir of all things before ever He made them. If all things were made through Him and unto Him, there was a point at which the Father made Him heir of all things, and it is just on that very matter of His heirship that history turns. Firstly, then there was the marvelous conception of this universe as constituting the inheritance. You do not need that I should strain at trying to say anything about the universe as a conception. Then there is the conception projected, with a view to its being brought into execution, followed by creation, and immediately, or very soon it would seem; the inheritance disputed and marred, but instantly its redemption revealed. Redeemed, reconstituted, perfected, possessed: that is the history of the inheritance, and what a lot that history contains. I said a minute or two ago that if we understood all that is going on, we should see that it centered in and raged round Christ. Why? Because He is heir of all things, and this disputing of His inheritance is the reason for all that is going on. Oh, how much Scripture could be crowded into that. The destroyers of the earth, what are they doing? Well - blindly, of course - but through their evil inspiration and instigation, they are seeking to destroy the inheritance of God's Son, and because spiritual men and women are the best evidence of that fact, they know the concentration of more than ordinary forces upon them for their destruction; for they are the redeemed of the Lord being reconstituted and perfected unto a presentation to Him as His rightful inheritance at last in glory. We know that this is true, that it is the inheritance of God's Son which has involved us in this long, long story of destructive intention from evil powers.

(3) The Idea or Nature of All Things

Further, Christ is the Idea or Nature of all things. I think here we only need two brief quotations.

"Whom he foreknew, he also foreordained to be conformed to the image of his Son" (Rom. 8:29). The Idea or Nature of all things is expressed in those words, "the image of his Son." The other passage which is from Ephesians 4:10, I think bears that out. The object of His ascending up on high was "that he might fill all things." Those two complementary statements answer this Idea or Nature of all things. What is the Idea behind, what is the Divinely intended nature of all things? Well, just the image of His Son. Of course, that embraces the whole of that comprehensive teaching of the New Testament of likeness to Christ. It is a far-reaching and all-governing idea in the New Testament, likeness to Christ, or, as it has often been put, Christ-likeness. That is the Idea of the existence of all things, that is the Nature of the being of all things; to be filled with Him and conformed to His image. You never will be conformed to His image unless you are filled with Him. How much New Testament teaching you can put into that. It is everywhere.

(4) The Final Test of All Things

Lastly, Christ is the final test of all things. In Acts 17:31 we have these words: "He hath appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead." The literal rendering is not, by a man, but "in a man whom he hath ordained." That word "ordained" means horizoned. God has made His Son the horizon of everything. Everything has to come within the horizon of this man and be judged according to Him. You see the point. Christ is the criterion, Christ is the standard, Christ is the measure of that great judgment of the world which God has fixed, the final test of all things.

That means that the judgment of the world will be according to how it measures up to Christ, its standing in the light of Christ, as to its attitude toward or relationship with Christ. God will not judge on any other ground. That is a very simple formula for judgment. If God had to take us one by one and judge us on the numerous things which belong to us by our inheritance, our birth, our upbringing, by the fortunes or misfortunes of our lives, well, He would have His hands full, speaking after the manner of men, and it would be something that would require a standard of righteousness so infinitesimal, so exhaustive, as to be almost unthinkable. God is not going to judge us upon the number of our sins, whether few or many, or upon our temperaments, or upon anything like that at all that comes down to us in the bloodstream. His one simple solution is, What is your attitude to My Son? What is your relationship to My Son? How do you stand here in the horizon of Christ, not just as a person, but in relationship with Him as a kind, what He means in Himself? What is your attitude, relationship and measure where the Son is concerned? On that all judgment will be based.

And notice, that is a very righteous judgment. It says "he will judge the world in righteousness." Thank God, that takes in the very thing that so many complain of through their lives, the disadvantages of their inheritance, of heredity, of early training and so on. My dear friends, take heart from this, that on none of those matters is God going to judge at all; it would be unrighteous. He brings us all down to the one issue of our relationship to His Son. Where do you stand with Him? What have you done with Him? What are you making of Him? How are you progressing in your conformity to His image? That is the basis of judgment, and the only one. Christ is the criterion, the final test of all things.

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Christ in the Old Testament

Well, let us return again to this contemplation of His greatness as seen in the Scriptures. If we take the Scriptures as a whole, we find that the Old Testament is shot through with expectation and anticipation. From the very beginning someone is demanded, someone is foreshadowed, someone is proclaimed, and someone is manifested in the midst of the nations; for this Someone was manifested in Israel whom God planted in the midst of them.

Let us look at that for a few minutes. Someone is demanded, demanded because of a calamitous failure which has brought the whole creation under arrest, into what the Bible calls vanity. Failure has made of the whole creation an abortion. Someone is demanded by reason of that failure, someone is required to repair it. Someone is demanded by intuition. Man feels intuitively that someone must come sooner or later.

This expectation and this demand can be traced in very remote civilizations. Universally we find the evidence of this waiting for something, this expectation that someone must come to answer the enigma of life and the world. The whole thing is an enigma, a problem, a puzzle. Man is an abiding quandary, everything is a great contradiction. Many of those who have probed the most deeply in order to try to explain the problem have been driven into blank, terrible despair. Yet man MUST solve this problem. The Bible is just full of that.

But by continuous intimations someone is demanded. It seems as though there is a reaching of a certain point, and now there is an intimation that something is going to happen, and then it recedes, and after a time it comes on again like a tide, only to recede once more. These successive tides in history intimate all the time that something will happen, or someone will come; until you reach the day when He did become incarnate, and the spirit of expectation was ripe in just a nucleus, a remnant. They were waiting, expecting. "The HOPE of Israel" (Acts 28:20). That hope was not only the hope of Israel, it was the hope of the whole creation. Paul tells us that the creation was subjected in hope (Rom. 8:20); it was there throbbing throughout the centuries. Someone is demanded along every line, and that demand is revealed in the Scripture.

Someone is shadowed forth. The Old Testament is full of the shadowing forth of someone in personal types and in symbols, and, although typology and symbolism and the figurative aspect of the Old Testament has perhaps been a bit overdone and sometimes discredited by exaggerations and straining, there does lie right on the face of things, without any straining at all, a whole system which speaks of something other than itself. It demands that which it signifies, typifies, symbolizes, for men cannot live for eternity on symbols, on types, on figures, on foreshadowings. Someone must answer to all this!

Someone is therefore proclaimed. The whole of the Old Testament contains the proclaiming of a someone by the Spirit of prophecy. Immediately Adam falls and the tragedy of sin occurs, the seed of the woman, who should put all this right, is brought into view and proclaimed. He is again proclaimed in Abraham - "In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed" (Gen. 22:18). In Jacob: aged and dying, Jacob, in blessing his sons, came to Judah, and proclaimed those beautiful and classic words - "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the obedience of the peoples be" (Gen. 49:10); a bringer of peace looked for out of Judah. Did He come of Judah, He whose Name is Peace, Shiloh? All that while ago was He proclaimed. In Moses - "Jehovah thy God will raise up unto thee a prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me" (Deut. 18:15). Ours is an unfortunate translation in its use of the words "like unto me." It just gives a wrong turn to what Moses actually said. "Jehovah thy God will raise up unto thee, of thy brethren," not "like unto me," but, "as he raised me up." You can think about that. How did He raise Moses up? But here is the prophecy of the coming of this prophet. Then you want to read the whole statement in Deuteronomy 18 and 34. In both those chapters you will see that the reference is to a greater than Moses. Well, we cannot go on. All the prophets prophesy of Christ, they were all proclaiming Him.

We close with what is perhaps the most difficult aspect and most difficult thing to say, but I believe it is here. This someone was manifested personally in the midst of the nations, that is, in Israel. You will recall the many theophanies, Divine appearances in man-form in Israel, and you will recall that in not a few instances it is impossible to discriminate between the one who is called the angel and the Lord Himself. They are interchangeable terms, synonymous words. Of the same person, first the word "angel" and then the word "Lord" is used. The angel, as it seemed, took up the conflict with Jacob, and he eventually cried, "I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved" (Gen. 32:30). That angel of the Lord appeared to Abraham and was confessed to be the Lord. The Lord said to Israel, "Behold, I send an angel before thee, to keep thee by the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. Take ye heed before him, and hearken unto his voice: provoke him not; for he will not pardon your transgression: for my name is in him" (Exod. 23:20,21). Who is this? Paul said about the smitten rock, that the rock was Christ (1 Cor 10:4). But do you remember this, and this is the point of the whole incident, that when the Lord was giving commandment to Moses about smiting the rock, He said, "I will stand before thee there upon the rock" (Exod. 17:6). It was the Lord who was the rock, says Paul; it was the Lord who was smitten to save the life of His people, and you cannot smite the Lord twice. Once smitten, and, blessed be God, that is enough. Then it is said that the rock followed them (1 Cor. 10:4), meaning, I think, that the waters of the rock, the values of the rock, the efficacy of the smitten rock, went with them on their way "and that rock was Christ," it was the Lord. "I will stand before... the rock." So I could gather up many other of these instances, where the identifying of the one called the angel of the Lord cannot be made without saying that it was the Lord Himself, and, seeing the connections, you cannot but see the Son of God. If that wants proving, go to the last book of the Old Testament, where mention is made of the messenger of the covenant. "The Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his temple" (Mal. 3:1). That word translated "messenger" is the same word translated elsewhere "angel." Who is this angel or messenger of the covenant? "The Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his temple... But who can abide the day of his coming?" It is none other than the Son of God. But there He was manifested in Israel, again and again personally present, not as yet incarnate, but in manifestation nonetheless.

Well, there is the Scripture. Now, you see, that is the Old Testament. It is shot through, we have said, with expectation, and anticipation. Someone must finally and fully come to answer to it all.

We know that the New Testament, on the other hand, is just brimful of testimony that all this related to and was fulfilled in Christ. The Bible says, in a word: HE, CHRIST, MUST BE MADE EVERYTHING OF. When we have glimpsed something of His greatness, we are at least in the way of glimpsing the wonder of union with Christ. Oh, what a great thing it is! Surely we can now confirm that with which we started. It is the hope of everything. Everything centers in Him and radiates from Him to the bounds of God's created universe. Union with Christ is the heart of all the revealed thoughts of God concerning man and man's relationship with God.