Books by T. Austin-Sparks

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Man in the Divine Scheme of Things

(a) The Answer and Explanation of All Things

What did the first Adam mean in the whole scheme of things? Firstly, he was the explanation of all, and the answer to the question of the universe. Why the creation of this universe, heaven and earth and all things therein? Why all this Divine activity and labour, this expenditure of power and wisdom? Why this projecting of Divine energy? Go through the whole account fragment by fragment and ask why? The universe waits for an answer; it is full of questions on Day Five. Day by day the question has been growing; every fresh touch of the Divine hand, every fresh exercise of the Divine energy, wisdom and power, is intensifying the question - What is it for? The universe is one big question when it is said, "And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day". When it comes to "And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day", the question is answered, the explanation is given - man is here! "Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet" (Psa. 8:6). So Adam One was the explanation of all things, and the answer to the question of the universe.

So also is the Christ, but infinitely more so. The last Adam, the second Man, is the explanation of all things. John tells us that quite clearly. "All things were made through him; and without him was not anything made that hath been made" (John 1:3); and Paul says, "All things have been created through him, and unto him" (Col. 1:16 ). That is the meaning of Christ, to begin with.

But remember there is this one new man, the Church which is His Body of which He is Head. It, in the larger, corporate, spiritual sense, is Christ in expression. It is unnecessary here for me to remind you that the article is very often used in relation to the Church: it is called "the Christ". "As the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is the Christ" (1 Cor. 12:12 Gr.). One body, many members. That does not rule out His separate personality, but in this Divine thought He has joined Himself to, or constituted by Himself, a Body of many members, which is the answer to the questions of the universe and the explanation of all things; and there are more than hints in the Scriptures that in the end it will be manifested that Christ, the Son, with the sons, in unveiling, is the answer and explanation of all things. "The earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God" (Rom. 8:19), and in that day of the manifestation of the sons of God the declaration is that the creation itself shall be delivered. Why is this creation always so abortive, getting so far and stopping short, not going through? Why, with all its tremendous potentialities and resources and abilities - why, with all this, does it turn in upon itself to destroy itself, not deliver itself? Why even today when secrets are being unearthed, divulged, when men have reached such a point of knowledge and understanding, why not an emergence into Utopia, instead of a degenerating into barbarism and self-destruction? With everything so wonderful it is all toward more suffering, more evil, more destruction. However far it goes, the creation cannot get through, cannot break away, cannot emerge to be a glorious creation; but here is the definite statement that the creation itself shall be delivered from bondage and from corruption in the hour of the manifestation of the sons of God. What is the answer to the question of the universe? - and there is a big question. Why this universe, why even this part of it, this fragment of it, this world? What is the explanation? Give us the answer! My soul, the answer is here. As in that smaller, limited realm Adam was the answer to, and the explanation of, that first creation, so in a far larger way, Christ is the answer to, and the explanation of, all things.

(b) The Terminal Point Between Purpose and Fulfilment

But that is only the beginning. What did Adam mean in the scheme of things? He was the terminal point between purpose and fulfilment. I hope that is not too difficult. We are let into this by the Word of God, that before ever that Divine hand set to work to constitute this creation, this present world order, there were counsels purposing the eternal purpose. A great Divine thought was worked out, and it was projected, put into operation, and it reached a terminus when man, Adam, was created, because it was unto him and then to be through him for realisation. There are the simple indications in the story that God worked up to man, put things into man. 'I have made you custodian of My purposes and intentions; upon you rests the great responsibility for My purpose'. He was the terminal point at which the purpose arrived, and from which its fulfilment was intended to begin. We know, of course, his tragedy, and how the purpose stopped short with him in realisation, but God has never abandoned His purpose, and immediately Adam broke down, the last Adam was mentioned, intimated, the "Seed".

As with Adam in that limited way, that intended way, so with Christ. He is the terminal point of all Divine counsels and purposes and thoughts and intentions. They are all unto Him. For Adam, we are told, was, after all, but a figure of Him that was to come. (Rom. 5:14). In Christ, all that ever was in the purposes of God found its point of arrival, and blessed be God, through Him and by Him all those Divine purposes are worked out and perfected and realised without any breakdown. The meaning of Christ is that He is the terminal point of all the thoughts of God from eternity to eternity, as to purpose and fulfilment.

In the corporate, we, "chosen in Him," "called according to (the eternal) purpose", are to be instrumental in the working out of the purpose to its final realisation, and, as a centre to the universe, the Church will be the embodiment and representation and expression of all those Divine intentions and purposes, as we are in Christ Jesus.

(c) The Climax of Divine Energies

Again, Adam was the climax of Divine energies. God had worked, and worked steadily, developing, increasing, moving up period by period, day by day - whatever that might mean, there is room for quite a lot in it, it does not matter - He had been progressively putting forth His energies in an evergrowing way, and phase by phase, step by step, there had been added and added increase, measure by measure, enlargement upon enlargement; and man was the climax of those Divine energies. When you come to Day Seven, there is no evening or morning mentioned. It is eternal in principle, the climax of Divine energy.

We are not just thinking about material and temporal things, we are talking about the last Adam, a life-giving Spirit; we are talking about things spiritual and things eternal now. In this far greater realm, which will doubtless involve the lesser - it will involve the material creation, it will involve our very physical bodies at length - but in that which is above all and over all, supreme to all, that is, the spiritual, Christ is the climax of all Divine energies, for in Him God finishes His work and comes to rest. God finds His final satisfaction in His Son, the Lord Jesus, and the fact that He has raised Him and glorified Him - and remember that it is a part of apostolic attestation that God glorified the Son, clothed Him with glory; and what they saw by the Spirit, and what Saul of Tarsus met even in the flesh, was the glorified Son of Man - the fact that He glorified Him was God's way of attesting Him as His complete satisfaction; and the Church is ultimately seen as coming down out of heaven, having the glory of God, which means that God has found His satisfaction, not only in an individual, but in a Body, the one new man, the climax of Divine energies. God is working now. That very word in our New Testament translation - 'work' or 'working' or 'worketh' - is in the original, the word from which we get 'energy'. It is energeo: "It is God who worketh (energizeth) in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure" (Phil. 2:13). Again Paul says, "Working in us (energizing in us) that which is well-pleasing in his sight" (Heb. 13:21). So we might go on. The Divine energies are at work. What for? To bring about the climax in the Body, as it has been brought about in the Head - the climax of glory. So was Adam in his realm; so is Christ in His far more transcendent realm.

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(d) The Instrument for Answering the Iniquity of the Universe

Again, Adam was the intended instrument for answering on earth the evil that had broken out in heaven. An evil thing had occurred. One occupying a place of very great influence and glory, the "Covering Cherub," had said, "I will be like the Most High" (Isa. 14:14). Iniquity was found in him. "I beheld Satan fallen as lightning from heaven" (Luke 10:18). "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!" (Isa. 14:12 ). "And angels which kept not their own principality, but left their proper habitation, he hath kept in everlasting bonds under darkness unto the judgment of the great day" (Jude 6). An evil conspiracy, an iniquitous thing somewhere in heaven, had broken out, and evidently multitudes of angels were implicated and were cast out of that realm and they turned to the earth; and Adam had this great opportunity and great responsibility of answering that thing, so far as this earth was concerned. It was given to him in faith, in loyalty, to shut the door of this world to that iniquity, to keep it outside. We know he became the open door to it. "As through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin" (Rom. 5:12); the door was opened. We are not speaking now of the issue, we are speaking of what Adam was in the scheme of things. He was intended to be the answer on this earth to that iniquity which had broken out in the universe: he failed.

Ah, but how easy it is to see this in all that we know now about the Lord Jesus. He has shut the door of a new creation so that that iniquity will never get in, so that that death will never have a place." There shall be no more curse" (Rev. 22:3); there shall be no more sin; "there shall be no more death" (Rev. 21:4). He is a door; but a closed door to that, and an open door only to life. He has answered that iniquity so far as the creation is concerned; He has met the full force of that very same evil power. The devil and all his angels, with all the evil that they bring in their train, all the spiritual evil that surrounds them like an atmosphere, He has felt it, He has registered it, He has known its impact upon Him; He has known conflict even unto a bloody sweat. He has known it, and He has answered it. "To this end was the Son of God manifested, that he might nullify" (that is the word) "the works of the devil" (1 John 3:; and in Himself it is done. The meaning of Christ, the last Adam, is that He answers the iniquity of this universe, He has answered it by His Cross, and He has answered the instigator of it all; the prince of this world He has cast out (John 12:31).

(e) The Channel of Life to a World Race

Adam was the intended life channel to a world race. We do not know by definite statement, we can only conclude by deduction, what would have happened if they had chosen another tree instead of the one which they did choose. If they had refused the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and had chosen the tree of life, our deduction is, from fairly good intimation, that the tree of life signified, symbolised, Divine life, uncreated life; what, in the New Testament we know as eternal life; for when Adam sinned, the Lord said "...lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever" (Gen. 3:22). He put that tree out of their way and put them out of the way of that tree. Talking about spiritual principles, (you can forget the symbolism if you like), if Adam had chosen the alternative and repudiated the forbidden, he would undoubtedly have produced after his kind, and have been the door and the channel of life to a world race. On the other side, our other deduction - and it is more of a definite statement this time - is that through him death came upon all, through him, the one man; and through this other One Man - life. "The last Adam" then does really mean that He is the channel of life to a world race. That is the meaning of Christ.

But His Body is a channel also of His life, life to be transmitted from Him. How much we would like to say about that! We are simply indicating things at the moment.

(f) Spiritual Head in Terms of Life

Finally, for the moment, Adam was, in the scheme of things in the Divine thought, the spiritual head of creation and of the race in terms of life through faith and righteousness; head in terms of life. The key to everything with God is life. You begin with life, you end the Bible with life, and the whole history of things is, the battle for life, life and death locked in this terrific conflict. Christ in the higher spiritual realm than the first Adam is God's appointed Head of the creation and of the race in terms of life. It is not official, ecclesiastical, it is life. We must realise that Christ's ascendancy, supremacy, power, ability and all that goes with Headship, is in terms of His prerogative of life. He is the Son, vested with life; He has the right given Him of God to give life to as many as believe. That is why He is Head. You can set up people in office and make Popes of them and they may make great claims, but what does it amount to? When you come up against death, what can they do? But bring in one who has the power of life over death, be he ever so humble on this earth, he is head, he is master, he is lord. You may bring all the greatest physicians that the world knows into the presence of death, and when death takes charge, they are helpless. But supposing you bring in a little, insignificant person who is nobody, with no capabilities whatever in this world, no training, and that one be invested with the power of life over death, he rules out all these others, they are as nothing in his presence, he is lord of the situation.

Christ is Head, not just by appointment, but in terms of life. We may be very insignificant people on this earth, nothing at all to be taken account of by the world, but if only we have Christ in fulness of life we are in a supreme position, we make all the great organisations and institutions as nothing. It is a spiritual thing, the impact of Christ; not tradition, not history, not theology, but the spiritual power of His presence in terms of life through faith and righteousness.

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Through Faith and Righteousness

Life through faith - I expect you have fought that battle out. You know as well as I do that the sooner we settle it, the better. Immediately doubt comes in, death comes in. It does not matter how difficult the situation is, and how real and genuine may seem to be the problem, as soon as we give way to doubt we are encompassed by death, and, although the situation may seem to be an utterly impossible one, if only faith can hold, death is kept at bay, there is life through faith.

Let us look at the first Adam in this matter. The whole thing pivoted upon faith. It was through unbelief of God that death came in through the first Adam. We substitute another word for faith, in order to get nearer to it. Suppose we use the word 'loyalty' for, after all, that was the issue - loyalty to God. Loyalty is good faith. Oh, how much of death and limitation and defeat the Church is suffering today because of this disloyalty of its own people, not only to the Lord, but to one another; and the enemy has an immeasurable degree of advantage because of this disloyalty. It may seem to be coming down to a lower level, but I do think that we have to learn very much more of this lesson of mutual loyalty, standing by one another, being true to one another; even though there may be doubts and reasons for questions, nevertheless, being loyal, finding a ground of loyalty. Loyalty is a grand thing. Adam failed in loyalty to God. He listened to the Evil One; he accepted the insinuation about God; he took on the unholy inference that the devil made; he allowed it to get in and gave an assent to it instead of standing true to God, being loyal to God, saying, Well, I do not understand, I cannot explain, but I believe God! Faith and loyalty are really one in essence, and it is the only way of life.

The Lord Jesus fought that battle. Note the utter loyalty of Christ to the Father. Yes, there was plenty for the enemy to play with. He was hungry and weak from His long fast, yet He was not going to be disloyal to the Father at the suggestion of the enemy. Yes, He was suffering, and was going to suffer, ostracism, discount and persecution in this world, and it was a hard way of deprivation. That pinnacle-of-the-temple way might have been a quick road to fame and popularity, but at the expense of loyalty to the Father, and He was having none of it. "It is written"; "it is written"; "it is written". And all the way through, it was that, His solid loyalty of faith to the Father, that made Him Head in terms of life. It is a big lesson and a very difficult one. We are probably all in that hard school, but we are learning that it does not do to let in doubt, to cede any ground to the suggestions of the enemy. We know that we are involved in spiritual death immediately we begin to question the Lord. Something comes over our spirits, and we know we are paralysed until we take that ground back again, get that cleared up and recover a position of faith.

Righteousness; for our present purpose, all we will say is that righteousness means bringing everything unto God - His rights. That is where Satan sinned; he sought to draw from God to himself, to get God's worship transferred to him. That is where Adam failed; to take out of God and have it in himself. "Ye shall be..."; "ye shall know" (Gen. 3:1-5). And that is where the Lord Jesus overcame. He held everything for God and unto God; He drew everything to the Father. He attributed everything to the Father. 'The words that I speak'; 'the works that I do', (John 14:10); everything to the Father. He lived worshipping, and thus He became Head over the creation and the race that was to be, in terms of life, for worship is life, and life is because of righteousness. So says Paul.

We must stop there for the time being. Are you beginning to see something of the meaning of Christ? If we can really see the Lord anew, and come back into a more living, utter oneness with Him, there will be a recovery of the lost impact, there will be a living testimony - not just teaching and not just a movement - there will be the impact of Christ Himself. May the Lord accomplish it soon!

[Shammu]

Chapter 2 - The Incarnation and Life on Earth

"The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam a life-giving spirit" (1 Cor. 15:45).

"The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is of heaven" (1 Cor. 15:47).

A Perfect Example of the New Creation Man

Now we want to go on to the further phases of the meaning of Christ. The next is the meaning of His incarnation and life on earth. Here again, the study of the doctrine and of the history, while being very inspiring, ennobling, yet needs the Spirit of God to break in on our hearts to make us realise the tremendous significance of this matter. Simply to say that the incarnation and life on earth was a representation of the new creation man from God's standpoint is, after all, but to make a statement. There is a lot in it. But we have to know that, as it was then, so it is now, a tremendous challenge. The question might be asked - Why did the Christ come by way of birth and babyhood and childhood and youth? If He came to be the Redeemer, the Saviour, and His redemptive work was essentially and solely related to His Cross, or fulfilled in His Cross, why were thirty-three years prior to that necessary? If it is God incarnate, God has been known in the Old Testament again and again to manifest Himself along the line of what are called 'the Theophanies', that is, visible manifestation to fulfil some immediate purpose, and then, having fulfilled it, withdrawal. Why should not God manifest in the flesh have been like that, if it were only the work of the Cross that was to be done? It is a legitimate question, because much hangs upon the answer. We shall see that those thirty-three years were necessary because God takes up things right from the beginning to represent His thought in a life that is lived through its stages, its vicissitudes, here on this earth, showing what His mind is about the new creation order of man; and before He can bring that in, in any collective or corporate way, He must have worked it out in One Who is a racial First-born, in a life lived here, in this world; worked it out triumphantly and secured it against every opposing force. So He started right there in babyhood.

The Lord does not want us to be too much occupied with the natural side of this always, romancing about the manger and the stable and the inn. He wants us to get behind that. What I mean is this: anybody can talk about the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth and make of it a beautiful story and a great example and that sort of thing, and never be affected so far as an inward change and revolution is concerned; and that is the peril of it. You can see that in its grosser and exaggerated forms in some of the systems of Christendom today. You can go in certain quarters and see the thing set out in shop windows - the baby, the manger, the cattle; and you know that the system that does that sort of thing is one that has no relationship to the inner life of people at all; the two are poles asunder. But not only in that realm, but in our own realm, there is always this peril of visualising, getting a mentality and an objectivity in spiritual things, not knowing that God has something to say right into our hearts by bringing His Son here into this world from infancy onward, and having that life here in a world like this for thirty-three years. He is working out something, showing something, is doing something, and He is doing that in the spiritual realm; and He wants to repeat that in the Church and in the members of the Church, the Body of Christ.

The Spiritual Value of Christ

One thing is particularly and jealously guarded by God in the case of the earthly life of the Lord Jesus. It is this, that, whatever Christ was it was spiritual; there was nothing from cradle to grave which made Him anything naturally or temporally. It could have been otherwise, and men were looking for it to be otherwise, and were offended that it was not so, "...born King of the Jews" (Matt. 2:2), a king born in a stable and cradled in a manger, shut out, excluded, not given room! And from cradle to grave, it was like that; nothing, nothing that could be taken hold of naturally and temporally to credit Him with particular value and importance, but everything to the contrary; and God jealously guarded that, would not allow it to be otherwise, kept Him at that level. Why? For this reason and because of this principle which abides, that whatever Christ is in value, it is spiritual. It is the spiritual value of Christ that God has safeguarded, not allowing men and the world to take Him up and say, Here is some great one; look at this and that and the other thing about him! No, you can say nothing like that about Jesus of Nazareth, nothing at all. He is to the Jews a stumbling-block, to the Greeks foolishness, but to us who believe, Christ, the wisdom of God and the power of God (1 Cor. 1:23) - but a hidden wisdom, not of this world nor of the rulers of this world. Do realise that, that it is the spiritual value of Christ that God has so jealously safeguarded by the conditions of the incarnation, and of His life while here on this earth, and that is what we want to seek to work out, to recognise.

Christ has become so much other in Christianity, and thereby He has lost His impact, He has been stripped of His dynamic; embellished with an embellishment that God never countenanced. The only embellishment of Christ, if we dare use that word, the only true glorifying, the only true exalting of Christ is that of the spirit, of the heart, and therefore it is only possible for the redeemed, who know that they are redeemed, to glorify Christ truly. The Lord repudiates all the garlands laid upon Him which are temporal, in this dispensation; He will not have them. What He wants is a spirit that appreciates and values, a heart that goes out in grateful worship. You notice how, through His life, that was always the thing upon which He put His seal. Any recognition of His spiritual value, and a humble brokenness at His feet - ah, there He found what His heart wanted; and when they would cut down branches and hail Him, He had a big reserve in His heart. He knew men; that was not what really satisfied Him. A heart appreciation of Christ is the only true one.

So we have to see the spiritual value of Christ during those thirty-three years, and there is a realm for wonderful unveilings to our hearts by the Holy Spirit. I am not going through it - it would take far too long, for one thing. I am simply declaring facts, principles. But to come to two things about Him which are of abiding meaning, not only in Him personally, but, as John says, "which thing is true in him and in you" (1 John 2:. [In passing, let us note that that is the right kind of interpretation of the life of the Lord Jesus. It is a spiritual one. John got it very clearly. He will, with the opening of his Gospel, present the Son. "In the beginning was the Word" and so on. But then, when he gets to his Epistle, he starts, "That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life (and the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the eternal, which was with the Father....)" That is the life of Christ, the only really valuable one - it is the spiritual revelation of Christ to the heart.]

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Constituted by the Spirit for Life

Now, as to these two things about Him which are true in Him and in us, if we are true children of God. One, that He was constituted by the Spirit for life. He was begotten of the Holy Ghost, He was born of the Spirit; the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, was there at birth. You will see what I am after in a moment. We mention the fact that at thirty years of age, the Spirit came upon Him. What is the difference? If He was filled with the Spirit from His birth, if He was born of the Spirit, why should the Spirit come upon Him thirty years later? You have to explain that. To begin with, the answer is this - He was constituted by the Spirit for life, to live His life by the Spirit, "which thing is true in him and in you". We cannot live the life of children of God, much less as sons of God, unless we are constituted to do so by the Holy Spirit. It was for life; and here you are going to have thirty-three years with a mighty climax of what it means to live by the Spirit, and everything in that life for those years is the working out of the Spirit dwelling within. Constituted to live, just to live - that is the point. For thirty years you know very little about Him, and what you do know is that He was not doing specifically and immediately the ultimate thing for which He came. You know that for thirty years He was more or less a private person living a private life, doing the work which many other men did, an ordinary trade, probably looking after a widowed mother, and helping to look after and support a large family, and learning privation and how to make ends meet, so that later He knew the cost of two sparrows in the market, and if you could buy two farthings' worth you would get an extra bird thrown in. How did He know that? He had probably lived it through. But through all that, He was living His life by the Spirit, and God was causing a man to live on the basis of the new creation by constituting him by the indwelling Spirit. Perhaps my way of saying it may be open to correction, but you see what I am after.

And, dear friends, in this new creation in Christ Jesus, we are called to live here, not romantic lives at all, not lives of great public attraction and interest, but ordinary lives - to do our job, learn our lessons, experience adversities, carry responsibilities, do the thousand and one things which belong to the ordinary person's life, but to live on a higher level than the ordinary person; and that cannot be done unless we are constituted to do it by the Holy Spirit. But it can be if we are. And one aspect or one side of the Holy Spirit's purpose in coming is to enable men and women to live the life of men and women in this world, on this earth, but on another level. Do believe that. So many people think that immediately they become Christians and are interested in the Lord's work, they have to come out of the ordinary realm of daily life and become something special - that the Holy Spirit being within them, of course they must give up their job and go and find some other kind of work for the Lord. Don't you believe it! I do not believe that the Lord does that sort of thing with anybody until He has made them live a life on a higher level in spheres where everybody else has to live. If you cannot do that, give up hope of being sent by the Lord into some other kind of sphere or work. If you try it by direct means or back doors, you will find that the Lord is never got over in that way. We have to be brought back here to live on the new creation level in this old creation world by being so constituted of the Holy Spirit. Is there any impact in that? I am sure there is challenge in it. So face your situation and understand why the Lord holds you in it and does not let you out. You have got to live there by the Holy Spirit before the Lord will make a change. So for thirty years He lived an ordinary life in an extraordinary way. He was constituted from birth by the Holy Spirit to live in the realm of the new creation while still moving in the realm of the old. We are constituted from new birth for that very purpose. That is one thing.

Anointed of the Spirit for Specific Work

Then we come to this matter of the anointing at thirty years of age. What is this? Ah, this is a new phase. He was anointed of the Holy Ghost for specific work, for that supreme thing for which He had come and been chosen of God - anointed of God for the remaining three and a half years and all that that meant. I want to get inside of that. You see, the Lord Jesus had a spirit in Him, His own human spirit, and in His case, His human spirit was sinless, and yet it was necessary that the Spirit of God should utterly dominate that human spirit, and hold entire government over it. When it came to working out the great purpose of God - not only living a life, but now working out something very much more serious and grim than that - the great purpose of God - it was necessary that the Spirit of God should utterly dominate Him for this reason - to hold everything unto God, that everything should be out from God, not even out from His own spirit. This whole work of God had to be held very strongly into God so that it was wholly and utterly of God.

You get back into the Old Testament, you have it in type and representation. You know how, again and again, the Spirit of the Lord came upon this one and that one, men represented as being already consecrated to the Lord. In all the typical sense, they were sanctified people. Bezaleel and Aholiab were consecrated men, separated unto the Lord. In the type, they were sanctified men, but the Spirit of God came upon them. You see, even consecrated men are not to be left to themselves, not to have ability in themselves and act out from themselves. Taking Bezaleel and Aholiab as examples - the Spirit of God came upon them. Why? Because there is a Divine pattern to be meticulously followed and carried out, and it is not going to be left even to people who are most devoted to the Lord to do the Lord's work out from themselves. Only the Spirit of God knows what and how and when, and that is very important to God. Not what we, in most earnest devotion, think should be done for the Lord - He does not accept that; not how we, with all the best motive in the world and the heart most real in its desire for the Lord's glory, think it should be done; and not when or where we, though given to the Lord, think or feel it should be. Not a bit of it!

Paul was a very consecrated man, out and out for God. There is no doubt about him, about his true zeal for God. (I am speaking of his post-conversion zeal.) He is a man who knows the Lord, whose spirit has been quickened, and whose spirit is indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and yet he will essay to go into Bithynia, and to preach the word in Asia, but the Spirit of Jesus will suffer him not (Acts 16:7). He will be forbidden of the Holy Ghost to go in the way on which he set out. You see the point.

Now, I am not saying that Jesus and Paul are identical, but I am saying that the Lord Jesus is a representation here on this earth of a man living in this world on the new creation basis and principle. I am not leaving out His Deity. I am talking in the realm of God bringing here an example, a perfect example or representation of a new creation man, and the principles of the life of such. To live that new creation life he must be constituted by the Holy Spirit. To fulfil the work of God, he must be anointed, because everything has to be held to God, held for God, come out from God, and only so can there be the effect and the impact - and it is an impact when the Holy Ghost gets hold of us and moves us in His direction. Was it not so with Paul? He thought to preach the word in Asia, essayed to go into Bithynia and the Spirit of Jesus suffered him not. The Spirit of Jesus took the positive as well as the negative line, and directed him to Philippi. Was there impact at Philippi? All hell felt the impact there, and we know the result of that visit to Philippi, both in the church then and in the product of that church spiritually through all these centuries. That letter to Philippi is the product of the church at Philippi. That little letter touches great ranges. The Anointing is necessary to bring about that kind of thing. It is not only necessary to be born of the Spirit and consecrated to God, but governed by the Lord. The Anointing means that everything in life and service must be held unto God and come out from God. Paul says "If any man is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new. But all things are of God" (2 Cor. 5:17-18). All things are 'out from' God.

[Shammu]

The Impact of Christ

Now this one further thing. Because the Lord Jesus lived on that basis and principle of a life lived in and by the Spirit, and a work carried out under the government of the Spirit, His earthly life here was a constant registration, both amongst men and in the spiritual realm. If there is one thing patent about His life here on earth, it is this, that, wherever He went something started up, nothing just lay dormant. People and demons were stirred; His presence meant that. The presence of the Lord Jesus in the house of Zacchaeus will cause Zacchaeus to confess his miserable, contemptible sin and wrong-doing. That results from the Lord's presence. "Today I must abide at thy house". You do not learn of anything else the Lord said to him. The story stops with that, and surely, if the Holy Spirit had meant us to know any more, He would have given more details. But the Holy Spirit has been content to say this; the Lord Jesus went into the house and the man began to feel bad and to say so. That is all. You have numerous instances of that sort of thing amongst people. Religious, self-righteous people, begin to excuse or to justify themselves. Have you not met such? They immediately begin to tell you what good people they are - they are not feeling comfortable, they have somehow to put up their fortifications, to protect their position. So it was with the religious people of Christ's day, and with the rest. Yes, He did not move amongst them without something happening. And the very demons cried out, "What have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God" (Mark 1:24). What is the matter with them? He is there under the Anointing, in the power of the Spirit; something is going to happen, it must happen. And, dear friends, that is just where our need comes - that our lives really do result in something. I am not saying that you and I should pass down the street and everybody should begin to shout and talk. But I do think that it must be true that our having been on this earth has registered something which means that things cannot just remain dormant as they were. Of course, many of you know this in your own experience as a believer amongst unbelievers. You know, without saying anything to them, how they begin to wriggle, to talk, very often. Praise God if that is so; it is a sign that the Spirit is in you if people are up against you - if you do not ask for it. If you are living there quietly and beautifully by the Spirit of the Lord, and things become ugly around you, be encouraged, that is how it should be. If you are a child of God and no one feels it, there is something wrong. The enemy knows where Christ is. I need not say more along that line. Here is the meaning of Christ's life on the earth - it was to show what a life in the new creation is like, and what its effect is, how it is first constituted and then governed by the Spirit. And, by all the teaching of the New Testament, this is intended to be true of us, true of the Church and of believers. O God, make it more true! That must be our prayer. This is where we must have our response, our reaction. It is not enough merely to accept the tale of the life of Jesus, the story of His birth and of His going about doing good: but what is the effect of this in the realm of things spiritual? What is the abiding value, as far as you and I are concerned, and the Lord's people? It must touch a realm beyond this earthly, and stir to the depths the realm of evil spiritual intelligences. His life was a mighty challenge in every realm, because the Spirit of God was upon Him.

I have not touched in detail that large realm of His life where the Anointing governed His movements. That is quite patent - that He did not move on the ground of His personal devotion to the Father. He moved by intimation and direction of the Spirit of God. You can see why the Church has lost its impact. It is because it has concluded that, once you have consecrated your life to the Lord, you can do anything you like - arrange for the Lord, plan, scheme, do all sorts of things for the Lord. The Church has been doing that for a long time, it is doing it now. Their argument is that it is for the Lord. How far is it getting? What is the comparative value of it? I leave you to answer that. It was not like that at the beginning, in the case of the Lord Jesus, in the first days of the Church when the Spirit, by the Anointing, really did govern. In a very short time, far, far more was achieved than was done in a very, very long time afterwards. No, we are consecrated to the Lord, but we have to have the Lord's direction for every movement, and not conclude that, because we are out for the Lord, we must just do all we can. Let us get it from the Lord, and only so will it be effective. It is not easy, perhaps, or it does not seem easy, but it is something to which the Lord calls us, and it is the way back to effectiveness. At any rate, let us put it like this - there is going to be nothing unless it is under the Anointing, and the Anointing means full charge of all life and all activity. Here is the place for repentance - repentance that there has been so much of ourselves and so little of the Lord. Here is the place for submission, that He shall be Lord in the power and reality of the Anointing. The Lord grant it!

[Shammu]

Chapter 3 - His Uniqueness

"So also it is written, The first man Adam became a living soul; the last Adam... a life-giving spirit. The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is of heaven" (1 Cor. 15:45,47).

"Wherefore we henceforth know no man after the flesh: even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so no more. Wherefore if any man is in Christ, there is a new creation" (2 Cor. 5:16-17).

I am returning to our previous meditation in relation to the incarnation and life on earth of the Lord Jesus as representative of the new creation. Let us at the outset understand Paul aright. When he said 'Henceforth we know Christ no more after the flesh' he did not dismiss the incarnation and the earthly life as being of no value and meaning. He meant that we no longer take account of Jesus of Nazareth simply as a man, or as a prophet, or (as many believed) as an impostor: as a man who had come into the limelight, made great claims, done many things difficult to understand and said many things which were extraordinary, and then had been taken by the Jews and delivered up and crucified: knowing Christ after the flesh, as we might know any other man. You notice that the immediate connection is with knowing people just as they are naturally on the earth, and Paul says that neither other men nor Christ do we henceforth know on that level. The other, and positive, side is that our knowing now of one another and of Christ is in the new creation, their place and meaning there - that is the realm in which we take note, recognise and appreciate, that is the thing with which we are occupied. I have sought to make that perfectly clear, because, to go back and dwell much upon the incarnation and earthly life of the Lord Jesus might otherwise look like a contradiction. Some might think that that is knowing Christ after the flesh, and that is the very thing we are seeking not to do, even while we dwell upon His earthly life. What we are really seeking at this time is that knowing of Christ - even in His earthly life - after the Spirit, getting through to the inner significance and meaning of Christ, and by coming into vital contact with the Divine, the heavenly, the spiritual, the eternal meaning, find a registration upon ourselves - what we have called an impact, a challenge, and the setting up of something to which we have to be adjusted and conformed.

But added to that, let me say this, that, when the Apostle speaks in his letter to the Romans about our being predestinated to be conformed to the image of His Son (Rom. 8:29), he is not referring to some image which Christ entered into when He went into heaven. Perhaps because we have not thought about this carefully, we have a way of thinking of Christ in heaven as altogether different from Christ on earth, and that we are conformed to that Christ in heaven, and not to this Christ on earth. I want to correct that. The Christ in heaven, glorified, is only the glorifying of the Man Who was here, or the glorifying of that which was true of Him here, taking it up into glory and establishing it there in the presence of God, attested and sealed with glory. It is the perfection of what was here. He was perfected through sufferings, and the arriving at a position of fulness (which is the word 'perfection', completeness) brought the seal of God in glory. It is not another Christ in glory, it is the same One - the Man in the glory, perfected and glorified - and it is that nature, that disposition, that conduct of His which were here on the earth, with all their features and characteristics, which are taken up into glory and established there. We are to be conformed to Christ as He was here inwardly, so that we also share His glory when perfected together with Him at the end. We have not to try and study a Christ of a mentality up there, but to get, by the Spirit, to the inside of the Christ Who was here, and as He was here: not the imitation of Christ according to Thomas a Kempis (that is mysticism, asceticism) but the inward revelation of Christ to our hearts, according to the hymn that we often sing - that which results in extinguishing our tapers because the sun has risen, the discarding of our winter garments because the summer has come, the smashing of our idols because He has filled the heart. That must become the spiritual experience, and progressively so. So we come to all that is recorded about Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Man, and ask the Holy Spirit to teach and to show us Christ from the inside. If the Holy Spirit does give us an insight into the Lord Jesus as He moved on this earth, there will be a tremendous effect upon our lives and a tremendous challenge. It will be the Spirit's method of conforming us to the image of God's Son.

[Shammu]

A Universal, Collective Person

Therefore we must begin by recognising the uniqueness of the Son of Man; everything begins there. When we use that word 'unique' we are always tempted to violate the laws of English grammar. You find people saying that a thing is 'absolutely unique'. Here you feel you want some emphasis on that word 'unique', but it will not do. There are no degrees of uniqueness. 'Unique' is complete and final in itself. When a thing is unique there is nothing else in the universe like it, it stands alone. So we must recognise the uniqueness of the Son of Man. There never has been another Son of Man in the sense in which He was Son of Man. His uniqueness is found in this, that all that is in the thought of God, all that is heavenly in thought and conception, value and meaning, all that expansiveness of the universal which God is, is crowded down into this one Person; and as the Spirit leads you into Christ, you find that you have been led into an utterly boundless ocean, you have been lifted completely out of every kind of limitation into what is universal. More, you have been brought into touch with that which is not of this earth at all. You cannot find its like here, you cannot find anything of its order here. It is another order, a heavenly order, crowded down into this one life. You find that Christ, the Son of Man, is not just a single Person. Yes, here He is, in a sense one, but He is a race crowded in, He is a collective Person, everything is gathered into Him. If you get your feet on the road of the revelation of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit from the inside, you will find as you move along that road that you come into the vision that the Apostle Paul had, that entrancing, enthralling, captivating vision which simply possessed Paul as he saw at length all the scattered, broken fragments of the creation gathered together and made one in Christ, the restitution of all things in Christ, all that which was divided and broken and scattered, gathered together in the new creation in Christ; and you begin to see how that can be, because here is such a comprehensive, all-embracing Person.

You know how impossible it is to put Christ down into any one of the sections of human life or of this world order and bind Him to that, and make Him the property of that alone. Can you really put Christ down into any one nation and say that He belongs to it? Yes, a Syrian by birth, but He belongs to all the nations, and all the nations have found Him just as much one of themselves, in meeting their need and answering to their hearts and challenging their conditions, as His own nation by birth. All nations shall call Him blessed. He is the desire of all nations. Can you put Him into any quarter of the earth? Take the four quarters. Take the West with its energy, its genius for getting things done. Well, what does Christ say to this active, energetic, Western world? He is not out of place here, and yet He would say something corrective to us about rest and patience. But He would not say, You must slow down in order to know rest. He would say, You can know rest in toil, in activity. Do you see what I am getting at? Christ does not say to us in this Western world, with all the fret and rush and drive and activity, All that must of necessity stop when you come to Me; but He says, You have to find the secret of rest in the midst of it all: for rest is not ceasing from doing, rest is a matter of the heart, and "you shall find rest unto your souls" (Matt. 11:29). Yes, He comes in, He is not out of place here.

Or go to the East. There you have slow and pensive patience, quiet, everlasting jog-trot - hardly that. What will He do with that? He fits in perfectly. He does not say, You must become energetic, and throw off this sloth, and so on; but He also has a corrective for that world. There is a lot in the New Testament about being not slothful in business, being fervent in spirit. You do not find a great deal of fervour of spirit on that side of the world. They are very easy-going, taking things as they come; but He will speak about fervour of spirit. He fits in, He has something to say. He is no stranger.

Go to Northern climes where things are hard and rugged, serious and grim, and you will find the Lord Jesus fits in and relieves the strain and smooths the ruggedness, and you will find beauty brought in there by Him. Go to the South with its passion and heat; you find saints in the Southern climes, and by the corrective of His presence that passion is changed to true love. The Lord Jesus, you see, comprehends all, and it would be, perhaps, interesting and profitable if we were to pursue that line further.

The Divine Answer to Universal Human Need

What I am trying to get at is this, that He brings in the fulness of heaven in His one Person, and we find that He comprehends the race and meets the need of the whole, and challenges the condition of the whole. He is not outside of anyone as a stranger, He is a universal Christ, a heavenly Christ, there is not another like Him. Other prophets belong to certain realms and environments and constitutions, and they are suited to those; but He, the Son of Man, is unique.

But you can bring that down to smallest details. Here we are, enough to represent a fair variety of dispositions and constitutions and temperaments. There are many differences among us. In medicine, the thing which differentiates people from a certain standard of law is called an idiosyncracy. Can you find any idiosyncracy in Christ? You will not find one, He has not got one. He utterly conforms to standard, and yet He meets us in all our variety, in all our differentiations. Not two of us are exactly alike, but we can everyone of us say that the Lord Jesus has exactly met our need, met us not in outward things - we are not talking of temporal things - but met us as we are. Not one of us can say, He may be all right for so-and-so because their make-up and temperament is just what He suits, but He does not fit in with me. We can, if we do not already, know Christ for ourselves as exactly meeting our particular make-up; and that can be spread over millions and millions of different people, all of whom have an idiosyncracy, something which makes them different from everyone else; the Lord Jesus perfectly meets everyone in their inner life and becomes the answer to their particular need. To know Christ after the Spirit means to know Him in this way, how He meets our particular need and becomes a living reality in our particular make-up.

Take heart, dear friends. You may think that yours is the most difficult nature that God ever had to deal with, and you may have despaired of yourself. Ah, but here is One Who comprehends all. He is not just a single Person to meet some particular kind of man or woman, He is a combination of all and yet outside all in that heavenly distinctiveness. When He was here on earth, the poor were able to say, He is one of us; arid yet He was at home as much with the rich as with the poor. There was no strain with Him, whatever circle He moved in. He was perfectly comfortable with the most learned, and with the ignorant. He embraces all. To learn Christ after the Spirit is to learn how He meets our personal need and the need of everyone.

[Shammu]

The Restorer of True Unity in a New Creation

Then to recognise how He is going to gather up into Himself all the broken fragments. Is not the race a shattered, broken, scattered thing? It is all fragments. How will that new creation man, that new creation race, be one? We begin to see it is one in Christ. It is going to take His likeness, be all-inclusive. It is a mystery, difficult to present, to speak about. Do you glimpse it? There is One Who takes up all these shattered fragments in His own uniting Person on a higher level, and in His own Person makes them one, so that they are all complements of one another instead of at variance with one another. Oh, temperaments are so different, they will never get on together! Christ is of no one temperament. Tabulate the temperaments as we know them and see where you fix Him! He was not temperamental at all, He was above it. Now gather into Him in a spiritual way and partake of His nature, and you can see a single Body fitly framed together, a beautiful harmony. Do you see through the spiritual meaning of Christ? He is going to gather the scattered children of men into one. How? Not geographically, calling them together from the ends of the earth and doing it from the outside. He is going to do it by the revelation of Himself first of all to their hearts, and then the work of His Spirit upon that revelation. When that happened at the beginning, it was a beautiful token of what it will be at the end. You see it in Jerusalem in those days. Oh, the love, the harmony, the selflessness, the self-forgetting! - continuing together, calling nothing that they had their own; just a foretaste of what is going to be - of what Christ means, in fact, when first of all He is seen and then the Holy Spirit acts upon that in the heart. Well, I have only started on that. May that glimpse mean something. What we need, first of all, is to see the Lord, yes, to see Jesus, by the Holy Ghost, and then to have His Spirit at work upon that revelation to conform us to His image. We know Him no longer after the flesh. Oh, to know Him - but to know Him as He really is! The Lord give us that knowledge, and, by even our brief and so stammering attempt at touching upon Him in His reality, stir our hearts to see that here is One in Whom is all the possibility of solving every problem, answering every question, and doing what no armies or organisations or leagues can ever do - gathering together into one: not organised oneness, but organic oneness. The Lord open our eyes!

[Shammu]

Chapter 4 - Knowledge of Christ After the Spirit

I am continuing for a little while our previous meditation. We were thinking of the uniqueness of the Son of Man, and seeking to see how Christ is the Divine meaning to and of a new race, a new creation; how in the new creation it is God's intention and undertaking to reconstitute everything according to Christ. We were especially emphasising the fact that He stands alone; there is not another, there never has been another, Son of Man in His particular sense, and that in itself indicates what God is doing. There has come out from heaven, from God, one Who is different from all others, and in the very difference itself there is implied the mind and the intention of God, inasmuch as that One has been so vitally related to the race. We were seeing how that, on the one hand, there was such a feeling that He was one with all shades, aspects and phases of the race, He fitted in - with men, women, and children: with rich and poor: with learned and unlearned. There was never a strain, an embarrassment, a sense that He was an outsider, in any one instance. He fitted in with different nationalities. On the other hand, while everybody felt His kinship with them, they also felt just as strongly how outside He was, how different. That is unique. To be so utterly other and outside and different, and not of this race in a very real sense, and yet to fit in without any friction or strain, where things are open and unforced, that is not natural. The only strain that ever arose was in the realm of prejudice and bigotry and determination not to have Him, or of willful sin, deliberate unbelief, the closed heart. Given the ordinary life, however varied, there was a marvellous kinship, sympathy, understanding, fellowship - and yet He was One from the outside, and One still of the outside. To reconcile those two things is the miracle of the incarnation, it is the mystery of Christ - and that is my next point.

In the World, but not of the World

If we are going to be conformed to His image, reconstituted inwardly on the basis of Christ, as we are to be, we are going to find this is the most difficult thing, and yet the thing that has to be. Paul in one place touches on this very thing about people becoming so exclusive in their Christianity on the matter of externals, and he says, Well, if we are going to follow that line, we might as well go right out of the world altogether, we cannot stay here (1 Cor. 5:9-10). How can we be in the world and not of it, and yet possess an abiding sympathy so that we do not unnecessarily alienate people, and do not put ourselves in some exclusive position, all the time frowning on people and things and making them feel that we think ourselves different and better by what we do and the way we proceed? How difficult it is to contemplate this - to be here, to touch human life at all points in all its phases and aspects, and to touch it with sympathy and understanding and kindness and solicitude, and not always the spirit of condemnation and detachment; and yet at the same time to register the fact unconsciously - oh, God grant that it may be unconsciously! - that we are different, we are not of it. I believe that a very great deal of harm has been done by Christians getting a wrong conception of their heavenliness. They have taken their heavenliness in a wrong way. If you walk in close touch with Christ, the heavenliness will register itself, you need not worry about it. People have been alienated, and even made antagonistic, by Christians who are all the time frowning on them, giving the impression that they are all wrong. I look again at the Master's life on earth with this thought in mind. He comes into a situation which is wrong; He does not condone it, nor smile upon it, nor accept it, His whole nature is right outside of it; and yet His touch with the persons involved is one that does not necessarily alienate them, nor drive them away, nor provoke them, irritate them, stir them to antagonism. He comes into the situation and the effect is either that they yield to His influence and He is able to lift them out of the wrong, or they revolt positively and turn away. I could cite instances. I am asking you to look at the life of the Master with this spiritual thought in view.

Consider the woman taken in sin. Do you think He accepted that, or was sympathetic to it, or could condone it? Do you not think that there was a revulsion in Him against the thing? He could not have any fellowship with it. He might well have come to this woman with a frown and caused her to cringe, to shrink, to break out in despair. He is outside of it, you know what His nature is, but oh! He is able to come near and touch her in such a way that she is not alienated nor driven off, she is lifted and helped. Now that is a simple incident, but I say it is a most difficult thing to do in a world like this, and only Christ in us can enable us to do it; but it is something we have to look at.

What is the object of Christian teaching? It is to present us with things like this and make us face them in prayer. The teaching cannot do it, but we can take it to the Lord. We can say, Lord, here I am in this world and I have to touch things against which my soul revolts, all that is of Thee in me hates it, and I could very easily make these people feel what I feel about it, and in so doing, I could drive them away from Thee. But they have to be won, they have to feel a lift by my presence rather than a crushing. Oh, solve that problem! Really, a life in true harmony with the Lord Jesus will be like that. "As he is, even so are we in this world" (1 John 4:17). Can you meet people of this world, whose life, manner, course and system simply revolt your soul, and make them feel something better by your presence - that you are not of their way and they know it - and yet not alienate them from the Lord? I say it is one of the difficult things for us here. But I am quite sure that that is the meaning of knowing Christ not after the flesh but after the Spirit. That is one of the meanings of the new creation. We have known so many well-meaning Christians who have simply gone through the world making enemies, alienating people, making them hate Christianity. That is not Christ.

Now, the difficulty is how to do that while standing clear - without yielding, without compromise; but there is a grace of God that can do it. The Lord Jesus did it, and if there is any meaning at all in our having the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of Jesus, the meaning is practical - we can do it too. His closeness of touch, sympathy, understanding, forbearance, gentleness, longsuffering, mercifulness, and yet His complete "otherness" of nature - that is Christ after the Spirit.

[Shammu]

A Perfectly Balanced Life

Then I want you to note another thing about Him which has so much to do with this inward adjustment of a Spirit-governed life - it has to do with the wonderful balance in the life of the Lord. How poised He was, how balanced! Take the matter of mind, heart and will, and you find in His case those three were perfectly balanced. We are very different naturally. I suppose people as a whole can be divided up into three classes - firstly, those who are more in the realm of their head than anywhere else. They are all head in one way or another. If they are not intellectual, they are of another kind of mentality - introspective, analysing, going round things in the mind, all thinking, all puzzling, all reasoning, all working in that realm: that is the chief characteristic. You can see it almost in their faces. It is this trying to get through with the head that more or less characterises people of a certain class. Then you have another class - all heart, all feeling, all emotion. They simply live in their feelings - perhaps different forms, but still feelings. They are governed by their feelings, and just how things affect them in the realm of their emotional life. They are either up or they are down - you can never be sure, but you do know that, whether they are up or down, it is their feelings that are ruling. If only they would think a little more and not move so much on impulse, they would be more balanced. The third class - people governed by will, people of a drive, forceful, assertive. The will is unreasoning sometimes. They do not stop to think. They get a drive on, but do not think of the damage they are doing to themselves or other people. Their will overrides feeling - very good sometimes to do that, but to be all will, all of that kind of strength, determination, grip and force, oh, it is overbearing, and does a lot of harm.

People are more or less divided into those classes naturally, but you cannot find anything like that with the Lord Jesus on earth. You can find will coming in at times very strongly, and sometimes heart and sometimes mind. Yes, mind could come in, and who could stand up against Him in that realm? Some of His answers silenced, paralysed, those who were cleverest. Look at some of the answers He gives, some of the ways He deals with a problem. They think they have Him this time, there is no way out. A simple statement, and the whole thing collapses; they have not got Him at all! But the point is this - while these things are there, they are balanced; there is never strength of will to the hurt of sensibility; there is never strength of emotion to the damage of rightful severity. He does not allow His heart to run away with His sense of judgment. He is perfectly balanced; and that is one of our needs. But that is why the Holy Spirit has come, and this is one of the things that has to take place in a Holy Spirit ruled life. It has to become a balanced life, to be saved from being lopsided. Anything over-weighted makes going very uneven. Draw a figure of a circle, and divide it into three segments - "mind", "heart", "will." Then get a bump on "will" a little bigger than heart or mind, and make your circle into a wheel, and see how evenly you go along! - the unevenness of an unbalanced life. It makes going difficult, hard and uncomfortable.

Take the even poise of our Lord's walk here on earth. Now, what we all need is that the Spirit of Christ should come in and bring about an adjustment to Him, reconstitute us so that we go along more evenly - not one day on the heights, the next day in the depths, variable, changeable, because our soul-life is so unbalanced. We have a long way to go in this, but conformity to His image means that, amongst many other things - the bringing of a poise into life, and saving us from these terrible effects of straining, of living in one realm of our souls more than another. We do need that. We sometimes sing "And let our ordered lives confess the beauty of Thy peace." I tell you, I covet that - that ordered life inwardly.

But then not only were the three things in Him balanced as three things, there was a perfect balance in each one of them. There was the perfect balance of His mind, the balance of His will, the balance of His heart, in this way - you can have a mind that is a very righteous mind, and be a person who is very just and right and proper, very accurate, very alive to anything that is a little doubtful. These very righteous people are exceedingly trying to get on with, and they make for great difficulty. You may be a very righteous person in your standards, and require to have things perfectly right - well, that is good in a way, but supposing your righteousness of mind is destroying tenderness and sympathy of judgment? I think George Eliot went to the other extreme, but there is a lot in what she said "To understand all is to forgive all." If only we really did know more than we know, our judgments would be less severe. We should see the necessity for reconsidering our verdicts, and be a great deal more sympathetic in our attitude of righteousness. The Lord was like that. You could not have anybody whose standard of righteousness was higher than His, or as high. His standard was an inflexible standard of righteousness: you can trace that in the Gospels; and yet His righteousness was never destructive of, or injurious to, His understanding, His sympathy, His kindness. A thing may be wrong, but there are two ways of bringing home the wrong and standing for the right. One is the destructive, the hurtful; the other, while it is not a variation by a hairsbreadth from the right course, is nevertheless full of understanding and sympathy and insight. With us, it may only amount to believing that there is an explanation that we do not see, a reason that is not apparent to us, another side to the story. (There are almost always two sides to a story. You very, very rarely come upon a matter that has not got two sides to it.) The Lord Jesus lived there, He had His standard, but it was not injurious to kindness and sympathy. We need that Spirit of Christ, we need that reconstituting.

I am not going to follow this in detail into each realm. You can see that His strength of will never rode rough-shod over human susceptibilities or did damage to men's hearts. His strength of will only blazed out in full force when there was the most obvious and manifest involving of the highest principles, when He had really to withstand the thing which was a positive affront to God. Then He will have a whip and knotted cords, and you meet something that does not compromise. But at other times, you can feel the strength of His will, but you can feel that strength coming through in understanding. I venture to say that His relationship with those disciples would not have lasted three days but for this. Look at the story, and see how He bore and forbore, and went right through to the end, and did not alienate one (save that one who was already alienated from the beginning, who never really was one with Him) but He kept those whom the Father had given Him. "Those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition" (John 17:12). But what a triumph of a balanced life! It is what in the later New Testament is called self-control, sometimes called temperance. It is a poor translation into our English; but it means that, He was able to preserve others in the way because of this.

[Shammu]

The Need for Subjection to Christ's Headship

I want to pass on to the larger application of this. This is why the Word of God so often emphasises that everything in the Church must be according to Christ. He personally is the new Man; the Church His Body is the one new man. Now here in the Church, the Holy Spirit wants to constitute corporately according to Christ, and if the old man comes into the Church with his state of unbalance, and some people or individuals in the Church move along one line, and others along another line, of natural life - mind, heart or will, any particular old creation line - they destroy the Church, that is, they nullify its very conception. In the Church all is to speak of Christ, and therefore in the Church what Christ is has steadily to grow and take ascendancy over all else: and that is why there must be in the Church utter subjection to Christ's Headship. We have such mental pictures about words like that - Christ, the Head of the Body. Do you not see that the Headship of Christ is a spiritual thing? Of course, we are perhaps not thinking that it is a physical thing, but somehow we do get an idea that it is an official thing. It is not physical and it is not official; it is spiritual. That means that Headship is in virtue of certain spiritual properties, a spiritual nature; and when we talk about becoming subject to Christ, and coming under the Headship of Christ, we are only speaking figuratively of being subjected to what Christ is - that He really does come on like the head and stands over, and everything is adjusted to Him and takes its nature from Him; just as our bodies take their direction from our heads, if we are normal people. Just as we live from our heads, and our character and nature and actions and speech are all controlled by the head, so the nature of the Church is taken from the nature of Christ; and what the Lord is seeking to get is a Church which does express what Christ is - this balance. Yes, His strength, but also His love; His truth and light, yes, but equally His life. Oh, we can have such a preponderance of light and truth - all head - and little heart. I have known, on the other hand, companies where all is heart, the people falling on one another's necks, with effusive terms of so-called love, and yet they are not growing, not coming to a place of responsibility. It sounds and looks like love, but underneath there is something lacking. They need instruction, they need edifying. When the Body is fitly framed and compacted, balanced, brought into proper articulation and harmony, taking its nature and its character from Christ and therefore governed by what He is as the new creation Man, then you are getting what God is after; and you can have that in a local company and in local companies, which thereby become, not places that stand for some extraordinary truth, something different from all other teachings, and all the time trying to get hold of something that is extraordinary and remote from common recognition - no, you simply get there an embodiment and an expression of Christ, and that is all that God wants, and all we ought to want. People meeting us as companies as well as individuals will be meeting something that touches them. They will say, If only there were more of this, the world would be a different place, and yet this is something so outside the realm of human possibility that only God could do this; this is God! It requires Almighty God, and yet here it is, it touches us, we see that this is what is needed! Oh, the tragedy in this connexion in these days! You hear it on the wireless almost any day; you find the literature of our day just crowded with it - the recognition of the fact that if only things were on the line of Christ, if only Christ's teaching were put into practice, if only Christ, and what He was, really were here and expressed, how different the world would be! There is plenty of recognition and acknowledgment of that; but on the other side, men at once begin to say, Well, let us get busy on this, we will do this and that to bring it about. They do not recognise that this is a miracle from heaven, and that it has to come in by a birth, a reconstituting, a new creation fiat. That is where the gap is, and the tragedy, and men fall between the two. But we know better; there He is, and there His Spirit is to do it. It seems to take a long time. A little bit of conformity to His image seems to occupy almost a lifetime. But nevertheless He is doing something, it does make a difference to have Christ; there are many changes because Christ has come in - we do know that. There are going to be greater changes yet. After all, whatever we may say about the poverty of things in the Church, the world would be a poor place if the people of God were taken out of it; and it will be, when they have gone. There is something here that is not of the world, and the world needs it. The Lord help us to see Christ and get continually to Him for this conformity to His image, this taking of the Spirit of Christ, this inward reconstituting after the Son of Man, a new creation in Christ Jesus.

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Chapter 5 - Christ Crucified

When we were thinking about this matter in its wider range of the second man, the last Adam, our key phrase from Scripture was 1 Cor. 15:45 - "The last Adam became a life-giving Spirit." Then we proceeded to be occupied with the uniqueness of the Son of Man. We added to that 2 Cor. 5:16 - "Wherefore we henceforth know no man after the flesh: even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so no more" - implying that Christ has to be known in another way than after the flesh.

Now we move on to the third phase, and we add another well-known passage from 1 Cor. 2:1,2:-

"And I, brethren, when I came unto you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the mystery of God. For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified."

The meaning of Christ? - Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

The Undercutting of a False Man

Although we have not, by a very great way, covered the meaning, for ourselves individually and for the Church, of His incarnation and earthly life, we have to move on and come anew to the meaning of Christ in the terms of His Cross - again something far beyond the possibility of our compassing within a short time, and of necessity to be looked at perhaps in only one particular; and that is, that the Cross of our Lord Jesus was the undercutting of a false man to make way for a true man. We have seen how that true man was brought in, and there is so very much more contained in those statements of His which, on the face of them, seem so simple and commonplace. "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6) - that comprehends everything for the new creation. The central word alone - "I am the truth" - quite clearly indicates that the truth is a Person, and not a system of teaching, not a philosophy; it is a Person. In other words, the Lord Jesus was saying, I am the true Man according to God's mind; all other men now are false to the Divine thought, a contradiction; there is one great, corporate, false man here; I am the truth as to God's idea about man, and I am the first of a great, comprehensive, corporate, true man, the one new man.

The true Man according to God's thought and intention was brought in in incarnation; He had grown up and lived His life by the Spirit; He had been tested, and through testing had been perfected; and then had been attested, and then placed, established, in heaven - there as the firstborn among many brethren, the standard and type and pattern to which the Spirit sent would work in a multitude of men. But, before that could be done, something had to take place to dispose of the false man, and so at a certain clearly defined point a new phase of His life was taken up - the phase of the Cross. That point is clearly discernible. Everything before had moved steadily up to one climax, and that was the climax of the transfiguration; the Man brought in, tested, perfected, and attested as seen in the Mount of Transfiguration. So far as He Himself was concerned, it finished on the Mount of Transfiguration. He is glorified, He is attested from heaven, He is clothed with heavenly glory; for Himself there is nothing whatever to stand between Him and entrance triumphantly into heaven; but He turns and comes down the Mount, and takes up this further phase of His meaning in relation to the false man, the man who is in a place from which he has to be removed to make room for the new corporate true man. Thus He descends and from that time He moves toward that point where He stands as the representative of the false man. On one side of His Cross, it is that. (There is another side, where He is offering Himself without spot unto God. There are two sides to the Cross.) But on this one side, He Who knew no sin was made sin in our stead that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (2. Cor. 5:21). How utter that statement is! It goes deeper than any other statement about the Cross. You have the statement that He "bare our sins in his body upon the tree" (1 Pet. 2:24), but here it is more utter than that - He is made sin in our stead, meaning that we are sin: we not only have sins but we are sin: and He is made sin in our place (not inherently but representatively). The other half of the statement bears that out in its own way - "that we might become the righteousness of God in him"; not that we might receive as upon us the righteousness of God, but that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. He is the righteousness of God, but not only as a virtue, as a characteristic, He is the righteousness of God, "That we might become the righteousness of God in him" - that is the statement, an utter statement. He was made sin for us. He therefore stands in His Cross as representing the false man, and comes under the stroke of Divine judgment, dismissal, cancellation: He is put away. If we want to see and know what God's attitude is toward ourselves and this creation ultimately if we are not found in Christ, listen - "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34.)

That is God's attitude toward us ultimately, outside of Christ. Now, thank God, it is the day of grace, and He is waiting, giving us a chance; but that is the actual and positive destiny of all those who have been in the way of being saved, and have refused, have not acted upon their opportunity; it is their destiny to know what He knew in that awful moment, the most awful moment in the history of any man - God forsaking him. You may have intellectual problems and difficulties about eternity and eternal punishment, but do not try to resolve that into human understanding, even by using human language of age and ages and eternal ages - no human language can convey that. Taste God-forsakenness, and though it be, in time, but for an instant, it will grey you like an old man, it will put years upon you, it will be like an awful eternity. Lose God for an instant, and it is an awful thing. Well, in that moment, He stood in the place that we shall occupy if we are not found in Him. In order that we might not be in that position, the grace of God in Jesus Christ is available to save us from it. But the point is, He was swallowing up the destiny of the false man, swallowing it up in His own person to get that man out of the way, to make room for a man who would never know that at all. Oh, thank God we in Christ inherit the countenance of God for ever - no face turned away from any child of God abiding in Christ, because it was turned away from Him for that awful, that eternal, moment.

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A Threefold Sequence in Experience

But we must keep closely to the specific thing we have in view. He has entered upon this new phase, taken up in His Cross the representation of the false man. While this is a clearly defined new phase, it is, after all, but the climax of underlying purpose, for this has been underlying the whole course of things - especially from that day when He came to the river Jordan to be baptized of John. All that was crowded into the three and a half final years of His life here was with the Cross underlying it. At His baptism He definitely and deliberately, in a figurative way, accepted the Cross, made the Cross the basis and background of everything to follow. There are two high peaks in the three and a half years with a deep valley between. The first is His baptism and the open heaven, and, looking across the valley, the second is the transfiguration. Those two things are joined and are in sequence. The baptism in figure is the Cross; the transfiguration, the glory that should follow. Between those two lies the deep valley of the temptation, immediately brought in after the baptism; the testing which, while it had a particular and peculiar form and inclusiveness at the end of those forty days in the wilderness, went on for the whole three and a half years in many other forms. The end of that valley is on the next high peak of transfiguration. I want you to see the sequence in those things; baptism, temptation, transfiguration. First the acceptance of the Cross; then the bringing home of what that acceptance meant continually through a lifetime, the working in of the Cross in principle, coming to know what He had accepted in a very practical way along a thousand lines; issuing in a glorious triumph so far as He personally was concerned, and heaven attesting Him as triumphant.

Now He is actually going to the Cross to make all that good for us, and possible of transmission to us; to bring us to the acceptance of the Cross; then through the working out of the Cross, unto that triumphant issue in glory. You see, this last phase is not for Himself, it is for us, every part of it. That threefold sequence is now taken up in the Cross to be made good for others, for His Church, for the one corporate new man. So we are immediately brought to the Cross of our Lord Jesus on one principle. It is the principle that came in to govern when He went to Jordan - that we, after nature, after our Adam relationship and life, are altogether put out. From the Jordan onward, in the more specific and positive way, with Him everything was - the Father. "Not my will, but thine" (Luke 22:42). "I delight to do thy will" (Psa. 40:. Everything was referred to the Father, and Satan's effort all the way through those long three and a half years was to get Him in some way to act on His own ground, His own choice, according to His own judgment, after His own feelings: to allow Himself to direct and govern His Procedure, His activities: to do it of Himself independently, out from Himself; and the one persistent attitude and determination of the Lord Jesus through the whole course was to refer everything to the Father, and to defer to the Father about everything. The governing thing was - "My Father"; it was "Father, Father," all the way through.

"No longer I, but Christ"

Now that is taken up for us in this way, that it is "no longer I, but Christ." I have been to Jordan, I have been to the Cross, I have been crucified, I have been put into a grave and have been dismissed, I have been ruled out, I have been cancelled, I am something not acceptable to God, I am false. It can only be Christ now; all must be referred to Him. In every thing, whether I understand or not, whether it is painful or otherwise, I must refer it to Him, I must defer to Him, I must judge nothing of myself, decide nothing myself, I must not come into the picture at all independently. It must be Christ, only Christ. That is the meaning of the Cross. I have gone out and He has come in - the new Man. I am on other ground, altogether other ground, and that Cross is the great divide.

It stands there to say "Finish" to a false man, and to bring in another. I am not going now to begin to analyse the old and the new man. I am simply stating facts. In His Cross the Lord Jesus has undercut a false man and ruled him out. We are that; dear friends, we are false, we are not the true thing that God meant when He made man. We are different, we are other, Satan has interfered and made man altogether other than God intended, and man is a false thing. But Satan is seeking to keep and preserve and propagate and maintain and minister to a false humanity. God has closed the door, in the Cross, upon us. Oh, that even Christians recognised this more! Here is the realm for our repentance - not only of our sinful life of the past, and our sins, whatever they may be: vices and evils and so on: but repentance that we have come in at all, that we have allowed so much of ourselves to come in, even for God. We cannot fail to be impressed with this, that inside of the whole system of Christianity the old man is sporting himself; he is making a name for himself, getting a reputation, gratifying himself, using the very service of God to bring himself into the limelight, to express himself, to realise himself; and that is the reason for the lost impact. "Can Satan cast out Satan?" (Mark 3:23). Can the old man cure the old man? Can the false make the false true? No! We have to get out of the way. We are getting in the way all the time. We are meeting the old man so much in one another. We see it, it almost obsesses us, we know it about ourselves. It is something about which we must continually repent, something we must continually repudiate, and ask the Lord to deal with in the power of the Cross - more and more to dismiss that which He has dismissed, to make good the mighty dismissal when He turned His face away, and said in effect, You are dismissed, I have done with you, you no longer stand before My face. Now, that refers not to a gross, vicious sinner, but to a man, a kind of humanity which has to go in order to make room for this other Man.

Why? While that is, in a sense, the negative side, it is very positive in its working, and we have stayed long with it because that is the realm of all Christian experience, right through the Christian life; it explains what the Lord is doing with us, and why He deals with us as He does. He is getting rid of us; He got rid of us, and He is getting rid of us. He is working out the riddance of this rubbish. The more we know of ourselves, the more we agree that it is rubbish; the more the Lord lets us see ourselves, the more we agree that the best thing is for us to be got rid of, and very often we would get rid of ourselves in the light of it. But, thank God, He has done this in the representative and inclusive Person of the Son of Man, and now He is working it out. We can trust Him to work it out. Do not put your hands on other people and try and work out their death - the Lord will do it. Do not put your hands on yourself and try to work out your own death; hand yourself over to the Lord, He will do it.

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The Reproduction of Christ through Death and Resurrection

But as He does it, there is the other side. As the one is removed, the other comes in. The movement goes on in even balance, making room for the true man, for Christ. He went to the Cross to get us out of the way representatively and inclusively in Himself, but He also went there in order to make possible a reproduction of Himself as He was truly; not as He was made in that moment - sin: but as He was truly in Himself. I am not talking about His Deity; please leave that out of the question. I am talking about the Son of Man. He went to the Cross in order to make possible a reproduction of Himself as He was as Son of Man, and reproduction remains inseparably upon the ground of the undercutting of the false man and the installing of the true. In other words, it remains upon the ground of death on the one side, and resurrection on the other. There has to be the continuous working of His death in us to get rid of that which is false and can never satisfy God or be used by God, that there may be a continuous working of resurrection to bring in more and more of Himself. It is the way of the Lord's reproducing of Himself. We know that from the law of the grain of wheat - "Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit" (John 12:24). But this for us is a thing which has repeated crises. I do not want to dishearten or discourage you, but I must say this, that these crises do not become less acute: they become deeper and deeper as we go on. Sometimes we think that we have touched bottom, and that we can never go lower, but we have lived to prove that we can go deeper yet, that there really is no bottom to this thing so far as this life is concerned. Well, do not lose heart about that statement. I am trying to say this, that the Lord is out to bring in His Christ in ever-growing fulness, and in order to do that, room has to be made for Him by getting rid of the fallen man which is in His place. The meaning of Christ is that, for one thing - reproduction. What is the most reproductive, vessel and instrument of the Lord, reproductive of Christ? It is the most crucified vessel or instrument, the most dead to the old man, to the life of nature: that which has had taken from it its own competence in the most utter way, which has been brought most completely to the place where it has nothing in itself but everything in Him. That is the most reproductive vessel; and do remember that the Lord is after a reproductive vessel. "It is not good that the man should be alone" said the Lord about the first Adam, and He says the same about the last Adam. So God made the woman, and she was called Eve - "because she was the mother of all living" (Gen. 3:20). But that was within the limited realm of a certain life which was not eternal life, for they had not partaken of the Tree of Life to live for ever. Christ is the last Adam; the Church, His Eve, having taken of the Tree of Life, is His vessel of reproduction, and she comes in by way of the Cross. It is after Calvary, that the Church comes in and becomes the Jerusalem which is above, which is the mother of us all (Gal. 4:26), the vessel through which Christ reproduces Himself. But my point is this, that the Church which is really going to reproduce Christ is the Church which has been to the Cross, has come out of the Cross, and is continually coming out of the Cross. This is only saying in other words that the law of enlargement is the law of death and resurrection continually operating. Oh, do we not know it in our own personal experience? It is true that any additional measure that we have of the Lord has come ever and always by some deeper experience and working out of our own undoing, our own dismissal.

And what is true of the individual will be true of any local company. It is possible for a local company to be put again and again ever more deeply into His death, and, as it is so, to be enlarged with spiritual measure, and with Divine reproductiveness. Oh, that the whole Church were conformed to that law! What a different situation there would be today. In the beginning it was a crucified Church, and it rapidly multiplied, reproduced.

The Reproductive Vessel

(a) Corporate, Not Individual

Now, this introduces something perhaps beyond what we ought even to touch now, but let me hint this to you. This is why everything in the New Testament was upon a Body basis. By this I mean a Church basis. Nothing was individualistic, nothing merely personal; all was corporate, on a Body basis. Even Paul, the great Apostle, foreknown and chosen before his birth (Gal. 1:15) for his great ministry and having it announced to him right out of heaven by the glorified Lord Himself, has to be brought into the Church and to move out to that great work on Church ground, on Body ground, and everything has to be held on that basis. Why? - because it is the Church that is the Eve of Christ, the mother, the vessel through which Christ reproduces, and it is the Church which is born out of His death in His resurrection. You see a governing law, you have the clue to the increase, the enlargement that took place at the beginning. It was on that basis then; and the multiplication took place and the reproduction went on marvellously then because it was a well-crucified Church, and a well-resurrected Church in Christ, and it was moving on that basis all the time. Now, perhaps that is a little beyond what we ought to touch now, but it is worth noting.

(b) Organic, Not Organized

Let us come to the simple principle itself. Christ went to the Cross to dismiss the false man, to undercut him, to get him out of the way. We are that. Christ, when He died, not only took our sins and not only took us as sinners, as we would regard ourselves, but He took us as people to the Cross. We are so mixed up and tangled, that you cannot separate between us and our sins, you cannot get in between something called "us" and our sinfulness, and separate the two. It is necessary to get rid of the lot and bring in another man, and Christ is that other. God is working on that principle all the time. He is not trying - He never does try - to make us something new in ourselves, and by ourselves apart. His method is to bring Christ into us, and build up Christ in us; and as Christ is built up, we go out, because we have gone out in the thought of God. That is God's intention, made so clear - that Christ is to be all and in all. Do you want your life to be fruitful? You will have to die, you will have to know the Cross ever deepening in its work. That is the way of fruitfulness. It is a painful way, but we can reproduce only after our kind. Christ, has to reproduce after His kind. He will do it and He will do it through the Church. I see a lot more than I am trying to say about the place of Eve taken by the Church as Christ's vessel to reproduce Himself. One thing that I wish you could see is this, that the Lord's method of reproducing is not by machinery and organisation, but by a living Body which knows in a living way death and resurrection. Any kind of institution that has not been born out of a death in which the stricture of God against the flesh and the old nature has been registered is not going to reproduce after Christ's order. It may grow, it may get a great many adherents, it may become a great multitude, but it is something of the old creation, it cannot stand before God. It is "this great Babylon which I have built"; I am going to violate grammar and say, which "I" has built, and it will not stand. Babylon the Great will fall, but the new Jerusalem will rise at the fall of Babylon.

The End

Up next, The Mission, the Meaning and the Message of Jesus Christ