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Divine Order - In Christ

by T. Austin-Sparks

This book is based on messages given at an Easter conference in 1959 and is not a transcript. The first five chapters were originally published as a series of messages in A Witness and A Testimony magazines in 1968-1969, volumes 46-3 through 47-1. In 2009 we received the text of the remaining messages from the same conference, chapters 6-9. While we have the audio messages of some of these chapters, we do not have the audio of chapters 2 & 5.

Contents

Chapter 1 - Knowledge of Christ

Chapter 2 - Harmony

Chapter 3 - In Christ

Chapter 4 - The Significance of Christ in His Cross

Chapter 5 - The Cross and the Disruptive Power of Sin

Chapter 6 - The Significance of the Cross - To Us

Chapter 7 - The Cross and Unity

Chapter 8 - The Way of Recovery - Truth

Chapter 9 - The Ground of the Church - Faith

Chapter 1 - Knowledge of Christ

We have opened our meeting with the singing of a very old hymn - "Tell me the old, old story". And when we have sung "Tell me the old, old story" so heartily, we are confronted with the most difficult thing that has ever been called for by angels and men. To put the story of Jesus and His love to music is to employ the whole range and compass of every note of every octave, and then to want more notes. It reaches the highest; it goes down to the deepest. It is the very range and compass of His Person and His work that show how great He is; so much greater greatness than all others. It is the universality of the Lord Jesus that is His supremacy. There is no language or tongue in all human speech into which that story cannot be interpreted, which cannot grasp something of its meaning. That has been proved, and is being proved continually - it compasses all language and all languages. Although it has taxed and over-taxed the greatest intellects of all the ages, it is enjoyed, appreciated and loved by the simplest and the most unlearned. It meets the problems and difficulties of the mature and the aged, and yet it is the delight of little children. Of all the various temperaments into which the human race is classified, there is no temperament that does not find in Him something to meet its own peculiar problems and demands. Jesus and His love are an ocean of the profoundest mysteries and treasures. He is a mine of inexhaustible wealth. In a word, it is going to take all eternity to reveal His fulness. That is what we are up against when we so easily sing: "Tell me the old, old story." It just cannot be told!

But it may be that in these hours of our fellowship together a little more of the light of that story will break upon our hearts. There is a phrase in the Word: "Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty; they shall behold the land of far distances", and that two-fold statement can quite truly, and rightly, be applied to Him. He is the King in His beauty; and He is also the Land of Far Distances.

Now, to come into a living relationship with the Lord Jesus is to come, sooner or later, to the impasse of the incomprehensible, and we just have to say: "Lord, You are beyond me! Lord, I cannot comprehend; You are too much for me!" That, of course, on the one side, means difficulties, for it puts us into a difficult position in that we cannot trace Him, follow Him, and understand Him. But, on the other side, we would not have it otherwise; we would not have a 'little' Christ whom we could comprehend and altogether understand with our little minds. No, He is beyond us altogether, and what you and I, as His people, are destined to come to if we go on with Him, is just this: that He is ever reaching farther and farther beyond us, and drawing us out beyond ourselves, beyond our resources of mind and will, yet drawing us on, and making us know that we have got to go on. We just cannot stand still; we have to go on.

Now, dear friends, the Bible rests upon one tremendous affirmation, upon a truth which it affirms in a thousand different ways, and that truth is this: that everything related to the great destiny for which man was created is bound up inseparably with the knowledge of Christ. You have two tremendous things there: the greatness of the destiny for which man was created - and the Bible has a very great deal to say about that. That destiny, that great Divine purpose in creation, demands for its realization the knowledge of Jesus Christ; it is bound up with the knowledge of God's Son. Within that compass of Divine purpose we have man's creation, man's redemption and salvation, man's transformation, man's glorification, and then man's eternal vocation. These are all features of the great purpose of man's creation and I repeat them: salvation, transformation, glorification, and eternal vocation, and all that rests upon the knowledge of Jesus Christ. None of it is possible without knowing Him.

We look at a little child from the day that it comes into this world, and the one thing the parents are watching for continually, and waiting for, is the sign of intelligence. For the normal development of a human life is marked by growing intelligence, that is, in the first place, the ability to identify objects. It is very simple, but very real, when, first of all, the parent is able to recognize that the child knows him or her - the child identifies. And so its development of its very life is marked by this growing intelligence, this ability to identify objects, and then to interpret and grasp their meaning. It comes so slowly, and yet it is there. To apply those recognized, identified objects to practical value, to turn them to account, to know that they mean this, and that they are meant for this or that; the application of their intelligence to practical needs or situations - I say these are the indications of normal development and it is along the line of growing intelligence.

If that is true in the natural, it is equally true in the spiritual. The mark of spiritual growth, the growth of the spiritual life, is this power to recognize the meaning of Christ; to identify Him in things; to interpret Him - the power to interpret Him and to explain Him; and then to apply Him to practical situations, our own and others. That is 'knowing' the Lord. And I say again, that is the way of spiritual growth to full manhood, to the fulfillment of the ultimate vocation. And let it be recognized at once that what is true in the natural is true in the spiritual in this sense - God created man with an object. A life has missed its way and purpose if it fulfils no vocation and if it becomes an end in itself. Vocation is the object, the end, of all life and all development. That is true in the spiritual life. The Bible reveals progress toward eternal vocation, and essentially along the line of spiritual intelligence, or the knowing of Christ.

The Pre-eminent Factor in Life

God has placed supreme importance upon this very basis. Hear His Word: "Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might; let not the rich man glory in his riches; but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth Me" (Jer. 9:23). Above all other things in which men do or may glory, God puts this, with His tremendous emphasis: Thus saith the Lord. The supreme thing with Him is to understand and to know Him.

We have read how the Lord Jesus put this matter in relation to the most vital thing, even that of eternal life, and there is no more vital thing than that. In one sense eternal life is the key to the Bible. "And this is life eternal, that they may know thee, the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, Jesus Christ" (John 17:3). Life eternal, with the Lord Jesus, is placed upon this basis of knowing Him. That man Paul, Paul the aged, with a long life of learning Christ, and of perhaps incomparable revelation of Jesus Christ, is now standing at the gate of eternity and crying, "…that I may know Him…" You might say that that was the cry with which Paul entered into heaven. And alongside of that, you remember, he said: "I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord" (Philippians 3:8). Not to be learning, dear friends, is to stop growing, for growing, is along that line. The knowledge of Christ is the beginning of salvation; the knowledge of Christ is the whole meaning of the Christian life; the knowledge of Christ is God's motive in all discipline and training. You and I find ourselves in those hands of the "Father of our spirits", who is putting us through a hard school, and on a difficult way. And the one question which should always be in our hearts is not 'Why?' as to His dealings with us in a general sense, nor any murmuring, but: 'What do You want me to learn by this? What is there of Christ that I am to understand by this means?' For, I repeat, all the dealings of God with us have but this one thing in view: our education as to Christ, the knowledge of Christ. The very essence of glory will be the knowledge of Christ. Perhaps that sounds a strange word, but it is not so difficult to understand. When at last we see in Him the answer to all our questions and our problems, and He becomes the answer to every cry of our need and heart, we see Him as He is, and He fills all the vacuum of our longing, that will be glory. It is so now in the smallest ways, is it not? If, after a very difficult time when we have been brought through deep and terrible suffering, we have our eyes open to see something of Christ that meets our need, that is glory! He becomes our glory. Glory is not just something of an external, shining radiance - it is a state of heart, it is full satisfaction, full gratification, and possession of a full explanation and understanding. That will be wonderful! So the knowledge of Christ will be the very essence of glory.

But having said all that, mark you, this is not, in the first place, a knowledge in the reason, nor the satisfying of the natural mind and intelligence. This knowledge of Christ is essentially, in the first place, spiritual knowledge. It is what we might call "life-knowledge". It means life; it brings life; it is life; we know by life. We may not yet be able to interpret it in human language, even to our own satisfaction, or be able to explain it, but we have come into a knowledge of the Lord which has brought life and which is life. "This is life... that they may know." This kind of knowing is life-knowledge and is altogether deeper than natural intelligence. We do not say, in the first place, that now we know because the thing has been explained. We say: 'I know because that meets my heart need, because something has happened in me through that. It has brought me into life.' That is spiritual knowledge.

And it is by way of experience. The Lord's school of instruction, training, teaching, is not to tell us things, or to write them in a book for us to study and memorize, and then say: 'We know now!' This is not a manual education at all. It is the education, the knowledge, that comes by experience, and experience simply means that something has been done in us by a certain process. We know in that way. We know the Lord in our constitution, and how much better it is to know Him constitutionally - that is, in our being. He has become a part of our being, and not just something explained to our minds.

That is the way in which we learn Christ. It is very practical - deeply practical.

Christ, the Embodiment of Heavenly Order

That is all by way of leading up to our present particular consideration. You will realize, in the light of this little that has been said, that Christ is many-sided, vari-sided. He is far too great to be comprehended, though we spent all our days trying to do so. And we can only look at Him from time to time from particular standpoints.

In the light of the situation in the world, and in the Church, and churches, I have been very greatly exercised about one thing. I have put it aside as being too difficult, but I am compelled to face it. It is concerning Divine order. Of all the ways in which Christ is to be known unto life and unto growth, there is one way in the Word of God which, we might be tempted to say, is supremely important - though we could say that of every way in which He is to be known. However, that one way is this: To rightly understand Christ is to see that He relates to a heavenly and eternal order of things.

That word 'order' lies right at the back of everything in the Bible. Everything that the Bible has to say to us is related to an eternal order that God intended to obtain in this universe. And His key to that order, without which nothing of all His glorious purpose is possible, is Christ. The Person of Christ is the very embodiment of all the principles of a universal order. If we could comprehend, discern, understand and know Christ, we should see that in that one universal Person are gathered up all the laws of a great heavenly order.

We are told that "in Him, through Him, by Him, and unto Him were all things created". His creative activity at work is marked by a marvellous order, and we shall say more about this as we go on. Creation, as it comes from His hand, as it is projected by Him, is a marvellous system of coordinated forces and objects in a wonderful relatedness and harmony. Everything is in its own place, everything is in its own time and everything has its own function. And so you could go on, but, I repeat, we will come back to it.

His redemptive work, the whole of the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus has this one thing in mind: the recovery of a lost order. He stands in His Person, in His creative work, and in His redemptive work, related to this whole matter of an eternal, heavenly order.

Let me pause here with a parenthesis lest you should be as near despair as I have been in this matter.

Everything seems positively to contradict what I am saying, especially concerning the Holy Spirit; that is, that the Holy Spirit, who is the custodian of the whole purpose of God concerning His Son, is occupied with this matter pre-eminently - a heavenly order; the will of God as it is done in Heaven to be done eventually on this earth in like manner. If you want to know the meaning of the Holy Spirit - and this will perhaps be a suggestion to you if you turn again to the Word - the answer is here. The Holy Spirit is meticulous about order, He will not overlook disorder. For Divine order to be overlooked, violated, ignored or frustrated, is to perpetuate the loss, the suffering, the disappointment and the despair of the creation, for the hope of the creation lies in the direction of God having it according to His order. This is the matter with which the Holy Spirit is supremely concerned.

You might well interject: "Is that really true, seeing that things are as they are, everywhere and in everything?" The answer is twofold. Firstly, the fact is proved by the condition. Where the Divine order has been violated, a condition arises which clearly indicates arrested maturity and a limitation of spiritual measure. It shows that what could and should have been, and what God intended, has been missed and lost. There may be the illusion - the seemingly pleasant illusion - of a false liberty and freedom to do as you like, but, in truth, things are less and other than God meant. The New Testament includes for our instruction for all time a document which is the classic on immaturity due to disorder. It is the First Letter to the Corinthians. The situation is summed up in a sentence: "I... could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, as unto babes in Christ. I fed you with milk, not with meat; for ye were not yet able" (3:1,2). Then there follows the explanation of that arrested growth. Twice the apostle uses the word "for", meaning 'because', 'for these reasons', and the reasons? disorder. The rest of the whole letter is occupied with the disorders and the apostle's labour to correct them. It would be quite difficult to find in the New Testament a stronger proof of this fact that spiritual maturity is governed by Divine order.

The second thing to include in our judgment of things is that eternity is governing this matter. While the Lord wants as much as can be of Heavenly order in time, especially in the Church, the churches and the individual, and there can only be limitation of Christ in each if His order is ignored, violated and disregarded (undoubtedly this explains the poor level of Christian life), it will be in eternity that measure will be the criterion of position and vocation. The Apostle tries to say something about this eternal difference in glory and position hereafter in chapter 15.

We may be responsible for the upsetting or contravening of God's order and seem to get away with it, but no Christian believes that what we do in this life is the end. We have always to reckon with Romans 14:10 and 2 Corinthians 5:10. The Apostle includes himself: "we... all".

So eternity bears down upon time, and time is revealed in eternity. When God's Kingdom comes, it will be perfect order!

Now we return to our main line: God is a God of order. But there is a personal evil intelligence in this universe who is God's arch-enemy and, as such, is the instigator of all disorder. He is called "the god of this world" (or age) and "the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience" (what an enlightening phrase - "children of disobedience"). The hall-mark of all satanic rule and influence is disorder. That rule is rapidly moving to its fullness and final judgment. The test of the measure of Christ is spiritual order under His government.

Important as a fuller consideration of this matter is, so as not to overload you at one time, I will break off for the time being by reiterating the four main points:

1. God is a God of order.

2. Satan is the instigator of all disorder.

3. Christ in Person and work is the embodiment of the Divine order.

4. The Church is the elect vessel in which and through which that divine order is to be manifested and administered in the ages to come.

We might add that God's disciplinary work with us is with a view to measure and position in the ultimate order.

Chapter 2 - Harmony

To those who have a knowledge of the Bible it is evident that the whole of the Scriptures open up along the four lines that we have indicated; namely that

1. God is a God of order;

2. Satan is the prince of a world under divine judgment, and the nature of that judgment is confusion;

3. Christ, in Person and work, is the embodiment of divine order;

4. The Church is the elect vessel in which, and through which, that Divine order is to be manifested and administered in the ages to come.

The end of God is glory as against chaos, and the Bible shows - comprehensively - that glory is inseparable from order; Divine order is the way to glory. The Bible should be read in that light. On the contrary, confusion always leads to shame. This, then, is the great issue of the Bible.

Perhaps you are wondering, or asking in your mind: What does this mean where we, simple believers, are concerned? It is all very wonderful, very great, but here we are, a little company of Christian people - how is this a message for us? Will you be patient, dear friends? This is of most vital account to you and to me. We are a part of a great whole. We are not just fragments that have shot off into space, with an independent and unrelated life. We are called by the grace and sovereign will of God into a great purpose. And what is true of the whole is true of every part. You and I are going to learn, if we learn anything about Christ, that we are a part of the disruption of the Divine order, and that grace, grace, in its deepest and grandest interpretation, is to bring order out of our chaos, is to introduce Heaven into us and us into Heaven, and is to conform us to that which obtains in Heaven. Oh, yes, we are going to learn in many, many different ways that what God is doing with us, and has called us into, is just this: to conform us to the image of His Son. But that is not only conformity to a Person, it is conformity to a Divine order. His Son is an order of God, the order of Heaven.

I do not know how you read the four Gospels. Perhaps you read them as the life of Jesus here on earth, what He did and what He said - purely as a historic record. I suggest to you that you go back to those Gospels with this one thought: Here is the embodiment of another 'order' of things, in constitution and in behaviour, in ways of life and in laws and principles governing the life. Here is Heaven in evidence. Here is Heaven in control. Here is another world embodied: "They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world" - here is another world that has come in in this Person. Read the Gospels in the light of that, and you will begin to see that He does not do and speak as the people of this world would, even the wisest of them. He is getting everything from Heaven; He is getting every word from Heaven; He is governed by Heaven. That is the meaning of the so-oft repeated phrase: "the Kingdom of Heaven" - the rule of the heavens. "The Kingdom of God" - the rule of God. As we learn Christ, so we pass more and more from this world in our inward life, and find ourselves more and more in conflict with it, and incapable of accommodating ourselves to it or being at home and happy in it. It becomes more and more a "far country" - something to which we do not belong. That is true in the consciousness of the true child of God, but growingly so. The true child of God, as he or she goes on in this inner, spiritual change of knowing Christ, will often ask the question: "What is happening to me? I used to be able to do this and that, but I cannot now. At one time I had no qualms or difficulties, but today I have a question." I think if we stayed here long enough we would find this world an utterly impossible place to live in spiritually. We could only live in it as Heaven came down to help us stay here at all. Well, that is a way of putting things - we are just 'going home' all the time.

Now, to refer again to our great interpreter of these things, the man who had such a full and exact knowledge of the Scriptures in the first place and, added to that, the one to whom was given that peculiar and that so great revelation of heavenly things, especially of Christ. To that man the great issue of all things was this very thing - the recovery of a lost Divine order in this universe. He has stated that. Here is one fragment of that great statement: "...unto a dispensation (an order, an economy, a government, a rule) of the fulness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth" (Ephesians 1:10). Here we are faced with a tremendous statement. There is a word here which is almost an unspeakable word in our language. In the Greek it requires no less than nineteen letters! It is a compound which is translated "to sum up", but in its original meaning is this: "to bring back and centre in One, all things". To bring back, to recover, and to centre in One, all things. To gather up all that which has been lost and focus it, embody it, in Christ. First of all, the implication is that there was an order once obtaining in God's universe - a perfect order. Secondly, that that order has been lost; a great disruption has taken place in the universe. And thirdly, the re-gathering, the recovery, the restoring of that lost order in Christ. That is what Paul saw to be the significance of Christ. What a range! What an interpretation of everything! What a word! To gather up all the fragments of this shattered vessel, all the parts of this disrupted and confused universe, to repair the damage and make of it all one beautiful expression of Heavenly order! That is the work of the Person of Christ in redemption. Paul uses a word so often - "to reconcile all things unto Himself" - to reconciliate, implying that the situation is such as to find God not in a state of conciliation with it, and it not in conciliation with God. Everything has gone to pieces, and is under a terrible strain where God is concerned because things have broken down - the Divine order has been shattered. This One, Jesus Christ, came into this world, in the first place embodying in His own Person that which He is going to recover, objectively. He cannot be deflected from that for a moment on any consideration, by any bribe, or by any suffering. He is going through with what He calls the Will of God. And, dear friends, while we use that phrase, sometimes glibly, sometimes seriously, we do not always recognize - if we ever do - that the Will of God is the expression of this perfect order of God. "Thy will be done in earth as it is in Heaven." If only we knew how things are done in Heaven we would see a beautiful harmony, a complete accord, and the utter absence of any janglings, confusions, contradiction or inconsistency. That is God's will. He came for that. It could only be, as we shall see later, by the Cross, in which He had to take hold of this enormous force of disruption and confusion, and break it for ever, and produce, or reproduce that order, which we find commencing in the New Testament. We must leave that for the moment.

To rightly understand and know Christ is to see that He stands related to this of which we are speaking - this universal, beautiful order of God in the creation. Christ Himself is the Seed of that order. You take your seeds, or your bulbs, and if you get the bulb of the hyacinth and place it in the earth, you do not expect a cabbage to appear! Within that small organism there is the order of hyacinths. That is the nature, the life, the species, the kind of thing that is there. So it is in every organic creation. Every seed has its own life, producing after its own kind. That is Scripture, is it not? - "after its own kind". Christ is the Seed of a heavenly order. In Him is implicit that order of God: the life is in Him; the order, or the 'form' is in Him; the 'nature' of that is in Him. The order requires a kind of nature. (Oh, for language, for words, for ability to explain!) A disposition, the kind of Person that He is. He is so different! We are always crying and praying to be "like Christ"! Yes, in Him is the nature which, when it becomes universal, will be seen in a certain perfect harmony and order. He is the constitution of everything. Paul finds himself beggared for words in this very thing, and he is a master of language and languages. He speaks about Christ "filling all things", and "all things filled into Christ". You cannot grasp that? It is just this. He is going to be the constitution of everything, and that "everything" is to be an expression of this "mind of God", how things should be, what things should be, and how they should behave. You and I behave as we do because we have a certain constitution. We are made like that. Make the whole creation like Christ and it will behave like Christ, the nature, the constitution of a great Divine system.

God is a God of order. If there is one thing that the Bible reveals about God, it is that. On the other hand, the Bible is a tremendous testimony all the way through against disorder. If you want to see what it is all about, what it means, why this and why that, it is this conflict between a Divine order, and a disorder. It is like that all the way through, and that is the battle.

And I say again, before we are through it has got to come down to our own lives in a very intimate way. But take the great truth, for it is capable of having a tremendous effect upon us. We must make it our business - if this is the business of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the meaning of the Cross - to come under the rule of Heaven, the rule of Christ, the rule of the Holy Spirit, so that all the discords and conflicts go out of our individual life and of our collective life; that we are more and more an expression of Him, whose life, character, work and ways have no inconsistencies, no contradictions and no conflicts in Himself. He is the sum of this beautiful harmony.

Do believe this, amongst other things and whatever else it means, that when that great Song about which we read in the Book of the Revelation is sung by a great multitude out of every language, every tongue and nation and kindred and people, the one thing about it will be that there is not one discordant note! It will be the most marvellous harmony. Why? Because the Centre of it all is one Person, who pervades all. It is the Lamb. His work is done; He has redeemed by His Blood out of every nation. He has brought together all the broken pieces, all the shattered plan of God, and here it is, redeemed. And the mark of His work is this: that out of all the divided peoples of this earth, divided by language, divided by colour, divided by temperament, divided in a score of different ways, He has made one harmonious whole, singing one song, with no discord. It is the mark of 'order' that is the mark of His redemption! 'Babel', which means confusion, is undone!

Chapter 3 - In Christ

We began these messages with a fresh contemplation of the greatness of Christ; and then we went on to remind ourselves that everything which has to do with the realization of God's purpose in creating man, and this world, and its universe, is a matter of knowing God in Christ, which, of course, means knowing Christ. Every aspect and detail of God's will and God's way and God's end is a matter of knowing the Lord Jesus. All progress, as all life, rests upon that - knowing Him. The Christian life here is meant to be one of continuous growth and development and progress, but that only takes place as we come to know more, and still more, of the meaning of the Lord Jesus. This progress will not stop when we leave this world, and when time gives place to eternity: "Of the increase of his kingdom there will be no end." Stagnation is no mark of life, and life there will be ever manifesting itself in new and more wonderful fullnesses and forms. Therefore, the knowledge of Christ which will, in time and eternity, be the secret of growth and progress, will continue in heaven, and it will take eternity to exhaust it. Well, that was our next thing - all growth, progress, fruitfulness, rest upon this growing knowledge of the Lord Jesus.

That brought us to this: Seeing He is so vast, so immense, so many-sided, we can only see Him from one standpoint at a time; we have to move round to see Him from every angle. And at this time we are just looking at the Lord Jesus from one of the many angles, or points of view, which is this particular aspect of His significance: that He, in His Person and in His work, stands related to an eternal, heavenly order. He Himself, in His wonderful, complex Person, is the very embodiment of all the principles and laws of a great heavenly order. When everything is conformed to Christ and takes its character from Him, it will be one glorious, harmonious whole, perfected into one, just one glorious unity.

So that is what we are seeking to grasp at this time: the relationship of Christ to this eternal heavenly order. We have, of course, laid our foundation in the Word of God. We have allowed that to come to us in one marvellous statement through the apostle Paul that "in the fulness of the times - the fulness of the times - God has determined to gather together (or, re-gather together) all things in Christ". Seeing that the very word contains that idea of re-gathering, it implies, if it does not declare, that there was a glorious order at one time when everything was as God meant it to be. All the sons of God shouted for joy as they beheld the marvel of His creation and His order. That word implies that that order has been lost, and in its place there has come disorder; and it declares that the order is going to be restored in Christ. That is the great significance of the Lord Jesus from this standpoint. We repeat: He personally is the embodiment of that; and His work is related to that.

That led us to the place where the great river of revelation divides into four:

One. God is the God of order. We dwelt a little while on that, although it altogether defeats us, for it is so great and so full. This fact, of God being such, is revealed clearly, firstly, in His creative work;

Secondly, in the great representation that we have in type and symbol in the Old Testament;

Thirdly, in His redemptive work;

Fourthly, in the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

In all these four ways there is a wonderful revelation that God is a God of order.

Let us think for just a minute or two on the first of those - revealed in creation.

While, of course, we are confronted with so much in this present world and system which seems to shout disorder, derangement, discord and confusion, even in nature, there is still discernible in nature a wonderful background of an ordered system. That is something which has engaged men for their whole life, and is a marvellous universe itself of instruction and of fascination. Here is an extract from a big work by one of the most outstanding biologists. He writes thus:

"The hosts of living organisms are not random creatures. They can be classified into battalions and regiments. Neither are they isolated creatures, for every thread of life is intertwined with others in a complex web. This is one of the fundamental biological truths, the co-relationship of organisms in the web of life. No creature lives or dies to itself. There is no insulation in nature. One organism gets linked on to others, and becomes dependent upon them for the very continuance of its race. Flowers and insects are fitted together as hand in glove. When we learn something of the intricate give and take, supply and demand, action and reaction, between plants and animals, between flowers and insects, we begin to get a glimpse of a vast organization in the creation."

Well, take it for what it is worth. You will see that that gathers up into a few sentences something that is capable of tremendous enlargement. You see it everywhere. Behind this creation there is a Mind that loves to have things properly ordered and related. Behind this creation there is a perfect, spiritual system. God is the God of order, and what is true in natural history is seen to be true everywhere else. God has arranged the year in seasons. He has arranged the co-operation of heaven and earth in that the heavenly bodies govern the movements of the earth, the tides; and so on.

We would not know where to stop if we were to allow ourselves to go on with this! There is one hymn in our hymnbook which begins: "The spacious firmament on high..." You notice that the conclusion of that hymn is: "It all declares a Mind Divine." Well, if we wanted to go on with this we do not need to go far away to the celestial bodies or to objects outside of ourselves; we have only to have a little intelligence about our own human bodies, and to see that the human body, in health, is a marvellous system of related, dependent, inter-dependent, co-operative functions, principles and elements. Anyone who really has any knowledge of the human body ought to be a great worshipper! It is a marvellous unity in diversity. It all speaks of this 'hand in glove' principle, of one thing fitting into another in perfect harmony and symmetry. There is another side to that, I know, and I am going to speak about it presently.

We have done no more than stated a fact: that wherever you can trace the hand of God before the other hand comes upon it - either the hand of man or the hand of the devil - you find this beautiful harmony, this wonderful order.

We come to the Old Testament, and anyone familiar with it will not need an exhaustive proof of this great truth. In the Old Testament representations of God's Mind we begin with Him bringing order out of chaos, for that is where everything begins. God, who is the God of order, reacts against this state of chaos, and His reaction issues in a remarkable and excellent order. And what is true as to God bringing order out of chaos where the earth is concerned is seen to be a principle that is working all through the Old Testament. You see it at work in a representative people - and here is the glory and the tragedy of Israel. The glory of Israel is that they were taken out of the nations to be the embodiment and the manifestation of a heavenly order on this earth, and the tragedy of Israel is that Israel has come to chaos. You see them in Egypt, and what was true in nature was true spiritually and morally of Israel in Egypt - chaos; no order; barrenness; frustration, confusion; hopelessness. Exodus is the book of emergence from all that, and they are not a rabble, a crowd of refugees going out into the wilderness. They are ordered, and ordered by their ranks. You can trace these marks as you read carefully. No, they are not just a mixed-up crowd, a disorderly crowd, running amok to get out of Egypt. See them marching like an army, in their serried ranks and their appointed order! It is order out of chaos. See them at Sinai, when God has given His pattern for their national life. Just take a look at one of those pictures that we have of Israel assembled around the Tabernacle. And then, the order of the service. Leviticus is the book of the ordering of worship. And what a marvellous system that book is of the order of worship! It is not just that God said this, and that, and that is to be in the way of sacrifices and offerings and feasts; you will notice that there is a marvellous sequence, an ordered sequence, and that need is supplied at every point. It is a progressive, ordered development of worship, of approach to God, under a specified and particularized government. That book of Leviticus is a wonderful book! You move into the book of Numbers, and the very name of the book indicates what it is all about. This is the book of the marchings through the wilderness, and everything is numbered, tabulated and ordered. I just indicate the details and you will pick them up.

Pass over the many years until you come to the Temple, and this is one of the things that almost overwhelms you! The marvellous, meticulous order about this Temple - every detail, every measurement; the size of everything; the place of everything; the material of everything. And what shall we say about the 'courses of the singers' and the 'courses of the priesthood' all in course round the clock. Everything is prescribed for. And when the Queen of Sheba came and looked at the order of the house there was no more breath left in her! That was the impressive thing. Everything here was so quietly, harmoniously and beautifully regulated. It all speaks of a mastermind, and that was God. He gave the pattern for that, and He gave the revelation. And although that was disrupted and the people went into captivity, passing seventy years in exile, the return of the remnant, the rebuilding of the wall and of the house were again marked by this order. We have read and studied the book of Nehemiah from other standpoints and have perhaps not been impressed with the wonderful organization in it. You notice that one whole chapter is taken up with: "next unto him... and next unto him... and next unto him". It is all arranged and ordered. It is, if you like, all organized. We can use that word in the Old Testament if we cannot in the New Testament. Nehemiah represents a master-organizer in the things of God. This is all under divine direction, and it all points to this: God is a God of order. We must be impressed with this, dear friends. It is not something to be contemplated objectively and historically. You and I have to be tremendously impressed with this and see that God is very particular about how things are done, what things are done, and who does these things, and also about the relationships that obtain amongst those who are employed. God is very particular, and, as we have said, this is not because He loves to have things 'just so', but because He is made that way. We know quite well that real progress, real fruitfulness and real achievement demand order. If we come into a place that is all upside down, disturbed, with everything all over the place, we know that we have got a job on hand, and we begin by saying: "Well, we cannot do anything until we have got this straightened out." That is God: "We cannot get on until we have got it straightened out! We shall never get anywhere until things are put straight."

But I do not want just to be piling a lot of data upon you. It is of very vital spiritual consequence that we get it into us that God is particular, and He is not going to overlook anything, or bypass anything. He will have it so, or He will not have all that He desires. He will be patient; He will work; He will wait; He will do a lot to get it so; He may take years to get it so, but that will be our loss. If He could have it His way, He would get on with His job forthwith by having things according to His order. Frustration, delay, unfruitfulness, are always due to this absence of God's way of doing things, or of His object in doing things, or of what He wants done, or of the way in which He wants it done. Let us never deceive ourselves in false satisfaction because God gives some blessing!

That is perhaps enough by way of emphasizing the fact that God is the God of order. I have only opened a window to you through which you can see a universe.

We come to the next thing: the disruption and disorder. There is a sense in which the Bible throughout is occupied with the confronting of this long-drawn-out, obdurate, incorrigible disorder, and with the evil forces that are behind it. You meet it everywhere - the dealing with interfering forces is found almost everywhere in the Bible. The Bible shows the source of this disruption and disorder. And we are all too aware of this disorder. Everywhere in this universe, in this creation, there is a disrupted order, a dis-order. There is a great schism everywhere. That is true, is it not? Well, taking it that you agree that it is so, the Bible shows us where it came from, the range of it, the entrance of it into this world, its development in this world, its nature and its effects, and its main cause.

This disorder, the Bible shows us, began in heaven. It was a rebellion against God; and we know how it entered into this world. The first result was that man himself became a divided creature, a centre of civil war in his own nature. Man is, by nature, no longer a unity. He is himself a clash of two worlds. The Psalmist prays: "Unite my heart" (Psalm 86:11). "Unite my heart!" Our hearts are divided things. Man is a division, and he is himself a conflict. And when I speak of man, I am uniting the man and the woman, for with both of them this became true in themselves individually, and then, of course, it became true of them as two. The enemy sought to divide the husband and the wife - and he did it. He struck right home to that marvellous oneness. You see, the Scripture goes out of its way to describe and emphasize the oneness: "They shall be one flesh... the twain shall be one flesh." It has so much to say about that oneness of husband and wife, but this disruptive influence and power came in and divided them. It is a real lesson! From the husband and the wife it reached to the family, and it is not long before you find the family disrupted. Cain and Abel - the one murdering the other, and destroying the family life. From the family, it reached out to embrace the whole race; and you know how the book of Genesis contains the story of racial disruption and confusion. This thing spread and it has become universal. The spirit of it is in the lower heavens: "The spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience" - it is in the air: "the prince of the power of the air"; you can breathe it and you can sense it in this world, the antagonism, hatred and malice, and much more like that. It has come right into the human life of the individual, and into human relationships, into the nearest two. It has come right into the family - and what a problem family life is now! And what a key it is to so much more! - until the race is shot through and through with this disrupting and dislocating spirit and power. Yes, it is here. We have seen where it came from, how it started, its range, its development, its nature and its effects - to set every man's hand against his brother.

Its main cause. This is something that we must stay with for a moment. Do remember that the Bible always regards this matter as a rebellion, for it is the spirit of rebellion. The more we know of our own natures under stress, under trial, under pressure, the more true we know this to be. Right in our constitution there is something that rebels, and would even rebel against God and His ways, would question His wisdom and His love. It is in us. And the seat of this rebellion is in man himself. He is a disrupted being, not only disrupted in his relationship with God, but disrupted in his own personality. Man is a divided creature in himself, for the spirit of rebellion came in. The word "iniquity", which is such a characteristic word of the Old Testament, has its roots in this very idea of rebellion.

Now the real nature of this thing lies here - and perhaps we can illustrate this best by looking at the physical body, because those who know something about this - the laws of physical health and disease - tell us that it is all a matter of the environment of the living cells. This is a quotation: "It is the cell environment that is responsible for whatever disease affects the human body, either in the immediate environment of the cells, the presence of a poison, or the absence of some essential ingredient." All these millions of living cells are environed by this lymph stream, which provides what is necessary for their life. This lymph stream is their environment. If some poison gets into that stream, or if something essential to their life is lacking, then the living cells fall into disease, and the body in its whole order is upset. And sickness is only disorder, is it not? Now, I have taken this illustration, for God has written His spiritual laws in all His creation, and, I think, pre-eminently in the human body.

You see, all this disorder, and resultant sickness, all the pain and agony due to this disruption, are because man left his environment. God is man's true environment. In Him there is no darkness at all, and no poison. In Him is all that we need for our life and for our health. But man left his environment. He took himself out of his environment in God, and took his life into his own hands, to say what he would do and not do, what he would have and not have. He became a law unto himself, rebelling against God as his law and his environment. What happened? He entered into an environment of poison and of fatal lack of what is necessary to his very life. Salvation - which is the word for health - is a return into God. Hence Christ emphasized the need to "Abide in Me".

Now start again with that thought. You see, this whole Bible is about bringing man back to God, bringing him into God, and restoring him to his environment. "In Him we live and move and have our being" is the fundamental truth of the spiritual life. There is one thing I suggest to you, or hint at, which, if you grasp it, would be such a tremendous help to you. When the Lord says anything it may look on the face of it something very simple, and not at all profound and wonderful; but anything that comes from the Lord, though it be apparently very simple, contains all the vast knowledge and understanding that the Lord has, and not to take account of that 'simple' thing may bring you into a vast amount of trouble. When the Lord Jesus says: "Abide in Me" it sounds so simple and so ordinary, but it contains all this history, and this great principle and truth: "If you get out of your environment you are exposed to all the poisons and all that creates spiritual disease. Abide in Me for your health's sake! for your life's sake! for the sake of everything! Abide in Me, and I in you!" Have you got that? You look again at any seemingly 'little' thing that the Lord says, and if you could see you would find that you have a universe of meaning in it.

Well, the main cause of all the disorder is getting out of your rightful sphere in God, and that is what happened at the beginning. The cure, as we shall see when we come to the redemptive work, is to get back into your place, into your cover, in God. Forsake your wandering, which is outside. Leave your independence, and come in.

Now, you see, this carries with it the whole matter of the absolute, undivided, unquestioned supremacy and sovereignty of God in and through Jesus Christ. Put that another way: the absolute surrender, yieldedness, unquestioning acceptance of the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ as Head. That is the way of life, the way of health, the way of fruitfulness, and the way of progress. And we know so well that frustration, limitation, arrest, barrenness are because there is still unyieldedness to Him in the life. Adam took things into his own hands and said: "I will be the lord of my life", and we are like that by nature. And I am afraid we have not got so far away from it in grace. We meet one another, and what do we meet? We meet a man and a woman who have got a mind of their own, a will of their own, and a way of their own, and will never be taught by you, or told by you, what they should do. Unteachable, stubborn, mulish, knowing best!

Let me close with this: Pain, all pain, is because of disorder. Pain is nature shouting: "There is something wrong!" It is true in the physical. You may kill pain. There are lots of things provided for killing pain, and I am afraid I am one who says: "Thank the Lord for that!" Nevertheless, no sensible person believes that the killing of pain is getting rid of the trouble. No, you may kill the pain and silence the cry, but the trouble that is there may work itself out in your death. The killing of the pain does not mean that you heal the disorder.

The world is trying to silence this cry of pain, to numb this ache, to kill it, and go on as though there is nothing wrong; but it is there. What is true in the physical is true in the spiritual. Pain in our spiritual life, in our corporate life, is the cry that there is something wrong, there is disorder somewhere, and things are not as the Lord intended them to be. There is a dislocation in the joints, there is a fracture in the fellowship, and there is a disease of sin in the Body. We cannot just take something to numb the pain, silence the cry, and go on as though it were all right. No, the thing will work itself out. We have got to stop and say: "What is it? Where is the disorder? Where are things wrong? What is it that is against God's Mind?" Until we can get our hand upon that, there is no hope for clearing up the situation at all. That is the need. Remember that the Bible says that the end of the age will see disorder - rebellion - come to the full.

Chapter 4 - The Significance of Christ in His Cross

We have been giving ourselves to a seeking to see and to grasp something of the significance of the Lord Jesus Christ and His work in relation to the whole created universe. We are really gathered around one thing: that He is the key to everything and that only as He comes into His place will the creation find the explanation and answer to its existence. That has taken us out along several lines. We have seen that there was a primeval order in the creation, of which He was the centre and the sphere, as the Son eternally appointed the ‘heir of all things’. There was an order expressive of God, who is the God of order. We have seen that all progress, all fruitfulness, all satisfaction, all fullness, is a matter of Jesus Christ; and that, so far as we are concerned, Christians or mankind, it is a matter of knowing Him.

We have dwelt much upon this matter of order as essential to life, to progress and to the realization of God’s end. Order is a key to everything.

We went on to see something of the disruption of that order, the interference with it and the breaking in upon it. The result: disorder, and all its baneful consequences — pain in the creation, spiritual pain as well as physical pain. The Apostle has put it like this: "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain" (Romans 8:22), because things are out of order. We traced the course of that disruption and dislocation, which began, apparently, somewhere outside of this present world — in heaven, where there was an uprising of a leader with a great following of angels, apparently in revolt against God’s destined place and purpose for His Son as ‘the heir of all things’. It was a bid for that position of equality with God, a bid to displace God’s appointed One. That brought disruption in that realm, and the leader and his followers were cast out — "angels, which kept not their first estate" (Jude 6). We saw the leader of them, no doubt with his following, invading this earth and breaking in, so that the beautiful order of the creation was upset. In the first place, the order in the man; the balance, the symmetry, the beautiful harmony in the man’s own life and constitution were upset and disorganized. Then immediately to the corporate — in the man and his wife, so that you can, in almost the first mention, detect something that has come into their fellowship. The one blamed the other for what had been done, and that momentous ordinance of God with so much bound up with it in His purpose — the two as one — is severed. And then of course, the family. The family has this schism in it, working out to one brother murdering the other. Jesus went right back to that and said of Satan: "He was a murderer from the beginning" (John 8:44). From the family to the race, and that book which records all this brings us to the whole race in confusion in every way. The order, universally, in the upper realms of this earth, in the lower heavens, the earth and its environs, what we mean by the cosmos is shot through and through with this disruption, this schism, this strain, this conflict, and is just shattered to pieces. Spiritual progress in the purpose of God is arrested and all the beauty of the Lord is marred.

Well, that is where we were in our earlier chapter.

Now we come to the significance of Christ in His Cross in relation to that. The Cross of the Lord Jesus stands right at the very centre and heart of that whole cosmic disruption. The Cross is the heart of redemption, but redemption relates to the whole range of Satanic interference with the order of God. The Cross, and redemption, and salvation are far, far greater things than dealing with men’s sins. They deal with sinfulness, which is much, much more than sins, and sinfulness is traced right to that one who made this assault upon God’s appointment, God’s economy and God’s order. The Cross of the Lord Jesus stands related to that whole realm and range of disruption and disorder from centre to circumference. The Cross is not a small thing; it is an immense thing, and it reaches as far as this thing that has happened in the universe reaches. And we must look upon the Cross and upon redemption in the light of this once existing Divine order, then its upset and disruption, and then its recovery and eternal establishment beyond any more fear of the thing happening again. So far the Cross reaches, and so far Christ crucified has His significance.

The Realms of Disruption

(1) The Cosmic Realm

The redemptive work of the Lord Jesus in the Cross follows the whole path of this mischief. It follows that very course, and it is important that you and I should recognize the order and sequence of this thing. The very first realm in which the Cross has its application is the realm of the spiritual hierarchy of evil. It begins there. On the day of our Lord’s crucifixion, or death, the very heavens were affected: "Darkness was over the face of the earth"; "there was a great earthquake"; "the veil of the temple was rent, from top to bottom". Heaven is involved and is breaking in, and there is a tremendous thing happening in that realm. When we read the Gospel account, of course, we only have the events and the associated happenings, but there was a man who was given an insight into something more. This was not in the Gospels and could not at that time be revealed. He tells us that in the Cross ‘He stripped off principalities and powers and made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it’ (Colossians 2:15). That is where redemption begins. The very heavens (by that, I take it, the lower heavens, not God’s Presence) were defiled by this revolt, and they were purged by the Cross. The disrupting forces of the order of God were met in the spiritual world by God’s Son on the Cross. It is far too deep and full a matter for us to dwell upon at length, but there is a very real practical value in this, for, after all, we are not dealing in the first place with circumstances, nor conditions, nor with effects and results. We are dealing with causes. When there is a breaking in, in any realm, of those disruptive, schismatic, disordering forces, in an individual life, or in a community, or anywhere, the usual way is to find a scapegoat, to blame somebody, to begin to look at one another, to put it down to this, and that, and something else, and in so doing we are missing the point and missing the way, and we will never clear it up like that. We will only make it worse. We have got to get behind it, for there is something behind it all — ah, there is someone behind it all.

I do not know what you feel about it, but with all the desire that we may have — and it is a very real one — not to become demoniacal-minded, you are just more and more forced to realize that there is a whole system of iniquity and animosity to the things of God at work in this universe, and it seems that these forces are more and more at work. They come very near and are like a blanket upon you, especially when there is something of the Lord on hand. It just recurs like the seasons when the Lord has something more in view. It just happens. It is not coincidence, nor chance, nor imagination, for the thing is far too desperately real; it is calculated to put you right out of the fight, and strategically so, at a very, very important moment. Well, we could say much about it, but this is in a realm that is over things, that encompasses ‘things’, circumstances, happenings, feelings, and all that. They are secondary. It is what is around as the source of them that it is important to recognize.

Now, the Lord Jesus, in His Cross, has something to say to that realm, and you and I will never know victory over things until we know the value of the Cross and the Blood of Jesus in that ground and realm. The victory has got to be won in that realm, or applied in that realm, before ‘things’ will give place. Oh, take that to heart! Remember that! For we are just being ‘played with’ by these evil forces, and being made to do just as they want us to do, because we have either lost, or never have had, this key to the situation: that Calvary touches the cosmic realm of evil. That is where the path of redemption begins, as that is where the trouble began.

(2) The Realm of Man

The next thing on the way, as you noted, is man. This whole thing, great and far-reaching in its range, and terrible in its nature, is focused down upon man. He is the next point of assault, to disrupt him, divide him, and make him, in himself, incapable of functioning simply because he is divided. You know that it is true, if you are divided in yourself, or amongst yourselves, you cannot do anything. You are just paralysed and cannot get anywhere. That is a fact, and the devil knows it, if you do not! And so he comes in from the outside and brings this disruption down to man himself, and man becomes a paralysed creature simply because he himself is in division. His nature is divided. The order, the beautiful order, balance and symmetry of his own personality is upset. Man was created in an order. I am not staying with the order of spirit, soul and body, but there is an order, and if that order obtains in Christ, you have a man in peace, in rest, in strength, and a man who is accounted for something. Upset that man in himself, in his own constitution, and throw him all out of gear and out of order, and where does he get? Well, that is what the Bible means by vanity. "The creation", says Paul, "was subjected to vanity" (Romans 8:20). That is, ‘You shall not get through!’ It is imposed and you cannot get anywhere.

Redemption by the Cross of the Lord Jesus is intended, dear friends, to come to us individually to recover and restore a harmony in ourselves. It may be a long process, but we do know that a beginning is made when new birth takes place; when we come to the Cross of the Lord Jesus as to our condition, our need as to ourselves, and that Cross becomes effective just at the beginning of the Christian life. The testimony of all that have come that way is that there is a wonderful sense of peace that comes into the heart. Peace is only another word for harmony, you know. It is not just that everything has quietened down. Oh, no! It is that now you have got into true line with the purpose for which you were made. You are on the path now. You have been all over the place, but now your feet are on the way and something of the peace of the end comes into the beginning. You are going to have many conflicts presently, but the beginning is like that. Even with a little child it is wonderful. A child does not understand all your theology and doctrine of atonement and justification, but a little child can know what it means to receive Jesus into the heart. And when that is done with a little child you at once see something. Something has happened, and it is not imagination. It is the beginning of a life re-adjusted, re-harmonized. The conflict has gone out, so far as the person is concerned. It is like that in new birth. It is the beginning of the new creation which, in its completion, will be a beautiful reproduction of a lost harmonious order.

The Christian life, from that beginning, from that starting point, is just the school in which we learn the way of harmony, the way of life. What is it? It is everything centred in, and governed by, the Lord Jesus. You see, we have these statements here. We are so familiar with them that they have almost lost their real meaning to us. "In him all things hold together." He is the integrating centre of this universe. He brings the broken parts together, and forms again. He takes hold of the chords which are all out of tune and tunes them again into a harmony. ‘In Him all things consist.’ When Jesus has His place, things begin to be like that. There is a re-conciliating. And, I say, the Christian life is the school of learning to let Jesus have His place, and when He has His place you know, as well as I do that, so far as our inner life is concerned, things are far more restful, more sure, and certainly more fruitful. It is just that, but that is a tremendous thing, because we say: ‘Jesus has His place!’ It sounds so elementary, but you see how comprehensive it is. He is the centre of a harmonized universe, and when He has His place, He begins to harmonize the inner life. And the more place He has, the more unified we are, and the more at peace we are. We know quite well how true it is in the opposite: that when He is not getting His place in everything, everything is under a strain.

For the individual, and His significance there as the unifying of the heart — one heart, not a divided heart — it is a deep work, a great work, and perhaps it is a long work, but that is the business of life: the unifying of everything in Christ. That is, Christ becoming the single Factor who makes of everything a single factor: ‘For to me to live is Christ,’ a single factor unifying the whole life. Satan is not going to leave that alone. He is going, by every possible means, to assail it, to interfere with it if he can. But, you see, he cannot, for he just cannot destroy Christ. He has been destroyed by Christ! And the work of the Cross of our Lord Jesus is the ground upon which we stand, and must stand, against all that interfering work of the evil forces to bring us again into inward confusion and uncertainty. Satan is trying it all the time. Stand your ground on the Cross! Stand your ground under the Blood when he tries to rob you of that quiet assurance that all is well, because of what the Lord Jesus has done in His Cross.

(3) The Marriage Realm

You move from the personal into the corporate life. This is the pathway of the evil forces, and this is the pathway of the Cross. Yes, into this most sacred relationship which was the true ordinance of God at the beginning — husband and wife. Is it necessary for me to say to young people who are contemplating that union: ‘Be sure that it is in Christ! Be sure that it is in Christ to begin with!’ There is no guarantee or even hope for all that it means in the purpose of God unless it is in Christ. And there are tremendous things bound up with that relationship in Christ. But, if it has taken place, this is one of the sacred things that the evil forces and the evil one will never cease to assail. You, perhaps, have not realized the tremendous damage that the devil can do when he can separate two in that relationship. It is a focal point of his constant attack to divide there. That relationship is a real battleground through life, for there is so much for the Lord in it. If it has in any way been interfered with, how are you going to put it right? Not by mere human attempts. You have got to get back into Christ, for it is only getting back on to the ground of Christ that will put that right. It may be that the man is pulling in one direction and the woman in another. There is no real togetherness. One has one mind, and the other has another: one will, and another; one interest, and another; one like, and another. And you know it is weakening, it is frustrating and it is desolating. It is only when the two get on to the ground of Christ crucified that that thing can be dealt with and put right. Every one has got to let go their natural ground and take the ground of Christ crucified as to themselves.

But, dear friends, the Word of God makes it perfectly clear to us that, in the beginning, that ordinance of God, that relationship, was a representation of something far greater. This, in its testimony, is a Church matter. ‘I speak of Christ and the Church’, says the Apostle in speaking of that relationship. The real principle in the principle of ‘corporate life’ anywhere, anyhow, in Christ — maybe the two, the three, the local company, or the larger company of the Lord’s people. The principle is one principle. The enemy will stand at nothing to get in between, to divide. And the only — but the sure — means of preserving that unity is the Cross of the Lord Jesus at work in an inward way in us all. That is a tremendous thing! But it will do it. If only that Cross becomes really a subjective reality in all concerned, that is the end of all divisions.

(4) The Realm of the Church

We can easily see, without dwelling upon it, that this extends, beyond the individual, beyond the two and three, beyond the little group and company, to the Church universal. We can see that, eventually, it will reach the whole inhabited world, when Christ has His place. ‘All the great multitude, out of every diversity of nationality, and tongue, and clime, and kindred’ will be on the ground of the Lamb slain, the Cross of the Lord Jesus. They will be ‘singing one song’ in harmony. The high notes, the low notes, and all the notes between will be ascribing worth to the Lamb. Glorious chorus! Redemption follows that course. The Cross of the Lord Jesus relates to that one thing, to an end where all is reunited in Christ.

We have placed John 17 as the foundation of this message, and you know the great, perhaps the highest, note of that chapter is in a little clause: ‘that they may be perfected into one’. Perfected into one! That is the end of His prayer, the end of His travail, the end of His redeeming work — perfected into one! Then the great arch-adversary of the Divine order can do no more. His work is finished, his power is destroyed, for the Cross stands victorious over this long history of disruption.

I see no hope for unity anywhere other than in the Cross of the Lord Jesus: Christ crucified, put in His place. And although the battle goes on and the enemy is always trying to make a show of disruption and disorder, if the Cross has really done a work in human hearts, there is a basic something that will triumph over all that.

Chapter 5 - The Cross and the Disruptive Power of Sin

"And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up" (John 3:14).

"Jesus therefore said, When ye have lifted up the Son of man, then shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself, but as the Father taught me, I speak these things" (John 8:28).

"And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself" (John 12:32).

In the Scriptures cited above we have the Lord Jesus three times speaking of being "lifted up". Of course, it means on the Cross. In connection with that ‘lifting up’ He uses two phrases: "Whosoever" and "All men". The issue of the Cross, then, is said to be a unifying of humanity. When we think of the Cross, we usually, and almost entirely, think of sin. This is right, if we understand what is meant by sin. There are sins, and there is sin. The Cross is His ‘bearing of our sins in His body on the tree’. The Cross is also the judgment upon, and destruction of, the effect of sin.

In the Bible sin is regarded as spiritual disease. There the greatest illustration of spiritual disease is leprosy, and the effect of leprosy is to disintegrate the body, to break down its unity. It does that first in the individual, and then in the society; for the leper must go outside of his family and away from other people. This breaking up principle and power of sin is also represented in another type, which has an embargo upon it when the Cross (in figure) is present, and that is leaven. The effect of leaven is to break up, disintegrate, and inflate.

Jesus says that the Cross, and the ‘lifting up’ will be against that effect of sin. Sin separates between man and God; between man and a heavenly society; between the "natural man" and the spiritual man in the Church. (See 1 Corinthians.) It was because of that divisive effect of sin that the Apostle said that he would know nothing among them but "Jesus Christ, and him crucified".

The only cure for divisions in any realm is the power of the Cross. We have — in these messages — been seeing the course of disruption, from Satan’s jealousy of God’s Son in the "before the world was" (John 17:5), and the resultant schism there, to the earth in its chaos as possibly Satan’s earlier "princedom" ("the prince of this world"), then to — and in the Garden — man and wife; then to the family, the tribe, and the whole race.

That long and terrible history was destined by Divine Counsels to be met and destroyed, and "reconciliation", reunification, reintegration, to be accomplished in the same dimensions as the evil. The instigator and his work were to be destroyed and cast out of God’s domain of light, life, and love, forever. The Person to do it, and rightly constituted for it, was God’s Son, and the instrument for its accomplishment was His Cross. Every aspect of the cosmic universe was focused in that Cross. The Cross is a factual position, basic, fundamental, final as to this schismatic power of sin. Then it is a progressive principle to be applied and made effective in the Church. The final and consummate vision of the Cross is a great multitude out of every tribe and nation singing in unison or harmony the Song of the Lamb.

This is all a very great test and challenge as to the place and work of the Cross in ourselves personally; in our relationships; in the local assemblies, and in the Church universally. The heart of the disrupted universe, and the heart of all disrupted situations contains an ‘I’. It commenced there when "Lucifer" said in his heart, "I will be equal with the Most High". The principle of self-hood, in some form of ‘grasping’ and not letting go to God, is accountable for all schisms which affect Divine interests and glory. (See Philippians 2:9 onwards.)

So, coming back to our main subject, the Divine order is in the Person of God’s Son. It is secured by His Cross. It is increased by the principle of the Cross at work in believers. It is the real meaning of ‘knowing Christ’, and it is consummated when the Lamb in the throne is the adored Centre of a new Creation.

Let us not just view all this objectively, but continually challenge all motives and situations by it.

The Application of the Message to Local Assemblies

While the disruptive work of the enemy of Christ is extended to the whole Church — the true Church — to effect its disunity by every possible means because the true Church — the Elect of God — is destined in the eternal counsels to occupy the position of administration of the ‘new heaven and new earth’, it is of particular interest and concern to the enemy to disrupt and discredit all local representations of Christ and His Body. This he will do — and does — by bringing about wrong order. Order — Divine order — is absolutely indispensable to growth, strength, and effectiveness. This fact is greatly overlooked and therefore much advantage is given to the disruptive forces. Because the Divine order is heavenly and spiritual, only the Holy Spirit, sent down from heaven, knows what it is and can administer and constitute it. Immediately man puts his hand upon the Church local to organize, form, arrange, and control it, disorder — or un-order — will set in, with the results of confusion, limitation, artificiality, make-believe, and — in time — an end in itself. It can be worse — even shame and disgrace.

Therefore, to have the Divine order it is basically essential — as in the beginning — that the Holy Spirit shall be in complete control in terms of the absolute headship and lordship of Christ. This means that everything shall be meticulously referred and deferred to the Holy Spirit. This is the principle embodied in fasting with prayer. We say the principle, because there is no virtue in fasting without its meaning. To some men it might be costly to go without a meal or two; to others meals are not of such account, indeed, they feel better without a few. The principle of fasting (not only or merely in going without food for a day) is the refraining from what is of man in any way to give the Lord a full way through occupation with Him, which is the function of prayer. The Lord does not want us to go on ‘hunger strike’ to get what we want, but to go on self-strength strike to let Him have what He wants. It was out of this ‘prayer with fasting’ that the Holy Spirit instigated the Divine order at the beginning. (Acts 13, etc.) Note: the appointments were made firstly through abandoned prayer, then by Holy Spirit direction, then in the midst of the (local) Church, and evidently by the Church’s unity. Who will ever estimate the values which issued from that microcosm of the heavenly order? The most impressive thing, and the most significant, is that the local emerged into the universal. Souls saved, companies born, and saints fed in far-reaching ministry, and all-time values. Man’s arrangements and appointments do not work out in that way!

Every assembly ought to be a vessel of light and food for all the Lord’s people, as well as of evangelism to the unsaved.

The law of order as governing development, growth, strength, effectiveness, and reproduction is written large by God in all organic nature, and not least in the human body.

Order is the spontaneous outworking of life. It proves that life is unimpeded, unobstructed, and working normally. What is true in nature is equally true in the spiritual organism — the Church. It is when there is an invasion of something contrary to "the law of the Spirit of life", from selfhood or the world, that the life is obstructed and there is a loss of power, effectiveness, and productiveness. The Bible calls this "the Anointing". Every vessel, every ministry, every "office", every position, every function in the local Church should manifestly be under the anointing. It should be evident to all that that man in that position, doing what he is doing, is unmistakably there and functioning under the anointing; that God put him in that position, and therefore life flows through him and his function.

When we have said this (and we could add very much more concerning Divine order in the local assembly), we are brought back to an all-inclusive and comprehensive work and meaning of the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit: it is to reveal Christ. We have said that Christ — the Son of God — is the full embodiment of the heavenly order. By the Anointing He expressed that order. We need to get right away from our man-crystallized systems of Christianity to a new Holy Spirit revealed apprehension of Christ. If the Holy Spirit is really governing He will organically constitute all things according to Christ, and the Church and churches will not be institutions, organizations, or even ‘churches’, but representations and expressions of Christ.

Chapter 6 - The Significance of the Cross - To Us

With the Gospel by Mark chapter 15 fresh in our memories, I just want to place alongside of it some words from the Gospel by Matthew, chapter 12, at verse 38:

"Then certain of the scribes and Pharisees answered Him saying, Teacher, we would see a sign from thee. But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth."

It does so happen that this evening, in memory, we are in that period, between the death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus - a period of three days and three nights. And it is upon the significance of that that we are going to dwell a little while, in close contact with all that has gone before in the previous chapters.

And we note, in the first place, the symbolic number that is chosen here, the symbolic number 'three'. It was not just chance or hap, but by Divinely deliberate choice; by very much foreshadowing and forecasting, as is here intimated, that Jonah's experience was, in itself, a prophecy. Jonah did not understand why that particular period should be appointed for him to be where he was in the depths, in the darkness. But in that Divine ordering of things, all the way through, there is one mind, the mind of God, always having His Son in view. It was no mere chance that Jonah went into the fish, and stayed there for three days and three nights; the number itself right through the Scriptures, always carries with it a certain significance. It is the number of Divine completeness. When you come upon that number, that is what you find. It is the number of the very Godhead Itself, the Trinity; - Father, Son and Holy Spirit, One, and complete. It is the number of man - spirit, soul and body. The Apostle says, your 'whole' spirit, soul and body, preserved blameless. Man as a whole is a trinity - three in one.

And so we could go on for a long time, through the Bible, and outside of the Bible, finding that this number comprehends a threefold realm of things which makes for completeness. But it is particularly related to the death of Christ. It is impressive to note this; we have read it: He was crucified at the "third hour"; "there was darkness over the whole earth from the sixth hour to the ninth hour" - three hours. There was an inscription nailed to His Cross in three languages, Latin and Greek and Hebrew. And then, He was "in the heart of the earth" as the description is, three days, three nights. What does it mean? Why, in the sovereignty of God, has this number been nailed to the death of the Lord Jesus, to govern it? Well, I think it is perfectly clear; it is the completeness of the work of His Cross; the completeness of His death, in all its significance. It is something that is full; something that is complete. It requires this number. If you take one, you have got to add something to it. If you take two, you cannot shut up anything in two lines, you have got to add a third to make a triangle, and that is your very first geometrical way of containing anything; it is enough to contain all that you want. The death of Christ, governed by this number, is something which is complete.

Now, we have been occupied entirely with the particular relationship of Christ to an eternal heavenly order, which obtained, and then which was destroyed, and which He came to recover. And the first thing that the death, or the Cross of the Lord Jesus says in the light of this number three which is so much in evidence, is that, in the Cross that old disorder is fully and finally finished. It is completed in Himself and in this universe, by His Cross; it is potentially brought to conclusion. The old disorder is finished. The death of Christ says emphatically: with God, with Heaven, all that belongs to that disruption in the universe, that dislocation, that upset which Satan has brought in, no longer obtains before God and before Heaven. He has put an end to it in His Cross. That is a statement of a fact; but it is a tremendous reality upon which God works continually in the life of every believer, and particularly, in the life of His Church.

It is a thing that we should continually remember, that God, from His side, is never working towards anything; from His side, He is always working backwards. He is working back to what was, both in His mind in times eternal, and which He had actually in His creative activity. There it was. He has never given it up. All the departure is away; God is always coming back. God is never saying to man: You must come onto Me; He is saying: You must come back to Me. It is only in us, where we are concerned, that we are moving towards a consummation; but God is always working backwards. The Cross is the ground towards which He is always working back, to bring us back. Every bit of His activity in our lives is to bring us back to what He meant in that Cross. And that Cross was full, complete, and final, as to an old disrupted system. God has said in the Cross: That is finished. Now, you cannot come back to that all at once, or there would be nothing of you left! But all through your life, I am bringing you back there; a bit more of that thing that the Cross cancelled out and finished has got to go - He is working back to that. God is always doing that. You see, it means that God, while He bears and forbears and is very patient and long-suffering with much that He will not have, He never will accept it. He may be patient, but He does not accept it. The Cross says about that which Satan brought into His universe: That is completed; nothing of that has any standing. We do understand the workings of God in our lives, and we say so much about the Cross at work in us. But what does it mean? Simply that. There is still a lot that God is not accepting; He has been very patient over it for a long time, but sooner or later, we have got to come to God's finality about the whole thing; completeness about the whole thing. And ultimate perfection, where we are concerned, is only the complete fulfilment of the work of the Cross in us: the making true in us of that which Calvary meant in itself. It is the old disorder that is fully dealt with.

That is the comprehensive thing. Within that compass there is, of course, very much that we shall not stay to even mention. But one thing can be mentioned. There was an old system in the Old Testament that was, in the type and symbol and figure, intended to point to this very fact of what the Cross means of an end of everything that is not of Heaven. That Jewish system was a system that, in every part, declared this truth of Calvary, that what is of Satan's doing has no place with God. Here is another order, a heavenly order, introduced in this system of types and figures - a heavenly order, another order - it all implied that, it all pointed to that, but it was a system that utterly failed. The whole Jewish system, with all its implication and meaning, from God's standpoint it failed completely; it never did bring in the heavenly order. And Calvary says: An end, then, to a system that fails; to every system that fails to produce what God wants even though that system may have been prescribed by God for a purpose. If it does not result in or lead to this heavenly order, out it must go - be it Christian or Jewish - if it does not produce the heavenly order, Calvary says: it is finished. There is an immense amount of Christianity that is going to go under Divine judgment; because it has the name of 'Christian' on it is no guarantee that it is going to stand. Christianity, as a mere system, will go the same way as Judaism. The Cross has said this one thing: Only that which really does put away all that is not of Heaven; only that which does bring in what is of Heaven has any standing with God now. The Cross makes that declaration.

You remember the parable of our Lord which is directed at Israel and Judaism - that tree and the looking and the expecting of fruit, and the verdict - listen: "These three years have I come seeking fruit..." (Luke 13:7) - these three years! Completeness of opportunity; the completeness of disappointment, in a system. That 'tree' was Israel. God said: I have given Israel a complete, perfect opportunity. And surely anybody who knows will agree; if ever a people had an opportunity with every provision to produce fruit, they did. God was complete in the provision that He made, in the patience that He showed. But, these three years... no fruit; therefore, cut it down, therefore wither it from the root! You see, that was a system; Israel, Judaism, was a system brought in by God, but it is not the thing, it is that for which the thing is intended. It is not the 'truth' that you and I have, not the teaching that we possess, not all that has come to us outwardly. The point is, does it produce what God intended? Does it bring us through to the heavenly thing actually? Does it lead us out of that confusion and disorder which contradicts the mind and will of God? The Cross, you see, is a very utter thing in that matter.

It speaks also of the completeness of God's abandonment of the world. That world is the world of a disrupted system and order; it lies "in the wicked one". If ever we wanted proof of this great truth, well, it is all around us today, our daily papers are full of it; column after column of this lawlessness, this anarchy, this disruption and disorder. It is just there, it is the problem of all countries today; it is everywhere and it is forcing its way into the very Church of God! The great trouble today is just this, is it not, that lawlessness, disorder, repudiation of authority, and control are becoming worse and worse. Now, in the Cross, because that whole thing is expressive and demonstrative of a broken-down Divine order, God said in the Cross: That world is cut off, is put away.

We have a great illustration of that in the Old Testament in Israel's coming out of Egypt. Do you remember the prescription for Pharaoh, from which neither God nor Moses would depart one hair's breadth: "three days' journey into the wilderness" - no less! Three days' journey in the wilderness. Pharaoh may bargain, but Moses is adamant. He may do everything to retain, to limit, but the number is Divinely fixed: 'three days' journey into the wilderness! Of course the Lord knew what that meant; perhaps Pharaoh had some idea that get that far, and they are gone; they are lost, they are beyond recovery. If they get that far! Well, that is God's meaning - the completeness of separation from this world - number three. That is God's thought in the Church. The Church is a long time coming to it, Christians are a long time coming to it - to see that what is called 'worldliness' was nailed to that Cross with the Lord Jesus, fully, and finally, and utterly. None of it stands with God. He will be patient and long-suffering, but sooner or later we shall be brought up against this fact that, to allow or condone anything that the Cross is set against, is to jeopardise, at least, our own spiritual life; to find us 'out' somewhere with God; out of favour with God.

And if we want still stronger proof of this, note that after this great double 'three'  "crucified the third hour"; "darkness over all the earth for three hours" - it was then that the cry went forth: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken Me?" Abandoned by God! That is the end; a terrible and awful end; there is nothing beyond that, there is no hope at all when it is like that. It is darkness indeed for three hours, when it is like that! You see, a completeness of darkness when God turns away and forsakes. We know that it was because He, there, in His Cross, gathered to Himself all these evil forces, in the first place, that had brought this world's disruption; and to Himself, all the sin of this disrupted man. And God said: Finish with that, completely and forever... and turned away, and abandoned that One, in that capacity. The cry of forsakenness is the great cry of something which is forever finished, finished with by God!

Well, we see that for those three days, we just have a little glimpse of what happened with the twelve, and with the larger company; it was a scene of desolation, despair, and disappointment. The Cross has written that and registered that.

Now you and I, while it is very terrible, have got still to be impressed with the completeness and the utterness of the work of the Cross. Now that is one of the three great aspects of the Cross. It is the darkest; indeed it is the dark. There is a second, and upon this, of course, we believers dwell with that profoundest gratitude. Yes, the completeness of the removal of everything that comes between us and God! How complete was the work where our sin was concerned; nothing left to be done, judgment exhausted upon that One for us! That is the theme for eternity, what we refer to as the 'finished work' and we are always moved as we remember, or are reminded, that that word 'finished' does not mean that you have just reached the end; no, it means that it is 'complete'. There is nothing to be added, nothing more to be done, it is complete! It is whole! It is full! The Cross says that - we mention it.

To pass on to the next, the other side, you see the completeness and utterness of the New Order which is made possible by the Cross; the way to which is opened up by the Cross. I want to put emphasis upon the two words: the 'utterness' of the 'new' order that is brought in through the Cross of Christ. We have seen earlier that all the disruption and the disorder in this universe came by an attempt to put the Son of God out of His Divinely appointed place. That is what happened in the garden; man put himself in the place of the Son of God. The Son of God was displaced, and everything that we know of this anarchy, chaos and disruption has followed in the train of that, because "in Him all things consist", "all things hold together". Put Him out, and things fall to pieces. The Cross not only dealt with that, but made a way for this, and this is the glory of the New Order, that Christ is back in His place. That is the shout of triumph, is it not? That is the message of the evangel; that is what they are saying wherever they go: "...both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth" - "Jesus Christ is Lord"! He is back in His place. It is the beginning of the new creation; it is the beginning of the recovery of the lost order in this universe. He is the Head of the creation, He is the Head of everything, He is back in His place. It is only when He is back in His place that things begin to be set right. The Cross, you see, means this: everything has got to be displaced that gets in the place of the Lord Jesus. And so the new order was an utter thing, beginning with this completeness of His exaltation. "God raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand, far above all rule and authority and principality and power." He is in His place again, back there! Now, from that, God says, we will get on with the work; we will reconstitute everything.

That is the beginning of everything for salvation, for every aspect of redemption, for the recovery of that lost Divine harmony in the universe - Jesus in His right place! But notice what happened next. What we said earlier was this, that it is all a matter of environment. We took an illustration from the human body, that these millions and millions of living cells, which constitute the very life and being of the human body, these living cells are all environed by something called lymph. And in that environment, in a healthy body, there are those things necessary to their very life and progress and reproduction. And there is, in the healthy body, the absence of all that that is detrimental to their life. Now we lifted that illustration out, and showed how God has written His spiritual laws in all His material creation, and in our bodies particularly. The life of every cell depends upon its environment, and you and I are cells in the great Body corporate! Disease and disorder, disruption and death, came in when man got out of his right environment, which is God. In God there is everything that is needed for the sustenance and the nourishment of the life of man; in God there is nothing poisonous to injure man's life. God is our environment! Man stepped out of his environment, and all this has resulted.

Now you notice what happens after the Cross, when man is brought back into God in Christ - in Christ... in Christ... in Christ... that is, back into God. He came to bring us back into God! When that happens, man is back in his environment in God, Christ becomes his new environment. And you see in the New Testament, what a living condition obtains, right there and then. These people, why, they are living in the Lord, are they not? Living in the Lord - difficult to put it, difficult to explain it, but this is what it amounted to: Christ was their whole sphere, their whole realm, their whole world, their 'environment'; and as they were drawing upon Him, you see a new order beginning to show itself. "They continued steadfastly in the teaching, in the breaking of bread, in fellowship, in prayer..." A new order is coming in, a new relationship, a new fellowship. It is very beautiful at the beginning, and it is all because they are back in their right environment.

We have a lot in the New Testament which speaks of the need of the meaning of the Cross in Christians in that very respect: how things break down when the Cross is not doing its work, or allowed to do its work as in Corinth. It is a very impressive thing, in the light of what we have been saying, that Paul said about the condition of things in Corinth that, "there were many sick among them, and some even died.' Why? They had got out of their environment of life and health, which was the Lord. In other words, they had not come into all that the Cross meant; they were not allowing the Cross to mean that to them which was even bodily life. The condition of things was a great declaration, testimony to the fact that, if you 'abide in Christ' it is a good thing for you, as a matter of life and not death, as a matter of strength and not weakness. So it was there. Well, this is what Paul saw at least, and others too, and continually used that little phrase, "in Christ..." We have not got that yet, you know, and all its profound depth of meaning: Christ as the living environment of the new creation. There it is, "If any man be in Christ there is a new creation; the old things have passed away" - all is new! It is a new way, it is called "a new and living way". Come back to the Cross in our chapter. What happened? At the end of the double three, when it is completed, and He cried with a loud voice, "the veil of the temple was rent... from the top to the bottom". That veil was typical or symbolic of the barrier between man and God, between earth and heaven; God is behind that, and the veil means: No entrance! No entrance, stay out!

Go back to the beginning, in the garden, and Satan has displaced God's Son in the heart of man, and the disruption has come in, and God "drove out the man from the garden". He drove him out from paradise, and closed the door, and set His cherubim with a flaming sword at the door, and said: You are outside! There is no way in! Listen to Jesus with His wonderful story of the king who made a supper for his son, invited the guests who spurned his offer and invitation. What does he say? To his servants he says: Go out into the highways and the byways, and compel them to come in, that my house may be full! What a reversing! Outside, no way in; the door is shut! Now, compel them to come in! Something has happened to open the door! The veil has been rent, from the top... from Heaven, in the Cross of the Lord Jesus. That which said: Outside! and No Entrance! has now been split asunder, and the way is wide open - an opened Heaven through the Cross. Is it not a change altogether in the Divine attitude, which once was no way in? The veil, while it hung through all the centuries, was just saying: No Way In! No way in to God! Now it is: Compel them to come in that My House may be full! The Way in is open by the Cross, it is split, it is open. The Cross of the Lord Jesus speaks of "a new and a living way", to quote from the Letter to the Hebrews. A new way. It never was before, since man sinned. It is a new life. It is a new position. He is in Heaven, and now we are regarded as "seated together with Him in the heavenlies". It is a new power, the power of the Spirit come down from Heaven. How powerless they were! Their leader, the chief among them, in speech and in action is powerless before a little serving maid in the Hall of Pilate. All courage, all boasting... just gone like a mist there. Listen to him now, before those self-same rulers in Israel: "Whether it be right for us to obey God or man, you judge"; 'we have not any question about this matter. Do as you like!' That is what it means. 'Do as you like with us; we stand here, true to that One whom you crucified.' A new power has come in.

And when we turn to the Letter to the Hebrews and we find ourselves at once in the presence of the 'new order'. It is a heavenly order now, not an earthly; it is not made with hands, to use the very phrase there, "not made with hands"; not something of man's creating; not something of man's ingenuity or organising ability whatever. This new order is something heavenly. It is something that is not of time, for anything that is of time grows old; it loses its vitality. That is true of a lot of Christianity - it becomes something made by man, organised by man, planned and run by man. It becomes a thing of time, and it only endures during man's time. It is of the earth. But this new order is something from heaven, and it is not of time, it is of eternity.

Take all that this implies if you can. I am making statements, but in the back of my mind, I am seeing so much more of what is implied. We have got to be very careful that we do not bring heavenly things down to earth, and make eternal things merely time things - that we do not take hold of heavenly things, and shape them into an earthly system - they are forever to be heavenly, living, eternal; vibrant with newness! There has got to be something of newness about everything all the way along. The Cross says that. There has got to be continuous newness. If we are in this new creation and walking according to this new life, we do not come to an end of anything; we are constantly coming to new beginnings, new releases, new openings up, new fulnesses. Newness is the hallmark! New because there is a 'new man', individual and corporate, 'a new man in Christ' who is the inclusive New Man, the Heavenly Man, the Man in whom life is.

I must leave it there, but the emphasis is here. The Cross of the Lord Jesus, those three days and three nights, do say so utterly: one whole order is finished or 'disorder' is finished, and another, which is so utterly, completely, different comes in on the other side of the Cross. It has all got to be like that, starting from zero. Completely, and at every stage and at every phase, something new. Oh, may we never get old in our spiritual life, never get old in our order of things so that it is set and fixed. I am not saying that we have got to try and be novel and original in our methods. I am saying this: that there has got to be something about it that is not just a dead custom, a repetition of things all the time, but there has got to be about it a freshness, a newness, a livingness. That is what it means that He completed the old and put it away, and by so doing, opened the way for all things to be made new.

Chapter 7 - The Cross and Unity

"And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; that whosoever believeth may in Him have eternal life" (John 3:14).

"Jesus therefore said, "When ye have lifted up the Son of Man, then shall ye know that I am He" (John 8:28).

"And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Myself" (John 12:32).

When we think of the Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, we naturally and rightly associate with it the whole matter of sin; rightly, because the Scriptures say so much about His bearing our sin in His Body on the tree. But there are very many aspects of sin set before us in the Word of God. Sin is said to be many things, or, sin has many forms; it covers a lot of ground, it relates to a lot of matters, it has a lot of different effects. But there is one thing about every aspect of sin which they all have in common as to sin's nature and sin's effect. That common element or factor in all forms of sin is its disruptive effect, its divisive effect. It is divergent. It breaks up the unity of life. Every form of sin does that. Sin, however it is expressed, works out that way.

In the Bible, sin is regarded as spiritual disease. We know that the great, perhaps the chief illustration of sin in the Bible, is leprosy. And we know that the effect of leprosy is to disintegrate the body, to completely break down its unity; destroy its integration. And that is what God thinks about sin. Having chosen that as the chief illustration of sin in its effect, He has put His finger upon that deepest and universal element in sin.

And that shows to us very forcefully and clearly what a terrible thing in the sight of God divisiveness, disruption, disunity and disintegration really is, how contrary to the Divine nature, how abhorrent it is to the Divine nature. We have vivid pictures of the leper in the Bible; how the leper had to be put outside altogether and if ever coming into proximity to other people, the leper had to cover his mouth with the linen cloth, and go on his way crying in his hollow voice, Unclean, unclean, unclean! God laid hold of that as the great symbol of sin and sin's effect, to disintegrate the individual affected, and to disintegrate the society to which he belonged - to break up fellowship and relationship. We have no more terrible picture, perhaps, of God's thought about divisiveness, the effect of sin.

Well, that is the setting of the Cross. Here we have Jesus saying that the effect of His being lifted up, that is, of His Cross, would be to bring together - "I will draw all men unto myself". The Cross would destroy that factor in sin which scatters, divides and breaks up and counter it, reverse the process, and reunite. "If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto Myself". The Cross would do that, because it would deal with the disease that disintegrates, the sin which divides.

Now, that statement that I have made is a very strong and very great statement, a very terrible statement. I have spoken like that because we treat this matter far too lightly. Oh, if I were to speak about sin and speak on and on about sin, of course, you would all thoroughly agree with me, and say: Oh, let us get as far away from that as we can, let us do everything possible to get rid of that - sin! Who wants to have to do with sin? Who wants sin? We would all say, No, while you use the word 'sin', but God calls division that, and are you quite sure that we are as desperate about this matter of division as we are about what we call 'sin'? Are we taking that as seriously as we do what we call 'sin'? If we mentioned some things that are called 'sin', we read the headlines of our papers and we will not read any further, because there is something in us that revolts against what is there that even the world calls 'sin'. We feel that we are touched with uncleanness; we do not want that. We are only too sorry that it is brought out like that, that it fills our papers, and that people want that sort of stuff. We hate it, we loathe it. But God says the common factor of sin in all its forms is this: it separates, it divides, it breaks up, it breaks down, it disintegrates; and it is the effect that God hates so much. We shall see why it is like that in a moment.

Coming back to the Cross of the Lord Jesus, there is one word that we always associate with the Cross and His work in the Cross, and that word is 'atonement'. We make His atoning work a fundamental of the Christian faith. We say it is one of the main planks in the platform in the Christian truth: His atoning death. We cannot make too much of that. I suppose we mean that He 'atoned' for man's sin. That would be quite true and right, but that is only a very small part of the meaning. The word itself gives us the full meaning: 'atonement' - 'at-one-ment', set at one. Atoned for sin - thank God for that, that our sin has been atoned for, that we have not got to 'atone' for our sin. That is very blessed, very precious. We will cling to that. But that may just take us so far, and put us in a certain position that we call justification, "righteousness by faith". But 'atonement' means more than that. It means that this common, universal factor of separation in all its directions and aspects, has been dealt with in the Cross and that the universal effect of the Cross is "setting at one", making 'at-one-ment'. The Cross is therefore the great reuniting, or uniting, power of God and not to recognise that, and certainly to violate it, is to render the whole meaning of Calvary in vain. That is a terrible thing! In God's sight that is what disunity means, what divisiveness means: making the Cross of our Lord Jesus of none effect. If it is true and it is His own words: "If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto Myself", then if we have not found our focus and unity in Christ, the Cross has not done its work!

The Cross, we have said, is the great power of unification. Now, this brings us back to all that has occupied us in these gatherings. One great thing that has been the fruit of sin in the universe, which has polluted, corrupted and defiled this whole universe: that disintegrating work of the evil power and powers from the beginning causing this, has become a universe shot through and through with conflict and strife, division, and all that belongs to that. It is a disintegrated and shattered creation, which, with every attempt of men through the ages can never be repaired. All men's greatest efforts, institutions and organisations to counter that, become perfectly laughable. A 'United' Nations - what a misnomer! A 'United Nations', the charter of which is for the protection of weak peoples! Today, Tibet... making the United Nations Charter a laughing stock, just as the old League of Nations was. I am not touching politics, I am only illustrating. Men's greatest - yes, best-meant institutions and organisations - they just become laughable in the end, in the face of the immense power in this universe of disintegration. The forces of evil laugh at everything that is done to undo their nature and their work! That came in at the beginning, and it has grown and become universal, so that today, more than ever, in spite of every effort men are finding that it is a hopeless thing to try to repair this damage. One after another leader and country goes down before this force, broken. It is too great.

There is only one thing that can meet it and solve it, and does when it gets a chance. That is the Cross of the Lord Jesus.

The first great schism that came in with that sin was between Heaven and earth. Heaven and earth became not only closed to one another, but in conflict with one another. There is no way through for man. Heaven is closed for man by nature. No correspondence, no fellowship, no communication, no open way from earth to Heaven, until the Cross comes in. And with the Lord Jesus "lifted up", the link is made again. To a man whose name was Nathaniel, He said, "Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile." More actually: "Behold, an Israelite in whom there is no Jacob." And you remember Jacob! And then He went on to Nathaniel: "Thou shalt afterward see the heavens open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man." This is exactly the same title as He uses of Himself, 'If the Son of Man be lifted up...' The 'Jacob' has been dealt with - the 'supplanter', the 'trickster', the man who broke up the family, the man whose presence, wherever it was, was a disintegrating factor. He could not get on with anybody, and nobody could get on with him! He was that in the world, while he was Jacob. He was always a disturber, restless, dissatisfied, selfish, cunning. The Jacob is dealt with and the Israel appears; the dream that he had is now possible of realisation. Heaven can come down to him and bless him and take him on his way, and fulfil all the promise and covenant. He has come at length to know the meaning of communication between heaven and earth; the ladder set up. Now, Jesus took that right over to Himself and said to Nathaniel: The day is coming when you, a true Israelite, will come into all that; you will see the heavens opened, you will see the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. Only a figurative way of saying and meaning: The day is coming, Nathaniel when this closed way between Heaven and earth, will be opened again; when this great schism and conflict between Heaven and earth will have been healed and they will be united by the Son of Man. "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." Heaven is opened for all men again; the division has gone, the sin has been dealt with. That marvellous effect, that terrible effect of sin, in separating between Heaven and earth and closing each to the other, is remedied in the Cross of the Lord Jesus.

I need not remind you that, in the Bible, again and again we come upon a closed heaven. You only have to lift out one of those many occasions in the life of Elijah. Because of Israel's sin Elijah said to Ahab, "There shall not be rain on the earth but according to my word". And the heavens were closed! We read the story, and it is a very terrible story of that closed heaven, that withheld blessing, that no communication. A closed heaven, whether it was literal in the Old Testament or spiritual, is always the mark of judgment for sin; the division between heaven and earth. The Cross of the Lord Jesus sees that judgment taken on Himself, and Heaven and earth united again. We know in experience how true that is. When we received the Lord Jesus into our lives, into our hearts, Heaven is not so far away as we thought it was! Heaven is not closed as we knew it was! Put it as you like - heaven is opened! The experience of every truly newly born again child of God: 'Heaven has come down their soul to greet'! It is an opened heaven. The sin which separated these has been dealt with, and the at-one-ment of heaven and earth has been made.

But not only so. An 'at-one-ment' between man and man! We have seen earlier how, with the coming in of sin, man was set against man. It started in the family, and spread and spread. This schism, this strife, spread until it became universal. Man against man, in his heart; jealousies, envies, covetousness, pride, and all the unholy brood of this sin - divisiveness. "If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto myself": heal that between man and man and bring man and man together again. We have already referred to it in chapter four, but it will bear another reference. You remember the words of the Lord to Job, when Job had exhausted all that he could say - trying to justify himself, put himself right with God and men and the whole thing had collapsed and broken down. He was not getting very far with that; between himself and the other men there was no healing, no fellowship. Every effort to get fellowship, to get right, to get a ground of oneness, failed. They have all been trying, all these men, for all these weeks or months to find a common ground on which they will all agree, and it has all failed. And when they have all failed, and they have all come to the last word that they can say, the Lord steps in. The Lord says to Job: "Who is this that darkeneth counsel with words without knowledge? Where were you when I laid the foundation of the world? The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy!" What a picture! What a description! 'Before all this came in, all this, Job, that you have been trying to get over, it was a state of beautiful harmony. The morning stars were singing in glee! Whether in unison or harmony, they were singing! There was no discordant note then! It was a unity of song! That is how it was before.'

From there we leaped to Revelation, chapter 7: "After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, out of every nation and of all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, arrayed in white robes, and palms in their hands. And they cry with a great voice, saying, Salvation unto our God who sitteth on the throne, and unto the Lamb!" Here is, at the end as at the beginning, a great song; whether in unison or harmony it does not matter. There is no discordant note; that has gone. That strange note that came in and spoiled the harmony of the creation and of man's relationships has been eliminated, and things are now as they were - perhaps better than they were - before all this came in.

Now, here we have the two songs, the song of a creation in harmony without sin, and therefore without any division or discord, and a song of redemption with no strange note in it, all singing together! Why? Of course, the focal point is the Lamb! "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men" ... "out of every nation and tribe and tongue." But what was the discordant note? If we can just put our finger upon that, we have got the heart of the whole matter; if we can just see what that foreign, strange note was that came in.

As the Divine octave was being played, suddenly another sound came in that did not belong to it at all and threw it all out and spoiled the whole thing. What was it? We can put our finger upon that note. It is described for us: "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, Daystar, Son of the Morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst lay low the nations! Thou saidst in thy heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; and I will sit upon the mount of congregation in the uttermost parts of the earth; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High." What is the discordant note? Do you hear it? Once, twice, thrice... I will! I will... that is it! The heart of it all - I will, as over against the will of God. That always does the mischief; that always lies behind division, schism. Somewhere, somehow, if only we could probe to the heart, the root, of anything like that, we would find something like that - I, I, I... To that it is traced. The whole Bible shows that.

But this is the wonderful thing, that over against that "I will... I will... Thou saidst, I...", we have the Cross. And we have the wonderful description of the One who went to the Cross, "being equal with God, He thought it not something to be grasped, to be on equality with God, but emptied Himself...", and ultimately became "obedient unto death, yea, the death of the Cross". And as He came to it, the dark night before in the garden He said, "Not My will, but Thine be done." "Thou saidst, I will..."; He said, "Not My will". The Cross of the Lord Jesus was the elimination, the annihilation, of that strange note which brought all the discord in every relationship: I... I... I. That was slain in the Cross, in the Person of the Lord Jesus.

Oh, if we could get it out of ourselves and out of everybody, why, the song would start right away! We know we go about this world, we go into all the nations, and when we meet the children of God of any and every nation, or tongue, or people, the children of God, we all sing the same song. We have got something that finds us 'in tune' with one another; mark you, while we keep on the ground of the Cross! You get on to some other ground, and you find that that is spoiled. But while we keep on the ground of Christ together, we have a wonderful fellowship! It is proved! Not only have we the proof that the great schism between heaven and earth has been bridged or closed when we come to the Lord Jesus, but when we move about the world we know that the effect of the Cross is to have created a marvellous oneness between men out of every nation. Try it! Try it without the Cross, and see what you can do with it! Oh, governments have tried it with armies. Today we are smarting and stinging with the awful shame and reproach and the breakdown of trying to overcome some animosity by force. You cannot legislate this thing out of God's universe, and you cannot drive it out by force; you only deepen the malice, and strengthen the hatred, and make it of still longer duration. Those wounds last a long time. They have tried all through the centuries - it does not work! But take the Cross of the Lord Jesus in - it works! Basically, there is something that all believers have in common that makes them one, keeping on that ground. It is true, is it not? Well, this is elementary I know, but this is what He meant, "I, if I be lifted up, I will draw... I will draw..."; "I will not alienate, I will not scatter, I will not divide, I will draw all men unto Myself." There is, after all, a magnetism in the Cross of the Lord Jesus.

What I have been saying, of course, carries with it a big challenge to the self-life. The self-life lies behind our divisions. And oh, do take this to heart. You and I have to make a covenant with the Lord about this. We have got to set ourselves to fight this battle of oneness. We have got to set ourselves, that, by the grace and help of God, we will leave nothing unturned to give to the Cross, Christ crucified, His rights in this: in overcoming divisions when we find them between ourselves and others. It has got to be a desperate battle, for it is a desperate battle. But the Cross could win in this, if only it does its work in us, if only that 'I' thing in us would submit; so deceptive, for of course it is always the other person who is wrong! We are always right! And that is just where the 'I' has its greatest strength. If we would get down and say, 'Very likely, after all, I am the responsible one'; at least open the way for such conviction.

If all that I have said as to God's attitude, and God's interpretation of sin is true, it is a very terrible thing; but it is a very great thing that the Cross means! And if we are going to really be companions of the Cross of our Lord Jesus, we have got to give ourselves to this: that, by His help, we will not countenance any kind of division except the division between what is of God, and what is of the devil. "I will draw..." The Cross has an appeal has it not, because, you see, the Cross is the great revelation of Divine mercy, and all men need that, and most men know their need of it. If we could only present the Cross aright to them, it will make its appeal. All men need, and know that they need, the mercy of God. Let us present Christ crucified as the great revelation of Divine mercy, of Divine grace, and it will draw. It is the great revelation that God is not against men, but towards men, for men. It is the proof that God wants men; He is not against men! And is not this a universal need, of which most men are conscious? Oh, to really know and be able to believe that God is for us! God is on our side; God is not against us. You see, the devil's first insinuation in the garden was that God was not really for the man, He was really not for him in forbidding him to do this, He was really against his highest interests. It is an awful insinuation and you notice the effect of many of this world's strongest religions is to put men in fear and dread of God. They are always trying in some way, by some means, to get even with God, to overcome that something about God that is against them - appeasement! That is the word in that whole awful realm: appeasing God somehow, for God to be 'appeased'. Oh no! We have got a better Gospel than that. Our God has not got to be appeased; He is for men, He is towards men, He has demonstrated it in the Cross. His arms are stretched out wide towards men. His great word through those human lips is "Come unto Me!"

The Cross is the great revelation of the fact that God has taken responsibility for us, for our sin, and for everything. He had to do that. It is a deep wonder about the Cross that when God decided to make man, He took tremendous risks and He knew it because to have man according to His own will and mind, He had to give him a free will. Man could never be forced or coerced, or made to go one way like a machine - that man could choose. All the greatest things for God lie in the direction of man choosing, willing, desiring, preferring; and so God took the risk of giving him a free will knowing exactly how it would work out. But seeing all the terrible consequences of the responsibility that He Himself took in so creating man, the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world. The Cross was not an afterthought, it is an eternal provision in the mind of God; something right back there before man sinned that, when man misused his great trust of choice and it would lead to all this, the remedy was on hand from eternity. The Cross is the great proof that God has taken responsibility not only for creating man, but for all the results of His so creating man! That is good you know! Of course, that is theology, but it is good gospel. Are you not glad that the Lord Himself has taken responsibility for you, for your sin, and for your make-up? If only you come to the Cross of the Lord Jesus, that is where you meet God taking over responsibility for you. The provision that we may have "the answer of a good conscience towards God" - is that not tremendous? What a lot men do to get that! You see, the whole Roman Catholic system is built upon that; the priest will be your conscience. But it just does not do it, it is something false. The tremendous success of that system, its sweep over the earth, is because men everywhere want a good conscience and want someone to take responsibility for their consciences and clear them of a guilty conscience. That is all a travesty - the truth is that at Calvary, in Christ, God took responsibility of everything for us. And it is there that we find the ground of a "good conscience towards God". The Apostle speaks of 'no more consciousness of sin', using that word 'consciousness' in this sense - 'no more evil conscience'! Wonderful! The Cross is just that!

All this is gathered into one thing - unity with God, fellowship with God. And the fellowship established between God and us, and between us and God, is to spread and spread through the family, through all our relationships, just as the opposite spread at the beginning. The disintegration started with one, and spread and spread, and grew and grew. The Cross reverses it, and puts it right in the individual, and then expects that the Cross will mean that it expands to all relationships. "If I be lifted up, I will draw all men to Myself." Oh, how imperfectly I have tried to present this, but I do trust that through so many words, and impossible explanation, you will catch a glimpse of the great meaning of the Cross, and what it involves us in "giving diligence to keep the unity of the Spirit". The fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with us all.

Chapter 8 - The Way of Recovery - Truth

Just the briefest possible word by way of retrospect to the gatherings and hours which now lie behind us, and the specific matter which the Lord has laid upon us at this time.

We have been seeing that in all the great and many-sided significance of the Lord Jesus Christ, not least by any means is that aspect of His standing vitally related to an eternal, heavenly order; that He is the centre and the embodiment, the full content, of a divine order. He was that in creation, He is that in redemption, He is shown to be that in the ages to come. A great, wonderful order (and by that we mean orderliness) not just a system, but a marvellous, ordered system.

Well, we spent much time on that, showing how He, being the expression of God in that respect, reveals God as a God of order. Then we went further, to spend not a little time in seeing that the whole universe as we know it now, which is so far removed from the idea of 'order', is the result of an interference with that order, a breaking in on it to disrupt the order of God, firstly by displacing God's Son from His position in relation to the creation. So we have as the result of that interference the disruption, dislocation, confusion and chaos in this universe. It is all evil and, as we said in the previous chapter, it is something which, on the one hand all men are aware of and confronted with, and on the other hand all their efforts, from age to age to rectify it by their counsels, confederations, institutions and every means in every realm, break down and are proved hopeless. There never was a time in the history of this world when men were more conscious of this conflict in the whole system of things; this disruption and disunity. Perhaps there never was a time when men were striving with greater effort and utilising more resources to try and overcome this; and it defeats them, and defies them at every turn, and at every effort; the confusion only grows. Today men are almost brought to a standstill in their efforts to bring about something like a composure of the world and an order which will bring rest to this troubled earth. No, it cannot be, because there is a ruler of this world; because there is a whole evil system which is determined that God's order shall not be and whose success in defeating God is ever along the line of confusion and disruption. It is not only that they objectively work as from the outside; it has come into the very nature and constitution of men and things. It is in us, and it is in all.

Now we are coming to put our finger on some of the major causes of this situation with a view to finding out and seeing what is the remedy, or what are the remedies, in particular. We have seen that the remedy in general is the Cross of the Lord Jesus. There is the focal point, there is the uniting centre - Christ crucified. But that encloses quite a lot of things, and it is on just a very few of those that we are going to spend our time. But it is very necessary at the outset that we should have it brought clearly before us as the background that disorder exists, and disorder almost always means weakness and loss and frustration wherever it is found; not only in the cosmic realm, but in the individual life, in the Church of God, in the local expressions of the Church of God, and in the homes. In every realm where there is disorder it spells loss, weakness and frustration. It means arrested progress. You just cannot go straight on where there is chaos, you just cannot do anything where there is confusion; you are brought to a standstill, and the whole prospect is covered with hopelessness until you have got things straightened out. That is where God began with the chaos at the beginning. In order to move towards His ultimate purpose in His Son, He had to bring order out of the chaos. And that is not only a fact in history, that is a great spiritual truth for the Church. Paul tells us that because of that disturbance and upsetting of the Divine order at the beginning, God pronounced something upon this whole creation; He pronounced what Paul calls 'vanity'. "The creation itself was subjected to vanity"; vanity is written large over the whole creation. 'Vanity' is not our modern idea: 'vanity' in the Bible means that all efforts, intentions and all that is called progress, will not cure or remove the fatal lack or deficiency in the constitution of things.

You are so familiar with one simple, historical illustration of that. Remember that a curse was pronounced upon Jericho, and the curse worked in this way: that nothing came through to perfection. It just went so far, and then stopped, and dropped into death. Many years afterwards, in the days of the prophet, the sons of the prophets came to him from Jericho, and they said, "There are many good things here, many things that are pleasant, but there is one thing that is wrong, and that spoils everything: the waters are deficient in some quality. We do our digging, planting and cultivating; we give our energy and our time in seeking to produce fruit, and things begin to grow, and there seems to be a prospect, and a promise. And just when it looks as though we can expect the fruit, it all falls off the trees. It never ripens; it all falls to the ground. There is a fatal deficiency in the waters of Jericho." You remember how the prophet dealt with it: "Bring me a new cruse, and put (meal) salt therein." Salt is the great element. "Put salt therein", and he cast it into the waters, and the waters were healed. Well, there you have a very simple parable of this great truth from the day when God subjected the whole creation to vanity - that it just goes so far.

And how true that is, for every step forward in history has only produced new problems of its own and very often fatal problems. If you have a disease or a malady, and someone through research finds what is expected to be a 'remedy', it does seem to touch that particular trouble, but it raises a lot of others. Penicillin is not the remedy for everything; it creates its own problems. It does not clear up everything, something else has got to be faced now by the very employment of it. And what is true in that is true in everything. And we can see it, probably, in this atomic age more than ever. 'Progress', advance, development, invention, discovery - but what problems, what threats, what perils! And men are holding their breath at their own discoveries and inventions, their hearts are in the grip of a terrible fear because of what they themselves have brought to light. The whole creation is caught in a terrible vicious circle. Now this is a fact which of course is clearly demonstrated on every side. Man is building a mighty tower to reach unto heaven, but he is holding his breath for his tower! The bigger the tower, the greater the threat of disaster! He is feverishly harassed into buttressing up his tower with conferences, and defence programmes and what not! No, we are not moving further away from fear and dread. The whole creation is subjected to vanity. Well, that is the situation, but what is the cause?

We are not under the illusion that in a little time, and in our local gatherings, we are going to solve the world problems. But these things come very near all the time. They are pressing into our lives and they are pressing into the Church of God. We are confronted continually in the Christian life in its various aspects, individual and collective, with this matter of disorder as the way, the means, of frustrating God's purpose. Will you listen to this, that God can only reach His full end on His own order, by His own order. He has an order; He has an order for your life, for mine. He has an order for our local companies as expressions of the whole company of the Church. He has an order for the Church, and that order has to come into our localities and into our local expressions of the Church. And the word 'order', or what it stands for in the mind of God, governs our progress, our fruitfulness and the realisation of the Divine purpose. God is not going to get there willy-nilly, neither are we. If there is frustration, arrest, sinking of heart, a sense of despair or if we find ourselves in weakness or helplessness, we should ask, we should seek - Is this because in some particular, or some particulars, the Divine order is violated? It can be sin in other ways which has the same effect, but this is one thing that has always been a most fruitful work of the devil to disrupt the people of God - their relationships, their fellowship, and their harmonious going on together - to bring in the discordant note again and spoil the music.

We must look then to this matter of 'order'.

Now, what we, who are concerned with God's purpose, have to be sure of is what, on the one hand, are the grounds of insecurity and on the other hand, what are the essentials to strength, to progress, and to final triumph. In other words, what was responsible for the disruption that was in the universe with such a sinister frustrating power everywhere? There are several major things. We will put our finger upon one.

We will just read one or two passages of Scripture. Firstly, as inclusive, in principle, from the book of Proverbs, chapter 9:1: "Wisdom hath builded her house. She hath hewn out her seven pillars" - wisdom hath builded her house. She hath hewn out her seven pillars. Pause for a minute before we read more. The pillars are the supports of any building; the safety and the duration of the building rests with its pillars. You will recall to mind the end of the life of the judge Samson, when the Philistines gathered and crowded that mighty hall, filled it to capacity, and climbed upon its roof; and, for their holiday, they wanted some entertainment, and so they called for the blind Samson to be brought that he might "make sport". And they brought him. And there he stood in his blindness, and everybody was ridiculing him. He said to the lad who brought him in: 'Just lead me to the pillars upon which the house rests.' And he prayed to the Lord, 'Just this once, Lord, vindicate!' And he took hold of the two pillars, and bowed himself with all his might, and the house fell. And greater were the number of the slain in the day of his death than all his life. It is a matter of the tremendous importance of 'pillars' in a building.

The other thing is that wisdom is always connected with building in the Bible. Solomon was the man of proverbial wisdom, the one who built the great temple. It was by that God-given wisdom that he built something that was the wonder and the marvel of all who saw it. The apostle Paul speaks of himself as a 'wise master-builder', according to the 'wisdom' given he 'laid a foundation'. And so we could go on concerning wisdom associated with building.

"Wisdom hath builded her house; she hath hewn out her seven pillars". This Divine House, of which Paul speaks: "The Church of God, the pillar and ground of the truth" has a seven-fold support. This marvellous House of God, His Church, rests upon seven pillars. Take them away, and the House falls. The creation was built upon these pillars, and when they were interfered with, the creation collapsed and disintegrated. Seven, of course, is a symbolic number; it is that which is spiritually complete. But we leave those details.

Undoubtedly, the first of these pillars is the pillar of truth. Now we can go over and read one or two other passages. John 8:44: "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father it is your will to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and standeth not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father thereof."

"He that saith I know Him, and keepeth not His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him" (1 John 2:4).

"There shall in no wise enter into it anything unclean, or he that makes an abomination and a lie" (Rev. 21:27).

"Without are the dogs and the sorcerers, and the fornicators, and the murderers, and the idolaters, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie" (Rev. 22:15).

Sooner or later everything will stand or fall according to whether it rests upon truth. Perhaps there was never a truer thing said, a thing more proved in history. Anything and everything false has its own doom within its own self. God has given a very large place to this matter. He Himself is the God of Truth. The declaration is 'In Him is no lie.' The Word of God is a mighty revelation of the fact that God is intensely and burningly jealous for truth. The Psalmist cries: "Thou desirest truth in the inward parts." He holds a lie in abomination. As we have seen, He consigns all liars to the lake of fire. He excludes from the New Jerusalem everyone that loves and makes a lie. All liars shall have their part in the lake which burns. That is expressive of the burning hatred of God for what is not true, and of His love for the truth. Jesus Christ Himself called Himself the Truth - "I am the truth". He is called "the faithful and true witness". The Holy Spirit is called by Him "The Spirit of Truth". "When he the Spirit of truth is come...". And the Church, the fourth of these great magnitudes, is the "pillar and ground of the truth".

On the other hand, as we have seen, Satan is called "the liar and the father of lies".

Now, this whole beautiful creation, its whole structure, collapsed when the lie entered in. The lie disintegrated everything. And that lie runs through the constitution of this world order as it is.

It is in man. Man is a lie. He is not what God meant him to be, or made him to be; he is a contradiction, a denial. That is not the truth when you look at man, as God meant and means man to be. And he knows quite well that there is something in his very constitution that is not true.

In the world itself, the whole world system, there is this lie. It is in commerce. How rare downright transparent honesty is in business and commerce. What a problem that is for anybody who really wants to be straight and honest. It is difficult to get on in this world if you are going to be like that. In society what a lot of falsehood there is: make-believe, pretence, acting, exaggeration, imitation. All these things are forms or expressions of something false. They call it 'make-up'; it is not true. Pretending to be something which is not true. Society is like that; the world is like that. Mixture! Oh, how artificial and false it all is, and it is only the Christians who really sense that. I suppose when we were in the world we had some sense of how artificial and unreal this all is: keeping up a show, a pretence, a make-believe; making an impression without the substance behind. It is unreal! That is the world; there is a lie at the heart of the whole world system.

Ah yes, but in religion it can be like that too - pretence, make-believe, show, making an impression without reality behind. The Lord Jesus, the fiery scorching Truth, looked upon the leaders of religion in His day, the scribes and Pharisees, and He said: Hypocrites! Play-actors! Pretending what is not true! Yes, it is all like that everywhere, in everything. And that is the cause of the disintegration, confusion and disruption of everything. That is the first cause. And nothing can stand and abide which is not true. Sooner or later it is going to be found out; it will collapse, it will go to pieces, it has the very seeds of disruption in itself if it is not absolutely true.

So here is this revealed fact: God's building has, in the very first place, the pillar of truth erected. 'I am the truth'; 'I will build My Church' - those things go together.

Now, we are to apply this. Our position must be true; our personal position must be a true one. We will never stand, never go through, unless our position is a true one. If there is any doubt, question, uncertainty or contradiction in our position, we are not safe. The Lord, in His gracious sovereignty which often seems so hard and so unkind, has allowed such things as storms, blizzards and hurricanes to come into the order of things, and when they are past, you see their effect. There are many things laid flat on the earth; trees lying there, uprooted. There are other things that have stood and gone through, and are going to face the next one the stronger for this. And it is a parable again: You and I, individually and collectively, in our local companies, and the Church as a whole are allowed to pass into terrible, shaking storms; storms that threaten our existence, our continuance. And when they have passed, there are those who have not stood up to it; who have been carried, uprooted, by the trial and testing. And you may say: "You see, the reason for this is you were too superficial; your position was not true. Therefore the Lord has brought to light your position." He does that. It is hard, no one likes that kind of experience; no company likes that, but in His gracious sovereignty it is necessary. He must have what is true! Something that proves the truth of God in its very being, that God is unmovable, unshakeable; that God endures forever. And something of that has got to be produced in everything that is of God. And in the final issue, the company that will be there around the throne will be the company that have come up "out of much tribulation, and washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb". Therefore they are before the Throne, that eternal, that everlasting Throne; into them has been wrought something of the steadfastness of God. He is trying to do that. But we will not stand unless our position is true. We have to look into our position from time to time; indeed, the Lord forces us to it. We have to say: 'Now, is my position, as I am, where I am, a true one, a right one? Is it of God, or are there other elements in this?' We have to search our hearts, and find out why we are where we are; why we believe what we say we believe. What lies behind it? Our position must be a true one. Our life must be a true life, not carried on by emotion, by other people, by system and order around us, even Church order. But we stand on the ground of a life with God of our own that does not depend for its continuance and its strength upon anything outside; it is between us and God. That is the only true and safe position.

Our testimony must be true, not just true in the Bible; not true, as in the company of people who believe it and hold it and teach it, but in every part true of us. If the testimony is 'the power of His resurrection', that has got to be true in us - in you, in me, in us. We have got to embody the power of His resurrection in our life, day by day. If the testimony is 'the unity of the saints in Christ', it has got to be in us; we have got to be that testimony. Our testimony has got to be like that: true, real.

I speak with solemnity, and I would not resort to lightness, but I read a little while ago of a good man who had had a very wonderful conversion, had come right out, as we say, of the blue, into something very wonderful and very real. And he had had his testimony printed so that he could distribute it to everybody. The years had gone on, he tried to keep up this thing of the past but it had lost its reality, and his life was no longer aglow with that testimony; indeed, there was a good deal more that spoiled the testimony. But he tried to keep it up, living on the past. After some years, a Christian man called on him, or came into the home, and began to speak about the Lord; and he asked this good man of the house whether he knew the Lord. "Oh yes, I know the Lord! Daughter, go up and get my testimony, it is up in the attic!" And up she went; there was a lot of noise, and turning over up there for a long time; and then she came slowly down, and she said; "Daddy, the rats have eaten your testimony!" It has got to be real, up-to-date, not of the past, not something on paper, but right here now, today. Our testimony has got to be real.

Our fellowship must be true. That little word, you know, is a very searching word of the apostle: in "unfeigned love of the brethren". It is so easy for us to pretend in this matter, and to be sentimental, or to use sentimental language about one another: 'our dear sister'; 'our dear brother'. But is it true? "Unfeigned love of the brethren" - fellowship must be true.

Our positions with one another must be true; they must rest upon the truth, not the strength of our own convictions, which may be false, but the strength of what is actually true. Prove your convictions. We can have tremendous convictions and be quite sure that we are absolutely right in our judgments, our conclusion and our position, in this matter and that matter, with this one and that. So positive, and yet it may be utterly false. It is possible. But our ears have got to test what they hear. So easily we hear things said about people, places, individuals and companies, and we take it at once, and are affected by it, and we are put on an utterly false position with the Lord. The Lord is not with us in that; sooner or later there is going to be an exposure of the falsehood in that, and we are going to be ashamed. Our ears must test what we hear, coming from whatever source it may, even what we may think the most reliable and trustworthy. Nevertheless, let us pause and ask ourselves, I wonder if that really is true? We must make sure. This thing is going to affect and influence us; make a difference in our attitudes and conduct. Let us be quite sure about it. Oh, that God's people would do that; that God's servants would do that; that leaders of God's people would do that - not take up reports, rumours, criticisms and judgments and do what it is said Jesus never did: judged after the hearing of His ears. No. We must verify what we see. We can be so misled by taking things as they appear.

Of course I know, but other people might not! We are at prayer... I happen to open my eyes, and I see my brother with his eyes opened, looking at the one who is praying, and looking intently, almost - it would appear - critically. Now, I could, if I did not know, and you would not knowing, say: Why is that brother not entering into the prayer? Why hasn't he closed his eyes? Why is he weighing every word like that, seemingly so critical? You see how you could misjudge a brother if you did not know he was deaf and was lip-reading; entering into the prayer by following the very movements of the lips, the only way in which he could enter into the prayer! You see the possibility of a terrible misunderstanding through judging after the sight of the eyes. No, it will not do! We must verify what we see. Did it really mean that? Is that the truth about it, or did it only appear like that? We are constantly misjudging one another in that way; putting a motive or a reason to somebody's behaviour that was never meant at all. It is not true. And how everything is spoiled and the building is either broken up or arrested. We must be on the ground of the truth in every way.

Our homes must be on a true basis; our business, as far as we have any power whatever, must be true. I had a friend, who was the head of a business and he put up on his desk those words: God first. And all the travellers came into his office; and again and again the traveller made some suggestion of how he could get business and do business, but it was not quite straight; it just had something in it that was not quite square and clear. And he said always to the traveller: Do you see that? If you have anything to propose that is out of harmony with that, our business ceases at this point. Now, I know what that is going to do for business, but you cannot build even in a business for permanence and the blessing of God, which is important, on a false foundation with something that is not true.

And when we have said all, our spirit must be true. It is, after all, a matter of what the eyes of flame see, is it not? "His eyes were as a flame of fire" as He came to the churches; and the eyes of flame are looking things through and through, and lighting upon the false, the untrue, the inconsistent, the contradictory, and challenging the whole existence of that church on the basis of the truth.

Now 'truth' can be and is, a very beautiful thing; but truth can be a very terrible thing. In this House which He is building and in which you and I are fellow-builders, there can be no painted pillars, no imitation marble; it has got to be true right through. However deeply you go into it, and wherever you probe it, you find it is the same. It stands up to the test. The issue is whether it will stand for eternity; whether it will go on to the end; whether it will fulfil God's purpose in its existence; that is the test of everything, is it not? Who wants it to be otherwise? However much of passing or transient glory might come to us by compromise, mixture, misrepresentation, a pretence, a show, by anything that impresses the natural man, it is not worth it if God does not put His seal upon it: the seal of Life. "How good a thing it is to see brethren dwelling together in unity... there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for evermore." Something genuine!

The Lord establish us in the truth, and the truth in us.

Chapter 9 - The Ground of the Church - Faith

We are being occupied in these messages with the relationship of the Lord to God's great, heavenly, eternal order. Having looked back to that order in its primal beauty, glory and nature, we have seen the disruption, upset and dislocation which were brought in by rebellious powers in heaven, who, by reason of their rebellion, were cast out. And then, their leader had this one object: to spoil the work of God and to upset that heavenly order which had been introduced into this earth. It is the terrible story resultant from a disturbed and upset Divine order, making that word and its meaning 'heavenly order' a key to the Bible.

But we are particularly seeing the relationship of the Lord Jesus to that whole business - why He came into this world, why He lived long enough on this earth to show and to manifest the laws of that heavenly order in His own Person, and all that was bound up with His union with the Father - in His teaching, in His works; and then, why He died as He did - all related to the recovery and establishment of the heavenly order in this creation. No wonder He was marked from His birth for destruction. No wonder the prince of this world, having a very ready instrument to hand in Herod, sought to curtail that life at its very beginning. No wonder all the way through His public life there ran that malicious hatred. It is repeatedly stated, "and they sought to destroy Him". He was here to "destroy the works of the devil". "The Son of God was manifested to destroy the works of the devil", and that meant to destroy the destroyer of God's heavenly order.

Now, we have covered a lot of ground in that connection. Today we have come to the point where we are seeking to put our finger upon some of the things which were the cause of that disruption. They have got to be destroyed, firstly in the individual believer. Remember that, it is an open window to a very great deal in our individual Christian life that that which the Son of God was manifested to do, destroy the works of the devil, begins in the individual believer; that is, so far as the practical outworking of it is concerned. And then it has to spread and extend through all relationships: personal relationships, and Church relationships. The works of the devil have got to be destroyed. And we are seeking to find out what those works are that have to be destroyed.

I am not going to take you again to passages that were before us in the previous chapter. I come straight to the truths themselves without the illustrations and symbolisms. We saw that the first blow at the heavenly at the beginning; Divine order was struck with the weapon of a lie. The enemy brought with him a lie about God and about man and about the laws of God. Well, it is all right so far, but when man exposed himself or opened himself to that lie (gave an ear to it, attention to it, permitted it to stand) it entered into the very constitution of the man and through the man to the race, and through the race into the whole system of this world. Well, we tried to show the devastating effect of untruth and therefore the tremendously vital importance in the reconstruction of a heavenly order of truth. For it is only in the Divine order that the Divine end can be reached. There is no other way.

Now we come to the second of these things which on the one side spelt the disruption of this creation, and on the other side spells the recovery and reconstruction. And that is: unbelief and faith.

Unbelief and Faith

There are so many parts of the Scripture to which we could turn in this connection. May it suffice for the present to remind you that, when at last the work is done, the recovery is perfected, and all the damage is repaired and the works of the devil have been completely cast out and we have that wonderful symbolic representation of what is heavenly in nature and order, the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of Heaven, there are some very significant things said there. We have this, for one, in Revelation 21:8: "But for the fearful, and unbelieving, and abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, their part shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone." The unbelieving come in the category at last. It was an original work by which the creation was thrown into such confusion; it is the final work of the triumphant Lamb that sees unbelief in the lake of fire. As I have said, there are many Scriptures on this matter of unbelief. There is that very significant statement regarding that whole generation which came out of Egypt, with God's thought and will that they should enter upon that which would be a wonderful, earthly representation of the heavenly order. It is written over the whole of that generation: "they could not enter in because of unbelief." It is the great frustrating and limiting thing; it is the great spoiling thing. It disappoints God and man.

What is the nature of unbelief? It is nothing less and other than a vicious slandering of God. "Has God said...?" You can hear mockery and you can hear something unholy, something that would bring God Himself into question. Well, unbelief is all that we can say that is against God; it is disparagement of God. "Has God said...?" There is the note of disparagement there. It is the defaming of God. It is calumny against God. It is libel against God. It is detraction from God. It is casting an aspersion upon God. It is all that and much more that is underneath. Unbelief always calls God into question; always takes something from God of His character; puts something upon God which does not belong to His nature. It is a terrible thing. We know quite well when we are saying all these things that we are hitting ourselves pretty hard. We are not saying this objectively about other people, or about you; we are taking ourselves very severely to task, facing the truth about our own hearts.

We know quite well that unbelief is always weakness, and it always has the effect of disintegrating the life, just shattering its unity, pulling it to pieces. Thus it weakens our souls. It weakens our hands in the work of God or in any purpose; it arrests our progress. Oh how true these things are, and how much more could be said about this terrible thing called unbelief!

If you were going to buy a newly built house and, wanting to be very sure, you brought the builder along and you said to him: "Will the foundation really hold up that house?" And he said, "I am not sure!" "Will that roof really be weatherproof and watertight?" "I don't know, I have my doubts." "Will those floors really sustain the weight that I want to put on them?" "I don't know." "Well, will the whole thing stay together?" "I cannot tell you!" What would you do? Well, I know what you would do. You would say, "You can have your house; that is not what I want." But perhaps you would turn to him, and say, "Have you ever thought of a name for your house?" Again, he might say, "No I don't know." "Well, I will give you a name for that house: Doubting Castle!" And we might just put in there a little parenthesis from our brother, John Bunyan. Do you remember Doubting Castle? And this might be very appropriate today for some of us, for Christian and Hopeful had been really enjoying a good time on the banks of the river as they walked along. But good times have a way of passing, and as they went on, they came upon a very rugged piece of road, so different and hard-going. But after a time, they began to complain about the road, and the hardness of the way. They began to ask questions as to whether this was right, whether this ought to be, whether the King was really kind in asking them to come along such a road. And while they were so occupied, they came to a little bypath in the road which led off from the main road, and it led into Bypath Meadow in which was Doubting Castle, the residence of Giant Despair. And because they were trespassing (how clever Bunyan was!) - they were where they ought not to have been - Giant Despair came out and dragged them in, and flung them into a dungeon.

Another touch of genius is that Bunyan says they had very little to say to each other now, because they both knew they were in the wrong. They had been rejoicing together, talking about the Lord and the things of the Lord, and having blessed fellowship. But now that was all brought to a stop in Doubting Castle, under the shadow of Giant Despair. There they lay, everything suspended. But after a while Christian recollected; he recollected that he had the key to the Castle in his bosom. And he said, "What a fool I am thus to lie in a stinking dungeon when I can be walking at liberty. I have the key!" When he said that, Giant's Despair's limbs began to tremble and to fail him, and his fits recommenced to take hold of him, and he was unable to keep them in his dungeon or his castle! Well, that is unbelief. It is forbidden ground; it is a bypath meadow; it is off the main road. You and I have visited that more than once; we have been caught. That is what happened to man. And that - let us be honest - has happened to us more than once. We have allowed this sinister thing to come in, asked questions about the goodness of the Lord, about the love of God, wondered whether our hard road is after all not a contradiction to His goodness and His mercy. Once we get down that road, we are getting off the track; once we let that thing begin to have a place, it will not be long before we are in the grip of Giant Despair. Well, this world is there and many Christians get there.

All that remains to be said is that faith or belief is a mighty weapon in the Son of God for destroying the works of the devil. You see His life here. He did not come into this world with anything whatever to rest upon as a guarantee, or assurance, of worldly success, or from the natural standpoint that His mission would be successful. He came in minus everything that this world requires for success. And so He lived. He had no wealth; He had no worldly influence; He was brought up in a place which itself represented a handicap for His life, a town with a bad reputation! "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" And so He lived right the way through, with everything lacking that this world demands for success, and very much present that was set against Him and in the very atmosphere of malice and hatred. It was there, but He lived and won through an earthly life on one thing only, and that was faith in His Father. And who shall say, in the light of the record, that that faith was put to it very severely at times. To the last breath He was assailed. "He was tempted in all points like as we are" - sin apart - tempted nevertheless. Satan came to Him in the wilderness on this very thing - 'If God were Your Father, He would not let you hunger!' That is the 'serpent'. But the fact is that under the severest testings of faith to the end, He won through. Those two last cries on the Cross: ''My God, why... why...?" That is the cry of a tested faith isn't it - "Why hast Thou forsaken Me?" You and I will never have, by the mercy of God, to cry that cry, but you and I in so much smaller ways have, more than once, said to the Lord, Why...? But then, I am so glad that there was a change from "My God, My God, why...", to "Father, into Thy hands I commit My spirit." Faith has triumphed; back into the realm of absolute confidence in His Father; and there He closes His life. But He was in His own life and Person recovering and re-establishing this law of a heavenly order; it is brought back by triumphant faith.

It is, in the first place, the assurance of God. It is the assurance that God is the Saviour, "...strong cries and tears that he might be saved..." - that He might be saved "from death, and He was heard in that He feared", meaning, of course, as that word always does in the Bible, not that He was 'afraid', but that he 'trusted'. He trusted God for His salvation. The assurance for salvation - that is faith in God. The assurance of purpose in calling. Satan tried to destroy that in the wilderness, to get Him to experiment with God, and resort to some other kind of method of fulfilling His vocation, in capturing the dominion of the kingdoms of the world. 'Do it in your own strength; do it in the popular way; do it as other men do it. Don't do it by faith; do it by works. Do it out of yourself.' He tried to raise the question, "If... if..." all the time as to whether, with all that was against Him and all this threat that was confronting Him, He could fulfill His mission. He was called to this work. And faith triumphed in the matter of His calling, His vocation; the purpose of God in His life. You and I are tested along those same lines. Many a man and woman who has lived a long life in walking with God has had a supreme test before the life closed on the question of assurance of salvation. It is a fact.

Last week I read again the life of Dr. A. B. Simpson. If ever there was a man who walked with God he did; if ever there was a man to whom the Lord talked, he was such. If ever a man was used of the Lord, he was - worldwide and with a wonderful testimony. However, in the closing weeks of his life he was under the dark cloud of questioning whether he was really saved. His brethren had to gather around him and fight that battle of prayer for him, and he came out triumphantly before he went. But Satan, you see, never gives up this thing and tries to spoil everything by insinuating unbelief and questions about God. It shatters everything.

This is because the enemy knows that faith, after all, involves everything, just as unbelief involves everything. It is not one of those things that you can isolate or separate. That is why in prescribing the armour against principalities and powers, the Apostle says: 'And take the big shield of faith'. That is what it is; it is not in our translation, but the big shield, the overall shield. You may have all the other pieces of amour, in all the other places where it fits, but you have got to cover everything with faith. Even your righteousness has got to be a righteousness by faith, every bit of it. The girdle of truth is of no avail only by faith. You see, faith involves everything, and that is why the enemy struck at faith at the beginning and never ceases to strike. And that conflict will continue to the end.

Now, we have related this matter to 'building'. This is the second pillar of the seven pillars of wisdom with which she is building her house. If the first is 'truth' the second is 'faith'. And there will be no building without faith. There will be just the opposite, everything will go to pieces if there is unbelief, if there is doubt. So Paul cries, "The life that I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God". Now, I am very glad that that is the literal way of putting it and for what that means, because you and I are so often found helpless and baffled because we feel we have not got the kind of faith, that measure of faith that is called for. And perhaps as we speak of it, what a tremendous thing it is, we feel almost appalled at our little faith. But it is 'the faith of the Son of God'. He perfected faith in Himself. He won the battle of faith completely, and in His Cross He met that whole realm of unbelief, that evil thing, and conquered it in His Cross, as we have seen. These principalities and powers and hosts of wicked spirits which compassed Him about like bees, were all concentrating for one final blow of victory - to make Him doubt His God. But He came through, triumphant over them all. And in that way He stripped them off and made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in His Cross.

Now, we know this is one of our platitudes and yet how slow we are to appropriate. We know that the Holy Spirit came precisely to make good in us, and in the Church, what Jesus did in His Cross. That is a part of our doctrine. But that is why the Holy Spirit came, to guide us into all the truth; to take the things of Christ and show them to us; to make real in us all that was true in Christ. The Holy Spirit, therefore, has come to implant faith, to nurture faith, to strengthen faith, to bring the faith of the Son of God alive in us and to increase in us. Oh, if it is 'my' faith, that is not going to get through! If it is 'your' faith, it is a poor thing. If it is 'His' faith, it is a mighty faith that has already conquered. It is His faith! "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I but Christ; and that life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me, and gave Himself for me." Faith is the gift of God. Faith is the work of God.

Let us ask the Lord to strengthen the faith of the Son of God in us. And as together we are built up, so the building will go on, a structure that proves by its testimony that the works of the devil have been destroyed, and this work in particular. May it never be that we cannot enter in because of unbelief, but rather be those who through faith and patience inherit the promise.