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The Church of the Firstborn

by T. Austin-Sparks

From unpublished manuscripts. Published on the web in August 2010.

Contents

Chapter 1 - The Church Foreshadowed by the Levites

Chapter 2 - A True Beginning and a True Walk

Chapter 3 - A Full Knowledge of Christ

Chapter 4 - The Measure of Christ

Chapter 5 - Responsibility for the House of God

Chapter 1 - The Church Foreshadowed by the Levites

Reading: Heb. 12:18-29; Matt. 18:1-3; Num. 3:5-7,9,11-13,41,45.

"...to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, who are enrolled in heaven...".

In that designation there are two things; firstly, the church, which is the supreme object of God's concern throughout this dispensation. Then, secondly, the words "the firstborn" set forth the nature of that object. It is the "church of the firstborn". The word is in the plural, and the more perfect translation would be: "The church of the firstborn ones, whose names are enrolled in heaven". Thus the second part of the statement gives character to the first part; it is the church of the firstborn ones.

Being in the letter to the Hebrews, and being, as it is, a part of a large statement which goes right back to the beginning of the history of the nation, when they were constituted a nation under the government of God at the Mount, it is easy to see that this phrase, "the church of the firstborn ones", links immediately with the Levites, of whom we read in the book of Numbers that they stood for the firstborn ones. They were a representative company in whom all Israel were gathered. So that, away back there in the constituting of Israel as the people of God under His government - and for our present purpose, especially the Levites - there are bound up spiritual, heavenly and eternal principles.

You will be familiar with the object of this letter to the Hebrews, and the last part of chapter 12 very largely expresses that object; that is, an earthly representation of heavenly things, which has served its purpose was passing or had passed; that a great shaking was to come, in which all that was not spiritual, heavenly and eternal would pass away and only that which was other than of this world would abide. The Jewish system, as a system of representation and of type, was a part of this earth and was to perish. It had passed in the coming of Christ, but as a system it was about to be entirely broken and scattered. And the letter was written to seek to hold these Hebrew believers to the heavenly and the spiritual and the eternal realities as their earthly system was passing, and to show them that Christ had taken up all the spiritual values of the Jewish system, had embodied them, and carried them into heaven and that now for them everything was in Christ above in heaven: "we see Jesus, crowned with glory and honour...". He, there in heaven, was the centre and fulness of the life of His people, and the earthly was passed.

We are familiar with all that, but our object is to see the abiding spiritual principles which have been introduced by figures and types and representations, "patterns of things in the heavens", and to seek to be in the value of these spiritual principles, for they endure. They are eternal, they are heavenly, they are unshakable, immovable; they abide all that is of the shaking of the heavens and the earth. So we are to be occupied in these meditations with this phrase, "the church of the firstborn ones".

We take the second half of the phrase first - the firstborn - and observe that it embodies several things.

The Firstborn Relates to

(1) A New Beginning

God begins in, and with, a firstborn. The firstborn shows where and how God begins. Israel's beginning as a nation, as a people before God, was bound up with the firstborn: "all the firstborn are mine; on the day that I smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt I hallowed unto me all the firstborn to Israel" (Numbers 3:13). By the taking of the firstborn God began the history of that people. Thus the phrase speaks of God's new beginning. The Lord Himself said, "Except ye turn and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 18:3).

We shall speak more of these things as we go on. For the moment, we want to indicate something of what is represented.

(2) The Rights of God

The second thing set forth by the firstborn is that God's place, God's rights are represented by them. The thought, the idea of the firstborn ran throughout everything in the life of Israel. It commenced with the firstborn of the family, and then it extended over the flock and the herd to the field, so that the very first fruits of all their labours in the field, and in the vineyard, were claimed by God, and had to be brought into the presence of God before anything else could be appropriated. Indeed, God held them so much to this principle that, if they failed in the firstfruits, in the course of their history they lost the whole harvest. You remember what the Lord had to say to His people through the prophet Malachi, at a time when a blight lay upon everything, and the crops failed, and failure was seen in all directions. In answer to the question, Why? the Lord said it was because of their tithes and offerings. Bring the whole tithe, said the Lord, and you will have the whole blessing. It was a question of the Lord's people, and of the Lord's rights, so that the firstborn represented or symbolized God's place and God's rights as first, supreme.

The church of the firstborn ones represents these two things to begin with; firstly, that God begins with birth (first-born), and never takes up anything at any later date. It is a law with God that He will never take up a thing at an advanced point. He will start right at the beginning, no matter how long its history, no matter how long-standing its tradition. If God is going to take it up He will bring it right back to the beginning, where it is born out from Himself, and He never accepts anything else.

The church is the embodiment of that truth, and of this also: that God has the first, the pre-eminent place. The church stands for God's place, God's rights.

(3) Death and Resurrection

Israel is represented as being a people which has come out of death by a mighty intervention of God, out from where death was raging, active, spread like a blanket over the land. There was this act of God which meant that people were given power to overcome death. There was that in them of God which defeated and defied the other, an ultimate work of death, and they are regarded as a people who have been in death, and have been taken out of death in resurrection. That very truth is set forth in their own history again at the Red Sea, and yet again at the Jordan. It is basic to their life at every stage. At its inception they are a people brought out unto God, and are brought out unto all that is of God. In the stages from Egypt to the land, everything is based upon the great truth of death and resurrection.

Mark it in the case of the Lord Jesus. While by birth He is the Son of God, there is that particular attestation of Him in resurrection: "set forth (or designated) the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead"; "God raised him from the dead"; "Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee." - Begotten again from the dead, and designated in a particular way the Son of God.

So that with regard to the firstborn, whether it be in the type in the Old Testament or the Antitype of Christ, or in the church which is the corporate expression of Christ, the principle underlies all; that the firstborn are invariably with death and resurrection. Therefore, the church of the firstborn is the embodiment of that truth of death and resurrection, or the power of life which conquers death.

(4) The Inheritance

Then the next thing about the firstborn is that they are related to the inheritance. It is a matter of honour, position, government, and administration. There is no need for us to trace that through the Word. We know that it is always so. The firstborn represent the inheritance. The inheritance belongs to them. What is the inheritance of the saints? It is the place of honour in glory, the place of the government in the ages to come. The church of the firstborn is chosen unto this.

Thus in this letter to the Hebrews you find that from the outset Christ is presented as the Son. Then reference is made to His brethren: "He was not ashamed to call them brethren"; "Wherefore, holy brethren, partners in a heavenly calling". Thereafter the inheritance comes into view, and we hear the echo of Paul's word to the believers in Rome: "heirs... and joint-heirs with Christ". All that is in this letter and then it is all gathered up at the end in this comprehensive statement of chapter 12, what the church is: "the general assembly and church of the firstborn ones...". We are come to that.

There is one all-governing fact which runs right through the ages. It is that Christ is in all the thoughts and ways of God. That is a statement that is comprehensive. Through all the ages, in all the thoughts of God, and in all the ways of God, Christ is central, Christ is supreme. Everything relates to Him, and everything connects with Him; Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning. If we could stand by the side of God and see through God's eyes, and become governed by God's mentality, we should recognise that God has but one thought and that one thought is influencing Him in every one of His dealings with men, with nations, and with the world throughout all the ages. That one thought centres in His Son, Jesus Christ, and therefore the very essence of revelation, and the very heart of spiritual enlightenment is that you see Christ in all those thoughts and ways of God as they are expressed in His Word and in His activities. If you ask: What is revelation, what is it to have spiritual enlightenment? the answer is this: that you are able to see in a living and ever-growing way God's thoughts as centred in Christ. We could put that in another way, and say that you are growingly able to see Christ and His place and His meaning in this universe, that this universe is interpreted and explained in the light of Christ, and that everything in our own lives in God's dealings with us, is connected with Christ in some way. If that is true universally, and if that is true sovereignly and providentially; if that is true not only in the whole history of things in this universe, but true in a special way in human life, it is true, perhaps, in the most essential way in the Word of God as the expression of God's thought. So that revelation, spiritual illumination, is to see Christ in all the Word of God; not truths, not doctrines, but Christ.

Here we have a concrete and very clear instance and example in the case of the Levites. The Levites are a divine thought. They are set forth as having come out of the mind of God. Everything concerning them that is written is a part of that mind of God. Now if what we have said is true, then everything to do with the Levites is the expression of a divine thought concerning Christ, and we too look to see what of Christ there is in this and in that. The end is Christ. The question then, that we ever need to ask, is: In what way does this or that lead us to Christ? In what way does this mean an increase of Christ, a knowledge of Him in a living and experimental way? We are looking for what is of Christ. We are not interested in anything else, because God is not interested in anything else. God is not interested in merely running a wonderful universe, in seeing His sovereignty operating in this world, in just seeing how He can bring good out of evil, and overrule everything to His own ends. God is interested in one thing, and that is in bringing all things to His Son, and bringing His Son into all things. He has one thought - comprehensive, vast, many-sided, but one thought.

Now then, we have one thought, and only one. This is not how much we can do for the Lord, and how much we know of Christian truth; it is not things at all, it is Christ. Our whole course here is to learn Christ, and with our latest breath we shall still, if we are living in a spiritual way, cry, "That I may know him". The longer we live, and the more we know, the more we shall be made aware of how little we do know, and how vast this Christ is.

Now we see in the Levites as a type a concrete example of God's thoughts leading to Christ.

The Levites Represent

(a) The People of God Related to Him in Christ

In the first place they set forth in representation the people of God as connected with God in Christ. They were taken in the place of the firstborn, which means that they represented all Israel. They were, in the thought of God, not a class called ministers, separated from all the others, but a spiritual representation of God's thought concerning all His people, that all His people should be Levites.

God had other ways of doing this if that were not the truth. The Lord could have said: "Now, I understand that you cannot all be My servants, for you have other things to do; therefore I would have you ordain a certain class, a certain company to be ministers, and they shall minister and be a class by themselves in this kind of service!" No such thought is ever expressed or hinted at. On the contrary, God gets right down to the bottom of things and says: "Now in the very birth of Israel, they are a priestly people, they are a kingdom of priests. It is not that they have a class in the midst of them who are priests, but that they are a kingdom of priests." The Levites are but the expression of God's thought concerning all His people, and inasmuch as it is priestly in nature and function, it is Christ, and Christ at the centre; God and His people brought into oneness on priestly ground, on a priestly basis, a mediatory basis, a sacrificial basis, a basis of blood. They are one, and the Levites declare this great truth, that man and God have been made one in Christ; and that is the church of the firstborn. That title is the title of Jesus Christ, and the title of the church; it is one title. He is the Firstborn, they are the firstborn ones; the one title governs them both. It is not the case that there are some apart; all are that. It is the oneness in Christ of God and His own that is set forth by the Levites.

(b) God's Thoughts as to His People in Christ

Then as you look carefully into their life, their order, their function - and it is a very wide-ranged function, it has to do with everything that represents God - we see that they set forth God's thoughts as to His people in Christ. It is not only that God and His own meet and are one in Christ, but there all God's thoughts concerning His own are set forth - what God's thoughts are for His people. They are centred in Christ, and the Levites bring out into view all the thoughts of God which are centred in Christ concerning His own people.

(c) The Vessel of Testimony

Then further, the Levites represent the vessel of the testimony of Jesus, one with Him. That is central to this universe. The testimony of Jesus is the occasion of the terrific conflict throughout the ages in the spiritual realm. John says, "I was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the... testimony of Jesus." Later again, he says, "I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus", speaking of that rage of the adversary against that which is so designated.

What is the testimony of Jesus? The testimony of Jesus is what God has determined in the eternal counsels that Jesus shall be in this universe. It is the place which God has eternally given to His Son. Now, the Levites are the vessel of that testimony; that is, that in them God's intention for His Son is set forth, and they are called into being to preserve and maintain that testimony. When you have those things, you have just got the ground prepared for the practical values that arise. The Levites set forth God's thoughts in Christ concerning His own people. Where do you begin with God's thoughts? You begin when you look at the Lord Jesus, and take Him into account. You begin with the altogether otherness of Christ so far as the whole race and the whole world are concerned.

It is important to see where likeness between Christ and the rest of the human race begins and ends. There is likeness and difference, and you have to see where the one ends and the other begins.

In what way is Christ like the rest of us? He is like the rest of men inasmuch as He is constituted on the same principle. He is a Man, a human being, and the make-up of His humanity is the same as that of all other men. He is spirit, soul and body. We would call that the vessel. He has a mind, a heart, and a will, as the constituents of His human soul. He is like all other men, that is, as to His form; He has a body like our body. As to appearance there is no difference. He has a soul like our soul, capable of feeling, reasoning, choosing and determining. He has a spirit - yes, so far as the entity is concerned, a human spirit, as we have. In all these respects He is like us.

That is where the likeness ends, and then the difference begins. What is the difference? The difference is in the inner man. We have spoken of that as the vessel, but what is in the vessel? What kind of thing is working in the vessel? Therein lies the vast difference between Him and ourselves. In the New Testament a great principle, indeed the governing principle of the old-creation life in man, a very great deal is spoken of under the title of "the flesh". That is the inner thing with us, it is a principle, a power, something in us: intangible, but very real and very strong; and in the fallen creation wholly evil. That is the difference between Him and us. There was no such thing in Him. He is altogether other. There is the vessel, the same, similar, but the actuating power (that which moves in the vessel) is entirely different, belonging to a wholly different creation. A wide unbridgeable gulf is fixed between Him and ourselves in the matter of the dominating, governing nature. We call it, in the language of one who has invented this phrase (and it is a useful one): the "altogether other-ness".

That is where God begins with the firstborn. The firstborn from God's standpoint is an "altogether other" than the old creation. Now this is not just doctrine, technique; it is something of tremendous value. I do not know of anything of greater importance than this particular thing upon which we bear for this short time.

The church of the firstborn from God's standpoint is something altogether other than we are by nature, and that altogether other-ness is what Christ is. Perhaps the major problem of most of the Lord's people is to keep that line of division between what we are in ourselves and what Christ is in us. The great line of attack on the part of the enemy is to bring what we are ourselves continually up into view and occupy us with that, and by so doing obscure Christ. The great object of the Holy Spirit in His opposing of Satan is to bring Christ into view and to occupy us with Him to the obscuring of ourselves. That is where the great difficulty arises for most of the Lord's people. There is always this beat back, this drive back to get us occupied with ourselves, as to what we are, to keep us from being occupied with Christ and what He is; in some way to get that gap, that gulf, that separation filled up, and the line of demarcation obliterated, so that there is confusion. God begins with the firstborn. That implies something altogether other than what we are, and it is important to see what God says, and how God views those who are represented as being in Christ, and in whom Christ is.

As a type (not spiritual reality, but as representing this truth) think of that tremendous statement which was forced through the lips of Balaam, in spite of himself, concerning Israel: "He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob." Read those terrible Psalms about Israel's forty years in the wilderness, and all the terrible things that are said about them, of their heart not being steadfast toward God, and all their constant declension. Terrible things are said; and then you have a statement like this coming up by the compulsion of God as Balaam looks over the whole camp of Israel, standing as it were by God's side, and saying: "He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob." Why? The Levites were in the midst, and all that they stood for, and God did not look upon what the people were in themselves, but upon what they were as having His thoughts in the midst of them in living expression, in active expression. He had His thoughts embodied.

When Christ is in us, God views us through Christ. Oh, that we might recognise this, that in Christ in us, there is the embodiment of God's thought, and He is able to speak so of us. His activities with us are all in relation to the Christ who is now by the Holy Spirit in us, and in Whom we are.

The fact that the Firstborn is invariably connected with death and resurrection is God's way of saying that what we are in ourselves by nature is buried from His standpoint, and it is His Son alone who obtains where we are concerned as a risen One, the only One who lives before Him. All else are dead and buried in the sight of God, and God would have us take that attitude. Remember that we are dead and buried.

The Root-cause of Trouble amongst Believers

Now you can see the reason of all the confusion, all the trouble amongst the Lord's people. It is because they will bring over on to the other side of Jordan what they are by nature. Have we not yet recognised the terrible complication of the old creation, what a complicated, inextricable tangle the old creation is? If we were the most adept at introspection, and could analyse ourselves to the most minute point, we should never have got to the end of that complication.

We talk about our motives, and we say, Our motive was right! We talk about our conscientiousness, we talk about our intentions; but you and I do not know what lies behind what we call our good motives. There is a deceitfulness about this human heart that defies our greatest attempt at tracking it down, and we shall never do it. It takes Him that hath the seven Spirits of God, with the seven eyes, the perfect insight, to see through you and through me. We shall never see through ourselves, and you and I can never talk with any certainty about our good motives, our pure motives, our conscientiousness, because of this tangle of the old creation. This soul life of ours is such an awful mixture that you never, never know when you are on safe ground with it. It will lead you into all kinds of deceptions as to yourself, and as to others, and if you begin to live in your soul life, and assert it and develop it, you are developing what is capable of leading you into the greatest confusion and contradiction and mixture. There is an alliance with this fallen creation of forces that are not the forces of God, and you and I cannot break in between the two and sort the matter out. God Himself has not undertaken to do that. God Himself has not undertaken to disentangle this network of confusion in this old creation. God is not going to get to work like a great surgeon and drive in between this part and that part, and separate the good from the bad. He is not going to excavate and analyse and rearrange this whole tangled mass; He has not undertaken to do it. God's whole attitude is (and this is the revelation of God's Word) that that tangled mass is finished with, dead and buried, and God brings in something that is altogether other than that: a new creation, even Jesus Christ. There is no tangle in Him, no confusion in Him, no mixture in Him; there is perfection of harmony, a balance of order, of arrangement. All the rest is put out.

Here is where the church has become such a confused thing, and such a tragedy; for the prevailing idea is that if you give yourself over to God He will take you up and use you: "Bring over your humanity and consecrate it to the Lord! Consecrate your old man to the Lord, and go out and serve the Lord, with a consecrated old man!" it is utterly contrary to the teaching of God's Word. The result is that in the work of God all the world over you have people serving the Lord in the energy of the flesh, in the reasoning of the flesh, in the emotions of the flesh. Meet them, counter them, frustrate them, and you meet something evil; you meet with a fight, a division, a schism, a scattering, and wholesale resignations.

Do you see what a havoc the enemy can make in that which is called the church, because people with best intentions, purest motives have come to serve the Lord with all their own intelligence, their own strength, and their own emotion? They have not seen that God has closed the door to the old creation, and that God's attitude is this: "The only thing that can satisfy Me, that can serve Me is My Son, and if you are going to come into My service, He has to be the energy of everything, the Life of everything, the Wisdom of everything!" He has to be the governing, ruling reality in everything. It is not to be a matter of your impulses, but of His urgings and leadings by the Holy Spirit; not your sitting down to reason out what it would be good to do for the Lord, what ought to be done, what needs to be done, but what He shows you, nothing more. It is Christ who is God's thought, and only Christ, and He is "altogether Other".

He lived on that principle Himself, when He was here. Great appeals were made to His sympathies, but He never responded to those appeals until He had weighed the thing up before the Father and obtained the Father's mind about it. Appeals were made to His reason, that He ought to do certain things: He ought to go up to the feast, it was the recognised thing, everybody was going up. If He was not going up He was laying Himself open to misunderstanding and misrepresentation! "Mine hour is not yet", He said. And when they had gone up then He went up secretly. He was not playing a trick, acting a deception; He was making sure that the voice governing His movements was not the voice of popular habit, but was the voice of the Father governing Him. See how other Christ is from men, from what we are.

You and I must not bring over our old creation and give it to God, expecting God to use it. God begins with birth. The church of the firstborn is something quite new, and it comes out of a death. That death is the death of an old creation, and the resurrection is of something that is not the resuscitation of an old creation, but the resurrection of something wholly of God.

The Way of Deliverance

Now, of course, that is very largely the negative side, the side which forbids, which counters, which sets back. There is the other side, the great, the blessed reality, that over against what we are by nature there is Christ as God's object of concern, and the Holy Spirit's object of interest. The Holy Spirit has been sent from God in relation to, and on behalf of, Jesus Christ, for one purpose only. We should not be taken up with the Holy Spirit Himself, nor with the manifestations of the Holy Spirit. We should be solely occupied with the object of the Holy Spirit, and the sole purpose of the Holy Spirit's coming is to make Christ everything, to conform us to the image of Christ, fully to form Christ in us. The Holy Spirit has the view of God, that Christ is the object always in sight.

Do we want to know the only way of deliverance? It will never be by going round ourselves, being occupied with ourselves, sorting ourselves out, and just weeping and mourning over ourselves; it will be by occupation with Christ. That is the only way, but it is the Way. Paul in Romans 7 tells us of the one side of things. He says he had longings in a certain direction, but his longings were frustrated by what was in himself. He had loathings in other directions, but even his loathings led to no deliverance, for what he loathed he did, what he longed for he never did. At length in despair he cried, "who shall deliver me?" Then, espying a way out, he said: "Ah, I see, I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord". There are no divisions into chapters in the original, you must read straight on. Because people have not been led straight on they have been left in doctrinal confusion. It should be, "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord... There is therefore no condemnation to them that are..." - longing to be like Christ, and deploring how unlike Christ they are? No! "...to them that are in Christ Jesus". Why no condemnation? Because God is looking upon the One in Whom there is no ground of condemnation at all, and He says: "Your deliverance is to be occupied with the ground where there is no condemnation, that is Christ." Every secret of the life of the believer is there.

Our greatest need is to be delivered from ourselves into Christ. There we find all God's intentions and activities concerning His Son. It is "Christ in you, the hope of glory", that is the great secret, and there is no hope of glory anywhere else.

What does this mean? Not that I come before God saying, "I have had pure motives; I have been very honest, earnest and conscientious, and my intentions have all been of the best." Let us stop talking nonsense. It is utter folly to talk like that. We do not know ourselves. Only God knows the truth about us, and none of that finds a place with Him or counts with Him for a moment. The point is, have I recognised that the Cross of the Lord Jesus was the smashing and ending of me, good and bad, so that I am not holding up before the Lord anything? I am as capable of the worst as any being in God's creation is. For anybody to take the attitude that they are not capable of the worst is an attitude of the deepest deception. We do not know the power in our beings until we are put to it. If we have never committed the worst, it is because we have never been put to it in the mercy of God, but it is all there. The Lord puts His finger upon it in principle when He says, "He that hates his brother is a murderer." It is the same spirit. You have only to extend that, provoke that anger enough, put that nature into certain circumstances, and you will discover that you are capable of things of which you would have stood in utmost horror at one time. You and I have got to come down before God and admit that we are capable of the worst, not standing on the ground of our right. The only right one is Christ from God's standpoint. The only safe one is Christ, and therefore the only one who stands in God's eyes is Christ, and it is as you and I, in all the brokenness, frailty, conscious weakness and humility of our own beings, by faith cling to Christ that we shall find the way out, the deliverance, the salvation. We must look behind God's words to see bigger things than words on the surface indicate. "To this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and that trembles at My word." That statement embodies all that we are saying.

To what one will He look? To the one who never says, "I am right!" but to the one who says, "I may be as wrong as ever man or woman was wrong, there is nothing of which I am not capable; my only ground is Christ; so help me God, Christ is my ground!" To stand on Christ is to stand always in the consciousness and recognition that this other ground, ourselves at any point, is dangerous ground. He is so Other, and there is the great divide, there is no overlapping. Between Christ and us there is a gaping chasm. God never sees that bridged, but thank God He will put Christ into us by the Holy Spirit, and while the two will ever remain apart, the old creation will go one day and that which is of Christ, as wrought into us, will abide.

Chapter 2 - A True Beginning and a True Walk

Reading: Numbers 8:13-19.

We shall be occupied at this time with some finer breaking up of one or two of the matters mentioned in our last meditation.

No Mingling of the Old and New Creations

We want to lay one further emphasis upon the word with which we concluded. We were speaking about the complications of the old humanity, the inextricable tangle of elements, and how that the Lord has no intention whatever of disentangling them, but that His way is to bring in a new creation.

Then we went on to point out that so much of the confusion and consequent failure, weakness, arrest and breakdown is due to an overlooking of that basic fact that the Lord does not take up something that has advanced in the old creation, something that has a history, but He begins again at the beginning in the meaning of the firstborn, or in new birth.

It is quite clear that the Lord does this, because of the incidents on record of where He shows His very strong disfavour of a bringing in of other elements in relation to His testimony. We remember so well the instance of the ark in the hands of the Philistines, and then the ark being put by David on a new cart, and other than the Levites taking charge of it. In both cases (the ark, of course, represents Christ and the Testimony of Jesus) the touch, the contact of non-Levitical elements with the ark resulted in judgment, and in a very severe action of the Lord against such as brought in those elements. In the case of Uzzah it was judgment unto death, arrest of the whole course of things, and a prolonged period of paralysis, of spiritual death. Then David discovered the nature of the mistake, and put it right, quoting the Scripture on the matter as He did so, that the Lord had said that none but the Levites should bear the ark.

All this is figurative, symbolic, and it stands to show that the Lord will not allow old creation elements to come and take hold upon new creation realities. Let us put that in another way: the Lord will not allow the old man to be associated with the new man. Or, still in another way, the Lord will not allow what is not Christ to be brought into harness with Christ. The Levites stand for that which is Christ, all of Christ, and they alone can bear the testimony; that is, Christ alone can express the mind of God and do the work of God, and if we bring other features in, and relate them to God's thoughts, and God's activities, we only come into the realm of judgment and certain spiritual death. So the warnings are very strong, and the teaching is very clear; we must not mix what is of man with what is of God in Christ. There has to be an end.

Having re-emphasized that point we are going back to some of those things which were said quite early in paving the way concerning the meaning of firstborn.

Becoming as a Little Child

You will remember we said that "firstborn" means a new beginning. We quoted the Lord's words as recorded in Matthew 18: "Except ye turn and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven". That certainly is a new beginning, and such a beginning obviously means certain things. When you start with the little child (and the word is the diminutive there, 'babe'), there is this to your advantage: that you have a clear course. It means that there is no history to be undone, nothing to be given up, gone back upon, but you have a clear way from the start, and everything lies before you. Thus it is when you turn and become a little child. It is interesting and helpful to remember the simple meaning of the word "repent". It is translated in the Revised Version as "turn". It simply means that you go back and start again; you reverse the course that you have taken, and come back to a new beginning, and so you become as a little child.

The Lord would not have His people childish, but He would always have them childlike, and there should be a cry in our hearts. God forbid that we should ever be other than childlike, that ever we should get beyond the place that is represented by the little child! We know all that the Lord says about growing up, about maturity, but there is this that we always seek to bear in mind, that real maturity is only possible to the childlike in spirit. It is the people of the childlike spirit who grow fastest, who make the swiftest progress, who arrive at things more promptly than other people. Remember that when the Lord uttered these words He was dealing with the question of greatness: "Who then is greatest in the kingdom?" Now the question of greatness is bound up with childlikeness.

The standards of God are so different from the standards of men. When John (in the book of Revelation) looks to see what he believes must be something phenomenal as the explanation of all that he is hearing, he sees a Lamb. That is a standard altogether different from this world's standard of power.

There is so much history to undo. That is the thing that is holding us up all the time, the tremendous history that lies behind and that counts for nothing, and has all to be undone. Yet we stand to the point of what we have just said, that it does not matter at what time this great event takes place of turning and becoming as a little child. That is, it does not matter how old we may have grown in this life and in this world, it is still possible for us to be in a position where there is no history to be undone.

New Birth the Essential Beginning

What is this beginning? What is this childlikeness that is essential, vital, and indispensable? It is just our own firsthand, personal knowledge of the Lord. Nothing else counts with the Lord at all, and we can, quite rightly, set everything else aside. It may have been a long set history in the world of sin and godlessness, indifference or hostility to the Lord; or, mark you, it may have been a long life of close association with the things of God, our having been either born in, or later been a part of, a Christian home where around us were all the things of God: much teaching, much truth, much that was related to the Lord, and we were right in it, and in a way a part of it. Yet, in both cases - as God-rejecting in the world, or as right in the centre of a strongly religious order of things and yet not ourselves of it - there was no real personal, firsthand knowledge of the Lord, and both of those things count for nothing where the Lord is concerned. The Lord says, "Whether you have been utterly outside and against, or indifferent, or whether you have been physically, by reason of your life here on earth, right in the midst of things which related to Me, but not yourself living in the knowledge of Me, those things do not count, that is not history with Me. What is history with Me is just your own personal knowledge of Christ, and at whatever point you enter into that, that is the beginning with Me." History begins there with God.

The church of the firstborn is not a traditional thing. It is not a thing of creed, which has been taken up generation after generation, not a thing of adopted truth, however full and deep and true that truth may be. The succeeding generations do not become the church of the firstborn because they accept the truths which their fathers held, the truths into which they were introduced, perhaps by their natural birth and with which they have been associated by reason of their family relationships. That is not the church of the firstborn. The church of the firstborn is that which has come into a firsthand personal history with God, and all the rest does not count. It is possible, in the briefest time, to move into a very real knowledge of the Lord if you are truly born, but if we bring over something or try to carry on something, or adopt something which is not of our own walk with God, we complicate the whole situation.

That word, of course, is set against a certain order and a certain course; but, oh, the value of it on the other hand! What a burden a history can be, and what a set-back a history can be, if we allow it. Of course, we may also allow years of unrelatedness to God to cause us a good deal of distress, and make us feel that because so much time has been lost in our lives we can never come to any fulness, and must be content with a very little. Now, that is a wrong attitude entirely, and it is not the attitude that the Lord takes. The Lord can bring us into a great measure of Christ's fulness in what we might call a comparatively short time, provided we take the attitude towards all other history that He takes: that it ends with the Cross of the Lord Jesus, and spiritual history begins in resurrection union with Him. That gives God a clear way. Then again, in the other case, oh, how often religious upbringing has been a hindrance! It is not always a helpful thing to be brought up in a hothouse atmosphere of spiritual things. Thank God for anything that can be a help when once we are on the right line and in the right position, but until we have our own personal knowledge of God, all that can be a great burden, and a great weight, and a great death to us, and not a help at all.

We do not have to think that we have to adjust ourselves to all that truth, and that teaching that is around us. Not at all. We have to begin as babes, and with God none of that other counts for us. All that counts is where we begin a personal, direct, immediate spiritual knowledge of Him. There is no government of time in our progress. Time does not govern the matter of spiritual progress. It is our escape from ourselves into Christ that governs. The thing that holds us back is some kind of occupation with the old creation. If only we knew the clean cut of the death of Christ between ourselves by nature and Himself, then we should know the way of spiritual growth which is not a time matter at all. It is the utterness of our acceptance of the meaning of His death to all that is not the living Christ in our own hearts, whether it be religious or irreligious. That is what we mean by the way back, the clear course being opened. You do not have to deal with what is not living at all; you have to rule it out. God rules it out and puts it aside. What we have to be concerned with is the point at which we come to a firsthand, personal, living knowledge of the Lord, and that from that point we do not bring in the old creation and make difficulties for the Lord, saying; "Yes, but Lord -." We must not have a lot of "buts" with the Lord, but a clear way of faith's obedience, without any of the complications of our reasoning and our wanting, or not wanting, our likings, and our not-likings, our going to, and our not going to. Our need is of a clear, steady, swift response to the Lord, and the progress can be very rapid, and the knowledge of Him can increase in a wonderful way. I am quite sure that the thing that holds us back is the fact that we are taken up with a history that the Lord has finished with, be it a religious history or a non-religious history. The Lord has finished with it altogether, and so He says, "Now then, back from that point, that is not the way; turn and become as a little child." The church which is the church of the firstborn is those whose history is nothing other than the history of a firsthand, personal, inward knowledge of the Lord, and that is open to all.

The Essence of Childlikeness

This childlikeness which gives God a free, clear, full way is a teachable thing. The essence of it is teachableness and adjustableness. If we know anything, and think we know anything, that very mentality is the hindrance to our progress. So many of us perhaps have been held up by a tremendous amount of knowledge that we think we have had of the things of the Lord. Oh, we do not know what a hindrance such a mentality is to spiritual progress.

The mark of maturity, of growth, is this: that the more you know and the further you go, the less you know that you do know, and the more you realize your need to know. That is where the spirit of the child is carried right through to the end. It is a teachableness, resultant from the consciousness that, though we may have been on the road for a life-time, we are yet only on the fringe of things so far as the Lord is concerned. That is a mark of the Holy Spirit's power working in us. That we should at any time come to the place where we think we know - we refer to that knowledge which brings us to a place where we deem ourselves authorities or experts - is not the work of the Holy Spirit. We do come to a place where we are able to say: I do know the Lord on that thing; I do know the Lord in this. But in that full sense of knowledge we have ever to be coming more and more to the place where we realise how little we know, simply because we are seeing more and more of what there is that we ought to know, need to know, and that there is to know in Christ. You can adjust a child. A child is ready to be adjusted. But that is the trouble with so many of us, we are not just like that, we are not adjustable.

There was a beautiful childlikeness and simplicity about David, although he was king. How marvellously adjustable he was! You notice that whenever David made a mistake the Lord had no difficulty in putting David right. He adjusted to the situation every time. He did not stand out against the Lord, he let go, he yielded, and whenever a new position required that he should adjust himself to it in the Lord's interests he did so. What a rich life of the knowledge of the Lord David's was. There, on the one hand, is this beautiful simplicity, this teachableness, and this adjustableness, and on the other hand, a wonderful walk with the Lord. How much his Psalms mean always! What a fulness of personal, simple walking with the Lord is in those Psalms. That is becoming as a little child.

The Issues of the New Birth

By this new birth we come into a new world altogether, where none of the old abilities stand us in any stead, if we did but know it. We are so long in recognising and realising it. We may have in this natural life certain abilities - we can do things, we can think things out - but when we come into the kingdom of heaven we come into a world where all this old natural faculty is of no use at all. We have a new life, and that life has its own particular laws, and the old natural life is useless in that realm. You and I cannot live by our natural life in the realm of the Spirit, in the realm of the things of God. We have to have a life that is suited to the kingdom of the heavens.

Now we find ourselves possessed of this new Life, a different life altogether. It requires certain things that we cannot provide it with from our natural life. We have to learn how to live according to this new Life and what its requirements are, and we discover from time to time as we go on that things are not right, they are not well, that new Life is not getting on; what is the matter? Then, by the very suffering of that Life, that sense of strangulation in our spiritual life, we learn some law of that Life. We have been violating it in some way, we have been depriving it of its demands, we have not been cooperating with it. It is something in itself which has its own laws, and we have to discover the laws of that Life and live accordingly. It is all a new, strange thing. It is a wonderful education to live according to Divine Life, which has its own Divine ways, and will not adapt itself to this other life that we have by nature. It is a new and different Life altogether. It is "the altogether other-ness" that we are talking about of what Christ is from what we are.

We have a new walk. We have never walked before. It does not matter how long we have been walking according to the course of this world, we have never walked in this sphere before, and we have to take our first step in the spiritual Life just in the same way that a babe takes its first step in the natural life. It is a new kind of walk, and we learn how to walk after the Spirit very often by the tumbles that we have and the mistakes that we make. This walk after the Spirit is all new, and partakes of nothing of the natural, of self-confidence. Self-assurance is a disastrous thing. We have said to our children in the beginning of their exercises, "You were too sure of yourself and you came to a crash. You thought you could do more than you could. It was your own self-assurance!" It is like that in the spiritual life. Walking after the Spirit and not after the flesh is a new kind of walk, and there is no place at all for self-assurance here.

It is a new knowledge. We have found ourselves in a new world of things of which we know nothing. "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man", but God is revealing these things to us by His Spirit. It is a new knowledge that we have not possessed. It is all fresh, strange, and we have to realize that this new world in which we are now to move is one where our experience is that of a growing newness. One of the blessed realities about a living, personal, inward, spiritual walk with God is that you have always something fresh coming; there is always something new, you never exhaust things; things never become stale or stagnant, there is new wonder all the time. How often we have thought that we had reached the end; and then there has followed the next deep, dark crisis and painful experience, and out of the depths has come something new altogether; a new revelation, a different aspect of the fulness of Christ. We think that now, of course, we have reached the very peak, there is nothing further! That is how it seems. What more can there be? The only thing now is for the Lord to come, we have reached the end of all revelation! We live perhaps for some years in the wonder of that, and then again the same thing happens. We go down to the depths, and everything seems to have gone, and out of the experience comes something more that never was before; and once again we wonder if there can be anything beyond this. We have had experiences enough like that to make us know that there must be yet much more. We never reach the end. That is the wonder of this Life. Everything is open, everything is possible if there is a clear way for God.

Now, why all this? It is this that is a true life according to the law of the firstborn. It is not something that is merely a matter of religious teaching, and truth, and doctrine, and interpretations, and crystallizings of truth. It is not just tradition, it is not just creed, it is not words. It is a living, wonderful, growing knowledge of, and walk with the Lord, which is marked by these movements, these crises, which bring fulnesses into view that were undreamed of before.

It is so dangerous to think that a big experience you have had is the end of all things in the matter of experience. So many are living on something that happened to them years ago, and they say they have had "an experience". It is put in different ways. We may have what is called a baptism of the Holy Spirit, and call it our baptism of the Holy Spirit. But let us not think that is the end of all mighty things. Many people do. They are always saying, "When I received my baptism...". Why, there is something more, and yet more beyond that!

It is a clear road when all is in the way of the firstborn; it is becoming like a little child and giving God an open way for all His fulness.

The Incarnation and the Gift of the Spirit

Christ came on that basis. He started as a babe. Why did the Lord Jesus come as a baby, and live to manhood here on this earth? Had the work of the Cross alone been in view, God could have incarnated Himself in a fully developed Man, and appeared amongst men, made His great proclamation, uttered His challenge, and been crucified just as definitely as Christ was crucified, without the years up to thirty-three and a half.

There are several answers to that question, and there is truth in them all, but we may further say this: The Lord Jesus came here to live a life, and to walk a walk, that had never been lived and walked before by any man on this earth. There never had been a man on this earth who walked that walk, and lived that life, and there was not another in all creation living that life, and walking that walk, that He came to live, and walk. It was something unique, something "altogether other". What are we to say of it? It was the life of God among men, and the walk of God among men. It was as God would live, and as God would walk, if He had a chance in men. If God had a chance to do what He wants to do, He would live and walk as Jesus Christ lived and walked. The Lord Jesus was the human expression of God's thought for man, as to his life, and as to his walk.

With Him it was a matter of faith and of dependence. He accepted the position that it was not in Himself, but it was by faith in the Father, as living out from the Father. And so He weighed everything before He said it, or did it, making sure that He was not doing it independently, but in perfect fellowship with the Father: "The words that I say... I speak not from myself"; "The Son can do nothing (out from) himself." That was His life and that was His walk as out from God.

Now listen! That is Jesus Christ. He is the only one who has ever done it. He is the only one who ever can do it. You and I know that quite well. "The imitation of Christ" is rubbish and pious nonsense. If Christ does not live His life in us there is no imitating Christ. Why has the Holy Spirit come? He is the Spirit of Christ come that we might, by the Spirit, walk even as He walked. What does that imply? Not the life of Deity, but divine Life in man, the Life of God in man, lived by faith, lived by utter dependence, lived by obedience. "Though He were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered." Think of that concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh!

The Holy Spirit has come that you and I, and all who trust the Lord, might learn how to live, and how to walk, as He lived and walked. Shall we put it the other way, and the more accurate way, and say that the Holy Spirit has come that the Lord Jesus might live His Life, and walk His walk, in us. That is what is meant by being conformed to the image of God's Son. It is being brought on to His basis, and by the Holy Spirit made to live, and to walk, as He lived and walked. That is a progressive thing, which will be consummated in the perfect likeness of Christ. That is why He came, and that is why He lived, that God should have a Man who lived and walked according to His own thought, and that having got that Man as the great Representative, He could send the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of God, to bring that walk, and that Life of Christ into us, and have us learn by the Spirit how to walk even as He walked. It is all Christ. "Apart from me ye can do nothing." It is impossible apart from Him, but if Christ is within it is possible, and that is the church of the firstborn. It is Christ as a living reality within; it is a personal, immediate knowledge of Him in an inward way.

We can all profit by being reminded of the nature of our life, and what it is God is seeking to have: a church, a company, a corporate body, which is the expression of what Christ was. So we are not to walk in the flesh. If we live after the flesh we shall die; if we walk in the flesh we shall fulfil the lusts of the flesh, and that is all contrary to God; but if we live after the Spirit then we shall by the Spirit put to death the doings of the flesh, and Christ will be formed in us.

We could resolve all this into this one thing: it is a matter of our own immediate, personal walk with the Lord. That is the beginning of history with God. No other history counts, nor need it bother us. It must not in any way influence us, and certainly must not be the ground upon which we stand, whatever it is. History with God is that where the knowledge of Him in a living way begins, and there is no other history.

So much, then, for what we were saying about a new beginning.

Chapter 3 - A Full Knowledge of Christ

Reading: Eph. 1:17-23; Colossians 1 and 2.

We want to point out how the letter to the Ephesians and the letter to the Colossians are all of a piece with the great truth that is contained in the fact of the church of the firstborn, especially underlining the words in Ephesians 1:17:

"That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him (that is, our Lord Jesus Christ)".

The word in the original is "the full knowledge of Him". It is important to note that, because there is a knowledge of the Lord Jesus which is not an Ephesian knowledge, so to speak; which is not the knowledge of the Lord Jesus that is brought into view in these later letters of the apostle. When we come to Ephesians and Colossians we come to something very much fuller to the Lord Jesus, and what the apostle is desiring as he writes, is that the believers may come to this full knowledge of the Lord Jesus which he is seeking to set forth. So that what we have in these letters is the full, or the fuller knowledge of the Lord Jesus for the saints, and unto that full knowledge he prays that the Father of glory may give a spirit of wisdom and revelation.

"Having the eyes of your heart enlightened..."

It is not just the case of the eyes of the heart being opened. The eyes of the heart are opened when we first see the Lord. That is a part of the work of our conversion; we see the Lord. But here is enlightenment for those opened eyes; enlightened unto full knowledge.

"...that ye may know..."

That you may know, not only that you are saved, not only that you are accepted, in that your sins are forgiven. All that is taken for granted, is taken as established when we reach this point. This is something more...

"...what is the hope of his calling..."

It is not that we may know His calling, for we know that, but that we may know the hope of His calling, what the calling is unto.

"...what the riches of the glory of his (Christ's) inheritance in the saints, and what the exceeding greatness of his power to usward who believe..."

Here again, it is not the exceeding greatness of His power unto our salvation, with a view to save us, but it is the exceeding greatness of His power unto us who believe in relation to the full knowledge of Christ. The full knowledge of Christ demands the operation of the exceeding greatness of God's power.

"...according to that working of the strength of His might which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and set Him at his own right hand in the heavenlies... and gave Him to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of Him that fills all in all".

We have hinted that the church referred to here is all of a piece with the "church of the firstborn". The church comes specially into view in the letter to the Ephesians, which is, as we understand, of all letters the church letter. It is the church of the firstborn, linked with the Levites in a typical way. These words in Ephesians 1 will help us to understand what the Levites were for; what their calling was, and their vocation, as we read backward

What is Meant by God's Full Thought

The Levites stood to represent God's full mind and thought as to His people as a whole, and their vocation was to hold everything in relation to that full thought of God. This first clause sums up the very life and nature and vocation of the Levites, "the full knowledge of Him".

What is God's full thought? No one would ever say that God's full thought is realised in His people when He has got them out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, into the wilderness. It is quite impossible to read the Word of God with reference to Israel's history during the forty years and to say that is God's full thought, that is all that God intended, and God has reached His end. Everything contradicts that, and no one would suggest that it was so.

Yet they were redeemed with precious blood; they were saved by a mighty hand; they were brought out of the world typically, out of the authority of darkness, and were made a people for God's own possession. But withal the full thought of God lies far beyond that. God's full thought was in the direction of the land, with all its typical meaning as representing the fulness of Christ and what that fulness is.

God's full thought for the saints is never realised in their salvation from sin, from the world, and from the power of Satan. That is a great part of the Lord's thought, but it is not the full thought. That is only the beginning of His thought. That is the foundation. What is the full thought of God? Firstly, it is "the hope of His calling" to know which requires that He, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, shall give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation unto the knowledge of the hope of His calling.

Israel in the wilderness were living - inadequately, it is true, all too weakly - with a hope. Every step that they took in their march was a step with a hope. Whenever they were caused to tarry, they only did so in the thought that it would not be long before they were on the march again. They were governed by a hope of their calling. What was the hope? A sphere in which there would be fullness: fulness of life, fulness of power; a realm in which they would have all that God could give them, and all that God in His grace and covenant had promised them; a realm in which they would be in the place of government, dominion, power, and much more than that. That was the hope of their calling.

Now, says the apostle, that is the hope of the church's calling, not just to be saved from the old state and realm, but to be saved right through unto all the fulness of God in Christ; "...the church which is his body, the fulness of Him that fills all in all". The hope of His calling is a tremendous thing.

Then there are "the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints". I am quite sure we shall never get to the bottom of that, but it is something to dwell upon. It will grow as we dwell upon it. The time was, no doubt, when every one of us in reading that clause wondered what in the thought of God it meant. It was far beyond us. We have been getting just a little glimpse of light. It has been growing, and is still growing, and it will grow as we contemplate it: "the riches of the glory of His (Christ's) inheritance in the saints". If we understood it, and if it gripped us, as such a thing should grip us, it would be a tremendous factor in our pressing on to make our calling and our election sure. We will come to that in a moment, and say a little more about it.

His full thought - the hope of His calling, the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints! Next there follows, "The exceeding greatness of His power". We note that it is power in accordance with the strength of His might which He energised first in raising Christ from the dead. That is no small matter when you consider all that had to be met of the power of death spiritually. Then the second step is the setting of Him at His own right hand, the getting back there through all principalities and power, and upon that giving Him dominion far above all other rule, and authority, and power, and every name in all ages, putting all under His feet (His enemies); and then giving Him to be Head over all things to the church, which is His body.

All this is said to be the working of the exceeding greatness of God's power, and the full knowledge of Christ is to know that. To know the full knowledge of Christ, is to be taken through exactly the same course in the power of resurrection, ascension, exaltation, enthronement, dominion, fulness of Him. That is the full knowledge of Christ. These are not small matters. We are not straining, not exaggerating. We are simply dwelling upon what it says, and that is the content of the single phrase "in the full knowledge of Him". That is God's full thought for His own.

We are called to hold everything in relation to God's full thought, and if the Levites are in type the church of the firstborn ones, and we are the antitype, the church, which is His body, then the church, which is His body, is called into being to become the embodiment of, and to hold all things in relation to, the full thought of God.

If you look back and study the history of the Levites from every standpoint - and their life and activity was many-sided, from the receiving and slaying of the sacrifice, and the receiving and taking of the blood, to ministry in the sanctuary, in the maintaining of the light, and the bread, and the incense; and when in transit through the wilderness in the carrying of the sanctuary, the tabernacle (its various parts apportioned to three families) and so much more - you will see that every part of it was linked with this full thought of God, that they were there to hold everything in relation to God's full thought for His people. That is all summed up in this, "the hope of his calling". The hope of His calling was there in the shed blood, in the receiving and sprinkling of the blood, and in every other part of their life. Further it was the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and the exceeding greatness of His power toward them. It was, in the comprehensive phrase, "the full knowledge of Him".

The church which is His body steps into the place of the Levites spiritually for that same work, ministry, life, vocation in a spiritual way, to hold everything and to function in every way, in relation to the full thought of God, that the saints may come unto the hope of His calling, and the realisation of that hope, the fulfilment of that hope; that the church may come to provide Him with the riches of the glory of His inheritance in it; that the church may be that in which there is the operation of His exceeding great power to translate it from death to the place where it is the fulness of Him that fills all in all.

Perhaps you say, "That is all wonderful, but it is not of very much practical value!" Well, to contemplate a thought of God ought to be an inspiration, even if it overawes us, even if it makes us draw a breath in amazement, even if we are staggered by it. None the less, these are the great thoughts of God, and you and I will not make much progress unless we are apprised of the thoughts of God, because we have got to set our hearts upon God having His thoughts realised. It is a matter of cooperation with Him, and so, says the apostle, "give the more diligence to make your calling and election sure". How can you do that unless you know what your calling and election is? This is it.

The Fulness of God in Christ as Man

Now we come back and gather all this up as far as we can. The great revelation which has come out eventually and called (until disclosed) "the mystery", and represented in a typical way by the Levites, the church of the firstborn, is firstly this: Christ personally, as Man, made the heir of all things, so that in Him, as Man, all God's fulness dwells.

Now you turn to the letter to the Colossians, and when you do so, and read the first chapter, and then the second, you will ask: Now what is the object in view? What is the apostle intending, or what does the Holy Spirit mean by what is written there? The first answer would be that it is to set forth, to declare, the Deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. You cannot get away from that. You take such words as those in verse 19 of chapter 1 and verse 9 of chapter 2. There, surely, is Deity.

The object of the letter was to present Christ in His right place, as one with God. Yet when you have acknowledged that, you have to recognise that there is a second thing which the apostle is seeking to enforce by that very means, showing that, although Jesus Christ was one with God, and of the very Godhead, He was also Man. The very words that it was the good pleasure of the Father that in Him should all the fulness dwell in bodily form, imply incarnation; that here was a Man in whom the fulness dwelt. He was God, but Man too. He became Man. The great revelation which has now been disclosed concerning Jesus Christ personally is, on the one hand, just this; not that all fulness dwells in God - that is no special revelation, there is no mystery about that. It is not that it pleases God that all the fulness should dwell in one member of the Godhead - there is nothing to be surprised at in that. That does not need a revelation; that can be taken for granted. But the mystery of Christ is that the fulness dwells in Him as

Man by the good pleasure of the Father; that it is in Man that God has made the fulness to dwell, that He is the heir of all things. When we put that stress and emphasis upon the word "Man", we are touching the very heart of mystery and divine counsels, and we are led back to this position, that from eternity in those counsels of the Godhead, God determined to display Himself universally man-wise, not in His naked-Deity, not as unembodied Spirit (for God is a Spirit), not in the abstract movement of the invisible, intangible, spiritual sense. No! it was man-wise, humanity-wise, and the all-inclusive representation of that intention is Jesus Christ. The incarnation is a marvellous, unspeakable, profound thing going back to the eternal counsels of God. It takes us beyond our depth altogether when we begin to think of Christ as the first-begotten, the only begotten Son.

There we step clean out of our understanding, but though we may not be able to trace it and comprehend it, we are able to understand it this far, that the purpose of it, however it was done, whatever its deep mystery, is the purpose of God to express, to manifest Himself in man-form in this universe. The heart of everything for God is man. The devil never attacked God's creation outside of man. He attacked the whole creation through man, focussed upon man, and man is his object. None of us will ever know what the Lord Jesus went through at the hands of the devil during His sojourn here on this earth, and especially in those hours of His cross. If you and I have ever known (and we have in a measure, which to us has been often beyond endurance) what the fury and hatred and the maliciousness of the devil is, the cruelty, the cunning, the iniquity of Satan, have not touched one little fragment of what the Son of Man had to encounter at the hands of Satan, especially in His Cross. Why? Because it is man that is God's thought, and Christ is the Man; the inclusive Man, and the representative Man.

The fact that God has a Man at last in glory, represents such power, such wisdom, and such triumph on the part of God as to have altogether outwitted, out-manoeuvred, and out-powered all the dominion of Satan. Stephen said: "I see the heavens open, and the Son of Man...". Saul of Tarsus hears the words, "I am Jesus".

The mystery hid from all ages and generations is just that, that God's eternal purpose is bound up with Man, and that Jesus Christ is the chosen, inclusive Man, the Firstborn. When we have said all that, we have not said anything, we have not seen anything. To know Him, to see who and what Jesus is, is the greatest revelation that can ever come to us, and so the apostle says that he prays that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, would grant a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the full knowledge of Him. There is no greater thing that can ever come than the full knowledge of Him.

This is not the full knowledge of God as God, in His Deity; this is the full knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ in the appointment, the thought and intention of God as Man. But that is only one side. You may call it the bigger side if you like, but it is only one side of that revelation which has eventually come out.

The Corporate Expression of Christ in the Church

The other side is that this fulness of the Person is to be manifested corporately in the church of the firstborn ones. He is the Firstborn, the church is the firstborn ones. He and we are set forth as one Body. You and I never become incorporated into Deity, we are not one body with Deity; it is the Man with whom we are one. We are incorporated into Christ as the Man. As Paul in this letter to the Ephesians says, making "of the twain one new man".

We said that the other side is the fulness of the Person of Christ to be manifested corporately. That leads us to this second petition in the prayer of the apostle: "...what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints". What is Christ's inheritance in the saints? What are the riches of the glory of Christ's inheritance in the saints? It is that the saints are to provide Him with the means of the universal manifestation of Himself as God has purposed Him to be. It is a part of the arrangement in those counsels of the Godhead, that He shall be the central fulness, but that the fulness should not be manifested, displayed in an isolated way. There would be no purpose in that, because He could have done that in Deity without incarnation, He could have possessed the fulness in that way, and that is what the letter to the Philippians says. He was equal with God, and had all the fulness, but He emptied Himself. Why? In order that others might be brought into the fulness, that He might not hold it all for Himself. That is what Satan wants to do.

The Lord Jesus let go in order to bring others in. The apostle says, "Let this mind be in you". If any of you are inclined to stand for your own rights, on your own ground, to hold things for yourself, you are violating the very spirit of Christ who let go His own rights in order that others might come into them and get the benefit. So the inheritance of Christ is this: that He is made heir of all things, but He can have all things only as He has the saints, and He gets those "all things" through and in the saints. It is a part of the arrangement, the agreement. It is not as one isolated unit in God's universe, that He is to have everything, but by appointment man-wise, in a corporate sense, and not only in a personal sense. So that the Lord Jesus cannot come into all that God eternally intended for Him until He has the church, and until the church has come to the full knowledge of Him.

The church is called His bride, and it is to be the bride who shows forth His glory. His glories are to be known through the bride. You remember Abraham's servant, who went to fetch the bride for Isaac, and the last stroke in winning the consent of that bride was the displaying of the riches of his master, and giving of those riches to her. When these things were displayed she gave her answer: "I will go." She became the means by which the riches of her bridegroom were displayed. How did the others in her household know what kind of a man this Isaac was, whether he was a beggar or a prince? The servant having taken of his, showed them these riches, these jewels, and they knew what kind of a man he was.

Typically, the servant represents the Holy Spirit taking of the things of Christ to show them to the bride, in order that the bride might become the vehicle of the display of His princeliness, of His glory, His wealth and His riches; His inheritance in the saints. When you come to the end of the book of the Revelation, to the city coming down from God out of heaven adorned as a bride for her husband having the glory of God, her light is like unto a stone most precious and you see that it is the church, with the fulness of Christ, and it is that church that shows what Christ is universally. That is the church of the firstborn. You and I are called to that; that is our calling, our election.

This has some very practical applications. Why is the Lord today laying such stress and emphasis upon the necessity for His own people to come into a new position? There is no doubt about this, that over a very large area the Lord's own people are growingly conscious of spiritual need, conscious of a lack, and a weakness and disappointment, a sense of failure, and they are coming into a new exercise. The Lord is not allowing that to be countered by great evangelistic movements, but rather it is found that almost every time such a movement is launched it resolves itself into getting the Lord's people right. It is significant.

The Lord is not satisfied with His people just being saved, and the Lord is not satisfied that people should just remain saved. The Lord has fixed this as His goal: the full knowledge of Him. It is indispensable to the Lord. His inheritance is bound up with it. The need today is that the Lord's own people should come into a knowledge of Himself which they do not possess, into a position in relation to Himself which they do not occupy; in a word: into the full knowledge of Him. That is the need, and when the church was in the enjoyment of Christ in His risen, ascended and exalted glory, then the Lord was free to add unto them daily those that were being saved. He had a free course to do that, and He did it.

One is bound to ask in these days as to whether it is safe for the Lord to do that in a wholesale way, to add such as being saved to what is; whether they do not stand to lose very largely. Is it not necessary, in order that men should be saved, that the church should be in life, and that the church should be enjoying the fulnesses of Christ? Is not that the key to the situation? Surely it is. A church throbbing with life, enjoying the Lord, is essential in relation to the unsaved. However that may be, here is the Lord's thought for the church. It is a great thought. The Levites were called in to be such, were the custodians of that divine thought, and held everything in relation to it. In other words, the church of the firstborn is to represent God's full thought, and to hold everything unto God's full thought for all His church.

Chapter 4 - The Measure of Christ

Reading: Eph. 4:7,13,15-16; Col. 2:19; Eph. 1:17-19.

You will notice in those verses of Ephesians 4 how the idea of measure is brought into prominence: "According to the measure of the gift of Christ"; "Unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ"; "...may grow up in all things into Him (the Head, Christ)"; "the working in due measure of each several part, maketh the increase of the body unto the building up of itself in love"; and "...maketh increase with the increase of God" (Col. 2:19).

Among the many things set forth by the Levites there are these two: (1) They set forth God's purpose as to fulness for His people, and (2) They set forth the nature of spiritual service. It is those two things which will occupy us at this time.

God's Purpose as to Fulness for His People

There are three ways, it seems, in which the Levites set forth God's purpose concerning the fulness for His people

(a) The Spirit of Sonship

We have seen that the Lord claimed all the firstborn in Israel, and said that in the day that He smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt He took the firstborn of Israel for Himself, and then, later, substituted the tribe of Levi for the firstborn in Israel. So the whole tribe of Levi became representative of the whole house of Israel, and in type became the church of the firstborn ones, to which the apostle refers in Hebrews 12.

The idea of the firstborn implies the truth of sonship, but when we come to look into the matter of sonship in the New Testament we have not, as we know, just an initial or elementary thought of God about His people; we have God's fullest thought about them. We find that sonship is an eternal thought, which links with the fulness of Christ; that is, we are taken back by the Word of God, in this letter to the Ephesians, to that dateless point where, in the counsels of the Godhead, everything was appointed to be the heritage of the Son, and all things were summed up in Christ, and universal fulness was made to centre in Him. Colossians chapter one opens that up very fully. It tells us that in Him were all things created, all things were through Him, by Him, unto Him, "that in all things He might have the pre-eminence". Then upon that we have the statement, "It pleased the Father that in Him all the fulness should dwell." When was that determined? The apostle tells us that it was in those counsels of the Godhead, those counsels which are operating now according to this word, "who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will" (Eph. 1:11). Now you see that, as to Christ, sonship is a very full idea, so full that there is nothing outside of it. It bounds everything.

But in the same eternal counsels which determined that Christ should be the centre and sphere of universal fulness, by divine appointment and undertaking the church, His body, was linked with Him to be "the fulness of Him that filleth all in all"; those are the closing words of Ephesians chapter one.

That means that unto that sonship the church is brought, and so we have a parallel revelation in the New Testament concerning the sonship of believers as God's full thought, and you have this remarkable word at the beginning of this letter, in verse 5: "Having foreordained us unto the adoption as sons by Jesus Christ unto himself". Sonship is not the initial thing in the life of a child of God. The initial thing is birth, and childhood, but in the New Testament sonship is something beyond that, something later. Sonship is something which relates to full growth and maturity, and the adoption of sons is not the same as being born a child of God. That is obvious, for if there is an adoption then it is not a birth, and a birth is not an adoption. They are two different things. We are born (in new birth) children of God; we are adopted sons.

There is an altogether different idea in the New Testament with its background, from the idea which obtains in our own civilization today as to birth and adoption. If a child is born into a family it can never be adopted by its own father, but in the Greek world it was altogether different. A child was born, and was the father's child; but when the child reached his majority, the father adopted that child; that is, gave him position as his son now in responsibility, and that was called the adoption of his own child as a son. It is to this that the Holy Spirit refers, taking up what was understood, of course, by the readers of this letter, that one may be born into the family of God, and not yet be a son. The child has to "grow up into him in all things", and then, in spiritual maturity, be adopted as a son.

The great adoption of the church is yet to be. The day of the adoption is that day to which the apostle refers in Romans 8, which sets forth the fact that when the sons are manifested the creation itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption. The creation is "waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God". That word "manifesting" simply means the presenting, as the Greek father presented his son, who has always been his child from birth, and has now come to maturity, as his adopted son. The Greek father would bring his son, in the day of his attaining his majority, and present him to the public as his son now. The great day of the adoption lies ahead, but what lies between the birth and the adoption is growth, a coming to the fulness of Christ.

Now, the church of the firstborn ones is to come to the fulness of Christ, unto its manifestation, the adoption of sons, according to the word that is written: "having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself"; and then, following that we have the word, "in whom we have our redemption the forgiveness of sins". Sonship is an eternal thought; the redemption is something in time, which, shall we say, is incidental to the eternal because of the tragedy of what has happened. The redemption is not an eternal thought in the same sense. It is eternal inasmuch as God is eternal, and foreknew and foresaw all things, and made provision before the fall, but it is not a part of His arrangement that there should be a fall and a necessary redemption. Adoption as sons, on the other hand, is a a part of His standing arrangement.

The Levites are the firstborn ones. They in type are the church of the firstborn ones. The antitype is that which God is taking out of the nations in this dispensation; and so the apostle says, "Ye are come unto the general assembly and church of the firstborn, whose names are enrolled in heaven". We know what the Lord said of Israel to Pharaoh: "Israel is my son"; "let my son go that he may serve Me"; "If thou wilt not let My son go, I will slay thy son"; and God did it. The thought was God's conception of Israel before their redemption, before the blood was shed, before they were emancipated, before they were really, actually in the place of being His people. It is an eternal thought, it goes back behind everything; then all the rest follows to make it good - redemption, the shedding of blood, the overthrow of the other powers. It is all in relation to securing that thought of God.

Sonship itself implies that God's thought for His people is fulness, not just that they should be born again and that they should be saved, but fulness, and that the fulness of Christ. All His dealings with them are towards that, are unto that. He is seeking by all means to bring Christ into fulness in His own, and bring His own into the fulness of Christ.

(b) The Church

The second thing which implies fulness on the part of the Levites as a type is that they represented or set forth the church. They are in type the church of the firstborn, so that we see how with the Levites there comes in that which is the great type of Christ and His own as a church, the church which is His body. The tabernacle, the sanctuary, the habitation of God is Christ and His members, even as this letter says, that we should be a habitation of God through the Spirit.

When you dwell upon the idea of the church in the New Testament and these great designations, these great titles such as the church have become obscured in their pure truth and their divine meaning by many false attachments and associations and wrong ideas as to what the church is, and the word "church" has been brought down to a very low level indeed and the title given to things which God would never own as His church. When you seek to discover God's thought as to what the word "church" really means, you find that the governing thought of God concerning the church is that it shall be to Him the vessel for the display of His fulness: "the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that fills all in all".

When you turn to the Colossian letter, again the same thought is there: "In Him dwells all the fulness... and ye are made full in Him" (Col. 2:9,10). And in that same chapter in verse 19 we read: "holding fast the head". In Ephesians the church is shown to be His body, and all the body increases with the increase of God, and the concluding thought and idea is God's fulness by Christ in and through the church to be ultimately universally displayed. So that when you use the very word "church", if you use it according to God's mind, you think of that vehicle and vessel which is called into being, constituted by God Himself, according to His eternal counsels for the manifestation of His fulness in Christ. Membership of the church implies that, involves that. It means that you and I as members of Christ are called into association with His fulness. God's dealings with us are all with a view to that fulness of Christ being found, as far as it is possible, in individuals, growingly manifested now, and eventually to the utmost bound possible. But it will take all the members making one body to display the entire fulness.

Our thought here at the moment is that the Levites, being in type the church of the firstborn, embody this thought of "the church", which itself is a thought, an idea from God relative to fulness.

(c) Heavenliness

Now a third thing connected with fulness in the Levites is that they stood essentially for what was heavenly in the life of God's people. Indeed, we can put that more strongly, and more definitely, and say that they existed to hold the people of God to the truth that they were a heavenly people. They had no inheritance on the earth; they were immediately linked with God, and all that which characterized them and was a part of their function, was entirely heavenly in its nature and its order, so that in the letter to the Hebrews, in referring to the Levitical order of things, the Holy Spirit through the apostle says that these were a pattern of things in heaven. Thus the Levites held everything in the life of God's people in relation to heaven. They set forth in object-forms (by object-lessons, types and symbols) heavenly realities. The letter to the Hebrews was written to show believers in Christ that those symbols and types in the Levitical order were only intended to be like mirrors in which heavenly and spiritual things could be seen reflected. They were intended to be like a glass through which you would look at heavenly things. They were only representations and they have passed; the true heavenly things continue, they abide. The thought is that the Levites represented the heavenliness of God's people.

Now come back to Ephesians, and what have you there? "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ; according as He has chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world..." (Verses 3-4).

Now remember that is addressed to the church. Literally it says, has blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ. That which has been chosen before the foundation of the world and which has been foreordained unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, has been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies. That is the fulness of God's thought for His own, as a full, comprehensive, utter thought. We have not yet come into all those blessings, not because God has not given them, but because we have not grown up into them. We have not grown up into Him in all things. That is the point of our word, the urge to come to God's thought, the measure of Christ.

What is God's thought? The full measure of Christ, the fulness of the stature of Christ. That is God's thought for us. Let us lay hold of God's thoughts; let us by faith appropriate those thoughts, let us believe in God's thoughts, let us seek to get into line with those thoughts, and take the Holy Spirit and His energies to form us, and constitute us, that God's thoughts may become living expressions in us. That is His purpose: to bring us to the full measure of Christ.

All that we need to do is to state that as a definite fact, but, mark you, it represents a tremendous responsibility. We cannot talk, and hear about things like that without coming under tremendous responsibility. If this is the revelation of God from heaven in Christ through His Word and to our hearts by the Holy Spirit, then it involves us in very great responsibility. Is it necessary to speak about responsibility? Ought not God's thought for us really draw out our hearts in unspeakable gratitude and worship? Ought we not to recognise these other words here associated with the calling: "according to the good pleasure of his will", the Lord's delight?

You remember what Joshua and Caleb said when they reported on the land: "If the Lord delight in us he will bring us in". That is only what we have here. Christ is the land of God's fulness, and it is according to the good pleasure of His will that we should come into that fulness.

The Nature of Spiritual Service

The nature of service, in a word, is ministering Christ to the increase of the saints. God's only end is that Christ shall be all and in all; that is, that the whole universe shall be filled with Christ in every part. That is God's fixed end. Then service to God relates to His end, His object. There is no real service to God which does not lead on to God's end, and if God's end is Christ - all, and in all - service to God is bounded by this: namely, that it is that which results in an increase of Christ, a growth in Christ, a ministration of Christ. So that from the very first step in the life of a child of God it is a matter of receiving Christ. The apostle puts it this way: "As therefore ye received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him". It is a matter of receiving Christ. Now God's great aim is to put Christ into things. The devil's great aim is to keep Christ out of things, and he will in every conceivable way seek to do that, even to making believe that Christ has been received when He has not been, in order to divert you and send you off somewhere else before the real thing is done. The thing of paramount importance is that we should be sure that Christ is really in. Once Christ is in, God has got His foothold in relation to His final purpose, but it is that foothold that the enemy is resisting all the time by every means.

It is a question of receiving Christ; not truth, not doctrine, not creed, not tradition, but the Person, the living Person. That is the only hope of glory; "Christ in you, the hope of glory". All ministry is bound up with that, and to God ministry is not ministry at all which does not result in that, that is, which is not an imparting of Christ. And from the point where Christ is first received, ministered in the Holy Ghost, introduced into the being, all ministry is a matter of increasing the measure of Christ, so that spiritual stature, which is the stature of Christ, is increased and developed. That is service.

It is not a case of a lot of work for the Lord or many activities of a Christian character. It all comes down to this: an impartation of Christ Himself, and, mark you, only the Holy Spirit can do that. He is the Spirit of Jesus, and that word means that receiving into us the Holy Spirit is receiving Christ. Only the Holy Spirit can convey Christ. You and I cannot put Christ in anybody; it takes the Holy Ghost to do that; and therefore all our ministry must be in the power of the Holy Spirit, because only so is Christ brought in.

Ministry, service, will be measured by the degree of Christ that we have to minister. To be a minister is to be a minister of Christ, but we want to be careful what we mean by that. Is our thought of a minister, a minister of Christ, that of someone called a minister, and associated with Jesus Christ as a minister? That is not adequate. A minister of Christ is one who ministers Christ, who is able to minister Christ because he has Christ to give, has the Holy Spirit of Christ to impart Christ. Remember that is the object of the church; it is to impart Christ. No professional service can do that.

You remember the woman's son who died in the days of the prophet, and who came to fetch the prophet in her distress. The prophet sent his servant Gehazi, and Gehazi went with the prophet's rod in some professional way: "I am the servant of the great prophet, and I have his rod, the insignia of his office." And Gehazi went in this kind of professional way and put the rod on the child; but nothing happened. There is no magic in what is professional. The woman was not to be satisfied with that. She clung to the prophet, and would have nothing second-hand but only himself, and when he came in what did he do? He spread himself upon that child, hands to his hands, feet to his feet, lips to his lips, in an utter identification of himself with that death, himself being in life, and he literally, by reason of the life in him, lifted that lad, so to speak, out of the grip of death. It was life by the living, and there is no other way.

The church is that which comes into contact with conditions of spiritual death and, because it has the living, risen Lord in it, breaks the power of that death, and delivers there from, and proves the testimony of Jesus, that He it is who lives, and Who became dead, but is alive for evermore. That is the testimony of Jesus.

Now to simplify that, all ministry is the ministry of Christ. Our homes ought to be a scene of that. Ministry is not something to do with platforms and pulpits alone. It is a glorious thing when such really are the instruments of ministering Christ, but that is not the only sphere of ministry. If you have a home in which you have any influence, that home, by your influence, ought to be a place where others receive an increase of Christ; not where they hear a lot of wonderful teaching and truth expounded and interpretations of Scripture given, but where they meet the Lord and go away feeling and knowing that they have an accession of the Lord Jesus in their lives.

So, let us also note, it should be with the individual members of Christ in all contacts. The church is here not as a congregation, but as a spiritual body, and wherever two or three are found in His name there the church is implied, and there can be a ministration of Christ; and there should be.

Are you concerned about ministry? Get rid of your ideas about ministry, if those ideas simply tie you to some line of preaching or teaching, or to having some organised Christian work to do, or some departmental activity in Christian interests. All such ideas must be discarded, and we must say to ourselves: "I am in the ministry, I am called to the ministry, and the ministry is just this - no more and no less - that I have Christ to give, I have something of Christ to give; that I know the Lord in this measure in such a living way that I can pass Him on to others in my own knowledge of Him." Our growing knowledge of the Lord means a growing ministry, and there is no real ministry to God beyond our own personal, living knowledge of the Lord. It is not a case of our knowledge of doctrine and truth, but of our knowledge of the Lord, and ministry is measured by that. You and I should ever be before the Lord in this attitude, that we should never go beyond our own knowledge of the Lord, but that the Lord would keep our personal, living knowledge of Him growing all the time, so that there will be the basis, the foundation, the background for a living ministry.

Let us confine our thoughts to that truth as to ministry, that it is the measure of Christ that we have to give; not running about taking meetings, but what of Christ we have got to give; not organised activity, but the measure of Christ that we can impart in the Spirit.

The Abiding Law of Death and Resurrection

The last word is this, that for both of these things (that is, to come to God's thought of fulness for His people, and to fulfil spiritual ministry) death and resurrection are an abiding law. In the case of the Levites it is perfectly clear. The thing which was governing their whole course and history was this dual law of death and resurrection; the death on the one hand, and the risen life on the other. The life is in the blood, and the blood is the life. That is the persisting thing, and in other ways the law of death and resurrection is observed in the case of the Levites and their own history is connected with that. In the day that the firstborn in Egypt were smitten with death, the firstborn of Israel were preserved in life through death, and the Levites took up that truth and became the embodiment of it, of life triumphant over death, resurrection from the dead. And so all that they had to do with embodied that double law, death and resurrection. Only by the continuance of that law can we come to the fulness which God has purposed, and can we fulfil that ministry which is an increase of Christ. It means that death has continually to work in the realm of that which is rejected of God, in order to make room for that which is accepted of God. In other words, it is a case of death operating continually to get us out of the way in order to bring Christ in. The increase, the fulness, whether it be in life or in ministry, must ever and always be by the operation of death to all that is of the old creation about us, and resurrection in which only Christ appears. Resurrection implies Christ. God has never raised the old creation. He has, in the death of Christ, crucified it, buried it, and He has never raised it. What He has raised is that which is wholly acceptable to Him.

So it proves. We go into experiences of deep, dark and painful suffering, in which some more of the self-life is slain; some more of our own natural strength of mind and will is brought to the grave; some more of the "I" is put out, and we come up out of that deep experience each time with something more of the Lord, an increase of Christ. So we grow by the law of death and resurrection, the law of the grain of wheat.

Ministry is on that basis. Those who have the greatest measure of Christ and His riches to give are those who have suffered most, because in their suffering, that which was in the way of Christ has been removed; and all suffering is to that end. What a shame that so often we do not allow the suffering to do its work. We either revolt and rebel against it and become bitter, or resist the thought of what it is unto and take the martyr attitude of self-pity. No, God's dealings with us in all suffering are unto an increase of Christ, firstly for our own enlargement, our coming to a greater measure of His fulness, the stature of Christ, and then that we may have more of Christ to give. For ministry this law operates - death and resurrection. It is the way of divine increase.

So let us take God's thought again, the fulness of Christ, and see that His thought is made to govern all His dealings with us. And surely we shall consent, and yield to Him if we truly see that God is working. It may be though haply by the difficult, painful, breaking, grinding way in order to save us from that of ourselves which occupies the place that Christ should occupy. This is so that He in all things might have the pre-eminence, be all and in all, fill all things, and then that others should come into the increase of that ministry, where the members are able to minister Christ. It is a very blessed thing, and this is the way.

Chapter 5 - Responsibility for the House of God

Reading: Numbers 3 and 4.

In these two chapters in the book of Numbers, we have brought before us the responsibility of the Levites for the house of God, and that responsibility is divided into three (Gershon, Kohath and Merari).

This speaks to us of the responsibility which rests upon the church of the firstborn, the church which is His body, as to its vocation and its trust. If we were able to see clearly, and to apprehend definitely that which these things mean, we should have a very full and comprehensive and valuable understanding and knowledge of why the Lord has called the church into being, and the purpose of its existence; not only on the earth, but in this universe.

It is quite impossible for us now to deal with the details of these chapters. It is only possible at this time to speak in a comprehensive and general way, indicating the main points set forth in this threefold division of responsibility.

In chapter 4 you have a change in the order. In chapter 3 Gershon comes first, Kohath second, and Merari third; in chapter 4 Kohath comes first. Then in chapter 10 there is another division in which Gershon and Merari are set together as in charge of the tabernacle, while Kohath stands in relation to the sanctuary. You must always remember the difference between the tabernacle and the tent; they are not the same.

Those differences of arrangement between chapters 3 and 4, and between chapters 3 and 4 and chapter 10 are not just points of technique. They contain their own spiritual meaning and significance, and that may come out in what we have to say in a general way.

When we look at this division of responsibility, and note how definite and distinct it is that all that went to make up the tabernacle can be divided in this way, we are bound to enquire as to what these three things stand for, and to look at the things themselves which make up the separate responsibilities. For it is not difficult to make the division, although perhaps had we been making it we might have put some of the things in another category from that in which we find them placed by the Lord. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see that they do fall very easily into these three sections, and that they therefore represent three aspects of the whole revelation of God for which the church is made responsible. And in the church, while these things are a whole and are not ultimately divided one from another, they are things which are given to certain in the church to carry in a particular way. By that we mean that the Lord gives to some a particular revelation, responsibility and ministry, which represents the upholding of certain things, and when you turn to the letters to the Ephesians and the Colossians you find this fact of the individual's particular responsibility very clearly set forth. While all are holding to one end, and are related to one object, it is given to some to maintain this aspect of the testimony, and to others to maintain that aspect. Or, shall we put that in another way and say that some are characterized by a particular trust in relation to the whole testimony, and others to another particular trust. Now the danger is to separate these things and make watertight compartments of them instead of recognising how related and interdependent they are. We may say another word about that later on, but we are just indicating in a general way what is here and not going into details, but in so doing we are able to come nearer to the different sections.

Before we go any further let us ask what it is we have in view. The answer is twofold. Firstly, the responsibility resting upon the people of God as forming His church for His full testimony. Then, that they should know that thing to which the Lord has called them in relation to that testimony to be their special responsibility. And if there is a third thing, it is that which links both: to recognise that all aspects are related and to guard against the danger of detachment, exclusiveness, and isolation in any ministry.

So, without going into all the detail, which is quite impossible, let us take what seems to be the governing thing in each of these three sections. We shall take the order of chapter 4, because that is clearly the right order in progress. The testimony is there seen to be moving in transit. That is, going on through the wilderness, and in the progress of the testimony you must have things in the right order and take first things first. In chapter 4, as you notice, Kohath comes first.

Perhaps it would be helpful here again to review the charge of each of these. In chapter 3 Gershon is made responsible for all the curtains and the hangings. Kohath is made responsible for the ark, the table, the lampstand, the altars, the vessels and the screen (or veil). Merari is made responsible for the boards, the bars, the pillars, the sockets and the instruments.

The Testimony to Divine Persons

Then, taking the order of chapter 4, beginning with Kohath, we notice from what we have read, that the responsibility here is for those things which relate directly and immediately to God. These are the things within: the ark, the table, the lampstand, the altar, the vessels and the veil. There you come in the most immediate way into touch with God Himself, with the Godhead; for if you look closer you will see that you are dealing here with divine persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

God, between the cherubim above the mercy seat, in the awfulness of His holiness, and yet as Father, because there is grace, there is mercy, there is a throne of grace. It is not only God the All-terrible, but God the All-merciful. He is Father because the Son is there, and the very term "Father" has no meaning if there is no child.

The Son is there. There is the ark, and that which has to do with the Son is seen everywhere as God's way of manifesting Himself; or, shall we put that more correctly, and say, the manifestation of what God is as in the Son.

The Holy Spirit is there in the oil, and in the light, and in that intangible thing that nevertheless is the mighty influence of the whole.

You are dealing with divine persons, and you begin with this wonder of the Trinity.

That can be illustrated from our own beings as made in the likeness of God. It seems that this is the deepest explanation or interpretation of the statement that man was made in the image and likeness of God. Each one of us has three parts. Firstly, there is the person. That is just a fact. The second thing is that the person has a nature. Now you may know of the existence of a person by sight or by repute, and you may know that that person exists, and that may be all. That person has a nature, and you have got to come into touch with that person in order to discover the nature of that person. When you come into the presence of that person, with that nature of his, there is something which comes out from that person which we call personality. It is an intangible thing. But you know the person and the nature of that person by the personality that comes out from him and affects you.

Even so we have the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Father is the great Person; the Son is the nature of that Person; the Holy Spirit is the personality, the impact of the Person and the nature. Here in the innermost you are dealing with the Person, the nature, and the impact of the Godhead, the divine Persons.

Kohath is called into responsibility in that connection, and that explains why in chapter 3 verse 32 we have this extra statement: "And Eleazar the son of Aaron the priest shall be chief over the chief of the Levites, and have the oversight of them that keep the charge of the sanctuary." That is something introduced strangely in the middle of the whole record, as though it were giving some special character, bringing in the princeliness, the higher dignity in relation to Kohath. The explanation of those words coming at that point is just this: that here you touch the deepest, highest, the most sacred, solemn things; you are in the innermost.

You can easily see that it would take a long time, even in this connection, if we were to start to talk about the persons of the Godhead; Christ the Son, the character of God, who is able to say, "He that has seen Me has seen the Father"; and again, "I have made known unto them Thy name." The very nature of God is entered into in the person of Jesus Christ. There is the great Person. All we know about the great Person, God, is that He exists. We know nothing about the nature until He finds a way of bringing that nature to us in the terms of our own humanity, because we can only understand nature along the line of our own humanity. We can only have intercourse and communion with a nature that has something which corresponds to our own make-up, and so God has come out in Christ to show us what He is like. Were we to begin to deal with the great Person it would engage us in a theological course. Were we to stop to talk about Christ, the expression of God, or again to allow ourselves to be engaged now at length with the person of the Holy Spirit and the emanation of the nature, the power of the nature and the impact of God in Christ, you see how long it would take us. But our point is that this is what is here.

That is the highest, the most solemn responsibly of the church of the firstborn. It has to do with God, with divine Persons; the testimony of God, who He is; what He is; how He manifests Himself; the power of that manifestation, and what it is for, namely that we might be made God-like. These are the innermost things. And so it becomes necessary for us to have that of which we have spoken much, and for which Paul prayed for, "a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the full knowledge of Him", because that full knowledge of Him is a deposit in the church, which is His body, as a trust and a responsibility. It is the church's business, the business of all members, to keep the knowledge of God in truth, in purity, in fulness, alive in this universe; to keep the manifestation of God and the expression or the power of God alive.

Here, then, is Kohath, and the responsibility of Kohath is to keep divine Persons in view, and to bring the great realities of the divine Persons home to the people of God. How much there is in the New Testament along that line, all expressive of this fact of One "with whom we have to do". You can see that the whole New Testament story of the church, taken along one line, is to that: the ministry of the sons of Kohath.

Take the very earliest expression of those things in the church. You have Peter's great statement on the day of Pentecost. In a word, it is God; and then it is Jesus Christ as the expression of God, the manifestation of God, the speech of God, the revelation of God; then the Holy Spirit. Now that is the maintenance of the truth before men.

What are the consequences? Ananias and Sapphira are an immediate issue of that very thing on the side of responsibility, where there is not a coming into line with the truth of divine Persons, that is, where there is a failure to recognise that we are dealing with divine Persons in the church. They lied against the Holy Spirit; they violated the truth of the manifestation of God in Christ, and they struck right back at God Himself. The result was they came under judgment. God was there expressed in the terms of sonship, and brought home in the power of the Holy Ghost, and that was death and judgment to any who did not come into line with it. The point is that here it is not doctrine, it is not knowledge, not just the doctrine or the knowledge of the Trinity, that God is three in one, and so on; it is the impact of divine Persons upon men for their salvation and for their judgment - their salvation if they adjust, their judgment if they rebel. So the word is: "It is an awful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." "Judgment must begin at the house of God; and if it first begins at us... where shall the sinner and the ungodly appear?"

That is the innermost thing about the tabernacle, and the charge: "and the stranger shall not come near lest he die". This is not just Old Testament truth. It is carried clearly into the New Testament, and we are dealing with divine Persons, not with teaching, doctrine, truth or with the Bible as a book and not with men who merely speak of these things. We are dealing with living Persons, divine Persons. That is a glorious thing when we are in line with it, but is an awful thing if we are out of line with it.

The sons of Kohath are called to that terrible and yet glorious responsibility of maintaining testimony to divine Persons amongst the Lord's people.

That is what the church ought to be. Oh, how different from that is the church which is so called in our time. But I believe that even now 1 Cor. 11 operates: "For this cause many among you are weak and sickly, and not a few sleep" - not discerning the body. The Holy Spirit is still there as the impact of God in Christ. Perhaps we do not recognise the meaning of things, but there is the truth and it is a truth which works. When God gets a people in line with His truth in a living way, these things operate, they are living things, and men have not just to reckon with certain people and certain teachings, they have to reckon with God. So God would have it that His church now as represented in any assembly should be a place in which all the meaning of divine persons should be brought home to men in the power of the Holy Spirit.

That is all we can say about Kohath and their responsibility, but I think it is enough to indicate what this means as to the church and its ministry.

The Testimony to Divine Laws

When we come to the next, to Gershon, with the responsibility entrusted to them for the curtains and the hangings, we are moving outwards from the centre, and we come into touch with those things which represent and embody the principles which govern the church, or, shall we say, which govern corporate life and corporate union with Christ.

You are dealing here with those things which first of all set the bounds. You have a court with a curtain right round, and then you have the tabernacle and the curtains, and these speak of the bounds of what is of God, in the first place. They fix the limits, and they say: Within this compass all is of God, outside of this compass it is not of God; this is where God begins, and where other things end. You step across this threshold and you come immediately into touch with God and what is of God. That means exclusion and inclusion, it means limitations. That is limiting things to God, binding things up with God. But that does not only speak of the bounds and the limitations, it carries with it this further thought: the safeguard for what is of God. If man approaches and enters here apart from the divine provision, it is death to him. It is a safeguard for God and the things of God, to keep Him and His things from the encroachment of what is foreign, what is strange. God will not have strange, foreign elements brought in to be associated with Him. It is the safeguard of His own utter holiness and what is of Himself, and the safeguard of men. It speaks, further, of the ways of God, for you will find that the outer court is a curtain of fine linen, speaking of the defined limit and bound marked by divine righteousness, and within that bound all is divine righteousness.

How can you get in there? There is a gate, and that gate is hung with blue, purple, scarlet and white. We know the symbolism of those colours and how they represent the constitution of the Lord Jesus in His heavenly nature (the blue), in His royalty (the purple), in His suffering (the scarlet), in His human perfection (the white). By what way can man come into fellowship with God? In Christ Jesus; but it is on the ground of what He has done, and that is the only way. It is the nature that is the basis of acceptance, access, and fellowship.

These curtains and these hangings speak of principles which govern the corporate life of the Lord's people. They say: Apart from these things you are outside; on the ground of these things you come in, and you find life in touch with God; apart from them you meet death in touch with God. This is Christ corporate, and it means that what is of Christ is woven into the very texture of the church. It is texture that we have here, it is fabric. It is just by oneness with the Lord Jesus in what He is that men may know acceptance, fellowship and life with God.

The detail would bear that all out. You have only to begin with some of this detail. Take the tabernacle itself, the curtains, for example, ten in number. Ten is the biblical number for responsibility. Then each of them was twenty-eight cubits long and four cubits wide, joined in two sets of five, with fifty taches of gold and a hundred loops of blue. Every one of those points is a principle which governs the corporate life of the Lord's people. All what we said with reference to what is represented by Gershon is borne out in every detail, that here you are up against principles which have to do with corporate union with Christ.

The church of the firstborn exists to look after those principles. One aspect of the responsibility of the Lord's people is to preserve and maintain the principles which govern corporate life. It operates in exactly the same ways as that which we have said about Kohath. If these principles are observed then all the blessings of fellowship with, and in the Lord, all the blessings of corporate life may be enjoyed, and all that the Lord has for His people may be had. But violate the principle and the Holy Ghost takes charge, and the church is called to act to preserve those principles.

So you find in the New Testament church the need for action. Paul called upon the Corinthians to take action in relation to certain there who were so grievously violating the truth of the body of Christ. They had to take responsibility for that. The church is here in a very responsible place and position before God, to maintain the power, firstly, of relationship with the Lord, and then of relationship in the Lord. That is, to keep those principles in view, as something for the Holy Spirit to work upon; to maintain them in a pure testimony. Then the Holy Ghost will work in both ways in relation thereto - fulness of blessing for the obedient, but chastening for the rebellious.

The Care of the Saints Themselves

We pass to the third section, Merari, whose responsibility was for the boards, the bars, the pillars, the sockets and the instruments. We ask what this represents. It seems to me that it is related in a more immediate way to the saints themselves. The boards in themselves speak of believers. When, of course, they stand together, bound by the bars, that is the collective life, but they are not carried through the wilderness bound together like that; they are carried through as individuals. That is not a contradiction in truth, but it is simply another point of view. Merari has to take charge of the boards, but of every board, and there would be some serious question arising if, when the Lord's Testimony reached a certain point and was to be set up there, a board was missing.

If you transfer all this to the Lord Jesus and see how, prior to the church, He personally embodies all the truth, you get a very simple and helpful way of understanding the truth of the church. Take a verse like this in John 17: "Those whom You gave Me I have kept, and not one of them is lost, save the son of perdition, that the scripture might be fulfilled." Merari has not lost a board on the road!

Here is a charge, a responsibility for looking after the Lord's people in themselves. It is so easy to get the great sweep of doctrine, truth, wonderful generalities, and forget that the application is brought down to the individual. There is to be care for each individual member, so that what each one represents for the Lord is not lost if by any means it can be preserved. All should be done to preserve every part in its place intact.

There is a wonderful revelation of that in the letters of Paul. Truly he was the church in spirit, and what care he had for the individuals as well as for the whole church. Look at those lists of names that he appends to his letters. Read the end of the letter to the Romans, and note all the personal names. That is caring for the boards, it is true Levitical ministry. We fail in this very much. The Lord correct us by His word.

Not only is it care for the believers in themselves, but notice it is care for those ministries which are represented by the vessels, the instruments. We take it that this is what is implied by all those tools used for the constituting of the tabernacle, the setting up of it, the pins, and such like tools that would be required. They are very necessary. Even a hammer is necessary sometimes in the house of God. Ministries, though they may be minor ministries, are indispensable for the whole to be carried, and they have to be looked after.

I am glad the bars are mentioned as well as the boards. The bars are the things that unite the whole, and if those things are kept always under your eye you will not move in cliques, and you will not have personal preferences, and ones and twos moving off on their own because they get on together. We have to remember that in the body of Christ there is nothing clannish, nothing that is merely of human preference, but all the members are held together in oneness. That is a responsibility. How much damage has been done by preferences, by human affinities having a place among the Lord's people! There must be a personal care, there must be a watching over the bars, all maintained together. It is what the apostle means when he says, "Give diligence to keep the unity of the spirit". We shall never keep the unity of the Spirit by taking sides with one against another. We may think that is care for the one. Oh, but what about the other? The bars will be a corrective, will keep the balance, and will give due regard to every member.

Then there are the pillars. Here we have each one's responsibility, for something hangs upon them, and we have to help one another in our responsibility before God, for each one is called to carry a responsibility, to carry a weight from God. It is bearing one another's burdens. Here are the pillars which carry the weight of testimony in their measure. This is a type of those things that are spoken of in Ephesians and Colossians and that are indicated by such words as "that which every joint supplies", and each part working in due measure. There must be mutuality in this responsibility, each one carrying his own weight before the Lord, and yet all one. So Merari has to care for all these things which are so important in the house of God. There is rich fulness in these two chapters.

The Essential Oneness of All Ministry

We will finish with but one further note of emphasis upon something said earlier. We said that these three things represent responsibilities which lie upon the Lord's people, and one responsibility may be the special characteristic of some, and another responsibility that of another, for "all have not the same office", says Paul. It may be that the Lord by His Spirit has gifted and endowed some with the special ministry of Merari, to care for the saints, to look after the unity in the fellowship of the saints, to support the saints in their responsibility, to cherish the ministry of the saints. Others may be characterized by a special charge in relation to those principles of the assembly; others may be brought into that ministry which has more immediately to do with God Himself, and keeping the great reality, the divine Persons, in view. The peril is that we should begin to make our ministry something that is watertight.

For a mental grasp of the difference just picture in your mind alternative ways of applying this truth. Draw in your mind's eye three squares, separate, standing each alone, and you will have what represents a very great deal of the nature of work for the Lord in our day from time to time. "Oh, this is my work, this is my department, this is my line; I am called to be this, I am called to do that! You have your work, you have your particular line, I have mine! You go on with yours, and I will get on with mine, and don't let us get overlapping!" That is where the breakdown comes. "I am an evangelist, not a teacher! You get on with your teaching, and I will get on with my evangelism; don't let us interfere with one another!" That is putting responsibility into watertight compartments. The result is always loss.

Will you tell me what Paul was? You have various things to choose from - pastor, teacher, evangelist, apostle, prophet. Any one of these are true, but you have to name them all to arrive at the truth. Why? Because Paul was the vessel especially elected for the revelation of the church, and therefore as that vessel he must be constituted according to all that the church stands for, every aspect. He is an apostle, a prophet, a pastor and teacher, and an evangelist. The church is that. It is not a question of what you and I may be, it is what the church is. There is no such thing as ministry apart from the church. Ministry is the church functioning, and the church functions in different directions, through its members. But it is the New Testament church. The church functions through some evangelically, through others pastorally and instructively. Men do not function as in themselves, but the church operates. Paul was an inclusive expression of what the church is. If you divide these things up you divide the body of Christ; you divide Christ, and you have failure and weakness.

Now draw another mental picture of this. Draw a circle and divide into three; you have three sections of one circle. That is Kohath, Gershon, Merari in one circle, all one within that circle. They have their own aspect of ministry, but it is one ministry. The end, the object, is one, and everything must, in the church which is His body, be related and interdependent, and so it makes increase of itself with the increase of God.

What the Lord has said to us in this meditation carries with it a very solemn charge and involves us in very great responsibility, but surely it would open to us very great privilege and honour. This Old Testament presentation of the Levites is a marvellous, though veiled, illustration of the church, which is His body. I do not believe that Kohath, or Gershon, or Merari knew anything about this at all. They simply did as they were told, and did not know. The Lord said to Moses that it was to be done, and Moses in his turn told them and they did it. That is what Paul means when he says that this mystery has been hid from ages and generations. They did the thing which they did not understand, in blind obedience. But you and I have been led into the meaning of the things which they did. Our eyes are open, the mystery is out, and we are called into the stewardship of the mystery.

It is a blessed calling, but it is a responsible one, it is a solemn one. Oh, that today you and I might find adjustment to this. The test is as to whether it is the Lord Himself to whom we are devoted, or whether it is to some personal thing. That is the heart of things here; it is all the Lord. Would that our obedience was as implicit as the obedience of these sons of Aaron, these Levites, even if it has to be blind obedience until we have understanding, because the Lord has called for it. But it need not be blind obedience; and surely after this word we have light for obedience. We see why and what it relates to.

"Ye ARE come... unto the general assembly and church of the firstborn, whose names are enrolled in heaven."