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The Cross and the Way of Life

by T. Austin-Sparks

This book is based on a series of messages given at an Easter conference in 1954.

From unpublished manuscripts. Published on the web in February 2009.

Contents

Diagram

Chapter 1 - The Way of Release

Chapter 2 - The Cross in Abel's Life

Chapter 3 - The Cross in Noah's Life

Chapter 4 - The Cross in Abraham's Life

Chapter 5 - The Cross in Jacob's Life

Chapter 6 - The Cross in Joseph's Life

Chapter 7 - The Cross in Moses' Life

Chapter 8 - "A Night to be Remembered"

Diagram

Chapter 1 - The Way of Release

"I came to cast fire upon the earth; and what do I desire, if it is already kindled? But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!" (Luke 12:49-50).

"But Jesus said unto them, Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink the cup that I drink? Or to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" (Mark 10:38).

"Or are ye ignorant that all we who were baptized into Christ were baptized into his death?" (Rom. 6:3).

Turning back to the first passage in Luke 12:49-50, it is necessary to say a very brief word about the translation of this statement of the Lord, for as it stands, it is not quite clear and there is a diversity of interpretation. "I came to cast fire upon the earth" - the better rendering would be - "and how I wish that it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to be baptized with." You see, there is a strange break here in the narrative. The Lord Jesus has been saying a number of things very largely in the form of parable and interpretation and explanation. So suddenly at this point, it is as though He checked Himself, paused and looked right on. His heart grew large and suddenly burst forth in these words which seem to have no connection with what He had been saying: "I came to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled, but I have a baptism to be baptized with", inferring that there was something through which He was to pass before the desire of His heart and the purpose of His coming could be realized.

His statement falls quite simply into its own parts. "I came to cast fire" - the purpose of His coming. "I have a baptism to be baptised with" - the passion related to the purpose. "How am I straitened till it be accomplished!" - the way of His release or the release of the fire.

We will now look at those parts of the statement briefly.

The Purpose of Christ's Coming

The purpose - "I came to cast fire upon the earth." At different times our Lord made some statement as to the purpose of His coming. "The Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10). "I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly" (John 10:10), and so on. Here is one of those declarations as to purpose in His coming, 'I came, with all the other things for which I came, I came to cast fire on the earth.' I think the best explanation of what He meant by casting fire on the earth is to be found in what did actually happen. We follow through to the afterward of His passion when the fire most certainly was scattered on the earth, and we look to see exactly how that worked out and what that meant, and it is quite clear in the first place that it was the fire of an irrepressible, irresistible expansion of His Kingdom. Fire has a way like that, you know, if it really gets a hold it takes a lot of stopping. It is irresistible and irrepressible. It is a feature and a characteristic of fire when it is scattered on the earth, especially if the earth is as it was in those days and still is - very dry and very flammable. And so we see that when the fire came down from heaven on the day of Pentecost, and was scattered on the earth through those in whose hearts it was kindled, it spread with this irresistible expansion. The Lord Jesus said, 'I came for that.'

I always feel that these statements are really challenges; that is, they find us out. Let us put it quite simply, that, if the purpose for which Christ came is having a clear way by the Holy Spirit doing His work unhindered, there must be this something which is irresistible and irrepressible. There is something which goes on, extends and expands. This thing cannot be shut up; it cannot be straitened. It is something released in the earth. That is what the Lord meant by the full statement - something released - release this fire and things will happen.

I remember a man went to see Mr. Spurgeon on one occasion as the representative of the "Defence of the Bible", and asked him if he would become a vice-president of a Society for the Defence of the Bible. Mr. Spurgeon looked at him in the way in which he did look at people sometimes, especially those people, and he said, "My dear brother, does a lion need defending? Just loose him, and that is all that is necessary." I think that is capable of transference to this. Give the Holy Spirit a way, and see what happens! Allow the release of the Lord, and things will be irresistible and irrepressible. Indeed, they will get beyond us and beyond us. We will not be able to cope with them.

There are various figures of speech and metaphors used in connection with the Holy Spirit. He is not only spoken of as fire, or symbolised by fire. On the day of Pentecost He was symbolised by a mighty rushing wind. You get in a mighty rushing wind and you just know that you cannot cope with that; that is beyond you.

There is a word here used later by the Lord, to which we will come presently, but it is appropriate to note it now. "How am I straitened till it be accomplished!" That word 'straitened' is very interesting in the New Testament. It is given to us in various forms. It means 'constrained', and that word is found in the gospels when the woman, pressing through the crowd with her infirmity, stretched forth her hand and touched the Lord and He turned and said, "Who touched Me?" His disciples said, "Master, the throng press Thee, how sayest Thou, Who touched Me?" And that word 'press' is exactly the same Greek word as 'straitened'. You know what it is to get in a crowd. Perhaps you have had some experience recently. Get in a mighty crowd, and see just whether you can resist it, whether you can hold it. No, it is like that; get in a crowd, and you have got to go with the crowd. It is no use, you have just got to go.

The same word is used about those who took charge of Jesus in the day of His passion and delivering up. It says that the men that held Jesus mocked Him. The men that held Jesus; it is our word again: straitened, constrained. And you know the type of men that they were; not very much use trying to resist those men. They were of the toughest type. They would not brook any resistance. The only thing to do with such men is to yield to them, let them have their way. The men that held, the men that straitened, constrained, or pent up. It is the same word that Paul used when he said, "The love of Christ constraineth us" (2 Cor. 5:14). This is the word, this word which means just holding in, obtaining possession and mastery. That is what it meant here. "I came to cast fire", and it takes possession, and there is no resisting when that fire really gets a hold and gets its way.

The Fire of Discrimination

It was the fire of unerring and unavoidable discrimination. Fire always finds things out. As it creeps and encroaches and overtakes, it makes one discrimination between things that it can devour and things over which it has no power. It puts them into those categories; the finding out, the classifying, the deciding. Look at the context, Luke 12:51 - "Think ye that I am come to give peace in the earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division." He goes on - "There shall be from henceforth five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. They shall be divided, father against son, and son against father; mother against daughter, and daughter against her mother; mother in law against her daughter in law, and daughter in law against her mother in law..." - discriminating, setting things in the category to which they belong.

One category is that which can go on and abide and endure because it is of God. The other will be licked up by the fire, and simply pass out of existence. "The fire shall try every man's work", said Paul (1 Cor. 3:13). The fire of unavoidable and unerring discrimination. That has ever been the effect of a work of the Holy Spirit; to put us into the place to which we belong. It is a kind of dividing thing all the time. Are you for or are you against? Are you with or are you not with the Lord? Are you going on with the Lord, or are you not going on with the Lord? The Holy Spirit is pursuing that course all the time to find us out and to just classify us like this, so that when the Holy Spirit has worked we are in definite categories. Division has come, and it is unavoidable.

It is no use, dear friends, our trying to avoid this. You see, here is a terrible statement. "I came not to send peace, but a sword" (Matt. 10:34), dividing even families and households. You cannot avoid it; it is no use trying to. If you are going on with the Lord, this sort of thing is going to happen, and in the world it is going to become perfectly clear and pronounced where we are. It is of no use just trying to keep and avoid, you have got to yield to the work of the Spirit, and it is costly in your own home with the clear division on the ground of whether the Lord is having His way or not - clear division in the family anywhere, everywhere - you just cannot avoid it. It is a part of what we are going to say in a minute about the cost.

The Fire of Provocation

It was the fire of inevitable provocation. No sooner had the Spirit come, the fire fallen and begun to move over the earth, than there was tremendous and terrific uprising of antagonism. It is inevitable. If you and I are going to be men and women of the Spirit, we are not going to have an easy time. Hell will see to that. At once the clash arises and it is true that the more the Holy Spirit is able to have His way in us and to lead us into all the will of God, the more we find this opposition, this antagonism. And it not only comes between us and the world, it sometimes comes in the circle of the Lord's own people. It is inevitable provocation. You wonder why, sometimes. As you read the New Testament you wonder, 'What is the matter with these people? Why should they be so upset and so annoyed? And why should it be so spontaneous, this thing? And persistent; so unreasonable?', but there it is. There is the fact. It is inevitable.

You see, this thing that the Lord came to do and is doing, will not allow for any neutrality. It is going to be one thing or the other. It is going to be for or against. The eyes of flame (here the fire comes in again) the eyes of flame will not allow lukewarmness or anything that is of the Laodicean character. The fire is a positive element always, and it will create positive situations. If everything is all just nice and quiet, no disturbance, no trouble and no antagonism and opposition, you have reason to question whether the Holy Spirit is doing much, because He does aim at such a positiveness, which is a very, very costly thing. It is either with the Lord, or not with the Lord, and there is nothing between. It is going to come out sooner or later and be precipitated.

Now, the Lord says that is what He came to do. This is not an accident, a chance or things having gone wrong or miscarried. This is exactly what He came to do - to scatter fire on the earth and these are the inevitable effects of the fire. They are going to work out.

The Passion of Christ and His Church

"I have a baptism to be baptized with" - and this really is the main point in my own heart for this hour: the passion. Quite clearly from His words to His disciples as we read in Mark 10:38, this baptism related to His Cross: "Are ye able to drink the cup that I drink? Or to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?", clearly referring to the Cross, the passion. It is the way, and the only way, of the scattering of the fire; the fire being cast upon the earth - this mighty thing of irresistible growth and progress and expansion. All that we have said about the fire entirely depends upon the passion. It was true in the case of our Lord.

And then we have our next Scripture: "Are ye ignorant that all we who were baptized into Christ were baptized into his death?" That means baptism into the meaning of His Cross, baptism into all the cost of the Cross, all the agony of the Cross as well as all the issues and values of the Cross. You see, it is very true that, while we are not one with Him in His atoning work and have no part in that, that is His own unique prerogative and work; there is no doubt about it that our identification with Christ goes beyond our salvation, our justification, our redemption. It carries us right into the passion, "filling up... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ... for his body's sake, which is the church" (Col. 1:24). The point is this, that there is no expansion and progress possible without passion, without agony, without travail. There is no mighty conviction in this world apart from the Passion. There is none of this work of discrimination and dividing and setting things in their place and making them quite apparent as to where they are and what they are without deep cost on the part of the church and the Lord's servants; and so they found it.

Stephen found it like that, did he not? Very soon that became apparent, that what it had cost his Lord, in measure much more limited perhaps, but up to the hilt in his own life it was costing Stephen and the rest. And it has always done that. This fire has got to get such a hold of us that we are not only glad and privileged to believe on the Lord Jesus, but also to suffer for His sake (Phil. 1:29); the fire which consumes us to suffer, if needs be, on His behalf. No individual life will become effective in the sense in which fire is effective except as that life is baptized into the passion of Christ. No local company will ever be effective in the sense in which fire is effective except in so far as that company, that local company, shares the passion of its Lord and knows His suffering in fellowship.

And so it is true of the whole church. It just must be like this. The history of the church is the history of a long succession of baptisms into passion, baptisms of blood, baptisms of suffering. With what result? Every time expansion, every time new effectiveness. It has always been like that; it always will be like that. We were baptized into His death, and into all that it means to be in union with Christ in His death. It means this also, that we were baptized also into His sufferings, into His passion. It is no use trying to avoid it, there it is.

The Way of Release

Then He says that the Cross for Him was the way of release, "How am I straitened, how am I held in, pent up, until it be accomplished!" The passion of the Cross is the way of our release, and if you consider your own spiritual experience, those of you who have any experience of a walk with God, you know quite well that it has been through times of deep and acute suffering that you have found fresh releases; fresh releases in your spiritual life. Is it not true? Yes, we pass into a time of excruciating spiritual and soul suffering. We do not know what the Lord is doing, what He means by this, what He is after, but we know the features of our experience and know what it is that we are suffering, and it goes on. We, of course, ask the Lord to stop it, to bring it to a quick end, to deliver us from it. He takes no notice of us, and it is only those people who get out the other end who say, 'Thank God, He did not take any notice.' In the meantime, we think He is anything but kind and good and doing the right thing, but as we get on under His hand, we begin to see and to sense that He is dealing with something. Maybe He is dealing with our pride, our independence, or our irresponsibility, for example. That is the issue that comes up, and we are faced all the time with something about ourselves that is almost devastating. We would not have believed that that was so strong in us.

Oh, of course we were always ready to believe that that is in mankind and in us as a part of mankind in a general way. Yes, we would never have resented being told that there was pride or something like that about us, but we would never have believed how deeply rooted and terribly strong that thing is until it was put to a fiery test and everything was held up, and we saw that everything in our life and work for God was held up on that point. A terrible ordeal.

Do you know what I am speaking about? And when we have come to see quite clearly what the issue at that given time really is, and are able to bring it to the Lord as a clearly defined matter and concentrate upon it, to have that dealt with fully and finally, when we are able to do that we see a new door open - a new sense of release and new possibilities. And we know quite well that what the Lord was after was not the pulverising of us, as we thought, the winding up of us, but to bring about enlargement, to bring about release, and release always lies along the line of the Cross, the passion. Enlargement always lies in that direction.

Our being baptised into His Cross, into His passion and sufferings becomes a very practical thing like that upon this issue and that issue, and another issue all the way along. And whenever those issues are hedged round, clearly defined, and become the thing upon which everything else hangs and are dealt with before the Lord on that ground, that whatever else there may be (and there may be a very great deal more) nothing is possible until this is cleared up. When it is like that, and we really have very thorough-going dealings with the Lord on that matter upon which He has put His finger, has put His Cross, and brought us into the passion of it. We begin on the one side to understand the meaning of Christ's Cross to Himself, that He was dealing with the whole universe of obstructions and limitations to God's full purpose.

Now, we have come into that piecemeal, so to speak, on this point and on that point. It was all included there, but now it is applied, it is applied Calvary, it is applied union with Christ in death. And the result? - Well, as I say, release. "How am I straitened till it be accomplished", and we can say that very truly over this matter and that. 'How am I held up, and held in until the Cross has effected my release concerning this and that.' The Cross is a way of release.

But it is a cup, and it is a bitter cup. It is into His death. I think that if we could grasp what is being said, we should understand what a terrible thing the death of Christ was to Him. We are today thinking of His death, His Cross, His crucifixion, His sufferings, and of the aspects and stages. But oh, dear friends, we have only got to go through the Cross on one point in our lives to be smashed to pieces! One point - our pride, as I have mentioned - just one point, something in our lives that is not the Cross, that is not really crucified, the ordeal of that one thing is sufficient to simply devastate us. To think in His Cross He summed up all such things! Who can count them? Who can remember them? Who can fathom them? All those things were concentrated in His Cross when He was made sin for us. How terrible must have been His Cross when considered spiritually; the spiritual meaning of it. No wonder His very physical frame broke down under it. The strain was too much for His soul in His blood, and it broke. Yes, but what a tremendous thing through that breaking, what a release!

You see, what I want to finish with is this: that the outcome, the issue, the tremendous power that went out into the earth was commensurate with the immensity of the thing which was done in the Cross. The Cross is an immense thing! The sufferings of Christ are immense sufferings. No other could stand even a part of them without disintegrating. Tremendous! Then the effect of the Cross ought to be commensurate with that - so effective, so telling - as we have said: so irresistible.

Well, what does it all amount to at the end? That you and I have got to have a fresh apprehension of the meaning of the Cross. We have to enter more understandingly into the meaning of the Cross of our Lord Jesus. The Cross, as we have so often said, is not just the elementary thing of the Christian life, where "at the Cross we first saw the light, and the burden of our sin rolled away", and that is the beginning and the end of the Cross. Make no mistake - that is only the beginning. But here the Cross is not for our deprivation. It is not something that is to be a weight that breaks us. The Cross of the Lord Jesus is meant to be the way of our liberation, of our enlargement, of our escape.

"I came to cast fire." That is the purpose. Incidentally to the purpose: the passion; but that is only a way - that is not the end. The end is the purpose realized. But it is always through the Cross, always on the ground of the Cross. Enlargement, expansion, increase in power and effectiveness, and all these things; the Cross brought into our lives in these very practical ways. If the Lord is leading us through a difficult time and you feel that it is all breaking and crushing and emptying, do believe that, if Good Friday says anything at all, if Calvary says anything at all, it says this: that this suffering, this bad time, in the whole purpose of the Lord is pointing directly to release and enlargement. Believe that. You may frustrate that, you may frustrate the purpose of God, but that is His purpose, and that is what He means, and it is not narrowing down and limiting, and crushing. It is release that is in view; it is enlargement. "How am I straitened till it be accomplished."

We can all say that about this and that thing, "How am I straitened until" this thing is done. When this thing is done, this fresh application of the meaning of the Cross, then I will be enlarged, I will be free, there will be something more of the Lord in life and in service - there will be more fire, mighty fire.

Chapter 2 - The Cross in Abel's Life

Before we take up the matter which is before us, I want to say just this preliminary word. It is necessary for it to be clearly understood that, with regard to messages given in these conferences, there is no human selection but very much definite and long waiting upon the Lord for Him to quite clearly give the message; to cause it to be planted in the heart and grow there.

As we come to this series I feel it necessary to say this to you: that this is not a message which we have thought out and selected and decided upon, but it is quite really something that the Lord has said inside, and said continually and increasingly. The point in saying that is that for some part of this series of messages we are going to be occupied with the Cross - the Cross and the way of life. If the Lord had not said so, that is not the subject that I would have chosen. I know how much has been said about that, and how much you know about it, and I often sense that when the Cross is mentioned, there is a lack of special interest. Perhaps it springs from the feeling that so much has been said and so much is known, 'Oh, the Cross again, the Cross... it is all the Cross!' And the Cross can bring a sense of heaviness because associated with the Cross, of course, is the idea of death. But here we are.

And let me go on to say at once that the Cross never ceases to govern the Christian life. It governs the Christian life at every stage, in every phase and aspect. There is never a point in the Christian life but that the Cross is basic and dominant. A building may rise with every added storey, but it never moves from its foundation. However high you go, however much you add, it never moves from its foundation and in a sense the foundation governs each additional level. If the foundation should give way at any point, that is the end of your building, that spells disaster however far you have gone. And the Cross is like that. The Cross is the foundation of everything.

It is there, of course, at the beginning in what we call conversion and new birth, but after that the Cross governs the whole matter of spiritual growth and progress. We never make one bit of progress except by reason of the law of the Cross operating. The Cross is basic to the church, basic to fellowship. Fellowship is only possible in so far as the Cross is at work in all those concerned. Relatedness and corporate life demand a deep work of the Cross, for that is only saying, in another way, that the Cross has got to be planted very deeply into our individualism - I am not saying 'individuality', but 'individualism'. It takes a deep work of the Cross to do that and so make the way for related fellowship and corporate life. Every bit of fresh light (if it is real light - living light) which transforms and transfigures, springs from the Cross or some working and application of the Cross. And every bit of conformity to Christ demands the continuous operation of the Cross. It never ceases; it goes right on to the end. As for service, work for God, ministry, for this to be fruitful and effectual, living and powerful, it must spring out of the Cross deeply rooted in the life of the worker, the minister, the servant of the Lord.

Having said that, surely we are ready to contemplate and consider this matter still further, and no one will just shrug their shoulders and say, "The Cross again?!"

Human History Dominated by a Question

Now to take it up more definitely. Human history is governed and dominated by a question. In all ages, by countless ways and means men have tried to answer that question. It is the question that comes in with our very birth. There is a big 'Why?' over our birth, and that question remains throughout life, unless, of course, at some given point the answer is found. The question is not always defined, faced and put into words, but we know what it amounts to. The question is: What is the way that leads right through to fulness of life? Men in all ages, by countless ways and means, have tried to answer that question.

Let us break that up. The way... is there such a way? If so, what is it? Given that there is such, is there a definite point of crisis at which that way is entered, and if so, what is that point of crisis? Such questions relate to the way. Is there a way that leads right through, seeing that life for so many is the story of frustration, disappointments, unfulfilled promise, disillusionment, unrealized hopes, uncertainty, bafflement? Is there a way that goes right through with growing enlargement as you take it, and is there certainty of ultimate fulness? That is a question with which we here are all concerned, and it really lies behind life as a whole. Is there a way that goes right through to fulness of life? Is fulness of life possible, and is it assured? Is there an absolute answer to this question with which we are born, and can we now have evidence of this; that there is a way that goes right through to fulness of life? That is the big question that we are setting ourselves to answer at this time.

The Bible the Answer to the Question

The Bible from beginning to end is the answer to that question in all its parts, I mean, in all the parts of the question. From its first pages in the book of Genesis to its last pages in the book of the Revelation, that way is marked out. Despite the failure of people to always go right through, the Bible shows that the way does reach its end. The end of that way is fulness of life. No one who knows the last two chapters of the Bible can question that. But this fulness which is the end and the goal, is testified to right at the beginning. That is a wonderful thing! Whatever may be the experiences of trial and testing and discipline and suffering on the way, when you first enter it you know quite well that fulness is the nature of that life. It is testified to at once. It is just wonderful that if we have a true and proper and right beginning in the Christian life, call it what you will - being saved, being converted, being born again, accepting Christ - however you may put it, you at once have a testimony in your own heart to the fact that this is the way of the fulness of life. The testimony is there.

But as we go on, it is evidenced in progress. The Christian life is a series of developments, new crises, and out of every new crisis comes something more, something fuller. And, as we said before, the crisis is only meant for that. Any crisis in the Christian life is meant for something more and something fuller and something further. And the testimony at the beginning and the evidence in the progress is realized in fulness at the end. This is the way of life.

The Cross the Way to Fulness of Life

Well, that brings us to the question: What is that way? The answer simply is: it is the way of the Cross. Strangely enough, contradicting all our morbid ideas about the Cross, disallowing ideas that the Cross is the end of everything and if you accept the Cross, well, you are in for it, you are going to lose everything, going to give up everything, and it is going to be a thin sort of life. It will not allow that. The Cross is the way of life; the Cross is the way itself. The Cross is not the journey, because the Cross is absolutely full and final at one moment, and that moment was long ago. The Cross is absolute at any moment in itself. It is not progressive. Get clear and straight on this. The Cross is not progressive. It is full, it is final in itself. Therefore the Cross is not a way. The progressive element is just a matter of our acceptance or rejection of it. How much we will accept, how much we will yield to it, how much of it we will allow to have a place in our lives; that decides the whole question of progression. There is no development in the Cross. The Cross does not grow, except in our apprehension, but in itself it is full. The whole matter of how far we go on the way of life depends entirely upon how we will allow the Cross to master, to dominate - how far and how much.

The Cross a Full and Final Principle

That brings us to this: that the Cross is a full and final principle, although it has many aspects. It is a full and final principle. We are going to see that the Cross in its fulness and finality was right there at the beginning of the Bible. As a principle, it was absolute then. It is just in so far as you and I bring our lives at this time of the day back to God's fulness in the Cross that we are going to know this progressive development and increase of life - so far and no more.

The Cross is a great divide. It divides people into three categories. Firstly, it makes a broad division between those who never get into life, and those who do. Whether men and women get into life at all depends entirely upon their acceptance of the Cross. But it divides further. It divides between those who do get into life, and those who go right through to fulness of life, and there is quite a real division there. Whether you like the theory or not, it is a fact.

There are many Christians who are in the way of life, that is, who have entered the way of life, but are not going right on to fulness of life. That is really what the New Testament is about - trying to get Christians who have entered into life to go on to fulness of life. The Cross divides between those, because, while we come into the way of life by the Cross, we also only come into the fulness of life by the Cross, and that is another thing - a fuller, deeper application of the Cross. So the Cross makes three categories, those not in Life, those in Life, and those in Life going on to fulness of Life.

The Cross as this full principle, was introduced immediately the door was closed to man. The Bible so early shows the closing of the door into life to man. It is all highly figurative, symbolical. That need not trouble us at all, but there the principles are set forth in symbolic forms and language. I am not going to stop to argue whether it was literal or not, that should not concern us very much just now. It is the spiritual principles that matter, whatever form they may have taken, but there in the symbolism was the garden with the tree of life in it closed to man who was expelled, and the door shut and guarded. The door was closed... but instantly, immediately, the Cross as a full principle of the way of life was introduced. It came in implicitly. It is startling; it is almost breathtaking to see how implicit it has always been. This challenge of the Cross, this verdict of the Cross, is nothing less than startling right at the beginning of man's history.

The Door Closed or Opened

We might here pause for a moment to see how startling it was. The story of Cain and Abel, that with which we are going to deal a little more fully presently, is really a terrific story - the man who got through to life, and the man who found the door closed and barred against him with no way through, and went out into the earth a vagabond with most awful consequences to him and his civilisation. The difference between Abel, who got straight through, and Cain, who found no way at all; a closed door, and an awful history following. The difference hung upon the principle of the Cross.

Follow through to the world and Noah, remembering that the world in Noah's day was the full development of Cain's civilisation, and that civilisation met a closed door in the flood. The flood was a closed door. There is no way through there, no way of life through that for that civilisation. And here is Noah and his little party who go clean through the flood and out on to the other side in life, in safety, in peace. The divide between the two, between Noah and that whole world, rested upon the principle of the Cross.

Chaldea - a great civilisation was Chaldea, very, very great developments by men with which we have no time to stay, and one man, Abraham. And the one man goes right through to today, and is still going on. Chaldea - where is Chaldea? What of Chaldea? A closed door. Sooner or later, Chaldea finds there is no way through, and disintegrates, becomes but a name, a far-off story not alive today. The whole divide rested upon this principle of the Cross between Abraham and the Chaldean civilisation.

Into the life of Abraham... Abraham and Lot. Say what you will about Lot, it is a sorry story of a man who has to be literally dragged out of Sodom and Gomorrah, sees everything consumed by fire, and turned to salt. The whole history of Lot's relationships, his voluntary relationships, is a Dead Sea; no life. Abraham goes on. The whole thing turned upon the principle of the Cross. We shall see that that principle of the Cross was not just latent, but patent and positive. It had a concrete point at which the turn was taken, the decision was made.

To press on - Egypt and Israel. Well, Egypt was no little thing, no insignificant thing; it was a great régime, a great system, a mighty world power, and a very highly developed civilisation. Yes, Egypt was nothing to scoff at in the days of Israel. Where is Egypt, that Egypt, today? Where is all that glory, all that development? It is a story that is told... something dead. Go to the Sphinx, go to the pyramids, they are dead things; monuments of something that was thousands of years ago, and now is not. Israel has gone on. Israel is not dead yet. The whole thing turned upon the night of the Passover, the principle of the Cross. The Cross governed that.

Still on - to Babylon. Babylon and the remnant of Israel. Well, how long and how interesting would be the story of Babylon's greatness and Babylon's glories, "This great Babylon which I have built" (Dan. 4:30), said its king. Yes, it was fabulous. Where is Babylon - amongst the seven wonders of the world, but where? What about that remnant? It all turned upon the principle of the Cross.

Still on in history - to mighty Rome. What a world power, subduing and subjecting the world to itself! What a structure, what a story, what a sight! Christians - poor, helpless Christians on the other hand. Where is Rome and its empire? Well, you can go to its city and see the ruins of that mighty empire. The historians who are present will be calling much to mind, the ravages of that city and civilisation, the work of the vandals, a story of long ago. It is dead. Where are the Christians? Here we are, we are alive and there are many more, and it all turned upon the principle of the Cross.

Yes, this mighty thing is not just some transaction on a green hill far away two thousand years ago. It is something running right through all the centuries as a mighty power, a terrific principle capable of overthrowing the mightiest civilisations. How great is this Cross! Yes, it is a power ever present at any given time in history, ever present in principle. The dividing factor, wherever division has been made, has always been the Cross.

The Meaning of the Cross

Well, we must come nearer still. What is the meaning of the Cross? What do we mean by the principle or the law of the Cross? What is the meaning of the Cross? I am going to sum it up in one statement. The meaning of the Cross is this: that there is that which God has fully and finally rejected, forsaken, and handed over to death, and He will never change His attitude toward it. Let me repeat that. There is that which God has fully and finally rejected, forsaken, from which He has turned His face forever, having handed it over to death. For that there is no remedy, there is no healing. It is a state which is not amenable to separation between good and bad. No surgeon's knife, no physician's potion can get in between good and bad and separate them in that realm. It is all so much of a piece that even God will not tackle the problem of disintegrating, separating, analysing and dividing. God has turned His face from it forever to have nothing to do with it. Till you and I have grasped that, we do not know the meaning of the Cross.

Oh, that immense thing, that unspeakable thing that happened when, with a breaking heart, the Son of God cried "My God, Thou hast forsaken Me", the very Son of God, the Son of God's love, broke His heart in that moment, a broken-hearted cry... forsaken of God. We have never plumbed and fathomed that yet. But that is the sum of this. There is that in this universe, in this creation, which God has abandoned, forsaken, and handed over to death, and which He does not attempt to remedy. Where God is concerned, death has already taken place in that realm, and death is death.

Now, it is the recognition and acceptance of that fact, that truth, that reality, or the ignoring or rejection of it that determines whether the way is closed or open. It all resolves itself into this: whether we accept the fact that death has taken place and that there is that, and we belong to that by nature which God has abandoned. Whether we recognize that, accept that, and submit to it, or whether we ignore or reject it, determines whether the way is opened or whether the way is closed. That is the principle of the Cross. It is very utter. It is what I meant when I said that it is implicit and final.

The Meaning of the Cross in the Lives of Cain and Abel

Well, that can bring us now to the first illustration and object lesson of that truth: Cain and Abel; for all this truth of the meaning of the Cross is gathered into the story of those two men.

Now, I want to say here in parenthesis that I am not at this time dealing with the doctrine of justification by faith, which I know to be a great doctrine associated with Abel and with all those to whom we shall refer. I am not referring to that, and I am not dealing with that now. But in every case which we shall have before us, what I am doing is to focus upon one central principle. That principle will be found in different instances, and different situations, but the principle is the same in every case, and it is just upon that principle - a single, ultimate, inclusive principle - that I want to focus at this time.

Cain's Offering and God's Rejection

Coming then to Cain, it was not a matter of God closing the door to Cain. The door was already closed. With Cain it was this question of recognizing or ignoring that fact, that the door was closed. He just did not recognize the fact that the door was closed. In other words, he did not recognize the fact of death, for it is written that God had said before they were born to their parents concerning the truth of the knowledge of good and evil "in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Gen. 2:17). And I believe that that means what it says, that in the day that they did eat, they did most surely die. It was not something potential and prospective. They died. Death took place.

On what do we base that? Listen! This is from the New Testament: "Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin..." (Rom. 5:12) - by one man. That man was Adam. Sin entered, and death through sin, "so death passed unto all men." Now that is a long section in Romans 5 - read it. It runs from verse 12 to verse 19, a long section, and it is all focused upon this: that death passed upon all men - all are dead. Through one man death entered. Or again in that wonderful letter to the Corinthians, first letter, chapter 15, verses 21 and 22  "For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die...". Death was a fact; it had taken place and Cain did not recognize the fact, he did not accept the fact, he ignored the fact. And this whole matter of whether the way is closed or open depends upon our recognition and acceptance of that fact, and there is no way through for us in our natural state. And it is a matter also of putting our approach to God upon that basis. That is what arose here.

Let us look at the features, then, in Cain's case. It was not that Cain was a godless, irreligious man. He was not atheistic, ignoring or disputing or doubting or denying the existence of God. He came to the place of worship! There was evidently a place of worship where there was an altar. God had not been ruled out of his universe, He was still allowed a place in their thought and in their attention. Cain was not, in that sense, a godless man, irreligious. Cain had worked hard and worked well. This fruit of the ground which he brought represented skill, energy, interest, and if the Lord's words still obtained  "in the sweat of thy face" the Lord had said (Gen. 3:19) - this fruit was that, it represented all that where Cain was concerned. It was the embodiment of his mind, the embodiment of his heart, the embodiment of his will. He had put himself into that fruit. We are going to give him as large a place as we can. We are not despising Cain in a certain realm. He had put himself into his fruit. That fruit was the expression of himself. It was all out from himself, and that was the deadlock and the impasse.

This is tremendously searching. A man's best and fullest consecration to his life's work, putting himself - mind, heart and will; intelligence, skill, devotion and labour - into producing something fine and good and bringing it to God and finding the door closed. That is searching. That was the beginning of a long history, that long history of self-sufficiency and its brood, for the brood of Self is a very, very large one - self-sufficiency, self-righteousness, and so on and on - a long history. It is the history of that which in a very large development focused upon Jesus, and murdered Him. This was the beginning of murder. You see, God knew Cain's heart even when he was at the altar with his fruit. He knew what was in that man's heart which only needed certain conditions and circumstances and provocations to divulge it. You do not have to divulge a thing for God to know. It is there, and He knows all about it. He may draw it out, but He knows all about it beforehand. This is the beginning of a history of what, in our time, has come to be called 'humanism': that man has it within himself, his own intelligence, his own power, his own will, his own resource, to find his way through, to get through, to save himself. It began here.

And do you not see that this was the beginning of that final development which is so far on the way to consummation now - Antichrist, the super-glory of man in his achievements, inventions, discoveries, and what not, by which he is going to save himself and his world - and it is nonsense! The Cross makes nonsense of it all, and says: There is no way through! And if men are not capable of seeing that there is no way through to heaven by the hydrogen bomb or any other weapon, they are fools indeed. "The god of this world hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving" (2 Cor. 4:4). It began here.

See what it amounts to. You and I, by the best that we can do and produce, never can get through with God. All such ideas and thoughts are the ignoring or rejecting of this fact: that the door was shut long, long ago, and death took place, and we are born dead every one of us - a mighty active death.

Abel's Offering and God's Acceptance

Pass over to Abel. Now Abel did not begin with any advantage over Cain. Cain had no handicap put upon him by God. Indeed, I think Abel may have been less accounted amongst men than Cain. It does not require all this intelligence and skill and labour and sweat to look after a few sheep. No, with God there is common ground for all, whether Cain or Abel. God has no favourites; God puts no handicap upon any particular class of person. Abel, so far as the ultimate fact was concerned, was as handicapped as Cain. The door was closed; death had passed upon all men, including Abel. Do not get romantic about Abel. His heart was no better than that of Cain in the sight of God. But what was the difference? Abel accepted the principle of death. He surrendered himself to the great fact and came to God, not with all that he was, but in a substitute and a representative; another's life, not his own. Simple, but thoroughgoing.

Look at the two offerings. Cain - beautiful fruit, the ripe product of his best energy of mind and heart and will. His fruit was undoubtedly a beautiful sight to look upon. Abel had a dead lamb. A weak, defenceless, helpless thing; foolish, little, young. An undeveloped lamb. Dead - could anything represent nothingness more than a dead lamb? But Abel got through! God opened the closed door to Abel, while He kept it closed to Cain. Oh, I say, that is the principle of the Cross right up to date.

"Not the labour of my hands

Can fulfil Thy law's demands;

Could my zeal no respite know,

Could my tears forever flow,

All for sin could not atone."

I can do nothing, I can offer nothing, and I am nothing but a dead thing. My way through is a Lamb, a slain Lamb, the Lamb of God - the principle of the Cross. Very drastic, very thoroughgoing.

And this, on Abel's side, was the beginning of another long history, leading right up to the Lamb of God, to Christ. Listen to Him; listen to Him in the presence of Cain, "The Son can do nothing of himself" (John 5:19). That is the principle of the Cross. He accepted that position of being able to do nothing out from Himself. It must all come out from God. There is no way through otherwise. Cain would say, 'I can do it, here it is; this is my doing, this is out from myself, this fruit is out from myself. I am in this, and I make this that I am in and have done - that I have achieved and brought about - I make that the ground of my approach to God.' The door is closed.

Now, that is not only a message to sinners, but the New Testament makes that the message to Christians, because it not only governs our entrance into life, but it governs the whole course of life in every aspect and phase. If it is a matter of more life; then more acceptance of the Cross... which means more and more realizing, acknowledging and submitting to the fact that it has all got to be of God. Yes, whatever that 'all' may be! It will touch everything.

There was a revolution in my life thirty years ago when that principle of the Cross came flat up against ministry - ministry that for years I had been producing - against all my study, reading and late nights, to get up the stuff for ministry, till the whole thing became an intolerable burden in myself. Others perhaps thought it to be pretty good, but the crisis when - listen to me, men and women who are in ministry, or contemplating it - the whole turn came upon the recognition of this principle, this principle of the Cross when, with the door closed, I said to the Lord 'I am finished in all ministry, I am never going to preach again unless You do something now. I have been doing it all these years; I have been producing this, now I am finished. You have got to do it.' But I saw that principle, you see, as the principle of the Cross and I meant it.

Forgive me speaking of myself, but I must bring this home in some way. The next week would have seen my resignation in with my church officers, and I would have gone out from ministry if the Lord had not done it. But the Lord was true to His own principle. It was an utter end of anything that I could produce for ministry, and I meant it to be like that, because I recognized that God meant that. That was the principle of the Cross - nothing out from ourselves. No fruit that labour and study of the mind and heart could produce has a way through in the work and service of God. God was true to His own principle - He always is. From that day to this, there has been no trouble about ministry. It is easy to let ministry go, and much more easy than to accept it. This clamouring for ministry - it is uncrucified flesh. Well, there has been an open heaven since then. Again I beg your forgiveness for making this personal reference, but this is a true thing. It is a principle which covers all the ground.

Some of you here are interested in, and concerned with, local assemblies. What are your difficulties in that matter? Probably your first difficulty is relatedness and fellowship, getting even two leaders to be absolutely one - and as for three...! And when you get beyond that, ah yes! But there is a solution. There is a solution. That can be. It can gloriously be, and it can last, and it can grow, if only you will plant that thing right upon this basis of the Cross, where, in each one concerned, all that is personal goes out. All that is merely individualistic is buried, crucified; all your personal likes and dislikes and preferences and all that sort of thing, where you come into the picture either to be something or to do something, it simply goes out, and it matters not at all whether you figure in the business. You see what happens when that position is reached! The church grows then. And that principle, I say again, applies to every detail of life and service, and to all God's purpose with Christians individually and collectively. The Cross is the law of life, the way of life, and the way to fulness of life.

Chapter 3 - The Cross in Noah's Life

"These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, and perfect in his generations: Noah walked with God" (Gen. 6:9).

"God... spared not the ancient world, but preserved Noah with seven others" (2 Pet. 2:5).

In the way of life by the Cross, we have before us at this time, Noah. I am assuming that you are fitting what is said into the diagram in front of the book, I am not turning to explain it, it is self-explanatory.

You can clearly perceive the two ways: the way of the natural man who repudiates God's verdict and seeks to enlarge himself in independence of God, but ever and anon meets God's verdict all the same. I think that has been perfectly patent in what we have already said. And the way of the spiritual man who does accept God's verdict and goes right on... the way of the Cross reaching right back to the very beginning of things in human history, saying from the beginning to the natural man that his destiny is zero, an end, death. The Cross reaches back to the beginning, saying that it is the way of life for those who accept its verdict, and that way is focused down, as you see, to a line which represents the links of a chain from Abel to Christ. The red line of the Cross followed a long succession through past generations, centuries, but it is the way that goes right through.

The Completion of a Cycle of Human History

We come to this link in the chain represented by Noah, and with Noah we come to the completion of a cycle of human history. Both in fact and in figure, Noah represents that. I suppose if anybody should be asked, "What do you know about Noah?" the answer would undoubtedly be, "Well, he built an ark." That is about all that you would say. There are other things about him, but that is how it is summed up - Noah's ark. We always link the two together. They are associated, and in a sense quite rightly so, because as I have said, here we come to the completion of a cycle of human history. The flood ended the first cycle of human history. The Lord Jesus in the first instance linked Noah's days with the day of His own coming, "As were the days of Noah, so shall be the coming of the Son of man" (Matt. 24:37). And Peter makes that perfectly clear by linking Noah and Noah's day with the Day of Judgment, so that it was a figure of a cycle; the end of a cycle of human history but a much greater, fuller end than ever Noah's was.

Someone has said that prophecy is history written beforehand, and there is very little doubt about it that there is a prophetic element in the story of Noah. It is history written beforehand. It is that history culminating in the great deluge, not of water, but of fire to which Peter refers when he says, "These things are... all to be dissolved... the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat" (2 Pet. 3:11,12). That is the final flood to which Noah points prophetically.

The Full Growth and Development of Cain

Well, when we come to the days of Noah, what do we see? We just have the full growth and development of Cain. We saw Cain and what he represented: the man who, ignoring the great verdict of God that the door was closed upon all of Adam's race, that death by one man had passed upon all, assumed that by his own works and efforts - the embodiment of the best in himself in the fruit that he produced - assumed that he could get through with God. He came up against the fact that the door was firmly closed and there was no way through. In the individual, right at the beginning (of greater significance in this than I have time to stay with) in a single man, all the elements of that vast history of man's pride, man's self-assurance, man's self-sufficiency, man's conceit, man's self-righteousness, man's unwillingness to accept the verdict of Calvary; in a single man all that was summed up.

Cain went out from the presence of God unrepentant, although God had pointed out the way and said, 'Yes, but even for you, Cain, if you will have it, the sin offering is at the door.' But he refused God's way and went out from the presence of God unrepentant, bitter, resentful, rebellious, recalcitrant. "Am I my brother's keeper?" he insolently answered God. He went out like that. Anything like that just leads to the abandoning of God - choosing a course of independence and abandonment to selfish gratification and pleasure. That was the history of Cain as you follow it, and of his civilisation.

Reaching the days of Noah some hundreds of years afterwards, that is found in full development. The whole world is a collective embodiment and expression of what was resident in one man at the beginning. The spirit of Noah's day was that of just flouting God, indifference to anything that would in any way interfere with their self-interest or their own natural pursuits; just indifference to it. There is the collective expression of Cain, and this is our point for the moment. When you come to Noah, you get a collective expression of Abel.

The Collective Principle of the Cross in Noah

In Noah you have the collective principle of the Cross represented. It may be comparatively small... seeing the great, great world that will not have it. That is why we read the fragment from 2 Pet. 2:5 - "Noah and seven others". I am not going to make anything of the number at the moment. There may be something in it. Seven and one, and seven in one. You can make of that what you like, but you know quite well that these numbers in Scripture do not stand for nothing, they are always significant, and here is something which represents a complete spiritual testimony in a corporate way. And it is that which, resting upon the Cross, goes through at the end. Oh, how much is wrapped up in that statement!

I cannot expect you to be in my head, but I am seeing a very great deal in that simple statement - a collective testimony to the Cross going through at the end. That sums up the book of the Revelation which is the end. The end-time situation with Noah was an almost universal repudiation of the principle of the Cross. It was not just drift: it was deliberate in the face of a testimony which was present long enough and was practical enough to challenge everybody. Noah's testimony covered a long time and Noah's work was a very tangible form of testimony. It was very concrete; it was no mere doctrine or theory. This is something present in a practical and tangible and palpable form, and it was present throughout that long time. And in the face of it, in spite of it, the repudiation was well-nigh universal which, of course, led to a well-nigh universal engulfing and involving in judgment in the verdict of God which had already been pronounced in Adam upon all such.

It is not difficult to see, standing alongside of Noah in his day, our own day and the end of this dispensation. Say what we will, and let men say what they do about the good in human nature and in mankind, the fact is that God does not judge upon a comparative basis at all of more or less good in men. God judges upon an absolute basis, and God's absolute basis is: 'What is your attitude toward the Cross of Jesus Christ? What have you done with the Lamb of God? It is not whether you are more or less good, whether you are very bad naturally, or, as men would account, very good. That is not the ground of judgment at all. It is that there is the Cross standing right at the centre of history, the testimony of God; holding in it God's verdict upon the whole world: "As in Adam all die." What is your attitude towards that?'

It is not difficult to see that when it comes really to the acceptance of God's verdict that all men without any exception at all are dead so far as God is concerned, lying under judgment, and have no way with God apart from the Cross; how many of the entire human race accept it and believe it? There is a well-nigh universal ignoring or repudiating of it. It is true. I say 'well-nigh' because in that we have the exception. Noah and seven others - they represent the exception. In them the principle of the Cross is found to be accepted and capitulated to. Noah and the seven others would have been drowned with all the rest if they had not accepted God's verdict upon the race and taken God's only way through.

That opens up another subject, that of their faith.  Hebrews 11, "By faith Noah, being warned of God concerning things not seen as yet... prepared an ark." We are not dealing with that at the moment. We are keeping to this single principle of the Cross as the only way of life. These eight accepted the principle of the Cross, that is, the closed door except by one way: God's provided way. And it was a collective thing, it was a collective testimony. It was a corporate thing that was there. The eight represented collective salvation, and that is a point that has been seriously overlooked. The sooner we recover that, get that back and get that established, the better. With God, while salvation reaches the individual and becomes a personal and individual thing, with God salvation is collective. God is saving a people, not just individuals, and what I do want to impress upon you is this: that the very fact of salvation means that you are not saved alone, you are saved in a related way.

You are saved in connection with something more than yourself. It is in salvation, collective salvation. Salvation is a collective thing, and you deny the very element of salvation when you allow division to come between you and other children of God or another child of God. You deny your very salvation. You know that word translated into our English  'together'. Now, you have a look at 'together' in the New Testament: "We were planted together in the likeness of his death" (Rom. 6:5). "Made us alive together with Christ" (Eph. 2:5). "We are seated together with Him in the heavenlies" and so on. That word "together" is the figure of the human body being made a corporate organic whole by sinews and tissues.

Together - A Body

From God's standpoint ours is a "together" salvation. It is a collective or together life. God's life is not broken up into fragments. The testimony of the Lord's people is not that there are as many lives as there are Christians. There is one life, a together life.

They were to give, in that collective testimony, that the Cross - the acceptance of God's verdict, the acceptance of death - is the way out of death when the death is that of a substitute. I am not staying with the typology of the ark as symbolising Christ in Whom we are sheltered from judgment, safe from death; but they entered together into the ark. That is the point: it was a together testimony.

And it was a collective or together victory. You have moved on from the individual, from Cain, and Abel, to that which is collective when you come to Noah.

Now, that is very important. It is a tremendous thing, and it carries with it quite a lot of very practical values. Was it collective? Well, it says "Noah with seven others". At any rate, they were at close quarters for forty days and forty nights and could not get away from it. No, you see the very law of their being together in that ark was the law that they had to learn (if they had not already done so) to live together and to live at close quarters, and their salvation depended upon it. If one of them flew out of the door, they were lost! If one said, 'I have had enough of this, I am going', where would that one have gone? If one had broken away, you see, well, the thing is obvious. Their salvation was collective, there was no getting away from it: they had to settle down to it. Their settling down to the collective, corporate life was the way of life for them. It was the practical application of the principle of the Cross.

Dear friends, it takes us a long time to learn the ABC's of corporate life. Plenty there are who have the teaching, the doctrine and tell you all about the church, the Body of Christ. They give long dissertations and addresses upon it. They have all the theory. Many there are who are very zealous to have the New Testament order set up with all its technique, and many who have all that knowledge and zeal have not learned the ABC's of corporate life.

Now, that is not said carelessly. It is said from much observation, and not a little experience. It is a tremendous thing in the purpose of God to learn that lesson as soon as you can, that your full salvation is a related thing. You may have salvation in bits, in the parts, partially, but you will never get full salvation as any individual, nor as any number of individuals. Fulness of salvation relates to this corporate Body of Christ. It is to be "glory in the church by Christ Jesus unto all ages for ever and ever" (Eph. 3:21). You have heard that so often, but this message of Noah comes with tremendous importance and emphasis just now.

You are tired of hearing such words as independence, unrelatedness, and so on, but you know that is one of the things which fundamentally needs the Cross as much as anything else. It comes out, it just comes out all the time in different ways and different forms. We 'fly off the handle' because of some provocation, because of the rub of related life. We want to get away out of it and throw it all up; we cannot bear this corporate life. Yes, it is the most difficult thing to the flesh that you can imagine. That proves that the Cross is very much needed, and this individualistic element in us comes up in numerous ways all the way along.

The Cross in Relation to Ministry

It not only comes up in our Christian relationships, it comes up in our work; our Christian work, our ministry, and jealousies over other ministries and what not. Oh, it is the awful thing that is in Christianity. I remember Dr. Meyer once told me that he had a terrible battle right on the Keswick platform. He was well known, he had a large and foremost place in Christian ministry, and he was invited to the Keswick Convention to speak. And then other men of less fame and importance and reputation were put in front of him. He said, 'I had my first Keswick battle actually on the Keswick platform where I had to learn the Cross in relation to ministry.' Oh, could we cover the whole ground if we tried? But there it is. It is this Self in one form or another of its countless forms. You cannot compass all the fibres of this root of Self, from one extreme of self-assertiveness and self-importance and self-advertising, to the other extreme of self-pity. There is a lot between the two! It is still Self. Oh, that we could forget ourselves:

"Oh, to be saved from myself, dear Lord,

Oh, to be lost in Thee!

Oh, that it may be no more I,

But Christ Who lives in me."

Our Inter-relatedness

How can it be done? It can only be done by the revelation to us that our salvation, our life, our testimony and our work, is corporate; it is related. That means that in every phase and aspect of our Christian life we are depending upon others. We are not the whole thing by any means. Our growth depends upon others, our life depends upon others, and our fulness depends upon others.

You see, it is all there: life, light, love, liberty, purity, power, purpose, prospect, and glory. It is all collective; it is all corporate. It is the church. You can test it. Your life... what do you owe to others for your spiritual life? Do you mean to say that you have got it all firsthand, independently, unrelatedly? You have not got very much, if you have any at all. Our light... what do we owe to others for the light that has come to us? Light is a related thing. And so right the way through it is like that. That is the emphasis.

I repeat, so much time is taken in learning just the ABC's of corporate life, and until we have done so, there is limitation and there is defeat. It is true. Noah and seven others... You and all the rest in Christ, and for that life, for that testimony, for that victory, we need one another. We cannot do without one another, and in order to have it, some deep work of the Cross has got to be done in us. Let Cain into this, and it spoils the whole thing. Independence - "I can get through on my own, by myself, I do not need any help" - that is Cain. "Am I my brother's keeper?" What is corporate about repudiating any responsibility for your brother? Let Cain in, and the whole thing is spoiled. Let the Cross in - that is Abel, the principle of the Cross - and you have a collective life and a collective testimony and right through to a collective victory and collective glory, and it is full!

The Difficulty of Corporate Life

What is it that emerges from this nucleus, from this 'togetherness'? A new world.

The word to Noah afterward was "Be fruitful and multiply", the same words as addressed to Adam and Eve before the fall: "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." New prospects, new vocation, new fulnesses, a new world, a new creation that opens up to those who have learned the meaning of the Cross together in a practical way.

Now do not be misunderstanding me in this matter. I think I hardly need to stress it at all. This kind of life together with Christians is not always an easy thing. You say, 'That is a terrible thing to say! Not easy for Christians to live together?' Difficulty over Christians living together! It sounds terrible, does it not? Of course you know it is true. Is it true? But why is it true? Because it is Christians in whom the truth is being made manifest.

You see, a lot of worldly people can get on together very much better than a lot of Christians can sometimes, and that is a thing you cannot understand, and that offends you. You say, 'Well, it is better to be out in the world. There is really good comradeship out there; we get on fine together out in the world. But look at these Christians! It is so difficult to live with these Christians!' Yes, quite true. But recognize the meaning of that. It is in Christians that there is being made manifest the need of the Cross.

We are no better in ourselves than the world. The same is in us as is in the world: a human nature. This has to be made manifest in order that the victory of the Cross should be a practical thing, not a theoretical thing. And if you get men and women who are of the same infirmities as anybody else, who have just the same human nature, the same Adam inheritance as all the rest, and you get them together, that is a testimony. That says something for the Cross of the Lord Jesus. You see, this matter of a testimony is a very practical matter. Oh, I beg of you to be careful how you use that phrase, 'the testimony'. My soul is sick to death of people talking about "the testimony", meaning some teaching, some form of doctrine, some system of truth, something that you stand for as a statement. That is not the testimony.

The testimony is this: that there, in you with others, there is a work of the Cross done that absolutely overcomes what is true of nature where you are concerned. It is like that: that is the testimony - something that can be seen in a company of people, in a number of people. God has done something there. Now you take those people, two, three or more, and look at them naturally and see whether under all the strain and the pressure that is brought to bear upon them, they would naturally go on together. Not a bit of it! You know many of you, that your going on with others is all a matter of the grace of God, and a lot of grace, and that is only another way of saying a deep work of the Cross.

An End-time Thing

This is the important thing I want to say: this is an end-time thing. It was in Noah's case, the testimony was collective at the end of that first cycle of human history. You turn to the book of the Revelation, and you find it is like that. The end is near, the tremendous universal cataclysm. Judgment is about to fall, all heaven is in ferment and agitation, the climax is in view. "And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb, and because of the word of their testimony" (Rev. 12:11). And when you look to see who the 'they' is, it is plural. The 'they' is called a son, a man-child. It is a plural. It is a company who have entered so deeply into the meaning of the Cross that they in the end, with all this tremendous upheaval in heaven and earth, go through in absolute victory. They go through, they do not succumb. It is a 'they', mark you.

Now, if the great dragon is going to have any success at all, or if he hopes for any success, it lies in one direction and he will concentrate all his force upon that point: the mutual love of the Lord's people and the corporate life of the Lord's people. He will stop at nothing. If he cannot make a true cause for division - something that is real and that is positive and that is actual to bring about a break in relationship - then he will create phantoms and ideas and suggestions and smoke and fog and lies and misrepresentation to make you feel separated, that there is something between you. It is in the atmosphere, you can feel it all the time; something trying to get in and make you feel that other people do not want you, to isolate you in spirit, anything! And it is a tremendous working up of that thing at the end, to break up this corporate life because it is a 'they' that will overcome him. It is a 'they', and they is - forgive my bad grammar - they is so corporate that it is represented by one name, a man-child, as though it were one individual.  So one that it is like one individual. Satan's hopes are lost if that can be maintained.

And how can that be? "They overcame because of the Blood of the Lamb, and the word of their testimony, and they loved not their life even unto death." Is not that the Cross? You see, the Cross is not just something at the beginning of the Christian life. It comes right out at the end. The final phase of the church's pilgrimage on this earth, and warfare in the heavenlies, is marked by the Cross and the Cross runs all the way through.

But here in this message it is the Cross as this collective aspect which is something which we must take note of, we really must. Ask the Lord to teach you, to reveal to you and teach you the meaning of corporate life, and strengthen you and gird you to resist everything that works against it.

Oh, it is an awful battle! I know of no battle more terrible than that battle for the relationships between us as the Lord's people, because the methods of the enemy are so subtle and so varied, so numerous, and his pressure is so terrible and intense in this matter that he will not stop until he has divided the last two of God's people, if he can.

Well, let us ask the Lord to very definitely cover us, and cover His word, and to get all that He is aiming at getting at this time. This is not just teaching, not just Bible truth. These are grim realities. Terrible issues, but glorious issues hang upon this - the testimony of Noah and seven others at the end of a dispensation.

Chapter 4 - The Cross in Abraham's Life

We want to continue with the matter which the Lord has brought to us: The Cross and the Way of Life. We have been seeing the working of the principle of the Cross in the case of men who stand out in the early history of the race - Abel and Noah. In this chapter we are going to pass to Abraham, and if you are not familiar with those parts, I would suggest you read Genesis chapters 17 and 22.

But before we come to speak of this matter in connection with Abraham, let me say this which I think may be helpful. We can only rightly and adequately appraise and understand the value and meaning of the lives of these men in the Bible as we recognize the particular purpose which characterized those lives.

Every one of them was connected with something quite specific or something quite specific was connected with them, and until we can put our finger upon that thing which accounted for them and explained them, we cannot really understand all their experiences or the ways in which God dealt with them. That is, while a particular law applied in the case of these men, it is also a general principle in life. In order to understand our lives under the hand of God, we have to see what it is that relates to our lives in the mind of God.

We have spoken of Abel, and the particular thing that comes to us through Abel is that he established the principle in fulness and finality that the Cross is the way of life. And in the first one all is summed up and so Abel, by the death of the lamb and then by his own death because of the lamb - for he was slain, was murdered - because of his lamb he established the law that the Cross is the way of life.

Passing on to Noah, the same thing in principle is there but in Noah's case we see that the principle which was established in the one man, Abel, now is manifested in a universal way. The whole world, rejecting the principle of the Cross, found no way through with God. They found a closed door but Noah and seven others, because they accepted that principle, found the way through and Noah's specific function was to set forth the universality of this principle. It is not only one man now, it is the whole world over against the comparative few who find a way through by the Cross. So Noah becomes the testimony in a corporate form, while Abel was the testimony in an individual and personal form.

Abraham - God's New Race Beginning

Now, when we come to Abraham, moving on in the counsels of God, we come to God's new race beginning. There are two titles given to Abraham with specific and peculiar meaning. Those titles are 'father' and 'friend'. He was the father of the Hebrew race, but he was not only the father of the Hebrew nation, for Paul says "the father of all them that believe" (Rom. 4:11) and again, "the father of many nations". And that was written to Romans, so Abraham steps clean out of the confines of the Hebrew race and, as Paul says, is "the father of all nations who believe". And we know that the one outstanding characteristic of Abraham was faith. He is called "the father of the faithful", that is, the people of faith, "all them that believe".

Faith, therefore, is generic; the characteristic of a genesis, that is, of a class of people. It is a power which creates a kind of people, that makes a race, a nation. Faith is a mighty propagating thing, and that was the particular characteristic of Abraham's fatherhood or paternity - faith. What a tremendous thing faith is. "I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heavens, and as the sand which is upon the seashore" (Gen. 22:17). What propagating power there is in faith! Now this particular characteristic of his fatherhood is the principle of all that follows. It is not just saying something which does not sound particularly enlightening or interesting, but it is the principle of everything, and so we proceed to look at this man Abraham.

Abraham's Call and Separation

Firstly, his call and his separation, "The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran, and said unto him, Get thee out of thy land, and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall show thee" (Acts 7:2-3). This was his call and his separation, which implied the rejection of Chaldea and the Chaldeans. God had no open way for them. Of course that would be understood if we had time to speak of the conditions in Chaldea, for they were exceedingly evil. Idolatry was rampant; iniquity was terrible. "Get thee out", which meant that for the Chaldean and Chaldea, there was a closed door with God, and Abraham being brought out, separated and called forth, meant that God's open way lay in that direction.

God's Covenant with Abraham

The next movement that we want to note in the course of things is that to which we come in Genesis 17: the covenant made with Abraham, and the sign of the covenant - being circumcised. Now, note the covenant that God made with Abraham then. As you can see if you look, it is related to perpetuity and increase; a going on, a clear, free, full way of going on - the way of life and increase. That was the covenant, "Thy seed after thee shall..." and so on. The covenant had to do with life or perpetuity and with increase, life and enlargement. But this life and this enlargement would be through and on the basis of, first of all the acceptance of the great fact that the door was closed to all that was other, death had taken place, and therefore it could only possibly be on the other side of that door. And that door proved to be the door of the Cross.

The life, the perpetuity, the continuation and the increase, lay through the Cross. And that is the meaning, as we know so well, of circumcision. In the New Testament you know quite well that circumcision is related by the apostle Paul to the Cross of the Lord Jesus. You have it definitely stated in Col. 2:11 where the Cross of the Lord Jesus is definitely in view and it is said to have been the circumcision of Christ. And Paul calls it the putting away of the whole body of the flesh. It is related to the Cross. So take that right back from Col. 2:11 to Genesis 17, and you see exactly the basis upon which the continuance, the perpetuity, the increase rests. The circumcision there implicitly represents the Cross - the end of something, and the beginning of something else. Death - a closed door to something. Life - the open door to something altogether different: God's new race beginning with Abraham.

Inward and Spiritual Circumcision

But in the New Testament circumcision is regarded as spiritual and inward. Paul said it quite emphatically, "Neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh... circumcision is that of the heart" (Rom. 2:28-29). "We are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God" (Phil. 3:3). It is a spiritual thing, an inward thing; it is of the heart. And it simply means that in the Cross of the Lord Jesus, the natural life and the reasoning of the natural life, or the self-life - the willing of the self-life, the desiring of the self-life - has been cut off by the Cross. Every expression and aspect of the self-life has been cut through by the Cross and is put in the place where the door is shut. There is no open door to any expression of the natural life. The Cross says, 'The door is closed; death rests upon that'. That is spiritual circumcision.

Stephen, in that matchless discourse of his which resulted in his murder, cried at one point to those who were persecuting and about to stone him, "Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart" (Acts 7:51). What did he mean by "uncircumcised in heart and ears"? He just meant this, that they were only willing and minded to have what they wanted and nothing more. Prejudice is a certain mark of an uncircumcised heart. Bigotry is the same, and anything that you can find that made up the situation which brought Stephen to his death is a mark of an uncircumcised heart. That is the thought. Still there is the reasoning and the arguing of the Self, of the natural life. There is still the desiring and the feeling of the Self obtruding itself. The Cross, spiritual circumcision, says "No!" to it all.

Now, you see that is the position to which Abraham came as recorded in Genesis 17 when God made the covenant and then gave circumcision as the sign of the covenant.

A Supreme Test

Now you pass to chapter 22, and you find Abraham's supreme test of that whole situation. "Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him..." Now, in that covenant sign, Abraham had taken the position that everything was to be through death to Self, and all the aspects of Self. That was in the covenant, and that was the significance of the sign: death to all the motions and activities and energies of the natural or self-life. He had become a party to that covenant, for a covenant must always have two parties. God was one, and Abraham was the other, and he had accepted it, and it has become very practical.

Now then, the test of Abraham arose, and Isaac was the test of that position which he had taken. It was this: God had instituted a covenant, and the covenant was that his seed should be as the sand and as the stars. God would multiply his seed exceedingly. He should be the father of many nations, and kings should come from him. These are the terms of the covenant. Abraham had said, 'All right, Lord, I am with You for that', and the Lord said, 'Very well, but that can never be along the lines of your natural resources, your own energies, your own abilities, your own intelligence. That has got to come only through death and resurrection.' Abraham said, 'Very well, Lord, I am with you in this, I agree to that, I accept it, and I perform the sign of the covenant as my declaration that that is the position.'

Oh, I do wish that there you would put into parenthesis that other New Testament symbol that goes with circumcision - baptism, because the two things go together in the New Testament. Baptism is the Christian's way of doing what the Hebrew did in circumcision, saying, 'I die to myself, I die to the natural life. I cut that all off in the Cross of Christ. I declare by baptism, just as Abraham did by circumcision, that I accept this: that the future is out from God, and not out from myself. There is no prospect of any kind so far as I naturally am concerned. It is only through the Cross in resurrection that there is any way at all, any life at all.' Abraham took that position in a very practical way and became party to it.

Now then, Isaac has come in by a miracle which Abraham had no reason whatever to expect to be repeated. God had bound everything up with Isaac, not with any further seed of Abraham, but with Isaac. At that point Isaac lives as the embodiment of God's covenant. Isaac dies, and what happens? What a test! Now then, between God and Abraham stands Isaac. And Isaac says "God and everything because of His covenant"; or, "no God and nothing". It is God and everything, or it is nothing. You see, the promise of this multiplying of his seed had already been given several times, but the fulfilment of it only came through Isaac being offered up, for, immediately Abraham had obeyed, then the Lord appeared to him again and ratified the covenant, "Because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son... in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heavens."

Now we must draw some very practical lessons and values from this. Firstly, nothing is truly established until it has been yielded up and has received the brand of the Cross upon it. Have you got that? Even though that may have been given to you from God, there is still always the danger of something in ourselves impinging upon something that God has given us. We insinuate ourselves into it, and make it ours somehow. This Self! This flesh! Oh, yes, God gives us a ministry and then we get hold of it and become jealous about our ministry and afraid of other people getting in our way and taking our ministry away from us; interfering with our ministry, you see. The flesh comes up in that way and in so many other directions and connections. God does something, and then we come into it. We get into the picture.

Somehow or other this flesh cannot keep itself out of even the things that God does by a miracle. We turn them to the glorification or the gratification of this flesh of ours, and even a thing which God may give - and you are thinking perhaps of different things which God may give - will never be established and confirmed until it has been yielded up and knows the mark of death to ourselves and that is only alive for and unto God, and we are only alive for and unto God in that connection, whatever it may be. The Cross is the way of life in everything and immediately the Cross is nullified by this thing upon which the Cross says, "No, no!" Immediately anything of that comes up again, we counter the life of that thing, we strangle its life, we limit its life.

We not only arrest the progress, but we bring into smallness God's intention of multiplication. Why cannot God increase? Why is it that in the first few years of the church's history there was such a going on and on and on in life, ever and on in life, and growing, growing, growing? Just think of all that happened in the short life of Paul alone; the churches over the whole then-known world in one short life - and nearly two thousand years since, and the world is not yet touched with the gospel. The contrast is terrible, but why? Why? And the answer is clearly and definitely this: that somehow or other man has come into this business of God and turned it to himself. The Cross has not been kept in its place to give God a clear, full, free way.

It is a lesson that you and I have to learn very deeply in our own lives, that nothing is given increase except on the ground that it is deeply marked by the Cross as to our own flesh and natural life. Everything has to carry with it the sign of, on the one hand, death to the principle of Self, and on the other hand, Life in the realm where it is only of God and all of the Lord. That is in each individual Christian life for life and increase; that a local assembly has got to be marked in this way; it has to be a crucified (and thoroughly crucified) company of the Lord's people so far as any personal ambitions and interests are concerned. It is just like that. This is the way of Christ so clearly in His own case: the way of the Cross.

Abraham the Friend of God

Now I come to that second title - friend. Abraham was the only man in the Old Testament called the friend of God. James says Abraham was called the friend of God. The Lord Himself, speaking through the lips of the prophet Isaiah, used this phrase - "Abraham my friend" (Isa. 41:8). Jehoshaphat in a day of pressure and need, appealing to the Lord, appealed to Him on this basis, "for the sake of Abraham thy friend" (2 Chron. 20:7). It is said about Moses that the Lord spoke to him face to face as a man speaking to his friend. That does not upset what I have just said because the Hebrew word is an entirely different one. The word the Lord used about Moses and the Lord speaking to him face to face as a man speaks with his friend is the word which just means his neighbour or his companion. Another word is used here of Abraham which is altogether different, which means 'loved one'. You may talk to your neighbour quite a lot, say a lot of things to your neighbour, but you will not say to him things that you will say to your loved one. So Abraham stands unique in this title - the friend of God.

Do you see why he was the friend of God? Do you see the basis of that exclusive title - God's friend? Because of the utter abnegation of the self-life demonstrated and proved in his offering of Isaac. Abraham knew what that meant, "If Isaac goes, everything goes. But God is God and He has made a covenant, and I can afford to offer Isaac. In some way, God will bring Isaac back again." Paul said Abraham believed God who gives life to the dead (Rom. 4:17). And when you get through where you can so utterly let go to God because you believe so utterly in God that no matter how much you let go, there will be no loss in the long run where God is concerned; you are not going to lose anything or be limited by letting go to God utterly and absolutely. If we can come to that position with God and God seems to be striking at that in which everything is contained and with which everything is bound up, and say, 'All right Lord, You are the covenant God; You have covenanted concerning this. I do not know how You are going to do it or what You will do, but I am going on with You'. That is the basis of this friendship.

Now you see how it points to the Cross of the Lord Jesus. "What is man, that thou art mindful of him? Or the son of man, that thou visitest him? Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him with glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of thy hands: thou didst put all things in subjection under his feet" (Heb. 2:6-8). "Thou makest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands" (Psa. 8:6). The Son of Man is Jesus Christ, as the context shows. He is made to have dominion over all things, made to have all things put under His feet, made the Heir of all things before times eternal. So says the Scripture. Very well, go to the Cross and die! He offered Himself, He laid down His life, and in so doing everything of God's covenant was put on the Cross, but He believed God. Beyond the Cross His seed was as the sand of the desert, as the stars of heaven - all through the Cross. You see the principle. It is a very, very impressive principle.

So then, Abel establishes the principle once and for all. Noah shows how absolutely universal that principle is. Abraham shows that in relation to God's great purpose of having a great multitude which no man can number out of every tribe and kindred and tongue, God's great purpose to take out of the nations a people for the Name of His Son is by way of the Cross, by way of the closed door to the flesh.

We who are so concerned with the matter of evangelisation, the salvation of the multitudes, the increase of God, the life of men, may we not be standing in the way of it all by bringing so much of our flesh in? Just frustrating it all because we come into the picture? It will be a crucified church that lives and grows, and no other. It will be crucified men and women who live before God and who multiply. It will be a crucified ministry that brings Life and increase.

You hear Abraham: in the time of trial and testing, the incident in the interval with Hagar and Ishmael had taken place, when Abraham had tried to do this in his own energy, tried to bring it about, and had met a closed door with God. And he knew it, and cried, "O that Ishmael might live before thee!" (Gen. 17:18). 'Ishmael does not live. I have produced Ishmael by my own energy, by my own wit, by my own effort to fulfil divine purposes. I have brought Ishmael into being, but he is dead, he does not live! God has not accepted him.' "O that Ishmael might live before thee!" No! No Ishmaels live with God, that is the fruit of the flesh, the work of the flesh. Only Isaac lives with God, and Isaac bears favour. That is the mark of the Cross in Abraham's life.

Chapter 5 - The Cross in Jacob's Life

Now we come to the next great link in the chain, to Jacob. Just by way of refreshing our memories, but again in order to understand Jacob, his life, his history and God's dealings with him, we must focus down upon his particular function in the ways of God.

What was the particular function or significance of Jacob? The answer is precisely, quite simply and definitely: the house of God. When Jacob is found to be moving and on the move, the very first night finds him at the place which he named Bethel, meaning the House of God. This is a fresh step, a fresh aspect, of the movements of God.

With Jacob the house of God comes into view. The house of God of course, in terms of a whole nation, a whole people. For the house of God, it hardly need be said, is not any place. I always feel that people who talk about this place being the house of God have not learned the ABC's of the house of God yet. They speak about "coming to the house of God", referring to some place where we meet! Well, it might prove to be a place where we find the Lord and in a sense the house of God, but we get very mixed up in our terminology. This system of things which has come into being is all confused in its language. The house of God is no building. The house of God is a people, a heavenly people, a heavenly nation out from the nations of this world. That hardly need be said, but here it comes into view with Jacob for the first time.

You remember probably a little fragment in this connection which occurs in the book of Ruth. When Ruth was being blessed, the people and elders expressed their good wishes for her upon her marriage to Boaz. They put it like this: "The Lord make the woman that is come into thy house like Rachel and like Leah, which two did build the house of Israel" (Ruth 4:11). Jacob built the house of God through Rachel and Leah. The twelve sons of Jacob became the heads of the twelve tribes of Israel. Through them the whole nation came into being, and in them the nation is represented.

And if we want anything more added to confirm this function of Jacob, remember how his two names stand right over the nation again and again, especially in the prophets - the house of Jacob - that is Israel, the whole nation. The house of Israel - that is the same nation. My point is that Jacob becomes the synonym for the nation as the house of God, and with him it comes into view. Now, we cannot understand Jacob's life and God's dealings with him until we recognize his particular function, and his function is to bring in the spiritual house of God.

Jacob at Seventy Years of Age

Having said that, we can pass to the man and his history. I wonder if you have ever seen Bible pictures of Jacob on that night, at that place which he came to call Bethel. What have you seen in the Bible pictures? Have you not almost invariably seen a young man hardly out of his twenties, perhaps about at the most thirty years of age, setting out on life's journey? It will be a shock to you when I tell you that on that night he was seventy years old. And when we come to the point of the incident at Peniel, he was ninety years old. Bear that in mind, because we are not dealing with a man without any history. We are not dealing with an inexperienced, immature young man. We are not dealing with somebody in all the impulsiveness of youth! We are dealing with somebody right there at the beginning, who is mature, experienced and with a lot of history behind him. Seventy years! Of course, men lived in those days very much longer than we do today, and seventy was, well, practically nothing then, but seventy years is enough in which to do a lot of things and get a lot of history. I mention that for a purpose which you will see.

Therefore, at seventy years, years which mark a large amount of maturity and history, we meet with this man. What a man he must be if, at seventy years of age, he can behave as he has just behaved to his father in deceiving him! His father whose sight had become so bad that he could not discern between one man and another man. And this man Jacob, with all those years behind him, can conceive this plot to deceive his old, infirm father, and to cheat his brother Esau of the birthright. This surely is ripe fruit of a life that has been after that kind. This is not something that has just sprung up, an evil which has overtaken him, a sin of youth, or a sudden fault. This comes out of a man of maturity. He is a man who is well developed as that kind of man, and the story from that point onwards for the next twenty years is just the uncovering and divulging of the kind of man he was.

Jacob at Ninety Years of Age

After the twenty years with his uncle Laban, he is found wealthy, but wealthy through an uncanny astuteness. Uncle Laban was an extraordinarily mean man and a contemptible man, but Jacob beat him; beat him at his own game. Keen, astute, independent, cunning, clever, always getting what he wanted and had set his mind upon, refusing to be denied anything. If he is frustrated at one moment, he will go on until he gets what he wants. Frustrated by waiting for Rachel for seven years, he will serve another seven. He will not give up until he gets what he intended to have, never allowing himself to be cheated of anything, but always succeeding in the cheating himself. He is self-confident and scheming. You say, 'You are piling it on!' Yes, intentionally, and not untruthfully, for a very real purpose, my friends.

God's Choice of Instrument

I have said that with this man came the great thought of God concerning His house, the house of God - with this man! And therein I find one of the greatest comforts and encouragements that can ever come to a man. How often it has been that God has chosen - deliberately chosen - a man, a person, an instrument for a purpose which in itself, or who in himself, is naturally the most utter contradiction of that purpose; that in such a one God should demonstrate that His purpose is not that, it is other than that, altogether different from that. And so you find again and again that instruments used of God are, in the thing upon which they are engaged, contradicting themselves all the time and having to say, 'I am not made this way, you know; this is not how I am constituted. I would never be in this and after that if it were left with me. I am only in this by the grace of God. I am only in this by the transforming power of God; I am not like this naturally. No, I am other naturally.'

Servants of God have had to say that to God Himself more than once. Moses, called to go and speak, to go before Pharaoh and make a speech, said, 'No, you have chosen the wrong man; I cannot speak, I am not eloquent', and when he did eventually go, he was doing something for which he had no natural qualification.

Jeremiah, called of God, chosen of God, 'Go and speak and be God's prophet', said, 'I am a child; I cannot speak. You have chosen the wrong man, Lord.' And look again at all these men. Look at Peter if you like. See how afterwards Peter was doing everything that he would never have done, and demonstrated that he would be what he would never have been, until God got right hold of his life and made him do what he would never have done, and be what he would never have been. It was true of Paul. But here it is so far as Jacob was concerned. How unsuitable he was naturally to this idea of the house of God. How unfitted and unfitting he was for this great divine conception - the house of God! Take comfort from it.

But, you see, what God does is a very practical thing. We argue that if God wants to do a thing, He should have something that is so suitable, suitable to that task, that it just goes on so easily. And what we find is that those whom God chooses are not suitable in that sense, but suitable in another sense: to be a sphere of the demonstration of what is contrary to what they are naturally. It is worked out in them, and you do not have to work out in anybody if they are already suitable. Jacob's history during the next twenty years was a history of working in relation to divine thought in a man who was altogether a contradiction to that divine thought. It is like that.

Jacob at Peniel

And then at the end of the twenty years, when he has cheated Laban up hill and down dale and got the better of him at every turn of the road, it comes into his mind that he will go back home now. He is wealthy, he has got all that he set his heart upon, including Rachel and Leah and a great multitude of cattle and everything else. He begins to organize the pageant, divides them up into companies to make a tremendous impression, scheming still. And why is he going back? He knows that that is the land of covenant and covenanted to him through the birthright, and he is going back to get it, to take possession, and unto that he schemes.

You know the story. He sends spies to see how his brother Esau is, what he is feeling, whether he is still feeling sore, whether it is dangerous to go back, and when he learns that Esau is coming to meet him with a band of four hundred, he gets scared to death, and an evil conscience needs no re-accusing. It is his conscience that takes all the courage out of him, and he must again resort to his cunning.

Well, I am not going to pursue the story any further, but when he has got it all nicely planned and he is once more going to come out on top, once more he is going to succeed as he always has succeeded, he divided his company into two bands and sent them over the river. He is left alone - and then the story of Peniel. God meets him, and says in effect, 'But, my friend, there is no way through for a man like you, either to the house of God, or for the realization of divine purpose by you as an instrument; there is no way through.'

Now, the brook Jabbok was a tributary of the Jordan, and the Jordan River always speaks of death, burial and resurrection. And it was there that he was met by God. The figure is quite clear, and we need not strain the typology, but there we are, and God met him there. There took place that wrestle, and this man of ninety years of age, with all his history of his own achievement, tries to concentrate it upon the very angel of God and win through on that ground. He strives with all his might, using all his experience of the will that has been built up through the long years, trying to get the better of God as the morning was breaking. God only had to do that, just that, after all, and the whole thing was broken - the whole thing, ninety years was maimed and lamed forever after: the way through being 'not Jacob, but Israel.'

God's House the Embodiment of the Natural Man's Defeat

The lesson, dear friends, is quite clear, springing out of this incident, this crisis, in the life of Jacob. The house of God is the embodiment of a great defeat of the natural man. You never know the meaning of the church until you know that. You can never come truly into the church until you see that God has touched the natural man at the point of his greatest strength, and has touched that strength into impotence and the natural man is a crippled man for ever. The house of God is, in that sense, comprised of cripples - and that is no joke. It is what it really means. If you and I have not been crippled, if we have not understood the meaning of the house of God and been crippled in the realm of our natural strength, whether it is our wit, our wisdom, our power to do and achieve and to get our own way and reach our own ends, whether it is of any other kind as to the natural man; the door is shut, the door of the house of God is shut to all that. There is no way through. The way through is only by this complete and utter subduing of the natural man to God.

I wonder what happened when, the sun having risen and the fight being over, Jacob went in the direction of his family and his servants and they saw him coming. I wonder what happened as they saw him come? 'Hello, what has happened to our father? What has happened to our master? Has he had an accident? What has happened? He is limping, he looks crippled.' And probably when he arrived they began to condole, to sympathize, and say, 'We are so sorry, what has happened?' 'Don't you be sorry for me, do not call me Jacob any more. I have been through a terrific crisis and experience during the night. I have met God and He has laid me very low. He has broken me, He has shattered me, and then, having shattered me, He has blessed me.' You see the point. The house of God is the place where God is to be prevailed with. God will yield Himself to be prevailed with when He has things like this people in whom this tremendous change has taken place. I did seek to bring out Jacob in all his dark colours for this very reason, to show that he, to the realization of God's thought of the house of God, has to be a man who is so completely different in God from what he was in himself. That is the house of God.

We could break that up, and apply it in many ways. It is just for us this: that there is no place for our flesh in the house of God, whatever kind it is - the mental flesh, the intellectual flesh, the emotional, feeling flesh, or the willing, choosing, deciding, determining flesh. It is all excluded. We are shut out; the door is shut upon that kind of man. The man, the woman, the people broken down before God in that realm, of whose natural life you can make nothing when it comes to the things of God. Oh, how much has been made of men of God, of Paul. What a lot has been made of Paul's gigantic intellect and other things about Paul. But ask Paul about it. You hear him cry, up against spiritual situations - "And who is sufficient for these things?" (2 Cor. 2:16). "Not that we are sufficient of ourselves" (2 Cor. 3:5). Many things come from Paul which indicate that he is not drawing upon anything natural in himself, either inherited or by training and education or any kind of history. He is not drawing upon anything like that for the purpose of God. He knows quite well that in the realm of the things of God, it is only divine wisdom, divine strength, divine ability, which can get anywhere, can get through at all.

Well, some of us know a little about that, that the getting through is always on some other plane from our own. It is like that, and more and more we shall discover that as the house is being built, it is built like that. You see on the one side, the bringing of us more and more forcibly to the recognition that the door is closed to us naturally. There is no way through for the natural man in the house of God. In the place where God is, even the priests have to go out. There is no place. But here where God is, it is all of another order. It is the order of Jesus Christ, the order of His Son. The Cross makes that great divide. The Cross is a very crippling thing to our flesh, it really is.

A Definite Crisis

Now I am only going to add this word as I close. It was a definite crisis. That crippling was not a process. However much Jacob learned of what it meant for the rest of his life as to the limitations that it imposed upon him, and no doubt he did, right to the end, discover that crippling, that maiming, meant more than he realized at once and more and more it meant of limitation to him in a certain realm. But the thing was precipitated by a crisis, and you can see my point at once. The Cross of the Lord Jesus is a crisis, a definite crisis.

However much through the years beyond you learn of what the Cross meant, what was included in it; however much we may realize, as we never realized then that the work of the Cross means this and means that, there has to be a crisis. There has to be a night, so to speak, when we meet God - a place where our natural man is extended to the full, and then proved to be helpless and hopeless in the presence of God. You may have that crisis if you mean business.

There is this one thing about Jacob - I do not know whether it can be called a virtue or not, but there is one thing about him: he was determined to get what he was after. If that was a saving factor, well, all right, he was determined. 'I will not let thee go unless, and until, thou bless me.' He gathered up all the strength that he had and concentrated it upon this. He meant business with God on this matter. He meant business with God as to the Cross. It must be like that. You must come without any reservations, without any equivocation, without any dividedness of heart and mind, and say, 'Look here, absolutely, completely, once and for all, I am going to have this understanding with the Lord that all that the Cross of His Son meant and means shall be made good in my life. That is the only way of deliverance from my accursed Self, my limiting Self, from all this wretched conscience of mine, and all this mess that I have made of things. The only way out is for me, on the one side, to accept the fact of my death with Christ to myself, my self-life, and my acceptance of the grace of God - of my resurrection on the other side where everything has got to be no longer I, but Christ, for I have been crucified with Christ.' God is ready to bring that crisis about if you are the kind that really means business with Him. Now, this is not just in the Bible, and this is not just things said here. This is true to life. Many of us know that crisis; how drastic and devastating it is on the one side, but how glorious on the other: the way through, the way of life, the way of enlargement. Yes, it is like that.

But oh, what is it all for? Well, when you have really come to an experience of the Cross, it will not be long before you have the revelation of the house of God. That follows in sequence, because the Cross always does lead to the house, to the church. It always does, and to have a really heavenly apprehension of the nature of the house of God, the church, is a wonderful thing. It brings in a whole new realm of relationships and resources and possibilities. Oh, it opens up a wonderful new purpose to see the house of God. What many of us owe to the house of God, and to the revelation that God gave to us of that house when He had dealt with us on the basis of the natural man and the Cross!

Well, that is Jacob, and if I want to put my finger upon the very helpful thing in the whole story, I would say again that Jacob naturally was the most unlikely candidate for the house of God of which you can think or conceive. And it was in the most unlikely of all, that God wrought it out so that it became practical. God is no theorist. He does not just believe in doctrines, doctrines of the house of God. God is immensely practical, and that is why He takes such stuff as you and me, for in ourselves, are we not a contradiction of the house of God altogether, at every point? We are, but it is in us, such as we are that the thing is wrought out. And when it is wrought out, it becomes very real.

Chapter 6 - The Cross in Joseph's Life

We are passing now to the fifth of the movements on the eternal line of the Cross as the way of life as we come to speak of Joseph  Joseph whose story covers thirteen long chapters of the Bible, that is, of the book of Genesis. You take it up at chapter 37, and you go right on to the end of the book of Genesis occupied with the story of Joseph. I mention that because that alone indicates how important this thing is. We are not dealing with a little incident now, a minor character or feature. There is something here which is very important with God.

Now, as in every other case, we cannot appreciate the life of Joseph until we are able to put our finger upon his particular function, for the key to the life of Joseph is not what Joseph did. It is not the incidents of his life, that is, that he was the favourite of his father, provoked jealousy in his brothers, was put in a pit, sold into Egypt, involved in a woman's intrigue and put into prison, interpreted various dreams, was lifted up and made second in the land and stored up corn against a time of famine and saved the land. They are the incidents, but that is not the function. That is the story, but the real meaning is within the story.

The function is that essential purpose that Joseph served and that is what we have to discover. Not one of you believes that the saving of Egypt and the world from famine was an adequate explanation of the story of Joseph. Not at all. All these thirteen chapters are not written just to tell us that Joseph saved the world in his day from famine. Of course there is that interpretation which is perfectly right and true that makes Joseph a type of Christ, one of the most perfect types of Christ perhaps in the Old Testament. But when you have said all that you can say about that, you have not exhausted the significance of Joseph and you are left with this particular function of which we are speaking today.

Joseph's Background

Let us look, then, at this thing more closely. Jacob, otherwise known as Israel - the man, the builder of the nation, the foundation stone in type of the house of God - was old, very old; about one hundred and thirty years old. A broken and sorrowful man, not only in the sense of which we have spoken, broken at Peniel by the hand of God, but now broken in other ways; a sorrowful and disappointed man. When Pharaoh asked him how old he was, he says, "The days of the years of my pilgrimage are a hundred and thirty years" (Gen. 47:9) and so on... in effect, sinful, disappointing, or in one word: a failure. That is Jacob's summing up of his life right at the end. One hundred and thirty years of disappointment, of sorrow, of failure. That is the first fragment.

The second is Joseph's brethren who represented the house of Israel at that time in a very low and poor spiritual state. Read the story and you find every unhappy feature and characteristic in those men, in that which is supposed to be the house of God: divisions, strife among themselves, jealousies, envyings, malice, suspicion, intrigue, deceit, prejudice, avarice, hatred, disloyalty to their father, unfaithfulness to God, and, to crown it all, murder. You have only got to leap over the centuries, to the days of the Lord Jesus, and you find them all in the sons of Jacob, all those things are there around the Lord Jesus, heading up to His murder. And yet these are supposed to be, you see, the house of God, the house of Israel. These are the sons of Jacob, the sons of Israel.

Further, they were in the land of promise, but wholly and utterly unsuited to the place that they were in. If ever there was an exhibition of inconsistency with a profession, they gave that exhibition. When you think of all that the land of promise stood for in the thought of God and typified as to God's mind for His people, and then find people like this in occupation you say, 'This is a glaring contradiction! There is no correspondence between their position and their condition.' Projecting that right on to its spiritual interpretation, it is possible to be in Christ, and be a contradiction to Christ, altogether inconsistent with the position claimed and professed.

Next, the famine. In the sovereignty of God, a world condition of famine and threatened disaster reaches and involves the house of Israel. It touches them, perhaps, in a more acute way than it touched anyone else. You see the sovereignty of God. That is why I said nobody thinks that the life of Joseph is to be explained by just saving Egypt from famine. God is working deeply in relation to His own purpose, very deeply in relation to His house. And so, in His sovereignty, we repeat, this state of threatened disaster overtakes the house of Israel and touches that house very acutely. Really it is there where the eye of God is resting. He is working out here, doing things on a big scale, but really He has His eye upon them. He always has had. He remembers Abraham His friend, and this is where God's eye rests; this is the object of His thought at this time.

Dear friends, that principle is capable of very wide application. God very often brings great disasters and calamities upon the world in order to secure a people out from the world. So God is moving with profound thought and wisdom.

Joseph a Pioneer

Back to Joseph's function, for we are now ready to put our finger upon that. When Joseph himself, later in the sequence of events, explained the course of his life to his own brethren with whom he was reunited in Egypt, he put the whole thing, as we say, in a nutshell when he said, "God did send me before you to preserve life" (Gen. 45:5). Break that into two, and you have the whole function of Joseph: "Before you", ahead of you, "to preserve life". Well, what did that amount to? Joseph was given by God special, heavenly, spiritual understanding and wisdom, and it was only in that spirit of wisdom and understanding that he was ahead of his brethren. He had gone before. It was not just geographical. That is quite true if you talk about the story and its incidents literally, but you have got spiritual principles here.

He was ahead of his brethren firstly in this, that God gave him wisdom and understanding. The interpretation of various dreams was declared to be the Spirit of God. The heathen would put it "the spirit of the gods". Here is a man who has wisdom that all the magicians of Egypt do not possess. This is divine. He is ahead, not only of the world, but also of his own brethren. And being ahead in wisdom and understanding, he had bread which they not only were without, but which they also needed for their very survival. Do you now see his function, the real heart of Joseph's life?

So, because he had the spirit of wisdom and understanding, God-given discernment and knowledge, and because he had thereby the bread of life, he became the link between his brothers' tragic condition and God's full purpose for them. I think that is tremendously impressive. What a lesson! Here is the house of God in a deplorable spiritual condition, altogether a denial of God's thought for that house in Christ; completely inconsistent, no correspondence between profession, position and condition. That on the one side.

On the other side, there is God's full thought and intention for His people, for His church: a church alive, a church well-fed with plenty of spiritual food, flourishing. There is a big gap between the two. Is that not true? It is true today as it was in Joseph's time; I think more true. God needs a bridge over that gap. God needs something to come in between to be His link between the sad, tragic, pathetic condition of so many of His own people, and what His thought is for them. And Joseph is the man in the gap, and he represents therefore an instrument, a vessel, that God will sovereignly raise up to bridge that gap and to stand in between, having the spirit of wisdom and revelation and having the heavenly food that is needed to save the situation amongst the Lord's people.

God's Need of a Joseph Vessel Today

I think that this chapter brings us to the putting of our finger upon one of the most vital matters with which we can be occupied: God needs today a Joseph vessel. We are always reluctant to uncover the state of God's people, to be critical, censorious, to exercise any spirit of judgment; we say it with sadness and grief, but we cannot close our eyes to the fact that the Lord's people are not where the Lord would have them, speaking very generally. The condition of things amongst the Lord's people is not what the Lord meant to be. And we could be stronger than that, could we not? There is so much inconsistency, so much denial. Divisions, and not only divisions, being content to live quietly in their own divisions, but also strife between them, and jealousies. Shall we go farther?

Is not prejudice one of the most noticeable things amongst the people of God today? Prejudice just means that the whole thing has been judged without any consideration and the door closed without allowing the possibility that you may, after all, be wrong and the other people right. And there is a lot of that about, bringing the Lord's people into very serious limitation and certainly closing the door to what the Lord wants for many of His people. Oh, beware of prejudice! It was that that murdered Joseph and murdered Christ. I will not pursue the list, but it is true today, not in the world, but in the compass of Christian people. The Lord must do something about it.

And what does the Lord do? Because Joseph is not the only instance of the wording of this very principle found in the Bible. God works upon this principle from time to time, that is, in His sovereignty and providential ordering He raises up an instrument to be a bridge between the poor condition of His people and the thing that really He desires for them. He does it, and if we will only accept it and put away our prejudice and our suspicions, that is a thing that God does.

God wants to counter this contradiction between the position and the condition of His church, His people. And today He must have some to stand in the gap who know, who really know by way of the Cross, the open heaven. You know that the letter to the Ephesians stands right in this very position. What Paul is talking about in that letter is just this, that here is God's great eternal thought for His church. Oh, how marvellous is God's thought for His church... seated together with Christ in the heavenlies, blessed with every spiritual blessing! That is God's thought. But the letter shows that the church is not corresponding to that thought. There are lots of things that contradict that in that letter to the Ephesians, and so it is. But Paul comes in to bridge the gap, he stands between and he talks about the Spirit "of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him; having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe". Is that the condition of the church? Is that the state of the Lord's people? Well, it would not be there if it was not the Lord's will for them, and it would not be there if it were not possible for them to come to it.

But how will God get it? Through a people who are already there to be the embodiment of it, and to show it forth. And so Joseph became the very embodiment of the thing that God was after for his brethren.

The Cost of Such a Ministry

And that leads us to the peculiar cost and deep way by which such a function is fulfilled; for in type there were few in the Old Testament dispensation who knew more deeply the meaning of the Cross than did Joseph. Yes, the Cross was planted very deeply in his life. He suffered in a measure all that the Lord Jesus suffered later: the suspicion of his own brethren after the flesh, the prejudice, the ostracism, the hatred, the malice, the jealousy and the murder. Joseph went through it all, cast off among the dead, lowered into the pit as one slain, put into the dungeon and left by men, forsaken, cast out. And it says, "His soul entered into the iron" (Psa. 105:18). Poor Joseph! And he did not know what it was all for. He did not know what was coming. He did not know of the glories that should follow. He went through it in utter loneliness and if the Cross means one thing more than another, that is where we feel it most, the utter desolation of soul where no one can go with us in understanding.

Yes, there was peculiar cost in suffering, in experience, bound up with this function. We can say that others do not go that way; even others of the Lord's people do not go that way. It is for this particular kind of instrument. It goes by a particular kind of way and it has so much that a multitude of Christians know nothing about. Their Christian life is more like a playground than a winepress.

Yes, Joseph knew the Cross deeply and terribly. Disliked, suspected, cast out, hated, killed, made to suffer immediately by them of his own family, and made to suffer resultantly at the hands of the world. You get the interpretation. I need not say more.

The Issue

What was the issue? 'God sent me before you to be used in this way.' We have to pioneer the way for others. Such an instrument of such necessity to God and value to God, has to go ahead in a lonely way. It may be an individual or it may be a company; it may be a little nucleus. It is all the same. It is going ahead, and all going ahead is a very lonely thing. You are tasting something that so many others have never tasted. Yes, "sent me before you, in advance of you, to preserve life". You see the Lord's thought for His people is life and life abundantly, fulness of life. Who will say that the church is in the good of that? What is the way? Well, it is the way of the Cross.

I do not want to finish on that note, although that, of course, is the heart of the matter, that it is the way of the Cross and you cannot avoid it. The measure of your value to the Lord in relation to His full and ultimate purpose depends upon the measure in which the Cross has been applied to your life. That is an unavoidable fact and you cannot escape it. But when the day of need was really manifested, Joseph was the man for the hour. All that had been God's secret, unexplained preparation for a coming hour. Oh, how true that is, how true that has ever been, how true it is today!

There is a dear man of God in China today lying in prison. He went ahead of Christians in China; he sought to pioneer the way for God's fuller thought for His people. He went a way in which he met all the prejudice, all the suspicion, all the hard blows, all the exclusions and ostracism at the hands of Christian brethren and Christian missionaries. The day of overflowing came, Communism walked in and spread itself like a terrible scourge over the land, and all the missionaries had to go and hand over to that man! He is the key to the situation. They asked him to carry on. Here is an up-to-date illustration of this truth.

You go ahead with God, you go right on with God, you accept what it costs to go right on with God and a time will come when you, by the grace of God, having been thoroughly crucified and dealt with in your own nature and ambitions and brought very, very low before the Lord, you may be the key to a big situation, to a need which God foresees is coming.

That is the message, that is the function of a Joseph, and it is no small one, is it? Tremendous! Well, God give us grace to see His need and the need of His people; to accept all that the Cross means in order to be in a position available to God for not only the salvation of the unsaved, but also the salvation of His own people into His full purpose.

Chapter 7 - The Cross in Moses' Life

We have been seeing that each one of these steps in the onward movement of God by the law of the Cross brought in some particular phase of the movement of God, and every one of the persons mentioned had a particular and peculiar function to fulfil on the basis of the Cross to final fulness.

In this chapter we come to Moses. This seems to be necessary by way of repetition that we never rightly and sufficiently understand and appreciate the life of any one of these Old Testament men until we can put our finger definitely upon the function that he fulfilled; that is, the particular thing which he represented in the onward movement of God. We have seen that to be very true of them so far.

When we come to Moses we have, first of all, to begin with discovering the exact function, significance and meaning of Moses. And that significance is found in the special designation which was given him, a designation which applies or attaches to Moses in a peculiar way. It is used of others, but it is particularly used of Moses. We saw that Abraham carried a double designation - father, "the father of all them that believe" and friend, "the friend of God".

Moses the Servant of the Lord

Now, we are very familiar, I think, with this: that the word or designation which attaches peculiarly to Moses is that of 'servant'. "Moses the servant of the Lord" - that phrase, in that form or in a little different form, occurs no fewer than twenty times and they are almost all of them in one book of the Old Testament. "Moses the servant of the Lord"; "Moses my servant". So then the function of Moses must quite clearly be that of service in some quite clearly defined way. It is for us to discover what that is.

So in this chapter we are in the presence of that particular aspect of the Cross which has to do with the servant and the service of God - the Cross and the way of life for the service of God. That is our subject. We come then to try to discover from the life of Moses the true meaning of service, and what a true servant of God really is. We can arrive at that in the best way and in the first place, by taking note of the bounds of the life of Moses, the two ends in which his whole life is compassed. At one end we have a people, an elect people in bondage to this world, an elect unreleased. At the other end of his life, we have the elect ready to take possession of the heavenly realm of their vocation, on the borders of the land, ready to go in, for we know well that Canaan is always a figure of the heavenly kingdom, the heavenly realm. Those two things bound the life of Moses, and therefore his service is within the compass of those limits, those confines or those defines.

The Emancipation of an Elect

It begins with the emancipation of the elect out of Egypt, out of the world. I do not want you to stumble at the word 'elect'. Please just close your mind to all your doctrines of election for a moment, and just be satisfied with the fact that there is such a thing as an elect and that from eternity past God has a people chosen for Himself. You can just leave it there. Perhaps it will be safe to say this, that the elect ultimately will not be the only people who are saved, as the book of the Revelation makes clear, but the elect are the elect and Israel is a type of the elect; an elect people, and this is a very real strength and directive to service.

You and I will never be told who the elect are. You and I must dismiss that whole thing from our minds, with this exception: that we must know that God has a people hidden in this world and they may be anywhere and everywhere, and it is for us to get on with the business and leave the sovereignty of God to discover the elect. Leave it at that, but it is a very important thing.

The most unlikely place in all this world for there to be any elect was Corinth in the days of Paul and yet the Lord appeared to Paul in a vision by night, and said "I have much people in this city" (Acts 18:10) before one soul was saved. I have - not, I am going to get, but I have. This is an eternal thing, you see, and we shall never, I repeat, be informed that there are some elect in such and such a place. Our business is to believe that God may have, yes, does have, His elect hidden in the most unlikely places. But there enters, you see, the importance of service being upon the basis of direction by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit knows. And the church at the beginning was a Holy Spirit directed church in all its ministry and service, and never lighted upon a place where there was nothing as the result. God knew. Even in the barrenness and desolation of a desert, there was one man passing in his chariot, and the Holy Ghost directed a servant there. I only illustrate the principle. Holy Spirit directed service is never in vain, but it must be Holy Spirit directed service.

The elect were emancipated first, we need not stay to consider the emancipation. What an emancipation it was! What power from God was required! The corresponding verse or passage in the New Testament and spiritual realm is "the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to that working of the strength of his might which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead" (Eph. 1:19-20). The exceeding greatness of His power, and in Egypt God's exceeding greatness of power was demonstrated, and the 'exceeding' meant that God had extended all the other power of world and devil and gone beyond it. He does that to get his elect. It requires that to get His elect. Though we may not feel the immensity of that power, it is at work for our emancipation. The more we know about it, the more we know that it will take the exceeding greatness of God's power to get us placed where God wants us to be if we have an adequate apprehension of where and what that place is.

The beginning of the servanthood of Moses, then, was in the emancipation of an elect. An old prophetic phrase was "out of Egypt have I called my son" (Hos. 11:1). Moses' challenge to Pharaoh was from God, "Let my son go, that he may serve me" (Ex. 4:23). Service begins with separation from the world, emancipation from the kingdom of this world, but it is a very thoroughgoing thing. Oh, that the church would recognize this, that God's last word about this matter of emancipation and separation is "there shall not a hoof be left behind" (Ex. 10:26). You see, Moses' service was a very thoroughgoing service, and it went that far, that not a hoof was left behind, and that is service to God. 'See that the people are utterly out, and there is no link remaining.'

The Constituting of One People

After the emancipation came the formation; the constituting of this people as an ordered people and a solid unit. They were a rabble, a mixed multitude, but when they are ready to go over into the heavenly country, they are a unit, they are an ordered people in step; one people. The formation of the people of God like that is a tremendous business, and all the life of Moses was drawn out in that work of bringing these people to formation, constituted according to Christ, with the laws of the kingdom of heaven.

And with the formation there was the education. Their teaching, their instruction in very practical ways - not theoretically, but practically they were taught these principles of the kingdom which they were to inherit. I cannot stay with all that. You see there is an immense amount of detail there. I can only gather it up into those words: emancipation, formation, education, and that was the service to God; that is the service of God.

God's Training of Moses for Servanthood

Well, having said that, we can pass from the service to the servant, and begin to understand the life of Moses now. We immediately understand why it was that God precipitated His emancipation of Egypt, and how thoroughgoing was the separation of Moses from the kingdom of Egypt. At the end of forty years in the backside of the desert there was not a hoof of Egypt left in Moses. God simply emptied that man out of his old life and his old relationship. Yes, it was a very deep and drastic work of separation that was represented by the taking of him out of Egypt and keeping him so far removed in a desert place for so long a time. During that time of separation a great work of discipline was going on.

We have said 'emptying', but not only the emptying of Egypt, but the emptying of himself. Separation between him and Egypt truly, but now the work was being carried into an inner realm; a great divide was being made between Moses, the old man, and another man: Moses the servant of God. Do remember that service is always governed by this: a deep inward separation. It is not enough for us to come out from the world and become parts of the people of God. Something more than that is necessary. The whole self-life in us has got to be definitely dealt with, and a great separation has to take place there.

The impulsive, hot, fiery Moses has to become the quiet, patient, meek Moses... learning, perhaps above all things, meekness and patience. What a discipline of those forty years of self-emptying. Presently when he really enters upon his life's work, his life service, one of the things that he will need most will be patience, and there is nothing more calculated to produce patience than the discipline of inaction. We do not learn patience when we can keep busy, when we can gratify all our impulses by doing something. But when we are not allowed to do anything, when we are cut off from ministry and work and service, and shut up to the discipline of inaction and the discipline of delay, God is preparing for better service than we would ever have fulfilled otherwise.

So it was with Moses. If ever a man needed patience in his service, that man did. You remember that one outburst, when the old Moses of Egypt flared up and said, "Hear now, ye rebels". You can see what the man was in himself, what was possible in that man, that of which he was capable. It is a marvellous thing that it was only once that it happened. It shows that something had been done very deeply in him. But here it was, the preparation of the servant was like that. That man was going to need meekness above all things.

There were going to be times when jealousies over him and his position would flare up. "Hath the Lord indeed spoken only by Moses?" (Num. 12:2), not by us? - jealousies. In that hour the most fatal thing that could happen would be for Moses to seek to vindicate himself, seek to establish his own position, to fight for his own ministry - the most fatal thing. Thank God, in that hour, in that very hour, when the jealousies were rife, the word is written, "Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men that were upon the face of the earth." He simply turned to the Lord, and said, 'Well, Lord, if You put me into this work, I did not choose it, if You put me into it, if You gave me this work to do for You, appointed me for this, it is for You to see that my ministry is fulfilled; I am not going to fight for it. I leave it to You, Lord. You just take responsibility for what You have done where I am concerned", and the Lord did it. But, mark you, that is not Moses naturally, not a bit of it. That is something that has been wrought in him very deeply and very thoroughly.

Do you see a little the meaning of service, the meaning of service to God? We have got to draw a very broad distinction between doing a lot of things, as we think "for the Lord", rushing about and being busy and organizing and conducting and speaking and preaching and taking meetings and classes and all this, and we call this "Christian service". We have got to draw a very broad line of difference between that and real service to the Lord. Real service to the Lord is the emancipation of a people from this world for Him and the formation of that people according to Christ for a heavenly vocation, and a heavenly vocation now, not afterwards.

You can test your service by this: the measure of the emancipation of the people who come under your hands and the measure of the formation of Christ that is going on. These are things which are service. And then you will discover that, whereas the other line of things with all the movement and activity and feverish and excited work does not call for very much patience of this kind. It does not call for much real self-emptying, no, it does not call for a great deal of meekness: rather I think it ministers to the opposite. It makes us self-important. It makes us proud. It makes us self-sufficient. It makes us self-assertive. It makes us jealous for our position and our ministry, and resentful if it is interfered with. Yes, Christian work does that with many. The true service can be tested by these things, and the true servant can be tested by the measure of those virtues of Christ: utterly selfless, self-empty.

The Crisis in the Life of Moses

Well now, the crisis in the life of Moses - that is the point of this message. Exodus 4:24 says: "And it came to pass on the way at the lodging-place, that the Lord met him, and sought to kill him." This is one of the most extraordinary and most difficult passages in the whole Bible, viewed from one standpoint. Here is a man who had been miraculously preserved at birth, who had been providentially educated and trained for leadership in childhood, in youth and in manhood. A man who had been deeply disciplined in patience by long years of delay as, apparently, a forgotten man, then brought directly and immediately into touch with the Lord Himself at the bush of fire; personally commissioned to his life-work by God Himself, and a great life-work at that. Then suddenly, after all that, with all that, confronted by God in some unexplained way, and it says, "God sought to kill him." He is on his way to Pharaoh. He has got all that history, he has got that commission, he has met God face to face, and on the way he comes to the lodging-place between the wilderness and Egypt, and Jehovah met him and sought to kill him. His life is suddenly threatened with a sudden end at the hand of God Himself. What can you make of it? There must be some very vital principle involved to account for so strange a thing and such a drastic experience, and there is.

All this servant and service, all this preparation, all this need of God, all this, and then God met him and sought to kill him. You can have all that, be called in that way, prepared in that way, commissioned in that way, and the thing does not go through. If this were not in the Bible, it would be difficult to believe, would it not? It does seem so terrible. Can it be true? But it is, and there is a reason. The reason is in the immediate context.

Sufficient to say it was the whole question of circumcision, and carried right over into the New Testament, we know what it means. Col. 2:11 - the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with Him in baptism, which Paul explains to be the putting away of the whole body of the flesh. There was a place in the life of Moses, and a very vital place, where the Cross had not been applied and everything is hung up on that. Everything is hung up on this: that right there at the centre of his life, the place where the Cross ought to be registered, had no such registration. I cannot go into it fully and explain it. You see, service and the servant of God, which we are speaking about now, is not just the matter of our salvation. We are speaking about the call of God to His service, to this great work to which the church is called, to which you and I are called. We will touch on that again in a minute. In this kind of work there is something to be done where we are concerned that may be lacking in a great many people called Christian workers, but in this kind of work God is very particular.

Do you see what it means from God's side? God is taking absolutely no risks about this whole thing that is in view. The thing that God is set upon is so tremendous, so utter. It has got to go right through, right through without any staying and cutting short. It has to go right through and right on to the eternal ages, this work of God. It has got to develop and grow and it has to be characterised by life and ever more life. This is the thing that God is after. He is not after just little fragments for the time being. He has got the whole thing in view and He is taking no risks where that great purpose of His is concerned, no risks at all. And one little bit of uncrucified Self in the servant, in the vessel, is a risky thing for God; a very risky thing. God knows how much may be spoiled and held up if you and I and all His servants, whether individual or collective, are uncrucified people.

I repeat, God was taking no risks at all. Of course, there is much more to it.

We saw in Genesis 17 how God gave the covenant sign to Abraham, the covenant sign of circumcision, and made everything for the future contingent upon that covenant sign. It was there. Moses knew it and had neglected it. God has made known His will and it is there. We have got to acquaint ourselves with it. We are held responsible for anything that God has said, and service is a very responsible thing, you know. God deals with His true servants in a far more drastic way than He deals with anyone else. The very law of His Son's Cross was in danger of being overlooked or neglected at that point in the life of Moses, and God will not have it. He sees the whole thing at a glance and will take no risks. Oh, what a tremendous thing is the Cross in relation to the service of God!

Well, thank God, the thing was put right on the spot there and then at the lodging-place, and Moses was released, his life was spared. He went on and fulfilled his life's purpose. Are you believing this to be a true interpretation of the Word of God? Do let me remind you that what God is really needing and seeking and must really have is this kind of service; that which gets a people right out and right through to the place where... what? Well, if the figure of the land stands for anything at all, it means what the letter to the Ephesians I believe interprets it to mean: the church now operating and functioning in the realm of principalities and powers and bringing down that whole kingdom and hierarchy. You cannot cast out the devil if you are living in the flesh, if you are not a crucified man or woman or instrument. The devil would turn and laugh at you and make an awful mess of you if the Cross is not there.

They had got to come in and dispossess that land of seven nations mightier than themselves. And does not that correspond with our position? What are we before the hierarchy of Satan? What are we children of God in the presence of principalities and the world-rulers of this darkness and the host of wicked spirits in the heavenlies? What chance have we got with nations mightier than ourselves? But crucified men and women can do it; a crucified church can do it. That is our vocation now, to set a Kingdom above that kingdom.

Moses' Touch with the Throne

One very particular point in the servanthood of Moses was his touch with the Throne; I mean his place with God in divine authority. That rod of Moses always symbolized the authority of God in his hand. That rod brought the authority of God against the Egyptians and all the gods of the Egyptians. Over the Red Sea it was stretched. Ever and always that rod spoke of the Throne of God in the hand of Moses - that is not a wrong way to put it. What tremendous divine authority was exercised by that man! It works itself out to the undoing of that other great kingdom of evil.

Now, says the New Testament, that is what the church is called for, to have such union with the Throne in heaven. Christ... far above all rule and authority and principalities and powers and such union with Him that this thing is happening, the other kingdom is losing ground, the other kingdom is being cast out. Oh, we say it very carefully. We are not of the people who lightly and glibly begin to hurl epithets at the devil. God forbid! But because it is such a tremendous thing and is really the essence of service, that is where service really reaches, because it is that the Cross must have a very real place, and that is the explanation of all this. God saw that if, in principle, the Cross had not been planted there right over the life of Moses, and deeply so, the whole of the work to which he was called would be jeopardised. That people would not be taken out, that kingdom would simply prevent it, that kingdom would not be formed and constituted in the wilderness, that people would not go through as a solid unit. And so He saw that it was worthwhile to straddle the path of Moses even at that point and say, 'Look here, a closed door to service apart from the Cross.' It is a very deep lesson, a very solemn lesson.

But there is the other side. Thank God, it was put right and the work was done. Eventually Moses brought the people as a unit to the borders of the land and handed over to Joshua and they went in. Well, it is all types, and all types and figures are limited things; they break down, but it is a type of the church in this dispensation and that which it typifies. The church is going through on the same principle.

My closing word must just be this, that while we have spoken in such broad terms, or even specific terms, we have to apply this. Such a servant and such servants and such service may be individual. It may be that. God will lay His hand upon a person to be the one whom He uses in this way. It may be upon a local company that the hand of God comes for this very purpose, that by reason of a local company, a local assembly of His people, He will make the bridge between His elect in bondage and His elect in the heavenly inheritance. A tremendous thing to think about. It may be that God in His sovereignty has brought a local company together, they have not fully known why, and it may be that in that sovereignty they are in that place, wherever it is, to be God's bridge for His elect, to be His servant collectively, to bring a people out, His people out, fully out, utterly out, from the kingdom of this world.

It is no mere verbiage to say that all Christians are not out of the kingdom of this world. To bring a people right clean out for God, and to form, or for God to form, something corresponding to His Son and make it into a unit out of a number of individuals. One unit, instructed by the Holy Spirit in the laws of the heavenly kingdom - and there in that place to be God's instrument of breaking the authority of Satan. This is what God has called us for. That is the service of the church, whether it be in its individual, special ministries, or whether it be in the local companies, or further, whether it be a matter of your being a part of a much larger work that is worldwide.

Do not think that Christians are called together just to have meetings and Bible study and nice messages and just live there as nice Christians, happy together, very pleased with themselves, seeking the Lord, praying and singing and so on. That is not what you are there for. Get the vision, the mighty vision, of your heavenly vocation which all concentrates and focuses down upon a little group here and there; a heavenly vocation, something much bigger than yourselves. If only little assemblies got the vision of their heavenly calling and vocation, how they would be freed and enlarged, and what effectiveness would come in. We know this to be true, we have seen it happen and we are seeing it happen, and we pass it to you. No, not just meeting together very happily, having good times, but how much is there a registration amongst the powers of evil? How much is there a testimony in the kingdom of Satan? What do principalities and powers think of you? And you will soon know if they think anything about you. Do not make any mistake about it - you touch them and you will know that they think about you. But what does it mean? It means the Cross; it does mean the Cross.

You must be crucified servants, you must be crucified companies. Nothing that counters the meaning, the deep meaning of the Cross must be there or your vocation will be arrested, your service will be held up. God cannot go on. He will say again, 'There is no way, the door is closed, you will have to stay where you are and die.'

May the Lord say His word into our hearts. It is a difficult word to say, but I must trust Him to interpret and explain. I am quite sure that it is His word - what He wants to say to us. God has a great purpose for His church, in every part, to fulfil in this dispensation. That purpose is to get His church, His people, into that position where they take the kingdom. And that, I say again, means a deep work of God in the life of such.

Chapter 8 - "A Night to be Remembered"

In this last chapter we must seek to focus everything on one quite simple and precise word. Those who have been here throughout, or earlier, will probably be able to detect in what I am saying the stages of the line through which we have moved, even if I do not in any way go back. There will be reference made, however.

But for this present time all is being gathered up into one fragment in one verse in the book of Exodus: "a night to be much observed" (Ex. 12:42). Another translation is "a night to be much remembered".

If there existed in your history a night which would be remembered and celebrated for 3650 years, it would be a very great night! Or let us put that in another way; if a night was of such importance that God said it should be remembered for 3650 years at least, it certainly would be a very great night! But that is nothing; there may be a night in our history which goes far beyond that. Three thousand, six hundred and fifty years is just a span of time; when we come into God's purpose we overlap time altogether and the governing phrase is "unto the ages of the ages". That is an important night, if at any given point we come into that. I mean that the time in which we move into that is a very, very great time; whether we call it a night or not, it is a time much to be remembered.

A Night Long Awaited

Coming back to this phrase in the history of Israel, we know that that night, that great night so much to be remembered and observed for so many centuries afterwards, was the night or the time of the realization of a long-desired and long-awaited deliverance; the culmination of that period mentioned by the Lord to Abraham about his seed. Four hundred and eighty years culminated at that time - a long time for which to wait, a long time to look forward to an issue. God has been waiting much longer than that to secure what He may secure tonight. We shall see what that is and it may be, dear friends, that there is the other side to that, that whether we are aware of it or not, we may have been waiting for this hour for a very long time.

You see, the New Testament distinctly and definitely speaks of our having been chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4). That is a long time ago, and yet with all that time lying behind, people are now coming into the good, the meaning and the value of that eternal choosing of God and many of us know that we have moved into something with the Lord. There has been a time of a crisis and a definite movement on our part, but have we realized that that was not just some hap in time or something to which we came or which came to us at a certain point? That sprung right out of eternity past, that was an eternal moment, an eternal hour, an eternal day! It is not just something in time. And what is on my heart is to try to bring before you something of the immensity of that to which we are called; that whether we come into it for the first time or not, we come into a new grasping of it and a new sense of what it is for which God has been waiting and, in a sense, for which we have been waiting a very long time.

We have been waiting - if you can understand talk like this - from before we were born for something which God meant for us. And if we grasp it (and we do not always grasp it in the day in which we were born again) we know something has happened, something very great has happened. We have a sense that this is what we were born for. But we have a very limited apprehension of the meaning of it and there awaits a time, or times, in our lives when something of that breaks upon us in a new way. And we feel as though all that had gone before was very, very small in comparison with this. This is the thing for which we were not only born naturally, but for which we were born again spiritually.

I remember a case of a dear servant of God who had been very greatly used of the Lord, who was very well known, who came to such a day when there broke upon him something of the real meaning, the greater fulness that he had been called to in Christ. It made such a difference that the next morning at the breakfast table his two sons said, 'What has happened to you, father? You seem to be a different man. What has happened to you?' He went back to the pulpit of his great and famous church, and the people began to say, 'What has happened to the pastor? He seems to be a new man.' As he went up and down the country where he was known, the same thing was being asked, 'What has happened to Mr. So-and-so?' And he said to me personally, 'You know, what has happened to me, although my conversion was a very real thing, has made my conversion as nothing compared to what has happened to me these last few days.'

Maybe we are waiting for something like that. Well, it would be a day or a night much to be remembered, would it not, if it were like that? Well, we are waiting, and God is waiting.

Some Reasons for the Waiting

But why? Why four hundred and eighty years in the case of Israel? Why the waiting? If God meant it to be from all eternity, then why delay? If He has already laid His hand upon the people and brought them into a relationship with Himself as He had done with Israel, why the waiting? There is a mystery about God's times, you know. Of course, it is the mystery of God's foreknowledge.

I do not want to tie you up in knots, but there is this fact. Whether you can explain it or not, it is a fact that two things synchronize in the mysterious ways of God, and those two things are: the readiness of man and the hour of God. The hour is a fixed hour with God, and yet in His foreknowledge He fixed the hour according to what He foreknows to be the readiness of the people. And there is a lot behind that, you know, the synchronizing of the readiness of man and the hour of God. God fixed the time, four hundred and eighty years, but He knew exactly what the situation would be at the end of every day of that period. And because He knew, it came to pass according to His timetable. Can we explain this?

Well, it is just this. God, as we have so often said, is very practical. God is neither theoretical nor willy-nilly. He is very practical. It is very necessary for man to be in such a state as to make the purposes and will of God very real in the history of man. We all know that although there is presented to us the purpose of God and the will of God and the plan of God and the mind of God, and we know that that is what God wants for us, we cannot just take it up and enter into it when we want to. It becomes absolutely necessary that a condition has been arrived at by us to make that thing real. It would otherwise be just a theory, something that came upon our way and that is that. But when God does a thing, He does it in a way and at a time when that thing is terrific because of the preparation that has been made for it and because man is now ready for it. And if it does not happen now because of man's preparedness, then nothing short of disaster will take place. It becomes an acute crisis because of what God has been doing in preparation.

You see, the Cross of the Lord Jesus had always been there. In principle it had been there all through the centuries from the fall of Adam. It had always been there for Israel in Egypt. The Cross was not introduced there in Egypt in the Passover for the first time. It had always been there for the people of Israel, but the people were not ready for it. Therefore, while being there, it was still latent and still not bringing them out by a mighty deliverance. The Cross is here with all its tremendous significance and meaning, but how many of us are ready for it? He waits until we are ready. There has to be a history that will make it very real indeed.

Of course that applies to the unsaved, that conversion and new birth is not just something that begins and ends in that moment. God has been already working and leading up to that. It is like the last flake of snow on the avalanche, down it goes, but there has been a long history of building up in the secret, not always perceived, but when it happens that soul says, 'I understand a lot now, I see the meaning of a lot now, I realize that there is something lying behind this now. I can explain quite a lot of things now in the light of this.' And what is true in the case of salvation at its beginning - conversion, new birth, however you put it - is true of these crises in the life of a Christian. I am not talking about just a solitary second blessing. I am talking about blessings upon blessings which are marked by new crises toward which God has been moving. Whatever may be your point of progress, there is something more yet that will make all that is past seem small in comparison. Do you believe that? A night much to be remembered can come again and again to a Christian as he goes on.

But what was this history of Israel? What was it that had delayed? Why was it they had not reached this point sooner? What were the things that had to be dealt with before that night, that memorable night, could come? Were they resting upon their Hebrew birth, and thinking perhaps that because they were children of Abraham, the seed of Abraham by birth, that they were right and they had got everything by birth when they were born into the family of Abraham, that they then had everything?

There is a certain teaching abroad today that teaches that when you are born again you have everything, and all this talk about more and more and further blessing and further life and light and so on is dangerous. You get everything when you are born again, and a lot of people have settled down on that. Well, the 'wrongness' (if I may coin a word) of that is quite manifest to all observers. It is limitation and very often contradiction, inconsistency. Were they just settled down on their Hebrew birth? 'We are the people, we are the elect, everything belongs to us, we have got it all by our birth.' Very well, that will have to be eliminated. It may take a long time, four hundred and eighty years or more. It will have to be eliminated before there can be the night much to be remembered which stands out so clearly in history so vividly.

There may have been other reasons, other causes and other things to be dealt with. They were in a very difficult situation in Egypt. Perhaps they were believing that the circumstances in which they found themselves, so hard, so difficult... meant that God had forsaken them and they had settled down into a kind of quiescent acceptance of a bad situation and lost hope. Maybe they were saying: 'Give up everything, this all seems to say so clearly that whatever the Lord may have meant at the beginning or at one time, He has given it up now and He has given us up and left us.' That may be a condition of some, that you have lost your grip because of things that have happened, things perhaps you have done, things which have come into your life, situations and circumstances which have become a part of your history. You say, 'Well, whatever God meant at one time, I have got to give that up now, abandon that now: look at this and that. This speaks quite to the contrary, that God has no real purpose where I am concerned. I just let it go.' You have lost your grip upon the intention of God in your salvation because of circumstances, of happenings or conditions. You have settled down to accept the situation and make the best of it: a fatalistic acceptance. 'Well, it may be all right for others, it may be God meant it, but God has given it up and given me up.' That has got to be destroyed.

We will see before we are through, that that was a thing that was destroyed. It has got to be repudiated, my dear friends. If God has said that He called you and if God has laid His hand upon you, then whatever the circumstances of your life and whatever your failures, whatever the thing which you may call the incident or the accidents, whatever the difficulties which may be around you, God is capable of realizing His purpose if you will believe and if you will lay hold.

If ever there was a hopeless case for God, it was Jacob. But, you see, that was just the wisdom of God in laying hold of such a one as Jacob with ninety years of intrigue and deception behind him. God laid hold of him to demonstrate that in such a hopeless case God can realize His purpose when He gets His way. If only like Jacob there is a laying hold of God and His purpose in that night - "I will not let Thee go", 'I am not yielding to despair, the despair which might well spring out of my wretched, ruined life, the mess I have made of things; nevertheless I will not let Thee go except Thou bless me.' He laid hold of God, and even a Jacob can be in the direct line of God's purpose.

Perhaps they had let go, foreclosed on God, and God had to do something about it. Perhaps they were thinking, fatalistically thinking, 'Well, something will turn up some day. It is a long road that has no turning. I suppose we shall come to the bend in the road one day. Well, we must wait for something to happen.' Passivity... how true it is that that postpones the night much to be remembered. With many it is just like that, that awful thief of time, passivity... waiting for something to happen. Have you got into that state where you are just waiting, hoping that, well, things will be better one day? You will go on waiting until that is dealt with. That will not do.

God's Precipitation of the Issue

Well, God took a very definite action in this matter to precipitate the issue. He changed the régime. For a long time they had had a fairly comfortable time with a Pharaoh after Joseph. For a time after Joseph, during Joseph's life and a little while after, it had been pretty good in the land of Goshen and they had settled down. But to precipitate this issue, God had changed the régime and there arose a Pharaoh that did not know Joseph. God began to make things difficult, to make things hard, to stir things up, to start this movement which would end in their being ready for God's day. Now, in all that, I have tried to point out that it is true and it is necessary for a condition to obtain in order for God's purpose to mature, for the "night much to be remembered" to arrive.

The Night of the Cross

That brings us to this, that that night much to be remembered was the night of the Cross. In the types and the figures of the Passover and the Lamb, that was the turning point in everything when they really recognized that their way through was the way of the Cross. Their way out was the way of the Cross, that in that which set forth the Cross of the Lord Jesus was their deliverance, was their emancipation, was their life, and was the realization of their destiny. It was all concentrated in that which was the heart of that night - the Cross, the blood and the lamb, the sprinkling and the eating. The blood always speaking of another life than our own. That is our hope. It takes even Christians a long time to get there in many cases. Another life, and in that other life there is all that we lack and there is all that which transcends what we are in ourselves. It is in that other life that there is everything. After all, it is not in us; even if we had never failed, it would not be in us. If everything had gone quite well, we would never have got through. That is what we have been saying.

Cain - everything went fairly well for him. He was able to till his ground and cultivate his garden and to develop his fruit, and very beautiful fruit at that, and it was all very successful. But it did not get him through. Abel got through because of this other life. Oh, for an adequate apprehension of this wonderful truth which sometimes seems so elementary, and yet it governs all the purpose of God; that Christ in what He is, is the answer to everything. 'Not what I am, O Lord, but what Thou art; that, that alone, can be my soul's true rest.' And I say it takes years for some people to get settled on that. They are all the time poking round to try and find in themselves something with which they can answer to the requirements of God, and so they are harassed and plagued and beggared by their own failures and weakness and sinfulness and the wrongs they have done. And in being so obsessed and occupied with themselves and their own messed-up lives, their eyes have got right away from the fact that, after all, it is not about what they are; good, bad or indifferent. It is all resident in another life, and that is the only way, but it is the way through.

Why not cut short this delay and provide the Lord with what He is waiting for, and you will find in the mystery of God's times that as you move there, God is already there, and the thing happens. Your emancipation, your deliverance, takes place. It is all in the virtue and value of that other life represented by the shed and sprinkled blood of the Lord Jesus.

The Lamb of God, the eating of the Lamb... it is another aspect of the same thing. What is it? It is a Lamb without spot, without blemish. You see, there is no getting through while you are eating yourself. What are you eating after all, if you are feeding on yourself? Just corruption, feeding on corruption. It is not nice, is it? But this is the point: the only possible way of getting through is by feeding upon another nature. There is no possible relationship with God except on the basis of God's own nature. We have got to be partakers of the divine nature in order to have any place with God. Union with God is upon the basis of what He Himself is in Christ.

We have to make that the substance and sustenance of our very being - feeding, that is partaking of the divine nature, making the divine nature and what Christ is in the perfection of His humanity, making Him thus that upon which you feed, that which you rest upon for your very existence. Is this very simple? But this is it. This was the way through, and until we come there, the great night is postponed. When we come there, it is a night much to be remembered. It is all the value of the blood as another life of the flesh of the Son of Man as another nature. "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves" (John 6:53). "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood..." It is all figurative language, but it is very, very real in the realm of spiritual things. The way of life is union with God, but union with God is on the basis of God's own nature which is provided for us in the broken body of the Lord Jesus and in His shed blood.

But you know that doctrine, do you not? That is no fresh light and information for you. You know the doctrines of faith. Ah, yes, I know, but what was the command on that night much to be remembered? "Ye shall eat it with your loins girt, and your staff in your hand" (Ex. 12:11). You are girded up on the ground of this, girded up in faith that this is your way out, you are girded, you are gathered up, you are concentrated, and you are poised. Your loins are girt and the staff is in your hand. You are in faith going out. That is where your passivity is set aside by the Cross, where your fatalism is set aside by the Cross. All your despair is set aside by the Cross, and everything else that makes the time run on without event. The Cross says, 'Look here, here is your provision, you gird yourself, take it, eat it with your loins girt and your staff in your hand.' What a position of faith, is it not? How practical this thing is. You are going to act upon this, and wonderfully enough, as they did eat, as they did appropriate the blood and gird their loins and took their staff, the door opened and they went out.

I know how very simple and elementary this message may be, but I am bringing it right along the Christian life, because God has a very great purpose for His people by their eternal calling and by their wonderful redemption. A very great purpose... so much greater than the majority of Christians have realized. I do not think I am saying a false thing when I say that perhaps the larger number of Christians have got little further than to know that they are saved, and to be very glad that they are saved, to rejoice in being saved. Comparatively few are really in the good of God's great, great purpose from eternity, "Called according to his purpose" (Rom. 8:28). It is not for us now to say what that purpose is, to explain it. It is sufficient to state the fact. We are called with a very great purpose, not just even to get out of Egypt and the clutches of the devil, but with an object, a tremendous object, nothing less than the infinite fulness of God's Son, Jesus Christ, and an eternal vocation. It is a great thing to which we are called in Christ, but how many Christians are really in it, and if they know they are in it, are tasting of the meaning of it: that this life is an inexhaustible life, that there are new vistas all the time?

I am not exaggerating. The heavens are opened and we see more and more, and ever more, of what it is to which we are called. It is just wonderful. It is like that, and this message must finish on that note. You are not meant just to be saved and get to heaven, to know your sins are forgiven and to have a certain number of blessings which come with salvation. But there lies before you and reaches out through eternal ages such a purpose of God concerning us all that "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him" (1 Cor. 2:9).

It is a very great thing to which we are called, and it is a night much to be remembered when that breaks upon us! But we have got to realize that it is all secured unto us by the Cross of the Lord Jesus and believe that this present stage or phase or position is not all that God means. God means much more than this, so we gird our loins; we take our staff and we say, "We believe that; we are going on into that by the grace of God. We will not linger any longer in this whether it be good or better, which is not God's best."

The Lord stir us very mightily and the Lord make this a night much to be remembered. It can be, I assure you, because it has been for some of us in a very, very wonderful way, and we do not believe that it is all summed up in one night. There are yet fulnesses to which the Lord is going to bring us, but it must ever be firstly on the same basis: not on the ground of ourselves and what we are or what we are not, but on the ground of what He is. And then it must be the girding of faith in appropriation and setting ourselves in the direction of the onward way, by the grace of God.