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The Gospel of the Glory

by T. Austin-Sparks

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazines, 1950-51, Vol 28-1 - 29-1

Contents

Chapter 1 - The Character of the Gospel

Chapter 2 - The Good News of a Satisfied God

Chapter 3 - The Glory of God's Sabbath

Chapter 4 - The Lord's Need of a 'Zion' People

Chapter 5 - The Vocation of the Church

Chapter 6 - The Glory of Life Triumphant Over Death

Chapter 7 - The Mystery of the Gospel

Chapter 1 - The Character of the Gospel

"...THE GOSPEL OF THE GLORY OF THE BLESSED GOD, which was committed to my trust" (1 Tim. 1:11).

"In whom ye also, having heard the word of the truth, THE GOSPEL OF YOUR SALVATION, - in whom, having also believed, ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, which is an earnest of our inheritance, unto the redemption of God's own possession, unto the praise of his glory" (Eph. 1:13-14).

"With all prayer and supplication praying at all seasons in the Spirit, and watching thereunto in all perseverance and supplication for all the saints, and on my behalf, that utterance may be given unto me in opening my mouth, to make known with boldness THE MYSTERY OF THE GOSPEL" (Eph. 6:18-19).

There are one or two things which we must note at the outset in connection with the above. Those passages are all words of fullness; that is, they are written very near the end of the life of the Apostle, when he is in possession of a very full revelation which has been growing through the whole of his life as a servant of the Lord. To the initial vision there has been added revelation, an enlargement of spiritual knowledge - added, sometimes in especial ways and also in the normal course of his continuous walk with the Lord; and here he is writing when that revelation, so far as his earthly course is concerned, is practically full, and out of that these words occur - "the gospel of the glory of... God"; "the gospel of your salvation"; "the mystery of the gospel". You note that his letter to the Ephesians opens with the second of these phrases and closes with the third. The point is that these are not two different gospels - the gospel of your salvation, and the mystery of the gospel. They are not the gospel divided into two. They are one gospel, and they are both gathered into that other fragment - "the gospel of the glory of... God". What I desire to indicate is that the gospel is a much profounder thing than is generally recognised.

Oh, how full is that word "mystery" as used by the Apostle! It is a tremendous word in its significance. As you know from this letter to the Ephesians, the "mystery" relates to the deep and hidden counsels and purposes of God before the world was. It relates to something ever present to the mind of God through all previous ages, though undisclosed - waiting for the day in which He should bring it out as a revealed secret; and in it are all those Divine counsels and purposes which find their full revelation at the end of the ages, in this dispensation, in the fullness of the times; and all that is said to be gospel, the mystery of the gospel. Yes - the gospel of your salvation is all that; something immense, unfathomable. In this one short letter alone it is all summarised in superlatives which are heaped together one upon another. You feel the Apostle is so pent up as he dwells upon this as to be very near an explosion. He cannot find words in the very rich language at his command to express himself concerning all this which he calls the mystery, the stewardship of which has been committed to him. It is tremendous.

And when he writes his letter to Timothy, he goes beyond everything in packing all the immense meaning of that into a little phrase - "the gospel of the glory of the blessed God". You want to sit down with that and think. What is the gospel? It is the gospel of the glory of God. Now, comprehend that if you can! The glory of God - fathom that if you can! If we want a key to unlock this whole marvellous disclosure, to unlock those secret counsels of the Godhead before times eternal, to unlock the mystery hidden from ages and generations, it is in one word - glory. That word alone is the key to everything from eternity to eternity.

What Glory Is

What is glory? Have you ever tried to write down what glory is? It cannot be done, and we shall look foolish whenever we try to define the glory of God. Nevertheless, with the Lord's help, let us at least approach the matter. What is glory? Before we come immediately to attempt an answer, let us say something which will indicate what a task we have, what a field we are in. To answer that question - What is glory? - from the standpoint of the Scriptures means that we shall come to the understanding of a number of other matters such as the following:-

To begin with, to understand glory will be to understand God, for He is the God of glory (Acts 7:2); and also to explain His creation intention, for right at the heart of His creation lies that word as its intention - glory, the glory of God.

Again, to answer our question will be to know the meaning of the fall. Firstly, the fall of Satan - the whole matter of glory is bound up with that; and then the fall of man, because right at the heart of man's existence in the purpose of God lies this matter of glory.

Further, it will be to know the nature and meaning of eternal life - that uncreated, Divine life which God intended man to have and which he never did have until he had it in Christ - for that life is the potentiality of glory.

Further, to know the meaning of glory will be to know the meaning of redemption, for again, redemption all circles round this one thing - glory; and I would remark, before we say any more, that whenever redemption is represented as an accomplished fact, even in type, glory is linked with it. Get the altar and the laver and everything of redemptive means in line, and the end of that line is the glory of the Shekinah in the Most Holy Place. It all issues in the glory. To understand glory will be to understand redemption.

To answer our question, What is glory? will be to explain priesthood and government in spiritual and Divine meaning, for both are always related to the glory.

And here is a little thing for you on the way! - to understand glory will be to see right through all the Scriptures. When I saw this matter of glory I got a new Bible. I thought my old Bible was very wonderful and altogether beyond me, but this put a new Bible into my hands. It will do the same for you if you see the meaning and content of just one word - glory.

It will be to apprehend and to grasp all the meaning of Christ. He is the glory of God; all the glory of God is centred and seated in Him. His whole work is connected with the glory of God. He came into this world from which the glory had departed, as the custodian of the glory of God. To understand glory will be to understand Christ.

If we apprehend the meaning of glory we shall know our calling, for we are called "unto his eternal glory" (1 Pet. 5:10), "that we should be... to the praise of his glory" (Eph. 1:6). Further, we shall come to understand our vocation, our service; for what does the service of God resolve itself into, after all? All service to God and for God can be weighed as to its spiritual value by this one word - glory, the glory of God.

"The Blessed God"

Well then, all this that we have mentioned is in this little phrase - "the gospel of the glory". The whole phrase is, "the gospel of the glory of the blessed God". That word "blessed" is not an easy one to translate into English. You know how very many times it occurs in the New Testament. It is the word with which every Beatitude begins. "Blessed are the poor in spirit". "Blessed are they that mourn"; etc. (Matt. 5:3-10). Elsewhere in the New Testament the word is translated "happy". Truly it is that in the Beatitudes. "Happy are the meek", and so on. But you hesitate to use that word in connection with God - "the gospel of the glory of the happy God." That hardly sounds right to our ears; but you might perhaps catch something even inside of that. God is in the place and state of great blessedness. Are you not always asking the Lord to bless you and yours? What do you mean? Oh, to be put into a position and condition of complete satisfaction: where everything is just as you would have it: where you have all fullness to live upon for yourself, and to dispense to others. That is a happy position to be in. "It is more happy to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35); there is the same word. It is very happy, very blessed, to be in a position to give; and God is in that position. All fullness is His, and He has limitless resources to give. What a happy position! "The happy, the blessed, God."

Now let us take another step. It is "the gospel of the glory of the blessed God". It is the good news of the glory of God Who is full to overflowing with all resources of wisdom, power, grace, truth - everything. Out from such a God the gospel, the good news, comes. I say this gospel of salvation is an immense thing. What do you mean by salvation and the gospel? Well, being delivered from the guilt and condemnation and consequences of sin (here, and mostly hereafter) and perhaps some other blessings, such as assurance, thrown in! But in that you have only touched the fringe of the gospel! I say again, it is not an extra gospel, a second gospel, it is one; and if that full gospel had been preached, there would be a very different situation in the world today from what there is. The trouble is the smallness of the gospel preached. It is the gospel, the good news, of the glory of the God Who is all-sufficient in Himself and for everything else - the blessed God.

Glory Linked With the Character of God

Now we will get nearer to the word. Glory - what is glory? Well, the Greek root of this word means proving by testing. There is one little passage which will help us a good deal, and it is in 1 Pet. 1:7. If you were reading that in the Greek you would find in that verse three words which have the same beginning, indicating that they contain a common idea. Here they are, emphasized:

"That the PROOF (or TRIAL) of your faith, being more precious than gold that perisheth though it is PROVED by fire, may be found unto praise and GLORY..." "Trial", "proved", "glory". Glory is something proved by testing.

What is the glory of God? You will find that the glory of God is almost invariably linked with His character; and His character is proved, established, unalloyed righteousness. He is right, He is righteous altogether, there is not the slightest shadow or suspicion of question about His perfection. And glory is linked with His character; therefore glory is the character of God shining forth in expression, the very nature of God manifested.

There are symbols, but they only help us on the way. We very often take the symbol to mean the reality. The symbol for glory is light, just as the symbol for evil and sin is darkness. The real thing is the essence of God's nature and being, and when you get that, you get what you mean by light, and that is glory. The glory of God is the essential nature of God as unquestioned righteousness shining forth.

The Good News of God Manifested Universally

Before we go further, let us come back. What is the gospel - the 'good news' - of the glory of God? It is this, that everything is going to be like Him, everything in His universe is going to be a manifestation of Himself and His nature. We are called unto that eternal glory. Let that stand over against what we are in ourselves and see what our calling is, see how great the gospel is! What do you feel about yourself? Any hope of glory? - that is, any hope of the manifestation of unquestioned righteousness and holiness? Ah, the gospel which has come to us is good news indeed. What a possibility, what a hope! "We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is" (1 John 3:2). It is the issue of the gospel of the glory. Get hold of that. What is glory? It is God in His essential nature, unalloyed righteousness and holiness, in expression. That is the good news - you and I and all this creation to be brought into that, so that the earth shall be filled with the glory of God, not just a radiance, a phosphorescent glory, but the glory of a nature in which there is nothing that is questionable, evil, sinful - "no darkness at all". It is the hope of the gospel. That is the gospel of your salvation. That is the hope referred to by the Apostle as he has seen it in its growing fullness. He speaks of it right at the end, from his prison - "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Col. 1:27).

Well, we are launched out into such an immensity we really do not know what to do with it! I confess that at that point I do not know how to proceed. You see, everything tumbles on top of you. We begin with Genesis, go all the way through the whole Bible, fragment by fragment, and we find it is all centred in and circling around this matter. The Cherubim - what are they there at the gate for? (Gen 3:24). They are custodians of the glory. All the way through it is this matter. And then the Son of God is manifested, Who is "the true light" that "shineth in the darkness" (John 1:9,5) and the message which He brings is gathered up by the Apostle John in this way: "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). The Son came both to manifest and to declare what God is - unquestioned, unsullied holiness and righteousness in His very nature and being. That is God, and we are called unto His eternal glory. It is something almost too big to believe, is it not?

And now the word 'hope' comes in, associated with the gospel. "Be not moved away from the hope of the gospel" (Col. 1:23). We are begotten again "unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead" (1 Pet. 1:3). So we could just pile it up like that. Do not such words as these hint at a tremendous prospect set before us in the gospel? It is the prospect of glory, and glory is character proved through testing.

The Trial of Faith Unto Glory

Now then, "That the proof of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perisheth though it is proved by fire, may be found unto praise and glory..." You are going through a test, an awful, fiery trial. What is happening? Well, the scum is coming to the surface and being removed, and the purity, the reality, the genuineness of your faith is being brought out through testing. The reality is being established through fiery trial, and when, through testing and trial, you have got the reality of the Divine nature established, you have glory. "Be found unto... glory." It is what is of God in us put to the test, tried, through fiery processes, and issuing in glory. It is God manifested in and through us.

In practical spiritual life it means this. God by His grace has planted in us a little germ of faith. How small and how weak it seems! But then, under Divine discipline and trial we are tested as to that faith. And as the fiery trial goes on, a good deal of ourselves comes to the surface. Is that not true? When we are in trial, a lot that is of ourselves comes to the surface. Yes, all that inherent unbelief of our nature comes up - resentment, rebellion, bitterness. Oh yes, it all comes up in the fiery trial. We do not know ourselves until we get into the fires of trial and testing. We would not believe what there is in us until we are put to the test. I heard Dr. Campbell Morgan once say that any man is capable of any sin you like to mention if only he is put into circumstances calculated to find him out. That is a terrific thing to say. You may not accept it, but that is because you have not been put into the situation. Put that in another way. You are not just going to pass through the temptations of life, be they what we think of as 'common' temptations or related to the most awful sins, without knowing that you are being tempted and therefore you could give way. The bias towards evil is all there. The Lord Jesus was only saying that sort of thing when He said, in substance, 'Moses said, Thou shalt not...; but I say, if you think about it - if you only look - it is just as bad as though you had done it' (Matt. 5:27,28). What was He meaning? - that it is in you, it is a part of you. Oh, you may think that is terrible, but I think it is glorious! Do you say, 'We cannot stand up to this; it is worse than ever; it is going to push us further down than ever. Moses is bad enough, but if we take this on, who will survive'? But I say that that is not bad but good. The Lord was not heaping condemnation upon condemnation. He was only saying, 'It is not just a matter of what you do or do not do; it is a matter of what you are, and I have come to take away what you are, not merely what you do'. That is glorious! That is the gospel of the glory, the righteousness of God which is by faith in Christ Jesus deals not simply with things that we do or refrain from doing, but gets us entirely out of the way, bringing in a new creation. That is glory; that is the hope of the gospel. Thank God, there will come a moment in the history of this universe when the last vestige of the fall will be rooted out of every one of us who trust in Christ. One moment and we shall be changed, and even this body of our humiliation will be made like unto His body of glory, a holy body, a sinless body.

Yes; we were saying it is in trial that all this self-nature comes to the surface, but it is as well that it does come to the surface. Grace deals with it, grace working through the growing knowledge of our need of Christ makes us very humble, and humility is a trait of God. Meekness is a fruit of the Spirit, it is the counter to the poison of fallen Lucifer - pride. Trial brings these things out in the grace of God, and it is found unto glory - Christ-likeness, God-likeness. Or again, in simple experience, our deep and terrible trials make us more like the Lord under His grace. They do not make people outside of Christ more like the Lord. It is only those who are under the grace of God who become more like the Lord through fiery trials. It is found unto glory, God-likeness.

I think I must stop there. I trust it is a glimpse of the greatness of our salvation, "the gospel of the glory of the blessed God." What a prospect it opens up before us! We are lost in it. But if we suffer with Him we shall be glorified together with Him (Rom. 8:17).

Chapter 2 - The Good News of a Satisfied God

"...according to the gospel of the glory of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust" (1 Tim. 1:11).

"...in whom ye also, having heard the word of the truth, the gospel of your salvation, - in whom, having also believed, ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, which is an earnest of our inheritance, unto the redemption of God's own possession, unto the praise of his glory" (Eph. 1:13-14).

"...with all prayer and supplication praying at all seasons in the Spirit, and watching thereunto in all perseverance and supplication for all the saints, and on my behalf, that utterance may be given unto me in opening my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel" (Eph. 6:18-19).

"Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of Jehovah filled the tabernacle" (Ex. 40:34).

"...then the house was filled with a cloud, even the house of Jehovah, so that the priests could not stand to minister by reason of the cloud, for the glory of Jehovah filled the house of God" (2 Chron. 5:13-14).

"Now when Solomon had made an end of praying, the fire came down from heaven... and the glory of Jehovah filled the house. And the priests could not enter into the house of Jehovah, because the glory of Jehovah filled Jehovah's house. And all the children of Israel looked on, when the fire came down, and the glory of Jehovah was upon the house" (2 Chron. 7:1-3).

"But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believed on him were to receive: for the Spirit was not yet given; because Jesus was not yet glorified" (John 7:39).

"The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of our fathers, hath glorified his Servant Jesus; whom ye delivered up, and denied before the face of Pilate" (Acts 3:13).

Let us make one or two preliminary observations as we now follow on our previous meditation with a specific point in view. We want to remember at this time that the book of the Acts sees three things - firstly, the Church born; secondly, a new dispensation inaugurated; thirdly, the gospel sent on its way to the ends of the earth. If we have those three things in mind, we shall be able rightly to grasp the significance of this wonderful phrase - "the gospel of the glory."

The Need to Understand the Meaning of Pentecost

Now in the light of our definition of the word "glory" we must approach and explain Pentecost, and in explaining Pentecost we are only explaining the Divine thought as to the dispensation in which we are living - that is, the dispensation from Pentecost or the ascension of our Lord to His return. Pentecost gives character to this dispensation. It is therefore necessary for us to know what Pentecost means. Many people have thought of it only as the advent of the Holy Spirit and empowerment for witness and service. That is rather the effect of Pentecost than the meaning. Many have gone one step further back and said that Pentecost is the expression of Christ glorified: He has been received up into glory, He is glorified at God's right hand, and because Jesus is glorified the Holy Spirit is sent forth and we have the results recorded in this book of the Acts. That is quite true, but we have to go further back still before we have a right apprehension of Pentecost, and therefore a sufficient ground for the existence of the Church, the distinctive character of this dispensation, and the preaching of the gospel of the glory of God. Why should the Church exist? why should this dispensation be different from all others? and why should the gospel be preached in all the world for a witness? These are not small matters: I suppose it would be rather difficult to get outside of them. We have to answer our enquiry in those three connections, and so, seeing that Pentecost was the inauguration of all three, we must explain Pentecost for ourselves and for present practical purposes for our very being now, and our very vocation now - and not merely as a subject of interesting Bible study.

We say that Jesus was glorified and therefore the Holy Spirit was sent. That, of course, is what is implicit in John 7:39: Jesus was not yet glorified, therefore the Holy Spirit was not yet given. But again, what is glorification from God's standpoint? Well, it has to do with this whole question of Divine righteousness; the very nature of God is involved. In the Church, in the dispensation and in the proclamation of the gospel, the very nature of God is involved. In other words, the righteousness of God is the supreme issue.

Glory Related to God's Satisfaction

Firstly, God's nature itself must be satisfied or there is no good news, no gospel. There is nothing of a joyful character to proclaim until God's own nature is fully satisfied.

But not only that: God must be satisfied along the line of His creation. We said in our previous meditation that one of those many things involved in this whole question of glory is the very existence of the creation, and of man as its crown. The governing thought of God in creating was for His glory, that is, that His glory might be expressed and manifested - that what He is in Himself might be displayed in everything that He touches, everything that emanates from Him; that He should not be just a self-contained and confined God living in the satisfaction and gratification of His own self-sufficiency. If He is love, if He is more than simply power, He must give. He must be the great Giver; He must be not only Jehovah Self-Sufficient, but Jehovah El-Shaddai, the great Pourer-Forth. He must be One out from Whom there go powers resulting in works and in definite expressions of Himself. That is creation in motive, in idea; God finding a sphere full of morally responsible people whose great desire is to satisfy Him in this matter - that He should show forth Himself in what He is in His own nature. Creation is governed by that, and God must be satisfied in that before there is anything that is the gospel of the glory of God - and of the happy God, "the blessed God," as the phrase is here: God satisfied. 'Satisfied' is a word that you can put at the beginning of all the Beatitudes. "Satisfied are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled" (Matt. 5:6); blessed, satisfied or happy. It is the gospel of the glory of the satisfied God. It is a great thing to go out with that born in your heart by the Holy Spirit - that God is satisfied, and satisfied with you and with me. Is that possible? That is precisely what you arrive at; you have no gospel to preach until you have arrived there. That is where we shall arrive, I hope, before long; that is the object in view at the moment.

Now, you see, the glorifying of the Lord Jesus is God's answer relative to the requirements of His own nature - absolute, utter, final righteousness. And it is equally His answer with reference to the conception and object of the creation. God is satisfied, and man is represented in the new creation - "We behold... Jesus... crowned with glory and honour" (Heb. 2:9). I must remind you of the use of the name "Jesus" here. This is where the use of that name by itself is right. It is habitually thus used by certain schools, as you know, thereby divesting Him of His Deity and Lordship; they always call Him simply 'Jesus'. That is wrong. But He is here called "Jesus" in a right way, because in that name He is representative of man, and "God has glorified his Servant Jesus" as representative of all who believe: Jesus glorified because God is satisfied.

God Satisfied in Christ Jesus

But how was God satisfied? How was it possible for God to say, "My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matt. 3:17)? - God fully, completely, utterly pleased. Well, here is the simple course of the gospel. What happened at Jordan was that the Lord Jesus, stepping across the line from a private life into the public life of taking up the real ministry and work for which He came in the redemptive sense, figuratively recognised that the Cross was basic to it all, and everything would spring from that. So "then cometh Jesus... to the Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him. But John would have hindered him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me? But Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness" (Matt. 3:13-15). "To fulfil (to make full) all righteousness." How? On two sides, in two connections; the death side in Jordan, the life side beyond Jordan.

God's Satisfaction Extends to all Who Are in Christ

Everything that cannot be glorified must be buried: it has to be put out of God's sight once and for all; that is an established law. That is, everything that is not righteous, not in harmony with the very nature of God, must be buried. But it can only be buried after it has been judged and, being judged, has been proved worthy of death. Therefore, judgment having come unto all men to condemnation, and death having passed unto all men, for that all sinned (Rom. 5:18,12), the Lord Jesus in His own person in a typical way at the Jordan took the place of that entire sinful race. In a representative way, the judgment was borne by Him and was concluded - the judgment of what we are. As we said in our previous meditation, this was not the judgment merely of things we do or do not do which men so often regard as righteousness, but the judgment of what we are. "Him who knew no sin he made sin on our behalf" (in our stead, in our place): "that we might become the righteousness of God in him" (2 Cor. 5:21). Now, you may wonder why I am saying this to you who doubtless are the Lord's true children. Well, I tell you this - probably you know it in your own experience, but you will be constantly meeting it in the experience of others and your power to help them will depend entirely upon whether you are settled and fully assured in this matter - you will meet all the way through your life people who are the Lord's real children who are constantly assailed by uncertainty about their salvation, who are constantly found with their eyes turned in upon their own spiritual condition and absolutely paralysed by a question, a question which goes right to the root of salvation with them. That is terrible. Some of us have found it to be the one thing which has caused us more trouble in other people than perhaps anything else with which we have had to do. It is this matter of Satanic assault upon the faith of the children of God, very often encamping upon some physical or nervous trouble, or in other ways assailing to break down absolute assurance; and immediately the enemy has a foothold there he has destroyed testimony, paralysed service and put the glory out.

Always the glory goes out. Wherever you find that sort of thing, you find no glory. It is a terrible thing for the glory to go out - a terrible thing that, over a life which is redeemed and has accepted its redemption and known the Lord, there should be written Ichabod, 'the glory is departed.' Remember that is a thing which the Apostle Paul particularly found himself continually striving to circumvent. Why do we have such frequent references in the New Testament to Israel's breakdown in the wilderness? Come to that awful reiterated statement in the Hebrew letter - "I sware... they shall not enter into my rest" (Heb. 3:11, etc.): and then the appeal, "Today if ye shall hear his voice, harden not your hearts." This is not a 'gospel message' to the unsaved. Many sermons are preached to the unsaved on that - 'now is the day of salvation, today harden not your hearts'; but those words were taken out of the Old Testament into the New and used to believers, and again and again Israel's example in the wilderness is presented to believers as a warning, as a basis of appeal. Why? Were they not translated typically out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of God's love? In type had they not come by the way of mighty, precious Blood? Were they not the Lord's? Yes, they were, but for them the peril was that the glory should depart.

Wherein lay that peril? It lay here, that their hearts were not set upon God's satisfaction but upon their own. This was the focal point of everything in the wilderness. They were constantly, in spirit if not in word, bargaining with God and saying in effect, 'If You will satisfy our desire and give us what we want, we will go on with You; if not, we will not go on.' So it was, when from time to time the Lord gave them their request, they were very happy, ready to go on a little further. Then He had to do something more. In the end God said, 'Enough of this; I brought you out for My satisfaction, for My pleasure, for My glory.' So, because they were bargaining with God, because it was always a matter of their satisfaction rather than His, the glory departed and shame stands written over that generation. Hence the Jordan has to be faced, and Jordan says once for all - fully, finally, overwhelmingly - 'It is the Lord; henceforth unto Him.' "We thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died; and he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him" (2 Cor. 5:14-15).

God's Satisfaction to be Appropriated by Faith

Until that issue is settled, there is no glory, no possibility of glory. Glory demands that we recognise that in Christ not only were our unrighteous selves buried, but there was buried also any possibility of ourselves ever being righteous. You are willing to take your poor, wretched, miserable self and have it buried, but you are not always ready to take the supposed possibility of your ever being otherwise and bury it! You still walk round that wretched corpse, hoping it will produce some life! The only thing to do is to put it where God has put it - bury it! Oh, miserable Christian, get buried! Accept God's judgment and have done with it! In yourself you will not be any better when you have done that; you will still be that wretched self. But the point is that you must cease to have your eyes on that, and you must have your eyes on Another Who has taken your place. Yes, judgment and death are to be accepted; but are you listening to those evil voices that constantly suggest that God is judging you, a believer, for your sinfulness? That is how the difficulties, the trials, the strange experiences of life are represented to you - and it is most extraordinary what sensations and experiences the devil can give believers to make them think or feel that God has departed from them. This is the realm in which the battle of faith has to be fought against our soul sensations and the things which come to us. You can have the most wonderful proof one day that the Lord is with you and is using you and pouring Himself and His word through you, and at that time you have no doubt about it; and the next day you can have all the sensations that there is no God at all in your universe. Which of these two things is the fact? Was your earlier consciousness only an imagination, a bit of hysteria, or was it a fact? Is your sensation of the next day, the reality? Well, listen; these fluctuating feelings are not to be accepted as a true criterion. If God is judging your sinfulness, Christ came in vain. We are not atoning for our sins as believers; if we are, the atonement was not completed on Calvary, the work was not finished. Whatever may be the need of training and discipline and chastening by way of developing what is of God in us and making actual the setting aside of what is of ourselves, we are nevertheless, with all that, not atoning for our sins or sinfulness. That was done when one Man gathered us all into Himself and went down under the overwhelming flood of God's wrath. That is the gospel for believers. It is the gospel of the glory of the satisfied God. If you find anybody constantly reverting to their sinfulness, inevitably they have a bad time and you have to help them and be patient and sympathetic, understanding that there may be some background for this: but if you find a believer who persistently, over a course of months or years, reverts to that and undoes the atonement, just point out what they are doing. They have removed Calvary, they have undone in themselves the work of the Cross, they have taken the place of the Lamb of God in trying to atone for their own sinfulness. Are you prepared to do that? God forbid! Oh, let us really face squarely the terrific issues that are bound up with this matter of the accuser of the brethren finding a way in to the spirit of a child of God.

God's Satisfaction Expressed at Pentecost

That is one side - Jordan on its death side. It is only on the other side, when Jordan has been passed through, that the heavens are opened and the glory is proclaimed - that is, God's absolute satisfaction is realized, righteousness is made full, and there is glory. Now that was indicated of course in Christ when the heavens were opened. When the first Adam fell, heaven was closed. In other words, Paradise was shut; there was no re-entry. When this last Adam took and bore away typically at Jordan all that the first Adam let in, Paradise was re-opened, heaven was re-opened, the glory was in view. That led right on to the transfiguration. But literally and actually all this was carried out at the Cross, as we know, and through the judgment and the Cross - the full atonement which He made, the "all righteousness" which He made full - the glory is immediately at hand.

Pentecost, then - issuing in the presence of the Holy Spirit in believers, the existence of the Church, the particular and peculiar nature of this dispensation, and the proclamation of the gospel to the ends of the earth - is just the glory of the satisfied God Who has found, in that inclusive, all-comprehending Man, His own nature satisfied and His own object in creating man satisfied. God can say, 'I have secured what I want, what I ever needed, and having that, I can reproduce from it.'

The Spirit an Earnest of the Glory in Fullness

Thus the Holy Spirit comes; and notice what is written - "in whom, having also believed, ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, which is an earnest of our inheritance" (Eph. 1:13,14). What is the inheritance? - the glory of God in fullness. We have read of the glory of the Lord filling the tabernacle and the temple. Have you recognized that is where all Israel's fullness resided? It was there that Israel's satisfaction was found; the glory was there, it was from thence that everything came for Israel's life. In that place where the glory was, Israel's inheritance dwelt. Now, you know that little fragment in "Ephesians" where the Apostle prays that believers may have the eyes of their hearts enlightened that they might know (amongst other things) "what (are) the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints" (Eph. 1:18). In the Greek, "saints" is basically exactly the same word as the word used in the letter to the Hebrews for the "Holy of holies" (Heb. 9:3), so that the scripture just quoted may be said to relate to His inheritance in the 'Holy of holies'. God has His inheritance in the 'Holy of holies'; we have our inheritance in the 'Holy of holies'. The fullness of God's satisfaction, therefore the fullness of glory, is found there. The Holy Spirit has come as the Spirit of promise and as an earnest of our inheritance. What is that going to be? - the fullness of God in the Most Holy Place.

Come to "Hebrews". Where is the 'Holy of holies'? It is in heaven. The 'Holy of holies' of the tabernacle or of the temple was only a pattern of things in the heavens; the real things are in the heavens. So that our inheritance is in the heavens, where God's glory is full because God's satisfaction in Christ is absolute. What was at the heart of the 'Holy of holies'? - the ark of the testimony. When the ark was brought in the place was filled with glory. It portrays the Lord Jesus glorified in the fullness of the glory. And the Spirit comes forth to us, and we receive Him, as an earnest that we shall be where the Lord Jesus is and in the same glory with Him - our inheritance and God's inheritance too, for God will have His satisfaction when He gets the saints there. You see, God's inheritance is His Son, His first-born Son, and He gets that inheritance in His Son when He has Him in glory. Now then, many sons are to be brought to glory, and God's inheritance is found in those sons as brought to glory. Yes, glory is a place, but it is more than a place, it is God in full expression. Oh, is it possible that you and I are going to reach the place where God has unhindered expression of Himself in us? That is the gospel of the glory, that is this gospel that we are always talking about. What a marvellous thing it is! "The gospel of the glory of the satisfied God."

When the Holy Spirit comes as an earnest of our inheritance, of full and final satisfaction, what is our first sensation? It is one of wonderful satisfaction. But are we any different in ourselves? We shall learn very soon that we are not, but somehow or other there has come into us the feeling that this is what we were born for, this is what we have been after all the time. But is it just a sensation? Oh no, it is the Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God and joint heirs with Christ (Rom. 8:17), and the Spirit is the earnest of the heir's inheritance. He is, in effect, bringing God's satisfaction out of heaven into our hearts. That is the one thing in this universe which Satan cannot tolerate. He was in the glory once and knows something of what the glory means, but he lost it, and now he cannot bear to see anybody enjoying it; and if Satan can do anything at all to destroy the glory in your heart and mine he will do it. God's satisfaction - oh, God's satisfaction witnessed to by the Spirit in our hearts! Ought we not to be more satisfied with the Lord? Well, everything begins there. The Spirit Who came at Pentecost comes as an earnest of our inheritance.

The Church the Corporate Vessel of the Glory

Then, as the result of Pentecost, the Church immediately became the corporate vessel of the glory, that is, of God's satisfaction. If you have anywhere a true expression of God's thought about the Church you have a people who are living in the enjoyment of God's satisfaction, a people who have entered into rest, a people who are very, very satisfied - satisfied not with themselves but with the Lord. You will have that, amongst many other things. The Church is brought into being just to embody and to be the vessel of this glory of God, which is God's satisfaction as to His own nature. Therefore, when you come to a letter which has to do mainly with the Church, you have this exclamation - "Unto him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all generations for ever and ever" (Eph. 3:21). "Glory in the church." The glory filled the tabernacle, the glory filled the temple: now it has filled something which is not a type but the reality. The glory is the satisfaction of God on the whole matter of righteousness, and you and I despoil our Church membership in the spiritual sense immediately we have any doubts about God's satisfaction. How can you preach about the Church while you are miserable and uncertain about your own salvation? You are denying the Church, and virtually putting yourself out of it in a spiritual sense, while you are in that condition. The enemy strikes at once at the Church when he gets any member doubting his or her salvation, having once known that salvation. It it a tremendous business. We are up against an awful thing: therefore this letter on the Church must inevitably head up to our wrestling with principalities and powers, world rulers of this darkness. You can talk about evil forces and go out against them in prayer, but do remember this, that if you have a question about your salvation the ground is taken from under your feet in fighting the enemy: you may say, 'I take up the whole armour of God', but the enemy is inside the armour and you are helpless. Talk as much as you like, you are beaten before you start fighting if you have a question about your salvation or about God's satisfaction with you in Christ.

The nature of this dispensation, then, is that it is the dispensation of a Church which embodies this testimony of Jesus.

Effective Testimony Measured by Glory Apprehended

Then we come to the proclamation of the gospel to the ends of the earth. It is this gospel to which we have been referring. Everywhere we go we find people up against the sin question - the problem of getting on to good terms with God, of removing every ground in them of His displeasure. You may say that brings us back to the simple preaching of substitution and so on, but I venture to suggest that it is a great deal more than that. In our apprehension, that can leave us with something entirely objective. You will find in the Word of God - in the Old Testament by abundant typical proofs and in the New Testament by much direct teaching - that the effectiveness of our testimony depends upon the measure of our apprehension of the glory. That has to be borne out and made clear, but there it is. There has to be an impact upon the enemy that is more than a doctrinal impact. The doctrine may be absolutely sound and true, but Satan is never overpowered in that way. There has to be an embodiment of the doctrine, and, if you will allow it, there is a clear revelation that there are degrees of glory because there are degrees of entering into the meaning of the death, the resurrection, the ascension, the glorification of the Lord Jesus. It is something to be entered into, as distinct from the mere knowledge of historic facts, doctrines, truths. The Lord Jesus is in heaven, and we have to know Him in a heavenly way. We have to go to heaven to know Him, and we have to go now. A Church that clings to this earth and becomes an earthly thing is a powerless Church. It is only a Church which spiritually occupies its place in the heavenlies that can register anything upon this earth, and the measure in which you are emancipated from this earth and this world and are knowing a life in the heavenlies is the measure of your impact, your testimony upon this earth. A worldly Christian is a powerless Christian; a worldly Church is a Church stripped of power and of glory. The heavenly position of the Lord Jesus is something to be entered into and we shall take all our lives to enter into only a part of that. If you go on with the Lord under the hand of the Holy Spirit, you will find that you are becoming more and more in spirit a stranger on earth, and more and more things which are not here are becoming the things which are your life. That is not only a statement of fact, that is a test of your spiritual life. As we go on, the things which are above ought to become more and more our very being, without which we cannot live here on this earth; and in so far as that is true shall we have power against the enemy and in testimony.

There are degrees of glory resultant from the degree of apprehension of Christ, and the degree determines the power of world-wide testimony. That is only saying in perhaps a round-about way that in the beginning, in the book of the Acts, the world-wide testimony did count for something; there was impact; they could talk about men who had turned the world upside down (Acts 17:6). There was a tremendous registration. Satan was mightily active, but he was beaten every time. Why? - the Lord's people had a great apprehension of the glory of Christ. By the Holy Spirit that glory had come into the Church and therefore the Church could minister like that.

Now this is but an attempt to point out what a gospel we have. Do you not agree that one of the greatest needs, if not the greatest, of our time is the recovery of the greatness of the gospel from its littleness and from its cheapness? - cheapness which is always offering something for the pleasure and satisfaction of those concerned in order to make them happy. That may be very good, but it is very cheap. Oh, there is something infinitely bigger than that! It reaches right back, before times eternal, in those counsels of God: it reaches right on to the ages of the ages. It is an immense thing - that the universe shall be filled with the glory of God, and that the vessel in which that glory is deposited and through which it is revealed and administered is the Church, "the holy city Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God." It is to that we are called. That is no small gospel. It is "the mystery of the gospel" and yet it is still "the gospel of your salvation."

Chapter 3 - The Glory of God's Sabbath

"The Gospel of the glory of the blessed God" (1 Tim. 1:11).

"The gospel of your salvation" (Eph. 1:13).

"The mystery of the gospel" (Eph. 6:19).

"The Spirit of the Lord Jehovah is upon me; because Jehovah hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the year of Jehovah's favour" (Isa. 61:1-2).

"And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Isaiah. And he opened the book, and found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor; he hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.... And he began to say unto them, Today hath this scripture been fulfilled in your ears" (Luke 4:17-19,21).

"And when the day of Pentecost was being fulfilled..." (Acts 2:1, R.V.M.)

The Year of the Grace of the Lord

"The year of Jehovah's favour," or "The acceptable year of the Lord." A better translation is "the year of the grace of the Lord." That is what comes in with the gospel, what lies behind it, what makes it to be the gospel of the glory of the blessed God. The gospel is founded upon the year of the Lord's favour. "The Spirit of the Lord Jehovah is upon me... to proclaim the year of Jehovah's favour." What is that year? It is taken from the Old Testament, from the book of Leviticus - "And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you, and ye shall return every man unto his own possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be unto you" (Lev. 25:10,11). Here is the year in which liberty is proclaimed, and here we have in Isaiah 61: "liberty to the captives." It is the Jubilee year, the fiftieth year, and the fiftieth year becomes the year in which the good news goes out. "To proclaim liberty"; "the year of the Lord's favour." "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me" to proclaim that.

Then on the day of Pentecost, the fiftieth day - forty from the resurrection to the ascension and ten spent waiting in prayer - the Spirit came upon the Church, and the gospel, the good news, the proclamation of emancipation, was started out on its way to the ends of the earth. "Now when the day of Pentecost was being fulfilled" - fifty, the year of the Lord's favour.

The Law of the Sabbath

Going back to Isaiah, we may remind ourselves that those prophecies, from Chapter 40 onwards, have to do immediately with Israel's return from the captivity. The people have been prisoners in captivity; now comes the proclamation of their liberty, the setting free of those that are bound, the acceptable year of the Lord for their return. But what lay behind it? You turn to the prophecies of Jeremiah, and you find him repeatedly referring to the reason for the captivity and saying that the land should have rest for seventy years to fulfil the Lord's Sabbaths. The people had broken the law of the Sabbath, not just the weekly Sabbath but the sevens of weeks and months and years. The land had not had its rest, the captives, the slaves, had not had their rest, their liberation. The people had been riding roughshod over the law of the Sabbath. You know what Isaiah 58 has to say about this - that they had turned His holy day into a holiday, doing their own pleasure therein. They broke the law of the Sabbath. That cannot be done with impunity because of what it signifies, and so they went into captivity, for seventy years - ten times seven. Ten is the number of responsibility; seven is the number of spiritual completeness. They were held responsible before God for this whole matter. Jeremiah reminded them of that again and again and, under the instruction and direction of the Lord, he declared that they should make good by seventy years of captivity. Then at the end of the books of the Chronicles, you have these words - "That the word of Jehovah by the mouth of Jeremiah might be accomplished, Jehovah stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king Persia, so that he made a proclamation..." The acceptable year of the Lord had come and they returned from captivity.

That is the history and that is the type, but you cannot say that obtains when you come to Luke 4 or to Acts 2. You have got away now from the historical or from the Jewish. That has served its purpose as a great illustration of how jealous God is for His testimonies, His ordinances, His Sabbaths. Israel is a great example of God's jealousy as well as of His grace.

Now we come to Christ, Who takes up that very Scripture and appropriates it, applying it to Himself, and says, 'Whatever was fulfilled in the case of Israel in their return from captivity when judgment was accomplished, here today you have a transcendent fulfilment of that in your very ears, for I am the Anointed One above all others, and the very purpose of My anointing is to proclaim, on the basis of judgment fulfilled, liberty to the captives.' He has just been to Jordan - this is the fourth chapter of Luke; the judgment in type has been put upon Him and He has gone down into death under the overwhelming billows of God's wrath: judgment is complete. Then He comes forth and declares, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me... to proclaim liberty... the year of the Lord's grace"; the gospel of the glory of the satisfied God, the blessed God.

Now we can understand the meaning of the day of Pentecost and of the day in which we are living, for it has turned out to be not a day of twelve or twenty-four hours but a dispensation. We often speak of this as the day of grace, the gospel day. It is a day that broke when the Lord Jesus rose from the grave and ascended to His Father and sent forth the Spirit, and that day will close when He returns finally from heaven. It is a long day, but this is the day of the Lord's favour in which this gospel of the glory of the blessed God is to be preached under the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

But let us come again to this matter of the Sabbath lying behind it, for it is just there that the whole point of the satisfied God is found. When was the first Sabbath? - when the Lord looked on all that He had made and saw that it was very good, and He rested from His works. "God... hallowed it; because that in it he rested from all his work" (Gen. 2:3). "Ye shall keep my sabbaths: for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations" (Ex. 31:13). He appointed the Sabbath as an ordinance forever throughout all their generations, and made a Sabbath of days, and a Sabbath of weeks in the seventh week, and a Sabbath of months in the seventh month, and then a Sabbath of years in the seventh year, and then a Sabbath of multiples of seven years - forty-nine; the fiftieth, the completion of seven sevens. They all speak of this - God is satisfied, and because of that, you can go free. It is as though a prisoner is interrogated at the bar and an altogether satisfactory case is made out and answer is given, and the judge says, 'I am satisfied, you are acquitted.' Why are you acquitted? This of course, brings us to the letter to the Romans: you are acquitted because God is satisfied.

So the Lord Jesus gathers this all up into Himself and He becomes the personal Sabbath of the Lord, the beloved One in Whom God is well-pleased. When He is at God's right hand, God is satisfied, and the great amnesty is proclaimed - the gospel of the satisfied God - and we are given our liberty. You know all that happened in the Jubilee year. All slaves were liberated, all properties in bond had to be returned to their owners; freedom from every kind of tie and bondage was proclaimed, it was a time of joyful release. Well, there ought to be nothing more joyful than our gospel, and there ought to be no more joyful people than those who have such a gospel as we have. It is the gospel of the glory of a satisfied God.

Christ God's Sabbath Rest

Let me stay one moment to touch further upon that matter of God's satisfaction giving character to the gospel, making it a glorious gospel. We said in a previous meditation that the word 'glory' in the Bible is almost invariably associated with the nature of God. That is quite understandable if you look at it like this. Usually, when you meet people off their guard, you can tell pretty much what kind of people they are. I mean this. If you meet a person with a guilty conscience, somehow or other that guilty conscience comes out at you, and though you may not know why, you have a sense that things are not right. You meet somebody who has something in the background of their life which is evil and there is a shadow over the face; you are conscious of the shadow. The more sensitive and alive to people you are, the more quickly do you know, in their presence and without a word, the state of their inner life. You register something that is inside - 'this person is not transparent, he is shifty, he must not be trusted.' You do not know why, you do not know their history, but you know that. By what comes to you from their presence you know what their life is. The registration may come in a variety of ways, leaving you with an impression, and when you get that impression you know your person.

God's nature is all righteousness, and therefore when you meet God, you do not meet any clouds, shadows, darkness, doubt, question, suspicion, uncertainty. All is crystal clear. It is a terrible thing to come really into the presence of God. You do not have to tell Him anything, you know that He knows; He reads you through and through, and absolutely truly. When the Lord Jesus was here, anything dark that came into His presence was immediately exposed. He did not have to say anything: He came into the place and the demons cried out, "Let us alone! What have we to do with thee?" (Luke 4:34). He might have said, 'I have done and said nothing to you; what is the matter with you?' Ah, He needed not to speak: He knew all men and knew what was in man (John 2:24-25), and men knew that He knew. The trouble all the time was that they could not bear His presence, they had to do something about it. The only thing to do for their own comfort was to kill this Man. He brings our sins to remembrance! He reminds us of our sin! Get into the presence of God, and it is like that. The glory of God is what comes out from God - the registration, the impact, the influence, that comes out from Him. He is all righteousness, and His glory is just that. God is all righteous, and He makes a demand upon all men that they too shall be righteous in order to have fellowship with Him, to stand in His presence, to abide the eternal burnings. Think of standing in the presence of such a God without flinching! That is the gospel of the blessed God - it is possible! We can kneel here and in perfect simplicity, without any question or hesitation, speak to that God and say, Father! We can commune with that God without fear, and abide in His presence in the glory which would destroy anyone who was not in Christ. This, I know, is quite simple and elementary, but it is the gospel of the glory of the satisfied God. It is not the message of the terror of a dissatisfied God, it is not the news of the awfulness of a holy God Whom we must fear and dread, from Whom we must stand back. No: the gospel is the good news of the satisfied God - of the year of Jubilee, the year of acceptance, the year of grace. He has found His Sabbath rest, His satisfaction, His good pleasure, the answer to all His desires, the perfection of all His work, in His Son, the Lord Jesus, and He has put that to the account of simple faith; and we, accepted in the Beloved, are proclaimed free and are given a proclamation of that same freedom to make to all captives. That is where you begin.

God's Righteousness in the Church

Now you notice that this is transferred to the Church. When you look at the Old Testament you find that so often the glory is linked with a dwelling place. "Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them" (Ex. 25:8); and when the tabernacle was made, the glory filled it. The temple was the same - a place for a dwelling. Now pass from the Old Testament to the New. The statements about the Lord Jesus are well-known. He is the effulgence of that glory (Heb. 1:3). He is "crowned with glory" (Heb. 2:9). He is, to use the words of the psalmist, "the King of glory" (Ps. 24:7); or in Paul's words to the Corinthians; "the Lord of glory" (1 Cor. 2:8). "We beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father" (John 1:14). But then He goes to the Father, and the Spirit of glory (as Peter calls the Holy Spirit) is sent forth and comes and takes up residence in the Church. The Church now becomes the dwelling place of the glory, that is - remembering all the time the meaning of the glory - the dwelling place of God's satisfaction because the dwelling place of God's nature. Righteousness is there "the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ" (Rom. 3:22) - it is there in the Church, and the Church is glorified or glorious because God's righteousness is there by faith, and God is satisfied.

God's Rest in the Church

And the point is this, that if we are the place of the dwelling of the glory we ought to be people who know heart rest. God has come into His rest, He is satisfied, and the Church ought to be the place in which the rest of God is found. Now, if these things seem simple, do remember that the whole testimony which is deposited in this vessel depends for its effectiveness upon these factors. You begin with God's satisfaction or God's rest, and the testimony must be that the people of God are in the enjoyment of God's rest. So that the enemy's first activity against the testimony of Jesus, against the Church, is to bring strain, unrest, into the Lord's people. All who are weary and heavy-laden ought to find rest when they come amongst the Lord's people, and we contradict the very conception of the Church when we lose our heart rest. It is most important; it is a part of our gospel, a part of our proclamation. Believe me, if we were really, in our experience, proclaiming this rest - that is, if it were not merely heard but seen, recognized - it would be a tremendously effective thing, for what we are is a much stronger proclamation than what we say; and if the Lord can have people here and there on this earth who are perfectly satisfied with Him and enjoying His rest, who have found rest unto their souls, He will have a tremendous witness in the earth, because one thing which is the mark of Satanic working in this universe is the seething, restless dissatisfaction, the longing, the craving, that is never being met. The gospel of the glory begins here in the place where the glory is; and the glory is that God is satisfied, God has come to His rest and we have entered into that rest. It is something that dwells in the Church. The gospel has to dwell in the Church. It is the gospel of the glory of the satisfied God.

The Lord Jesus A Priest-King

Now that again in turn lies at the heart of the fact that the house, the dwelling place, the Church, is a priestly dwelling. You remember that it was said that the robes of the high priest should be "for glory and for beauty" (Ex. 28:2). Well, in the eyes of God, of course, the mere dressing up in gorgeous garments had no value; the garments can only be typical of something very much greater. There is nothing you can do in the way of elaborate and gorgeous pageantry that can impress God - though it may impress men. And yet God said these priestly robes should be "for glory and for beauty." (The word 'beauty' could equally well be translated 'honour.') John 17 is the high priestly prayer. The Lord Jesus is going to the altar, the Cross, and then He is going to pass through the heavens and up to the throne, and the Apostle is going to say "We behold Jesus crowned with glory and honour" (Heb. 2:9). Peter used exactly the same words when, looking back to the Transfiguration Mount, he said, "He received from God the Father honour and glory" (2 Pet. 1:17). When was that? "And behold, there talked with him two men, who were Moses and Elijah; who appeared in glory, and spake of his decease (or, exodus) which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem" (Luke 9:30,31). It is the priest in view. We cannot go back and talk about the priestly features of the exodus from Egypt - the blood shed, the blood sprinkled, the testimony against death. That is all priestly function. The point is, this is all gathered up in the Lord Jesus as High Priest.

The glory and the honour reside upon priestly work. What is the priestly work? It is again this whole question of satisfying God in the matter of righteousness, of destroying the ground of death and judgment as a spiritual thing.

"He shall be," says Zechariah, "a priest upon his throne" (Zech. 6:13). That is a combination of things that you do not very often find in the Bible, but it comes out that Jesus unites both king and priest in His own person. He is King because He is Priest. Because He has fulfilled all the priestly work of dealing with sin and unrighteousness and satisfying God. He is enthroned as Priest upon His throne; He is King.

Now, you have only got to look at the book of the Acts, and you find that it is all there. The second psalm is more than once quoted in that book. What is the connection? "God... raised up Jesus; as also it is written in the second psalm, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee" (Acts 13:33) - indicating that in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus a specific meaning is given to His Sonship. He is in full Sonship in a special way by reason of resurrection from the dead. If Jesus had not been raised from the dead, would God have owned Him as His Son? I am not ruling out the fact that He was always the Son of God, but now that He has gone into death, that Sonship can only be ratified and established as a living, full thing in heaven, if God raises Him from the dead. That is the thing the enemy was after all the time. When He came from Jordan the Voice had said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matt. 3:17), and Satan wants to nullify that and ensnare Him into death somehow. 'Throw yourself down from the pinnacle, bring yourself somehow under the judgment hand of God.' That is what the enemy is after. Every temptation is to try to get the Lord Jesus out of the way of that good pleasure of the Father, and to bring Him into condemnation and death. But He was never side-tracked; He went into death voluntarily, not enticed there by Satan. "I lay down my life... no one taketh it away from me" - no one, either man or devil. "I have power (authority) to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment received I from my Father" (John 10:17-18). "God... raised up Jesus: as also it is written in the second psalm. Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee!" That is in "Acts."

The Way of the Enemy's Defeat

Then the second psalm again. "I have set my king upon my holy hill of Zion." Jesus is raised, glorified and enthroned, set upon God's holy hill of Zion, crowned with glory and honour, a Priest upon His throne. What is the outworking of that? Well, the point that I have wanted to arrive at is this, that when that reality is in the Church, as it came to be on the day of Pentecost - Christ risen and enthroned in virtue of God's absolute satisfaction - then the devil's power is undercut. That is what comes out in Acts. If you go back upon that you reinstate the devil in power. I want to press this point seriously because one of the major end-time activities of the devil is to seek to bring the Church into a place where it cannot function, where it is neutralised in its power, its witness, its influence, because the mighty reality of God's absolute satisfaction has been weakened: or - to put that in the more positive way - where believers are challenged as to their assurance of salvation. Many of you probably have no questions or shadows on that matter, but I doubt whether you will get through to the end of your course without a vicious assault from the enemy to undermine your assurance. It may not come directly on the point of assurance of salvation; it may come in some other way to undermine your confidence in God, or even to becloud your certainty of God. That is, at heart, the nature of the battle of faith. We are not going to get out of the battle of faith till the end of the journey. Indeed, it will doubtless become more and more severe and acute. Faith is going to be tested more and more, and when it does survive and triumph there will be victory indeed.

And on what ground is faith tested? It is on the ground of our very relationship with God and God's attitude toward us. The concentration of the enemy's forces is upon that point - to interfere with our link with God.

What is our link with God? It is this - the Lord Jesus Christ, as the answer to God and to Satan for us. It will never be what we are in ourselves. If you are expecting a day to come when in virtue of what you are in yourself you can satisfy God, you are destined to an awful disillusionment and disappointment. The day will never come when we can satisfy God in ourselves, not even more or less. The strength of the Church is its faith in the Lord Jesus. The link with God is the Lord Jesus as God's satisfaction, and as God's answer to Satan, the Accuser.

How then can we really dislodge the enemy, undercut his power, destroy him in effect? That is a very big question. We are not going to defeat the enemy by big organisations and movements; he will soon get inside of those and turn them to his own account. We are not going to do it along any one of many lines which might easily be mentioned here. We are going to destroy the enemy in effect, and establish the sovereignty of the Lord Jesus in the kingdom of the enemy, only by a full apprehension of what the Lord Jesus is. Now when I use that word full, I underscore it several times because I feel that is the point to which we must come in these meditations. It is the measure of our inward apprehension of the Lord Jesus - of what He is - that is going to answer this whole situation. Therefore for disposing of the whole hierarchy of Satan and emptying the heavens of those evil principalities and powers, the Lord needs above all things, as His instrument and vessel, a people corresponding to Zion, that is, a people who are the embodiment of His fuller thought about the Lord Jesus to a degree that is beyond the average. Some people have gone further into what the Lord Jesus is, and in them something very much more of God's knowledge of His Son is found. It all amounts to this - the measure of Christ. It is one thing to believe on the Lord Jesus, to be converted, to be saved. That is a glorious thing as a beginning, but it alone will not take you right through all that you have to meet; and if you are really in the Lord's hands He will see to it that by virtue of need you are pressed into knowing more and more of His Son. It is the normal course of a true, Holy Spirit-governed Christian life that, in order to get through, a constant increase of Christ, a growing discovery of Christ, is necessary. In the end, the vanguard of the Church, the spearhead of the spiritual Israel, by whom the way will finally be made for the Church into the heavenly dominion and government with Christ, will be a people who have been wrought into Christ very deeply and into whom Christ has been wrought very deeply. They are a necessity to the Lord.

That principle is seen through the Scriptures in many ways. It is one to which the Lord will work - the raising up of a people who have come to some larger measure of what Christ is than is common among His people; and those who have only the lesser measure will need a people like that to get them through. Why does the Lord take one and another through such deep and trying experiences? Why is it that He does not allow some of His children to have an easy way and to be satisfied and gratified with elementary things? Why does He keep them on the move, never let them settle down? Why does He take them through these unusual and extraordinary spiritual experiences and cause them such exercise as multitudes of Christians do not have? Why is it? The need of the others - that is all. We know quite well that if any have been able really to help others, it is because they have gone through deep experience, they have pioneered this way, they have paid a great price for this freedom. It has been costly - but worth while if others can be really helped. It is just the outworking of the Lord's way. So He takes a people by strange ways, very deep and very high and very much outside of the realm of the ordinary, in order to fit them to be a peculiar people of value and usefulness to His Church.

Chapter 4 - The Lord's Need of a 'Zion' People

"Let mount Zion be glad, let the daughters of Judah rejoice, because of thy judgments. Walk about Zion, and go round about her; number the towers thereof; mark ye well her bulwarks; consider her palaces: that ye may tell it to the generation following. For this God is our God for ever and ever: he will be our guide even unto death." (Psa. 48:11-14).

"Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth, is mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great King." (Psa. 48:2).

"They go from strength to strength; every one of them appeareth before God in Zion." (Psa. 84:7).

"I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go unto the house of the Lord. Our feet are standing within thy gates, O Jerusalem; Jerusalem, that art builded as a city that is compact together; whither the tribes go up, even the tribes of the Lord, for an ordinance for Israel, to give thanks unto the name of the Lord. For there are set thrones for judgment, the thrones of the house of David." (Psa. 122:1-5).

"Whither the tribes go up, even the tribes of the Lord, for an ordinance for Israel," or, "for a testimony unto Israel." We have often pointed out that, in the Old Testament representation of Divine thoughts, Zion is that which fully expresses God's mind for His people. It is in Zion that are found all those features and characteristics of a people wholly according to the mind of the Lord. Zion is a representative word. Just as a little technical matter, we might point out that in some places in the Scriptures it is stated that the house of the Lord was there, but actually the temple was not on Zion at all, it was on Moriah. But what is indicated by that fact is this, that Zion really does stand for all the Lord's mind about His house. Moriah is in Jerusalem proper and greater; the house is there; the Church is there, if you like. But in Zion, the Church is what the Lord means it to be in thought. I wonder if you catch the significance of that? Viewed as a whole, the Church is not always in itself what the Lord intended it to be. Who, looking at the Church today as a whole, would say that it closely approximates to the revelation of it in the Word of God? Anyone who would say that does not know much about God's revelation of the Church. But God still cleaves to His full thought about the Church. He has not accommodated Himself to the situation which actually exists, and accepted it. He still holds to all that ever He thought and intended, and in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, He has that full thought. And then He is at work by His Spirit to gather to His Son a people, not distinct from the Church as a whole, not a separate body in reality, but a representative company, who really do satisfy Him at least more fully as to His full thought about the Church; and this is what is meant by Zion. That is the point we reached at the end of our previous meditation, and we have now come to the very heart of our subject.

That is what God is after - a 'Zion.' It is Jerusalem, but as the Lord would have it to be and not as it actually is. Oh, we could take up a whole mass of Scripture to bear that out; but you have only to look at that section of the Scriptures dealing with the return of a remnant from captivity, and you will see it there. It is a coming back, not to Jerusalem but to Zion, every time. "The ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto Zion" (Isa. 35:10); and the Lord says, "I am returned unto Zion" (Zech. 8:3). Yes, "I am returned to Jerusalem" (Zech. 1:16), but, "I am returned unto Zion," for Zion is what Jerusalem should be in His mind. "I am jealous for Zion with great jealousy, and I am jealous for her with great wrath" (Zech.8:2). Zion is God's whole thought as to what His people should be, and it is the focal point of Divine interest. In the New Testament there is a spiritual interpretation of this, a spiritual counterpart to the historical. "Ye are come unto mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem" (Heb. 12:22). "Ye are come;" not 'ye are coming, ye are on the way, to Zion,' whatever you may mean when you sing 'We're marching to Zion'! We are come to Zion. That is the thought of the letter to the Hebrews - that we are come to something which in heaven is absolute, full, final. We have left the partial, we have left the figures, the types, the pictures of the Old Testament, none of which reached fullness and finality; they only led us so far and left us there, but now we have come to the end of it all. "God... hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in his Son" (Heb. 1:2), and we are come to Zion. In His Son we are come to Zion - God's full thought in Christ. In New Testament interpretation, therefore, it is this - Christ, the embodiment of God's full thought concerning the Church, and a gathering into Him of those who satisfy that full thought, a gathering of a people to be a 'Zion' people. Now that is the basis of everything. Around that are gathered numerous things; if you want to know how numerous, sit down with a concordance and look up the word 'Zion.' That will give you a long task. Zion is a very comprehensive thought of God, with numerous aspects.

Zion A Testimony unto Israel

We come to one of the main things connected with this desire of God. It is here in this Psalm 122. "Whither the tribes go up... for a testimony unto Israel." A people in Zion for a testimony, not to the unsaved in this case, but to Israel. It will go beyond Israel to the unsaved, but this is God's method - from the centre to the circumference and beyond; Zion, Israel, the nations. But here for the moment we are confined to the first reach of the testimony, from Zion unto Israel. Now, that that is true in principle is proved by remembering that it was an ordinance established by God. We are back at the beginning when Israel was constituted a nation. You have only to look at one fragment in the book of Deuteronomy - "Three times in a year shall all thy males appear before the Lord thy God in the place which he shall choose: in the feast of unleavened bread, and in the feast of weeks, and in the feast of tabernacles, and they shall not appear before the Lord empty" (Deut. 17:16). Now you would be wrong, of course, if you read into this passage in Psalm 122 that all Israel went up to Jerusalem three times a year, or even once a year. They could not all get into Jerusalem, to start with; they could get nowhere near to Jerusalem; but they went up representatively. All the males went up three times a year; Israel went up in representation, and when they came to Zion, well, there a number of things happened.

They came, of course, into a wonderful renewal of the realisation of the love of God. How? The High Priest was there with the names of the tribes on his breast in the breastplate. They were before the Lord in the high priestly love - the love of God in Christ bearing them all on his heart. On his shoulders, again, their names were borne - the strength of God in Christ sustaining them through their lives. They came into a renewed apprehension of the love and the strength of God on their behalf in the high priest.

Well, I dare not stay to say all the things that happened when they went up. We have a little taste of that when from the distances of the earth, the hard places, and the spiritually cold and lonely places, we come together like this and touch the love and the strength of God, and feel anew the oneness of the Lord's people. When we have been apart and have felt we were the only Christians on the earth - sometimes you do feel like Elijah, "I, even I only, am left" (1 Kings 19:14) - we come together, and all things go that are not true, and the real truths are strengthened, and it is all good. They came up three times in a year in representation, and they took back to all Israel the good of Zion - a testimony for Israel.

My point now is just this - they were a representative company in Zion; Zion was representative in the matter of a testimony. Can I put that more explicitly? A company came to what Zion represented, and that company had a testimony for all the rest of the Lord's people. When you grasp that, you can see one of God's sovereign ways. I wonder if you have thought about the course of things in the New Testament. You start with the day of Pentecost, and the following period, however long or short it was, when things were really in fullness, very satisfying and gratifying to the Lord; He was having His thought very largely expressed in those first days, months, or, it may have been, even a few years. But then things began to change. You find a lowering of the temperature, the standard is being dropped, mixture is coming in; it is found necessary to correct a lot that is wrong in the Church; things are not the same. And it would appear that that process went on and developed. But what did the Lord do about it? Did He say, 'It was very grand while it lasted, but they cannot stand up to this, they cannot meet this standard, it is quite evident that they will not be able to maintain the original level, so I must accommodate Myself to the situation and accept this lower level and try to be satisfied with it'? Did the Lord do that? He never did. The impressive and remarkable thing is this, that the Lord began giving ever fuller and enlarging revelation - yes, to a Church which was no longer what it was at one time. You come to these closing letters of the Apostle Paul's life. Who can stand up to their contents? Look at the condition, the weaknesses, the defects, the limitations of the Lord's people, and yet He goes on like this, simply piling it on. He is not accommodating Himself to smallness, He is not accepting the situation, He is answering back with more and more and more. And what is the point? If they will not or cannot all have it, some will, and through that nucleus, that representative company, He will keep the lamp of full testimony alight. Even when shadows creep into and over the Church, He will maintain a full testimony, even if it be only in a few.

And that is where you are in the first chapters of the book of the Revelation. The Church as a whole is far from what it was at the beginning and far from what God intended and had revealed as His mind, but He does not excuse and accommodate and accept. He comes right back with the full revelation and calls for the nucleus from all the churches. That is how God reacts. Why? For a testimony unto Israel, a representation for all Israel. Oh, do grasp that. Even if you do not understand fully what the Lord is after, it is for you to decide whether you are going to be with the general, nominal, ordinary, or whether you are going to be of Zion. That is a point we shall have to emphasize more perhaps before we have finished. But after all, this remains - what God is after is this which is meant by Zion, that is, a representative company who have a fuller testimony for all Israel, and who are in the good of it on behalf of others. That is the way in which the Lord seeks to meet the great need, by having amongst them some who are a satisfaction to Him and know Him in this fuller way.

A Testimony to the Absolute Sovereignty of the Lord

"Whither the tribes go up for a testimony unto Israel." What testimony? What is the testimony? Well, the answer is Zion. That is the testimony itself. But what is Zion? Well, look at the history of Zion and you have the explanation of what the testimony is. In the first place, the testimony is to and of the absolute sovereignty of the Lord, and, in our own present meaning, the Lord Jesus. That is where the testimony begins. It is out from that that all testimony flows - the absolute sovereignty of the Lord Jesus. Zion is "the city of the great King" (Psa. 48:2). Solomon lived in Zion, David lived in Zion. Look at the history of it very briefly. Probably you recall that the first mention of Jerusalem in Gen. 14:18 was in connection with Melchizedek, who was king of Salem - that is the first name of Jerusalem. Melchizedek was priest of the Most High God, but he was king of Salem. The very first mention of Zion or Jerusalem is in connection with kingship in relation to priesthood.

Then we move on, and we find that Zion was the citadel or the stronghold of Jerusalem in the hands of the Jebusites. It was called first Jebus, the stronghold of the Jebusites, and it was in the hands of the Jebusites through the whole period of the Judges and the reign of Saul and the reign of David in Hebron. But when all Israel came to Hebron to make David king and he was doubly established in his kingship, then he went up to Jebus. He threw out his challenge to his mighty men, "Whosoever smiteth the Jebusites first shall be chief and captain" (1 Chron. 11:6), and Joab broke through; but it was such a stronghold as to be considered absolutely impregnable by the Jebusites, for they said, 'Why, the blind and the lame are sufficient to defend this!' Now that is not just a story, there is something wrapped up in that of tremendous significance where you and I are concerned. Believe me, the establishment of the Lord Jesus in absolute sovereignty is no child's play. Take it in His own case. What a tremendous thing it was to gain that absolute ascendency over all the forces of evil! What a grip the powers of evil had upon the citadel of man's soul, upon this world - such a grip as to make the enemy feel that his position was impregnable; and we know that there is something in that. Have you never been defeated by an enemy stronghold in a life? We have all come up against situations in individual lives in which Satan had such a purchase that it required something infinitely greater than the strength or the ingenuity of man to solve the problem. The problem of the deliverance of that soul, the establishment of Christ's lordship in that life or in that place, was no small thing.

But listen. Let us come away from the objective to ourselves; and this is the point for the present. We can sing our hymns, 'Crown Him, crown Him,' we can proclaim with strength and vehemence that Jesus is Lord, but it is just on that very point that all our own battles rage. Have you never been locked up in a controversy with the Lord, in a situation in your own life where the one issue was this - Is He going to be Lord in this? Have you never come into situations and circumstances where it looked for all the world as though the devil were in the mastery and had gained the ground and were holding it - as though he were lord and master? Are we not constantly up against things like that where it looks as though the devil and not Jesus is lord? It comes right home to our own spiritual lives as a tremendous test of faith. I am thinking of those experiences into which the 'Zion' people are brought which are not the ordinary experiences of Christian life, not the ordinary temptations and persecutions and difficulties of being a Christian, but situations which are much more deeply spiritual and involved, and sometimes their faith is tested right on this question - Is Jesus Lord after all? Look at the situation, look at the conditions, look at the forces which seem to be in control! Is Jesus Lord? I hope I am not scandalising anyone. You may not have had that experience. Well, all right, do not be scandalised and do not worry about it. But there are some who know what I am talking about, who have been there in the vortex of such spiritual trials and testings as to raise the issue as to whether the Lord is really Lord after all. Down in our hearts as a matter of our faith we believe it and we cling to it, but we are thrown about a good deal on this matter. We do not get through this easily. It is like that with Zion. The lordship of Christ is only established at great cost. It is only by terrific conflict and trial and testing that you get through to that place where in your own heart He is Lord; but when you are through, oh, something tremendous has happened and you are in a position where you know the Lord in no usual and ordinary way, and you have a testimony for people who are to go through similar trial, and you can help them because you have fought through terrific conflicts on faith as to the lordship of Christ. May that not explain why some of you are having such extraordinary experiences? You look at other Christians and you see them go through comparatively easily; they get what they want or what they think they ought to have, but with you everything is a matter of conflict, nothing comes easily at all. That experience may be explained by this, that the Lord has put His hand on you, with a view to putting into your life something of His lordship, and putting you into that lordship, in a way that will make you a peculiarly useful vessel and servant for Him. Some of you have been through it and know it is true; some of you may be going through it now.

Isaiah, the great prophet of recovery, the great prophet of Zion as the ultimate issue, went through some terrific testings, and his family came into his experience, and he gave his children names expressive of his deep experience. "Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath given me are for signs and for wonders" (for testimonies) (Isa. 8:18). His very family was engulfed in the deep and terrible experiences through which he went, because he was a prophet, not to the nations alone, but specifically to Zion. You see the place of Zion in the second part of his prophecies. This is very true, that Zion - that is, the company who come to be of greatest value to the Lord in representing His mind - will have to come to the place where the sovereignty of the Lord is something established on very solid ground. It is not doctrine, teaching, theory, historic fact, that Jesus ascended to the right hand of God: not something that we study from a book: but something that has been wrought into our very being by the bitterest way and the deepest experiences, so that our knowledge of Him is no ordinary knowledge, but is for a special purpose. Oh, the temptations while we are going through! What ground there is for the enemy to play upon when the Lord is putting us through those fires! But you see, Zion is something wrought in the fires. First of all it is the testimony unto Israel as to the absolute sovereignty of the Lord Jesus.

Let me conclude that for the moment by saying again that there is a very great need today for the Church to be recovered into the place of the absolute lordship of Christ. Its impact upon this world has very largely been lost, and the reason is that the Lord Jesus has not His place as absolute Sovereign. All sorts of things have come into the place of the absolute sovereignty of Jesus Christ - that is, of the complete government of the Holy Spirit. Councils and committees and boards and anything you like but the exclusive government of the Holy Spirit. But the Zion way is a costly way, it is not an easy way at all; that is why it has been surrendered and easier things have been put into its place. It is not easy to wait for the Lord, to have your government entirely by the Holy Spirit. It is a difficult way, and it tests you out as to whether you are going to put your hand on things - whether like Saul, the man of flesh, you are not going to tarry for the Lord, but to take things into your own hands. It is along those lines and in those ways that the whole question is raised - Is He Lord? The Church has not been prepared to pay that price, and it has lost its testimony. The Lord recover that testimony for the Church in the midst of the Church!

The Testimony of a Life Which has Conquered Death

Now the next thing about this testimony. "And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering that covereth all peoples, and the veil that is spread over all nations. He hath swallowed up death for ever" (Isa. 25:7-8). In this mountain, Zion, the testimony is to the complete triumph of the Lord over death, the testimony of a life which conquered death. It comes out of His absolute lordship, it is a part of it, but it works out in this way - where the Lord gets a 'Zion' people, there you have an unusual testimony to life. The thing we must ever keep before us (I state it simply as a fact without any exposition now) is that if you get a people who are what Zion means - coming into God's fuller thought as in His Son - the thing that is found when you meet them is life. Oh, I tell you that I cherish this aspect of the testimony very, very dearly and very greatly. To me it means almost everything, that we shall be maintained in life - not merely a people who have a specific teaching, a lot of light and a lot of truth but as dead as anything can be. (And it can be like that: you can have a marvellous amount of truth and be quite dead.) But whether the teaching is understood or not by the people who come, we want that the first thing they shall meet and register shall be - What life there is here! Not, what teaching there is here, but what life! In such an atmosphere you get a tremendous lift-up, you find yourself re-vitalised. Yes, death has been swallowed up. That is the testimony; that is part of the testimony unto Israel, and who will say that the Church as a whole does not need to know in some new and mightier way the power of His risen life? Is that not just what is needed? That is really what many are after. They are trying to get it in great organized movements; they feel the need of life as a mighty reaction against the death that has come in. It is not for us to judge or criticise, but we can say this, that this life can never be manufactured. It can never come by great efforts. It is the uprising of the risen Lord where He has room and capacity; and room and capacity are only made by travail. You have to suffer unto this life. You cannot get it cheaply, you cannot work it up and produce it by any means of man. It can only come as out from death by resurrection. It costs.

The Testimony of Abundant Provision

Then in verse 6 of Isaiah 25 we have this - "In this mountain will the Lord of hosts make unto all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined." "In this mountain;" "for a testimony unto Israel." Here is rich provision. If the Lord gets a people really into His full thought, they will not be a people who are merely existing on starvation diet, hardly able to make ends meet, just managing to keep going spiritually; and as for having anything to give away...! Oh, yes, conditions are like that in many places. You would not credit the number of letters that come to me from all over the world in terms like this - 'I cannot find any spiritual food anywhere, there is nothing to be found in this whole district; we are starving.' I am not exaggerating when I say that in the course of a year I could fill volumes with that sort of thing - the cry for food from the Lord's people. Here is the picture and it is not an imaginary one, it is tragically true. But, thank God, the other side is equally true; there is a feast of fat things when you are in the way of the Lord's full thought and are prepared to pay the price - the price of being for Him an instrument; not a price for salvation, but, a price for vocation to serve Him. Then you can have a table well-filled, a feast of fat things, with abundance for yourself and plenty to give to others. Oh yes, it is true, there is no want, no lack; there is abundance, an overflow, in Zion, "in this mountain."

A Testimony of Revelation and Enlightenment

Then finally, "He will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering that covereth all peoples." That simply means that the testimony going out is one of revelation and enlightenment, where people who sit in darkness are made to see. The word to Zion here in Isaiah is, "Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee" (Isa. 60:1). That is to Zion. But what is the counterpart in the New Testament? I think it is in those final letters of Paul for the Church. Look at "Ephesians" with the word 'glory' in your eye, it is notable what a large place the word 'glory' has in those prison epistles. "The glory of the Lord is risen upon thee." Arise, shine! In this mountain, in Zion, in a people wholly abandoned to God's highest and fullest interests, there is given a ministry of enlightenment and revelation, the taking away of the veil. This is the testimony unto Israel, God's spiritual Israel. "Whither the tribes go up for a testimony." All that we have to do is to ask the Lord to give us the energy of heart, the diligence and purpose, to go up to Zion - all that means spiritually - to have the highways to Zion in our hearts. "In whose heart are the highways to Zion" (Psa. 84:5). This way which leads to Zion is a heart matter.

Chapter 5 - The Vocation of the Church

"The gospel of the glory of the blessed God" (1 Tim. 1:11).

"The gospel of your salvation" (Eph. 1:13).

"The mystery of the gospel" (Eph. 5:19).

We were speaking in our previous meditation about the testimony in Zion, "...whither the tribes go up for a testimony unto Israel". We saw that "the tribes" do not mean the whole of Israel. "Three times in a year shall all thy males appear before the Lord thy God in the place which he shall choose" (Deut. 16:16) - a representation in Jerusalem, in Zion, for a testimony to the rest everywhere, wherever they were. And Zion is just that - a representation of God's mind on behalf of all His people; something fuller apprehended by some not necessarily chosen for it, but who choose it, who are prepared to pay the price for it, who are prepared to go the journey; and in them is found God's mind in greater fullness for the rest of His people.

A Prevailing State of Need

I want to bring you to another passage of Scripture in the prophecies of Isaiah.

"Bind thou up the testimony, seal the law among my disciples. And I will wait for the Lord, that hideth his face from the house of Jacob, and I will look for him. Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath given me are for signs and for wonders in Israel from the Lord of hosts, who dwelleth in mount Zion" (Isa. 8:16-18).

"...and they shall look upon the earth, and, behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish; and into thick darkness they shall be driven away. But there shall be no gloom to her that was in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali; but in the latter time hath he made it glorious, by the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations. The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light" (Isa. 8:22-9:2).

The particular verse that I am lighting upon is verse 18 of chapter 8. The whole section gives you the setting for this verse. The Lord's people in general are not seeing, that is, they are not seeing the great revelation that God has given concerning them and their glory and their vocation. Will you challenge that today? It is not a criticism, it is not a judgment, it is one of those things that we very much dislike saying. It is so easy to find fault and point out bad conditions; you can go on like that for ever. One would very much like never to have to do that sort of thing; and yet you are up against it all the time. The Lord's people are not seeing the greatness of His purpose in Christ, the vastness of that which has come from the eternal counsels. They are seeing so little, and a great many of them are not willing to see - that is the further tragedy. They are satisfied, they do not want any more, and many are suspicious and prejudiced and shut up; they will not have it, the Lord has not a clear way. Again, there are many who will not pay the price - not the price of their salvation, but of what it means to go on to all the Lord's thought. That price is the price of popularity and acceptance with men, of large doors of opportunity, prestige, and such things. That is a very general situation.

A Prophetic Instrument - 'For Signs and Wonders'

In such circumstances, what will the Lord do? He will bring into a company a prophetic instrument. In the case before us it is the individual, the prophet, to begin with; He will bring into being a prophetic instrument, that which will represent His thought - for you know quite well that the title of the prophet is "Son of man", and that is a phrase which always means representation. (He occupies the aspect of man-form in the cherubim or the four living ones; man-form - representation, Son of man.) He knows God's mind for His people, he has the thoughts of God in fullness. In a day of shadows and darkness and declension, God will bring into being such an instrument - and we are thinking of it in the corporate sense now. It has ever been His way. He will deal with that instrument in a strange way. There will be nothing normal in its experience, nothing ordinary - you might say, nothing straightforward. It is a strange, mysterious, and altogether extraordinary way that the Lord takes a prophetic instrument. See what He told these prophets to do - all sorts of extraordinary things! Ezekiel must lie for many days in the sight of the people, first on his left side and then on his right. And the people looking on say, 'What is this man doing? He is mad!' But all that is constituting his message. The way of a vessel for this purpose is not a straightforward way, as men call it. It is an unusual way. The experiences of such a vessel are all off the usual lines, and the people concerned very often cannot be understood. You can write up some things about the work of God and the instrument of God's work, and it is all clear and straightforward. But God gets something like this - and you cannot explain it. All sorts of questions are going round - 'What are you doing? What are you? What are you after? We don't understand.'

And every issue of that instrument is an indication of the particular purpose for which the instrument is called. "I and the children whom the Lord hath given me are for signs and for wonders in Israel". Here is a vessel, and the children represent all the aspects, the outworkings, the issues, of that vessel. How am I going to explain that to you? In the case of a vessel that is held by God for this particular purpose, every means used, every method followed, every piece of work that is done, will be in keeping with the Divine thought at the root, and will be an indication that this is not something ordinary, but something extraordinary, unusual.

Having said that, I have touched a spring. I am sure that many of you are seeing a long way ahead, but I shall have to explain it. Please do not think I am criticising. I recognize this - and let me say it again with great emphasis - that God employs different means and instrumentalities for different purposes, and you must not try to conform every instrument and vessel that God takes up to one mould, one purpose, one idea, one direction. When the Church, as the Church, failed to fulfil the Divine function of carrying the gospel to the unenlightened, God raised up vessels to do it, and so you have many institutions; and not one of us would dare to say that God never employed them, that they are outside of His thought and consideration. We should be saying the utmost untruth to hint at such a thing. He has used and He does use them, and many other things too He has employed for His purposes; but it does not mean for a moment that He has departed from His one true, essential, original thought as to how and by what means things ought to be done. He will always come back, if He can, to make the Church His vessel, and any other means will only go so far. If it is going to fullness, it will have to come back to His original idea. Do not let us think that the things which God has used He has not used, and that they are all false and wrong. But when God does seek to get that vessel which is essentially related to fullness, you will not find that He deals with it in the same way as He deals with others, and you will not find that He allows it to employ the means and the methods that others are allowed to employ. Here the thing itself and all its activities, its issues, its sons, its offspring, will be signs of something - signs of some essential nature and character, something very much nearer to the thought of God. They will signify that and they will be signs and wonders. Signs - yes, they signify something that God is doing and is after; they will all point to that. Wonders - yes, they will all be in the realm where it is utterly impossible to man; and that is one of the things that make all the difference.

'All of God' - A Costly Vocation

When God gets that which comes most closely into relation with His full thought, He will put it into a realm where man can do nothing, and everything associated with it will say, 'It is God alone, it is only the Lord, no man can account for this. Look and see if you can honestly trace this at all to any man or men or people.' Look at the thing. Is it something with names, titles, influence, status, and all that is so commonly associated with a 'successful' work? No; this is of God or it is nothing. No great names, no great people, no great natural gifts, no great or outstanding human qualifications; weak, in itself helpless, foolish, often having to say, 'I do not know'; shut up like that, just thrown right back upon God, and if it is going to be anything at all, it must be by the Lord's doing; if it is not of the Lord, there will be nothing. You can only account for it on that ground, that it is of the Lord. The Lord originated it, the Lord has kept it going, and the Lord is doing it. "I and the children whom the Lord hath given me are for signs and for wonders". There is something about this which is inexplicable on any human ground. That is how it is going to be, it must be, if it is going to approximate most closely to Christ.

I have John 5 before me as I speak. Here is Christ, the full embodiment of Divine thought, in Whom the perfection of those eternal counsels is centred, Who is to be the expression of God's mind in utterness. Hear him say, "The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing: for what things soever he doeth, these the Son also doeth in like manner... I can of myself do nothing". But listen, the One Who says that, immediately goes on to say, "As the Father raiseth the dead and giveth them life, even so the Son also giveth life to whom he will". You can account for that on no other ground than God. The Son can do nothing; God raiseth the dead; He gives the Son to do what only God can do. That is the principle we are getting at. We cannot get beyond Christ in utterness as to God's mind, and yet He says, 'Nothing out from Myself - it is God.'

Then Isa. 8:18 is quoted in Hebrews 2:13 and put right into the mouth of the Lord Jesus. "I and the children whom God hath given me". He has taken up the principle, and if you look at the context of that statement in Hebrews 2 you see it is this, that the children conform to Him, take their nature from Him. Now what is it? "I and the children whom God hath given me are for signs and wonders". Oh, is Christ a sign? Why, in John's Gospel everything that He did was a sign. And what was it a sign of? "Many other signs... did Jesus... these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God" (John 20:30-31). It was a sign that God was here in this One. "And wonders"; and what is the essence of a wonder? Why, this cannot be attributed to anything or anyone but God. Read John 9, and note the issue. The poor fellow whose eyes the Lord opened could not understand these wise people and their logic, their reasoning. "He opened mine eyes... Since the world began it was never heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing". 'Don't you see this must be God? He must be something more than a man.' And that is why they cast the man out - because he made Jesus God. That was the effect of the signs and wonders - 'it is only the Lord!' Ah yes, that is the nature of a vessel, an instrument, which is going to serve the heart of God's purpose. That is a very costly way. You will have nothing usual. Oh, how we long to get things straightened out and have a straightforward course! Yet we know quite well we are never going to have it. We are never going to have our affairs running without a difficulty. Other people with their family life - how easy-going it is! Everything for them seems to go evenly, but our affairs never go just on that straightforward track; there always seems to be something in our situation we cannot cope with, it is beyond us, and unless the Lord handles it we are in the most awful and hopeless confusion. I wonder how many people can accept that as being right - that is how it should be and how it must be, and (the Lord help us!) how it always will be if we are really committed to the basis that everything is to be of God. May it not be - and I speak with experience in this matter - that the Lord is trying to say to us, 'Why do you not capitulate to that and take a positive attitude in acceptance of it? I am waiting for you to do that. You are trying to alter it, to get out of it, you are rebelling, fighting against it and if only you knew it you are all the time frustrating the very thing you are seeking. Why don't you recognise that a situation like that is absolutely essential to My intervention so that achievement will come not by your cleverness, your ability, your acumen, but by a miracle every time; it will be God?' Ought we not to try to face this - that we are called into a realm where God deliberately plans that we should live on the basis of His deliverances, and where we are not allowed to get through on the level of the ordinary. Here again, though, is a peril. We must not become unpractical, and simply sit down and wait for the Lord to work miracles for us. We must do our part, as far as in us lies, and cooperate with the Lord in every practical way that is open to us; but even so, we shall often find that we shall never get through apart from a very real intervention of the Lord in such a way that when we are through it is manifest that it was not our effort that brought success but the Lord's working. The testimony will be - 'it was the Lord's doing'.

The Need for a Definite Committal

I wonder if what has been said has helped you at all. It helps me. The difficulty for you and for me is going to be to accept this and put our feet down on it. The Lord must present His mind in greater fullness to His people, and He must have that through which He can present it. He is seeking to get that more and more. But there comes a point where all of us have to have a transaction with the Lord about it. You can go away and be an 'ordinary' evangelical Christian if you like. You need not go right on with the Lord, but you have to risk a good deal if you say No to Him. You will come to the time when you will look back and say, 'I missed God's best'. But I do not want to frighten or drive. We are here just to give what God has shown us of His greater fullness of purpose - and we are as yet only in the shallows of that vast fullness: but, so far as He has shown, we have to speak it. He must show it. "Son of man, show the house to the house of Israel, that they may be..." (Eze. 43:10). Be what? The rest is with the people to whom it is shown. Are we of the number of those who will accept and yield to what He shows? Again and again in some more acute form the question arises as to whether we are going on in this costly way. We are required to face this and to make a decision before the Lord in our hearts as to whether we are going on, whether we are going to stand with Him for the fullest expression of His thought, or whether we are going to decide on some lesser course. There are plenty of arguments to induce us to take the easier way if we are prepared to listen to them. 'Most other Christians take the easier path, and God uses and blesses them. What more is required?' All I say is this - if you have good reason to think that the Church today as a whole is in the good of the greater revelation of God's purpose in Christ, if you are sure they are, then go the way of the majority; but if you feel that there is something more needed - the Church needs something, you need something more - well then, it is going to cost. You will be saved all right if you put your faith in the Lord Jesus, but that is not the point. You will not lose your salvation, but you may lose the prize. Salvation was never anything earned, but there is something called the prize (Phil. 3:14). We are not going to say what that is at present, but we are called to face the question whether the Lord has not got something more that He wants for His people and that He would give through us, having given it to us: or (to put that in another way) something into which He would bring His people because He brought us into it in experience, in life. Is that so? Well then, we are all of us up against a crisis, I as much as you. Let me say this from my own heart, that I personally am quite frequently brought up against this crisis as the cost of this way of the Cross is pressed home. I have to stand back and say, 'Well, what was the basis upon which I started in this way?' What was the basis upon which we started? Was it not on the basis of John 5? It was a thing we were always talking about. We did not know all it meant by a long way, but we said quite definitely, 'God wants something here on this earth which declaredly and manifestly can do nothing for Him out from itself. We will give Him a chance to do it all, that no one will ever be able to say, This is due to any man's great gifts or to this people's outstanding qualifications and qualities. If ever there is anything at all, the only explanation will be that the Lord did it.' That was the foundation, but how that gets pressed home as you go on! It is a challenge all the way along, and it comes up in ever new situations, new expressions. 'Are you still prepared to stand on the ground that it is just the Lord or nothing at all? If the Lord does not come in in an altogether new way, you are finished!' Are you prepared for that? There is a mystery about this, the mystery of the gospel. It is not a matter of terms. This is where many have made a mistake; they think this mystery is a matter of phraseology and truths - 'It is the truth of the Church,' they say, and all that sort of thing. Oh, brethren, God save us from that mistake! This ministry cannot be fulfilled along the lines of terminology. There is a mystery about it; it is the mystery of revelation, something deep down which you cannot explain by getting commentaries on the subject and collecting all the data about it and then giving it out. That is not it, that does not work. It may be the same phraseology, the same ideas, but it does not produce the same results. You cannot explain the mystery of what is of God. It is a deep, hidden secret of God Himself. That is a tremendous challenge. I say again it is a very costly way, and it is for us to say, and, as is necessary, to say again and yet again, 'I can have no other way, I must go on with God, whatever the cost.' The Lord help us to that position.

Chapter 6 - The Glory of Life Triumphant Over Death

Reading: Isaiah 8:16-9:2.

"Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath given me are for signs and for wonders in Israel from the Lord of hosts, who dwelleth in mount Zion."

Let us be reminded that we are here concerned with fullness; it is that which governs all that we have to say. When, of course, that matter was in view in the days of the prophets, it was a question of recovery of the fullness of Divine thought and intention. We in our time correspond to that, but in the book of the Acts it was not recovery that was involved - there were all the principles of fullness clothed with much that spoke of actual fullness. You have things there very much as the Lord desired and desires to have them, but all too soon the radiant morn passed away and a new period came when the need was for recovery; and as you move on in the New Testament you know how true that is. Arriving at the first chapters of the book of the Revelation, you find them occupied with the recovery of something that is lost. In all but one or two cases, the Lord has to speak of things that have gone, a state that has been left behind. It is recovery that is in view. We are in the time when the question of recovery is before us, and therefore we are in the time when the prophetic principle and function are operating - that is, when a vessel of prophecy is proclaiming that which was from the beginning as God's thought concerning His people.

The Testimony in Zion Summed up in Life

Now we saw in our previous meditation something of what Zion stands for - sovereignty, fullness, light, glory. If we look for one thing which includes all these elements and features of Zion we find it gathered up in the one word 'life.' By that, of course, we mean Divine life. So the testimony in Zion is basically that of life, a particular life, a life utterly and altogether different from any other life. We are going to follow on what we said in our previous meditation, with life as our interpreter.

Divine Life a Nature

Firstly, this life is a nature. Now throughout these messages we have been speaking about the gospel of the glory of the blessed God, of the satisfied God, and we have been saying that glory is the nature of God shining forth, manifested, expressed. That Divine nature is given to us in the eternal life which we receive in new birth. It is a nature, something planted within which has Godlikeness inherent in it. Of course, I am not meaning that we have planted in us Deity. Is it necessary for me to say that? But I am saying what Peter said - "...whereby he hath granted unto us his precious and exceeding great promises; that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pet. 1:4). It is in the life of which we are speaking that the nature resides. It is always subjective-objective, that is, we have this life in God's Son; we only have it in ourselves in so far as we have Christ in us. We do not become Divine, and no Divinity degrees can make us so! We are not great 'Divines,' and never shall be. It is an essential part of what we were saying earlier that we do not become that. This vessel will always be something which attributes everything to God, therefore in such a vessel He will have people who in themselves are very imperfect. You will never be able to talk of them as great in themselves. They will be very human people, and the very mark of their humanity will be their utter dependence upon the Lord for any bit of goodness at all. They will know that if there is anything in them at all that is of any worth, it is because the Lord is there, because Christ has come in. But saying that, and keeping that in mind with all that we say, we repeat that we have given to us the uncreated life of God, Divine life in Jesus Christ, and that life is the nature of God. That life does not sin and will always be our correction, whatever our own life does and whatever our own nature does. That is why the Lord's people who make mistakes and go wrong have a very much worse time in themselves than anybody else. They have a standard set up in them and they do not get away with things, because there is within them that which is a sinless life. If ever we raise the question of sinless perfection, we shall never be able to say it of ourselves; it can only be said of that other life that is given to us. But of that life it can be said.

God starts with that mighty potentiality of holiness, that mighty dynamic of His own likeness. He plants it in us at the beginning of our spiritual experience and Christian life, and it has in it all the mighty possibilities of God Himself. As it has its way, as we yield to it, complying with its demands, recognising its laws as we recognise the laws of our natural life, only so shall we come to fullness of spiritual health; but, given that, the result will be a Church which has the glory of God. "Unto him be the glory in the church... unto all generations for ever and ever" (Eph. 3:21). "He... showed me the holy city Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God" (Rev. 21:10-11); the glory which is the nature of God in the very life of God which is given to us. Is that too elementary for you? It is the first thing that we must recognise, however.

Divine Life a Method

The second thing is not, perhaps, quite so common in our knowledge and recognition - that this life is a method. We have often said that God's method is the biological and not the mechanical. Man's method is usually mechanical, even in the work of God. He makes a machine, he makes a 'Philistine cart' - some apparatus for the work of God, something outward, a framework. That is man's way of doing the work of God. With God it is always the method of life. When He is going to do something, His method is to implant life from Himself there. That is His basis, His method. Is He going to develop something? - it will be by life, and only by life and the increase of life.

Simply, it means this, that the real spiritual growth of the Church, and development and expansion of what is of God, will depend entirely upon the measure of Divine life present. That is God's method; for all purposes, that is His method. The one great thing that the enemy is out to do is to hinder that life from getting in. If he cannot do it in open campaign, by direct activity, he will do it by either deception or counterfeit - perhaps they are both the same thing. I mean this - there is a very great deal produced in the work of God which is not life. It is nothing of the sort. It is enthusiasm, it is zest, it is interest, it is strong emotion and feeling and the overflow of natural spirits worked up, drawn out, fed and ministered to, and it goes by its own momentum, and it has to be kept going from the outside - you have to give it more and more and more. God's method is inward - His own life; and when He gets a way for His own life, there is no need for any of these externals at all, the thing just goes on.

You have it like that in the beginning, in the book of the Acts. When things are as the Lord would have them, life solves all the problems, meets all the needs, gives all the directions; life, of course, not as abstract but in the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of life is a mighty intelligence for direction and counsel and guidance. If you are alive in the Spirit, and you are praying on an issue, you know by the witness of life whether the thing is according to the Lord's mind; and on the other hand you know quite well that the Lord is not interested in it because the thing just does not live in you. That is spiritual intelligence, that is having your senses exercised to discern good and evil (Heb. 5:14). That is a matter of function resulting from life. You go the whole way round in the work of God and you find that is the secret of everything. Things to be done at all or not to be done at all, things to be done now or not to be done now - any question whatsoever - it all resolves itself into a matter of life in the Spirit in believers and in the Church. Well, again, that is elementary.

You know quite well, and the devil knows quite well, that the greatest secret of success is life. 'So let's have a semblance of life.' says the enemy, 'in order to triumph by death.' And he triumphs very often with his great weapon of death by getting for a time a semblance of life and then letting it go, so that people are not ready to try again. 'It is all a myth, it is all false', they say; and he has doubly killed, and the last state of that thing is worse than the first. God has the true secret. Now the testimony of Zion is there, the true life of God, not only as a nature and a power, but as a method. If we are concerned with the work of the Lord, the point upon which we shall fix all our attention will be this, that life is having full, clear way in us and in all concerned. That of course will necessitate on many things, the application of the Cross to get them out of the way, but that is something on which I am not going to dwell for a moment. I am simply saying that this Divine life is God's method; it has always been.

Divine Life a Law

Then it is a law. Paul calls it "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus" (Rom. 8:2). Now, what is the nature of this life, this law? The law of life is that it is spirituality which is the first and final standard of God. That is the law; not by any other standard does God judge a thing. He judges entirely by spirituality. That is a very searching thing. You can have all the framework of the truth and yet with a total absence of spirituality; having it all, it may be a beautiful and clever and masterful presentation of things, but still hollow. I have heard a perfectly masterly presentation of the letter to the Ephesians which, if you were spiritual, left you cold and dead. Why? We can carnally present Divine things by the sheer cleverness of our own brain and strength of our own soul appeal. We can come right into the picture with Divine things and be the force - the force of brain and the force of will and the force of emotion - and it may for the time being seem to be a marvellous exposition of the Scripture; but after all, what has it done? It can be like that - carnal. Was it not John Bunyan who said that the greatest peril that he knew was that of Divine things carnally handled? Spirituality is God's standard. It may not appear to be so clever, but it will go much farther. Our measure before God is just the measure of our spirituality, our spiritual life. What we count for is determined by our spiritual life, nothing else.

And what is spirituality? Well, God is Spirit; it is just what the Lord is, that is all; the measure in which the Lord is met in us, the measure in which it can be seen that the Lord is getting the upper hand with us, subduing us, getting on top of us, taking our place. Oh, that is testing; we all fail there; we often fail terribly. I am not saying that we should never fail; that would be to discourage you far too much. But I am saying this - that if we are growing spiritually, the same old failures ought not to be just as dominant now as they were; we should not now be fading at the same point, in the same way, as we did; the Lord is becoming more; that is spirituality. Do not think of spirituality as some abstract high-flown thing somewhere up in the air, in words and kind of talk and ideas and sanctimoniousness and intensity - things that are, after all, just mental. That is not spirituality. There is a false spirituality that is an utter deception. We know of people whose 'spirituality' has made them superior to the Scriptures - the Scriptures are no longer the basis of the government of their life. It does not matter what the Bible says - 'the Lord has told me to do this,' they say; and yet there is a Scripture which directly contradicts what they are doing! You may say that is extreme, but it is only the issue of a false spirituality which begins somewhere.

Remember that true spirituality is a matter firstly of character. Is the Lord met? Is the registration in the main that of the Lord? Well, the law of life is spirituality; it is spiritual life because it is God's life.

The Practical Outworking

Now we are going to turn at this point to bring this into a very practical realm. I am going back to a section of the Old Testament, not to study it, but to remind ourselves of it. At the end of the first book and the beginning of the second book of Kings you have the ministries of Elijah and Elisha, and when you look into those ministries you find that the distinctive characteristic of both was life. I am not going into all the incidents, but just to dwell with the issue. The distinctive characteristic being life, it indicated what was the issue for the Lord's people to whom they were called to be prophets - and for those beyond the Lord's people; because, you remember, their ministries went beyond Israel. That is the point that the Lord Jesus made at Nazareth. "There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah... and unto none of them was Elijah sent, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon... And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian" (Luke 4:25-27). The testimony was to go out to, and through, Israel; keep that in mind. And it was the testimony of life; and that was the issue which was in view for the Lord's people as seen in the fact that these men were prophets of Israel.

Therefore, again, that ministry necessitated situations which were humanly quite impossible. The characteristic feature of their ministry was life. That indicated the issue that the Lord had with His people - their life, their spiritual life, their testimony to the nations; and being a question of life in the ministry, to recover that testimony it became necessary that they should be brought continually into situations of human impossibility which could not be met on any other than Divine ground.

Now in these two men, of course, you have typically Christ and the Church - Christ in Elijah, eventually coming to Jordan and from Jordan going up in glory, and in his ascension his mantle falling upon his successor; and the Church in Elisha taking up the ministry of the ascended and glorified Lord in the power of His Spirit, fulfilling His own word - "and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto the Father" (John 14:12). What does Elisha represent? We have said that he represents the Church, but we must be more precise than that. He represents the ministry of the Church on this basis - that he speaks of the Holy Spirit present in the Church bringing out all the values, all the potentialities, of the resurrection and ascension and glorifying of Christ. You see, they have both been to Jordan, they have both passed through Jordan, the one with the other - speaking in New Testament language, the one in the other - and on the other side of Jordan the glorious rapture of the master has taken place; and then the successor, taking up the mantle - taking up the Spirit, receiving the Spirit - moves to put to the proof all the mighty virtues and powers of that risen life. "Where is the Lord God of Elijah?"

Now that question is going to be answered in numerous ways, every one of which is set in a situation of death. If you can grasp that, you have the key to the whole matter. Then some other people come into view, called the sons of the prophets. Well, of course, from the story as it is written, you do not become very enamoured of these sons of the prophets. However, they mean something. What do they stand for? Well, just this - those who will serve among the Lord's people in relation to that energy of the Spirit which is present with Elisha; those who will serve among the Lord's people in the testimony of Jesus. It is the testimony of His risen life. That is very simple.

Now note what happens. These sons of the prophets must have experience in order to serve, and their experiences will be identical with this particular ministry that is going on - the ministry of life conquering death. Now consider the matters recorded - the waters of Jericho, the poison in the pot, the axe-head that fell into the river and was made to swim. All are suggestions of death working in various directions, in various ways, in various connections (each of which has its own significance) and of life coming in to triumph over death in all its operations. These sons of the prophets are having experiences in this, and they are learning by being terribly tested about it. Every time it is like that. "Master, what shall we do?" is their immediate cry, as it is ours in similar dilemmas. But the point is that it was through severe, deep testing that these men came to prove the power of resurrection life in order that they might be sons of the prophet.

You see how that corresponds to our passage - "Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath given me are for signs and for wonders." They signify something which is altogether outside of the human realm - something wonderful, which cannot be accounted for on any ground other than that it is of God. They are for signs and wonders, and the sons of the prophets alongside of Elisha are taking their character from him, learning in his school in an experimental way.

Now we too are right there. We have the Spirit present. The ministry of the Spirit is the ministry of life conquering death in all manner of ways and directions, and our education is in that connection. If we are to come into this service, this real service amongst the Lord's people, we must know through experience in this way and in that way the power of His resurrection. The only thing that will really serve is life which conquers death. Now let me repeat; in a testimony which is not a testimony of words and phrases and doctrines and systems of truth and interpretations, but a testimony in very truth, in very power, in utter reality, we have to be brought constantly - not once nor twice - in different ways, different connections, different places, into situations where only God can meet the need - the God of resurrection Who alone can raise the dead. That is the testimony, and it is not something that you can hear talked about and then take up; don't you try it! If you want to be in the good of the ministry of the Spirit of life, you have to face this - you are going to be plunged into situations where no one can help, nothing can meet the need, but God Himself. That will happen more than once, and you, like the great Apostle will have to say "that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raiseth the dead" (2 Cor. 1:9). When iron swims, you have a testimony that there is life triumphant over death! One is tempted to take up the various incidents in Elisha's life, but it would take far too long. All the way along it is life triumphing over death in this way and that.

Succession a Question of Life

The point I want to make is that succession is a question of life, life which has proved itself again and again as more than sufficient for all the power of death. Elisha's testimony went on after he was gone, that is, the power of life was there even when he himself as God's servant and instrument had passed off the scene. You recall the incident of the dead man coming to life when he touched Elisha's bones. The testimony of that is this - Elisha may be dead, but this life is not dead. The vessel of it for the time being may be laid aside but the life itself goes on. If it touches what is dead, it will restore it to life. It is the whole principle of succession. God's principle is life - that is my point. You cannot have succession of personal ministries or of instrumentalities, of means or anything else; you cannot have a guarantee that the thing will go on fulfilling the original purpose by appointing successors. It must be a testimony of life, and it would be better that things were allowed to cease when the original life is no longer there. We should not try to keep going something which no longer has that life of God in it. The earth today is cumbered with the lifeless corpses of works, organisations, which had a beginning in life, but which have lost it and are now being kept going at tremendous expense and yet fulfilling no vital purpose. Succession is a matter of life. Let us remember that. Oh, if we are concentrated upon anything at all, let it be upon that. We do not want to get something going with a name; we do not want to keep things, places, ministries, teaching, going. No, no, not at all! If the thing is to continue when we are gone, it can only be if the life of God is in it to carry it on, and still prove that it is of God and not of ourselves. We can go, but if the thing is of God it will go on; it does not depend upon any thing or people, but upon the Lord Himself. The Divine principle of succession is life, and that the life of the Holy Spirit.

Life by the Cross

Well, one more word - the contrast between Elisha's servant, Gehazi, and the sons of the prophets. Gehazi is a very despicable figure. You call to mind the outstanding incidents of his association with so great a man as Elisha. Gehazi represents that professional association with the testimony. You remember when the widow's son died and she went after the prophet, and the prophet said to Gehazi, "Take my staff in thy hand... and lay my staff upon the face of the child" (2 Kings 4:29). The woman saw through Gehazi, as women usually do see through people like that, and she was not putting any confidence in him. She clung to the prophet, but Gehazi went off with the rod, and arrived, I expect, very self-important, very professional - the servant of the great prophet! In he walks and makes his way to the room where the boy is lying, puts the rod upon the lad, and stands back expecting to see something happen, but nothing does happen. No doubt Gehazi exhausts every method of making this thing work. Perhaps the rod is not in the right position; try it another way! - but nothing happens. At last he has to admit defeat and go back a confessed failure.

The sons of the prophets, on the other hand, are brought into touch with equally difficult situations where acts of God are called for, but they see the things happen. What is the difference? What is the explanation? I think we find it here. You remember that when the Lord came down from the mount of Transfiguration, He found some of His disciples at the foot, and a poor father had brought to them his son that the son might be healed; and the father said to the Lord, "I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him" (Matt. 17:16). Afterwards the disciples privately said to the Lord. "Why could not we cast it out?" Well, you remember the end of Gehazi. He had seen the miracle upon Naaman, who, when he found himself cleansed from his leprosy, wanted to make a present to the prophet, and the prophet refused it. But Gehazi was governed by personal interests and so he went after Naaman and concocted a story and obtained the present. When he came back, his master said, "Went not my heart with thee, when the man turned from his chariot to meet thee? ...The leprosy of Naaman shall cleave unto thee" (2 Kings 5:26,27). Gehazi became a leper. Now it is a very solemn thing to carry this over to the New Testament; but do you see Simon Peter in that Judgment Hall denying his Lord thrice with oaths and curses? What is this? He is closely associated with this very Lord of life, this Prince of life, but in Peter as in the others, all the way through the time of that association you can trace personal interests; they had personal interests in the Kingdom, they wanted position in the Kingdom, they quarrelled amongst themselves as to who should be greatest in the Kingdom. Yes, there were personal elements. The end of that is spiritual leprosy and death. Anything that is personal, professional, in the way of our association with the Lord, is going to end in our undoing; it will not carry the testimony through.

The sons of the prophets are in another position. They are themselves in living union with this one whom they call Father. There is nothing that you can trace of personal interest with them. Whatever you may have to say about them and their faults and weaknesses and failures, you have to recognise that these men are really in spirit, in heart, one with their master, and they are recognising that everything for them depends upon that master. Is there poison in the pot? Well, he alone can meet the situation. Is this crowd of people hungry and needing to be fed and there is nothing for them? He alone can do it; he will feed them. Has that axe-head gone to the bottom? It is he who can recover it - not Gehazi! The power is in him and in him only. They are in spirit on the other side of Jordan, in the place where the self elements have been dealt with. I know the type is imperfect, but I think there is no doubt that this is what it is.

If the Cross has not done its work, we are 'something' in the work of God, and that is the way of death, not the way of life. When we come into the picture it is the way of death, as for Gehazi, and that must go out in the end in shame and failure. When the Cross has been planted well into that self-life, it is no longer I but Christ; that is the way of life. We may come into very difficult situations which may look like death, but no, this "is not unto death but for the glory of God" (John 11:4).

Death an Opportunity for the Manifestation of the Glory of God

This is one big argument for the fact that the testimony of Jesus to be in us, to be borne by us, necessitates in the first place the setting aside of ourselves by the Cross, and such a union with Christ on the ground of His risen life that He can allow us to come into situations which are death and seem to be the end of everything, but those very situations are the ones that are definitely foreordained for the glorifying of God. Remember there is that sovereignty behind these experiences, they are not accidents, they are not just haps. "Who sinned, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind? ...Neither did this man sin, nor his parents; but that the works of God should be made manifest in him" (John 9:2-3) - that God may be glorified. Strange sovereignty in a man born blind!

Lazarus is sick and dies, and there is sovereignty behind it. The Lord Jesus is standing back to give place to that sovereignty. "Said I not unto thee, that, if thou believedst, thou shouldest see the glory of God?" (John 11:40). That is the thing that governs this.

How do we view our situations - as tragedies? as judgments of God? Let us ask again whether the Lord has not got something wrapped up in them which, when it breaks out, will be tremendously for His glory. That is Elijah, that is Elisha. It is life triumphant over death as a sovereign thing in the hands of God to bring out His glory. I do want that all the words and ideas and material used shall not just be the stuff of a message, but that we shall really get to the heart of what the Lord is saying. The Lord is after a vessel with this testimony - that here is that which is of God, very God, all of God, not of man at all, and which will therefore bring all the glory to God. But to have part in such a 'Zion' vessel for His glory we have to come by strange, unusual ways, and many times we shall come to situations which look like the triumph of death, and the answer in ourselves will be death. "We despaired... of life: yea, we... had the answer of death within ourselves" (2 Cor. 1:8). But then there is sovereignty in it - "that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raiseth the dead." Let us look at ourselves for a moment; have one glance at yourself. What is the hope? Is there any hope? The sentence is that it is death. All right; but go the next step. It is not the end with God; it is only "that we should not trust in ourselves." Are you trying to find something in yourself in which to hope? Is that a part of the trouble? What is the meaning of all this introspection, this accursed introspection, which is death, death, death? Oh, let me say to you from my heart - be as objective as you possibly can in your faith. Leave the subjective side to the Lord; that is not your business at all; that is God's side. Our business is to hold on to Him, to look off unto, His is to do the rest. We simply recognise it has to be done, and commit ourselves to the Lord to have it done; then we hold on to Him, but we do not hope in ourselves. Let us stop looking for any ground of hope or trust in ourselves - "that we should not trust in ourselves." Why has the Lord brought you to despair? - in order to stop you looking for any ground of hope in yourself; that you should not trust in yourself, but in God Who raiseth the dead.

Chapter 7 - The Mystery of the Gospel

"The mystery of the gospel" (Eph. 6:19).

"I shrank not from declaring unto you the whole counsel of God" (Acts 20:27).

"...in whom also we were made a heritage, having been foreordained according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his will" (Eph. 1:11).

We have remarked that the mystery of the gospel relates to the deep and hidden counsels of God before creation. If we want to know what those counsels were, we have that given to us mainly in this letter to the Ephesians. There are three aspects of this whole counsel of God, or of this mystery of the gospel. In dealing with it we are, of course, touching perhaps the most controversial matter that has ever come under the discussion of the Church and probably the most difficult thing that has to be resolved; indeed, I do not think that it can be resolved. We have simply to accept statements of fact. You will see what I mean as we go on.

The Mystery of the Eternal Counsels

There are three aspects of this whole counsel of God, or of that which is called the mystery of the gospel, the mystery or the secret of the good news. Now, a secret is not a thing which lies on the surface; you have to get deeper down to find a secret. It means that there is something here in the good news of God that has a very deep meaning. If God has a secret, you may be sure that it is not some trifling matter. No, it is something tremendous; and the first aspect of this mystery, or secret, or whole counsel of God, is the mystery of the eternal counsels. What are those counsels? We must, of course, speak after the manner of men; but we must not try to bring such things within the limits of our understanding and knowledge. We do not know exactly how it happened, but what we do know as a fact is this, that before the world was, God is represented as taking counsel with Himself, projecting an intention - a great, comprehensive intention - which is called here 'the purpose', 'the eternal purpose'; a purpose, an intention, which has a centre and a circumference with a good many aspects of outworking and realization.

The centre was God's Son, known to us as the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the pivot; that in the fullness of the times God should "sum up all things in Christ" (Eph. 1:10). That is very comprehensive, for if you have "all things", you have all; you cannot add to that. "To sum up all things in Christ". That is the heart of the purpose and of the counsel.

But then there is the marvellous statement - words around which there is so much controversy - that He saw us, He had us in His eye. When I say 'us' I refer to an elect company which at a certain time, in a certain dispensation in the history of this world, would be gathered out of the nations; and He foresaw every one of them. Now this is the mystery of the gospel, and it is beyond us. Imagination reels here; the statement seems almost fantastic. If the word means anything at all, those concerned were individually foreseen, foreknown and chosen in Christ, and foreordained and predestinated. Those are words you cannot overcome; every member of that elect body was foreknown, every member was predestinated. Now listen: predestination was not to salvation or otherwise - that is where so much interpretation has gone wrong. Predestination has to do with specific purpose, not with salvation. It is according to His purpose in Christ Jesus that we were foreknown and foreordained "to be conformed to the image of his Son" (Rom. 8:29). We were predestinated with a purpose, and - marvellous to relate! - given to Christ. It is as though, before ever we had a being, before the creation, the Father had the Son and brought each one of us and gave us to the Son as His. Does that sound extravagant? Well, what is the meaning of the Scripture? Have you read thoughtfully through the seventeenth chapter of John? What is the thing which is constantly recurring in that chapter? Repeatedly we read there of "those whom thou hast given me". And in another place He has said, "All that the Father giveth me shall come to me" (John 6:37). It is tremendous in its implication. Those are the eternal counsels, this is the mystery of the gospel; and although that mystery, that secret, is said to be disclosed now, who of us has got to the bottom of it yet? I doubt whether any of us will get to the bottom of it in this life, but we have at any rate got it opened up. But this mystery of the gospel is so boundless, so unfathomable. Here are statements of fact concerning a people given to Christ in God's foreknowledge. I know, of course, your mental problem about election, but wait a minute; let us begin there, and we will come to the other in a minute.

That, then, is the first thing about the mystery, the wonder, of the gospel, the secret of God which was hidden from ages and generations but now made known (Col. 1:26). I say, that startles our imagination, but there it is; and we can do no more than point it out.

The Proclamation of the Mystery

(a) Essential, Despite Divine Foreordaining

The second thing about it is the proclaiming of it. "I shrank not from declaring unto you the whole counsel of God". And here in the end of this letter Paul is asking for prayer from believers that he may be able to open his mouth to utter this mystery, that he may have boldness to speak it (Eph. 6:19); and does it not want boldness to say things like that! See what such preaching makes of Jesus Christ, see where it puts Him; all things summed up in Christ! Go out and say that to Mohammedans and see what they will have to say to you! Well, you want boldness to declare that to those who have not seen. However, the Apostle is concerned with the proclamation of the whole counsel, the mystery of God.

That proclamation brings us up against another matter. If eternal counsel is all this - foreseen, predestinated, given - then why proclaim the gospel? Surely it must happen if God has decided upon it! If it is all settled like that and they are given, why proclaim? Immediately you introduce the question of man's responsibility, and that seems to be a contradiction. That is the great theological trouble; but all I am going to say about that is this, that responsibility in this matter of proclaiming does not undercut what we have just been saying about predestination. It does not mean for one moment that in putting before people an option you rule out predestination. No, you are put into the position of responsibility for declaring the whole counsel of God, and people are put into a responsible position by hearing it. The one truth does not neutralize the other.

It is the same in prayer. If God knows what He is going to do, why pray? Will it make any difference? But we cannot argue like that. We are told we have to pray, that is all. The responsibility comes back on us, although there is all this other side concerning the Divine counsels.

(b) A Full Gospel Essential to Full Growth

Then - and I want to say this very precisely - the full counsel of God is the only safe thing. I wonder if a very poor spiritual condition in converts, in Christianity, is not due to very inadequate preaching. Men are afraid to go too far, and they say, 'Preach the simple gospel of sins forgiven and judgment past and hope of heaven' - making the individual in question the object of it all instead of God's eternal counsels. Yes, the poor state amongst Christians is due to their not having been taught the whole counsel of God at the beginning. I do not believe that it is necessary to reserve the whole counsel until they reach some stage along the road where they can accept it. Why should we not go and declare to unsaved men that God from all eternity had them in view and has now come to tell them so, and to tell them why He had them in view, and what the great goal of it all is - His Son Jesus Christ? I think we should get better converts and a far better state in the Church. I believe that people should be very much better born than they are. Many are very poorly born, and their infancy is far, far too much extended in time. Well, Paul said to the Ephesians, "I shrank not from declaring unto you the whole counsel of God"; and that was before he wrote his letter to them. Yes, a full counsel is the only safe thing. I must leave that there, we have a long way to go.

(c) The Message Essentially Spiritual and Heavenly

The next thing about this proclamation is that it must ever be kept in mind and in view that the gospel is an essentially spiritual and heavenly thing. When Paul speaks about the mystery of the gospel he does so in relation to all that he has been saying about "in the heavenlies in Christ". "The heavenlies" is not merely a matter of location, it is the nature of things. Again, the trouble with ninety-nine out of every hundred Christians is that they are so earthly in their Christianity, so earthbound, and the gospel has become after all such a matter of temporalities - how it affects things here in time, and the temporal and material outworkings of Christianity. As we were saying in our previous meditation, the real measure of Christianity is the measure of spirituality, and that means the measure in which the Lord Who is in heaven is known and manifested in us here. Everything takes its rise from a Christ ascended to glory outside of this world. While He was here, He was limited - limited by everything, and most of all limited in the apprehension of those in closest association with Him. When He went to heaven and the Spirit came, they received marvellous enlargement of apprehension of Christ. It was no longer an earthly one, a temporal one. It had to be a spiritual one because He was outside of this world, He could not be seen with natural eyes; in no way was it possible to have any link or communication with Him other than by the Holy Spirit. It is a very wonderful statement that Peter makes in his letter - "whom not having seen ye love; on whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice greatly with joy unspeakable and full of glory" (1 Pet. 1:8). You do not see Him, yet He is most real to you. How does that come about? Because you went to Jerusalem or Capernaum and had an interview with Him? Not at all, you do not know Him in that way; your knowledge of Him is entirely spiritual. That may be true, of course, right at the beginning of the Christian life, but the principle of spirituality and heavenliness ought to mean more and more to us as we go on, as Paul wrote to the Colossians - "If then ye were raised together with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated on the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are upon the earth. For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory" (Col. 3:1-4).

And the need today of proclaiming the whole counsel of God lies firstly in the direction of the Lord's own people. They must know the whole counsel of God; they ought to have known it at the beginning. And then beyond them, the whole counsel of God must reach to the unsaved. But what do we find? We find this sad state in the Church, and therefore the Church cannot lift the unsaved higher than its own level. We find the Church earthbound, tied up with things here in all sorts of ways, with vision purely earthly, on this low level. The great heavenly vision of that eternal purpose of God concerning His Son is not the thing which the Church has seen and is seeing and is therefore ministering. No, the Church has to be saved from its own earthly condition and to come to the original position of the Church, a purely spiritual and heavenly thing. The whole ecclesiastical system proves the truth of this. What a thing of earth the Church has become in respect of its ecclesiastical architecture, its buildings! And that is pointed to as evidence that the church is something! The more ornate, elaborate, impressive, the building, the greater evidence that the church is something! But that is purely earthly, it is not a bit necessary to real spiritual life and effectiveness. Indeed, very often the real spirituality is found in places very different, or in no place at all - the Lord's people gathered to Him under an opened heaven. That is where the testimony is.

(d) Preaching Directed by the Holy Spirit

Then in this proclamation, the preaching must be directed or precipitated by the Holy Spirit. Why? For this very reason - and it is a principle that is borne out and shown us clearly in the book of the Acts - that only the Holy Spirit has the Divine knowledge as to where there are those given to Christ who are ready to come to Him. You cannot just go out willy-nilly and be sure of results. We have cited Paul in this matter and here is the principle stated. They were "forbidden of the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia, and they assayed to go into Bithynia; and the Spirit of Jesus suffered them not" (Acts 16:6-7). Paul might go to Bithynia and Asia at another time, but not then. The Holy Spirit is in charge. "Forbidden of the Holy Spirit... the Spirit of Jesus suffered them not". Why? - that is for the sovereignty of God. When Paul came to Corinth, he was up against a terrific situation and the Lord the Spirit said to him, "Be not afraid... I have much people in this city" (Acts 18:9,10). "I have", not 'I am going to have'. Do you see the working of eternal counsels and foreknowledge?

The whole book of Acts is constructed upon that principle. There is a lonely man crossing a desert. God in heaven has seen him and known that he is ready for the gospel, and sends Philip to make contact with him. "Go near, and join thyself to this chariot". The issue is straightforward immediately (Acts 8:26-40). Then away up in Caesarea there is a man praying; he is evidently asking the Lord to lead him on, to show him all His will. He is living up to the light he has, but he wants more. The Lord in heaven is taking notice of him. To Peter, away at Joppa, the Lord says, 'Go, make contact with that man who is ready' (Acts 10). This is the sovereignty of the Spirit in relation to eternal counsels and foreknowledge. The point is that the Holy Spirit must precipitate the proclamation and govern it, or we waste a lot of time and effort. You cannot do this sort of thing by having committees and drawing up programmes. You must be a Holy-Spirit-governed instrument for this work. "It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us" (Acts 15:28). It is like that all the way along. It must be a matter of the Holy Spirit in charge of things; the proclamation must be entirely governed by Him like that, and precipitated by Him.

The Responsibility of the Hearers

Yes, but then, you see, we come to this next thing - the responsibility of the hearers. In the mental realm this is another problem in the light of what we have been saying. Never mind, put that aside. The responsibility of the hearers. First of all, look at it in this way - the sovereignty of God which lies behind the very fact that the message has come across your path. It may be at work here at this very moment. Yes, away back there in those eternal counsels (this is no stretching of imagination) God saw you, and He said, 'I want that person for My full thought concerning My Son'; and here you are being told it and all the eternal counsels of God may sovereignly be behind your receiving this message. But the point is this, you are here where the message is being proclaimed. Do you just happen to be here? God is consistent, and if He decides upon a thing in His counsels He works to it and there it is. You say it just happens; but there it is - we are here, and it is that which begins our responsibility. Responsibility begins when God sovereignly puts His plan into operation and brings it across our path.

But you are saying, 'Man has a free will and he can refuse in spite of God's predestinating'. That is where the clash comes. Yes, he can; but we are not talking about salvation at this moment, we are talking about the purpose of our salvation. Oh yes, we can refuse our salvation, and the clash is there between God's foreknowing and predestinating, and our free will; we cannot resolve that. But here is the fact - that at this very moment God is telling us that we were called with a holy calling, that there is a tremendous thing bound up with our being saved. We can refuse the Lord what He intended; we can forfeit that which He had in view. You cannot reconcile these two things, but there they are, and there is a responsibility laid upon us. That is where that other side of the New Testament comes in, all the time warning, warning - "if", "if", "if" - and it is said every time to people who are already saved. There is a mighty 'if' constantly being pressed upon them; and are you going to say, as some, that you never know whether you are saved till you get to heaven? I am not going to accept that; I know I am saved. It is not a question that if you do something, you will be saved; and, after you are saved, if only you do something else you will keep your salvation. The 'ifs' relate to this purpose of your salvation, and you can miss that. That is where responsibility comes in on the side of the hearers. It is a mystery, true; but it is a fact.

But what does this amount to? what are we saying? Well, here you are; you believe in the Lord Jesus and believe you have eternal life; you are saved. But then the Lord comes along to you in His sovereignty and shows you that there is an 'unto' as well as a 'from'. It is a great thing to be saved from hell, from sin, from Satan, but now the Lord is saying that you were saved unto something; and if there is a lot from which to be saved, there is infinitely more unto which to be saved. Oh, it is the mighty 'unto' that governs this mystery of God. You see, the 'from' is incidental, the 'unto' is eternal. The mystery of God, our salvation, does not date back simply to when sin entered, the beginning was not the fall of man. Salvation overlaps that point and goes back to purpose - all these counsels of the Godhead before the creation and therefore before the fall. That is the object in view in the end, and God is working to that. He would have worked straight on to it but man sinned and fell. Now God must make a dip in His course and reach down with salvation to bring back to His original intention. Salvation is in relation to the eternal purpose which was before the fall. It is 'unto' more than it is 'from'. 'From', I say again, is incidental - terribly, tragically incidental, but incidental; it is not the eternal. It is the 'unto' that is governing everything, that purpose of God. Of course, in the 'from', God clothed Himself with extra glory. In the letter to the Ephesians, we have the two things - "that we should be to the praise of his glory" (1:12), that is one thing; "the glory of his grace" (1:6) is another thing. The glory of His grace is the extra that God gets when Satan interferes and man goes wrong. God is never beaten by wrong, He always gets more. So through grace, He adds to His glory.

But, mark you, that was not His intention in the beginning. I have had it said to me that God was glad when man sinned and fell, because it gave Him the chance He wanted of showing He was a gracious God. I repudiate that. No, not at all! Nevertheless, God cannot be defeated, and interference with His purpose cannot leave Him just where He was - He will get more every time. It will be the interferer who loses, and man's sin has only made possible extra glory to God along the line of grace; but it was not His intention, it was His triumph. And He is doing that with us all the way along; He is making good our need of grace in order to get extra glory to Himself. Through grace, He is getting glory where we are concerned.

God's Need on Earth of a Representation of His Full Counsel

(a) Experimental, not Theoretical

Now, God has set His heart upon having His whole counsel represented - that is the real heart of these meditations. God must have that whole counsel found in representation or He is defeated, and so He sets to work to bring those who will come, who will pay the price, into this position which, in the first place, satisfies Him, and in the second place, serves Him in that purpose; and a basic essential is a passion in our hearts for God's fullest thought. If He is going to lead us into it, He must have that response in us for His own satisfaction. Now in His dealings with us in this connection, He may lead us by permissive ways - ways, that is, which are less than His ultimate and full thought, and yet, in His permissive will, He will lead us by those ways. We find that in the sovereign government of our life we are led into something that is not wholly God's thought. That is true.

If you will allow a personal testimony, I can say with the utmost confidence that the years I spent as a denominational minister were the sovereign permissive will of God. It was right for me to be there at that time, although, as I came to see later, that realm of things was not God's full and final thought for me. But my coming to that fuller thought had to be on the basis of experience and not of theory. In that narrower realm I learned something of weakness and limitation and disappointment, both in myself and in the sphere in which I moved, which made me reach out for something better - I knew not what, and I would not have sought it but for the experience of disillusionment in the lesser realm. It was the lesser thing that made me cry out for an opened heaven, and for an order of things where I would not have to preach so many times a week simply because it was required of me as a duty, with all the terrible labour of trying to work up something to preach about - an order of things where ministry would be by revelation out from heaven, and only as and when the Holy Spirit gave and required it. Oh, the heart cry for deliverance from that old realm and order! And God in His mercy brought me through to something else on an experimental basis. Yes, God, in His sovereign permissive will, leads us in certain ways which are not His full thought at all in order to make our ultimate position to be based upon a real spiritual experience, and not upon a doctrine or a theory that we have taken on or that has been imposed on us. There are multitudes of Christians in doctrinal positions today which they know nothing about experimentally. They have accepted a tradition, a system of teaching; they are in it, they believe in it, but they know nothing about it in their own experience. That is not God's way.

The point for the moment is that we must be very careful that we do not take God's permissive will as His ultimate will. We must not say, 'The Lord led me into this, therefore I must stay and I must never move'. Be careful; you must always give God a free hand. He will not explain Himself at the time; He will seem to be contradicting Himself sometimes; you will understand later on. The thing is, never fix anything for God. If there is one thing that is made clear in the book of the Acts, it is this - God is not going to be tied up to men's ideas as to what He ought to do. That sheet let down from heaven in Peter's vision is a declaration that in heaven things exist which men will not allow here. Heaven's view is very different. Peter is going to argue this thing out with the Lord: "Not so, Lord". He might have added, 'and I can give Scripture for it! Lord, look at Lev. 11'. And the Lord makes it perfectly clear that He is not going to have anything of that. Sovereignty demands a clear road. God is always doing that sort of thing, and He demands that we shall be in such a position that He can do as He likes with us and we will not argue. That is the only way to fullness. If you are tied by your tradition, by your upbringing, by the thing that may have been of the Lord at one time, if you are tied with it and you say of it, 'as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be', you cut clean across the path of the Spirit of fullness. It is only as we are open to the Lord without prejudice, without fixity, stretched right out to the Lord, only so shall we come into the full counsel of God.

(b) The Purpose, Not Self, Dominant

You see the real starting point - the point which is the guarantee of fullness - is this, that everything is governed by God's purpose and God's will, and not by our need or our desire. We are called unto His eternal glory, we are called according to His purpose. If we are going to limit the gospel of salvation to just the meeting of our need, we are going to limit things. The full thing is not just to be saved from a fall, it is to be saved back to that which we missed in the fall - and that is not just a life marked by a certain kind of behaviour, but a mighty purpose of God. It is when we see that, and only as that becomes a dominant thing - God's will, God's purpose: not even my need, and certainly not my desire - only then are we on the highway to God's fullness; and you will find, if you are going to be entrusted with the fellowship of the mystery, that will be the way the Lord will take you. You will constantly be coming up against this. We have to be governed by eternal purpose, not by what we think necessary, not by what we would like, even for the Lord.

This mystery of the gospel - we realise even now how it defeats every attempt to explain it; but if we cannot grasp the terms, that is, if it does defeat our minds, let us open our hearts to the Lord on this simple but very sound basis - 'Lord, there is something very great in Thy thought; I see it is something infinitely more than that I should be saved. I do not grasp it, I cannot explain or understand it; but it is something very great to which Thou hast saved me and called me in Christ; and I want it, and I commit myself to Thee for all that. I trust Thy grace in whatever it may cost; I trust Thy power to perfect that which concerneth me, to work it all out; I commit myself to Thee for all Thy will, for all Thy purpose, for the whole counsel, for all that is so far beyond my apprehension; Lord, work in me that which is well-pleasing in Thy sight'.