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The Kingdom That Cannot be Shaken

by T. Austin-Sparks

Contents

Chapter 1 - Christ's Cross Foundational to the Kingdom

Chapter 2 - Sonship, Outside the Camp of Traditional and Earthly Religion

Chapter 3 - Finality - The Governing Factor in the Kingdom

Chapter 4 - Constituted by the Finality of the Work of Christ

Chapter 5 - Sanctification in Christ, the Way to Dominion

Chapter 6 - Constituted with God's End in View

Chapter 7 - The Constituting of Sons

Chapter 8 - The Constituting of Sons (Continued)

Chapter 1 - Christ's Cross Foundational to the Kingdom

Reading: Hebrews 12:18-29.

"Wherefore, receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us have grace, whereby we may offer service well-pleasing to God with reverence and awe...".

There is a sense in which that clause is the summary of the whole of the letter to the Hebrews. Everything leads up to it and it is the embodiment of all that the apostle has been saying; indeed, we may say that it is the summary of a great deal more than this letter; it embodies the New Testament. But for the time being it is with the letter to the Hebrews we are particularly occupied, although we shall go outside of it in order to come back again to it.

While it is never right to give pre-eminence to one part of the Word of God above any other part, and say it is more important, I think those of you who are familiar with this letter will agree that it has a peculiar significance and value for the present time; indeed, I know of no part of the Word of God which would be more revolutionary than this part if it were rightly apprehended and responded to. This fragment of it which we have quoted seems to come to us with special pointedness and poignancy. You notice that the context runs like this:

"Whose voice then shook the earth; but now He hath promised, saying, Yet once more will I make to tremble not the earth only, but also the heaven. And this, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain. Wherefore, receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken...".

That whole part of the letter comes with the force of a direct message in an hour like this. Perhaps I should be more accurate or would state the matter better if I said that an hour like this gives force to a word like that. The word has its force and has its meaning, but very often you need a circumstance in which to make that force felt.

There are two parts of history referred to here.

(1) "Whose voice then shook the earth...". That had its fulfilment at Mount Sinai.

(2) "Yet once more will I make to tremble... the earth."

But there is this, "Yet once more", and it also was to be history when not only the earth would be shaken, but the heavens also.

This universal shaking is said to be in order that there shall be nothing left but what God Himself has established. This letter is a comprehensive comparison and discrimination between the passing and the permanent, the shakeable and the unshakeable; and it is important to recognise that it was written to a people who for a long period had held the position of a people whom God had taken out of the world unto Himself, showing that even such a people may make their separation an earth-bound thing and have to be warned that that kind of separation is not God's kind of separation. God took them out of the world to be a people for Himself, and then in the course of time they gravitated earthward, so instead of being a heavenly people in the earth they became a religious people on the earth, and there is a great deal of difference. And such a letter as this had to be written to them to tell them, the people who were once taken out of the world for God by God, that they are to have their whole foundation shaken and their whole system of things, in the shaking, removed. On the other hand, the letter is a statement of permanent and final things, and the things which constitute the Kingdom which cannot be shaken.

Going for a few moments outside of this letter, may I remind you that the New Testament is comprised of twenty-seven books, most of which were written to combat some form of a universality of effort to destroy that which had come in with Christ. I want you to grasp that. The New Testament is a comprehensive countering of a many-sided attempt to subvert the church and to pervert the right ways of the Lord, and the chief point of the attack was and is the meaning of Christ's cross as to His own Lordship and as to the meaning of His Kingdom. In view of this mighty effort it was necessary, and is necessary, to make known the ground upon which security and triumph rest, and that is, of course, the positive side of the writings.

Now I have opened up a field that could engage us for a very long time. It is not my intention to take you right through all the books of the New Testament to show how what I have just said is so, but I might just take you through a part in order to indicate the matter, and that, of course, very imperfectly.

You take the four Gospels, and they were written to establish the four-fold claim of Christ to be, firstly, the rightful King; secondly, the Lord's Sent One; thirdly, the Son of Man, and, fourthly, the Son of God. Those four things were disputed. In each of those connections He was rejected; for all of those claims a cross awaited Him; and after He was risen and there was enough evidence in the world that the disputed challenge was hardly well-founded, these Gospels were written as a means to establish those claims. Now, of course, in the light of what we know of Him as the risen Lord, and all that has resulted from His resurrection and His exaltation, we are able to read the Gospels in a new light and we are able to see how confirming they are of His claims.

You pass to the book of the Acts, and there you have the Kingdom introduced from heaven and the risen Lord proceeding with His Kingdom activity, and the book for the most part is occupied with expansion, formation and opposition. And this opposition becomes manifold, many-sided. There is a universality of antagonism to what has come in through the cross of the Lord Jesus, and the rest of the writings of the New Testament deal with the many-sidedness of that antagonism, and each letter takes up some form of that opposition to what has come in with Christ through His cross.

We will now refer to some of Paul's writings alone. With the letter to the Romans we have a challenge to the cross undoubtedly, for the point of emphasis in that letter is the cross. Everything up to chapter 6 leads to it in every direct way, and everything from chapter 6 comes back to it. The cross is central. But the challenge is in relation to sin and righteousness, and the instrument of the challenge is the law, or external obligations. And what arises there is just the issue as to the value of the cross of the Lord Jesus. If the law prevails, then the cross goes out. If the cross prevails, the law goes out. If the law prevails, sin remains and righteousness is not found in God's universe. If the cross prevails, sin is dethroned and righteousness established. There is your challenge.

In the first letter to the Corinthians you have the challenge to the cross along another line. It is the challenge of the flesh in believers, the carnal nature in the people of God. The instrument of that challenge to the cross is just nature and the world working together; that is, believers proceeding in their Christian life upon a purely worldly and carnal basis. The cross is introduced there, or Christ crucified, and if the cross prevails the carnal nature goes out and the world is destroyed. If believers go on in carnality and in worldliness then the cross has been robbed of its power. That is the statement of the letter in a nutshell. It is a challenge to the cross from another angle.

You pass to Galatians, and again it is a challenge to the cross. See how many times the cross is referred to in that letter, and here you have not only the law but the whole system of Judaism rising up to destroy the value of Christ's cross. It is not only the question of sin and righteousness, righteousness which is of the law or of faith. That is not the specific argument in Galatians as in Romans. Here it is the whole system of Judaism, the whole range of that historic religion in its outward expression, and it rises up to bring believers again into bondage; and if Judaism prevails the cross, again, is destroyed as to its meaning and value; and if the cross triumphs Judaism goes out.

Then you pass from Galatians to Ephesians. It is again the challenge to the cross, and this time it is in relation to the character or nature of Christ's church. The Ephesians, and those included in that rather general term (for the letter was undoubtedly a circular letter for a region), had a background of pagan mysteries, rites, initiation, secret societies, a whole mystical system. The peril there was to make Christianity, and what had come in with Christ, just a mystical religion. You remember at Ephesus it was that they made the great bonfire and burned their books on magic and such like things. All those books contained the ritual and order and system of this mystical line of things, with initiatory rites into secret societies, and so on. Now you can see the place of this letter to the Ephesians.

I am always afraid of that phrase "the church mystical", and yet it gives point to this letter when you remember the background of the people. Yes, the church is mystical, but not in the pagan sense. There is initiation, but not after their order. The church is heavenly, it is spiritual in reality, the church is not a seen, a tangible, an earthly thing. The knowledge of the things of God is not along the line of ordinary intellectual training and ability; it is only by initiation, "a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him...". Do you see the peril?

Here you see there was a challenge to what had come in through Christ's cross, the true, eternal, spiritual, heavenly nature of the church which is His Body, and how that church is entered, what is the basis of membership of that Body, and what are the features of the life of that church as in a heavenly place with a heavenly revelation, something that has come out of eternity and goes through to eternity, in which time is only an incident. Oh, there is a large field for mysticism, but mysticism is not spirituality in the New Testament sense: it is an imitation, a false thing, it is Satan's counterfeit of the church, and multitudes of the Lord's people have fallen into the snare that was lying in the path of these converted pagans, and thinking of mystical Christianity and religion as essentially spiritual. We have to get a right understanding of the meaning of the word "spiritual" according to the New Testament, and not get into that morass of death which is merely mysticism.

You may think that is very much up in the air, far above us all, but, do not make a mistake, it is a snare for every one of us. There are those to be found very near at hand who are always probing into things to try and get something that is not obvious, something that is remote, and they think that if they can get behind the thing said and find some extraordinary interpretation that they have got the inner secret of the Word of God; and so we find a lot of these extraordinary, fantastic interpretations of God's Word by a probing into it and trying to draw out some fanciful interpretation. It is called spirituality, and larger and deeper knowledge, and it leads nowhere, only to death. There is all the difference between mystical interpretation and divine revelation.

It is the cross which is basic to the church, and if the cross is put aside you can get a false and mystical kind of church, but not the church of God. So it was a challenge to the cross.

Passing to the letter to the Colossians, you have another challenge to the cross, and this time it is in relation to Christ's supremacy. You know the whole line of that letter, the marvellous part of the first chapter in its presentation of Him. Here again the challenge came, this time through what was called Gnosticism, the people who claimed to know, to have extra knowledge. Such believed that that system of thought which saw the universe of the unseen as arranged and ordered in a great hierarchy of angelic beings, all in different ranks and orders, from the supreme archangel down in ever-widening circles and ranks of archangels and angels, coming down to the more inferior spirits. This was what lay behind the visible universe and governed it, and in the interpretation Jesus was just the supreme Archangel in the spiritual system. He was that and nothing more. They allowed Him the supreme place there, but that was as far as they could go.

Now you see the point of this letter. The apostle tears that theory to fragments, and says that in Him, through Him, unto Him were all things created, things in heaven, things in earth, things under the earth; angels and principalities were created by Him, and He is above all, all are in Him, all things held together in Him. He is appointed by God to have the pre-eminence. And that, all hung upon His cross. That is why in such a letter as the letter to the Colossians you have such emphatic passages as that in chapter 2 verse 12 about the circumcision of Christ, in which the whole body of the flesh is put away in baptism. If you do not have the application of the cross to your fleshly mind you become a fanatic, and your fanaticism means that Christ is given a less place than God has given to Him. You may exalt Him, but to a lower place than His rightful place. There must be the circumcising of the mind and of the heart of man; he must know what it is to be buried with Christ in baptism. Do you see what hangs upon the cross? So much!

You pass to Philippians, and again the challenge comes in in relation to the ultimate object, the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus. That third chapter of the letter to the Philippians is one upon which hangs God's highest purpose for the saints.

"If by any means I may attain unto the out-resurrection...", and that connected with the prize. And what is the prize of the upward calling? It is the throne. Saints are called to be joined with Him in His throne. "To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, as I have overcome and am sat down with my Father in his throne." Paul's aspiration is to that, the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ, and as a true aspirant he says, "this one thing I do... I press on... if by any means...".

There is an assault upon the cross, because that is the supreme issue for the saints. How does the assault come? Along the pathway to the throne. It is that simple, commonplace language: "I beseech Euodia, and I beseech Syntyche, that they be of one mind in the Lord." Do you see the relationship? If the enemy can get in between saints and get them at variance in mind and heart, get them divided, get the love of the Lord in them for one another damaged and interrupted, he has struck a blow at the prize, he has arrested their course on the way to the throne. Jesus, equal with God, emptied Himself, being found in fashion as a man, taking the form of a bondservant, humbling Himself, and becoming obedient unto death, yea, the death of the cross; wherefore God highly exalted Him. He has emptied Himself to come down, to be obedient unto death, in order that He should be there, not alone but having His church with Him, He loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might present the church to Himself not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, a glorious church.

Now here is the challenge. Called into union with Him in His exaltation. What will defeat it? How can it be arrested, prevented, hindered? Just in this way: Euodia and Syntyche - and all whom they represent - at variance with one another. You will never get to the throne that way. What is the remedy? It is the remedy of the cross. "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who... emptied himself...". Why will Euodia and Syntyche be at variance? Because of some pride which keeps them back from saying, I am sorry! I was in the wrong! They are standing upon their dignity. "He emptied Himself, He took the form of a bondslave, He became obedient unto death, yea, the death of the cross" - shame, ignominy, humiliation, degradation. Sometimes in order to get to the throne it is necessary for us to degrade ourselves (if you will use that word, for pride often uses that word and says it will be a degradation). He did! There is the challenge to the cross along the line of Christians at variance, an attack upon the issue of the cross, the Throne.

We close with a word about Thessalonians, for here is the challenge of the cross in relation to its ultimate crisis, the Lord's coming, the church's hope and dynamic.

We have reached Hebrews 12:28, a Kingdom which cannot be shaken. Do you see what the Kingdom that cannot be shaken is? It is all those things that we have been speaking about. Hebrews summarises all Paul's letters:

- Romans. The sin question dealt with and a righteousness established. That runs right through the letter to the Hebrews; the priesthood of the Lord Jesus, His sacrifice.

- Corinthians. A life in the Spirit, not in the flesh.

- Galatians. An emancipation from an earthly system of religion into Christ. That is Galatians, and that is Hebrews.

- Ephesians. Heavenly union with the risen and ascended Lord. That is Hebrews again: "Holy brethren", says the apostle to the Hebrews, "partners in a heavenly calling".

- Philippians. "The prize", corresponding to: "What is man, that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou puttest him in charge?"

- Colossians. The absolute sovereign headship of the Lord Jesus. Well, read again the first chapter of the letter to the Hebrews: "Whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom he made the ages". That is a summary of Colossians.

- Thessalonians. The heavenly hope. "Receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken". That sums it all up.

Now, of course, we ought to go back and have a look at these components of the Kingdom which cannot be shaken. We are not going to do that at the moment. This is only an introductory word, but it is a call which has been reinforced during these days with tremendous pointedness. Are we quite sure that we are receiving now the Kingdom which cannot be shaken? Note the language, note the tense. "Wherefore receiving (present active) a kingdom which cannot be shaken". It does not say the Kingdom is going to come; the Kingdom has been introduced, and the Kingdom is going to be consummated: it is progressive and it is spiritual. The question, put quite bluntly, is this: Are we quite sure that we are founded and grounded in the spiritual and the heavenly realities of Christ and His cross, or are we simply linked up with some system of truth, doctrine, practice? Are we dependent upon the externalities of our faith, or have we the risen, living Lord resident in our hearts, and is He answering to all the need of our spiritual life, as represented by that system which has been put aside? Has the question of sin been for ever settled for us by His one offering? Is the question of sanctification settled for us? Is the question of glory settled for us? Is the question of going through triumphantly settled for us?

How practical the Kingdom is, as seen in the light of the Philippian letter! How practical it is as seen in the light of the Ephesian letter! You ask me what the Kingdom is. I say it is the message of all those letters. Are we receiving in a spiritual and living way what is there? You begin with Matthew: Jesus is King. Receiving the Kingdom is first of all to have received Him as King, as Lord, and so on.

May the Lord Himself bring His own appeal to our hearts.

Chapter 2 - Sonship, Outside the Camp of Traditional and Earthly Religion

Reading: Hebrews 12:26-29.

We come back to this letter to the Hebrews, and we can narrow the whole thing down to it. In the first place, is there not some peculiar and wonderful significance about the preservation of this letter in particular? You see, it was written for a special occasion, and that occasion was one historically very near to the time of its writing. If, as many believe, its date was between 66 and 70, then it was very near in time to the actual carrying out or fulfilment of the thing for which it was written; that is, it was written because Jerusalem and Judaism in the order in which it then existed was about to be shattered to pieces and scattered to the ends of the earth, it was preparation for that, and that took place in 70. So the letter, written so near to the occasion, fulfilled its purpose within a very short time.

Why, then, should it last out till now? Why should it occupy the place that it occupies now in the preserved and protected writings of the New Testament? Some have been lost, we know. Why did not the Lord let this be lost, seeing that it had fulfilled its purpose? I venture to say that this letter is living now. It is not a letter that has no life in it, as though it had served its purpose and could now be put aside. It is a tremendous letter as a spiritual document today. What does it mean? Why was it written? Certain Jews had turned to Christ, and in turning to Christ had turned to the fulfilment of all their Jewish patterns, all their Jewish types and figures and shadows, passed from the substance to the reality. Then ardent Jews came along and sought to make it very hard for them. It meant ostracism, boycott, persecution, and much suffering; and a great effort was launched to Judaise Christianity, that is, to link Christianity on with Judaism and preserve, maintain, perpetuate all the Jewish orders in connection with Christianity.

The letter, as you see, was written against such a movement, and to strengthen those believers in the faith, and it set forth the fact in a very comprehensive way that Jesus fulfilled, embodied, transcended all the spiritual values of the Jewish foreshadowing and types, and put them aside, and that henceforth for the Lord's people it was not a matter of a tabernacle or a temple, an altar and its sacrifices, a priesthood in rota and all that outward order of things, but it was all in Christ in heaven, of spiritual value.

That was the content of the letter in brief. Its object was immediate. How far it achieved its object we do not know. It is possible that some of those believers went back in spite of the repeated warnings, and perished with Jerusalem and Judaism. It is probable that many of them were saved by this letter, so that when Jerusalem, the temple and the Jewish system was shaken, as the Word says, and ceased to remain, their link was with heaven, with a living, risen, exalted Christ, and it meant nothing to them of loss that all that did go. The immediate purpose was accomplished. Why maintain the letter? Why keep it alive? Why preserve it? That is the question we have to answer, and the answer is that the letter does not merely deal with an historic instance. It deals with an abiding tendency. It is something which is always the peril of God's people, whether they be Jews or Christians. The value of this letter today is that it is a letter no longer to Jewry, no longer to Israel but to the Christian church, and that is why it lives, because God knows that that tendency is a persistent one in the direction to which these Hebrew believers were being tempted, and in the direction to which they were almost being driven. So that something very concrete arises. It is this: that Christianity can become exactly what Judaism became, and God is against that. And it brings us back to the central point of our earlier meditation. It is one of the master-strokes of Satan against the Lord Jesus, and the principle result of his work is tradition. By that I mean the making of things into a system run by man. Now that covers a lot of ground, a lot of history. Christianity has become a repetition of Judaism. Organised Christianity today is what Judaism was when this letter was written: an historic thing, a systematised thing, a whole system of beliefs, truths, doctrines, activities, movements, which are very largely but an imitation of something.

We come to the New Testament. As to the things taught in the New Testament, we say these are the New Testament doctrines and we are called upon to subscribe to these doctrines. Now we are not going to attempt to cover the ground of what the New Testament doctrine was. Fundamentalism as such draws a circle around New Testament doctrines, but then there are a good many that go beyond that. Then we come to the New Testament and we see not only doctrines but practices, and we say, This is the practice of the New Testament. Then we come again, and we see the activities, what we may call the work which was carried on or carried out in New Testament times by the apostles, by the church. And then we come again and we see what the church was in New Testament times. We have a presentation of the church as it is here on the earth.

Now those four things since New Testament times have been taken up as a system and imitated: that is, there has been the forming of the doctrine into the creed, the Christian creed, and it is accepted, and we say, I believe in so-and-so! Why do you believe in it? Because it is in the New Testament. Well, that may be quite good so far, but you proceed beyond that. This was the practice of the church in New Testament times: therefore we can do likewise. This is how the church was organised (I am doubtful about that word, but we will use it for the moment) in New Testament times. This is how the church came into being, and how it was ordered and arranged in New Testament times, therefore we do the same. We have our churches on that basis, we imitate. And then as to the work, whatever it might be, evangelism and all the other activities on the side of the work of Christianity as a movement, we see this is what happened, we do the same, we imitate. And so for centuries the thing has become a system like that, of imitation, and that is what I mean by tradition.

That can just be Judaism repeated in Christendom. That is what Judaism was. Remember that Judaism came from God out of heaven at one time; it came by revelation, and it came in power, and it was accompanied, as this letter points out, with the voice of a trump, with fire and smoke, shaking and earthquake. It came with the accompaniments of God Himself, all terrible, a consuming fire: and yet it became that, a thing which had to be overthrown, for the overthrow of which God had to shake the earth. It became the thing which was the occasion of the chief conflicts of apostolic times. Paul's battles were on the field of Judaism. Yes, a thing which originally came from God, now one of God's main difficulties, doing more harm than it is worth, set aside, repudiated. You have only got to look at Jewry today and see how much respect God has for Judaism as such. Well, Christianity came from God, out of heaven, and this letter says that Judaism came through man but this faith came from the Son of God Himself. That is the comparison. He that spoke then on the earth, Moses; how much more in the case of Him that speaks from heaven. "God, who in time past spake unto the fathers in the prophets... hath at the end of the times spoken unto us in his Son..."; yet the peril and possibility and tendency is exactly the same in both cases, the end can be similar, and God will yet shake Christendom to its foundations, that it shall be shattered as He has done with Judaism. That is the testimony here. Yes, all our creeds, all our imitation of the New Testament. God never meant anything of His in this dispensation to be an imitation. He meant it to be the real thing. The difference between the real thing and the traditional is between life and death. Tradition is in one realm and life is in another. It depends entirely upon whether it is earthly or heavenly.

I am impressed with that phrase, "...as of things which are made..."; that is, things shaken, passing. "Things which are made"; imitations are always made. The original is never made: that comes out from God Himself. What then is the truth? What is it that God is after? Well, you turn to the beginning of this letter and it all becomes very clear at the outset. "God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us Son-wise." It is not just what Jesus said: it is what Jesus is. The revelation is not of something, it is a Son-revelation, and if you pursue this thought - and you will have to seek to follow closely - into this letter a little further, you will find that this word "Son" is a term, not only a personal designation. It belongs to Him in a unique way, in a specific and peculiar way, in a way which has that in it which is not shared by any other, and yet there is that in it which is an imparted thing, and God speaks first of all Son-wise in the absoluteness and finality of His Son.

Then it is not long before you find yourself being engaged with a secondary thought; that Son's relatedness to the race, and bringing out of the race sons, and bringing them to glory, so that a family issues, "Wherefore, holy brethren, partners in a heavenly calling..."; "...bringing many sons to glory..."; "...he is not ashamed to call them brethren...". And then you move on from what lies between, and you come to chapter 12: "My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord... whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth." We gave to the fathers of our flesh reverence: how much more unto the Father of our spirits. There you have got to the heart of things. What is the essence of living Christianity? What is the thing that God is after, which will be established, which will be eternal, which will satisfy His heart, which will fulfil all His intention, and which will be the very occasion of His shaking the heavens and the earth to get rid of all else? It is Sonship.

It is in Sonship that we have all that God means, and so here you see it is a matter of living union with the living Son of God as raised from the dead and exalted to God's right hand: for that is what this chapter says. "Unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee?" Turn to the book of the Acts, chapter 13 and verse 33: "He raised up Jesus, as it is written, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee." Now He was the Son of God from eternity, He was the Son of God when He was born at Bethlehem, He was the Son of God in Jordan's waters, attested there, but here is something peculiar, related to Him in Sonship: He is declared, says Paul, the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead. God raised Him, as it is written, "Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee."

There is a Sonship connected with His resurrection which is of peculiar significance, because when Jesus was dead (if I may put it this way) that was an end of everything, everything as to the thoughts and intentions and purposes of God. If Jesus had remained dead, all God's eternal purposes would have ceased. When God raised Him from the dead and He lives again, it is Sonship, but it is Sonship in an inclusive way. All God's purposes and thoughts and intentions spring to life again, have realisation, and this very principle of Sonship is a related thing, is a family thing, is that He should not be the only begotten but the first begotten; that He should be the firstborn from among the dead, that He should be the firstfruits of those that sleep, "Bringing many sons to glory". And so Sonship has a very far-reaching significance in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

Now then, Sonship embodies, as you may see, all the thoughts of God, all the purposes of God, all that God has before ordained and intended. It is in the Son whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom He made the ages. Now the Spirit of God's Son, of that risen, living Son, is given to believers for the purpose of realising all those intentions and thoughts of God in the church, and that is God's method. God's method is not to call upon you and me to accept certain doctrines, prescribe to certain things set forth as New Testament truths, to act in a certain New Testament way, and do a certain kind of New Testament work. God's all-inclusive thing is that you and I should receive the Spirit of His Son, and from that time everything is in His hands. We do not take on anything from the outside; everything begins from inside. And anybody who simply takes Christian truth as in the New Testament from the outside, accepts it, adopts it, and assents to it, will become a traditional Christian and a dead one, and anybody who tries to conform to the New Testament order of things has put on a mould, a garment and will simply get into what the New Testament describes as "dead works". Anybody who tries to do the work of the Lord, because that was done, and it was done in that way, in the New Testament, will find that they have a long way to go in the matter of power with which to meet the demands. Unless the Son of God does it all, and that from within, in the end it will be lost, it will be shaken, and it will fail to possess. Everything becomes inward by Sonship. Christ is the sum total of God's thoughts, God's desires, God's intentions.

By the Spirit of sonship indwelling, those thoughts, those desires, those intentions become an inward thing in the believer, and then begins our real history spiritually. What is spiritual history? Spiritual history is not what we believe as doctrine; there is no history in that at all. Spiritual history is not in what we do as practice. There is no history in that. Spiritual history is our testing, our trying in relation to the thoughts, desires and intentions of the Lord.

Now that is difficult to grasp. How can I put it clearly to you? The apostle Paul, after he had met Jesus of Nazareth on the Damascus way, went away into Arabia for two or three years. He got new things revealed in him by the revelation of God's Son in him. God's thoughts in Christ, God's intentions in Christ were revealed to him. Up to that time Paul had been pursuing a course dictated by outward acceptances. If Jewry said a certain thing ought to be done, because Jewry said it Saul did it. He conformed to the outward system. It was something imposed. But now the whole initiative had been taken out of his hands, the authority had been taken away from him, and from a system. Now his relationship with the living, exalted Jesus of Nazareth meant that he could no longer adopt his own course, follow his own thoughts, be governed by any outward order or system. Even though that thing had originally come in through and from God no longer could it be the governing thing in his life, the thing now is, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" Then there was a new Lordship, a new mastery, and on his side a new imprisonment, and he was going to be tested all through his life as to that basis. He had the Old Testament, but I challenge you to find in the Old Testament what Paul found in it, without special revelation of the Holy Ghost. I could give you one or two passages quoted by Paul, and ask you if you could see that in the Old Testament. There is every justification on the natural line and ground for what his opponents said, that he was just reading into the Old Testament his own ideas. But we do not believe that. With spiritual illumination you see that that is what God meant, but it is extraordinary that God meant that: it never looked like that at all. Judaism said that God said it meant this. Now then Paul, you are going to be tested by God's thoughts as interpreted in your heart by the Spirit of God's Son.

That brings us right back to this first chapter of the letter to the Hebrews, Jesus Christ, God's Son, is absolute Lord, and that Lordship has got to have its expression in the believer in the power of the Holy Spirit, so that the believer is not governed by anything but the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the living, exalted Christ, and that is the only safe way; it is the only true way. It is made so perfectly clear, with an abundance of evidence in the Word. You go through this letter and see what it says about the new covenant, for instance. And then you take up other parts of the New Testament which deal with the new covenant, like the second letter to the Corinthians, and see what the new covenant is. Well, it is quoted from Jeremiah 31:31: "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah." What is the nature of the new covenant? "I will write my laws in their hearts, and upon their minds will I write them." Paul says in 2 Corinthians, "Not on tables of stone with pen and ink, but upon the tables of the heart by the Spirit of the living God". This new order of things is the inward writing of God's Spirit in the heart of His people as to what He wants. John writing his epistle says, "The anointing which you have received abideth in you, and ye have no need that anyone teach you, for the anointing which abideth in you teacheth you...". You say, that is dangerous; that makes everybody a law to themselves; that is setting the Word of God on one side. Do not think that. There is one Spirit, not so many Holy Spirits as people who receive Him. The Holy Spirit will never take us away from the Word of God, but He will fulfil it in us, and we will come to know the Word of God as we can never know it by the most ardent application and study; and believe me, no Holy Spirit governed life will at any point contradict the Word of God. It is because of this other kind of thing that reading any part of the Word of God results in a hundred or five hundred or a thousand different interpretations of it, and applications of it, and practices concerning it. There is all the difference between the thing made and the thing not made. The thing made is mechanical, the thing not made is organic; it is living.

So that God's thoughts and intentions become the testing ground of a believer. Oh well, God has a plan, and He does not reveal His plan to us all at once: but as far as He goes as a rule - even with His most devoted, consecrated, sacrificing servant - is the next step. And so Paul, with all his revelation, and all his vision, and all his walk with God, and all his knowledge of the Lord, would just be allowed to go to the border of a country with his own feeling that that is the direction, that is from where the call comes, that is where the need lies, and that is the thing to do. Yes, he is a devoted man, he is a consecrated man, but he has thought that this is the present movement, this is the present direction, this is where the present need is, this is where the call is, and just there he gets a showing from the Lord that night that it is in another direction altogether, and when he explains it he says: "Assuredly gathering...". (That is, "concluding.") And so he leaves that about which he had such strong convictions and for which he had such good arguments, and goes this other way. He has been tested as to whether he will follow outward dictates, the dictates of appearances and seeming demands, or whether the voice of the Spirit in him will govern him.

Now we can organise our movements, lay our plans, draft our schemes. We can lay it all out according to the New Testament and it can be dead, ineffective. God is merciful, God is gracious, and God is sovereign, and in so far as there is devotion to Him, and in so far as His interests are at our hearts, and in so far as there is a possibility of something being accomplished for Him, He blesses; but that is not the point at all. The thing is, can God go all the way with this? Is this ultimately God's way, God's thought? Will not a very great deal of that go when the shaking comes? That is the point. The thing is now what God Himself through the Spirit of His Son is doing in a living way. Every life, and every assembly has to be constituted directly and immediately upon the basis of the living expression of the thought of God, and that thought as wrought into the very life by testing. A thought from God, a divine thought is not enough. It is not enough to carry us through. It is not enough to act upon. That thought has got to test us, try us, until we are constituted by that thought. You are dealing with tremendous principles. It is not enough for me to say to you that the Word of God means this, and for you to take it and straight away in accepting it, try to make it a part of your order of things. It may be the truth, you may have to believe it, you may have to adjust yourself to it, you may have to obey it, but it has not become a living power in you until you have been tested on it, tried on it, taken through the fires by it, and that thought of God has become a part of your very being, that you are constituted according to it in perfect oneness with the living Lord. It is thus that the believer's life becomes a living expression of those thoughts and desires and intents of God. It is thus that the church is constituted. You cannot imitate apostolic methods. The Holy Ghost must do this. He must constitute the church.

You see the difference between a traditional system, whether it be Judaism or Christianity, and a living thing coming all the time in a living way out from the Christ Himself by the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit Himself doing it. Well, this is going to cost something. See what it meant for these people. At the end of this letter you come on this: "Wherefore, Christ also... suffered without the camp. Let us therefore go to him without the camp, bearing his reproach." The camp was Judaism, and He suffered without the camp because He repudiated Judaism and stood for the realisation of all God's thoughts as in Himself personally. He gathered up everything into His own person, "I am." It is the Christ who is the full sum and embodiment of all God's thoughts and ways, and that takes the place of Judaism, and He, therefore, repudiated Judaism and suffered without the camp. Let us go to Him without the camp.

If, as we were saying at the beginning, this letter's preservation has any significance at all from God's standpoint, then its significance is that it applies to the same tendency in Christianity as there was in Judaism. What is the issue? If you are going to take this line you are going to repudiate organised Christianity, going to repudiate Christendom as a traditional system, going to repudiate that order of things which is made, and going, therefore, to suffer reproach and be outside of the camp suffering His reproach. In other words, in line with what we have said earlier, we are immediately going to come up against that force of antagonism to stop what has come in through the death and resurrection and exaltation of the Lord Jesus, the heavenly thing. Is it not sad that these people met it through God's historic people, the people who claimed to have the oracles, to be the elect, to be the favoured of the Lord? It is always like that. "A man's foes shall be those of his own household." Do not narrow that down to the limits of a family where one is a Christian and all the rest are not. That is not the point at all. It is his own household, the Christian household. You will meet the antagonism to what has come in from heaven as a heavenly thing; you will meet the antagonism amongst those who are the traditional people of God in this dispensation. That is how it will be. That is going to be the cost of a walk in life with the Lord and not with man, knowing the Lord for yourself.

Now what will be the form? Why all this difference, this separation? Well you see, it is so difficult to understand, and yet the fact stares you in the face that organised Christianity as it is today cannot understand anything that is not organised, that is not advertised, that is not run. It must have names that carry weight, that mean influence. If you can get people with some title you are going to have the guarantee of success for your Christian enterprise. And so the letters and the titles strung on are a necessary requisite for the success of the Lord's work. You must write it up in the press, you must give a report of it, you must be able to make some kind of return that people can read, and say, This is a successful thing. If you cannot do that the whole thing is doomed to failure. They say, you must advertise, you must have publicity, you must organise, you must bring in all these things to support it, to carry it on. If you did none of those; if you were never heard of in the press; if you never had a report; if you never had any names; if there was nothing at all that came out in a public way for people to take account of, what is the verdict of organised Christianity? Nothing is being done. You are doing nothing. It is a-hole-in-a-corner sort of thing. Is that true? What must we say about that? There was a striking absence of all that in the beginning, and a marvellous manifestation of power, of progress, of effectiveness, so that nothing could stand in the way. We must only conclude, we are driven to this extremity, that the Lord can do His own work. Evidently the risen Lord is able to carry on His own work, the Holy Ghost knows how to manage things. What a surprising discovery! Forgive my irony. I say, this is that upon which Hebrews 12:26-28 is fixed. "I will shake the earth and the heavens"; that which can be shaken will be shaken; that which cannot be shaken will remain; and what is that? It is what God has done. "Whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever." What God does is done in a spiritual way; it is spiritual, it is heavenly, it is eternal.

That may leave you perhaps in a vague, perplexed position, not knowing where you are, but I have no doubt about the truth of the message. If you do not feel you can accept it; if you disagree; if you revolt; if you feel it cuts clean across all your training, all your acceptance; if you feel that it runs counter to all that you know, all I ask of you is honesty with God. I ask you to come and ask Him to open to you the meaning of the letter to the Hebrews, why it was written, what its significance is, why God has preserved it, what its application is now. Have honest dealings with the Lord. Please do not go away hot in spirit, antagonistic; do not lay this at the door of any man. At least give God a chance. It may be costly, it may be that you will have to be prepared to accept the position that God's greatest work through you is something hidden, something secret, something that no one can read about, perhaps no one can discern what is going on; and it is the mightiest work that God is doing. But, oh, this natural life - how it must see, how it must be in things. That is just the point. Where the cross has done its work to slay that natural craving of ours to have some feeling, some place of some kind in the things of God, not prepared for God to do His work through us without our coming in some way personally into it.

May the Lord give us His own interpretation, give us honesty of heart, and show us His meaning in having brought us to this consideration.

Chapter 3 - Finality - The Governing Factor in the Kingdom

Reading: Hebrews 1, 12:26-29.

We must remember that the Kingdom is always referred to as something being already in existence and that as complete. It is not something now being formed, constituted, or built. It is something which, already being in existence, is to come to be received, to be entered into: "Thy kingdom come." Receiving a Kingdom: "Except ye receive the kingdom as a little child, ye cannot enter therein." Here the word, as we have already pointed out, indicates that, so far as we are concerned, the Lord's people, it is a matter of progressively receiving the Kingdom, receiving that Kingdom more and more. The Kingdom is complete, it is full, it is a realised thing, but for us it is a matter of receiving that Kingdom in ever-growing fulness.

The governing factor about the Kingdom is the element of finality, the accomplished fact, the established thing, the unshakeable truth and reality; therefore the sons of the Kingdom should be characterized by this particular and dominant feature, assurance. If we have rightly understood and apprehended the Kingdom, we ought to be the most assured people in God's universe, for a real spiritual understanding and apprehension of the Kingdom will destroy all uncertainties, will put aside all doubts and questions, will deliver us from all that weakness and paralysis resultant from a question, an uncertainty. It will make us at the centre of our beings an established thing: we shall be taking our spiritual character from the very Kingdom to which we belong, and that is what it means to be in the Kingdom, and to be sons of the Kingdom. We take our character therefrom, and it is this element of finality which is predominant in the matter of the Kingdom.

Having said that, it remains to be explained what this finality is, and this letter to the Hebrews sets forth finality in three directions or connections. We may only get a little way at this time in seeing it; if we have every step established it will be worthwhile. Finality is shown in three connections in this letter: firstly, as to the Person; secondly, as to His work; thirdly, as to the calling and position of the Lord's people.

The Person of the Lord Jesus as God's Final Appointment

You know how the whole letter bears upon that, but even that has to be looked at from more than one angle. Turning to chapter 1 we have right at the outset a declaration concerning the finality of the person in God's appointment. The Son is God's final appointment: "Whom he appointed heir of all things". He appointed the Son heir of all things. All things are His inheritance. You cannot get outside of all things, and there is nothing after that. Finally Christ inherits all things by the eternal appointment of the Father, of God. Upon that all our faith hangs. The whole question of faith is immediately raised by that first finality. Do we believe that the end which is fixed, and the thing about which there is no question at all is that Jesus is going to inherit all things? Do we believe that, in spite of all the course which this world's history has taken, and is taking, and all that seems to be so much to the contrary; in spite of all the grasping for world possession and world dominion; in spite of all the disputing and the quarrelling over the inheritance in this earth; in spite of all the apparent grip that Satan has upon things; in spite of the deeply rooted and apparently established order of things, which it sometimes seems so nearly impossible to change, to root up, to destroy? That is the first question for faith. It has been the challenge to faith all the way through.

Of course, we are so largely spectators. We have been very nearly more than spectators, and we find ourselves in the position in which a large number of the Lord's people are today, in the havoc, the chaos, the evil consequences of evil, the very Devil's work; in a position of utter impotence, helplessness, driven, no home, no place of rest, nothing here but all around the terrific pressure of evil, the domination of iniquity. This is where the challenge to faith comes. It is in conditions like that that the big question arises. But this letter, and, of course, much more in the Word of God, brings at the outset this before the people of God for their faith, that in the appointment of God, His Son is the heir of all things, and He will have His inheritance no matter what intervenes. This very first presentation to faith links with the whole of chapter 11, for that chapter, that great survey of faith through the ages, is linked with the ultimate issue for the people of God, and that issue is the complete, universal sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ, God's Son. That is the inheritance.

Now that is the first factor of the Kingdom which cannot be shaken. To these Jewish believers, who were passing through such deep trial, persecution, suffering for the faith, for the testimony, receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken meant that they were to rest upon and be established in the fact as a living thing in their own hearts, that finality is bound up with Jesus as heir of all things, and it is presented to us in the same way. Let us remember that all the conflict of history circles and rages around that one thing, and as history grows and the times near completion, the end draws nigh, the one thing which will rise clear in definition out of all other things will be this finality of issue: Who is Lord in God's universe? Who is God's appointed and eternal King? Who is the inheritor of the earth? And that issue is being steadily urged today. This question of world lordship is centred not now in a great number of lords but in one. It is being narrowed down, it has come to a very few, and the question is a very, very hot one; the pursuit of this thing is very feverish. Let us not be deceived. Oh, we thank God for respite, we thank God for a little postponement, but do not let us be deceived. We are probably today at a point of far greater seriousness than we were some time ago, for we are obviously very much nearer that point when: "They shall say, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh...". God has sought to stir us to the depths by allowing things to go that far in order to bring us up and make us realise that at any moment our testimony may be suspended. Therefore let us give the greater diligence for the time is short. Any day we might have to say, It is the end, no more can be done. Then for utterness for God until that time comes!

There will not be a giving up of this grasping, or an abandoning of the programme. There is something more deeply at work than is seen. There is the drive of that one who must produce his Antichrist. It is in God's Word. It will come to pass. There will be one who sits in the temple of God announcing that he is God, and being worshipped as God, claiming the allegiance and worship of the world. The whole thing will be headed up into that one, and then the question will be between two only, between that one and the One Who has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. There is no question about the issue when that clash comes: "Whom the Lord shall destroy by the brightness of his coming". God is going to see that it is all headed up to one, and then He whose right it is to reign will come and will smite with the brightness of His appearing the all-inclusive one of the Devil's producing. Receiving that, now receiving that! That is the basis of the Kingdom which cannot be shaken.

Finality is bound up with the Son of God as heir of all things, and that is where the Kingdom which cannot be shaken begins and ends - Christ the Son, God's final appointment.

The Person of the Lord Jesus as God's Final Speech

Then the second thing as to the person is Christ, the Son, as God's final speech: "...hath at the end of these times spoken unto us in his Son...". He who in old time spoke by divers portions and in divers manners hath gathered it all up at the end of these days, and has spoken in fulness and in finality in His Son. So that the Kingdom which cannot be shaken is a matter of the utter government of the Lord Jesus Christ in what He represents as the embodiment of God's thoughts and expressions. I can put that much more simply. The Kingdom which cannot be shaken, which we are to receive, is a matter of the complete knowledge of the Lord Jesus. You and I have not got to learn all kinds of truths and doctrines, teachings and interpretations. It is not our business, our obligation to be familiar with all the different kinds of doctrinal truths in the Word of God. Of course, it is very useful in a subsidiary way to know these things, but if we know them all they simply become a matter of intellectual knowledge, and they can then become the ground of a good deal of discussion, argument, and dispute; but they do not get you further than that in a spiritual way. They never constitute for us a Kingdom which cannot be shaken: they constitute the kingdom which is never stable; this doctrinal kingdom, this point-of-view kingdom, even in the things of the Bible. The Kingdom which cannot be shaken is knowing Jesus Christ in our own hearts, God speaking in us in His Son.

I must remind you again that that is exactly what the apostle Paul says in his second letter to the Corinthians. When God gave expression to His thoughts in the old dispensation He did so by writing on tables of stone: that is, it was an outward, objective presentation of obligations brought to rest upon His people. That is the old dispensation: that is past. Now, says the apostle, in this dispensation it is not so, but there is a covenant, there is an expression, there is a revelation of God's thoughts, God's mind, God's will for His people; but now it is upon the fleshly tables of the heart, written by the Spirit of the living God. And right in connection with that the apostle says: "God hath shined into our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." God has spoken in His Son, and now it is a matter of our knowing Christ in an inward way by revelation of the Holy Spirit. That is the Kingdom which cannot be shaken.

I have marvelled at Paul many times, and I expect you have. I have said many times that I do not know how Paul managed to go on. How did he go through? How did you go through, Paul? You tell us all these things that befell, you give us these lists of happenings, and then I see that, after your long life spent to the last drop for your Lord, and being used so mightily, with such a wide range, I see you at the end shut up, held in a chain, in prison, and I know that you are getting news from the whole field of your life's activities that your work is simply being destroyed; it is falling to pieces, and all those for whom you were used to bring to the Lord are forsaking you. I hear you say: "All they in Asia be turned from me." Paul, how do you get through? How can you be so triumphant? How can you write so much about the heavenlies, and every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus, with those conditions around you? And my answer is found in his first letter to the Galatians: "It pleased God... to reveal his Son in me." If Paul had adopted a system called Christianity and given a kind of mental assent to all the propositions doctrinally of Christianity, he would not have lasted a year. His first year would have put him out, and yet he went right through because of this: "It pleased God... to reveal his Son in me." That is the Kingdom which cannot be shaken. All other knowledge of the Lord will find us wanting in the day of the ordeal, when heaven and earth are shaken. We shall go to pieces; we shall collapse under the strain. Do take this to heart.

There are going to be shaking ordeals for every child of God. God has appointed it; it must be. It can be in our lives without great world upheavals. We can go through trial, through testing, we can be put into the fires in personal ways, but believe me we are all going into the fires in some way or another. God has appointed that we shall not be in a false position.

The question is: Have we got the unshakeable Kingdom within? That is, in a word, do we know the living Son of God in a living way within us? "God hath spoken"! Are we progressing in the knowledge of God in Christ? For He, the Son, encompasses all God's fulness. All that ever we are to know, to have of God, is in Christ. God has given Him, and with Him given all things. We have to learn Christ, and learn Him in an inward way, and as we learn Him inwardly, what He is, how He expresses God's own thought, desire, will, purpose, nature, the Kingdom which cannot be shaken is taking root in us, so we are receiving that Kingdom. To receive the Kingdom is to be progressing in the inward knowledge of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, in all the comprehensiveness of God's fulness dwelling in Him.

The Person of the Lord Jesus as Our Finality of Responsibility

Now we close with this word as to the Person. He is the finality of God's appointment; He is the finality of God's speech; and our learning is simply a learning of Christ. Christ is our finality of responsibility. It is not, What did Moses say? What did Elijah say? What did Isaiah and all the prophets in whom and through whom God spake in old time say? It is now just the Lord Jesus. Our responsibility is for Him. Responsibility begins and ends with Him. We are responsible for the Lord Jesus.

The apostle draws the distinction between God speaking on the earth through Moses, and Israel being responsible for God speaking through Moses on the earth. Now He says, How much more when it shall be a speaking from heaven, and that through the Son. What a great responsibility it is when God speaks from heaven through the Son. "God... hath... spoken in his Son." Our responsibility lies there. God has spoken, and God has spoken in Christ. Now all responsibility is summed up and bound up with that in this sense: we are not going to have to answer for any other thing before God than for our response to His voice in Jesus Christ. I think many people have an idea that when they stand before God and are in judgement the whole question of the ground of their judgement will be spread over quite a lot of ground. How many sins did you commit? How much better or worse you were than someone else! They seem to think that they are going to stand a much better chance in the judgement if they have not committed quite as many sins as someone else, if they have not done certain things that other people have done. If they have been an improvement on certain fairly poor types of people their judgement will be according to the degree of their goodness or their badness: and if, therefore, they can so curtail their bad deeds as to bring them to a minimum they are going to stand quite a fair chance in the judgement.

You may smile at that, but that is the inveterate habit of this nature of ours, and that is why so many wear worried looks. As Christians they are always poking around inside to find something good, and because they find so much bad they are miserable; and they have never come finally to God's conclusion about the whole matter of what they are, that in them dwells no good thing, and they are always trying to find some good thing, and, not finding it, they are miserable. We are already in spirit standing before a judgement seat of God, bringing ourselves under judgement, under condemnation, and it is a false judgement seat. It is something of our own imagination or of Satan's projecting. Let me say now, quite definitely and precisely: the ground of all judgement is our reaction to God's presentation of His Son, not how many sins, be they few or many, or how much badness, little or much. It is this: God has spoken in His Son, and what have you done? That is where responsibility begins and ends. Judgement is simply a matter of our response to God in Christ. It simplifies the whole matter, gets rid of a great many difficulties.

What is your heart attitude to the Lord Jesus? If you can answer that, then you have got the answer to your standing before God. It is there that responsibility begins and ends; it is final. You and I can say, Oh yes, in me, that is, in my flesh dwells no good thing, I am the chief of sinners; nevertheless, my heart is all towards God's Christ, and by God's grace I am going on to respond to everything that God will make known to me of His will in Christ. That is the only ground of responsibility which lies at our door, and there it ends. That is all God's requirement. It is very simple, very blessed. Let it be remembered that it is just where we refuse to respond to the voice of God in Jesus Christ that we have to take the responsibility, but inasmuch as we give a full and hearty response to the Lord Jesus, God takes all the rest of the responsibility, and, of course, that is the gateway into the very next part of this consideration: finality in the work of the Person.

This is the Kingdom which cannot be shaken. May the Lord find us unshaken in these days.

Chapter 4 - Constituted by the Finality of the Work of Christ

Reading: Hebrews 12:28.

This brings us into that large section of the letter to the Hebrews which from the point of view of subject matter covers the bulk of the letter; that is, as to the priestly person and priestly work of the Lord Jesus.

His Priestly Person

In the first place we are brought to recognise the finality which is characteristic of His priestly person, and we are directed to such passages as those which are in chapter 7, taking Melchizedek as a type of His priestly person:

“For this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of God Most High, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings, and blessed him, to whom Abraham divided a tenth part of all (being first, by interpretation, King of righteousness, and then also King of Salem, which is, King of peace; without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like unto the Son of God), abideth a priest continually” (verses 1-3).

“Who hath been made, not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life” (verse 16).

“(For they indeed have been made priests without an oath; but he with an oath by him that saith of him, The Lord sware and will not repent himself, Thou art a priest for ever)” (verse 21).

Now the priestly person of the Lord Jesus is there and elsewhere seen to have as His supreme, central, all-inclusive factor, eternity. The whole point of the argument is that the Lord Jesus, as God’s High Priest, stands altogether outside of any particular period of time, dispensation or economy. His origin no one knows, without beginning of days, without genealogy. He is the Eternal One, and He is that not only as a member of the Godhead, not only as Very God in deity, and not only as the eternal Son of God, but here the point is that He is eternal in His priestly person: He bounds all time and all eternity in His person as priest. The principle of that eternity is an indissoluble life, and a life which is not subject at all to the effect of time, a life which in no way is tainted or touched by that which means corruption and death; so that being constituted on the principle of this indissoluble, incorruptible, indestructible life, there is that in the very priest Himself which is unshakeable. This Kingdom which we are receiving, or which we are exhorted to be receiving, is a Kingdom which is built upon this priestly person who Himself is constituted by an indissoluble life.

Israel was called to be a kingdom of priests, and Israel was gathered round Aaron as a high priest, and the argument in the letter to the Hebrews is that the value of Aaron’s high priesthood at most could only be for a day. Therefore Israel’s place as a kingdom of priests could only be a temporary thing because it rested upon something which was only of time, because Aaron himself had a nature and a life for which offering for sin had to be made. He had a corruptible life, and the writer of the letter to the Hebrews says that he had to offer sacrifices for himself as well as for the people because of the nature that was in him. He himself, and his work, and the people were all subject to death because all were subject to that corruption that was in them.

This Son goes right outside of that realm altogether and takes things right outside of that realm, and the value is that which is represented by what He Himself is. In Him is an incorruptible and therefore indissoluble life, and therefore He ever liveth; and the practical value of that in application is that He is therefore able to save right on to the uttermost, right on to the end — and there is no end — those that come unto God by Him.

The force of this presentation of finality in the priestly person of the Lord Jesus is this, that that is the kind of kingdom which is coming to us, which is offered to us, into which we are brought through Christ. It is the kingdom of an incorruptible nature, and an indissoluble life, which absolutely rules out death and corruption and all those elements which undermine the stability of the universe. The stability of God’s new universe rests upon what Jesus is as to His nature and as to the life which He possesses. It does not rest upon anything at all that is corruptible, or anything that is capable of changing, of passing. This is the unshakeable Kingdom, rooted in the very person of the Lord Jesus, and what that person is as after the power of an endless life, an indissoluble life. I think it is a very striking phrase: “...but made like unto the Son of God... after the power of an indissoluble life”.

Do you see, then, that in which our salvation stands, upon which it rests? First of all upon the priestly Person. You cannot rightly value the priestly work of the Lord Jesus until you have rightly grasped the priestly Person, because the work that He does is done out of what He is, and is therefore like Him; that is, it partakes of the very same elements and constituents. A great thing to rest upon is the Person of our Priest. It is not first of all resting upon something that He has done; it is first of all resting upon Himself and what He is. This One who was appointed heir of all things, through whom the ages were made, who was the very effulgence of the Father’s person, the very expression of the Father’s image — that One became Priest and His office was shot through and through with what He was Himself. Now, give to the priestly office the values of the very effulgence of God, the express image of the Father’s person, the Maker of the ages, and the Heir of all things, and you endue priesthood with something that is altogether outside of the changes and the course of this world.

That sounds very great, very high, very exalted, but unless you get hold of it you are going to be shaken. This is the point. The Lord’s people need to be established. The Lord has in view here the establishing of His people by way of shakings, and they can only be established as they see what their foundation is, and the foundation is not something which belongs to time, it is something right outside of time. It is not something which is subject to death; it is altogether outside of death. Nothing in the course of this present world’s history can touch it, because it cannot touch Him.

We must rightly see the Lord Jesus: who our High Priest is, and what our High Priest is. That is an end of everything; yes, that is finality.

His Priestly Work

Then as to His priestly work. If His priestly person is eternal, then this word teaches us that His priestly work is perfect, and those conclusions of this letter are full of value. You go through, and you see how frequently things are represented as once and for all finished. Look at some of them.

Redemption accomplished

Take chapter 9 verse 12. There is contrast in those words between Aaron who went in once a year with the blood of goats and calves, every year going in. Therefore whatever redemption was represented in that blood and in that entering in, was at most only a yearly thing. But now here is the Lord Jesus, said to have entered by His own blood once for all, once for ever, having obtained, not a twelve monthly redemption, but eternal redemption; so that His priestly work has the element of finality in it in regard to redemption. Our redemption is perfect.

Or look again at chapter 10 verse 12. Punctuation does not matter in this passage. It says here: “But he, when he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, (the comma comes there) sat down on the right hand of God”. You could put the comma in another place: “...when he had offered one sacrifice for sins, for ever sat down...”. No one knows where the comma should come, but it does not matter. The point is that once for all He offered a sacrifice for sins, and redemption became an accomplished fact. These are the constituents of the unshakeable Kingdom. But there is no chance in this; there is no speculation about it. It is not a question of how things will turn out: it is done, it is finished, it is perfected for ever in Christ. That is redemption.

Sanctification accomplished

Then look again at chapter 10 verse 10. Our sanctification in Him has reached finality, and the Kingdom which cannot be shaken has in it that great fact, something which is done. We shall never get anywhere while, on any one of these points, we are still looking to the Lord to do something.

Now that is a most important thing to grasp. Are you pleading with the Lord to sanctify you? It is not until you receive and thank God that the Holy Spirit is released that you know it, because until you do that you are putting things back generations, and you are virtually saying that what the Lord Jesus Christ did, He has not done. If you asked me for a coin, and I put that coin on the table for you, and then you kept asking me for the coin, and I said to you: Well, there it is on the table, you may take it! But you still ignored the coin and kept asking me to give it to you, I should wonder what was the matter with you. Nothing must be taken away, even by inference or suggestion, from the perfection of His work: it is done, and you see the whole call of this book is for faith. The great appeal of this book is for faith. We will come to that again, but faith is not that God will do something but that He has done something and we rest upon something that is done. Our whole attitude has got to be that of those for whom everything is an accomplished fact. We have been sanctified once for all.

Of course, I have to say something more about that later, but it does not come here. What we are trying to do is to emphasise this element of finality in the priestly work of the Lord Jesus.

Perfection accomplished

Look again at chapter 10 verse 14. We are building things up. It is as though he said, “It takes your breath away to know that you have been sanctified; now then, I will see that you have nothing at all to stand upon; I will go beyond that and say that, being sanctified, you are also perfected for ever.” Can this be true? Do we read it rightly: “For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified”? He has just said that we are sanctified; now he says we are not only sanctified but also perfected for ever. Our perfection is an accomplished fact in Christ.

We very often hear and speak of our identification with Christ in death. We say so often that when He died we died with Him. What do we mean? We define that in this way: we say He died as us, not only for us but also as us, that when He died God saw us dead in Him. And then we say when He rose we were raised together with Him, and God saw us risen in Him, or saw Him as us risen, and called upon us to reckon ourselves to be alive unto God in Christ. That identification matter spreads over all these things. Is He sanctified? So are we. Is He perfected? So are we. We are before God what He is before God: that is the ground for faith, and that is unshakeable ground.

Glory accomplished

Then look at chapter 2 verse 10: “For it became him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory” (the Revised Version margin reads: “having brought many sons to glory”). You can read it which way you like: “...in bringing many sons to glory...”, or “having brought many sons to glory...”. It is only a part of the whole comprehensive truth. Is He in glory? So are we. What is the basis of our glorification? It is that He is already glorified. On what ground shall we be glorified? On the ground that He is glorified as the guarantee. Now what was the point of the Lord Jesus going all this way — redemption, sanctification, perfection, glory? The point is that it is not for Himself. There is no need, there never was any need, for Him to go that way for Himself. He went that way for us.

He has gone the way. That is the point. The Lord Jesus is not now doing the work of redemption. He is not now doing the work of sanctification. He is not now doing the work of perfection. He has done it all. That is the point here. It is all done, and that is the foundation for the faith of the people of God.

Preservation accomplished

One more thing, which is found in chapter 7 verse 25: “Wherefore also He is able to save to the uttermost...”, or, as the Revised Version margin puts it: “...able to save completely...”.

Our preservation rests upon His ever living, His living ever, and making intercession for us. I am quite sure you will agree that if our preservation rested upon our prayers it would be a very fitful kind of experience, but, blessed be God, this is in Him as all other things are in Him. He is alive for ever, and alive for ever making intercession for the saints. There are things which are tremendous facts in our history, of which we have no consciousness, and this is one of them. Explain why it is that we are here today: why there is that going on, that persisting, that enduring, that coming through. It is a miracle how the saints, how the church, survives. Explain why our faith has not failed, why we have not gone out in view of the excessive pressure and trial. Why do we go on, with all the suffering and all the difficulty? It is not due to us; it is not due to anything here. This is the answer: He makes intercession! Do you think that such a one as He is, being in the relationship that He has to the Father, being the Son of God’s love, any prayer of His will not be answered? Do you think that He prays futile prayers, that He does not pray according to the will of God? The assurance is that prayer according to the will of God will be answered: it cannot be otherwise. Does He ever pray other than according to the will of God? No, His prayers are prevailing for us, and when we get through there finally to the glory it will just be due to His having been holding on for us all the time.

Now these things are brought to us cumulatively and they are presented as the constituents of an unshakeable Kingdom, and the Holy Spirit would say to us through this word: Fasten your faith upon these things and you will be unshakeable; get these things under your feet as your foundation, and you will abide for ever; receive the Kingdom that cannot be shaken, receive the fact that redemption is accomplished, sanctification is accomplished, perfection is accomplished, glory is accomplished; intercession is effective and triumphant; preservation rests with Him and not with us.

We have said that it is not until we really do get hold of that in faith that the Holy Spirit can begin to make it good in us. The danger is — and it is a danger into which many have fallen — to simply accept that in an objective way, and, accepting it in an objective way, to proceed blindly, careless of the necessity for it being made good subjectively. That has resulted in an utterly false position and a many-sided contradiction.

There is the other side, that what is true in Him has got to be made true in us, and God is making it true in us. The redemption that is in Christ Jesus is going on in those who believe, and we are moving daily to that day when the finality which has been reached in Him will be reached in us. His Body has been redeemed from corruption. “Thou wilt not suffer thy Holy One to see corruption.” He was redeemed from corruption in His Body. We are moving to the day when this corruptible shall put on incorruption in the day of the redemption of the Body. The earnest of the redemption of the Body is the Holy Spirit of His already redeemed Body. There is depth of truth and value in the Lord’s Table that you and I have not grasped for practical purposes. When we take the loaf and testify that we are one loaf with Him, that we are joined with Him in His Body (“Take, eat: this is my Body, which is for you”, said He) what are we doing? We are laying hold by faith of the fact that we are to be made like unto His glorious Body, and in that giving of Himself by the Holy Spirit we have the earnest of a glorified body. So that by faith I live now upon the Body of Christ, redeemed, delivered from death, and that is the meaning of Romans 8:11. “If the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead be in you, he that raised up Jesus from the dead shall also quicken your mortal body by his Spirit who dwelleth in you.” The Spirit that redeemed Christ’s Body from corruption is in us to quicken our mortal body, to deliver us now from premature corruption. It is the earnest of our bodies being made like unto His glorious Body, the Holy Spirit in us. By faith now we accept the values of Christ’s Body having been delivered from corruption. The Holy Spirit sustains us here on the principle of what Christ has gone through, and where He is. We are by the Spirit linked with what Christ is and how Christ is.

I have only singled that out as a very practical illustration, the realm of the redemption of the body. What is true there is true on all these points. Do I want to know in Him sanctification, as I want to know in my body redemption from corruption? Then I must by faith take Christ as my sanctification, and the Holy Spirit operates on that. I do not ask the Lord to do something called sanctification; I ask the Lord to make good in me the sanctification which is already perfected in His Son. It is living on Christ in every respect by faith, and the Holy Spirit, the active, intelligent agent, gets to work to make good in us that which our faith appropriates, that which we lay hold of by faith. And so here is finality in Christ as to His priestly work.

The Finality of the Calling and Position of the Lord’s People

Now I shall come nearer to what I have just said if I go one step further in the matter of finality as to the calling and position of the Lord’s people.

The calling and position of the Lord’s people as set forth in this letter and elsewhere, is shown to be heavenly not earthly, and that from the divine standpoint is final. That is God’s conclusion, that is God’s settled mind: the church is heavenly and not earthly. The church is not becoming heavenly, it is not going to heaven. From God’s standpoint it is now heavenly, utterly and finally. But we are not going to stay with that for the moment. I want to come to the second point:

The Responsibility of the Lord’s People

This letter makes it perfectly clear that there is responsibility on the side of the Lord’s people in connection with all that we have been saying, the priestly person and the priestly work of the Lord Jesus. Responsibility runs right through this letter, but responsibility is related to this secured and available completeness, and the relation to that is one of progressiveness. Responsibility rests upon our progressiveness in this which is a completed work for us. The urge here is, “Let us go on”, or “Let us be going on.” As we are found in a state of going on to full growth the Lord places to our account everything. It is a question of progressive receiving or forfeiting the Kingdom which cannot be shaken.

On the one hand the call is: “Wherefore, holy brethren, partners in a heavenly calling...”; “We are made partakers with Christ if...”. There are a lot of provisional things in this letter, and if you read them by themselves it will make you feel that everything is uncertain, is not as settled as we have been saying, but that is purely the side of responsibility, and responsibility is all gathered up into one thing — going on, and Israel is taken as an illustration of people who did not go on. Their hearts went back; they did not go on; they stopped. You can see them as a people who are not by any means pressing on, and they perished in the wilderness. They are taken as an example and as a warning.

Now all the warnings, and all those provisional elements in this letter are connected with God’s full end, not with our salvation but with God’s full end. They are connected with the inheritance, with the Kingdom, and in a word what is said here is: You may miss the Kingdom, you may lose the Kingdom, you may not lose your salvation but you may lose the Kingdom; and there are the strongest things in all the Scriptures said here. Terrible things are said in chapter 10 and they are only to be explained in the light of the Kingdom which is to be received. “If any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him. But we are not of them that draw back unto perdition...”. That sounds strong. That sounds like the loss of salvation. Then, Israel came out of Egypt on the ground of shed and sprinkled blood, the blood of a covenant. They became God’s people, they perished in the wilderness, and that wilderness perishing was a perdition indeed. Later the remnant, the new generation, went into the land, possessed it, and they again ceased to go on and God sent them away into Babylon, and Babylon was perdition. They did not cease to be the Lord’s people, but they were in perdition. A remnant came back, and in the remnant there were those who went on: “Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another, and the Lord hearkened and heard, and a book of remembrance was written before him... and they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in the day wherein I do make a peculiar treasure.” They went on, but where do you find them at the end of the New Testament, and where do you find them in the days of the Lord Jesus? Where is this Israel now? The Lord Jesus, God’s final speech, appeared in their midst; God speaks at the end of the times in His Son. They did not go on. They drew back. I ask you whether Israel has been in perdition since the year seventy? Is Israel in perdition today? What word describes better the state of the historic Israel, the Jews, today? Is it not perdition? But are they not still that distinctive race? Have they not yet a future as God’s people? Have they ever been cut off? That would contradict Romans to start with. It would contradict Ezekiel. But are they not in perdition? “We are not of those who draw back unto perdition”; “...my soul shall have no pleasure in him.” It is terribly true, the Lord’s attitude towards Israel when they drew back from His Son. How could Israel go through that awful experience of the year seventy, and the awful experience since, if the Lord’s soul had pleasure in them? No, it is concerning the Kingdom. We may lose the Kingdom if we may not lose our salvation.

“The rest of the dead lived not again for a thousand years.” There is a different resurrection for the Kingdom, and we may miss it. Responsibility is not for our salvation, our redemption, our sanctification. He has taken responsibility for that. The responsibility is that we can go on in what He has done and we make progress in what is an accomplished thing for us, and as we do that the whole question of responsibility is settled, is answered, and we come by the obedience of faith to the realisation of the truth that He has accomplished it all: it is for us through faith. So faith becomes a great word in this letter, and faith is linked with this progressive attitude, looking on and going on. It was unbelief, says the apostle, that brought Israel to perdition in the wilderness, to a standstill. Faith would have meant that they went on to the Kingdom. So the Lord calls strongly to us to recognise that the Kingdom is constituted by all these elements of finality, and we are called by faith to receive the Kingdom, to go on to full growth, and not to draw back, not to turn aside, not to allow doubt and unbelief to creep in and paralyse our walk so that we cease to go on. Finality in connection with the calling and position of the Lord’s people as to responsibility is here: He has accomplished everything for us, and we by faith must go on in the accomplished thing. So shall we be established, unshakeable.

Our attitude has to be a very practical one from day to day. We are not yet in ourselves perfect. We discover that as we go on more and more how imperfect we are, how far from wholly sanctified. But if, when that reality comes upon us strongly and sternly, with all its discouragement and despair, we take that on, if we sit down under that, if we regard that as the final thing, then it is perdition, we shall know it. But if we take this attitude, even today, when for some reason we are smitten again with the imperfection, the lack of sanctification; if we turn to the Lord and say, “Lord, this is me, it is not You; You are other than this. You are not as I am; I take anew my position by faith in what you are. I step off of the ground of what I am and on to the ground of what you are!”, we shall discover that the Holy Spirit comes in on that, and we shall know comfort, and find release, deliverance and uplift.

You could take the other two courses of just accepting that, and sit down and be miserable for the rest of the day, or the rest of your days; or you could begin to struggle and strive to get out of your mire, out of your slough, deploring that you got in and you had so often got in, and you are going to make another effort. You will not get very far either way: you will be dragging along. But if you take Christ’s ground by faith, repudiate your ground and take His ground by faith, and tell the Lord that He is altogether other than you are and you take the ground of what He is by faith, then the Holy Spirit will deliver you, you will find help and deliverance, you will find yourself lifted with new comfort, new strength, and, what is more, new energy to go on, and you will not so easily get into that mire again. You will grow so that the mire is left more and more behind. The Holy Spirit is working on the ground of what Jesus is.

You will find this principle operates in many ways, not only in the matter of definite sin or failure, when you are tripped up at some time or become particularly conscious of your own unholiness, but in many other ways.

Take the matter of going to bed at night just enjoying the Lord, full of the blessedness of the Lord, all at peace with the Lord, no cloud between you and the Lord; you simply go to bed and you go to sleep, and in the morning you wake up to find that all the blessedness has flown, somehow or other everything is as though it had never been, and you have got to start all over again: it is as though you had got to start the Christian life again. Sometimes we have the blessed experience of waking up in the morning in the joy of the Lord, and everything is clear, but that is not always so. We may have the most blessed fellowship with the Lord last thing at night, and simply the bottom has fallen out of everything through the night, and it is like starting the Christian life all over again in the morning. We may be irritable, we may be anything, not feeling a bit like a Christian: everything is topsy-turvy. What are we going to do? Are we going to raise questions about this Christianity, that it is not certain, not stable, variable, and so on? Or are we going to succumb to these feelings, these sensations, this situation, this condition of things and have a wretched day because we feel like that today, that is how we are today; it is a bad day and so we go through a bad day? What is going to happen? It is very real sometimes, you feel just about as evil as you can feel, and you have all the reasons for asking the questions as to whether you are a Christian at all.

The cause may be any one of a number of things. It may be the Devil himself is anticipating something: he has a sense of something coming which is of value to the Lord, and he has come in and right from your waking consciousness he is surrounding you with a black cloud of evil enmity and is pressing that upon you to frustrate and defeat something for God. But whatever the reason is there is the fact: you feel bad, and everything argues that you are bad. What is your way out? I will tell you how I have found deliverance. I have turned to the Lord and said, Lord, You are not this; You are other than this. You do not change from night to morning; there is no variableness with You. You are not subject to all these elements which give us these different and varying sensations: You are the same Lord, just the same, unchanging, unchangeable. Last night You were love, and You are love this morning; last night You were peace, and You are peace this morning; last night You were joy, and You are joy this morning. You are outside of all this, Lord; I take my stand on what You are, and repudiate what I am, and all this. I forsake this ground and take my place in You as other than this.

I have found that is a ground on which the Lord encamps for deliverance. It is so easy to just settle on that ground, put up your tent there for the day, and go on saying, Oh, well —! Repudiate that ground, but not in that psychological way of simply repudiating something and saying it does not exist. Repudiate that ground in the positive way of Christ’s ground. He is not that; He is other than we are, and by faith we take His ground.

The Holy Spirit works according to that faith, and there is deliverance. Am I feeling evil? He is not feeling evil. Lord, I take your ground this morning. It is a law of victory, it is the ground of what Christ is, and that is unshakeable ground.

That is the Kingdom which we are to be receiving. In that way, by that faith, we go on to full growth. It is full growth in Christ, and in what He is.

The Lord interpret this to us, and open our understanding, so that we shall come to rest and be established.

Chapter 5 - Sanctification in Christ, the Way to Dominion

Reading: Hebrews 2:1-18; 3:1; 12:25-29.

The words of verse 5 in chapter 2 can bear a slightly improved translation, and would be more correctly translated if put in this way: “Not unto angels did he subject the inhabited earth to come of which we are speaking”. So that what is being spoken of in this letter is the dominion of the inhabited earth to come, a Kingdom which cannot be shaken. Those two things, one at the beginning of the letter and the other at the end, are related to the same thing, and all that lies between the two passages represents the basis of that Kingdom which cannot be shaken over the inhabited earth to come.

Now in that inclusive connection there are four things in this letter. I am not going to attempt to speak about them all at this time, but I want to mention them. The first is the original purpose of God, the second is the securing of that purpose by the Son through the cross, the third is the heavenly calling and partnership with the Son of the saints, and the fourth is the training of the saints as sons for dominion. We take the first matter:

The Original Purpose of God

“Not unto angels... but one hath somewhere testified, What is man?” Another very good, and, I think, accurate translation puts it thus: “What is man that Thou makest mention of him, or the son of man that Thou puttest him in charge.”

In the history of this world as recorded in the Scriptures the first and the final question is that of dominion in this universe. Every other factor and element in the Scriptures is gathered into that. Genesis and the Revelation bound that history, and the two comprehensive features of Genesis and the Revelation are dominion and redemption, and all the other books of the Bible are aspects of these two things, and they all have to be gathered into these two things, dominion and redemption.

In the book of Genesis the first thing in order is dominion. “Thou madest him (man) in order to have dominion”; that is the statement. The original purpose of God in man’s creation was that he should have dominion. And then in Genesis, because that dominion was lost, was forfeited, the programme of redemption was introduced.

Then you go right through the Bible and you find that redemptive programme being set forth in many ways, in types, figures, symbols, prophecy, representation, and then carried out in actuality in the coming, in the person and in the work of the Son of God, concerning whom this letter to the Hebrews says at its beginning: “God... appointed Him heir of all things.” And you come at length to the end of this world’s history, gathered up in the book of the Revelation, and there at the beginning of the book you find the redemptive programme consummated: “Unto him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins...”; “...who redeemed us unto God by his own blood...”. The redemptive programme consummated, and dominion for ever established.

That is the Bible, but it is wonderful to notice that this one single letter in the entire Bible covers all that ground in itself. Here it opens with the eternal intention, “Thou madest him to have dominion”; and then it is seen that that dominion was forfeited. Then through a large section of the letter the redemptive programme is unfolded, the High Priestly person and work of the Lord Jesus; and then, “Receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken...”; dominion established, never again to be forfeited or lost. This letter to the Hebrews is a remarkable book.

There, then, is God’s purpose, and that purpose is governing all God’s dealings with men, and that purpose lies behind every divine activity, and it is to govern and lie behind all our spiritual concerns for ourselves and for others. The purpose of God in this dispensation, since the redemptive work was accomplished in Christ by His cross, is to call out of the nations a people to be prepared and fitted to reign. It is not just to call out a people to be saved. That is only related. That is only a fragment, an essential and indispensable step towards the end, but no end in itself. The message of the Gospel is not just the message that man may be forgiven and saved from his sins. The full message of the Gospel is that man is called to occupy a place of dominion in the ages to come, that man is called into the place which God eternally intended that he should occupy, for which God created man, that he might have dominion. That is the message, and that has to govern all our concern, our interest and our activity, and that has got to shape our mentality with regard to God’s dealings with us.

That, of course, is a phase which comes later in our consideration, but if we want an explanation for God’s ways, God’s methods with His people, and an adequate objective in seeking the salvation of men, it is this: God had a purpose, a high, a great, a glorious purpose in creating man. The explanation of man’s very existence is in the eternal counsels of God, and it is here set forth in these words: Not unto angels, but unto man, did He subject the inhabited earth to come of which we are speaking. If we want to understand why God deals with us as He does, why the people of God are subjected by Himself to such fiery trials and to such a course of difficulty and suffering, the explanation is here: he is chosen to reign, and he has got to learn how to reign and what reigning is. Oh, the Gospel is a great thing, and that is why here at the end of this letter, as it first of all introduces and presents the great purpose of God from eternity concerning man, and then unfolds with such fulness the great redemptive work, with all its cost, with all its wonder, with all its power, it is all summed up in this way: “How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?”

What is so great salvation? It is not just our salvation from our sin, not just our salvation from hell. That is a great thing, but it is our salvation back into all that mighty thought of God before the world was, when He said — or when They said — “Let us make man....”; “Thou madest him to have dominion.” That is the so great salvation. How shall we escape if we voluntarily antagonise, positively resist, say vehemently, We will not have it? No! None of that is necessary — neglect! Fail to give heed to so great salvation! That is the purpose, the great object of God from eternity, that the people of God shall with the Son of God be a reigning people in His Kingdom which is for ever and ever. You notice how first of all the Son and His Kingdom are introduced, and then man is brought in: “For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee?” “Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity; — see the crown of His Kingdom, the crown of His exaltation; it is by reason of what He has done in His cross — therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.” He is brought in as heir of all things, appointed by the Father, and given a Throne which is for ever and ever, and a kingdom of righteousness. And then: “What is man that Thou makest mention of him, or the son of man that Thou puttest him in charge?” You see believers, the people of God, are brought there into relation with the Son in His Kingdom to reign, and so the second chapter goes on with that relatedness: “For it became him for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For both he that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren...”. They in oneness with Him, in family relationship, are to have dominion. That leads us right on to chapter 12: “Wherefore, receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken...”.

Now there is one other thing that is explained by this. It is that persistent, dogged effort in all its many-sidedness of the whole kingdom of Satan to prevent the people of God from reaching their divinely intended end. That effort begins with the Lord Jesus Himself; that is, in depriving Him of His Lordship. You and I must more and more be impressed with this one tremendous thing, that the main note, the dominant note, the supreme feature of our life and ministry, our testimony and our position as the Lord’s people, is in relation to the absolute Lordship of Jesus Christ. The great declaration of the commencement of this dispensation made by Peter on the Day of Pentecost was: “God hath made this Jesus, whom ye crucified, both Lord and Christ, a Prince and a Saviour.” This was the note, mark you, that opened the dispensation; this was the note and the proclamation which, on the one hand, resulted in the gathering in of men, the Holy Spirit’s mighty operation in relation to the church; and, on the other hand, which caused the fury of the adversary to break upon the church. That is the supreme note of the dispensation, and if you follow on through the book of the Acts you will see that it was on that note that the Holy Spirit came and did His mighty work. Again, at Caesarea with Peter, amongst the Gentiles, now not the Jews, the cry of Peter in the midst of that company was: “He is Lord of all”, and the Holy Spirit fell upon all those who were assembled together. That is the Holy Ghost’s note for this dispensation. His Saviourhood is a great thing, but His Lordship is greater. His Saviourhood is in a sense only incidental, because it comes in by reason of what has taken place in sin; but His Lordship is eternal, back to eternity and on to eternity. That is the Lordship of Jesus Christ against which the enemy is set, and we know quite well that it is not until we come to the place where the Lordship of Jesus Christ is established from centre to circumference of our lives that we come really into victory.

So many of the Lord’s people know Him as Saviour; that is, they have come into the joy of assurance of salvation, but they are living an up-and-down life, a life with much defeat in it and much weakness and much contradiction, and which has in it much inconsistency. The whole trouble is that Jesus is not Lord. When that mighty thing happens which results in Him being established as Lord, then there is power, then there is liberty, then there is glory.

As we have already said, this issue of His Lordship is becoming more and more acute in the history of this world as the age nears its end; therefore, the call to the people of God, the call to believers, the call to the church that their need at the end of the dispensation is to be the need of His sovereignty, His sovereign Lordship. The Lord would work with us to bring us there, not just that somewhere remote in this universe, called heaven, Jesus is exalted, is enthroned; no, but that enthronement, that Lordship is a practical working factor in our lives inwardly and outwardly; that it is an expressed thing, a manifested thing, a ministered thing; that it is brought to bear upon situations, upon circumstances, upon need; that Jesus coming in the power of His Kingdom should register His mighty impact upon things here now. The Lordship of Jesus Christ is to be a practical, working thing.

It is a working thing, and, mark you, it is a basis of appeal on the part of the church. He is King of the princes of the earth, He is Lord of lords and King of kings, His interests have dictated the course of things. It is a ground of appeal, and it is a ground which is upheld in heaven. God upholds that ground. Jesus is Lord. God answers a challenge to that Lordship. There are many challenges that He ignores, but He responds to every challenge to that Lordship. That opens a wide field, and we will not go further with that.

Now the next thing that I feel should be mentioned in connection with the original purposes of God in Christ concerning man, is that unto the realisation of that purpose man has got to be prepared. The redemptive work has been accomplished in Christ. Here we are introduced to it at once: “Having accomplished purification of sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high”. He tasted death on behalf of every man. The work has been done in Him. “He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one.” On the ground of what He has done, and what has been done in Him, something has got to be done in the saints to bring them to the place that He now occupies. There has got to be the expression in us of that which has been accomplished in and by Him.

I want to gather that to one point: “He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one.” The point is, What is sanctification in relation to the Kingdom, the Throne, dominion? It is very vitally related. There will be no reigning unless there is sanctification; there will be no dominion unless there is sanctification. Sanctification in Christ is the way to the dominion, to the reigning, to the realisation of God’s eternal purpose. What is sanctification then with its tremendous significance for the purpose of God? It is a separation from all that which came in and, coming in, meant the forfeiture of that dominion which God intended.

But I am going to put that in another way. It is the breaking of the power and the stripping off of the whole natural life. The whole natural life of man now since the fall — since Satan’s interference and man’s response to Satan’s interference — is in itself the great obstruction in the way to God’s purpose in him and for him; and when I speak of the whole natural life I am not just speaking of that sinful life which everybody recognises and acknowledges to be evil. I am speaking about man as he is. According to this world’s standards, and according to the best standards of men, he may be called a good man, but God says: “There is none righteous, no not one.” And the great apostle himself said: “In me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.” That lies behind our religious life very often. Our very religious life can be energised by nature. Our interests for the Lord may be by the energy of our own natural life, and so we find the flesh sporting itself in the things of God, a kind of natural interest carried over into divine things: that just as you might be taken up with interesting things in this world, and study them, and apply them, and use them, and turn them to certain account for the furtherance of certain interests, so you have swung all the application of mind and heart and wisdom to the things that are divine, and you begin to manipulate things for God, and organise things for God, and govern things for God, and be something in the things of God. It is all the natural man brought over into divine things, which can be interesting, fascinating. Yes, the deep things of God making an appeal to that in us which can be so fascinated, things such as prophecy, the things to come. Oh, the fascination of prophecy!

I shall never forget the shock that came to me once across the other side of the Atlantic. I was due to speak in a city there, and I arrived on the closing evening of a series of meetings on prophecy and was in the last meeting. I was to open my own series of gatherings at the end of that last meeting, and I listened to the address on prophecy, on the signs of the times and so on, and I saw the people all down with their notebooks, going at it as hard as they could go, noting down all these things, tabulating all these interesting facts, all this data about prophecy. They were very interested and very busy, and then that finished. I had been very much waiting on the Lord for His message, and He gave it to me, I believe, and when I began to speak at the end of that meeting my message was: “And he that hath this hope within him purifieth himself”; the practical outcome of the times being fulfilled and the Lord’s coming in view; the practical outcome of a life of sanctification and holiness. The people lost interest, and they flung down their notebooks, and closed their Bibles, and were not a bit interested any more. There was no fascination about it.

You see where we can get to. It is all natural, busy, interested, feverishly taken up with things for the Lord, and yet it may be all the drive of this natural life.

Now what I want to say, and the point upon which I want to lay special emphasis in all love, and yet with all faithfulness, is this: Beloved, you and I will never come through to God’s eternally intended place for us in the heavenly Kingdom until everything of this earthly life has been smitten, has been smashed. We have got to be broken men and women on the side of this nature; we have got to know the meaning of the cross as planted right at the centre of this whole life of nature, to bring it to naught, so that we can do no more of ourselves, we cannot speak as out from ourselves, we cannot work as out from ourselves, we can do no more organising as of ourselves, we can run nothing as of ourselves, we are brought to the place where we know nothing as of ourselves — and we know it; and if there is to be anything, and if there is anything at all, it is the Lord only doing it — doing it at the time, and then usually leaving us empty and spent and helpless, until He comes along again. It is so different from this continuous, everlasting go, go, go of the flesh. It is helpless dependence upon the Lord because the cross has been planted there right at the centre of all the strength of nature, and now our preaching of a crucified Lord has to be by crucified men, our working in relation to a heavenly Kingdom has to be by heavenly men; that is, those who are drawing their very life from heaven, from God: those for whom Christ and Christ alone is their life and their resource, and they know it. The essential unto the heavenly Kingdom is a breaking, fully, finally, of what is earthly.

So the course of the believer’s true spiritual experience is, on one side, emptying, emptying, weakening, weakening; on the other side it is growing knowledge of Him as fulness, as strength, as life, as everything. The Kingdom which cannot be shaken is Jesus Christ in His fulness in the saints, in the church, and nothing else. “Wherefore, receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken”. Let the fruit of my effort come up against that mighty shaking of the heavens and the earth, and what will be left? Let my strength encounter that shaking of God, and where shall I stand? Let my work for God meet the impact of that shaking, and what will remain? Let anything of me come into the realm of that tremendous upheaval, and what can there be? It will go in the category of the things that are made, “the things which are shaken will not remain, as things which are made”, says the apostle. The things which cannot be shaken are the things which He does, and only those things, the unshakeable things. Are we then today supported by the Lord Jesus? Is He our life, our energy? Is He our strength? Is He our resource in everything? Do we know Him? Only so can we come to God’s end, for Christ is God’s end. All things are summed up in Him by God. He is Heir of all things. It is to know Him, and by reason of the very nature of things we can only know Him in a living way as we have to know Him. We do not know the Lord only as we have to know Him. You cannot learn the Lord Jesus by a book. You cannot know the Lord Jesus by information. The only way to know Him is by having to know Him, being wrecked upon Him, being put to it so that you have got to make a new discovery of Him; and so He brings us to a place of helplessness in order that we might discover anew our resource in Him. That is the way to dominion, for no flesh shall glory before God, in His presence no man shall stand there to take any of the praise to himself. All the glory is going to come to God’s Son. Every bit of the glory is going to Christ, and yet we are going to share His glory. How? Because He has become everything to us, and we have nothing of ourselves in which to glory. It will be His glory in the church by Christ Jesus unto all ages for ever and ever, amen.

Chapter 6 - Constituted with God's End in View

Reading: Hebrews 1:1-2; 2:5-11; 3:1; 12:28.

There are several matters of very great significance which have to be taken into consideration by those who would be one with the fullest thoughts of God, and it is concerning those matters that we shall be occupied for a little while at this time.

1)  The Eternal Counsels and Purposes Greater than an Unfallen Innocent Humanity

The first is this, that the eternal counsels and purposes of God are greater than an innocent race of unfallen created humanity. Ephesians 1:5 goes a long way beyond Genesis 1 to 3: “Having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself”. That precedes creation and that governs creation, and that goes a long way beyond a created race just in an unfallen state. Adam’s was only a probationary position. If he had been faithful he would not have remained just an unfallen creature; there would have been something added. The way would have been left open for fuller intentions of God, and the test was not allowed just in order to leave him where he was. The test was allowed with a view to some addition, some increase, some progress, some development, some enlargement, some advance. God had something more in view than just having an innocent humanity in an unfallen state. So that his innocence was only probationary, and, in the probation, the testing, was a view to something more.

a) The purpose of God in eternity concerns His Son

The purpose of God was from eternity concerning His Son. There are two things there. It is not something which has come in at a later point; it precedes what we understand by time, it precedes this creation, this history; it is something which arose before the foundation of the world, and the purpose before times eternal was concerning His Son. That takes it back before Adam. That gives it a very much larger significance than the creation itself. It is from eternity and therefore it is not just bound up with unfallen Adam, it is bound up with God’s Son.

The Lord Jesus did not come in just as a rescuer of man and of man’s lot. We should almost be led to believe by certain emphases that redemption is the greatest thing in the universe, and that all God’s interest is in redemption, and that we should be occupied solely with redemption. Redemption is a great thing. We can never, never exaggerate, and I doubt whether we shall ever know what a great thing redemption is; and yet, great as redemption is in its scope, in its depth, in its cost, redemption is only incidental to the eternal purpose. Christ came in to time to rescue His own inheritance. In that, of course, man is rescued, but it is something very much bigger than that. It relates to the Son primarily, and until the Lord’s people get the right attitude, the right point of view, that is, that all things in God’s full and final concern are centred in God’s Son, they have not come into line with all God’s resource. While the direction is toward ourselves — redemption, sanctification, glorification, and so on — or toward anything less than the Son Himself, we have not got God’s dynamic for accomplishing His work, and therefore it becomes necessary, as the sufficient, the adequate basis of the Holy Spirit’s operation, that there should be a revelation of Jesus Christ in the heart, for it is in relation to Him and what God has purposed concerning Him that all the energies of God are released and made active.

b) The purpose of God in Christ is universal

Further, the relationship of God’s purpose in Christ is not merely to this world, it is universal. All things are in Him, through Him, by Him, unto Him created; things in heaven, things in earth, things under the earth, whether they be principalities or powers — all things. The purpose of God is a universal purpose in relation to His Son, and goes far beyond the bounds of this little world, important and difficult and problematic as it may be to us.

c) The church is brought into that purpose

The church is brought into that relationship, it is instrumental in the purpose of God to universal domination. You will at once find words of Scripture leaping into your mind which support and bear that out, such as “Now unto the principalities and powers in the heavenlies, by the church...”.

That is the first of these very significant matters to be taken into consideration by those who would be one with the fullest thoughts of God.

2)  Redemption and Salvation Not Merely Related to Sin

The second of these matters for consideration is that redemption and salvation are not merely as to sin and a certain state in which man finds himself; but redemption and salvation relate to the eternal purpose, going back of sin, back of that state in which man is: hence you have the significance of all the New Testament writings, and that significance is something that is always with me as a tremendously impressive thing.

There is only one book in all the twenty-seven which speaks of and tells us about the preaching of the Gospel to the unsaved, and their response to that Gospel. I do not mean by that that the preaching of the Gospel to the unsaved falls into insignificance; that is not my point; but it is impressive that all the rest of the New Testament and quite a lot in that very book itself is brought to bear upon the saved, those who have believed, and it is a tremendous mass and weight dealing with believers, with Christians, with those who are the Lord’s.

This means in the very first instance that God can never be satisfied with just positional salvation. Positional salvation is this: something has been done for us by the Lord Jesus, altogether apart from us, on our behalf, and we take an attitude of faith towards Him and towards that, and by faith in what He is for us and has done for us we are accepted, we are saved. That is true; that is where we are positionally in Christ through faith, but the very logic of the New Testament is that God is never satisfied just with positional salvation. It is a great thing, and we shall constantly be compelled to fall back upon it, and it will often come to our rescue when we are being driven or lured or tempted to get on to certain dangerous ground where we try to find something in ourselves as a basis of acceptance, and so on. We shall have at once to go back to the great truth of positional salvation and positional sanctification, but the fact that all these letters are written to believers is proof positive that God is not satisfied with positional salvation alone.

Ah yes, but I am going to press that further, and if we listen to the undertone of the New Testament writings (Old Testament as well) we shall be brought to this conclusion: that God is not satisfied with just consistent Christian living. That is something more than positional salvation. There is positional salvation in the New Testament writings, and there is much about conditional salvation (using that word “conditional” in a certain sense); that is, not only the position but also the condition of believers. It is all there. But there is that deep undertone which shows that neither of these things, nor yet both of them, answer to God’s fullest thought. There is the urge, the constant urge of that undertone to go on, to go on, to go on to full growth; not just live a consistent, good Christian life, not just to live day by day without sin, without failure, and to have your life so ordered in conduct and behaviour and demeanour as becomes Christians. Yes, that should be, but there is something more: on to full growth, with an object, God’s purpose, God’s eternal purpose. Positional salvation does not bring to that necessarily, it is something on the way. A good Christian life does not bring to that necessarily, it is on the way. It is essential but on the way. There is an increase, a growth, an adding which means spiritual development to a certain measure which is bound up with God’s eternal purpose. Hence this constant exhorting, admonition, entreaty, warning, not that we should fall away from our salvation and lose it, and not only that we should fall away from our good spiritual position or condition, but that we should miss that which God has fixed for us as the purpose with which we are called, “the called according to His purpose”. Purpose governs everything.

3)  Some Related Issues of the Church and the Eternal Purpose of God

We come to the third consideration. This presents us with the position that there must be quite a number of things.

a) One dominating and governing objective in all life and service

Not just to be saved, that is not good enough; and not just to get others saved, that is not good enough; not just to be good, or make others good, or help them to be good, that is not enough. In all life and service the eternal purpose, the full thought of God is to be dominant and governing. I underline, and doubly underline, that word “all”. We will explain that emphasis in a minute.

b) A positive relatedness in all life and service

The second thing with which we are presented by what we have been saying is a positive relatedness in all life and service, that nothing becomes a thing in itself, separated, detached, isolated, self-contained as to our spiritual interests and activities. Fulness is the basis, fulness is the means, and fulness is to be the outcome; nothing partial and nothing detached; everything has got to be brought into a oneness in the direction of God’s end, and has got to work on the basis of God’s end: that is fulness. We are never to be content with anything that is only fragmentary, and we are never to be content with anything that is something in itself.

Take, for instance, the matter of evangelism. Fulness ought to govern evangelism, just as fulness ought to govern the ministry of teaching. But how evangelism has been made something in itself, and something less! The attitude of mind of so many is that you do not need very much to be an evangelist, that anybody can be an evangelist; that you do not need very much spiritual knowledge, and understanding, and wealth and fulness to bring souls to a saving knowledge of Christ. All you have got to do is to get a man saved, and then turn him into an evangelist and send him out into the world! And then you say, evangelism that is something in itself! And so evangelism can just work in its own watertight way, and have no interest in anything else, and say, Well, of course, all this wonderful teaching does not interest me; that is not my realm! We have heard many talk like that. I do not find that in the New Testament.

Fulness is to be the basis of everything, and it is no waste of time for the one who has the greatest measure of Christ, and the fullest knowledge of the things of the Lord, to bring it to bear upon the salvation of a soul. The best and most far-reaching evangelism is that which has the whole purpose of God in view from the outset, and unless that is so you will get a very poor type of convert, who will not go very far, and will have to be nursed all the way along. Get God’s full thought into evangelism, and you can leave your converts and they will go on, and they will grow, and they will take responsibility, they will learn the Lord themselves.

Fulness is to be the basis, and fulness is to be the relating factor in all things, so that whatever we may be doing in the sovereign ordering of God, it is not something apart, a line of its own, our peculiar and detached work. If it is not related to the ultimate it will lack something, and it will fail proportionately. A positive relatedness in all life and service, so that fulness is the basis and fulness the means: that is, that everyone who is in the thoughts of God and in the work of God has as great a measure of fulness that it is possible for them to have, and you may not think that it is unnecessary for them to have fulness in order to do that work; and that fulness therefore is the outcome of everything. If ever any servant of God should say: For my job the greater fulness is unnecessary, it would be wasted, there would be no room for it, no place for it at all; then that servant of God has an entire misconception of his calling; they are on some line that may lead to nowhere. At best it will only lead just so far and stop. If we are going through, right through, without an arrest, without a stopping short, without a narrowing down, without a thinning out, we must be, from the outset, right in line and in union with God’s ultimate purpose in His full thought.

c) Divine fulness the purpose of God

Then again, divine fulness will be proportionate to the measure in which the purpose of God governs. Now, I am using the phrase “divine purpose” in just a slightly different sense. I mean the Lord committing Himself, the Lord giving of Himself, that fulness which is for us, which He desires us to have, that large measure of Himself given now into life and into service. That will be proportionate to the measure in which the purpose governs. Divine fulness is spiritual; therefore spirituality is the law which governs fulness; that is, it is just in so far as spirituality obtains that God gives of His fulness. God is limited by us. He is bound up so. He is curtailed by us, not by His own desire or will. He would give Himself altogether. He would give of His fulness in life and in service, but what limits Him is that which is not spiritual, and, of course, more positively, that which is unspiritual. God’s end is spiritual fulness. He is working to that end. Oneness with God in His end means a way that is wholly spiritual, and therefore God is governed by a law in His giving of Himself, in His pouring out of His resources, in His committing of Himself, and that law is the law of spirituality; and so His fulness is proportionate to the measure in which the ultimate purpose governs. If we have something less than the ultimate purpose in view, we have got some piece of work in which we are engaged that we want to be successful, we want it to be established, we want it to be known, we want it to grow; and in some way it is bound up with us and our activities, interests, and so forth, God cannot commit Himself to that. Only in so far as there may be a bit of spirituality within that will God be able to commit Himself, but not to that; to what is spiritual within, but not to that. He ignores that. He has no interest in that. If the setting up of something on this earth in time in any way governs our consideration, our activity, God is not in that. He is not giving Himself to that, that is not according to the eternal purpose. In this dispensation God is doing nothing in relation to this earth; He is doing all in relation to heaven, taking out for the heavenly. If we are seeking to set up and to keep going something on this earth, God is not in it. It is just in so far as there is a measure of spirituality somewhere that God in any way takes account of it. If our methods, our means are other than wholly spiritual, God is not in it, and therefore the fulness of God is not there, it is limited.

That explains why so much that is man-propelled, man-ordered, goes such a little way, although the world may be full of it. Think of the disparity between the number of Christians and those who might go by the name of apostles in the world today and in the time of the book of the Acts, concerning which the book of the Acts was written, and the difference in effectiveness, in power, in fruitfulness. If in those days, concerning which that book was written, they had had as many Christian workers then, on the basis of those who lived then, we should have been in the millennium long ago, the work would have been done. And yet today with countless more agents at work for the Gospel and agencies, the one cry is “Limitation”! Limitation, limitation, defeat, weakness, getting just so far and the fruit of what there is (I am speaking generally) is so poor that very often you have to ask: Are these people really born again or not? There was no doubt about it in New Testament times. What is the matter? Well, that book answers for itself. Someone has called the book of the Acts “Holy Ghost days”! That goes to the heart of it. Things were then in the hands of the Holy Spirit entirely, not in the hands of men.

I am not going to pursue that, but I am seeking to help you to grasp what I mean by God’s end governing the matter of God’s fulness, and that fulness is proportionate to the measure in which God’s end really does govern. Therefore, we must take one further step:

d) Divine disfavour upon all that opposes

Divine disfavour will rest upon all that stands in the way of the full thought of God. Hence there has to be discrimination in work, in method, in means. Is this God’s purpose? Is this the way to reach God’s purpose? Is this the means that God would employ? And so often in the light of a true spiritual understanding of what God is after, and how God reaches what He is after, there has to be a shedding of a very great deal in the work of the Lord. And that requires this, so far as the Lord’s servants are concerned, that they shall be marked by true adjustability.

We have often in this very connection cited David and his cart for the Ark. Yes, the purpose was right, the object in view was in God’s mind, but a cart was not God’s prescription. It was a man-made thing, a mechanical means of propelling and carriage for the testimony. But the point is this, that when David met the displeasure, the disfavour of the Lord, not concerning his object, and not concerning his motive, but concerning his method and his means, although at the moment he was grieved, displeased and he smarted, we find that when he had had time to be quiet and get before the Lord, and the heat of his own soul and his own soul’s interests had died down, he was found an adjustable man, and he adjusted himself in his method to God’s purpose. Then David said, “Let the Levites bear the ark, for so it is written.” I believe that is one of the many things in David that made him a man after God’s own heart that should do all His pleasure — not David’s pleasure.

How necessary it is for us, then, to be adjustable, ready to shed those things which are not directly related to God’s end, or those methods and those means; ready to let go that which is something in itself, though that something may be good, and valuable, and seemingly necessary but not what God is after in the full sense. There are any number of good works going on, and valuable in their way, and to those who are doing them, evidently necessary, but are they really God’s full purpose, that which God is really after? They are things in themselves, and largely apart, either unrelated or else not reaching God’s end at all.

e) The need of a vessel to keep the purpose in view

There must, therefore (and this is the point to which we have been working all the time), be that vessel and that instrument sovereignly raised up by God to keep His full purpose in view. It is essential to God. When there is so much that is less, and contentedly less, so much that is blindly other, so much that leads nowhere, and so much that is entirely unsatisfactory to the Lord, it is necessary that the Lord shall raise up a vessel, an instrument for the purpose of keeping His full thought before His people. God has had a small witness to His full thought right down the ages, but that vessel has been His plummet, His measuring-line. Men have refused, men have persecuted, but men are going to be judged by that.

As the dispensation moves on and grows old and nears its end, shall we not be right in concluding that if what we have said is the truth, towards the end and in the end time God will seek that He shall be in possession of a vessel which does set forth for Him before His people His full thought. I believe He will, and we might apply in this connection the words of the apostle in another connection: “Ye see your calling, brethren...”.

Now half of the statement is that there must, therefore, be a vessel and an instrument sovereignly raised up by God to keep His full purpose in view. The other half is God will call into relationship to that ministry. He will call into relationship to that ministry, and therefore there will come about a discrimination in ministry under the sovereign calling of God. There will be many things which will arise. For such as are thus called, laid hold of, apprehended of God, there will be such a line taken by the Lord that they cannot do what others do, even in the ministry. Oh, these are serving the Lord, and they do this and they do that and there seems to be blessing and the Lord seems to be with them. They... Why shouldn’t I? Why can’t I? The only answer that will ever come is: Others can, you cannot! And there is a deeper explanation: you are called for something to which they are not called, or to which as yet they have not come, and you are entirely governed by God according to His purpose; not just interest, but specific object.

f) The end determines the preparation experimentally of the vessel

That vessel, and those who are called to its ministry, have to be constituted in a living and experimental way according to the end in view.

That opens a new line. I just make that statement and close there for the time being. They will be dealt with in such a way as no one else will be dealt with. That vessel will be constituted by such divine means, such divine dealings as no one else knows. That vessel will go through experiences in the hands of God which are peculiar experiences, strange experiences, deep experiences, and all the time the human heart may be crying out, Why should I go this way? Why should I have this experience? Why is it that such things have befallen us? These are not the things common to man! Our experience is a different experience altogether from the experience of the majority of the Lord’s people! What we are called to do, and let go, and so on, is altogether different. The way in which the Lord deals with us is different! Yes, it is not only, “Called, according to His purpose”, but constituted according to His purpose. The end is governing the Lord’s dealings with us.

Oh, listen to this as we close. No one can come into the ministry of God’s full, eternal purpose in relation to God’s fullest thought by taking it up, by the attitude which says, I am going into that! I am going to take that up! I am going to be in that! I am going to do that! That is going to be my line of ministry! That is going to be my message! Beware! Do not take any such attitude: it is impossible. If you do you will soon be found in a false position, and you will be knocked to pieces. You have got to be constituted for this thing, and that constituting follows a sovereign movement of God in your life which makes you know that, although you might be doing good work in various other ways and directions, this is God’s way for you, and you do not argue from the general, you argue from the particular: I see now that, whereas I have been in a certain realm, on a certain line, God has wound that up for me, and laid His hand upon me and called me to something other. Until that becomes, not something mentally apprehended but something born into our very being, so that, although we might often have recoiled, we might have gone through contortions over it, we know that God’s end has come upon us, and in the specific sense of ministry (I am not talking now about our place in the purpose, but in the sense of ministry), we are the called according to His purpose. Then God begins the constituting.

Chapter 7 - The Constituting of Sons

Reading: Eph. 1:5; Gal. 4:19; Rom. 8:28-29.

Coming to this letter to the Hebrews, let us find our link between the calling, the purpose of God in Christ, and the preparation of an instrument for its expression.

We have seen in the first chapter that the eternal purpose relates to His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom He made the ages. And then, passing into the second chapter there is the extension of that thought from the Son to sons, “bringing many sons to glory”, and both of these things, the Son and the sons, are gathered into a comprehensive quotation from the Psalm: “What is man, that thou makest mention of him; or the son of man, that thou puttest him in charge.” That quotation undoubtedly embodies both Christ and those who are Christ’s, because the apostle goes on concerning man, “Thou madest him to have dominion; thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet”, and so on: “But we see not all things put under his feet; but we see... Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honour.” So that this purpose of God concerning His Son embraces the sons, and takes us back to this passage in Romans 8: “...conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren...”; “...bringing many sons to glory...”.

Then you pass in the letter to the Hebrews to what is the first verse of chapter 3: “Holy brethren (these are the sons), partners in a heavenly calling...” and you pass from there right through the great unveiling of that priestly work of the Lord Jesus by which the sons are secured and come at length to chapter 12, where you have the sons in training. I am not going to quote the whole passage, but I want to underline some fragments which are relevant. Here is a connecting exhortation: “Looking off unto Jesus, the author (or captain) and perfecter of faith...”; “Consider him that endured such gainsaying of sinners... lest ye be weary...”; “...the exhortation which reasoneth with you as with sons...”. The Captain has been made perfect through sufferings; the Son has gone this way. That is what is being said, leaving, of course, in its own untouched place, that peculiar value of the sufferings of Christ in relation to sin and atonement with which we have no connection at all. There is that other side of the sufferings of Christ with which we are linked, and the beginning of this twelfth chapter clearly links us with Him in the way that He has taken as the Son; and then, “The exhortation which reasoneth with you as with sons, My son regard not lightly (do not think of it as something unimportant) the chastening of the Lord”; that is, the child-training of the Lord. Do not think of it as something unimportant. And as a guard against fainting when reproved of Him remember the range of relatedness and value in this child-training. That is what is implied here, what is said in other words. This child-training is in relation to the eternal purpose. It is connected with the Son for the inheritance and the receiving of a Kingdom which cannot be shaken. Child-training has to do with that, and when we see it in that light then we do not regard it as something unimportant, and we are strengthened by that knowledge when we are chastened, so that we faint not: “For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.” “Furthermore, we had the fathers of our flesh to chasten us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of our spirits and live?” “The father of our spirits”! That immediately shows where the chastening is, where the child-training is, where the sonship is, or where the sonship is to be developed — in our spirits. That is the point that we may reach presently as we work towards it.

The training of sons in relation to the eternal purpose, and for our present purpose here, a sonship vessel or instrument to fulfil the ministry of keeping God’s full thoughts before His people. For such a ministry the instrument to be employed will be dealt with in a very definite and direct way on the lines of sonship, will know the strict child-training of the Lord. The end fixed for all the Lord’s children is sonship. We will not — we must not — put Romans 8:28-29 into any lesser category than God’s purpose for all in Christ; that is, we must not say that this is for a certain number in the thought of God. It is for all in Christ, and this is God’s will for all His people, but as has always been the case the majority of the Lord’s people do not follow on spontaneously, and the Lord has continually to have in the midst of them, amongst them, before them, a company embodying and representing and expressing His full thought, to be a ministry of revelation and a ministry of strengthening and exhortation to His people. It is a ministering vessel in the midst of His people, and that vessel not just having special information to give, but that vessel being the embodiment of that which the Lord would have all His people know and be. Paul put himself into that category in a personal way, and spoke of himself as a first one — “… that in me as a first one …” — and then he used a phrase like this: “that he might fulfil the Word of God”, and the sense there is not just what we in our modern English mean by fulfil, that is, carry out something; it means make full the Word of God. He put himself, therefore, in the position of one who was the full embodiment of God’s thought for the church, and so Paul became in very truth a dispensational man; that is, the individual in whom the whole supreme meaning of the dispensation was gathered up experimentally; and the church, the Body of Christ, being the supreme feature of this dispensation, had its embodiment and expression in a living way in that one man.

Now what was true in him as an individual early in the dispensation has had to be true and be repeated again and again through the dispensation in instruments which God has raised up; that is, that there shall be a living voice — not a voice of teaching, a voice just of truth in the technical or academic sense, not just the proclamation of something, but a living embodiment and expression of God’s thought amongst His people. The Word of the Lord to such a vessel at all times will be: “whether they will hear or whether they will forbear”. It is so easy from time to time to let go, to sag because your message is not wanted and because you see no place for it, no room for it, or because you see almost universal opposition to it; to conclude, or to take the attitude as though you had concluded, that this is not the message for the time, the people are not ready for it, they are not open for it, they will not have it. Whether they will hear or whether they will forbear, is the Lord’s word to an instrument which He raises up for any purpose. That is, although you may be speaking in the wilderness, you have got to get on with it; although no one will listen to you, you have got to go on; although you may see no response, but just universal antagonism, you have to go on with your work, “whether they will hear or whether they will forbear”.

For the fulness of God’s thoughts a vessel has to be constituted accordingly, and if the fulness of God’s thoughts is sonship as the means of the universal dominion of which this letter speaks, the universal dominion of Christ, then our training is along the lines of sonship, for we are called to that ministry.

I am tempted to stay with another parenthesis, to remind you of the very greatness of our calling, not something in time but something which came in eternity; not something that just belongs to this earth, but which is over this earth. It is not the dominion merely in the inhabited earth to come; it is that but it exceeds that. The church is not just going to reside here on the earth in the age to come, even to have dominion on the earth. The church is going to have dominion over the earth, and its dominion is going to reach beyond the earth into the realm of principalities and powers. It is in the light of that calling to that capacity that the Lord’s dealings with us go on.

What is the basis of the training of sons? It is the cross. What is the pattern of the training of sons? It is the Son. What is the sphere of the training of sons? It is in the spirit. Those are the three things for our present consideration.

The Basis of Training is the Cross

In the thought of God, in the mind of God, the cross of the Lord Jesus was the end of one race and type of humanity. From God’s standpoint the death of the Lord Jesus on the cross wound up, concluded and set aside one type of being called man. Calvary does not just represent the dealing with sin in man as though God by the cross plucked sin out of man and dealt with it in judgement and destruction and left the man. God took the man with it, and the man was put away, so far as God was concerned, with sin; he is sin. “I have been crucified with Christ”; “We were crucified with Christ”. In the resurrection of the Lord Jesus a new type of man is represented. He in resurrection is called the firstborn among many brethren. Sonship according to God’s mind is represented in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: “declared the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead”. “God raised him from the dead, as it is written in the second Psalm, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.” You see, it is a new kind of man: in God’s thought the man of sonship is represented in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. That has nothing to do, of course, with His eternal person as the Son of God, but here in representation. You may put it, if you like in the full form, and say, here is a comprehensive, corporate man, race, after a certain order, of a certain kind, and that man, that corporate, inclusive, collective man is crucified, is put to death and is buried, and that is an end. And then, after a period, God acts and brings out from that tomb a man of a different order, the same yet another, a different type altogether, another kind of man, and He who could never say of that one that has died, Son! But He says of this one, “Thou art my Son.” How all that is represented, gathered up and included in the representative person of the Lord Jesus, so that a sonship is brought into being on the ground of resurrection, and God in the resurrection of Christ has a new order of man in view, a new type before Him, and that type is designated, Son! That in Christ is what sonship is, but in Christ, the representative one, you have sonship reached, completed, consummated. In Christ we have but received the Spirit of God’s Son, and are told to become sons as conformed to the image of His Son, and as His Son is fully formed in us. Then, on the ground of His resurrection, and by the power of His resurrection, and in virtue of His risen life, there is being worked into us sonship under the hand of God: that is, so far as the process is concerned, the process which was concluded in an act in the representative one, the Firstborn, now to be wrought out progressively in us.

So far as that process is concerned it has these two sides, the two sides of the cross, the death and the resurrection. The process of the cross has to follow the act of the cross.

Now I do not want to confuse you, but I am going to try to explain what I mean by that. There has got to be a crisis of the cross, and on the basis of the crisis of the cross there has got to be a process of the cross. That crisis takes place in the hour in which we see with the eyes of our heart opened that when Christ died we died, and that “we” or that “I” is not some part of us, something in us, something about us, but it was ourselves. When we see that, that is a crisis. If we are able to comprehend and take in what that means it is a tremendous crisis.

What am I? I am a thinking creature, I am a reasoning creature, I am a feeling creature, I am a willing creature, I am a choosing, a deciding creature, I am a judging creature, I am a talking creature. I am all that, and much more, and I have died, and when I am dead my thinking stops, my reasoning stops, my arguing stops, and my judging stops, and my feeling stops. It all stopped when I died. In the sum total of our natural functioning and activity in the death of Christ God sees the end of us. In the resurrection of the Lord Jesus God sees only Christ thinking, Christ reasoning, Christ judging, Christ feeling, Christ choosing, Christ talking, and it is no longer I but Christ since I have been crucified with Christ. I can no longer talk: if I do, so far as God’s eternal purpose is concerned it does not count for anything. It is only what the Spirit of God’s Son in me says through me that touches God’s eternal purpose. I may be a preacher of renown, and it counts for nil in relation to God’s eternal purpose unless the Holy Ghost is doing the preaching. And that applies so far as my thinking is concerned. I may reason, and argue, and work things out, and apply my mind, my brains to things of God. It does not effect one fragment unless it is Holy Spirit inspired thinking, unless it is revelation by the Holy Spirit beyond my powers of grasping divine things.

This matter of the application to the cross is a comprehensive thing, setting aside fully, progressively, what is of ourselves in mind and heart, and will, in spirit, soul and body, and bringing up the Son of God in everything; so that it is Christ.

That is where the eternal purpose of God lies, and only in the measure in which it is that, can there be ministry related to God’s eternal purpose; therefore those who are going to serve God in relation to His fullest thought have got to be the most crucified people in God’s universe. All natural ambitions to do anything, to be anything, to say anything will have been smitten, and it will simply be by the Spirit, and by the Spirit alone that anything can be said or done that counts. When this work is done to any degree of depth, those concerned have a longing not to do anything and not to speak anything unless the Lord is going Himself to do it and say it. It is only in the Spirit that you know anything is worthwhile. The cross, according to what was conclusive with God at Calvary, is to be applied. And if God in His forbearance and longsuffering, still permits things which are not crucified and not put out of the way, that is, if they are allowed to remain for the time being and they come into the Lord’s work — and we do see a good deal in the Lord’s work that is not of the Spirit, not Christ — let us never conclude for a moment that God has set Calvary aside and has accepted that. Sooner or later if that one is going on with God they are going to be smitten hip and thigh on the matter of the flesh. If they are going on in the Spirit that will be. God has never since the day that it took place moved one hair’s breadth from Calvary, which was finality as to that kind of man represented when He was made sin in our stead. So the cross is the basis of the training of sons, of the training in sonship.

The Pattern is the Son

The pattern of the training of sons is the Son. Conformed to the image of His Son! Christ fully formed in you! Foreordained unto adoption as sons! And adoption is at the end not at the beginning; adoption still waits; the day of our adoption has not arrived. You know the New Testament teaching on this matter is altogether different from modern English practice; and so, although Paul does not use that actual word in that connection, he puts the same truth into other words when he says, “Waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God”. The manifestation of the sons is only another way of saying the day of adoption: that is, when the sons are brought forth and presented as sons, no longer children but mature, now to take responsibility.

What is God doing with us? His work with us is to reproduce in us the constituents of sonship as represented by the Lord Jesus. The battle that rages and rises between our thought and the Lord’s thought, between our will and the Lord’s will, between our way and the Lord’s way, between our desiring and the Lord’s desire, has this one issue at stake, whether something more of His Son is to become a part of our very constitution, or whether we are going to put that back and remain just the same old creation. There is a big thing hanging upon that battle. In our last meditation we were speaking about adjustability. What is it that we are to be adjusted to? It is simply putting Christ in the place which we ourselves in some way have occupied, giving place to the Lord. That is Christ being fully formed. He is in us, but He is to be fully formed in us.

I am sorry the translators left out the value of the Greek in that passage. The Greek word is perfectly clear: “Till Christ be fully formed in you”. He is there, but there is formation, and this formation is through conflict, and Paul says that he is undergoing the suffering: “For whom I am in travail till Christ be fully formed in you”. There is something going on that is costly. It is marked by a painful process.

The Sphere is our Spirit

I want to come to the sphere of the training of sons, the spirit; of course, now not the Holy Spirit but our spirit: “the Father of our spirits”. You notice the word “father” in this twelfth chapter is implied, suggested by son; “fathers of our flesh” — “Father of our spirits”. So that it is in the realm of our spirit that all this is going on. God is concentrating upon our spirit, and I want to define that. The teaching of the Word of God about the spirit is not just what we mean when we say, He has a nice spirit! That means that what you meet is something very pleasant, it is a kind of outgoing influence to you. Or we may say, He has a nasty spirit! You mean he is a cantankerous person. That is not the meaning of the Father of our spirits. Our spirits are represented in the Word of God as the essential man: that is, the innermost part of our being, and if you like to sit down with a concordance and go through this matter of spirit you will be surprised.

I am impressed with some of the things that are said about spirit. I will give you two or three references.

Take 1 Corinthians 2:11, “For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? Even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God.” That is not just breath, that is an intelligent organ, and that is clearly something deeper than reason. It is not that I meet a certain man, and I look him up and down; I look at the size of his nose, and the shape of his chin, and just how his head is formed, and various other things, and I come to the conclusion that he is a certain type of man; that kind of man will behave in a certain way. I know what I may expect by having taken the measure of that man, and so I know that man. No, it is not that. This passage is deeper than the reasoned thing, the thought-out thing, the sized-up thing, it is intuitive knowledge, and that is spiritual knowledge. Spiritual knowledge is intuitive knowledge, and the spirit is the intuitive organ. That is exactly how angels move; they are spirits. God and angels never have to reason out anything. They never have to calculate. Angels do not move at the behest of the Lord by being told in words and given an explanation. They move intuitively. It is intuitive knowledge of the Lord. If another brother and I are one in spirit we intuitively know what we will do, and what we would like each other to do. We do not have to be told, we do not have to be argued with, we know intuitively and we can anticipate one another’s wishes intuitively. It is an organ of knowledge.

Or take another passage in the same letter, 1 Corinthians 5:3: “For I verily, being absent in Body but present in spirit, have already, as though I were present, judged him that hath so wrought this thing”; “...absent in Body... present in spirit, have... judged”. In spirit judged. I have weighed this thing up in spirit, my spirit has come to the conclusion that such-and-such is the case; my spirit has decided this thing. It is an intelligent organ.

Or pass to 1 Corinthians 14:14-15: “For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is unfruitful. What is it then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also: I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also.” There you have spirit and soul. The understanding heart is the intelligent, the rational soul, but that is not the point. The apostle is saying that it is possible for the spirit to pray. It is an organ that can pray and that can sing. You can sing in spirit, and you can pray in spirit. If it comes to the matter of an unknown tongue that is another thing, and it is not our point. We are detaching it from the matter of tongues at the moment. Here is an organ that it is said can pray and sing. I suppose you know something about the singing inside; your understanding is not at work, but it goes on. I know what it means. I remember an experience I had myself, and just recount it to convey to you what I mean by this. When undergoing a somewhat serious operation I experienced that in coming back to consciousness. Not knowing anything or anyone, being altogether dead so far as soul activity was concerned — that is, reason, and feeling, and all the rest — there was going on in me a hymn all the way through. I might have been in another world; it was going on all the time:

“Like a river glorious is God’s perfect peace.”

The tune was going on, and the words were going on. It was in the spirit, and one of many examples in the experience of others whom we know, of how the spirit functions altogether apart from the intellect.

Now I know what psychology says about the subconscious mind and all that, but that is mere materialistic psychology, and I am dealing with the Word of God which is a direct contradiction of the psychology which is generally accepted now, and which is pagan in its origin. Here Paul says that there is an organ that functions, and it is called the spirit.

You take Romans 1:9: “For God is my witness whom I serve in my spirit in the gospel of His Son...”. Paul says, “...I serve in my spirit...”. And we could add to these many other passages and find an abundance of proof that the spirit is something more than air, wind, breath, or what we mean by life when we say we give up our life. It is an intelligent organ, a functioning organ.

Now that spirit is where our new creation begins. It is there that new birth has its place and its meaning: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” You cannot have anything more definite than that. Now birth is there, and it is that. The spirit of man is born from above, renewed with divine life, and indwelt by the Spirit of God’s Son; and from that moment all God’s interests are centred there. Oh yes, they are going to affect our souls very definitely, they are going to affect our bodies, but they begin in our spirits and it is through our spirit that everything else that God does is accomplished.

The first thing that God is concerned with is to see that our spirit has its right place, and its right place is dominion. Dominion begins in the spirit, and dominion ends in the spirit, and the spirit is indwelt by the Spirit of God’s Son. It is sonship, therefore, in the spirit where dominion begins, and all the training for dominion goes on, and dominion is consummated.

I am more and more impressed and convinced with the importance of this matter. It is my life’s work, very largely, to help others, to look to their spiritual well-being, growth and maturity, and, of course, we meet with a large number of people. It is more than ever patent to me that the clue to everything lies in this discrimination between soul and spirit. If the Lord’s people could really get hold in a living way of this distinction and understand it, they would be saved from so much. They would make so much faster progress, and the church of God would be delivered from all kinds of entanglements and confusions and contradictions. It lies here, in seeing with spiritual eyes the difference between spirit and soul. The soul not under the government of the renewed spirit, indwelt by the Spirit of God, sets up a counterfeit kingdom of God, it is a psychical kingdom of God. It counterfeits conversions, purely psychological or psychic. You can have everything that is in the New Testament counterfeited in the realm of the soul, the psychical. The people who dwell in the realm of their souls become a complete contradiction to what true life in the spirit is, and, oh, what havoc the Devil has made; what confusion, what chaos and what dishonour to the Lord along that line! God’s first concern is to see that the soul is brought under the spirit: that the spirit indwelt by the Spirit of His Son is dominant over the soul.

The soul is the sum total of human emotions. You can get anywhere in the realm of human emotions, but this is all false so far as spiritual things are concerned. You can get everything in the realm of the reason. Some people’s battlefield is the realm of their own emotions and feelings, they live there; they have different emotions, some of elation, carrying them away in that way; other emotions of depression, morbid; swinging between these two frequently, so that you never know exactly how you are going to find them. You say something to them that is not very cheerful and bright and down they go into the depths; they cannot stand up to any kind of faithful speaking, and you are afraid to speak to some people faithfully: they go to pieces if you do. That is not living in the spirit; that is in the soul. In other cases the battlefield is the realm of the reason, the head, the intellect always getting in the way, and everything must be analysed there, everything must be dissected there, everything must be properly articulated and constructed there; and there they live. Their spiritual value is practically nil. They are living in their soul, on the intellectual side. With other people it is all action, all doing; they must be on the go, and their whole world is taken from them if they have to sit still for an hour; if God should put them aside so they cannot do anything they have lost everything.

That is why, in order to develop sonship, to train in sonship, God has to bring us up against the hopelessness of everything in these realms, break down, break down this habitual mental analysis, investigation, probing and all that goes on in our emotions; bring us to a breakdown perhaps, lay us aside so that we cannot do anything. God is after our spirit, and to bring the spirit into control, so that He may speak to us through our spirit and we may have spiritual understanding.

You say, where does the soul come in? As the instrument of the spirit. I trust that that is holding good at this time. How do we know these things? Not by study but by revelation in our spirit. How do I pass them on to you so that at least in some little measure you are able to intelligently grasp them? I mean, how do I make them even in a little measure intelligible to you? Through the working of my soul, my reason, but I do not get it that way. I never got it by sitting down with books to study it. It came through the spirit. Oh yes, the soul has its place, but it has to be the instrument; and my soul has not to become the dominant thing in any of these departments. I must know not just in my soul but in my spirit; I must feel first of all, not in my soul but in my spirit. Paul said that he went bound in spirit. The Lord would govern our lives in every way, knowing, feeling and doing through the spirit, and that by the spirit of His Son, so that what is expressed is Christ, not ourselves.

I think we have said enough to indicate that this training for dominion begins there. That is the realm of our schooling, and the smiting of that will be a humanity of a spiritual order, not disembodied spirits floating about in space, but humanity spirit-governed and of a spiritual order. Do you see Christ in resurrection? There you have Humanity. “Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones...”. What they meant by a spirit was something vapoury, and yet that Humanity was not fettered at all by the ordinary limitations and barriers of this life. He can be there in an instant, and can be miles hence the same instant. Time does not obtain there. The material has no power there; He can come through closed doors. That is Christ in resurrection. That will be the church when this corruption has put on incorruption, when this Body is made like unto His glorious Body. It will be a humanity, but a spiritual humanity; but that is the consummation. It begins now in our spirit, and we are learning the nature, the constitution, the order of a new Kingdom, a Kingdom that is not of this world nor of this creation, another Kingdom altogether different from this Kingdom, and yet we are learning a little here what the laws of that Kingdom are, what the faculties of that Kingdom are, and so we are receiving the Kingdom which cannot be shaken, because that which is shaken, says the apostle, is of things which are made, but this is not something made, this is generated by the Spirit of God.

Chapter 8 - The Constituting of Sons (Continued)

Reading: Hebrews 12:9; 2:6,10; 3:1; 4:12; 5:8,12-14.

There are some words in these passages which we must note — teachers, senses, experience, full growth, learn. All those words relate to relationship in the sense of sonship, and training in sonship. The government of the inhabited earth to come is to be with the sons in the Son, so that spiritual sonship is essential to God’s purpose in coming ages, which is not just relatedness to the Lord but with all that sonship means as so much more than childhood.

1) Israel in the Wilderness — A Warning

Having got our setting we note, in the first place, that this going on of which the apostle speaks, and to which he urges, is linked in the letter to the Hebrews with Israel in the wilderness. They are taken as the tragic example of people who did not go on. Seeing that the apostle links this particular verse concerning full growth as the end of going on, full growth evidently corresponds with the land which they missed, unto which they did not go on. The wilderness, therefore, corresponds to immaturity, babes; the wilderness is therefore the place of the training of children in the matter of sonship.

I am impressed with the fact that it is in connection with Israel in the wilderness that that remarkable word in verse 12 of chapter 4 occurs: “The word of God is quick and powerful... piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit.” You notice the context. Israel in the wilderness and what leads up to it: “...they shall not enter into my rest”; “Today if ye will hear My voice...”; “If Joshua had given them rest...”; and so on. All that follows that word in verse 12. In the wilderness God was dealing with the inner man in type; “the Father of our spirits”, not of our souls — of our souls in a secondary sense, but primarily of our spirits; and it is in our spirits that the Spirit of God’s Son resides. God is not soul, and therefore relationship cannot be with our souls in the first instance. Relationship is spirit with spirit: “...that which is born of the spirit is spirit”.

God seeks such to worship Him, such as worship Him in spirit because He is a Spirit. God is Spirit; therefore we must worship in spirit, not in the soul first of all. Here training is related to the spirit, and if you ask for the spiritual interpretation and explanation of Israel’s failure to go into the land, on to full growth, and perishing in the wilderness, it is because they lived in their souls and not in their spirits: that is, they lived on their feelings, they lived according to their outward reasoning, they lived on the basis of what they wanted. The inner life was not linked with God in oneness, therefore living in their souls they did not come to God’s appointed end, the Kingdom, the fulness of Christ, the land, which is the type of God’s eternal purpose, the covenant with His people.

If we live on the level and basis of mere soul-life instead of living in the spirit joined with God, the Holy Spirit, we shall not make spiritual progress, we shall simply go round and round in the wilderness, we shall never get through to God’s end, we shall never attain unto sonship, and therefore we never shall have dominion over the inhabited earth to come whereof we are speaking.

I think that is a very true summary of the situation, so that what God is after is not just to have a people out of Egypt or out from the world, called His people; not just on the basis of atoning blood, related to Himself as His children, not delivered, even, from the kingdom of darkness. That is not enough for God, for Israel came out on that basis, and in that relationship, and much more, representing all that salvation in its initial stages means, but yet they missed the object. God is not satisfied just to have a people saved from the world and from sin, called His people. He is the Father of their spirits to train them in sonship for a Kingdom, a dominion which is the realisation of His full thought from eternity.

2) The Need that the Foundation be Laid

The second thing, the thing which follows, is that full growth or sonship requires that the foundation shall be fully and finally laid. That is the word in the section from what is chapter 5 verse 11 through into chapter 6. You can never get through to sonship unless your foundation is established. All that is being said here about needing to be taught when the time was more than past for their being teachers relates to this matter of foundations. The foundations had been presented; they had been taught the foundations, but they were still occupied with foundations in the sense that it was not an accomplished fact; they were not settled, and therefore they could not go on. So the urge comes: “Let us cease to speak of first principles of Christ, and press on to full growth.” For full growth, or for sonship, the foundation has to be finally laid. Then the apostle presents the foundations and calls them first principles of Christ.

First Principles of Christ

Let that govern. A lot of commentators have said that these six things following are Jewish ordinances, but this says “first principles of Christ”, and they are:

a) Repentance from dead works

In the case of these Hebrew believers it was repentance from Judaism as a dead system, dead works. As we have already said, the very significance of the divine preservation of this letter after it had fulfilled its immediate purpose to Israel means that it is a message for the church, for if the dates fixed for its writing are correct then it was only two years after the writing of this letter that its purpose was fulfilled. It was written in view of the imminent destruction of Jerusalem and the passing of the temple and the Jewish system, in order to get Jewish believers attached to heavenly things and detached from earthly things. That shaking came about very shortly after the letter was written. But it has persisted for all these centuries and generations, and is full of life now, which means that the Lord intends this letter to apply to the church as well as to Judaism, and to say that Christendom can become a dead system, that Christianity can decline into spiritual death, and that there is a call, therefore, to believers to repent from dead works; that is, not just repent of their sins as unbelievers but change their attitude, repudiate dead religion.

Of course, it embraces everything else that you can call by that name. There are the dead works of the sinner who labours for the bread that perishes, labouring for this world’s good, and glory, and pleasure: dead works. But it reaches right on to the Christian, who is simply labouring in dead traditional Christianity, and the call is to repent.

b) Faith towards God

I think we need not stay with each of these clauses. One or two may call for a little further comment.

c) The teaching of baptisms

You notice it is in the plural, and the word to be stressed is the word “teaching”. What the apostle is saying here, as I understand it, is this, that you have got to understand the meaning of the different baptisms: that is, the baptism of John, and the baptism of Christ. And if you want that explained just insert at that point the paragraph in Acts 19:1-7. These people were baptised twice, and on the basis of having the two baptisms explained to them. They were taught the difference. Now I am not saying that you have to be baptised twice, but I am just saying that this is what this passage means as I understand it.

Perhaps some of these people were saying, Oh, we were baptised with John’s baptism; that is quite good enough! And then they had been told that it is not good enough; that that is one thing, but baptism into Christ is baptism into His death, into His burial, into His resurrection. It is identification with Christ, not John. There are the two different baptisms. They were still evidently going round this question, circling round in this wilderness, and getting nowhere. Now, says the apostle, you have got to get that first principle of Christ established and settled once and for all.

I do not suppose the difference between John’s baptism and Christ’s troubles you very much, but you may be held up on the baptism question all the same, and the Lord would say you have got to get that settled before you can know freedom. You may think you are going on but you are not; you may go on for fifty years and at the end of that time have to come back and settle that question. The Lord has never given up. The Lord has never left that point, and, sometimes with humiliation, there has to be an acknowledgment on the part of those who have gone on many years, that they left undone the first things, and from the Lord’s standpoint sonship does not come in. The result is that we have many people like these Hebrews who after years and years have been called by the Lord’s Name, and ought to be teachers, are still babes to be fed, still unable to take spiritual responsibility, still getting everything from the outside instead of from the inside. Why is it? The foundations were never settled; they have never really gone on. Sonship demands that each first principle of Christ should be a settled matter in the life.

d) Laying on of hands

One word in this connection I think is necessary. If you look at this matter in the New Testament you have, I think, got to come to one of two conclusions. Either something was delegated by the Lord to certain men at a certain time, that by the laying on of their hands something was imparted and something happened, but it remained with them and belongs to the first times, it has nothing to do with now; you have got to take that view, and your difficulty will arise when you discover that it was not always apostles that did it; sometimes it was someone such as Ananias who laid his hands on Paul so that he received his sight and was filled with the Spirit, so that you cannot say it was apostolic. Or you have to take another view, that this was a representative thing which embodied a principle, the principle being that of the oneness of the Lord’s people in and under one anointing of the Holy Spirit. And that, therefore, the act of laying on of hands was not an official thing but it was simply a representative act, setting forth a principle that these who have received the Lord and have been baptised into Christ are members of one Body, and that it is the Holy Spirit who forms that Body and who constitutes its oneness, and therefore when the principle is set forth in a merely representative act the Holy Spirit bore witness to the truth that Christ is one with and in all His members: the Body is one.

The book of the Acts is a book of foundation principles. It is not necessary that throughout the whole dispensation there should be the same divine, heavenly manifestation or attestation. Even in the book of the Acts it was not always so. Not on every occasion do we read that, being filled with the Spirit, they spoke with tongues, but here the Holy Spirit in laying the foundation of the dispensation gives clear evidence that this is the truth, and we are called upon to accept the truth in faith, not merely to demand the evidence. So that laying on of hands, on the one side, represents simply an act by which a testimony is borne to the fact that the Body of Christ is one, all in Christ are members of Christ and of one another, and that under one anointing which is upon the Head for all members, and the Holy Spirit confirms that. So that everything becomes related to Him, and related in His Body. Life is a related thing; service is a related thing: for they laid hands on in connection with service, ministry. No one has a detached ministry, but it is the ministry of the whole Body, and there may be a value in taking account of that, that this is not my ministry, this is the ministry of the whole Body of Christ; that is, the Body is expressing itself and its purpose through the ministry that I am fulfilling. It is a related thing, and there are spiritual values in that for the Holy Spirit encamps upon that ground.

We are not going fully into the meaning of the one Body, neither are we going into the full range of the meaning of the laying on of hands, but here are the alternatives. I do not see another course in this matter. I only see the apostolic one, that this was a matter which apostles were delegated to carry out and they had special powers from the Lord and the thing was bound up with them and ended with them. But there were difficulties, one that it was not always apostles who were delegated, and many others. I do not believe the Lord was ever official in any of His appointments but always spiritual, and what is spiritual is timeless. We must get behind this system of officialdom in Christian organisation to the realm where things are spiritual. If you can find me a third alternative I shall be very glad to have the opportunity of at least looking at it, opening my heart to the possibility of it being true, but I have not found it, and so I have come to rest on the second of these two, and I find that it works. This laying on of hands is a testimony to oneness, identification, not only with Christ but also in Christ. The meaning of the act is that we are one in Christ, under one Spirit, one anointing which embraces the Head and all the members.

This is something to be settled, and, like all the other things, is related to sonship. And is it not borne out by the whole truth of sonship, that sonship is a Body matter? It is sons in the Son on the representative side of the Lord’s person, not as Godhead, as God’s Son in that initial deity sense, but on the side of His representative person, the Firstborn among many brethren. Sonship is an inclusive and embracing term, bringing in sons, so that ultimately what will obtain is a great corporate son under the sovereign headship of the Lord Jesus to govern in the ages to come. “Wherefore, holy brethren, partners in a heavenly calling...”. This oneness in the Body, this oneness of the Spirit, is vitally linked with the whole question of sonship and the purpose of it.

e) The resurrection from the dead

We will not stay with that.

f) Eternal judgement

You have no need that I comment upon this. The two we have stayed to deal with more fully are the least generally understood and accepted.

The point is this, that these things, being foundations, are in the direct line of God’s end, and they are foundational to training in sonship, and until we have got clear here and got settled here we cannot go on, and so the urge is, “Let us cease to speak of first principles of Christ...”; we ought to have settled this thing.

We shall go on talking about these matters to those who need that, but for us at this stage we cease to speak about these things, and press on unto full growth, for these matters are related to a living spiritual state, and until they are settled the apostle here says that a state of infancy and lack of capacity remains.

Now, following on from that into sonship, “Solid food is for full grown men, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern good and evil.”

I am very strongly tempted to put in here something which I am afraid quite a lot might not understand, and I do not want to confuse any, but it might be helpful to some, and if you cannot grasp it do not worry about it. That phrase, “good and evil”, takes us a long way back to Genesis 2:17 and 3:5 and 7.

Firstly let us note that these are not two categories, things which are good and things which are evil. That is not what is meant here. If we come back to this passage in Genesis, “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”, in its outcome it came to mean the evil of a right thing. What was right became evil because of the governing motive. It was good, but it became evil because of the way in which it was taken hold of. In the first place it was the soul taking ascendency over the spirit, the soul listening to the reasoning of Satan, the soul yielding to the persuasion of the enemy and the soul acting upon the basis of the reason and the emotion. That is the soul. So that they went out in their soul. If they had remained in the spirit and acted according to the spirit they would never have done what they did, and yet the very thing would have taken place in perfect purity: there would have been no evil in it. It was the reversing of God’s order. It was soul, and body, and spirit, instead of spirit, soul and body. The nature of man was upset; he disturbed the balance of his constitution, so that good and evil was not that there was a set of evil things and a set of good things; it was the evil of a good thing, a good thing made evil because of the motive. “The word of God... piercing...”. And what does it do? Well, look again at exactly what it does, “...quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart...” (Hebrews 4:12). It was just those intents of the heart that brought Israel to death in the wilderness, the soul. It was not wrong to be in the wilderness, it was not wrong to be babes, it was not wrong just at that time not to be in the land, but it was wrong so to live in the soul-life and not in the spirit as to be kept where they should not have remained.

Now the soul triumphed over the spirit, and there came about the knowledge of good and evil. With what result? Death! The knowledge of good and evil led to death. God never meant that. Do you think that God planted that tree (taking the figure, the type, the symbol) of good and evil in order to work death? Did He plant it in order to hold death over man’s head? Death is not an institution of God. Now if we may speak in spiritual terms more directly than in symbol, if man had been obedient to the Lord in spirit, man would have become possessed of a living knowledge, a knowledge of God which would have led to life, for it is in the spirit that we come to spiritual knowledge. That is the point we are coming to here.

Spiritual knowledge in the spirit by obedience through faith is sonship, but moving in the realm of our soul we come back into 1 Corinthians 2: “Now the soulical man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are discerned by the spiritual.” This knowledge of good and evil was death; death coming by good things becoming evil, because of the intent of the heart, the motive, the soul element taking pre-eminence, governing the life. And so as the soul triumphed over the spirit, death came. It was a kind of knowledge, but a knowledge that men would fain be without today, a knowledge that is a curse, a knowledge that is death. The Lord would have us be people of knowledge, and He would have us know good and evil in another sense, but He would have us know good and evil in the spirit and discern, discriminate between and keep clear of that which we in spirit discern to be the evil of the good thing.

Now that phrase, “the evil of a good thing” can embrace such a lot. It is not just the one thing in Genesis: it can embrace a lot. We believers are up against this very question all the time. Yes, it is a God-appointed thing, it is instituted by God, it is a good thing. Yes, that is all right if you keep it in its right realm. If you in your soul begin to take hold of it then it will become evil. Man in his own soul-life has taken hold of God’s things, God’s truth, God’s work. Man comes along and takes hold of all sorts of things that God has appointed and instituted, and the thing which is of God becomes evil.

See the work of God. See man sporting himself in the work of God, man getting into view, getting a name for himself in the work of God, man managing, governing, lording it over God’s heritage. That is a good thing made evil, and as you expand that principle it covers such a lot of ground. Now the apostle is saying that sonship means discriminating between good and evil in that sense. Yes, that is of God, let it remain of God, and do not put your hand on it, do not begin to take hold of it. God has begun something; do not bring it down to earth and begin to manage it and advertise it. Let it remain God’s pure, Holy Ghost work. Keep out of it in so far as your soul is concerned. That is sonship; that is maturity; that is spiritual growth. When this reaches its consummation in glory it will be all the glory of God, and the only place we shall have in it is that His glory rests upon us, and we have no glory of our own. That is sonship consummated, perfected. Man’s soul-life is directing him all the time, and making all things bad; he brings his name, and his title, and his degree into the work of God, thinking that is going to secure success for the work of God, and it is the whole realm of soul brought in; and with it comes spiritual death.

If you cannot follow all that we have said do not worry, but I think it is of value to recognise exactly how the Holy Spirit gets down to the root of things. The Holy Spirit inspired this letter, and He gets down to the root of things, and it is there that we find the abiding value of anything written by God, that it is not for any one time. It has a principle in it which ranges all the ages; it is eternal. Here in a little fragment in Hebrews you are taken back to Genesis, and you are touching a primary principle that a good thing can be made bad by man’s soul taking hold of it instead of it being held in the spirit. Sonship is the holding of everything in the spirit, and not taking hold of things in the soul.

3) The Exercise of Spiritual Faculties and Senses

You will recall that phrase, “have their senses exercised”. Senses! Do you see the force of senses now? There are faculties for discriminating. These senses are those which are given to us with our new birth; for with new birth we have a new set of senses. As in the physical our five senses are seeing, hearing, tasting, touching and smelling — every normal babe has those — so in the new birth, that which is born of the Spirit, there is a new set of spiritual faculties or spiritual senses; that is, faculties for seeing spiritual things which the natural man cannot see; hearing, “He that hath an ear...”; tasting, touching, scenting. These are very real things in the spiritual life, but every newborn babe truly born of the Holy Spirit has these faculties, though they are not yet properly functioning. And when you put all the senses together you can sum them up in two words, spiritual perception or intelligence; that is, that by which we know, as differing from study, making ourselves aware of things simply by studying their existence, and as differing from information, being informed, receiving it as in someone else and not in ourselves. The difference lies there. There is a word used very much in the New Testament instead of perception. It is discernment. “He that is spiritual discerneth...”.

It would be impossible to place too much emphasis upon the value of spiritual discernment, spiritual perception. It is an inclusive faculty of fundamental importance, the faculty of spiritual intelligence, perception, discernment. For want of this the Lord’s people are kept in infancy, and the church is kept in infancy, and the church and the Lord’s people are therefore a prey to all sorts of things. They are a prey to anything that is presented to them in a persuasive way. They are open to anything that has a real, sound argument based upon Scripture. They are a prey to anything that comes along in any guise using the language of Scripture. Oh yes, the range of perils for the undiscerning is almost limitless, and how necessary for all the Lord’s people to have in the midst of them those who have discernment, spiritual intelligence. So a vessel, an instrument related to God’s full purpose, to His fullest thoughts, is one characterized by this factor in sonship, spiritual intelligence, senses exercised to discern. Oh, that amongst the Lord’s people there were more of those who saw through, “quick to discern”, quick of scent. This is a need. It is a matter of absolute importance, and it is an indispensable thing to real service, that there shall be spiritual discernment, spiritual perception, the power of discriminating, senses exercised.

This is just the opposite of impulsive or mechanical action. So many receive a kind of impulse, a presentation, a soul-impact, an appeal, a vivid picture, a thrilling story, a romance, something pathetic or tragic; and that is made the instrument of appeal to go out to serve the Lord: it is pure soul, and a lot go out under the impact of such an appeal. I have known of young people going to a series of missionary meetings extending over a week, and one night it was China, and the next night it was India, and the next night it was somewhere else. The first night they were sure they were called to China, and they were going to offer themselves to China; and the second night they were sure they were called to India, and were going to offer to India, and the third night they thought they were called somewhere else; and if they had done what they decided to do, they would have offered themselves to every country during the week. It is the difference between impulsive mechanical action and senses exercised to discern. It is the difference between external instruction and the Spirit of the Lord inwardly making known. It is the birthright of every child of God to know the voice of the Lord in his or her own spirit. It is maturity when we come to that and all the other is commanded to stand back while we listen to the Lord, while we detach ourselves and let all the emotion and heat of the hour fall away, and our heart hears the voice of the Lord. That is maturity, that is sonship, that is spirituality, and that means God entrusting with responsibility. He needs such a personal walk with Himself in which all things are tested in His presence.

4) The Organ and Faculties Not the Final Issue

We do not listen to our spirit; the Holy Spirit in our spirit is the intelligence of God, and the intelligence of the inner man. Let us beware of that danger, that peril into which many have fallen. We hear strange language: “I listened to my spirit”; “My spirit said so-and-so.” Do not let us make the organ the end; it is only the means. We can get a kind of false spirituality that way, and we have found very often that people who have listened to their own spirits have gone and done things which violate the Word of God in its most obvious meaning. That is false leading. Let us remember that the Holy Spirit indwelling governs us through our spirit, and becomes our intelligence, and it is a matter of absolute dependence upon the Lord. We must not become lords ourselves. Some of these very wonderful people who are always listening to their spirit think they can never make a mistake, they always know at once what the Lord’s will is. They are the people whose language is always so pat, that the Lord told them to do this, and the Lord told them to do that. I confess to you that I do not always know right at once what the Lord wants.

Note: This is where the message ends and was probably the end of the tape rather than the end of the message.