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The Man God Has Ordained

by T. Austin-Sparks

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazines 1954-56 (Volumes 32-5 - 34-1).

Contents

Chapter 1 - God's Standard

Chapter 2 - A Presentation of the Man

Chapter 3 - The Sealing of His Brethren

Chapter 4 - The Spirit's Work in This Dispensation

Chapter 5 - The Process of Reproduction

Chapter 6 - God's Standard of Judgment

Chapter 7 - The Bride

Chapter 8 - The Man Who is Alive

Chapter 9 - The Man Child

Chapter 1 - God's Standard

Reading: Revelation 1:1-18.

“…He hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness in THE MAN WHOM HE HATH ORDAINED; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead” (Acts 17:31, marg.).

It will be with that little phrase, “he will judge the world… in the man whom he hath ordained”, as our key, that we shall consider this wonderful revelation of the Lord Jesus which forms our preliminary reading. “The man whom he hath ordained.” Let us look for a few minutes at one or two of those words.

Firstly, “He hath appointed a day”: that is, He has fixed, or established, a day. Into that statement the whole book of the Revelation is gathered. When John said: “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day”, he said more explicitly: “I became in the Spirit”, or, “I found myself in spirit, in the day of the Lord”. God “hath set forth, or fixed, a day, in which he will judge the world in righteousness”.

And then, “in the man whom he hath ordained”. That word “ordained” is a very interesting word. It is the Greek word from which we get our English word “horizon”: it means, basically, to set bounds or limits, to mark out a defined or determined realm. In this passage, the Man is the realm, the marked out limit, the defined sphere in which God will judge the world. It is suggestive that the phrase in the original Greek is, literally, “IN the man”. (Compare 1 Cor. 6:2: “if the world shall be judged IN you”.) Everything is to be brought for its judgment into the realm of what this Man is. Everything and everyone will be judged according to the significance of the Man whom He has ordained.

We shall come back to that presently, but it may be helpful just to have said that much as to these two words. There is a day, and a very crowded day, coming, as this book of the Revelation shows, and it is the day of a Man: that is, in which everything is to be tested by that Man, according to that Man — the Man whom He hath ordained.

Now we come to this book of the Revelation, and to this first chapter in particular. I say no new thing when I say that the books of Genesis and Revelation bound the history of this present world. One is the book of the beginnings; the other is the book of the endings. The one is the first, the other is the last, and it is there that the Lord Jesus, the Man whom God has ordained, embraces that whole history, and says: “I am the first and the last”, “the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end”. “I am the Genesis and I am the Revelation. I am the beginning, the Alpha, and I am the end, the Omega”. This whole history moves by phases, shorter and longer, and the first phase, which, so far as its record is concerned, is gathered into a very short portion of Scripture, the first two chapters of the book of Genesis, ends with a man and the tree, the tree of life. From that point another phase commences. At that point what is called “the fall” takes place, and an entirely new phase begins. The first phase brings us to the man and the tree; the last phase, in the book of the Revelation, brings us — in the first chapter to the Man, in the end of the book to the tree. These two things are governing all history. What they signify embodies and embraces the whole of the history of this world. We shall confine our attention, at this time, to the man.

The Conception of Man

There are several things that we have to note about the man. First of all, there is God’s CONCEPTION of man. What is that conception? In the words so familiar to us, it is: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”. So the conception of man is God-likeness. That is all-governing with God; that is all-governing in all God’s dealings with man. It is that which comes out pre-eminently in the book of the Revelation as the consummation of God’s dealings with man. That is the thing which lies behind all these movements of God in relation to man — God-likeness. If we miss everything else, let us hold on to this: because in this is found, and out of this proceeds, everything else. God’s concern with man is HIS LIKENESS.

God is not concerned in the first place, or in any very important way, with doctrine, with teaching, with Christian work, with our many-sided activities. These all may follow and have a place, but they are all very subordinate. They have a far smaller place with God than they have with us. With God they are only related things, they are side-issues. With Him, the one all-important and all-inclusive thing is His own likeness. What matters to Him about all our teaching, about all our gatherings, about all our works and activities, is the measure in which His likeness appears as the result. Nothing else counts. We do not gather together for teaching, doctrine, “conference meetings”. Let this be established at the outset. We gather together, if we are in line with the divine desire, in order that there may be in us more likeness to God, as He judges everything in the Man whom He has ordained — IN the Man, not by the Man; in the Man, in what that Man is.

That is the conception of God. Let us ask the Lord very much that He will lay strongly upon our hearts, and keep it ever before us, that the thing that matters, from A to Z, from Alpha to Omega, from beginning to end, is that God’s conception and purpose, in giving us a being at all, is HIS LIKENESS — an expression of Himself. This must be an adjusting factor in our mentality, in our conversation, in our teaching. We must not be taken up with efforts to get the church according to a certain technique and order and conception. Our message must not be the message of the Body of Christ as a truth, as a doctrine, as a procedure. All these things come within this encircling conception. What is the Body of Christ for, if it is not to express what Christ is like? What is the church for, if it is not to manifest the presence of Christ? This must adjust our thoughts, our ideas, our teaching and our talk. The thing about which we have to be concerned is — not this and that aspect of truth — but: How much is the Lord seen, recognised, understood, as to what He is like?

You know that that is the key to the Word of God. The whole Word of God is occupied with this: What is God like? On one side there is the constant implication, or at least inference: “God is NOT like that, God is NOT like that, God is NOT like that — but God IS like this”. In the days of the Lord Jesus, the whole idea of the most religious people — the Jews themselves, and all the Jewish rulers — was a false conception of God; and the Lord Jesus in their midst was, by His very presence, His very nature, as well as by His teaching and His activity, saying, “No, God is not like that; God is like this”. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). And see how He clashed with popular religious ideas as to what God was like. Yes: “Not technique, not truth, doctrine, but ‘our likeness’”, says the Lord.

The Principle of Man

The next thing is what I am going to call the PRINCIPLE of man. What is the principle we find when God has made man and set him forth? The principle is that the man is a standard man: he represents or sets forth a standard. He is not just a being, but he is a KIND of being. He is not just holding an office; he is a PERSON. God did not make a drawing of His thoughts or paint a picture of His conceptions; He made a man. He did not make a working machine to set forth the operation of certain laws; He made a man. And that is a standard to which God would work, which God would impress upon His creation, His universe: that what that man is should be found, as it were, emanating or issuing forth and pressing upon everything, and that everything should be conformed to that man. As you see the works of that man and the expressions of that man’s being, you should know what kind of a man he is: just as, in every sphere of life, in a home, in a garden, in a business, if there is a man about — not a feeble caricature, but a MAN! — you find that that particular sphere, in which the man exercises his influence, bears the impress of that man. You can trace the man here — see what kind of a man lives here, works here, moves here. You know the man by the impress of his hand. He is, in his sphere, the standard of things.

And that is a principle in man. There is a principle about man that he is a standard set forth by God: everything is to take the impress of that man, as a standard; is to come up to a certain level. That man must not let things down. That man must not allow things to lose character, to lose form, to become a shapeless mass. He must see to it that everything comes up to that express full thought that is found in the man God has made.

The Vocation of Man

“Let us make man… and let them have dominion” over this and that — over all things. The VOCATION of man, according to God’s intention, is dominion, government. And when you come, in the light of the whole history of man, to look into this vocation, this governmental idea of God as to man, you find that it has three aspects.

It begins with himself. That is quite clear, as to Adam. It is quite clear all the way along that God holds man, in the first place, responsible for the government of himself. Everything else proceeds from that. All that the New Testament has to say about self-control — a poor translation of the word — is just that. It all begins with government of himself.

Then, in the second place, it extends to the world — and, mark you, man’s government of the world depends upon his government of himself. It extends to the government of the world. But do not get false mentalities about that. Government of the world is not temporal government, to begin with. It was with Adam, and it will be eventually, but this is a spiritual thought. We remember all that is said by John about “he that overcometh the world” (1 John 5:4,5). This Man whom God has ordained said: “I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). We will not take time just now to define and explain what is meant by “the world” in this connection, but perhaps it is not necessary. Do you find the world something to be overcome? Is there not a spirit — is there not an order, a nature of things, a way, a mentality, a disposition — that we speak of as “the world”, “the way of the world”? Yes, and you know what a great force that is to be overcome. It is a spiritual thing, dominion over the world; and there will be no government of the world in any more literal sense, later, if there is no government of the world in a spiritual sense now.

Then, in the third place, this government reaches to the heavens. It is found to affect, to be related to, spiritual forces beyond man — outside of man and outside of the world. It is in that realm that this government finds its ultimate and supreme expression.

There is no need for me at this point to take you into the New Testament with those three connections: government as to our own souls, as to the spirit of the world around us, and as to the forces of evil, of darkness, working through both. That will probably come out more fully as we go on.

The Testing of Man

The fourth thing is the TESTING of man. Here we have to repeat that man was not just an official, but a morally responsible person, and the whole issue of his moral responsibility was the question of FAITHFULNESS: faithfulness to God, faithfulness to the divine conception, faithfulness to the standard God had set up as to Himself. There are many aspects of self which are forbidden, but there are some aspects of self which are right, and self-respect is one of them — that right kind of self-respect which marked Nehemiah: “Should such a man as I flee?” (Nehemiah 6:11). That is moral dignity, and man was tested as to his faithfulness to God — faithfulness to himself in the highest sense, to the dignity of his own being in God’s thought, from heaven’s standpoint. It was not self-importance — you know what I mean — but faithfulness to his vocation to govern for God. Faithfulness was the ground of testing.

And with a view to that testing, you can see the play of spiritual forces: the permission of those forces of evil, of Satan, the tempter, the adversary, the deceiver, to come and play upon this man to test him as to his faithfulness. Note that it is the play of SPIRITUAL forces, through the WORLD, upon the SOUL, regarding the VOCATION, involving the destiny. I want you to get those phases. The play of spiritual forces: in the testing of man unto his approving, unto his establishing. The play of spiritual forces through the world: it is through the world, in the first place, that you and I will find our testing. That world is a very comprehensive world. Upon our souls: our reasoning, our desiring and our deciding. Through the world, upon our souls, regarding our vocation: to rob us of our divinely-appointed governmental function, to rob God of His intention to make man His ruler in the creation and in the spiritual world.

Yes, it is that vocation that God has in view. Do not forget it. Do not let the point be missed through my imperfect way of expressing it. I have to put it in this way, but do not look at that — do not just hear it as words, as things said. Do you not see what the enemy is after, as he plays with his evil forces upon your souls through this world? If God did not have this meaning always in view, He would shut you up in convents and monasteries, He would keep you in conferences all the days of your life; He would set up hostels and say, “Live there! Never go out of doors; look at the world from behind a grill!” — but He does not. He puts you in the world, and you are all the time wanting to get out of it into “spiritual work”, into “spiritual service”, to have a Bible everlastingly under your arm or on your desk. But He drives you into the world, and there you are, under testing by the forces of evil — by His permission — in relation to spiritual government: of yourself first, then of the world spiritually, and then of the spiritual forces behind the world. That is what God is doing.

The Destiny of Man

The fifth and last thing here is the DESTINY of man. Our destiny is all involved — and what a destiny it is! What is it? The destiny is GLORY. Perhaps that does not help you very much. It sounds abstract. What is glory? First of all, in its essence, it is the shining forth of the divine nature: it is what the Bible calls immortality or incorruption. Christ “brought life and incorruption to light” (2 Timothy 1:10): that is glory — where there is nothing left that is corrupt or can be corrupted. That is the destiny of man.

And when it is like that, when there is the shining forth of the divine nature, it is a most potent thing. You and I have not grasped the tremendous significance of some of the statements about the appearing of our Lord. Saul of Tarsus went down, smitten blind, as one paralysed or dead, when this “Man whom He had ordained” appeared before him on the way to Damascus. John “fell at his feet as one dead” (Rev. 1:17), and the Scripture declares that by the manifestation of His coming or presence He will bring to nought the lawless one (2 Thess. 2:8). This is not just light, a blaze of light. This is a nature — terrible, unendurable: to wickedness, to sin, to evil, destructive; but, for the man after His heart, incorruption, glory. We shall be glorified together with Him (Romans 8:17). Even our bodies will be bodies of glory, because no corruption is found in that resurrection body. “Conformed unto the body of his glory” (Phil. 3:21).

The destiny is the thing that is involved in God’s permission to the enemy to put us through severe testing. It is that that is bound up with our being put by the Lord where we are in this world — not only as to location, but as to atmosphere, in a condition of things so inimical to God, so unlike God, where Satan has his power.

Everything Recovered in Christ

Now all this — the conception, the principle, the vocation, the testing, and the destiny — is what we have in the first chapter of the book of the Revelation. You notice the one designation given to Christ in that chapter is “son of man”. “I turned to see… I saw seven golden candlesticks; and in the midst of the candlesticks one like unto a son of man” (vv. 12,13). Here we have THE Man, the perfect Man, presented, embodying all that of which we have just been speaking. He embodies God’s conception of divine likeness in a Man. He embodies the principle of man, as a standard — God will judge the world in that Man. In virtue of what He is He will bring everything to judgment. It is all being judged, not only by Him but in Him, by what He is. Here He is presented as the standard.

Again, here is the Man in full possession and exercise of His vocation of government. Further, He has been tested and approved. Tested in obedience unto death, yea, the death of the cross — “I became dead”; approved — “Behold, I am alive for evermore”. Let us recall Acts 17:31 again: “He will judge the world in righteousness in the man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead”. He was subjected to the test of ultimate faithfulness, an obedience unto death; He was approved after utter testing — God raised Him from the dead. Here is “the Man”. And, lastly, the Man is in the glory. He has reached His destiny — glory. This is what we have in this chapter: a Man — THE Man — answering to God’s thought, of God’s appointment.

In the fall it was all this that was lost. The conception — divine likeness — was lost. The principle — the divine standard — was lost. The vocation — government — was lost. The approving through trial was lost. The glory was lost. But in the Man it is all won back, it is all recovered. And I close here by just putting my finger upon the glorious significance of some of John’s words in this chapter. “Jesus Christ... the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins by his blood; and he made us to be a kingdom, priests unto his God and Father; to him be the glory and the dominion for ever and ever” (vv. 5,6). Remember, John wrote that prelude, that introduction to his wonderful book, after he had received the whole revelation. He says, in effect: “I am going to write down all He has shown me: but oh, in the light of all He has shown me — ‘unto him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins by his blood; and… made us to be a kingdom, priests unto his God and Father...’!”

What is the significance? All that was lost is recovered for us by that love and by that blood. He “loveth us”. He by His blood has “loosed us” from all that came in by the fall. In Himself He has recovered it all, secured it all. Now He is the representative One, the Son of Man, and

“In Him the tribes of Adam boast More blessings than their father lost”

That is why John was so exultant. He might have put this at the end, but he puts it at the beginning. Terrible things are going to be revealed, but he begins with a shout of exultation. It is a terrible thing that has happened, but it is a glorious thing that has followed: therefore “unto him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins by his blood; and he made us to be a kingdom,… priests unto his God and Father; to him be the glory and the dominion for ever and ever”.

“In the man whom he hath ordained.” You see how Christ compasses everything, dominates everything, determines everything, becomes that realisation of God’s original conception and purpose in man, and the standard to which God by His Spirit is working — yes, actually working in us, and using the very forces of evil through this world to do it. There is no God-likeness to be attained unto except in the midst of a hostile world. The greatest victory of all is to walk in the midst of Sodom and Gomorrah in white raiment.

Chapter 2 - A Presentation of the Man

Reading: Revelation 1:12-17; Acts 17:31.

In our previous meditation, we were occupied with the fact that it is IN a man that God has determined to judge the world, and we were seeing something of God’s conception of the Man whom He has ordained to be the sphere and standard of His judgment. Now we are going on with that in a closer analysis, according to the characteristics of the Man as they are presented in the portion we have just read.

But first of all, I would seek to draw you strongly into the living present purpose of God in so speaking to us. I am so well aware that this can all be teaching, ideas, “truth” in a technical sense. Unless we are very careful, it may just remain that, and have no great effect upon us. We tried in our first message to bring everything into the realm of practical spiritual value, by pointing out the basis and background of all God’s thoughts, purposes and dealings with man, as found in the original divine conception, when God said: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”. The first, the constant, and the final intention of God is to make man LIKE HIMSELF. And the test of everything is just there — how much we are like the Lord. It matters quite in a secondary way (and, apart from this, it matters not at all) how much teaching we give or have, or how much we do, if, governing and surrounding it all, there is not the one essential condition, that we are like the Lord and that our hearts are set more upon that than upon anything else; not upon the work, not upon the teaching, not upon the success of our efforts in Christian activity, but simply upon being like the Lord. In the end that is going to be the determining factor as to how far we have apprehended Christ, how far we have understood Christianity, how far we have gone on in the spiritual life. All that matters is that people should be seeing in our lives, in a growing way, WHAT THE LORD IS LIKE, that there should be coming into view — maybe all too slowly, maybe in all too small a measure — something of the likeness of the Lord in us. In all that follows in these messages, I do want that you should realise that that is the thing that matters — it is all unto that.

Now, if God is set upon having man like this and He still is, for He never, in Adam’s failure, abandoned the intention to make man in His own image, after His own likeness — if it is like that, with all the resultant purposes which we mentioned in our previous study, it is necessary for the Lord to show us something of what He is like. We must see what the Lord is like in order that, seeing, we may adjust to that, and then commit to the Spirit of God and press toward that attainment. So, when we come to this next part of the first chapter of the Revelation, the Man presented in His characteristics, we have the answer to that need. What is the man like that God is seeking, and has already secured in this Man — the standard, the model? What is he like?

Just one more word. In the light of what we were saying earlier as to God’s intention for man, in likeness to Himself, fulfilling a tremendous vocation and then coming to eternal glory, in that we have the interpretation and the explanation of the spirit and attitude of the apostle Paul, as we have it expressed in the third chapter of the letter to the Philippians, where, “counting all the gains as loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Lord”, he says that he “presses toward the mark for the prize of the on-high calling of God in Christ Jesus”. It drew him out in that exhaustive way, in that utter way, that complete abandonment. “Not that I have already obtained...”; “but one thing I do...”; “if by any means...”. It is not that Paul was seeking salvation, but that he had seen the meaning of Christ as God’s standard and God’s goal for man. He had seen what the “on-high calling” was — namely, to fellowship with Christ in the position which had been given Him by the Father.

So, you see, it is something rather important that engages us at this time — far more important than information and instruction in the Bible. It is nothing less than our very destiny, according to God’s fullest intention. It is what God means in our having a being at all — and it is possible for us to fail in this, to miss it.

Christ God’s Horizon

Let us now come, then, to this section in Revelation 1. Here is the Man who, as we said in our previous meditation, has been tested — tested down to the utter obedience of the death of the cross. “I became dead” — He was approved by His perfect faithfulness; and as the seal of His approval He was raised — “I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of death.” “Now I am in a position of absolute authority over all the forces which have been set against the fulfilment of God’s purpose.”

“I am the Alpha and the Omega” (Rev. 22:13). That must be set at the beginning of this contemplation. “I am the Alpha and the Omega.” In that word in Acts 17:31, “the man whom he hath ordained”, the Greek word “ordained” implies “the man whom He has made His horizon, His scope, His sphere, His circumference, His set bound”: and in the Alpha and Omega you have the bound of God, the beginning and the end. Christ governs everything from the beginning to the end; nothing is going to escape Christ, nothing is going to escape God as to Christ. That is very important; we may come to that later in a more particular way. But let it be understood that God sums up and ties up everything in Christ. There are many people who believe in God, who would call themselves “God-fearing” people, but they leave out what Christ means, and they will not get through, they will not escape. God has made Christ the ordained one, the horizon of everything. Everything from God’s standpoint is horizoned by Christ.

The Son of Man

Now, having established the setting, the sphere — “I turned to see the voice... And having turned I saw seven golden candlesticks; and in the midst of the candlesticks one like unto a son of man”. “Son of man” — that is governing. We are not going to get away from that, the Son of man. I need not remind you how often that title is used of Him, and how in the great majority of cases it was used by Himself of Himself; but it is helpful to remember how it came to be used in the first place. The title “Son of man”, as used by the Lord of Himself, was first introduced at the time when He was rejected by the Jews.

Prophetically, this is quite clear from the Psalms. In the second psalm, you have the “heathen raging”, “the rulers taking counsel together” “against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us”. Then comes the response of the Lord in heaven to their rejecting, their casting out of the Anointed: “Yet I have set my king upon my holy hill of Zion. I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee”. Now that was quoted, as you know, in the prayer of the church in Acts 4, when it is mentioned that Herod and Pontius Pilate, the Jews and the Gentiles, combined to kill the Lord’s Anointed, and heaven responded again.

From Psalm 2 to Psalm 8 is not a far cry. In Psalm 2 you have the rejection of this Anointed One in the first place by the Jews. In Psalm 8 you have: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him but little lower than God, and crownest him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands.” Adam never was the son of man, so in no full sense can it be made to apply to him, except prophetically and symbolically. When the Jews had rejected Christ as the Anointed and combined with the Gentiles and the rulers to cast Him out and to strip off His bands from them, He is brought back, not as the Jewish Messiah, but as the Son of man, which universal title went far beyond Israel. All men are gathered into that.

“I became dead.” That is the story of their rejecting and their casting out, their thinking to have done with Him. Here He appears at the beginning of the book of the Revelation: “I became dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore”. “I saw... in the midst of the candlesticks one like unto a son of man” — not the Jewish Messiah, but the Son of man — universal representation, inclusion.

It is MAN — that is the point — the MAN whom He has ordained. Do keep this all the time very much in mind, that what we have here is not only related to and bound up with Him as an isolated individual. He is representative of the corporate man whom God is taking out of the nations to bear His Name, and the things said here about Him are the features of that corporate man, as well as of every part of that corporate man, every individual man and woman. Keep that in mind, otherwise you will be looking at this objectively only, and it will not register anything in your own heart.

Let us now look at Him as He is given to us in John’s account, fragment by fragment.

A Garment Down to the Foot

The first thing is: “Clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about at the breasts with a golden girdle”. “A garment down to the foot.” All I am going to say about this, because it is so largely reiteration, is that this is not the priestly garment, but the governmental garment. It is the garment of the governor, of the lord, of the judge. It is the Son of man in the full place — “down to the foot” — in the full place of authority and government. It is man representative in government, corresponding to what we said in our last meditation. “Thou madest him to have dominion.” The very purpose of man’s creation is that he might have dominion. I simply remind you that in the letter to the Hebrews, where Psalm 8 is quoted — “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” and so on — that is linked with: “Thou crownedst him with glory and honour” (Hebrews 2:7). “We behold him... Jesus... crowned with glory and honour” — just answering to the original intention of God.

A Golden Girdle at the Breasts

“Girt about at the breasts with a golden girdle.” The girdle is, as you know, a symbol of strength for action. This One is in action, that is quite clear, and He is girded with strength for action, invested with authority and endued with power for this administration. It is a golden girdle, depicting or symbolizing the divine nature. And “girt about at the breasts” is His faithfulness to the purpose and will of God — His love, His faithful love. He is called in this book the “Faithful and True”. (Rev. 3:14, 19:11).

These are spiritual features. Let us get away from the symbolism to the spiritual meaning, for we are involved in this, we are included in this. In this Son of man we are included, and if the purpose which is realised in Him as representative compasses us, includes us, the point is that THESE are the features which make up the purpose, THESE are the conditions which must obtain if God is going to reach His end in us. This is going to be applied to the churches, and here is the statement of the background against which God is working. What it amounts to is this: Here is God’s inclusive thought, mind, standard; you are called with this great calling — this is the . You have got to come into line with that, into conformity to that. What is true in Him has to be true in you, the individual, and in the corporate, the church. “Girt about at the breasts with a golden girdle”. There is to be a heart devotion and faithfulness to the revealed thoughts of God concerning His people, concerning ourselves. There has got to be the strengthening of us by the divine nature to stand as God’s administrative instrument to the world. There must be a heart strong with faithfulness to what is according to God — gold-girdled breasts mean a heart strong in its faithful love and devotion to what is of God. We have got to be found there.

You can have all sorts of things as Christians, all sorts of Christian things; we can have all the things that the churches had, and yet find the finger of condemnation upon them, saying, “It is not good enough, it will not do, it does not justify; with all that, I cannot let you off”. We can be very devoted to a teaching, to a movement, to any Christian work, very busy indeed in all that sort of thing; it may be very interesting or we may even be giving ourselves, pouring ourselves out to it; and yet behind it all there may be lacking some real love for the Lord Himself.

I would like to press that. It is so possible for us — oh, God forgive us, we have all failed so terribly in this matter — it is so possible for us to be poured out in the ministry, and yet to be slipping up all the time on things that are not pleasing to the Lord, our hearts not girded with the strength of a great faithful love to His thoughts. The enemy is always trying to counter our testimony by getting us to be in some way a contradiction, to be inconsistent. You find nothing like that in this One, nothing of that contradiction and inconsistency. His heart is wholly girded with faithful love to His Father’s thoughts and will. Is there not a place for us to come to the Word of God a little more and see whether, after all, with all our Christian activity and devotion, the Word of God is not against us on many things?

White Head and Hair

“His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow.” What is this? Well, there are two things here. In the first place, there is the mark of all time extended, exhausted, lived out. There is such a thing, of course, as premature grey-headedness; there is such a thing as becoming grey-headed or white by reason of something abnormal; but the normal grey-headedness or white hair is a mark that time has been lived out, has been covered or is being encompassed and exhausted, and for a white-headed man to be in full vigour is a testimony to the fact that he has defeated time and all that that means. In this description of the exalted Christ, therefore, the whiteness means that all that belongs to time or corruption has been destroyed. This One is not a victim of time or time’s conditions, of this world or this world’s corruption: He outlives it, expands it, triumphs over it. Time means death, sooner or later; death means corruption triumphant. But this One is in full vigour, girded with strength and authority and standing forth. The further description is the picture of one in full vigour, full of energy. This is not an old man worn out. This is a young man, in youth, in vigour — and white-headed. He has defeated all that time represents, death and corruption overcoming. His white hair is not a mark of old age. It is a mark of eternity triumphing over time. He is as the “ancient of days” (Dan. 7:9).

What is the spiritual value of that? Well, you see, it means this, that the man according to God will have vigour to the end, will have spiritual energy to the end. I do not know what you feel about that, but I am in revolt against finishing up in exhaustion and emptiness, having no more to give to the Lord’s people because I am too old. There may be a challenge along that line, but my spirit revolts against that. “They shall still bring forth fruit in old age” (Psalm 92:14). We read that “the path of the righteous is as the light of dawn, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day” (Prov. 4:18). This does not imply that circumstances get easier, that the way becomes simpler and less complex, that the path becomes more and more cheerful. No, it does not imply that at all — rather the reverse. But I do believe it must mean that inwardly, while the “outward man is decaying”, the “inward man is renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4:16). That is something to claim, to lay hold of — to beat time.

So let us stop looking for sympathy by saying we are getting old. We do far too much of that. The white hair of the exalted Christ is a mark of corruption transcended in moral perfection, and that is a mark of energy.

Eyes as of a Flame of Fire

“His eyes were as a flame of fire.” Here again there are two things. The eyes are the seeing organs and faculties, and this — as is borne out by a lot more that follows in this book — speaks of spiritual intelligence and knowledge. Later you will come upon seven spirits of God. That is the perfection of spiritual intelligence, if you look at the context. And here we have the eyes, the organ, as a flame of fire. The fire searches, the fire tests, the fire finds out, and the One here is in a state of active knowledge. He is finding out. God will judge the world in the Man whom He has ordained, and it will be because of His perfect spiritual intelligence and the power of it.

That is not so remote as it may sound in a statement like that. When we come face to face with the Lord, with the Son of man, we know that He knows. We do not take that as a theory, as just truth. We cannot come into the Lord’s presence and be alone with the Lord without knowing that He knows. It is no use excusing ourselves, it is no use arguing, it is no use covering up, it is useless to try to get round it. You know that He knows what you are not wanting to uncover. You are set in the light of His countenance and you cannot get away from it. His eyes not only see, but they search. They not only know, but they test. They are not merely organs, but there is something about these organs that registers on you, and you know you have to answer to the Lord. It is well for us to recognise that.

But let us still remember that this Son of man is representative. Would it not be grand if our life, our testimony, our ministry, were like this — that those whom we meet, and those who hear us, have to say, “How did he know all about me? Who has been telling him?” — and they will not believe that no one has been telling and reporting and passing on. Oh, that it might be like that in our ministry, that people have to say: “No one could have known that about me but God; that is God who has spoken to me and dealt with me. No one knew that, that was something hidden in my life from everybody else. God only knew that, but it has been dragged out into the light.”

That is the meaning of “His eyes were as a flame of fire”, and God would have something like that about us. There being those other features which have been mentioned, this should be one of the consequences, that our presence has the effect of making sinners uncomfortable, making sin incapable of remaining hidden, bringing things to the light. It will mean trouble — nevertheless it is very much better than pouring out words in addresses and teaching and nothing resulting. Oh, that God might be more in our lives to bear this flaming witness against iniquity, against sin.

The eyes are linked with the other features. The eyes are connected, for instance, with the heart: for this kind of thing — these eyes as a flame, this witness, this knowing and this effecting — is by way of a pure heart. The pure in heart see God (Matt. 5:8). Effectiveness of witness is based upon purity of heart.

Feet Like Burnished Brass

The next thing here is: “His feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace”. Feet speak of our goings and our ways. They are the means by which we move. And what makes us move, what makes us go? There are some people who have no reason for many of their movements. They just go running about all over the place without any rhyme or reason, without any sense at all. There are a lot of people who just move by impulse. The Lord Jesus never did that. Sometimes people tried to persuade Him to move, and He would not — they could not get Him to move; sometimes they tried to get Him to go one way, and He went another; sometimes they tried to stop Him from going — and He would go.

But in His goings, His movements, His refusing to move, these feet of His were governed by a certain incentive and motive. Motive should govern our movements. Why did you do that? What is your motive? This is very searching. Why did you go and live at so-and-so, in such-and-such a place? You found a nice house there, very comfortable surroundings? Why? Either your motive is the Lord’s interests, or it is your own. Why do you go to this place and that? Why these movements in your life? By what are they motivated? What is the incentive of your life?

Now, in the case of this One, this Son of man, you can see in His walk here on earth the motive and the incentive which governed. It was not the judgments of men, not the interests of the flesh, not the prizes and appeals of this world, not the shunning of suffering. He moved only under the mighty incentive of His Father’s will. His feet were purged in the furnace as to their motives. The strength of His goings, like brass, was the strength of the divine approval, because His heart was set in the ways of the Lord. Irresistible are His goings, strong because pure. Tested and tried are His motives. The Lord bring us into line with the Son of man. In all our motives and incentives, our objects and our interests, the things which influence us this way and that way, where we go, how we go, may He bring us more fully under the government of His Spirit.

A Voice as the Voice of Many Waters

“His voice as the voice of many waters.” I think the meaning of that is quite obvious. It speaks of power, commanding power. You cannot stand against a flood — everything has to yield and go with it. They said of Him when here that He spoke “as one having authority” (Matt. 7:29). There is a QUALITY about His speaking. It is not only the volume, the sound as of many waters, but there is such a quality about it. It is, in other words, not just the force of His voice; it is not that He is shouting; it is the character, the quality of it. He speaks, and because He speaks out of a pure heart, out of this utter devotion to the will of the Father, out of this life which has no motives or incentives other than to be well-pleasing unto God — because He speaks thus, He has the support of heaven and nothing can withstand Him.

I believe our witness, our testimony, our ministry, would be much more powerful, persuasive — irresistible — if we were more like the Son of man. That is what I am getting at. If you and I want to speak with influence, with power, to speak so that something happens, it must and can only be in so far as there is Christlikeness behind the speaking, if what is said is true in the life. This matter of speaking with power is very practical. It is by the Holy Spirit in a crucified and risen man. “I became dead,... I am alive...” A crucified and risen man is the vehicle of this speaking to such effect and with such power. On the day of Pentecost, they were truly crucified and risen men; in a very real way they had been crucified with Christ and were risen together with Him; and a voice that is going to carry weight has got to be the voice of a crucified and risen man or woman. If it can be detected, when we speak to others, that there is self-glory influencing us; that, as we speak, we are influenced by any motive, any interest, any consideration other than the glory of God, the pleasure of the Lord; if it is not true, and manifestly true, in our speaking, in our preaching, in our teaching, in our talking to others, that we have been crucified to the flesh, that ours is a risen life with the Lord: if that is not true, there will be no power in our testimony, no power in our words. Power in speaking arises only from this spiritual experience of being crucified with Christ and raised together with Him.

Seven Stars in His Hand

“He had in his right hand seven stars.” The stars, He says later on, are the angels of the churches, those who have influence and power in the churches. A star is that which governs or is supposed to govern, to govern in the night. It is a subordinate governing instrument, subordinate to the sun and moon, and here the stars, these angels — whoever they may be, whatever they may be; we will not stay to discuss that — represent the place of authority, the governmental position, which is held in the church. He has them in His right hand, and the right hand, according to the Old Testament, is a symbol, first of all of honour and then of power. Honour and power — the two things go together. His authority to deal with the matter of government and influence is because of the honour and the power of His moral position.

A Sharp Sword out of His Mouth

“Out of his mouth proceeded a sharp two-edged sword.” We know from other Scriptures what this two-edged sword is. It is the Word of God; its action is for laying bare, for discovering. His Word is a Word that lays open, lays bare and gets down to the inner recesses of our thoughts, our motives.

A Shining Face

“His countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.” The countenance sums up everything. It is the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. “The sun shining in its strength.” You may put up your parasol and it will destroy it! The sun shining in his strength knows no resistance, no restraint. There is no shrinking in timidity and fear on the part of the sun. There is no shame that makes it want to veil its face. There is no uncertainty about the sun. There may be about the weather! — but there is no uncertainty about the sun. He is forthright, he is downright. He has no reason to shrink, to hold back, to be afraid, to be timid. There is boldness, there is assurance, there is certainty. I think that is what is meant by the sun shining in its strength. It is terrible when you get right into the real strength of the sun. The sun shining in its strength. It is terrible when it does not say, “I am very sorry, I would not do it if I could help it”; it just does it! There is certainty, definiteness, positiveness about the sun shining in its strength.

God needs His church like that. He desires that it should be possible to say of it: “There is no doubt about it with them, there is no question where they are concerned; they know the Lord! If you touch them, you will get a positive note; you will find something that gets rid of all your doubt, all your uncertainty, all your questions.” Oh, for lives like that! There is so much of the deviation and the “shadow cast by turning” about us. One day you will find us all right and the next day you will find us all wrong. For a little while we are shining, and then our sun has gone in. You never can be sure how you will find some people, as to their spiritual life, from day to day.

This Son of man is not like that. It is a wonderful thing to go to those parts of the world where, when you get up in the morning, you do not look out to see if it is raining. You never do it. You know that, for the greater part of the year, as sure as the day comes the sun comes, and it shines. For a large part of the year in those parts of the world you do not talk about the weather. You know quite well that the sun will be there before you, if you are not very early, and that it will go on. Oh, for our lives to be like that — sure, certain, reliable, trustworthy, to be counted upon, positive, definite, real. “The sun shining in his strength.” It is one of the glories of God that there is with Him “no variableness, neither shadow cast by turning”. In all this, remember, it is the Son of man to whom we are to be conformed.

The Effect of Seeing Christ

And finally, the effect. “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as one dead.” Now two things must be linked together. John commenced by saying: “I was in the Spirit”. He finished this presentation by saying: “I fell at his feet as one dead”. What is the effect of this contemplation? What is the verdict? If you are in the Spirit, there will be an effect in the contemplation of Jesus Christ. There must be something as a result. “I was in the Spirit... I fell at his feet as one dead.” What do YOU say about this? I am not saying that my presentation is as good as John’s, I am not saying that I am as inspired as he was, but we have been contemplating the same Lord, we have been seeking to bring Christ into view — His excellencies and glories and what He means for us. Can we be other than deeply affected? Is there not something challenging that brings us down inwardly before the Lord? “Am I not found out? Am I not smitten? Do I not realise how altogether short of this I come? Do I not see that it is unto this that the Lord has called? Am I not moved to make my calling and election sure? Is there not the inspiring of something of that ‘one thing I do... I press on toward the goal’ (Phil. 3:13,14)?”

What is the effect? What is our verdict? A mental judgment upon the subject, the subject matter, the presentation? What is it? We have failed — I have failed, you have failed — if we are not touched deeply in our hearts over this and come down before the Lord to make the necessary adjustment. If we are not moved with a new incentive to be like Him, it is all a failure. God forbid! If it is not so with you, will you ask the Lord to use the sword, the two-edged sword, to lay bare?

Chapter 3 - The Sealing of His Brethren

“...In whom ye also, having heard the word of the truth, the gospel of your salvation, — in whom, having also believed, YE WERE SEALED WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT OF PROMISE, WHICH IS AN EARNEST OF OUR INHERITANCE, unto the redemption of God’s own possession, unto the praise of his glory” (Eph. 1:13,14).

Sealed with the Holy Spirit

I want you to note at the outset a very important little word: “Ye were sealed WITH the Holy Spirit”, not by the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not the sealer, but the seal. God the Father seals, and the seal is the Holy Spirit. The value of that is that the sealing is not a matter of some feeling, some experience in the realm of our senses. The sealing is definitely the receiving of a Person for indwelling.

The apostles were very careful and very particular as to this divine consummation of saving faith. They never left anything to chance. If there was a profession of faith in the Lord Jesus, if there was a declaration of the acceptance of Him, the acknowledgment of Him as Saviour and Lord, they never allowed it to stop there. If a report came that some had turned to the Lord through the preaching, they went to verify and to see that the thing was sealed, and for them the consummation of that saving faith, that faith unto salvation, was that they received the seal of the Holy Spirit. You notice here that, although it is in Ephesians, which goes so much beyond beginnings, it is connected with “having heard the word of the truth, the gospel of your salvation, — in whom, having also believed” (heard the Word and believed), “ye were sealed”.

Now the enemy will allow anything short of that. He will allow you to have a lot of sensations, to make a lot of declarations, sign a lot of papers and cards, and go out to a lot of penitent forms. He will allow anything short of this particular thing, and it was there that the apostles were making so sure, not accepting anything less than this, that these people definitely and positively did receive the Holy Spirit as a Person to indwell them. “Ye were sealed by God with the Holy Spirit of promise as an earnest of our inheritance”. Well, that is all bound up with this little word “with” — with the Spirit.

Then come these two words which are word-pictures — “sealed” and “earnest”. “Sealed with the Spirit as an earnest.”

The Effect of a Seal

(a) The mark of reality

What is the nature and effect of a seal when it is put upon anything? I think it has several meanings and several effects. First of all it is the mark of reality; that is, of security. It introduces this element: “Now, that is that! That is a real transaction, that is a definite act. Something has happened that is very real — you cannot get away from that.” In the New Testament, when this sealing took place, when they received the Spirit as a seal, it was precise, it was real, it was definite; it was lifted entirely out of the realm of vagueness, indefiniteness. It was a mark about those first Christians which was unmistakable. The seal gives that character to the life: that is, the receiving of the Holy Spirit as a Person makes everything very real — it makes for an unmistakable addition to the life that has to be noted, taken account of. From that time, if it is a genuine thing, there is nothing vague about that one’s Christian life, nothing indefinite.

(b) The mark of certainty

And then the seal is the mark of certainty. When we receive the Spirit, when this seal is set to believing faith, there enters in something that is very positive in the life. We have certainty; that is, we know. That positive note is struck so much by John. “The anointing which ye received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any one teach you” (1 John 2:27). That does not mean that we are exempt from instruction in the things of God, but it does mean that we do not need that anyone should tell us we are saved — we know. “We know that we have passed out of death into life” (1 John 3:14). It is the seal of security and certainty.

(c) A mark of distinction

And another thing about a seal is that it brings a resemblance. When we put a seal upon a thing, that seal bears a mark. It may be the Great Seal of the realm, it may be a family seal, a business seal, a personal seal — an initial or monogram. It bears a mark, has a character; it distinguishes that which is sealed. And in the same way the Holy Spirit gives a certain mark, a certain character, a certain resemblance, a certain design to the life. He brings in this mark of the Lord.

These are very simple things, but this is the outworking, the immediate result, of receiving the Spirit. You have only to look into the book of the Acts to see this borne out. “They took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13). They knew the seal, the likeness; they saw the mark, the design.

“An Earnest of Our Inheritance”

“An earnest of our inheritance.” Of course, in ancient times this was a very well-known thing, as it is today. It is the legal pledge of a commercial transaction. In old days, if a man was buying a piece of land, he was given by the seller a handful of the earth of that land as an earnest that he was to have the whole, the whole was his by right, it was his inheritance. The word “earnest” is the Greek word arrhabon (Hebrew erabon), which means a surety, a pledge, such as an engagement ring; that is, I make you a promise, I commit myself; this is a token. That is the word that is used here of the Holy Spirit. He is the pledge, He is the promise, He is the token of all the inheritance which God has for us in His Son. “An earnest of our inheritance”; the “Spirit of promise”.

“An earnest of our inheritance.” A little earlier the apostle has said, “in whom also we were made a heritage”. A little later he will speak of God’s inheritance in the saints, but here he is speaking of our inheritance; not God’s inheritance in us, but our inheritance in God. This letter to the Ephesians has a very vast sweep. It looks right back to past eternity, and tells us of the great purpose of God from before times eternal, before the world was, “the eternal purpose”; it tells us of our election, “chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world”, and it tells us unto what; and then it sweeps on through time, through the ages, on to the eternity future, and shows us the realisation of that purpose and that election — and what a glorious picture is brought into view of being “unto the praise of his glory”, “the glory of his grace”!

The word “glory” here is the key to it all. I am quite sure that you have been impressed with the fact that the New Testament is so futuristic — not just in the prophetical interpretation of the Bible, but in the sense that the writers are always looking on. Whatever they are doing, they are looking beyond this life. They have their eyes filled with a wonderful future. The apostles are full of that, straining after that; their teaching is concerning that all the time. They are seeking to bring the believers, the saints, the church, into the mighty inspiration of a glorious hope, a marvellous future, and this letter to the Ephesians, perhaps more than any other, brings into view that great future realisation of eternal purpose and calls it our inheritance — that to which we are heirs, through the grace of God, in fellowship with our Lord Jesus Christ.

But my point in saying this is that this is not just some glorious presentation of ideas, or even of truths in words. How shall we know that it is not a beautiful story? How shall we know that it is not just the production of men’s imagination? How shall we know that it is not just wishful thinking? How shall we know it is not just a dream, a beautiful dream? How shall we know that, having given up everything in this world and abandoned all interests here for this, we shall not at last find that we have made a mistake and have lost both worlds? How shall we know that this is true? And the apostle answers all such questions and says, “You can know in a very real and practical way right here and now — in as practical a way as it is possible to know anything. You can know it right inside yourself!” And I venture to suggest that that is a more real way of knowing things than any other way. I am not always certain of you, you are not always certain of me — but I am perfectly certain of what goes on inside of me! That is the real thing. And so the apostle says, answering all questions as to whether this inheritance is a solid thing, whether this eternal purpose is a real matter: “He has given us the Holy Spirit as an earnest”.

A Positive Sense of Purpose and Destiny

This is borne out very clearly and precisely, inasmuch as when we receive the Holy Spirit, when we have the indwelling Holy Spirit, the first thing that results is that He gives us a positive sense of purpose and destiny. He lifts life out of unreality and vagueness, and we become conscious that there is, after all, some real purpose in our being on this earth. Whatever we may have felt before, as to its having been a matter of chance, or as to there having been anything accidental in our coming into this world, a mere fragment among the teeming multitudes: now it is as though we — individually insignificant as we are in ourselves naturally — are, in a right sense, somehow characterized by a tremendous importance. I mean that rightly. A meaning, a significance, is given to us; we feel that we are bound up with some tremendous thing. When the Holy Spirit comes in as the seal and the earnest of our inheritance, a sense of positive destiny takes hold of us. We know we are linked on with something. You can test yourself by this, as well as testify to the truth of it.

And then the Holy Spirit gives us a positive urge and incentive towards something. We become aware that we are apprehended — there is an urge in us, there is an incentive, there is a pull; we are gripped, we are being drawn on, led on; and that is the explanation of all our reactions. If we lapse, if we get slack, if we cease to press on, presently we shall have a bad reaction, we shall realise that something is lost, we are losing out; life has lost something: we must see to this matter. The Holy Spirit has linked us with that purpose, and He is the incentive within us, the urge, the dynamic.

A Progressive Understanding of God’s Purpose

And then again the Holy Spirit gives us a progressive understanding and knowledge of the purpose. It should be characteristic of every Holy Spirit-indwelt life that there is a progressive, increasing understanding and knowledge of God’s purpose, the purpose unto which we are called. It was this that governed the apostles in the writing of their letters. They were “moved by the Holy Ghost”. They spoke and they wrote “as they were moved”, that is, “as they were borne along by the Holy Ghost” (2 Pet. 1:21). The word-picture here in the Greek is of a crowd, a surging crowd, moving in a certain direction, and here is one life standing by, that suddenly finds itself caught up in the crowd — and what is the good of trying to resist that? It has simply got to let itself go, be borne on with the multitude. That is the word that is used here. They were borne along by the Holy Spirit as they wrote and as they spoke. And what was it they spoke and wrote about? It was about this purpose — explaining, informing, giving growing knowledge, as they received it from the Holy Spirit.

The same Holy Spirit will do that in us. There is something very wrong with a life — a Christian life — which, after a given time, is no better instructed on God’s purposes in salvation than at the beginning; something very wrong. The Holy Spirit is there for that very purpose. Growing intelligence is a mark of the Spirit within, as the earnest of our inheritance.

Our Responsibility to Honour the Holy Spirit

Then we are brought by the Holy Spirit, as the earnest of our inheritance, to face the responsibility of His indwelling. Here we have such words as: “Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, in whom ye were sealed unto the day of redemption” (Eph. 4:30). Our responsibility is to cherish the Holy Spirit, to honour the Holy Spirit. We read so much about “walking in the Spirit”, “walking by the Spirit”. What does walking in the Spirit mean? Well, it means, in the simplest of language, first of all that we recognise and acknowledge the Holy Spirit. That is the first simple thing — to walk in the Spirit is to recognise the Spirit and to acknowledge the Spirit; not to ignore, not to affront Him; to give Him His place of honour and right and then to obey — to yield to the Spirit and to obey.

And the Spirit within us is mainly very quiet. When the Lord speaks by His Spirit within, He speaks very gently. I have for many years tried to train myself to recognise His voice. We expect tremendous impressions, a loud voice, something that we cannot mistake, and my experience is that the Lord very rarely speaks like that until He has to, that His Spirit is gentle, and if we really were being led by the Spirit, we should be attuned to a very, very quiet voice, just intimating something. How easy it is for us to go on and pass it over, to ignore it, because it is so gentle — and yet when we look back we have to say, “Oh, what a pity I did not take note of that very simple, gentle little touch of the Lord — I would have been saved such a lot!”

We should never need to have our ears trained if there were shouting going on all the time. But the ear is trained by having to listen, and this inner ear of “hearing what the Spirit saith” must be an ear that is attentive, an ear that is inclined, an ear that indicates the attitude of our hearts. If someone is speaking, I can be perfectly careless and preoccupied and looking round, but if I realise that what the speaker has to say is of very great importance, I am all attention, showing the state of my heart. “He that hath an ear, let him hear.” This is what walking in the Spirit means — inclining, being set upon knowing all that the Lord has to say and give.

The Need to Press On

I close just by reminding you that the meaning and value of an earnest, of a token, of a promise can all be lost if you do not follow it out to its fulfilment.

The man who received his handful of soil had the guarantee that the whole field was his by right of transaction; but supposing he just carefully preserves the handful, without following up and pursuing the transaction, and taking possession and turning to account his inheritance? The handful is no good to him at all! What it signifies is all lost, nullified. I knew a couple who became engaged, with an engagement ring given, and they went on — one year, two years, three, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years. They were never married! They were engaged all those years, but the transaction was never completed. We are not, of course, appealing for hurried engagements and hurried marriages! But the point is: do let us follow up — do not let us make a fiasco of this thing. We have the earnest, we have the Spirit as a seal and earnest, but we have not yet got all that is meant, all that is included; and we can miss it all — even while we have the earnest we can miss it all — if we do not follow up, if we do not pursue, if we do not go on.

You know the place of the many “ifs” in the New Testament. “If we hold fast... unto the end” (Heb. 3:6). You know the great urge of the Word that we should go on. “Let us press on...” (Heb. 6:1). Why? Oh, it is not enough to have believed, and it is not enough even to have received the Spirit as an earnest. We must follow on to make good all that is represented by the earnest, to possess all that is included in the guarantee.

Chapter 4 - The Spirit's Work in This Dispensation

“And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth”. (John 14:16,17).

We are going to think about the dispensation of the Spirit. This is not something apart from what we have been considering hitherto. I think we shall see how this matter of the Spirit is a part of that greater vision that the Lord has been bringing before us — the Man in the glory. In our last study we were for a little time occupied with the subjective side of this matter of the Spirit — receiving the Spirit as an indwelling Person, the seal and earnest of our inheritance. We shall now look at it from the other side — the objective side of the Holy Spirit and His work.

Let me say here at once that, while the subjective side of truth is of very great importance, as a source of strength and light and help generally to the spiritual life, the objective side of revelation is usually the more joyful side. If we are feeling ourselves to be in need of more joy, I doubt whether we shall find our need supplied by more subjective occupation. Our need will be met by objective occupation — by turning outwards and viewing the Lord’s provision for us, as in Heaven and as here, altogether apart from our own inner attainment unto it. It is this matter of attainment that is the trouble with us, and so, although we may not find the same inward teaching value in the objective side, I am quite sure we shall find a great deal of inspiration and uplift as we contemplate for a little while those activities of the Holy Spirit out of His own sovereignty.

“The Acts” Covers the Dispensation of the Spirit

Here, then, in the passage from John that we have read, the Lord Jesus points to that event so soon to take place as He was going, the advent of the Spirit. “I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter” (or “Advocate” — neither word is an exact translation), “that he may be with you for ever (for the age), even the Spirit of truth”. He indicated an age, or, to use the other word, a dispensation — the dispensation of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit has inaugurated a dispensation and has taken charge of it. That comprehends everything. The book which goes by the title of “The Acts” — certainly only in a subsidiary way the acts of the apostles, primarily the acts of the Holy Spirit — is a book which covers the age or dispensation of the Spirit from first to last.

You may argue with me that the book only goes as far as Paul’s imprisonment and leaves him there. I repeat, it covers the whole dispensation. That will be shown quite clearly before we are through. Actually, as to time, the book only covers about thirty years. All that took place as recorded in this book was crowded into something round about thirty years. How do we arrive at that? Well, the ascension of Christ was about 33 AD and the last letter written within the compass of this book was written about 64 AD. So you see all that is here is within that brief time.

“The Acts” a Book of Principles

What a crowded thirty years it was! What a seed plot for a dispensation, a whole dispensation! And that is exactly what it is — a seed plot. This book of the Acts laid the foundation of the whole dispensation. The dispensation was to rise out of and upon what took place as recorded here, and so the book is a book of principles for all time. The meaning of this is that, while it is not at all necessary for the Holy Spirit, at any other time in the dispensation, to repeat Himself in exactly the same form, nevertheless He will always act on the same principle. If you read this book and see what is here, as “acts of the Holy Spirit”, you will have to come to one of two conclusions. Either that the Holy Spirit is not the same today as He was then, because the things that are recorded as the normal and ordinary happenings no longer happen. Or, that what is here embodies a principle, and whether the form of its expression is repeated or not, the principle remains intact.

Take the simple example of Ananias and Sapphira and their sin against the Holy Ghost. I venture to say, with very little fear of contradiction, that there are many in the church today who are guilty of a like misdemeanour, a like sin; seeking to hoodwink the Holy Spirit — forgive the word — seeking to deceive the Lord, seeking to cover up a double life. There are many who are positive contradictions to a life under the government of the Holy Spirit, whose lives are an affront to the Spirit of truth: there is a lie. But in how many cases does the same thing happen as happened with Ananias and Sapphira? I suppose we should be involved in very serious legal trouble if it did! It would not do for any Peter among us today to pick out such people, with the result that they instantly fall down dead and have to be carried out as corpses! The Holy Spirit may not do things in the same way physically, but He has established a principle that, if any Christian lives a double life, if any Christian is living, acting, practising inconsistency, a lie to the Holy Ghost, their spiritual life is seriously at stake, and they will become corpses in a much more serious way than physically. There are a lot of “corpses” in the church — dead people — because of something that is an affront to the Holy Spirit. We cannot continue to deceive the Holy Spirit and at the same time maintain spiritual life. That is the principle.

So we could go through this book, indicating that it is a book of principles. We have to say all the time, “Now, are we to expect a repetition of the form of the act of the Holy Spirit in every matter, or are we to look to see the principle that is involved?” For when we find the principle, and lay hold of it, we find that the principle works; whatever may be the external form of its working, the principle works. May that not be a key to the very difficult subject of the gift of tongues? It is there. Are we to say that that manifestation is to follow in that same form, universally and invariably, throughout the whole dispensation, or are we not to conclude from the book of principles, and from the full way in which the principle was established at the beginning, that in the Spirit there is a universal spiritual language which you and I speak, and we understand one another in that language of the Spirit — not necessarily literally in a tongue; that Pentecost sees the triumph over Babel — the destruction of that cause of division — in a spiritual way, so that, in Christ, all nations and tongues and languages and peoples understand the language of the Spirit? We know we have something in common: spirit speaks with spirit. We may not speak one another’s language, but somehow there is a concord and a flowing together, and it is so often more easy, even in the spoken word, when you are spiritually one, to understand things of the Spirit than to understand natural things. There you have a principle.

So the Acts is a book of principles, and it is for us to look at it and say, “Now, what is the principle in this?” Do not let me be understood as saying that the Lord does not sometimes exactly repeat His actions — He does; but not as a normal and general rule. He has shown us, by very clear, positive examples, what His principles are, and He would say to us, “If I do not smite you dead for that lie, do not think that I condone the lie, that I am any less against the lie than I was in the fifth chapter of the book of the Acts.”

The Spirit Providing for the Whole Dispensation

Now, the next thing is that, in providing this book, God has provided for the whole dispensation. I said that, although its actual history according to time was gathered into about thirty years, yet this book covers the whole dispensation, and it does so by way of its provision — through that which it provides. The Holy Spirit gave in those thirty years all that which was to be the church’s life and light for the whole dispensation. That needs no argument. We should not be meditating today on the record of those thirty years, and deriving spiritual life and benefit and instruction from it, if that were not true. The Spirit provided, then, for His own full dispensation — provided Himself with what He would need right to the end of the age; and He is using it still, not acts only, but utterances. Let us then look at this work of the Spirit, this acting of the Spirit, as we have it here.

The Spirit Bringing the Church to Birth

First and inclusively, His act was that of bringing the foreknown and foreordained church to birth. He reached right back to the eternal counsels, right down to the hiddenness of past ages, and He brought from the eternity past and from the hiddenness of the ages the church foreknown, foreordained. Sooner or later we shall find that, in the course of this record, He gives His own explanation of that. But here is the act, bringing the church to birth. In the light of its eternity past and future, what a mighty act that was! In the light of those eternal counsels of God, in the light of the meaning and calling of the church, what a great thing it was to bring that church to birth, to bring it out into actual being on the day called the day of Pentecost. Yes, He at once reached back to those counsels before times eternal and took up the purposes and intentions of God in and through the church, and brought them into the church to which He gave birth, to which He became the Spirit of life on that day.

I said He reached down into the hiddenness of the ages. I am not one of those who hold that there is no church in the Old Testament Scriptures. I am agreed that it was not recognised; agreed that they did not see the meaning of what was going on in themselves as a people. Oh, yes, I am agreed that there was no revelation of the church in Old Testament times: but not agreed for a moment that there is no revelation of the church in the Old Testament ages to the church in this age. With the Holy Spirit’s enlightenment now, we can see all the eternal principles relative to the church hidden in the Old Testament Scriptures. They are there; we can see them now. And the New Testament uses the Old Testament Scriptures to explain and illustrate the church. Strange things are said about some of the Old Testament Scriptures, that might well be thought to be straining them, making them mean what they do not mean, unless the Holy Spirit had shown the mystery. “Mystery” simply means something that was there but hidden. You cannot hide a “nothing”, a something that does not exist. If it says that it was hidden, it must have been there to be hidden. But now at the end of those ages it is brought to light. And so the Holy Spirit uncovered the mystery hidden from the ages or in the ages, and brought out the eternal counsels of God when, by sovereign act, He brought the church into being on that day, at that time. That was no mere happening; there was nothing casual about that: it was a sovereign act of the Spirit.

The Spirit Directing the Church’s Movements

Then we find that from that point He proceeds in the directing of the church’s movements, that being the object with which He is concerned. Having brought it into being, He assumes charge of its movements. Here is a wonderful story of the sovereign activity of the Holy Spirit to make the church move — and moreover to make it move as it would not move, as it would refuse to move, as its prejudices would forbid its moving; but He sees that it does. If it does not do so spontaneously and voluntarily, it will do it under compulsion of circumstances. He has taken up this matter of directing the church’s movements for the age. This obtains with the Holy Spirit as much now as it did at the beginning.

The Spirit Ordering the Church’s Constitution

Next we see Him arranging and ordering its constitution: wonderful sovereign acts in the choosing of men and the giving of ministry, gifts in persons, selecting, choosing, bringing forward. It is as though the Spirit reached out His hand, and, where men would not have looked, where men were afraid, fearful, put His hand on this one and on that one; and they had to come forward, they had to come into place, and they had to be taken into account. The Spirit has said so; the Spirit is doing this: you cannot refuse Saul of Tarsus and keep him out, however bad his record is.

In other cases He is ordering the constitution of the church. He is seen giving the gifts of the ascended Lord and establishing the functions by means of those personal gifts. It is a matter for the Holy Spirit what ministry men fulfil in the church. It is not for us to select our ministry, either its kind or its place; it is not for us to choose what we are going to be in the work of God; it is not for us to say what kind of ministry we are going to engage in: “I am going to be an evangelist”; “I am going to be an apostle” (if you like you can use the word “missionary” in its place — it is the same word in another language); “I am going to be a pastor, a teacher”. That is not given to us at all, thank God; that is with the Holy Spirit.

And every other gift and function is the Holy Spirit’s matter, entirely in His sovereign hands, and that is a thing set forth here. Would to God that men would keep close to this book of principles and not try to do that for which they are not qualified, and to which they are not called, by the Holy Spirit. There are many misfits; many have to give up because they find the Lord is not taking them through, is not with them in it. There are many who are trying to do that for which the Lord never called them. It works too the other way: there are many who are not doing, simply because they do not feel qualified to do so. They have not recognised the principle that it is not on the basis of any ability of our own at all, but by the Holy Spirit. He can take up the most unlikely and make functionaries or functions in the church. Both negatively and positively this whole matter is seen here to be a matter of the Holy Spirit’s sovereign ordering of the constitution of the church.

The Spirit’s Sovereign Use of Every Agency

Then, further, we see the Holy Spirit using all agencies in relation to the purpose of the dispensation. This is grand — this is where I think objective contemplation is so inspiring and helpful. Would to God we had a more ready apprehension or grasp of this: the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit, not only in the church through this dispensation, but as wide, as far, as all-embracing as the Throne of the exalted Lord Jesus. And here you see Him using all agencies, heavenly agencies. In this book you have a record of angelic activities: the ministry of angels co-operating with the Holy Spirit. In the letter to the Hebrews, we are told that we are come to “innumerable hosts of angels” (12:22). “Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to do service for the sake of them that shall inherit salvation?” (1:14).

Now see one beautiful little example of co-operation between angels and the Holy Spirit. It is in the tenth chapter of Acts — the record of Peter on the housetop in one part of the country, and the sheet let down from heaven, and Cornelius in another place, 35 miles away, seeking the Lord for light. Peter is a man who knows the Holy Spirit: therefore the Spirit can speak to Peter. But Cornelius is not yet in the dispensation of the Spirit experimentally. He has not come into the realm of receiving the Spirit yet. That is coming soon, that will not be long: in three days it will happen, but not yet. Therefore an angel comes to him. He cannot understand the Spirit yet, but he can understand angels. A beautiful co-operation. But do not think that the Holy Spirit is confined to spiritual people, or that spiritual people have only the Holy Spirit. They may have both the Holy Spirit and angels, for Paul, who certainly knew what it was for the Spirit to speak to him, was able to say: “There stood by me this night an angel of the God whose I am, whom also I serve, saying, Fear not, Paul” (Acts 27:23,24). But here, in this incident of Peter, is a heavenly system at work in co-operation with the Holy Spirit, and this is soon to happen again and again. My point is this, that the Holy Spirit has all agencies of a celestial order at His service, co-operating with Him; all heavenly resources are at His command.

Then we also see how the Holy Spirit is making use of earthly agencies, people and things — very often of those that are inimical, unsympathetic, hostile. He just uses them, that is all. And behind them there is the sub-earthly, the diabolical. Oh, what a record of forces of evil at work this book contains: the spiritual hosts of wickedness, the adversary himself, working through things, working through nature, working through people. What is the Holy Spirit doing? He is just using them. They mean it for evil; He makes it work for good. Of course, that is easily said. In actual experience, we do not always look at it like that. It is the last thing that we do, when we are up against some terrific position of the enemy, to say, “That is all right! This is splendid! The Holy Spirit is going to turn this to glorious account!” We do not do that. But this book is a record of the sovereignty of the Spirit, using all agencies, heavenly, earthly and sub-earthly, unto the purpose of His dispensation. He has taken charge. Is that not helpful? That is what I mean by objective apprehension.

The Spirit’s Provision in the Matter of Revelation

Next, we see the inspirational work of the Holy Spirit making provision for the whole dispensation in the matter of the revelation of the church — the church’s nature, the church’s vocation and the church’s destiny. The Holy Spirit has taken up this matter and is here seen giving progressive instruction, by inspiration, as to what this thing is that has been brought in by birth on the day of Pentecost — what is its vocation, what is its destiny.

The progressive aspect of this fact is a most helpful one. We probably know that, although the letters of the New Testament are arranged in our Bibles in a certain order, this is not the order in which they were written. The order in which the Spirit has sovereignly arranged them for us is the progressive spiritual order, the right spiritual order. For students of the New Testament, and for merely informative or academic purposes, it is quite helpful to have the New Testament in the chronological order. You can actually buy a New Testament bound up in the order in which the letters were written. The first is Thessalonians, and so on. But the Holy Spirit has had a say in our having it in the order in which we do have it. It is quite clear. You cannot get anywhere until you have got Romans. Everything else will wait until what we have in Romans is established as the beginning, the very genesis, of the new creation. And it is quite as much in order to have Thessalonians at the end, its chief theme being the coming of the Lord. And if you look you see that each letter as we have it, represents one step further than the last. It is in the progress of things — spiritual progress. You would not want to have Ephesians before Corinthians. It would be terrible if, after reading Ephesians and Colossians, we then had to drop right down to Corinthians — that awful contradiction; but, with the letters in the order in which we have them, we say, “Well, here is Corinthians, and this is not how it ought to be: we must get out of this on to higher ground!”

So the Holy Spirit has brought about this order, given it to us by His sovereignty as a progressive revelation of the church’s nature, of the church’s vocation and of the church’s destiny. For the whole dispensation He inspired the providing of this light, this truth, this revelation of God for the church. Men of God wrote “as they were moved by the Holy Spirit”, and there is far more in that than I have been able to point out. The most enlightening, the most instructive matter is to see how the Holy Spirit puts things in order — to see the order in which He puts things as He gives His revelation.

The Spirit Relates Everything to Christ

Finally, for the present, we see in this book of Acts how the Holy Spirit relates everything to Christ. While He, the Spirit, is the worker, while all that is here is the expression of His energy, His activity, He is keeping Christ in view all the time. He is not speaking of Himself; He is keeping Christ in view and relating everything to Christ. He is relating to Christ in a threefold way.

Firstly, eternally. He makes it perfectly clear that God’s purposes, His vast, great, wonderful purposes, were all settled in His Son before ever this world was. Before this world was, He summed up all things in Christ, He centred all things in Christ. The Holy Spirit makes it perfectly clear that all things relate to Christ eternally.

Secondly, incarnately. What is before is subsequent. It is all heading up to that great consummation, and all things are gathered together in Christ, related to Christ incarnately. (This is the point at which I think this falls into line with our first two meditations in this series — the Man, the Son of Man, and how this Man gathers up all things into Himself.) He is made man, becomes man. The Holy Spirit keeps the Man in view — “the Man Christ Jesus”. In the seventeenth chapter of this very book of Acts we have: “He hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained” (verse 31). There is another fragment very much like it in the tenth chapter (verse 42). The Holy Spirit is keeping everything related to Christ incarnately as the Son of Man, God’s Man.

And then, in the third place, exaltedly: for what the Holy Spirit is always careful to point out is that God raised Him, God exalted Him, God gave Him the place of supreme exaltation and glory — “crowned Him with glory and honour” — and everything is related to Him as there. He it was who filled Stephen on that memorable occasion, when Stephen, “being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55). By the Holy Spirit Stephen saw Christ exalted at God’s right hand. Everything is related to Him as exalted. The Holy Spirit quotes the Psalms — the inspired Psalms. How the Holy Spirit brings in all that He Himself has before provided! See how He uses them through inspired men. He draws in the Psalms concerning the exaltation of the Lord Jesus: “Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies the footstool of thy feet” (Heb. 1:13). “Therefore being at the right hand of God exalted...” (Acts 2:33). That is the work of the Holy Spirit, to keep everything related to God’s central object and interest and concern — His own Son.

Our Responsibility in Relation to the Spirit’s Sovereignty

All this robs us of every bit of ground for being introspective. All that has been said is a provision for rejoicing. If this is true, what a wonderful confidence it brings — this contemplation of divine sovereignty. And yet remember that there is another line running parallel — the line of our responsibility in relation to the Spirit’s sovereignty. The Spirit says very often, Go here, go there, do this, do that. Then responsibility comes in to respond, to obey, to be in subjection to the Spirit, to be completely yielded to Him; and that is all embraced in one principle at work all the way through. The Spirit’s ground of sovereign activity, so far as the church is concerned, is the ground of the cross — the application of the principle of the cross all the time. Unless the Lord’s children, even these apostles, will allow a further working of the cross, the Holy Spirit, as far as they are concerned, is unable to go on. He must bypass them, He must take up some other instrument.

Yes, responsibility is there, even in sovereignty. Do not let us, in our joy of contemplating the sovereignty of the Lord, think, Oh well, we can sit down and it does not matter — He will do it in spite of everything. So far as the church is concerned, and that means you and me, there is a responsibility running alongside of the sovereignty of the Spirit: the call for yieldedness which is the principle of the cross, the setting aside and putting to death of self-will, self-interest, self-assertiveness and everything that is of self. All that is of self must go under the power of the cross, and the Spirit goes on (and only goes on, where we are concerned) on that ground — the ground of the cross. That is how He makes the cross work for us unto glory: whereas those outside the church, who do not accept the cross, find that the cross is made to work for their undoing, their destruction. Herod knew all about the cross, but he refused to be subject to it. He set himself and his own interests in opposition to it, and he was destroyed out of hand. For its enemies, the working of the cross is death, but for us it brings to glory, by the sovereignty of the Spirit.

Chapter 5 - The Process of Reproduction

Reading: Acts 10:1-11:18.

The New Creation Man in Process of Formation

Acts 10 follows on what we were considering in our last message. It concerns this particular dispensation or age of the Holy Spirit, and the specific object which the Holy Spirit has in view during this age. We can put it in one phrase — the formation of the new-creation man. This chapter is a phase in that formation, and therefore a phase in the dispensation of the Holy Spirit.

It is a remarkable chapter. Much that is in it can only be explained in the light of something very much bigger than the conversion of an individual. Not that the conversion of an individual is a small thing, by any means, but it would have been very easy and very much more simple just to have sent a preacher to Caesarea to proclaim the Gospel there, so that this one man heard it and got converted. Things like that were happening; that in general was what was taking place.

But there is a tremendous amount of — if I may use the word — “paraphernalia” about this that actually happened. It is something quite “extra” and extraordinary, even for the general movement of the preaching of the Gospel in those days. That an angel from Heaven should visit the man, that the Holy Spirit should speak to Peter, that there should be these strange accompaniments of the sheet let down and the voice speaking, and many other strange features and factors, all indicates that this incident must be set in a realm that is more than the conversion of an individual, however important that may be. It is a part of a great dispensational movement: all the forces at God’s disposal in Heaven and on earth are brought into a “combined operation” in relation to this matter, for the man in the case is not just a man — he is a representative.

If you think that that needs proving, you have only to look further into this book. You can see that this is a phase, and the outstanding phase, of all that is happening. You have only to step back two chapters — and remember there are no chapters in the original record, it is one continuous narrative — step back into chapter 8 of our arrangement, and you have that extraordinary matter concerning the Ethiopian. Here was this man, holding a position of great power in the palace of the queen of the Ethiopians, who had been up to worship, and was now going back — a dissatisfied man. On his way back to Ethiopia, back to his seat of influence and activity, he has to pass by way of the desert; and the Spirit — the Holy Spirit, the same Holy Spirit — speaks to a servant of God, named Philip, in Samaria. Great things are happening in Samaria, very important things are taking place there, much is going on under the power of the Spirit, but the Spirit touches Philip and says, “Now, go down toward Gaza, the way of the desert.” And Philip obeys. He is at the disposal of the Holy Spirit; he has no arguments and no personal objectives. There is nothing contrary about him — he is yielded to the Spirit. He obeys, and is brought into touch with this outstanding man, this representative man, this man who is right at the heart of everything in Ethiopia.

In chapter 9 we meet with another man, even more outstanding than the last. Saul of Tarsus was undoubtedly an outstanding man in every way. Whatever we may think about his persecutions, we must remember that he did it in all good faith. For him it was conscience; he was being utterly conscientious. Yes, he was an outstanding man, and again, a representative man — a representative of a nation and a great nation, a man who had a place right at the very heart of things in that nation. And the same mighty movement of Heaven comes to him and lays hold of him. There are big things happening in relation to individual men.

And so we come, with the straight course of the narrative, to what we have in chapter 10. Here is another man. He is away up in Caesarea, the capital of the country, the very stronghold of Roman influence. All that Rome stood for was centred there. This man holds a place of power, position and importance right there, and so an angel and the Holy Spirit, as we pointed out previously, co-operated in relation to the winning of this representative man.

So we have an Ethiopian, a Jew, and a Roman: men representing nations of no small significance and influence. This is no ordinary thing. What is it all about? Well, as I have said at the beginning, there is a “new-creation man” in process of formation. Out of this dust of the earth God is forming His new corporate Adam after the image of the One that He has in His own presence, in the likeness of His own Son. A new creation is in process of formation, and it centres in man — in a Man — and that Man is in the glory. But that new creation man that is being formed after the likeness of the Man in Heaven is corporate — the collective man after the likeness of THE Man, the last Adam.

Well, the new creation man is firstly Christ, and you notice how everything circles round Peter’s words — “Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God” (Acts 2:22). And then in chapter 10, verse 42 — “He charged us to preach unto the people, and to testify that this is he who is ordained of God to be the Judge of living and dead”. That word “ordained” is the word with which we commenced our first meditation in this series. It is the Greek word from which we get the English word “horizon”. We may perhaps think of Christ as marking the horizon of everything with God.

So everything here is within that horizon. The Holy Spirit is working within the horizon of Christ, the new creation Man, the last Adam. He is the new creation personally in God’s very presence, but then He becomes the new creation Man dominantly. He is governing everything here — not officially, but by His likeness. It is the likeness of this Man that is governing everything. God is working by the Holy Spirit to bring about something after the likeness of this Man, a collective man in the image and likeness of this individual perfected Man before God. And this Man is dominant, in the sense that His character dominates all the activities of the Holy Spirit: that is, the Holy Spirit is in action to bring about a collective reproduction of this individual new creation Man. Dominating the activities of the Holy Spirit is what Christ is as man, according to God’s mind. Then follows, of course, the collective side of this, and that brings us here to these representative people.

The Natural Man Dismissed

Of what will this new-creation collective man be made? Will he be made of Peter and Cornelius and the Ethiopian? Not at all. You see, Peter is here very much in view as an instrument, and Peter naturally, according to his earthly life, is of Jewish constitution, Jewish mentality and Jewish horizon — very much of Jewish horizon by reason of his very blood and his birth and his upbringing. He is horizoned by Judaism, by Israel. That is how he is constituted. Cornelius — well, he is very Gentile-constituted. He is Roman, and he is very Roman, or he would not be a centurion. He certainly would not be in that place without being a Roman of the Romans. You know how these centurions were selected, on what grounds they were appointed. They were magnificent men, humanly speaking, splendid specimens, the best specimens of Roman life and training and discipline, and very thoroughly devoted to Roman interests. This man, being in Caesarea, is not a centurion of an outpost. He is at the heart of Roman influence in that part of the world, so that he is naturally Romanly constituted.

What we find, therefore, is not that these two men are brought into Christ just as Peter and Cornelius, but that they are disintegrated, broken up, broken down, put out, as to what they are naturally. They are born from another country, from above, brought into the kingdom of Heaven, brought into the “new creation man”, the church, where there is “neither Jew nor Greek” nor Roman nor Gentile, but “all... one man in Christ” (Gal. 3:28), and “Christ is all” (Col. 3:11). You notice that even Peter has to be broken down, disintegrated, when he allows what is natural in his constitution to begin to influence his judgments and cause him to argue with the Lord. A transition has to take place in him, from the point at which he was commanded by the Lord to rise, kill and eat, and he said, “Not so, Lord” (verse 14) — a transition had to take place, under this mighty breaking down of the Holy Spirit, to the point where he said, “He is Lord of all” (verse 36). Notice, not only of the Jews — “Lord of ALL”. That meant something very drastic in Peter’s case, but it had to be done.

And so far as Cornelius is concerned — I shall say a little more about him presently — it is quite clear that in the issue of this he became a man governed not by Rome but by the Holy Spirit; under the influence not of what was natural but of what was spiritual; not earthly but heavenly. For you notice that the Heavens were opened — the Spirit of God from Heaven fell on them, and in so doing made them different. But they both had to be broken down in what they were naturally, and formed again, another vessel, not according to nature but according to Christ.

The Spiritual Education of the Born-again

Now just one further glance at Peter in this connection. Peter had already been born from above, he was already in the kingdom of Heaven, he was already under the government of the Holy Spirit, but even with such people as Peter — and none of us would claim to compare with him — the Lord will not allow any of the old natural influences to arise and control judgments and movements. Those influences have to be put back, there has to be still fuller, deeper conformity to the image of the Man who is not this or that, but is different altogether from all the rest. You and I must remember that, though we are born again, we are not permitted to allow our natural judgments, standards, conceptions or mentality about people to influence us. We have to get Heaven’s estimate.

And what a revolutionary thing that is! Consider for a moment the contents of this sheet that was let down to Peter: four-footed creatures, reptiles, birds — and the inference is that they are “unclean” birds naturally — just the very things that were forbidden in Leviticus 11 to be eaten by the Jews. And Peter is informed that Heaven’s point of view is altogether different from his. Although he may have the most utter conviction about this matter and his mentality may judge this people to be altogether outside the pale of the kingdom of Heaven, Heaven’s view is quite different, completely different. Peter has got to learn not only what it means to be born from above, but what it means to be conformed to the likeness of the Man above.

There is a great deal to be done in all of us about this matter. We are so influenced by our own constitution, by our own make-up, by our own natural outlook, mentality or training, and we think God has got to come into line with that, conform to that and accept that. But the Lord is teaching us the very hard lesson that He does not accept our mentality at all, He does not accept our standards, He repudiates much that is a strong conviction with us, even religiously, and demands of us things that “religiously” we would never do. That perhaps needs a little safeguarding, but I say it within the right realm and the right limits. What it amounts to is that when the Holy Spirit comes in we have to go out of court. He must be allowed to have His mind about things and people and ways and means, for He is not going to accept ours. Peter, as Peter naturally, will have to be set aside. It is a large part of our education.

And if that was true of Peter, it was of course much more true of Cornelius, because he was not yet born from above. He has got to be born from above — to cease to be Cornelius, the Roman centurion, and simply become a man in Christ. Thank God, there were all the possibilities of that with Cornelius. God had an open way with him.

Well, the Holy Spirit obliterated Peter and Cornelius and put Jesus in their place. That is what it amounts to, that is what He was working toward. But you see, the whole dominating objective is this divine conception of a man as gathered up in the Person of Jesus Christ, a new creation man in Himself. His purpose is to gather into Himself, not OF all nations, but OUT of all nations — there is a profound difference — to gather out of all nations that which will compose and comprise the collective new creation man. Let us therefore at once be ready to be stripped of all our national prejudices, to let go all those things which govern our attitudes and judgments. Let us be free for them to go, to leave us. Let us seek very much, earnestly and continually, to “know no man after the flesh”, but to know only Christ, to cleave to Christ, to make everything of Christ in one another.

Oh, may God give me, and give you, grace to make more of Christ — even when we may feel there is only a very little of Him — in other people. Fasten on to that measure, small though it may be, and make that the all-important, paramount thing. It is an absolute essential in our apprehension of the Body of Christ, and that is the very work of the Holy Spirit in this dispensation. If the Holy Spirit is in us and we know anything about registering the movement, the voice, the influence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, when we pass a wrong judgment upon someone else or take more account of that which they are naturally than of Christ in them, we shall meet a rebuke, we shall sense a displeasure of the Holy Spirit. Ask the Lord to make you sensitive to the Holy Spirit in this matter, that Christ may grow and grow. We do make it difficult for Christ to grow in other people. We do get in the way of the Lord Jesus. We do tie Him up, because we do not seek to release Him and make the most of Him in one another. We are so ready to fasten upon the things that run counter to our prejudices and contrary to our ideas of what ought to be. Let us make more of the Lord Jesus. That is the setting of this tenth chapter of Acts, in its dispensational meaning and its supreme concern.

The Need of the Naturally Morally Good for Salvation

In conclusion, I want to indicate briefly the bearing of this word upon the preaching of the Gospel. There are many aspects of the Gospel application of all that is going on in the book of the Acts. Take this man Cornelius. There are some grand things said about Cornelius. He is a very devout man, he honours God, he is a man who prays to God; he is a man of practical charity, he gives alms — that means he has the interests of other people at heart, he is not living to himself. As you look at him naturally, he is a fine man, characterized by an honest and pure spirit — there is no doubt about it. We wish everybody were as ready as Cornelius was to respond, to answer without argument, without prejudice. He was a fine specimen of a man: I expect physically he was that; certainly he was that morally, mentally and religiously.

And yet — and yet — Heaven and earth are combining in a mighty movement to get that man SAVED. Everybody would say, “That is surely enough; that man honours God, he is a God-fearing man, he prays, he puts his religion into practical expression. That man is unselfish, he is generous, he is kind in his actions, he cares for other people, he is full of charitable works: what more do you want? That man is going to Heaven, if any man is!” And yet, I say again, Heaven moves, and Heaven moves earth: the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of the great dispensation, on the one side; on the other side, angels at work, co-operating. For what purpose? — to get such a man saved. He is not yet born again, he has not yet received the Holy Spirit. With all, he does not know the Lord Jesus in a personal way. He knows about Him. Peter says so. “You know all about what happened, you know the story of Jesus of Nazareth; but you do not know Him personally.”

Well, what are you going to make of that? That is not my interpretation, that is not my Gospel, that is not my prejudice: that is the clear statement. If anything could be more vivid, tell me what it is! Here is the point. Why, as I put it earlier, all this excitement, all this “paraphernalia”, all these extraordinary things? Why does Peter go up to the housetop and pray at 12 o’clock, and then want his dinner terribly, so badly that he sends downstairs and asks them to get something ready, and Heaven comes in and takes hold of his very hunger to make him to understand, appreciate, heavenly things, taking occasion by this to give this vision? What is all this about? Why should an angel go up there to Caesarea and visit Cornelius and speak to him, and why should it be necessary for him to send men and a soldier all the way from Caesarea down to Joppa — 35 miles — and then for Peter to have to take the long journey back? Why all this, if this man is such a good man and is going to get through all right?

No, the new creation is something much more than religion, than praying, than giving alms, than being charitable. Christ is much more than that; the Holy Spirit is after more than that. You may say, “I do not agree — I believe if you do your duty and you are kind and you recognise God and you go to church you will get through all right”. You take this account and read it again. This is a positive denial of any such thing, and to settle down in such a position is to assume something which is not true. There are many in the position of assumed salvation, and there will be for them a very great undeceiving unless something happens. This is not enough. The Spirit of God takes great pains to get even a Cornelius — as he did also with another devout man, the Ethiopian, who had been up to Jerusalem to worship God. Likewise Saul of Tarsus, a man who was utterly devoted to what he believed to be God’s will, God’s way. The Holy Spirit — Heaven — comes in in mighty power to get these people saved. Salvation is a very big thing, far transcending religion and a good moral character and many kindly activities. Salvation is far more than that.

But, thank God, Cornelius was prepared. Here is something very precious about it all. You may be like that — you may not be one of those who could be classed as an outrageous sinner and criminal and offender, marked by all those things which society calls bad. You may be God-fearing, you may pray, you may be doing many kind things; and yet, like Cornelius, you may still have, somewhere deep down, the feeling that there is something more. “I am after something, I am reaching out for something; I do not know what it is, but I feel I need something more; all my praying and all my doing is only an expression of a longing for something — I want to get somewhere that I have not yet got!” That was Cornelius, and God took account of it and worked to see that he got what he needed and what his heart longed for. When Cornelius heard it, he instantly responded, and in effect said, “This is just what I have been after! I did not know what it was, but this is it! This answers my longing, this answers my praying, this meets my deeply-felt need!” The very story at its end seems to say that. Oh, how full of joy and thankfulness they were! God had been doing something in preparation.

It may be that you who read these lines are prepared for something God has for you — you do not know what it is. Do not be deceived by the fact that you pray and go to church, even that you attend Christian conferences or do kind things. Do not be deceived. Be sure that you are positively born again — that you have received the Holy Spirit into your life, as a living Person, and know that He is there. Do not rest until that is true — otherwise there will be a grievous awakening and disillusionment. Do not assume anything. Demand that you KNOW. The basis of your knowledge is the present, instant indwelling of the Holy Spirit. It may be that some longing of yours, some hunger, some unexplained and inexplicable feeling of need in you is just God’s way of preparing you for what He offers, what He presents, and what He may be saying to you at this very moment. There is something more, and you will find that “something” when you receive the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of the Man in the glory. That Man is God’s satisfaction, and therefore He will be our satisfaction too.

Chapter 6 - God's Standard of Judgment

Reading: Revelation 2:3

Seven is the governing number of this whole book of the Revelation. We have the seven churches, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls, seven angels, seven spirits of God, and so on. We know that seven is the number which speaks of completeness and fullness. God ended His works and rested from all His labours on the seventh day. The seventh is the sign of completeness: the works were complete. So that when we come to seven churches, we at once find ourselves in the presence of something which is being judged as a whole, in completeness — the completeness of the church in itself and the completeness of the church in all time. I am not staying with those details of biblical exposition which are familiar to everybody. This is not an exposition of the book of the Revelation, and so we are not touching on any of the theories which have been propounded, such as whether these seven churches represent seven stages in the dispensation, and so on. That does not concern me at all just now, and I do not think it should concern us so much as it has done, because theories as to times are quite unnecessary here. At any given time you will find conditions such as marked all these churches. You may find them all simultaneously in different parts of the church. In the church scattered over the earth today, different parts may be marked by all these things which are found here in the sevenfold message. So we can dismiss those technicalities and say that what is really being brought into view is that the church as a whole, in itself and for all time, is being interrogated by this Man, and by the standard which He represents as the Man according to God’s heart, whom God has made the horizon of all judgment.

The Lord’s Unalterable Standard

The next thing with which we find ourselves confronted is this. As we come to the sevenfold message to the church, we are brought right to the very heart of God’s purpose. We are compelled to take account of one thing, and that one thing is that the Lord will not accept a lesser standard than His full thought for the church. However we may cringe, however much we may dislike that, however much we may try to get round it, here it is. The Lord will not accept anything less than His full thought concerning His church, and He is going to have it. We shall see, as we go on, that He may not have it, in the first instance or at the beginning, in the whole church, but He will have it somewhere. That is the heart of things.

Many difficulties and questions may arise in this connection. When there is a presentation of God’s full thought concerning His church — when we come to these wonderful revelations of the eternal counsels and purposes as we have them in some of the later letters of Paul, and when they are presented, expounded, explained to us, and the Lord throws light upon them and shows how great, how perfectly astounding and marvellous are His conceptions concerning His church, and what that involves and necessitates — our immediate reaction, and in a sense a very natural one, is, “But only one in a thousand sees it, one in a thousand has any apprehension of it! And as for entering in, going on, coming to expression of it — well, look at the church! Where do you find it?” And because that is true, alternatives have been sought and back-doors have been fled to.

Now, the fact is this — and I bid you to confirm or, if you can do otherwise, repudiate this by the Word. The fact is that, in the Word of God, God has never made provision for anything less. You say, “Well, what is going to happen to all the other people who have not seen it, or who have had it presented and just do not accept it and will not go on? What is going to happen?” The Lord does not give a provisional revelation, that, if they do not — well, it is all right, He will be comparatively satisfied, He will accept the situation simply because He cannot do otherwise, He will make the best of a bad job. There is nothing like that at all. There is plenty to indicate that failure to go on to the fullness involves in very serious loss, very serious consequences; if not in the loss of salvation, at least the loss of the great purpose of salvation. There is plenty there, but nowhere will you find the Lord saying, “Well, we will put this lot of people into a second category, and be quite satisfied with them where they are.” The Lord always keeps His full standard in view, and says, “That is what I am after, and I will never be satisfied unless I have it. Satisfaction for Me is found only in fullness, in completeness.”

That is the real upshot of these messages. While there is so much that is good in the churches, so much commendable, the Lord does not settle down and say, “Well, that is very good, very nice; I will be content with that, I will be satisfied with that.” Men very often have to do that, but God never. There is no provision for a lower standard and no reprieve given to a lesser measure. He holds us to the fullness of His original intention. So He presents the church, not with a second-level challenge but with a first-level challenge. He is judging here — not in a second man of an inferior type: He is still judging in the Man who is complete and perfect before God. That is God’s horizon.

The next thing — perhaps, in the light of some people’s ideas, this needs to be said — is that these churches are composed of Christians. There has been a theory put forth that these are only professing Christians and not real Christians; that these are professing churches, not real churches. Well, I am not accepting that. These are churches with a history, a spiritual history, and the challenge is on the ground of that from which they have fallen, that which they have lost, and that which they have let in. They are Christians. “Thou didst leave thy first love. Remember... whence thou art fallen”. “Thou sufferest the woman Jezebel”. (2:4,5,20). They have a history, a spiritual history. They are not merely professors. It is what they have allowed to happen to them and amongst them. So this is not just an attempt to get people saved. It is an effort to get Christians where they ought to be. That of course is very simple. I am quite sure it hardly needs to be emphasized, but we take it on the way to the objective in view.

Distinctions Made by God Among Christians

And here we come to something which is of course the ground of much controversy, but about which we have to be very bold and take the consequences. This book of the Revelation reveals clearly and unmistakably, distinctions and divisions made by God amongst Christians. God makes distinctions and God makes divisions, and the whole book is full of that fact. These divisions are not the schisms in the church, the divisions in the church, with which we are so unhappily familiar, but God’s divisions, God’s distinctions — yes, God’s separations. There are distinctive companies here, indicated by various titles and designations.

There are “overcomers” and they are distinct from the rest. There is a “firstfruits” company, and you will find that they are distinct from the rest. The very word and title itself would have no meaning if there were not a “second-fruits” — if there were not others. There is the “hundred and forty-four thousand”, a distinctly marked out company, different from the rest. There is the “bride”, and language does not mean anything if that which is meant by the bride comprises all. There are those who are “bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb”. They are not the bride. I could follow that very closely. If the Lord wills, we shall devote our next study to this matter of the bride. But my point at the moment is this, that here in this book there are distinctive companies, there are divisions made by God between His own people — believers — and they are marked out in the main by spiritual measure. Spiritual measure determines their distinctiveness.

Distinction According to Spiritual Measure

What is the meaning of firstfruits, if it does not mean that they are ripened before the harvest, before the rest? You have only to go to the Old Testament for that. The sheaf of the firstfruits was that which ripened before all the rest and was brought in as a token of what was to follow. Ripeness indicates spiritual measure. It does not say that the others will not come to that — do not misunderstand me. It does not mean that others will not follow on and come. But it does mean that here are those who are earlier satisfying God’s standards, who have matured more quickly, who have responded more readily, who are spiritually leading the way. They are not an “elect of the elect”, they are not people who are exclusive. They are representative: yet they are at the same time distinctive, because they have more readily and more quickly come to that place of satisfying God’s heart, and that of course has involved them in particular and peculiar difficulties, adversities, sufferings and conflicts.

But again to our point: there are these, and there are the rest. THESE are not ALL. They are something distinct in themselves. I do not think we can get away from that, if we honestly face this book in a spiritual way. We cannot escape this fact, that God marks out people as distinct according to their spiritual measure, according to how far they satisfy His fullest revealed mind. And those people will come to a particular position, will be invested with a greater measure of glory, will be entrusted with administration. These are all things which follow. That is what the Lord is set upon, and that is what this book clearly reveals. So that these distinctive companies in the first place represent an approximation to the characteristics of the full revelation in the Man in chapter 1: they are like Him, they partake of those characteristics which we have studied; and, secondly, they enter on to the vocation of the Man in the glory: spiritual administration now, and both spiritual and literal administration later.

God’s Concept in Creating Man

So we are brought to this, that the dealings and judgments of God in Christ by the Holy Spirit in the church must be viewed in the light of the full conception and purpose which has been presented. These dealings must be considered in the light of the revealed purpose in fullness. Now inasmuch as it is the new-creation Man who is governing everything personally, and the concept of the new-creation man corporately that is governing all these judgments, we find much light thrown upon things from the first creation, which was a material, temporal, earthly representation of heavenly principles. We mentioned this earlier.

a) God-likeness

What was the concept that governed God in creating man? What is man intended to mean, to BE in his very being? “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”. He is intended to set forth what God is like in His own Being and Person. That is the governing concept of man. The first man failed of it; the last Adam achieves it, reveals it, manifests it. This Man is tested, tried and proved to the very last degree; tested as to obedience, love, faithfulness unto death, even the death of the cross; and He comes up as the Man who wholly satisfies God, in showing what God is like. So that, when you look at this Man, you can say, “Now, that is what God is like.” When you hear this Man speaking, you say, “That is what God is like.” You hear Him giving some of His illustrations and parables, such as that of the Good Samaritan. The priest passed by on the other side, and so did the Levite, and the Lord Jesus is saying, in effect, “God is not like that — that is exactly what God is NOT like!” But then comes the Good Samaritan, as he is called, and he crosses the road and takes in the need and distress of this poor fellow, and delivers him, brings him home and pays for his needs. The Lord Jesus is saying, in effect, “That is what God is like.”

Or take the prodigal, with the elder brother representing the Jewish conception of God. The implication is: that is not what God is like. God is so different. This poor fellow who is worthless, who has no claims whatever, who has forfeited every right — a wastrel — the Father does not just pity him, and say, “Come home, you rascal, I will give you a bed and a corner”; no, he lavishes everything upon him and goes as far as he can possibly go, as though to one who had not failed him, but had completely satisfied him. And the Lord Jesus is saying, in effect, “That is what God is like.” So you look at Him in His Person, in His manner of life, in His teaching, and you have this contrast — what God is like and what God is not like. That is what is making people so miserable, so unhappy, so enraged — they feel what a poor picture they are in the presence of this Man and what He says. They make right deductions when they conclude that He has said this about them, against them. They are right.

Here, then, in the Revelation, He is brought out in all the completeness of the Man made in the image and likeness of God; and that is governing — the whole corporate new man. I want to press this as a very real part of this message, for if we take what is said merely as teaching, interpretation, and so on, it will all be of no profit. We have got to be motivated by this primary consideration: that in the new-creation man, which we are in Christ, the thing that God is looking for, is His own likeness. What matters most is not how much teaching we possess, how much Bible knowledge we have, how much work we do. What matters is: How much is the Lord manifested? It should really engage us continually. This should be the basis of our self-judgment, of a right kind. “That was not Christ, that was not like the Lord, this is not like the Lord.”

“Ministry” is the cause of so much trouble. “My ministry”, getting a place for our ministry, being able to fulfil our ministry. Oh, let it drop. The Lord will test us on this matter. Are we going to hold on to our ministry, our place, what we believe to be our divine calling — hold to it in the strength and tenacity of our own will, our own fleshly conviction that that is what God has called us to? Oh, no! If God has called us to anything, He will hold us into it, and we must let go to Him if there arises a situation in which that is necessary. The Lord will see that the ministry is fulfilled and the position occupied that He wants for us. The thing that is far more than the ministry, and out of which the ministry must come, is that I should be a Christlike man, and that you should be a Christlike man; and we can show Christlikeness in just letting others get into our place in ministry, being very meek about it, not fighting to keep our position. The Lord will look after the rest. “The meek shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:5). That is God’s word. The image of the Lord is the all-governing matter.

b) Spiritual government

Then — “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion.” Now, dominion issues from likeness. We are not talking about offices and appointments. We are talking about spiritual matters: for dominion now is a spiritual matter. That is obvious, of course. Dominion with us is not at present temporal. But dominion is none the less a very pertinent matter. This word in Genesis — “Let them have dominion” — is the earthly, material, temporal representation of the spiritual reality, and the spiritual reality of which it is only a representation is found in Ephesians 6: “principalities and powers”, “world rulers of this darkness”, “hosts of wicked spirits”. And the church is seated together with Christ in the heavenlies, “far above all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is named” (Eph. 2:6; 1:20,21). There is a proposition for you and for me! It is a question of dominion in the spiritual realm, the church’s dominion in the spiritual realm. This man, this new-creation man, is to have it, and we are brought into it in a spiritual way in Christ.

Now, you see, it is just here that our education is so much at stake, so much involved. There are numerous situations which the enemy projects. Why did the Lord let Satan come into that garden? The Lord knew all that was involved. Why did He let him get in there? Just for the very purpose of giving the man the chance to exercise his dominion, because the Lord knows quite well that back of the material is the spiritual, back of the world and flesh is always the devil. You have not conquered when you have only mastered material things. You are only at the beginning of conquest then. It is the spiritual forces behind. Men are — to some limited extent — mastering the material today, but God only knows how they are being defeated by the spiritual lying behind the material.

I am saying that the Lord allows the enemy to precipitate and project all kinds of situations and conditions and difficulties — situations in the home, situations in the business, situations in the church, situations in our personal, private and secret experience. They are devil-projected, satanic in origin, though not always seen to be so. But you calculate what they will do if they triumph, and you will see that there is something sinister about them. And the Lord allows them! What are we going to do about it? Begin to pray and plead with the Lord to take this difficulty away, change this situation? Nothing happens. We try to fight and get on top of it by being optimistic, being hopeful, being cheerful. We do not get very far. We may indeed just get worn out, and still nothing happens. What is the meaning of this? It means that we are in the school of rulers, in training to be made rulers. The whole destiny and vocation of the new man is at stake in these situations. We had better settle it quite soon that we are in this very matter of having dominion, and that this situation is something that has to be dealt with on a spiritual level, from a heavenly position.

But the great effort of the enemy is to get us so involved morally that we have no fighting power left, because he has the right to the position. He is trying to destroy our testimony, destroy our vocation, destroy this very calling to have dominion, by getting us involved in a situation where the Lord cannot come to our rescue. He says: “You have got to get out of that, repudiate that, put that back, before anything will happen. You have become caught in something wrong, and until you break clear of that, you are defeated; I cannot do anything for you.” Some of you may be thinking, “This is a Christianity that is very complex, very difficult!” Need it be stressed that we are not now speaking of our salvation? We are moving in a realm altogether beyond “simple salvation” — although salvation is never a simple thing. This is not a matter of our being saved from hell, having eternal life and going to heaven. This is the great eternal purpose of God, centred in His Son personal and corporate. This is the central conception and idea of God in making man to have dominion. So that in future let us as quickly as we can face whatever situation may be exercising or perplexing us, and say, “Is this something in which I am to exercise my position in Christ, as above this, as over this — to bring this thing under my feet, in Christ as the exalted Man?” For we inherit with Him the dominion that He has taken since God has “made us to sit with him in the heavenly places” (Eph. 2:6).

The judgments, then, and dealings of the Lord with His people are in the light, firstly, of the likeness, and secondly of the dominion. The question for these churches in the Revelation is not whether they are Christians and are going to Heaven. It is the question of how they are reigning in life, how they are exercising spiritual dominion in the spiritual world.

c) Fruitfulness

The next thing about the new-creation man is this: “In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them... and called THEIR name Man” (Gen. 5:1,2). He said to them: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (1:28). So the new-creation man is related to Christ, or is the functioning of Christ, in reproduction after his own kind. This is a test. The idea of stagnation has no place in the things of God. Anything that draws a circle, that is limited to a smaller sphere than that of continuous development, continuous growth, continuous expansion, continuous reproduction, is contrary to the thought of God. Reproduction is a law of the creation, and in the new creation it is that. In the book of the Acts, you see this thing at work. The new-creation man has come in truly — and look at the multiplication and the reproduction after his own kind! This is the calling, and this is the ground of testing and judgment: Are there those, and more of them, in this world, who are in existence as the result of our spiritual travail, as the result of our spiritual life passed on? Or are we just alone, just individuals, trying to be Christians on our own? That is not God’s thought. Reproduction cannot be in that way. The word at the beginning was: “replenish the earth”; and God knows it needs replenishing with children of God after this kind — the kind of this Man.

d) God-blessed and a blessing

Finally, for the present: “And God blessed them” (Gen. 1:28). They were not only to be blessed but to be a blessing. Very simple in terms, but how wonderful. This world does not know what a blessing the church is to it in its midst. It will be a sorry day for the world when the church has gone. Just as truly as Joseph was a blessing in the house of Pharaoh, so the church is a blessing in this world, if the world only knew it. But it must not only be so in that unrecognised way. God forgive us that we are not the blessing in the world and to the world that we ought to be; that is, that the world has a good deal of reason to feel that the church is not worth very much. But we will leave that. It must also be that our presence here is a blessing to others. This is a real test. Are we a blessing? Is the blessing of the Lord resting upon us so that we are made a blessing? I think it is one of the loveliest things that we come across in our Christian fellowship, when we are able to hear someone say, “So-and-so is a blessing to me.” That is how it ought to be: we ought to be a blessing to people. Very often we are a bother to one another! Yes, “God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply”: that is to say, reproduce a blessed people, be a blessing unto multiplication.

God’s Standard of Judgment

These are the things which are governing the judgment of the church at all times right on to the end — likeness to the Lord, spiritual government, reproduction in Christ, growth and a blessing, and you can apply that to these seven churches. “Now then, with all that you have and all you are doing and all your profession, what is the measure of your revelation of what God is like? What is the measure of your absolute dominion over evil forces?” We collapse in so many instances before the evil forces which have got inside. “What is the measure of your increase, your spiritual reproduction?” May that not touch the very point of first love with Ephesus? What a centre Ephesus was as a church at the beginning, radiating blessing to all in Asia! What increase came through Ephesus! May it not be perhaps that Ephesus had become something in itself, turned in upon itself — occupied with itself, its own works, its own profession and reputation? And how is it with you in being a real blessing where you are, to all near and far — a real blessing? It is that to which the Lord is really challenging and with which He is concerned.

So this Man, who is the image, who has the dominion, who shall see His seed, who has brought so many children to birth, who has been such a blessing in this world, says, “I want that it shall be like that with the corporate new man — just like that. That is what you are called unto. That is the meaning of your existence.” Now you do recognise that that is not just Bible exposition. It is a real spiritual challenge to us, it really is. You are going to meet this — we are all going to come up against this. “Was that like the Lord? Was that Christlike?” Very simple; but you see it is an ultimate thing. “Has the enemy got the upper hand there, or have you stood and withstood and kept him from his objective, reigned in life, kept on top, maintained your position?” We are found out. “How much result is there of our spiritual life in reproduction?” It is a challenge. “How much a blessing are we?” Oh, if only we measured up to that last point alone, if every one of us were a blessing in the church where we are, a blessing on this earth, what a difference it would make!

May the Lord truly conform to the image of His Son.

Chapter 7 - The Bride

“And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. 21:2).

“Let us rejoice and be exceeding glad, and let us give the glory unto him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. And it was given unto her that she should array herself in fine linen, bright and pure: for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they that are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:7-9).

“The Spirit and the bride say, Come” (Rev. 22:17).

“Christ also is the head of the church, being himself the saviour of the body... the church is subject to Christ... Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up for it; that he might sanctify it, having cleansed it by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish... we are members of his body. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church” (Eph. 5:23, 25-27, 30-32).

It would be good for us, as we approach this subject, to do a little forgetting: to forget, for the time being, any theories that we may have heard or accepted under the designation of the bride of Christ. There are crystallized theories on this matter. There are those who believe the bride is Israel. There are others who believe that the church is not the bride and the bride is not the church — they are two distinct and different entities, and so on. Will you kindly order them out for the time being — not in order to accept a new theory, but in order to be open for anything that the Lord may have to say at this time. Please give the Lord the benefit of an open heart and mind.

It would also be good for us to try to get away from the symbolism of this book of the Revelation, a very difficult thing to do, because it is a book that is just full of symbols and symbolisms. But let us try to forget the symbols — even the symbol of the bride, in that actual word — and let us seek earnestly to get to the meaning. It is easy to be so occupied with the symbol that we miss the meaning.

Three Main Ministries in the New Testament

To begin with, let me remind you that in the New Testament there are three main phases, or ministries.

There is the phase of what we may call INITIATION; that is, the gathering of the material for the House of God. That is a very prominent phase in the book of the Acts — the reaching out to, and laying hold of, those who are to compose and constitute the church.

Then there is the second phase or ministry of the BUILDING of that material: the building up, to use Paul’s phrase, of the Body of Christ; and that is wrapped up with Paul’s letters — the teaching ministry which follows the gathering. The building up proceeds after the material has been secured and as it is being brought in.

But then there is a third phase, a third ministry. It is that which comes in with the last parts of the New Testament, and mainly through the ministry of John — though not altogether, for Jude was engaged in this, and James to some extent; but mainly in John’s letters, and pre-eminently in the book of the Revelation — the ministry of MEASURING UP, measuring up to all that has been given; a RECALL ministry, where there has been loss, falling away, departure, declension; and a ministry of JUDGMENT — judgment not in the sense of passing judgment only, but judgment in the sense of making clear where things have gone wrong, and warning concerning the delinquent state.

These, then, are the three phases of the ministry of the New Testament, and there is the sovereignty of the Lord marking each one of them.

The Sovereignty of the Lord in Relation to the Ministries

We saw previously the sovereign activities of the Spirit of Jesus in laying hold of, apprehending, the material for the House of God. We saw a wonderful combination of heavenly, angelic forces, and the Holy Spirit, in sovereign activities to secure the material of which the church is made. There is no mistaking the sovereignty at work in that phase of the New Testament.

There is likewise a sovereignty observable and very patent in connection with the second part — that is, the securing, raising up, equipping, endowing of those who are to fulfil the ministry of building up the Body of Christ — personal gifts of the ascended Lord in sovereign action, qualification by the Holy Spirit unto the many-sided ministry by which the church should be brought to full growth.

But the sovereignty is very much in evidence, too, in the third phase. It is evident in the statements at the beginning of the book of the Revelation. “I John,... was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (1:9). And what happened? He says that things that were given to Jesus by the Father, “the revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave him”, were sent, were brought by an angel, by a special messenger, and “signified... unto his servant John” (1:1). If that is not sovereign action, what is? That is Heaven moving, and it is related to this ministry of measuring up, recall, judgment.

Note, moreover, that it was measuring up to the full revelation that God had given. These messages were addressed in the first place to the seven churches in Asia, and it was to the churches in Asia that the fullest revelation through the apostle Paul was given. Ephesus, Laodicea, and the rest, were the churches which were brought into being through this very apostle, who was so sovereignly raised up and equipped for the fullest unveiling of eternal counsels that we have in the Bible. It was concerning that fullness of unveiled divine thought that the book of the Revelation was brought in, sovereignly to recall to that, to judge concerning that; to deal with the Lord’s people in the light, not of some partial truth, but of the whole revelation of God’s mind.

My point is that it was sovereignly done; and God, who is sovereign, does determine the ministry that is to be fulfilled and by whom it is to be fulfilled, and there is a place in the sovereign purposes and activities of God for a ministry that is a recall ministry. This is a ministry of measuring up, and that particularly characterizes the end times, as is clearly seen here.

The Bride Expresses the Fullest Thought of God Concerning His Son

Now, as we said in our previous meditation, there are seen, in the book of the Revelation, distinctive and particular companies who represent something very much more of the Lord than the rest, and of those various companies, or those various titles which we mentioned — overcomers, the hundred and forty-four thousand, first-fruits, man child, and so on — of all these titles, it seems to me that the one that gets nearest to the heart of God is that which is called “the bride”. The bride undoubtedly, from every description and presentation and implication, embodies and expresses the fullest thought of the Father concerning the Son. We could gather a very great deal into that — Old Testament type and figure — as to the Father’s concern for His Son’s bride. You will recall, for instance, the story of Abraham, Isaac and Rebekah. But we cannot stay for details. We just make the statement, which you can verify, that, out of all the titles mentioned, it is the bride who embodies and expresses the fullest thought of the Father for the Son.

That which is signified by the bride is, indeed, the first and the governing idea of the entire Trinity — the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

The Father, for the Son, is governed by this thought supremely — to provide His Son with a bride. What was true in the first creation, humanly, literally, is transcendently true in the new creation, the Heavenly Man. God says that it is not good for Him to be alone. To provide Him with a bride is the Father’s greatest interest in the Son.

The concern of the Son for His bride, the church, is self-evident; we shall see more concerning that presently.

As to the Holy Spirit, that is His very work in this dispensation. We were speaking earlier of this being the dispensation of the Holy Spirit. He has come to secure that bride for the Son, and is pursuing that purpose, and in this sevenfold reiteration, “what the Spirit saith to the churches”, you have implicit His concern to get the church on bridal terms with the Son. The active operations in the book of the Revelation begin with that sevenfold word: “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches.” It is reiterated seven times — “what the Spirit saith”. And the last thing in the book is: “The Spirit and the bride say, Come.” Everything between, so far as the people of God are concerned, is the Spirit’s mighty working to secure this bride for the Son. In that last word, which we shall consider later, is found the great joy of the Spirit at the end. “All is ready for you! The work is done; the object is secured. Come!”

Christ’s Love, and Giving of Himself, For the Church

This object is found in a specific way in the cross of the Lord Jesus. The cross of the Lord Jesus is a very comprehensive thing and has many sides in its value and function. It has to do with sin, sin’s judgment, sin’s remission. It has to do with death and death’s annihilation for the church. It has to do with Satan, the prince of the world, and his casting out. It has to do with redemption, atonement, justification, and all sides of salvation. They are all in the cross. Then the apostle put his finger upon a specific meaning of the cross when he said: “Christ loved the church and gave himself for it.” When Christ went to the cross, while all these other things were being effected and were included, this central thing was being secured. He gave Himself for the church.

This throws us back to some of His own parables. We recall the parable of the treasure in the field, when the whole field was purchased to secure that treasure. Or we think of the parable of the pearl of great price, and the merchant who makes everything that he has subservient to securing that pearl. I once went through the narrow streets of Basrah, on the Persian Gulf, looking into the shops of the pearl merchants, and I saw there, behind glass and bars, some wonderful, marvellous pearls. I was fascinated with them. And from those narrow streets you could look away to the sea, and see the pearl fishers at work in their frail vessels — perilous work, costly work. Then a pearl merchant from Basrah came and travelled with me the rest of the journey to India. He was a solemn man, and you should have seen how he watched over and guarded his box containing the pearls. It was a reinforced box, with two heavy padlocks, and it was never out of his sight — never even out of his hands. He arrived at the other end, and the customs wanted to have a look — but oh, the concern of this man, all the time watching, alert, to see if anybody else was looking. A pearl represented his very life, his subsistence. All his being was concentrated into the pearl — it was everything to him.

And as I saw it and noted it, how I was taken back to this parable. That is what the Lord knew. We shall come back to that presently. A “pearl of great price”: this is a figure of His church, this is a figure of His bride — the church in the terms of a bride. “Great price”: He gave Himself; the cross and all that that cross meant was centred in the pearl, was centred in the bride. “Christ... loved the church, and gave himself up for it.”

Again, we said that this is the primary interest of the Holy Spirit; that, in this dispensation, this is the one thing that the Holy Spirit is after. By every method, by every means, along every line, through every ministry, the end that He has in view is the securing of this bride. Would that all the Lord’s servants would keep that always before them — that the end is not just to get individuals saved, important as that is; the end is not just to have so many Christians in the world, important as that is. The end is a corporate vessel called “the bride”. The Holy Spirit is dominated by that, He is governed by that in all His activities.

We said, too, that the bride is the consummate, the ultimate, full embodiment of the eternal counsels and purposes of God concerning His Son. This reaches right back to the past eternity into those counsels of the Godhead. God determined everything concerning His Son, in His Son, for His Son: everything was for the Son; and at the heart of everything is the bride, the church, His chosen bride, the elect.

The Lord’s Quest for Bridal Characteristics

We come now to this second phase. All the judgments and dealings of the Lord with His people are governed by this object. This is the object of the Lord’s dealings with us — with the church, with the churches, with individuals — and we must view these messages to the churches in the book of the Revelation in the light of the bride. What is it that this Lord, the Bridegroom, this Son of man, is seeking? What is it that He has in His mind in these messages to the churches? He is after bridal characteristics. So He sits and summarises. There are many things which He commends. These are features of the bride. “I know thy works” — all right, quite good; “thy labours” — all right; “thy patience”, yes, very good; “thy conscientiousness” — “thou didst try them that call themselves apostles, and they are not” — “you have a sense of right and wrong, conscientiousness” — yes, very good, the bride must certainly be like that; “you are honest, you will not tolerate false apostles and false teachers” — yes, very good, the bride will certainly be like that; “thou holdest fast my name” — that is all right, that is good; thou “didst not deny my faith” — yes, it must be like that, people who comprise this company must certainly be like that. Thy charity, thy service, thy faith, and still more works, more than at the beginning — all right, all good.

Yes, these are features of the bride, but there is a longer list of things that the bride must not express — features which are not bridal features and which must go. Lost first love — that will not do; the bride must be characterized at the end by that which was at the beginning, by an utterness and freshness of devotion to the Lord Himself. “Thou hast there the doctrine of Balaam, and those that teach the doctrine of the Nicolaitans.” We may not understand what that was altogether. I do not pretend to be able to tell you, but I think I can tell you exactly what it MEANS. In both these cases, the doctrine of Balaam and of the Nicolaitans, it was a teaching which had come in, purporting to be something superior to the Scriptures, to what God had said. What had God said to Israel, and what had God made Balaam say about Israel? But then, for the gain of unrighteousness, Balaam went right back on his words and brought in a teaching to Israel which in effect said, “Look here, you can do this, you are allowed to do that: God will not take any notice of it, God will not bring you into judgment for that.” And the other teaching had the same effect — a life and a practice which had the Word of God against it, being excused on some theory introduced.

This is not strange to our own day. There are many people who are superior to the Scripture. There is the Scripture plain and clear on certain things, and yet they are above the Scripture. They even claim that the Lord has shown them that a certain course is right, when the Scripture is as glaringly against it as anything could be. If it were necessary, I could begin to take a whole handful of scriptures and show how they are violated and a theory is gathered around them which excuses from the precision of God’s mind as revealed in His own Word. Satan used Scripture to try to seduce the Lord Jesus into complicity with himself — spiritual fornication. “It is written, He shall his angels charge concerning thee...” (Matt. 4:6). But the Lord Jesus saw through his suggestion, saw what it would lead to, what it implied, saw that the result of following Satan’s course would be something contrary to the revealed mind of God. It is easy to use Scripture to support us in a way that we would like to go.

Now the Word of God gets down to motives, and here were two teachings which resulted in a practice and a life which was contrary to, and claimed to be superior to, the Word of God — fornication, things sacrificed to idols, and so on. Yet there is another teaching that undercuts even that, and results in another sin, well-known in those early times, that it does not matter how you behave: you are saved and you will never be lost; rest upon the eternal security of the believer and behave as you like — an iniquitous thing. It was that kind of thing the Lord was up against. It may be in very gross forms and it may be in very simple forms, but the point is — this will not do for the bride. The bride must be transparent, pure in motive, doing nothing to gratify personal ends, having no arguments to support personal interests.

“Thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.” Profession without reality. That will not do for the bride, by any means. “Thou art neither cold nor hot”. Indefiniteness, an absence of real character; not clearly defined and unmistakable as to your life and position, so that everybody knows exactly where you are and what you are, and there is no mistaking it. The bride must be like that.

Perhaps enough has been said to indicate that what is in view here, in these messages to the churches and to us, is the quest for bridal conditions, summed up in those words: “Christ... loved the church, and gave himself up for it; that he might sanctify it, having cleansed it by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing.” That is the heart of chapters 2 and 3 of the book of the Revelation; that is the bride. The Son’s satisfaction, the Father’s satisfaction, and the answer to all the Holy Spirit’s activities, is found in a people after this kind.

The Calling of the Whole Church

We must dismiss another thing: the idea that the bride is a select company, chosen and appointed to be like this. We must make no such distinction and discrimination between the church given as a whole and the bride. The whole church is called to this — that is the revelation of the New Testament; not only some, but the whole church. Whether the whole church will arrive, or arrive at the same time, is an open question, but we are all called to it, every one. This is incumbent upon us all, not merely upon some called “overcomers”, a “bride”, “firstfruits”, and so on. This is the church in view. There may be those who move ahead of others, who go on more rapidly than others, who satisfy the Lord more quickly than others; the others may lag behind and come on afterwards; but whether all attain unto the same glory or not, this is what we are all called to. None of us is excused by any provision made by the Lord. The Lord has not got pigeon-holes already fixed, saying, “We put first-class Christians in there and second-class Christians in there, and provide for them accordingly.” He has only one pigeon-hole in view. If you do not come into it He has not provided a place for you anywhere else, and He has told you that you will lose very much. It is a very serious thing not to answer to Him in the primary way.

The Bride, the Wife of the Lamb

“The bride, the Lamb’s wife.” Do not ask the mechanical question, Who will be in the bridal party? Who will comprise the bride? There again you are mentally dividing things up. I can tell you at once who will be the bride. Not a certain number of people who are called to be the bride, as different from others, but those who come to the bridal position spiritually. They will be the bride, and that is open to everyone. The bride is not a technical term belonging to a certain class, order and section of Christians. It is a spiritual term belonging to a condition, a spiritual state.

“The bride, the Lamb’s wife”, is the term here. “The Lamb’s wife” — what does that mean? The Lamb was one who suffered in meekness. “As a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and as a sheep that before her shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth” (Isa. 53:7). The Lamb went that way: the bride will know the fellowship of His sufferings, and must be of the same spirit of meekness. No standing for her own rights, upon her own dignity, asserting her own interests, but letting go to the Lord, in self-emptying and meekness. That is the Lamb, and that is the bride, the Lamb’s wife, taking her character from Him.

The Lamb in the Midst of the Throne

Ah, but there is the other side. There is a Lamb in the midst of the throne. There is the wrath of the Lamb — the Lamb shall make war. The mighty “beast” rears himself — what a terrific force is represented by the “beast” here. He is let loose in all his ferocity and malignity and evil and mighty power. And then the Lamb makes war and smashes the beast, destroys him. The LAMB does it. There is a mighty power bound up in this weakness. Oh, we have not yet learned the strength of weakness, the strength of emptiness, which means that there is nothing in ourselves but everything in the Lord. When the Lord gets people there, the enemy is afraid; something is going to happen. We can never overcome the enemy while we are standing up for our own rights, while we are in any way defending our own interests, looking after our own name, being something or trying to be something or hold on to something. The enemy laughs at us, breaks us. When we know that meekness of the Lamb, the meekness of Jesus Christ, then the enemy’s power is going to be weakened and destroyed. These are principles in the book.

The wife of the Lamb is going to be with Him in His throne. Let us dismiss the symbolism and grasp the principle and the spiritual meaning. It is absolute ascendency in Heaven over all the forces of the earth and hell, vested in the Lamb, and conferred upon His bride, the Lamb’s wife. It is the mighty power of a yielded life, the mighty power of weakness of the right kind — that is, of dependence, conscious dependence upon the Lord.

The Pearl of Great Price

In conclusion, I want to come back for a few moments to the matter of the pearl. It is a remarkable thing, the place that the pearl has in the New Testament. If you look in the Old Testament, you will not find it anywhere. When precious stones are mentioned in the Old Testament, the pearl is never included. It was something upon which the Jews set no special value. They had great ideas of the sapphire and the beryl and the onyx and all the other precious stones, but the pearl they despised. It was therefore almost a shock to them when the Lord Jesus began to speak about the merchant man and a precious pearl. It was an entirely new idea, investing the pearl with a value and preciousness which was strange to them, new to them. In the New Testament the pearl has a significant place. Right at the end, we find that the very gates of the city are pearls. We know the pearl is formed through suffering — therein lies its preciousness — and the suffering leads to beauty and glory.

The bride is to know “the fellowship of His sufferings”. “If we suffer, we shall also reign with him” (2 Tim. 2:12, AV). There is an “if” there, a governing “if”. It does not say, “If we are saved, we shall reign”, “If we become believers in the Lord Jesus, we shall reign.” It does not say that in the Scriptures. It says: “If” (and only “if”) “we suffer, we shall reign with him.” It is a very constituent of the bride that she shares His sufferings, pours out her very life-blood — it may be in a spiritual way, it may sometimes be in a literal way — for her Lord. Her life goes for Him as His life went for her. There is such a moving together that one life is given for the other, and vice versa. That is the bride.

Now are you, apart from all the words and ideas, seeing God’s point? Why do we gather for “conferences”? If you were to come here between conferences, you would find that the threefold ministry of the New Testament was going on: the seeking of the material, the bringing of souls to be material for the House of God; the building-up ministry; and this ministry of bringing into view the full thought of God, God’s requirements as to the utter revelation of His mind. It is this last that is the object of these conferences. These are not “material-gathering” meetings, evangelistic meetings, much as we are concerned for the unsaved, very truly so; and these are not just “building-up” meetings, for teaching and instruction — though they are that. But they are not JUST that. The crown of the ministry is to keep before the Lord’s people the fullness of His intention in the church; to measure up, to call back, to make adjustment, to judge things; and to satisfy our Lord’s heart in the ultimate, consummate sense of His desire, as expressed in the bride.

It will involve in sufferings, in the wrath of the enemy. It will mean that we are not let off with our flaws and failures. The Lord comes again and says, “There are many good things, but I am not accepting anything less than My standard.” He must do that — we are involved in that. But oh, it is a great destiny, the destiny of the bride — no less than His throne, nothing short of His throne: to be with Him in the administering of His great universal kingdom through the ages of the ages. May the Lord bring His call and challenge to our hearts.

Chapter 8 - The Man Who is Alive

Reading: Revelation 4,5.

When we commenced this series of studies with the first chapter of the book of the Revelation, we said that the book of Genesis and the book of the Revelation bound the whole history of this world: one the beginning, the other the ending. The very first phase of that history is governed by man and the tree of life. The book of the Revelation opens not with that man, but with the MAN — the new creation Man — and brings us to the tree of life. These two things underlie the whole of the history from the beginning to the end, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation — man and the tree of life. In other words, the overruling factor throughout the whole of history is this matter of life in a man, or life in MAN. That is the great issue. Around that, in relation to that, concerning that, everything goes on.

The Dominant Factor of Life

Here, in this book of the Revelation, you can see how this is prominent and dominant. In the first chapter, we have seen the presentation of the Man living, the living Man, the Man of the new creation, the Son of Man, as He is there called, who announces concerning Himself: “I am... the Living one; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore.” That governs all that will follow.

We come to chapter 4, and here the great factor, nearest to the throne, the very centre and heart of the universe, is that which is symbolized in the four cherubim, or “living ones”. (“Beasts”, in the Authorised Version, and “creatures”, in the Revised Version, are misleading. It is simply “living ones”, or “living things”.) Here, right at the heart of things, next to the throne, is a symbolic embodiment of LIFE, and the ascendant feature of that fourfold symbolism is MAN. We see elsewhere in the Scriptures how, with the cherubim, the man feature dominates the whole.

Passing into chapter 5, we find the creation brought into view in this symbolic representation. The whole creation — the lion, the ox, the eagle, the man — creation fourfold is represented there, in a LIVING state. Here it is the whole question of redemption, the redemption of the creation. You will notice that it is again summed up in the matter of LIFE: the whole creation redeemed unto life, found now through redemption in a state of life, in virtue of the work of the Lamb slain.

And later, as the book begins to come to its end and to sum things up, we are introduced to the tree of life, with its universal benefit; and then the “river of water of life, bright as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb” (22:1), and everything living where the river of life comes. And the last glorious sound and voice in the book of the Revelation is: “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come... And he that is athirst, let him come: he that will, let him take the water of life freely” (22:17).

So we see: the first thing in Genesis — life; the last thing in Revelation — life. That is a very brief and imperfect summary, in order to indicate how dominating is this matter of life.

“I am He that Liveth”

Let us for a minute go back to the beginning of this book of the Revelation — because it is the summation of history from beginning to end — and look at the language used here by the Son of man. “I am... he that liveth”, “the Living one” (Rev. 1:17,19). That is a discriminating statement. It quite obviously suggests that He is unique. If I were to say to you, “I am alive!”, you would reply, “And so am I! You are not so very different from me!” Ah, but, you see, when the Lord Jesus here makes this announcement, no one can say in the same way, “I am alive.” As the beginning, as the first and the last, as the firstborn of the dead, as the representation of God’s thought, He stands alone. “I am he that liveth”. He is evidently distinguished by a life not elsewhere possessed. “In him was life”, says the same writer (John 1:4). “I am he that liveth.” How much is contained in that word “liveth”! If you want to see the content of that word as used by John — what this life means, what its potency is, its tremendous effectiveness, its rich potentialities — you should go right through the book of the Revelation. This life gets right to the very throne of the universe and is there in the place of government.

“I am he that liveth; ...I became dead.” What is the significance of that? Oh, wonder! — it is this. “When I accepted, yielded to, went into death — when I ‘became dead’ — I did so in order that I might take on, as a wrestler, a boxer, a fighter takes on an opponent, the full force of death, and enter into a mighty conflict with death. It was not just that I passively died, that I was crucified here, but I deliberately BECAME DEAD.” In the other words of John: “No one taketh it away from me, but I lay it down of myself... This commandment received I from my Father” (John 10:18). “I laid down My life. Deliberately, consciously, knowing exactly what I was doing, with full intelligence and meaning, I became dead, in order to take up this mighty, terrible enemy, to take him on and to rend him, to break his power and subject him entirely to Myself.”

“I became dead, and behold, I am alive unto the ages of the ages.” This is a life which will never see death again; this is a life which has no death ending; this is a life which will never, never again come under the power of death. “I am alive unto the ages of the ages, and I have the keys” (the symbols of authority) “of death and of Hades.”

“The Firstborn Among Many Brethren”

Well, if that were all, that would be something — that would be a great deal for us: for all that is truly for us, on our behalf — not on His own behalf, but on ours — and all that is gathered into Him for us to possess through faith. But then we come to the next phase, a further phase, of this matter. For He as the new creation Man is not alone. He is “the firstborn from the dead” (Col. 1:18), “the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom. 8:29). He is the Head of a Body, and so now what has been true in His case has to be made true — not theoretically and doctrinally, but actually true — in the whole of this new creation man, collectively and corporately. That is what lies behind these messages to the seven churches. In effect it amounts to this: “Through faith in Me, through faith in the meaning of My death and resurrection, you become possessors of My life — of that very life which in Me has overcome death. I gave you that life, eternal life, and you, possessing that life, have been subjected, like Me, to the ordeal of testing, the testing out of that life as to its quality, its potency. What has happened to you? What has happened to the testimony of that life in you?”

Well, we find that in the majority of the churches, as representing the whole history of the church, the greater part has not lost its life, but has allowed its life, in differing measures, to succumb to the power, the onslaught of death. It has not been proved, through the faith and the attitude and the stand taken, to be what it is. The testimony of Jesus IS this, but the testimony, in terms of life absolutely, unreservedly triumphant over death, has been in measure lost. For various reasons, on differing grounds, the life has not been made to manifest itself in its mighty qualities of holiness and purity and in its tremendous power and energy.

The risen Christ is saying: “You have been put to the test in the presence of death, as I was.” Not, of course, in the sense of redemption, atonement; that does not apply to us. There were other aspects of the meaning of the cross, but its innermost meaning was this, that He met the full force and range of spiritual death in this universe and destroyed it, in Himself — a Man for man. “Now”, He says, “I pass on that life to you, and with it I pass on the testimony, My testimony — ‘the testimony of Jesus’. You are in this world, placed in this world, not guarded, kept, from the assaults of spiritual death, but subjected to it in numerous, almost countless, forms and ways. This force of death is allowed still to remain and to assail you — whether openly or secretly, manifestly or hiddenly. In every conceivable way, and many inconceivable ways, this one thing is at work, this power of death, and you are there to prove that I became dead and am alive for evermore, that I destroyed death and am henceforth alive in the power of an indissoluble, eternally deathless, life.”

The Certainty of the Ultimate Triumph of Life

As we know, the churches, and the church which they represented, largely failed. But then suddenly we leave the failure of earth conditions, all that is going on down here, and the voice calls us up higher. “Come up hither, and I will show thee...”, and in the Spirit we are caught right away from the earth. We see a throne; and, immediately encircling the throne, in touch with the throne, we find these living ones — a representation in the presence of God of life absolutely regnant, triumphant; life reigning. “throne” is the great word here — a throne, and thrones — and that which pre-eminently characterizes them is life. The throne is exercising its great authority and dominion in terms of life, because there is a Lamb there who has abolished death and is alive for evermore.

Because God has that testimony right there in the throne, in His very presence, there is going to be an ultimate triumph, an ultimate glorious triumph. The churches may fail in part, the individuals that make up the churches or the church may lose their testimony, may stumble along the way, may go down before death again and again, but the end of the story is a tree of life and a river of water of life. It is life absolutely triumphant at the end, because it is secured in Him who is the beginning.

Eternal Life the Occasion of Satanic Opposition

What is the value of this? To begin with, it says to us that this life, this eternal life that we have received, is the very occasion of all that we experience of satanic opposition. For it is the saints, it is believers, who know so much more of this than anyone else. All that we are allowed to undergo of opposition, of suffering, of knowing spiritual death — what is the explanation of it all? Physical death, of course, is universal; but this spiritual hostility in terms of death, to kill you, to kill your testimony, to destroy your note of triumph, to do anything that covers, hides, beclouds or eclipses this life — the very life itself is the occasion of it.

Do understand that, if you had not got the life, the enemy would not be after you as he is. Our possessing the life is the continuation of the testimony of Jesus that He has conquered death, and it is that testimony that the enemy is after. We compose the church, and it is the church which is His Body, which is the vessel of the testimony of Jesus — and the testimony of Jesus is that He became dead and is alive for evermore, and all that that means — it is the church which is the object of terrible hatred, animosity, vindictiveness, on the part of the enemy, to destroy that testimony of Jesus. This is no new truth to many, but may the Lord bring it home to us both as a challenge and as an explanation. It is not that the enemy does not like you or me. It is that life — the regnancy of that life, and the testimony of its mighty victory — that he is after. It is the life which is the occasion of all the trouble, the explanation of all our strange experiences.

But then, blessed be God, the message here is also that, though we may fail many times and grievously, our testimony may for a time become eclipsed, we may know the overflowing of death in spirit or in other ways, the end is a picture of complete deliverance from death, the end is the full triumph of life. And that is not something said as of a future thing. Thank God, many have enough proof of this in their spiritual history. There are many who know that they have more than once seemed to “touch bottom”. Again and again, in our spiritual history, we have got down so low that it seemed no recovery was possible. We have just come to despair, come to the place of giving it all up: it seems so impossible and hopeless; we are such a failure. But the Lord has given us an experience of life again and again. We have come up, have we not? We have just been amazed that it was ever possible that we should have come up again, but we have. It was not that we struggled out of the mire, it was not that by some tremendous effort of ours we got ourselves clear. No, no effort was possible, but we had the life, and although for the time being we seemed to be crushed, almost buried, and we did not feel that we had any divine life at all, nevertheless the Lord has borne with us and has done this very thing.

Oh, yes, we are responsible very often. If we had been more watchful, if we had stood our ground, if we had laid hold of the Lord more continually, very often it need not have been. But there are experiences where, in spite of ourselves, we seem to be encompassed and overwhelmed by death. In spite of all our laying hold of the Lord, we have gone into an experience of terrible darkness. Everything seems to have gone. And then, apart from ourselves — save that, in some weak, very weak way, we have still hoped in the Lord, still looked to the Lord, still feebly trusted the Lord — the Lord has sovereignly come in and we have been raised up again. And as we look back upon it (apart from those times when it was due to some sin on our part), we look back upon many experiences where we cannot say definitely that it was because of this or that — it just happened, it came on us, we found ourselves in an awful conflict with death — and we have to say: Evidently the Lord was allowing us to know death in order that we might know life again, that this thing should not be something we talk about, a theory of ours, a teaching, but that it should become really living in us, that we should be the living embodiment of the truth.

The Embodiment of Life in a Man

This brings us to the very point that we are trying to stress all through: that this testimony has got to be IN man, it has got to be THE MAN HIMSELF — not merely something to teach. As truly as it was in His case, the Son of man, so it has to be made in our case, as in the Son of man. This matter of life has got to be expressed in man-terms, it has to be a man-way of expression and manifestation. Life is assailed; yet marvellously, and often strangely beyond our understanding and comprehension, causing us to be wonders to ourselves, resurrection has taken place. It will be like that to the end. Many people have the idea that if they have eternal life they are going to have a glorious time. It is all going to be so wonderful — life, wonderful life, life more abundant — they are going to be on top always. No, you are not! The very fact that you have that life will mean that it will be tested to the utmost, in order that it may be proved in people, in human beings, that there is One who has conquered death and all that death means.

And it does not stay there. In the beginning, when man sinned and the sentence of death was passed upon him through his sin — “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”, and he did die, for death is severance of relationship with God — then the creation was placed under the curse because of the man. But here you have the Man — the new Man, the new-creation Man — perfected, established; and then the whole creation is seen to come into redemption of life, as Paul says in Romans 8. But before the creation can come into its life, the sons of life have got to be manifested, and this life has got to be made manifest in them as triumphant over death.

When you come into the realm of resurrection life, of divine fullness, the river flows and flows and flows. We are not just containers given a supply for the day — we are channels. It begins somewhere else high up in the Man in the glory, and comes flowing down as a river, and it will go on and on. This is life! The testimony of Jesus is the testimony of life. When we really touch the Lord Jesus, we touch life, and if He is present in His Body, the church, in even a small representation, there ought to be a testimony of life. It is not a matter of so much light and truth, but of life, growing life.

The rest of the book of the Revelation, from chapter 6 onwards, deals with all that stands in the way of life. The church having been brought to account on the question of this testimony of life in Christ, the Lord then takes up the judgment of this world, as to that which gives ground for death, and deals with it and progressively passes it out, until it is all judged and put away and a new creation in life is established.

Now, if you have lost heart, take heart! If you have come near to giving up, do not give up yet. HE is not dead yet! Your Lord has gone up, and there is still a testimony up there governing. The throne, that throne, governs, and the end is going to be life. Let us stand for it — you stand for it! Do not accept death. The enemy is all the time wanting us to accept death, he is holding it out to us in one form or another and wanting us to take it, whereas the Word says, “Take life!”, “Lay hold on life!”

The Lord help us, so that He may have in us an unbroken testimony right to the end.

Chapter 9 - The Man Child

Reading: Revelation 12:1-12.

Sonship in Representative Fullness

Here we have, I believe, the whole matter of sonship gathered into representative fullness. This son, this man child, is sonship in representative fullness: that in which all the principles and elements of Christ have been brought to utterness.

The conception of Christ takes place in the believer by the revelation of Christ in the heart. Paul said: “It was the good pleasure of God... to reveal his Son in me” (Gal. 1:15,16). Again he said: “God... shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). The man child — sonship — is conceived by the revelation within of Jesus Christ. Something takes place in us, the beginning of something new and wonderful, when we are able to say, in these or other words, “By an act of the Holy Spirit, a conceiving act of the Holy Spirit, God has revealed His Son in me: in my heart I have seen the Lord Jesus.” The principle of Christ is that He was “conceived of the Holy Ghost” (Matt. 1:20), and that is true in the case of every believer. The conception of Christ in our hearts is by the Holy Ghost, and the method is the revelation of Christ. We have to date everything, all this wonderful new beginning and prospect, to the time when we could say, “I have seen the Lord Jesus”, which marked the conception of sonship.

Sonship Not Possible to the Flesh

But again, the principle of conception is that which we find stressed throughout the Scriptures, Old and New: namely, that it is something which is not possible to the flesh, not even to the religious flesh. It is not possible to the church. You know the Old Testament instances in which this very principle is revealed. Isaac is impossible to the flesh, even to the flesh of a separated and consecrated Abraham, a man who is walking with God. He cannot of himself, by the will of the flesh, produce sonship. This is of God, wholly, utterly of God. The Isaac man child, with all its tremendous significance, is something that the religious flesh cannot produce. Samuel is another case. How impossible Samuel was without a divine intervention, a real act of God. Again and again we find the situation under the sovereignty of God related to the bringing forth of something to serve God’s purpose in a very particular and special way.

This is an abiding principle brought out spiritually in the New Testament. It is something which cannot be unless the Lord does it. Sonship is an impossible thing apart from God. This that is to come forth as the full expression of God’s mind concerning His Son is beyond us. It is outside of any ability of our will or mind — it is of the Lord. Christ said: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). Here, in the “man child”, this principle is brought to utterness: “...who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). There is a good deal of mixture in Christians. There is much of being Christians by our decisions and willings and efforts and activities. Many people are in a false position as to the beginning of their Christian life. It is not a thing utterly of God. It is something they have done and decided upon. Many who are children of God are mixing things up, mixing their own strength and effort with what is of the Lord; and, in so far as it is like that, it is a contradiction of divine principle and cannot come to this ultimate full expression.

The principles of Christ are brought to utterness in the man child. Let there be no mistake about what it is that we have in view. It is not just being Christians. It is the principles of Christ brought to utterness. That is what is here set before us.

The Full Formation of Christ

Paul said to the Galatians, and through them to us: “My little children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you...” (Gal. 4:19). The conception has taken place, there is something there, but there has to be a full formation of Christ within. Paul says, “I am in distress, in agony, in great pain, till Christ be fully formed in you.” The “man child” is the full formation of Christ in the church.

And the formation, as we know so well, is in the first place by means of a ministry — a ministry which God provides to that end. If God’s thought is full conformity to the image of His Son, the full formation of Christ or the full expression of Christ, He will provide a ministry sovereignly for that purpose. So we have in the New Testament not just ministry for the salvation of souls and for the care of spiritual babes — it is there — but the importance of the New Testament bears down upon this other thing: the full formation of Christ. The real weight of the New Testament has to do with full formation, and God has marvellously provided ministry for that purpose.

The formation, too, is by means of discipline. By far the greater amount of the discipline (what the Word calls “chastening”, literally “child training”) in the life of a true, earnest believer, has to do with this full formation. There are phases of discipline concerned with our wrongdoing, our sins, our errors, where the Lord has to correct and has to chasten, but let it be understood that by far the greater amount of the chastening or the discipline of the people of God has to do with the full formation of Christ.

The Travail

After the conception and the formation, we come to the travail. To begin with, the travail starts, not with ourselves, but with the Holy Spirit Himself. It is the Spirit of God who is in the first place travailing to this end for the full formation of Christ. You have only to read the letter to the Galatians to recognise that. See the place of the Holy Spirit. We must understand that this travail in the apostle Paul is not Paul’s working of himself up to a state of trouble and anguish, but something in him by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit takes up this matter of travail, and wherever He expresses Himself He will cause this sense of pain concerning spiritual life. When you and I have a bad time over our spiritual life, it is a mark of the Holy Spirit’s work. It is indeed a sign of His working when we have a bad time over other people’s spiritual life — provided we are having a bad time about our own as well! You understand what I mean. There is the possibility of always being troubled about other people’s spiritual life, and not looking after our own; but, provided we know what it is to have the work of the Spirit in us, it is a mark of the Spirit’s moving in us that we are deeply pained about spiritual conditions in the Lord’s people. The travail begins with Him.

Women, in the Bible, are types of spiritual principles, and Hannah, being a woman in the Bible, represents a spiritual principle. It was Hannah who, in the presence of God, in the House of the Lord, was found breaking her heart over this matter of the man child, in travail for a man child. Hannah, in type, indicates that a principle by which God is going to reach His end, His full expression, is the travail of our spirits brought about by the Holy Spirit.

Travail at the End-time

Now, this picture of the woman in travail, in Revelation 12, belongs to the end-time. There is no doubt about that, because Satan here is still in the heavenlies, where Paul showed him to be in his letter to the Ephesians. John has outlived Paul by thirty years, so that, sixty years after the ascension of Christ, Satan is still in the heavenlies, operating and making war. John is being shown the things that shall come to pass afterwards, so that this travail belongs to the end-time. It is the church in suffering in order to produce something.

Do not let us be led astray, do not let us be deceived and become mistaken, if the Lord should for a time do a work of what is called “revival” and many saints are gathered in, and there seems to be some tremendous thing going on; do not let us be deceived. That is one aspect of end-time need, that there shall be an ingathering, but — let there be no mistake about it — the actual end-time is going to be marked by suffering on the part of the church. How that will come about I do not propose to discuss now. The possibilities for the church, with the irresistible spread of one great power over the earth, are pretty clear. It will not be put back, it will go on; it is anti-God, anti-Christ, and wherever it holds sway it will begin to limit the activities of the Lord’s people, and presently it will break out. But whether that be it or not, there is coming, and it may be in our lifetime, a time of real suffering to Christianity, and out of that suffering there will come that which goes right out to the Lord. Many will fall away, many will give up, many will drop out of the race, paralysed by the situation, but there will be those who see that the only thing is utterness for the Lord — to go right on.

Is not that the question which confronts us, in a small way, a particular and personal way, in every bit of suffering? Something comes upon us — the Devil makes an onslaught — and there are alternatives for us. One is to sit down in hopelessness and give it up, say that you cannot go on, to turn with bitterness against the Lord, to become full of questions and almost cynical. The other alternative is to say: “There is nothing for it but just to go on!” We are all brought to that situation in simple ways. “Am I going to succumb, to yield to despair, to give up? Or am I going right on, and all the more because of this activity of the enemy?” The Spirit of God would bring us to that. You notice that that is the thing upon which Paul put his finger in his word to the Galatians. Because of certain things, they had stopped in the race; they were Christians, but they had stopped, come to a standstill. “O foolish Galatians, who did bewitch you?” (3:1). “I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you” (4:19). “You have to go on. The only thing for you is to go on; not to stop, to give up, but to go on.”

The Birth of the Man Child a Crisis

And it is those who go on who reach that which is here represented by the man child — full sonship. But it is the product of suffering, the effect of suffering. It is going to be made corporate at the end, and — there is no doubt about it — the birth of the man child is the crisis. Thank God, it is going to be a definite crisis, an act. It is going to be a rapture. The word here is quite clear. It is not a word that has been coined to express some theory. “Caught up” to the throne is just the word “raptured”, and it is used in the New Testament in other connections. When we read that Philip the evangelist was “caught away” by the Spirit and found at Azotus (Acts 8:39,40) the same word is used; he was raptured, he was caught away. When Paul said: “I know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not; or whether out of the body, I know not; God knoweth), such a one caught up even to the third heaven” (2 Cor. 12:2), it is the same word — raptured.

And here this man child is caught up, raptured. It is an act. Philip was raptured in an act, not over a lifetime; it was something sudden, quick, precise. And so this man child is caught up to God and to His throne. It is the consummation of a work of the Holy Spirit of bringing children of God to a place of full and utter expression of spiritual principles, the principles of Christ. A principle is not an outward form, but an underlying law, and there are these underlying laws of Christ which are going to be made utter in us. Christ is heavenly: that is a law. It will have its utmost expression in the man child — born out from Heaven and at last caught up to God and to the throne. It is the principle made perfect.

The Wrath of Satan Against the Man Child

“To rule all the nations with a rod of iron” (Rev. 12:5). That word was spoken also in promise to the overcomers of the church at Thyatira (Rev. 2:27). If this is God’s thought and intention, what may we expect? Well, there is a great red dragon not far away, whose one concentrated interest is in this man child. The woman, with the rest of her seed, the whole of the church, will come second. They will be a secondary, though by no means unimportant, interest and concern. But the primary concern of the great adversary — here called the “great red dragon”, later called Satan, the Devil, “the deceiver of the whole inhabited earth”, “the accuser of the brethren” (12:9,10) — the dominant object of his hatred is this expression of Christ in fullness, in utterness. He is against that; he is out to devour this “child”. His hatred and malice are concentrated in a determination if possible to destroy those who are seeking to go right on with the Lord, and those who are seeking to fulfil any ministry in that connection, to destroy them, to swallow them up and put them out altogether, to make it impossible for them to come to their divinely intended place and destiny.

Just look for a moment at this in the Bible — the wrath of Satan against the man child or against sonship in full expression. The book of Exodus is just this. Exodus is sonship and victory over the world. The very first verse strikes this note: “Now these are the names of the sons of Israel” — sons of a prince with God! Here is sonship right in the first verse of the book. When you come to verse 16 of that first chapter, you find Pharaoh issuing his order for the destruction of all male children, and the word is: “If it be a son, then ye shall kill him.” How much of spiritual history lies behind that! We see Herod coming in, centuries later, and killing all the male children to get one particular Son (Matt. 2:16). And again, in chapter 4 of Exodus, we read: “Israel is my son, my firstborn: and I have said... Let my son go” (vv. 22,23). It is sonship, and the exodus, the emergence of Israel, is sonship triumphing over the world and its principles. There is much more in the Old Testament concerning the wrath of the enemy against the man child — against sonship in fullness.

Satan Cast Down

So there will be a climax. God will get what He is after; it will be found in the throne — it will be established in its position for its glorious purpose and function. And it is quite obvious that when that man child, that full expression, is found in the throne, Satan is put out of his heavenly position. He and his angels were cast down to the earth (Rev. 12:9). They have only been there until the right and proper instrument of the heavenlies has come to its place. There is no room in the heavenlies for the man child and for Satan together. One or the other has to go. When the Lord finds among His children those who satisfy Him in the matter of a full expression of these divine principles of sonship, the ground of Satan’s power in the heavenlies is undercut, and he is cast down. What a time that is, according to all that is said here! “Rejoice, O heavens...” (verse 12). This is indeed the climax of the ages. It is an immense thing, and therefore it involves with us very great matters in spiritual experience.

I close with something that I want you to take particular note of. We are not occupied with a special object called “the man child”, and we must not be. We are occupied with Christ. But we must recognise that there is a fullness of Christ to be reached which carries with it very, very big issues indeed. There are tremendous issues bound up with this chapter that we have read — divine interests, eternal issues, factors of supreme account. It is the matter of government in the heavenlies. It is no small thing to be caught up to God and His throne; no small thing for Satan and his angels to be deposed. That is bound up with a “man child” — a company of which it will be said: “And THEY overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb, and because of the word of their testimony; and they loved not their life even unto death” (vs. 11): their soul-life — a big thing. But do not go around talking about the “man child”. This is only a representation of Christ in fullness. Talk about Christ. It is not the representation that we are after — it is Christ in fullness we are after: so let us keep our eyes on Him. Let us allow a message like this to move us, not towards some THING, under whatever designation, but towards Christ — towards a position of utterness in Christ.