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The Mountains Around Jerusalem

by T. Austin-Sparks

From unpublished manuscripts.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

Contents

Chapter 1 - The Mountain of the Heavenly Nature of the Kingdom

Chapter 2 - The Mountain of His Heavenly Presence in the Midst of the Storm

Chapter 3 - The Mountain of Heavenly Resource

Chapter 4 - The Mountain of Heavenly Vision

Chapter 5 - The Mountain of Heavenly Dispensation

Chapter 6 - The Mountain of the Eclipse of the Earthly

Chapter 7 - The Mountain of Commission

Chapter 1 - The Mountain of the Heavenly Nature of the Kingdom

"And seeing the multitudes, He went up into the mountain: and when He had sat down His disciples came unto Him" (Matt. 5:1).

"And straightway He constrained the disciples to enter into the boat, and to go before Him unto the other side, till He should send the multitudes away. And after He had sent the multitudes away, He went up into the mountain apart to pray: and when evening was come, He was there alone" (Matt. 14:22-23).

For some time past there has been one thing pressing more and more strongly upon my consciousness and being forced up to recognition, and it is what we have often called "spiritual ascendancy". It seems to me that that is the issue for the church, and being the issue for the church, it is the issue for every child of God, every member of Christ. The end of the church's history on this earth is ascension, and it will not just be mechanical or automatic. It will be the climax of a spiritual history, which is this having learned to ascend in a spiritual way, of having come to know what real ascendancy means while here.

This as a necessity has, of course, been felt and recognized by the Lord's people fairly generally, and although many have not really perceived the inner nature of it, they have felt the need of it and so this very sense has been put into phrases, into language, which often have become a slogan. For instance, 'the victorious life' is almost a slogan. It has been the name given to certain kinds of Christian activity, work, teaching and movements. Others have used the word 'overcomer', have spoken about overcoming, and it has become the name or label for certain teaching and certain movements. And so we have these various ways of trying to put into a concrete expression something recognized and felt to be necessary, but not fully understood, and therefore often limited in its application and meaning. It has been limited rather to present, temporal, earthly things, rather than being seen as a great spiritual principle with a very much greater content than just getting the better of your temper and overcoming difficulties in your make-up and being a little more kind, generous and happy; for that is very largely the way in which the victorious life is thought of. There is something infinitely greater in the principle than most have recognized.

We shall therefore be occupied for a little while with this matter, and we have come to Matthew's Gospel which is very much marked by these heavenly features, things which indicate, symbolize and represent that heavenly position, that above position, for the church.

One of those features in this Gospel is the frequent occurrence of the word 'mountain' and the number of times in which we find a mountain brought into view. Another feature is the activity and ministry of angels. These are suggestions, at least, of something from above, something off the earth, something which in principle is ascendancy and a link with heaven. A mountain top is a link with heaven, in type and in figure. An angel visitant and ministry is a link with heaven. That is the thought which will lead us to the spiritual truth so vital and necessary for the children of God.

The Strength of the Mountains

You know this matter of what we term 'spiritual ascendancy', getting above, getting on top, breaking the power of earthly gravitation, mastering this down-pressure to bring us lower and lower and finally under. We are all conscious of this spiritual force that is focused upon Christians more than upon any others, to get them down, to get them to take a lower level or to accept a lower level, and then when they do that, that is not the end - still further down they go. Once you have started the downgrade, there is no end to it; once you have let go a little bit, you let go some more. The end will be overwhelming, submergence, thoroughly down. We are all conscious of that tremendous force of down-pressure and down-drag to keep us from maintaining a high level of spiritual ascendancy, mastery and spiritual dominion, of being on top of the enemy and things. That position really known, reached, and maintained, is a tremendous factor in the matter of fortification, of strength, and that, of course, is why the enemy always seeks to force the people of God down.

You remember the words in Psalm 125:1: "They that trust in the Lord are as mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides for ever. As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the Lord is round about His people from this time forth and for evermore." Mountains? And the Lord like the mountains? What is that? It is fortification, it is strength, it is protection. And what is the point of fortification if there is nothing against which to be fortified?

Away back in Old Testament times, when the people came into the land, the remarkable thing is that they occupied the higher places more than the lower. You will find that their towns, cities and villages are almost all of them upon some high place; the reason being that their enemies, who had chariots and horses, had their strength on the level, in the plain, but they could do nothing with chariots and horses against mountains. And therefore the safety, security and fortification of the Lord's people was by being on high places. That is a parable. If the enemy can get you on to his level he has beaten you. So he must pull you down, he must get you down, he must get you to accept something less than God's full place and mind for you, and then he will undo you. That is what he has done with the church, speaking of the church now in very general terms. He has pulled it down to this world level; he has reduced it to the level of things here, and he has absolutely disintegrated it, broken it up and divided it and robbed it of its power. The church which is revealed to us in the New Testament is always on high ground. That is what we are going to see. In Ephesians, it is "in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus". It is a great power to be on high ground, it is a great defensive, protective factor; the enemy can do little with you if you keep up there and refuse to come down. Nehemiah found that to be so, when they said, Come down and let us confer; and he said, "I am doing a great work so that I cannot come down" (Neh. 6:3). It is a principle operating.

Now here you are in Matthew on the mountains round about Jerusalem. What you find here is that every one of these mountains reveals some great factor in the church's state of impregnability. We are simply going to take the main principles out of some of these mountains.

We come to Matthew chapter five. As you have looked at it, your eye has passed on from verse 1, and you need to let your eye run right through to the end of chapter seven, because it is chapters five, six and seven which contain what happened on this mountain.

The "Exceeding High Mountain" of Temptation

And may I remind you that this is not the first mountain mentioned in Matthew. There was an exceeding high mountain to which the devil took the Lord in vision and showed Him all the countries of this world and their glory, and said, "All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me" (Matt. 4:9). My point is this: the devil reached his highest point in that mountain of temptation, and the Lord beat him there. It was on a mountain that the devil, fully extended, was defeated by the Lord. The Lord, so to speak, takes up the whole of this question of ascendancy over all the power of the enemy, this place where the enemy's power is taken from him, and begins to apply it; and in the Holy Spirit there are always principles. This is not fanciful interpretation, it is not imagining something. You always have to ask the question, 'Why is it all written?' Is it just a pretty story, an incident? No! The Holy Spirit has, may I say, a 'mentality', and the Holy Spirit's mentality is always conscious of great spiritual principles which fill the universe and apply to everything. And whenever the Holy Spirit takes up anything, He sees through the thing to the principle behind it. If the Holy Spirit has inspired this Gospel and inspired a man to mention various mountains, He sees behind the figure to the principles.

And so the Holy Spirit has all the time a second interpretation in mind which is the true, the ultimate, and He is bringing that in representation. He will bring it out without representation presently through the apostles in the letters. It will be direct, it will be just pure spiritual truth; He will not have symbols in those letters, it will be direct teaching. He will not say then that the church is a city on a mountain; He will say that the church is in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus. That is what He means all the way along. So the Lord is here taking up this matter of Satan's defeat as on a high place, and then proceeds to apply that and to tell us what are the secrets of that ascendancy, dominion, authority and power.

Then we come to these chapters, and does it not strike you as also containing something significant that, when you come to the end of this section, at the end of chapter seven, the talk on this first mountain, you have a man who has built his house upon a rock and the storms came and the winds blew and the house stood, for it was built upon a rock. It may only be suggestive, but it does seem to me to be rather remarkable that that is what the Lord is after - strength, stability, something that cannot be shaken. You will find that this is the idea of the mountain, "...as mount Zion, which cannot be moved" (Ps. 125:1). Spiritual ascendancy is only another way of saying a rock which withstands the storm.

The Heavenly and Spiritual Nature of the Kingdom

It is almost too well-known to suffer repetition, that this Gospel as written by Matthew is the Gospel of the King and the kingdom. That is the particular emphasis of Matthew: Christ as King. Then if that is true and that kingdom is not of this world, it is a heavenly and a spiritual kingdom in this dispensation. And that Kingship is not now political or temporal on this earth, but spiritual. Then when He ascends the mountain, you have the principle of spiritual Kingship and the spiritual kingdom of spiritual command, of spiritual government, of spiritual elevation. In this Gospel Matthew speaks of Jerusalem as "the holy city" (Matt. 4:5) and "the city of the great King" (Matt. 5:35), but as you proceed you perceive that the earthly Jerusalem is in the way of rejection. Steadily, deliberately, the movement is towards the setting aside of the earthly Jerusalem, and as that movement proceeds and the Lord Jesus reaches the outermost bound of that kingdom there at Caesarea Philippi, (the furthest point of that earthly Jerusalem's influence in the earthly kingdom), at that point the Lord Jesus brings the church in. It is the first time in the New Testament, as far as the order is here, that the church is mentioned, and it comes fully in: "Upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it" (Matt. 16:18). There we have our mountain, our rock, our Zion which cannot be removed, which will withstand the tempests and the raging storms of adversity which are coming upon it, as it proves later.

The church has been brought right in to take the place of that earthly Jerusalem. A heavenly thing has come to supplant the earthly, but the heavenly thing takes over the principles which are illustrated, represented, and symbolized in the earthly. And if that principle that we have enunciated of stability, power to resist, to overcome and to have dominion, was inherent in the earthly representation with the representation's rejection and setting aside, the principle is lifted right up and made the very principle of the church, "and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it".

But it has got to be on high ground for that to be true. It has to be, so to speak, in the mountain, a position essential to power. Power is not found down on level ground; power is found by reason of position.

A Transfer From the Outward to an Inward Spiritual Disposition

Then you come to recognise that in this transference from the earthly Jerusalem (the temple) to the heavenly and the spiritual (the church), there is another change indicated. Everything is transferred from the outward to the inward. Now that is summed up in these chapters.

The first section is in chapter five - on the mountain. The King is there; His disciples come to Him; those who are to be taught the meaning and nature of Kingship and the kingdom, who are to come into the spiritual meaning of that, come to Him. And He begins to enunciate the spiritual laws and principles of His Kingship and kingdom, and you find that they are an extraordinary lot of regulations by the standard of this world. The very first one reverses the whole conception of power. When people begin to build a kingdom in this world, see how they begin. They will start by looking for the people who are obviously, manifestly and conspicuously great among men: capable, efficient, strong, aggressive. But this King says concerning those who are to govern in His kingdom, "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." I just want to lift out this principle again. It is something inward and not outward, something of character, of nature, of disposition; it is a kind of person inwardly, and that kind of person is altogether different from the person that this world seeks for its kingdom. But He is saying power is with these, authority is with these, dominion is with these. Do you want to know what ascendancy over the enemy, the great devil and his whole kingdom, is? The secret is "poor in spirit". The Devil can do nothing with that. He can do anything with anybody whom he can get down on to his own level, that is, being something in himself. "I will exalt my throne above the stars of God", said the Devil, "I will make myself like the Most High" (Isa. 14:13-14). Get on to the 'I' level, and it may be a very big 'I', but it is a very low level; it is an earthly thing, it is a devilish thing. And the Devil cannot even stand up; he is a serpent, grovelling in the dust.

That is how the Lord looks at pride. "The haughty (the proud) He knows from afar" (Ps. 138:6). "Every one that is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord" (Prov. 16:5). Power over the enemy is the reverse of the enemy's disposition, taking his own ground from him, or having it taken from us. The inclusive ground of the enemy's dominion is always pride, which has so many forms of expression. It is there as a root of all sin; and this kingdom, this dominion over the whole power of the enemy is, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." That is where the Lord beat the enemy finally on that exceeding high mountain. The enemy said, "All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me" (Matt. 4:9); an appeal to the Lord Jesus to be something, to have something, to be great in the eyes of men. In effect the Lord says, 'It does not interest Me, that does not touch Me, you cannot get Me on that line, I have no ambitions in that direction. My whole interest is in spiritual matters, not things temporal.' "The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal" (2 Cor. 4:18). He was poor in spirit in that sense, and the enemy was defeated. I do not know what the actual truth and reality of that temptation in the wilderness was, whether it was a literal mountain, whether the thing happened literally or whether it happened in the soul of the Master.

We know what it means, you imagine things, you can have suggestions and presentations of prospects and possibilities made to you; you do not need to have it all brought about literally, it can all take place in the chambers of imagery by suggestions. If it was like that with the Lord, it was rather a principle that was at work, and He was dealing with the spiritual principle. It was the spiritual principle of dominion, which is not, 'have and hold and get for yourself'; it is, 'lose everything for yourself if only God gets what He is after'; "the poor in spirit". It is the reversing from the outward to the inward, and it was on this very ground that these disciples had to fight out their one inclusive battle.

Yes, the great battle of their lives had to be fought out on this very ground. They were ambitious men; they were men who wanted to get possession and position. "Lo, we have left all, and followed thee; what then shall we have?" (Matt. 19:27). And they quarreled with one another on the way as to who should be greatest in the kingdom. They were ambitious: "Grant that... one may sit on thy right hand, and one on thy left hand, in the kingdom" (Matt. 20:21 paraphrase). This is the world's idea of success. The Lord is saying, No, that is not the secret of real power and authority; it is just the reverse of that: the power to let go. That is being poor in spirit - the power to let go for the Lord's sake, to let go even your rights. We know how fiercely the battle sometimes rages on that very point of our ability to let go to the Lord. The whole thing rages like a storm while we hold on. Immediately we let go to the Lord and say, 'Well, Lord, I just hand it right over to You, I take my hands off, You take charge', something happens; there is relief; there is ascendancy; there is a new position obtained, and it is one of power.

Even in relation to the interests of the Lord, we come into it. We are so devoted to the 'interest' of the Lord that we get a grip on the interests of the Lord, and is it not true that so often we only believe things to be the Lord's will because we want them to be? We want them so much to be the Lord's will that they must be the Lord's will.

He is on the mountain and He is saying in the first place, that the secret of the church's power (that means the power of every individual believer) is that of an inward ascendancy over the spirit, the disposition, and the mentality of this world, of this old creation And it is a new kind of outlook, a new kind of mind, a new kind of temper and disposition. It is a change from the outward to the inward.

The Lordship of Christ

We pass to the next section of these chapters.

"Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets; I came not to destroy, but to fulfil" (Matt. 5:17).

"Verily I say unto you" (5:26); "I say unto you" (5:20,28,32,34,39,44; 6:2,5,16,25,29).

And do you notice what that is set over against? "Moses said - but I say. Yes, Moses said certain things, but I say unto you..." It is tremendous. Think of those to whom He was speaking, all the immediate world in which He was moving who were holding the law and its giver, Moses, as its last word and the final authority in all the things of God. If there was any question they asked, "What did Moses say? He closes the whole argument". And here one comes along and says, "Moses said" - yes, "but I say unto you", "I say unto you". There is constant repetition: "But I say"; and, "Verily, truly, I say."

Now note: He is not contradicting Moses; that would not do. It is not that He is contradicting Moses, but He is transcending Moses, He is taking things on to a higher level - you can see the context - from the outward to the inward. If a man murders his brother, well, Moses said what should be done to him; but I say unto you that if you are angry with your brother, you are a murderer. This is something not in the act that you do outwardly; it is the nature from which it comes, which is very much higher ground. It is not what you do, it is your disposition. Many a murderer has never killed anybody, but he is a murderer all the same, according to this standard. You say, "That is terrible ground, who can take that ground?" That is not the point just for the moment. The point here is this: that the King is on the mountain, and He has gathered to Him the men who are to be instructed in what that Kingship means, what real ascendancy is. What is it? The full and final and utter sovereignty of the Lord Jesus. "I say unto you. You may have thought that Moses was the last word; I am the last word; there comes with Me a kingdom that never came with Moses; there came with Moses a kingdom and a system of laws and regulations which were but temporal. There has come with Me a kingdom and a system of spiritual laws and principles which is spiritual and eternal, and therefore infinitely greater than that of Moses." I - this is the only One in God's universe who has the right to use that personal pronoun, but He used it in the right connection, He used it in relation to the divine mind, the divine thought. Satan used it out of that relationship.

All I am going to say about that is this, that spiritual power, authority and ascendancy is gathered up into this: that the Lord Jesus has the place of complete and perfect sovereignty in and over our lives to govern them so that our minds are made completely subject to His. Our ideas, our thoughts, even in His work and His interests, should be subjected to Him, so that it is not how, where and when we think things should be done, but that He should become complete Master in His own house.

He is enunciating the principle which became evident with the coming of the Holy Spirit. What was the secret of the church's ascendancy in those first days? What was the secret of the power of those who represented the kingdom of the heavens? Well, it was their subjection to the absolute Lordship of Christ. Look at Peter in relation to the house of Cornelius, the little bit of battle that was fought out in relation to the mastery, the Lordship, of Christ. But when that Lordship was established, even over Peter's traditional acceptances and mentality, what power came in in the house of God! Why, heaven came down, heaven was manifested there in mighty power! Peter, in reporting the thing over against the questionings of his own brethren, said, "Who was I, that I could withstand God?" (Acts 11:17). 'I was perfectly helpless in this matter; heaven took it out of my hands. Just as had happened at Pentecost, heaven took it out of our hands; we were swept off our feet, so it happened there.' It is the Lordship of Christ.

In the life of Paul it was like that. Paul set out on his way, committing that way to the Lord and trusting the Lord about his way, and he reached a certain point and he thought to go in a certain direction and preach there, but he was forbidden of the Holy Spirit. Then he thought in another direction: this would be the place to go to, this is a needy area, surely it would be the right thing to make Christ known there, but the Spirit of Jesus suffered him not (Acts 16:7). Now, supposing he had leaned to his own understanding and pursued the course of his own judgment, he would have gone into Asia and Bithynia, and there would have been no result. Perhaps he would have got into trouble; that is usually what happens when you pursue a self-chosen, self-directed way. But at that point, the Lord showed him another direction. Perhaps he had never thought of that. That certainly was not in his present mental program, but he was adjustable to the Lord. The Lordship of Christ was established, and so he went there, and you have the churches in Macedonia, and glorious churches they were - Thessalonica and Philippi and others. But here was Christ's Lordship governing through the Holy Spirit. And you find that right through the Acts.

I venture to say that not one of us, leaning to our own understanding, would have taken Philip's course from Samaria to the desert, but he was subject to Christ, and who will say that that was not the most fruitful thing? It is the working out of this principle, "I say unto you". You have to transfer your seat of authority from that which up until now has been the greatest, to something that is greater than anything you have known. You say, "Of course we are there; we do regard Christ as greater than Moses; for us there is no trouble about that." But the application of that principle is not as simple as that.

Listen to that last statement of mine again, that last clause: transfer from what has hitherto been the greatest thing in your knowledge to something now revealed to demand that transference. Even in Christianity that principle has to be applied. Are there not many people who have been born and brought up in a certain Christian way and that is the "best and greatest" they have ever known? They think that is the last word, and if they hold to it and take the attitude that there cannot be anything better than this, they have closed the door to something that may be much better. Many are there, tied up to what they hold to as the very best thing that ever was or could be, and so the Lord is excluded. The Lord may constantly be breaking in and saying, "I have not reached the end; I have not exhausted all revelation; I have yet much more to make known than has ever been known by the greatest and fullest person. Are you ready to adjust? Am I Lord?" And on that question of His Lordship, power, dominion, authority and influence hang.

Adjustableness is such a tremendous thing in the matter of knowing the Lord in greater fullness. So-and-so says, but I say. Oh, we have been brought up to believe this! Yes, "but I say..." Sometimes it just works like that. The Lord is hitting right up against some fixed position of ours, some kind of finality, some rigidness because we believe that that is the end of all truth. He comes right up against it and applies this matter of His sovereignty in new things over our judgments and conceptions, even our spiritual ones. Are we open for anything more that the Lord may have, or are we fixed? Upon that depends this whole matter of power and spiritual government. I could give you many living examples of how that works out, but there is your law of the kingdom - adjustableness to Christ. "Moses said", and we are fixed on Moses. That was just the little point between Peter starting out for Caesarea and that great work of God. Moses said that no unclean creature was to be eaten. The unclean and clean are catalogued in Leviticus 11; you have a catalogue of unclean creatures which are forbidden, and here they all are in this sheet, and the Lord from heaven says, "Rise, Peter; kill and eat" (Acts 10:13). What about Moses? "But I say unto you...". You say, surely that is a contradiction of Moses? Not at all. If you saw more deeply into the meaning of that discrimination, you would see that after all the unclean beasts only represented principles, just as the clean ones did, and the actuality is secondary. It is only symbolism, after all; it is the thing implied that matters.

Do we at any point have another authority but the present exercise of the authority of Christ? The present exercise, for that authority of Christ comes in at points and stages, and tomorrow it may mean something more than it means today, and it is the everyday progress of the authority of Christ. I mean by that that tomorrow some new ascendancies may be necessary that have not been before; it is His word that must govern in all things. "But I say unto you".

The great question for you, for me, for the Lord's people is this: the question of higher ground. And higher ground means advantage, vantage ground over the enemy and all his work and his power. If that ground is to be obtained, these two things which come out here in connection with the first mountain must be realized - things in our own hearts. First, a spiritual disposition found in those laws of the kingdom: the poor in spirit, those that mourn, the meek, the hungry and thirsty for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and so on - a disposition. Persecuted for righteousness' sake - there is no virtue in being persecuted; anybody can be persecuted for anything, but for righteousness' sake is different. For example, you do not turn round and say, 'I will get even with you one day.' It is a disposition: "Who... when He suffered, threatened not", it says of the Lord (1 Peter 2:23). That is the secret of power and ascendancy. And then the preparedness to let the Lord have the upper hand in all arguments, to let the Lord have the last word in all matters, to adjust to anything that the Lord brings in a new light. Yes, openness to Him and complete subjection to His full authority. That is the way of going on in power. It is proved in this book, as we have seen, and it always is so. May the Lord bring us on to that mountain.

Chapter 2 - The Mountain of His Heavenly Presence in the Midst of the Storm

Immediately Jesus made His disciples get into the boat and go before Him to the other side, while He sent the multitudes away. And when He had sent the multitudes away, He went up on the mountain by Himself to pray. Now when evening came, He was alone there. But the boat was now in the middle of the sea,tossed by the waves, for the wind was contrary. Now in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went to them, walking on the sea. And when the disciples saw Him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, "It is a ghost!" And they cried out for fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying, "Be of good cheer! It is I; do not be afraid." And Peter answered Him and said, "Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water." So He said, "Come." And when Peter had come down out of the boat, he walked on the water to go to Jesus. But when he saw that the wind was boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink he cried out, saying, "Lord, save me!" And immediately Jesus stretched out His hand and caught him, and said to him, "O you of little faith, why did you doubt?" And when they got into the boat, the wind ceased. Then those who were in the boat came and worshiped Him, saying, "Truly You are the Son of God." (Matthew 14:13-33).

In our previous meditation we were in Matthew chapters five to seven, and what really is before us for our apprehension is the meaning of the kingdom of heaven with the church as the embodiment of it. In these mountains we have foreshadowings of that kingdom which was then coming and has now come. You remember that on the occasion when the Lord was about to take His disciples up into the mount of Transfiguration, He said, "There are some of them that stand here, who shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom" (Matt. 16:28), and undoubtedly that was fulfilled on the day of Pentecost. The Son of man came in His kingdom then, fulfilling His own words "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36); so that here we have the kingdom coming, the kingdom imminent, and here are foreshadowings of the nature of that kingdom and of the vessel, the church, which embodies it.

The first and inclusive thing about that kingdom is that it is a heavenly kingdom, and so the great things foreshadowed as to that kingdom are disclosed on mountains in Matthew's Gospel; six mountains comprehended, meaning (of course figuratively) that these belong to heaven; they are of a heavenly character. And when these things become true in the church, it will be a heavenly church, and then it will be a church in a place of ascendancy, dominion, authority, government and power.

The Real Government of the World is Spiritual

Now we pass over to Matthew 14:13-33. "He went up into the mountain apart to pray: and when evening was come, He was there alone" (v. 23). And He was there alone in more senses than one. He was physically alone, and He was alone in His soul. If you look in John 6:15-21, the corresponding record, you will have the explanation of His act here. The words used in the translation are quite weak. Our word in Matthew is, "He constrained the disciples to enter into the boat." The word really is very much stronger than that. It is really only equalled by our word 'forced', 'compelled'. He compelled them; He forced them to get into the boat and go before Him. John 6:15 explains that the multitude would "take Him by force, to make Him king". This would have been a precipitate political movement which would have wrecked everything, pulled things down on to an altogether lower level of this world and would have destroyed the prospects of this heavenly kingdom.

It would have been a very subtle and clever move of the enemy to come and take Him and make Him king by force, and the disciples were evidently caught in it. We know that that was their idea, vision and ambition right up to the end, even after His resurrection. "Lord, dost thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" (Acts 1:6). Their vision was earthly and political and it is not exaggerating or misunderstanding them or wrongly judging them to say that when this thing suddenly came up in a mass movement, they were involved, they were caught, so He sent them away first of all. He could deal with the multitudes better without them present. He sent them away to another place, until He had sent the multitudes away. It is so often when those who are associated with the Lord get wrong views of His intentions, false conceptions of His work and His purpose; so often they are the ones that complicate the whole thing and make difficulties for the Lord. The only thing to do is to get them out of the way, and so He got them out of the way and dealt with the multitude Himself. He had to quiet the multitude, He had somehow to stop this sudden, precipitate drive, and you can believe that that was no easy thing. So He forced them, He compelled the disciples to go.

The real government of this world is spiritual, not temporal; that is the upshot of it. They would come and make Him king by force, and try in that way to set up a temporal kingdom with Him as its head, but the real government of this world is spiritual. He had to refuse and repudiate the other, and disentangle His disciples, who were the nucleus of the spiritual and heavenly kingdom, from that. What follows is an acted-out parable of the kingdom in this specific connection.

The church is in the sea. The sea in the Bible represents mankind, the nations: restless, often in tumult; and the spirit of mankind, the spirit of the world, the spirit of the nations is running counter to the church. The church is going through a difficult time. That is where the church is, and the sea at this time has worked itself up into a tempest.

The Lord in Complete Ascendancy

There are two pictures of Jesus: there (on the mountain) and here (on the sea). On the mountain He has been getting back into His native air. You know what it is to be caught in something of this drive and push and rush of man to get something done by his own energy, effort and determination, and you know so often that your spirit revolts against it. You say, No, that is not a movement of the Spirit; that is man trying to do something. There is a lot of tremendous hot-air activity in relation to the Lord to bring His kingdom about, and spiritual people saying, This is not it; that is man. The Lord Jesus was there, and in effect His action said, Let me get back to My own native air, let me get out of this, let me get control of this situation from heaven. He is alone, but He is there in prayer taking possession of this tumult. He is in ascendancy; no one else is; but He is in the place of mastery over all these forces in this world. The next that is said of Him is that He is on top of those restless forces, in complete command of them. They have no power over Him, He is walking on the waves. There on the mountain and here on the sea in control, the two places are one; in complete ascendancy over all those raging forces seeking to engulf His church.

Then to Peter, the representative of the church at that time, He says, "I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 16:19). The representative one is to be brought, through faith, into union with that ascendancy. He, so to speak, is bringing the church into that ascendancy of the Lord through faith.

The Church with the Lord in His Ascendancy

Well, those are the features of the whole situation, the acted parable. What is really being enacted here is another foreshadowing of the post-ascension days; Jesus there at the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens, all things put in subjection under His feet, absolute Lordship committed to Him, the King of the spiritual kingdom which is not of this world, but lies behind and really governs. It is not long before you see this being fulfilled in the church in the tumult of the nations. On one occasion in the midst of that tumult they quoted the second Psalm to the Lord. "O Lord... who by the Holy Spirit, by the mouth of our father David thy servant, didst say, Why did the Gentiles rage?" (Acts 4:24,25). Here is the raging sea of men, and they are in it. Yes, they are precipitated into it; Herod, Nero and all the rest. But He is not only there, He is here, not to do the thing apart from them, but to bring them into the good of His own position. So you find that in the tempest, when the church exercised faith and bore testimony to the absolute Lordship of Christ, what happened? Well, they were not engulfed, they were not overwhelmed, they went on their way. Sometimes there was a great calm: "So the church... had peace... and... was multiplied" (Acts 9:31). "Saul... breathing threatening and slaughter" (Acts 9:1); you can hear the wind and the waves, you can feel the tempest raging when Saul is acting against the church, but they exercised faith in their exalted Lord, and He is found to be in their midst. Saul is on the way to Damascus; Saul sees Him and hears Him saying, "Why do you persecute Me?" 'I am there, Saul; where My people are, there I am, as well as up here!' Through their faith, this mighty storm is brought under His ascendancy and Lordship. They have come into the good of it, and the storm breaks. So the church had peace and was multiplied. The point is that the church came into the good of the mountain top, into the position of ascendancy, through faith.

This mountain foreshadows the coming days of the church, when the church is precipitated into the tempests in the nations. We are there now, there is no doubt about it. But what about it? We may not at this time be suffering directly great persecutions from men, but I leave you to decide which is worse - to suffer direct, open persecution at the hands of men, or to know the awful raging of the powers of darkness against your soul. We know something about that, this awful conflict, these atmospherics, this pressure, this terrible determination of the evil forces to overwhelm us if they can, to bring us under; we know it continually; we are in the way of the kingdom.

The Need of Faith

What does the Lord want to teach us? First of all, His kingdom is not of this world. If you get down on to that level of something temporal, tangible, seen and handled, you are off the line. If all these sentient factors weigh with you, then you are on a very low level. That is not the realm. No, the heavenlies is the realm of the church, the kingdom, the government, the dominion, the place of authority. Given that that is recognized, then the Lord seeks to teach us the way of union with Himself in His ascendancy, to go through these tempests and not to be overwhelmed by these forces of evil. This is figurative language mainly, but you understand what this means in a spiritual way every day. The enemy is seeking to get you down and get you under, to overwhelm you, and the Lord does not just come along and stop him. He says to you, 'Come out here with Me to the place of ascendancy, you come into My place, on to My ground, you exercise faith in Me and by faith you will share My power over those powers of evil. Take your place by faith' - and it takes a lot of exercise of faith to step out of a boat into the sea and believe that you will not go under, or out of an aeroplane on to clouds and believe that you will not fall down. Faith is tested like that as severely in the spiritual realm as it would be in the natural. It is simply stepping out onto the Lord (where to step out naturally will be disaster) and to believe that there will be no disaster at all. That, of course, applies to many things. This is the thing the Lord is trying to teach us and bring us to, and that is borne out by this acted parable, this foreshadowing of spiritual things.

The Lord's Engineering of Circumstances

The Lord Himself deliberately chose these circumstances for them. He compelled them to get into the boat, and He knew from His vantage point on the mountain what was happening down below. He could see it all, and He came to them in the fourth watch, which was the last watch. He knew exactly when He would go to them, when things had got pretty well near the end where they were concerned, and they were at the end of their tether. Scripture does not include things for artistic reasons; every detail has its significance. He deliberately precipitated them into this position and He deliberately waited for His own most advantageous time. When there was no natural strength or ability left and when it seemed that the power was all with these adverse forces, He was going to reveal how utterly Master of the situation He was, and how calmly so. There is no great fanfare, no demonstration; He just walked quietly on the water, and all is tranquil. 'Come on, you will be the same, it is easy, come on!' Tranquillity... Mastery of forces have worn these men down completely, brought them to an end. He has waited as He waited deliberately four days before He came to Lazarus, so that everything should be utterly impossible and hopeless from any other quarter but His own.

He is always doing this sort of thing. He has this matter in hand and is seeing to it that there are no resources anywhere else, they are all spent out. The Lord chooses circumstances for us quite deliberately, and lets them run on very often - we think often too long, but He knows what He is doing. He is going to let us know, on one hand, how completely, and therefore tranquilly, Master of the situation He is. Is not that one of the factors that we have so often recognized? The thing was terrific, and then when the Lord came in, it was as though it was nothing, and we asked afterwards, "Was it as bad as we thought it was?" It is so simply cleared up. It was just as bad as ever it was and perhaps a great deal worse, but He is so completely Master that it does not need a demonstration of power from Him to bring this thing under. It is easy. Well, anything ought to be easy for omnipotence, ought it not? He waits in order to teach this, firstly: His own complete mastery in this universe.

But then the disciples are to come into the good of that in an experimental and actual way. They are to know this heavenly ascendancy themselves and, to summarise, we only come into it and make these discoveries when we are forced to; when, if we do not, it is the end of everything. We are like that, and it is as well that the Lord takes us on that ground. He never believes in theoretical ascendancy, He never believes in doctrinal ascendancy. He does not believe in people having all the doctrine and the theory of reigning and dominion. He sees to it that it is very practical, and so He precipitates the situations, and drives us into them in order to make it very practical. Of course, we do know how practical it is. It is very practical because it is very grim, but oh, that we might more quickly learn the lesson and more readily exercise the faith in His supreme ability to deal with this whole situation when it is completely beyond us and we can stand no more.

Is it not part of our training, as of these disciples, that we, perhaps far too slowly, but nevertheless, that we should come steadily and surely to the place where we say, 'I have been in situations like this before where I thought it was the end, but it was not. I proved the Lord then, I will prove Him again now.' We are constantly redeemed from our despair, our lack of faith, our great tendency to give up because it is all too much, it is impossible. That is the tendency - to say it is beyond us now; this is the end; we cannot go any further. That is unbelief, and He says, "O ye of little faith"; but we should reduce that steadily until, in the presence of storms that have never been before, we also are learning the tranquillity of ascendancy through faith in the Lord.

Chapter 3 - The Mountain of Heavenly Resource

Jesus departed from there, skirted the Sea of Galilee, and went up on the mountain and sat down there. Then great multitudes came to Him, having with them the lame, blind, mute, maimed, and many others; and they laid them down at Jesus' feet, and He healed them. So the multitude marveled when they saw the mute speaking, the maimed made whole, the lame walking, and the blind seeing; and they glorified the God of Israel. Now Jesus called His disciples to Himself and said, "I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now continued with Me three days and have nothing to eat. And I do not want to send them away hungry, lest they faint on the way." Then His disciples said to Him, "Where could we get enough bread in the wilderness to fill such a great multitude?" Jesus said to them, "How many loaves do you have?" And they said, "Seven, and a few little fish." So He commanded the multitude to sit down on the ground. And He took the seven loaves and the fish and gave thanks, broke them and gave them to His disciples; and the disciples gave to the multitude. So they all ate and were filled, and they took up seven large baskets full of the fragments that were left. Now those who ate were four thousand men, besides women and children. And He sent away the multitude, got into the boat, and came to the region of Magdala. (Matthew 15:29-39).

Here is a scene of great need; the extent and the range of the need is quite definitely and deliberately stressed repeatedly. It is "the multitudes", "great multitudes" which are in view. The need is brought out in great fulness, and over against it there is this disclosure of Christ's concern and desire that that need should be fully, wholly met, and strangely, this occasion is in the mountain. There was another occasion when He fed the multitude, as we saw already in the earlier chapter. Here it is said to be in relation to the mountain, indicative again of this principle that it is heavenly fulness which is in view. This, figuratively, is the mountain of heavenly or spiritual fulness, out of which the need, however great, vast, or deep, can be fully met. Let me reverse that and put it in this way, that heavenly fulness demands a heavenly position. "In this mountain will the Lord of hosts make unto all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined" (Isa. 25:6). "In this mountain...". When you look to identify that mountain, you find it refers to Zion, and then you find that it indicates the heavenly Zion of Hebrews 12. "Ye are come unto mount Zion" (v. 22). It is a heavenly, not an earthly Zion, which is really in view prophetically there, and it again embodies this law that a heavenly position is essential to heavenly fulness. This operates in two connections.

Resource for Need

First of all, as to the disciples. If we are those who are, in heart at least, and some in very practical ways, taking responsibility in the things of the Lord, called unto that service, that ministry, of meeting spiritual need, it will depend entirely upon our spiritual position as to how much resource we have with which to meet the need.

If we are working with the mentality of an earthly kingdom for God, if our conceptions of the work of God are all just down here in relation to this earth, and we are pursuing the work of God along the line that this world employs for pursuing its interests and ends, having just a temporal conception of the things of God, we shall be left to find the resources. That is the history of Christian work, that if you have a merely temporal, earthly conception of the work of God down here, establishing something here, getting a name for the work of God here, God just leaves you to find your own resources to carry it on, so you will have to be travelling about all over the place trying to get people to support it. The Lord is not taking responsibility for it; He is leaving it to you. But when we get into His own heavenly conception of things we see that in this dispensation God is not seeking to build something on this earth of a permanent character, but is taking something out of the nations to be linked with His Son in heaven, a people out of the nations for His Name, something that is taken out and linked with Him in heaven in a spiritual way. While here in body, its life is drawn from above, all its relationships are heavenly, and you come into the realm of spiritual fulness, and God looks after that; there is plenty.

That is a very practical thing indeed, and it represents the great, vast difference, between your wearing yourself out in trying to find the means to carry on the work of God, and the Lord carrying you on on an altogether supernatural basis of resource. Some of us know that difference in our own history between the time, the years, when we were having to find the straw for the bricks, the resources for building what we were trying to build, and it was exhausting work. It meant reading all the latest books and keeping in touch with all the latest ideas and working hard to find sermons and addresses and the wherewithal to meet the demand. How often we were just at the end of all resources, but then the revelation of God's heavenly intention came and a transition took place, from which time forward there has been no lack. It is just the river flowing in fulness all the time; a very practical difference.

You must really know what it means to have your life hid with Christ in God, where Christ is, in order to have all the heavenly resources at your command for a heavenly realm of life and ministry. As you know, in the Gospels things are only hinted at, suggested and illustrated. When you come over to the latter part of the New Testament, you see it just working out all the time. There is abundance, plenty of food available. The need is vast, there is no doubt about it. People are saying everywhere that they are in a state of spiritual starvation - quite unnecessarily. The supplies are adequate and even more to meet the level of the demand, as indicated here. In chapter 14 there were twelve baskets left over; here it is seven baskets. You will notice in your margin that different words are used for 'baskets'. The words indicate that the seven baskets were larger than the twelve baskets. But there are seven baskets here, and that is the number of spiritual fulness, and there is always a margin in heaven. You never exhaust heaven, and you never can keep even with heaven. Heaven will always be ahead of you. If you have a life in union with the Lord above, He is always well ahead of the greatest need. You never can catch up with heaven's resources. This is one more emphasis upon the heavenly position necessary to know heavenly resources.

Resource for Service

Again, as in each previous instance, there is a foreshadowing of things. On both occasions the disciples were proved to be altogether inadequate to the situation. It is remarkable that two occasions like this should occur, and that on the second they should not have learned the lesson of the first. They had seen the five thousand fed, and then when it comes to four thousand - beside women and children, they raise the old question, 'How can it be done?' They project their doubts into it; they are altogether unequal to this situation, they do not see from whence the need could be supplied. The Lord does marvellous things, and a little time elapses and another big situation arises, and we are just as much in doubt as we were. It was overwhelming then, but somehow or other it has lost its power with us now, and we are just questioning again as to what is going to happen, what is going to be the issue; that is the old earthly life. And so these men were proved repeatedly to be unequal to the situation, not seeing or knowing how the thing could be dealt with and the need be met.

Get them on the other side of the Cross; the other side of Pentecost, and are they questioning this matter? No, they are equal to the situation now. What they find now is, not that the need is too great, but the capacity of the people too small to receive what they have to give. 'We have many things to say unto you, but you cannot bear them.' So far as the disciples are concerned, they have come to know by the Holy Spirit heavenly union with the Lord and that meant that they can be equal to the situation, however great. Let us take that to ourselves. That is true as to the multitude, as to the need. Well, here again, the same thing applies: the servants for their service, the crowds for their need. It is all in heaven, it is all available; there is sufficient resource, and more than sufficient, for the greatest need that could be brought to the Lord, provided you get away from earthly limitations; provided the Cross cuts clean in between your earthly relationships to bring you into union with your Lord in heaven.

Chapter 4 - The Mountain of Heavenly Vision

Reading: Matthew 16:13-Matthew 17.

In chapter 16, we have the Lord questioning the disciples, "Who do men say that the Son of man is?" (v.13). We have their various replies, and then Peter's declaration, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." Then we read what the Lord said in reply as to the source of that revelation. And after that the great word about the church which brings the church fully forward for the first time in the New Testament: "I will build my church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven." The two are brought together, the church and the kingdom; the church being the embodiment of the kingdom in its laws, principles and nature. Here is heaven governing where the church is concerned; it is heavenly government in and through the church.

"Then charged He the disciples that they should tell no man that He was the Christ. From that time began Jesus to show unto his disciples that He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed." Then came the reaction to that from the disciples, and what the Lord saw of Satan behind their reaction. "Get thee behind me, Satan."

Now verse 28: "Verily I say unto you, There are some of them that stand here, who shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom. And after six days Jesus takes with Him Peter, and James, and John his brother, and brings them up into a high mountain apart: and He was transfigured before them" (Matt. 17:1-2). There ought not to be a break between Matthew 16 and 17. It is one of the very unfortunate things that have happened by dividing up in this way, because in this arrangement Matthew 17:1 is the continuation and the complement of Matthew 16:28. "There are some of them that stand here, who shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom", and after six days, with the Mount of Transfiguration it is revealed what that coming kingdom would be like.

We are on the mountain again with the Lord; we have seen that Jerusalem is now, in the earthly sense, being set aside. Another Jerusalem, a heavenly one, has appeared: the church, taking up all these spiritual features symbolised in the earthly and embodying the meaning of the kingdom of the heavens.

The Vision of the Glorified Son of Man

What does all that mean? What is this for the future? I think we can call it 'the heavenly vision'. If you look at Matthew 17:9, you have this: "Jesus commanded them, saying, Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of man be risen from the dead." What then does that heavenly vision include? Well, first of all, that very title which He uses of Himself is indicative. "Who do men say that the Son of man is?" "Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of man be risen from the dead." That title gives us the significance of the range of Christ. You need to turn to the letter to the Hebrews again to understand that. In Hebrews 2:6-18 the Lord Jesus is brought right before us, and then appeal is made to the eighth Psalm, "What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and crownest him with glory and honour. Thou makest him to have dominion over the work of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet" (Psa. 8:4-6).

"But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold Him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus... crowned with glory and honour" (Heb. 2:8,9); Jesus, the Son of Man, crowned with glory and honour. And Peter, many years afterwards, thinking back to the Mount of Transfiguration, says, "He received from God the Father honour and glory, when there was borne such a voice to Him by the Majestic Glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: and this voice we ourselves heard borne out of heaven, when we were with Him in the holy mount" (2 Pet. 1:17-18). Peter is referring back to Matthew, to the Son of Man in the Mount crowned with glory and honour. It brings to us this: that God's thought for man is here seen in its full realisation in Him who has become the inclusive representative of man, the inclusive Son of Man representing man as God intended, and still intends him to be, as God intends that one, new, corporate, comprehensive Man to be, "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ" (Eph. 4:13).

On the Mount of Transfiguration we see, so to speak, the Son of Man reaching right back towards the Fall and taking up the divine thought for man, bridging that long gap from the divine conception to the divine realisation, bridging all that came in with the failure of man, taking up the divine thought and realising it in Himself, and then throwing on to the future that representation of God's thought in perfection and saying in effect that this is how it will be when God reaches His end; He will have a race like this. Do you see Him on the Mount of Transfiguration? That is how it is going to be corporately, collectively, when God realises His first intention concerning man. It is going to be like this - a glorified humanity.

Christ Expressed in the Church

And now this comes in concerning the church, or the church comes in concerning this. It is all of a piece. It is this heavenly church. Oh, not the church that you and I are all too sadly familiar with, not what is called 'the church' down here. No, but that church which God has ever had in mind, which He can see. What is it? Well, it is Christ expressing Himself through countless members of one Body. It is Christ corporate, that is all, but eventually Christ corporate, glorified, transfigured. That is God's intention, God's thought. And here, in this figurative, heavenly place on the Mount, the high mountain, there is a revelation given which is the heavenly vision.

You know exactly how that worked out later. It was when they saw Christ risen, ascended, glorified, saw Him by the Spirit; when they saw that great, eternal, vast thought of God concerning His Son, it was then that things became marvelous and effective, down here in the gathering of the living stones, the material for building that church. It was then lifted right away from all poor, earthly conceptions of the church as an organization and an institution and something down here. In the case of the apostle Paul, when he saw the Lord Jesus in glory on that memorable day in his life, it was then that he was overwhelmed, not just with the single idea of Jesus as a unit, Jesus of Nazareth of whom he had heard down here, but now as a glorified Person. That was big enough to smash him to pieces and all his earthly system as well. What he came into at that time, as he makes perfectly clear, was that this Christ is comprehensive. He is not just a single man; all those whom Paul was persecuting were, in effect, Christ. "Why persecutest thou Me?" (Acts 9:4). They are Christ. All that comes through that apostle later on that line, had its beginning there; the seed of the vast meaning and significance of Christ was dropped into his heart on the Damascus road, and he went away to the desert to get hold of that, to grasp it, to wrestle with this overwhelming thing. And it was that heavenly vision that broke all his national barriers, all earthly departmentalism of race and everything else, and made him [part of] the great comprehensive Man, Christ inclusive. Paul saw the heavenly vision, which meant not only Jesus as an individual glorified, but he saw in that Individual the elect church comprehended and what its heavenly calling, heavenly vocation and heavenly destiny is. "A glorious church" (Eph. 5:27); that is how he puts it at the end of the Ephesian letter, the document which most fully brings the church into view. "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", a church of glory. That is the Mount of Transfiguration.

Has he not already said to the Corinthians, "We all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed." It is the same word, transfigured "into the same image" (2 Cor. 3:18). Eventually the transfiguration will be complete, and the church will be a glorious church. That is all here in the heavenly vision.

For a time that vision became eclipsed because the men were not on heavenly ground. However, after the cross, by which the earthly ground was cut away, they came onto heavenly ground, and it was that vision which governed them. It was that conception of Christ comprehensive which lay behind all their living and serving. It was indeed a glorified Christ crowned with glory and honour. The word of Psalm 8 was undoubtedly meant to refer to the first Adam; he missed it and now it is taken up by the last Adam, crowned with glory. He is the first of this heavenly race, this heavenly kingdom.

"Crowned with Glory and Honour"

What is glory? It is simply the outshining of the essential nature of this new Christ. It is not just an endowment from without. It is the manifestation of what is within. In Christ's case that is undoubtedly true. The true, divine nature burst forth. The glory is seen to be inherent in the very nature.

He has given us His own divine Life, and while we in ourselves are not as He, not being the original vessels of the divine nature, He has given divine Life to be within us. Eventually that divine life, if it has its way and is not frustrated by disobedience, will show itself in the same way and break out in glory. The word of the apostle regarding that is very simple: "...when He shall come to be glorified in His saints, and to be marvelled at in all them that believed" (2 Thess. 1:10). It is "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Col. 1:27). At some time Christ is going to blaze out and betray the hidden secret of our spiritual life in glory. People will look on and say, I never thought they were that kind of people, that that was possible where they were concerned. Now, you and I are anything but glorified people, but there is resident within us that power which one day will manifest itself in glory. We have little intimations of that sometimes. We say we have had a touch of heaven on earth, times of blessed fellowship with the Lord and with one another, and we say, This is a bit of glory and something breaks up inside! It is a spiritual sense of glory. But think of that in overwhelming fulness. That is the destiny of the church - "the fulness of Him that fills all in all" (Eph. 1:23).

"Crowned with glory and honour". Those two things are the reverse of corruption. Glory over against corruption, honour over against shame. Let me close here for the moment with this. The church is not a theme, it is not a doctrine, a teaching, it is not a subject in the Bible. You can have all the teaching and all the doctrine and know all that the Bible says about it, be conversant with all the theories of the church, and there be no glory or Life about it. The church is not a subject to be studied or a doctrine to be taught. The church is a Person to be manifested; it is Christ.

And no one really knows anything about the church until they have seen Christ by the revelation of the Holy Spirit. Do not ask to see the church and do not ask others if they have seen the church. There is a lot of that sort of language going on - have you seen the church, the truth of the Body? Oh, the Lord deliver us from that sort of thing! Have you seen Christ? If you have seen Christ, you have seen something more than just a Person. Great, vast and wonderful as the Person is, that Person signifies something more than Himself as an isolated unit. He represents and signifies a vast, elect company to come to His likeness, to be conformed to His Image. It is only as we really see Christ in a spiritual heavenly way that we know anything about the church in truth. So do not begin to study the doctrine of the church, and be very careful how you take hold of any teaching about the church. Always remember that you can never have that in a living way unless you are seeing Christ, and for the expression of the church we have to keep on seeing Christ. It is to be the manifestation of Christ.

You may have none of the doctrine, teaching, theory, and yet be in the good of the reality of seeing the Lord. Far better to have it that way than to have all the technique and not to have seen the Lord. It is on heavenly ground that He is seen, and that Mount is a marvellously comprehensive Mount. It goes right back to those eternal counsels of the Godhead before man was created, in their deliberations, counsels and conceptions as to the meaning of the creation which they were about to bring into being, and man was its centre; and right on to the eternity yet to be the realization of that, and it is fixed upon that Mount. It is a tremendous Mount, and it is tremendous to come up into a heavenly place and see the Lord, and, while that may sound external and somewhat remote and far away, it simply is what happens when the Holy Spirit gets a full way in us. It is what happened on the day of Pentecost, it is what happens whenever Christ becomes absolutely Lord and Master in a life. The sovereign Lordship of Christ as Head is the secret of everything else.

Chapter 5 - The Mountain of Heavenly Dispensation

In order that the essential nature of the Lord's work and the Lord's purpose in this age should be known livingly and worked out livingly, a higher spiritual position is necessary. We understand so well the nature of the work of the great adversary in this connection. We see the success of that work even before we get out of the New Testament.

From the high altitude of the first years as set before us in the book of the Acts, the church began to decline. When we get out of the apostolic age we find that decline steadily going on, until the church publicly, generally, becomes a thing of this world, even becoming politically attached to the earth. The battle all through the ages has been in this very connection, as to whether the church would maintain or retrieve the loss of its heavenly high position, or for any reason at all, by prosperity or adversity, accept something lower. What is and has been true throughout all its history is true today and is true with us. It is true in the case of every individual believer, as it is of the whole - the tendency to come down; and everything from the side of the enemy is directed towards creating a lower level of things than God intended, and therefore a lower level than that to which the Lord can wholly commit Himself. It is only as the Lord's position for His people is held that the Lord can commit Himself.

It is at this point that we need to recognise something that may solve some problems or just give the final answer to a lot of our difficulties. That to which the Lord really does commit Himself wholly is the spiritual side of things, not the temporal side of things, even in relation to His work. He may facilitate; He may help; He may send resources; He may rule and overrule in temporal matters; but we would agree that it would be very dangerous for the Lord to make that His realm of complete operations. That is, whenever a difficulty arises in the temporal realm, if the Lord immediately came right in and swept that out of the way and gave an easy, clear path to His work and His servants, it would really militate against true spirituality, and it would bring the whole thing down to a temporal level, and you can see what would happen. Multitudes would come in because of the advantages. 'It is a good thing to be a Christian; God does everything for you if only you will be a Christian', and so you become 'rice Christians', as they are known in certain parts of the world. So the Lord neither can, nor will, nor does, commit Himself fully to the temporal aspects of His own work.

My point at the moment is that the Lord does commit Himself to the spiritual side. You may be having a bad time in temporal things; there seems to be hold up, delays, contradictions and you wonder that the Lord does not do this and that in the realm of material things which you think are necessary to the Lord's work. But when you begin to look at the spiritual side of things, you have to say that the Lord is there, there is something happening there, the Lord is going on there. There seems to be a contradiction, but really it is only a proof that the higher the level above the earthly and above the natural, the fuller is the measure of the divine commitment. That is what we are after. Perhaps in the churning sea of illustrations and symbol and type, you have just lost sight of the real landscape, but that is what it is. A certain level is necessary for the full accomplishment of the divine purpose in this dispensation, and the measure of the Lord's commitment is the measure of our 'altitude'. Heaven always symbolizes universality. There is a sense in which you cannot get beyond there. Spiritually the position in union with a heavenly Lord means fulness, and the measure of fulness depends entirely upon that heavenly life and the heavenly nature of everything.

Perhaps that helps us to come to these closing chapters of the Gospel by Matthew. We come to our next altitude in chapter 24.

The Shaking of the Earthly

"And Jesus went out from the temple, and was going on His way; and His disciples came to him to show him the buildings of the temple." How does that strike you? The disciples wanting to take the Lord Jesus on a sightseeing trip, and show Him the buildings of the temple! That is where their eyes are, that is what they are thinking to be important, that is their idea of impressiveness, importance, greatness and grandeur. You have not gone very far towards this mountain before you note this setting. "But He answered and said unto them, See ye not all these things? Verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down. And as he sat on the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the consummation of the age?" (A.R.V. Marg.). You know what follows through Matthew 24. It is the old ground of the prophetical school, and we are not having anything to do with that now, because that would bring us down out of our mountain at once; but what does clearly arise here in connection with this Mount is that it is the Mount of the heavenly dispensation. We see that material and temporal things according to this world's ideas and standards of greatness and even of the religious world's standards, are the things which govern the mentality of these disciples after all this time. There is something there so deep-rooted, so inveterate, so persistent. We do not judge them, we are just like them. However spiritual we may think we are, the fact remains that we are tremendously influenced by temporal standards. It is a continuous battleground as to how things stand in this world before men, and even as to what the great religious leaders, and even evangelical leaders of our time regard as the important thing. It has a good deal of influence with us.

The Lord makes His pronouncement about that. The whole thing is going to be completely disintegrated. And it is on a mountain that He takes up this whole question, and you cannot get away from the fact - however it may be chopped up by those who are interested in these things - that at least the first part of this chapter relates to Jerusalem, and what comes out is that it is going to be broken up, shaken to its foundations and will totter to the ground. All that which they thought so great and so permanent is going. All that which they thought so established here will not have one stone left upon another.

On the Mount He begins to show the disintegration of the one in order to make room for the other. On the Mount heaven touches earth and from there the heavenly dispensation is clearly in view. Notice some of the small details, for example, "The disciples came unto Him privately." Of course, they are scared for their very lives that such statements as He has just made should be known by the people concerned, so it is in secret that they come to Him; they are afraid of this whole thing. How different they are not so long afterwards! You see them in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost! But here they are afraid for themselves and they are afraid for Him, and they are afraid for everybody. What a real difficulty it is!

The Test of the Heavenly Dispensation

He leads them to the Mount of Olives. Just glance back at chapter 21, and you will see that it was from the Mount of Olives that He sent those to find the ass on which He would ride into Jerusalem, fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah: "Behold, thy king cometh unto thee; lowly, and riding upon an ass, even upon a colt the foal of an ass" (Zech. 9:9). From the Mount of Olives He went, and in that meek and lowly way presented Himself as King. The fickle multitude, of course, jumped at earthly possibilities, and again the disciples are all in it. But when you get to Matthew 21:15, you get to the true situation in Israel among the Jews, and it will be found that even the fickle multitude will come to that presently when they discover that He did not mean a temporal, political kingdom at all. And when all that prospect seems to be more than doubtful, the crowd will join the ruler's cry, "Away with Him!" The real thing deep down behind is in verse 15: the positive antagonism towards Him; no desire to have Him, of course stimulated by envy and jealousy. The place where it was really drawn out as to what people wanted was the Mount of Olives. From there it was first of all drawn out as to what people were after; apparently on the one side wanting a king, (but see what sort of king and kingdom they wanted!), and behind that was, "We cannot have that and we do not want the other." There is a deep-down antagonism to the kind of kingdom that He is really bringing in, although it may seem otherwise in the case of the multitudes who went before and followed after shouting "Hosanna".

Really their thoughts and His are very far apart, and that becomes very clear in the end. The Mount of Olives first of all gets down into the truth as to what people are after. You never know the truth about a situation. It may look alright, it may seem to be quite favorable, but in fact it may be all wrong, false, untrue. You never know until you obtain the heavenly position of higher ground, and then from that higher ground you can see the truth about things. That works in principle; that works in history. If you present the high ground of God's full thought for His people and the hearts of the people are really set upon having a work for God down here that is flourishing and prosperous and well-spoken of, you find that people are really, after all, only going with Him so long as He comes into line with their ideas and ambitions. But immediately that runs counter to thoughts more earthly, thoughts even in relation to Him, something deeper rises up. They are not going to have that. You have seen that many times; you must not touch their things. They say it is for the Lord, but you must not touch it; it is their own. If you are not coming to help their thing or things with your ministry or presentation, of course they won't have it, and it resolves itself into this: they won't have Him; that is not the kind of Lord they want. They want a Lord who is going to make their thing for Him successful down here. You can only know and discriminate between the true and the false when you yourself are on the higher ground. Perhaps you know something about that. The Lord may have led you on spiritually, He has led you into new realms, and you look back and see what your devotion to the Lord really amounted to before - very largely something in this life.

The Heavenly Dispensation the Doom of the Earthly

Then the Mount of Olives was also the place from which Jerusalem's rejection and doom was settled. Matthew 21:19-20 embodies this: "And seeing a fig tree by the wayside, He came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only; and He said unto it, Let there be no fruit from thee henceforward for ever. And immediately the fig tree withered away. And when the disciples saw it, they marvelled, saying, How did the fig tree immediately wither away?"

From this Mount, He wept over Jerusalem. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that kills the prophets, and stones them that are sent unto her! How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate" (Matt. 23:37-38). From the Mount of Olives this whole thing - which is not the true, not the heavenly, although professedly, ostensibly, for God - is rejected and its doom is fixed.

A Kingdom Which Cannot be Shaken

It was over against the Mount of Olives, just by the Mount of Olives, that the Lord went up in ascension, and the whole dispensation from that point, everything in relation to Him, became heavenly. You see how this Mount governs this whole matter of a temporal, earthly dispensation, and a spiritual and heavenly one. The Mount of Olives is the dividing point in this matter. We said that the first part of Matthew 24 relates to Jerusalem, and it is clear that it connects with the letter to the Hebrews. "Ye are come unto... the heavenly Jerusalem" (Heb. 12:22). And then what follows? "But now He has promised, saying, Yet once more will I make to tremble not the earth only, but also the heaven. And this word, Yet once more, signifies the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain. Wherefore, receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken..." (Heb. 12:26-28). You see how this fits in there. The letter to the Hebrews is the transition from the earthly, (the whole system of types in the old dispensation), to the heavenly, and then it comes to its climax with this: all the earthly will be shaken to its very foundations and will totter to the ground, but "receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken...". That is all fixed, so to speak, in the Mount of Olives. From that vantage point you can see the difference between that which is down there and that which is up above. Hebrews, of course, is the heavenly kingdom.

Here on this mountain we have the foreshadowing of the new dispensation which can only really be seen from above. People looking up from below will never see it. You have to get up above and see it from the heavenly standpoint to see what God's real character in this dispensation is, the character of His work and His purpose. You must have the eyes of your heart enlightened.

Chapter 6 - The Mountain of the Eclipse of the Earthly

"And when they had sung a hymn, they went out into the mount of Olives. Then said Jesus unto them, All ye shall be offended in me this night: for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad. But after I am raised up, I will go before you into Galilee" (Matt. 26:30-32).

Midnight

Here the Mount is the place of the eclipse of all the earthly. It is rather remarkable and impressive how one thing moves into another like this. It is as though you are in one continuous, unbroken movement; the Mount of Olives bringing out in clear revelation this thing which has to go, and the Mount of Olives again showing how it is going, and bringing them right into the eclipse of all that. They were still clinging, still holding on for something here. Now it is shown that that is going into midnight, going to be blotted out, and so far as they are tied up with it, they are going to be blotted out, they will go with it if they are bound up with it, and their only hope is that they come out on to other ground altogether. What a terrific thing is the breaking of the earthly and the natural things! Just look at these men when this word was fulfilled - all made to stumble, offended because of Him, scattered abroad, disintegrated in every way; personally in themselves, broken to pieces, shattered; among themselves, scattered, no one trusting the other's report. Nobody is being trusted. Yes, a real scattering in every way. What a shattering thing it is to be delivered from the old, earthly attachment, even in the things of God. Your world goes to pieces. When God brings you into view of His real spiritual order of things, the real nature of His work in this dispensation, your world eclipses, disintegrates, and you go into the dark, you do not know where you are. You have lost one world and so far you are not right through into the other. It is midnight.

There can be midnight in spiritual history; when the Lord is putting us through a transition from one level to another, applying the Cross to things which were less than the Lord's intention, we cry out to the Lord to lead us into His heavenly fulness. We pray and beg of Him to do it, but let us remember that that is not done mechanically or automatically. You go through some tremendous disintegrating process, the scattering and breaking up of your old world. At times it may be like this. You are between two worlds. Here the Mount of Olives for this occasion was between two worlds, heaven and earth. It was something suspended, so to speak, between the two. It was the end of one; the other was in process. They will be there presently, but they are not there yet.

There was an earthquake when Christ died, and there very often is an earthquake in another way when we come really into the meaning of that death so far as things spiritual and things temporal are concerned. Our very earth shakes under us, and things come tottering, tumbling and crashing down all about us, and so often it takes an earthquake to do that. Ruins, just ruins! Well, that is a dark side because we are talking about the mountain of the eclipse of the earthly. "Scattered abroad".

The Dawn

Thank God, from this mountain the streaks of dawn had begun to rush across the sky. Presently we shall see them in that dawn which is not yet daylight, see them between the Cross and the day of Pentecost. It was just like that - flickers, streaks of light rushing across the sky. Two men on the way to Emmaus - it is a streak of the new dawn. And other things are happening, all very uncertain yet, all seemingly unreal, and yet very real, something in between day and night. But the day will break! They will come right into the daylight. I say that here, because, remember, God's nights are always intended to lead to new days, and if you are in the inbetween stage now, you may just be getting streaks, swift shafts of light flashing across your horizon, that is the promise of a new day. "All ye shall be made to stumble, shall be offended...". That may be necessary in the ways of God with us. If offendedness has to come to us in our ways with God, in our very going on with the Lord; if He has to bring about the offendedness and allow us to stumble, let us remember He never does it with a view to final devastation, it is not to ultimate loss, it is simply the exchange of the lesser for the greater. We are going to come out into something better through this eclipse. "I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered." Yes, scattered on the earthly ground, but gathered on the heavenly.

The Day

The fact is this is not just an outside event and happening. The fact is that that earthly ground itself as the very nature of disintegration, is only accelerating the process which will take place sooner or later. That earthly life, that earthly association, has in it all the seeds of corruption, therefore of disintegration, because there is death in it. You know quite well that any Christianity that is earthbound has death in it, and sooner or later it will disintegrate; it will not stand the shaking. It is only on resurrection ground where another incorruptible life is present that you have the very nature which cannot be disintegrated. It is in the resurrection that we are begotten again - not to the prospect of another eclipse or shattering, but unto a living hope. In resurrection there is an indissoluble life, and therefore that which is on that ground is something that will stand and withstand the shaking.

Chapter 7 - The Mountain of Commission

When they saw Him, they worshiped Him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, "All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." Amen. (Matthew 28:16-20).

One thing that must be noted in this connection is the 'inclusiveness' of this mountain. It is the mountain which includes all the other mountains that we have seen in these meditations.

A Mountain which Includes all Others

Here in this mountain there is, at least potentially, the first mountain: the new nature of the people concerned, the new heavenly nature of the people concerned. You do not need me to work that out. You know the Lord is not going to commission anybody out of the old Adam who is not reconstituted, who has not the heavenly nature. The tragedy is that so much of the work of the Lord in the nations is nullified because the old man does come up so much in those who are seeking to do that work. So this mountain must include that.

Then the second mountain, or the mountain of His heavenly presence in the midst of the storm; from the mountain down to the lake; the heavenly presence for the sake of His own in the conflict. "Lo, I am with you always."

The heavenly resource is in the third mountain. They came by His feeding of the multitude, to discover heavenly resources for situations for which they were naturally not equipped. There was heavenly supply. And here, what is the heavenly supply? "I am with you." That is how it worked out afterwards, and we know that if we know the Lord is with us, we are equal to any situation.

The heavenly vision - transfiguration; surely that is included in this final Mount! "All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth." The heavenly vision, the Lord glorified in His sovereign position by the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens. "All authority is Mine!" That was the power of the church later on, of the apostles, and that was their testimony by which they overcame.

A new dispensation, the dispensation of the Spirit, we know that that is included here. It is not mentioned, but we know that, although this commission was given here like this, another of the evangelists recorded it in this way: "but tarry ye in the city until ye be clothed with power from on high" (Luke 24:49). Then the book of Acts begins with, "Ye shall receive power when the Holy Spirit is come upon you" (Acts 1:8). So that right here, interwoven with the commission, is the new day, the new dispensation of the Spirit, in which everything is spiritual in its character. Also inherent here is that transition through the Cross out on to the other side, for here they are out on the other side.

So all these other mountains, with what they signify of spiritual principles, are gathered into this final one, and the point is this - you have got to have that in order to be in the commission. It is no use taking hold of these words at the end of the Gospel, 'The Great Commission' as it is called, and giving it to anybody, saying, "If you are saved, get on with the great commission" - "Go ye, and make disciples of all the nations." There may be disaster along that line, you have to have a background, a basis, and a heavenly position, otherwise this world and its principles will break you. You cannot meet the situation in the nations unless you are in a spiritual position.

I have said that the need is a higher position, higher ground, and oh, how clear that is! I have said that for years, but I have never felt the force of it so much as when I was in India recently - the need for the servants of God being on higher ground to be able to cope with situations, things which arise in 'missionary work' as it is called; and for the most part they recognize that. What we need is a higher position. There are different ways of putting it, but that is what it amounts to. The carrying out of the commission demands a mountain position, a higher ground, which includes these things about which we have been speaking. This is the basis of the commission.

A Mountain in Galilee

They "went into Galilee, unto the mountain where Jesus had appointed them". They are now in Galilee. It is not Jerusalem now; it is outside Jerusalem; it has moved away from Jerusalem. Take out of that what you like. But they are in Galilee, the place where He performed His first sign. "This beginning of His signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee" (John 2:11).

That sign was the turning of the water into wine, the new wine of the kingdom; the new Life; something higher which everybody had to admit was higher than anything that had been. You will not find that in Jerusalem now. The Ethiopian had been up to Jerusalem and tasted its wine, but, going away a disappointed man, he found real wine in the desert away from Jerusalem. It is not there now; that is merely formal religion; that is merely earthly. It is in Galilee - the new wine and the better wine and all else that is, in principle, bound up with the first inclusive sign in Cana of Galilee. Yes, it is there that the last touch in commissioning His disciples is found. He will come back yet to the Mount of Olives and go up from there, but the commission is away up there in Galilee. "Oh," said Nathanael, "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth" (John 1:46), Nazareth in Galilee? The commission comes out of Galilee. "A prophet is not without honour save in his own country" (Matt. 13:57). That was Galilee before.

But the sign, the place of dishonour, reproach and rejection has become the place of world conquest. This is a mountain in Galilee.

Heaven Governs All

So it is the high place of the commission, the place where heaven and earth are in touch with one another. But heaven governs all; "All authority has been given". The word there literally is 'has just been given'. It opens the door to rather interesting suggestions - "All authority has just been given unto me in heaven and on earth." And you remember His words to Mary: "Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended unto the Father" (John 20:17). It suggests that there was a movement between heaven and earth during those forty days after the resurrection. "I have not yet ascended unto My Father." "All authority has just been given unto Me."

Was He moving to and fro between heaven and earth? Well, it is only a suggestion, but even the suggestion carries the fact that now heaven is brought into touch with this earth to govern it. Sovereignty from above in Him is moving in relation to this earth to take out from the nations a people for His Name.

Well, all that means for us is that there is a place to which the Lord would bring us where heaven really is governing. That is the point, a high place with the Lord where we are not left to our earthly resources, left as a prey to things down here; not left just to do the thing which will pass when we pass, but everything comes out of the eternal heavens and is stable, vast, sufficient and eternal. Yes, everything from above.

The Lord, then, is seeking to have us on higher ground, and on that higher ground we find Him in fulness for all that is needed here.