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The Pathway of the Heavenly Vision

by T. Austin-Sparks

From unpublished manuscripts.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

Contents

Chapter 1 - The Law of Heavenliness

Chapter 2 - Circumcision of the Heart

Chapter 3 - Separation Unto God

Chapter 4 - The Natural Man Ruled Out by the Cross

Chapter 5 - The Application of the Law of Heavenliness

Chapter 6 - The Law of Resurrection

Chapter 7 - The Last Step of the Spiritual Journey

Chapter 1 - The Law of Heavenliness

"And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him... I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee..." (Gen. 17:1,8).

"They that are of faith, the same are sons of Abraham... Now to Abraham were the promises spoken, and to his seed. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ." (Gal. 3:7,16).

"For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh: but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God." (Rom. 2:28,29).

"By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out unto a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he became a sojourner in the land of promise, as in a land not his own, dwelling in tents, with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: for he looked for the city which hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is God... wherefore also there sprang of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of heaven in multitude, and as the sand, which is by the seashore, innumerable. These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things make it manifest that they are seeking after a country of their own. For if indeed they had been mindful of that country from which they went out, they would have had opportunity to return. But now they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed of them, to be called their God; for He hath prepared for them a city." (Heb. 11:8-10, 12-16).

The Law of the Double Aspect of the Scriptures

Before we can proceed to the message that is embodied and introduced by those Scriptures, there is a preliminary word which I think may be helpful to some who are not familiar with the truth in this connection and which is basic to all that we have to say just now. It is related to what we may call the law of the double aspect of the Scriptures. It is very clear, in the passages which we have just read, that there is a double aspect to all the Scriptures. On the one side, there is the aspect of the earthly, the temporal, the symbolic, the typological, the local and the temporary. On the other side, in the same Scriptures, or behind them, as over against the earthly there is the heavenly; as over against the temporal, there is the spiritual; as over against the symbolic and the typological, there is the essential and the real; as over against the temporary, there is the eternal; and as over against the local, there is the universal. These are the two aspects of the Scriptures, and, while that is not fresh information to most of you, it goes far deeper and is far more revolutionary than any of us have yet recognized. The one set of things mentioned is just a framework; the other set is that which is embodied in the framework. On the one hand there is, so to speak, the outward structure which, as we have pointed out, is earthly, temporal, temporary, local, but that embodies spiritual principles which go vastly beyond that framework. The framework is but the embodiment of something much more.

The one - what we will call the 'A' set - is limited. It is limited by time, it is limited by the need, the occasion, it is limited by the conditions of people and the earth at a given time, it is limited by range. But the 'B' set is unlimited. It is full, it is timeless, transcendent, universal, and those two are to be found everywhere in the Word of God, especially in the Old Testament.

God's Work in this Dispensation is Heavenly and Spiritual

That brings us to this very important point that, in this dispensation in which you and I are living, the 'A' set of things does not obtain. Now it is the heavenly and not the earthly; the spiritual and not the temporal; it is the eternal and not the transient; and, mark this, as this dispensation approaches its end, that fact, that truth, will be more and more pressed to its manifestation by God Himself. That is, as we get nearer to the end of this dispensation, all the temporal aspects of what is of God will most certainly shrink and the spiritual aspects will become paramount. Surely we can see that before our eyes now. The things which can be shaken are going to be shaken so that the things which cannot be shaken may remain (Heb. 12:27). That is the enunciation of a divine principle concerning this present dispensation, that the framework of things, the mere external embodiment of divine things, will gradually crumble, steadily be overthrown or brought to an end or they will shrink. The outward, formal, and all that belongs to the earth and to time, everything that is of a temporal character not associated with what is of God will most surely come more and more to its end, and the thing which will remain and arise will be how much there is that is truly heavenly and spiritual here on this earth.

The heavenly and the spiritual are the governing features of this dispensation. In past dispensations, the temporal and the earthly were very much in evidence, but God never meant them to be, even then, everything and paramount. There are diversities of views about what the next dispensation on the earth may be. But what concerns us is that this dispensation, from God's standpoint, is essentially heavenly and spiritual, so far as God's things on the earth are concerned. And there will be a tremendous overthrowing of everything that has become attached to this earth in the Name of the Lord. Everything that has been built up here on this earth and connected with this earth which assumes to be of God, will be destroyed, narrowed, and steadily shrink. And we shall find that all those externalities of Christianity will be suffering blows ordained by heaven, and not by any means prevented by heaven, whatever the instrumentality may be, even the very Devil and all his system. But God will not protect anything that is bound up with this earth in His Name from shattering blows, and more and more at the end of the dispensation, we shall see what I have called the externalities of Christianity suffering reduction and limitation. On the other hand, we shall see God increasingly emphasizing and re-emphasizing the necessity for things being heavenly and spiritual; His people being a spiritual people, a heavenly people, and all the work which they do being of heaven and related to heaven; essentially spiritual.

It is very important to note that, otherwise we shall come into confusion. The Lord allows what looks like the work of God, what He has permitted, what He has used, what He has even blessed for a time, and what has become something too much attached to the earth and to men, to suffer terrible havoc. We shall be confused unless we understand what the explanation is. God, at any cost, is going to stand by this eternal law of His, which law we shall see more fully as we go on, that the supreme thought of God, which is bound up with this particular dispensation, is a heavenly thought, a spiritual thought. And, for the time being, it has nothing to do with this earth except to take out of this earth and out of the nations something for God and for heaven.

That is capable, of course, of application in many ways, but it is a broad principle which you must ever bear in mind, and you will find that it operates in this way: that the more the thing is of God, the less will He allow it to assume those forms and features and proportions of which men can take account and say, That is something great, something big as on this earth. The Lord will not allow that. He will reduce and reduce what is most essentially of Himself to what is just heavenly and just spiritual.

Abraham the Embodiment of Eternal Spiritual Principles

Well now, our passages have brought a man into view. The most comprehensive and outstanding personal embodiment and example of this two-fold principle that we have enunciated, apart from the Lord Jesus Himself, is Abraham. Abraham is the most comprehensive example of this double aspect of Scripture. He is not just an Old Testament character from whom we could learn many lessons for the Christian life. He has been used a lot in that way as a type and so on. He is much more than that. Abraham is the embodiment of God's full message to the church in this spiritual dispensation. We are going to prove that before we are through. I am fully aware of how that will clash with many accepted interpretations of Scripture, that the Old Testament saints do not come into the church and so on. Nevertheless, I make that affirmation with full consideration and have no question about it, and I trust that, as we go on, that will be borne out.

Do you not see how Abraham is brought up to date in the New Testament, not as a type merely, but as the embodiment of eternal spiritual principles? Not temporary, earthly principles, but heavenly and spiritual principles which outbound all time, outrange all limitations; they are the principles of God. Abraham is brought forward in the New Testament as the embodiment of those divine principles.

Abraham, as Set Forth in "Romans"

Let us take three instances. Take the letter to the Romans. I am not going to deal with these in detail, but you know how much Abraham comes in within the first four chapters of the letter to the Romans and what a large place he has. In doctrine, he has been mainly, if not entirely, shut up to the doctrine of justification by faith. Of course, he is there undoubtedly set forth in that connection, but the mistake is to limit him to that. Justification by faith is something very much greater than is generally recognized. What is the setting of the letter to the Romans? You are familiar with these words - "Whom he foreknew, he also foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren: and whom he foreordained, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified." (Rom. 8:29,30). Get the setting of justification - that is the point. You have two verses, and in those two verses, you are taken right back before times eternal - foreknown, foreordained and on into eternity to come - "them he... glorified". That is the setting. It is timeless, it goes far beyond any limits of which we are conscious or of which we have any knowledge, right back there in those eternal counsels of God, foreknowing and foreordaining. It goes on to the end. "Them He... glorified". From eternity to eternity.

What is justification by faith? What does justification by faith do? It takes you clean out of all that came in with the fall, of all that came in with Adam, all that came in with this world, and puts you behind it, makes all that as though it had never been, gets you into the eternal and out of the temporal. Justification has a background like that, and Abraham, who is presented here in that connection, is therefore the embodiment of the eternal idea of God that all that came in with the fall, all that happened by man's complicity with Satan, all the results accruing to a fallen creation, everything - and it is vast and terrible - is completely leapt over and set aside as though it had never been and put right back there. And you are carried right out there from eternity to eternity; and Abraham embodies that.

Abraham is a great man; he means far more than just an Old Testament type from whom we learn a few lessons for the Christian life. It takes us to the fundamental things of God's spiritual universe. Look at the words  "called according to His purpose... to be conformed to the image of His Son" (Rom. 8:28,29), and that is what Paul, in this letter to the Romans, calls the Gospel. "The gospel of God" he says at the beginning of the letter, "the gospel of God... concerning His Son... Jesus Christ". What is it? "Foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son." That is tremendous; that is not just being saved. It is a great thing to be saved, it is a great thing to be justified, it is a great thing to be redeemed, but that is something in time because of something that has happened. The Gospel is bigger than that. What is said here is that the Gospel goes right back to those eternal counsels of God where He foreknew, foreordained, and chose us to be conformed to the image of His Son. It is only another way of saying, "them He also glorified". That is the Gospel here. His Son is the object in view in justification by faith. Justification is related to His Son and all His purposes are centred in His Son, and when those purposes are realized, there will be a great corporate expression of His Son in glory. Glorified! It is the Gospel of God concerning His Son.

That is how Abraham is introduced in the letter to the Romans, and you see it is not earthly. It is not temporal or temporary; it is not of time.

Abraham as Set Forth in "Galatians"

Let us go on to the second illustration in the letter to the Galatians. You know that Abraham comes into this letter to the Galatians quite a bit. We read at the outset some fragments in that connection, and what has the letter to the Galatians to say about Abraham? In chapter 3 verse 7: "Know therefore that they that are of faith, the same are sons of Abraham." "Now to Abraham were the promises spoken, and to his seed. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ" (Gal. 3:16). That is the heart of things so far as Abraham is concerned in this letter, and Abraham holds a central position here in principle. The principle embodied in Abraham is that which is governing the whole of this letter to the Galatians. You can follow that through yourself. What is the principle, what is the heart of it? It is a spiritual, and a new and distinctive seed.

Distinctive contrast is drawn between the spiritual children or sons of Abraham, and those who on natural grounds claim to be children of Abraham. They are making their claim purely along natural lines that they are Jews. They call themselves the seed of Abraham. They feel that they can trace their line back to Abraham, and so make their claim to be children of Abraham. And then, of course, because God gave Abraham the covenant sign of circumcision and they had been circumcised, that is an extra claim and evidence that they are children of Abraham. I do not think we have sufficiently felt the force of the New Testament on this matter, that the Lord Jesus repudiated that Himself. "If ye were Abraham's children..." (John 8:39) raises the question. And both in the letter to the Romans as we read earlier at chapter 2 and here in this letter to the Galatians particularly, the apostle just brushes aside all this question of circumcision and natural descent and says, 'It does not count, it does not effect the thing that you think it effects, the result is not what you have concluded it to be. You, along natural lines, however you may be able to follow your genealogy right back to Abraham, are not necessarily Abraham's seed". "He is not a Jew who is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh ... circumcision is that of the heart" (Rom. 2:28,29).

And so this letter to the Galatians brings Abraham fully into view on the principle of not a natural, earthly, seed, but a spiritual seed - distinct and not marked by religious rites and ordinances. These are all relegated to the place of non-effectiveness; of no value in spiritual matters. Now it is all a matter of a spiritual seed which is Christ, One Seed, and if you are not in Christ, you have no claims whatever, even as an historical Jew. There is no other claim, there is no natural basis upon which to be this seed. That is not new to you in principle, but note how Abraham is brought in here on this eternal principle: that Christ, from eternity to eternity, gives character to what is of God, and it is only as we find Christ, as it were, in reproduction that we have what God is after. It is heavenly, it is spiritual; it is not earthly.

Abraham as Set Forth in "Hebrews"

That is borne out by the third instance: the letter to the Hebrews. That passage which we read in the eleventh chapter is very remarkable, and it is worth looking at a little more closely. "By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out unto a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he became a sojourner... wherefore also there sprang of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of heaven in multitude, and as the sand, which is by the seashore innumerable. These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth (not only in the land of promise - on the earth). For they that say such things make it manifest that they are seeking after a country of their own... that is, a heavenly." What does that say? Is it not perfectly patent that it says that, whatever they did get on the earth, whether it was a country or whether it was a seed, an earthly seed (and there did come of Abraham a multitudinous earthly seed) but whatever they got, however great, that was not what God was after? And they came to see that this earthly country was not what God was after, and that this earthly seed was not what God was after: He sought a spiritual seed. The whole letter to the Hebrews is built on that very principle.

The whole letter has to do with that which is heavenly and spiritual. It begins with a Person in heaven. It has completely set aside the earthly, historical Jesus, and we see Him crowned with glory and honour, and He is presented in the first verses of the letter as Christ in heaven, the inclusive Son, then bringing many sons to glory; a heavenly and spiritual people. And steadily the writer undercuts the earthly. He undercuts the Aaronic priesthood and carries you over to Melchizedek, without father, without mother, without genealogy, without beginning or end of days, made like unto the Son of God after the power of an endless and incorruptible life.

Then there is the argument about Abraham and Melchizedek and their association. They are brought together on heavenly ground. This one whose genealogy we cannot trace, we do not know who he is, what he is, the apostle says. We have no data, therefore he stands to represent something timeless, earthless, something outside of the ordinary bounds and limitations of mankind, and Christ is after that order.

I am not going to try to analyse or sum up this letter to the Hebrews. It is a Person in heaven only known now spiritually, and then it is a people being taken out of the earth as a heavenly people... sons being brought to glory, and Abraham is the embodiment of that heavenly people. He, with others, began by fixing his eyes upon an earthly object, a temporal object, and was disappointed right to the end of his life, and died in faith, in effect saying, "This is not it; there is something more than this; however much we have, however much we get here, that is not God's meaning. It is a better, that is, a heavenly country"; "wherefore God is not ashamed of them, to be called their God". You notice, going right back again to Genesis 17, that was the word: "I will... be a God unto thee and to thy seed after thee." "Wherefore God is not ashamed of them, to be called their God" (Heb. 11:16). Why? God is not the God of an earthly thing or an earthly people ultimately. He is the God of heavenly people, and that is brought to fulness in representation right at the end of the Bible where consummation is reached in all the thoughts of God, and the new Jerusalem comes down from God out of heaven. This is a figure of this heavenly people: "the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them, and they shall be His peoples, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God" (Rev. 21:3). It is heavenly, it is spiritual.

We have taken all this time in enunciating the law by illustrating it. It has yet to be broken up and applied in perhaps still more profitable ways. But do you see what God is after? Do you see why God permits so much that looks like destruction of His own work and the narrowing of what represents Him? That is only the temporal side, the earthly side. God is bent upon increasing, strengthening, intensifying what is heavenly and what is spiritual. Those who, like Abraham, are going to walk with God and go on with God, will find that they have less and less to glory in on this earth, and their glorying will not be of men, but of God. That is, their glorying will be in the increase of their spiritual life and spiritual measure, which is the increase of Christ, the heavenly Man.

Chapter 2 - Circumcision of the Heart

We are occupied at present with the pathway of the glory. In our previous meditation we took up a good deal by way of getting our setting in this matter, and laying a foundation.

Before going on with the outworking of the matter, I am going to try to make it quite clear in a concise statement as to what we feel the Lord is really wanting to make known to us at this time, and it seems to me to reside in that little phrase from Romans 2 which we have just read - "circumcision is that of the heart". Circumcision of the heart.

There has come into this creation a deplorable and very terrible state of mixture, confusion and corruption by 'affinity with Satan'. Human nature is a terrible mixture. The heart of man naturally is full of conflict and contrary elements. We are a terrible tangle, we have inwardly a morass, we are all mixed up, we have lost the way, we are confused, we are a mass of contradictions and inconsistencies. The more we come into the light, the more we come to know that. The more the Spirit of God teaches us, the more hopeless and helpless we feel as to our own natures, our own hearts. It is no mark of understanding, intelligence, spiritual knowledge or maturity that we are lacking in such a consciousness, or characterised by anything in the nature of self-satisfaction or complacency as to ourselves. Really, under the enlightening work of the Holy Spirit, we come more and more to the realization of utter hopelessness, so far as we are concerned. That consciousness may be the background of the pathway of the glory.

This phrase, 'circumcision of the heart', is a tremendous phrase, cutting clean in between two whole sets of conditions, and dividing asunder; putting things in their place; ruling out and putting away, completely cutting off one whole realm that is in us and bringing us out into that other realm of the Divine glory. That is what is resident in that phrase, "circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit not in the letter", and it is that with which the Lord is concerned now.

We have brought before us Abraham's place in that whole course of the glory. In our previous meditation we saw what a large place Abraham has, especially in the New Testament. We saw how he stands with two eternities on either side, linking those counsels of God concerning His Son with their realization, counsels from eternity past realised in eternity to be. Abraham stands, as it were, bringing together those two eternities in the purpose of God, and shows the way through.

Circumcision a Covenant Sign to Abraham

It is with Abraham, as you know, that circumcision was introduced as the covenant sign, and here in these New Testament passages, we are shown that it is a spiritual matter and not a natural thing at all, not an outward thing. It is something right deep down in the innermost being of man. It is a cutting right down to the very roots, and undercutting all this confusion, all this chaos, all this corruption, all this mixture; getting right down as with the knife of the Cross, to undercut the whole thing and put it asunder. So that, on the one hand, that which came in is now put out by the Cross. This is what God intended to be and is to be brought in by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

So we turn to see a little more of the outworking of this law in Abraham. It is, as we strove to make clear in chapter one, the law of heavenliness, the law of what is spiritual and heavenly. It is not earthly. Circumcision is not outward in the flesh; it is of the heart, of the spirit; it is inward. And while Abraham is used and taken up by God to show on the earth the outworking of the law, he is entirely governed by what is heavenly. Everything taking place in his life is the application of a heavenly truth, of a spiritual principle.

Well then, we are able to come to this most remarkable man. How great a man Abraham was! I trust we shall see something of the outworking of the law of heavenliness, which is the pathway of the glory in this man's life. I quote here a little paragraph from the recently published life of Mr. D. E. Hoste, late Director of the China Inland Mission, a statement by Mr. Hoste himself.

"When God raises up a man for special service, He first works in that man the principles which later on are, through his labours and influence, to be the means of widespread blessing to the church and to the world".

He might have been speaking of Abraham! How true that is. The principles of God's intention, of God's purpose, had got to be wrought into the instrument, into the vessel. God does not just call to office, to a work to be done. He takes a servant, an instrument, and begins to work in that servant or instrument the very principles of the work. How true that was of Abraham.

Abraham's Natural Background

Let us consider something of Abraham's natural background. We know his natural home was Ur in Babylonia. Babylonia was a land of cities, and Ur was the largest of the Babylonian cities on the West bank of the Euphrates. Now, let us get quite clear about this man's background. I do not know what your mentality is about Abraham, whether you think of him as a poor nomad, a wandering shepherd, or a semi-heathen. If you do, you have an entirely wrong idea and you will never get really to the heart of the spiritual meaning of God in Abraham's life until you are quite clear on this matter.

Ur, as one of the cities of Babylon, was a centre of a very high and advanced civilisation in Abraham's time. It was a centre of great wealth, a centre of learning and high education. You younger people who have to wrestle with the problem of higher mathematics, will be surprised to know that the young people of Ur of the Chaldees did exactly what you are doing now. They were as advanced as we are in these particular sciences. Their architecture was wonderful, their houses were beautiful; some magnificent. Their literature was very rich; they had great libraries in their cities. And Abraham was a citizen of that kind of city, with that kind of setting. He was no ignoramus, no poor, uncivilised nomad or shepherd, but a man of considerable learning and status. And yet with all its civilisation, Babylonia was very corrupt, sinful, idolatrous, morally corrupt, polytheistic, and Ur itself was the centre of the worship of the moon god, Sin. So very much like our advanced civilisation with all its sciences, its education, its arts, it was deep down corrupt, sinful and idolatrous. You can get a cameo of the creation, you can see the state of the fallen creation in a small representation in Ur of the Chaldees or in Babylonia. On the outside, all this that looks good and wonderful, in which man boasts himself; inside, it is corrupt, mixed, evil, two sides contradicting one another, all the time completely inconsistent; so strongly that everything is wonderful, progressive, civilised and clever, and yet wholly empty, corrupt and evil. That is the creation in small representation. It declares Abraham was in the heart of that and he belonged to that.

Further, the earliest name of Babylonia was The Place of the Tree of Life, and right up to the time of Alexander the Great, the tree was the symbol which they put on all their coffins, graves and sepulchres. If they wanted to mark something off with their particular sign, they put the tree on it, the symbol of The Place of the Tree of Life. This brings us to the Bible.

God Governs Now By the Law of Heavenliness

Since the earthly type of Paradise was closed and lost, and Paradise was removed to heaven and taken off this earth, God has been governing everything on this earth by the law of heavenliness. That is, by the law of relationship to heaven, not to earth. He has removed the centre of things from the earth to heaven, and He is governing everything here by this law of heavenliness. He is not trying to build Paradise again on this earth.

Men who think in terms of making this world a Paradise, trying to bring Paradise back here on to this earth, are deluded with the madness of the devil. Paradise has gone, it has been removed, it is a Divine reserve, and God, in His activities in relation to this earth, is governed entirely by this law of heavenliness, not as to this earth. So far as this earth is concerned, the Scriptures make it perfectly clear that this earth is a reserve for fire. What happens after the fire is another thing, but for the present it is reserved for fire, and Paradise is a reserve for glory.

The Working of the Heavenly Law in Inward Circumcision

Now, Abraham, being a full embodiment and expression of that heavenly law, comes right into view as to the working of that heavenly law in inward circumcision. That is, separation right down to the very depths of his being. A progressive separation is going on. Oh, how God is pressing this heavenly law in the life of Abraham! Stage by stage He is working it out. It governs even Abraham's 'lapses'. He comes to know that law more strongly by the violation of it; he comes to recognise the glory bound up with that law by obedience to it. But the point is that, all inclusively, Abraham is a centre of the working out of the law of heavenliness unto the glory.

At least six times God visits Abraham, and every time at different points, at different stages in His visiting of Abraham, it was with the object of going further and taking Abraham further. You notice, it amounted to this: Now we are going on to the next stage; here is what I am after, and here is the way to what I am after. And very often it was a costly thing, it was a ploughing deeper of the Cross. You will see that in the final appearance. "Take now thy son, thine only son..." (Gen. 22:2). Oh, how deep the Cross went, ploughing right down to the very subsoil of Abraham's soul life, and every appearance was like that. It was God wanting to go further. That sojourning on the earth of Hebrews 11 in reference to Abraham, as that chapter shows and we saw, turns out to be a spiritual journey and not an earthly journey at all. He is steadily coming to see that this earthly side of things is not it at all; he has walked up and down in this country, he has ranged it, but he dies without possessing it. He dies in faith, seeing afar off, and then Hebrews comes in and says about that, "now they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly"; so that the earth has not fulfilled his expectations, it is a heavenly country. Abraham has sons and grandsons, a growing family, and he is able to see the natural earthly seed as a great nation, but even so in Galatians and in Hebrews, we come to see that that is not the end that God is after. The seed of which God has spoken is a spiritual seed. So that Abraham's is a spiritual journey, it is a heavenly journey; that is, it is governed by this heavenly law of God which is moving steadily away from the earth, steadily towards what is heavenly and away from the temporal to what is spiritual.

The point is this, God shows Himself as wanting to go on to a full spiritual end. All these visitations show God wanting to go on. His goings on involved Abraham and all that Abraham represents - spiritual seed. God wants to go on, and so He is pressing step by step, stage by stage. He is pressing for this going on, this inward progress, by deepening application of the circumcising knife of the Cross, ploughing, cutting deeper all the time. That is the law of spiritual progress unto the glory; it is unto spiritual fulness.

A Parenthesis

Now, I want to pause here, because we have to take into account certain reactions which often come from Christians, especially from young Christians: "This all may be true, it may be very wonderful, but is it necessary? Can we not have just a simple, happy Christian life? Are there not many earnest, true, devoted Christians on this earth who are enjoying the Christian life and basking in spiritual blessing, and they do not know anything about this? Is this necessary? Can we not get on without all this?" Now, if you are inclined to have such a reaction, listen! First of all, what does the Word of God say about it? Both in the Old Testament and in the New, the emphasis is all the time upon this matter of spiritual progress, of going on. The Word of God, from beginning to end, is just full of this matter of going on with God to spiritual fulness. There is no doubt about the Scriptures on this matter, but because so many do not go on, and there is such an amount of spiritual smallness, some have tried to reconcile the two things. On the one hand, this clearly indicated and revealed mind of the Lord, and on the other hand, the comparatively few who go on that way, the great majority who are content with just a happy, everyday Christian life, serving the Lord, and being in earnest. Because of these two things, people have had to take account of this apparent contradiction. They are up against the fact that here is the state of Christians. What are you going to do about it?

I am only saying this to try to help you. It is just at that point of difficulty and apparent contradiction that all those doctrines arise and gain their strength which try to solve that problem. I can mention some of them. Out from this very letter to the Hebrews and other parts of the Bible some build up the doctrine that if you are once saved, you are not necessarily always saved, you can be lost. Now, that takes its rise from this difficulty, that there are those who do go on, but if you do not go on, you are in jeopardy of losing your salvation. That is one.

There is another and it is very strongly held, that all believers are not necessarily in the Body of Christ. The Body of Christ is one thing, and all the rest of believers may be another. I say, I am not discussing this, and I am not saying where I stand on these matters, but there is the fact. So a doctrine springs up and gains strength from this contradiction.

Then again there is what is called "selective rapture", that some will be translated at the Lord's coming for His people, others will be left behind (I am not saying whether rightly or wrongly) but I am saying such things find their rise and gain their strength largely from this problem of God's full thought revealed, and, on the other hand, so few going on.

And still there is another large body of people who believe, although you may be saved, be born again, you do not have necessarily the indwelling Holy Spirit; that is why you do not go on.

Do not worry about those problems and try to decide about them, but I am pointing out that here you are confronted with a fact, and, whether these things are the right way of solving the problem or not, you cannot get away from the fact. However you try to solve the problem you cannot get away from the other fact that the Bible is just full of revelation that God means you to go on, and fulness is God's irreducible minimum for His full satisfaction.

Initial Circumcision Unto Glory

Let us look at Abraham again and see how God takes up this matter of inwardly dividing, inwardly separating, inwardly circumcising, and He begins in Ur. How does the beginning take place? We are told in Acts 7:2 through the lips of Stephen what the nature of the beginning was. "The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia...". "The God of glory appeared". It is the way of the glory right from the beginning to the end. Glory is the ultimate thing in all God's intentions, and God brings the ultimate thing right to the beginning and begins to work at the beginning upon the ultimate principle.

A Definition of glory

What is glory? Well, if it is ultimate, it is finality; it is perfection in nature. That is the end, and that is governing the very beginning. Glory is the very nature of God in satisfaction expressing itself. That is, all that God is in His essential being is completely, beautifully, wonderfully satisfied. God is satisfied, and when God is satisfied and that comes out from God and finds its expression in creation, that the creation answers to God's essential nature and gives Him absolute satisfaction, that is glory. Even in our human life, our whole being craves for satisfaction, it craves for love or it craves for some other thing. It is not just an idea, a whim, but our whole being craves for that, and when that is given, and we have it, our nature is answered to fully, finally. What a wonderful sense of satisfaction, of joy! We have what we have craved for all our lives, and we can only use one word for it - it is glory. That is, if the thing is not evil and wrong, if it is a legitimate thing. You can see it in anybody who has an object of love and craving for that object and the love to be given by that object and to be lavished upon that object, and at last they have that object. Then they are very happy and satisfied and smiling, and it is all glory for them.

Now think of God on so much higher a level. The nature of God is holiness, righteousness, truth and purity, everything that is perfect morally. When God is able to say: "I have got, fully and utterly, all that My nature craves for, and I have it in man, and I have it in the creation" that is glory! And that satisfaction of God goes out and is felt vibrating through the whole creation. That is glory in the creation. That is glory. Glory is not just some wonderful light and adornment. It is the expression of an internal condition, an inward state, which is God satisfied. And in little ways, so small and yet enough for us to understand, when at any time after some conflict, some controversy, some battle between us and the Lord, the Lord has put His finger upon something and been making a demand, indicating a way, calling for an obedience, a letting go, that has gone on for a time and it has been anything but glory - it has been misery, darkness, shadow, suffering. At last He conquers, at last we yield, at last God has all that He has been after. What is the sensation that comes to us? Oh, the relief! Oh, the rest! Why did I hold out? Why did I fight the Lord? Why have I been so slow? If only I had known! Oh, the satisfaction! Yes, in little ways, it is glory. That is, the satisfaction of God's heart found in us, in our hearts. God is well-pleased. There is nothing in God's universe so wonderful as feeling God's good pleasure. If only God could say to you, to me, "I am well-pleased!" There is no sense possible to us more gratifying than that.

The Glory of God in Man

Now "The God of glory appeared unto our father". What does this mean? Oh, God is going to bring this man along the line of the glory that in the end He will be able to express His full satisfaction in that man. Could you think of anything more satisfying, more heart ravishing than for God to come along, Almighty God, the God we know Him to be, so perfect, so wonderful, to lay His hand upon you and say, "My friend..."! We can hardly think of it. But Abraham was God's friend. "Abraham my friend" (Isa. 41:8), said God. My friend! What is this that satisfies God? What is this friendship of God? It is the result of this deep, inward circumcision, where two things have been put apart. What is of ourselves by nature, all that corruption, all that contradiction, all that mixture, all that affinity with Satan, all that conflict within, the knife has cut clean through it and put it out, put it aside, and now God's will, God's way and God's thought prevail.

God's Starting-Point

Now, no more do we, than Abraham did, come to that in a day, but my point at the moment is God's starting-point. Right in the conflict, right in the contradiction, right in the corruption, right in the midst of all that has come in through the fall, the God of glory comes as the God of glory, and says, "I am going to take you in hand and get rid of all this and make you a heavenly citizen, fit for heaven, belonging to heaven, a reflection of heaven. This earth is entirely corrupt; I am going to take you spiritually out of it and begin a process and progress by which you will be of another order of creation, a new creation, different altogether." The God of glory... you see the God Who says, "I am going to get rid of everything that can never be glorified and I am going to create a state of things which will result eventually in glory in the sense of My absolute satisfaction." That is the spiritual pilgrimage of Abraham, and it is ours. The God of glory appeared and said, "Get out!" This is God's initial, inclusive decision. That is going to be worked out in detail, that is going to be applied stage by stage, but there has to be a basic and inclusive beginning, the all-inclusive act of obedience, recognising that however full, rich, wonderful the world may be, it is no place for us. It is, after all, doomed and reserved for fire. We do not belong to it, we have to quit in an inward way. And that is going to be pressed home as we go along.

I trust enough has been said at the moment to indicate what God is after, what the end of God is, and how He is seeking to bring more and more of the glory into our lives by piercing deeper and deeper, cutting between ourselves in every form: self-will, self-content, self-conceit, self-centredness, self-strength and self-opinionation, etc. What a clock self is! Every second of that clock, self shows itself in some way. God is going to apply that knife of the Cross - Col. 2:11,12 - "a circumcision not made with hands, in the putting off of the body of the flesh, in the circumcision of Christ" which is of the heart, not external but inward. That is the way of the glory, and God is making a way for the glory by ever fresh applications of the Cross, deeper yet, still deeper, initially but still more. And if we did but know it, every time the application is made and felt, the sharpness of that knife, we sense the exactingness of that Cross, the suffering right to the end, "Take now thy son". If only we realised it, it is the way of the glory, it is the way of the Divine good pleasure and satisfaction, the way by which more and more God's delight is going to be found in us. It is the God of glory Who is doing it. The enemy says He is anything but the God of glory, but rather the God of despair, the God of shame, the God of loss; it is all working out just the opposite. No, it is the God of glory Who has taken it up right in the midst, and if we suffer with Him, we shall be glorified together. Even these bodies of corruption, of humiliation, are going to be changed and made like unto the body of His glory. It is going to be glory. This is the way of glory. May the Lord give us grace to allow Him to take us all the way.

Chapter 3 - Separation Unto God

Reading: Gal. 3:7,16; Rom. 2:28-29; Heb. 11:8-9,12-16.

We have been occupied in the first two chapters with the principle which lies at the heart of those passages, that Abraham embodies and represents the divine thought and intention to have a heavenly seed, a heavenly people. And we have been seeing something of the outworking of that principle in the life of Abraham, and narrowing it down as we have gone along. Now we are going to narrow it down still more, and I trust the Lord will bring it to us in His own way and power as of serious personal consequence.

In our previous meditation we got to the first point of God's contact with Abraham, with this great spiritual principle in view, the point indicated by Stephen in his address recorded in the seventh chapter of the book of the Acts: "The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham...". We dwelt upon the meaning of that phrase "the God of glory", showing that glory is the ultimate thing. It means finality and perfection in nature, and is really the nature of God fully satisfied and expressed in a creation. The God of glory appeared to Abraham while he was in Ur of the Chaldees, while he was in something which was altogether and utterly contrary to the nature of God, in which God could never find any satisfaction. The city of Abraham was a representation in a small way of the creation to which you and I belong by nature. So the God of glory demands that "Get thee out", that initial, fundamental, basic thing.

"The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia... and said unto him, Get thee out...". It is an initial movement which includes and embraces all subsequent movements and outworkings of the principle that by nature you belong to a realm which can never be glorified; the God of glory can have no place there. The purpose of God to glorify can never be realised in this creation. You can do what you like and do all that you can to embellish this creation and argue against its depravity and try to make something better of it. But you will find that, as it was in Ur where Abraham had his citizenship, the external civilisation may be very great and wonderful and apparently very satisfactory, yet inwardly the thing is full of corruption, contradiction, evil and idolatry. That is true of this creation to which we belong, however we argue and whatever we may try to do about it. Men must be blind fools who do not see that, and go on as men are going on today, the very leaders of world policy, in the way they talk and argue! It is almost unthinkable, unimaginable, how they can do it in the light of facts.

Here you have on the outside a wonderful civilisation so far as sciences and arts and all such things are concerned; progress is tremendous. All the external structure of man's activities and abilities is sometimes most amazing. Yet inwardly there is that which is a contradiction of it and a moral corruption, and it is working out rather to man's destruction than otherwise, because of the deep inward iniquity and the idolatry that is there. Even man's cleverest and most wonderful inventions and discoveries are the undoing of him because there is an evil principle. God, as the God of glory, says, "My purposes can never be realised in that, glory can never come into that; its destiny and its doom is shame and destruction, it is a reservation for the fires of judgment, and those fires are already kindled".

So the God of glory, because He is that, says, in the light of His intention, "Get thee out", and that initial movement, that first inclusive step, is very largely an outward exodus at the beginning. That is, it is a transference from one kingdom to another, from one dominion to another, from one spiritual realm to another. It is what the New Testament calls, in its original word, from one cosmos (one order of things) to another.

With Abraham it was that. From one kingdom which was of this creation, to another; from one dominion which was of this world, to another; from one order of things which was of Satan's creation, to another. Is not that what is implicit in the words of the Lord to Paul at his conversion recorded in Acts 26:16-18: "To this end have I appeared unto thee... I send thee, to open their eyes". The God of glory appeared to open their eyes "that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive remission of sins and an inheritance among them that are sanctified by faith in me". The word translated "sanctified" is really "separated", 'them that are separated, that are cut off, that have been transferred from the authority of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of his love'. That is what is here in "Get thee out". It is a clean cut right at the beginning on the part of the believer with all that belongs to him by nature as born into this creation, the taking of an altogether new position. And it is so completely a new position that he knew not whither he went. He had absolutely no information and no education as to this new kingdom; he had to start from zero and learn everything from the beginning. "Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 18:3).

It is such a complete new beginning by the utterness of this transference, that you can bring nothing over, none of your old intelligence. We pointed out what an educated and enlightened man Abraham must have been. He was a member of that very advanced civilisation, in many respects quite as advanced as our own civilisation. Abraham belonged to that, but he could take none of it out with him; it was no use to him in this realm. What is the good of all that architectural knowledge and ability to build wonderful houses and temples and be living in tents up and down the land, never many hours together in one place, a sojourner? What is the good of that education in this realm?

Typically, it is very close to principle. All that, however great, which belongs to this creation, counts for nothing. Here in the new creation in Christ you start all over again and learn everything from scratch. It is a wonderful education upon which we enter, but it is an inward education. It is the outworking or the inworking of divine principles. God is working heavenly laws into us, and we are getting a wonderful education as we walk with God in the Spirit. So it is an inclusive break, an inclusive transference right at the beginning.

The First Movement Negative

In a sense, that first movement of Abraham and of ourselves is negative. There are positive elements in it, but it still remains negative. The positive aspect of revelation and realisation has yet to be. It demands a new position. While the God of glory comes to Abraham and says, "Get thee out", that is all He does say, except "unto the land which I will show thee". That is not very much to go on, that is rather negative. And it is just that that is made so much of in the New Testament, where his faith is proved to be so marvellous, that on such a negative basis, such little information, such a withholding from him of any knowledge about things which lay ahead, he moved, he acted in obedience. But it is negative. That is as far as God can go in that realm. "Get out".

When he came into God's realm, and when we come into God's realm, then the positive side begins, and, as we pointed out, some half a dozen times God appears to Abraham, and every time it is on some positive matter, something extra, something in advance, some going on, some increase, some addition. I want you to remember this. We need not hurry to cover too much ground, but we must make sure of every point. You will never get further revelation of God's mind and purpose to your heart until you have made the break and the cut that God requires. You must be on God's ground to get God's revelation. God will not go on with us while there are links with something that God has ruled out and set aside. That is basic and that is progressive. Do you want to know the Lord in a new way? You will find that the Lord will apply this principle of severance and of heavenliness before you get that further revelation. Arrest, delay, limitation in spiritual life and spiritual growth is usually, if not invariably, due to some earth touch, some touch somewhere with what God will not have, which can never be glorified.

The Danger of an Earth Touch

We mentioned Abraham in the New Testament, and it was on that very point that we saw him in the letter to the Galatians. What is the trouble in the Galatians' church? It is that these people who made a good start and seemed to promise well and were going on, were suddenly stopped. The whole movement forward with God has come under arrest and they are not going on any longer, "Ye were running well; who hindered you?" "Who did bewitch you?" Something has come in. You look in the letter to see why, and you find they have come down to earthly ground, they have come down from Christ in heaven, from the spiritual to the religiously earthly; they begin to take up again these rites and ordinances as earthly things. They have gone back to the ground of what is merely on earth in a religious way, the old Judaistic system of things, which was only intended to point on to the heavenly and spiritual and eternal. Everything has come under arrest, and the great appeal of the apostle is, Get off the earth, break that contact, renew your relationship with Christ in heaven, and as you go on, this arrest will cease.

And so all spiritual arrest or limitation will be traceable to some point, some form or another of an earth touch. It may not be, mark you, grossly worldly or grossly immoral. It may be religious, but it is earthly, something that is built up on this earth and maintained on this earth as a link somewhere, somehow, in a spiritual way with the world that is not God's world. I think that is patent to most people who have eyes. There is a tremendous amount of arrest in what is called the church today and spiritual limitation. And when you look, how the world has got into it, and how it has got into the world, and how worldly principles are governing! That is perfectly clear. So, if we are going on, we have to get onto God's ground. If God is going to speak and reveal Himself, we have to be where God does speak.

Separation Already Effected in the Cross

Note how thorough-going is God's demand over this matter, because He is a positive God, because it is positive things that He is after. If God makes a demand, it is not just because He wants that thing done, but because everything is bound up with that in His purpose, and so He says to Abraham, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house" (Gen. 12:1). Three circles: the widest circle, the whole domain, "thy country"; the narrower circle, "thy kindred"; and the narrowest circle, "thy father's house". Three circles; not the final, that has yet to come, that will be the inward realm, the whole world within. Here God is very comprehensive. "Thy country, thy kindred, thy father's house". For us that means spiritually the whole range and realm of our old natural relationships, and the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ includes that, effects that. This is not something that we can do or that we can bring about. We can only do what Abraham did and be obedient to God; respond to God from our hearts. We do not know all that is involved, we do not know all that it is going to mean, and thank God we do not. We could not face it if we did, but what we do know is that God says, "Take this attitude, that the whole of your natural life and natural relationships lie outside of the possibility of the realisation of My purpose; you have got to start all over again in another realm".

The Cross of the Lord Jesus has effected that. If we will come in heart to that Cross, accept God's meaning in the Cross of His Son, we shall find that this thing happens. That is exactly what is meant, as we pointed out, by the words of Paul to the Colossians which you should take account of again quite definitely, "In whom ye were also circumcised with a circumcision not made with hands, in the putting off of the body of the flesh, in the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism, wherein ye were also raised with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead" (Col. 2:11-12). It is something that the Cross of Christ has done and which is inherent in the Cross, and our coming in faith to accept the divine meaning of the Cross will do this thing in us. It will do this thing initially in us. That is initial, basic and fundamental, and it is very thorough and very comprehensive. Let us have no doubt about it, that the Cross of the Lord Jesus is a complete severance of us from the whole realm of nature. If we are living in that realm, we do not know the Cross of the Lord Jesus.

The Law of Letting Go to God

Without following that for the moment further in the life of Abraham in particular points, I want to come to the law that is really operating here. It is the law from the beginning right to the end of the life of Abraham which governs and touches everything, and I think, if we can just grasp this now, it will be enough to last us for the rest of our days. We shall find that it is coming up every time, all the way along. What was the law at work in Abraham's life? Well, it was simply this: the law of letting go to God; the most difficult thing for human nature to do. There is in this nature this fallen creation because of that thing to which we earlier referred. There is in us by nature an acquisitiveness and a possessiveness which finds it the most difficult thing in life to let go, to give up, to yield, to hand over, to change an attitude.

It came from Satan himself. The origin of it, as we have it in the Scriptures, was when Satan, in his high place with God in heaven, said, "I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God... I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High" (Isa. 14:13,14). It was an acquisitiveness and a possessiveness born of pride, a taking hold to have, to get. That is the very nature of Satan, that is the original sin: self-possessiveness, self-acquisitiveness, self-control, to have it, to hold it. And it was that that came into the race through Adam, when Satan said to him, "Ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil" (Gen. 3:5). You can have, you can possess, you can acquire, it can be your matter. Then why not? And Adam fell to it, and from that time this possessiveness, acquisitiveness, self-holding, gripping, keeping, is the nature of man.

We see it on a large scale in the world all the way through history, and if you think that you are utterly without it personally, I venture to say that, if the Holy Spirit gets you into His hands, it will not be long before you discover that there is some kick in you and some come-back against the Lord which says, I do not want that, I do not like that, I am not going to have that, and it is a will that is other than the will of God in you. Our fallen nature is to hold to our own way, and to what we have got; to hold our ground. That is this nature, and it is earthly, sensual and devilish, as James puts it in his letter (3:15). It comes from Satan, it belongs to this fallen creation, it is not heavenly and it cannot be characteristic of this heavenly people, this heavenly seed.

It is the law of letting go, self-emptying, obedience. What is obedience but doing someone else's will and not your own, letting go to someone else, standing outside of yourself, forsaking your own ground? That is obedience.

Now you see where this has landed us. What are the Gospels? What are the four Gospels, or, if you like to take one of them alone, what is the Gospel by John? It is the Gospel of the heavenly Man. The Gospels are the divine instruments of setting forth what a heavenly man is on this earth, what a heavenly man is like, how he behaves, what his nature is. We find that the heavenly Man, Jesus Christ, is always emphasizing, "I came down from heaven" (John 6:38), "from above", "Ye are from beneath; I am from above" (John 8:23). He is always keeping that in view, that He does not belong to this creation, He belongs to heaven, "The Son of Man, who is in heaven" (John 3:13); even while He is here, He is in heaven. His life is heavenly, it is hid in God. But what is the supreme characteristic of a heavenly man as represented by Him? It is meekness. And what is meekness? - self-emptying.

We come on to this again and again in the life of Abraham - letting go to God. The very temptations with which the public life of the Lord Jesus commenced, those temptations in the wilderness, are three marvellous examples of this principle of letting go to God. Satan is saying, "Command that these stones become bread." The Lord Jesus reacts to that, not in these words but on this principle, 'I am not so concerned about saving My own life as that; the Lord will look after Me without My doing anything under the coercion of apparent necessity; I am sustained from heaven.' Each answer to temptation was just self-emptiness, not looking after Himself, not taking hold for Himself, not yielding to pressure to do something in His own interests, either personally to preserve His own bodily life, or publicly to make a way for His ministry by some sensational act in casting Himself down from the temple on the basis of a Scripture that "He shall give his angels charge concerning thee... on their hands they shall bear thee up, lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone". In other words, do a sensational thing, and people will at once flock after you and you will become popular. 'I am not concerned about My popularity at all, I am not here to get a Name for Myself.' The devil showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. 'I am not a bit concerned about getting them in that way; I leave that with My Father, the whole matter is with My Father, it does not concern Me at all; I have to go the way of obedience to My Father.' The way of utter selflessness... not at any point whatever acting on my behalf, in my own interests, to my own ends, not a bit. Self-emptying! And all the way through it was that. Oh, marvellous was His meekness! Meekness is the greatest virtue in God's universe, the most powerful thing known to God.

Note Abraham: "Get thee out", then stage by stage the pressing home of this principle of letting go. It is beautiful, marvellous, right up to the last, final, terrible test: "Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest... and offer him" (Gen. 22:2); let go even what God has given you, even the result of a miracle from God. And the result? "I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven" (Gen. 22:16).

Carry that over to the Lord Jesus. He let go, was emptied in meekness, holding on to nothing, even what God had given Him, letting it all go in obedience, in meekness, in humility. And God filled Him with all the fulness of the Godhead, and summed up all things in Him. "I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven." You see the way. "I leave that with God. My way is letting go, self-emptying, meekness, and the consequences are with God; God looks after the consequences. You may humiliate, you may do everything to degrade, I am not going to stand up for My rights". The Lord Jesus would say that. Abraham said that. 'I am not going to fight for my ends, seek my rights, stand on my ground, hold on to anything; I let go to God.' The consequences are with God, I leave that to Him entirely; mine it is to be obedient and in obedience to show meekness. That is not my ground at all, but God's ground, God does the rest. He vindicates, He justifies, He gives, He multiplies, He increases, He brings in the fulness, and the end is glory; glory through humility, through meekness; fulness through emptiness. That is the law of Abraham's life.

I say it is the most difficult thing for human nature to let go. Your interests are challenged in some way, something comes your way you do not like. See how easy it is at once to let go, to say, All right, I leave that with the Lord, I am not going to fight, I am not going to hold on, I am not going to cling, I am not going to argue back, I am not going to seek my own vindication, I leave that with the Lord, that is the Lord's matter, let them do what they like, that is with the Lord. Mine it is to go on with Him, with no consideration for the consequences at all. That is meekness, that is self-emptying. It is the law of Christ. It is what is meant by this very fragment, "the circumcision of Christ", and Paul, the same writer, says, "circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit not in the letter" (Rom. 2:29). See the circumcision of Christ, how His heart was circumcised; that is, inwardly He was separated from the flesh and all that the flesh means. Then the apostle says, That is the meaning of baptism. "We were buried with Him through baptism into death" (Rom. 6:4). It means your heart has been dealt with, you have come to an end of all self-government, self-acquisitiveness and self-possessiveness. It is no longer I, but Christ.

So we see Christ as the heavenly Man, and we see the principles of Christ wrought out in Abraham. We hear the Lord Jesus saying, "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it, and was glad" (John 8:56). How did Abraham see the day of Christ? - in his experience. The principle of Christ's life was wrought out in the experience and the spiritual history of Abraham, and he saw. If Abraham did not see God giving His only and well-beloved Son, when he was called upon to offer Isaac, if he did not see something in that, I do not know that he would have gone through. But he believed God that He was able to raise him from the dead. You notice that the New Testament often mentions that about Abraham. "He considered his own body now as good as dead" (Rom. 4:19). He believed "that God is able to raise up, even from the dead" (Heb. 11:19). And then it is related to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: "Abraham rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it, and was glad." The apostle says that the Gospel was preached unto Abraham. What is the Gospel? - the Gospel of God concerning His Son.

So Abraham is this comprehensive embodiment of the principles of the heavenly Man, and as those principles are wrought out in us by the grace of God, we become the heavenly people who are to know the fulness of God and come to that divine fulness which is in Christ, the spiritual seed of Abraham.

The Lord interpret His word and make it helpful to us all.

Chapter 4 - The Natural Man Ruled Out by the Cross

"They that are of faith, the same are sons of Abraham, and the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all the nations be blessed. Now to Abraham were the promises spoken, and to his seed. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ." (Gal. 3:7-8,16).

"For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh: but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God." (Rom. 2:28,29).

These passages lead us from Abraham to Christ, and show that the seed of Abraham is really Christ and those who are of Him. In this dispensation the earthly natural seed of Abraham, called the Jews, are not in view with God as such. It is a spiritual seed, a heavenly people.

Now, this transition from Abraham to Christ makes it necessary for us to understand what Christ is as God's heavenly Man, the first of this heavenly race, this heavenly and spiritual people to whom all others in Him and of Him are to be conformed. And then it becomes necessary for us to know how Christ is reproduced in a heavenly people; that is, what the people of God really are. We have been seeing how this two-fold truth is worked out in the experience of Abraham. The previous chapters very largely dealt with the basic, the fundamental and inclusive severance of Abraham from all that belonged to him by nature in his old relationships and constitution in Babylon.

Now with Christ in full view as the heavenly Man, we are going to follow this a little further in its details as to how the inworking of that principle of severance took place in Abraham's life, bringing him onto the ground of Christ. That brings us back to the chapters in Genesis, the end of chapter 11, on into chapter 12 and over a number of other chapters, but for this chapter probably only the first part of chapter 12.

An Earthly Man Trying to Work Out a Heavenly Vision

Chapter 12, as it is marked in the chapter divisions of our Bible, begins with a throw-back. "Now the Lord said unto Abram..." and it is important for us to see exactly what that statement means. In the Authorized Version it is more helpfully translated. It says, "Now the Lord had said unto Abram". The revisers have taken the significance of the statement without using the exact word of the past tense "had". The meaning is still here. "Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house", and you have to put that back before verse 27 of chapter 11. "Now these are the generations of Terah". Terah was Abram's father, and if you put these beginning words of chapter 12 back there, it is like this: "Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out". The "thee" is emphatic in the original language. It really means: 'Whatever other people are going to do, this is My word for you, this is what you have got to do, this is personal to you'. That had been said, in that personal, direct way to Abram. The next thing you find is "Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran, his son's son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran and dwelt there. And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years: and Terah died in Haran".

You see what has happened: Terah has taken hold of the vision and revelation given to Abram, he has taken hold of it, collected up all his family and essayed to go forth to put that vision and that Divine purpose revealed to Abram into operation to realize it. But it was never said to Terah, it was never said to any of the others. It was said to Abram, but Terah took hold of it. Abram's father, the old man, took hold of it and tried to fulfil it, to realize it, and you are not surprised, therefore, that there comes a halt on the way. They got to the frontier town of Haran, and stayed there probably for about twenty-five years. I say 'probably' because you have to put certain things together to arrive at the exact time. But that seems to be the result, that they just came under arrest, to a halt, at Haran for twenty-five years until Terah was finished, until he was out of the way, until the vision, the Divine revelation and purpose had got out of the hands of Terah. He was dead and immediately everything is released and on they go in the Divine purpose.

Now, that is the first thing that you and I, as those called into this heavenly relationship with the Lord Jesus, have to learn. It is a part of the fundamental movement. It is what you might call the first practical stage and aspect of that basic thing. Leaving the whole realm of nature, the whole world to which we belong by natural birth, we have got to recognise something or before long we shall come under spiritual arrest. There will be a long delay in our spiritual progress in the Lord Jesus and we want to keep Him before us even more than Abram.

In the Lord Jesus, we have this thing in perfection and completeness, a full presentation of the heavenly Man, and, as we pointed out in our previous meditation, the one thing that He was constantly saying Himself was that He did not belong to this earth and this world and this system of things. "Ye are from beneath; I am from above"; "I am come down from heaven"; "the Son of man who is in heaven". It would do you great good if you went through the Gospel by John alone with that word 'heaven' and 'heavenly' in view. See how large a place it occupies and how much the Lord Jesus makes of it as the essential basis of everything that He is doing and saying. There is a lot of deep instruction here.

Heaven Reopened in Christ the Heavenly Man

To me, it is very wonderful and very engaging. Just this little fragment, for instance. We said that the earliest name of Babylon was The Place of the Tree of Life, and right on as far on as the time of Alexander the Great, their symbol was the Tree of Life. It was imposed or carved upon the coffins, as late as that. We know what happened to produce The Place of the Tree of Life. We know what happened to Paradise, the Place of the Tree of Life, when man fell away from God and entered into that alliance with God's enemy, not only outwardly but in an inward way in his very nature. Paradise was closed, the Tree of Life was made a reserve and disappeared from the earth and reappears in the Lord Jesus. So far as man on the earth is concerned, heaven is closed, there is no entrance. It is an enclosed reserve, there is no coming to God any more and walking with God after that.

The place of fellowship and communion with God, the place of eternal life, is removed from the earth, and in the New Testament it re-appears in the person of the Lord Jesus. He is the Tree of Life, He is the place of communion and fellowship with God, He is the place of the opened heaven for men of faith. So early in the Gospel of John that comes into view: "Ye shall see the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man" (John 1:51). That is Paradise reopened, and Christ, the Tree of Life, is the centre. The communication of man with God is a heavenly thing now in the Person of the Lord Jesus.

But you see in Babylon they were still clinging to a dead tradition. It was a religious thing; they were holding on to their symbol of the Tree of Life which no longer existed amongst men. We come, in this new dispensation, as shown us here in this Gospel by John, to see that the true Tree of Life is still alive in the heavenly Man. All the heavenly seed of Abraham have to leave the realm of dead tradition and religion and come into a living, personal relationship with the heavenly Man, and partake of His heavenly nature, and for them the heaven is opened. Abram, under Divine command, in the obedience of faith, left the realm of Babylon, the realm of mere dead tradition, where it was only symbol, not reality, where it was a dead thing altogether. When he came right out, he came into the place of the opened heaven, and from that time God was constantly appearing to him. He was living under an open heaven, except on one or two occasions when he lapsed, and we shall see the meaning and value of that.

Now you see, all this is summed up in the heavenly Man, the Lord Jesus. And we come into the good of the open heaven, of the renewed fellowship with God in the heavenly Man, as we become His seed, the spiritual seed of Abraham, which is Christ; that is, as we become a heavenly and spiritual people.

We were saying Terah essayed to take up this heavenly vision, and it was found that an earthly man can never do that. You have to become a heavenly man in order to go through with the heavenly vision. Terah brought everything to a standstill because, as a natural man, a man of the earth, a man who had not come into that personal relationship with God in a heavenly way, he tried to take hold of heavenly things and brought everything to a standstill. I was saying that that is one of the first great things we have to learn, and there is a lot of history bound up with that. Some of us were in the place of Terah for many years. We had taken hold of Divine things, we were trying to do God's work, we were trying to fulfil a Divine programme, we had got hold of some idea as to what the Lord wanted done, and we threw ourselves into it. We took hold of this thing, we pursued it, we pressed it, we worked at it. The Lord had pity upon our innocence and our ignorance, but He did not accept us on the ground of our taking hold of Divine things naturally, with natural strength, with natural wisdom, with natural energy and natural enthusiasm. And the time came when a new crisis arose, where we had to accept the implications of our death with Christ, that it was not only the taking away of our sins, but it was the taking away of ourselves; where we had to die, and die to all that was of God.

That sounds strange, but there is a sense in which we have to die to all that is of God. This is the sense: that the natural man cannot live in the Divine realm. He has to accept that he is dead, and it is impossible to apprehend Divine things, and fulfil Divine purposes. It is not in him, he has not the capacity or the ability to come into the realm of heavenly things; it cannot be done. We have to come to that crisis where we accept our death to ourselves, even as to the work of God, even as to the things of God; the place where, if there is going to be anything known, anything done, it must be the Lord Who does it on an altogether new basis, a new creation basis, a resurrection basis; where something has happened that has put us out naturally.

That is not fresh information to most of you, but there are perhaps those here who are not quite clear about that and Terah is brought into the Scriptures in this way to say to us, Oh no; you may hear about Divine things, it may be told you, someone may have been like Abram and given the information and told what they have heard from the Lord and what the Lord has said to them, you may have heard it in the meetings, in the addresses, in the teaching, and then you may have taken hold of it and said, I am going for that, I am going into that, I am going to follow that out! And you find it does not work, you get into a false position, and while you believe the thing in a way as being quite right and quite true, nothing is happening, there is a pause inwardly. Do understand the importance of recognising the meaning of Terah, the old man, the old Adam, the natural father, the one from whom all the natural springs. He cannot take up heavenly things and follow through. No, the natural man cannot fulfil the spiritual.

Nicodemus an Illustration of the Inability of the Natural Man

That is exactly the teaching we have in John chapter 3. Here comes Terah; his name is changed to Nicodemus. He comes to the Lord Jesus to discuss heavenly things, Divine things. He has heard, he has reports, he has been listening to things that the Lord Jesus has been saying, and he has come along to talk over those things, for "no one can do these signs that thou doest, except God be with him". So Nicodemus (Terah) begins to take hold of heavenly things, as he thinks, or essayed to do so, and there comes a terrible pause. "Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except one be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God... Most truly, most truly, I say unto thee, Except one be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God". Here is the double 'cannot' written large by the Divine hand upon Terah and all his company, Nicodemus amongst them. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh" and remains flesh, whether it has stepped across the frontier and essayed to take hold of Divine things or not; that is, whether it has listened to the teaching, to the truth reported from an Abram who has really got the thing firsthand from the Lord. Whether he has believed that the teaching is quite right, true and sound and on that basis has moved to do something about it, Nicodemus cannot, he just cannot; he can get no further. That which is born of the flesh remains flesh, still is flesh.

"That which is born of the Spirit is spirit". Listen! "If I told you earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you heavenly things? And no one hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended out of heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven." What a conundrum for Nicodemus, or Terah, or anybody! What is the Man talking about, what does He mean? Who descended out of heaven and is here, and yet is still in heaven? What are you going to make of it? This heavenly Man is incomprehensible, is beyond all natural power of understanding and grasping. 'If I told you heavenly things, how would you believe?' You see the heavenly side being brought in as showing that the natural man is slain, he is out of it. Then you have to cut out a portion of this chapter from verse 22 to verse 30. The narrative is taken up again at verse 31. It should follow on verse 21. "He that doeth the truth cometh to the light, that his works may be made manifest, that they have been wrought in God... He that cometh from above is above all: he that is of the earth is of the earth, and of the earth he speaketh: he that cometh from heaven is above all. What he hath seen and heard, of that he beareth witness; and no man receiveth his witness (no man can receive, is capable of receiving, his witness). He that hath received his witness hath set his seal to this, that God is true. For he whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God: for he giveth not the Spirit by measure." It is all this heavenly Man speaking heavenly things, and the earthly man totally incapable of grasping, apprehending, understanding, following through.

That is Terah, that is Nicodemus, and that is you and me by nature - the impossibility of entering into and fulfilling any heavenly thing until we become a heavenly people. So the Lord is saying to Nicodemus in other words, If you want to understand heavenly things, if you want to have an opened heaven, if you want to be able to know what I am talking about and what I am doing, you must be born (it does not say 'anew', the word really is 'from above') you must be born from above, you must become a heavenly person, and a heavenly person is one born of the Spirit; that is, a spiritual man and a spiritual person.

The Lord has been showing to me the inner meaning of this circumcision of the heart in such a way that I can say to you I have never seen it like that before. It is out of that that I am speaking and we shall never exhaust this truth, we shall never get beyond the possibility of new applications of the truth of the Scriptures in what we are calling inward circumcision, that is, a deep down separation between what we are by nature and what Christ is. We will never get beyond that, and it is going to be applied more and more as we go on, because we are called to be this heavenly people. Oh, the ramifications of this natural life of ours! How deep they are! How complex they are! How comprehensive they are!

The Lord's Need of a Crucified People

This work of the Spirit, dividing, inwardly dividing; what is it, after all, that the Lord is trying to get at? In a word, it is this. The Lord must have for His full purpose, the realisation of what is fully in His heart, He must have a thoroughly crucified people. That means a people thoroughly and deeply separated from themselves by the Cross of Jesus Christ; not only separated from the world in an outward way, but separated from this old man Terah who is inside us. God must have a deeply crucified people.

What is needed on this earth is a crucified people. The trouble is people, the trouble is Christians, the trouble is Christian workers. I am not going to say much about that, but take that as a statement. We are the trouble to the Lord. There is a Christianity, an organized Christianity, which is the greatest enemy that Christ has on this earth, and is standing in His way. It is standing in the way of many being saved. It is a caricature, a false Christianity, a false Christ, it is a most terrible thing. But that is speaking very generally in a larger realm, but even with ourselves, we are the trouble to the Lord's interests, we are in the way, we are not crucified sufficiently to make it possible for the Lord to go right through with His purpose. There is too much of Terah holding on still in us to the things of God and getting in God's way, and therefore holding up everything. Oh, suffer this word, it is very necessary.

What is needed is a deeper inward cutting clean in between the life of the flesh and the Life of the Spirit, the life of the earthly and the Life of the heavenly, the life of Adam and the Life of Christ; a severance as utter, drastic and terrible as the Cross of the Lord Jesus. I say "terrible" because there is no doubt about it that the most terrible moment in the whole history of this into which the universe and eternity were crowded, and in which the heart of God's beloved Son was broken, was when He cried, "Thou hast forsaken Me!" It was because in that moment He stepped right into the place of man by nature, you and me and the whole race, to carry it under judgment out of God's sight, inclusively, basically, fundamentally. And God turned His back on that, turned His face away from His Son when He was made sin in our place and made a curse for us. God abandoned Him because at that moment He stood in that place. We have to recognize that that world which God abandoned as represented by His Son in that moment, still is abandoned by God. He has never brought it back, not one bit of it, and, although He is very longsuffering, patient and forbearing with the remaining traces of it in us while He deals with us to get rid of it, His attitude to it all is still the same as in that moment on the Cross. He has nothing to do with it, He will not accept it. Yes, the need is a crucified people, crucified workers for God, crucified, deeply crucified, and the crucifixion is the severance between what is nature and what is the Lord.

We do need to face this matter. Do believe me that so much of the trouble is found in many of the Lord's people who are not just simple believers but who are in positions where they have responsibility and where they are taken note of, where they are seen, where they are prominent, and it is just there in so many cases that the Lord cannot get on, and the things of the Lord are being brought into shame, confusion and dishonour, and the Lord Himself is being dishonoured. Oh, the story of the breakdown and failure of us Christians and of us Christian workers... the constant seeping in, the creeping in, of some form of our natural life, self-interest, possessiveness, where we meet one another. We have not seen the awfulness, the depth of what there is in us even in matters like stubbornness. Let us look at it again at 1 Sam. 15:17: "Though thou wast little in thine own sight, wast thou not made the head of the tribes of Israel?" You see the attitude of the Lord, and now, by inference Saul left that ground of littleness in his own eyes. He has become something and this is what it amounts to: "To obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry" (vv. 22,23). Rebellion and stubbornness are directly linked with the evil powers. Witchcraft is a link with fallen spirits. Will any one of us say that there is no old man stubbornness, no old Adam rebellion in us? It is there! This Scripture says that kind of thing is immediately linked with the evil powers, the fallen spirits, the demons, it is satanic. When that comes up in Christians, how can the Lord go on? There is bound to be some kind of arrest, and there is bound to be some kind of dishonouring of the Lord, as there was with Saul.

How we do need this heart circumcision deeper and deeper, especially as Christian workers. I say again as I close, the great need today is a heavenly people, a spiritual people. Let us ask the Lord to make us, not workers, not preachers, but people like Christ.

Chapter 5 - The Application of the Law of Heavenliness

Reading: Gen. 12:1013:4.

We are occupied at this time with the Lord's desire to have on this earth a heavenly people, a people who, being born from above, in vital relationship with the heavenly Man, Christ Jesus, are His expression on the earth. And we have been seeking to take account of the working out of this law of heavenliness as seen in the life of Abraham, concerning whom the New Testament says that his real seed was not the Jew of the earthly type, but this heavenly people, this Seed which Paul says is Christ. For the sake of any who might have very strong dispensational views, I am not saying that the Jews were not in a sense the seed of Abraham, but in this dispensation it is neither Jew nor Greek, it is all one Man in Christ, and that means a heavenly Man, for Christ is essentially the heavenly Man as John in his Gospel makes so clear.

Now, the outworking of this law of heavenliness is seen in a number of different ways in the life of Abraham. We saw in our previous meditation the pressing of this law in relation to all his past connections; the old world, the old relationships, the old kindred had to be cut off and left behind, and until it was, there was no possible movement in the realm of Divine things, no possible entering into the things of heaven. Now we will pass on to some of the specific and more particular applications of this very law.

The Testing of Faith's Obedience

The passage we have before us has to do with Abram having at length moved away from Haran into the land in obedience, and now full obedience by that basic separation, and then it says he comes in, having built his altar and called upon the Name of the Lord at Bethel, it says, "And there was a famine in the land: and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there; for the famine was sore in the land." This is the first real pressing of the law of heavenliness in the land, and it is a very severe one, a very big test, and it embodies some very important lessons for us.

A heavenly position has been taken, a faith position has been taken, and it has been taken on the basis of a definite revelation from God, a definite making known to Abram of God's mind, God's will and God's intention, and in relation thereto this utter position has been taken. He has moved away from the frontier right into the land, and having done so, he finds very sore famine in the land, and he finds himself tested by the very position that he has taken. We naturally would expect that if the Lord had distinctly and definitely shown us a course that He wanted us to take and made us to understand that a certain direction was His will, that a certain position must be taken up by us in relation to His thoughts and His purposes, that when we are committed to it, when we take that position, when we are obedient to the heavenly vision, we should immediately find the Lord came out to meet us with great, wonderful confirmations that we were in His will and that it was all right. That is the natural expectation, argument and conclusion but very often it just works in exactly the opposite way. A position is taken on a basis of strong conviction and assurance that it was the Lord's will, the Lord's way, and almost immediately we find ourselves in trouble, we find that the position has brought us into difficulties and our obedience has precipitated us into a situation which is naturally impossible.

What do you expect when you are being wholly obedient to the Lord? You, of course, expect that an act of implicit obedience to the revealed will of God will bring from Him an attestation, a demonstration, a confirmation in some way that He is quite pleased and satisfied, and that all is well. Do you expect an immediate confirmation of obedience? If you do, you may be very disappointed. See all that Abram had done and see all that happened. We have noted what a forsaking it was, what a wealth of life he had in Ur of the Chaldees, what security, assurance, riches and what an advanced state of civilisation it was. He had left it, all of it. Later he had left kindred, coming out on nothing, as we may say naturally. It was sheer obedience to a command from the Lord, very costly indeed, and every argument would be that the Lord should vindicate that straight away, and show by confirming signs that our obedience was well-pleasing to Him and quite satisfactory. What Abram found was quite contrary to that. "A sore famine in the land", an impossible situation, naturally speaking.

Now, is that very discouraging, disheartening and terrible to take a step of obedience to the Lord? You may find that you will get a very real testing by means of the very position that you have taken. You will be sifted and shaken and tried about the whole matter. God is going to press this principle of heavenliness more and more inwardly. When things go like that, remember Abram, remember that this is in the Bible, and remember the Lord Jesus, because, as we saw in the previous chapter, the Word transfers us with one step from Abram to Christ, Christ the full measure of that to which Abram was being step by step brought. Christ is there in the perfection of it all, having completed this spiritual journey and summed it all up in Himself.

We have been brought onto the heavenly basis of Christ by being born from above, and we are on the journey, and the journey is not always one of immediate confirmations and vindications from heaven. It is usually one of the applying of heavenly principles more and more stringently.

The Nature of the Test

What was the nature of this test? If we see the nature of it, perhaps we shall be more helped in understanding. Well, simply, the nature of this test for Abram was apparent necessity, the argument of necessity. Of course, you have to decide on what ground the necessity rests, in what connection the necessity lies, but to all human argument it is a matter of, "It is necessary to do something", an apparent necessity for his very life. A subtle argument would come from somewhere, whispering in the ear, 'For the very purpose of God, you must do something.' That suggestion came to Abram more than once, "For the realisation of the purpose with which you are called, you must do something about it." Do not misunderstand me, I am not saying that we are not to be practical people and never do anything. There are a lot of people who would take up a passive position and be altogether unpractical, so "spiritual" that they do not want to do anything practical at all. That is not in the realm of what I am thinking about.

If we allow ourselves to be carried at once with this very thing from Abram to Christ, we shall find that it was the very first thing that arose in the case of the Lord Jesus. What had happened? He had been baptized in Jordan, in which He Himself had openly, before heaven and earth, declared that He was a separated Man, separated unto heaven, separated unto the will of His Father, separated from all earthly ways or earthly interests and all personal concerns and considerations. He was separated by that symbolic grave of Jordan from everything of the natural man, everything of this earth. He was joined to heaven. When He came up out of the water, the heavens were open to Him; heavenly attestation was given, this Man is linked with heaven.

Now, that had been His declaration by the practical means of baptism, "Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights ... the tempter came and said unto Him, If thou art the Son of God, command that these stones become bread" (Matt. 4:1-3). In other words, "If You do not do something, You will die and You will never be able to fulfil all this work to which You are called, all this heavenly vocation which has been declared, You will not be able to go on with it and get through with it, You will simply collapse. You will die. You must do something about it, necessity is laid upon You. For Your own personal vindication, for the very proving that it is true what has been said from heaven that You are the Son, and for the going through with this great work upon which You have set out, You must do something about it, everything is in the balances, and now do something to save Your own life!" Of course, that was not said, but that is what lies behind it. There is Christ right at the very beginning, just at the other side of Jordan, with the great divide, the heavenly position taken up, and the first application of the heavenly principle is the argument of apparent necessity in relation to all interests. It is a throw-back upon the original move.

We have not a full record, but I think we can do a lot of filling in from the little experience that we have had, and from what we have gleaned from our own spiritual history and from the spiritual history of other servants of God. Those whispering voices are always present in a position like this, when you are right up against it, when the way seems closed, when the Lord does not seem to be vindicating your obedience, when He does not seem to be fulfilling His half of the undertaking, when everything seems to argue that the Lord has left you to it. You have taken this course, this step, and now you are left to it, to your own resources. Those whispering voices, they come and they say, "Are you quite sure that you were right in taking that step, are you quite sure that it was the Lord, quite sure that there was nothing of your own self in this, that you have not been mistaken, deluded and deceived?" When you are right up against it in spiritual matters, the enemy is always very near to throw back on the original step and raise questions as to whether you were right.

One of the enemy's great activities and methods is to try to get us to go back on our course and in some way call into question our obedience to the Lord, to confuse us, to paralyse us by a doubt as to whether we were right. Don't forget that. It has been the experience of many servants of the Lord, that coming up against a very difficult situation, an impossible one, the enemy has immediately said, "You see? You were mistaken, there was something wrong about the beginning of this!" The enemy throws you into such a state of paralysis where all is hopeless, going right back to the beginning and raising questions as to the beginning of things. Was it really on the ground of the Cross that you took that step, was it really utterly selfless when you moved in that way? Was there not, after all, something of self in it? You see what he is doing. He is trying to undercut the whole meaning of the Cross, the whole meaning of the Cross as typically represented in that baptism of Christ.

Christ had taken that step, with the utterness of intention and declared that it was on the ground of the death to all self-interest that He moved on in the will of God. Now Satan would undercut all the meaning of the Cross and raise questions about that. It is a terrible thing when we allow something like that. Beware of that! Some of you have enough understanding to know what that means, this terrible throw-back of the enemy to raise questions about the origin, the beginning, as to whether it was right. If he can get us into doubt about that, he has destroyed the life of faith.

Now, Abraham is the embodiment of the principle of faith for a heavenly life. Try to live a heavenly life on this earth apart from faith, and it becomes a fiasco. Faith is the law of a heavenly life here, it must be in the very nature of things. The law of the heavenly life is assailed by circumstances, by appearances, with the argument that says, "You have been wrong, you have made a mistake; now you have to rectify this somehow, you have to go back on this and do something." So the argument of expediency is brought in and at this point Abram fails; he leaves the heavenly position and goes down to Egypt. He takes the matter into his own hands and out of the Lord's hands. Oh, it is easy to say these things. It is easy to talk like this unless you know something about it. It is a very real experience. Some of you have been that way, others will come this way, but remember this is a true and genuine aspect of a spiritual life. The Lord presses in this law of heavenliness in this way, and tests us as to the very position that we have taken, and then Satan comes on to that ground of our testing and tries to twist the whole thing and distort it and give it an argument and complexion that would undercut the whole purpose of God in our lives.

The Complications of a False Step

Abram went down to Egypt, and what happened? If you take one false step like that, rather than find that it relieves and removes the difficulty, it only accentuates it and brings other complications. So you have the rest of the story: Pharaoh and Abram's wife; a very complicated situation arises, and a half lie (it is only a half lie) has to be told to save the situation. One false step leads to another, and so you get into a constellation of complexes and find yourself involved in more difficulties, and rather than get out of your trouble, you land yourself in more trouble immediately you listen to the argument of expediency and apparent necessity instead of holding to the ground of God and His faithfulness. Oh, in many ways this will come to our lives, an argument that it is sheer folly for you, on all natural grounds, to take a certain course that you feel the Lord would have you take. It will be disaster, it will be death, it will be the end of everything, if you do that. Why, all common sense is against it! All advice is against it, the whole world is against it! You must not do that, you should do this, you should look after yourself, you should preserve yourself, you should do something about it in the natural.

And the attitude of the heavenly Man, the Lord Jesus, was undoubtedly this: "I would sooner perish, standing firmly in the will of My Father, than I would live and have everything by stepping out of that will." That test is very severe, but it is the way of the glory, it is the way of fulness, the way of enlargement, of increase. It is the way to "I will multiply thy seed" (Gen. 22:17), "I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward" (Gen. 15:1). That is what lies in the way of standing steady in the known will of God, when necessity seems to be laid upon us to do something else. It is severe, but there it is. It is the way that the Master went.

Satan usually has something nearby, at hand. Egypt was not so very far away, the stones were right there to be made into bread. Satan usually has something not so far away that you can do, if you like you can do it; it is there to be done, it is quite easy. How easy the enemy makes the way of disobedience! - only just a little thing to get us out, a nearby Egypt solution, as we think, the solution of expediency, but it only involves in a false position. Abram came into a very false position with Pharaoh. It was the earth touch again, and touch this cursed earth anywhere, and you are in confusion. Become related to it in an inward way, in any connection and direction at all, and you are in confusion. It is death so far as spiritual and heavenly things are concerned.

Finding the Lord Where We Left Him

Just before verse 10 of chapter 12 - "And he removed from thence unto the mountain on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, having Bethel on the west, and Ai on the east: and there he built an altar unto the Lord, and called upon the name of the Lord." He went down into Egypt, and then you come into chapter 13. (It is a pity there is a break of chapters here.) Verse 3: "And he went on his journeys (back now from Egypt into the land) from the South even to Bethel, unto the place where his tent had been at the beginning, between Bethel and Ai, unto the place of the altar, which he had made there at the first: and there Abram called on the name of the Lord." He came back to the place from which he started on the false road.

Now, there are two things about that. One is that there is, of course, no hope at all until you get back to the point where your deviation started. You will never recover until you get right back there and put things right just at that point, and see everything from that position. I had a friend once who was very fond of playing golf, and he had a habit of losing his balls, but he also had a wonderful way of recovering them. Being asked how it was he was able to recover his balls so often, he said, "I always go back to the place where I hit them; I follow with my eye the most likely course, and usually find it." Back to the place from which you started, and just take in the whole thing from that vantage point, and you are able to correct.

Abram came back to the very spot, the place of the altar, the place where God was. We always find the Lord where we left Him. The Lord is so faithful that He cannot go with us always. We get away, we go on our own, take our own self-chosen way, we fall a prey to the enemy's arguments, we get away from the place where the Lord meets us, where the Lord was with us, but we always find the Lord waiting for us just there when we come back. The faithfulness of God! How often we have found that. He is ready to resume when we get back on to His ground ready to go on. He has not given us up, He is waiting for us. If you have deviated, if you have missed the way, if you have lost your touch with the Lord, just see why, discover why. Get back to the point where it happened. You will find the Lord there waiting for you. The Lord is not awkward or cantankerous, He is not of that kind: "You went off, all right, get on with it. I am not going to take you up again!" He is not like that. He is right there, and many, many times some of us have found it like that. We have made our mistakes, our blunders; we, like Abram, have defaulted. We have allowed argument to carry us away, we have been forced by seeming necessity to do something, and we found the Lord was not with us and it has been a barren patch, a dark tunnel, a closed way. When we have put it right and got back to the altar, to the Cross, where all things are adjusted, we found the Lord there waiting for us. So did Abram. He got back to Bethel, got back to the altar.

The Course of a Carnal Christian

Now, I want to take the next phase of the working of the principle. It is Lot. You come on into the very next paragraph, and you have Lot brought in, and his history in a practical way becomes accentuated and emphasized. You know who he was; he was the son of Haran, who was the son of Terah. He was closely related to Abram, and it would seem as if, when father Terah died, Abram took this young man as a younger brother. But it is a sad story, and it bears out this very principle of which we are speaking in a wonderful way on both its sides, the contradiction of the principle in the case of Lot only accentuating the observance of the principle in the case of Abram. They are two sides of the one law of heavenliness.

All you need to do is to see six steps which Lot took to find out exactly what sort of man Lot was, and those six steps, beginning in verse 7 with strife between Lot's herdsmen and Abram's, lead to strife between Lot and Abram. The nature of that strife we can only imagine, as their herds and flocks had greatly increased, so it was difficult to live within narrow confines together, and they were always overrunning one another. And so the herdsmen of both sides were clashing, and it was a matter of: 'You keep off my ground; you keep encroaching on my preserves, you are all the time interfering with my things.' That is Lot's side of things, and that is what is happening; this strife upon the principle of my, I, me and mine. That is Lot. You see presently that there was none of that in Abram. In Lot it is that. It is something deep down in Lot which is going to come out more and more of self-interest, earthly considerations, the government of things temporal, things present, things sensual.

There is a little fragment in Paul's letter to the Corinthians, 'You always take note of the things in front of you', by which he meant, "You are always concerned with what you see immediately in front of you, you are short-sighted, you only see those immediate things, you don't look beyond, you have no spiritual perception. It is things right up close, that can be seen and handled, these are the things you are taking account of." That was Lot's very disposition. You know as well as I do that if there is anything of personal interest and concern, it is not long before you are quarrelling with somebody, before jealousies arise, and I, me and mine become strong elements so that you are clashing with other people because your personal concerns are being touched. Do not think that this is necessarily a thing which is only in beginners, in spiritual infants. It is the sort of thing that has got right into organized Christianity. What is the cause of a very great deal of the disunity and the trouble in organized Christianity today? It is because of interest in private things, our work, our mission, our institution, you are interfering with our something; yes, it is supposed to be the Lord's. You are stealing our sheep; yes, they are supposed to be the Lord's, but they are ours. There is something that is less than the Lord, something that is not this utter selfless occupation with the interests of the Lord. It is something that now belongs to us, that we have to look after, we have to get support for it, we have to see that it is maintained. It becomes something like that, and so you get jealousies and divisions and all this unhappy state because it is not all the Lord's, there is something of ours that has to be safeguarded. It is very carnal. Christianity, speaking generally, is shot through and through with that very Lot spirit, and it is not Christ, it is something additional to Christ.

Well, take account of that, and let it sink in and have its effect, for we are wrestling with the great problem of divisions, of strife, amongst Christians, and see no solution to that problem except on this principle. It is no use writing about John 17 - "that they all may be one" - and presenting the vision of the Lord's mind and trying to get people to come on to that spiritual level; it is useless. You can have your unions and your amalgamations; it does not bring about real spiritual unity, and the only possible solution to this whole problem of disunity, of division, is leaving earthly ground altogether and taking heavenly ground, the ground of Christ, and saying, "It is not anything on this earth at all, not our this and our that, my this and my that. It is not some thing, it is the Lord that matters." Until you take that ground, you have no solution to the problem of disunity amongst Christians, it has got to be the Lord. Lot was on the line of personal interests, earthly interests, and therefore there was strife.

After Abram so wisely, kindly, generously, said to Lot, 'All the land is before us, make your choice', it says in verse 10: "Lot lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the Plain of the Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere." He beheld - that was the original sin. "When the woman saw that the tree was good" (Gen. 3:6); the lust of the eyes. He beheld, he looked naturally, his eyes argued naturally, his heart through his eyes saw possibilities of natural gratification. He beheld - the second downward step. Strife because of inherent personal interest, then he beheld. Verse 11 - he chose; it is not a far cry from beholding to choosing. Verse 12 - he pitched his tent towards Sodom. He beheld, he chose, he pitched his tent in a certain direction. Chapter 14, verse 12, he dwelt in Sodom... he has left the tent and taken a house. He pitched his tent, now he dwelt in, he settled down. You see the downward steps. And the sixth, final step. Chapter 19, verse 1. "Lot sat in the gate." Oh, he is an elder now, he is one of the magistrates of the city! He is sitting in the gate where counsel is given, he has become a thorough-going part of this earthly corruption in the city of Sodom.

Six downward steps. Why? Because he was a man of a divided heart. He had some kind of association with what was of God in an outward way; he was a professor, yes, and he had something inside which would make him more than a professor if Peter's word be taken seriously about him, that Lot was vexed every day with the wickedness (2 Pet. 2:8). Lot was something more than just an empty professor, there was something about him that brought him on to a ground of being in association with God. But somehow or other this Christian was affected and influenced by personal advantage, and it became too strong for him and it became a snare to him. The story from that point is a sad one.

You remember the angels coming to announce the destruction of the cities, seeking to get Lot out, practically dragging him out, with the fire already raging, brimstone pouring down so near at hand that his wife only had to stay for a moment behind while Lot and the angels went on, and she was caught in the brimstone and turned into a pillar of salt. It was not necessarily that a miracle happened. She stopped as the flame and brimstone was spreading and she was caught in it. But you see what a close thing it was for Lot, how difficult it was to get this man out, how deeply his roots were in Sodom, and he was, as Paul said to the Corinthians who are a great spiritual instance of this very thing, "saved; yet so as through fire" (1 Cor. 3:15). Everything lost, all his works gone, all those interests of his perished; saved, yet so as by fire.

Then he argues with the angels about the little city of Zoar, why cannot he go there? And because he argues for it, they let him go there. It is not the Lord's full thought. They had said, Away to the mountain! He said, No, Zoar. And then later new fears come upon him, and in his new fears he leaves Zoar. He goes to live in a cave with his two daughters, and then we have that most shameful of all Bible stories. Here is a carnal Christian, a Corinthian, saved, yet so as by fire.

Why have we brought this picture so luridly in view? Why have we looked at Lot? Just to accentuate the principle of heavenliness. Yes, you may in some sort of way be a saved person, but do you want to be that kind of person? After all, when worldly ambition has influenced you and temporal gain and personal advantage, when these considerations have been indulged to the full, you may not have bartered your soul and lost your eternal salvation, but do you want to be that sort of person? Is this not a tremendous argument for the opposite, the Abramic line of being right out, wholly on heavenly ground? See the course of Lot and the end of Lot, and mark you, it does not end with Lot's death. You have that double line coming out of that tragedy and story of incest in that cave. They live on to be a thorn in the side of everything heavenly for generations after. It is an awful residue of carnality. Do you want that sort of thing? Is not this an argument for God's full thought of a heavenly people, and do you think that if you take the opposite line you are going to lose? Do you think that you must be alive to the psychological moment of advantage, you must always have a business eye? Do you think you are going to lose if you choose God's full way and not that way of things?

The Course of a Spiritual Christian

Look at Abram. How beautiful! To say to this kind of man that Lot was, "Here you are, here is all the land lying before you, make your choice." What heavenliness! What letting go! Why? Abram knew in his heart that God had said, "I will give you the land, it is yours." 'Oh well, I can afford to let go if God has secured that to me, if God has called me for that purpose. Let anybody get into my place, let anybody usurp, I am not going to strive about it, I can take it with perfect equanimity, I can rest in the Lord, I can leave that with the Lord. My business is just to see that I keep in a heavenly frame, in a heavenly world, in a heavenly realm, that I exemplify the Lord Jesus.' You are transferred again at once to Him. "All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me" (Matt. 4:9) - a quick way of personal realisation. What is the attitude and reaction of the Lord Jesus? "Don't you worry, it is all secured to Me, you can have it all for the time being. I am not going to worry Myself about it, I am not going to compromise to get that, I am not going to fight for My own things at all; that is in My Father's hands. The thing for Me to do is to keep on heavenly ground." It looked as though He lost everything, but He has it all. Perfect rest, perfect, quiet assurance. He let go everything and got it all. He let it go on the earth and got it all from heaven.

Abram exemplified that very principle. He said to Lot, "Take your choice, have it all if you like, I am not jealous, I am not concerned that I shall lose anything." We get so worked up if people begin to get on to our preserves, take our place and seem to be getting the honours that we ought to have, all that sort of thing. We get very disturbed about it, very jealous, we begin to feel bad about it. Don't worry; concentrate on meekness, self-emptiness and letting go to God. Wait a bit and it will all come your way, the Lord will see that you lose nothing. It was when Lot had parted from Abram that the Lord appeared unto Abram and said, "I am thy exceeding great reward. Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art, northward and southward and eastward and westward: for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever" (Gen. 13:14-15). Let go and see what God gives you; do not fight for it, do not strive for it. That is heavenly life, heavenly nature; that is the principle of the heavenly Man.

Chapter 6 - The Law of Resurrection

Reading: Rom. 4:13-35; Heb. 11:12,17-19.

We have been occupied with the Lord's purpose to have a heavenly people, a spiritual seed, and we have been seeking to see something of the nature of such a people and what is required for their constitution and seeing all this being worked out in the life of Abraham. We have seen him as setting forth this heavenly people. We have mainly been concerned with how such a people are made - that is, by the deep inworking into the heart of circumcision. Now we want to look over on to the other side.

On the other side, we find the passages we have read have definitely given us not the death side, but the resurrection side of Abraham's life. You notice that connection in Romans 4. Abraham is brought into view, and by a swift transition, we are carried to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. It says here in these passages that all that Abraham apprehended and came into, and all that was secured in Abraham, was on the ground of resurrection; he believed in God Who raises the dead. A tremendous amount is made of this whole matter of the necessity for resurrection if there is going to be anything at all. See how much there is about this in the background of Abraham's life. He is really the embodiment of the law of resurrection as over against the necessity for it, and so, at a certain point, Isaac becomes the dominating figure. It is interesting to note what that point is. Do remember that Isaac stands for the full, comprehensive embodiment of Abraham's life. All the meaning and all the significance of Abraham's life becomes embodied in Isaac. That is the marvel of things, that if Abraham had really slain Isaac and God had not raised him from the dead, the very meaning of Abraham's life and faith would have been snuffed out. The marvel is that, seeing that all his life, his vindication, his justification, and everything of his hope and God's promise was centred in Isaac, Abraham was ready to slay him, because he believed God would raise him from the dead. And he received him back, as in a parable, from the dead, so definite and strong was his faith in the resurrection. Isaac, as we have said, therefore becomes the full embodiment of all that Abraham represents, and that in resurrection.

I said just now that it is interesting to note the point at which Isaac came fully into view. Of course he has been there in the background from the beginning in the very promise to Abraham about his seed. Isaac was there, but not mentioned; that is, not defined, but at a point he comes right into view. The point is that Abram is out of Ur, he is out of that realm; he is out of Haran and what that means; he is out of Egypt and what that means; he is out of Lot and what he means, as we saw in our previous meditation. When he is out of these four things, then the Lord appeared to him and brought Isaac fully into view. It is interesting and full of significance to note the point at which Isaac, so to speak, came right on the scene in clear definition.

Natural Incapacity Sovereignly Ordained by God

But there are one or two things that we must take account of, certain factors which lie behind this. First of all, you have to take account of Sarai. It is not just a matter of detail that there, in Gen. 11:30 where the children of Terah are mentioned, it is said that Sarai, Abraham's wife, was barren. It is just put in amongst the genealogies, amongst the descendants of Terah. That is included. It is not just a detail included, it is there by Divine direction. And then you know all that is said about that in Romans 4 and Hebrews 11 about Sarai's condition. Here you have the sovereignty of natural impossibility, so far as heavenly things are concerned, the sovereignty of natural deadness. God has had a hand in this. This is not an accident, not just a chance occurrence. Our incapacitation for heavenly things is not just our misfortune, not just our disadvantage, not just something that happens to be. God has ordained it, has fixed it. It is something settled by the sovereignty of God that heavenly things cannot be born out of earthly.

Heavenly things cannot arise out of the natural, it just cannot be. God has settled it; and we may struggle for years in our Christian life to try to produce something of God by natural energies and natural resources of brain and will and organization and all that sort of thing, and nothing will come. We may build up something externally, we may make a big thing, but so far as it being of heaven is concerned, there is nothing. It is ordained of God. Sarai is not accidentally as she is, it is not just a misfortune. It is ordained of God. You know that that principle is made to hold good of a number of others in the Old Testament, showing how God is in this thing. There would have been no Samuel but for the Divine sovereignty in this matter, and so of others. But here it is. You have to take that into account. It is the background of the sovereignty established background of resurrection, where nothing can be unless heaven intervenes. We can have nothing of this heavenly Life unless heaven intervenes; it is quite impossible.

But we are keeping on the positive side. God intends it to be, but it cannot be until we come fully face to face with the fact that it cannot be unless God does it. There is no resource whatever for this but God Himself. A heavenly thing is wholly of God. Then you take, alongside of that, Abraham's own age. Here he says, "What wilt thou give me, seeing I go hence childless?" (Gen. 15:2). He was, we are told, about a hundred years old, actually ninety-nine years old, and he thought his time had come to die, he was taking it that his demise was arriving, he was now ready to pass on, that life was at an end for him. "I go hence childless." Much is made of that in the New Testament, "...his own body now as good as dead" (Rom. 4:19), and so on. But it is marvellous that God held on to that point, just as the Lord Jesus held on to the point where naturally Lazarus ought to be in corruption, so God has held on and will not intervene until the thing has gone beyond all natural hope. Oh, this is the realm of hope. It is not so hopeless as that, only in its own realm. God does this: He ordains that we shall get beyond hope when He wants to do His heavenly thing. Things have not gone wrong when they become apparently hopeless. From God's standpoint they are very often just as right as they can be when we are there. Remember that!

Then the third thing - Melchizedek in Chapter 14 of Genesis. You have only a couple of verses, three at most, about Melchizedek in the Old Testament. You have something over thirty verses about him in the New Testament. He has a very much larger place in the thought of God than you would think. What is the upshot of Melchizedek? The object of bringing in this man (as Hebrews makes clear, it being the letter of heavenly things) is to say that Melchizedek is the figure of the heavenly Man. The transition in Hebrews is with one bound from Melchizedek to Christ, leaping clean over Aaron and all the Aaronic priesthood, all that system which is earthly, which is temporal and temporary, leaping right over all the earthly as represented by Aaron. Where does this man Melchizedek come from? You do not know who he is; he has come out of oblivion, "Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like unto the Son of God, abideth a priest continually" (Heb. 7:3). Melchizedek, Christ, the heavenly Man, and in connection with Melchizedek in Hebrews, "Having then a great high priest, who hath passed through the heavens..." (Heb. 4:14). That is the conclusion of the matter. It is this heavenly Man that is in view, and so Melchizedek is introduced here as showing that all this is not possible, is not intended on an earthly level or along an earthly line. That will not get you anywhere at all, it is only heavenly, it must be heaven.

So the birth of Isaac became the focal point of all faith, and it was here that all the main testings of Abraham took place, and it was here that Abraham's greatest lapses took place.

The Test of Patience

Even when the Lord promised Isaac, and Abraham embraced the promise and believed God, it was not so easy as that. He was tested on it. First of all, tested on the matter of patience. It was necessary to come into a heart union with God's waiting, God's patience, to be conformed to Christ in the matter of patience. He was tested while nothing seemed to be happening at all.

If we went closely into details there, you would see how very exacting was that form of test, but we dare not go into the detail. Although the promise was given and the date fixed, nothing seemed to be happening, and in that 'nothing-seemed-to-be-happening' gap, Abram made his great lapse over Hagar, with Ishmael consequent - a seeking to realise heavenly things along earthly lines. What a terrible consequence that had! What a lapse it was! What sorrow, what complications it introduced!

It was about Isaac that all the testings were going on in the matter of the possibility of this thing, the realisation of this thing. It was a test as to the God of resurrection. Yes, the point is that when God purposes a purely heavenly thing, a purely spiritual thing, He takes infinite pains to undercut all natural ground, and while He is doing that, almost anything can happen to us. We are going through that test. God is showing that there is no natural ground, and anything that we think is good natural ground and we may be using, turning to any alternatives, any substitutes, any seeming useful things to realise the purpose of God, we are discovering that as we turn to them, they only create greater complications.

God must do this, God must bring us through, it must be all of Himself, and He takes infinite pains to make it like that with a heavenly people. They will be a heavenly people, a spiritual people, there will be no doubt about it. There will be no ground whatever for arguing otherwise, that this, that and the other thing can account for it. No, it has to be attributed to the Lord. Whether it be in our life, our very survival, or in the work of the Lord to which we may be called, it is going to be like this. It is going to be heavenly, it is going to be eternal, it is going to be impossible, but for the Lord.

But what I want to emphasize is that that is what God has ordained; it shall be, and it is positive with the Lord. That is what He is after. Every fresh cutting with this knife deep down into the heart is not unto destruction and loss, it is unto increase. Every fresh pressing of the law that it cannot be except from heaven, is heaven saying, it is going to be from heaven. It is positive - it will be, and that is the focal point for faith.

Chapter 7 - The Last Step of the Spiritual Journey

Reading: Gen. 22:1-19.

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life." (John 3:16).

"He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?" (Rom. 8:32).

"For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died; and he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again." (2 Cor. 5:14-15).

The story we have read in Genesis 22 is the most holy and sacred scene in all the Old Testament. In all the law of typology, there is nothing which touches such holy depths as that incident. The New Testament counterpart of it, which transcends it, is John 17. In Genesis 22 we are taken away from the earth. We find those concerned leaving the earth level, so to speak, and moving farther and farther away, and up and up as to a heavenly place, and there it is a sacred scene between father and son, son and father, and it is a revelation of matchless love. You cannot read that story without hearing the tones of love in the conversation, the questions and the answers. "My father". "My son". These two are very deep in one another's hearts.

There is a mystery, there is something of a great problem, a great question born of a great necessity, and a necessity which is laid upon both of them, not for any reason in themselves. It is not that they, either of them or both of them have, because of a certain failure, error, wrongdoing or sin, become involved in the necessity of making a great sacrifice and going through a great suffering. That does not enter into it at all. There is a mystery about this. Why must this be? Abraham does not express the question, but no doubt that question was knocking at his heart. There is little doubt but that the cry of his heart was, Why must this be? And certainly it was in Isaac's heart. What is the meaning of this? It is a mystery which lies beyond those who are immediately involved. Love is making a strange and mysterious demand upon the father and upon the son.

I have said that the counterpart in the New Testament is John 17. There it is a sacred scene between the Father and the Son. It opens with, "Father, the hour is come", and how often throughout that chapter that word is heard: "Father". And how clearly throughout there is seen the attitude of the Father to the Son, this mutual infinite love. Yes, it is something very sacred taking place, while in a sense on the earth, yet really in heaven between the Father and the Son. They are working out something, and they are working out the deepest meaning of infinite love.

Divine Love Utterly Selfless

Now, there are profound lessons lying at the heart of this wonderful incident which we are not going to try to investigate, or even touch upon now, but to be content with what lies nearer the surface, what is almost obvious to any quiet and serious reader. We have said it is a revelation of matchless love, and what comes out is that the very essence of love, Divine love, is that it is utterly selfless, that its one motive and one concern is to give. We have been tracing this course of Abraham up to this point, and we have seen how all along in the fulfilment and unto the realisation of the great Divine purpose it was a matter of progressive and constant letting go. That progressiveness of letting go was bringing him nearer and nearer to the very heart of God until, in chapter 22, it seems as though Abraham takes the last step of that spiritual journey into the heart of God. He is lost in that infinite love, he enters into the very passion of the heart of God. God so loved that He gave... He spared not His own Son but freely delivered Him up for us all. "The love of Christ constrains us; because we thus judge, that one died for all" (2 Cor. 5:14). Right into the very heart of God. How deep the Cross had entered into Abraham's heart, into Abraham's soul; how complete is the work of dividing between all natural, personal, earthly, worldly concerns and interests and the interests of God!

Here, at this point, the divide is eternal, the divide is very great indeed. You can see this man and see all the promise that God made concerning this very son and see all that was involved in him. As we said earlier, all the very meaning of Abraham's life was centred and wrapped up in Isaac, and if Isaac went, then Abraham's very meaning in life was gone. When you take everything into account, and then see this man, not lingering to the last moment, not putting it off as long as he could, not setting back the awful hour, but rising early in the morning, starting with the very break of day, preparing everything, moving on a long, toilsome, wearisome journey, going on undeterred. It is wonderful how completely this man is delivered inwardly from all considerations of cost to himself, of all the interests that were personal. Yes, the Cross has entered very deeply into Abraham's life and heart at this point. We almost feel that it is superhuman. We shrink in the presence of this. It is not difficult for us to contemplate certain situations, certain sufferings and costs which might come into life and, even in the contemplation of them, say, I can never go through, I could never face it. If that happened to me, it would destroy my faith. But God was working out in the very inner history of this man the great drama of heaven. God so loved that He gave, and we shall see why in a moment.

The Love of the Father

What we want to note first of all is that the thing began in the heart of the Father; the thing was first of all wrought in the Father. Transferring from the type to the antitype, carrying right over into the New Testament, we read, "God so loved". Oh, how much we have in our New Testament that points to the love of the Father for the Son. Yes, "this is my beloved Son" is more than once declared. Paul speaks of Him as the Son of God's love, "the Father... who delivered us out of the power of darkness, and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of his love" (Col. 1:12,13). The Lord Jesus said, "The Father loveth the Son" (John 3:35). How much there is about the Father's love for the Son, and love is love, however difficult it may be for us to intellectually understand the mysteries of the Godhead, of Divine relationships, and how God could suffer. Here is the fact set forth. It is the great background of grace, the great background of redemption, that the thing began in the heart of God. It is God's love and suffering love, giving love. We must always remember that, difficult as it is to understand, it cost God infinitely to give His Son. There was something in that relationship of the Son to the Father which meant heartbreak for God in letting Him go and in giving Him up. He gave Him up, the Son of His love. This, first of all, then, is the story of the Father's giving love.

The Love of the Son

As to the son, we have not all the details in the narrative in Genesis 22. We are left to assume and conclude certain things. There was a point between that answer of the father, that seeming evasion - "God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son", between that seemingly evasive answer, and the moment when he took hold of his son and bound him and laid him on the altar, there is a point where all the possibility of the son's refusal and resistance could have entered in, for this was not a little boy, a little child, a babe to be picked up and handled like that. You look in the history and you will find that he is a grown lad, he is capable of exercising a will of his own, and at least of demurring and calling this whole thing into question. However, there is nothing of that, "As a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and as a sheep that before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth" (Isa. 53:7). There is a great silence there: nothing is said. "He opened not his mouth". He is evidently (and this is another thing not actually related, not actually stated, but clearly included) trusting his father's wisdom, he is trusting his father's love, he is yielding to something which he does not understand and about which there may be a great question. At that last critical moment when death seemed imminent, he might have cried, Why? as did this other and greater: "My God, why...?" (Mark 15:34). Isaac might have raised a lot of questions, but he does not. The question is there, the mystery is there, but the last word is the word of love: "Father, into thy hands..." (Luke 23:46). Yes, "as a sheep that before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth."

There lies a large history behind that. Did Isaac know about the covenant, the promise? Surely it is difficult for us to conclude that he did not. Had Abraham never conveyed to him what was bound up with him, how miraculously he had come into being by the intervention of God, and what God had said about him and all that was wrapped up with his very life? Surely he had told Isaac something about that, and Isaac knew, and was aware of all this. Well, in the presence of this altar and this knife, where does the promise come in? Where is the covenant, where is all the justification for my very existence, where is the vindication of my very life? You see, Isaac had a lot to let go also. Isaac was called upon to give up everything that was vested in him by Divine intervention and Divine covenant, and it looked as though this was the end. But he did not demur, and because of the love for his father which is so much in evidence, let go everything to the father, and it was a great 'everything' that he let go in that moment. All was going: all promise, all hope, all purpose, all vision, in that moment of the upraised knife, but he let it go. It is a figure.

We transfer it to the greater Son, and the greater Father. We know that in heaven it commenced. John 17 begins, "Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son..."; and then, later, "Glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was." He has let it all go in heaven. He has come down and none of it is with Him; He is stripped of everything and then for three and a half years He walks the way of letting go. Oh, see how often He lets go! They would have Him stand for His rights; they would have Him vindicate Himself. All the time the appeal of friends and enemies is to vindicate Himself, to hold on, to take, to possess, to assert. His is a course of letting go, letting go to His Father in His love. "I lay down my life" (John 10:15). Those were His words.

The Object of Self-Sacrificing Love

Now, what was the object of it all? What was the object in the case of Abraham and Isaac, which in principle is the same with the Father and the Son: our Lord Jesus? Well, if you look at Genesis 22, you will see what the object is. "By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, that in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heavens, and as the sand which is upon the seashore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed My voice." What is the object? God had others in view, God had a heavenly people in view. It was a matter of multiplying this kind of person that Abraham had come to be in Isaac. Isaac became the full expression of that spiritual history of Abraham. He gathered it all up. The very word 'sonship' means fulness. Sonship is a full thought. It is not childhood, it is sonship, it is fulness, completeness, and it is the completeness of this position, of this spiritual history in New Testament words, "Though He was a Son, yet learned (He) obedience by the things which He suffered" (Heb. 5:8). He was made "perfect through sufferings" (Heb. 2:10). He became the consummation of suffering love, and God wants to reproduce that kind of person, have a race of people like that, a heavenly people after that order.

So the Son is carried over into the sons. First, God hath "spoken unto us in his Son" (Heb. 1:2), and then, by "bringing many sons to glory" (Heb. 2:10); there is the reproduction of this kind of person in a heavenly people, a multiplying. That law is emphasized, as you see, in the phrase "bringing many sons to glory", or in the illustration given by the Lord Jesus, "Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit" (John 12:24). It is the multiplication of this kind, and Christ is that grain of wheat. Isaac was that grain of wheat typically or typologically. The Lord Jesus has no natural progeny, He has no earthly seed, and yet of him it is declared: "He shall see of the travail of his soul" (Isa. 53:11): "he shall see his seed" (Isa. 53:10), and that through travail. The travail of the father and the son on Mount Moriah secured a heavenly people. The travail of God the Father and His Son on another mount and in the immediate vicinity of Mount Moriah resulted in this heavenly seed, of which you and I, I trust, are a part.

But what is this Seed, what is this heavenly people, what are we supposed to be by very nature, born out of the travail of Jesus Christ? We are supposed to be the very embodiment of this kind of love that is always giving, always yielding, always letting go, that is utterly selfless... That is God's love, that is Christ's love, and the Seed is born of that love, and is to be, by its very nature, the expression of that love.

The Way of Reproduction

You see the history right up to Isaac. Where did it begin? Well, we pointed out that it began in a little clause squeezed into the genealogies of Terah about his sons and then Abram and Abram's wife, Sarai. "And Sarai was barren; she had no child" (Gen. 11:30): just squeezed in for a Divine purpose. That is where it began: in barrenness, an utter unfruitfulness and impossibility of fruitfulness. But, by the way of an inward working of God in love continually letting go; from barrenness to, "I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heavens, and as the sand which is upon the seashore" (Gen. 22:17).

Reverse it, dear friends. Holding on means the establishment of barrenness. If you keep it, hold it, there is no reproduction. Life is a trust; the fulfilment of that trust is in multiplication. That principle is established at the very heart of creation by God Himself. Hold things to yourself and they wither and die, there is nothing that follows on. Keep things locked up within yourself, and it is eternal barrenness. Let go, let go to God.

Ah, and how that is pressed home here! It is not always evil things that are to be let go. When you come to Isaac, there is nothing evil; it is God-given. By a very miracle of God he was given. But you know, it is so easy for us to lay our hands upon God-given things, and hold them for our own use, to ourselves. God has given us some work to do, and before long it is our work and we are very jealous if anybody else interferes with it. God has given us some position to occupy, and then it becomes our position, and we get very upset if someone else gets into our position and takes our place and they are given the credit for doing what we have done or were open to do. It works down to fine points, this taking hold of even Divine things, Divine blessing, and turning it to our glory and to our reputation, making it ours. Yes, a heavenly thing may so easily be dragged down to earth. That is the tragic history of so much work of God. If God does something - visits a people, blesses a servant, or raises up an instrument and a movement, it is not so long before men take hold of it and turn it into their movement with their name attached, bring it down to earth and label it, and the Lord withdraws and leaves it to them to carry on. But it can be personal history too. Let us beware of the purchase upon the things of God and making them ours and being personally jealous.

John 17 - "The hour is come." What hour? That hour of which He had so often spoken from the first time with the marriage in Cana of Galilee. "Mine hour is not yet." Repeatedly on the way He used that phrase, "Mine hour", the great hour of the Cross, and at last the hour is come, it is here. John 17 is the hour of His offering Himself up. Note in that great hour of the Cross and letting go, He says, "that they all may be one"; the fruit of the Cross: the great Divine oneness. Why? How? Because the very fruit of the Cross is the transmission of that infinite love of giving to others. We said that the only possible solution to Christian division and disunity is a heavenly position, born of this divine love of Calvary; the giving love, the letting go love. Somehow, somewhere, in all divisions and all jealousies and all envies, we shall find a holding on to some interest that is earthly. You find a company or lives welded together in an indissoluble, indestructible oneness and you will find there the love of God wrought very deeply into the heart. "That they may be one", one by the giving love of God through the Son transmitted to the seed.

Yes, this matter of Divine love touches so many points all the way round, and why is there such a passion in our hearts as we do speak in these days about this matter? For this very reason that tragically, grievously, on this earth so very many of those who bear the name of Christian are drawing to themselves, are standing for their own rights, are jealous, envious, divided. And it is just the contradiction of the Divine thought to have a heavenly people on this earth of this kind; the reproduction of this seed which is Christ, which is the embodiment of this love that lets go, this love that knows how to yield, this love that is all the time giving. That is what the Lord is after. It represents a deep work of the Cross within, but surely we can accept nothing less than this? Surely we do enter into those words: "For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died: and he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him..." (2 Cor. 5:14,15) "The love of Christ constraineth us... not unto ourselves, but unto him who for our sakes died and rose again". And even Divine things must not be held on to in a personal way. Give God a chance of vindicating, give God a chance of glorifying His Son in you, give God a chance of coming in and showing where He stands in matters by letting go. Keep hold and your life will be barren. Fasten, grip, retain, and there are no children. Let go, yield, give yourself to God, hand over all that about which you are jealous and concerned to the Lord, and He will not decline it. It is the principle of ministry; it is the principle of Life.

I do feel that we need so much more of this grace of our Lord Jesus, this love of God, that gets us out of the picture. So often, as you look at people, you can almost see them occupied with themselves, turned in upon themselves. They are just individuals in themselves, tied up. The love of God should release us from all that sort of thing, to say nothing of worse traits of spitefulness and criticism and hurting one another with words. The Lord's love deliver us from all and make of us part of this heavenly seed, this heavenly people, really expressing the giving, letting go love of God which comes back a thousand-fold. And do not let us do it for that, to get, but to glorify the Lord. The Lord give us grace!

Now, you have a life, and that life is a great trust, a great responsibility. It can stay in its own ambitions, its own interests, its own worldly concerns and considerations, it can stay by itself. Will you give your life to God, will you let it go to Him, will you put it on the altar and let the knife be taken that God may have it utterly? If you will, God will multiply your life, God will extend your life, God will make much more of it than ever it would have been if you had kept it in your own hands. Have you got something in your life that you are holding on to as a Christian; you are not letting that go to the Lord? You know what it is. I should miss it if I tried to catalogue the things it might be. You know you have something where you are not letting go to the Lord. The Lord has put His finger on something, and you are holding on. You have an argument which you think is a very good argument. You have a reason you think perfectly good, so you are holding on. Deep down the truth is you are not prepared to let that go.

Has the Lord spoken to you and shown you something or indicated some way that He wants and you laid hold of that like Terah, and are going to press through on that at all costs? And the 'all costs' in this case means cost to other people, and you are going to make them suffer by the way in which you are going to do what you believe to be God's will. There are times when, in recognition that a certain course is the Lord's way, we have to wait for the Lord's time and see to it that our strength of will coming into alliance with some purpose of God is not jeopardizing the fruitfulness of that thing, and doing other people harm and making other people suffer. There are times when we have to come back to the Lord and say, "Lord, You have shown me that is Your way for me, but I can see that it is going to involve others in a great deal of suffering. I do want to be sure of Your time in this, and that I am not taking hold of it; it is not my strength of will to do Your will. I want to do this thing in self-sacrificing love, so that the least loss shall be suffered by others." We have seen people who are right as to their objective, right as to what the Lord wants, but the way in which they do it often spoils the whole thing. They take hold of Divine things, and while the thing is right, they are spoiling it by bringing their own strength of will into alliance with it. This applies in many ways. We must be circumcised in heart to do the will of God, ready to let go and let God determine the way to accomplish it.

May the Lord interpret His Word and make it fruitful. I know it is challenging. It searches us all; we shall all come up against it. But oh, see what happened in heaven, and see that He desires that as it is in heaven, so it shall be on earth.