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The Persistent Purpose of God

by T. Austin-Sparks

Transcribed from conference messages given in Taipei, Taiwan in January 1957. The spoken form has been retained verbatim. A book of the same title has also been published by Emmanuel Church using a different editorial approach.

Contents

Chapter 1 - Principles of Biblical Interpretation

Chapter 2 - God's Mind for His People

Chapter 3 - The Prophet's Preparation

Chapter 4 - The Man on the Throne

Chapter 5 - The Living Ones

Chapter 6 - What the Wheels Represent

Chapter 7 - The Three Titles of Ezekiel

Chapter 8 - The Glory and the Spirit

Chapter 9 - The House of God

Chapter 10 - The One New Man

Chapter 11 - The Altar (the Cross) Governs Everything

Chapter 12 - The Fullness of the Spirit

Chapter 13 - "The Lord is There"

Chapter 14 - Question and Answer Session

Chapter 1 - Principles of Biblical Interpretation

We are going to occupy the first part of this morning with preparation for what we are going to consider later, and I want to speak now about some principles of Biblical interpretation. It is very important for us to be able to know how the Bible is to be interpreted, and this will be especially seen in what we have to consider later on. Unless we do understand these principles of the interpretation of the Bible, the Bible is not an open book; we may know what is in the Book as a book, but we do not understand it until we have the principles of interpretation. So I ask you to try and remember what I am going to say now and bring it over into our later study.

The first principle of the interpretation of the Bible is:

The Eternity of God.

We must always remember that all time is present time with God. There is no past and future with God; all that is past and future with us has been present with God always. At any moment in what is time to us, eternity is present with God.

The architect always has the completed plan before him. If he is the designer of a ship, he has a model made of that ship before anything is done. He sees in the model the completed object, that is exactly how the thing will appear when it is finished. If it is a great building, or even a city, it is the same. The architect draws what we call "a scale model", and he sees in that model exactly how the building, or the city, will be when it is finished. The builder works day by day according to that completed plan. Those who only see the parts cannot understand, and must not take the parts as being the whole. Sometimes when you look at the parts of a building, you cannot for the life of you understand what it is going to be. It is only as the completed thing is seen that you can understand the parts.

Now, the Bible is just full of parts, but they are all the parts of something that God sees in completion. God is the Great Architect, He has the completed and perfect plan before Him before He begins any work. God's eternity is in every part. So we must realise that God has His full Mind behind everything that He does! God's full intention governs everything that He does! You must realise that God's Mind never grows - God Himself is incapable of development.

Now, I think I would like to say at this point, if you do not understand anything that I say, and would like something more said about it, just put up your hand. I do not want to just go on and leave you not understanding what I'm saying. You will have an opportunity in the second session tomorrow to ask questions, but I do want to be sure that as we go on you know what I'm talking about. So if you would like anything repeated, just put up your hand, and I'll say it again. Now we continue.

The temporary form of anything contains the eternal and full thought of God. You must realise that there are always two meanings in anything that is in the Bible: there is the present meaning, that is, how that applies to the present situation; but there is also the future meaning. Everything in the Bible, while it has a present application, has a fuller meaning in the future. That is the first law of interpretation, it is: the eternity of God.

The second law of interpretation is:

The Comprehensiveness of Christ.

Christ is the interpretation of all the Bible. To know Christ, is to understand the Bible. Men like Peter and Paul knew the Bible, but they did not understand it until they knew the Lord Jesus. We first know the Lord Jesus, and then we take Him back into the Bible, and He is the interpretation of the Bible. Therefore, we cannot really understand the Bible until we know the Lord Jesus. That results in this: that the Bible is really a Person, and not a book. The Bible is a Living Person, and not a dead letter. Because this Person is inexhaustible, He makes the Bible inexhaustible.

Now, that is a more important principle than perhaps you realise. It is possible to exhaust the Bible as a book. We have known great Bible teachers who went through the Bible, teaching it again and again, but at the end of their lives they were having difficulty in finding something fresh and they were only repeating again and again things that they had said in past years. That is because they dealt with the Bible as a book. That will never happen if you know the Lord Jesus and see the Bible in Him, and Him in the Bible. I repeat that the Lord Jesus can never be exhausted. As the Holy Spirit reveals the Lord Jesus to us, the Bible is always more alive.

So, we have our first two principles of interpretation: 1, The Eternity of God; 2, The Comprehensiveness of Christ. Now we come to number 3:

The Interpreter of the Bible is the Holy Spirit.

I have said that Jesus is the interpretation of the Bible. I am saying now that the Holy Spirit is the Interpreter of the Bible.

We are familiar with the words in the letter to the Corinthians, but I think we might just look at them again now. In the first letter to the Corinthians, chapter two and verse thirteen: "Which things also we speak, not in words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth, combining spiritual things with spiritual words." Now, I don't know whether you have marginal references in your Bible, well, the more correct translation of those words is this: "interpreting spiritual things to spiritual men." Let us read the whole passage again in that way: "Which things also we speak, not in words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth, interpreting spiritual things to spiritual men". Well, that's a very important statement and it definitely affirms the principle that we are now setting forth: the interpreter of the Bible is the Holy Spirit.

First of all then, the Bible is the Holy Spirit's Book. The Bible is not firstly man's book, it is not our book, we have not got the book. We have got certain writings which are called "Scriptures", but in truth we do not possess the Book.

You remember the case of the Ethiopian eunuch, when Philip came near to his chariot, he heard him reading. He was reading the book at Isaiah 53. Philip said to him, "Understandeth thou what thou readest?" and he said, "How can I, except someone explains?" Well, here is a man who had the book in a certain sense, but in a real and profitable sense he did not possess the book. We can have the book as a volume, and yet we may not possess the book because the Bible is the Holy Spirit's book first. The mind of man and the Mind of the Spirit are two altogether different things!

Do you know, there are many, many Christians who do not recognise that! There are many Bible teachers who do not recognise that! And this is the cause of very much confusion and the reason for very much spiritual smallness and weakness. I think this may lie at the bottom of most of the controversies. The Bible is a closed book to all but spiritual men. This is the principle that the Lord Jesus set before Nicodemus: You must be born from above before you can see what is above.

Our measure of understanding of the Bible will be just in accordance with the measure of our spiritual life. That is why the Lord takes us through experiences in order to bring us to understanding. The measure of our death to the natural mind will be the measure of our understanding of the things of the Spirit. Please remember that in these days which are before us - something has got to happen in us before we understand the Scriptures. We cannot understand the Word of God by just deciding that we are going to have a training course, we are going to have some classes for Bible teaching. That is not the way in which we come to understanding of the Word of God. We shall only understand according to the measure of our spiritual life. That is the third principle of Biblical interpretation.

Now number four.

The Final Mention of any Particular Matter in the Bible is Usually the Key to all its Meaning.

That is something that you must just think about. We find certain things mentioned again and again in the Bible, but when we come to the final occasion where that thing is mentioned, we usually find the key to all that has been said about that matter before. If you take a particular matter where it is mentioned for the last time, and then note the setting, and the context, and the relationship, you will get the full meaning of all that has been said about that before. Now, that is a statement that I have made, and you need to work on that, but I will help you by taking just one illustration.

In the last chapter of the Bible, Revelation 22 and verse 2, we have the last reference to the tree of Life. Now, when we go right back to the beginning of the Bible, we have the tree of Life mentioned, but we are told nothing about it - it is just referred to as something that exists. We have no explanation, we are not told what that tree is, or what it means; it is just referred to as: "the tree of Life." We have to go to the end of the Bible for the explanation, and when we come to this last chapter of the Bible, by the context and relationship, we have a very large explanation.

Supposing we look at the passage. Revelation 22: "And He showed me a river of water of Life, bright as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb." Note the context: "the throne of God and of the Lamb". You've got to read the whole book of the Revelation to understand that! There's a tremendous amount in the early chapters of this book about "the throne of God and of the Lamb". And you have to understand what the throne of God is and what is the significance of the throne of the Lamb - in the midst of the throne is a Lamb!

Now, in relation to "the throne of God and of the Lamb," there is "the river of the water of Life... in the midst of the street thereof. And on this side of the river and on that side was the tree of Life, bearing twelve manner of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no curse any more; and the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be therein and His servants shall serve Him." There is the tree of Life. It bears immortal fruit, there is no place for death here. Its fruit are borne every month: this is fruit immortal, or fruit without death.

The leaves of this tree are for the health of the nations. I am sorry that in most versions the word is wrongly translated. I don't know what the word is in your translation, but the original is not for the healing of the nations, but for the health of the nations. You may ask, "What is the difference?" Well, one is the removal of disease and the other is the prevention of disease.

In this chapter we have come to the time when the spiritual diseases of the nations have been healed, but the health of the nations needs to be preserved. It is a state that is to be maintained. So the leaves are not for healing, they are for preservation. And so it says: "And there shall be no more curse."

You see, you've got the whole history of the Bible in those words! You have got all that came on the nations through Adam's sin. You have corruption and death - moral disease - the result of a curse; all that is now cleared up. And the Tree of Life represents victory of Life over all that, Life triumphant, and Life abundant. Here the full meaning of the Tree of Life is revealed. And it is like that with all other matters. When you come to the last mention, you have the key to the whole subject. That is a principle of the interpretation of the Bible.

Now I come to the last for the present, number five.

The only Real Value is the Spiritual.

You must remember this when you are reading and studying the Bible, and you must keep this in mind in these times in which we are together. You must not come here just with a thirst for more information or a craving for more knowledge. There are people who just want to get more and more knowledge and education. And I think that is a particular characteristic of the people in the far east. You will do anything to get education. You will go to the other side of the world if you can get more and better education. Now, that constitutes a danger. Of course it is better than not wanting to know anything, but there is a danger about this.

We must not come to these classes with a craving for more knowledge. That is exactly how Adam was caught. You see, Satan said: "If you take of this tree, you will know..." it was "the tree of Knowledge." And there is always a danger in eating of that tree, it might just lead you into death and not into Life. So, I repeat this principle of Biblical interpretation: the only real value is the spiritual. And spiritual value is just how it affects our life with God! I do wish that Adam had recognised that when Satan tempted him to take of the tree of Knowledge. If only Adam had said, "How will this affect my life with God?" he, and we, should have been saved all the trouble.

So, let me say this again: spiritual value is just in how it affects our life with God. Shall I put that in another way - just how much it increases the measure of Christ. If Christ is the interpretation of the Bible, the spiritual knowledge of the Bible results in an increase of Christ. If our days together now do not result in an increase of the measure of Christ, we have missed the Way. You may go away in two weeks time with your notebooks very full, and you may have an idea that you have got a lot more knowledge, but if we do not go away more Christ-like men and women, with a larger measure of the Lord Jesus, this training course has failed. So I beg of you to pray all the way through that this time together may mean spiritual increase, not intellectual enlargement, but spiritual knowledge.

Everything has got to be judged by how much it contributes to the Ultimate Purpose of God. We have to ask, "Where does this lead us to? Is it leading us anywhere? What is it leading us to?" All spiritual knowledge leads to an increase of Christ; it contributes to the ultimate Purpose of God. The question always is: "How much of Life is there in it?" It is not a matter of interest. It is not. The real value is the spiritual.

In our second hour we shall take that over into our special subject for study in these coming days. Now you have a little over half an hour before we meet again. May I suggest, that if you can, you will read some chapters. I would like you to read the first three chapters of the prophet Ezekiel. You will have to read them more than once in these coming days, but it would be a help if you had refreshed your minds with what is in those three chapters. So we will come back with that in half an hour.

Chapter 2 - God's Mind for His People

What we were considering this morning (for those principles are the key to this book in a special way) we begin by indicating one of those principles in another way: God's end is always implicit in all His beginnings. Thus we have Genesis in the book of the Revelation and the book of the Revelation in Genesis. Do try to remember this as we proceed with these studies. Let me repeat that:

God's End is Always Present in His Beginnings.

Perhaps you would like an illustration of that. We will have it in the fifteenth chapter of the book of Exodus. Chapter fifteen, verse thirteen: "Thou in Thy lovingkindness hast led the people that Thou hast redeemed, Thou hast guided them in Thy strength to Thy holy habitation... Thou wilt bring them in and plant them in the mountain of Thine inheritance, the place, O Lord, which Thou hast made for Thee to dwell in, the sanctuary, O Lord, which Thy hands have established."

Now, do you recognise what that has said? Israel has only just got out of Egypt, they are just over the Red Sea; this is the song of Moses and all Israel as they have escaped from Egypt and Pharaoh. They had only just begun their journey. But here it says: "Thou hast guided them in Thy strength to Thy holy habitation... the place, O Lord, which Thou hast made for Thee to dwell in, the sanctuary, O Lord, which Thy hands have established." That takes us right on to the end of their history. Hundreds of years would have to pass before the Temple was built, before Jerusalem - the holy mountain - was secured. They had got to go a long way, for a long time, before they came there. But here, right at the beginning, it is spoken of as though it were already accomplished.

(Now I'm going to pause for a moment. I don't know whether you're going to be able to do two things - it is not very helpful for me to be speaking to the tops of everybody's heads! I would sooner look into your faces as I'm speaking, whether you'd be able to do your writing and look at me at the same time I don't know!)

Well, you see from this instance what I mean by God's end always being right there at the beginning. Heavenly things always govern all the earthly things. Invisible things govern all the visible things. Spiritual things govern all the temporal things. Universal things govern all the local things. That is something you must always remember when you are reading the Bible and that is something which must be kept in mind as we approach this book of Ezekiel.

Human history is not just human history, it is God's history! This book of Ezekiel seems to have a lot of earthly history in it, but the truth is that it is all governed by a Divine End and Purpose. Now, the big question which we meet right at the beginning of this book is, "Does this book have a message for the Church in this dispensation? Does it just relate to a period in the past history of the people of Israel? Does it relate to the future dispensation in the matter of prophecy? Or is its main message for the Church in this dispensation?" We shall be compelled to face those questions as we move into this book, especially in those parts of the book which we are going to particularly consider. The answer is found not in the earthly, but in the Heavenly; not in the temporal, but in the spiritual.

So we come to the setting and reason for this book. We must recognise when the book was written, and why. What is in this book happened at a time when a whole system had broken down and failed. The reason for that breakdown and that failure was because that system became something in itself; it lost its spiritual and its eternal meaning. We must recognise that this is something that constantly recurs in the history of the things of God. It happened in Israel. It has happened in Christianity generally. It has happened in many movements and pieces of work of God. It began with a great testimony, just as Israel began. It was a wonderful testimony to the Lord with which Israel's history began, but then that whole thing broke down. It completely failed because it lost its spiritual meaning and became something in itself. The same is true of Christianity, it had a wonderful beginning, but speaking generally, Christianity has broken down and failed because it has become an earthly system, something in itself, and has lost its Heavenly meaning.

Now we return to this book of Ezekiel, and we find God moving away from Jerusalem and God is found outside and not inside, and the thing in which God once was, has now become an empty shell. That which was once vital and effective, and was greatly used of the Lord, has become a merely formal and empty thing with God on the outside. That is the setting and the occasion of this book.

Now let us look at the prophet himself. You know that Ezekiel did not begin by being a prophet.

Ezekiel was a Trained Priest and Not a Prophet

You know it is verse three tells us that, and then at the beginning it refers to "the thirtieth year": "Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year...". The thirtieth year was most probably the thirtieth birthday of Ezekiel. It was at the age of thirty that the priests finished their training and entered upon their ministry. You remember that it was when the Lord Jesus was thirty years of age that He entered upon His ministry. His preparation was finished and His ministry began. So at the age of thirty, Ezekiel ought to have commenced his priestly ministry, but instead of fulfilling his ministry as a priest, he was called to be a prophet. His whole life and training and vocation were changed.

A prophet is one who represents the full Mind of God when that Mind has been lost. It is impressive to note that Ezekiel had to take up something altogether different from that for which he was trained. The situation which existed required that. We shall come back on that again later.

Now, when God moves in relation to His full Mind which has been lost amongst His people, there are always things essential in the instrument of His movement, because if this is going to be done, it is only God Who can do it! You know, the course of men is quite different from that. The way of men is to take men and train them and make them able to do the work, so that when they come out of the college, or the Bible institute, they feel that they are equipped for the work and now, of course, they can do it, they have been trained for it.

I'm going to tell you something that you need not put down in your notebooks, by way of illustrating what I have just said. This is a very important point. I know of a certain great Bible institution. In the city where that Bible institute is, they have every year a great carnival and everybody in the city is supposed to have some representation in the carnival. So they hire great carts, and they build on the cart some representation of their business; it is all done very wonderfully. And so the Bible Institute joined in and it set up on the cart a representation of the institution. Here was the Bible College: going in at one end were all kinds of men; there was the farmer with his farm instruments, there was the engineer with his tools, there were all the kinds of trades that you could think of, they're all marching in to the Bible Institute. But then they're coming out at the other end; but you cannot recognise them now, they've left their old clothes behind, they have left their tools behind, and they've all got their collars on round the back way and they've all got black clothes with a black hat. They are now all pastors. They've been through the machine. That is not what God does. That is a purely mechanical way of making "servants" of God. Of course, all those men now are "qualified" for the work, Ezekiel was not qualified for his work. He was qualified to be a priest, and he was called to be a prophet. And what we find is that all through his life, he never found it easy. You see how difficult Ezekiel found his work; he realised that it was only by the help of God that he could fulfill his ministry.

We all have to begin there if we are really going to minister in heavenly things. There has to be this tremendous change where we come to realise that we cannot do this work of ourselves, only the Lord can do it. There was this great sense of disappointment with things as they were, the overpowering sense that things were wrong, and this state of things had to be made the business of Ezekiel's life. You will have to begin there if you're really going to be used of God. You will have to be overwhelmed with the sense that things are all wrong in this world, that things are not as they ought to be. You have no ability to put them right, but you sense that God has called you to this, and that your ability to do anything must come from God Himself.

That is where we begin with Ezekiel. And, of course, we take the spiritual principles as we go along. I think I need not go back over that ground. There is a breakdown in things, they are not as God intended them to be. God calls men and women in relation to this situation, and the call changes the whole course of their lives. And in the call is the consciousness that they have no ability in themselves to meet the situation, but God, Who has called them, will be their Sufficiency.

I have read the first three chapters of this book into what I have just said. Just take one little fragment, it was the commission of Ezekiel: "Son of man, I send thee not to a people of a strange language, whose language you do not understand. If I sent you to them, they would listen! But I send you to the house of Israel. They will not hear you." That's a difficult commission, and only the Lord could carry a man through that. But then notice what the Lord says as to Divine equipment: "I have made thy face hard against their faces, and thy forehead hard against their foreheads" (Ezekiel 3:8). In other words, the Lord is going to be the strength of this difficult work.

Then we notice another thing. With this sense of disappointment, this whole change in the course of life, this having to take a way for which there was no natural equipment, there goes this second great factor:

Ezekiel Saw the Lord.

He was given a vision of the Lord, a vision of what the Lord wanted. Now it is very important that these two things that I have just mentioned always go together. If we have disappointment and dissatisfaction without vision, that is negative. There are plenty of people who are dissatisfied with things as they are. They are the people who can always see what is wrong. They can point their finger at the weaknesses and the faults; they are experts in criticising everything. That is negative. It does not get us anywhere. With dissatisfaction, there must go vision. But vision must rest upon travail. Vision without travail and suffering of heart, is mere mysticism. These two things must go together. If you or I feel dissatisfied, feel that things are all wrong, we ought to be in possession of the knowledge of what the Lord really does want. We ought to have a positive vision of the purpose of God.

Now I want to stop here and say a word to the preachers. Let us read these first verses: "Now it came pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, that I was among the captives by the river Chebar that the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God. In the fifth day of the month which was the fifth year of King Jehoiachin's captivity, the Word of the Lord came expressly unto Ezekiel the priest, son of Buzi, in the land of the Chaldeans... and the hand of the Lord was there upon me."

I say, I want to say a word at this point to the preachers. You notice that what Ezekiel was about to do, had a special date for its beginning. It is very impressive how particular Ezekiel is about dates in his prophecies. If you really read through these prophecies, you will see that he is very particular about dates. That gives us our first point for preachers: A preacher, according to God's Mind, must have a message for the time. It will not do for us to be giving out things just in a general way. Our Bible teaching must not be just of a general character. What God needs more than anything, is men who have a message for the present hour. When we have finished our life and our ministry, it ought to be possible for it to be said of us, "That man had a message for his time, he was not just one in the general mass of teachers or preachers, but he had God's Word for that hour - his ministry related to a special time in the purpose of God".

Now, you preachers ask the Lord to make that true of you, that it can be recognised that your ministry relates to the present time - what God wants to do now. That is a very important factor in ministry. What does God need at this time? We must pray that we shall be the Lord's instrument for the present time, that there shall be a very clearly defined time factor in our ministry. So the date is a very important thing in ministry. When God really raises up men, He raises them up for a time.

And then next note: Ezekiel was raised up in relation to a special situation at that time. What we have just read shows that Ezekiel was right there in the situation: "I was among the captives by the river of Chebar". Ezekiel was not preaching to a situation that was distant from himself. He was not preaching to a situation that he imagined to exist. He was not preaching to a situation that had been reported to him to exist. He was right in that situation. He was in the closest personal touch with the need. The need was his need; he was put right into the heart of the situation, and his ministry came out of that. He said: "I sat where they sat." And that takes ministry out of the realm of the merely theoretical and puts it into the very practical.

You will notice that this was true of all the prophets. They did not speak to the Lord about the Lord's people as "they" - "they are in this situation; they have done these things; they have these needs." The prophets always spoke to God: "WE are in distress." Read the prayer of Nehemiah, read the prayer of Daniel, they were a part of the situation. And you and I, to be effective ministers, must be there.

Then the third thing:

This Ministry has to be very Personal.

Do you notice what it says in verse three: "The Word of the Lord came expressly to Ezekiel the priest." That means two things: it means that Ezekiel did not get his ministry out of books. He did not fulfill a second-hand ministry. His ministry was not the result of study. This came to him personally. These visions of God were his own. His message was original and not second-hand. It must be like that. Our ministry must be like that: it must be the result of something that God has said to us personally.

And then the last thing, the Word of the Lord came expressly... that meant that there was an urgency about it. You know the meaning of that word, you speak about an "express" train. Well, what do you mean by an "express train"? One that must get there quickly, it's very urgent. You remember the word of the apostle: "...the Spirit speaketh expressly" - there is urgency about this! "The Word of the Lord came expressly to Ezekiel." "There is something very urgent about this. You have got to get there as soon as you can. There is very serious business on hand. All your energies must be concentrated upon this object". That is how it has got to be with us. There has got to be a tremendous urgency about our preaching. There are very great issues at stake. I would say to you preachers one thing: before you deliver your message, stop and say one thing to yourself: "I am now going to influence lives; perhaps for all time and all eternity."

What God's Mind is for His People

We shall meet the great River, we shall see the great House, we shall come to the wonderful City, and then at the end we shall come to Jehovah Shammah: the Lord is there. But you cannot come to understand all that until you see the kind of man that God needs for it. It is a kind of man that will bring that into view. The things that I have just said are the things which make up the kind of man needed. I would like for you to go back over them again.

Remember that this is a man whose whole life has been revolutionised by the purpose of God. God's need has changed the whole course of his life! God's need has disappointed him so far as his natural life is concerned! Something of the disappointment and dissatisfaction of the heart of God has entered into this man's life. Now, do try to lay hold of that this morning, because it was on that very thing that God moved all the way through history.

I suppose Abraham was, for most of his life, very satisfied with "Ur of the Chaldees". He had all that he wanted there, but then there began to come into his heart a great dissatisfaction with that life and his heart was reaching out for something that he did not know. All he could say was, "This is not what I was made for. I am sure that there is something more in life than this. There must be some greater purpose and meaning than this. This does not satisfy me." It was on that ground that God moved in in his life. It was God working into Abraham His own dissatisfaction. And when that dissatisfaction was there, God could give the positive side of what really was His purpose.

And that was true of all the great servants of God. I believe it was true of Moses, I'm quite sure that it was true of Ezekiel. It was true of Paul, I believe that we can detect, even in Paul of Tarsus, something of dissatisfaction. God prepares His way like that. We must have this in us before God can do anything else. In order to bring His great Positive Purpose in, He must write the negative in our hearts. This is the way of service - on the one side, it is disappointment; on the other side, it is God's appointment. And then the consciousness of having no natural ability, and all the ability having to come from God Himself - a work that no man could do, and certainly a work that no man would take on himself - that was Ezekiel. But God had taken hold of this man, everything that happened to him was because "the hand of the Lord was upon him".

For this morning I am going to finish there. It's a matter of the hand of the Lord being on us. If the hand of the Lord is upon us, then we cannot help ourselves; while it may be difficult, the disappointment may be great, the demands may be beyond our ability, but we just cannot help it; we have got to go on!

You remember what Jeremiah and other prophets said about this? Because the people would not listen, and because his ministry meant so much suffering, Jeremiah said that he decided never to speak again. He was going to give up preaching, he was going to give up the work of God, but then he said: "While I kept silent, the fire burned. The Word of the Lord was as a fire in my bones, and then I broke all my resolutions. I began to speak again. I just could not do otherwise". That is what Ezekiel meant by: "The hand of the Lord was upon me". You see what that meant afterwards, how that hand of the Lord moved Ezekiel everywhere. He was a man under the hand of the Lord. Do pray that you may be like that, that it will not be your choice one way or the other, but that your lives will just be because "the hand of the Lord" is upon you. The Lord needs men and women like that. Pray that you may be like that. You are not in the thing because you like it, because you choose it, because you have any qualification for it. You are in it because the hand of the Lord is upon you. And to take yourself out of this work, would be to take yourself out of the hand of the Lord.

Now, if it is like that, something's going to happen. You will have a message for the time. You will have a message for the situation. You will feel the urgency of this message. The word will be like a fire in your bones. The Lord make us all messengers like that!

Now you can see what I meant at the beginning: it's spiritual value that matters. It is not the intellectual knowledge, but that we are men and women like this. That is spiritual effectiveness. Do ask the Lord to make you like that: that everybody is able to recognise that you have a heart that is burdened by the Lord - on the one side, you have seen what is wrong, on the other side you have seen what God wants, and that you feel that He has laid His hand on you in relation to that. The Lord make that true of all of us!

Chapter 3 - The Prophet's Preparation

We are in the book of the prophecies of Ezekiel and I'm going to ask you to do something which I think will help me and I think it will really help you. When I come to the actual message, I'm going to ask you not to write it down, but just to listen to what I'm saying. Afterward I will go over the points and if you want to put them down, you can. I really think that that method will help you. But to begin with I'm just going to give you a very broad outline of this book; this you can put down! But let me say here, that I have no intention, it is not my thought to study the whole of this book, I'm just going to take out some of the great features. There is a large middle section that we shall hardly consider at all. Now, this is one of the most difficult books in the Bible to understand; I expect you have discovered that in reading only the first three chapters. So I will just give you this very broad outline of the whole book, you can fill in the details.

You want to know, first of all, what the whole book is about; can we put on the first page anything that sums up the meaning of the whole book? I think we can. This is the book of the persistent purpose of God; the Divine energies in relation to Divine purpose. If you want a New Testament fragment that will explain that, you have it in Ephesians 1:11: "According to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will". Ephesians 1:11 is the key to the book of Ezekiel. That word in Ephesians 1:11, "who worketh" is a strong word. The Greek word is energeo, which means "energy," so that God is energizing "all things after the counsel of His will." In a special way, that is what we have in this book of Ezekiel - you must read the whole book in the light of Ephesians 1:11. I think we shall see that as we go on.

Now for the broad outline of the book. We begin with the prophet himself and his preparation for his ministry. That covers the first three chapters: the prophet himself, the prophet's vision, and the prophet's commission - chapters one to three.

The next section is from chapter four to chapter twenty-six; that section has to do with the nation of Israel. There are three things in that section about the nation: firstly, their departure from God; secondly, their denunciation by God; and thirdly, their judgment.

Then the next section is from chapter twenty-five to chapter thirty-two. This section has to do with the nations. There are first of all four nations dealt with: Ammon, Moab, Edom, Philistia. And then there are two: Tyre and Sidon. There is a very brief interval referring to the restoration of Israel in chapter twenty-eight, verses 25 and 26. And then the judgment of the nations proceeds, and Egypt is judged.

Then we come to section four. This brings us back to Israel the nation. This section is from chapter thirty-three to chapter thirty-nine. This section deals with the watchman, the shepherds, the new order, the vision of dry bones, and the last enemy.

Then we come to the fifth and final section, that is, the restoration found in chapter forty to chapter forty-eight. In that we have: the temple, the Lord, the service of the temple, the river, the land, the inheritance, and the city. Now, as I said, we are not going to study all that. That is only given you to help you get a grasp of the whole of the book.

We come back to our part of the study, and we are still going to spend some time in the first section. I think it is most important that we should spend much time with this section. I suspect that from time to time you will be saying, "Well, I wish he would get on with the book!" but I am in no hurry to cover a great deal of ground. I want to make sure that we really do get hold of these fundamental lessons.

So, we come back to the first three chapters.

The Prophet's Preparation for His Ministry

This is a matter which concerns us very much - how the prophet was prepared for his ministry - for what was true of Ezekiel, is true concerning us spiritually. Yesterday morning we saw the time factor in his ministry, the situation to which he was called to minister, and the express word of the Lord to him personally.

Now this morning we come to the visions. You notice what this says: "I was among the captives by the river Chebar, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God." And I want to say right here that while the form of these visions will not be repeated in the case of the Lord's servants, the spiritual principles and meaning must be true of us all. Our purpose is to get behind what is objective, to the meaning of things; we shall all the time be trying to get at the spiritual meaning. You see, the objective side is only the temporary method; it is just the means that God employed for the time being. The spiritual meaning is the permanent and the real.

So, we come to the visions. Ezekiel said: "I saw visions of God." That had two meanings: that means that the visions came from God, they were visions which God gave him. And it meant that they were visions of the goings of God. God was on the move, God was taking a certain course, and the prophet was given to see the ways that God was taking; that is the meaning of "visions of God". But before he saw visions of God, it says "the heavens were opened". I am going to speak mostly about that this morning, but before I come to that, there are one or two things to say.

The visions that were given to Ezekiel varied in time, in nature, and in method. That is, they:

Varied at Different Times.

They did not all come to the prophet at the same time. The Lord gave something to the prophet. This had the effect of bringing the prophet down on his face before the Lord. That is what it says at the end of chapter one, "Then the Lord put him on his feet," and this kind of thing happened from time to time. My point is that there were intervals in the prophet's life, and in those intervals the prophet had to think about what had been shown to him and to adjust himself to what the Lord had shown. Now, brothers and sisters, I want to put a line underneath that. We must have such intervals in our ministry. If the Lord shows us something, we must take a time to consider it, to face what it means and what it implies. That is a necessity in ministry. A very great deal of value is lost by our just continually going on and not giving those periods for quietness with the Lord over what He is saying. There must be a kind of Sabbath-quiet to meditate upon what the Lord is showing.

The Lord says something, and then we go and give it out, and we go on and on like that, and we do not pause to think about what the Lord is really saying - what this really implies, and to adjust ourselves to it. I believe that a very great deal of the life and ministry of the apostle Paul came out of his two years silence in the desert. He had the vision of the Lord on the way to Damascus. It was a tremendous vision that brought him down on his face. It required two years of silence to adjust himself to the meaning of that vision. I have often tried to imagine what was going on during those two years - what it was that Paul had to adjust himself to, how he had to read all his Bible over again in the light of that vision. He had to reconstruct his whole theology in the light of that vision: he had to think things all over again in the light of that vision. And I believe that a great deal that we have from Paul came out of those two years.

Now, I am not suggesting that after this training course you go away for two years! I could get myself into trouble with the elder brothers if I suggested that, but you see, here is a principle. The Lord spoke to Ezekiel, and Ezekiel was silent for seven days. He could not go on with his ministry until he had spent those seven days thinking about what the Lord had shown to him. My point is that the Lord does not give us everything at once. He waits until we have really understood what He has said, and He waits until we have adjusted ourselves to that, so be very jealous about these intervals. Say to yourself from time to time, "I must get away and think about what the Lord has been saying. I must get away from the ministry. I must get away from the work. I must have at least a few hours to think about it all..." That is of tremendous value. I can say that out of my own experience. Sometimes if I only take a journey away from things, I may go away in my car, or I may go away by train, just for a few hours to get right away from everything and let the meaning of things come back to me afresh. Do believe me, that is very important. Our ministry will become just words and very thin unless it is like that. We have got to come back again and again altogether fresh.

There's a very great deal of what the Lord has said, that lies in the path that has never been applied, and it will only really live as we spend quiet time with it. I believe that is one of the enemy's great methods to try and keep us busy all the time. He gives us a wrong kind of conscience about the Lord's work. I can tell you this also out of experience. I went on for a long, long time like that, I never gave the Lord His Sabbath rest. I got a false conscience about this thing: "If I am not doing something from the Lord, then I am all wrong. I must keep going on and on." And I felt very bad inside if I was not busy for the Lord, but I came to see that that's wrong. And because I did not give the Lord His rest, He took it and He put me aside for some weeks where I could do nothing. And then I started afresh. But in that time the ministry had become a new thing.

We are touching a very important principle here - this matter of periods between revelations. So it was with Ezekiel, he had his quiet time - not just an hour in the morning, but from time to time he was silent; he was saying nothing, he was alone with the Lord.

Then this ministry, these visions varied in their nature and not only in their time. So you have the:

Various Kinds of Visions.

We are not going to stay with these just now, we only mention them. First of all there was the vision of the Throne. Then we know of the vision of the valley of dry bones. Then the vision of the Lord's House. Then the vision of the great river, the vision of the land, the vision of the people in their inheritance, and finally, the vision of the city. We leave those for the time being because we are going to speak more fully of them later.

In the third place, the visions:

Varied in Method.

And this is something we must stay with for a minute. The visions that came to Ezekiel, came in two different ways. Firstly, they came in an objective way - things were presented to him in vision; he was like John on the isle of Patmos, he saw things in an objective way. But the visions were not always in that way, there was a second method by which the visions came to Ezekiel, and that method was by the instruction of the Spirit, and that was the larger method. Of course, these two methods were not always separate, but they do mark a distinction.

In our dispensation, the first method is very uncommon. Paul did have some visions and revelations in the first way. In 1 Corinthians 12, he said: "I will come to visions and revelations... I knew a man about fourteen years ago, a certain one was caught up in the heavens... whether in the body I know not, or out of the body I know not... such a one was shown things unlawful to be uttered." Well, that was the first method for Paul. He had those objective visions. The apostle John had the same, but these were the exceptional and there are very few of us in this dispensation who have that kind of thing. Such visions usually belong to the beginning of things; the objective side usually relates to beginnings.

I'm tempted to enlarge upon that because it is important. Take the whole matter of those spiritual gifts mentioned by Paul, such as the gift of tongues, the gifts of healing... these are the objective things. They belong to the beginnings. You know, you have a great Chinese man of God. You may have heard his name, Pastor Hsi. If you haven't heard of him, he is well known in the West. His life has been written, and there was one thing which he said which is very illuminating. This is what he said, "When we were breaking new ground, and dealing with the heathen who had never heard of Christ, the Lord gave us many outward signs. He gave the gift of tongues, He gave the gift of working miracles, the gift of healing bodies; all these things were connected with the beginning of things in any place. But we noticed that when these believers began to grow up in the Lord, these things were withdrawn and they had to trust the Lord, not because of signs, but just because of Himself. Maturity in the Christian life meant the withdrawing of these things which the Lord gave to little children." That is very illuminating. These objective things relate to laying foundations.

Paul and the other apostles were laying the foundations for this whole dispensation. Therefore, they had the exceptional, and what we might call the abnormal, side of things. That is the abnormal, what is the normal way in this dispensation? It is the second method that the Lord employed with Ezekiel, which had to do with the development of the purpose of God. When you come to such a great thing as the House of God, and the Inheritance, and the City, it is the Spirit Who is doing it all the time. You notice it is, "The Spirit led me in, the Spirit set me down, the Spirit took me out, the Spirit showed me." It is all the movement of the Spirit! That is the normal way for this dispensation. The Lord Jesus Himself said that that would be the normal: "When the Spirit of truth is come, He will guide you into all the truth... He shall take the things which are Mine, and show them to you." And the rest of the New Testament is along that line. The normal way is the anointing Spirit teaching us all things.

That brings us back to this first part of the vision: "The heavens were opened." Now, you have heard me say quite a lot about the opened heaven, but I want to say it again and a little more this morning.

The Opened Heaven

We all know that in the symbolism of the garden at the beginning, the heavens were closed to the man who sinned. The garden stands to represent the kingdom of the heavens. It is an order which God Himself has created. It is the true representation of heavenly things. But when Adam sinned, he was turned out of that realm, and the door was closed behind him and that door has remained closed to all the sons of Adam. Behind that door is the place where God is. Behind that door is the place where Life is. Behind that door is the place where the Divine order is. Outside of that door is death. Outside of that door God is not. Outside of that door is no Divine order and that door is closed, it is closed to all the sons of Adam. But that door has been opened again. We know when it was opened, it was opened to the Son of Man.

You remember His words right at the beginning, His words to Nathanael. He said to Nathanael, "Hereafter thou shalt see the heavens opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man". Of course, that was a picture. It was a picture taken from the Old Testament. Nathanael knew what it meant, it was taken out of the life of Jacob. Jacob was in the place of the closed heaven; at Bethel, he saw the heaven opened, he saw the angels of God ascending and descending. Nathanael knew all about that. Now Jesus said, "I Am that ladder. It is over Me that the heavens are opened; all communication between heaven and earth, and earth and heaven is related to Me: no one cometh unto the Father, but by Me, no man gets anything from the Father but by Me." And so, on the banks of the Jordan, the heavens are opened to Him, and Jordan is a figure of His Cross. In the Cross of the Lord Jesus, one man has been put to death and buried; that is the man to whom the heavens are closed. On the other side of the Cross, a New Man rises and to Him the heavens are opened. Well, we are familiar with all that, it's very simple, but it is over the Lord Jesus as a new kind of Heavenly Man that the heavens are opened.

We know that that is exactly what the Lord was saying to Nicodemus - Nicodemus, the very clever man; Nicodemus, the very educated man; Nicodemus, the very religious man, yet he is still a son of Adam. And the Lord makes it very clear to him that he has no open heaven. I think Nicodemus realised that he had no open heaven. In order to have an opened heaven he had got to be born from heaven. That is the beginning of the opened heaven. You remember that it was in His Cross that the veil of the temple was rent, [through] His blood we have our access unto the Father. That is the first meaning of the opened heaven and we would not be here this morning if we did not know that in our own experience. If you don't know that in your experience you have no right to be here, but I think that is a settled matter and we can leave it.

But there is another aspect, and that has to do with ministry. There is:

The Opened Heaven for Ministry.

And that is what we are talking about in the case of Ezekiel. For him, the opened heaven related to his ministry, and this is a matter that you and I need to understand. This is a special aspect of the Holy Spirit. We receive the Holy Spirit when we are born from above, but the anointing of the Spirit relates to ministry. Jesus was born of the Holy Spirit, but He was anointed of the Spirit for His ministry. I do not want to draw too great a distinction between being born of the Spirit and being anointed, but there is a difference!

Here it is the effect of the Holy Spirit in us in relation to ministry. This is what the apostle Paul meant when he prayed for the Church. You are so familiar with the words that I hardly dare read them; nevertheless, let us look at them again. You notice that the apostle has been saying these tremendous things about the calling of the Church. It is the great vocation of the Church that is in view. It is not just the salvation of believers - that had taken place - but now he is dealing with the matter of the Church and its great ministry; its ministry now and its ministry in the ages to come. That is what we have in this letter to the Ephesians. Do recognise that what is in this letter is not something to individual Christians. It only applies to individual Christians in a related way. None of the things that are in this letter can be fully true of any individual; no individual Christian can be blessed with all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies. You may be a very greedy person and feel that you want all spiritual blessings, but you cannot have them. I'm very sorry to tell you that you cannot have all spiritual blessings, it takes the whole Church to have all the spiritual blessings and you will only come into all the spiritual blessings in a related way; that is, by your fellowship with all the other members of the Church.

What are these spiritual blessings for? Are they just for our satisfaction? Just that we should be blessed? You look at this letter, and you see that it is for the purpose of ministry; it is that the Church shall fulfill its ministry. I did not intend to move out of Ezekiel into Ephesians at this time, but perhaps the Spirit is leading us also. Now you see what the apostle says here: "When He ascended up on high... He gave gifts among men... He gave some apostles; some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers." What for? - "For the perfecting of the saints unto the work of ministry" - for making the Church complete that it may fulfill its ministry. The object of everything is the ministry of the Church. Now, it's because of that ministry that the apostle prays in this way: "For this cause I also... cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers; that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him" - that is, the knowledge of Christ. And you Greek scholars will know that the word "knowledge" there is "full knowledge", "a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the full knowledge of Christ; having the eyes of your heart enlightened that you may know". And then the things that you "may know" are mentioned.

Here is the work of the Holy Spirit in relation to ministry. In relation to the ministry of the Church, the Church must have the eyes of its heart enlightened, the Church must have a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the full knowledge of Christ. This ought to be the normal life of the Church in this dispensation. That it is not the normal life means that things are all wrong. The Church ought to know "what is the hope of His calling," it ought to know "what is the riches of the glory of His inheritance." It ought to know "the exceeding greatness of His power". This ought to be the normal knowledge of the Church for its ministry! And what ought to be true of the whole Church, ought certainly to be true as ministers. This is the meaning of the open heaven: the Spirit of wisdom and revelation has been given, the eyes of the heart have been enlightened; we know! We know the movements of God. We know the Way that God is taking, we know the End that God has in view, and we know that God is working "all things after the counsel of His Own will."

That is what Ezekiel came to see by the opened heaven. God has an End! God is moving toward that End! All the mighty energies of God are directed toward that End! All these things in heaven and in earth are being governed in relation to that End! This is what Ezekiel saw. The book is the book of the persistent energies of God toward His End.

We, brothers and sisters, ought to know that in our own experience! Are you saying, "I don't know anything about this"? Are you saying, "That is not my experience"? Well, I want to say to you very strongly, that that can be your experience; [it wasn't] the inheritance of people in the day of Paul only, this letter relates to the letter in the whole dispensation and afterward. It reaches unto us. We can be in this position. I expect you are saying, "Well, how can we be there?" It may be one of the questions that you will raise presently. I would just answer it in this way: go and ask the Lord to do this thing in you at any cost, if you will accept the cost.

It was a tremendously costly way for Ezekiel. And that opens up quite a new line. Read through this book and see what it cost the prophet. There was a time when this vision cost the prophet his wife. His young wife died as a sign to Israel, and many other things happened to him which were very painful. It is a costly thing to have the open heaven. The cost may not come to us in the same way, but believe me, an open heaven involves us in a great deal of suffering. It involves us in the impossibility of being understood by those who have no open heaven. It involves us in persecution from other people of God. That is what it meant to Ezekiel; and yet, it's worthwhile! Anybody who has the opened heaven would not give it up for anything. They would not give it up for all the popularity in this world. It is the most precious thing that any man can have, is the open heaven - to have this kind of fellowship with God where God is going on and on showing ever new things.

If you are prepared to accept the cost, then ask the Lord to make it real. Do not be surprised if you have what Ezekiel had very soon after his first vision. He said: "I sat for seven days astonished", but [seven days] had to be taken for the burial of the dead. When anyone died, no one was clean for seven days. They mourned for seven days, and they were as dead for seven days (the eighth day is always the day of new life in the Bible, you know that), but Ezekiel was like a man dead for seven days - the tremendous effect of vision - it took him through a very painful time. Don't be surprised if you begin to have a difficult time; that may be part of the price of a new ministry. What I mean is this, when we have undertakings with the Lord like this, the Lord usually begins to take us through deep experiences to make it very real. Oh, our flesh does want the vision, our flesh does want the ministry, our flesh wants all the glory, but the Lord takes action against our flesh and we go through a period in which the flesh is brought to death, and then it is quite safe for the ministry. This is true to experience, and this lies right there at the heart of the ministry of Ezekiel.

Now I've gone over my time by ten minutes. I promised that I would go over this and give you all the points. Perhaps you'll have a try at getting them, see what you can put down afterward, and then we'll go over it again at some other time.

Chapter 4 - The Man on the Throne

We continue our studies in Ezekiel. Yesterday morning I promised you that I would go over the points that we had covered because I did not allow you to write them down. We did not have time to do that at the end of the session and I think it would be losing valuable time if I were to do that now. So what I am suggesting is this: I will just put down here the points that we covered yesterday, and if anybody who understands English would like to translate this into Chinese on the blackboard, everybody could get it. So here it is.

Now we return to the prophecies in Ezekiel. You will remember that yesterday morning we began to consider the preparation of the prophet for his ministry, and we spoke about the opened heaven. Now this morning we come to the second half of the statement, "visions of God". And we take this morning this first great vision that was given to the prophet. This occupies verses 4 to 28 of chapter 1. You have carefully read these three chapters so that it is not necessary for us to read this section again this morning. You will just glance at these verses and refresh your memories as to what is here.

The first thing that we must note is that this vision is all one thing; it has various parts, but it is just one object in view. The last verse of the chapter tells us that that this is so. Verse 28, the second part of the verse: "This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord". Everything in the chapter is included in that, "the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord".

The inclusive factor of this whole vision was the Throne of the Lord. All the other things in the vision are just a part of the Throne; they all go to make up the Throne of the Lord. It is very important for you to recognise that. You are not dealing with a number of different things in this vision, you are dealing with only one thing which is made up of many parts. There is fire, there is lightning, there is terrible power, there is irresistible progress, there are the living ones, there are the wheels, there is the likeness of a man. All these things are parts of the Throne. They all go to make up the meaning of the Throne of the Lord. They are all included in this final statement: "This (all this) was the appearance of the glory of the Lord".

Now, I do want you to grasp the appearance as we have it in this chapter. We must not think of the Throne as something separate, away up in heaven and then the cherubim as down here. What we have got to see is that these are all one. Here is the Throne above, then under the Throne there is a firmament, and then immediately under the firmament there are the cherubim, but they are all one, and they are all moving together. It seems that the Throne and the cherubim move together. You will see that they come from the north. This is one thing; that is the point that I want to make just now.

Now, before we consider what is under the firmament, we will consider that which is above. Perhaps we had better read verse 26 again: "And above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a Throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone; and upon the likeness of the Throne was a likeness as the appearance of a Man upon it above".

So we begin by noting that the all-governing factor is:

The Man Upon the Throne.

Until you have grasped the meaning of that, you do not understand the whole of the prophecies of Ezekiel. All that is in this book, both of history and the future, must be viewed in the light of the Man on the Throne. There is a Throne above the firmament, and there is the likeness as of a Man above the Throne upon it. All government is vested in the Man on the Throne. That is not only the key to the book of Ezekiel, that is the key to everything in history, and particularly to this dispensation. It is government vested in the Man on the Throne. That is the key to everything. From that everything else comes, up to that, everything else goes.

We asked a great question when we started these studies, "Has this book a message for the present dispensation?" The answer can be given in three fragments from the New Testament. One from the lips of the Lord Jesus Himself in John 6:62, "What if ye shall see the Son of Man ascending up where He was before?" You see, that introduces the question about the right place of the Son of Man. "What if ye shall see the Son of Man ascending where He was before?" The second passage comes from the lips of Stephen, Acts 7:56: "I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." The words of the Lord Jesus have been fulfilled, the question has been answered: "What if you shall see the Son of Man ascending where He was before?" "I see the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." The question is answered.

Now the third passage includes both of those and goes beyond them. That is in Hebrews, chapter 2, verse 9 [should be 1:8]: "...of the Son He saith, 'Thy Throne, O God, is for ever and ever.'" You see, that goes back to where He was before, the Son of Man ascending where He was before. "Thy Throne is from evermore..." and it carries on to eternity - "Thy Throne... is for ever and ever." This is said of the Son, but Jesus speaks of Himself as the Son of Man, the Son of Man upon His eternal Throne - "Above the firmament a Throne and the likeness as of a Man upon it above".

First of all, God has His Man. We spell that with a big "M". God has His Man, the Man that He ever wanted and intended to have, and now that Man is in His rightful place; the Man is where God intended Him to be.

Just keep hold of those two things because, as I have been saying, they govern everything. At last God has His Man. There is a sense in which God has been seeking for that Man all through the past. God created Adam to be such a man, and God has been in quest of the man after His Own heart all through history. God has found the Man in His Own Son. That is the full meaning of the incarnation. God has provided Himself with a Man, and that Man is now in the place of God's appointment. He is in His right place. He is in the place of government. This answers to the Psalm, "Thou madest Him in order to have dominion. All the dominion and authority is vested in this Man! He is the Son of God, but He is also the Son of Man. Now we must note that everything is governed by that! The preparation of the servant of the Lord is governed by that! The ministry of the servant of the Lord is governed by that! All ministry must take its character from that Man in the Throne!

Then you move right through this great book, and you come into the judgments of God, the judgment upon the Lord's people first, and then the judgments upon the nations; and all these judgments are governed by the Man in the Throne. After the judgments, you come to the recovery of God's testimony. The recovery of His testimony is according to the Man in the Throne. Now, we could stay a long time with that, but we must leave its greater fullness till later on.

But this question arises, "What is the testimony that God wants, and God wants to recover?" - It is the testimony of Jesus! It is the testimony that God has the Man after His heart, and that the Man after God's heart is a certain kind of Man, He is different from all others, and that all authority is vested in that Man Jesus Christ. That is the testimony that God wishes to recover. We shall find later on that the House of God is the place where that testimony is to be found. The House of God is constituted according to that Man; it is the meaning of that Man that is expressed in the House of God. That is what we shall come to if ever we do get there, but you see, it is the testimony of God in Jesus Christ in the House of God.

So, the work of recovery, as we have it in the prophecies of Ezekiel, is governed by the Man in the Throne. And when I speak of it being governed, I do not mean just official government - I mean that it is the character of that Man that governs everything. Then we do move to this House of God. It occupies a very important place in these prophecies. It is a very wonderful House. When we come to it, we shall see that this House has never existed as an earthly thing, but this House is governed by the Man in the Throne. Then we shall come to the river, beginning in the House, flowing by way of the altar out through the court and down right through the country, with everything where "the river cometh" being made to live. We shall see that that corresponds to what we have in the book of the Acts, the river flowing out of the sanctuary, from spiritual Jerusalem to all Judaea, to Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth. Everything where the river comes is made to live. That is a very long river. It's the longest river in the world. It has reached to China. It has flowed through India. It is a river that flows over the whole earth, and wherever the river comes it makes things live. But remember, this river takes its rise from the Man in the Throne. It is all governed by God having His Man in His right place.

Then we shall see the people of God coming into their inheritance. That is another great truth of the New Testament, the Lord's people coming into their spiritual inheritance. That is one of the last things in these prophecies. Again, the Lord's people only come into their inheritance when the Lord Jesus is in His right place. Let us put that round the other way: when Jesus is in His right place, the people of God come into their inheritance. We can never come into our inheritance until He has His right place!

Now look at the book of the Acts - what a fullness the Lord's people came into! What a large inheritance came to them! Why did it come, and how did it come? Because the great message of that book is: Jesus Christ is Lord! God has raised Him far above all rule and authority! When Jesus has His place, the Lord's people get their inheritance.

The last thing in these prophecies is the City. We know that the last thing in the Bible is the City, and there is the river flowing out of the City, but it flows from the Throne of God and the Lamb. Jesus at last is in His full Place, and the City is the vessel of His fullness, and that fullness goes out as from the City to all the nations. All this is here in type and symbol in the prophecies of Ezekiel.

Have I answered our first question: "Has this book a message for the present dispensation?" I think we can now see that it has, but our point just now is that all this is governed by the Man in the Throne.

We see two things about that, for God to have His Christ in heaven is a very great thing. I would have you think much about that! What a great thing it is for God to have His Christ in heaven! That could occupy us for a long time. We are told by Paul that God exercised the exceeding greatness of His power to bring Christ there. That meant that every other power in this universe had to be overcome to get Christ there. It is a very great thing to God to have Christ in heaven! And then, secondly, it is a very great thing for the people of God that Christ is in heaven.

Now let us come back to what we were saying a minute or two ago: all judgment comes from the Throne of Christ, and He is judging His people and the nations from His Throne. You notice that judgment begins with the people of God in the prophecies of Ezekiel. That brings us to the beginning of the book of the Revelation. It is the churches which are first judged by the Lord Jesus in glory. It is a principle with God that "judgment must first begin at the House of God." Of course, that is necessary for the very character of God. Supposing God were to judge the world, and then the world could point to Christians and say, "But look at them! Look what a contradiction they are and yet You let them go on. You come and judge us, but You don't judge Your Own people." That would be all wrong. So as a matter of principle, judgment must begin at the House of God. We, as the Lord's people, must come under the judgment of that Throne.

Let me take great care to explain what that means, I have said it more than once already this morning, but you may be missing the point. You see, it is a kind of Man that is in that Throne, and God judges everything according to the character of that Man. That is what you have at the beginning of the book of the Revelation. You have a full-sized portrait of the Lord Jesus at the beginning of that book. His Person and His Appearance are described in detail. He presents Himself like that to the churches and then it is as though the Holy Spirit was saying, "I am going to judge you according to that Man." So the message to every church is: "He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says." The Holy Spirit's work is all related to Christ. You know that as a great New Testament truth. Now the challenge to the churches is: "How do you measure up to that Man? How does your life, your character, and your work answer to that Man?"

The Man is the basis of the judgment. The churches are judged according to the Man; that is the meaning of judgment - the measuring line of God is His Son. That is what we have in Ezekiel, and that is what we have in the book of the Revelation. All judgment of the people of God and of the nations is according to the Man.

Then you will see the second movement of God, it is so clear in the book of the Revelation. It is:

The Movement for the Recovery of the Testimony of Jesus.

John says, "I was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus." And that phrase, the testimony of Jesus, occurs several times in the book of the Revelation. It is that that is the basis of God's activity.

Now in the churches the one issue is this: "to him that overcometh...". The overcomers represent the recovery of God's testimony. The recovery movement of God is found in the overcomers. The overcomers are those who have put away what is not according to Christ and are now an expression of that Divine Man, so that when we come to the end of the book, both Ezekiel and Revelation, we have the City. We all know that this is not a literal city; it could not possibly be that. You'd have to get rid of a great deal in order to have this City on the earth. This City, of course, is a figure. It is a figure of the Church, and now that Church, as the City, answers to the Divine description. Paul put it in this way, "Christ loved the Church, and gave Himself for it that He might present the Church to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing". That fully describes the City at the end of the book of the Revelation: "He showed me the holy city, new Jerusalem having the glory of God". A glorious Church. "Her light was like unto a light most precious". Light is always the symbol of purity: "Not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing." "Christ... loved the Church, and gave Himself for it" - in the midst of the City is the Throne of the Lamb. You see the symbolism. You see the spiritual meaning - this final state corresponds to the Man in the Throne!

The book of the Acts is the great beginning. It begins with Christ in the Throne. Before we get to the end of the apostolic age, things have begun to go wrong. We can detect that in the letters of Paul, and especially in his last letters which were to Timothy - things have begun to go wrong. The testimony is being lost. We come then to the Revelation, and God begins judgment at the House of God as seeking to recover that testimony; and in the end of the Revelation, we see it fully recovered!

Now we come back to Ezekiel. In this book, as we have already said, we see the energies and goings of God. This first vision is a representation of that. Look at the symbols that are used. Firstly, "burning fire" - who can stand before the burning fire? When the fire begins to sweep across the earth, no one can stop it. Fire is irresistible. And then, "flashing lightning" - it is like a great electric storm here. It is a terrible thing. Who can stand before the great electric storm? You cannot resist that, you cannot sweep that aside. You see, you have all the symbols of tremendous energy, and all this is connected with the movement... but it was that Throne that conquered in the long run!

I say that the great consciousness of the Church at the beginning was that Jesus is in the Throne. Satan is not on the throne. Caesar is not on the throne - Jesus is on the Throne! The Church moved forward in the energy of that great fact! The Church prayed on the basis of that fact! Its appeal was to the Throne, and it prayed in confidence because it knew that He was on the Throne. You remember one instance of that - they were in a time of great opposition, the rulers had risen up against them. They gathered together for prayer, and in their prayer they quoted the second Psalm. You know what is in the second Psalm: "Why do the heathen rage, and the peoples imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth were gathered together, against the Lord, and against His Anointed... He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: The Lord shall have them in derision... I have declared the decree. I have set My Holy One upon My holy hill of Zion." And then the kings and the rulers are appealed to: "You had better kiss the Son lest He be angry." You see, that was what they used in prayer in the book of the Acts. What confidence it shows that they had in that Throne and in that Man on it! They prayed on that basis! They preached on that basis! They sang on that basis!

Yes, they were a singing people. Listen to two men singing. Where is the singing coming from? It's coming from a prison! There are two men who have been beaten and bruised, and they have been cast into an inner dungeon. Their feet had been made fast with chains, and they're singing. How could they sing in such a situation? Only because they knew and believed that Jesus was on the Throne! Their song was a song of faith and confidence; and in a few minutes there was a great earthquake, you know a little about earthquakes, and all the doors were opened and their chains fell off. Jesus is on the Throne, and they sang because of that! They suffered because of that! Yes, they suffered very much, but the strength to suffer came from their consciousness that Jesus was on the Throne. And they died on that basis! Stephen is dying, and he says, "I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." That was his testimony, he died on that.

Now I have got to leave it there this morning because our time is gone. We have only come to the beginning of this great vision, but I am sure you see that this book has a message for our time. But I cannot close without reminding you of this - all this had to do with the preparation of a man for his ministry. If Ezekiel had not seen that, he would never have been able to fulfill his ministry. Everything in his ministry came from that first vision. We must see the meaning of this. There must be that which grips us as it gripped him. The thing that grips us must be: "Jesus is Lord! Jesus is on the Throne! Therefore, I can go on. I can meet the difficulties, I can suffer, I can die, I can pray, and I can sing!"

Chapter 5 - The Living Ones

Before we proceed with our consideration of Ezekiel, let me say that I have not prepared an outline of yesterday morning's study because we broke off in the middle of a section. When we have completed this section, I will give you the second outline. We are still occupied with the preparation of the Lord's servants for His ministry, and yesterday morning we were considering the Throne above the firmament and the likeness of a Man upon it. As you will remember, we concluded yesterday by pointing out the importance to the servants of the Lord of seeing that Throne - what it means to the Lord's servants to recognise that there is a Throne, and that there is a Man upon that Throne. We passed on into the New Testament, and we saw that it was that that accounted for everything in the first days of the church. They were able to sing, and to pray, and to preach, and to suffer, and to die, because they knew the Man was on the Throne! So that part of the vision came first and was of very great importance to Ezekiel.

I expect you know what the name "Ezekiel" means; if you do not, let me tell you that it means: "God shall be my strength." And Ezekiel had to have vision and experience that made his own name true. All this that Ezekiel was seeing was just establishing the meaning of his own name, "God is my strength." We shall only have strength as we see the Man on the Throne! That is a very important thing for ministry.

Now, before I go on, I want to say a very definite word to you brothers and sisters here. I see in these prophecies of Ezekiel something which seems to correspond very closely to what God is doing out here. You know that God did a great thing in the West, it was in the West that the Lord raised up a very strong ministry and testimony, and from the West for many years the Lord sent out spiritual blessing all over the world. It is to the West that many countries owe a very great deal. I think that is recognised by everyone. In the West there were many great teachers, there were great men of God, and from these men of God and their teachings, blessing has come to many parts of the world. We can say that Christianity, or the church in the West, has been greatly used in the past. But that is not as true today, as it was. The West has lost something. The testimony has become weak. The state of the church has become very poor. The measure of spiritual value has become very limited and it seems to me that the Lord is moving away from the West and it looks to me as though He is moving to the East, for I see the Lord doing a new thing in the East. It would seem that He has made a beginning all over again and in the last thirty or so years, God has been doing a very wonderful thing in the East and I believe that you are a part of that thing that the Lord is doing.

The Lord is seeking to raise up here a testimony, a testimony in spiritual fullness. You see, the Lord must have this. He must have His purpose and His truth represented on this earth. This that He has revealed in the letter to the Ephesians is not just something in heaven only, there must be an expression of it here in this world. We know that that is the purpose of this dispensation. The Lord must have it. He cannot close the dispensation until He has got it: a representation of His own thought concerning the church. That is the manifestation of Christ in His Body. I repeat: the Lord must have it. He has not got it in the West, only in very small ways. I believe that it is there in small companies, but speaking of the people of God as a whole, the Lord has not got it. He has tried to have it, but His people have failed Him. Now He is beginning again and He is beginning in the East.

There is a very great responsibility resting upon you brothers and sisters. It is no less a responsibility than providing the Lord with that which He must have before the end of the dispensation. There may be weaknesses and imperfections, we are all conscious of those, probably you are conscious of those, but the Lord is seeking to do something, to do something in a new way and in a fuller way - that which will be on this earth a true expression of His mind as fully as He can have it. Now, I have said that to you and in saying that I have pointed out your great responsibility and that will explain very many things. It will explain why the Lord will not allow you to be satisfied with anything less than His full thought.

Well, I trust that you can see more than I have said, but if you could recognise it, that is exactly what is in the book of Ezekiel. The Lord had had a full testimony in one place. His people failed Him there and what we see here is the Lord moving away from that and bringing His revelation in another place. He is moving away from the earthly, to the heavenly. It is as though the Lord was saying, "I am not able to do what I wanted to do there. The condition of things there does not permit Me to realise My full purpose, so I move away and start again somewhere else." That is what is in this book. But that is the kind of thing that the Lord has done from time to time, He has begun to do something in a certain place with a certain people. For the time being there has been something very much of the Lord there, and then the Lord has come up against something that prevented Him going on; it put a limitation on the Lord. The Lord has been patient, but then He found that He could not go on, and He has had to say, "I cannot do what I intended there, I must do it somewhere else." You see that is true to history.

Now, I don't want to give you a sense of too great importance, this ought to be a very humbling thing, it ought to bring upon us a very great sense of responsibility. That brings me back to what I said at the beginning this morning, it was in that movement of God that Ezekiel was found. It was a movement of God onward, but away from the place that He had been for so long. It was a new movement of God and for that ministry Ezekiel needed the strength of God. So his name means "The Lord shall strengthen". If you like, you can write that name over yourselves. I don't know what the world would think if they saw over your hall the name: "Ezekiel", but in your great responsibility write that name spiritually over your heart. The Lord has called us into a great responsibility, but the Lord will be our strength. Now, I think that is a worthwhile introduction to our further consideration.

So we come to the next part of "the visions of God" which were the preparation of the Lord's servant; that is, what was under the firmament, what was directly under the Throne. And the first part of this was:

"The Four Living Ones"

What are known to us as the cherubim. There are eight references in fullness to the cherubim in the Bible. If you like, I will allow you to write these down: Genesis 3:24, Exodus 25:18-20, Exodus 26 verses 1 and 32, 1 Kings chapters 6 and 7, Isaiah chapter 6, Ezekiel chapter 1 and chapter 9, and Revelation chapters 4 and 5. There you have the eight references to the cherubim in fullness. There are other references to them in the Bible, I only give them to you; not because we're going to study all those now, of course. We do recognise that these cherubim were not real creatures, they are not a real creation, they are only symbols of spiritual things. There are many ways in which we could prove that to be so. I do not think it would be profitable to turn aside to try and prove that that is so.

One thing about them is this: that in different places they are different in representation. For instance, here in Ezekiel they have four wings; in Isaiah they have six wings. That is only to emphasise particular spiritual principles. And you will notice that there are other differences in the references to the cherubim. This means that at one time, in one place, certain things are emphasised, at another time, in another place, certain other things are emphasised. It is the spiritual principles which are to be taken note of, so that these cherubim are symbols of spiritual realities. We must not imagine that they are actual beings. We know quite well, that especially in the East, symbols are the common way of teaching, while in the West we do use some symbols. In the East it is a much more prominent thing to use symbols; that has always been true. I suppose your Chinese dragon is one of those things. I don't know whether that Chinese dragon ever actually existed, but you know that the dragon is intended to represent some spiritual idea. Right from the very earliest days of history in the East, symbolism was the common way of teaching or representation. So the Bible, right from beginning to end, is just full of symbolism - things taken up by God to teach spiritual truth.

Now then, we look at these "four living ones." First we take account of their number, their number is four. Everything about them speaks of the number four. They have four likenesses, each one of the four has four likenesses. And there are four of them. They have four wings. Now I think I need not stay with all the details. Their characteristic number is four; and as you may know, four is the number of creation. If we want to cover all the dimensions of the creation, they are covered in the number four: north, south, east, and west cover the whole world; there are the four seasons of the year: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. In the Bible the four winds are referred to, four winds as coming from "the four corners of the earth". Now, we know that the world is not square, it does not have four corners, but this is a symbolic way of speaking, "the four corners of the earth" mean the whole world. And I could go on like that with the number four. It, therefore, represents the whole creation; it is the number of creation. Keep that in mind as we move on to their four likenesses.

You see, they had four likenesses: the likeness of a man, the likeness of a lion, the likeness of an ox, the likeness of an eagle; and those four are representative of four parts of the creation. The lion represents the wild creation, the ox represents the domestic creation, the eagle represents the flying creation, and the man represents the human creation. All creation is represented here. But then, what is the symbolism? This is so well known that I'm almost afraid to mention it. The lion is the symbol for royalty and government. The ox is the symbol of service and sacrifice. The eagle is the symbol of heavenliness and mystery. And the man is the symbol for representation. That is the symbolism.

We ask, "What is the meaning of all that?" Surely it is impossible to not see that this, in the first place, is a symbolic representation of Christ. It is Christ in His four-fold capacity. The Lion is "the Lion of the tribe of Judah", out of Judah came the Ruler, so that the Lion is the symbol of the government or royalty of the Lord Jesus. You probably know that the gospel by Matthew corresponds to that. It is the gospel of the King.

The Ox is the symbol of service and sacrifice, and again, that is a representation of the Lord Jesus, the servant of Jehovah sacrificing Himself: "The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life". The ox corresponds to the gospel by Mark. It is in the Gospel by Mark that, more than anything else, Jesus is seen in service giving Himself.

The Man aspect of the cherubim is very clear, "The Son of Man is come". That is the message of Luke: Jesus the Man.

And the Eagle, is the symbol of heavenliness and mystery, and that is clearly seen in the gospel by John. The Lord Jesus so often in that gospel speaks about His having "come down from heaven", and yet there is a mystery about Him that no one can understand. He is a Man, but He is more than a Man. This is the eagle symbolism. So I say it is quite difficult not to see the Lord Jesus as represented by the cherubim.

They are called "the living ones", In our translation, a word is introduced that is not there in the original. In one translation, it is living "creatures"; in another translation, it is living "beasts", the four living "beasts". Well, of course, to begin with, man is not a beast, and an eagle is not strictly a beast. Those words are not in the original. They have had to be there because of the impossibility of translating it. You know the impossibility of translating some words, probably we're up against that now every day! Some words are untranslatable from one language into another. What is here in the original text is this: just the plural form of the word "life". Now you see, it is impossible to translate that: Life in a plural form. In the Greek language that is quite simple and clear. You might be able to translate it into Chinese, I don't know, but it simply means the plurality of life. The chief characteristic of the cherubim was Life: - "In Him was Life". What was the Life for? The Life of the creation! Jesus is the Life of the creation. Of course that is now the new creation!

We go back to the first appearance of the cherubim. Man has sinned, God has cursed the race and the earth, He has driven man out of the garden in which there was "the tree of Life" and He has placed the cherubim at the gate to guard the way of the tree of Life. What does all that mean? The sinful and fallen creation can never have that Life. That Life can only be had by "a new creation". Between that which represents the fallen creation and that which represents the unfallen creation, stands Christ as "The Door". Christ says, "There is no Life for that sinful creation; there is only Life in a new creation." So the cherubim stand between. You see, Christ always stands between an old creation and a new. There is no Life outside of Christ. There is Life inside of Christ. Christ as "The Life" stands at the door. He says "No" to one creation, and "Yes" to another. Well, I think we can say that the cherubim represent Christ. They represent Christ as the Life.

Now, it is also very difficult not to see that the cherubim in relation to the Throne affect the whole creation. The Throne is linked with the creation - in creation and redemption. On the one side, it relates to the creation; on the other side, it relates to the redemption of the creation! God's Throne governs those two things. The Chariot-Throne of God is linked with God's creative and redemptive power. This Throne says that God is concerned with the redemption of the creation. You notice over the Throne there is a rainbow. The rainbow is the symbol of God's covenant of redemption. You will find that rainbow again in the book of the Revelation and presently we shall see its connection in that book, but let us be quite sure of what we have just said.

Here is the Chariot-Throne of God! Underneath are the symbols of the whole creation. The whole question is the question of Life for the creation, but we have seen the tremendous energies and power of those movements of the Throne! All the energies and movements of God are in relation to a new creation, a redeemed creation. So it is difficult not to see that the Throne is moving in relation to Divine Purpose - the Divine Purpose in creation. That movement is by way of the Lord Jesus. That new creation is to have Him as its King. That is by way of His service and His sacrifice. That will be an expression of His Heavenly Character, and it is all summed up in:

The Man After God's Own Heart.

You will see that the Man feature is the predominant feature in the cherubim. Now, if we want to have a New Testament explanation of that, we have one. We have it all in that very full eighth chapter of the letter to the Romans. In that chapter creation is seen as in bondage. You remember the words, "The creation was subjected to vanity... the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain". It is groaning under its bondage, waiting for its liberty. That is the thing we see in Romans 8. And then we see that the heart of that situation is "the sons of God" waiting for "the manifestation of the sons of God". Until God has sonship in the creation, the creation cannot be delivered. The sons of God are involved in this situation. But then this chapter shows us God's eternal mind about those sons, "whom He foreknew... He foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son... whom He foreknew, them He also justified, whom He justified, them He also called" He called.

First of all: the emancipation of the sons and then when that has been accomplished, the emancipation of the creation. When the sons are released, then the creation will be released. We have all that in the eighth chapter of Romans, it's a very wonderful chapter. And you can take that right back into the beginning of the prophecies of Ezekiel. In principle, that is exactly what is here in this vision. God had a thought concerning a people. He created man with that thought. Man failed Him. God brought the whole creation and man into bondage. It is groaning in its bondage. Paul says, "We ourselves grown within ourselves waiting for our adoption", but God is moving, He is at work in the groaning creation. All the energies of God are toward getting those sons out of the groaning creation. He is getting those sons now. They are not recognised by this world, but the day is coming when the sons shall be manifested, when God shall display to the whole universe the sons that He has redeemed. That is what we have in the fourth and fifth chapters of the book of the Revelation - a great multitude of redeemed ones displayed to the whole universe; and when that comes to pass, the creation itself shall be delivered.

It will not be long before God says: "I create new heavens and a new earth... the former things are passed away." All that is here in Ezekiel in principle. Now here is a very significant thing: in chapters four and five of Revelation, you have the four living ones. In chapter four, they are connected with the creation. The song in chapter four is "For Thou didst create all things, and for Thy pleasure they were created." The living ones are there in connection with that, the Divine purpose in creation - "He created all things in Jesus Christ." The living ones are a representation of Jesus Christ: King, Sacrifice, Heavenly Man - that gives the meaning to the creation. "All things were created in Him," and the living ones are there in the presence of the song of creation, but in a special way now, it is the song of a new creation.

In chapter five of the book of the Revelation, another song is being sung, and the living ones are there. This is the song of redemption, "Thou... hast redeemed"; that's the new song, and the living ones are there. The purpose of creation in Christ Jesus - Jesus as the Purpose of creation, and when the new creation is secured, the living ones are there. It is a new creation in Christ Jesus. The song of redemption: "Thou hast redeemed us," - and the redemption is in Christ Jesus. I think that's all very clear.

You see, that takes us back to Ezekiel - the cherubim, in the first place, as a representation of Christ. On the one side related to creation; on the other side, related to redemption. And all these mighty energies of God concentrated upon that. All the goings of God are unto that. One creation has failed; God is going to have a new creation. One representation of God has failed; God is going to have a new representation. Israel has failed as the representation of God, He will have His Church. That is what comes out later in these prophecies.

Now I must leave it there. That is only half of it. The other half you see, is the wheels; I think we must leave that for this morning. This is all not only interesting, but very instructive. It ought to help us to see one thing: here is the Throne of heaven concentrated upon a full and perfect representation of the Lord's Mind. When we sum up this whole section, we shall see more of what that means for us, but it is a tremendous thing to be right in the way of the goings of God; not alongside of the goings of God, not in some little bit of the goings of God, but right in the full way of the goings of God! That is where we shall find the support of the Throne! That is how it was at the beginning of the history of the Church. Oh, surely God wants it like that at the end and I believe that the Lord is moving in that direction: to have something at the end which corresponds to what was at the beginning. That will be true of the creation; the Lord wants it to be true of the Church. I expect you're storing up quite a lot of questions for next week!

Chapter 6 - What the Wheels Represent

As you know, this first section in chapters one to three deal with the preparation of the Lord's servants for His ministry. So far we have considered firstly the prophet in himself and then the opened heaven, and then we have gone on with the visions of God and we still have a little to say about the first vision. We have considered the Chariot-Throne of the Lord, and we have considered the four living ones. There are just two other aspects for our consideration. The first of those two is the wheels. That section is in verses fifteen to twenty-one. You have read this so that we need not go over it together this morning. There are several aspects or characteristics of the wheels, I think they can be set down as five things.

First of all, wheels are symbols of movement, they signify mobility. And then the wheels here speak of directness. Thirdly, they begin upon the earth and then they are lifted up from the earth and then they seem to touch the earth again at different times. In their movement they seem to come back to the earth from time to time. Then fourthly, these wheels are full of eyes; all around the wheels there are eyes. And in the fifth place, the Spirit of Life is in the wheels. I think just to mention those things is to indicate their teaching. We need not spend a lot of time upon each point, but we will just go over them again with one or two remarks.

Number one:

The Wheels Represent Mobility.

That suggests two things. Firstly, God is on the move. We are here in the presence of the movements of the Chariot-Throne of God. In the second place, God demands absolute liberty for movement. He requires complete freedom for His movements. If you are not quite sure of what I mean by that, you have only to remember that you are really dealing with what is in the book of the Acts in this book of Ezekiel. And when we speak of the book of the Acts, we understand that we are speaking about the whole of the New Testament. All the letters of the apostles came out of the book of the Acts - all you Bible students know exactly where you can fit in the book of the Acts, so that the book of the Acts comprehends the whole of the New Testament. We are going to have to see that in more detail presently. But when we come to the Book of the Acts, we find these two things: the Throne is on the move - there is no doubt about it that the Man on the Throne is moving. We can see the goings of the Lord in the book of the Acts. That is not a stationary book, it is not a Lord Who is standing still, He is on the move, but the second thing is the Lord demands liberty to move. That liberty of movement must be recognised and accepted.

We remember Peter and the house of Cornelius. That vision that Peter had on the housetop is always present in our minds. The Lord is on the move from Israel to the Gentiles, from Jerusalem to the regions beyond. That's what we have in Ezekiel. But Peter would stop the movement of the Lord - he would say, "Not so, Lord." But the Lord will not have that arresting hand of tradition. The Lord will not have the arresting hand of prejudice. This was a tremendous crisis for Peter, and this was the nature of the crisis: the Lord was saying in effect to Peter, "Peter, I am going on. Are you going with Me? If you are not going with Me, it makes no difference, you'll just stay behind. But if you are going with Me, you have got to give Me perfect liberty of movement. Your mind must not interfere with My movement. Your religious traditions must not interfere with My movement. Your prejudices must not interfere with My movement."

The Lord is on the move, and He demands absolute freedom of movement. That is what is here in the wheels at the very first. God is moving, and God claims the right to keep on moving. That is not something just stated to you this morning, there is a very great deal bound up with that. We must remember that God is always moving toward His Eternal End and we must put nothing in the way of the Lord. Again and again the Lord may come up against things in us, our mind about things, or even our past experiences, our ideas that we know all about it. The Lord says: "I have still yet more light and truth to break forth from the Word. You have not yet come to the end of all My movements. There is far more in front than there is behind, and you must give Me perfect liberty to go on."

Now you must think about that, because that is not only the first thing, that is the foundation of everything. This Chariot-Throne of the Lord rests upon wheels. It rests upon the principle that God is a God of movement and demands liberty for His movement.

Then the second thing:

The Wheels Speak of Directness Without Deviation.

This is one of the most difficult points in this vision to interpret, but as I see it, it seems to mean this: when God goes forward, God is never held up by something that He has not foreseen. If God does change His direction, that is all in the pattern, that is not an emergency, that is not because God had not anticipated the situation. Now, probably you find that difficult to understand.

Well, come back again to what we have just been saying about Peter. It looks as though God is changing His direction; right up to this point He has been moving with Israel, all His goings up to this point have been related to Israel. Now it looks as though He is changing His direction and that was the problem for Peter. It was such a big change in the direction of God. Peter wanted the Lord to keep straight on with Israel, and not to change His course to the Gentiles. It looked as though God was changing course simply because He had come up against difficulties in Israel. You see, some Bible expositors interpret it in that way: God came up against a difficulty in Israel, and therefore He had to go to the Gentiles. Going to the Gentiles is an entirely different policy of the Lord simply because the Jews presented Him with a difficulty. That is how Peter viewed the thing. And he felt very bad about it, and he would have said, "Lord, You just cannot do this! You have gone all through these centuries with Israel, You cannot change course now."

Now do you see the point? The fact is that God was not changing course. The Bible makes it perfectly clear that God always did have the Gentiles in mind. He would reach the Gentiles through the Jews, but that's quite another thing. If the Jews failed to serve Him in that matter, He is going on with His purpose all the same.

These wheels go straight on. They can change direction, but that does not mean a change of purpose. Even in the seeming change of direction, they are still going straight. God is not caused to go out of His Way because of circumstances. He just goes straight on. Now, that is a very difficult thing to understand when you read this vision of the wheels, but I think the illustration of Israel and the Gentiles is a key to this situation.

When you come to the end of the New Testament, you come up against another difficulty, this time with the Church in general. It seems as though the Lord has met another obstacle, and it looks as though He has to turn out of His Way and take another course. It looks as though He has to leave the Church in general and deviate to the overcomers. That is only one way of viewing it, the Divine Way is: God is still going on with His purpose. God still goes straight on. Well, I think we have said enough about that, but there is a lot of instruction in that if you will think about it.

Then point number three:

They Touch the Earth and then They are Lifted Up from the Earth.

And then it seems that they come back to earth and stay. The living ones let down their wings, and for a time everything seems to be standing still, and then the inference is that they go on again. I think there's a lot of history in that.

The Lord began on the day of Pentecost. He began at Jerusalem. We might say that He began, as it were, on the earth and then His movements are above the earth - He is there, through that book, in a position over the earth and then He stops. This is not a contradiction of what I have just been saying. There are times when the Lord has to wait - He has to wait for something - His onward movements seem to tarry. What a lot of history there is in that - the whole history of the Church is just that. God moves on and then He has to wait... and then when He gets what He is waiting for, He goes on again. There are these movements of God which we can see in history. We need to very seriously consider this matter of God having to wait for something!

Take our own lives. There's a movement of God, and then there seems to be some waiting period - the Lord is waiting for something. It may be He is waiting for our adjustment to some light that He has given. It may be that He is waiting for the removal of something that has come in that is not of Himself, it may be many things, but we do know that in our own lives there are periods when the Lord does not seem to be going on. Perhaps He has been stopped in His going on - He is now waiting for something. During that time of waiting, we ought to have very serious exercise, "Why is it that the Lord is not going on? Why is the Lord not going on with me? What is it the Lord is waiting for? What adjustment have I got to make? What is it that I have got to put out of the Lord's Way?" You see, we ought to have exercise about every seeming staying and waiting of the Lord.

And that is true also of the Lord's work, it's true in our own spiritual life, but it is true in the work of the Lord. There come periods when the Lord seems to be waiting. It looks as though He has stopped going on. There may be any one of many reasons for that. It is not because the Lord has given up His purpose! It is not because the Lord has ceased to be a God of movement, but He is waiting for us! He is waiting for His people - He is waiting for something in His people. At all such times, we should have very great exercise: "What is the Lord waiting for?"

Well, if we take the history of the Church during the last two thousand years (and it is a very instructive study), on the one side we see those movements of God from heaven - it is as though the Throne was lifted up from the earth and was going on. The Throne was overriding things of the earth - going on in its power. That has happened again and again. On the other side, we see those dark times in the history of the Church, what we call the Middle Ages, and other times when it seemed that the Lord was standing still. It's been like that many times, the Lord was waiting for something and then a people arose who took on that matter and had deep exercise about it. That is the history of the Church. Out of that exercise God went on again!

It would be quite easy for me here this morning, if I had the time, to give you those movements and those stayings of the Lord, but we shall not take time for that. We are just putting our finger upon this principle: The Throne moves; the living ones let down their wings and the Throne stands still for a time, and then it moves on again. Well, think a lot about that. It is full of instruction.

Then we come to the next thing:

These Wheels are Full of Eyes.

All around the wheels there are eyes. We meet those eyes on several occasions in the Word of God. We meet them in the prophecies of Zechariah, and we meet them several times in the book of the Revelation; and, of course, we know what they symbolise - they represent the complete and perfect intelligence of the Throne. This government of the Man upon the Throne is the government of a Perfect Intelligence. If we transfer this principle to the beginning of the book of the Revelation, there we see what it means. The churches are about to be judged, but the One Who judges them is the One Whose eyes are as a flame of fire. And that One says to the churches, "I know thy works". And then He goes on to say all that He knows about the churches, and it is shown that He knows more about the churches than they know about themselves.

He tells one church that they think that they are rich and increased in goods, that they have everything. He says, "You know not that you are poor and wretched and naked." And then what does He say? "I counsel thee to buy of Me eyesalve, that you may see what I have seen". The Lord knew more and saw more than the church knew about itself. That is only an illustration of this. All the movements of this Chariot-Throne are in complete Intelligence. That One upon the Throne sees and knows everything. The Lord is not blind to anything and He is not ignorant of anything. Well, we leave that for the moment.

And then finally:

The Spirit of Life is in the Wheels.

The whole governing principle of the movements of the Lord is Life. The thing which governs that Throne is this main principle of Life. Now, you know so much about Life in the Bible that I need not stay with it this morning. You have been taken right through the Bible on the principle of Life, and you know that that is the governing question of the whole Bible. That is the issue with which the Bible begins, and that is the issue with which the Bible ends. All the movements of God from eternity to eternity are on this basis, and with this question of Life.

Now, these are the characteristics of the wheel. You can think more about it, but we will sum up and bring this into the New Testament. There is very little doubt that in the first place we have to read Matthew 28:18 into this. Jesus said: "All authority has been given unto Me in heaven and on earth." That is the first half of the statement, that brings us back to the Chariot-Throne in relation to the whole creation and the authority that is vested in the Man in the Throne. Do note that that word that He used... He did not say, "All power is given to Me in heaven and on earth"; of course, that was implied, but He used another Greek word, He said: "All authority is given unto Me" - that is a bigger thing than power. The power lies within the authority. The authority is the exercise of the power.  We have often illustrated it in this way: you go out onto your main thoroughfare and there at the crossroads stands a little man. He is in uniform, he puts up his hand. Now, that hand would not be able to hold up all the traffic. If one car decided to go on, well, it would be a poor look out for that little man! But behind that little man and that hand, is all the authority of the government. The car has not got to deal with the man, it has got to deal with the whole government that he represents. In himself there may not be much power, but in his position there is all the authority of the government. Well, that's a very simple and common illustration, but that is what Jesus said. "Behind Me is all the authority of the government of heaven. Men may just call Me Jesus of Nazareth, they may regard Me as just another man, but they are going to find out that behind Me is all the authority of heaven." And that is what they did find out.

And then the second half of the statement: "For this very reason, go ye into all the world; and I am with you all the days." Here are the movements of the Throne "into all the world," and the authority of Jesus Christ with the Church. All the authority of heaven is behind the Church when it gets into line with the goings of that Throne.

So, first of all, we bring Matthew 28:18 right into Ezekiel, and note: we are dealing with the preparation of a servant for his work. Ezekiel certainly needed that preparation. If he had not had that vision, then his work would have been impossible. Every servant of the Lord needs that vision. You and I need to see that. We need to be assured of that. Well, we can leave that and go on.

Now, there are other parts of the New Testament which must be brought right into this section. You must read right into the first chapter of the book of Ezekiel the letters to the Colossians and the Ephesians. Bring the first three chapters of the letter to the Colossians into chapter 1 of Ezekiel and then bring the first three chapters of Ephesians into the first chapter of Ezekiel. It is full of instruction, and those New Testament letters will be the best exposition of Ezekiel 1.

Now, of course I would like to sit down with you with our Bibles, but you can do it yourself. Note some of the main words in those chapters and some of the governing ideas. Take for us to begin with, "creation". Can you call up at this moment the first chapter of the letter to the Colossians? There is nothing in all the Bible like that chapter as to the place of the Lord Jesus in creation. It is a tremendous chapter on the matter of the relationship of Christ to creation and the creation to Christ.

Now, you will remember what we've been saying about "the living ones" as representing the whole creation in heaven and on earth, and then the Throne is imposed upon that. That is exactly what you have in Colossians and Ephesians. Take the word "heavens" as in Ephesians. Well, that is all very interesting, but it ought to be very instructive to us. All this has to do with the preparation of a servant for His ministry.

Now I'll just spend our last few minutes on this second thing, and it will only be a very little that I say about it. As you see, it is in chapter 2 and verse 9, through to verse 3 of chapter 3, and then in verse 14 of chapter 3. It has to do with:

The Roll.

Ezekiel says that he saw a hand stretched out and in the hand was a roll and it was written on both sides with lamentations, mournings, and woes. And a voice said, "eat the roll" and when Ezekiel proceeded to eat the roll, he said it was as sweet as honey in his mouth. In verse 14 it says, "I went in the bitterness of my spirit" - sweetness in my mouth and bitterness in my spirit. This sounds very strange. Here is a roll written within and without with lamentations, mournings, and woes. How can that be sweet in anybody's mouth? And then as the prophet proceeded to fulfill his ministry, he said he went in the bitterness of his spirit.

Here is a combination of sweetness and bitterness in ministry. What does that mean? How can we explain this? Well, I think if I just quote one or two passages of Scripture it will explain the whole thing. Jesus is at the Passover supper with His disciples. You know what His Mind was about the cup; presently He will say, "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me." The cup was the cup of His sufferings, the cup of His passion. It was a bitter cup; there's no doubt about that, and yet it says this: "He took the cup, and gave thanks." He took the cup and gave thanks, there is a combination of two things: bitterness and thankfulness, suffering and glory. That is the paradox of the Cross.

Jesus has told His disciples what is just going to happen. He has told them that He is going to suffer. He has gone over the whole ground of His Cross with them, and then it says, "And when they had sung a hymn, they went out." They sang a hymn, and went out. You know what they went out to. You would have thought that that was the last place of ever singing a hymn; you'd have thought that they would have gone out in absolute silence and sorrow, but they went out to the notes of a hymn.

I wonder if you know what the hymn was that they sang? There is very good authority for believing that the hymn that was sung at the Passover was the 118th Psalm. Now, of course, we ought to read the 118th psalm, but right at the heart of that psalm, we have these words: "I shall not die, but live." It's the psalm of the passion, but it is the psalm of victory. It is the psalm with the Cross in view, but it is the psalm of the glory: the other side of the Cross. If it really was that psalm that they sang, then we see the mingling of the sweetness and the bitterness in the cup.

Shall we take another phrase, "Who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the Cross..." the bringing together of the bitterness and the sweetness. Is this what Paul referred to when he said: "sorrowing, yet always rejoicing"? These two things always go together in the ministry of a servant of God. The way of the Cross always means those two things. It is the way of the bitterness, often the bitterness of spirit; but it is not all bitterness. The Lord keeps the balances between the bitterness and the joy. There is not only the bitter side of the fellowship of His sufferings, there is the joyful side of that fellowship!

I think that's all I need say about that this morning. I've given you a lot to think about, I'll give you all that in outline later on, then you'll be able to take it away and think about it. You see, what we are doing in these times together is not completing the work, we're only laying the foundation for the future. Your training will not be finished when you go away from these times together, your training will only begin then.

I remember many years ago, I was preaching in a church in Philadelphia in America. And just as I was finishing my message, a man rushed up the steps of the church to the door and he said to the man at the door, "Is the sermon finished?" The man at the door said, "No, the preacher is finished, but the sermon is just beginning!"

Chapter 7 - The Three Titles of Ezekiel

Now we come back again to the prophecies of Ezekiel. There is a large section of this book with which we shall not be able to deal in detail, so we must find some comprehensive way of dealing with it simply. I think that way will be by looking at the three different titles by which Ezekiel was called. Perhaps you have noticed that in these prophecies Ezekiel has three different titles and these three titles gather into themselves this large section of the book.

The first of the three is:

Son of Man.

Look at chapter 2 verse 1: "And He said unto me, Son of man...". Verse 3: "And He said unto me, Son of man". Chapter 3 and verse 1: "And He said unto me, Son of man". Verse 4: "And He said unto me, Son of man..." and so it goes on. And right through the book that is one of the main titles of the prophet. Perhaps you would like to go right through and note how many times it occurs.

We note then, at the beginning, that this title was peculiar to the prophet Ezekiel. No other prophet is called by this name in the same way. It marks out Ezekiel in a special way. Now, we know that the Lord Jesus chose as His favourite title for Himself, "The Son of Man," but we must not think of Ezekiel in the same way. In this title, "son of man", Ezekiel was unique among the prophets. Jesus as the Son of Man was unique among all men. So let us be careful not to confuse the two titles "son of man" and "the Son of Man". If there is any relationship or similarity, it is in the function, and not in the person. That is the matter that we shall now consider.

We have seen that on the Throne, above it, there was the likeness as of a man, and we have seen that the predominant feature of the cherubim was the man. Therefore, we take note of this place of "man" in this book; it is a special idea. We also know that man means representation and speech for God. Man is not only a person, he is a Divine idea. There is a Man upon the Throne, and while that Man is a person, He is not only a person, He is a Divine idea. The idea in God's Mind in creating man was that he should represent God, "Let Us make man after Our Own image, in Our Own likeness and in Our image." Man is God's fullest thought, and God's final thought.

In the creation God ended with man, and He headed all things up into man. When God has reached such a man, He pronounces His verdict and takes His rest. When He has the man according to His intention, then He says about everything, "It is very good"; and then God takes His rest. God finds His rest when He has His man according to His Mind, but that is not the end of everything. At that point God looks for reproduction. He says to that man: "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." And the law of creation was that everything should reproduce "after its own kind." Things were never intended to change their form (I think that this is a little blow at evolution) everything was given a definite and distinct form. It was a kind of creation, and everything was to reproduce after its kind. A jellyfish was not to reproduce a monkey and a monkey was not to reproduce a man; "everything after its own kind".

Now you see, God has made man, and before man has fallen, God says, "Be fruitful, and multiply." God's idea was that that unfallen man should multiply, and that unfallen man should fill the earth. But we know that that man fell, and the earth was filled with a kind of man that God never intended. And God put a limit to his life; He fixed the number of his years, that man should not go on indefinitely. I think you see from this that God's idea is a man according to His Own Mind. In a full way, the Lord Jesus was that, therefore, He is the Son of Man, and in a sense we can say He was the only Son of Man. But the principle of manhood is taken up for the people of God, and that is where Ezekiel comes in.

It is not the person, but the function; it is the principle, so that "son of man" speaks of two things. It means bringing into view God's original thought and pattern. That was a principle that the Lord was wanting to have realised in Israel. Israel is a man in God's eyes, but in this book Israel is not the man that God intended. In this book Israel is a man which has been marred, and God is moving along the principle of manhood to recover that idea in Israel. Later we shall find that He was unable to do it in Israel as a whole, and He therefore sought to realise it in the remnant. But the Old Testament closes with this idea as a complete failure in Israel.

When we move into the New Testament, we find ourselves in the presence of the one new Man, that is, the corporate Man which is the Church. But we are not going on to that this morning, we are just with the principle. "Son of man" in principle, means speaking in relation to an original thought and pattern of God. You have got to recognise that as the key to the whole of these prophecies. What is it all about? What does this whole book mean in all its parts? Well, this title "son of man" is scattered right over the book, and it means that the governing thought of God is this conception of man according to God's Mind. If God sends this collective man into captivity, it means that that man cannot stand before Him any longer. God must have another kind of man. The great illustration of that, of course, is the valley of dry bones - bringing up out of the grave of Babylon a new man with a new heart, and a new spirit.

Well, I think that is enough to indicate the meaning of this title. God is moving for the recovery of His original thought. That thought has been lost. This is all what Paul meant in speaking to Timothy as the "man of God." His appeal to Timothy was, "Oh man of God"; that is, God's man - that is what God is after.

Now we must take this up as to our ministries, we come into this. What are we here for? What is the meaning of our ministry and our work? It is that God may have this corporate Man according to His Own Mind. That is the meaning of Ephesians, chapter four: "Until we all come to the unity of the faith, to the full knowledge of the Son of God, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ".

God is working toward this corporate Man. We must remember that God's idea is man. I would emphasise that because so many seem to think that God's idea is some organisation, some institution, some thing that is called "the church", a way of doing things, a certain teaching - a whole system - and God is not after that. God is not after the Church just as the Church. The object of the Church in God's Mind is that it should be an expression of Christ! The Church is the Body of Christ; it is not a system of teaching. It is not a special form of practice. It is a Man, and it is Christ in corporate expression. We shall come to that later in this book of Ezekiel, but we take up this principle, it is a very important thing for us to recognise.

Well, here this man-principle speaks of three things. First of all, a presentation - God presents His idea. And then a representation of something that expresses that which is presented. And then a declaration - a preaching concerning that. The thing is presented as a Divine thought, and then the thing is represented in a Body, and out of that comes the message.

Now, brethren, have you got those three things? First there is the vision, the Man is presented. You see the Man in the Throne. You get God's idea. God's idea is manhood, manhood of a certain character. From that, God has a representation of it, something which embodies the idea, and then when God has got that which embodies the idea, there's a message. We must not put it in the other order, preaching it first. We must first of all have seen it, and then there must be an expression of it. There must be that to which we can point and say, "This is it." The message must come out of something that actually exists according to God's Mind.

I think I need not stay with that any longer, but you see, that applies firstly to Christ. You must first of all have seen the Lord, and then that must have produced something in you, so that it is not only objective and abstract, but the Lord has done something in you as you have seen. And then out of that comes your ministry.

The same applies to the Church. First there must be a revealing of the Church, and then there must be a representation of the Church, and out of there existing a definite expression of the Church - the message goes out. It is almost impossible to preach the truth unless there is something behind it. It is essential that we are able to say, "This thing works, and I can show you where it works." That will become very clear when we come to our next consideration in Ezekiel, but I do hope that you have got hold of this first idea, the principle in this first title, "son of man." There is a very great deal of the Mind of God in that title.

Now we go to the second title of Ezekiel. In chapter 3, verse 17: "Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel".

In chapter 33, verse 1: "And the word of the Lord came unto me saying, Son of man, speak to the children of thy people, and say unto them, 'When I bring the sword upon the land, the land and the people of the land take a man from among them and set him for their watchman; if when he sees the sword come upon the land, he blows the trumpet..." and so on. Verse 6: "But if the watchman sees the sword come and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned..." Verse 7: "So, thou son of man, I have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel...".

So, the second title of Ezekiel is:

A Watchman.

Well, this idea is not peculiar to Ezekiel. We have the watchman in other prophets, or shall we say, we have the function of the watchman in other prophets. Habakkuk said, "I will stand upon my watch": that is a function of the watchman. In Isaiah we have, "Watchman, what of the night?" So again we have the function, but no one else was exactly called a watchman, but Ezekiel. And as you have noticed, that title was applied to him at the beginning of his ministry, and later at his recommissioning.

Now, this title and this function need not keep us very long. We just ask ourselves the question, "What is the function of a watchman?"

First of all, the function of the watchman is to know and to declare the time. That was always an idea associated with the watchman. Right down to modern times, that is true. I don't know whether it is true in China, or in other parts of the world, but until quite recently it was true in Great Britain. In the country places, the watchman went round at certain times of the night and blew his trumpet or rang his bell and shouted the time. He would ring his bell and shout, "It is five o'clock of the morning!" That idea is in Isaiah, chapter 21. Someone is asking the time, "Watchman, what is the time?" And the watchman answers, "The morning cometh, and also the night." The first thing about a watchman is that he must know the time - he must know what time it is in the purpose and work of God.

You know, there are a lot of people who are very badly mixed-up on this matter. They are trying to do a lot of things out of time. There are some people who are confused in the dispensations over this. In this dispensation, God is doing a special thing. There is one particular thing that marks this dispensation in the purpose of God, and it is of the greatest importance that you and I know what it is that belongs to this dispensation.

There are all sorts of systems of teaching which have nothing to do with the purpose of this dispensation. They are very interesting, there may be some truth in them, but they are not right in line with God's specific purpose for this dispensation. I'm not going to take your time this morning to illustrate what I mean, I could tell you of different systems of truth which have taken people right off the line of God's specific purpose for now. It is not always a question of how much truth or how much error there is in it. The real question is, "Is that what God is seeking now, in this dispensation?" Now, you can usually detect the fault by one thing: has that something to do with this earth now? If it has, then that is not what God is doing in this dispensation. God is not concerned with doing something on this earth in this dispensation, but He is taking out of the nations a people for His Name. He is building something in heaven in this dispensation. Whether it is Israel, or anything else, that is not God's concern in this dispensation and anything which has wholly to do with this earth, does not belong to this dispensation. That is why the Lord Jesus left this earth and went to heaven. This dispensation is characterised by a Heavenly, and not an earthly thing. That is a major test of everything.

Now, of course, I could spend a lot of time in speaking about what God is seeking in this dispensation. That will come later in the book of Ezekiel. This morning we are just underlining this truth: a watchman's first business is to know the time and then to give a very clear message as to what the time is. If his note is not clear and distinct, people will not know what the hour is. I do ask you brothers in ministry, to go and think much about that. The whole matter of how much the Lord is with you will depend upon how much you are with the Lord in the purpose of the hour. If you are trying to do something that God does not want done at this time, you're wasting your time and you are wasting your strength.

The function of the watchman then, is to be eyes for the people of God. And then the second thing: to discern what the situation is and what it will lead to. All this is contained in this description of the watchman's word which the Lord gave to Ezekiel.

The watchman is looking out, he sees certain things, and he discerns what those things imply. He sees that those certain things mean something evil for the Lord's people - these are signs that there is evil coming. If these things are not guarded against, the result will be death. You see, that is what is here in the description. And then on the other side, he sees the Way of Life and he is able to say, "Now that is the way of death, and that is the Way of Life". But the watchman has to be familiar with what is in the Way of Life and what is in the way of death. So he has to discern the situation and recognise the way in which things are going. It is a very big responsibility. We are all called to be watchmen, and we must have an unmistakable message. We must understand the things that mean death for the Church.

[Break in audio. The third title of Ezekiel is:

A Sign.]

Because so very much of these prophecies are gathered into that, all these things that Ezekiel was commanded to do are gathered into that title. You look at chapter four, and you see the strange things that the Lord commanded Ezekiel to do.

He commanded him to take a tile and to draw on it a picture of Jerusalem, a picture of Jerusalem as in siege. And then he was told to lie on his left side for 390 days, and then to lie on his right side for 40 days, and then to uncover his arm before all the people, and then the Lord said that He would put bands upon him so that he couldn't move, and He would make his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth so that he could not speak. And then he was told that he must become a baker and he must make enough bread to last 390 days. And then Ezekiel was told to take a sharp razor and to shave his head of all its hair, and then to weigh the hair in balances. These are all strange things, and he was to do all these things in the sight of all the people.

And then when you get well on into the book, you come to that very sad thing. In chapter 24 Ezekiel's wife dies, and he is not allowed to mourn for her. He is to just go on as though nothing had happened. And everybody would look at him and would say, "This is a scandalous thing; the fellow does not care, although his wife has died. He goes on just as though nothing had happened!"

What is all the meaning of this? It is all gathered into this title: "I am your sign." And we just gather it up in this way: it means that the message of Ezekiel was first of all wrought into his own experience. He was taken through the message before he gave it. The things that he was to say were already wrought in his own life. I do not know how far we are to take this literally, but I'll make a suggestion to you: try to lie on your left side for 390 days without moving. That is experience! That is painful experience. The thing has been wrought into you by experience: "This is not a theory, this is not just an idea, this is something that I have felt in my own being!" Well, you do any of these things and you see that it is a matter of the thing being personal. It is something that happens to you. That's the whole point. The messenger must be a personal embodiment of his message! It must not just be things that we say, it must be things that have been wrought into our own life. You see, Ezekiel did not just give a message, Ezekiel was the message; when the people looked at him, they saw the message.

Well, you can see what a big principle that introduces. John put it in this way: "We speak that we do know and testify that which we have seen... our hands have handled." There must not be any gap between the teacher and his message. The teacher and the message must be one thing. Our position must not be one of just doctrine or theory, our teaching must be ourselves. The message must be seen in our history, it must be seen in our experience. This will, of course, explain a lot as to the Lord's dealings with us. If the Lord really gets hold of us, He will not let us just give out theories. The message will be born out of deep experience.

We take three illustrations. Peter's commission was "to shepherd the flock," and in his letters, as you know, he speaks much about that. He speaks three times of the Shepherd and then he speaks to the elders and says, "...shepherd the flock over which the Lord has given you responsibility." What is the key feature of a true shepherd? Well, if we take the Lord as the Example, the key feature of a true shepherd is that he lays down his own soul for the sheep. Notice, I have chosen the word soul. That is the word that the Lord Jesus used. He spoke about the disciples laying down their souls. Now, Peter had a very strong and big soul. You know what the soul is, and Peter had a big one of those! And Peter's great life lesson was how to lay down his own soul. If the soul is the mind, and the feelings, and the will, we can see what a big one Peter had. He had a mind of his own, he had a will of his own, and he had feelings of his own, and he was always pushing these things to the fore. Peter's life was in the hard school of having to learn how to lay down his soul. You know enough about the whole life of Peter, as we have it in the New Testament, to show you how true that was. Peter was not a professional shepherd - he had had the principle of the shepherd wrought right into his very being.

Pass to the apostle Paul. Paul's great ministry was concerning the Church as the Body of Christ. The principles of the Body of Christ are: relatedness, dependence, interdependence, heavenliness, spirituality. Now, did not Paul have to have those things wrought into him? When you remember Saul of Tarsus, you have the very embodiment of independence: personal action and earthliness, and unspirituality. Saul of Tarsus had no sense of dependence, of relatedness, but see how the Lord took him in hand, and right from the point on the Damascus Road, all the way through, he was having to learn these lessons.

Now, Paul was a sign for the dispensation. You think about that! We know the purpose of this dispensation: it is the Church which is His Body. That is not just an idea or a teaching, that is a practical reality. That revelation came to the dispensation through the apostle Paul and, therefore, it had to be wrought right into the very constitution of Paul. All independence had to be destroyed, all unrelatedness had to be removed, all earthly expectations had to be taken away. Paul had to have his whole life constituted on the basis of the message that was given to him. He was a sign to the dispensation. That is why we make so much of Paul.

And now, what about John? What was John's particular message? The ministry of John particularly related to Life. That is the big word of John through all his writings. John became the embodiment of that principle of Life triumphant over death. When all the apostles had long gone to the Lord, John is still going on. He outlived all the others, not because he had an easier time than the others. John suffered with the others, and at last John died as others had died; but here is a testimony to Divine Life in spirit, mind, and body. The point is that John really, personally represented the message that he gave. Peter, Paul, John could say: "I am your sign."

Brothers and sisters, you and I have got to be able to say the same. People must see in us the message and not only hear it from our lips, but see that that message is true in our history and experience. Now I have stolen some extra time, but we'll make up for that presently.

Chapter 8 - The Glory and the Spirit

You have been reading these following six chapters [of Ezekiel], and so you know all about it. You notice that this chapter and this section begins with a new date. When the prophet gives us a date, it usually relates to a new phase of things. It means that one phase is ended and another phase is beginning. Chapter 39 finishes what we may call "direct predictions", and chapter 40 begins what we may call "apocalypse". Here we have a revelation as to the realisation of God's purpose. You will notice that the date is given as twenty five years after the captivity. We know that the captivity lasted for seventy years; twenty-five from seventy means that there were forty-five years yet to go. That is something that we must keep in mind, because this section is looking a long way on. We might ask the question, "Why should this vision be given forty-five years before the end of the captivity?" The answer to that will come in our general consideration as we go on.

Now, we cannot go on into this section without facing the problem of interpretation. Probably few parts of the Bible have been more controversial than this part, and there are many schools of interpretation. Now I've got to stop here for a moment because what I'm going to say may only be helpful for those who have responsibility in ministry. One difficulty that I have been facing through all these sessions is this: there is such a variety of spiritual position represented in this company. There are many who are only at the beginning of their training. Perhaps their knowledge of the Bible is limited. There are others who are not responsible for ministry, they are in the work in a more general way. But then there are all these "very important" people here, these men who have real responsibility in the ministry and in the church. I have been trying all the way along so to present the message as to meet the need of all. That is not always easy. Those who are further advanced are wanting something deeper and stronger. Those who are not so far advanced might be mystified about much that was being said. That is my problem. Now in the next few minutes, probably what I say will only apply to those who are in ministry, and yet it may be helpful to all who are studying the Bible.

So we come to this problem of interpretation. Of course you will remember what we said right at the beginning of this course about principles of interpretation. And we said that those principles apply to the whole of the prophecies of Ezekiel. That is true, but they must be brought, in a very special way, into this section of the prophecies. I would suggest to you that you take that outline of principles of interpretation and just read it over again before you start at chapter forty, because those principles are the key to this section of the prophecies in a special way.

Now about the interpretation of these chapters. We are going to come on the House of God, and then the River, the Inheritance and the distribution of the Land, and finally, the City. And we ask, "How is all this to be interpreted?" Now I may mention the several schools of interpretation. There is what is called the historical-literal school. That school teaches that Ezekiel had seen Solomon's temple and with certain alterations, he was reproducing the pattern of Solomon's temple for the people after the captivity. Therefore, for that school, what is in these chapters is the pattern of the temple to be built after the captivity. There are a lot of people who believe that. Well, there are very many big difficulties about that! Well, we leave that for the time being and come to another school.

This is what is called the historical-ideal school: this temple never had been, it was an altogether new idea, something greater and better than anything that had been. And after the captivity there would be something better than there was before. This was the ideal temple. And this ideal temple was going to be built after the captivity. Well, there's a whole school that believes that, that is, what was intended to be after the captivity, but of course what did not happen.

Then there is a third school, and this school believes that what is here was what was actually begun after the captivity. This is the temple that the remnant began to build, but that they were never able to do it, they found that they had not got the resources and the difficulties were so many and so great that they had to build something very much more simple. That school so interprets those words from Haggai and Zechariah about disappointment of those who had seen the earlier temple. They had been led to believe by Ezekiel that the latter house would be more glorious than the former. And when they looked on that latter house they were disappointed. They had started to build according to Ezekiel's pattern, but they had not been able to do it. That is what this third school teaches. They go a little further and they say that Herod took up the pattern of Ezekiel and built his temple according to it so that the great temple that existed in the days of Jesus, really corresponded to this pattern. You can believe that if you like. You will see presently how impossible it is!

Then there is number four school. This number four jar has its own interpretation. This is the school that believes that this is the temple that is going to be built in the millennium. When the millennium comes and the Jews return to their own country, then they will rebuild the temple according to the pattern of Ezekiel; I think the largest school of interpreters believe that. Well, we'll leave them with that for the moment.

And then we come to number five school. This is the Christian spiritual school of interpretation. That is, that all that is here in this section is just typical and symbolic of something spiritual. This is not a very large school of interpretation.

Now, we have got to choose between one of those five schools of interpretation. You are bound to come up against these things in your ministry, sooner or later, and it is very important that you know where you are in this matter.

My method this morning will be to present you with two or three great facts. I will put them to you in the form of questions. Firstly: Will there ever be a return to the ground which means that all was not fulfilled in Christ? Let me put that in another way: is there anything in the Bible that really supports this view that the time will come when the ground will again exist where everything was not fulfilled in Christ? We believe that all this was fulfilled in Christ, that all sacrifices were finished in His one sacrifice; that all priesthood was gathered up in and finished with Christ. We believe that all types and figures were fulfilled in Christ. We believe that that applies to the sacrifices, the priesthood, and the House of God. We not only believe, but we know that the New Testament teaches that.

Will the time ever come in the history of this world, when that will all be reversed, when we get back again behind all that and look on toward it? Was the work of Christ a once-for-ever work, or only until the millennium, and when the millennium comes, all that will be set aside and we'll be back again on Old Testament ground? Can we believe that? Well, if you can believe that, then you can accept one of these other four schools!

Let me put that in another form: we'll just take out of our New Testament the letter to the Hebrews - we hold that up in the millennium and we tear it to pieces and we say, "That does not apply to the millennium. We're starting all over again with priests, and sacrifices, and altars, and temple, and everything else. For the millennium, Christ has not finished all that." Well, that is the first problem that you have got to solve! For my own part, I do not accept that interpretation. I cannot believe that there ever will be a future time when the work of Christ is as though it had never been.

Then we have to face another big problem. The description of the temple, and the city, and the land, and the river represent difficult impossibilities. If you will take up the full circuit of the wall that encompassed the holy ground, it will amount to a hundred... half a mile and 166 yards. And if you measure the square of Ezekiel 42 verse 20, you will find it six times as large as the measure we have just given for the wall, so that what we have here is a total of three and a half miles and about 140 yards. So, what have we? We have a compass far greater than the measurement of the whole of Mount Moriah. A physical impossibility! The whole contour of the land has got to be changed to have a temple according to these measurements.

This river is a physical impossibility in that land. If you look at this temple and take its measurements, you will find that it is larger than the whole of the present Jerusalem. And the Jerusalem that is in this book is larger than the whole of the land of Canaan. Now note that it was the Spirit who was showing this to Ezekiel. The Spirit must be correct! If this thing is a physical impossibility - that is, it is something that really could not be on the earth, that is, in that country - then the Spirit must have another meaning. I pointed this out to someone on one occasion, and I said that for such a temple you would have to go right into the sea. The answer was, "Well, in the book of the Revelation it says there will be no more sea!" You see how people try to get round things?

Before we touch that, let us take one other problem. Paul teaches us very clearly that the mystery of Christ and the Church was hidden in all the prophets - that mystery was hidden in all the scriptures of the prophets. It had been hidden from all ages and generations, but in this dispensation that mystery has been brought to light. I think that is the key to the whole situation.

What we have in this section of Ezekiel is a system of spiritual principles. It is not a literal temple that ever was, or was intended to be, or ever will be. It is a symbolic representation of what obtains in a spiritual way in this dispensation. That is the only honest and safe way of interpreting these chapters. So we must approach it in that way; and when we have seen that the mystery is now revealed, we see that Ezekiel was saying things which were much greater than he understood.

The Spirit was showing him, showing to Ezekiel, something beyond Ezekiel's understanding, but the New Testament teaches that by the Spirit, we have come into understanding of these things. The whole meaning of spiritual understanding is that we see what the Spirit has always meant. It is one of our laws of interpretation that the whole Bible is focused in Christ and that the work of the Holy Spirit in every dispensation related to Christ. The work of the Holy Spirit never did relate to something finally on this earth, just for a time. The work of the Holy Spirit has always been related to the Eternal thought of God, and that is centred in Christ. So that what we have in these chapters is a symbolic representation of Christ and His Church.

Now, I don't know how much help all that has been to you, it is very technical, but I think it is important for Bible students to understand. I leave that with you and come to this section; we shall be able to only go a little ways with it this morning.

There are several preliminary points to notice. Firstly, Ezekiel's later visions are governed by the first vision of chapter 1, verse 28. Look at chapter 43, at verse 3: "And it was according to the appearance of the vision which I saw, even according to the vision that I saw when I came to destroy the city. And the visions were like the vision that I saw by the river Chebar; and I fell on my face." You see, that statement brings the vision of chapter 1 right over into this section, so that all we said about the vision in chapter 1, governs this new section.

We cannot go back over all the details of that first vision, but I suggest that you take your outline of that first vision and bring it here before this section and see how that every section of it applies to this particular part of the revelation. In a word, all this is governed by the Throne with the Man upon it. And therefore, we are again right in concluding that what follows is a representation of that Man on the Throne. In various ways, we shall come on that fact as we go along.

Now notice two governing factors here. They are represented by two words: one is "the glory," the other is "the Spirit". You put a line underneath those words, and then you come on another thing:

The Glory and the Spirit

Carry that over into the New Testament, and you'll find that the revelation of the Church in the New Testament comes by the Spirit on the ground of Christ glorified. The beginning of everything is Christ glorified on the Throne. That is where you begin the book of the Acts. The Spirit comes because Christ has been glorified, and the Spirit's work is connected with the Church - the formation and the revelation of the Church. Those things are quite clearly seen here: the vision of the glory, the Man glorified on the Throne, the Spirit coming, and then the House of God being brought in. Of course, that is so simple; it is so simple that nobody could fail to see it.

It is very difficult to separate the Man with the rod from the Spirit. If you read these words in chapter 40, you'll find it very difficult to make that separation. The Spirit is mentioned, the Man with the measuring rod is mentioned, and then "he" is referred to. Who is that "he"? Is it "the Spirit," or is it "the Man with the measuring rod"? That is not made clear, as you read, it looks as though they are the same. And I think in principle they are the same. The Man with the measuring rod is the Spirit; the Spirit relates to the Man with the measuring rod.

Perhaps we could understand that if we took just a look at the first chapter of the book of the Revelation. John there said: "I was in the Spirit... and I saw." What did he see? He saw a Man with a measuring rod, that is, the vision of Christ coming to measure the Church, or the churches. These two are moving together, the Spirit and the Divine Man, and their activity is one activity: to measure the House of God. That is just a little point of interpretation, but it helps us to see that here we have New Testament truth again.

We remember all that the Lord said about what the Holy Spirit would do when He was come. The Spirit's work, when He was come, would be all related to Himself. "He shall take of Mine, and show it to you." The work of the Spirit would be to show Christ, to give the length, and the breadth, and the height, and the depth of Christ - all the measurements of Christ. That is what the Lord said would be the work of the Spirit; that is exactly what the Spirit did. First of all, He presented Christ, and then He went on to show the dimensions of Christ. How great Christ is! Christ is too big to be confined to any earthly Jerusalem! Christ is too big to be contained in any earthly temple, and Christ is too big to be confined to any earthly country. Therefore, what we have here just bursts all the bonds of the old Jerusalem and the old country. That is, I think, a very clear spiritual truth as contained here. I said that what is here was a physical impossibility. When I use the word "physical" I do not mean just our body, you know that, I use the word in a geographical sense. Most of you understand that. This was a geographical impossibility! And Christ is a geographical impossibility! You cannot contain Him in any [thing here on earth] He is found in Ephesians in the heavenlies. In order to see this, you must be in a heavenly position.

We can read what was in Ezekiel in the same way we can read what is in the New Testament. The result is this: that we get on the one side an earthly thing, and on the other side a contradiction. What do we find? If you were to go into the theological book stores of London or Europe, today you would find more than ever, books on the church. They are very wonderful expositions of Scripture. Yes, they teach what is in the Bible very, very cleverly. You might say of these writers, they have a wonderful idea of the church. The teaching is alright, it is according to what is in the Bible, but we look at the writers and we find that they are the leading men in the earthly system of the church. All this is a merely earthly system. Well, I'm not going to enlarge upon that, but what it amounts to is this: they do not occupy a heavenly position; they are viewing it all from an earthly standpoint. And therefore, what they see, is an earthly thing and it is a contradiction to this Heavenly thing. You can only really see what the Spirit presents when you occupy a heavenly position. To see the Lord and His Church, as we have it in Ephesians, you must be in the position that is there: "He hath raised us up together with Him and made us to sit in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus." It was from that position that Paul gave us the revelation of Christ and His Body. "He set me upon a very high mountain..." this is a higher mountain than was ever in the old Jerusalem.

One more thing for this morning. In chapter 40: "He brought me thither, and, behold, there was a Man, Whose appearance was like the appearance of brass." I think we shall have to stop halfway through that verse.

"Behold a Man"

Here comes back our Man idea. You see, it is the Man idea that is going to govern everything. That is a thing that we have said again and again. "There was a Man..." and there is a very great deal gathered into that statement. Everything is going to be according to the measurements of that Man. We make the statement again and leave it there.

"Whose appearance was like the appearance of brass." This also takes us back to the first vision. You remember the vision of the cherubim: "their feet were like fine brass". When you come to the first chapter of the book of the Revelation, in that presentation of "the Son of Man", (don't forget that that is the description) in verse 15 you find, "His feet were like unto fine brass". I expect you know what brass represents in the Bible: it represents righteous judgments. Here then, in the symbolism, all the activities and ways of this Man are those of righteousness. The unrighteous man has been judged and put away. He has no place in the House of God.

The great altar was made of brass, and everything was consumed on the great altar. It is the symbol of righteous judgment - God judging everything in righteousness. There is no place left for the flesh: all is reduced to ashes. Therefore, this is another Man, this is the Righteous Man, and everything is being measured according to righteousness. I think we will just have to leave it there, how much Scripture we could quote! Of the Lord Jesus it is said, "He is made unto us... righteousness"; "The Lord will judge the world in righteousness by the Man Whom He has chosen"; "Jesus Christ the Righteous One"; and much more Scripture could be brought in. It is what Christ is in character that is the standard of the House of God. So the comprehensive statement is that the whole dimension of the House is "Holiness unto the Lord".

We shall come back to that later on, but it becomes perfectly clear at this point that there is no place for the natural man in this House. This House only gives a place to the righteous man, the man who has "the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ". So, if the Lord wills, we will proceed with this tomorrow morning, and go on with the "measuring". I'm aware that most of what has been said this morning is very technical, but I do hope that you have begun to see something, shall I say, you have begun to see Someone, for it is Christ by the Spirit Who is coming into view! May we be given these visions of God.

Chapter 9 - The House of God

We come back again this morning to this House which was revealed to the prophet Ezekiel, and I'm sure that as you have read these six chapters you have found very great difficulty in getting a clear picture of the whole. I have tried many times to draw a plan of this house with all its details and its correct measurements. Up to the present time, I have not succeeded. That is not because it is impossible, I expect that there is some architect here this morning who might succeed, but I have come up against the Lord in this matter, or the Lord has come up against me. I have got my paper on my board, and I have got all my instruments, and then again and again I have started on this plan, and I have not found that I could get on very far. It was as though I was trying to do something that the Lord did not want me to do. I wonder if you've had that experience, you've tried to do something, but you just have no Life in it at all. The thing becomes dead; and if you are spiritually sensitive, you just have to say, "Well, the Lord is not in this." And that has been my consciousness every time I have tried to reduce this thing to a plan on paper. And that is the point at which I begin this morning, because I believe that contains a very important principle.

As we read these chapters, we find ourselves in the presence of a great mass of detail. It is very difficult to cope with all the details. If we were to try to deal with that in these sessions, we should find that we had undertaken an impossible task. For one thing, we would have to be here till next year, and for another thing, we might begin to lose our sense of Life in it. My point is this: it would be very easy for us to fall into the very mistake that we must most carefully avoid. There is one thing that you and I must be very careful to avoid and that is to resolve spiritual things into a technical system, to be taken up with the technique of the House of God. That is a very great peril! And I do want to emphasise that this morning.

Here is this great mass of material and detail; altogether beyond our power to handle. If we were to resolve this into merely a technical system, we could easily destroy the Life! I therefore urge you brothers, to be very careful on this matter, be very careful not to reduce the House of God to a technique. Immediately it is resolved into a system, then it is in danger of losing its Life. That is the very thing that has happened again and again in the history of the Church. Before you get to the end of the book of the Acts, you'll find that that thing is happening! The whole present system of Christianity was beginning; and, as you know, Paul wrote his last letters to Timothy to restore the spiritual nature of things. He sought to show that the offices of the church are not just offices; that is, elders are not officials, they are spiritual men.

The House of God is Not a System - It is a Spiritual House.

Already men had begun to make spiritual things into an earthly system, and that has happened many times during the past centuries. God has done something of a spiritual character, He has given a fresh revelation of the spiritual nature of things, and for a time things went on in that spiritual life, and then men took hold of it and reduced it to a fixed system. They brought it out of the heavenlies, onto the earth; and, in doing that, they killed its spiritual Life. That is the history of so many things in Christianity on the earth today. Many of them did begin in real spiritual Life - they were in spiritual power - and out from them went a river of Life. But then men took hold of them and organised them into a system; they introduced a technical element into things and, in doing that, they killed the Life so that the things remain just an empty, cold, dead shell. That is the ever-present peril in the things of God. I do urge upon you to be alive to that peril, and to guard very carefully against it, especially those of you who have responsibility. Do beware of this danger.

It would be so easy for this beautiful thing that God is doing to come to be just a technical system. You might have all the rules and all the principles and lose the Life. I'm quite sure that you will allow me to say that to you. It is the peril that I have been fighting for many years. It has been my definite business to try and avoid that. We do not want people to go about saying, "This is how it is done. This is how they do it in Taipei and this is how they do it in Honor Oak." May the Lord deliver us from that. You cannot just put people into a system and make them live. Well, you, I'm quite sure, see the importance of that.

Now we come back here. Of course, this whole presentation does show how exact and how careful God is. It shows how particular the Lord is about the smallest detail. We recognise that. That is a law of the House. God is most particular about the smallest things. Every little thing has its own measurement - it is a measurement which is given to it by God. You are not allowed to make that smaller or larger, that must exactly express the Mind of the Lord. Well, as we have said, there is a tremendous mass of detail here, but every part of it represents God's particular concern to have things according to His Mind. We recognise that, but we must at the same time recognise that it is not a system that is presented. In this vision of the House, God was not presenting a system. He was not presenting an organisation. He was presenting a Person. This is the Person of His Son. This is a spiritual House, not a system of truth. The supreme characteristic of this and everything to do with it, is Life.

Now we look at that from both sides. Life will demand exactness in behaviour, Life will demand exactness in order, but we can have the order without the Life. It is possible for the system, or the technique, to destroy the Life. It does not necessarily follow that because you have things according to the Bible in technique, that you have them according to the Bible in Life. It is possible to resolve Christianity into a legal system, just as much as Judaism. The law of this House is holiness of Life. We therefore have to come to view this temple in an objective way first. That is how Ezekiel first saw it.

You will see that there were two views of this temple given to Ezekiel. First of all, he saw it as a whole, as from a distance; he was given to view it from the very "high mountain". He saw it comprehensively in that way. He saw its broad outline. He saw its boundaries and its inclusiveness and then the Spirit took him in, and he saw it from the inside. He was shown all the details from the inside. It is important that we see it in that way.

The first thing that we see from this heavenly standpoint is:

The Great Size of this House of God.

The whole area of the House was revealed to Ezekiel, and it is, as we saw yesterday, a very great thing. We must be very careful not to make Christ, or His Church, smaller than it really is. We must not make Christ smaller than God has made Him. We may not make Him just our Christ, our "little Christ", the Christ that belongs to us, the Christ of our locality. We must be very careful that we don't make Christ smaller than God has made Him, and we may not make the Church smaller than God has made it. This is not our little Church, it is not anybody's little Church. This is much bigger than our thoughts: it goes much beyond our imaginations. This is a very great Christ and a very great Church.

Here again we must guard against a peril, that is, the ever-present peril of reducing the size of Christ and the Church, reducing the Church to the measure in which we have seen it. The measure of the Church is not our measure of understanding it; the measure of the Church is not the measure of our comprehending it. The prayer of the apostle Paul in Ephesians concerning the Church was that they should have an enlargement of comprehension. He prayed that the Church might know "what is the breadth, and the length, and the height, and the depth." This is a knowledge which surpasses all human knowledge. If there was one thing about the apostle Paul more than another, it was just this thing: he was always overwhelmed with the greatness of Christ, and the greatness of the Church.

So, we must see it like that and always guard against the peril of reducing Christ and the Church to our own size; that is, to the size of our knowledge of it. You and I have yet to learn far more about the Lord and His Church than ever yet we have seen, and the realisation of that fact should always save us from littleness.

Here, then, is the compass of great fullness - this fills all things, and all things are to be filled into it. This House is to affect all things to the uttermost bounds of the earth. That is what we come to of course, when we come to the river. The river is the influence, or effect, of this House. It is what goes out from this House to affect the world, and it is to affect the whole world, so that stored up in this House there are all the potentialities to affect the uttermost bounds of the earth.

You notice that this House, the whole dimension of the House, is square. It has four sides, and all the sides are equal. I am speaking now about the whole area of the temple; really, everything is made up of squares. We are not going to deal with that at the moment. We are dealing with the whole temple area, it is one great square, four sides which are equal. Now, you remember what we said about the number four. When we were beginning, we pointed out that the number four is the number of creation. Four embraces the whole creation, and this House represents the new creation in Christ. Paul tells us that He is to fill all things and all things are to be filled into Him, or to use another phrase of Paul's, in Ephesians 3:9, "to make all men see what is the stewardship of the mystery."

Do take note of that, "To make all men know what is the stewardship of the mystery." That does not necessarily mean that all men will accept it, or understand it. We must be very careful that we do not confine "Church truth", as we call it, to just a few: "Now, we are the people who have seen the Church, we stand on the ground of the Church, we hold the truth of the Church, we have seen the meaning of the Body of Christ". Many other Christians have not seen it, they do not stand on that ground; therefore, what conclusion do we draw? "We must be the Church, and they are not!" You see, that is a very artificial conclusion. We have got to be very careful of that danger. There may be a difference in apprehending the truth, there may be a difference of position as to the Church, but the Will of God is that all men should be made to know, "to make all men see what is the stewardship of the mystery." You cannot get outside of all men; that is the range of God's Will, and we must enlarge our heart and our mind to God's measure. This is something the Lord would say to us. I might just stay here to say that I have had very deep exercise before the Lord early this morning. I felt that I must put this whole thing back and extricate myself from this mass of material and ask the Lord, "Now, what really is it You want me to say? What do You want these people to know?" And these are some of the things that He has definitely put on my heart to say to you. You cannot make Christ too big. You cannot make the Church too big, provided it is God's Church and not man's church. So, here we have the comprehensiveness of Christ.

I said that Paul was overwhelmed with that consciousness. He was constantly crying out under that tremendous overwhelming of the greatness of things. He spoke of: "Oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God... how unsearchable are His ways!" He spoke of "the exceeding riches." Paul was overwhelmed with this greatness. What it amounts to is this: that a real apprehension of the Church will make us big, and not small. There is nothing that will save us from littleness more than a true apprehension of Christ. If we become little, or if the work becomes little in its mind, it has not really apprehended Christ. So, that is the first thing that we see here, how great this is! It represents the whole of a new creation. In the ages to come, it will fill all things; and all things will be affected by it. That's a glorious vision. We must, therefore, be very big people: big in spirit and big in heart.

Then we notice the threefold purpose of this House. First of all, it is:

The Place of God's Glory.

Chapter 43, verse 7: "And He said unto me, Son of man, this is the place of My throne, and the place of the soles of My feet, where I will dwell in the midst of the children of Israel forever; and the House of Israel shall no more defile My Holy Name, neither they, nor their kings, by their whoredoms, and by the dead bodies of their kings in their high places." You notice that it is the word "glory" that leads up to verse 7. Verse 2: "And, behold, the glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the east." Verse 4: "And the glory of the Lord came into the House by the way of the gate... east... and He said... this is the place of My throne." This is the place of the Throne of Glory.

Now, "the glory" had left Jerusalem nineteen years before this. It is not returning to the literal earthly Jerusalem, it is returning to the spiritual House. The glory left the earthly Jerusalem when God's Son was rejected and it has never come back to the earthly Jerusalem, but it did come back to the spiritual House on the day of Pentecost. This House is the House of God's glory, and you notice from the whole of that seventh verse that the glory is "the glory of Holiness." It is not just some bright shining, it is a spiritual condition. No defilement has a place here, no dead bodies have a place here, there is no death or corruption here. The glory is the glory of holiness, where corruption and death have been removed. Do remember that the glory depends upon the spiritual condition; it depends upon the holiness. This then, in the first place, is the place of His glory.

And then it is:

The Place of His Government.

"This is the place of My throne" - it is the seat of His government. Remember that this is a heavenly House. The seat of His government is not in a church on the earth, whether that be in Rome or in anything else. The seat of His throne is in heaven. We only come under the government of God when we come into a heavenly position. Now, that is a very strong statement. It carries very much with it: we really only come under this government of God when we are in a heavenly position. And I am sure that you would agree that it is a very important matter to be under the government of God. What hope is there for any of us, or for a church, that is not under the government of God?

Then what we have in the book of the Acts just sets this very clearly before us. There the Church is under the government of heaven, and it is a very effectual Church. When the Church got under the government of man, it lost its effectiveness. The government then, requires a heavenly position, but this is a Church, or a House, that is wholly according to Christ. That is necessary for heavenly government. The government of the Lord will come by way of things being just according to Christ. "This is the place of My throne!" What place? The place that is according to Christ. Everything here in this vision is Christ. Christ stands over everything. Everything takes its measure and its character from Christ, and this is the place of the throne.

And then, this is a House that is entirely ordered by the Spirit. Do you notice the place of the Spirit in this: "The Spirit lifted me up... the Spirit brought me in... the Spirit took me out... the Spirit took me around" - all this is in and by the Spirit. This is the revelation of Christ by the Holy Spirit, and this is the consummation. The church government where the whole church governs itself, the whole church elects its minister, the whole church votes on everything that is going to be done... that is democratic government. None of these systems have a place here, they are all merely official. The government of this House is the government of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit may use men, He may choose those who are called elders, but there is a great deal of difference between the official and the spiritual. You can be what is called an "elder" officially, and not be an elder spiritually. If you are an elder spiritually, you are bound to become that officially. Your spiritual measure will be recognised and whether you are made an elder or not, you will be one if you are spiritually one. The government, I am saying, is spiritual. The men of the New Testament were described as men "filled with the Holy Spirit" - they were the apostles, they were the elders, they were the deacons - that was the thing that made them what they were: men "filled with the Spirit"!

And then the third thing. This House is:

The Channel, or Vessel of God's Life.

Out of a house, like this House, Life flows. It is from this that the Life flows. You do not have to start the Life flowing, you do not have to make this Life. This Life comes from a stream. You do not go and collect buckets of water and then try to pour them out of this House. There is nothing artificial about this. There is nothing second-hand about this. There is nothing of man's doing about this. The Life just springs up! And it flows out, it flows out of a House like this - a House where the Lord's throne is, a House where the government of heaven is, a House where the Lord is. Out from that House the Life flows. The testimony itself is in that Life.

John said, "This is the testimony." Do you want to know what the testimony is? The testimony is not a system of doctrine and teaching. The testimony is not a technique. "This is the testimony: that God has given unto us Eternal life, and this Life is in His Son". The testimony is in the Life; and when the testimony is in us, when the Life is in us, the testimony is in us. So the test of everything is Life. That is a searching statement!

Life is that which determines the presence of the Lord.

Life is that which tells whether things are according to Christ.

Life tests whether this service is the service of God.

Life tests everything.

The question is, "Is it ministering Life? Is this thing a living thing, and is it pouring out Life, pouring out Life to the ends of the earth?!" If that is not true, there is something wrong with it. It may be a very wonderful technique and system, but there is something wrong with it. Everything is tested by Life.

I think we shall have to leave it there this morning, I haven't got to my pretty little picture yet, we'll come there, if the Lord wills, tomorrow morning.

Chapter 10 - The One New Man

Yesterday morning we took a general view of this House which was shown to Ezekiel. This morning we shall begin to consider it more in detail. We are going to return to chapter 40, at verse 3: "He brought me thither, and behold, there was a Man, whose appearance was like the appearance of brass, with a line of flax in His hand, and a measuring reed; and He stood in the gate. And the Man said unto me, Son of man, behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears, and set thy heart upon all that I shall show thee; for to the intent that I might shew them unto thee art thou brought hither: declare all that thou seest to the house of Israel."

So we take another look at this:

Man of Brass.

You will remember that we noticed that the feet of the cherubim were of brass, and the feet of the Lord Jesus in the first chapter of the Revelation were of brass. And we said that brass in the Bible is a symbol of righteous judgment. This Man of brass stands at the gate, and that means that there is no way in for the unrighteous man. The man of the flesh cannot enter this gate. There is no place for the flesh in this House. It is only the Righteous Man who may come in here, and everything is going to be measured by the Righteous Man.

We take a look at these two instruments of measurement, and we note that there are two instruments of measurement. There is firstly the line of flax, and no measurement is given to it. We are not told how long that line was, but we do know that it was used for the greater measurements. When we come later to the river in chapter 47, it is not the rod, but the line that is the instrument of measurement; and we find that that river becomes too deep for man. I think this clearly corresponds to what Paul said in the letter to the Ephesians. There he spoke of the knowledge, the love of Christ, which passes knowledge. We are here in the presence of something that is far greater than human measurement. If this Man does represent the Holy Spirit, as we said, there is no measuring the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is without measure, but within that great fullness, there is the rod of measurement. There is that which brings the great fullness down to particular matters. So we have this measuring reed. These are two ways of measuring. One is what we may call the measureless measure, the measure that has no limits; that is the great fullness of the Spirit. The other is that which is brought down to things in everyday life. This rod was used for all the details of the House. Now, I do not think it's necessary to stay with that, we only note that there are two means of measuring. One, there is the great fullness of Christ; the other is that that fullness is brought down to the details of the House of God. I will just leave that with you because there's a lot in that.

We must remember this: that when we think of the fullness of the Spirit, or the fullness of Christ, we must not forget that that is going to be brought down to the details of our life. That is made perfectly clear in the letter to the Ephesians. The first three chapters relate to the great fullness of Christ, that unmeasured fullness. Chapter 4 begins in this way: "I beseech you to walk worthily of the calling wherewith you were called..." and then all the details are mentioned: husbands and wives, wives and husbands, masters and servants, servants and masters, children and parents, parents and children. You see, the measuring rod has come down to everyday life. We must not think in the great terms without realising that the Lord is going to apply His measure to every detail. It is so easy to have these great ideas about the fullness of Christ, and to neglect the details. Every little thing must be measured by the same Spirit as measures the fullness of Christ. I hope you see that.

Here is this Man, let Him represent the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit is speaking about the vast fullness of Christ and His House, the vast fullness of the Life which flows out, but that same Holy Spirit comes to these very small details. It is the same Spirit, and while He speaks of the greatness, He also points to the details. I do not think that there would be any value in our looking at the measurements of the rod, so we just pass on to the instructions that were given to the prophet.

Notice in verse 4: "The Man said unto me, Son of man, behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears, and set thy heart upon all that I shall show thee, for to the intent that I may show them unto thee, art thou brought hither."

Notice these words: Behold! Hear! Set thy heart! Declare... and then, if you go over to chapter 43 and verse 10, you have another part of the instructions: "Show the House to the House of Israel." Now let us think about that for a minute.

Before we can present anything to other people, we ourselves must first know what we are going to present. The instructions to the prophet were very particular: "Behold with thine eyes, hear with thine ears..." and so on: "Give very careful attention to this whole matter! You must have a very clearly defined apprehension of what you are going to show to the people. You yourselves must see this object." We ask again, what is that object? What is the answer to this whole vision? In the first place, undoubtedly the answer is found in the Incarnation. The Incarnation is the key to everything here.

First of all, in the Incarnation we have:

The Righteous Man.

The Man according to God. And He is the standard and the measure of everything, "He is made unto us righteousness from God." You will remember that that was said at a time when things were out of order in the Church, things were not according to the Lord's Mind, and so the apostle said about Jesus, "He is made unto us righteousness". Everything in the Church has got to be measured according to Christ, that is, according to God's standard as presented in His Son. He is the righteous One. "God hath appointed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness in the Man Whom He hath appointed." Jesus said that the Father had given Him authority to execute judgment because He was the Son of Man. Here is the Man of brass, the Son of Man who is the Righteous One, and He is God's standard of measurement. God measures everything by Him. We shall have to come back to that again later on, but we just note the meaning of the Man of brass and His measuring reed.

You remember that the natural man had intruded into the church at Corinth. The apostle had to speak to Corinth much about the natural man and the carnal man. He pointed out that this natural man, this carnal man, had no place in the realm of the things of the Spirit. This man "receiveth not the things of the Spirit... neither can he know them." That is what this Man of brass is doing, He is saying that only the man according to Christ can behold, and see, and hear. Only the spiritual man can come into this realm of the things of the Spirit. I say that the natural and carnal man had intruded into the church at Corinth, and you see the method by which the apostle sought to put that right. He said, "I determined to know nothing among you, save Jesus Christ and Him crucified". Paul brought in this righteous Man to correct the things that were unrighteous. By bringing in the righteous Man, He put out the unrighteous man. By bringing in the Man of the Spirit, He put out the man of the flesh. That is exactly the meaning of this Man of brass with His measuring rod, so that first of all, the object in view is Christ. He is governing everything.

And then of course, going with that is:

The Church, which is His Body.

The Church is called "the one new man". Paul said, "You have put on the new man." And so the Church is measured according to Christ. Christ is the measure of everything in the Church. Indeed, that is the only Church that is known in heaven! The only Church that heaven recognises is that Church which is the Body of Christ; that Church which is measured according to Christ. Everything in that Church has to do with one thing only: it is the measure of Christ. That is, of course, what we have in Colossians and Ephesians, and we may say, in Philippians also, but Colossians and Ephesians are particularly the letters concerning the Church. In those letters measurement is mentioned, "the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ"; "the length, and breadth, and height, and depth". You see, measurement is there very much, but this measurement is in the Church, and everything with the Spirit is just a matter of how much of Christ there is.

Let us try to get free of our technical ideas of the Church. We know that the Church is not a thing. It is not an institution. It is not here or there as to geography. The Church is just where it is, as the measure of Christ. If there is more of the measure of Christ in one place than another, then there's more of the Church there. It is just the measure of Christ that determines how much the Church is there. Do try to remember that, it is spiritual measure which is the measure of Christ which defines the Church. If you ask the question, "What is the Church and where is the Church?" the answer is, "Where Christ is!" And where Christ is most fully, there is the Church more fully.

We must recognise that the Church is entirely measured according to this Man but that Church can only be seen by revelation of the Holy Spirit. If we have not received "the Spirit of wisdom and revelation", then we may talk about the Church, but we shall just see the Church in some way that is not the Spirit's way of seeing the Church. It requires the Holy Spirit to enable us really to see the Church. And when the Holy Spirit shows us the Church, what shall we see? Shall we see something that is called the Church? Shall we see a lot of people who hold a certain doctrine about the Church? Shall we see something in which a certain interpretation of Bible teaching about the Church is held? Shall we see a congregation of people who call themselves the Church? Shall we see any of that? No! When the Holy Spirit opens our eyes, we shall not see that. We shall see Christ! To see Christ is to see the Church! And to have seen the Church means that you have seen Christ. You see, Christ is a great spiritual order as well as a great spiritual Person.

There is a great heavenly system. Christ is the embodiment of that heavenly and spiritual system. It is all a matter of what Christ is. It is a matter of the Mind of Christ; that is, what Christ thinks and how He views things. It is exactly how Christ does things. You see, the Church is an expression of a very comprehensive Person. That is how we should consider the Life of Christ: as here to reveal these great spiritual truths of heaven. It is a vast heavenly system brought to us in the Person of God's Son.

It was when Paul saw Christ that he began to see the Church. Those two things went together. And the more he saw of Christ, the more he understood the Church. That resulted in Paul giving us this unique presentation of the Church. It is only Paul who calls the Church "the Body of Christ"; and I have often said, if we understood the whole of the human body, and after many centuries of studying it, there is no one in the world who understands it altogether today, this human body is still capable of developing things that the wisest physician does not understand. With all their knowledge, and all their wisdom, they are still trying to understand the human body. If we understood everything about our physical body, we should understand Christ and the Church, because the Church is the Body of Christ. I'm saying that this can only be seen from a heavenly standpoint by revelation of the Holy Spirit.

So we come to these instructions, "Son of man, behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears, and set thy heart upon all that I shall show thee." What does that mean in New Testament terms? Well, in the letter to the Ephesians the apostle prays that the Church may come to "the full knowledge of Him," There it is. As you know, in the original "the full knowledge of Him". The Ephesian believers had a knowledge of the Lord, I think they had a very large knowledge of the Lord, Paul had been with them for two years and he said that he had not shunned to declare unto them "the whole counsel of God" so that they had received very much teaching from Paul. And yet, in the end he is praying for them that they might be brought to the full knowledge of Christ. And he explained that in his own prayer: "that you may know what is the hope of His calling, and what the riches of His inheritance in the saints, and what the exceeding greatness of His power." - "That you may know." - "Son of man, behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears and set thy heart upon all that I will show you." So Paul says, "That I may know Him." Right at the end of his life he is still saying, "That I may know Him." "Son of man, behold and hear, and set thy heart".

You cannot, as ministers of Christ, show anything to others until you yourself have seen. Afterward the Man said to Ezekiel, "Show the House to the House of Israel," so that this new ministry to which he was called was a presenting, or revealing, of Christ. We can put it in this way: in the first vision Ezekiel had seen the Man on the throne, he had seen the Man in heaven, and now his last great vision was the Man in the Church. He was seeing the Church now, and his ministry at the end related to that: the presenting of the fullness of Christ, and the Church which is the fullness of Him that "filleth all in all". So the end of that prayer of Paul is "unto Him be the glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus unto all ages for ever and ever.

"Son of man, show the House to the House of Israel." What will be the effect of that? This is the test as to whether we have seen. You see, we can talk about the Church as we have it in the New Testament. There was a time when I was doing Bible teaching, and in those days I could give a very good analysis and outline of the letter to the Ephesians; it was what was in the New Testament about the Church, and I could present it in that form on the blackboard. But in those days I was in a denominational church. I was wearing the clothes of a denominational minister. I was talking about the Church, but I knew nothing about it. I had really not seen the Church. All my knowledge of what the Bible taught made no difference to me. What was the result of that? There was very little spiritual value in that ministry. All that ministry certainly did not create a revolution.

Now notice what it says here, "Show the House to the House of Israel, that they may be ashamed of their ways, and may keep My words"; the effect of the ministry, if it is to have effect like that, we must have seen it in the Spirit. It will not have that effect if we have only seen it in the letter, "The letter killeth, but the Spirit maketh alive." The effect of a ministry of revelation is quite positive; it has an effect upon people.

Now, I had hoped that this morning I would get a little further than that, but if I start at this point, I shall want to go right on for an hour. I wanted to turn to that little picture, but we seem never to get there. But I will not start and spoil it by having to stop too soon. It is not that it would take so long, but it is a very important matter. So I think we'll just stop there for this morning. No doubt you will be glad of a little extra time to be quiet.

Chapter 11 - The Altar (the Cross) Governs Everything

Reading: Ezekiel 43.

In verses 13 to 27 we have the great altar and its service. We will not read the whole section, but just the first verses of that section: "And these are the measures of the altar by cubits; the cubit is a cubit and a handbreadth; the bottom shall be a cubit, the breadth a cubit, the border thereof by the edge thereof round about a span; and this shall be the base of the altar."

Then we are given more particulars about the measurement and the ministry. We all understand that the altar in the Old Testament is always a type of the Cross. This altar is the place of the whole burnt offering. This corresponds to Hebrews, chapter 11, where the Lord Jesus is likened to the whole burnt offering. So we are going, this morning, to think about the centrality and the universality of the Cross.

Now, we have seen that the whole area of the temple was square. If we draw diagonal lines from each corner, those lines meet at the place where the great altar was. The central place in the whole area was the altar. You will recognise that this is different from the tabernacle in the wilderness. The court of the tabernacle was not square, and the altar of burnt offering was right at the gate, but in this temple the altar is right in the centre of a square. It is important to realise that. All the lines meet in the altar, and all the lines go out from the altar. The central place of everything is the altar.

This represents the temple, and I would like you to know that this is not drawn to scale. Probably my temple is bigger than the actual temple was, but I've only put it there to show you the position. The actual temple was there, this is the whole temple area, and the central place of all is the altar.

The altar governed everything. It governed everything as to the house; that is, all that was actually in the temple was governed by the altar. It governed all that was immediately around the house. If you had a plan of this whole house, with the different course and the whole area, you would see that all the chambers of the priests were round about and the places where the offerings were prepared were all round. Everything was gathered round the house, but everything in the house and in the whole area was governed by the altar.

And then, all the ministry of the House was governed by the altar. We could say that there was no ministry that was not related to the altar. And then beyond the house, and beyond the immediate area, right out to the whole land, everything was governed by the altar. We shall see that when we see that the river, which came down through the whole land, came by way of the altar, but we turn inside first.

Here we have a very important and vital truth. When the Cross is in its place, with its full measure, everything else will be in order, and everything else will be given its meaning and its value. I feel that I cannot say this too strongly. We are so often concerned about the outside things, about the order of the House of the Lord, about the ministry of the House of the Lord, about the people who are related to the House of the Lord. We are always beginning on the outside. We are trying to set up an order of the House of God. We are trying to put the people of the House right. We are very much concerned about the ministers, and the ministries. But if the Cross was really in its place with its full dimensions, all those things would see to themselves. The people would be right if the Cross was in its place. The ministries would be living if the Cross was in its place. The order of the House would be right if the Cross was in its place. It just does work that way. If the Cross is right at the centre in full measure, and note that it is a large altar, then everything else will come into its right place and into a living relationship.

Although it is not said so here, I think we are right in concluding that this altar was of brass. The altar in the tabernacle was of brass, the altar in Solomon's temple was of brass, and I think we can assume that this altar was of brass. We have already met brass. We have met brass in the Man in the gate, and we have said that with His reed He measured everything according to what He was. Brass is the type of the righteous judgments of God. This great altar represents the fullness of the righteous judgments of God. This altar of brass is measured by the Man of brass, so that this altar represents God's thoughts in judgment.

In this altar of whole burnt offering, the one unrighteous man is completely removed. That altar of brass sees one man brought to ashes. The ashes were taken from this altar and emptied onto the ground at the side of the altar. That is a picture of God's Mind about the unrighteous, or the natural man. He is consumed in the fire of God's judgment, he is reduced to ashes, and he is poured out on the ground. That is God's mind about the natural man. On the other side, it is only the righteous man that can stand here in the presence of this altar. Of course, those are the two sides of the Person and work of the Lord Jesus. On the one side He was made sin for us, and in that capacity He was wholly consumed and brought to ashes. When He cried, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me" - it was the cry of the ashes! He had been brought to ashes and poured out on the ground.

But then there was the other side of the Cross - "He knew no sin". In Himself, there was no unrighteousness, and therefore He can go through the altar, He can live after the fire! "Thou wilt not suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption" because in Himself there was no sin, He could not be holden of death. His own nature could overcome all the righteous judgments of God. This is the meaning of the great altar: one man is brought to an end, and Another Man stands in his place. Everything has been judged at the altar. Everything is judged in the Cross.

We have been judged in the Cross of the Lord Jesus and in our own selves we have been brought to an end. Everything of the natural has been judged and brought to an end in the Cross of the Lord Jesus. It is a very important thing to recognise that! You see, that makes anything possible. That is why I have said that if the Cross is in its place, everything else will be right. The House will be right; that is, the Church will be right. The ministry will be right. The order will be right. You will not have to go to work to try and bring about a right order, it spontaneously comes out of the work of the Cross. I do hope that you're writing that in your minds.

You may meet disorders in the House of God. You may meet the natural man in the House of God. You may meet conditions which are all wrong in the House of God. How are you going to deal with them? You can only deal with them by the principle of the Cross. You cannot deal with the people themselves, you cannot deal with the things themselves; but if only you can bring the Cross into that situation, you have solved the whole problem.

I remember many years ago I was speaking in America and I was asked to go and speak to the teachers of a great Sunday School. You may know that in America Sunday School does not mean little children, Sunday School means adults just as much as little children. And this was one of the biggest Sunday Schools in America. It was in one of the most famous churches in America. They had everything that you could think of. Right in the centre of the great Sunday School building there was a pond and a fountain and goldfish! Up at the back of the great building was a wonderful pipe organ and then there was an echo organ; there was a chime of bells attached to the organ. And I could go on describing this wonderful Sunday School.

The Superintendent of that Sunday School asked me to go out to lunch with him; this was before I was to speak to all the teachers. At the lunch table he told me a very terrible story. He said, "Mr Sparks, I want your help. I have a great problem in this Sunday School: I cannot get my teachers to study the Bible and teach the Bible. They bring anything along to the Sunday School and read it to the classes. Any book that has anything of religion in it, they bring that and read that as their lesson to the class. They are worldly people. They will not come to a prayer meeting and I cannot do anything with them. I dare not say anything, or they would resign. What am I to do? Will you please give me the solution to my problem?"

I said, "Yes, I think I've got the solution." So I took my Bible and I opened it at Romans 6. Now, everybody here knows Romans 6! And I went through Romans 6 with him, and I said, "What you need to do is to speak to these teachers about their identification with Christ in death, and burial, and resurrection. In other words, you must make them see the meaning of the Cross." And I spoke to him about the meaning of union with Christ, that is, the real meaning of the Cross. And as I spoke to him about that, I saw the light coming into his face.

He said, "Mr Sparks, you have solved my problem! You have put your finger on the key to the whole situation. I myself have never seen that before, therefore, in my teacher training classes, I have never said anything like that! I believe if I go back to my teacher training classes with that message, it may solve my problems."

Well, I went to the teachers that afternoon, you can be sure that I felt the Lord had given me my message, and I spoke to them about the Cross. I was very surprised to see how attentive they were, they all opened their eyes and followed every word that I said. They had never seen it before! I do not know what permanent effect it had upon them. I never heard of what happened afterward, I had to go away, but there's no doubt about it, the Cross made an impression that day! And at least one man saw that it would solve all the problems if only they realised it. If only the Cross had its place, all the other problems would be solved. It is like that. We do not start from the outside. We do not start with the people. We do not start with the order of the Lord's House. We do not start with the ministry - we start with the Cross. And if only people see the Cross, everything else would put itself right.

Everything is Judged by the Cross

Now I am going to indicate something to you that I shall not be able to follow through. If brother Wei would just put his fingers in his ears for a minute, and a few other people, I will tell you that I think this is what the Lord is saying to me for Hong Kong next week. So if you want to hear it all, you must all come to Hong Kong next week! But I just give you the outline.

The letter to the Romans is the message of the Cross in its full measure. In that letter to the Romans, you see the great measurement of the Cross. There the Cross comprehends all things. It brings the whole race in Adam to an end, and it begins an entirely new race in Christ risen!

It is very impressive that the first of these letters should put the Cross there in its full measurement. You all know that the letter to the Romans was not the first letter written by Paul, but the Holy Spirit has put it first in the arrangement. I think the Holy Spirit had something to do with the arrangement of the books in the New Testament, and in His sovereign arrangement of this book, He has put the altar in its fullness right at the beginning. Well, of course, you'll have to recall all that you know about the letter to the Romans to see that.

In the first letter to the Corinthians, the Cross is applied to the natural and the carnal man inside the Church. The natural and the carnal man has come in where he has no right to be. This unrighteous man has slipped in through the gate, and so the apostle brings Christ crucified over against the natural and the carnal man. The Cross in 1 Corinthians has to do with that man, not outside the Church as in Romans, but inside the Church.

The second letter to the Corinthians sets the Cross in relation to ministry. That letter shows us that ministry flows out of a broken and a humbled vessel. I can only say these things and leave the full explanation.

The letter to the Galatians, in that letter the Cross is brought down upon making Christianity into another legal system, and bringing Christians into bondage. How strong the apostle is in that letter, but see how he uses the Cross! He uses the Cross tremendously against that effort to make Christianity into a legal system, and to bring believers into bondage again.

In the letter to the Ephesians, the work of the Cross is to put the Church on heavenly ground. The Cross in Ephesians completely cuts the Church off from all earthly ground. It puts the Church outside of time. It puts the Church outside of the world.

The letter to the Philippians, the Cross in Philippians is applied to that which is spoiling the harmony of the Lord's people. There is a painful dislocation inside the Church. There is a spot where things are unhappy; that is because of personal interests and pride. Some people will not let go their personal interests. Some people will not let go their pride. They have been offended and they are not going to forgive. So the apostle brings the Cross in there over against this discord and dislocation, and he points out that if only the Cross were in those lives, everything would be put right.

The letter to the Colossians - this letter shows that the Cross delivers from all false spirituality. The Cross sets aside all that is mere mysticism, and everything that would make Christ less than He is.

The letters to the Thessalonians. Here the Cross is the strength for suffering and inspiration unto the coming of the Lord. There may not be much said about the Cross actually, but the principle of these letters is the principle of the Cross. The people were suffering for Christ's sake. They were suffering the loss of all things, and they had thought that the Lord would have come to deliver them and the Lord is delaying His coming. So the apostle tells them that their sufferings will issue in the coming of the Lord and glory. These sufferings are suffering with Christ. They are sufferings for Christ's sake: it is fellowship in the Cross, but the sufferings issued in the glory. The Lord is coming, and then it will be all right. The Cross has a very real message for suffering believers.

And then we just conclude this survey with the letter to the Hebrews. In the letter to the Hebrews, the Cross shows how everything is brought to fullness and to finality.

Now all this relates to the House on its inside. It touches conduct. It touches character. It touches order. It touches ministry. If the Cross is in its place, everything will be effective.

Now, I have not just given you some Bible teachings, I know that this is true. I could tell you a story out of personal experience; I have seen all these problems solved just by preaching the Cross. I have seen a revolution in a church just by preaching the Cross. I have seen the Lord producing His new order just by preaching the Cross. The Cross is the key to everything!

Then, what is true on the inside is also true on the outside. It is the Cross which effects the whole range of the Church's influence. The river comes by way of the Cross. That is the influence that goes out from the sanctuary to the whole land. It is the Cross which gives effectiveness to the ministry to the whole world. So the apostles preached everywhere Christ crucified.

And then we note another thing: the altar was the great defensive against the enemy.

If you look in the book of Ezra in chapter 3, and verse 3, you have this: "They set the altar in its place, for fear of the peoples of the land was upon them..." Because fear of the people of the land was upon them, they put the altar in its place. The Cross is a great defensive - the Cross defends us from... [Unfortunately the recorded message ends here]

Chapter 12 - The Fullness of the Spirit

We have only two mornings left, and that means that there is a very great deal in Ezekiel that we shall not be able to consider. So this morning I suggest that we give our attention to chapter 47. As you know, this is the chapter of the river. I think that this chapter is well enough known by you that we shall not have to read it right through. Of course, we ought to read also the second chapter of the book of the Acts, because I feel that Ezekiel 47 and Acts chapter 2 go together. The second chapter of the Acts is the New Testament fulfilment of what we have here in this chapter in Ezekiel. But there is a passage of Scripture between the two, and that is in the seventh chapter of John's gospel, and we will read that. John, chapter 7, verse 37: "Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, 'If any man thirst, let him come to Me and drink. He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said, out of him shall flow rivers of living water.' But this spake He of the Spirit, which they that believed on Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified."

Now, strict interpretation demands that we observe one point. That to which the Lord Jesus was referring to in John 7 is not strictly what we have in Ezekiel 47. That last day, that great day of the feast, related to the Feast of Tabernacles, and that takes us a long way back before Ezekiel; it takes us back into the life of Israel in the old days. You know that the Feast of Tabernacles was the commemoration of their coming out of Egypt and living in tents in the wilderness. We need not dwell with the details of that, because that is not our subject; it was to that that Jesus was referring here in John 7.

Ezekiel 47 is not a celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles, but there are some features which are in common. Ezekiel 47, John 7, and Acts 2 have some common features. You know that when Jesus said those words He was in the temple at Jerusalem. It was in the temple that the Feast of Tabernacles was being celebrated, and at that time the priest went down to the pool of Bethesda and brought water back and poured it out over the threshold of the temple. Jesus took hold of that and applied it to Himself.

Now, the common feature of these three places - Ezekiel, John, and Acts - is this: the waters are flowing out from the House. And then there is another common feature: in the House, as we have seen, everything related to the Man glorified in the Throne. The Man glorified in the Throne governed everything. Now here in John 7, John makes that comment. He said, "This spake He of the Spirit, which they that believed on Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified", so that pointed on to the future when Jesus was glorified. Undoubtedly, that was fulfilled on the Day of Pentecost. Jesus was glorified, and the waters came out from the House, so that we do have some common features.

Now we come to some details of this chapter 47, but to begin with, we must note that this whole situation is one that sets forth a condition in this dispensation. As we said earlier, there is a large school that believes that all this belongs to the Millennium. Well, the situation in this chapter is not a situation in the Millennium. Neither does this fully correspond to the end of the book of the Revelation. It is true that in that book we have the river flowing from out of the Throne of God and of the Lamb, and there are many features there just like these features in Ezekiel, but what we have here in Ezekiel is neither the Millennium, nor in the coming age. It relates to the dispensation in which we are living. As you see, it is a situation of need, it is a scene of death and disease. These waters are to overcome death, and the leaves of these trees are for medicine to heal disease; it's a scene of great need. In the Millennium death will be suspended for a time, and at the end of the book of the Revelation, death is no more. Here death has to be met and overcome. Here an unhealthy condition has to be dealt with. It is important to realise that this chapter applies to the present dispensation.

Now let us take note of a few other details.

The Source of the River

The Source of the river is somewhere hidden under the threshold of the House. It says that the waters issued from under the threshold of the House. Now, of course the threshold was in the front. Now, we have a little difficulty here, because it says that the waters issued from under the threshold and came down by the south side of the house. It seems to be a little contradictory; you see, this is the south side of the house. So this would mean the waters ought to have come out from here somewhere [referring to a drawing] but it says that they came out from under the threshold. Perhaps we should conclude that they came out of the threshold and moved toward the side of the House, because it says that they went down toward the east. This seems to have been the movement. Now, we shall come to that again in a minute. For the moment, the waters issued from some secret place under the House.

Now, we know that the Lord had said about the Sanctuary that it was the place of His throne and the place of His glory. This is the sanctuary, this is the place where the Lord dwelt, the place of His throne and of His glory. I think we are to conclude that the waters came from there. Of course, this is all type and symbol. We are not told exactly where the waters started, but we are told that they came "out under the threshold." I think that we can conclude that they started in the place of the throne and the glory, and that is a hidden place in the presence of God, you know that God was hidden in the Sanctuary. Now the Man in heaven is hidden in the Sanctuary. He is the heavenly mystery. He is on the throne. He is glorified, and then the Spirit comes out from Him as in that position and in that condition.

We remember that Jesus said that afterward He would not manifest Himself to the world, He would manifest Himself to witnesses whom He had chosen. After His resurrection, He did not show Himself personally to the world. So far as the world is concerned, Jesus has gone right out. The world does not know of His personal existence. He is a mystery to the world. He is an unreality to the world because He has hidden Himself from the world. He is hidden in Heaven, but there is a manifestation of Himself, and that is in the Spirit of Life which comes out from the Sanctuary. Christ is not only personally in heaven, He is enshrined within the heavenly Church.

For the world, in this dispensation, Jesus is still a mystery and the Church is a mystery. The Church is not understood, but this is the mystery: "Christ in you, the hope of glory." And perhaps you Bible students know that the literal translation is: "Christ in the midst of you, the hope of glory." Of course, Christ is in us personally and individually, but the word there is "Christ in the midst of you". The Church is the context of those words. The mystery which is great among the nations is Christ in the midst of the Church. That is the hope of glory. So Paul said, "Unto Him be the glory in the Church by Christ Jesus". The world can only know the mystery by the Life which flows out from the Church.

That is what happened on the Day of Pentecost. By the river which came out from the Church, the world became aware that Jesus is alive; this is the only Way in which the mystery is made known. The waters come out from the Sanctuary.  You notice that is what it says in  verse 12: "because the waters thereof issue out of the sanctuary" and you know that there is a difference between the temple and the sanctuary. The whole of this is the House, it is only that part that is the sanctuary and here is the definite statement that the waters come out of the sanctuary, but they are still hidden until they issue from the Church. In the Sanctuary, they are a mystery. The mystery is made known when they come out of the House. I wonder if you're following what I mean. This is all so true to the teaching of the New Testament.

That is the first detail. The second is that they go:

Toward the East.

Now, as you see, it is the front that is the east. It says here that the temple was toward the east, so the waters moved by the south to the east. Now, that is also an interesting point! That did not literally happen on the day of Pentecost. On the Day of Pentecost the waters literally went toward the west, they steadily moved toward Rome and Europe. This great river that started on the Day of Pentecost did not go toward the east, it went toward the west. I suppose it has come to the east since then, but there's a point here: we are not to take this literally.

Why was the House built with its gate toward the east? Why does everything look toward the east, and why do these waters move toward the east? Well, of course, the east is always the symbol for a new day. The sun rises in the east, the world's day begins in the east. Therefore, the east is the symbol of a new day, and it is quite clear that this River meant a new day for everything and everybody: it is that new day of the Spirit to which the Lord Jesus referred, "The hour cometh, and now is when the true worshippers shall worship in Spirit." When Jesus was speaking about the coming of the Holy Spirit He said, "In that day." How often He used those words, "In that day," that is the day of the Spirit; that is the new dispensation - the dispensation of the Holy Spirit. So here we have another proof that it is this dispensation.

It is in this dispensation that God is offering a new day to everyone. Of course, it is new in many respects. All the old things of that past generation are gone - the old things of types and symbols, the old things of forms and ceremonies. Those old things are passed away: "Behold, all have become new," and this is the river that makes all things new. It is the day of the Holy Spirit. So it flows toward the east, the Spirit brings in a New Day.

Then the next thing:

This Man of Brass Measures Four Times a Thousand Cubits.

He measured a thousand, and the waters were up to the ankles. He measured another thousand, and they were up to the knees. Another thousand and they are up to the loins, and He measured another thousand and they were "waters to swim in, a river that could not be passed over".

Well, I think the symbolism is very simple. This sets forth the progressive fullness of the Spirit, or the progressive fullness of Christ. In the beginning there is immense intrinsic potentiality. It may be small in Jerusalem, it may be small at its beginning, but that is only a comparative matter. Of course, it was a very great thing that happened on the Day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, but compared with what came afterward it is but small! The beginning is small in comparison with all Judaea and Samaria and the uttermost parts of the earth. But in that small beginning, there are all the potentialities to meet the whole world. The scope of this river increases! It grows fuller and fuller, and wider and wider, but what is here in the waters is sufficient to meet all the need, however great. The Spirit of Jesus is sufficient for all. That is what it says, or that is what it means. There is sufficiency in Christ ministered by the Spirit to meet the greatest need.

There is no need, however great, which cannot be met by this River. It does not matter where the river comes: "wheresoever the river cometh, everything lives." If you study this chapter, you will see that there is no situation for which these waters are not equal. And yet one must make a reservation in that statement. It says later in the chapter that there is something that will not be healed, but will be given over to salt. There is such a thing as resisting the Holy Ghost. Judas did not come into the good of the day of the Spirit  and there is in the New Testament this possibility of sinning against the Holy Spirit. Where that is deliberately and persistently done, then there is not Life, but death. But provided there is no deliberate and conscious refusal of the Spirit, the Spirit is equal to every situation. How great is the Spirit, He is altogether incomprehensible!

The prophet said it was a river that could not be passed through - this is something that is altogether impossible to cope with. How true that is! In Acts 2 the coming of the Spirit is likened to a mighty, rushing wind. Well, you know something about that in this country. When you have that at certain times in the year it's no use trying to cope with that. You cannot resist that. It will carry you away, it will carry your houses away, it will carry everything before it. It is irresistible. The Spirit came like that on the Day of Pentecost. This thing cannot be managed by man. You cannot bring the Holy Spirit within the compass of your ability.

Ezekiel said: "a river that could not be passed over." This is too much for man. Oh, that we knew the Spirit like this! And yet, in principle, this is what the Spirit does. He refuses to be tied up to our human systems and our human measure. He refuses to be limited to our natural man. He refuses to be limited to our traditions and our prejudices. That is what we find in the book of the Acts. The Holy Spirit is too much for the people in Jerusalem. He is too much for Peter, and all Peter's prejudices. He is too much for Herod the king. He is too much for everything that gets in His Way - a River that you cannot control.

Now, for the Spirit to be like that, to be expressing Himself in that way, two things are necessary, and this is a very true principle. There will only be this fullness and power of the Spirit if these two things exist. The first is the absolute authority of the Throne. That is, the absolute authority of the Man in the Throne. We have said again and again that the Man in the Throne governs everything. Everything in the whole Book comes under the Man in the Throne. In the book of the Acts, we see the Man in the Throne governing everything - it is the absolute Lordship and Headship of Jesus Christ - until God gets what He wants. And God has shown quite clearly that what He wants is His Church or His House. When God gets His House constituted and established according to Christ, then this will happen again. In the measure in which God has what He wants, we shall have the Spirit.

God will not give His Spirit in fullness and in power to something that does not correspond to His Mind. So these two things are essential: the Throne and the House. Now, what this increasing measure says to us is this: the Lord never desires to leave His people ankle deep in the Spirit. It is not the Lord's will that we should have the Spirit and Life just up to our ankles, neither is it His desire that we shall have up to our knees, nor yet up to our loins. The Lord's desire is fullness, waters to swim in, but waters that are too much for us.

Of course, this is rather a terrible situation. I think that you might detect in Ezekiel that he was a bit frightened. To him, this was a terrible situation, and when it gets like this, of course, it is terrible - we want to keep our feet on sure ground - we do not want to be swept off our feet; the Church wants to have its feet on this earth, to be quite sure of its ground. Well, you know what that means spiritually, but the Lord's thought is that we should be swept right off our feet, that we should be carried out into depths for which we have no measure. Well, you must think about that. There are two little words here, "a river that could not be passed through." There is the great "could not" of the Spirit. That "could not" stands over all human capacity.

Now we go on. The next thing is:

The Banks and the Trees.

The banks of the river are referred to, this is a river that is flowing between banks. It is not just a flood spreading itself all over. This River is running between banks. You know, the Holy Spirit has a way, He has a way that He will take, He has His Own Mind as to which way He will take. If the Spirit says, "I am going this way," it is no good our saying, "Well, we are going another way." You have a lot of that in the book of the Acts. Paul spoke about assaying to preach the Word in Bithynia, and going toward Asia, but he said, "The Spirit of Jesus suffered us not" and it turned out that the Spirit was going to Macedonia at that time. Now, if Paul had gone to Bithynia, or Asia, he would have gone away from the Spirit. The Spirit was saying, "I am going this way at this time. If you want to be with Me, you must come My way." That is what happened to Peter. The Spirit was moving toward the Gentiles, but Peter wanted to go his way. The Spirit said in effect, "If you want to go with Me, you must go My way. I am not coming your way. I am not coming the way of your tradition and your prejudice. Today this is the way that I am taking." And when Peter went that way, he found the Spirit in greater fullness than he had ever known before.

I think you see the principle. The banks represent a definitely and clearly defined Way that the Spirit is taking. He may change His direction from time to time, the River may not be just one straight line, but it will always flow between banks. The Spirit always knows exactly what He's doing and what He is after. How important it is for us to be in the banks with the Spirit!!

And then the trees on either side of the river. Of course, these trees in the New Testament are the living witnesses. I suppose a passage which best sets that forth is this one in Ephesians 4: "He gave some apostles; some prophets; some evangelists; some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, unto the work of ministering unto the building up of the body of Christ; till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the full knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." Here are living witnesses on the banks of the river. Here are those along the banks of the New Testament, and God has had His trees all down the centuries. They are the living witnesses bearing testimony to the fullness of Life in Christ, leading on toward spiritual fullness, the fullness of Christ.

There is a rather interesting thing to note here in verse 9 of Ezekiel 47: "It shall come to pass, that every living creature which swarmeth, in every place whither the rivers come, shall live." I don't know whether you have got a mark in your Chinese Bible against that word, in the Hebrew it says, "whither the two rivers come." It is in the plural in the Hebrew, and my Bible gives me a reference in the margin which says, "whither the two rivers come"; that's the Hebrew.

Now that seems to upset everything, doesn't it? But I think, again, it's a symbol. Perhaps this river did divide into two, but "two" in the Bible is the number of adequate testimony. Wherever you find the number two, you find sufficient testimony - "In the mouth of two witnesses everything shall be established... Whatsoever two of you shall agree... He sent them forth two by two." See, two is the number of sufficient testimony. Well, what we have here by the Spirit is sufficient testimony in the witnesses.

Now we must close. The effect of it all is Life, and of course, I would like to say a lot about that, but we must leave it. The test of everything is Life. The test as to whether Jesus is Lord is found in the Life. The test as to whether the House is in order will be in the Life. The test as to whether the Spirit is having His way will be the Life. The Life is the testimony. So John says, "the testimony is this, that God has given unto us eternal Life".

And so we close for the time being. Ezekiel had been told to show all this to the House of Israel. In order to show it all to others, the prophet had to be caused to go that way himself. You notice what Ezekiel said,  that "He caused me to go." You and I must be caused to go this way before we can show it to anyone else. This is not just objective truth for teaching, this is the experience of the servant of the Lord.

Chapter 13 - "The Lord is There"

Now this morning we have to bring these studies in Ezekiel to a close, and I think we cannot do better than come right to the end of the book itself. The last clause of this book reads like this: "And the name of the city from that day shall be, The Lord is There."

We might just put alongside of that some words from Ephesians chapter 2, verses 19 to 22: "So then ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the chief corner stone, in Whom each several building, fitly framed together groweth into a holy temple in the Lord, in Whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit."

Chapter 3, verse 17: "That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; to the end that ye being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations for ever and ever."

"And the name of the city from that day shall be, The Lord is There."

The end to which all God's works move is this End. Everything that we have in these prophecies of Ezekiel points to the one end, but that is also true of the whole Bible. The whole Bible moves toward one end, it is the end for which all things were created, and that is: the presence of God in fullness and in finality. The purpose of God is that He shall fill all things. So then the end is: "The Lord is There."

Now, there is one particular thing which is [needed for] this end; it is the one thing which is necessary if that end is to be reached:

God Must be able to Commit Himself to Man without Fear.

That is what God wanted to do at the beginning. It is perfectly clear in the beginning of the book of Genesis that God wanted to commit Himself to man. He wanted to be with man. He wanted to trust man. He wanted to put all His interests into the hands of man. In a word: God wanted to trust Himself to man. That is the absolute essential for God's end. That is what the Lord Jesus wanted to do, but He found that He could not do it.

You are familiar with the words in John chapter 2, at verse 23: "Now when He was in Jerusalem at the Passover during the feast, many believed on His name, beholding His signs which He did, but Jesus did not trust Himself unto them, for that He knew all men, because He needed not that anyone should bear witness concerning man, for He Himself knew what was in man." Jesus found that He could not commit Himself to man. Here is God present in His Son, but unable to commit Himself to man, therefore He cannot remain with man. He cannot be with man in fullness and in finality. He will have to create the conditions which are suitable to Himself. God will have to create the conditions which will not involve Him in man's disordered state. This may explain a great deal. This may explain God's reserve and God's delays. There is very much desire and prayer that God will commit Himself. For instance, there is prayer all over the world for revival; that has been going on for years! Why does God delay? It may be that He is not able to commit Himself to men. He is not able to involve Himself with men and men's work.

Whether that be true or not in this particular connection, it is true as an established principle with God. He will not commit Himself to what is of man. He demands the conditions which are suitable to Himself. It would be dangerous to God Himself to commit Himself to man. From the beginning satan has always tried to put man in God's way. Man was made for this very purpose: that God should be with him, but satan captured man and he has made man the greatest hindrance to God. Man, as he is, now defeats God's purpose, therefore God cannot commit Himself to that kind of man. Jesus saw that it was man that made it dangerous for Him to commit Himself. He knew what was in man. He needed not that anyone should tell Him what was in man, therefore He could not and would not commit Himself. That is why just at that very point the whole question of new birth arose. There ought not to be a division between chapters 2 and 3 of the gospel by John, it ought to run straight on. Jesus would not commit Himself to man, therefore you must be born anew! I advise you to just blot out that number 3 at the chapter and take no notice of it, it ought to follow right through. There is the man to whom Jesus will not commit Himself, therefore he must be born from above.

So the great question that is now before us is this:

To What will God Commit Himself?

The whole book of Ezekiel is the answer to that question. In the first place, the answer is given in a negative way. God will not commit Himself to that in which satan has a place. Satan had gained a place in the nation of Israel and in the nations outside, therefore the glory is removed and it goes right outside. God will not commit Himself to that in which satan has a place. Satan and his works must be destroyed before God will commit Himself. The Son of God was manifested to destroy the works of the devil, but that was not an end in itself. He was manifested to destroy the works of the devil in order to make way for God, in order that God should have His place and reach His End. God will not commit Himself to that which has not been judged in righteousness.

Now you'll recall all that we have said about brass in these prophecies: the brass in the cherubim, the brass in the Man of brass, the brass of the great altar. God will not commit Himself to anything that has not been judged in righteousness. Until the nation has been judged in righteousness, God will not commit Himself. The same applies to the nations, so the largest section of these prophecies has to do with the judgment of the nation and of the nations. Until that has been done, you cannot reach this point where: "The Lord is There". That is the negative side; there is the positive side or answer to our question.

To what will God commit Himself? The positive answer has several aspects. It is firstly: where Christ is, on the other side of judgment. The Man in the Throne represents Christ as on the other side of judgment. There is a rainbow around that Throne. That rainbow is the symbol of redemption. In the book of the Revelation, it is represented by the Lamb in the Throne. The Lamb is the Man and the Man is the Lamb. He is there as on the other side of judgment, and that is the first thing related to God committing Himself. I repeat, that God will commit Himself where Christ is on the other side of judgment - that is, where all judgment has been fulfilled. You must study that with your New Testament in your hands.

When Jesus went to His baptism, He said to John the Baptist: "Suffer it to be so now; for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness." His baptism was, as we know, a type of His Cross. Therefore, baptism and the Cross represent the fulfillment of all righteousness - that is, through judgment: the death of one man and the putting of a New Man beyond the reach of judgment. That is where we are supposed to be by faith in Jesus Christ. That is where the Church is in the beginning of the letter to the Ephesians, it is seated together with Him in the heavenlies. That Church is seen as on the other side of judgment; it has been raised together with Him. For that Church, all judgment is fulfilled. That is the first thing that makes way for glory in the Church - all judgment fulfilled; that makes the Way for God to commit Himself. There are other aspects of that, it is where Christ is Glorified.

God will commit Himself where Christ is glorified. You notice in John 7 it is Jesus glorified and the Spirit given. The giving of the Spirit is God committing Himself, and He commits Himself on the ground of Jesus being glorified. Where Jesus is glorified, God commits Himself; where man is glorified, God holds back. No flesh shall glory in His presence. It is only where Jesus is glorified that God will commit Himself. Here is a law of God. If God is to give Himself by His Spirit, then Jesus must be glorified. When the glorifying of the Lord Jesus is our only object, then the Father will come in by the Spirit.

Then there is this third thing: God will commit Himself where Jesus is enthroned in government. Where this Man is on the Throne and is really governing everything, then God will commit Himself. Where all the authority committed to His Son is recognised and accepted, there God will commit Himself. Firstly where the authority of satan has been destroyed, where it is true: "Now is the prince of this world cast out", and then where the authority of man is removed - where every other kind of authority but the authority of God's Son is put away. If we come in with authority, then God stands back. Our authority must get out of God's way and God waits for that before He commits Himself.

And then there is a fourth thing: God commits Himself where all is formed "according to Christ" where everything takes its measure from Christ.

You see, these things are all in this book of Ezekiel. We have been just looking at the House. We have not studied it in any detail, but what we do know about it is that everything was measured by the Man of brass. The least little thing had its measurement given to it. Everything took its measure from the Man. That is the place to which God will commit Himself, where everything takes its measure from Christ.

And then just one more thing: God will commit Himself where the Cross governs everything. We saw how the altar governed everything within and without. So, where the Cross governs everything, God will commit Himself. The Lord Jesus is the great example of all this. God committed Himself to His Son. It was there at His baptism that God committed Himself to Jesus, "The heavens were opened and the Spirit descended upon Him". We have said that the giving of the Spirit is God committing Himself, so there, God committed Himself to Jesus. It says that God does not give His Spirit by measure to Jesus; that is, He gives His Spirit fully, without any reserve, to Jesus. He wholly commits Himself to Him. That was done at His baptism. In type it was by His Cross. When the meaning of the Cross has been laid down and established, then God commits Himself. That is God's ground.

Then, God committed Himself to Jesus by His close walk with the Father. You notice how Jesus measured everything according to heaven. We have so often pointed this out, Jesus would never be governed by the mind of man - He would never do anything, say anything, or go anywhere at the advice of man. He was all the time pushing away from Him the suggestions of men and women. He did that with regard to satan, He did it with regard to everything. He pushed back everything that would come from man. He would only take His way and His words and His works from the Father. He measured everything according to Heaven. His was the closest walk with heaven. For every detail in His life, He took the government of heaven. Therefore, the Father committed Himself to the Son.

And then by His perfecting. He said: "I must work today and tomorrow, and the third day I must be perfected". We are told that He was made perfect through suffering. Of course, we understand that this was not moral perfecting, it was not the making perfect of His nature, it was bringing Him to fullness, the fullness of the will of God. He was walking every day in the will of God, He said: "Lo, I come to do Thy Will" but the Will of God was making ever greater demands upon Him until, at last, the will of God requires that He should drink the cup, that He should go through Gethsemane to the Cross. He was being made perfect or complete as to the will of God and when He was made perfect as to the will of God, God fully committed Himself to Him. God gave Him that fullness for the Church. "God gave unto Him the Name that is above every name." God committed Himself to Him. I think that is all quite clear. Jesus is the Great Example!

Now we bring this study to a close. We do so by noting three necessities. For this end of God to be fully and finally reached, three things are necessary. The Church must have these three things.

First of all, a clear apprehension of God's purpose. It is absolutely necessary that the Church sees what God's purpose is. That is why Paul prayed that great prayer for "a spirit of wisdom and revelation," that the Church might have "the eyes of (its) heart enlightened." It is absolutely necessary that we have a clear apprehension of God's purpose, that purpose being that God shall come to fullness in present residence in the Church, that the Church should be the fullness of Him "that filleth all in all", that God should have a full place in the Church. That is the first necessity, that we should see that, and that we should be governed by that vision, so that it is a matter of spiritual vision or spiritual understanding; a revelation of God's purpose concerning the Church. This is why we read those scriptures at the beginning that the Church should be a habitation of God through the Spirit, that God should be resident there and that it should be said, "The Lord is There," - a habitation of God. Unto that, we must see what God's purpose is.

The second thing is a clear apprehension of God's Way to His End. [break in audio] Therefore, it is essential that the Church has a clear apprehension of the Cross. These three things are essential to the end that God shall be there!

Now, there are two aspects of those three things: there is the present progressive and the future perfect. Just at this present, this is not all fully true, and yet, what is in the letter to the Ephesians has a present application. At present, this is only progressively true. That means that the Lord is more, or less present, as these things are true. Where there is a clear apprehension of His purpose, where there is a clear apprehension of His House, where there is a clear apprehension of the Cross, there you will find most of the Lord! At present, these things determine the measure in which the Lord is present, but the time is coming when these things will be complete, when He shall come to be glorified in His saints. Then He will be in His Church in fullness. Well, you notice that at the end of Ezekiel, it is the city that is mentioned: "The Lord is There". The city represents the vessel in and through which God is present in government. It is that in which God is present in government.

Well, we have given a broad outline. We have tried to make these lines as clear as possible, but comprehended in this outline there is a tremendous amount, and as I pass it over to you, I do say to you, go away and pray over it. Do not just take it as some Bible study; I have told you that I am not interested in that. Everything must have spiritual and practical value. So I say: pray over it, think over it, and ask the Lord to make it all true where you are.

Chapter 14 - Question and Answer Session

Q: ...The same seems to have applied in the case of Paul, he first had the heavens opened to him, and it was that opened heaven and the vision he saw through the opened heavens that provided him with the resource to be obedient to the heavenly vision and not to do anything contrary to the requirement of the vision. Is it not that the opened heaven itself and the vision that comes through the opened heaven provides the resource that attracts and enables the one who receives it to pay the full price in the following days? Is it not that the open heaven is in itself a power, the vision is in itself a power, which provides the needed resource for the individual who has the vision to walk in accordance with its demands? Our observation would seem to indicate that there are folk who seem to be willing to pay any price, they endure all sorts of hardship, and they're willing for every kind of sacrifice and yet you can't say that they really live under an open heaven. If you, if the requirement is the paying a price in order to get an open heaven, then is not that sort of on a bargain basis? It all resolves itself into this: how can we have an opened heaven?

A: That is not so difficult to answer as it may seem. The answer is that it works both ways. The Lord Jesus was very careful to make His disciples know that there was a cost attached to discipleship. Today discipleship of the Lord Jesus is made too cheap. John 12:24 makes it perfectly clear that there is a big price attached to discipleship. The Lord told His disciples that unless they were willing to lay down their own souls, they could not be His disciples. They had to go by the way of the Cross in order to get the open heaven. So it does work that way.

I anticipated this question this morning, I knew that a lot of people would say, "Now, how do we get an open heaven?" And I did not want to deceive you by making you think that this is all a very easy thing. I just wanted you to know that there is a price attached to it. We pay no price for our salvation, that is without money and without price. But there is a cost attached to discipleship and an open heaven. The disciples would never have come to the day of Pentecost if they had not gone by the way of the Cross. And I tried to point out that Ezekiel was introduced to the way of the Cross, and the open heaven for him was by that way.

Now we follow that side for a moment: you notice that with all the prophets it was like that. The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, calling him into the work of a prophet, Jeremiah immediately saw what it would cost and he felt that he could not face it. It was the cost that troubled him. The Lord had to give very special strength to Jeremiah, the same was true of Ezekiel. It was true of Isaiah, and it was true of all the prophets. I do not think that Paul failed to see during those two years of silence, what it was going to mean for him. He had two years in which to weigh up the whole meaning of this thing. During that time he saw what it would cost, he knew that it had cost Jesus His life, he knew that it cost Stephen his life, he knew very well what the attitude of the Jews was to Jesus. He had to face the cost and he accepted it, and he got more of the open heaven. So it does work that way. But our brother is perfectly right in pointing out that it works the other way: the open heaven does mean strength to endure. Sometimes the Lord gives us an open heaven in a certain matter, because this matter is progressive, although we may get an open heaven once and for all, we do not get everything through the open heaven at the same time, there is more and more to come. And so it works backward: as the Lord gives, so we are strengthened. This matter works both ways.

The forward movement is facing the cost; then fresh revelation brings into new cost. But what we now receive is a strength to us to go on. We should never go on unless our open heaven was producing more and more. It is just what is coming to us all the time that is the strength to go on. So this matter works both ways, the factor, of course, of buying an open heaven doesn't come into it. What we suffer is no merit and reason why we should have something more for the simple reason that we need all the grace that God can give us to go on with this open heaven. There are times when those who have had the most from the Lord feel that they can't go on. They must have more grace, so it is grace and not merit, all the way along.

I wonder if you understand that this thing works both ways; it works forward and it works backward. Does that answer the question?

Q: I should like to speak at some length to express my question. My question is really hidden in what I shall say. The church here in Taipei was raised up about ten years ago. We can divide the history into two periods. The period six years ago, that is, the first period, during that period people came very easily into an experience of salvation. It was easy for people to love the Lord. Many during that period came to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and truly loved Him. And many set aside their professions or occupations to serve the Lord. We were very conscious of the presence of the Lord during that period and people were very eager to attend the meetings. That entire period was a spring time.

During the last three years or so, all the local churches have entered into a different type of experience, the way has been extremely difficult. We have been dissatisfied with various circumstances, we have also had the consciousness that the Lord is not satisfied. I should like to mention several aspects of this.

In the first place, it's not easy for people to come to a knowledge of the Lord Jesus in salvation and once they have come to the Lord, they don't seem to have come into a very clear experience, so that, if we have a hundred baptisms, of that hundred, there may be only ten who truly follow the Lord. If we were to reckon according to the number of baptisms, there would be no accommodation in the hall for them! But as a matter of fact, the numbers remain very much as they were. There are a number of people who have been recently added, and another in their place; a number fall out. That's the first aspect.

The second aspect refers to those who have already believed, they find it very difficult to follow on with the Lord. The sweetness of the early days has gone. We believe that this is in the Lord's ordering, and yet there's a paradox here. We're aware of very many things in our lives that are contrary to the Lord's pleasure. We said we ought to repent, there ought to be a change in these inner conditions. Yet, on the one hand we have not got the strength to alter, and in the second place we rather hope for the old condition to help attain to it. This applies in particular to those of us who have given ourselves to serve the Lord, we find service in the church exceedingly difficult.

What should be our attitude before the Lord? Is there nothing for it but simply to go steadily on in this way, or is there salvation here? I find it difficult to express my question. I'm very dissatisfied with my own spiritual condition, I'm also dissatisfied with the condition of the church. I'm dissatisfied in regard to the whole testimony. I feel a little bit like what we heard of Ezekiel right at the beginning. And lots of our brothers and sisters are feeling exactly as I do, but we can't find the way. Is this a wilderness experience, a time of testing? So that we may be stripped of the whole of the old creation? We really want that our brother Sparks shall know the actual state, we trust that he will give us an opportunity later so that we may discover what his reaction is to this state of affairs.

A: I have a certain reserve in trying to answer that question, because I don't know the work very fully. You see, I am very largely a visitor, and I know no more than what I am told. I question whether I have the right to talk to you about the work here. I tried to get brother Lee to answer that question, because he knows it so much better than I do, but he thinks that I might be able to give you, at any rate, one or two principles.

As far as I can see, there are only two things that I could say. Our brother has mentioned a state of things that is not pleasing to the Lord: that is, things in the life of His people. Well, of course, that is a matter that only you can deal with. If there are really things in the lives of the Lord's people or the Lord's servants that are wrong, you will never get anywhere until they're put right. Here, there must be a true and right kind of self examination. We speak much about the evils of introspection. And of course, there are such evils. It is a dangerous thing to be always turning your eyes inward and analysing yourself. At the same time, the Word of God does say, "examine yourself, if you would judge yourselves, you would not be judged". That is, you would not come into the judgment of God. So it is very necessary for everyone to have very close dealings with the Lord about their lives.

This is not a matter of whether they are loving the Lord, or whether they are as spiritually mature as they want to be, this is a matter of definite sins. Are there things in the life that the person knows that the Lord is against? That begins with us individually and it is therefore very necessary for those in responsibility to take the first step with regard to themselves. If you brothers and sisters are in spiritual responsibility, you must begin with yourself. You must ask yourselves the question: "Do I know of anything that the Lord has shown me is wrong? Am I aware of anything with which the Lord has a controversy? Has the Lord spoken to me about anything? Has He put His finger upon anything?" That is a right kind of self examination. It might be one of a whole number of things, it might be our thoughts about other people, it might be the way in which we talk, it might be that we criticise, or it might be any one of a thousand things. But we know whether the Lord has said anything to us on that matter, and until that is dealt with, the way of Life is closed.

One thing in the life of a servant of God can hold up the work of God. Remember Achan; one man in all the thousands of Israel, he just took a wedge of gold, he buried it in his tent, but the whole of Israel was brought into defeat by that. If it is not personal, it may be in our home. There may be something wrong in our family life, there may be something wrong in our home life and the Lord cannot go on while that is there. Well we, as responsible servants of God, have got to see to it that the Lord has no controversy with us. We must be very careful not to divide between the church and other things. I mean between the church and the family home life. We must not divide between the church and our business life; these are all one thing. We cannot be one thing in the church and something else in the business. Our business life and our home life have got to come right into line with our church life. We have got to be very particular about our business transactions. We have got to be absolutely honest before the world. Well, perhaps you hardly need that to be said, but we begin where our brother began: is this changed situation due to something that is wrong? When we have put that right, then we can look at the matter from another standpoint.

Do remember that the Lord, when He is going to do a new and fuller thing, always brings into a travail before. Our brother said, "We are not satisfied. We are troubled about this situation." When he said that, I said to myself: does he want to be satisfied? It is a very dangerous thing to be satisfied. The Lord save us from ever being satisfied and I said the other day that God always begins by putting His dissatisfaction into our hearts. And every larger movement of the Lord begins in that way. The Lord will never do any more if we are quite satisfied with things as they are.

There is always a winter before there's a summer. When you look at the fruit trees in the springtime, the blossoms are very beautiful, everybody wants to look at the blossoms on the fruit trees, that is something that you can see that is very lovely. And then the winds come, and the rain comes and all the blossom is blown away and you say, "That's a great pity, oh what a pity that we lose all the blossoms off the tree!" You would never have the fruit if the blossom was not blown away. You would never have the fruit if you didn't have the storm. You would never have the fruit if the tree was not stripped. That is a law of God in nature, that is a law of God in His own work.

There are periods in the history of the church when it goes through a time of real death and darkness, but if you went out amongst the trees in the springtime when the winds are blowing, and if you could listen you would hear those trees cracking and groaning. The whole creation groaning together. This is very true. Sometimes in the forest you can hear the cracking going on in the trees. What is it that is happening? The new life is coming up. It is forcing its way up, it is forcing off the old life of last year, it is making way for the new life of this year. There's an awful groaning and cracking going on. It is not a sign of death, but a sign of life! When a thing is dead, there is no groaning and cracking. If you're troubled about it, it's a very good sign, it may be travail unto new life. Well, even so, don't settle down with your groaning, but hold onto the Lord for His new thing.

I am very glad that this work is characterised by a certain right kind of dissatisfaction. As I have looked at the many hundreds here, gathered during these past days, I have said to myself, the worst thing that can happen to this work is for it to be satisfied: "We have got hundreds of people, we have got a great piece of work!" That would be the most awful thing that could happen to you. I hope the day will never come when you're satisfied, when you look at things and say like Nebuchadnezzar did about Babylon: "See this great Babylon that I have made". The days of Babylon are ended when that happens. Perhaps your continual life and growth will come along the line of very real dissatisfaction, but your travail must lead you to very strong, united prayer. The Lord's new thing must be born out of real soul suffering. You must not look on the situation and be sorry about it and leave it there, you must bring it into very definite prayer. The whole church and all the churches ought to concentrate upon this matter. A great cry ought to go up to the Lord about it. Perhaps that is what the Lord is waiting for.

Q: Just over a year ago many full time workers, both brothers and sisters, saw the truth of being crucified with our Lord and they entered into a new release. After a while they went through a period of struggle corresponding to Romans 7. Thereafter they had some further light and entered into a fuller release and for a period were in considerable measure of freedom both in their prayer life and in service; they knew a real emancipation. After a while, things were worse than ever. Some thought that proved that everything was false. Was it really true or was it false? Is it because there's been a lack in fellowship and they've turned inward and lost what they had gained? No very great fruit is apparent from that fuller release, but some have made progress in the matter of knowledge of the Word. We should like an interpretation of this state of affairs, we don't know how to help our brothers and sisters, and we ourselves don't really know the answer to the problem.

A: Here again, I labour under difficulty. You see, all I know is what our brother has just said. I was not here when it happened, I did not see what happened, I only have it by report. I believe that our brother has given a faithful report, but how am I able to tell whether it was soul or spirit? I should have to examine it very much more closely and I should have to know a lot more about it. Of course, it is possible to have these experiences just in the realm of the soul. They may just be emotional experiences. On the other hand, they may be completely false; they may be deceptions of the devil. That would come, of course, along the line of the soul. We'll just take those matters first.

Let's illustrate from a great deal of false spiritual experience. It goes by a certain name in our time which I won't use, but there is a situation like this, it is a very terrible situation, many of our mental institutions are full of people and there are multitudes of Christians now entirely in the dark as to their salvation. They believe they have committed the unpardonable sin. They therefore doubt whether they can ever be saved. These are Christian people; how did this come about? They got caught into a great emotional or soulish realm. They were told that the sign of the baptism of the Holy Spirit was speaking with tongues, therefore they set themselves upon having that baptism and they strained with all their soul to get that experience. They worked themselves up into a psychic condition and then something happened: they began to "speak in tongues" and these experiences came. That went on for some time and then it all disappeared. The devil immediately came in and said, "You have committed the unpardonable sin; you have sinned against the Holy Ghost." The result is they lose their mind, they lose their assurance of salvation. The whole thing was false and a deception; that was not the baptism of the Holy Spirit, that was a purely psychical thing. The devil came in on that and gave them something, and then took it away and said, "You have lost the Holy Spirit!" Now, that is the extreme situation, it is possible to have that quite mildly, I mean that if you go out in your soul, with all your emotions, you can get some experience and then it will pass and you will be in a worse state afterward than you were before. That is one aspect of this situation and it is a very common one.

On the other hand, you must remember that new experiences of the Lord are usually accompanied by some very special joy, there is something very wonderful about it and you live on the surface of that for a time, but the Lord does not intend us to live on the surface of experiences. The Lord does not want us to live on an experience, He wants us to live on Himself. And therefore, after a time the thing goes down deeper. Supposing I illustrate by married life.

At the beginning of married life everything is wonderful. It's all very wonderful, the newly married people say very nice things to one another, and they feel that life is now a matter of saying very nice things to one another. Now, after a few years, of course they don't stop saying nice things to one another, but the thing goes deeper down. The relationship becomes stronger. Hallelujah! It's deeper down! I know the Lord better now than I knew then, the Lord drives things down deep. And after a time we discover that there's something more than we realise, we come to realise that what the Lord did has gone down deeper. Spiritual life is like that all the way along; you have an experience of the Lord, you feel that nothing can be more wonderful, and then it all disappears and you have a bad time - you think it's all gone. And then the Lord comes back again and there is something more the next time than there was the first time, and then it goes down again. And so you go on all the time, every fresh death leads to some fuller life; that is the law of the spiritual life.

While we're in the time of death we think that everything is gone, but it's just a corn of wheat fallen into the ground and sometimes we want to go and dig it up and see if there's anything there; just to have a look at it and see that it hasn't all gone. I think that is what our brother is doing now. He's digging up the corn of wheat to see if there's anything left at all. You leave it there, and it'll come out in Life. Your spiritual life will be like that all the way along; anyway, my spiritual life has been like that: it's Life, death; death, Life. It's just like that. The dark times are very difficult, but don't let us lose faith; "He who hath begun a good work will perfect it unto the day of Jesus Christ".