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The Representation of the Invisible God

by T. Austin-Sparks

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazines, 1943-44

Contents

Chapter 1 - Representation a Principle with God

Chapter 2 - Representation on the Basis of Identification

Chapter 3 - Representation by the Holy Spirit

Chapter 4 - Representation the Essence of Service

Chapter 5 - The Dynamic of Representation

Chapter 6 - The Way of Attainment of Knowledge Necessary for Representation

Chapter 1 - Representation a Principle with God

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness..." (Gen. 1:26).

"Christ... who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation" (Col. 1:15).

"...in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn upon them." (2 Cor. 4:4).

"For whom he foreknew, he also foreordained to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren." (Rom. 8:29).

"And have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him: where there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman; but Christ is all, and in all." (Col. 3:10-11).

Reading: Eph. 4:13,15-16; 5:22-32; John 20:21-23; Acts 1:8.

In the first and second series of passages, there is one word common to them all, as you will have noticed. It is the word "image".

"And God said, Let us make man in our image."

"...who is the image of the invisible God."

"Christ, who is the image of God."

"...conformed to the image of his Son."

"...the new man... renewed... after the image of him that created him."

Our English word has behind it in the New Testament two Greek words - idol and ikon. Heb. 1:3 - "the very image of his person". Rotherham translates, "the exact representation of his image" or "of his substance". It is that word "representation" which has taken hold of me, and which seems to be the key to our meditation.

Representation an Eternal Principle

You will at once see that in the passages which we have read, that is the governing idea; firstly as to the Lord Jesus, representation of God. He is said to be the image of God, the image of the invisible God. Then the thought is transferred to the elect, the Church, foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son, a new man renewed after the image of Him that created him; and alongside of that, passages in which the actual word does not occur, but where the thought is still the dominant thought - "the measure of the stature of Christ", "a fullgrown man" (Eph. 4:13). That with reference to the Church, the Lord's people - representation.

Then those final passages bring it into a very practical realm - "As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you" - placing the emphasis upon the "as". Then, with the question which must arise, "Who is sufficient for these things?" the answer is, "Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you: and ye shall be my witnesses", the latter word of which is only another word for representatives.

(a) Before Creation

This, then, is an eternal thought, a thought which has come out of eternity, God purposing to be represented in His universe, to have representation in man, and that eternal thought lies behind everything. It is before creation, before the fall, and therefore before redemption. It is the pure thought of God unclouded at all by sin and sin's consequences and sin's necessities. It stands back there as governing all the thought of God projected into the future. It is as though God decided He would have representation of Himself, the invisible God, in visible form, in man form, that He would be seen, be known, be understood; and, more than that, He would constitute upon a basis of fellowship, living relationship, in terms of representation, that which would represent Him not merely officially but in nature, after His own heart. By that means He would make Himself known, would give Himself, and would bring the creation into something more than mechanical obedience and response to His sovereign will; into agreeable, desired, loving fellowship with Himself, with His own heart, along the line of consent, and not of compulsion. That is what representation means in brief. It is exactly what it means in the case of the Lord Jesus being the image of the invisible God, and exactly what it means that the Church is conformed to the image of His Son. The thought, I say again, lies behind everything, goes before creation, and then governs creation.

(b) In Creation

The creation is brought into being by this one governing thought of God, that the whole creation should, in a variety of ways, express Him, represent Him, speak of Him, and all the ordinances of heaven and earth as established by God, and all the relationships in creation, should in some way represent God's thoughts. If we had eyes to see, we should see Divine thoughts in all that God has done. The whole creation is the embodiment of this desire of God to be represented.

(c) In Redemption

But not only so, for when we come on to the matter of redemption, it is the same thing. Of God's dealing with the necessity which has arisen, representation is at the heart of it, and the representation in redemption is twofold, it has two sides. By reason of what has happened to the creation, and of the judgment pronounced upon it even unto death, there is a nullification of that order of things. If that sentence is carried out nakedly, barely and utterly, creation will be dismissed from God's universe, there will be nothing left. But representation again is the way of redemption, and in the person of His Son a representative position is taken under judgment, condemnation, and death, and in Him representatively the creation passes out, dies. We today surely do come afresh upon this aspect of things with new gratitude, that is, that you and I are saved from the awful fulness of judgment upon the creation because One has been our representative in that judgment. He representatively died as a cursed and judged and doomed creation because of sin. He died for us and as us, and we died in Him. That is a simple and very familiar truth.

But there is the other side in redemption. In resurrection, exaltation in glory, He is our representative. The Divine thought of representation is taken up again, not now in despair but in hope. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again to a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead" (1 Pet. 1:3). In resurrection He is our representative, in glory He is our representative, and just as truly as in His death we died in Him, we were included in death, so now we are included in Him in glory, in exaltation. As the "Captain of our salvation" He is bringing "many sons to glory", where He is as their representative.

Bearing upon that, the leaving out of two words which have been introduced into our translation, but which do not occur in the original, give added emphasis. I mean in Rom. 8:29. "Whom he foreknew, he also foreordained to be conformed to the image of his Son." They have introduced the two little words - "to be". Those words do not occur at all, they ought not to be there. They were put in because it sounds blunt and awkward to leave them out, and just say, foreordained conformed to his Son. Before the world was we were so, in the thought and purpose and power of God Who is not of time. There is no past, present and future with Him. All future is with Him in one moment. When He determined it, it was then done in Him. You and I may be undergoing a process of conforming to the image, but that is only on our side. From God's side it is all finished, it is eternally accomplished before ever we started, These are mighty foundations for faith that, so far as God is concerned, there is no hap or chance about this. It is all an accomplished fact. "Foreordained conformed to the image..." So you see this Divine thought, this eternal thought of representation, does lie behind everything; creation, redemption, death, resurrection, glory.

(d) In the Church

But it comes right into the very centre of our lives as the Lord's people who have believed. The Divine thought concerning us is just this, that we are here for one purpose in the thought of God - to represent Him. The Church is constituted for that one purpose - to represent Him. All the dealings of God with us have that one thing in view, the perfection of representation. That is but to say in another way that the discipline, the chastening, the dealings of God with us are to perfect our representation of Him; that is, to make us more like Him, not just as a thing in itself, but because He has ordained this to be the agency of His self-revelation, His self-manifestation. "The image of the invisible God". That with reference to Christ. The image, we might say, of the invisible Christ is the Divine thought for the Church and all its members.

It seems to me that is the very essence of this idea - "the church which is his body". Well, there is such a thing, of course, as reading one another's spirit, but even that is exceedingly difficult without their bodies! What we know of one another inwardly, we so largely know through our bodies. Even our personalities are expressed very largely through our bodies. If we are familiar with a person, more or less it is by some physical expression that we know who they are. A little child indoors knows daddy is coming down the road. Why? Because he or she knows daddy's step. You may be in one room and certain people in another, and you hear them speaking and you are able to say, There is so-and-so, I know their voice! There are doubles, perhaps, in that, but you are not often mistaken. You know they are there because that voice is their's. We are known by some physical expression. We watch one another, we touch one another, and we read and register one another's inner life by a look in the eye, a look on the face, a tone of voice, a mere gesture, a mere grunt! Yes, and a history lies in the slightest physical indication if we are alive to one another.

The Church which is His Body stands in relation to Him in that sense, and He, by His Spirit being present, indwelling, is indicated by means of His members. The purpose of the Church as His Body is to represent Him, and this is the very essence, of all - shall we say - missionary work, all ministry, all service. The dominating idea of all service or ministry is representation; not first of all things said, preached, proclaimed, but what we are, what is conveyed of Christ by our being. In the case of the Lord Jesus that was predominant. It was His presence which registered the Divine impact upon this earth; sometimes His silence was more terrible than His words. When He, on that Good Friday, that first Good Friday, was silent, that was an awful silence which men could not bear, under which they writhed and would by any means make Him speak and break that silence. He came into the country of the Gerasenes and, without a word from Him, those possessed with demons cried out. His presence! It is representation.

What a mighty thing this is if it is there in the power of the Holy Spirit. You do not always have to begin to preach. If you are a Spirit-filled man or woman, your presence will make sinners uncomfortable and saints happy. What I am trying for the moment to emphasise is the truth, the principle, the law, that of representation.

With regard to this matter of representation, I would have you pre-eminently occupied with it in relation to the Lord Jesus Himself. He is the sum of all Divine thoughts, and the Incarnation is the supreme expression of this one thought of God to be truly, adequately, fully, perfectly represented; so that it was possible for the Lord Jesus to say, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father"(John 14:9). There is the mystery of Christ.

What is the mystery of Christ? The mystery of Christ is God veiled in this Representative. You say, A representative of God, and yet God veiled? - a contradiction! No, no contradiction; not necessarily veiled, for a New Testament or a Scriptural mystery is not something which cannot be known, but something which, for certain reasons, has not been known but can be known. When those reasons are set aside, this which has been a mystery, a hidden thing, is a mystery no longer, but it remains a mystery while those things obtain.

You can see it in the days of His flesh. Here is God in representation, but how many saw Him? "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father". But I think that word "seen" means something very much more than just looking upon Him as a man. "He that hath seen me..." "Whom do men say that I am?" Some said this and some said that. Peter said, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." And He said, "Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father who is in heaven" (Matt. 16:13-17). That is what it means to see; it is by revelation. It is that which is the mystery. The fact is there, the true representation or representative of God in person, yet unrecognised, unseen. "The God of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them" (2 Cor. 4:4). The mystery is men's inability to see a great fact, or a great fact present still undisclosed.

Now, the Resurrection and Pentecost seem to me to have meant just this one thing - the seeing of Christ. You remember when He was considered dead and buried, even disciples were in black despair and eclipse of faith and hope, and some went on the way to Emmaus very sad indeed, and their words were, "We hoped that it was he who should redeem Israel" (Luke 24:21). But before the end of that episode was reached, we are told that He opened their understanding that they might know the Scriptures. Having taken up the Scriptures right from the beginning and spoken to them things concerning Himself, He opened their understanding, and it was just that that was marking His appearances during the forty days after His resurrection. They were in some altogether new way coming to see Him. Oh no, not now physically merely, that He was alive, that He had a body; it was not merely this that was being borne in upon them very powerfully. They were seeing Him, Who He was; the mystery of His Person was breaking down. They were seeing Him, and the day of Pentecost seemed to bring that through to full birth. The forty days were moving up to that day, and then on that day by the coming of the Holy Spirit the thing was consummated, and in the full blaze of Who He was the Church was born. It seems to me that the Church was born - yes, by the Holy Spirit, but by the Holy Spirit's breaking open to men Who Jesus was after all. It seems to me that is how every one came into the Church. They saw by an operation of the Holy Spirit Who Jesus was. That is how Paul came in on the Damascus road; he saw who Jesus of Nazareth was. On the day of Pentecost, Peter stood up with the eleven, as under the power of the Holy Spirit they opened their mouths, and the spontaneous declaration was all about Who Jesus was, and they are men in a new revelation.

Oh, I know from our fundamentalist standpoint, this is nothing very much. I do not suppose there is one here who does not believe that Jesus was the Son of God, God manifest in the flesh. You all believe that, as a bit of your faith; but what is the effect of it? What was the effect of that at the beginning? The witnessing, the representation, is not just attesting historical facts, nor doctrinal facts. When they went out as witnesses unto Him, it was not just to say things which, while they were true, were only truths. They went out in the power of having seen, having had their eyes opened to the Lord Jesus. It was as though they had been men moving in the shadows during those years, groping, sometimes feeling an assurance, a certain amount of certainty, but then questionings, uncertainties coming in, shadows all the time. But at last the heavens were rent, the blaze broke through, and they saw. It was in the light of that they were constituted witnesses, representatives. It was in the light of that the Church was born. It was in the light of that the Church went on its way so effectively. The fact was that, wherever they came, it was the impact of God in Christ by their presence. Their presence stirred hell, because hell felt anew - God is here! It touched men who were in the grip and under the control and influence of higher intelligences, spiritual intelligences.

We know how true that is now in measure, that the presence of a true child of God, without words, provokes men, annoys men, irritates men, disturbs men. They want you out of the way, they don't like you. They don't know why, but they want to get rid of you. You could almost feel they have a supernatural intelligence about you, though they have not. If you ask them why, they do not know. There is the other deeper thing, they sense something that makes them uncomfortable. It is the presence of God in the child of God, and God is represented by their being there. That is how it was with Christ. "As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you." It is in this way, on this line, on this basis - representation.

Representation Based Upon Identification

But we must realise that representation stands upon the basis of identification. It was the identity of Christ with God the Father that meant everything. They were identical. It was not that He would say or could say, He that hath seen me hath seen God's representative. That can mean anything. You can send anything and anybody as your representative. But He could say, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father", seen God; not a representative of God, not someone sent as a kind of ambassador, altogether different, two personalities, two natures in a different category, but identical. The presence of Christ is the presence of God and God is present in Christ.

Now, you say, how are you going to work that out in extension to the Church and to the member of the Body? In principle it holds good, and therein is found the whole requirement that you and I should lose our own independent, separate life of self-interest, self-motive, and growingly come to the place where it is "no longer I, but Christ". Oh yes, there will always be those things about us which remain our human features and marks, but the real and essential implication of our presence will not be ourselves, it will be the Lord; that there has come about within us, at the very centre of our being, by the residence of the Spirit of Christ, an identification with Him so that He and we are one; one in life, in motive, in thought, in desire, and whatever people have to say about our frailties, our weaknesses, our imperfections, if they will be honest they will have to say, But despite that, when you meet so-and-so, you do meet the Lord! It is a terrible thing if people are unable to say that, and have to say the contrary: When you meet so-and-so as a professed child of God, there is nothing of the Lord that you touch in him, and you come away grieved at so much that is otherwise. That is a terrible thing.

Does it not occur to us very strongly that it is a denial of our very existence as members of Christ's Body if we can tolerate things which are a contradiction of Christ; such a matter as unforgiveness, harbouring in our hearts an unforgiving attitude or spirit, nursing a grievance, wounded pride, divisions. Oh, dear friends, where are we as Christians, what is the Christian life, what are we for as Christians, what have we taken up, what have we assumed? Have we assumed certain things in the way of doctrines as a kind of professional matter, a business kind of thing altogether out of relation to our own personality, our own nature? Well, that is not the New Testament Christianity, that is not the real Christian life. The fact is if you and I are true Christians (and "if any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of his" - Romans 8:9), if we are true Christians and have the Holy Spirit, this ought to be the truest thing about us, that we can never be unforgiving without having a most miserable time about it, never suffer from wounded pride without being altogether thrown out of gear in our spiritual lives, never be un-Christlike without having a crisis over it. It is a living thing inside. Why? Because of identification in the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ and He has come into us to make us one with Christ, so that we cannot live a detached life from Christ and just go on anyhow indefinitely without being met by the Lord. That is quite impossible on the basis of a life in the Holy Spirit, and there is no other basis for a Christian. Many of us thank the Lord with all our hearts that this is the kind of experience we have, that we have a miserable time because of some un-Christlike thought or attitude. We thank God for that; it shows that things are alive. If you or I could possibly harbour anything un-Christlike in our hearts and not have a bad time, we have reason to question whether we are born again. Every bad time is an evidence that we are alive, for dead people do not suffer.

Identification is basic to representation, and it is a vital, an organic, thing, not a thing of doctrine merely.

Representation Based Upon the Spirit's Sovereignty

Well, that is what Pentecost did. Oh, how we are launched into a realm of things when we recognise that. Peter, standing up with the eleven, what is he saying? Peter has heard the Lord saying, "Ye shall be witnesses unto me in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth". Well, both he and the others are going to come into the good of it. Not so very long before, some of these disciples were saying of these very people to whom they were now to be the representatives of Christ, the messengers of His gospel of grace, "Lord shall we call down fire from heaven upon them?" You cannot go on like that when you come under the power of the Holy Ghost. Burning people up from heaven - that is not a Holy Ghost governed life. You see what I mean.

As to Peter, this is going to carry him a long way further yet he is going to be taken well out of his depth. It is a glorious thing to see what the Holy Spirit does when He is really sovereign. He makes you say things altogether beyond your traditions and your intentions, though you do not recognise it. The Holy Spirit means a great deal more than we do when we say things, that is, when we say things by the Holy Spirit. We say a lot of things by the Holy Spirit's government which will take us a long way beyond what we ourselves mean at the moment.

"Unto the uttermost part of the earth"! Peter will endorse that. Or again in his address on the day of Pentecost, he will use words like these: "The promise is to you and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call" (Acts 2:39). He says that under the power of the Holy Ghost, but he does not mean that. A little while afterwards he will be asked to go to the house of a Gentile in Caesarea. He sees a sheet wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts and creeping things of the earth and birds of the heaven, and a voice says, Rise, Peter; kill and eat! But Peter said, Not so, Lord! This thing was done three times and the sheet was caught up into heaven. Three men stood at the door (Acts 10). Not so, Lord! - "As many as the Lord our God shall call." He said it by the Holy Spirit, but he did not mean it. Now he is up against it. The Holy Ghost will carry him out of his depth, his tradition. That is what the Holy Ghost does when He gets hold of a life. He makes demands far beyond what we at the moment are ready for.

Thus the crisis will test you as to whether you are ready to adjust to the Holy Spirit? If not, your representation of the Lord breaks down. Are you ready to adjust? Is He going to have His way completely? I am keeping close to the Word. "As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you... Receive ye the Holy Spirit."

My point at the moment is that the sending as His representatives was on the basis of the absolute sovereignty of the Holy Spirit, and you and I will individually fully represent Christ only by that sovereignty, the Spirit's sovereignty, because the Spirit alone is big enough to bring Christ in, the Spirit alone is great enough to represent Christ. Can you or I represent Christ? Why, we do not know anything about Christ yet. Our thoughts about Christ would make a very little Christ. Peter, with all the big things that he is saying on the day of Pentecost, in his own interpretation of those things would have narrowed Christ down only to the Jews, but he came to discover that the Holy Spirit meant a great deal more than he, Peter, did about Christ, and what representation of Christ meant. And so it is by the Holy Spirit alone that an adequate representation of Christ can be made.

I do hope that we shall see that for which we are here, what it means. This is a very real thing, this matter of Christ being represented, brought into view, our presence meaning that. Oh, I am sure we all feel that, if things had been kept strictly there all the way along, the impact upon this world would be so infinitely greater than it has been. The thing has become mechanical; we cannot say that the Church in all its parts has really brought an impact of Christ upon this earth. We have to get back somewhere perhaps on this matter. It is not in doctrines, in words, in truths; it is in a mighty work of the Holy Spirit inwardly, which results in our being able to say, "It pleased God to reveal his Son in me that I might preach him among the nations" (Gal. 1:16); the representation within first, the preaching afterward; not the signing of a statement of fundamental doctrines, but a revelation of Christ in the heart.

Chapter 2 - Representation on the Basis of Identification

Reading: Gen. 1:26; Col. 1:15; 2 Cor. 4:4; Rom. 8:29; Col. 3:10,11; Eph. 4:13,15,16; 5:22-32; John 20:21-23; Matt. 28:18-20; Acts 1:8.

The Identification of the Son with the Father

I think we might take our meditation up at the point where it most immediately relates to the Lord Jesus. At the close of our previous meditation, we were especially emphasizing the principle that representation is upon the basis of identification. The Lord Jesus was very particular and very emphatic when He was here in the matter of His relatedness to the Father. He kept that always in view. Of course, every consequence arose out of that. We will not deal with the consequence for the moment, we remind ourselves of the fact. “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). “I and My Father are one” (John 10:30). “Show us the Father... Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know Me?” (John 14:8,9; ASV). So we might gather up the tremendous amount that there is which bears down upon that identification of the Son with the Father, of Christ with God. Our special point at the moment is this, that we are not dealing with two, we are dealing with one. That is to say, we are not meeting Christ apart from God, apart from the Father. When we meet Him and have dealings with Him, we meet God.

And, what is more, from the other side God refuses to meet us on any other ground but the ground of His Son. “No man cometh to the Father, but by Me” (John 14:6), and any going to God independently of, and apart from, the Son will have but one result: the Father will refer us to the Son, He will not act apart. The oneness is absolute and is divinely, sacredly, jealously safeguarded and preserved. It is identification.

The history of Israel since then can be summed up on that one principle, that one law.  Israel refused to take account of Christ as God’s Son, set Him aside and essayed to approach God, and found a closed door. From that day the door to God has been closed to Israel. The Father has very effectively and forcefully said to Israel, There is no independent way; if it means a thousand or two thousand years, time will not alter this; you will still be at the place where you will have to come by way of the Son if you are going to find Me! That is the position today with Israel. God is jealous over this thing.

Why is this? The answer could be given in quite a number of ways, but, for our present consideration, it is a matter of God’s intention to bring Christ His Son into the inheritance which He has appointed for Him, the dominion. “Adam was a figure of Him That was to come” (Rom. 5:14), and God had said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness: and let them have dominion” (Gen. 1:26). That “them” is very significant. We will not follow it for a moment. “Let them have dominion.”—“A figure of Him That was to come.” Says the writer of the Hebrew letter, “Not unto angels did He subject the world to come, whereof we speak. But one hath somewhere testified, saying, ‘What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? or the Son of Man, that Thou visitest Him? Thou madest Him a little lower than the angels; Thou crownedst Him with glory and honour, and didst set Him over the works of Thy hands: Thou didst put all things in subjection under His feet. But now we see not yet all things subjected to Him. But we behold Him Who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honour'” (Heb. 2:5-9; KJV: ASV). Here is the Antitype, here is the greater than Adam, here is the One of Whom Adam was a figure, eternally destined to have dominion, with all things put under Him, Jesus, and God is keeping very close to His arrangement concerning His Son. The Son is the supreme and all-inclusive representative of God for executive purposes in dominion, and their oneness is absolute. So it is that, if all God’s purposes are bound up with and vested in His Son, He must bring that Son into His place, that must be His supreme business, that the Son shall there be as God.

That thought is an Old Testament thought in type, as well as a New Testament thought in reality. You know right through the Old Testament God had His representatives, and those representatives were in their day as God here. The statement to Moses is a very utter one. When the Lord was sending Moses to Pharaoh, He said to him, “You shall be as God to Pharaoh” (Exodus 7:1), and in effect, in actual outworking, when Pharaoh met Moses, he met God, and was having to do with God. Whether it were the patriarchs, or whether it were the prophets, by reason of their Divine appointment, they were there as God, dealing with them was dealing with God. The very term “Son of Man” as used in the Old Testament implies that representation, God represented; and God not as apart, God standing by, God committed, God involved. No matter how long you may have to wait, the end is absolutely sure.

Jeremiah represents God on the spot. Well, they may do all sorts of things with Jeremiah: they may refuse his word, drop him into the dungeon, well-nigh kill him, so that officials will go to the king, and say, Unless you take that man up, he will die! They may do that, and years may roll by and it may seem that Jeremiah has not been vindicated, but it will be written, Now at a certain given time in the reign of Cyrus that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah the prophet should be fulfilled... (Ezra 1:1). It does not matter, wait as long as you like, do what you like, it is God you are dealing with; representation. Oh, the Old Testament is full of it in principle, but it is all gathered up into Christ; He is the sum and the total of it all.

It is not necessary for me in a company like this to stress this great fact, that we have to deal with God when we touch the Lord Jesus. When we have to do with the Lord Jesus, we are dealing with God in a far greater way than was true with any prophet of the Old Testament, and it was great enough then.

The Church’s Identification with Christ

But what are we leading to? Well, along this line of representation on a basis of identification, we come to this present dispensation, and the nature of it. This present dispensation is the dispensation of the Church, and the Church is here on this very ground, and if you and I have been baptized into Christ, we have been baptized into His Body. Do not let us think of the Church as something objective and apart from ourselves. We are in this, it has to become a matter of personal application as we speak, not thinking objectively of the Church, but thinking of ourselves as members of Christ.

Well now, this identification with Christ works out in exactly the same way as did Christ’s identification with the Father. That is why I read Ephesians 5:21-32 about husbands and wives and wives and husbands, and why I emphasized that strange word in Genesis—“Let them have dominion:” and you noticed that it is followed out again in Genesis 5:1 and 2. “In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made He him; male and female created He them: and blessed them; and called their name Adam,” called their name Man. That passage in Ephesians 5 about husbands and wives brings out this principle here, and if we could just see that, I am sure it would be tremendously helpful, and lift us away from modern views in this world on this matter. There is this eternal thought, this Divine thought, back of this relationship, this thought of God in representation on a basis of identification, and the phrase to be underlined there is, even as Christ and the Church, the Church and Christ. The oneness here, the identification, is the Divine thought and intent. You are not dealing with two things here, two independent lives, two persons apart. “He made them male and female, and called them Man,” called a plural a singular! And that is what He does with Christ and the Church; that is what He did between Himself and the Son, called a plural a singular, in effect. And He is saying here in other words, that a wife loses her own independent identity when she is married, she loses her own name, she lets go her own separate life. Now her one single idea is the life and vocation of her husband, into which she merges herself, and the twain become one, even as the Church Christ. When we come into the Church, we abandon our own independent separate identity. All that is ours personally and privately is yielded up and we are merged into the Body of Christ, so that the Church and Christ are one flesh, the twain are one: I know that modern views on woman’s place in this world will not accept that, but you are not bothered about modern views: but I hope you are just as strong on these principles. Lift it here.

God has vested in His Son everything, and you inherit everything. The Lord is simply saying about this earthly relationship that it is meant to be a representation of that heavenly thing, that if that relationship between husbands and wives and wives and husbands were as it is meant to be, the husband would be standing for God in this world, as a servant, a minister of God—do not misunderstand that; I do not mean he would put a clerical collar on and go into “the ministry”—he is standing as representative of God in a positive way, and his wife would be working into that, the results of that; not herself apart in independent ministry and life, not pulling another way, but yielding all that is personal to that. That is the Divine idea, and in that way she would come into the Divine endowments, the Divine vocation, the Divine blessing; she would get her portion in that relatedness and, with the loss of what is merely personal and private, in the larger. That is the Divine thought, and the Divine blessing lies in that direction and not in any other direction. Take that, but do not take it as merely a human idea, as the modernist and the people of the world say, That is Paul’s idea about women and we do not accept this! This is a Divine thought going right back, and its vision is Christ and the Church, the Church and Christ.

The point is, it is identification, that on this line where that relationship is right, the effect is this, that when you meet the wife, you meet the husband. I mean this, that she will not act on her own independently, she will express the mind of her husband, she will refer to the husband, and in meeting her you will have to meet the husband. It is no use trying to get round some other way in this kind of woman, to get her to take a line on the quiet when her husband is absent. Oh no, you cannot get her away from her husband; she is bound up there, so one that you cannot meet her apart from him. It is not a matter of whether the husband is present or absent, seen or invisible; you are meeting him all the time. That is the relationship.

The Lord is saying this about Christ and the Church, and He is saying the identification is so one that when you meet the Church, the members of His Body, you are not meeting something apart, you are meeting Him. “Lo, I am with you all the days, even unto the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20). That is the principle. That is not merely an individual thing, that is said to the Church: the nucleus was there and it was said to the Church. “I am with you always, even unto the consummation of the age” (ASV). “I am with you.” How? In the midst, right there in you by the Spirit.

Identification and Authority

And that is the meaning of these other words, “Receive ye the Holy Spirit: whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them” (John 20:22,23; ASV). That is tremendous: the Church in the position of Christ saying, Thy sins be forgiven thee. Yes, the Church under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, if really filled with the Spirit, if the Church is Spirit-governed, that is its right, its prerogative to say, “Thy sins be forgiven thee;” on the terms, of course, that condition all forgiveness, namely, repentance and faith. “Whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained” (KJV). The Church says, Look here, my brother, my sister, you are violating a Divine principle and putting yourself out of court, and we assure you most solemnly before God that you have no way with God until you put that right: on the authority of the Holy Spirit we say that to you. And God stands by, and it does not matter, you may wait a generation, a lifetime, that brother, that sister, will not get through, apart from obedience to that counsel. They think the day is coming when they are going to be vindicated along their own line. Not at all! They will die unvindicated if they have not recognized that, in a Holy Spirit governed representation of the Church, they are dealing with Christ.

Of course, I know that the Roman Church has taken this very thing, and it is upon this very basis the Roman Church exists and operates, but of course in a temporal realm. They have brought it down from Holy Spirit government and made it purely a priest-craft matter. Wherever you get truth you will get error that simulates truth, a counterfeit of the true. But the truth is here, and it is a tremendous thing to be in the Body of Christ; and it is a tremendous thing to be in a local representation of that Body of Christ, the Church. It brings you on to executive ground, and I do feel so strongly that what is needed in our day, perhaps more than anything else, is for the Church as represented to function, the Church really to function in local representation. There seems to be such a call for a new functioning of the Church in its local expression along the line of prayer, and prayer that is of an executive character.

In Jerusalem there was the Church, and we mark that again and again they are found in prayer. When Peter is in prison, the Church made prayer unto God. It acted over this matter, and it brought the Lord in on the ground of Psalm 2, and Peter was released. Church function—I submit it to you that this is a great need, that the Lord should have locally represented this Body, which is Himself in expression, Himself in effect, Himself in execution, doing it there in them, through them, by the Holy Spirit. It is that which is called for today in a new way, for meeting this tremendous on-drive of the forces of evil. Who amongst the Lord’s people is unconscious of that on-drive of evil forces? What is going on in the world today? You can see the counterpart of this war in the spiritual realm in almost every detail; intense malignancy, evil, poison, hatred, violence and lies and misrepresentation; that the time is short; and a gathering up of every diabolical bit of ingenuity for destruction. And here within the last days we have had a revival of talk about gas, the idea being that the time is short, the day is drawing in; the enemy will resort to any device, however wicked. That is the idea. But look away from this. You see that in the spiritual realm, you feel it. The enemy is out to crush, to cripple, to annihilate the true children of God if he can, and his intensity was never greater. Why? Because his time is short. “The devil is gone down unto you, having great wrath, knowing that he hath but a short time” (Rev. 12:12). The day is drawing in for him.

How is it going to be met?  I again submit it to you that it is the Church that has to meet this. I confess that I cannot meet this alone; you cannot meet it alone. We have to have co-operation, we have to come on to our ground of identification with Christ and let Christ representatively meet this thing. None other but Christ can meet it, but He can. “All authority hath been given unto Me in heaven and on earth... and I am with you” (Matt. 28:18,20). That cannot be just taken for granted. It seems to me that the Church has to come into a faith position on that ground and act with Christ. I submit that to you for what it is worth, but I feel intensely about it myself, that there is a great call and need for the Lord’s children where they are, as representing the Church, even though they be but two or three in any given locality, really to act in this matter executively in the name of the Lord. “In the name of Jesus”—it is only another way of saying, Representatively we say, representatively we act, it is Christ by us; given always that the Holy Spirit has His place. Well, you see, identification means representation. That oneness with the Lord means that the Lord has a way to express Himself. Well, that opens up all those matters of oneness with the Lord, unhindered oneness, unsullied oneness with the Lord, so that He has a free way of expression.

Identification and Human Relationships

This identification with Christ, and His coming in along that line, if we could see it, if our eyes were open—and I would that our eyes were opened to this—does set up a very real solemn and serious piece of business for the Lord’s people in the matter of human relationships. How can I best pass this on to you and explain what I mean? You know, some of us have been to a number of different countries in this world, among other nations, and one of our greatest difficulties has often been the national character of the people to whom we were ministering. I need not mention different nations and their characteristics, but as you know, different nationalities do differ very much one from another in their constitution, their make-up. They seem to me to represent all the temperaments of humanity. Some are very emotional; others are intensely practical; others mental, in the right sense—I was going to say intellectual, but that is not quite the right word—living always in the realm of the mind. They must have the thing thoroughly threshed out in reason, and they keep yon in that realm. Well, they differ, and our problem has often been this—Oh, we cannot get anywhere here at all, because here is this superficiality, or there is this intellectuality, this intense national disposition! And you might give it up if you accept that and work on that basis alone. But we have come to see that that whole thing has to be relegated to a secondary place and not be allowed to dominate at all. You see, Christ is other than all that, He is different from all that, He is of a peculiar disposition, make-up, constitution. The Holy Spirit is all powerful, and if the Holy Spirit can bring Christ in, introduce Christ into these lives, no matter how they are made, He has introduced that which is going quietly, deeply, surely to work to supersede and transcend all that other. Give Him time and you will find something there that is quite other than the natural disposition, altogether different from the natural make-up. It is something other, and that will hold on its way. That is Christ. Herein is the universality of the Holy Spirit.

Now that is exactly what happened on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem. There were representatives of all nations under heaven; Parthians, Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia, they were all there. That was strategy on the part of the Holy Spirit, and that day He came and so spake through the Apostles as to be understood by them all. That was the thing which amazed them. Here are we, all nations and languages under heaven, and yet as these men speak we hear them, every man in our own tongue wherein we were born, just as though it might be that it was but one language that was being spoken. The universality of Christ, the universality of the Holy Spirit! Just how it was done may not be clear, but there was evidently a miraculous transcending by the Spirit of the curse of confounded speech among men. It sets forth a principle, that Christ simply ignores the differences of nationality and human make-up, and He is Himself one constituent, one basis, Who can come into all and constitute all one in the innermost reality, make all one. That is the meaning of those words which we have cited as one of our passages—“Have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of Him That created him: where there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman: but Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:10,11; ASV). The Holy Spirit can make of all nationalities, temperaments, constitutions, a oneness which is Christ, deeper than what we are in ourselves. We are all different. If we simply met and tried to proceed on a purely and merely human basis, well our differences would be clashing all the time and making immense difficulties. But if we will seek to relegate them to a secondary place and take account of the fact that, being members of Christ’s Body, we all have something in common, and that it is that common something which is to be the basis of our relationship and our going on, which is to be cherished and safeguarded and looked after, then there will be a building up of the Body, and an increase of Christ; and that is the way of representation. Let us deliberately turn our backs on that attitude that says, I cannot get on with so-and-so, I give it up! and say, So-and-so is a child of God, there is something of Christ there and I am going to cling to that. That, beloved, makes for increase, and that too is the way of representation.

I know this, that when there is some real business for the Lord’s children to do, if it is only two of them, husband and wife, or two in a place, some real matter which has to be dealt with corporately together, the enemy works upon all kinds of human conditions to paralyze that. He is out all the time, in advance very often, before we recognize the business that is going to arise, he is out working upon those human elements to get us across one another, to bring strain in relationship, to create phantoms in the mind about one another, and lies. And they seem so true! So-and-so said something and did you notice how they said it, and did you notice how they looked?—and you give an interpretation which has no truth in it! The enemy puts a construction; nothing is too small, too petty for him, and he is trying to get you across one another, a strain in relationships, because there is an issue. Presently you will be required to stand together on some matter, and you cannot; he has seen to that beforehand, by sowing seeds of destruction and discord. These are real things, they are not imaginations; they are the result of experience and observation.

What I am saying is this, that we have to get on to the ground of Christ if Christ is to be expressed, and seek to keep off this ground of what is Jew and Greek, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, and so on. Have that ground where Christ is all, and in all, hold that ground, and then He comes in. Representation of Christ means identification with Christ, and that is the only identification that you and I will ever find here, unless it is identification with the Devil himself. There are only two alternatives, it seems to me.

I do trust you are not confused but are seeing glimmers of light, and that we shall recognize why we are here. We are here on this earth as the Lord’s representative. But it is not that we are here or there and He far away; we are here to be the vessel in which He is, and He is here because we are here. That is to be the implication of our presence. Oh, that this might not just be a theory but more and more a fact, by reason of our living in the Spirit, that our presence may mean to all unseen intelligences, as well as men, Christ is here by His Spirit. The Lord grant it may be so.

Chapter 3 - Representation by the Holy Spirit

Reading: Luke 24:46-49; John 20:21-23; Acts 1:8; ASV.

“And He said unto them, Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer, and rise again from the dead the third day; and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name unto all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. Ye are witnesses of these things. And behold, I send forth the promise of My Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city, until ye be clothed with power from on high.”

“Jesus therefore said to them again, Peace be unto you: as the Father hath sent Me, even so send I you. And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Spirit: whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them; whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.”

“But ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you: and ye shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judæa, and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.”

Continuing our occupation with the matter of the great Divine thought of representation, we shall now be especially concerned with one simple emphasis on the place of the Holy Spirit in this connection.

In our previous meditations we were seeing this Divine thought as revealed in the Scriptures; firstly, God making man in His Own image, after His Own likeness; and then the thought taken up in fulness in Christ, Who is repeatedly declared to be the image of the invisible God; and finally the thought carried over into the Church, the elect, which is to be conformed to the image of His Son, all speaking so clearly of this intention of God to be represented, to be known by representation.

Christ’s Representative Work by the Spirit

Now, the Holy Spirit has a very vital place in this whole matter. When the Lord Jesus officially took up this particular phase or function of His life and work, you know it was then that the Holy Spirit came specifically into evidence in His life and ministry. It is true that He was begotten of the Holy Spirit, it is true that He was very God, but in the official work for which He came into this world, the work of the Son of Man, which is a representative term or title, He stands to represent man, the race. Luke’s Gospel, as you know, is particularly and peculiarly the Gospel for the race, as Matthew is that for the Jew, and Luke’s particular title for Christ is the Son of Man, representative. He takes the place of man as God intended man to be, to bring man in His own Person inclusively to the Divinely appointed destiny. He, the inclusive Man, will advance by all the stages of man’s course to that Divinely appointed end, and eventually, glorified, exalted even at God’s right hand, He will stand as inclusively representative of that new race, that new creation. I say that, as Son of Man, He will advance by all the stages of man’s progress toward that glorious destiny; for He will be there as the first-fruits, the firstborn among many brethren. That very phrase is linked with this thought of representation. He “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15); representative, firstborn. Just as the first-fruits of the harvest were representative of the whole harvest, and the farmer would take the first-fruits and offer them to God in token of the whole harvest which would follow, so Christ was the first-fruits of all creation, and the firstborn among many brethren, and He occupies that position at God’s right hand now representatively, the token of all to follow. But from the very first step, through every stage of that course to the glory, His way is by the Spirit.

The Cross the First Step

In a sense, a very real and true sense, the Jordan was the first step toward the glory. The Cross is always the first step to glory; there will be no glory if there is no Cross, and the measure of glory will be the measure of the Cross. We will leave that and come back to it again presently. The Jordan was the first step toward that glorifying, not of Christ alone and merely in a personal way, but the glorifying of man, the many sons to be brought to glory by Him, the whole harvest to be brought to glory by Him, the many brethren who come by Him. I say, in a very real sense the Jordan was the first step toward that glory, and in the Jordan, as we have already pointed out, the governing idea is representation. A race which cannot be glorified must be put out of the way, to make room for a race which can be glorified. A mankind which can never come to glory must be put away from occupying the ground of a man that can come to glory. So, representatively in the Jordan in His baptism, His death and burial in type, He takes the place of a race, a mankind, which can never be glorified, and it is got out of the way in Him representatively.

In the reality of the Cross, of which the Jordan was the type, we have that blessed accomplishment. All this that can never be glorified, never come to glory in us, has been put away. Are you worried, obsessed and troubled with all that about you which can never be glorified? Well, if you have accepted Christ as your representative, and have stood right into His representative work for you, everything that will hinder your coming to glory has been dismissed, every bit of it; and God is working on that ground with us. The last phase of that work will have to do with our bodies of death; they shall be changed, and made like unto the body of His glory. We are coming in every part of our redeemed being to glory, because what cannot be glorified has been representatively got out of the way. That is, of course, the ground for our faith.

In His coming up out of the Jordan, type of His coming up from the grave, He occupies the representative position of a man who can be glorified, a mankind that can be glorified, a race that can come to glory, and at a certain point in His life these two things were brought together in one hour. In the Mount of Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah spoke with Him of the death, or exodus, which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem, and in that same hour He was glorified. The death and the glory came together in one hour in Him. That is how it can be with Him because He so perfectly represents God’s thought. It is representation.

But then this new creation, this new man capable of coming to glory, of being glorified, this new race as gathered up into Him as its Head, as its first-fruits, as its first-born, can never come to glory, only as from that very point of standing on the new creation ground, resurrection ground. The Holy Spirit takes charge; and so, coming up out of the water, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit as in the semblance of a dove came and rested upon Him. That is the first thing. The Holy Spirit takes charge, so to speak, of this whole matter of bringing to glory, of perfecting this new creation for glory. It is the Holy Spirit’s work from beginning to end.

What was true in the case of the Lord Jesus as the Head has to be true in the case of the whole Body, and Pentecost must be the counterpart of the resurrection side of Jordan, where the Body, brought on to resurrection ground, is taken charge of by the Holy Spirit, to be brought right through all the course and stages of perfecting unto glory. There is a little phrase in Peter’s writings about “the Spirit of glory resting upon you” (1 Pet. 4:14).

So our emphasis is there, that this is the object of the Holy Spirit, this is the necessity for the Holy Spirit; for nothing is possible of all this Divine thought apart from the Holy Spirit.

The Father’s Attestation of the Son

But there is a second part, another side or aspect of this. The Spirit certainly comes, the anointing takes place, but upon the anointing, the Divine voice is heard from heaven saying “This is My beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:4). With the anointing there comes the attestation. God is calling attention to this One, is indicating this One, is pointing out this One, and in effect He is saying, This is My representative! You know that on the Mount of Transfiguration, when Peter in his impulsiveness would be found dictating, advising, suggesting what should be done, the voice, that same voice, came again: “This is My beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased; hear ye Him;” referring everything to Him for government, for direction: for dictating. “Hear ye Him.” It is the voice of attestation from heaven at Jordan and on the Mount, singling Him out as God’s representative. It is representation again.

Now those two things go together. They are only two aspects of one thing, because the anointing means that God Himself has committed Himself to this One. That is the meaning of the anointing. As we were saying in our previous meditation, where the anointing is you have to meet and deal with God. “He reproved kings for their sakes, saying, Touch not Mine anointed ones, and do My prophets no harm” (1 Chron. 16:21,22; ASV). It is to meet God if we do touch the anointing or that upon which the anointing rests, or those who are anointed. God has committed Himself in that anointing. Therefore if God is there committed, involved, wrapped up with that, that is God’s representative, and that is as God functioning there. The Holy Spirit has constituted that vessel of representation by His coming and His presence; God is present. That means that all the rights of Divine sovereignty have been taken up by the Holy Spirit and brought into the midst of that which is anointed, that which is indwelt by the Spirit. All the rights of Divine sovereignty are in the Holy Spirit, and if He is present, He is present in all the rights of Divine sovereignty.

I do want you to be able to grasp this, because I feel it is tremendously important for us as members of this Body of Christ, indwelt by the Holy Spirit. We just very faintly touched upon this matter yesterday, and I feel there is something more to be said about it.

The Sovereignty of the Holy Spirit

When this counterpart of Jordan, death and resurrection and the open heaven and the descent of the Spirit and the anointing, when the counterpart of that took place on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came in terms of Divine sovereignty to be present, and it is a thing which you and I have to recognize, to which we have to bow the knee absolutely. It may be that we have not recognized sufficiently that receiving the Holy Spirit of anointing means that the sovereignty in our lives is taken right out of our hands. Have you asked for the Holy Spirit? Have you prayed to be filled with the Spirit? Have you recognized the tremendous importance of the Holy Spirit indwelling? If you have not, then, of course, that will account for all kinds of weaknesses, failures, slowness of growth, powerlessness in service, ineffectiveness in life, and a host of other things. But if you have seen the tremendous importance of the Holy Spirit’s presence in power, in fulness in the life—and I do trust that you have—then, having sought the Spirit, you have consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally, invited that the whole sovereignty of your life shall be taken out of your own hands, and that it should be entirely transferred to another; and that involves you in far more than you have any idea of. This is the point we were trying to make yesterday.

On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came in terms of sovereignty, and took hold. He took right hold in terms of sovereignty and, in doing so, He made men say things the import of which they accepted within the compass of their own understanding, it is true. Yes, they were not opposed to those things which they were saying, so far as they understood them, but the things which they were saying, while they agreed with them, only went to the range of their appreciation, their understanding of them. But the Holy Spirit meant infinitely more than that, and before long these very men who agreed up to the point of their understanding and appreciation of the things they were saying, were confronted with the fact that the things they said committed them to a great deal more than they had understood. And that is the practical issue of the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit.

Peter quite agreed, according to his understanding, the range of his appreciation, with what the Lord had said about “unto the uttermost part of the earth.” He quite agreed with what he was saying... “to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call” (Acts 2:39). But it will not be many days before Peter will stumble right up against it, the very thing he himself has said, and find it meant far more than he intended it to mean, when it comes to Caesarea and a Gentile house. “All that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call!” Peter says, Not so, Lord; and there is a battle. But you notice that the Holy Spirit, when He gets Peter through, comes right down on that situation in a mighty way. It is a matter of which the Holy Spirit has charge, and the verdict, the conclusion of the whole matter is Peter’s report at Jerusalem—“Who was I, that I could withstand God?” “If God gave unto them the like gift as He did also unto us... who was I, that I could withstand God?” (Acts 11:17). There is a man having to go down before the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit. He has been committed to that from the beginning.

Now, what do we want to get at in this matter? It is this: if you and I really do come to the place where the Holy Spirit as Lord becomes resident in us, we are confronted with this great law of the absolute sovereignty of the Holy Spirit to do as He likes with us and to take us completely beyond our own intentions, right beyond our own prejudices, our own traditions, all our past history, take us beyond our present mental range of what we now conceive to be the right and the wrong. We have all got a fixed mental horizon today. At this moment we would all put a certain limit and bound and hedge to what we consider is right and wrong, what we ought to do and what we ought not to do. We move within our own mental interpretation of things, and that is our range. Are we going to bind the Holy Spirit to that? If so, we will never go on to God’s ultimate purpose and end. What we shall find is that the Holy Spirit will demand from time to time that we get rid of our hedges, and let Him lead us sheer out of our own fixed bounds of acceptance and interpretation. He will demand that, that is His sovereign right, and our progress towards God’s final end, and, mark you, the measure in which we can truly be representative for God here, depends entirely upon that capacity for adjustment to a new revelation or indication by the Holy Spirit, our capacity, our amenability to adjustment to what the Spirit will show us.

It seems to me that very often the Lord hedges our lives up to an emergency, a crisis, a disputed position, in order to bring about something new. The fact is, of course, we will not move into anything more of the Lord unless we are compelled to. That is how it works out, and however good and however great and however precious may have been the Lord’s dealings with us, showings to us, impartations to us, the best that He has ever given to us will have to be brought to the place where it no longer meets our fullest need, in order that we should move on to something more. That is the way of progress. We have had, perhaps, wonderful revelations, wonderful dealings of the Lord with us; things have happened in our lives which have eclipsed all that ever preceded them, and at the time we have felt that we have reached the fulness. We have not; there is something beyond this. Just at the time this is as far as it is possible to go, but our experience and our history is that those things which at the time and for a time were so great, so wonderful, so all-absorbing, have come to be as though they were not, with a growing sense of new need, new demand, and another crisis has arisen in which we have had to know something more than has ever been. And the Lord forces situations like that. It is the way of enlargement, it is the way of growth. It seems to me to be His only practical way of keeping us going on. But it is the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit bringing about those crises and making these demands; and I suppose that will be our experience right to the end. If we really are under the government of the Holy Spirit, we will never have reached finality here, there is still more beyond; but to reach it we have to lose contentment with what we have. One of the tragic features of Christianity is the measure of contentedness with that evangelical Christianity. The great need today is a sense of need everywhere, amongst Christians and in the world, a desperate sense of need. The Church will never grow until it grows by this intense sense of need of something more. Men will never come to Christ until they have a real sense of need.

The New Testament is just full of this work of the Holy Spirit acting sovereignly to precipitate situations in which a new knowing of the Lord becomes indispensable to life, to very existence, and when that is brought about the way is open for the Lord to reveal Himself, and to come in in some new way; and that is the enlargement of representation. The Holy Spirit, in His sovereignty, holds us to His step by step method; He never acts mechanically, He acts only in life. So you see, in the Book of the Acts, the Acts of the Holy Spirit, He always kept the Lord’s servants at very short commons in the matter of what He was going to do. He never put the sovereignty into their hands, He always retained it in His own hands. In the Book of the Acts you cannot have a missionary programme; there is no programme there. Men, of course, now have resolved the New Testament into a missionary programme, though in fact it was not one. Would to God we could get back behind programmes, back to the point where the sovereignty is in the hands of the Holy Spirit entirely.

The Holy Spirit Directing Service

That is seen in the choice and sending out of the representatives of Christ. You see it in Antioch; Paul and Barnabas are there, and for a whole year men with whom a great destiny is bound up by foreordination must be there under God’s hand, and await God’s time. Especially was this the case with Paul, known of God from all eternity as the man for a tremendous mission. But even so, and although apprised by the Lord from heaven of his mission right from the beginning—“To this end have I appeared unto thee, to appoint thee a minister and a witness” (Acts 26:16)—he cannot take the sovereignty of his missionary calling into his own hands and work it out. He must get into that company at Antioch, that representation of the Body, and wait for the Holy Spirit. He waits twelve months there at Antioch, perhaps a little more, and then the Holy Spirit said, “Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them” (Acts 13:2). The Holy Spirit is holding this matter of their life-work in His hands as sovereign. They cannot decide when to take it up, even though they may know in their hearts quite definitely what their life-work is.

Then, as they go, they are not allowed to sit down and draw up a line of action, a scheme, a plan, a timetable. They go under the sovereignty of the Spirit. They reach a certain point and Paul thinks one day of Ephesus, and his natural mind consecrated to the Lord gets to work. Ephesus is a great city, a very influential city. If only he can get to Ephesus and get the Church planted there, get things going there, it will be a tremendous thing! Yes, I think for the Lord’s sake, we ought to go to Ephesus! But they were not suffered of the Holy Spirit to preach the Word in Asia. Well, Bithynia is a good place, a very important place, and it presents a great door of opportunity: we had better go to Bithynia! No, the Holy Spirit suffered them not to go to Bithynia; and while they tarried, not suffered of the Holy Spirit to preach the Word in Asia or Bithynia, a vision appeared to Paul in the night, a man of Macedonia, and Europe is indicated first. Ephesus and Bithynia will come in the order of the Spirit, in the Spirit’s sovereign time, and the sovereign time of the Spirit is not yet in that direction. The sovereign time of the Spirit is just now in this other direction, Europe, Philippi (Acts 16:6–10).

Fruitfulness Vitally Related to the Spirit’s Sovereignty

Now all this is only taking little fragments out to indicate and emphasize this, that the Holy Spirit coming into a vessel comes in terms of absolute Divine sovereignty to take the rule of our lives out of our hands, and that is why the Holy Spirit can never come and do His work until you have been to Jordan. Until the Cross is a fact, an accomplished fact, there can be no sovereign government of the Holy Spirit carrying all the Divine programme; for the Cross means the deposing, not only of the sinful body of the flesh, but of the natural man. Paul is as consecrated to God, to Christ, as ever a man has ever been on this earth, with one exception, and yet even Paul with his utter consecration to the Lord cannot assume this missionary programme and follow it out himself. He has to be a bondslave of Jesus Christ, he has to be under the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit, he has to recognize when the Spirit suffers not. There would have been, and there would be today, a very great deal more fruitfulness, if the Church were governed in this same way. What has happened is that Mark 16:15— “Go ye into all the world”—has become a missionary programme that anybody may adopt at will. All you have to do is to get saved, and adopt that, and go into all the world, and preach the Gospel. Well, God forbid that I should disparage anything in the way of preaching the Gospel: that is not the point. But what about the effect of it all comparatively after two thousand years? Half the world is not touched yet after two thousand years.  Look at the difference between the few Apostolic years, with the range then covered and the impact registered, and all the centuries which have followed.

Is not that an argument for this one thing, that you cannot adopt the missionary manifesto and commission and go and work it out yourself; that this is a Holy Spirit business; and while what I am saying may seem to be the negative side, I want it to be the positive. When the Holy Spirit gets hold of the situation, He will do it, but He has to be sovereign.

The Cross therefore clears the way for the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit, and the Cross means that even consecrated natural minds have to have something more than their own consecration as the governing factor. So many say or think, If only I am consecrated to the Lord, then I ought to do anything that comes into my head that I think would serve the Lord! Oh no, that may be zeal, but not according to knowledge; and that may be waste.

The Sovereignty of the Holy Spirit in Relation to His Perfect Knowledge

Now let us not go round the thing any more, but just strike the heart of it. It is this: the Holy Spirit demands absolute sovereign rights in our life, and to take the sovereignty right out of our own hands; and that, of course, progressively. However much we may know, we do not know all that is in the mind of the Spirit, for the Holy Spirit never grows. The Holy Spirit of God never has grown, He never does grow, His mind does not enlarge. You never think of the mind of God enlarging, you never think of God growing. I say that reverently. The Holy Spirit never gets any new knowledge. From the very beginning, the Holy Spirit has all the knowledge that can ever be had, His knowledge is perfect.

That is the significance of that wonderful word in the book of the Revelation, where everything is consummated and brought to its full end: “Saith He that hath the seven Spirits of God” (Rev. 3:1). It is a figurative or symbolic term which means, He that hath perfect knowledge, the perfection of spiritual knowledge. He has that from the beginning, and I say again, the Holy Spirit has never acquired one fragment of new knowledge as He has gone on; He has had it all from the beginning. When He came He had as complete a knowledge of things as ever He will have. The Spirit’s knowledge is absolutely final, but for ourselves what we do not know? At most we know but a mere fragment of what the Holy Spirit knows and means. That means that we are going to get a great deal more knowledge as we go on. We can only get that increase of knowledge as we are prepared to learn things all over again, all anew. You see what I mean. There is no hope whatever unless the Holy Spirit can in sovereignty just show us that we know nothing, and that we have everything to learn, and that His knowledge is infinite and will always be miles ahead of us, and therefore adjustment on our part will be necessary again and again and again. Have you come to a fixed position about truth, about light, about the ways of God, about the mind of the Lord, about what you ought to do and ought not to do, and what you are never going to do? Have you come to a fixed place? If so, you have shut the door on the Holy Spirit. No one who believes in the Holy Spirit could ever possibly say, I shall never do that! Peter said that: Nothing common or unclean has ever passed my lips, and never will! That was his position, but the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit showed that everything of God’s purpose in his apostleship hung upon whether he abandoned that closed position: and he could quote Scripture for his position, too! It does not matter. One of the remarkable things about the New Testament is the unlooked for interpretations it gives to Old Testament Scriptures. No wonder the Jews and the Judaizers who dogged Paul everwhere would say, This man reads a lot into the Old Testament that is not there, this man is putting constructions upon the Old Testament that it will not bear, he has taken out of the Old Testament something that is not there! Look at what Paul says about Old Testament things. I cannot see it means that in the Old Testament. It does look as if he is using the Old Testament and putting a construction on it that was not meant in the Old Testament. It is an extraordinary thing how in the New Testament the Old is given a meaning you could never find without the New Testament. The Holy Spirit knows what He means, and He means a great deal more than ever men have yet seen. The very Scripture you quote may mean more than ever you intended it to mean. I think this is enough to show you how necessary it is for us to be in a position where we are really open to the Lord, and really under the Holy Spirit‘s government, ready to let go our most cherished position, if the Holy Spirit indicates that is the way. To say that, is not to say we are to be unstable and carried about by every wind of doctrine and sleight of men, or that we are just going to follow anything that comes along.

I do not think the Holy Spirit ever denies Himself. What the Holy Spirit has said at one time, He is not going to contradict at another. But what may seem contradiction may be in this form, namely, that the Holy Spirit, transcends what He has already said. Just as a miracle is not necessarily a violation of natural law, but a transcending of natural law, so the Holy Spirit will not contradict or violate anything He has said before, but He will transcend it and, when He does transcend, it may look like a contradiction. It may be you will be able to say, I am quite sure the Lord led me at a certain time and in a certain direction, but He has led me right away from that now! That is not necessarily a contradiction, that is a transcending, a moving on. At that time you could not have gone the further step, He could only get you that far then. But in His own mind that was only a step which was to lead to another, and yet another, and you leave a lot behind in such a process. But oh, the point is that the Holy Spirit shall be able to do what He is after.

Even in the case of the Lord Jesus, it was like that. His was a sinless nature and a sinless natural mind, but He would not use it apart from the Father, and if One with a sinless natural mind will not use it independently, what about us? How much more necessary it is for the Holy Spirit to be sovereign in our case. Everything of power lies in that direction. “Ye shall receive power, the Holy Spirit coming upon you” (Acts 1:8).

The Menace of the Natural Mind

I think we can leave it with this one simple emphasis now, namely, this need for the Holy Spirit to be sovereign. He must. There are good people, godly people, who do not see, and who will not agree, and the problem arises: Oh, they are godly, they are consecrated, they have lived for God for many years, and yet they are so opposed to certain things which seem to be so evidently the mind of the Spirit; and they would deny that. What is the explanation? Well, there may be several explanations, but I suggest that this is one possible explanation in a great many cases, namely, that the natural mind has never known the Cross; yes, the consecrated natural mind. I am not talking about the wicked natural mind. The consecrated natural mind has never known the Cross. Our own mind is still our mind, it is our judgment, even after we are saved. What we have said about Paul and Ephesus and Bithynia, and other cases, is true of all the most consecrated people. They still have a mind which they can follow which is not the mind of the Spirit. The mind of the Spirit is acting in another way from their mind. They would go this way for the Lord. Oh, so devoted to the Lord, it is all in the Lord’s interests; they would go that way, but the Spirit is taking another course. Upon what does the whole issue rest at such a time? Upon whether the Cross has been planted sufficiently deeply in that life as to take the sovereignty of mind out of its hands, so that the mind of the Spirit can be sovereign. That is a very important thing. Are you quite sure that the sovereignty of mind has been taken out of your hands into the hands of the Holy Spirit, and that it is the sovereign mind of the Holy Spirit that is governing, and that it is not merely the case that you are sure of yourself, quite fixed and final in your own conviction about a thing, and that your own strength of mind and will, your reason, back of it all has fixed you there? You may be a most devoted child of God, and yet it can be like that with you. It is a terrible possibility for the Spirit not to be sovereign in a most devoted child of God, for their own minds still to be sovereign. There is no way through there; that is deadlock, that is a closed door. If we are going to be here in that growing representation of the Lord, we have to be on the same basis as the Lord was on. That is to say, from the first to the last it is the Spirit Who is to be sovereign, and that by the power of the Cross.

Chapter 4 - Representation the Essence of Service

[Note: At the end of chapter 3 in the AWAT magazine were the words "To be continued" but no more chapters were published. However, in the manuscripts that were left behind these remaining chapters were found and are included here as chapters 4-6.]

"Others said, These are not the sayings of one possessed with a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind? And it was the feast of the dedication at Jerusalem" (John 10:21-22).

"But ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you: and ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth. And when he had said these things, as they were looking, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight." (Acts 1:8-9).

We have been led to be occupied with the Divine thought of representation: the Lord present and known by means of representation. We have seen that that Divine thought is gathered up in fulness in the Lord Jesus. All Old Testament means of representing God, whether the means was personal in the case of prophets and kings and priests, or along the line of witnesses from Abel onward, or whether it was in the types, symbols, signs; everything pointed on to and was gathered up into Christ as the consummate representative of God. Then we have been seeing how that Divine thought on the ascension of Christ has been transferred in and by the Holy Spirit to the Church and its members as a Body, the very meaning of which is representation, and that the Church with all its members here, scattered as they may be over all the earth, just comes into that whole spiritual succession to perpetuate that divine thought of being here to represent the Lord. We have said a lot about that along quite a number of different lines, or dealing with a number of its aspects and features.

Now we are going to be occupied with one other specific feature of this matter of representation for God, and that is representation as being the very heart and essence of service. In our previous meditation, we were seeing that the whole matter of representation was taken up by the Holy Spirit, and that this divine thought, from start to finish, every step and stage, is in the hands of the Holy Spirit. What we have to say about service immediately links up with that and issues from that. There are many ideas about Christian service, the service of God, the work of God. It may be well if we just for a moment sought to really adjust ourselves to the essential nature of service, to put away all our notions on this matter and really get to the heart of the matter.

What is the very heart and essence of the Lord’s service, the work of the Lord? The answer is found in this word — representation. That may include many things, it may cover a lot of ground, but it may be a very simple matter indeed without a great many things. It means simply this, our being on this earth implying the Lord, the very fact that we are here carrying with it the implication of Christ. It conveys quite positively the fact that the Lord Jesus has not departed from this world, has not left this earth, but while in glory is also here quite definitely and positively. It may often be quite impossible to say much about it. Now, do not make that a cover for silence. Sometimes it is impossible to say very much, sometimes it is impossible to do very much, to engage in the various forms of activity in what is called the Lord’s service. There may be very severe limitations and straitness may be on all sides. It does not necessarily affect the matter of the Lord’s service at all; that is not the point. In the first instance, the service of the Lord is not the amount said nor the number of activities engaged in. The Lord’s service is a matter of being, in the first instance. It is this tremendous implication carried effectively and positively in a vessel, in a witness, in a being, the implication that God is here, the Lord is here, the Lord is in His world, the Lord is in the midst, the Lord is available, the Lord is accessible, the Lord is near, the Lord is real, the Lord is living, the Lord is willing, is ready, the Lord is at hand — all that as a many-sided implication of our being on the earth. That is the service of the Lord. That is the very heart and essence of service.

The Holy Spirit the Spirit of Service

Now we have to break that up and seek to grasp what that means. We have said that the Holy Spirit came to constitute the church on the very basis of Christ’s being here. Just as at Jordan He came upon the Lord Jesus and from that moment constituted Him in a more definite and public way the representative of God, so He came at Pentecost to constitute the body of Christ on that same basis as the continuation of that representation. The Holy Spirit came to constitute a representation.

In this meditation we come back to this, that the Holy Spirit is most decidedly and positively the Spirit of service. This may be a very simple beginning, but it may do us good to just be reminded of this. It has always been the case that when the Holy Spirit has really gained His place in a life, that life has very quickly become governed and mastered by the Spirit of service, and I feel that something must be wrong if ever a Christian life loses the Spirit of service. If ever you or I lose that urge to the service of the Lord, something has gone wrong. I am not speaking about forms of service. I am speaking about the spirit of service.

So we find that, right at the beginning, the Holy Spirit created this urge to serve the Lord, became within the mighty energy to service. A tremendous concern was planted in the heart of those who received the Spirit, about the Lord being known by others, about the Lord being brought to others, the Lord getting His place in others and in all the earth — a real concern about it. That is a mark of the Holy Spirit. There is something wrong if that is not found in us, a real concern that Christ should get His place and be brought into His place in the people of this world. Let us ask our hearts quite honestly now — is that true in our case?

We do not know exactly why the apostle Paul when he reached Ephesus and found certain disciples there, immediately put a very pointed question to them — "Did ye receive the Holy Spirit when ye believed?" (Acts 19:2). We do not know exactly why he put that question. It might be any one of those things which betray the absence of the Spirit. Paul simply came to the conclusion that these people did not bear any marks of their having received the Spirit; there is this lacking or that. But we can take the question and if it is true that you or I are devoid of a real concern to serve the Lord, that question has a right to be asked. Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed, or have you in some way swamped the Holy Spirit with other things in your life and He is unable to function normally? His normal functioning will be to put deep down as the mightiest thing in our hearts a real concern that the Lord Jesus shall come into His place in other lives in ever widening circles. The Holy Spirit is, as a fact, the Spirit of service, and we may ask ourselves truly and rightly the question, if we are not actuated by that Spirit of service. The major question arises, What has happened to the Holy Spirit where we are concerned? Let us face the fact. We do not know what is going to happen in coming days. It may be that the Lord is going to need a new force of representatives, for there is a growing demand, there is no doubt about it.

Whether it be that some are going to be sent out specifically in this capacity or not, it does not alter this fact, that each one of us, having received the Spirit, should bear this mark of the Spirit: a deep and undying urge to serve the Lord in this sense, that He should be brought into His place over as wide an area as possible, in as many lives as possible. The Spirit of service is the Holy Spirit. Let us remember that. Now, if there is need, get down to exercise before the Lord about that. Everything will take its rise from that. It may be there is not an adequate concern, no real passion to serve the Lord. Now will you honestly answer the Lord in your own heart on this matter? Ask yourself the question, Have I, above all concerns and interests in life, a desire to serve the Lord? It is not, how am I going to serve the Lord? Suspend that, put it back on the Lord. It is not whether I am going to give up what I am doing now and be a minister or a missionary. I am not talking about that. I am talking about the spirit of service, and the thing is, am I above everything else in life concerned for the Lord’s service, to serve the Lord? It may be that I shall serve along this line, in this capacity or in that; it does not matter. The thing is that I serve. Above all other things that I do and through all other things that I do, however much I may do, that it is the Lord’s service that is governing me, and is dominating. It is to serve the Lord, that my life shall really serve the Lord. I am not going to serve this world, I am not going to serve myself, my own ambitions or reputation. It is the Lord and His service. Suffer that appeal to you, but the Lord knows why He gives this emphasis.

I simply put it back here, that it is as clear as daylight when you come to the New Testament and look at the fact of the Holy Spirit’s coming, that He produces a great concern that the Lord Jesus should be served. No one can get away from that.

The Nature of Service

That being the truth, the foundation of service, that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of service, and that those who have the Holy Spirit are governed by a spirit of service and that you cannot really be a Spirit-filled life without a real concern for the Lord’s service, that being so, we can go on to see the nature of service. What does the Holy Spirit do to make for service? This, perhaps, is where some adjustment is needed. I am quite sure in a general way in evangelical Christianity, adjustments are needed on this matter. In the first place the Holy Spirit does not make official workers, that is, He does not make missionaries officially so, He does not make ministers officially so, He does not make any officers as such in the first place. We think of going into the Lord’s work and we at once get certain forms and modes of service. We think of a missionary, that is, a class, a particular kind of person; a minister, that is a particular kind of person too. He is marked out from everybody else in various ways. You can tell he is a minister, he calls himself a minister, he is different. That is something official; or in many other forms of Christian work officially, we think of the Lord’s service, and the Holy Spirit does not begin there at all.

What the Holy Spirit does is to make people. He constitutes representatives, He deals with individuals. He does not give them, in the first place, something to say, He does something in them out of which all their saying comes. He does not tell them what to do; He so works in them that they go and do it, it comes out, it is spontaneous as the result of something done in them. If this were not true, and where this is not true, you get all sorts of false and artificial positions. Quite a lot of young men and women are ready to throw up business and go out and be a missionary. There is something romantic about it. They could serve the Lord so much better if you put them down in the heart of Timbuktu. But here they are in the heart of a tremendous crying need, and they are not serving the Lord at all. That is false and artificial. The Holy Spirit does not do that. The Holy Spirit makes witnesses or representatives — the same thing, and if you are not a representative where you are, do not think that by changing to some foreign land where they are dark heathen that you are going to be a representative there. It does not work that way, not under the Holy Spirit’s regime.

We are constituted representatives and when we are representatives, then the Holy Spirit disposes of us and puts us here or there, where He will. In His sovereignty He appoints to the sphere, but He does not appoint officials, He appoints people. A mere official may cut no ice at all, and the Lord knows that Gehazi may be the official servant of the prophet and he may get hold of the prophet’s rod and go in his official capacity with the insignia of office into the death chamber where that boy lies and he may manipulate the insignia of office and put it this way and that, but nothing happens. The woman saw through Gehazi and said, I am not going with you, I am going to stay with the prophet! When the prophet came as the man anointed of God, he spread himself upon the lad, identified himself with the lad in a vital way, and he was literally dragged back from death into life. That is not official, that is vital, that is a person (2 Kings 4:17-37). "Why could not we cast him out?" said the disciples after that ignominious failure at the foot of the Mount of Transfiguration (Matt. 17:19). Well, we perhaps ought not to give an answer to that other than the Lord gave, but perhaps they had tried officially. We are disciples of Christ! They had evidently made an attempt at casting out the demon. The Lord said, in effect, This thing is done vitally not officially, you cannot do this by merely bearing the name of a disciple, you have to be a divine representation! It needs no reiteration and overemphasis.

These are principles of service. The Lord makes people, makes men and women, the Holy Spirit does that. He does not make officials. The service of the Lord is fundamentally personal and springs out of what the Lord has done in us, and it amounts to Christ coming into a situation by us. I am sure none of us would covet anything more than that, that our very presence might mean in influence and effect the presence of Christ, but that is it; that is the service of the Lord that He comes in by us.

All sorts of perils and dangers are associated with that, and you know how foolish people are, that immediately the Lord does something through a channel, by means of an instrument, people begin to make something of that person at once. ‘Oh, let us call so-and-so, if only he will come, if only she will come’, and they begin to make something of the vessel, and the next time it does not happen. It is the Lord and He is very jealous and you can never take anything for granted. You have got to recognize all the time it is the Lord, but this is the service of the Lord. That is why it is so necessary for one who really brings Christ into a situation, to be a thoroughly crucified person who will never take any glory to themselves, who will never allow people to make of them experts in spiritual matters, but it is the Lord. If it were not for the Lord, nothing is possible. It is only a crucified man or woman who can serve the Lord really because service is bringing the Lord in. It is all the Lord.

There is a lot of history behind what I have just said. If I am not mistaken, that is the explanation of all Paul’s suffering. If ever a man brought the Lord Jesus into a situation, Paul did. If ever a man’s presence meant the presence of the Lord, his presence meant that. But there is nothing in the natural realm where Paul was concerned which gives him anything whatever to trade upon. If we are not mistaken, the right reading of Paul’s life is this, that Paul himself was more often than not unconscious of any demonstration of God’s presence. If you had asked him, he would often have had to say, "No, all I am conscious of is extreme weakness, dependence, need, helplessness; I am not always aware of the mighty power of God resting upon me, I am not always aware of being lifted completely above my infirmities, weaknesses, I am conscious of them all the time; if anything is happening, it is happening in spite of all sorts of things which cripple and limit and seek to defeat and destroy me; the Lord is doing it in spite of these things!" I believe that was the true history of Paul. The Lord kept him there.

It is the mystery of Christ. See the Lord Jesus here in the days of His flesh. Look at Him purely along a human line. What do you see? Well, men do not see anything but a man, perhaps a very ordinary man at that. Evidently there is nothing about Him as a man which overpowered them, which made them feel: Here we have a superman! No, nothing like that. Probably they saw weakness. "His face was so marred more than any man’s" (Isa. 52:14). They saw tiredness. There was no difference between Him and us regarding His humanity, but there is something in spite of that, something that you cannot account for. It is not natural at all, it cannot be accounted for along any other line. There is something else here. That is the mystery of Christ. It is God here present in this weakness.

And the principle is carried over to His servants and to His Church. If you look for any explanation at all along human lines you will not find it. You will find a great deal which seems to provide a background for wondering whether anything more is going to be possible, and the mystery of Christ is this, that it goes on and it comes again and again, but it does not get rid of all these human weaknesses and limitations. It goes on in spite of them.

I believe we have got to come to some acceptance on this point. It has got to be something we settle before the Lord. That amounts to this, that naturally we might die, a hundred times, a thousand times; from every natural standpoint, you might take a very short lease of life, but we will live to seventy, eighty, ninety years of age — until God says, it is finished! I think we have got to come to a settled place about this matter, that we are not going to finish up, if we are here representing the Lord, until the Lord says, "Finished!" though all the best human opinion, all scientific wisdom and understanding, might say, "No!" I believe this is something we have got to settle before God. Some of us again and again have felt that the end has come, but it has not been. It is a coming up again and again, and you cannot account for it. It is not hysteria at all, it is God, the mystery of Christ. Shall we not settle back on that and say, Yes, it will be, until the Lord says, "Finished" it is not going to be finished. You have your bad times and feel the Lord has done with you or that you are finished. Do not accept anything until the Lord says so, and you know when the Lord says so. That by the way.

The point is that it is the Lord. It is not what we are, what we do, at all; it is the Lord coming into evidence. That is the service of the Lord. The Lord is coming in by us in this representative way, and it is all Himself. That is the Holy Spirit’s method, that is the Holy Spirit’s way of doing things. That is the service of the Lord. Oh, it is not our going out to preach this or that or another doctrine or all the doctrines of Christ. It is that we are where we are in the will of God as being there for Christ, implying Christ, signifying Christ, and if that is true, hell will be provoked, for hell is ever-determined that Christ is not going to have His place.

What we are saying is that it is a matter, not of office, but qualification, and qualification is spiritual. Spiritual qualification is that, by the anointing of the Spirit, Christ is brought in by us and this is representation.

We can apply that. Of course, it begins with the individual. It has got to be true in the case of every one of us individually just where we are. That has got to be the meaning of our lives. We call ourselves ‘Christians’. Well, Christ — what is that? The very word is ‘The Anointed’. All the anointing in the Old Testament points to Him and is gathered up in Him, the Christ. It points to the Christ, the Christos, the Anointed One. Christ; then the anointed ones, and we have seen that the anointing means God committed, God there. That is what a Christian is. What is a Christian? — an anointed one, and anointing means God by His Spirit is there. So wherever we are in the will of God, it is to be God by His Spirit there, and it has got to be individually so, and that is the service of the Lord foundationally.

Universal Representation in One Body

But of course the Holy Spirit did not stop there. This divine thought is a collective thought, a corporate thought. It must affect and involve the individual, but ultimately it works out to universal representation in one Body, the Church, God represented in the Church, and then in the New Testament the one universal Church, the Body of Christ, locally represented. It is not just a matter of collecting a number of people together in any given place, people who have accepted certain teaching and therefore have a common creed and they meet together. The Holy Spirit is doing something deeper than that. It is not firstly external, from the outside, objective. What the Holy Spirit is doing is bringing into being in each locality a corporate representation of Christ, that that company there is Christ corporately present. "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I" (Matt. 18:20); it is Christ present. That is the meaning, that is the purpose, of a local company of the Lord’s people, and there is something, as we have so often said, about the corporate expression of Christ which is of peculiar value, meaning and power.

I know some of you will find your heartbreaking problem in that very realm. "I am alone where I am!" Well, you are not. In the first place, you must remember and maintain the fact that you are a member of a great Body, and in the realm of things spiritual there is no separateness. I wish we could grasp this which seems such an abstract thing, but, I feel, a thing of tremendous importance and reality. There is a great deal of pressure today being felt by spiritual children of God, terrific conflict, and when you look around for the explanation, you cannot find it. Some of us where we are there in the North, have felt terrific pressure, conflict, strain, as though the enemy was out for our utter destruction, and we look immediately around us to see what the explanation is and we cannot find it. We cannot really give an answer to the question as to what it means from what is immediately around us. It is not that something tremendous is happening round us, so great that the enemy is out to kill us for it. What is the explanation? I submit it to you, not without New Testament support for it, that "if one member suffer, all the members suffer" (1 Cor. 12:26), and are there not many members of the Body over the earth who are suffering immensely in these days? And if this Body is a Body that is bound together by a great spiritual nerve system, if the Body is a true metaphor or representative thought for the Church, it is not just an organization, not just a building of cold stones without life, but a Body which is shot through and through from the uttermost extremities by the keenest nervous system, so that you cannot touch a needle point anywhere without affecting the whole Body. That is how it is with our physical body, and if that is transferred to the Body of Christ, the Holy Spirit Himself being the nerve system binding the Body together, may it not be that those members who are suffering so much are registering their suffering in other members of the Body who are sensitive, who are alive. The more alive we are to the Holy Spirit, the more we shall suffer with other members of the Body. The Holy Spirit means to draw us out to stand with them and for them, and not knowing, not having information as to what is happening, nevertheless, interpreting this as the meaning. There is a great need for our standing strongly, not only for our own life, but for the life of many others. There is no doubt about it, the Holy Spirit is making for corporate representation of Christ, and the devil is out to scatter saints, and, scattering them, break them down and destroy them, and the Holy Ghost is reacting to that because this corporate representation means a very great deal indeed.

The Power of the Holy Spirit

I am going to close on this note. "Ye shall receive power, the Holy Spirit coming upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto Me... ye shall be My representatives, in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth." Ye shall receive power... the Holy Spirit coming upon you... and my last note is just this: that for all this service of the Lord, this representation, this bringing in of the Lord, this standing in our place against the forces of evil which are bent on ousting Christ from this world, for suffering as His representatives, for it all, we may ask the question: Who is sufficient for these things? The answer is "Ye shall receive power, the Holy Spirit coming upon you." The Holy Spirit constitutes the vessels and the service. He is the Spirit of service and He is the constituent factor in the vessels of service. He is the power by which this representation is maintained in the earth. "Ye shall receive power...". The Lord knew quite well that these men would never stand to bring Him in, to imply Him. He knew Peter well enough in spite of Peter’s boasts. He knew those men and He said, "Tarry ye in Jerusalem, until ye be clothed with power from on high" (Luke 24:49). "Ye shall receive power, the Holy Spirit coming upon you." Then we can see what happened. The man with all his boast of what he would do and suffer and go to death, ran away and denied his Lord with oaths and curses before a mere serving-maid downstairs — that is the worth of his courage when put to the test. But there is no cringing about that man standing up on the day of Pentecost and confronting the murderers of Christ and laying the charge for His death at their door. "When they saw the boldness of Peter and John..." (Acts 4:13). That is what the Holy Ghost can do for us. The Holy Ghost can change a cringing coward into a courageous, bold man. He is the Spirit of courage, and He did a good many other things as well. "Ye shall receive power, the Holy Spirit coming upon you." That is our hope, our assurance — the Holy Spirit. Let Him have His way, make sure He has a free course to make us true servants, that is, representatives of the Lord.

Chapter 5 - The Dynamic of Representation

"And many women were there beholding from afar, who had followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering unto him: among whom was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee. And Mary Magdalene was there, and the other Mary, sitting over against the sepulchre... Now late on the sabbath day, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre." (Matt. 27:55-56,61; 28:1).

"And certain women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary that was called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out" (Luke 8:2).

"But Mary was standing without at the tomb weeping: so, as she wept, she stooped and looked into the tomb; and she beholdeth two angels in white sitting, one at the head, and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him. When she had thus said, she turned herself back, and beholdeth Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turneth herself, and saith unto him in Hebrew, Rabboni; which is to say, Teacher. Jesus saith to her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended unto the Father: but go unto my brethren, and say to them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and my God and your God. Mary Magdalene cometh and telleth the disciples, I have seen the Lord; and that he had said these things unto her." (John 20:11-18).

"These all with one accord continued stedfastly in prayer, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren." Acts 1:14.

A very simple word is in my heart for this moment. It is impressive to notice how frequently Mary Magdalene is referred to, how much she is kept in view. She is found in every one of the Gospels and undoubtedly was included with the women of Acts 1:14, and hers is a place of considerable significance and value. We cannot but ask why she should be kept so much in view, should be mentioned so much by name. It is no accident; it is not just good enough to say that all these apostles who wrote these records were evidently impressed with this woman and the others, and that they found in writing the story of Christ’s life and death and resurrection, that they could not just leave these people out. I think we have to go deeper than that, believing that the Holy Spirit has something in mind if these records are inspired by Him, and we look to see what that something might be.

Beginning at the end, we find that Mary Magdalene was the first of the witnesses of the resurrection of the Lord. In these meditations we have been much occupied with witnesses. "Ye shall be witnesses unto Me" (Acts 1:8). The first witness, the first representative one of the risen Lord to testify that He was alive, He was risen, was Mary Magdalene. It seems to me that she stands here to indicate the service of the new dispensation, the service of Christ — to be a witness to Him, to represent Him. This service of the Lord begins with her, and why? The thought that is in my mind is just this: that here is the service of the Lord again. And what is it that lies right at the heart of the service of the Lord, what is it that really makes a witness, a representative, what is it that constitutes this testimony in person to the risen Lord? — and I think Mary Magdalene answers the question for us very simply but very forcefully. The dynamic, the power, the essence of the service of the Lord is a passionate devotion of love to His Person. That is simple, but fundamental.

In the first place you find her a woman in great need — need of deliverance, of salvation, of mercy, of grace — a woman in great trouble and distress, and the Lord saves her out of all her troubles. From that time she is never far from Him; she is one of a band of such women who follow Him everywhere and minister to Him. Then in the last scene she is there with our Lord’s earthly mother standing some distance from the cross, watching, grieving, in those last hours. She is, perhaps, the last or one of the last, to leave that scene. Then she is the first back at the sepulchre; before daybreak she is back there watching the sepulchre, breaking her heart. John 20:11-18 is perhaps one of the most moving stories in the New Testament. The cry of her heart — "Sir, if thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him." Then Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said, "Rabboni, Master!" Is not this all the embodiment of a personal love for the Lord, a mighty personal love for Himself? And it is out of that that her witness springs and that she becomes the first preacher of the dispensation.

It is out of that that the whole of the true ministry of Christ through the whole dispensation springs. That is the nature of it. We can say it in a few words and quite simply and although it is brief and very simple, let us nevertheless seek to recognize the supreme importance of this, that the service of the Lord is not in the first place going out to do things, or to say things, to propagate doctrines or truths or interpretations, to set up movements or fellowships or churches. The service of the Lord is the spontaneous outflow of a personal love for Himself. And when you move on to the day of Pentecost, and from then on, it is just that.

It would seem that the coming of the Holy Spirit was a baptizing of believers into a love of Christ, for from that moment of the Spirit’s coming, they had nothing to talk about but the Lord Jesus. They were just full of Him! Their conversation was full of Him, their preaching was full of Him, their witness was just all concerning Himself, and it was ever so. It was so with the great apostle of the Gentiles — Paul. "God", he said, "was pleased to reveal His Son in me that I might preach Him among the nations" (Gal. 1:15,16). "The love of Christ constraineth us" (2 Cor. 5:14), "The love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit" (Rom. 5:5). That was the dynamic of service.

Now, that is simple and it works in two ways. All activity, work, and what is called "service" for the Lord, without that behind it, is lacking in the true power of fruitful service, but if that is there, we cannot help being the Lord’s servants. Nothing can make us true servants of the Lord but a personal passionate love for Himself. Nothing can substitute that. But given that, there is no need for any kind of human ordination, an ecclesiastical setting apart. You are the Lord’s servant right enough if you have an adequate love for Himself in your heart. It will be, it will work out. All our value to the Lord depends upon the measure of our heart-love for Himself. That is all. There is nothing profound about that, but it is testing.

We may do many things, like the church at Ephesus later on. It did many things, but the Lord said, "I have this against thee, that thou hast left thy first love" (Rev. 2:4). And in effect He said: There is no justification in your lampstand remaining, it is merely an empty profession, an outward vessel without the inner Lord, the inner light. And unless this original first love is recovered, it is mere profession, doing many things, but the thing which justifies our existence is that love and only that. Nothing but that love will keep us going. It is the power of endurance through the years, and it is an awful thing to come to a Christian life which has got to be kept up without that love for the Lord in the heart. It is only that love that really makes the Christian life possible under all the strain of the years.

I am quite sure that in the case of the apostle, with all his suffering and all he had to meet, the thing that kept him going was that flame of love in his own heart for the Lord Himself. Through the suffering, nothing but a strong love for the Lord will keep us going.

And so, without adding any more to that, I simply say to you and to my own heart, what you and I need is a recovering, reviving, an increase. Whether it be that we have it or have lost it or have never had it, what we need is this mighty flame of love for the Lord Himself, not to be just professional workers, servants of God in some professional way. No, what we need is that love for Himself to be intensified and out of that everything else will come, and apart from that, the Christian life is a miserable thing, a burden to bear, while love for the Lord makes us witnesses.

So Mary Magdalene just comes to us with the greatest of all lessons. She stands there, the last at the cross, the first in the resurrection, the first witness of the dispensation. It is a woman. Now, of course, you can take that wrongly, you can take that technically, and say of course that at once justifies women’s ministry and women having first place. I have nothing to say against women’s ministry, but what I believe the Holy Spirit means here is that women in the New Testament represent the affectional side, the principle of affection, of love and devotion and service in terms of love. That is what the women are there to represent and it seems that this woman gathers it all up. But you see the background — heart devotion to the Lord which produces her marvellous ministry, her representative ministry for the dispensation. For her ministry was representative of the dispensation — that which produced this ministry and this representation was her own heart-sense of indebtedness to the Lord for His grace. And what ministry is of value which has not got that behind it? Paul says, "I am debtor" (Rom. 1:14) and that is the dynamic of his ministry. Mary Magdalene would say, I am debtor, I owe everything to Him!

If you and I come into a lively and sufficient sense of our indebtedness to the Lord for His marvellous grace to us, we will be witnesses right enough, we will serve the Lord right enough. Oh, then, for a revival in our hearts of the sense of our deep indebtedness! Of course, you have to be patient with the simplicity of this word, but I think it touches the centre of things, however simple. Do not let us be concerned about things at all. The matter about which we have to be concerned is our own heart relationship to the Lord, that heart devotion to Him. The Lord save us from having anything of a Christian life that is less than that which simply is abiding in that attitude of love — "Master! Rabboni!" I do not think we can ever reproduce the accent, the tone, in which Mary uttered that word at that moment. It was the come-back of a heart that was breaking over her Lord, now the floodgates are opened. I wish that we could get the accents of the two, when the Master said, "Mary!" You cannot catch it, but you can imagine something. And in the familiar tone she had heard Him address her before, she caught the tone and said, "Master! Is it you, Master?" The depths of that! I do not want to be sentimental, but there is something there which indicates this, which leads to the possession of the first note of the dispensational service. The whole dispensation, the whole age, is gathered up into this woman in what she represents. All service to the Lord springs from this — Master! In that sense, "You are the one with whom everything for me is bound up."

Well, the Lord speak more than my words can say on this matter.

Chapter 6 - The Way of Attainment of Knowledge Necessary for Representation

"...marked out the Son of God in power... by the resurrection of the dead" (Rom. 1:4).

"...till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man" (Eph. 4:13).

"I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord... that I may know Him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming conformed unto His death" (Phil. 3:8,10).

There is a matter that I want to bring to you now which perhaps, unlike the word of the previous meditation, will call for a little more exercise on your part, not just mental exercise, but it will call for some giving of ourselves intensely to it in order that we shall grasp the great significance that lies here.

Before we come to that specific matter or point, may I remind you of the very great value and importance which the Scriptures attach to spiritual knowledge. There is all the difference between spiritual knowledge and mental knowledge or mere head knowledge. We may say rightly, according to the Scriptures, that everything for the life of the child of God depends upon spiritual knowledge and is bound up with spiritual knowledge. "This is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and Him whom thou didst send, Jesus Christ" (John 17:3). So life eternal is linked with a certain knowledge, and from that very first thing in the history of the child of God (that is, eternal life by knowledge) everything else is linked with a particular, specific knowledge. That is, we have got to know in a spiritual way in order to grow in the spiritual life.

You notice how much importance the apostle attaches to this. "I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord." And that is not completed even at that point, for he afterwards follows on by saying as something still lying ahead — I press on that I may know Him! He is a man who has a vast knowledge of the Lord but who is so aware of the tremendous importance and value of spiritual knowledge as to put all other things which are of account to men aside as worthless for the excellency of the knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Then there is this great prospect presented and opened out in Ephesians 4. The ascended Lord gave gifts among men; He gave ministering gifts, apostles, prophets, and so on, for the perfecting, the building up of the body of Christ "till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God". It almost seems as though what is implied is this: that the goal of this body of Christ of which he is speaking, the Church which is His Body, is the full knowledge of the Son of God. Everything must be linked with that full knowledge of the Son of God.

Now, of course we understand this in a little way from our own spiritual experience and history. Every one of us who has any real spiritual life and history knows quite well that we owe our spiritual growth to spiritual knowledge that has come to us. We say: when I came to know (whatever it might be) when I came to know in a spiritual way, in a vital way, when I came to know that, it made all the difference. From the time I came to know in that way there has been a difference; I have been different, it has meant a great deal to me that I came to know! All the differences are made along that line of progressive, growing knowledge, spiritual knowledge, inward knowledge.

So the Word would reveal to us this: that all that God has intended in Christ for the saints, the great destiny, the great vocation, the great attainment — and what a calling it is, what an , as Paul calls it — all that is to be reached by spiritual knowledge, by a progressively and continually coming to fresh inward knowledge. We can say: I know, I have come to know, and I am coming to know, and the Lord is leading me to know! It is like that, that is the way of it. That is simple, but I simply wanted at the outset to emphasize and remind you of the great value and importance that is bound up with spiritual knowledge.

The Law of Spiritual Knowledge

Now, the thing which I want to get over to you, as the Lord alone can enable me, is a law which is found in the Scriptures throughout; a law of spiritual knowledge. I have seen that there is a law wrapped up in the Scriptures which governs this whole matter of spiritual knowledge. In the Old Testament, of course, it is presented very largely in a typical way, but the law is a spiritual law and it governs this knowledge which is spiritual enlargement, growth, and progress in the life of the child of God. The law is this: there is a place necessary in order to have the knowledge.

Now, if you go back to the Old Testament, of course you find it just full of that in type, in figure. For instance, the light of the purpose of God was only disclosed to Abraham when he came into the land, not when he was in Mesopotamia. God told him to get out of Mesopotamia, and it was not until he came into the land that God disclosed to him His purpose. It was necessary to be in a certain place before he got the knowledge.

The light of God and of the name of God was not disclosed to Jacob when he was in Paran (Gen. 21:21), not when he was in the foreign country, but when he was there on the spot at Bethel. He did not get the light of God, of the Name of God, until he had got to that place.

The light as to the Divine dwelling in the tabernacle was never given to Israel in Egypt but waited until they got to the place where the tabernacle was to be in the wilderness.

A place was necessary in order to have the knowledge and the Old Testament is just full of that. You know that place names in the Old Testament are always typical. You know how much is bound up with Gilgal. You have to come to Gilgal in order to have a certain kind of spiritual knowledge — Bethel, Hebron — and so you go on, and the Lord fixed places in the Old Testament for the revelation of Himself. "Where I put My name" (Ex. 20:24), if you come there you will know Me. You will not know Me out there somewhere else; you have to come to the place I have appointed, there I will meet you! That is the type.

In the New Testament, in the spiritual side of this, of course it is not geographical places, it is not a certain local gathering. You do not have to go to Honor Oak or anywhere else before you get the light! It is not geographical spots or places, but it is a spiritual place that you have to come to before you get the knowledge.

Well now, that opens a wide, large field, and we just indicate one or two of these places which are the places of spiritual knowledge which has to do with our coming to the full knowledge of the Son of God, to the full-grown man.

Resurrection

"...Determined (marked out) the Son of God in power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead". The knowledge, the light of the knowledge of resurrection, demands that we come to a place and that place is the place of death. That is simple and well-known, but it is a law. It is a law written in the Old Testament in type and figure again and again. The resurrection demands that you come actually to the place of death. The law is made clear in the New Testament. You have to be in the place of death and burial before you can know Him and the power of His resurrection, before you can have that knowledge of resurrection with which so much is bound up. Oh, everything at the outset is bound up with that, that we know union with Christ in resurrection, not as truth, not as doctrine, a creed, but in an inward way, a spiritual knowledge.

There is a very remarkable paragraph in Ezekiel 39. Of course, there is the prophetic side to it, but there is also the spiritual as there always is in prophecy. Gog and Magog come from the North into the land, and then the people of God come back from captivity into that land, and the Lord comes in judgment against Gog and Magog who have invaded His land and slain many. And then the Lord calls for the whole people to rise up to bury the dead that have been slain. They are to bury through a whole period of seven months, a perfect spiritual work, in burying the dead. All the people are to do it, but there is to be a certain company appointed to go through the land, and wherever they find even an exposed bone they are to set up a mark. And then this appointed company who come and find this mark over an exposed bone, are to bury it; so objectionable is anything dead and not buried that He is going to have it put out of sight. They cannot possess the land, they cannot come back and enjoy the inheritance while there is something dead that is not buried.

I remember a brother once speaking about baptism. He said, "When you came to the Lord and you saw that Christ died for you, did you not see when Christ died, you died? Well, why have you not got your corpse buried?! The only place for a dead person is the grave!" Well, that is very blunt.

This is the Lord’s thought. Christ is the inheritance, Christ is the land, all the fulness represented by Canaan is in Christ, all the wealth, the land flowing with milk and honey. And the Lord’s people cannot come in and possess and enlarge their inheritance in Christ, the full knowledge of Christ, if there is anything dead that is not buried. The Lord says that we are dead, we were crucified with Christ (Rom. 6:6), and the New Testament principle is this: that it has got to be put out of the way, out of sight, before we can come into fulness, full possession and enlargement. It is simply emphasizing this law of the Word of God throughout that in order to know resurrection knowledge, we must come to the place of death and burial, that is, the putting away firstly of the whole body of the flesh and then of the whole natural man. It is only as you and I in the natural life are buried, are put out of sight, out of the way, that we can know Him. We are standing in our own light when we are not buried, when we are not out of the way; when we have not come to the place of death we are obstructing the light of the full knowledge of Christ.

You know how true it is, when the natural man is in evidence, the spiritual man is in eclipse. When the natural mind is active upon the things of God, the Holy Spirit does not show us the things of God. That natural mind has got to get out of the way to know resurrection, which is not just a thing once and for all, but a thing in which much more obtains for us which is to be known. Paul says, "...that I may know him and the power of his resurrection" (Phil. 3:10). Paul had been on the road a long time when he said that. "Unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us..." (the power of His resurrection). That depends entirely upon the working of death, our coming to the place of death. The law is this: that the more we come to the place of death to the natural life, the self-life, the more we come to the place of knowing the full knowledge of the Son of God in terms of resurrection.

Sonship

The light of sonship demands a place. You know that that is the whole argument of the letter to the Galatians. It was a question of sonship, and the apostle is saying, "Before you can know sonship, you have to come to a place where sonship is known, and the life of sonship is only possessed when you come to the place of the Spirit as over against the flesh." I cannot stay with Galatians along those lines, but here is the truth. Sonship is something much more than being born again, than just being a child of God. Sonship is the coming to the full knowledge of the Son of God, it is growing up into Him in all things. Sonship is an added thing. You cannot come to the knowledge of all that sonship means as something more than childhood unless you come into the place where the Spirit takes ascendancy over the flesh. It is a place; it is a place of crisis.

It may be like Jacob’s Jabbok where that strength of self-life is touched and withered in its very sinew, in the very strength of the thigh. Jacob’s self-life is deeply affected from heaven, and then his name is changed to a heavenly name — Israel, a prince with God, a spiritual people, no longer carnal. You see, the law of the knowledge of the Son of God depends upon our coming to a place.

Does this not say how hopeless it is to try and get spiritual knowledge by study, by information? Not one of us have ever got this from books, from people. This thing has got to come by our coming to a spiritual position. We have got to get somewhere. We cannot take it on from others. We may get help from listening and reading, but we cannot get this full knowledge of the Son of God in that way. We have to come to a place, we have to have a crisis. The knowledge of sonship depends upon the place where the Spirit is established as sovereign Lord over the flesh.

Christ’s Sovereign Headship

The light of the knowledge of Christ’s sovereign Headship demands a place. This is Colossians — the sovereign Headship of Christ, His supreme authority as a functioning thing. Christ is sovereign Head of the church, Christ is exalted above all principalities and powers, Christ is pre-eminent, transcendent. That is great truth, but that is not good enough for me as a truth. I want that thing to become an actuality in my experience; that mighty authority and power of Christ has got to become a reality in dally life. Somehow I have got to get into that where I can lay hold of it and appeal to it and it works; where the forces of evil are overpowered by it in my experience as they assail me; His sovereign Headship has to cover me, protect me, guard me from evil forces and deliver me. I have to know His all-authority, I want to know Him in His sovereign Headship.

To know that, I have to come into the place of relatedness to the Head in the Body. "Holding fast the head" — this is the word of Colossians, "...holding fast the Head, from whom all the body, being supplied and knit together through the joints and bands, increaseth..." (2:19) I have to get into line with the members of His body in a spiritual way under that Headship; that is, I have to forsake all independent, detached and unrelated ground. It is a position. If the enemy can get you and me detached and unrelated and separate, he is going to rob us of the benefits of Christ’s sovereign Headship. If we are going to know the value of Christ as our sovereign Head in all authority, we have to get into a relationship with that Head with other members. "Holding fast the Head, from whom all the body...", every part.

Full-Growth

You come to Ephesians "...the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man..." (4:13). What does it demand? Well, if Colossians sees me in relation with other believers holding fast the Head, Ephesians sees me in relation to other believers working together corporately. Colossians is the upward aspect of the Head. Ephesians is the outward aspect of the body to the other members, and these are complementary. To come to full-growth and to the full knowledge of the Son, we have got to come to the place where the body is a reality, not just a doctrine or a truth. So often when we speak about this matter of the Body of Christ, the Church the Body of Christ, the rejoinder from many is: of course! We take it for granted, all believers are one Body, they are all members of Christ and we are all one Body! Yes, that is the fact, the truth, but what about the practical working of it in a spiritual way? That is something different and something more. It is a strange thing the people who hold that can still without any question go on in schisms and divisions and all kinds of distinctions here on this earth among Christians. They can be cut up into a thousand denominators and this truth of the Body is not a working thing which simply rules out all that, refuses all ground of schism, division, and every kind of human department amongst Christians. It does not effect that with so many.

Well, you say, does it matter? Look at the Church, look at the Lord’s children today. What about the full knowledge of the Son of God? What about this growth to the fulness of Christ? Oh, there is an appalling and tragic ignorance among the majority of the Lord’s people of the Lord Himself. The ignorance is awful and the result is that the spiritual power is very small indeed. It does matter to our coming to the full knowledge of the Son of God, it does matter to our growth up into Him, to the attaining of the fulness of Christ, the full stature of Christ. It does matter whether the truth of the Body is a practical thing, not just theoretical. You have got to come to the place where you forsake all ground that is other than the ground of the absolute and working spiritual oneness of the Lord’s people. To occupy such ground means limitation and loss, as the history of the church proves, and as all the activity of the enemy demonstrates. To divide the Lord’s people is to weaken and limit them. To bring the Lord’s people in spiritual oneness is to build them up and make them a force with which the enemy has to reckon.

Will you remember this law? It is everywhere in the Old Testament. The Lord says in such a place I will meet you. You can go anywhere in all the universe but that place, and you will not get that knowledge. Even Saul of Tarsus, elect from eternity, chosen from the ages to be God’s apostle to the Gentiles, foreknown and foreordained, will ask the question: "What shall I do, Lord?" (Acts 22:10), and the answer will be, "Go into Damascus and it shall be told thee there." It was not that Damascus was anything more than any other place, but the Church was there, and the Lord was not going to meet any man, even a destined apostle, on any other ground but that. He says, I am in My Body, I will meet you in My Body! That is a spiritual law. If you have been wandering the world, ask the Lord to show you that spiritual place, that spiritual position, where you will find what you are after. In the case of most of us, the Lord has had to deal with us in order to bring us to a spiritual place in order to show us something. When the Lord brought us there, we saw. We found there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for evermore.