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The Significance of Christ

by T. Austin-Sparks

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazines, 1953-1954.

Contents

Chapter 1 - In Relation to the Race as it is

Chapter 2 - In Relation to the Race as God Intends it to be

Chapter 3 - In Relation to His Power

Chapter 4 - In Relation to His Knowledge

Chapter 5 - In Relation to His Resurrection-Ascension

Chapter 6 - In Relation to Spiritual Sight

Chapter 7 - The Significance of His Baptism

Chapter 1 - In Relation to the Race as it is

"And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever - therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man" (Genesis 3:22-24).

"And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46).

"And there shall be no curse any more: and the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be therein: and his servants shall serve him; and they shall see his face" (Revelation 22:3-4).

THE FACE OF GOD

So, with the book of Genesis and the book of the Revelation, we have the whole bound of human history. And as we read through the Scriptures this whole story of man's creation, calling and destiny, we seem to see that one matter governs the whole long record of human life, and this one matter is that of THE FACE OF GOD. The expulsion from the garden was expulsion from the face of the Lord. From that time the face of God was never again seen by man, except in tokens - such as His mercy, His goodness - and even then only on certain conditions; but His face in reality man did not and could not see.

And throughout this Book, we find that man's greatest blessing, highest good and deepest longing always related to the face of God. How often from the heart of man the cry is heard - "Lift thou up the light of thy countenance" (Ps. 4:6); "Make thy face to shine on thy servant" (Ps. 31:16); 'to walk in the light of his countenance' (Ps. 89:15). The deepest longing in the heart of man is ever for what that means, and his highest good is always seen to be connected with the face of God; while, on the other hand, man's deepest misery and desolation is always when God's face is turned away - when he senses that that countenance is not toward him. To be spiritually alive and sensitive, and to feel that there is a cloud over the face of the Lord, is the most miserable experience of which we are capable, the greatest desolation of heart.

THE ISSUE CENTRED IN THE CROSS OF CHRIST

Now, that great, shall I say, eternal issue of the face of God was brought to a focus in the Cross of Christ. It is, I think it can be said quite safely, the very heart of the Calvary story. At the beginning God drove the man out. The end of the Bible is "they shall see his face". But midway, not in the Bible as a book, but in this human history, the Cross gathers up that great matter of the face of God. On one side, that face is turned away - the man is in desolation. On the other side, that face is turned toward - there is a new hope, new joy, new prospect, all things are new: because once more the light of His countenance is, in the full sense, lifted upon believers. Genesis and Revelation meet at Calvary.

THE WILDERNESS OF THE TURNED-AWAY FACE OF GOD

A wilderness is always a type of desolation and death through the curse. The wilderness came when the Garden was lost. It was the very fruit of the curse. In other words, it was THE outcome of God's face being turned away, and from that time we find the wilderness again and again coming up in the picture of human life. Israel in the wilderness spoke of the curse, desolation and death. In that wilderness, if Heaven had not intervened, they certainly would have perished - and they knew it, too. There was nothing there to assure of life. It was only because there was a Testimony in their midst that they could possibly live in the wilderness; and when their hearts were rightly adjusted to that Testimony, they lived above the wilderness. In the midst of death they were in life: in the midst of desolation they were in plenty: in the midst of the curse they were in blessing. And that Testimony was the Testimony of Jesus.

When, later, they went into the far captivity and knew the desolation again for seventy years, and at last the seventy years' accomplishment came into view, the prophet cried with his gospel of hope - "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished" (Isa. 40:1). The issue of that is that "the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose" (Isa. 35:1). "In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert" (Isa. 35:6).

THE LORD JESUS IN THE WILDERNESS

But you know quite well that, set there for the real fulfilment - not for the symbolic or partial fulfilment, but for the real fulfilment - Isaiah 53 has its place. "He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed." The Lord Jesus went for forty days into the wilderness - the place of desolation, the place of death, the place of the curse; that wilderness being the place of Satan's power, because he made it. Every wilderness belongs to the Devil. It is in the wilderness that you will always meet the Devil. In that place of Satan's power, that One would not have survived, had He not been a Heavenly Man with no relationship whatever to the wilderness; had He not just before gone to Jordan, and in figure died, and, rising, overcome death.

But it says that He was led "of the Spirit" into the wilderness (Matt. 4:1). When He rose from the waters, when in figure He was risen from the dead triumphant, the Spirit came upon Him. By that Spirit He went into the wilderness, and there, in virtue of a victory already secured, He overcame.

The wilderness is always a symbol of the desolation of death because of the curse. Look back to Israel's life in the wilderness. You remember one of the most poignant of all the figures of the tabernacle ritual - that of the scapegoat. You never read that little account, I am sure, without feeling deeply and desperately sorry for that goat, with all the curse transferred by identifying hands to its head, and then led by a priest to the outer bounds of the camp and beyond, away, till the last sign of human life is out of sight, and then, driven from that last man, alone in the wilderness to die, forsaken of God, desolate, bearing sin.

Well, that is the Cross. That is the meaning, but only a shadow of the meaning, of the words we read in Matthew 27 - "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" 'Why hast Thou turned Thy face away from Me? Why am I in this awful desolation, beside which every other kind of desolation is nothing - the desolation of losing God? Why?' Well, thank God, there is probably no one reading these lines who could not answer that question. But it is not my object at this moment to try to answer it. I am just pointing to two sides of this great matter - the lost face of God and the regained face of God.

So the heavens were closed against that man; so that face was lost as for eternity; so the deep and awful desolation settled down upon his soul; and for ever that orphan soul, that desolated soul, is crying, 'Where can I find Him? Where can I find HIM?' "Oh that I knew where I might find him... Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: on the left hand, when he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him" (Job 23:3, 8-9). And yet there has never been one who has known that desolation, and that sense of forsakenness, in any measure commensurate with what the Lord Jesus knew, in the hour, in the moment, of that cry. That desolation has broken many a soul. Ah, but never in the way in which it broke His heart.

He had sensed what was coming. There have been many arguments about His cup and His exceeding sorrowfulness and His cry - "If it be possible, let this cup pass away from me" (Matt. 26:39). I think the only answer is here: that He sensed what was coming. It was certainly not His physical death and sufferings. He was going, of necessity, to be forsaken of the Father with whom, through those thirty-three years, He had had unbroken fellowship. Favours were shown to Him in His birth; He grew in that favour as a lad; He came out into public life, and the open heavens declared "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matt. 3:17). In the secret of His own heart He was in the favour of the Father. He dwelt in the bosom of the Father every day. And now that was to be withdrawn; He was to know the loss of that. Surely there is nothing to approach it!

We are speaking of facts, and if we were to speak of any experience of our own, it would be almost approaching sacrilege. And yet some of you may have known what it is to have a very blessed time with the Lord - when the Lord has seemed so real, and everything was betokening the Lord's nearness and the Lord's favour - and then it has gone, completely gone: all the tokens seem to have been withdrawn and the Lord seems to have gone out of your world entirely. You will say that there is nothing more miserable than an experience like that. But how small compared with this! How infinitely terrible that He, who had from eternity been in the bosom of the Father, should lose that - not as an act in a play, not as something staged, but as a reality, a terrible soul reality. He was taking the place of all who had lost the face of God, in order to get it back again for them - for you, for me.

THE LORD JESUS AND THE OPEN HEAVEN OF GOD'S FACE

And you can look at the other side, the open heaven, the face of God. He had it in His birth - all heaven was open. He had it in His childhood. How manifest it was we do not know, but we do know that at the age of twelve He could speak of God as "My Father" (Luke 2:49). This was surely expressive of a lad's life with God in very intimate and affectionate terms. At His baptism, the heavens were opened to Him and a voice was heard saying, "Thou art my beloved Son". To Nathanael He said, "Thou shalt see greater things... Ye shall see the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man" (John 1:50-51). His transfiguration again saw those same heavens opened, that same voice attesting Him as the beloved Son. And after the desolation of the Cross, at His 'receiving up in glory' (1 Tim. 3:16) - I like that better than the word 'ascension'; His 'receiving up', that was how they liked to put it then - the heavens were opened for the great reception. There is no question here; no having to stand at the gates and meet the Apostle Peter to get a passport! No, He was "received up in glory"; the heavens opened. And at Pentecost the heavens were opened, and "he hath poured forth this" (Acts 1:33); and through the heavens which He Himself had opened by His merit, by His Cross, He attested for all who would believe, that God's face was back again in their direction. How could you better express those days of Pentecost and following than in the words that the light of God's countenance was upon them? What joyous days they were, what precious days! - and it was simply because they were in the light of God's countenance.

But there is a still more intimate witness. "Did ye receive the Holy Spirit when ye believed?" (Acts 29:2). The Holy Spirit is given, not only to the Church as a whole, but to every member of that Church to dwell within. And what is the Holy Spirit dwelling in the believer? It is only, in other words, that the Lord is for us and with us again, His face is in our direction. The old invocation which has become a benediction was - "The Lord make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace" (Num. 6:25-26). Is that not just it, that when we come into the good of the work of the Cross and of Pentecost, that is, the coming of the Holy Spirit, that is the light of His countenance, and it is peace? When His face is not toward us there is no peace. The indwelling Spirit is just another way of saying that the face of the Lord is toward them that fear Him, and the great glorious consummation of that is in the words in Revelation: "His servants shall serve him, and they shall see his face" (Rev. 22:3,4) - as though that were the crowning blessing of all, the inclusive blessing of all, in the last chapter of the Bible. "They shall see his face": this is the one thing that has been the great issue through all the ages - the face of God in its towardness being man's greatest blessing, in its loss man's greatest desolation. You are not surprised therefore to read in the same utterance - "there shall be no curse any more". "No more curse... they shall see his face."

IN CHRIST AN OPEN HEAVEN FOR US

Well, all that is, I know, very simple, but we shall not do ourselves any harm by contemplating what He won for us in that wilderness, how great a thing it was that resulted from that cry. The answer given to that cry - "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" - is our supreme and all-inclusive blessing: it is that we may never know any more forsaking of God. Oh, put your feet down upon that. It is not as simple as it sounds. No more forsaking of God! Have you, a believer, a believer perhaps for many years, in full devotion to the Lord - have you never been tempted to believe that God had forsaken you, God had left you, had given you up, washed His hands of you, parted company with you, withdrawn? If you have never had that temptation, I am not going to say that you ought to, but I will say that I do not think you will get through your course in a really spiritual life without having it, and more than once. As in Adam's case, so with every son of Adam and every child of God, with every member of this human race, the Devil's greatest work is to get between us and God. Once he has done that, if he can establish himself there between us and God, it is an end of all things, it is hopeless. But in the case of a believer he cannot now do that in actuality. He can only do it in effect, by the attitude that a believer takes toward this great thing that happened on the Cross, by the answer that the believer will give in his or her own heart to Christ's question, "Why hast thou forsaken me?" If you really will give the answer, 'In order that I might never be forsaken' - if you give that answer and stay there, you have entered into the value of what the Lord Jesus accomplished in destroying the works of the Devil, especially his supreme work of getting between you and God.

Calvary is always an open door, an open way, to God's face. You know that it was ever by Jordan that the place of God's face was reached - always by Jordan. Of the promised land the Lord said, "The eyes of the Lord thy God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year even unto the end of the year" (Deut. 11:12); His face would be toward it, and so it was described as the land of unspeakable blessing. Israel never arrived there except by the Jordan. When they came back from the captivity to the land again, where God's face was, they had to go across the Jordan again or through the Jordan. When the Lord Jesus went to the Jordan, He passed that way in order to come to the place where the heavens were opened, where the face of God was seen; always by Jordan to the place of God's face - in other words, always by the Cross. It is by the Cross that we come into the light of His countenance.

THE VICTORY OF FAITH

But the point here is that faith is the victory (1 John 5:4). It is faith in one thing. If you pin your faith to this one thing, all other things will come into line, all the other problems will be overcome: if you really will pin your faith to this - that the Lord Jesus, in that terrible moment, lost the face of God in order to secure it for us forever, so that we might never be out of the light of that countenance. He has brought that face back to us - and what blessing there is in that! I am not saying that we may never experience some shadow over His face because of our folly, because of our grieving Him. We have to admit sometimes that there is a shadow between us and the Lord. Ah, but never need it be total eclipse, and never His forsaking. He is behind that shadow, and a thousand times we who have known such shadows, because of either our unbelief or some other grieving Him, when we have adjusted, cleared that matter up, got right with the Lord, we have found Him there just where He was. He is behind the shadows; His word abides - "I will in no wise fail thee, neither will I in any wise forsake thee" (Heb. 13:5).

THE FALL A FALL INTO THE HANDS OF SATAN

Surely Israel has a many-sided testimony, and this is one side. God has written the story of His willingness to be toward man. That story is written very fully in the life of Israel. If ever a people might have been fully and finally forsaken, Israel might have been. I think there is nothing that proves the fall more than Israel - proves the fall not in a general but in a specific way. We say of Adam that the fall took place, Adam fell. How did he fall? Where did he fall? Into what did he fall? He fell into the hands of Satan, to be used as Satan's instrument against God, and his fall developed in Israel. They fell into Satan's hands. "Ye are of your father the devil" (John 8:44), said the Lord Jesus. They fell into Satan's hands to be his instruments against God to crucify His very Son. There is nothing deeper than to be the instrument of Satan to kill God, to put God out of His place. That is why the record of Israel's spirit and attitude is given us so fully in the Gospels, leading up to Israel's crucifying of Christ. Their attitude is all brought out by Christ, and He focuses upon this - that what they did to Him they did to God. And so in the Cross of the Lord Jesus we see a people, a nation, held by Satan, having sold themselves into the hands of Satan to crucify God and put Him out of His place. That is not too strong, to speak of Satan's instrument against God. That is the fall - into the hands of Satan. That opens up the Word of God in many ways, from many angles. It is a terrible thing.

When the Lord Jesus came, there was one who, looking upon that infant, said, prophetically, "to grant unto us that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies..." (Luke 1:74) - and that went far beyond any earthly enemies. Have you really felt the force of what I have just been saying? Have there not been times when, through duress and suffering and oppression, through spiritual trial to the depths, Satan has got so near to your soul or has been so bound up with your soul that it has seemed he would turn you against God, make you bitter toward the Lord, make you the enemy of God, bring up such feelings in you? These things are real. That is what he is trying to do all the time - to get man back into his power, to get the believer into his power, to use him against God. There is no instrument more useful to Satan against God than a Christian. You expect unbelievers, men of the world, to be against God; but see a Christian revolting against the Lord, and that gives Satan just what he is after - one who is supposed to know the Lord, in rebellion against Him. What a battle there is over that! - but what a triumph our Lord has secured to get us right out of that realm, to destroy all the impingement of Satan's insinuations and suggestions. If you do ever know the cloud, the temptation, remember Calvary: remember that the Lord Jesus has established forever the ground upon which God will never forsake you, never leave you, never withdraw His face from you. Believe that. That is the faith which overcomes and it is a mighty overcoming, going right back to the beginning.

DELIVERANCE BY THE CROSS OF CHRIST

"Why hast thou forsaken me?" I am so glad that the story of the Cross does not end there. The cry, the awful cry, is "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?", but the last words from the Cross are not such. "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46). He is back on the ground of perfect fellowship with the Father and absolute trust. The victory is gained, the work is done, the enemy is defeated, the ground is secured. Whatever Satan says, as he does in our deep hours of spiritual experience, about the Lord having given us up, departed from us - all that sort of thing; whatever he says, it is not true. It may be that you do not feel the full weight of that; but if ever you come, as perhaps some of you have come, to a time, such as many of the most faithful and devoted and greatly-used servants of God have known, when the dark forces spread themselves over, gather around in their hordes, and seek to come between you and your Lord and then begin their whisperings - 'The Lord has given you up, handed you over', or something to that effect - when you come to that place, then I trust you will know that this word is no light word, no unimportant word: for the last depths of Calvary were fathomed in the moment when our Lord cried that bitter cry and gained the answer and came out victorious and into rest. "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." That was not for Himself, that was for us - for you, for me. I feel that that is the Good Friday morning message: the depth of Calvary and the eternal value of His having secured for us the face of God. Never, never is it necessary for anyone to know that desolation of God-forsakenness while they put their trust, their faith, upon His taking up this age-long issue as Man for man - the issue of "the light of thy countenance".

So let us rejoice that we have an open heaven secured for us by our blessed Lord. We have but stated the truth, the fact, of this thing. There is much more bound up with it, which the Lord may show us as we go on, as to what kind of man it is who enjoys that opened heaven, but that is with the Lord. Let us thank Him for the fact that we may have the heaven opened to us. He has done it. But to a Nathanael He will say, "Ye shall see the heaven opened". God grant that we may all be in that blessed position.

Chapter 2 - In Relation to the Race as God Intends it to be

"And the Lord spake again unto Ahaz, saying, Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God; ask it either in the depth, or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord. And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David: Is it a small thing for you to weary men, that ye will weary my God also? Therefore THE LORD HIMSELF SHALL GIVE YOU A SIGN: behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel" (Isaiah 7:10-14).

In our previous meditation upon the significance of Christ, we were gathered around the Cross and heard the bitter, anguished cry wrung from the breaking heart of our Lord Jesus - "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" - and we sought to understand that in that deepest moment of all the ages the Son of Man was dealing with the deepest cry of the human heart, the cry for fellowship with God, the cry for the face of God. All through the ages that has been the one concern of man: to know that the face of God is toward him. With the garden and what transpired there, followed by man's expulsion, the face of God was lost to the race, and so for ever man has been, as it were, in a wilderness, having lost the face of God. The Lord Jesus took up that state of the withdrawn face of God on behalf of the whole race and bore the sin which brought it about, and recovered the face of God for all men who will believe. The face of God toward man is only another way of saying that heaven is opened again, having been closed fast by God himself.

Now we are going to consider the man of the open heaven. There is a man, we have seen, a man corporately, racially, a humanity of the first Adam who cannot have the face of God, cannot know the open heaven. There is the Man who can, and who has, and we are going to look at these men - the man of the closed heaven and the Man of the opened heaven; the man without the face of God and the Man with the face of God.

NATURAL MAN'S QUEST FOR POWER

We have to ask at the outset - from what was the face of God turned away and why? What was it that lay behind and led to Adam's loss of the light of God's countenance and resulted in the desolation of his soul as of a wilderness? The Bible, of course, is full of the answer. There are various ways in which that question can be answered. Doctrinally, we should use certain words. We should say it was because of sin or unrighteousness, but then we are committed to explain what we mean by sin and unrighteousness. I think the answer nearest to the heart of the whole matter is given more fully when we say that the reason for that lost face, that closed heaven, was and is a nature which is opposed to God, a nature which is sinful and unrighteous, a nature whose sinfulness and unrighteousness is found in its desire to usurp the place of God. That is the heart of it - a nature disposed to usurp the place of God, and when you try to gather that up and express it in a word, it amounts to this - THE QUEST FOR POWER.

It is to that that you trace everything in the fall, in what took place in the garden in Adam's case, and we are informed by the Scriptures that that quest for power, that unholy quest for power which is unrighteousness, which is contrary to what is right, had an earlier history in another realm. We are informed of the one who came to Adam having formerly made such a bid for power to usurp the place of God, and that was the essence of the temptation in the garden. Of course it was not explained to be so. Deception wrapped it around. Adam would probably have fled from that temptation had he seen its nature, perceived its essence. Anyone who does not implicitly obey the word of God because it is the word of God, without any explanation of why He has given it, will be deceived, and, being deceived, will be caught in the deepest trap of evil, of unrighteousness.

The essence of the temptation was to make a bid for power, which would put man in an advantageous position over God, make God unnecessary, put God out of His supreme and exclusive place, and bring man in as equal with God, at least. That is it. It was that that lost the open heaven, the face of God. And we find that that is the very heart, the very root, of the human nature which has sprung from that first Adam. That is the battleground. You might not, indeed, admit, when it is put so glaringly and nakedly and luridly, that that represents yourself. How little we know ourselves, and how little we make our deductions or draw our conclusions from all the things that are happening in human life! Why, this is the very stuff of 'psychology' - of what is happening today in the whole nervous system of the race; it is the reason why people are queueing up to see the nerve specialists - I will not use their technical names - people who can tell them what is the matter with them - because this and that and the other symptom brings such a lot of distress into their lives.

A whole list of new terms has been produced in recent years in that particular realm. 'Frustration' - what a word that is! 'Inferiority complex.' You are beginning to recognize the list. Behind many - not all, but many - of the nervous breakdowns, when the matter is looked into and explored, there is all the time something to do with the selfhood: the selfhood cannot have what it wants, do what it wants, be what it wants, get where it wants. In these various and numerous ways it suffers nervous reaction. The word 'frustration' is a very good one. People are bothered and troubled about themselves, and the matter resolves itself into a clash with the power to do and to be - the defeat of the SOUL. How deeply related to the soul, that is, to the self-conscious life of man, is this question of power - power to be, power to do; power to find one's satisfaction and contentment in being something and doing something, and not being a nobody without significance - the whole soul revolts against that. It is a question of power. As I have said, frustration and the inferiority complex are the very stuff of psychology.

You see, this soul of ours must in some way or other be on top. In order to be on top, it must subject everything and everybody to itself. It must go one better and be one better than the others, and there rise all the jealousies, the rivalries, the competitiveness, the possessiveness, the impatience - to be on top, not to be underneath.

PRIDE LINKED WITH THE LUST FOR POWER

The lust for power and pride are inseparable. You know why pride is an abomination to God, why God 'beholdeth the proud afar off' (Ps. 138:6). It is because behind the pride is this selfhood which took its rise from the spring of Satan in the human race: the desire to have power. We can see quite clearly how true that is in human life individually. It lies behind the whole world today - power and pride working together to have domination, everyone going one better than the other. You have only got to suggest that some nation or people have made a certain discovery, or produced some invention and it will not be long before some other people or nation will say they have gone one better, and so it goes on. That is the thing that constitutes the root and basic sin of this universe - the quest for power. It is the commencement and the consummation of Antichrist.

This is the human nature of the first Adam, and as with its originator, Satan, so it is always insinuating itself into the things of God and invading His very presence. The whole painful story of the Church's disruption, dissension and failure is the story of this selfhood coming into the realm of the things of God - self-assertion, possessiveness, domination, place in the Church, place in the work of God. What a story is bound up with this inherent lust for power, which, if it does not show itself in the more positive forms of self-assertion, will express itself in a feigned meekness, and is manifest in this inferiority complex. You do not know anything about such a thing as an inferiority complex if you do not suffer: and what is it that you are suffering? You are suffering the mortification of being less than you think you ought to be - and that is simply an expression of the lust for power, I am not going to dwell upon the miserable picture. I am only seeking to come to the main point.

God is not going on with that. He decided right back at the beginning, in the garden, that He was not going any further with that, His face was not toward that, it was turned away; never would that kind of humanity or human nature find His face. No, God will not go on with that kind of humanity.

CHRIST'S UNDERCUTTING OF THE NATURAL MAN

There is another kind, another type, with whom God will go on; but this former has got to be completely undercut; and herein is the significance of Christ, where we reach the more helpful phase of this contemplation. Everything about the Lord Jesus relates to this very thing - on the one hand, the undercutting of a human nature, a human order and kind that can never know the face of God, and, on the other side, the bringing in of a humanity that can have that face, that countenance and that open heaven. I repeat - everything about Christ relates to that issue.

THE SIGN OF THE VIRGIN BIRTH

Now I go back to that passage in Isaiah 7:14 - "The Lord himself shall give you a sign: behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel": the sign of the incarnation; and there are several things about that - connected with the incarnation of the Son of God - which simply, beautifully and clearly bear out the issue we are considering.

Firstly, the sign of the virgin birth - "Behold, a virgin shall conceive". Man is ruled out. What is said about those who through faith have the right to become children of God? - "who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John 1:13). 'Not of the will of A man', it is literally: man in his strength, and his initiative, has no place in this new kind of humanity that knows the face of God. It is man on his weak side. You remember in the beginning He called them - man and woman together - He called them both "Man" (Gen. 5:2), meaning that the race had two sides, a strong and a weak. That woman is the weaker vessel is, of course, not universally acknowledged in these days! But therein lies a reversal of all the glorious Divine thought. Only on his weak side has man a place in this; shall we say, only in his weakness and not in his strength, not in his initiative by deciding: "not... of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man". "A virgin shall conceive." That represents weakness, the weak side of the race, humanity on its weak side.

You will not misunderstand my usage of that word weak. It is a glorious word when rightly related. Do not misinterpret, you sisters who read this, and say you have to be weak in the wrong sense. You have got to be strong in weakness as you have to be weak in strength. When the angel appeared to the virgin and announced what was going to happen, and she got through her perplexity and the battle which would very naturally arise in her, and surmounted the natural human factors, her response was, "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word" (Luke 1:38). A virgin, a handmaid - weakness, humility and subjection. It was along that pathway that the new Heavenly Man came and recovered the face of God for man. That is the very beginning of this humanity, the kind of person who will have the face of God, who will inherit the open heaven: weak, humble, not assertive.

You see, right back even before His birth, His very door into this world was the door which undercuts the whole Adam race, in that nature of unrighteousness which, in its own strength, or in having strength in itself, would usurp the place of God. For "Be it unto me according to thy word" speaks of a disposition that is far removed from usurping the place of God. It was the sign of the virgin, that had been promised: "the Lord himself shall give you a sign". What is the significance of Christ? Here is the answer. Right there, before He is born into this world, He has undercut the human strength of the race, man's will, the strength of the flesh - nay, more than that, has undercut the very work of the devil in the race. He was manifested "that he might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John 3:8). While it was by His Cross that He did that, the basis of it was the incorruptible life in Him. The Virgin Birth is a deep thing of God in the undercutting of a fallen nature, the work of the devil.

THE SIGN OF THE UNIMPORTANT TOWN

"But thou, Beth-lehem Ephrathah, which art little to be among the thousands of Judah, out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel" (Mic. 5:2). Little among the thousands of Judah - the thousands of families, that is, of Judah. The sign of that unimportant town. The Lord is sovereignly keeping to principle. Everything connected with the very birth, incarnation, of the Lord Jesus contains the principle. To be ruler He ought to have been born surely in Jerusalem or some important place, but no. By that time Bethlehem Ephrathah had lost its place of importance. Its importance was spiritual, not natural. it was just there that Rachel died when Benjamin, 'the son of Jacob's right hand' was born (Gen. 35:18,19), and it was said that in him Israel was to find its realization. It was spiritual significance. All natural significance has gone now, and there, where there was no significance, the most significant thing happened and the most significant Person was born. It is very simple. It is not making something of nothing. It is following the working out of a principle.

THE SIGN OF THE MANGER

Listen again to this sign in Luke: "And this is the sign unto you: Ye shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger." "This is the sign unto you." What does it signify? What is the significance of the lowly manger? Well, it is obvious, it is plain. Surely such a One as He ought to have had a more imposing, impressive place for birth, for entering the world? But no: He is undercutting all the importance of this world, all the glory of the flesh, of the old race. He is just undercutting it with every step. Many, many have been the homilies and helpful addresses upon Bethlehem's manger, the place of His birth; but oh, let us see right back behind that manger, behind that humble cattle-trough, right back into hell, right back through the whole depth of a fallen and God-abandoned humanity. That is what it touches. It is related to that.

"A SIGN... SPOKEN AGAINST"

And then in that very same chapter - Luke 2, verse 34 - we have this: "And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the falling and rising up of many in Israel; and for a sign which is spoken against." "This child is set... for a sign which is spoken against." As you know, the reproach which was laid upon Him by His nation was that He was not important enough. He disappointed all their expectations and hopes as to what their Messiah would be. Oh, what a crashing of their castles in the air was the actual fulfilment of the prophecy - "Behold, thy king cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass" (Zech. 9:9). A sign spoken against. If only He had been somebody of greater importance, a personality with power in the temporal realm, they would not have spoken against Him as they did. It was all the time - "Is not this the carpenter?" (Mark 6:3). 'Who is this fellow making Himself out to be? He is a nobody! He is taking far too much on Himself. He really cannot rightly lay claim to all this. Look at Him!' A sign spoken against. What was it for? It was to undercut all that the world looks for and must have in its great ones - strength of their own kind, power of their own. "A sign which is spoken against."

THE SIGN OF NAZARETH

And so we can glance through His life and see the same principle always obtaining. His home was in despised Nazareth. "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" (John 1:46). 'Give a dog a bad name, and hang him!' Nazareth had a bad name, and He lived there. Not much of a prospect, coming from Nazareth. His work? - a carpenter of Nazareth! "Is not this the carpenter's son?" (Matt. 13:55).

THE SIGN OF TWO TURTLE-DOVES

Then consider His poverty. In that chapter, Luke 2, we find that they brought Him to the temple, to offer the offering commanded by Moses, and what was it? - the offering of the poorest people in the land. Some could bring a bullock, some could bring a ram, but the poorest, who could not afford anything like that, could bring two turtle doves; and His parents offered two turtle doves. How poor they were! His life throughout was like that.

THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF CHRIST'S WORK OF UNDERCUTTING

And then His death. Oh, the depth of shame, of SHAME, of ignominy, of disgrace! Oh, the stripping of every vestige of human pride when He became "obedient unto death, yea, the death of the Cross". The death OF THE CROSS! Not being compelled to it, but being obedient to it: not having by outward compulsion to yield, but Himself accepting it. Does it need that we should say more? Has He not undercut the old Adam in all his pride, in all his self-importance, in all his quest for power? Yes: He did it when He was "crucified through weakness" (2 Cor. 13:4). This is the Man who has opened heaven; this is the Man to whom heaven is opened and heaven's attestation is given, who lives in the light of God's countenance; and this is the Man who, because of what He was and is, has secured that open heaven, that countenance FOR US.

CHRIST FOR US

The first principle of our Christian life, the very foundation of our Christian life, is not that we are like Him, or that there is anything about us like that. The beginning of the Christian life is not that you have in some way to forsake your pride and be like Jesus. The BEGINNING of the Christian life is that what He was and is is given to us by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ. It is put to our account. Yes, I know - you and I are still proud, we still suffer from this horrible thing, it is in our nature. We still resent and resist being made nothing of, being left out of account, being despised and rejected. There is still that in us which does not like it, to say the least. We like to be acknowledged, to be recognized, to have some kind of title amongst men, if we can. It is still there. But, blessed be God, the whole meaning of grace, the grace of God, is that what Jesus Christ is - not what we are, but WHAT HE IS - is put right to the account of every one who will accept Him. We speak about accepting Jesus Christ as Saviour, accepting Him as Lord; but what does that mean? It means accepting Him as the One that we are not, but that God requires; as the One who makes good all that God demands and we can never supply. That is accepting Christ. Never depart from that. However much you may become concerned and occupied with conformity to His image, that is a later consideration. However much you may be occupied with being made like Christ, never, never at any time allow the matter of the process to get into the place of what He is for you ALL THE TIME. He IS that Other whom God favours, and we have been made accepted in the Beloved One.

I am going to stop there for the present, in our consideration of the significance of Christ, of the many-sided sign of the Son of Man. Every thing about Christ sets forth some aspect of the undercutting of one kind of humanity or mankind - of one kind of man who has come into this universe and has no longer any place or standing with God. That kind was put away by His great substitutionary and representative act, when He accepted the full, final and consummate result of it in the moment of His cry 'Thou hast forsaken Me'. It was all swallowed up in the bitterness, the unspeakable bitterness, of His soul's desolation, and having been swallowed up, there is no longer any place for it; and inasmuch as He Himself in His own nature was not that, He could be raised again - what wonderful words! - "by the glory of the Father" (Rom. 6:4). It is shame that has gone in the Cross; it is glory that springs out of it, the glory of the Father. And, being raised, He is the "firstborn among many brethren" (Rom. 8:29). He is the first of this new and different race, the race of those who are begotten, "not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God", and have the right to be called children of God, a new race in Christ. Because of what He is, being put to our desolate and hopeless account by the unspeakable grace of God, we ought to sing, with the deepest, the most profound gratitude and wonder -

Not what I am, O Lord, but what Thou art:

That, that alone, can be my soul's true rest.

Chapter 3 - In Relation to His Power

"Seeing that Jews ask for signs, and Greeks seek after wisdom: but we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumblingblock, and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God" (1 Corinthians 1:22-24).

"And blessed is he, whosoever shall find no occasion of stumbling in me" (Matthew 11:6).

With most of you who read these lines, it would be altogether out of place to ask the question: Does Christ signify? For us, He signifies above all other and beyond all else in this universe. But we do just put that question forward in order to draw our attention again, and to give a swift, almost instantaneous review of how immensely Christ has come to signify in this world. What an immense significance has arisen with the name of Jesus! - and not only amongst believers but in history. Does He signify? Well, that is answered by our hearts very strongly and finally, but we have to go further in our contemplation of what He signifies. What is His significance? In our previous studies we were seeking to see something of the significance of Christ in relation to the race as it is, and then to pass to the significance of Christ in relation to the race as God intended and intends it to be.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DIFFERENCE OF CHRIST

That leads to the further question: How and why does He signify? I could answer that in what might be a somewhat abstruse, and would certainly be a very imperfect, way, but in a way nevertheless which would set us in the right direction of discovering this significance of Christ. I would say that the answer to the 'how' and the 'why' is found in the fact that He is so different - utterly different - from all the rest of mankind. That is how He signifies, and that is why He signifies. He is not only different, but He is of another order. Yes: very Man, true humanity, but of another order; and that other order was not perceivable on the outside as He moved amongst men. But that was the great, the basic, feature of His signification - there was that which was so completely different in order, in inward constitution.

Jesus was a stranger in this world - but not only a stranger. He was an enemy in this world; He was definitely up against this world, what was here, and His very presence was a provocation to it. It found Him a problem, a difficulty, and often unbearable - because "the whole world lieth in the evil one" (1 John 5:19). The world was and is in the power of Satan, and in that realm His significance was fully recognized; so that a clash between Him, who was of another realm and another spiritual order, and this realm and this spiritual order, was inevitable.

ISRAEL PECULIARLY IN THE POWER OF SATAN

Now, here is a very interesting and significant thing. While the whole world was in the power of Satan, the Jewish nation was peculiarly and particularly so. Here we touch one of those principles in the Divine order and economy. God has always had to have a representation of His thoughts. Israel was raised up to be a national representation of God's thoughts to the world, among the nations; to be the servant of God to make God's thoughts known. Israel failed. And it was not only that Israel FAILED in their calling, their great vocation. It was worse than that. Israel, like the first Adam, fell clean into the hands of Satan to be used to misrepresent God and His thoughts: that is, to turn right round on their Divine calling and present exactly the opposite. As we said in our last study, Israel so fell into the hands of Satan that he could even use that nation against God, to kill the very Son of God Himself.

That was the corporate expression of exactly what took place in the individual in the Garden. Adam not only fell from his calling and the Divine intention. He went lower than that. He fell right into the hands of the devil, to be, himself and his seed, a misrepresentation of God's intentions and thoughts - to be the direct opposite of what God meant. That is Satan's work.

THE LORD JESUS A STRANGER IN THIS WORLD

So, when He came into the world - He who, in His very constitution, was not of this world, but of another realm and another order - He was a stranger. "The world knew him not" (John 1:10). And He was an enemy: the world hated Him. John says both of those things. He tells the Church not to be surprised if the world does not know them - "the world knew him not"; and not to be surprised if the world hates them - it 'hated Him before it hated them' (John 15:18). Where does this come from? It is strange that you find this spontaneous hatred and alienation from Christ in the world. It is there naturally and they do not know why. Sometimes when you get down alongside of a person who has shown real objection, animosity or hatred, distance from Christ, and begin to talk to them quietly, they change altogether and do not know why they ever took that attitude. They become milder and more reasonable, and you can talk with them. So often that happens. They do not know why. Well, we know why. "The whole world" - ignorantly in very large degree - "lieth in the evil one" (1 John 5:19).

Christ is a stranger in this world. "The world knew him not." That applied primarily to His Deity. The world knew Him not in His Deity: that of course is the great point of John's writings, the gospel and his letters - who Jesus Christ essentially was. The world knew Him not in that sense primarily; but that is true in a larger sense also. The world knew Him not in His true human nature. It did not know this kind of MAN. He is another kind of man - to them a very irritating man, a very annoying man, a very disturbing man. It was not simply because, from their standpoint, He was an upstart and a revolutionary and 'agin everybody' - no, not that. There is something about this Man Himself that they cannot understand, they cannot fathom; they cannot cope with Him. They knew Him not in His real Manhood. He was at variance with their whole mentality. They were mentally constituted after a different order from what He was. Jesus was in conflict with the whole natural make-up of man as he is found on the earth since Adam: with man's thought-life, yes; but deeper than that - with man's motives, man's UN-thought-out way of life. He was in conflict with it in its very essence, its uttermost depth. And from the other side, for that very reason, it was impossible for man on this earth to grasp and appreciate Him. He was so differently constituted in the very depths of His being - not in His thought-out philosophy of life, His creed, but in what He was. The natural man cannot grasp and appreciate Jesus.

And now we come very near home. That is as true of you and of me as Christians as it is of non-Christians. That is the basis of so large an amount of our trouble, and is the basis of all God's work with us: to create an entirely different mentality from what we are naturally, to bring about an altogether different constitution - not in our philosophy of life, but in the very springs of our being, in what comes up spontaneously, without thought, without premeditation. It is there that the work of the Spirit of God goes on. Christ and Christians can be just as much at variance as Christ and worldlings, because we Christians are still so much actuated by the world's ideas. Certainly organized Christianity, as it is called, proceeds along the lines of the world's ideas.

THE QUESTION OF POWER THE ROOT OF THE DIFFERENCE

I come back to that point with which we were dealing earlier: the very root of this difference - the whole question of power. The natural man's ideas of power are as far removed from Jesus Christ as the heavens are removed from the earth. I said that this matter of power is the very root of all the trouble in this world, in the individual and in the whole race. The whole matter of power as an instrument in the hands of self sprang up with Satan. It brought that first mighty clash between God and that perhaps highest of His created beings - with what results, with what havoc, we are unable to measure. And then the same principle of power for personal use, power for personal 'being something', was insinuated into the race through Adam, when he fell to the temptation to have that power in himself and not in God. It is a very, very far expansive reach that is gathered into that little phrase, that little clause, in Ps. 62:11: "God hath spoken once, twice have I heard this, that power belongeth unto God!" It belongs to God. You take it from God into your own hands, and get away with it, and you get the far reach from the poor iron cannon-ball to the atomic bomb. That looks like a tremendous advance in power. Take it out of God's hands, and see where it will land you. The very thing that you have clamoured for may be given. God seems to be giving - until it becomes your very doom. There is a terrible history bound up with this matter of power. "God hath spoken once, twice have I heard this, that power belongeth UNTO GOD."

Seeing, then, that there is such a mighty gap between the race, in its mentality about this, and the Lord Jesus, the necessity does arise for a new birth. We have to learn yet about the new birth. We have never comprehended one small fraction of what it means to be born again, or anew, or from above, born from another world, with that world's mentality. Now step back one step and we will come on to that again.

"To this end was the Son of God manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John 3:8). The "works of the devil" are found concentrated in this word 'power'. He made a bid for that power which would put God out of His place. He caused man to do the same, and thus we have all this wrong, false and disastrous mentality about power.

FEAR THE COMPANION OF THE QUEST FOR POWER

What is the, perhaps imperceptible, but very real thing which lies behind all the trouble in this world, all the 'nerves' of the individual or of the race? It is FEAR: fear of being overwhelmed, of being overcome, subjected, of going under, losing out - put it how you like - in many, many ways. It is fear that lies behind all this hankering and craving and working for power. Now look at the Lord Jesus. Was there ever a sign of fear in Him? Everything gathered round Him that would make for fear. His whole position, not only from his enemies' but from this world's standpoint, was a most precarious one. Nothing seemed naturally to be sure, to be safe. Indeed, everything conspired to become a tremendous threat to His security, His personal security, the security of His cause. But there is never the suggestion of a moment's fear. There is perfect confidence, assurance, tranquility. He goes on quietly, unperturbed. That was the thing that made everybody wonder. They could not understand this Man, in His precarious position in the judgment Hall, being so utterly tranquil, self-possessed, self-confident. As has been said many times, it was Pilate before Christ, not Christ before Pilate. They could not understand this perfect absence of fear. Fear comes from hell, and it is the companion of this quest for power. The rush today for power, to get the upper hand in the nations, is simply born of fear. How different the Lord Jesus was and is! Fear is the result of the work of the enemy, of Satan.

Let me say to you in the very simplest way: In the simplest matters of life, if you ever fear about some movement, some step, you are going to take, if ever the element of fear comes in with a proposition - stop; do not move; wait. If Satan can, he will bring in an element of fear. You and I have got to move with God in quiet, steady restfulness. You keep your eye upon the fact of a fear. Whenever it comes, you say, 'This is not of God'. "God gave us not a spirit of fearfulness" (2 Tim. 1:7). That comes from somewhere else.

THE LORD WAS WITHOUT FEAR

Did Jesus signify? Does He signify? How does He signify? Because He is different. The question of power with Him had no fear associated with it. Oh, how He was urged to act in a precautionary, in a safeguarding way, in a self-preserving way - lest this or that should happen. The exigencies and the contingencies of the way He was taking were constantly brought before Him, and so the emergency element was constantly introduced, to get Him to act to safeguard either Himself or the mission on which He had come, the work committed to Him. But they never could get Him to act on that emergency basis at all. He was perfectly at rest, and in His case that represented tremendous power. Their ideas of power were other: 'You must do this, you must do that; you must build up here, you must safeguard there; your security will come along the line of your own doing something.' You see, it all hung upon the question of faith - for the greatest factor in power is faith. That is how it was with Jesus at the beginning. Will He trust God? The voice of the tempter said, 'If you are not quite sure of God, you must do something yourself or the day is lost, everything is lost.' So we see that, in this matter of our attitude in regard to power, we have to be 'born again', 'born from above' - to get an entirely different mentality, from another world, which brings in another nature, a disposition altogether different.

THE POWER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

There is a paradox of power in the Word of God. On the one hand you can see how evil it can be - not, however, that power in itself is evil - but how when man takes it into his own hands, to use it as an instrument of his selfhood, it becomes an evil thing, the very root of iniquity in the universe, because it puts God out of His place. That is one side.

And yet the Bible is just full of exhortations to be powerful, to be strong. It is the great word on which Christians rest for the accomplishment of the work of God in this dispensation. "Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you" (Acts 1:8). What is this power? You have to look again and again at the Lord Jesus. Do not think that power is invariably or preeminently demonstrated or manifested by miracles. There were miracles, there were manifestations, there were the phenomena of power, but they were for a purpose. You do not find either Christ or the apostles spending every minute, every hour, of their lives working miracles. There may be many recorded, but it was not the miracles that were the foundation of Christianity, and they are not the foundation of Christianity now. They are not the proofs positive and final that Christianity is Divine. Satan can simulate miracles, Satan can always work miracles, and it may sometimes be difficult to discriminate between the Divine and Satanic, for often they are psychical miracles. Antichrist will work miracles, and it will not be easy to detect that they are of Antichrist. Miracles do not represent the power, essentially and basically, of God. They are only one means of fulfilling His purpose at times, under given circumstances.

THE POWER OF WHAT WE ARE

The real power of Christ, the real power of Christianity, the real power of the Church, is essentially spiritual: it is what Christ WAS and IS, and what you and I ARE, not what we DO at all. The power of God is not in our activities: that is, our activities are not just the proof of the power of God. If that were so, the Church would be a mighty force on earth today. It never was more active, more busy, more engaged in DOING, than it is now. I venture to say that the spiritual power is far, far from commensurate with the Church's activities, and its mentality is so different. It has made bigness take the place of greatness. Loudness now seems to be regarded as force. No, power is a spiritual thing, and it is a matter of what we are. Our presence, without our words or actions, ought to be far more than both words and actions put together. After all, our words and our actions may only touch men as seen. What we are touches the world unseen. "I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God" (Mark 1:24). "Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye?" (Acts 19:15). It is not that you have embraced Christianity; it is that you now belong to another realm, which realm is destined utterly to set aside this realm - which Kingdom of Heaven is destined to put aside this kingdom of Satan. It is not going to be official; it is not going to be done objectively. It is going to be done, and it is being done, spiritually. It is just in proportion to the measure of Christ represented in individuals, in companies, in the Church, that the kingdom of Satan is put out. And that means Christ's ideas, Christ's mentality, Christ's constitution.

THE POWER OF LETTING GO TO GOD

It works out, as we tried to show earlier, in this way, that very often the most mighty thing that a believer can do is to let go to God. Everything is locked up while they are holding on, while they are not going to give anything away or let anybody have their work; while they are not going to relax or 'eat humble pie'; while they are determined to stick to it on the ground that God has given it, and they hold it in their hands and will not let go. A terrific battle goes on, very often. But when at last that child of God lets go to God, relaxes the grip and says, 'Lord, I hand it back to You: it is Yours, not mine; it is for You to guard, it is for me to be the custodian of Your things; this is not my work, it is Yours, I am not going to hold on to it' - when that happens, something else happens. The lock-up gives way, there is a mighty release. God comes in, and He in freedom does something, something wonderful. He may give back, but He will give back with something very much more added in of spiritual power. It was not until Jacob, with all his effort and strain through the hours of the night, recognized that he was, after all, weaker than God, that he came to be Israel - a prince with God. The Lord Jesus was never holding on in fear of losing something. It was in the Father's hand, He trusted the Father, He let go to the Father. That is His way, that is His nature, that is His mentality - and that is power. Heaven comes in along that line, and it is then that the significance of a life arises. That is why He signified, and signifies.

Do you desire to signify something for God, to be, after all, of a right kind of significance, accountability, meaning? You see the need of getting Christ's Holy constitution in us. The most powerful thing, we have often said, with God and as bringing God alongside, is meekness. Power is spiritual. That is the point. You see the place of weakness in the New Testament. "When I am weak, then am I strong" (2 Cor. 12:10). "Most gladly... will I... glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me" (2 Cor. 12:9). There is a lot said about human weakness. It is just the opposite of the devil; it is just the opposite of what the devil made man. I am only hinting. There is far too much in this of detail to stay to speak of.

What is your idea of power? What is your mentality concerning power? Are you clamouring for power, wanting power? Well, it all works out this way. True power from God's standpoint is Calvary power. Christ crucified is the power of God. What is Calvary power? Well, it is emptiness of self, you and I being emptied of self - and truly, that is easier said than endured! Oh, how very much there is of this self about us still! How we hate - how we suffer - being emptied of ourselves! What a terrible thing it is to feel our inability - to know that we do not count in ourselves. Oh, to be ABLE! And yet have we not proved, again and again, that our times of greatest emptiness and weakness have been the times when God has done most, and got glory by what He has done? Yes, it has been true. We have learnt it along various lines and different ways, but God has been working right into the very inside of us, so that the thing is done - it becomes a part of us. He does not have to maintain it by external conditions. But He frequently uses such - very often physical - conditions, to bring us to that place of utter dependence upon Himself. It is really not good enough, is it, to be forced to it, compelled to it? That is God's way of education, but it would be very much better for us to be fit and well and as dependent upon God as ever.

"Power belongeth unto God." Power is a spiritual thing. The true nature of power is of a totally different order from our natural idea and conception of it. The Lord is so different. Power is not a temporal matter, it is not a physical matter, it is not an intellectual matter, it is not a social, a positional, or a possessional matter, at all. Power is essentially spiritual: I say again, it is what we are. Do believe that Satan is far more afraid of you being Christlike than he is of all your phraseology, and your epithets against him, and your hurling at him certain terms about the Blood. He laughs - he snaps his fingers at a lot of that. He says, 'I will catch you one of these days, and you will rue it!' But if you are spiritual, what can he do? "The prince of this world cometh: and he hath nothing in me" (John 14:30), said the Lord. So, in the hour of the power of darkness, He could say, "Now shall the prince of this world be cast out" (John 12:31). I say again, that was not objectively and officially done. It was done by what He was. Satan had no ground, and so no power. This Man defeated every contemplation of Satan as he walked round Him. 'How can I get in? I have been trying all these years to find some little gap; I cannot find it, I am beaten, I can do nothing with Him, He does not give me a chance. I offer Him prizes - He snaps His fingers at them; I threaten Him with the direst consequences of the course He is taking - it does not make any difference! I cannot get this Man.' That is how the prince of this world is cast out.

So it all resolves itself into the need, in the first place, for what is meant by being born from above: an entirely new nature and disposition, to begin with, and then a letting God do His work of conforming us to the image of His Son. I am not saying that works and words do not come in, but it is a heartbreaking business to be working and speaking with no power, no registration of heaven.

The Lord give us light as to what He means by this.

Chapter 4 - In Relation to His Knowledge

"And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Gen. 2:16-17).

"And the woman said unto the serpent, Of the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat" (Gen. 3:2-6).

"And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever - therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden" (Gen. 3:22-23).

"For seeing that in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom knew not God, it was God's good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe" (1 Cor. 1:21).

"We speak wisdom, however, among them that are fullgrown: yet a wisdom not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nought: but we speak God's wisdom in a mystery, even the wisdom that hath been hidden, which God foreordained before the ages unto our glory: which none of the rulers of this age hath known: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Cor. 2:6-8, R.V. mg.).

The Lord Jesus did not come into this world as God incarnate, taking human form, merely for His own sake, to do something in isolation, in His isolated Person, and go away again, as though He had accomplished His life-work and that was that. The fundamental fact of our faith is that the Lord Jesus is God's basis and model for the constitution of every child of His. Christ is very vitally related to us. God's thought is: "as he is, so are we". We are "foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son". The significance of Christ for us is a very real, very vital one.

Our significance, therefore - and our hearts must be wholly set upon being, as utterly as God has made possible, men or women of God - our significance in this universe must therefore be the significance of Christ. Exactly what HE signifies, WE have to signify, and so it is for us to understand, to grasp, to see, by Divine enablement, what is the nature of Christ's significance.

HIS SIGNIFICANCE NOT OF THIS WORLD

We have seen that His significance was altogether outside of this world and its standards, its ideas, its mentality. It was another significance. It was the impact of something other upon this world and in this world. It was not just an influence, it was not something abstract. It was the very nature of His humanity. He was a Man in possession of certain things which no other man possessed. All the race beside Him did not possess the things which He possessed, and those things are the things which are going to give us our significance, as the significance of Christ. For there is no doubt about it - these things do make people significant.

THE NATURE OF HIS POWER

We spoke in our last meditation of the nature of His power. With the world's ideas of power it had nothing in common. It was power which worked through utter selflessness, meekness, humility, so far as He Himself was concerned; emptiness, absolute dependence upon sources outside of Himself. That was the position He had accepted voluntarily. But He would not have been such a man of power if He had had it in Himself. Why should He spend all night in prayer before He would allow Himself to choose the men who were to be His disciples and later His apostles? He would not allow Himself to do that out from Himself. It was necessary for Him to be able to say later, "I know whom I have chosen" (John 13:18), and any man making choice for such responsibility would naturally never have chosen those men - least of all Judas Iscariot. "Did not I choose you the twelve, and one of you is a devil?" (John 6:70). He spent all night in prayer before He did it. Many other pointers there are to His power not being in Himself but being drawn from another source. It is just the exact opposite of the world's ideas of power.

THE ASSOCIATION OF KNOWLEDGE WITH POWER

Now I come to another point in connection with that - the association of KNOWLEDGE with power. There is a saying, 'Knowledge is power'. That may in a sense be true in the natural world. It certainly is true in the spiritual world. But natural knowledge is not powerful in the spiritual world. We have only to go back to the passages in Genesis that we read, to see that the idea primarily was one of power. 'New power is going to be reached by way of knowledge: knowledge is going to bring to power' - so the devil said, and so the woman came to believe, and the man and the race. Knowledge and power. Yes, it is true, it is quite true. The lie of the devil was not in that he said, in effect, 'Knowledge is power'. The lie was, "Ye shall be as God"; that is, 'You will be able to dispense with God, you will be as God yourself; you will have the power in yourself, and that will make you equal with God, and you will have the secret of life, the secret of pre-eminence, the secret of dominion; you will have it in your own hands, in yourself.' The lie was there.

The truth was that in the day that their soul-eyes were opened, when they acquired a soulish or psychical knowledge, in that day their spiritual eyes closed. In the day that they saw in one realm, they became blind forever in another. The whole race was blinded by seeking knowledge - not by knowledge in itself, for knowledge is not evil, it is not wrong - but by seeking knowledge as personal power, to give personal advantage and to glorify the flesh, to glorify man. The end, as we said earlier, is man's undoing. The more he knows, the more by his knowledge he brings the race into proximity to utter destruction.

THE NATURE OF CHRIST'S KNOWLEDGE

Let us come to the Lord Jesus. The significance of the Lord Jesus was His knowledge. His power worked by way of His knowledge. It was not just putting forth force. His power was because of His knowledge. But what was the nature and basis of His knowledge? The nature of His knowledge was that He knew God, He knew the Father; He knew heaven's standpoint, heaven's standards. He knew eternal laws and principles. He knew with the knowledge of heaven - that was His power. It was spiritual knowledge which He possessed. They could not understand. As we said, He was a stranger in this world. They did not understand. "Whence hath this man this wisdom...?" (Matt. 13:54). They referred to what seemed to them to be His store of information. He could speak about almost anything. He could speak about the sea, He could speak about boats, He could speak about fishes, He could speak about everything on a farm; He could speak about anything. That was impressive enough, but that was not the thing that perplexed them. There was something more than that. "He taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes" (Matt. 7:29), who were the knowledgeable people according to this world. There was some element in His knowledge which defeated every attempt of theirs to fathom. It was spiritual knowledge, and that spiritual knowledge met men's need as nothing else met that need - when men's hearts were open to be met and when they realized that they had a need. It met need in the deepest way for man.

Of course, we know that ourselves. You know very well the difference between information and Divine spiritual knowledge. If the Lord speaks spiritually, how utterly satisfying it is, how it meets us right deep down in our being, how it is food, how it is life! But the mere imparting of Bible or religious information - that is another thing in another realm. It may be the cleverest person doing it: it does not touch us. I have lately been trying to read a book on doctrine, Christian doctrine, by an eminent religious scholar who took a whole year off from his work at Oxford University in order to write it. I had to read every sentence two or three times before I knew what he was talking about. I thought: 'Something has happened to me, I have lost out - I can't cope with this!' Until I met a man who is miles and miles ahead of me intellectually and I said, 'Have you encountered such and such a book?' He said, 'Yes, but it is a weariness to the flesh; I do not know what the man is talking about!' That was a great comfort to me, purely naturally, in the flesh! But, you see, that kind of approach, in dealing with the things of God, is death.

But when the Lord Jesus spoke, He spoke out of knowledge which was not of that kind. "The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life" (John 6:63), and the hungry heart knew it and ever has known it. There is a knowledge which we, like the Lord Jesus, may possess. He is not apart from us in this. He accepted our position, to have, in the days of His flesh, all things as we may have them. In saying that, nothing is taken from His Deity, His Godhead; but I must accept His absolute humanity, and that, for the duration of that humanity, He, of His own will, accepted our position - to go our way, and not to have power in Himself, but to have it only in God and to obtain it all from God. The purity of His Spirit, of course, made for possibilities beyond anything we can imagine. "The pure in heart... shall see God" (Matt. 5:8), and therefore He could see and discern and perceive as perhaps we never shall. But, on the same basis, we are permitted to have knowledge, of an order, in a realm, which means the very heart satisfaction of others and which, being that, is a power beyond anything that is academic, however great it may be. It is heart knowledge and heart satisfaction that matters. It is that that is going to make you and me men and women of God. In a word, we shall be men and women of God just in proportion to our spiritual knowledge of the Lord. That is our measure as men and women before God.

"Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches; but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he hath understanding, and knoweth me" (Jer. 9:23-24).

THE AUTHORITY AND POWER OF CHRIST'S KNOWLEDGE

Then I said that He spoke with authority. His knowledge gave Him an authority. It was not official authority - it was not that God had placed Him in a position of official authority. It was the authority of spiritual knowledge. He could speak straight out, without the slightest wavering in His certainty. 'Moses said' - and Moses was a great authority - "but I say unto you" (Matt. 5). Here is an authority transcending Moses. 'The scribes and Pharisees say, but I say...' It was not just the asserting, self-sufficient, self-assured declaration of some conviction. It came out of a hidden secret knowledge which brought Him absolute certainty. He could say it, and commit Himself and everything to what He said. I very often hesitate to say some things that I say, and I often keep things back on the point of saying them, and sometimes when I am thinking of things beforehand, I make up my mind I am not going to say that, not because it is not true, but because I am afraid of the consequences. The Lord Jesus never had a reservation. He could say a thing, and know that sooner or later that would come about and they would have to acknowledge that He had spoken the truth.

Think of some of the things that He said. Speaking of the temple, He said, "There shall not be left here one stone upon another" (Matt. 24:2). 'Before this generation passes away, Jerusalem will be compassed about with armies; families will be betraying one another; the most ghastly things will he happening here.' "This generation shall not pass away, until all these things be accomplished" (Mark 13:30). Was it true? Fifty years later it all happened to the very letter. That is only an outstanding example of what I mean. He could commit Himself absolutely to what He said, knowing that sooner or later it would be proved, because it was true. And if you and I are on His basis, taught by His Spirit, something of that significance will come into our lives also. People will say - That is what So-and-so said, and there it is; it is just what they said. That is power by knowledge. Oh, it is not just using power for self-vindication or self-justification. I am speaking of power like that of the Lord Jesus - of His knowledge being His power and the power of tremendous authority.

So I could go round the clock and touch on all sorts of things relating to authority, relating to His hidden knowledge giving Him His significance in this universe. It was what He knew that gave Him His significance; not what He did only, but what He knew. If you know the secret, you are in a position of great power. Some years ago I tried to illustrate this. An engineering firm sent in an account for some work they had done. The account was a very heavy one, and the people who were asked to pay sent it back and questioned it. 'This is much too heavy! We want you to explain why you are charging us so much.' And the engineering firm sent it back again, detailing the account item by item: materials - so much; time and labour - so much; so they itemized it. But that did not amount to the whole, that did not account for the total, by a long way. There was still a large balance, and this was summed up by one item: 'To knowing how'! It would never have been done otherwise. There was all the material, all the labour, all the time - but 'knowing how' is the big thing.

THE COST OF SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE

And it is the costly thing. This spiritual knowledge is costly. It is like power, as we said in our last meditation. It is Calvary knowledge. The Cross will have to strike very hardly and deeply into our own certainties, our own self-assurance, our own self-confidence in what we think - yes, into that whole store of knowledge that we thought gave us significance. It will have to strike deep into us until we have to say, 'I do not know, I do not understand; I cannot follow, I cannot see. What is it that the Lord is doing with me? There is an end to all my own understanding!' Spiritual knowledge comes by way of the Cross, as every other spiritual thing does. It is Calvary knowledge. It is the weak things who have been broken by the application of the Cross who become the powerful factors in the realm that counts most.

"Behold your calling, brethren" - in other words, 'You see your calling, brethren: how you are called, the basis of your calling.' "Not many wise... not many mighty, not many noble... God chose the foolish things of the world" (1 Cor. 1:26-27); because it is not the wisdom of this world and the strength of this world - it is another kind. Have you noticed how some who are very ignorant and foolish so far as this world is concerned, some who would never pass an examination, who could not answer a general knowledge paper of the most ordinary kind - how, when they have come to the Lord and come under the power and instruction of the Holy Spirit, they begin to take on significance and weight, and how very often it is just to such people that others needing help go? That is the thing that makes for significance - knowledge of the Lord. How often, on the other hand, have we found those who, according to this world, are tremendously advanced, very knowledgeable and very highly educated, have the very best scientific knowledge and equipment - and yet they are like little babes in spiritual things. I confess that I have often been taken aback by that. I have thought, Here is someone who is very intelligent: with their great academic achievements and accomplishments, and their very able minds, they will be able to understand things and we shall have a good time. We have started off, and soon they have taken on a far away look and do not know what you are talking about, and we do not get anywhere at all.

I am not saying, of course, that that is always so. When the Countess of Huntingdon heard that passage read - "not many noble" - she said: 'Thank God, it says "not many" - there can be some!' I am not saying it is necessary to be without education in order to have spiritual knowledge, nor am I saying it is necessary to have it. But spiritual knowledge is of another order, something different altogether, and it is that that gives the meaning. If you know the Lord, if you have that opened heaven, that which the Lord Jesus had of a life with God, a walk with God, a fellowship with God, you will count for something, not only as an influence, but as one who has the secret for other people, who can help by enlightenment and instruction, who has something to give - and oh, how much that is needed! Is it not true that the poor, weak, retarded state of the mass of Christians today is due to the absence of a teaching ministry that is truly under the Holy Spirit? Surely it is! We can see what is bound up with this matter of spiritual knowledge, spiritual understanding, in giving significance.

Now I started here - do you really want to be a man of God, a woman of God, as swiftly as it is possible for God to make you one? Then, if so, your heart will be set upon knowing the Lord more than anything else. It will be your one ambition, your one passion - to know the Lord. You will be seeking to walk with the Lord, to know the Lord - but it is going to cost you.

FAITHFULNESS IN TESTIMONY

In our last study, in connection with power, we cited one or two passages of Scripture. "Jews ask for signs, and Greeks seek after wisdom: but we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumblingblock, and unto Gentiles foolishness" (1 Cor. 1:22-23). And then, "Blessed is he, whosoever shall find no occasion of stumbling in me" (Matt. 11:6). Now the offence of the Cross comes here in this matter. In order to be a man or woman of God, are you prepared to be called a fool, to be regarded as silly, weak, foolish - and the world does think Christians are foolish - and because you know that they think of Christians like that, are you either going to hide your light and not let them know too clearly that you are a Christian, or are you going to try to meet them on their own ground, and 'be up to them' with natural ability, thinking, deludedly, that you are going to win them, or are you going in some way to convince them by being as they are, taking their standards? Both of those courses, needless to say, are disastrous. The only way to be of real account in the eternal sense, in the heavenly sense, as a man or woman of God, is to come right out with it, plainly, clearly, unreservedly - 'I am a Christian, I belong to the Lord!' - and all that that means, risking everything upon a very clear testimony; leaving the Lord to support, to vindicate, but taking the consequences, which for the time being will probably be sneers, jeers, discounting, calling you names that hurt the flesh, perhaps ostracising or isolating you. But, sooner or later, your significance will come into light; sooner or later you will find that conditions are forcing men beyond their own resources to the need of something which you alone have got, and that God gives you the opportunity because of your faithfulness. God will never give you opportunities unless you have been faithful. You have to be faithful in the least before you have your opportunity increased.

COUNTING FOR GOD

Does this matter to you - whether you are of that kind of significance or not, whether you count? Some of you have settled that long ago; but it is so easy to stand up and sing - especially with a tune that helps and is perhaps rather soulish - "Jesus, and shall it ever be, a mortal man ashamed of Thee?", and all those wonderful things that follow in that hymn; but is that true? You say that this is very elementary. Let it be elementary. I am going by elementary stages in order to get at the thing itself. The thing itself is this: you are counting, or you are not going to count, according to your measure of spiritual knowledge - your knowledge of the Lord. That can only be had in a walk with God as the Lord Jesus walked with the Father, and that is going to be by way of the Cross. It will be for us Calvary knowledge. It will mean that we are emptied of all self-resource, brought to the place - yes, many times - where, unless the Lord helps us, we are finished.

But that is the way of spiritual knowledge. That is what the Lord would bring us to, and here I close. We go through it as Christians - so much suffering, affliction, trial, adversity, disappointment - oh, yes, so much of it. But what is the meaning of it? Why does the Lord not shield His own loved children and spare them? Why does He allow them, perhaps more than any others, to know affliction and suffering and weakness? It is for this very thing. There is no other way now for us to know the Lord, the flesh being what it is. If everything is going all right, if we are all hearty and well, we do not feel our need of the Lord, we do not go seeking the Lord with all our hearts. We can only know Him by the way of the working of the Cross, which is the death of ourselves, and the Lord will bring us to the place where He would have us and where we would say, in the time of affliction, There is something to learn in this, something to get out of this: something of the Lord is bound up with this. The enemy will have us revolt against the means the Lord uses, tempt us to break away from it, to escape it, to get out of the difficult place, to run away. The Lord would have us to say, In that difficult place, in that painful experience, there is something of the knowledge of Him to be had. Do not allow yourself to be pressed out and do not run away. Say, Rather let me have this, if it has something of the Lord, than be free from it.

That is the way of stature, measure, manhood. We grow when we get there. That is significance. "The cup which the Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?" (John 18:11). That is manhood, that is to be full-grown. Oh, the temptation for the easy way that was constantly pressed upon our Lord! 'The kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof - you can have them on the simple condition that you acknowledge me, the prince of this world!' It was the temptation to the easy way all along. 'Save yourself! Spare yourself! Get out of the difficulty by an easy short cut.' No, His very measure, His spiritual measure, meant refusing, repudiating, anything like that, and accepting the cost. This was the way of the Father, the knowledge of the Father.

I have tried to pass on to you something that is so difficult to explain. Let us sum it up again as we started. This is the kind of man and woman that is going to bear significance of the true kind, of the eternal kind, the kind that matters. It is those who know - whatever else they do NOT know - those who know the Lord. They may be like the man in the Gospel who is such a great example of this very thing. On the one side, there was the sin of Adam bringing blindness; on the other side, the works of the devil destroyed by the Son of man bringing sight to the blind. When challenged: 'What do you know about this man, what do you know about this and that?' - he replied, 'Oh, I do not know this and that, but whatever I do not know, there is one thing I do know - that, whereas I was blind, now I see' (John 9:25). 'I know': that is authority, that is power - by seeing. The Lord wants witnesses like that - men and women who know Him because they have made it the one passion of their hearts to know Him, at any cost, at every cost. And, seeing that this knowledge is by way of the Cross, through Jesus Christ crucified, every occasion is present for being offended - offended because of the foolishness from this world's standpoint, the weakness by the world's standards. "Blessed is he, whosoever shall find no occasion of stumbling in me" (Matt. 11:6). The Lord make us men and women of spiritual stature.

Chapter 5 - In Relation to His Resurrection-Ascension

"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" (John 20:17).

"For the death that he died, he died unto sin once: but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God... Present yourselves unto God, as alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God" (Romans 6:10,13).

Everything waited on the resurrection of Christ. When He died, everything stood still. There was silence in heaven, darkness over the face of the earth. There was a universal pause, and heaven was holding its breath. The resurrection of Christ was the greatest and most momentous event in history. Everything that had preceded it, His birth, His life, His teaching, His works, His death and all that death meant, His atoning work: all waited for His resurrection to make them effective. If He had died and not lived again, it would all have been of no profit. "If Christ be not risen, our faith is vain, we are yet in our sins" (1 Cor. 15:17), although He died an atoning death.

A PRE-ASCENSION ASCENSION

The passage we read in John 20 - the words to Mary - is a remarkable one. "Touch me not" - that is, lay not hold of Me - "for I am not yet ascended unto the Father." There has been much speculation as to this pre-ascension ascension. The fact that this very woman was allowed to take hold of Him later (Matt. 28:9) gives much point and strength, with other things, to there having taken place an ascension.

CHRIST THE FIRSTFRUITS

Of course, one thing was the fulfilment of an Old Testament type, and was the spiritual, the Divine heavenly counterpart of something that was probably taking place on that very day. On the day after the Sabbath the High Priest would be waving the sheaf of firstfruits before the Lord, according to Leviticus 23, and it was on that very day after the Sabbath that Jesus presented Himself alive to the Father from the dead. As Paul says: "But now hath Christ been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of them that are asleep" (1 Cor. 15:20).

That, of course, is one of the meanings of this - "I am not yet ascended"; but there is much more in it than that, and we will seek to see something more of this ascension of Christ to the Father on the morrow after the Sabbath.

FIRSTBORN AMONG MANY BRETHREN

We begin by noting that it was the presenting of Himself as alive from the dead, for God's satisfaction, in a representation. He had been true to the figure of the firstfruits. The sheaf of the firstfruits was representative of all that was to come. It was the prophecy of that which was to be, it was the earnest of the whole, it was the certainty that the harvest was on its way; and it was accepted as that. God was satisfied that all the travail, all the labour, all the falling into the ground and dying, all the giving over of life unto death, was eventually not for nought. God was satisfied that in the Firstfruits He had all the fruits of that death; a representation - "the firstfruits of them that are asleep"; or, in other words of the Apostle, "the firstborn among many brethren" (Romans 8:29). That is surely inherent in these two words in John 20:17: "Go unto my brethren" - not, 'Go to My disciples', or 'to My Apostles', or 'to My friends; to those men whom I chose, who have been with Me' - "Go unto my brethren, and say to them... my Father and your Father." He is representative of the family, of the whole. God is satisfied in the representation, and the representation is the firstfruits sheaf.

With one further word on that, we pass on. The Lord Jesus Christ, because of who He was and therefore because of what He alone could accomplish, has secured everything unto God: He has established the security of all that God is to have. He is our security unto God. Put that in another way. When the Father received that presentation of His Son at that time, He received us - all who would believe. We are not secured in the day in which we believe. We only enter into our security then by faith. We were secured at that moment when He, the sheaf of the firstfruits, presented Himself unto the Father's full satisfaction. We were secured there and then. Our security does not depend upon anything in ourselves. Through faith our security is established in Him and what He is to the Father's satisfaction. That, of course, is the very beginning, the most elementary thing in the Christian life.

INSTALLED AND ACCREDITED AS THE PROTOTYPE OF THE NEW CREATION

This ascending to the Father was also the installing and the accrediting of Him as the Prototype and Beginning of the new creation. Remember that His resurrection and ascension always go together - they are not two separate things. Paul puts them together in his letter to the Ephesians: "he raised him from the dead, and made him to sit at his right hand in the heavenlies" (Eph. 1:20). There is no space between: He is raised and exalted in one act. That is how it is here in John 20: He will return for forty days, and then the ascension, as it is called by us, will take place - the great ascension. This resurrection-ascension was His accrediting - "declared to be the Son of God with power... by the resurrection from the dead" - and His installing as the Prototype and Beginning of the new creation. In His resurrection-ascension, He not only presents Himself to the Father's pleasure and is accepted to the satisfaction of God; He not only includes all who believe in Him afterward in that presentation; but He there and then becomes the Image, the Model, the Pattern, of the whole of that creation - that new creation which is coming in through faith in Him.

Jesus Christ is Man still. The New Testament Church believed that He did not let go His humanity when He went to heaven. Stephen saw the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:56). The Apostle writes: "There is one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus" (1 Tim. 2:5), and He is still mediating as Man. The whole system of Christianity hangs upon this very thing, that there is now a Man glorified to answer to God's original thought and intention. So He is now installed as God's model and pattern for the whole creation.

INVESTED WITH ALL AUTHORITY

Further, at that moment when He ascended to His Father, on that occasion, there was conferred upon Him all authority in heaven and earth for the great world commission. We do not get the full force of the original words in Matthew 28:18. Literally, it is: "All authority has just been given to me in heaven and on earth." When He appeared before the Father, satisfying the Father and being installed as the model for the race, the new creation, all authority was then given to Him because of that satisfaction, and in His capacity as that model. "All authority... in heaven and on earth" - SPIRITUAL authority. I think sometimes we may have a little difficulty, mentally, in reconciling the fact that all authority has been given to Him and that He has been made to sit at the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens and that all things are put in subjection under Him, and all the other things that are said of His Lordship and His supremacy and His authority - in reconciling this with the setbacks, the difficulties, the enemy's triumphs, as they appear to be, and all the extreme difficulty connected with the slightest degree of progress in the things of Christ. It does not seem to balance. But that is just our earthly way of judging. The authority of Christ is spiritual and it remains.

To condense very much into a phrase, a tremendous history into a short sentence or two, this is how it works: that if Christ ever really and truly, spiritually, comes into any place on this earth, that place can never be the same again. An issue has arisen, an eternal issue, and for all eternity the consequences of that issue, in one way or another, will be found to exist. So often it seems that, when Christ has come, when something of Christ has been brought, there is nothing to see as the result, or it seems to be just covered over and the enemy seems again to take possession; and you say, 'What was it all for? Why were those lives laid down? Why all that suffering and cost. There is nothing!' Oh, make no mistake! The authority of Christ has come there, and how often it has happened that years after, perhaps when that generation has passed away entirely, something has sprung up in that very place. That is the story of the Gospel in Japan. Something of Christ came in, in a simple way, and then it was all swamped and seemed to be drowned. But years after something was found growing, and growing, and growing, till a great thing of Christ existed. There is something that is not official authority, but a spiritual power which cannot be quenched. It will come back somehow, in some way. Paul expressed it that he was a sweet savour unto God, and that it was a matter of a savour of life unto life or of death unto death (2 Cor. 2:15-16). It was never neutral. The authority of Christ means that where He comes, in any form or in any way, neutrality is impossible. There will be an effect one way or the other. But that, as I said, is a very insufficient explanation of this authority, which works in many other ways.

A GREAT DIVIDE BETWEEN TWO ORDERS

The first issue of this resurrection-ascension is that there is created a great divide between two human orders. There is the order that was and the order that is - a new order, the new human order. One order, to which all the children of Adam belong, in the resurrection of Christ is left behind in death; then there is the new human order in His resurrection in life; and there is the great divide between two humanities. That divide is planted right into the very centre of the being of every child of God, so that now there are TWO beings in the believer. On the one hand we are a new creation, we are of the new order, of the Christ order, there is the new kind in us. On the other hand we still carry the old order about with us - but it is a dead body. And right through all this race, that divide is established. Two orders of humanity, one in death, one in life.

To the latter, the order in Christ, the heaven is opened. That is the meaning of this resurrection-ascension. Yes, He can ascend to His Father, He can ascend right away, there is no need to wait. Immediately on resurrection He can go right through. The heaven is opened, the face of the Father is in His direction waiting to receive Him. Heaven is opened to this new order. It is closed to the old. These are facts, but they are the facts which lie at the very basis of the Christian's life.

THE WORK OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

Immediately we pass from the one order to the other, from the old order to the order of Christ as God's model, from death unto life; immediately we in Christ 'present ourselves a living sacrifice', or, in other words, 'present ourselves as alive from the dead' - immediately we do that, we must understand that we enter into the school of the Holy Spirit. The great Schoolmaster takes charge. He is not a despot, but He takes charge; and there is one work to which He is committed, and that work - if we will let Him - is to teach us, to make us know the difference between these two orders: the order that lies behind and the order that now is; the order that is in death and the order that is in life; the order that has the closed heaven, and the order that has the opened heaven. And almost any hour or moment in our lives, if we are under the tuition of this great Divine Schoolmaster, the Holy Spirit, we can be having the registration in us of what is alive and what is dead unto God. It is the very nature of the Christian life. It is the very purpose for which the Lord leaves us here and deals with us as He does - to make our spirits, as alive from the dead, capable of discerning what is dead to God and what is alive to God.

SPIRITUAL GROWTH BY THE KNOWLEDGE OF LIFE AND DEATH

That is the basis of guidance, the basis of knowing the mind of the Lord, the basis of our complete transformation - the renewing, the making over again, of our minds. It is the basis of our new intelligence. It is all governed by the laws of life and death, and our spiritual growth will be according to our ability to know, on the one hand, what is dead when we touch it, when we come into contact with it, to recognize what lies behind the withdrawn face of God - the Lord is not in that, the Lord is not for that, the Lord does not accept that - and on the other hand, when we meet life, to be able to say, 'Yes, I am touching life here, the Lord is in this'. It is not something reasoned out; it is not the result of logical comparisons: it is something in the Spirit; it is life and death. Oh that every Christian, every young Christian, lived on this basis - not on the basis of meetings, not even on the basis of being told by others, but steadily, surely, on the basis of their own spiritual discernment and perception of what is alive and what is dead so far as God is concerned; what is left behind in His judgment, and so has to be left behind and repudiated by us; what is brought in with Christ and has to be apprehended. The difference is life and death. I think you know something of it. This is the mark of growth, but we do not grow out of it: it is always ahead of us, and it will be ahead of us to the last breath that we draw in this body.

Let me put that another way. The longer we live and go on with the Lord and know a life of fellowship with Him, walking in the Spirit, the more acute will be our sense of life and death. We shall not be overtaking this; it will always be ahead of us. The most advanced people spiritually are those who have the keenest sense of what they may and what they may not touch, and they sense it in this - life and death, death and life. You touch something at one time, even in your Christian life, and you touch it without any reaction. But touch that now and it precipitates a new crisis. You have gone on. You used to do that and have no trouble, but somehow or other you cannot touch it now. And it will always be like that.

Let us remember that death is an immense thing, a terrible thing - not merely as we know it, but as it is in this universe. Death is the greatest enemy of all that is of God. "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" (1 Cor. 15:26); everything in the end of the Bible is the swallowing up of death and the curse. Death is no friend; we do not go with the poets in that. Death is a terrible enemy - it is the end of everything. Spiritual death is a very, very grim enemy indeed. And as we go on we become more acutely aware of how great death is and how far-reaching, and therefore of how much more there is which, being death, we may not touch - even though others may because they have not reached that point of spiritual sensitiveness. It is all right to be a child while you are a child; there is nothing wrong with that; but it is wrong to be a child when you ought to be a man. God blesses the children. Do not say, These people do these things and the Lord blesses them. Of course He does; He blessed the little children. But if they go on with the Lord and grow up, they also will come to the place where they know they cannot go on with certain things any longer. If they do, they forfeit their consciousness of Divine life; something has gone. I do not say they forfeit Divine life, but they forfeit the LIFE in their life, their enjoyment of it, their consciousness of it.

Do believe me, that this is true - Christ has become a standard and a different standard, a model altogether different, and the Holy Spirit has taken in hand the work of conforming us to the image of Christ. And how does He do it? Just in this way - in our own growing spiritual consciousness; and that consciousness is a matter of death or of life. How much can you corroborate? I am sure you can, up to some point; but do give heed to this word, because a very, very great deal is bound up with this. "I ascend unto my Father!" "I ascend!" If He had explained why, He would have said, 'I ascend to be installed, accredited; placed, in the great Son-placing, as God's model and basis for you'; meaning, 'You cannot have Me on the old earthly terms; you have to apprehend Me now in a different way.'

So may we really be people who are growing. It is painful. This capacity for knowing when you touch death is a painful thing, but it is also a very blessed thing to have the capacity for knowing when you touch life. Very often you have to go round the whole dial on the Divine radio, feeling your way till you get attuned to that particular frequency and wave-length - and you touch life. As you go round that radio dial - I cannot have this, I cannot have that, you go a little further - Ah, now, this is it! The selectiveness of the Spirit in us as to Divine things bears witness in our spirits: 'This is of God!' - and there is life and there is satisfaction.

Chapter 6 - In Relation to Spiritual Sight

Reading: Mark 10:46-52.

THE WHOLE RACE IN ADAM BORN BLIND

What is in view here is the question of sight. In our earlier meditations we were occupied with the matter of seeing the face of God. In different ways we have sought to show that, in Adam's sin in the garden and his unholy attempt to see what God had hidden from him - hidden from him, as it proved afterward, in great love and mercy - in his unholy grasping after that seeing, Adam lost his sight, and the whole race in him has been born blind, blind as to the face of God. The race has, deep down in its very constitution, a cry and a sigh. Although it is not expressed in words, or understood for what it really is, it amounts to this: 'If only we could see the face of God - if only we knew that God's face was toward us!' The Son of Man came into the world, and He said, "The Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10). One of the great things that was lost was that sight, that conscious enjoyment, of the face of God.

As with all blindness, when that loss occurred, a whole world, a very wonderful world, was lost, was closed, was shut up. The reality of things, things as they really are in that world, was understood no longer. It is a very wonderful thing when anyone who has never seen receives sight - when something is done by an operation to give sight. What a wonderful new world! It had been a world of surmise, of imagination, of ever straining to understand, to know, and now that whole world is suddenly opened up. What a wonderful day! Sight is a marvellous thing; but if this is true in the natural realm, it is infinitely more true in the spiritual.

When we were in America a few years ago, we met our dear old friend Mrs. Lemmel, who wrote the chorus:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,

Look full in His wonderful face,

And the things of earth will grow strangely dim

In the light of His glory and grace.

Mrs. Lemmel was practically blind; she had to be led everywhere. But she was fulfilling a marvellous ministry. Because she was blind, hosts of people were visiting her, thinking, perhaps, to console or befriend her; but she was ministering Christ to them, and it was they who were getting all the benefit and the blessing. Then a surgeon offered to perform an operation with a practical certainty that he could restore her sight. She weighed this up before the Lord in prayer for a long time, and then, she told us, 'I decided not to have the operation: by my blindness many are seeing what they would never see if I had my natural sight; I have chosen that they should see that greater world than the natural sight can see.' Well, that was a noble decision; but my point is that to her the seeing of the things of the Spirit, the things of heaven, the things of God, infinitely transcended the having of her natural sight.

CHRIST CAME TO RECOVER LOST SIGHT

Oh, yes, there is a world - a world that God wants us to see, in the light, glory and fullness of which He wants us to live, ever making fresh discoveries of what is there. He wants us to have eyes that can see the tremendous values of His own eternal things. Yes, the value and importance of spiritual sight is so great that the very Son of Man came from heaven to recover it - "to save that which was lost". It was a very costly thing, in heaven's estimation, that kind of knowledge. If we want further confirmation of it, we have only to take account of how fiercely and maliciously the enemy fights against the people of God coming into any further knowledge of God's eternal thought, or of any soul being enlightened as to its salvation. How bitterly the enemy contests that! You know something of that; I need not dwell upon it. I am simply saying that from heaven's standpoint there is a tremendous value bound up with this question of sight.

As with all others mentioned in the Bible, this man about whom we have read is not there just by chance, as something that just happened in the way. They are all here in the sovereign orderings and movements of God; they were moved into these positions to stand out as examples, parables and indications of great spiritual things. This man Bartimaeus comes before us in connection with something more than his natural sight. It is a parable of what Jesus has come to do for blinded sons of Adam. The crowd surged, he heard the tramping of their feet, the feet of the multitude, and asked what it was all about - 'Who is it?' And they said that it was Jesus of Nazareth who was passing by.

Jesus of Nazareth. I think that name and the word 'Nazareth' bring Him very near to us. It was a place of no great importance and of no very high reputation. It represents something very ordinary, common, without repute, without honour, without glory, and Jesus has in history become associated with Nazareth. Jesus of Nazareth - how often He was called that. But you see, it is JESUS of Nazareth. There were, I expect, thousands of Jesuses in Palestine. There had been thousands of Jesuses in the history of Israel. Jesus - Jeshua, Joshua, Hoshea - was a very common name. And God came right into the midst of that which was common and humble and degraded and said, "Thou shalt call his name JESUS". Oh, surely He ought to have a better name than that - He ought to be more distinguished than that! But with God the name given to Jesus meant what it did mean. "Thou shalt call his name JESUS; for it is he that shall save his people from their sins" (Matt. 1:21).

Nazareth - "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" (John 1:46) - Jesus of NAZARETH. You see the point. It is Jesus touching the depth of human degradation, coming right into association with our fallen humanity, into touch with that which has lost its Divine significance. Jesus - 'Jehovah saves', 'the Lord saves' - that is the meaning of the name. But look at all the Jesuses of Israel's history and see how many of them were saviours. No, the name has lost its value and meaning. It was everywhere but it meant nothing. Here the name has recovered its meaning, come right down into the midst of that which needed saving, as represented by or typified in Nazareth and in all the other Jesuses who needed saving. He had to go right down into that, in closest touch with our poor, fallen humanity, in order to save. Jesus of Nazareth.

This man heard that. Oh, it is wonderful; there is so much in that answer of the Lord to him. "Thy faith hath made thee whole." This man knew where Jesus came from, but he believed that He was something more than an ordinary Jesus, an ordinary earthly association, He was more than that, and he cried out, "Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me" (Mark 10:47). They tried to silence him, to sit on him, to make him be quiet, and he cried out so much the more, "Jesus... have mercy on me." They commanded him to hold his peace.

THE NEED FOR VIOLENCE ON OUR PART

There are two things in that connection that are, I think, very clear and obvious. One is this, that this wonderful blessing of an open heaven, that we have been talking about - this recovery of the face of God, this entering into that world of Divine fullness, this apprehending of the thoughts of God which means so much - is not just going to happen to us while we sit passively, hoping something will happen. The Lord Himself said, "The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and men of violence take it by force" (Matt. 11:12). This man had entered into that spirit. He had inwardly perceived what a tremendous thing it would be to have his eyes opened. And if you are concerned about a "spirit of wisdom and revelation", "the eyes of your heart being enlightened" - if this to you is of any concern at all, you will not be passive about it. You will get on your knees, and say, 'Now, Lord, this has got to be made good.' You will cry and cry aloud. Are you doing that? It is not enough for us to attend meetings and hear things said, whether they be more or less wonderful, and just think that we have got it. We have not got it, and a very great deal of the failure of so much ministry to have a real outworking is because we do not go at once to the Lord and say, 'Now, Lord, I have heard that: mentally I know it, I am informed about it; but that thing has got to become a living revelation in my inner man.' I have to SEE it, and I can only see it by a Divine touch, by the finger of God, by a miracle from heaven.

We shall never see Divine things by the aid of our reason. We shall never see things because they are put plainly to us by the one who ministers. No, it will only be as Jesus of Nazareth comes into touch with us and we with Him. And that applies to every stage of the Christian life.

If there are any reading these lines, who have never in the first place had their eyes opened to SEE, so that the result is life eternal - for knowing is only another word for seeing, and Jesus said, "This is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ" (John 17:3); "that they should know" - another word for seeing - if you have not yet entered into life, received eternal life, remember that it will not just HAPPEN to you; it will not simply HAPPEN. You will have to become tremendously concerned about this and show the Lord that you mean business; you will have to be like Bartimaeus, cry, and 'so much the more', cry. Remember that the Lord does so often wait, delay, hold off, to see if we really place value upon this seeing. We are tested as to how much we esteem His things.

Here is a man of great possessions, called a rich young ruler. It was not that the Lord wanted him to become a philanthropist and give away his money. It was the question: 'Do you value eternal life more than all your worldly possessions? Let us see! What value do you put upon eternal life, upon having your blind eyes open? Do you cry and cry so much the more, become desperate about it?' The Lord waits to see that. We have known so many cases, when sinners have been seeking the Lord, and we would have thought that immediately they began to seek the Lord they would find Him - and yet very often the Christian worker has been greatly perplexed and distressed. Days and nights pass in agony. There seems to be no coming of the Lord to save. What is the Lord doing? He is just bringing out that desperation that represents a heart conviction that, unless the Lord does this thing, there is nothing else to live for. It is a matter of life and death, and it is not cheaply and easily got.

And what is true at the beginning is true all the way along. There is no end to Divine revelation; there is no end to our seeing. Oh, how little we have seen, how little we know, of the vast stores of Divine intention and thought and purpose and meaning. We stand and paddle on the shores of this vast ocean of God and of His purposes and meanings in our creation. How little we know about it! - and we are not going to know until we have deep heart exercise. But it is there, and it is there for us, and oh, we have got to come in this way - 'so much the more'. Are you like that after a conference, or after any meeting in which there has been a ministry of God's Word? Are you sure you have seen all that God meant you to see? Are you just hearing what is said? You agree - but what is the effect? The real effect waits upon this heart exercise, this crying out - and a crying out 'so much the more'. The Lord is not close and mean, holding it from you, but He is wanting to know that this is of greater price to you than all else; if needs be, of greater price than your sleep, your rest: you are going to give Him no rest until He opens your eyes.

That is very simple, but it is very important.

THE ENEMY'S ATTEMPTS TO SILENCE US

The other thing in this connection is that there will always be plenty of things to try to silence you, to make you be quiet, to 'shut you up'. There were those who commanded this blind man to hold his peace. There is always much to command you to hold your peace. But much may depend upon our not holding our peace. That applies in much larger realms than just this one of receiving Divine eye-opening.

Very often we never enter into the real value of a thing until we make a declaration of our attitude toward it. Very often we do not enter into the real value of our Christian life until we begin to proclaim something about it. I expect some of you know that. I was a Christian for some years; I had given my heart to the Lord. I believed that I was saved, and I am sure I was, but I was not enjoying it: I was not a free man, loosed inside, in the real joy of the Christian life, until one night I stepped right into the centre of an open-air meeting and gave my testimony and began to talk from that testimony, and from that day to this I have been a free man in the enjoyment of salvation. At the time I wondered if it was only then that I was really converted - so real was the difference. That is very simple and elementary, but it applies all the way along. There are plenty of things that will keep us silent: shame, for instance - that will keep us silent. Fear will say, Be quiet; will keep us with our mouths shut. Despair is a terrible thing for quietening us, or preventing us from speaking. And oh, what a veto upon declaration is pride! Yes, there are many things that are saying, Hold your peace! This man stood up to them all, he resisted them all, and, although they said, 'Hold your peace, man, hold your peace!', he said, 'I am not going to hold my peace', and out it came - 'so much the more'. It is an impressive picture. It is almost humorous if it were not so serious - a man absolutely refusing to be bottled up, so much did he feel the importance of the matter in hand.

It is just like that over everything that the Lord has for us. We are not to be silenced. We cry - and nothing happens. We cry to the Lord, and nothing happens. And then the enemy comes along and says, 'You may as well be quiet - He is not hearing you! Do you think He will have regard to you? He has got more important business than you! You must think yourself very important if you think He is going to turn aside from all His affairs to attend to you!' The enemy talks like that and tries, by making us feel our insignificance, to quieten us, to silence us. But you be in the company of blind Bartimaeus, and say, 'No, I am not going to be quiet! I believe that what I need lies in the power of that Man to give me, and I believe that, being Jesus of Nazareth, having come down to so low a level of association and fellowship, He will have respect unto my cry. I may be a nobody, but He will have respect to the cry of a nobody!' This is the kind of spirit that will not be silenced.

Is it too simple? It is important! As we get further and further on, there is so much more for the Lord to reveal to us of His fullness. It will always be the same - plenty of things to silence, to put to quietness, to tell us to hold our peace. You remember the Lord's parable of the importunate widow and the unjust judge. He hung the whole of that parable on this: that the man would not have regard to her for any other reason than that she worried the life out of him; and the Lord turns and says, 'If an unjust man will yield to importunity, how much more the just Man - how much more One who is not like that!' (Luke 18:1-8). And yet His Church must cry unto Him day and night, not because He is unjust and unwilling and unmoved, but because He must have in those who are in need a deep enough sense of the importance of these things. You say, 'Why speak like that? Don't we all feel that?' Dear friends, while one is more and more hesitant to say anything to criticize Christians or the Church, surely it is true that there is not sufficient of this downright earnestness to know all that God wants us to know. We are too contented, too complaisant, too satisfied with a little: we are not on full stretch for all that God means, and He is not going to give it until we CRY - and cry 'so much the more'.

"Jesus of Nazareth passeth by." With Him is all the power to give everything necessary to bring into all that God intended - and He may pass by. He might have just left Jericho and gone away. They were going out of Jericho; He might just have gone out of Jericho and gone on His way. But knowing, being informed - that was enough for Bartimaeus. Being informed that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by precipitated the whole matter. Oh, that we all were sufficiently aware of how needy we are of having our eyes opened to all God's meaning for us! Oh, that our hearts were sufficiently concerned to enter into everything God purposes for us! Oh, that we felt something more of the strong meaning of "Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, and which entered not into the heart of man, whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him" (1 Cor. 2:9). It never will enter into our hearts, it never will be seen by our eyes or heard by our ears, until we realize, and lay to heart, how important it is and how valuable, and we begin to cry out, 'Have mercy upon me!' It is not only the cry of a sinner, but the cry of a mature saint. 'Have mercy still upon my lack of capacity, my limitation in apprehension, my smallness of sight! Have mercy upon me!'

Paul's prayer to God was "that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him; having the eyes of your heart enlightened" (Eph. 1:17-18). That was his prayer. It was not going to happen unless someone stood in between the need and the supply and mediated by prayer. It is a big matter. The Lord put that spirit into our hearts. Do realize that a great deal does hang upon this importunity, this seriousness, this laying hold, and not just coming and going to meetings and then wondering why we are so retarded in our spiritual growth, so easily a prey to the forces around us in this world. Perhaps it is because we have not yet expressed an adequate appreciation of Divine things by laying this matter to heart and constantly being before the Lord that we may receive our sight. If at this moment you are recognizing that "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by", you have only to cry from your heart - He has what you need. The Lord put the cry in our hearts.

Chapter 7 - The Significance of His Baptism

Reading: Luke 3:21-22; 4:1-12.

This section of Luke which we have read contains all the principles and elements of what we have been occupied with in this series of meditations - that is, the significance of Christ. Here we have the significance of Christ as the presenting to God of a manhood, a humanity, which, being according to God's mind, has given back to it the opened heaven which was lost by the first man; the restoration of the face of God which was turned away from Adam and his race because of the kind of man that he became through disobedience. That, in a sentence or two, is the significance of Christ.

Now Luke, as all Bible students know, is peculiarly the Gospel of the representation of Christ as the Son of Man. This Gospel is a record of the life, works and words of the Son of Man, given without any spiritual interpretation - just the record. It is the only Gospel which has a preface. Luke says that he took pains to ascertain the truth of all the things that he was about to write. The spiritual interpretation came later. It waited upon two things: firstly, the coming of the Holy Spirit as the interpreter, secondly, Spirit-indwelt people to whom He could interpret. In this record, then, we have no spiritual interpretation, but from the vantage-ground of our now having the Spirit and the interpretation in the later New Testament, we are able to see the spiritual principles which are here.

THE MEANING OF BAPTISM

I must condense very much into a short space, so let us come to this matter of Christ's baptism, and reiterate what is probably well-known to most. It is necessary to our purpose that we should first of all be reminded of the meaning of baptism itself. Baptism is not peculiarly or exclusively a Christian ordinance. There was a Jewish baptism by water, and when John came baptizing, he was not doing anything strange so far as Israel was concerned. They were very familiar with it as a kind of 'nationalization' ordinance, when a Gentile wanted to embrace the Jewish faith, just as Christians are baptized. In the pagan world baptism was also known - not of water but of fire. The basic significance in Jewish, Christian or pagan world is the same, but for the Christian it is so much deeper and more meaningful. With the Jew, baptism simply meant that the man died to his old racial connections as a Gentile, and rose to become in effect a Jew, a member of another race. With the pagan, the baptism of fire or 'making their sons to pass through the fire' - you remember that phrase in the Old Testament - was simply a passing as into death, with the destruction of an old connection, an old system, and an initiation into something altogether new. In Christian baptism, the same ideas are present, but with this extra, that this baptism speaks of the utter depravity of man. Pagans would not admit that, and the Jews would not admit that. But Christian baptism testifies to the utter depravity of man, his hopelessness before God; it says that he is by God utterly rejected, unacceptable, and that if there is to be any hope at all he must die and rise again. It must be a death and a burial, signifying the complete passing out of that man, as to all that he himself is and as to all that with which, by nature in Adam, he is connected. Man's depravity calls for - not repairs, but death and burial.

That gives tremendous and wonderful significance to the baptism of Jesus.

He who knew no sin, in whom there were no seeds of depravity; He who was the Son of God, who held the title in His own rights to be equal with God, and was equal with God; He who was with the Father in glory, as He prayed, "Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was" (John 17:5); HE came and identified Himself with man, in his utter depravity and God-rejection. When He came to Jordan to be baptized, it was a most wonderful thing that happened - that He, being such as He was, should take the place, in death, of one completely cast out by God, buried from His sight, put away as being wholly unacceptable to the eyes of God, identifying Himself with sinful man.

It is small wonder that John the Baptist, the 'baptizer', demurred when He came to be baptized. John would have forbidden Him. "I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?" (Matt. 3:14). John could not understand this - because God had spoken to John, God had intimated to John that the Messiah was in the vicinity. John knew that he was the forerunner, that he was fulfilling the prophecies concerning himself as the opener of the door to the Christ, and he had the intimation that this was He; and he stood back aghast that such a One should wish to take this place. "Ye offspring of vipers", John was saying - 'you serpents' brood, fleeing from the oncoming fire of judgment, trying to get into the water for your escape!' That is how John viewed those who came to be baptized. And then Jesus came on that ground. How marvellous is the condescension of our Lord Jesus! How far down He has gone for our salvation! How utterly He has touched the depths for our sin and sinfulness! Can He do more?

CHRIST'S BAPTISM NOT FOR HIMSELF

And then John's great declaration afterward. "Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29). That is a confirmation of his apprehension of the significance of Christ: he saw that this Man was not dying for His own sin; He was not being baptized because He Himself was a sinner. He was doing it for the sin of the world. This was all a rehearsal of the Cross which was coming later, and surely this in itself speaks to us - could anything speak more forcibly than this? - of that great feature of God's Man, heaven's Man, the Man who will get the open heaven, the Man who will have the face of God - that wonderful feature of His humility. Yes, He took the form of a man, was "found in fashion as a man" (Phil. 2:7-8) - a true man; His was true humanity.

CHRIST IDENTIFIED IN HEAVEN BUT NOT RECOGNIZED ON EARTH

There seems a paradox here, almost a contradiction, but here it is. There was nothing on the outside at all to indicate that Jesus was different from any other man. John said, "I knew him not" (John 1:31,33). This is strange, is it not? He must have heard of Jesus. Their mothers were kinswomen, and had had a joyful time together a few months before John's birth, on the occasion of the annunciation to Mary; and all that had happened right up through the thirty years must have been knowledge to John of Jesus. But he had not met Him, he did not know Him personally. He says: "I knew him not: but he that sent me to baptize in water, he said unto me, Upon whomsoever thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and abiding upon him, the same is he that baptizeth in the Holy Spirit. And I have seen, and have borne witness that this is the Son of God" (John 1:33-34). He was identified by heaven but not recognized on earth. He was so like other men on the outside - true man; and yet how different inside - what a different humanity is there! "I knew him not."

THE LORD JESUS A MAN OF MUCH PRAYER

"Jesus... having been baptized, and praying" (Luke 3:21). I am glad Luke put that in there - "and praying". What is prayer? Prayer has many aspects, but I suppose the one which stands out most clearly and governs all other prayer is supplication. It is the act and attitude of a suppliant asking. Here He has become so truly one with us in our humanity as to be in our place of suppliants - that is, altogether dependent upon God. People who are most conscious of their need, and most dependent, are the most prayerful people. People who are most self-sufficient are the most prayerless people. The Lord Jesus was a man of much prayer, and He started here in His public life - "and praying".

You see the features of a man according to God's mind. And if WE are really born from above, if we have really apprehended the meaning of passing from one relationship to the other, if it is true that we are in Christ, these will be the features which characterize us. We can tell the measure of our life in Christ by our humility, our meekness, by our readiness and willingness to come right down and have no reputation, by our prayerfulness expressive of our dependence. This is the man expressed, not only in the individual, but corporately - by companies representing the whole Church, of which we were speaking earlier in this series. If they have any measure of Christ, they will be very humble people, not at all self-important. They will be consciously very dependent upon the Lord, and therefore very prayerful people.

HEAVEN OPENED TO CHRIST AFTER HIS BAPTISM

We have seen the baptism of Jesus and its meaning, giving the significance to Him as Son of Man. Then came the open heaven. The heaven was opened, showing us the kind of man who inherits the open heaven, the face of God, the recognition and acknowledgment of God. This is the kind of man - the man who has died, the man who has been buried, the man who has risen again on the other side. That is the man of the open heaven.

And then there was the Spirit as in the form of a dove coming and resting upon Him. The Holy Spirit is not given primarily as power to make us something. Oh, how we clamour for power, and therefore crave for the baptism of the Holy Spirit in order that we may have power - meaning that we may be a success, that our work may be a success. The Holy Spirit is really given to us because we shall never get on at all without Him. In our union with the Man who went down into death, declaring man's hopeless condition, we are, as He was, utterly dependent upon a power that is not in ourselves and of ourselves. That is the meaning of the gift, or the baptism, of the Holy Spirit.

A NEW POSITION TESTED

If that wants proving, the next step proves it. Before it can be said, "And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit", and began to preach effectively, it has to be said that in the Spirit He went into the wilderness to have the whole of His new position tested.

I wish Christians recognized the meaning of this wilderness interlude. 'Receive the Holy Spirit and then go and get on with it - begin today!'? Oh no! Receive the Holy Spirit, and then have the whole basis of your life in God put to the test and proved, and THEN go and get on with the work - but not until then. It works like that in principle, even if it does not seem to be like that. The Lord keeps to His law. The baptism of the Spirit was to be the basis of His new life - it was to be entire dependence upon God. I am not away from the Scriptures over this, for He depended upon the Holy Spirit for everything from this time onwards. "If I by the Spirit of God cast out demons..." (Matt. 12:28). Everything was by the Spirit. We will not stay to prove that.

So this next step - the temptation in the wilderness - was basically a testing as to the position taken by Him and as to what that position involved. We can never take a position with God and not be severely tested as to the position we have taken. He had taken a position, He had come over to occupy certain ground, and now He was going to be tested as to that new position.

AN ASSAULT UPON FAITH

First of all, it was the ground of the relationship with God that had been declared in His baptism, in His figurative resurrection. "Thou art my beloved Son" (Mark 1:11). That is a relationship with God declared. Now then: "If thou art the Son..." You see the question projected in relation to the ground of His relationship with God, the subtlety of this 'if' - "If thou art the Son". The subtlety of it was of this kind: 'Do something about it - prove it by doing something!' You see the subtlety. Supposing your greatest friend said something to you of assurance, and then someone came along and said, 'Well, you had better prove that by doing something!' Where is your friend? What is your relationship to your friend? You have not fully trusted him, you really have not accepted his word, if you are going to put it to the test in some way. So the subtlety of the serpent in the 'if' was: 'Do something about it, prove it - put it to the proof and do something about it!' To do something about it is to accept a question in it.

But the man of the open heaven will stand on this ground: 'God has said it, and that is enough. No proof is called for; God has said it.' "It is written..." That is the man who has the open heaven: the man who, even when circumstances and conditions are very difficult and adverse (for God's Word stands related to trial, to affliction, to adversity) - the man who stands firmly on the declaration: 'God has said I shall not perish; God has said I shall not die; God has said, and God is faithful.' That is not easy. Do not think that this was just play-acting. This was a terrible ordeal through which the Son of Man went. It was the very devil in person. The mere proximity of evil spirits is bad enough - quite enough to bring your spirit under, to make you feel terrible; but to have the very devil himself, in person, making direct assault upon you, under the most trying conditions of physical and mental exhaustion - what do we know about that? It was very real. But, in the reality of it, this Son of Man, for the sake of a whole race that was to come - His seed - took this position: 'God has said - that is enough!' It is upon basic faith that the assault is made; upon the faith that is basic to everything which is to follow.

THE BASIS OF THE TEMPTATION

So we find that His mission is immediately in view. "He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and he entered... into the synagogue on the Sabbath day" (Luke 4:16), and the roll was delivered to Him, and He opened it at Isaiah 61, and began to read: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach..." And then the subjects of His preaching, the message, His work, His mission, His proclamation, His utterance, were all here in view, and Satan was out to destroy that ministry, that mission, to destroy that utterance, that proclamation, and to silence Him.

Now, if you look back to the first chapter of this Gospel by Luke, you have a wonderful parable and example of this very thing. You have the story of the announcement to the father of John the Baptist, the announcement of his birth. Zacharias, the priest, a man holding a high and influential position, is representative of the nation, the priestly nation; the whole nation is embodied in Zacharias. The angel Gabriel came and spoke of the birth of John the Baptist, which was a natural impossibility. We will not stay with all the details, but the upshot was that Zacharias handed back the question to Gabriel: 'How shall this be? I am an old man, my wife is old - how shall this be?' It was a doubt. Now see the force of the reply of Gabriel : "I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God". 'Do you know who you are talking to, questioning? You are challenging the very authority of heaven, the very ability of heaven to do as it will.' This was an act of unbelief in the face of heaven and heaven's highest messenger. "I am Gabriel": it was a severe rebuke. 'Now then, Zacharias, it will be, but this shall be a sign - for a season you will be dumb, not able to speak; your ministry will be suspended through unbelief.' And he was a type of the whole nation. Israel has lost its ministry and its message to the world for the whole of this dispensation. Israel is dumb as the messenger of God to the nations throughout this whole dispensation. It has nothing to say to the world from God. Why? Because of its unbelief.

Now Satan was working on that line, on that principle, with the Son of Man. If only he could get Him to entertain a doubt as to this Sonship, as to the Father's expressed attestation - "Thou art my beloved Son"; if he could get Him to entertain a doubt, by doing something to try and prove it; then he had silenced Him, robbed Him of His ministry. You know quite well that you have no power in ministry, whatever you may say, if there is a question in your heart, if there is not a complete faith in God in your heart. If Satan can bring in any unbelief, any question about God, your ministry is crippled. Satan was after this great ministry - "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach..." That is the basis of the temptation.

THE FORM OF THE TEMPTATION

The form of the temptation was threefold. Whether you take it in Luke's order or Matthew's, it does not matter. I prefer to take it in the order in Matthew. I will do that now simply because I think it is the spiritual order. That is no aspersion upon Luke. He had his own way of writing for his own purpose. He was recording just facts as he collected them.

(1) An Attack upon His Body

First of all, the assault was made upon His body, and the question which arose in principle - I am not going to stay with it, I just mention it and pass on - the question which arose in principle was: Was this Man ready to present His body "a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God"? Was He prepared for His body to be utterly at God's disposal, and not held for His own personal interest, benefit, convenience? That is why Paul says, "I beseech you..., brethren, ...to present your bodies..." (Rom. 12:1). The devil has a great desire to get hold of our bodies. They are our media for expressing what is inside. If he can capture the medium he has captured a lot. You know all that comes later on by interpretation of the Holy Spirit. "Know ye not that ye are a temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?" (1 Cor. 3:16). "Present your bodies." It was an attack upon His body, to get Him to let in unbelief and doubt and fear because of the physical consequences of the course that He was taking. That carries very much with it.

(2) An Attack upon His Soul

In the next place, in Matthew's order, it was an attack upon His soul. The devil took Him to the pinnacle of the temple and said, "Cast yourself down"; and, trying to enforce or reinforce his temptation, he even comes over to Christ's ground - "It is written". Christ has said that; Satan is trying to capture the situation by using the enemy's means, the enemy's ground. "Cast yourself down." What is this? Well - 'Do something to realize your ambition in a quick way. You have come to get a following, you have come to win men, you have come on a mission; now then, secure the success of your mission, get this following by doing something wonderful, something miraculous! Nothing will happen to you: you will come down from the pinnacle safely, whereas anyone else would be dashed to pieces!' 'Here is a quick way to success. Realize your ambitions by some expediency, by some policy.'

Oh, the curse of policy in the world! "Is it politic? Will it get success? Will this expedient achieve our end quickly?" That is the soul of the fallen man, the soul of the old Adam. We are all there. This is not something subjective. This is true of us all in Adam. We do not like the long-drawn-out road of patient waiting to see God vindicating, while everything is against us, the road which seems to have no turning. Trust in God? Oh, let us do something to accelerate! It is said of Philip Brooks of Boston that he was walking up and down his study one day, seeming very heavy and perplexed. A friend came in and asked, 'What is the matter?' 'Oh,' said Brooks, 'I am in a hurry and God isn't!' Do something to make God come into your stride! - that is the soul, and it really is crucifixion to the soul to refuse anything and everything like that.

(3) An Attack upon His Spirit

And then the attack upon His spirit: "If thou wilt... worship me." "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:24). When we come to worship, that which comes forth from our spirit is a spiritual thing. So, through the body and through the soul, the enemy was seeking to strike at the innermost man in his relationship with God in spirit, because it is by spirit that we are joined to the Lord. "He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit" (1 Cor. 6:17). Satan's thought is: 'Oh, to cut in there!' That is the form of the temptation.

THE VICTORY

Just a word as to the victory. The victory of the Son of Man was threefold: over the flesh, over the world, over the devil - a threefold victory through faith, maintained faith, stolid faith under the most trying and adverse conditions. This is the man that has the opened heaven; this is the man who has the face of God. This is the Spirit of Sonship. This is the order of mankind that God has set His heart upon; this is the kind that Jesus Christ has come to beget through the travail of His soul.

WHAT OUR BAPTISM MEANS

Finally, the application. It was by His baptism that He effected it all, that He took the ground and held it and secured it before God right through. It was through His baptism that He was attested, accredited and established as the Son, as God's representative Man, as "the firstborn among many brethren". But then we may open the later New Testament, and on the day of Pentecost we hear the Apostle crying, "Repent ye, and be baptized every one of you" (Acts 2:38). I am not going to give an exposition on the subject of baptism, but I want to say this, that our baptism is our means of declaring that we stand on the ground of this Man. We have died to one manhood, one mankind; we have ceased, voluntarily, to have a life in that relationship. In our innermost being a severance has taken place, a circumcision inwardly of the heart has taken place, and we have passed out from all that, by way of a grave; and now we occupy, in Christ risen, the ground of another order, another man, another kind; we are alive unto God.

That is what we mean when we are baptized. We have said, earlier, that baptism as an ordinance effects nothing: but baptism is the New Testament means given for declaring a fact which exists, and the poignant point of this is that every man and woman of Adam has been baptized, all the sinners in the world today have been baptized. I do not mean that they have gone into a baptismal pool or been sprinkled. I mean that, in the baptism - the death - of Christ, the whole world was taken and given the chance of a new relationship, had it provided for them, carried out for them, effected on their behalf; and if every man and woman in the whole creation is lost, it will not be because they were not redeemed, but because they have not accepted their redemption, they have not taken the place which Christ has secured for them. Our invitation, our call, our beseeching, our entreaty, is that men will come into the thing which God has done for them in Christ. They are there, but they have to declare that they are there before it is made good for them. Our baptism is the testimony to the fact that we are on this ground of the new man, and that, accordingly, heaven is open for us, the face of God is turned towards us in Christ - a new creation, "accepted in the beloved" (Eph. 1:6), on the ground of this heavenly Man.

That is the significance of Christ. Oh, if you have gone that way, if you have given that testimony, keep the meaning ever in view. I so often meet Christians who have at some time borne that testimony: they have had it explained, they have accepted and believed it, and have been baptized; but oh, how they are living to the old man, how they are influenced and actuated by the old man's interests, how their soul is still mastered by worldly ambitions! I often feel like asking: Were you baptized? What did you mean? Have you really apprehended your death in Christ's death? Have you apprehended the meaning of the other side - that you are alive unto God, and only alive unto God, and you have no life other than unto God? Have you? If not I am not surprised that you are not enjoying the open heaven, the face of God, the glorious presence and power of the Holy Spirit, victory over Satan, over the world, over the self-life. You have got to keep this ever as a living reality before you.

May the Lord Himself put His seal to this word, by making us men and women after this kind, even according to Christ.