Christ the Power of God
by T. Austin-Sparks
Chapter 1 - Christ the Power of God Reading: Matthew 27:38-50,54.
"But unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." (1 Corinthians 1:24).
"For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and Him crucified." (1 Corinthians 2:2).
In this message we will be considering two phrases from these passages: "Christ the power of God" and "Jesus Christ and Him crucified". These two phrases are closely linked together and the latter is to a great extent an explanation of the first.
Two Kinds of Christians
There are two kinds of Christian life which seem to me to very largely divide the Lord's people into two kinds of Christians. One, perhaps the more common, is that of an almost continuous struggle to live up to something which has been objectively presented, objectively seen. It is Christianity as a system, as a kind of life, as composed of a great many rules, laws and regulations. It comprises things which ought to be, and ought not to be: something as apart from the individual, called The Christian Life. The individual has seen that, had that presented to him and in a way apprehended it, and then from that time there has commenced and developed a great effort, endeavour, and struggle to live up to it; to carry it out objectively. It is Christian endeavour: it is a striving, a putting forth of effort to attain unto a conceived level of life which would be the Christian life. Very largely it is a matter of conscience; very largely, therefore, it is a matter of fear, and therefore it is not always a matter of joy. It is a strenuous business, fraught with much disappointment and much failure. It is rather an existence than a life, characterised by up and down experiences. There may be from time to time a sense of having succeeded, and feeling very pleased and very happy, very joyful, very glad, but then by all the strange changes of our soul-life we do not always feel like that. Feelings change, conditions change, there are failures, there are collapses, there are mistakes, and we come down, and come down badly. Then a fresh effort has to be put forth to get up and to go on a bit more.
That kind of Christian life is a somewhat burdensome one; and we find so many of the Lord's children in that realm, just longing to know something about real victory, something about real overcoming, something about the abiding joy of the Lord, deliverance from the strenuousness of being Christians. Do you understand what I mean? It is the experience of a very great many. The struggle life, the up and down life, and for the most part, the sense that this Christian life which is presented in the New Testament is something different from that which is experienced by these children of God, and either they have misapprehended the whole thing, or else the thing does not really work. And the enemy is never slow to pounce upon such and harass them and tell them Christianity is not a success, the Christian life is not what it is presented to be.
Well, that is one kind; we are all too familiar with it. It is the Christian life which is according to something objectively presented and accepted. But there is another kind and that is, the entering into something already completed in Christ. Not something to be attained unto, but something already accomplished; not something at all to be lived up to, but Someone to be lived with. The vast difference between those two things in the outworking can hardly be measured. It is "Christ, the power of God". Now when we have said that, we have opened the way to see just what the Lord Jesus is, and we can never get outside of that and we never want to. But it is very important that we should see exactly what that means.
The Peril in "Advanced Teaching"
Now there is no such thing as teaching which is an advanced system as such. Teaching is not departmental or sectional. What I mean is this. You hear of people talking about truth which has to do with the "more advanced stages of Christian life", as though it were something in a watertight compartment by itself, sectionalised. You can accept it or you can leave it; "that line of things", that particular teaching, regarded as something extra, something different, something that is more than the normal Christian life, something by itself. You take it or you reject it, and it does not matter very much. If you are going to live the "higher life" then you must have the "higher teaching". If you are not going in for that sort of thing well you must remain, as you say, "simple Christians" and believers and abide by the simplicities of the Gospel of Christ. It does not matter very much. It is just a matter of your interest in teaching and in truth. Now I want very emphatically to undermine and undercut all such notions, because there is no such thing as "advanced teaching" as a separate system. It does not matter with what you deal in the New Testament, you will never find it as a thing by itself, departmentalised, sectionalised, in a watertight compartment, to be taken or left at your own will. Never can you come to the New Testament in that way!
We have spoken much of the "Overcomer" for instance. The Overcomer of the book of the Revelation and the Overcomer company coming at length to the throne. Now it is quite easy to begin to take that as advanced teaching, as something which is for certain people and not for others. That is for some who care to pursue it. It is not for all, and it is quite optional after all whether you do pursue it. Now what is the Overcomer individually, and collectively? The Overcomer of the book of the Revelation is only the ripe and full product of the work of Christ in His cross; it is only Christ in His fuller manifestation and expression. The Overcomer is still a matter of Christ the power of God. Just exactly as in salvation at its commencement, so in full triumph at its consummation. The most advanced point is vitally connected with the most elementary point. We are constantly brought back from the ultimate to the initial in the Word of God. You get to Revelation and you get to the throne, and you get to the triumphant Overcomer company, but even there you are immediately linked with the blood of the Lamb, and the Lamb slain, and that is initial and fundamental, basic. The two things, the end and the beginning are brought together, they are not separated, and you cannot take "Overcomer" teaching and departmentalise it and make a system of it and say that it is an advanced teaching for certain believers. No, beloved, it is the normal outcome of your initial faith in Christ. It is to be what God intended Calvary to be for every believer. It is simply the realisation of God's thought in forgiving us our sins right at the beginning. It is only the development, the normal development according to God's mind, of the elementary things of our salvation, and there is a very great peril in becoming taken up with, and fascinated by, advanced teaching, as though it were something in itself. A very great peril, for this reason, that very often that fascination causes an overlooking of the steps of advance. It is something out there, objectively, and people get into it with their heads mentally and take it up and are fascinated by it, and are always talking about it. However, they have not advanced progressively into it in experience and spiritual development. There is a failure to recognise that you cannot get anywhere by definite steps of spiritual advance. Those steps are always in relation to the Cross of Christ, for there is not one step forward in the spiritual life which is not first a step backward.
What I mean is this, that there has to be some undoing before there can be some updoing. There has got to be some application of the Cross in some fuller way before we can go one step further. All advance into the fuller things is by reason of the Cross being progressively applied and wrought to release us from that which holds us back; that in the flesh which holds us back from that which is in the Spirit. So then we cannot come to anything by a mental process. There is that peril of fascination with advanced things which overlooks the steps of advance to the higher, or deeper things of the Lord. That is the peril, and we can never reach the highest, or the ultimate, unless the beginnings are properly wrought in us, and in this sense we never do depart from the beginnings. It is a point which has often been noted, but which we do well never to forget, that when Israel went over the Jordan, (a type of the Lord's people coming through identification union with Christ in death and burial and resurrection, and coming on to Ephesian and Colossian ground, that is, the heavenlies) the base of all their operations from that moment was Gilgal. They never went out to battle, to an undertaking, to possess any fresh territory, except after returning to their base immediately after, and moving back from their base again for the next bit of conquest. Gilgal is the place of the Cross, the cutting away, the circumcision of the flesh, and every bit of advance into new spiritual territory, apprehension, inheritance, is on the ground of coming back to a recognition of that fact. That is, we never move from our base finally. The beginnings of our faith, the first ground, which is the Cross of our Lord Jesus, governs every bit of progress. Therefore when you get to the end, the consummation, and the Overcomer company in the throne, and the great cry from heaven, "Rejoice O heavens", the end of God realised in that company, it is still in relation to the blood of the Lamb, still in relation to the Lamb slain. Never have you got away from that, not for an instant.
Not "Teaching", But a Person
Now then, that being true we must recognise that everything is bound up with the Person and must never be regarded as just truth. That is the thing. We must never look at things as truth, doctrine or teaching as such. Everything is bound up with the Person. It is Christ the power of God. It is Jesus Christ and Him crucified. The Person, though in the glory, though exalted to the right hand of the Majesty on high, though having ascended far above all principality and power, though now in the power of His mighty resurrection, the Person is still Christ as crucified. And beloved, you and I will advance spiritually just in the measure in which that is a practical reality in our hearts, in our lives, every day that we live. It is still a Person and the Person is still Christ crucified, in all the virtue of that. That has yet to be more fully explained, of course. The Person is Christ crucified, that is Christ in relation to His Cross. Now what is the Gospel then? Well, Paul tells us what the Gospel was, and is, so far as he was concerned. You look over the Galatian letter, chapter one, verse eleven. "For I make known to you brethren as touching the Gospel which was preached by me" — now you notice what he is saying — "As touching the Gospel which was preached by me, I make known to you brethren, that it is not after man, for neither did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ" (Gal. 1:11,12). Verses 15 and 16: "When it was the good pleasure of God to reveal His Son in me that I might preach Him among the Gentiles." You see the two things, the one note. "The Gospel which was preached by me was by revelation of Jesus Christ." "It was the good pleasure of God to reveal His Son in me that I might preach Him."
What is the Gospel?
What is the Gospel? The Gospel is Christ crucified, as revealed in the heart. The Gospel is not only attesting objective facts, even the fact of Christ crucified, but what constitutes the Gospel is that, that which was true in the Lord Jesus, has been revealed by God in the heart. We are not constituted Gospel preachers because we have read somewhere that Christ was crucified, raised from the dead and ascended, and all those historic facts, but because God has revealed in us, not facts but a Person in relation to the facts, and the facts in relation to the Person. There has come to our hearts by revelation of the Spirit of God Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and that has constituted us preachers; that has constituted the Gospel. There is no Gospel apart from that. Now you see how that brings us back to our initial position. It means this, that a struggling to reach, to attain, unto something conceived as Christianity, is a failure to see Christ. Christ has not been seen, He has not been revealed. Immediately the Holy Spirit reveals the Lord Jesus in us, we have come into the place where the work is done, and what we are doing now is to live out from a perfected position, instead of striving to reach a perfected position.
I will explain this. What happens is that the Holy Spirit brings Christ in His completed work into our hearts, and then proceeds to conform us to Him as we co-operate and go on. Do we realise that if Christ is in us, He is not an imperfect Christ? He is not only the Christ Who has dealt with our sins. He has covered the whole ground of our perfection in the work of His Cross. When the Lord Jesus wrought His Calvary work, beloved, He not only dealt with the matter of forgiveness or remission of sins, so that when we come to the Cross that is all we get. The Lord Jesus went right on by His Cross, right on to the perfection of redemption until He reached the throne of the absolute Overcomer. He swept the whole ground, everything and anything that ever believers will encounter in the course of their Christian experience as an obstruction, resistance, difficulty, as a temptation, as something intended and calculated to hinder them reaching God's end. He met it all. There is no experience that can ever come to you or to me in the course of our Christian life which creates difficulty in our reaching God's end, except that which Christ has already met. In Him, the Person, from the remission of sins to the absolute victory over the dragon and all his hosts. In Him, the Person, the whole ground is covered, is finished, is completed. It is not something we have to struggle on to, it is done. Now the Holy Spirit brings that Christ into our hearts with all that He contains in His Person by reason of His Cross. Then, being brought into vital union with Christ indwelling the next thing is the Holy Spirit proceeds, as we let Him, co-operate with Him, as we consent and as we go on, to conform us to the image of God's Son, Jesus Christ, and to bring us into the fulness of Christ. Therefore overcoming is not something to be struggled unto, it is something to be wrought in us as we consent to the work of the Cross. You see the difference. Oh, such a difference! "Christ in you the hope of glory", and some people seem to think that their struggle is the hope of glory. It works out as the despair of glory. They have soon come to discover that there is not much hope of glory left along that line! So then the Christian life, according to God's thought, is Christ having His way in us and us going on in living fellowship with Him. There are enough tests in that because it is there that Christ and Him crucified is applied.
Now we are going to see what that means. Going on with the Lord is the application of Christ crucified. It is the daily "bearing about the dying of the Lord Jesus that the life also of Jesus may be manifest." The dying of the Lord Jesus; and one very important aspect of the dying of the Lord Jesus was a dying to everything but the will of God. He took up that dying at Jordan, when the tempter came and tried to get Him to act in His own spiritual interests, in the interests of His great life-work, to act out of harmony with the will of God. He died every time to everything but the will of God. That is Christ crucified and that is the dying of the Lord Jesus. There is enough room you see, in going on with the Lord for testing, for trying, and that is what makes the thing so real. It is progress by death. It is life out of death. It is gain out of loss. But blessed be God — and we must keep our eyes on this — Christ is there with the whole fulness, as it were, in His hand, and as we go on "of His fulness we receive, grace upon grace". So what we have first of all to see is the meaning of Christ's death. I feel the Lord wants us to see at this time perhaps more than we have ever seen, with spiritual eyes, not mental eyes. Please do not say, Oh we know all about that, we have heard so much about that. You have not heard more about it than I have, at least I do not think you have, and yet if there is one thing that is more real to me today than ever, it is the conscious need of knowing more of the meaning of the death of Christ. Oh, may the Lord open that to us in these days. Just hints of what is in the death of Christ are sufficient to make us desire to look into this thing afresh. There is something in the death of Christ that you and I have never seen, and my heart is just reaching out to get that at which the Lord has hinted.
Finally I want to remind you that the Holy Spirit has been charged with, and has accepted the full responsibility for all this. That is, His work is to reveal Christ in us and to produce Christ in us. Now that, on the one hand, is a blessed thing for our hearts. If that is not done, the Holy Spirit's work is not done. And the only reason why it will not be done is found in our own attitude towards Christ. The Holy Spirit will never fail in Himself because He cannot in Himself do the thing for lack of resource, lack of power, lack of ability, lack of patience and persistence, and all that is needed to do this. He will never fail on His own side. If He fails the cause of the failure will be with us, because we do not let Him, we do not co-operate. But we may rest assured that if the Lord, the Spirit, has His way He will make every one of us overcomers, and not just a little select company, sitting in the throne. That is for you, simplest believer in the Lord Jesus, you who delight and glory in the great initial fact that you are saved from sin and hell and judgment. The Lord in that saving of you has bound up His throne, if you will let Him work it out. Of course, while this fact of the Holy Spirit's mission and work is a great and blessed thing to bank upon, it is a test also on the other hand. It is a test as to whether the Holy Spirit is having His way. It may be a test as to whether we have received the Holy Spirit. At least it is a test for believers as to whether He is having His way.
That is, are you living the up and down life, the struggle life? There is something all wrong with that. That is not the life of the Holy Spirit. That is not the life of the indwelling reigning Lord Jesus. So we must recognise this, that power in relation to the Holy Spirit is not some thing to be sought, to be had as an abstract force. It is related to the Person of Christ, especially in connection with His Cross. When we speak about the Holy Spirit we usually get ideas of power, and when we are talking about power we usually think of the Holy Spirit. But so often in effect the thought of the Holy Spirit is without the article, it is "Holy Spirit" in a kind of power, element, force, some thing that comes and takes you up and does extraordinary things and effects certain issues. It is the working just of an element, a mighty element. That is foreign to the New Testament. Power in connection with the Holy Spirit is inseparably bound up with the Person of Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and the Holy Spirit working as power only does so by revealing Christ and Him crucified. That has always been so, in New Testament times and ever since. The power of the Holy Spirit was manifested in the revelation of Jesus Christ and Him crucified, so that Christ was the power of God, and is the power of God. What we need to see is the need for the Holy Spirit to make each part of Christ crucified, real in us. And that must be daily. Each part, that is how I put it to simplify it. There are many parts of Christ crucified. There is the death of course, there is the resurrection, there is the exaltation; and the Holy Spirit has got to make the spiritual meaning of each one of these parts of Christ crucified real in us. But we have to recognise the need for the Holy Spirit to do it. We have to come to the place where we count on the Holy Spirit to do it, where we definitely have an understanding with the Holy Spirit. Now it is understood that He makes all the meaning of Christ's death real in me, and all that is implied and involved in Christ's resurrection and ascension, real in me.
And so now the way is open for us to go forward to see something more of what is in the death of Christ, in the resurrection of Christ, in the exaltation, in the enthronement. But these are only different parts of the one Person and one work, Christ and His Cross. Beloved, I want this thing to be gathered up in one practical word that you can grasp, and I want to say this as the closing sentence. Everything for a life of fulness, of victory is bound up with the fact that this Christ Who has accomplished and perfected all, is in our hearts and is having His full way and full sway in our hearts. That is very different from struggling to live the Christian life. It is the Christian life being lived by Christ, through the Spirit, in us as we obey, comply, co-operate, actively and not merely passively.
Chapter 2 - The Death of Christ: The Power of God "For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, that ye may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God. Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all generations for ever and ever. Amen." (Ephesians 3:14-21)."And he gave some to be apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of the body of Christ: till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ" (Ephesians 4:11-13).
That with which we are occupied at this time is summed up and included in the words "Christ the power of God" (1 Cor. 1:24). Of course these are very familiar words, as familiar as any of the passages of the New Testament, but the content, fulness and meaning of them has never yet been unveiled to us. We believe that the Lord has something more to say as to His own meaning in these words: "Christ the power of God". The Lord Jesus has by the Holy Spirit been brought into the heart and the life of the believer, and He has come in, in all the fulness of the work which He accomplished in and through His Cross. It is still, in effect, Christ crucified as the power of God. That is, Christ in relation to His Cross, and all the work of His Cross. That is also Christ risen, ascended, glorified, exalted. These are only aspects of the one Person, in virtue of the one Cross, and all these are gathered up into Christ the power of God, and Christ as the power of God is manifested in the believer in the outworking of those aspects. His death, the power of God in Christ; His resurrection, the power of God in Christ; His ascension, the power of God in Christ; His anointing, the power of God in Christ; His exaltation to the right hand of the Majesty on high, the power of God in Christ. These are phases, aspects of the one Person on the ground of the one Calvary work, which are to be made real in the believer by reason of Christ dwelling within. That is a very simple summing-up of what is before us.
The Death of Christ: The Power of God
And so now immediately we have to think of the death of Christ as the power of God. I just want to add one passage to those which we have quoted, from Luke 9:30-31, "And behold, there talked with him two men, which were Moses and Elias; who appeared in glory, and spake of His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem." Now that word "decease", as probably your margin tells you, is the word "exodus". "...And spake of His exodus, which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem." And that gives an altogether new idea as to the death of the Lord Jesus. It first of all says that it was a way out and a going out. Then it says that it was an accomplishment on His part. An accomplishment, something achieved, something which He did and when we recognise that to be the nature of the death of Christ we get a different conception from His just being killed or just being crucified by men. It was His way out, it was His achievement. I want you to get the picture of that. See Him hemmed in by everything that the Scriptures make us to know as the things of human bondage, man's slavery, man's limitations, man's enthralment, sin, the flesh, the power of the world. Only believers understand what that is: all the forces of darkness, of hell, the limitations of spirit and of soul and of body. Not merely geographical limitations, but the limitation by reason of nature and the conditions which obtained through the fall, everything that holds man within its grip to limit him and prevent him from reaching God's thought for him, which is a great thought, a wonderful thought, a vast thought. The Lord Jesus came into those limitations, came into that world, accepted voluntarily that bondage, allowed Himself, by His own will to enter into every phase and aspect of that thraldom (excepting inherent sin). He not only allowed Himself to come into it and know it, but drew it on Himself in His Cross, and then with all those forces of every kind, natural and supernatural, shutting Him in, pressing upon Him, compassing Him about like bees, He broke through and accomplished a way out, by His death. So that the death of Christ was a way out of everything here, and that is the thing that I want to say. The death of Christ is a way out, a way out from everything here. If that breaks upon us as a revelation we shall be different people, there will be big changes.
Now first of all, do we realise that judgment was upon everything here? There is nothing in this whole creation, this whole realm of nature, which was not under judgment. Death passed upon all. That is the Word of God, and judgment therefore, rested upon everything. It rested upon man, it rested upon the world, it rested upon nature, it rested upon man's soul and body, body and soul; judgment universal upon everything because of sin. And the death of the Lord Jesus was the entering by Him into that judgment, and in His death accepting to its full all the judgment that rested upon everything here, so that where He is concerned there can be no more judgment. Judgment has been finished in the Person of Christ by His death. All the waves and the billows of God's wrath have gone over Him and He has therefore left judgment without any more power, by His death. That death was a gateway through which He passed bearing the judgment of God out to the place where no more judgment exists. And so He made His exodus, He accomplished His exodus out from a representatively sinful state, not an inherently sinful state, but a representatively sinful state when He was made sin. He went out from a judged world, a world upon which judgment rested. He accomplished the way out from the scene and sphere of divine judgment, through death, went out from it, and out from everything else that was under judgment through death. Now of course, comprehensively we see that in Christ Jesus we too have gone out from all that. Our being made to sit with Him in the heavenlies includes all that.
Our being in Christ Jesus includes all that. Our faith in Christ makes all that good for us.
Out From Condemnation
It means simply that you and I if we are in Christ have gone by His way out, through His death, from that upon which judgment rests, and there is no more judgment because the ground of judgment has been fully dealt with by Him. Everything into which we were born by nature, upon which the judgment of God rested universally, we have escaped from in Christ through His death. That is the great objective fact of Christ's death for us. For us. "There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." Judgment is passed for ever, exhausted on Him. The way out has become our way. I know that that is almost too elementary to provoke in you any fresh appreciation, but that is one side, a blessed reality in which, I trust, we are all rejoicing. That has been done for us. There is a way out from all condemnation, from all judgment, and from all that state of things which was under judgment, and still is under judgment if not in Christ. But beloved, there is the other side, and that is the thing we have perhaps more especially and particularly to consider at this time.
There is such a thing as being in Christ, as making good objectively for us all that is in Him, but then there is the complement of that which is Christ in us by the Holy Spirit working that out experimentally. It is just there that we begin our experimental Christian life, that what is true in Him has to be made true in us, and that we have got to be "planted together in the likeness of His death." That death was for us. Now there is our side: "planted together with Him in the likeness of His death", so that the teaching of Christ, or Christ crucified, has got to come into our lives and be wrought in us by the Holy Spirit to bring us out unto God. That is the experimental application of the Cross as a way out for us.
Out from Sin
How are we to be actually, experimentally delivered from sin, which is a state upon which judgment rests? And judgment rests as much upon sin in the believer as it does in the unbeliever. "If we sin..." and that phrase is not mine but is inspired Scripture through the Apostle John, "If we sin we have an advocate." But "If we sin" admits of the possibility. The sin of the believer is no less sin than the sin of the unbeliever, and therefore, no less under divine judgment than that of the unbeliever. How are we to escape, therefore, from the bondage of sin which brings us under judgment? Only by death-union with the Lord Jesus, on the one hand appropriated, accepted by faith, as something that He has done for us; on the other hand, entered into by our own reckoning of ourselves as dead in His death. And what has happened in the life of the believer by the operation of the Holy Spirit? Is it not just this, that He, the Spirit, is applying the Cross, or Christ crucified, as a power, as an active thing, as a reality, applying Christ crucified to us on the sinful side of our nature, applying it to the sins of the flesh, applying that Cross to deliver us, to give us the way out.
There is another way of putting this: "If we, through the Spirit, do put to death the doings of the flesh." How do you put to death the doings of the flesh? You do not try and strangle them, and you do not try and struggle them down into non-existence. You do not take hold of them and wrestle with them. If you do, you have the kind of Christian life of which we have spoken in our first message, which is a Christian life of constant struggle, and more failure than success. What you do is to hand over to the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, those doings of the flesh that He might bring upon them the power of Christ crucified. That is how you put them to death. You co-operate with the Holy Spirit. You bring in the Holy Spirit Who was the mighty energy of Christ's death. You bring in the Holy Spirit and count on Him in this matter to work Calvary upon this thing and the other thing, handing it up to the Cross in the power of the Holy Spirit.
If that sounds difficult and far away, let us try and get nearer to it. When you are confronted with the fact of something in your heart, in your life, in your nature, which is wrong, which should not be, which in all honesty you have to call sin, and which has been touched by the Lord and you recognise that judgment stands over that until it is dealt with. We all know that kind of thing and there are two courses to be adopted. One is to say, "Well I am going to wrestle with that thing until I get the better of it." You can adopt that course if you like, but if you take the experience of the majority of people you will not. That is not a very successful line of operation, and when you have it down in one place it will come up in another. You need something more than yourself to keep that under. A lot of people are trying that. They say, "I realise this is one of my failings, weaknesses, shortcomings; I am going to stop that, I am going to get the better of that." The enemy can keep you very busy on that line and you will never have anything else to do but that, for if you have ninety-nine down and there is — you think — only one more left, ten thousand more will come up and you have to start further back. That is true to experience.
Another course is, "Lord, that thing was dealt with by You in the Cross. There is nothing that is possible in this fallen humanity but that You dealt with it in the Cross. You triumphed over it, You broke its power and broke Your way through it, having met the judgment of God upon that, and exhausted that judgment. You did it. Now You have given the Holy Spirit to them that believe, as the Spirit of Your victory, of Your triumph, of Your conquest, the Spirit Who has come in virtue of Your Calvary work to make that Calvary work actual in the believer. I definitely now, taking my position upon the ground of all Calvary's victory, claim in Christ the energy and power of the Holy Spirit to bring this where Christ brought it at Calvary, into subjection. I cannot do it, and if I could I cannot keep it under, but You have done it and You can deal with it permanently." That is another course to take. "And Lord, seeing that you died to that and went out from that very thing, I reckon myself as having died in Your death, and gone out from that thing in Your exodus. I claim my exodus." You see, that is another course of action, and the results are very different. What has happened? You have not come merely into the light of some doctrine, you have come into the power of a Person, and it makes all the difference whether you are trying to deal with things doctrinally or in the power of the Person. This matter is related to the Person of Christ. It is Christ crucified, Christ the power of God, the power of God in the matter of sin. A way out and no judgment. Now you see we have started at the first principles of the Gospel. You and I are not too old in the faith to still benefit by such a contemplation. We want to know more and more of what this death of Christ means to us.
Before we take the next step let us say this: although it does give us the glorious and joyful hope of assurance of a way out, for our comfort, our consolation, it also says most emphatically that it was a way out and you must not stay in. That is, you must not trifle with sin. You are supposed to be out of that realm, in Christ. You are supposed to be right out of that. Do not trifle with sin, do not tolerate, do not play with sin. Be careful that you do not get into that realm by the slightest contact voluntarily. Get out of it as far as you can and keep out as far as you can, because the believer can come under the present judgment by tampering with sin. It is a way out, that is a blessed assurance for those who want it. But it is a way out, and that is a tremendous warning for those who trifle with sin and think of sin lightly. Christ, with all that He went through of all the judgments of God, went through to give us a way out, and we must not make light of what He suffered by nullifying it by any tampering with sin. Tampering with sin is acting as if Christ had never borne that judgment and made that way out. It is undoing all Christ's work and making little of His terrible suffering, and God can never hold us guiltless if we do that. Now suffer the strong word, the word that has a frown in it as well as the other word. We delight and glory in the good things, but that must never cause us to refrain from pointing out the responsibility that rests upon us in view of the blood of our Lord Jesus.
Out from Law
"Now", says the Apostle, "the strength of sin is the law", and as we know, Christ's death is seen in Galatians to be the way out from the law. Now just one brief word upon this. The matter of the law is not very often interesting to people, probably because they do not understand it very much. Mentally they almost invariably swing back to the Ten Commandments and think of that as the law. Now this matter does concern us in a very practical way, as it should; it is not just doctrine. If there is one thing against which my whole being revolts, it is just giving out teaching as teaching. The practical value of a thing is paramount with me, so that I am not trying to touch on anything without real practical value.
You can have Christian law as much as you can have Mosaic law. You can be in bondage in Christianity just as much as in Judaism. Christianity can be an imposed system with "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not", just as much as the Mosaic law, and there are just as many Christians today who are afraid of Christianity, so to speak, as there were Jews who were conscious of the dead-weight of the law imposed upon them. How many there are in bondage to Christian law, whose consciences are an awful bugbear to them in Christianity. It is very blessed to sing "Free from the law, oh happy condition" when you are thinking back into Judaism, but it is infinitely better to be free to sing it in relation to Christianity. That wants explaining. Is Christianity to us in any degree a matter of what we must do and what we must not do, and if we do not do what we should do, and if we do what we should not do, we lose our peace of conscience, our peace of mind? Is it that? It means this: I can take this Bible and I can say, here is God's standard for your life; it is all here, Old Testament and New Testament, God's standard for your life. It is a very exhaustive one, a very thorough one, and you will not find that any point of your life remains untouched by it. It has something to say about it all. God expects you to live up to that! What is your reaction to that? Try it, and a lot of people are trying it. They are trying to live up to the New Testament and it cannot be done. It cannot be done that way. I tell you, beloved, that if you are going to take this Book and try to live up to it you will be far better advised to leave it alone. Don't even make the attempt. You will come back very sorry people in a little while if that is your line. Yet multitudes of Christians are trying it. That is one way of preaching God's standard. I have given you the Book and told you God's standard and you have tried it and found that it condemns, condemns, condemns more than anything else. The one effect it has upon you is to make you feel what a wretched miserable thing you are, and how impossible you are. That is the effect of it from that standpoint.
What is the other? I bring you, not a Book but a Person, and that Person has lived up to that standard, absolutely fulfilled every minute demand with the most absolute success, satisfied God to the full under our conditions of life. He was "Tempted in all points like as we are", submitted to all the trials, in spirit, in soul, in body; tried under all conditions inwardly and outwardly, and passed through what you and I will never have to pass through. We shall never know the depth of His temptations, of His soul-sufferings, of that which tried Him to get Him to swerve from the path of obedience. We shall never know the same measure. He has been subjected to the ultimate test of all God's perfect will, and has triumphed, succeeded, satisfied God, and has therefore gone out from the realm of the law. He has replaced the law, the way out He made through His death. The law had no power over Him, has no power over Him. He is far above law as law now. That Person, that living Person in all the virtue and content, the power, of that complete triumph, I bring to you and I say: God in His great grace and wisdom and love has offered to allow that Person to live in your heart by the Holy Spirit in all the virtue of His Cross. He is there, in the Holy Spirit, He is there with all that accomplishment in His possession, living within. If you will utterly yield your will, your heart, your mind to Him, if you will allow that Cross on its death-side to be planted in the realm of your mind with all its independent thoughts and judgments, your heart with all its desires and affections, your entire nature, your will with all its choices, its ways, if you will allow the Cross to be planted there to cut you off from yourself unto Him, and you will yield and obey and go on with Him, and co-operate with Him as He witnesses in you to His will, you need not worry about the Book any longer. I do not mean you can ignore the Scriptures. That is, if the Lord is speaking His will in you, you will come up to the Book, you will not be contrary to the Book, you will not be working other than according to the Book. It is a way of realising the Book. The Lord of the Book lives inside you and helps you to live up to it.
There are things which are not wrong in themselves, but at times they might be wrong because of a brother with a tender conscience. There is no written law about this, but the Holy Spirit should speak in us as to the Lord's will at the moment. This is what Paul wrote about to the Corinthians in connection with meats and drinks.
You need not worry about the law any longer, you are free from the law, you are above the law, you have got the law of God written in your heart, "not with pen upon tables of stone but by the Holy Spirit upon the fleshly tables of your heart". The law of God is written there, and you know the mind of the Lord about things, and what is more the power is there to do it. It is inward; you see the difference between a Book and a Person, between Christianity as something to be lived up to, and Christ living within. Free from the law. Oh, but you have got to go through that open way, with Christ from the law. I trust you will be able to understand what I am going to say. For a believer it is never a question of what others think you ought to do, or ought not to do; of an accepted standard of things. It is never a matter of you ought to do this and you ought not to do that, you ought not to ride in a vehicle on a Sunday and a lot of other things.
That whole system of things ought to have passed for you and for me. The question of riding in a vehicle on the Lord's day and all these other legal questions ought to have been wiped out as legal factors. What is the law for us? "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" That is the Lord speaking in our hearts, not law imposed upon us from the outside, but the Lord making known in our hearts what we should do. We have got the law in our hearts. I want you to see this. The Lord Jesus embraced all the will of God on every point, on every matter, and perfected it in His own Person. Now He, as the perfected will of God, comes to reside in us in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, to work out that perfected will of God, not to ask us to struggle towards some thing, but to work it out in us as a power, not as a binding imposition of something upon our lives, but as a living force within. The difference between the Old and New Testament truth is just this, that in the Old Testament it was something presented and people groaned under the weight of it to try and fulfil it. In the New Testament it is Someone resident within Who is perfectly capable of living up to the will of God, and bringing us up to that standard by working within us to will and to do of His good pleasure. All very simple and elementary again, but oh, for the Lord's people to get out through the death of Christ, because through His death we see Him out from the law, and that may be, as I have said, Christian as much as Jewish. It is life, not legality.
Out from the Flesh
Now what is true of sin and the law is true also of the flesh. The death of Christ was a way out from the flesh. That is, as I understand the Word in the New Testament, the whole body of nature, the whole body of the old Adam nature, that is the flesh. It is one thing, of course, to be free from sin in its guilt and in its judgment, it is something more to be free from the flesh, the body of nature, and the Cross of Christ was a way out from that, His death was a way out from that. If you look at Galatians again you will see how this was so. Galatians 5:19: "Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are, adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings and such like." Now just break those up. Here you have firstly, gross physical sins: fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness. Then you have evil dispositions: hatred, variance, emulations, wrath and strife. Then you have religious forms of intrigues: divisions, sectarian parties. Then you have evil supernatural elements: Satan in idolatry and witchcraft. Then fifthly you have self-indulgence in drunkenness and revellings. Now of course all these are easily recognised, and most believers imagine that they are wholly free from walking after the flesh because they think of the flesh as here in the grosser forms, but I do not know that even here there is not some challenge. We may not fall under the first category of gross, fleshly or physical sin, fornication or uncleanness, but I wonder if "strife" finds us out? I wonder about "jealousies", "wrath", (that is a better word than bad temper, isn't it?) When we, "in our moral integrity", say we were very wroth, we do not mean that we got into a bad temper, but very often it is the same thing. The works of the flesh are strife, not getting on with one another, and if you track it down there are fleshly reasons for not getting on with one another. That applies to believers. Bad temper, wrath, it is in the plural here, bad tempers, works of the flesh. We will let it sink in. "Jealousy". We might not call it by that name, we should hate to hear that name applied.
These religious things too: factions, divisions, parties are works of the flesh. Is that true? Does that account for all this? May it be after all that in sectarian parties the flesh is at the root? Of course that is not always true, but we ought to be very honest with ourselves to see that on no ground whatever before God but the ground of the purest, most transparent, crystal clear spiritual principle do we stand where we stand. It must not be because we cannot get on with other people that we separate from them. Not because of some wretched element of disaffection. If we cannot get on with people we will separate from them instead of dealing with the reason why we cannot get on with them, and having the Cross brought in there. It is the easiest thing in the world, if you cannot get on with people, to separate from them. Some personal interest perhaps there, some wish or want of our own, because we could not have our own way. This Word says these are the works of the flesh, issuing in factions, sectarian parties and divisions. Now the word that is here in Galatians is this, that the death of Christ was a way out from all that. That means that, blessed be God, we can be delivered from it all, but it means also that we are contradicting the death of Christ if there is any of that. We are denying the Cross if there is any of that. We are working against all Christ's Calvary work if there is any of that. If it can be said in any one of these, or in any other respect, the flesh is there, the flesh prompted that, we do not know Christ. We do not know Christ if that is true. Christ has brought us in Himself out from that, out from it all and we must not go back and live there. Oh, that we may see what a mighty thing this death of Christ is to bring us out of the whole body of the flesh, to bring us right out by the Cross. Now Christ in us by the Holy Spirit means that all those things of the flesh must be smitten, must be brought consciously as under judgment. They must be revealed as judged of God and being revealed as judged, we must see that our union with Christ in death is our union with Him in getting out from all that. If then, these things are there, any one of them, we have simply to say that we are still inside and we ought to be outside. We still have not apprehended Christ, we have not seen the Lord.
Out from the World
Finally, what is true in these three respects is true with regard to the world. Out from the world; and Paul here in this Galatian letter cries: "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus by which I have been crucified unto the world and the world unto me." Out from the world! Do you catch the note in Paul's shout: "God forbid that I should glory"? Glory in what? That by the Cross of Christ I have been brought clean out of the world. It is a dead world to me. What is the attitude that seems to hold with so many, even Christians? That they just hold on to as much of the world as they can without losing their peace of mind, without having their conscience disturbed. If they can have this and not be compelled to give up that, and if the other thing does not involve some disturbance of their inward peace, well, they would like to keep it, they would like to stay there. But Paul says, "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross by which the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world." Glorying, not so much in the fact that he can have so much of the world with peace of conscience, but that he has gone out of the world. Christ, by His death, delivers us from it, and it all comes back to this main inclusive question, what is Christ to us? Is the Lord Jesus your attraction, are you satisfied, are you here because He is more to you than all the world? He has proved to be our way out. Yes, we would like to have a motor ride, to get out in the sunshine and enjoy that. But when we come to face it deliberately and frankly, and say, "Shall I go to the conference or shall I go off to the country and open air?" we find our hearts will not let us go. The verdict is here for deeper reasons than nature. By His death we are out, but remember that this is the only way of living in the world.
The only possible way of staying in this world for believers is that they are out of it! You see the meaning of that. We cannot stay here on this earth except if we have got something more than this earth, this world. If we had not, well, with things getting as they are getting just now in the world, beloved, with the suicide mania, the pressure, men's hearts failing them for fear of the things that are coming upon the earth; the only way to live in this world is to be out of it, to be delivered from it. Then we can live here. We can come back to it in a sense, when we are not of it and our destiny is not bound up in it. We have been delivered! Are you out? So out that you are perfectly satisfied with the Lord Jesus? We said already that everything in the Christian life is bound up with the Person of Christ, and power is related to the Person, not to truth, doctrine, or knowing laws in Christianity, but the Person. It comes back to this question: What is Christ to us? Has He proved to be our way out from sin, its bondage, its judgment, out from the law? Is that calculated to destroy all our peace of conscience, to bring us under a burden? Out from the body of the flesh, which spoils everything? Out from the world? Well, now, Christ in us is for this one thing, that what is true positively in Him shall be true continually in us. The application of the Cross by the Holy Spirit of Christ crucified is just to get us out, right out from all that upon which death and judgment rests. May we enter into His accomplished exodus by fellowship with Him in His death. We have still to see much more, both of what the death means, and then the resurrection and ascension. The Lord make this, at any rate, very real to us.
Chapter 3 - The Cross and Deception Reading: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; 2:1-5.1 Cor. 1:18: "The word of the cross... is the power of God."
1 Cor. 1:23,24: "We preach Christ crucified... unto them that are called... Christ the power of God."
1 Cor. 2:2: "I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified."
In the KJV it says "The preaching of the cross", instead of the word of the Cross. That is quite an unfortunate translation, for here it is the Logos of the Cross; the same word and title as given to the Lord Jesus in the beginning of the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word" (the Logos). You will also have noticed from the context and the other passages that we have read, that what is in view is Christ crucified, Jesus Christ and Him crucified. It is not a doctrine, a teaching; it is a Person, and that Person crucified is the power of God and the wisdom of God; the word of the Cross. That is comprehensive and includes a very great deal, but there is one specific emphasis in my own heart for this particular hour in relation to the times in which we are living.
It is said in the Word that "in the last days perilous times shall come", and I think most of us, certainly those who have spiritual perception, will agree that these are very perilous times. Perilous times spiritually, perilous times for the people of God, and a very special word from the Lord seems to be necessary for His own people in these times to secure them, to establish them, to hold them, to make them safe, and bring them into a place where they are established, because the peculiar nature of the peril of these days is that of deception, delusion. What is delusion? Well, it is to lead from truth into error. It is to mislead the mind or the judgment, to beguile, to lead astray, to cheat, to frustrate, to disappoint, to impose upon. It is something that is not the truth. These are days peculiarly marked by that peril. There is a sense in which we may say that the gospel itself has as one of its main features, the deliverance of man from deception. Of course, it is delivering them into the truth, into the light, but in a very real way it is for their deliverance from deception, and we shall see in a little while how true that is. I feel, beloved, that the Lord has a very great need of a ministry by which His own people will be safeguarded in a day when deception and delusion is so widespread, many-sided, persistent, and so extremely subtle. The Lord surely would serve His Body by such a ministry, and so it may be that we gathered here are in line with that desire of His, both to safeguard us, make us sure, put us in a safe position by light, and through us minister to others who are in peril of making shipwreck of their faith and being led astray by what is abroad today as the imitation of the truth.
In that connection it is necessary to see exactly what happens at the end of the dispensation. We find at the end that a great angel descends having a great chain and he lays hold of the dragon who is the Devil, and Satan, the Deceiver, and casts him into the abyss that he shall deceive the nations no more. There you have the titles of the adversary: the Dragon, the Serpent, the Devil and Satan, and the Deceiver, and his work of deceiving the nations. Now such words occur more than once in the book of the Revelation if you care to look them up, almost the identical words occur on two occasions. You have it in the twentieth chapter, the other occasion is in the twelfth chapter where, the man-child reaching the throne, the Dragon is cast down and there is no more place found for him in heaven. He is again designated Dragon, Serpent, the Devil, Satan, the Deceiver.
We could gather a very great deal of Scripture containing the very same thought and expression, as to the universal activity of the Adversary as being the work of deception and delusion, and the Lord Jesus related to that activity in a special and intensified form to the end time. "Many shall come in My Name saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many." "There shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders so as to deceive, if it were possible, the very elect." "He doeth great signs, that he should even make fire come down from heaven upon the earth in the sight of men, and he deceiveth them that dwell upon the earth."
Now these are marks of the end time. It is but one strong emphasis and stress upon this, that the end times (and we believe that we are in those times) are going to be marked particularly by an intensified activity on the part of the enemy along the line of deception, and deceptions are deceptions. That is, they are with very great difficulty detected, and require a very keen, clear insight and perception to be recognised. This, of course, is, while true in a special way at the end, true of all times. The chief peril of all ages has been deception. Paul tells us that it was so. In a reference to what happened at the beginning he said: "For the man was not deceived, but the woman". Deception was the first weapon of the enemy against God, and the first method of the enemy by which he would secure his end, attain his object, accomplish his purpose. As the result of man's complicity and sanction, or failure to resist what he knew to be contrary to the express will of God, the whole race has become a deceived race. The race is deceived universally. Deception is not something now that is out in the air, objective, apart from man. Deception is now something in man as a part of him. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked."
Beloved, deceitfulness was not a constituent in the man that God made. Deceitfulness is something that has come into the nature of man, a foreign something, and it is in the race. It is in man. It is a part of his very nature. God's greatest opportunity is always with the honest in heart, and God never stands a chance when there is not honesty of heart. His beginnings are there. He wants a contrite heart, an honest heart, an open spirit, where there is no covering things over; for that was the very first thing that happened when deceitfulness entered the race. Man went to hide himself, and deceitfulness is always that which is hiding something, keeping something under cover, not transparent, clear, open before heaven. God always demands absolute openness and honesty before He begins negotiations. God can always get on very rapidly when He has an honest heart to deal with, and that life with an honest heart will go ahead with God by leaps and bounds, and those who will not be honest with God, meaning business whatever it costs, will make no progress. (That is somewhat aside, we want to get to the real main factor in all this.) We have said that deception is a universal method of the Deceiver. It is universal, but it is adapted to the special realm in which he may be active. That means, his deceiving work is suited to those with whom he has to deal, and there are, I think, mainly three realms.
Three Realms of Deception
There is the realm of the ungodly, the realm of the religious and the realm of the spiritual. In every one of these realms the Deceiver works projecting his deceptions, but he adapts his deceptions to suit the realm.
We touch lightly upon the first and the second in order to come to the third more specifically.
1) The Ungodly
But first we want to say something about the deceiving work among the ungodly. "The whole world lieth in the Wicked One", and "the god of this age hath blinded the minds of them that believe not", they are in the "kingdom of darkness", they are utterly deceived though they know it not. They are so utterly deceived that this letter to the Corinthians in its earlier passages tells us that the world in its very wisdom, at the very height of its wisdom, slew the Lord of Glory, killed the Prince of Life, so blind was it. Saul of Tarsus was an excellent specimen of the wisdom of this world in setting his hand against the Lord, and the Lord's own, to hound them to death. When the light came and he was undeceived, how completely he saw the blindness in which he had been. But the ungodly are even more deceived than that. Many of them before they close their earthly course wake up to the fact that they have been deceived. You find in the end of their life so frequently they realise that they have been out full stretch in quest for something to make life complete, to make it full, to satisfy themselves. Now in some cases disaster has overtaken them, calamity has befallen them and all that they set their hearts upon has been lost. They have nothing left of time or ability or strength or any kind of resource to begin again, and life has gone and now laughs back at them. Everything was put out to reach an end which has eluded them, which they have missed, and the only thing that they can honestly say is, that they have been deceived. On the other hand many reach their goal, accumulate wealth and possessions, position, influence, power and still heart-hungry they end their lives.
Well, we have had many instances of late. We have read of one who took his own life, not because things had gone wrong, for he had accumulated his wealth, but he turned his hand upon himself because he had nothing more to live for, and if that is not deception what is? Indeed, the ungodly are in the grip of a mighty deception and in the end the Deceiver is going to laugh at them whether they succeed or whether they fail in what they set their hands to in this life. In the end they are going to discover that the thing for which they were given a being has been missed and life has been just one delusion. That is the meaning of the commission given to the Apostle Paul. He had had his eyes opened and the Lord said to him "Thou shalt stand before kings and rulers, and nations to whom I send thee to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God." Turning from the power of Satan unto God, from darkness to light, is the result of having eyes opened; thus becoming disillusioned, undeluded by having eyes opened. They are blind and the blindness is the work of one who has got them in his grip. Kings, rulers and people, yes, many of them repudiating any such suggestion that they are blinded or deluded, but the Lord knows how "to open their eyes". That is what we meant when we said that the Gospel in a sense is peculiarly for delivering men from deception, universally. That is all we have to say about the ungodly.
2) The Religious
Next we want to say a word about the religious, for the same thing holds good here, adapted by the Deceiver to the realm in which he is working, the type of people with whom he is dealing, the religious. Yes, religiously deceived, to put it in another way, deceived by their very religiousness, and that is a strong and a mighty delusion. There is power in that delusion that seems so often to defy every kind of attempt to deal with it. The religious are deceived by religiousness! What more can be expected than the recognition of the fact of God and the giving to God of reverence, acknowledgment, and recognition: of taking active interest in things which relate to God, attending religious services, and being very busy in religious activities and interests, and finding your chief interest in religious things and the religious realm? What more can be expected? What is the matter with that? Be patient, bear with me if I say with very great emphasis: that may be one colossal delusion. So often that very thing obscures one fundamental thing, a true and living relationship with God. "Ye must be born again", and religion very often obscures that issue. Oh, religion is no argument for salvation. Religion can be found in the darkest places of the earth. Universally there is religion; depraved and very low in many places, but universally there is the consciousness of standing in relationship to some supreme object of worship, demanding worship. Then men's minds or imaginations get to work to give some kind of expression to that consciousness, of that supreme object of worship. The imagination produces that sometimes out of a tree, a stone, or in the heavenly bodies. Somehow it is expressed, but it is the thing that is there, behind all the forms of expression which is universal. All the highly civilised forms of that brought into the realm of Christendom are only the same thing developed. It does not say that Christendom's more intelligent, civilised, educated interpretation of God, even though it gets its ideas from the Bible, is salvation. It may be a mighty delusion and very often is.
I have asked people if they have been born again, and they have said "It is not necessary; I have been confirmed." Such may be an extreme case, and I do not take it up for criticism but by way of illustration. You may take on religion because you have got a religious temperament and that does not mean that you are saved. The Devil may be holding you just as firmly, tightly, in the grip of an unsaved state by your religion as he does the worldly by his pleasures. He does not mind how he holds you. By the most aesthetic religious activities, self-denials and such like, so long as he can keep you from the main thing. This is mentioned in passing, as deception is our subject. There is a vast difference, beloved, between vital union with God in Jesus Christ and religious formalism, and as we said at the outset, there is a very great need for a ministry by which deception, even amongst religious people, shall be shattered and broken and the fact of an essential, vital union with God by new birth shall be brought home to religious people. Along that line the enemy is destroying the whole testimony of the Church by packing it full of active, energetic, unconverted people. That is where he is sapping the strength of the Testimony of God.
3) The Spiritual
Now we come to the third realm, the spiritual people, and we are now dealing with the truly born again children of God, the spiritual people. The enemy will adapt his work of deception to this realm as cleverly and even more cleverly and ingeniously than to any other realm. But he does not give up the children of God as incapable of being deceived, for it is here that we find delusion and deception in its finest, its most acute forms. It is here that so often dear children of God have been utterly led off into error by something which bore all the semblance of absolute Gospel truth. It is in this realm, amongst the Lord's own children, that the deceptions of today are most rampant and active.
What is the mark, the peculiar mark of the Deceiver's deceiving work for the Lord's own people? It is the counterfeit of all that is of God, the counterfeit system which includes anything that is of God. Now if you will study your Bible you will be able to trace that counterfeit system as it moves into every connection with God. First of all you will see that there is a counterfeiting of the very Godhead. That is saying a terrific thing, but it is true. A counterfeiting of the very Godhead: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The counterfeiting of the first Person in the Trinity: God. What does the Scripture have to say? "The god of this age hath blinded..." The god of this age, and Satan is seen in the Word of God to set himself up all the way through as the supreme object of worship to draw away from God Himself. You have not to go very far into the Bible to see that. It is implied in his very first act. "Hath God said?" Well, "I am a greater authority than He is." That is what is implied in that. "You listen to me", and so by subtle insinuation he captured God's place of reverence, of fear, of acknowledgment, in the heart of man and in so doing became man's god obtaining worship. The subtle insinuation by which he did it was, "God knows if you do that, you will be as God knowing good and evil, and God forbidding you to do that is simply robbing you of something which, being yours, would make your life fuller and larger and greater; and so God after all is not favourable to you, and is keeping something back. He is making life smaller and narrower than it need be, and if you will only do as I tell you, you will have a life higher than that." Yes, become a Christian, give your life to God, and life will become a narrow, mean thing, and you will have to give up this and that. That is always the insinuation of the enemy. He never lets you know what you are going to gain by going on with God, and the deception works, that instead of gaining you lose, when you give heed to the enemy. "The god of this age hath blinded."
When Israel came out of Egypt, the supreme object of their coming out was not the coming into the land or the wilderness, but that they should come out to the Lord, belong to the Lord, be His people. "Let my son go"; that was the word: coming out to, belonging to, the Lord. They had not been in the wilderness very long before Moses went up into the mountain for a period with the Lord, and the enemy broke into the company. What was God saying to Moses in the mount? "Let them bring me gold and silver and brass and precious stones and fine linen, and let them make me a sanctuary." The enemy broke in at that time and said in effect: "Not if I can help it". He provoked the people to bring their gold for a molten image, taking the gold away from God. What is gold? That which is representative and typical of God Himself, of His divine nature. This theme runs all the way through the Bible. The god of this age is seeking to get the worship due to God, and he simulates the first Person of the Trinity. He imitates and counterfeits along the line of religion to get worship. Then the second Person of the Trinity (you realise that we cannot make a thorough study of each one of these) is the Lord Jesus, God Incarnate in the Son. We read: "Many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ, and shall deceive many." Antichrist is the simulation of God Incarnate: taking the place of god amongst men in human form to capture the worship of men's hearts; sitting in the temple of God giving the impression that he is God. "There shall come false Christs." The Deceiver is out to counterfeit Christ, simulate Him even to the point of incarnation, the Devil incarnate, Antichrist. As far as possible he takes all the semblance of Christ.
Counterfeiting the Holy Spirit
Then, there is the third Person in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. The enemy is out certainly along this line to counterfeit the Holy Spirit. There is no doubt about it. If this is the dispensation of the Spirit, it is also the dispensation of the counterfeit of the Holy Spirit. What is the work of the Holy Spirit? Well, it is many-sided, but, beloved, the enemy can give false signs, which are an imitation of the signs of the Holy Spirit. The enemy can give false guidance which is an imitation of the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Experiences? Yes, you can have experiences, supernatural experiences, which are a counterfeit of the Holy Spirit. Teaching? Yes, teaching from the Bible: doctrines of demons, false doctrine. But they would not be deceptions, delusions if they were not based upon biblical content.
There is also imitation of the Holy Spirit by miracles, working great signs and wonders, calling down a fire from heaven to deceive them that are on the earth. Miracles, signs, wonders, power, yes, and even life, to give life unto the image, power to give life unto the image, and, even conversions. Apparent new birth, changing lives. Here we are on perhaps the most terrific ground when we say that. Questions would at once arise: "Does the devil make men pure and turn men from godlessness to a life of God-interest?" "Does he really change men for the better?" Is that true? He will stand at nothing if he can get his ultimate end. Which is to give you a false baptism of the Holy Spirit so that you have a wonderful experience, full of wonderful sensations, sublime sensations, and accompanied by remarkable gifts, powers, supernatural abilities. His purpose is to give you that and let you glory in that for a time and then withdraw it, and with the withdrawal suggest to your mind at once "you have sinned against the Holy Ghost", "you have committed the unpardonable sin." Thus he has cut from under your feet the ground of any hope whatever. The power of the precious blood of Jesus Christ is no longer of any value to you because there is no more pardon. What is the good of the blood if there is no more pardon? All the atoning work of Christ is no longer effective for you if once you take that suggestion on. Christ and His Cross have lost their value for you.
Yes, Satan will stand at nothing if only he can really strike a vital blow at faith in Christ, and he has done that with many, and he is doing it. There are many dear children of God who, if only they knew, if only they had light and the knowledge, would be saved from the most awful state of mental hell today under that pressure of accusation from the enemy that they have sinned beyond forgiveness, that they have grieved the Holy Spirit so that He has left them. There are many dear children of God like that today. I say we need help in these days for the people of God to be made secure, to be saved from these awful deceptions. And in many other ways the Deceiver is imitating. He can use Scripture as much as anybody. He can provoke worship, he will set up his own church, "the synagogue of Satan", imitating. He will teach wonderful teachings, biblical truth, to get people in a corner and bewildered and eventually get them into such a mess that they do not know where they are, and they get into a place of fatal inertia and wonder if they can ever believe anything again. You see, delusions!
The Ground of Deception
Well, now, that is the position. Unfortunately, having said all that, I only get to the beginning of my message because at this point, beloved, we have to say that not one scrap of that deceiving work of the Devil has the vestige of a chance apart from something in man himself. There must be some ground for all this in man or it could never, never work. It would stand no chance of success. Deception is not something out there that is put upon us willy-nilly, or in spite of ourselves. All deception has its own ground in man. What is that ground? It is the fact that man is now a psychical being. Now if you can get to the bottom of that, if you can apprehend that, you will understand the whole thing.
The ground of all this is in the fact that man is a psychical being, and when Satan interfered with man at the beginning and man consented along the line of his own soul-life, Satan made man suitable to his own government. It was not that he came and set himself up as man's ruler and subjected man by sheer force to his own government. How did he do it? By breaking into that realm in man's being where man was linked with God, and that was in the realm of man's spirit. "He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit", and man was in fellowship and communion with God by means of his spirit, not his soul, not his body. These two were under the government of his spirit. The enemy, the Deceiver came to man's soul, and instead of man reacting by his spirit-fellowship with, and knowledge of, God, he dropped down on to his soul, came out of his spirit and reacted in his soul. What is soul? It is reason, emotion, feeling, desire, and then, of course, choice, will. And the enemy reasoned through the desires and captured the will by deception. You see what happened when man violated the very organ of his union with God, his spirit. He was in the deepest sense, in his unfallen state, a spirit having a soul and a body, but he violated that with the result that it was severed from God, and, as a means, an instrument, a vehicle of divine fellowship, it died. It does not mean that it was annihilated, or it ceased to have an existence, but it fell out of fellowship with God, and that is spiritual death. It fell out of union with God with the result that the soul has taken ascendency, and from that time man is another species from that which God created. He is now a man of soul, and in securing that the enemy had adapted man to his own government. So the enemy governs man, and the whole of the race now through the nature of the soul-life. What is the basis of deception? It is just that! How do you get a counterfeit Holy Ghost operating? By reason of your psychical nature. You can become mediumistic in your very psychical nature and open all the avenues of your being to supernatural guidance and come under the power, the sway, dominion, of deceiving spirits operating in a multitude of ways. You can so suspend your soul and come into a state of utter passivity that you are open to everything to play upon you. You can have your quiet hour in your soul, which is the most perilous hour of your life. That happens by suspending all spiritual activity and becoming utterly passive and opening your psychical being, which is a most dangerous thing.
God never asks you to become spiritually passive. Waiting upon God is not being spiritually passive. God wants us active in spirit even when waiting on Him in silence. You see what I mean. It is the very nature of man, now adapted by the enemy to his government, that has made possible all this mighty system of counterfeit in its success. Now leaving a whole mass of evidence I come to the point.
What Christ Did at Calvary
What did the Lord Jesus do in Calvary? He took that man to death and made room for a spiritual man. In Christ Jesus we are no longer soulical men, we are spiritual. That is the whole argument of the first Corinthian letter. Now, says the Apostle, "the soulical man (he is the 'natural' man) receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them." "The spiritual judgeth all things." In the new birth of a man his spirit is brought back from the realm of spiritual death and banishment from God, into new creation union with God, joined to the Lord in one spirit. The right organ of divine government is re-established to bring man's soul and his body under divine control, and the Holy Spirit takes up residence within the born-anew spirit of a man to govern his desires, his thoughts, his reasonings, his decisions.
What I want to close with is to remind you of the tremendous thing that Christ did in His Cross. We have never fathomed Calvary yet. It is a blessed thing to see Him taking our sins and bearing them in His own body on the tree, but even more blessed to see that He took the whole ground of satanic activity in man. He took that to the Cross and put that aside, and the deep meaning of the Word of God is just that we were crucified, we were buried with Christ. He did not deal with sins alone, He dealt with man, the race, and put it aside; not just to bring a race to an end, but to bring the sphere of the Devil to an end; not to end man in his fallen state, but to break the power of Satan and destroy his work as Deceiver. He did that in the Cross.
It is a tremendous thing to see that the Lord Jesus was not just striking a fatal blow at man in dealing with the flesh, but in dealing with the whole body of the flesh He was striking a blow at the satanic activity in man. That is the word of the Cross. What is the bedrock truth for the people of God in perilous times? That they should come to that and recognise the fact that the backbone of nature has got to be broken by the Cross of the Lord Jesus. It is that every one of us in Christ must come to the place where we know that the backbone of nature has been snapped and that no longer can we, dare we, follow nature in things, reasonings, desires, affections, choices and decisions. All must now come out from God, to be given by the Holy Spirit to govern our lives, and we must not in any way lean to our own understanding.
Nature's backbone has got to be broken and we have to be men who, like Jacob, go for the rest of our days leaning upon our staff because the sinew of our natural strength has been touched, broken, dried, withered. Yes, to carry the testimony of Calvary all the days of our lives to the fact: "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I..." I have been met and smitten and there must be no insinuating of "I" any more. It is no longer "I". We have perhaps thought of the Cross, death-union with the Lord Jesus, in the hard light of having to let go, having to give up and having to die; being crucified, and all the pain of it. However, beloved, it is to translate us out of the kingdom of darkness into that of the Son of His love; from the power of Satan, to deliver us from deception. Now unless our soul-life is met in the power of the Cross, and subjected to God, and we know what it is to live in and walk after the Spirit, we are exposed to deception. You will find where the counterfeit Holy Spirit works, there is a tremendous amount of soul-excitability, soul-emotion, lack of soul-control and sometimes indecency: and yet supernatural things. Yes, but that is not the Holy Spirit. There has been a reaching out of soul in an intensified quest for some kind of experience, a supernatural experience. That has opened the being to the other and you can get anything. You can get guidance, you can get miracles, anything along that line; but beware! The counterfeit, beloved, has its ground of success in our very nature, and nature must be broken. That, of course, must be applied more carefully, but do take the truth of that. If the Lord is going to save His children in these days from delusion and deception, He has got to bring them back to the bedrock truth of identification with Christ in death, burial, and resurrection, and what that means as to the passing of one kind of man and the coming in of another kind of man.
In this matter, as amongst many others, we see that Christ crucified is the power of God and the wisdom of God.
Chapter 4 - Christ Crucified, the Wisdom of God and the Power of God "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father... But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth: for such doth the Father seek to be his worshippers. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth." (John 4:20,21,23,24)."...that ye be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth." (Ephesians 4:23,24).
"Furthermore, we had the fathers of our flesh to chasten us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?" (Hebrews 12:9).
Just link these passages together: "God is a Spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth;" "The new man, which is after God created in righteousness and holiness of truth;" "The Father of our spirits."
In chapter three we were dwelling upon the great counterfeit system which has been launched into this universe by him who is called the Deceiver. We were seeing how that he has counterfeited the whole heavenly system, from the Godhead through all orders of spiritual beings and all forms of spiritual work, and that there is not a thing which is true of God and in relation to God, which has not been imitated by the Deceiver. Now there are two great systems. There is the divine system and there is the counterfeit, the satanic system. We have also seen that God created man suitable to His own system, that He made man in a way which was perfectly adapted to His own divine government and method. Man made according to God's mind was supremely and essentially a spiritual being having a soul and a body. He was primarily spiritual, because his spirit was his essential self by which he was joined to God, Who is a spirit, and that therefore, the communication of God to man was by his spirit: everything divinely spiritual was apprehended by man through his spirit.
The Deceiver, in order to capture man and secure the success of his system — the counterfeit of God's system — must of necessity make man suitable to his ends. In the garden there was, so to speak, an interference with man which, because of man's sanction, resulted in man becoming another being than that which God had created. He became a soul-man with his spirit severed from God, and on the Godward side, in death. The soul was in ascendency, and man a man of soul instead of spirit. Everything in the fallen man is on the soul-level of life and operates along the line of the soul instead of the spirit. This whole world is constituted and organised and run upon a soul-level: "and the whole world lieth in the Wicked One."
What we have been aiming at seeing in the main is two things. One, that all deceptions, delusions, errors, have their seat and their ground of success in the very nature of man, in what he is as adapted to the work of the Deceiver. The soul is the seat and the ground of all deception. And the other thing, that in His work on the Cross, the Lord Jesus carried that whole race away under the judgment of God, to death, when He poured out His soul unto death. That race was finished with. In doing that He cut the ground from under the feet of the Deceiver for any further work of deception for those who by faith take their place in all Calvary's meaning. Hence the issue is the tremendous importance of our rightly apprehending and becoming obedient unto the truth that when Christ died, we died. From the time of our taking that position in Christ crucified, we know that we may not, we dare not, we cannot live after the flesh, or walk after the flesh, or live merely upon a soul-level of life, but that henceforth it is after the spirit in the power of the Holy Spirit. Wherein will you find greater wisdom than this? The universe is full of one big question. How can you destroy the power of this whole counterfeit system and the Deceiver behind it? Find the wisdom that will outwit that, find the wisdom that will outplan that. See all the cunning, all the wit, all the craftiness, all the diabolical subtlety of this system of deception, of counterfeit, of error, from this one known as the Deceiver, who has deceived the whole race and all the nations. Where will you find a wisdom to meet that and successfully triumph over it and break its power, and rid the universe eventually of it? The answer is "Christ crucified, the wisdom of God." And in what way does that supreme, transcendent wisdom work as by the Cross of the Lord Jesus? In this way, that in Christ crucified the whole race in its fallen nature is carried out in death and the ground of the Deceiver is removed. Therein is the wisdom of God manifested in Christ crucified. Oh, that we should be able to grasp that more fully, the wonder of the Cross, the matchless wonder of the Cross. Herein is the wisdom of God displayed.
The Bedrock Truth for the People of God
Now, for days of growing deception, even amongst the people of God, the bedrock truth is the truth of our death, burial, and resurrection union with Christ. We just want to pass over for a minute to see the resurrection side of this. We have seen the mighty power and the mighty wisdom of God in the death-side in putting away the race, the man, the nature which is in essence Satan indwelt. That does not mean that people are devils incarnate. That is not what I am talking about. There is a difference between that and there being something of Satan in the very nature of the race. We have pointed out one thing before, that there is such a thing as deception in the very nature of this fallen race. The Word of God says "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, who can know it?" and believers who walk nearest to God, know best how desperately wicked the natural heart is. The nearer we get to God the more we loathe ourselves.
Now, deceit was never in man unfallen. That is not of God. There is no deceit in the divine nature and there is no deceit in man who is made after God. One of those superlative features of the New Jerusalem, which after all is only the designation of the church, is its transparency; it is said to be clear as crystal. That means that everything filmy, deceptive, subtle, double, cunning, crafty, will have been absolutely rooted and purged out from the people of God, and they will be absolutely transparent, clear as crystal. There will be nothing dark, sinister, untrue, insincere about them. It is the root of Satan, and that is in the natural man, a nature which is in essence Satan-indwelt. God is not going to pluck that out of us, He is going to put us out, and have a new creation. It is of tremendous importance for us to see the significance of death-union with Christ. Not only what we call our sins, but ourselves. But on the resurrection-side, the wisdom and the power of God are wonderfully displayed.
What happened again at the beginning when Satan interfered and man assented? The spirit by which man was joined to the Lord in one spirit fell out of that functioning union, and on the Godward side became dead. That was Satan's triumph. Now upon that fact the whole system of satanic government encamped and was constructed — severance from God in spirit. When the Lord Jesus rose from the dead, He rose in the same representative capacity for a new order, a new creation, as in His representative capacity for the old order. That is, on the death-side He represented by voluntary acceptance of our sin and taking on Himself this sinful creation in His Cross. He accepted representatively the position of the fallen race and went out carrying it in His inclusive Person to death. In resurrection He is the Firstborn among many brethren, and in resurrection He is representative of God's new order. You see what has happened? In the Cross of the Lord Jesus, at a given moment, Christ as representing the old order was severed from God. He entered into that place, that position, that state of being cut off from God, God-forsaken. That is because of what He is doing, He is taking the place of a race severed from God. He has entered the depths, the awful depths of the state of man severed from God. In the power of resurrection, all the satanic might, all the satanic wisdom was broken in bringing back Christ from among the dead, bringing back one representing a race from a place of separation from God.
That new fellowship with God carried with it, and implied the fact that all the work of Satan was destroyed. What a tremendous thing! The power of God, "the exceeding greatness of His power which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand far above all..." He has brought Him back into closest fellowship and union; but He had been severed from God. It may only have been, in the matter of time, a moment. However, if you knew anything about separation from God, real separation from God, though it might be for a moment it would be like a lifetime, beloved, for one who had known fellowship with God to have, for an instant, separation from God. It would have aged you so that your hair would be white; and the Lord Jesus tasted that, He did meet this. He as man, had gone into the place of that spirit-separation from God, for the moment He lost God, but when God brought Him back from the dead into fellowship right into His presence it meant that all which was responsible for lost fellowship with God was destroyed. Now resurrection-union with Christ, in Christ, is just that: "the exceeding greatness of His power which is to usward who believe, according to that energy of His might which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead" — "To usward who believe."
What Lies Behind our Union with Christ
Now, many Christians ask the question, and might well ask the question, "What does that mean?" "I do not know that I am conscious of that having been true in my case. Is that something future when we are going to be raised from the dead in the resurrection? Is that Scripture then going to be fulfilled?" "The exceeding greatness of His power to usward, according to the energy of His might... when He raised Him from the dead". "Is that when it will be?" No, you may not have had the consciousness of the exceeding greatness of His power in proportion to that energy of His might which He energised in Christ when He raised Him from the dead. However, I ask you this question, "Do you know spiritual fellowship with God?" Do you know what union with the Lord is? If you do, beloved, that has called forth the exercise of the exceeding greatness of God's power. You never came into union with God except on the ground of the whole power of Satan being broken, and all the result of Satan's work being set aside. Our fellowship with God is an enormous thing. The spiritual life, beloved, is no small thing. Resurrection-union with the Lord Jesus, to walk in newness of life, means that God in Christ by the Cross has done an enormous thing. Oh, for a right estimate of the work of Calvary. Oh, that we should come with our eyes open as were those of the Apostle, so that our chief glorying and our one determination is to know nothing save "Jesus Christ, and Him crucified", and the "cross of our Lord Jesus, by which the world is crucified to us, and we to the world." That is why Paul gloried in the Cross. That is why Paul determined to know nothing save Jesus Christ and Him crucified, because he saw the momentous thing that Calvary represented on the death-side and on the resurrection-side.
Now the Lord would have us spiritually in that position. The power of Satan is destroyed when once a believer stands on resurrection ground, and keeps there, and refuses to come down on to the lower level of soul-life, self-life. The battle of the believer's life thenceforth is not to attain unto some spiritual position, but to maintain a spiritual position which has been given in Christ: "He hath made us to sit in the heavenlies in Christ". It is not something to be struggled after, but the whole object of the enemy is to bring the believer down out of that place on to a lower level. That is why the Apostle says: "Our warfare is in the heavenlies". We have got to "Stand, withstand and having done all remain victor on the field." That is, in other words: keep your position, the position which is yours by resurrection-union with Christ. So the enemy is out with a down-drag, or an on-pressure, or a subtle device, snare, trap, by any one of his many methods to get the believer out of position. But the Cross represents for us a spiritual life in the heavenlies where Satan's power is broken. Now this is again very largely general, and we want to get, before we close, from the general to the more specific; that is, to bring this whole thing, this great truth, into touch with practical matters. Not that what we have said is not practical, but I mean the things with which we are more closely associated in our lives; the truth must be applied there.
The Foundation and Nature of Fellowship with God
Where does everything begin in relation to God, and therefore, in relation to the enemy in his counterfeit? It begins in the realm of worship. The beginning of everything is worship, in relation to God. That is, God having the central and supreme place of recognition, acknowledgment, of government. In our complete obedience, surrender, in every part and phase of our being, God having supreme right. Worship begins there. It is a relationship, not only an exercise. It is not something that we do in specified ways and methods. It is some attitude of the life, some place which God has in the entire consciousness. That is worship.
Now if Satan is to counterfeit and take God's place, worship is his objective. With the first Adam that was his objective; to draw man away from giving God the supreme place, that he might take God's place. He supplanted God in the reverence and the acknowledgment and the obedience of man and captured worship and became "the god of this age". When the last Adam, the Second Man, came and entered officially, publicly upon the great work that He had come to do, the one thing that the adversary sought to capture was His worship. "All these will I give thee if thou wilt worship me." He has betrayed himself; he has shown his hand. If he could do the same with the last Adam as he did with the first, he has defeated the object of a new race.
Now it is just here that we have got to have light. We have read John 4 from the twentieth verse. The woman is saying "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem men ought to worship." Jesus said unto her, "Woman, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, will men worship the Father. Believe Me, the hour cometh and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth." In spirit — a small "s", not a capital "S". Oh, what is this? This represents a new regime, a new order. This is the crisis of the Cross in the realm of worship, the basic thing. But what has happened? Jerusalem was definitely, divinely ordained as the seat of honour and worship. The Samaritans imitated with temple and mountain the system which was at Jerusalem and worshipped the same God. But God had brought into the world that system of worship at Jerusalem; He had projected that. It was a temple, a building, a piece of elaborate ecclesiastical architecture with priests, with robes and vestments, burning incense, offering sacrifices, making prayers, reading Scriptures, and many other things. Yes, God had brought that in, and now the Lord Jesus was setting the whole thing aside, and in so doing, implying as clearly as anything could be implied, that this is not true worship. It is a comparison which is almost invidious. "Neither in this mountain, nor at Jerusalem, will men worship the Father. But true worshippers shall worship in spirit and in truth." "God is a spirit."
Where Christendom is Astray
What has happened, then, if this is not the truth, what is the truth? That is where Christendom has gone astray. That is the divide between soul and spirit. Not something which was but a type, an illustration, a set of symbols. God never intended that to be the final thing, never intended man to make that a thing in itself, never intended that that thing should go on indefinitely. It was brought in to illustrate and represent something else and its time for duration was until the Lord Jesus came. It all pointed towards Him, led up to Him, spoke of Him and His Cross in which that which was merely of the soul would pass, and that which was of the spirit would come in. What is the spiritual life in the matter of worship? Oh, it is not ecclesiastical architecture, it is not vestments, it is not ordinances, it is not rites. They pass out with Calvary. The perpetuating of anything like that is a contradiction of Calvary. See where we are today. The maintenance of that sort of thing, beloved, is because of a failure to perceive what the Lord Jesus has brought in.
What, then, is spiritual worship? It is getting back behind all that and seeing the spiritual meaning. Those sacrifices which were brought and sacrificed were looked into and most carefully turned over, if peradventure there might be a flaw, a blemish, a taint, an inconsistency, a double element, two colours, two kinds. If any such mark could be found the whole thing was rejected. When, however, after careful inquiry and investigation not a flaw or a blemish could be found, and God's representative with the keen eyes of an expert could pronounce over them the familiar "Tetelestai" — "It is perfect", then they were offered to God. And the truth embodied in the type was this, that the only fellowship with God is on the basis of the spiritual perfections of the Lord Jesus.
Worship is no longer bringing of animal sacrifices but bringing up from the heart an appreciation of the perfection of Christ. That is worship. The vestments of old were only types and figures and illustrations. The priestly apparel was speaking all the time in type of a righteousness and beauty and glory which is the nature of the God-Man, the Lord Jesus. It is given, imputed and imparted to the one who by faith apprehends Christ. We who are in Christ, in the sight of God, are wearing garments of beauty and glory and holiness. Why, then, perpetuate a system? The Lord Jesus put all that away in His Cross, it is all gone. That is what He means by worshipping in spirit and in truth.
The temple and the tabernacle were only types, speaking of that spiritual fellowship of the saints as joined to an exalted Head, one Body, the Temple of God. The boards of the tabernacle tied together by the bands only speak of saints with the imputed righteousness and holiness and glory of God laid upon them, bound together in one spirit, one Body, with the "joints and the bands". The fitting together of the stones of the temple wrought in the quarry and brought together without the sound of hammer or axe, silently fitted in, only speaks in foreshadowing of the living stones built together for a spiritual habitation. God now indwells not temples made with hand but, a spiritual body, the members of Christ joined to Him.
Why, then, perpetuate a thing which God has dismissed in the Cross, and keep to the lower, fail to reach the higher, the fact that "we who are many are one body"? Do you see where things are astray today? I know how sweeping this is, but all this has to do with worship.
Now note that when there is a failure to recognise, to know the spiritual meaning of all this and to enter into it, and a maintaining of the old thing, you are still on a soul-level and you are open to deception. The whole thing may be a ghastly deception. And how does that deception work? In this way, that so many good Christian people are absolutely in bondage to a traditional system which is cutting clean across divine revelation for them. It is their traditional system which is simply barring the way to the spiritual revelation. The Cross of the Lord Jesus represents the liberty in the spirit for God to lead into the fulness of His life and light. That is the whole purpose of the letter to the Hebrews. It was for that very purpose; that here was a people that had received light concerning the true nature of fellowship with God in Christ. The Lord Jesus had taken the place of the temple and the priesthood and the sacrifices and the ordinances, and even the sabbath. The sabbath was no longer merely a point of time but related to a Person. God had reached His rest in Christ. All God's works were finished in Christ. God has entered into His rest when Christ perfected the work of God in redemption on the Cross.
Now that is no longer a matter of form, ceremony, external rites, buildings, priests, sacrifices; it is all Christ. They had seen that; He had called upon them to go outside the religious, formal, historic, traditional camp, and that brought persecution, ostracism, isolation, loneliness and all manner of things. The official religious people made it very hard for them because of that. The price to be paid for what is truly spiritual and heavenly was and is great, and they were dangerously in peril of going back to the old thing. The letter to the Hebrews was just written to save them from that peril, and to more fully tell them about the great change that had come about in the Cross, the work of the Lord Jesus. One system had passed, the earthly representation, and the other, the heavenly reality, had come in. You know how that letter speaks about the "pattern of things in the heavenlies" and "the heavenly things themselves". The letter comes to the great conclusion in "We are come to the heavenly Jerusalem, to the blood of sprinkling, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant", come to that in Him.
Now you see historic Christianity as such, traditional Christianity as such, may still keep us on a soul-level of worship where we must have a certain kind of building with certain kind of windows, with a certain kind of music, and certain kinds of prayers, certain kinds of people and certain kinds of dress, and all this to "aid" our worship: all this to make real our fellowship with God. It is living back on pre-Calvary ground and it may be all soulish, and it may just be obstructing the path to a full personal inward spiritual life with God.
Free from Outward Systems
To know the Lord in Life we must be free from the Grave Clothes of Outward Systems. Beloved, it is as true as anything I have said, that if you want to know the Lord livingly in greater fulness you have to be free from every external control of religion, you have got to be free and open to the Lord, you have to be free in the spirit. Formalism has got to go and reality and life have got to come in.
There must be a personal life in God, and that is not dependent upon place or anything outside and round us. That is dependent entirely upon our spiritual fellowship with Him. It can be as real, as blessed in a dingy rat-infested Bedford jail as it can be in the most gorgeous ornate cathedral. Oh, yes, some of the most wonderful fellowship with God has been in the most unlikely places. You need no "helps" of that kind when you know God. Your life is with God.
Now remember, that letter to the Hebrews was written in anticipation of something. The Apostle knew that before very long the whole of that Jewish system would be in ruins. The Lord Jesus had prophesied it, that there should not be left one stone upon another. It would be scattered to the four winds. There would be no temple, no altar, no sacrifice, no festivals, no priests. The whole thing would cease and be smashed in fulfilment of the divine prediction. What would happen to these people if their fellowship with God was bound up with that? It would go. It would go with the system, and He wanted to save them from that thing which, being bound to earth, would go, and to bring them into a new thing which belonged to salvation. Fellowship with God must be of that kind, that whether we can go to meetings or not we have still got the Lord. Whether we have nice soulish music or not, we have still got the Lord. We are not in that realm. "Woman, believe Me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father."
Bricks and mortar cannot communicate with spirit. Man's soul can communicate with God only through the vehicle of his spirit in union with God. That is what Calvary has done. Of course, you can understand now why the message of the Cross is unacceptable, and if you are going to proclaim and stand for it, you will be outside the camp because of this strong cleaving to a historic traditional inheritance. The awful thing is this, that Satan has taken hold of the divine representation or typical system to appropriate it, when God has done away with it. That which God has had brought in for a temporary purpose Satan has captured for himself to obscure the real nature of fellowship with God.
Now no one will think that I am saying that there are no spiritual people in that system of things. I am not saying that, but I am saying that if that represents for them their spiritual life, and if they must have that, and if that is the realm in which they live, that they do not see beyond that and are not free from that as a thing in itself, then they have missed the meaning of Calvary, and they are bound to miss all the meaning of Christ crucified, the wisdom and the power of God. Wrestling with principalities and powers demands something more than a system of external things.
You see we are up against a terrific business, we are up against a spiritual position which is colossal and only a spiritual position is adequate to that, nothing less. I trust you have received enough light to see that what has been said is justified. We do not want to be in any position less than the Lord's first best for us. I am sure we are prepared to pay the greatest price to be in God's first place for us, by His grace. May He enable us to be willing to go on with Him, "leaving the things which are behind and pressing on", or, to come to the Hebrews again, "Let us go on unto full growth". The toys, the picture books, the illustrations, the symbols, the types are for children who have little intelligence. They are taken away at a certain time when God's intention is, not to have children, but to have sons, and there is all the difference between the two. And so Calvary dismisses the kindergarten of external things in relation to God and brings in the fulness of heavenly order to make of us full-grown sons of God. May we be so.
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