Reading: 1 Cor. 1:1-10.
Two
things remain to be said about this introductory section
to this letter. One is that it represents the position of
the Lord’s people in Christ. Quite clearly all that
is said there does not directly apply, so far as
conditions were concerned, to the whole Corinthian
assembly. But the letter is written to the whole
assembly, and this salutation is addressed to the whole
assembly, and therefore it represents a condition in
Christ to which that of the church itself may not
altogether correspond. What we are in Christ, and what we
are found to be in our own spiritual condition may be
quite different things. But what we are in Christ becomes
the basis of the appeal to us as to the condition in
which we may be found actually.
The
other thing is that clearly the whole church at Corinth
was not bad. While there were sections there to which the
apostle had to write such severe things by way of rebuke,
and admonition, and exhortation, the whole church was not
in that state.
I
suppose the same could be said of all the churches in the
days of the apostle, that there were two sides to them.
There was that side which was good and noble, and there
was that which was subject to warning and rebuke. The
object of the letters, almost invariably, was to seek to
bring all into the full position as represented in
Christ. We could say that there were those who were
failing, who were in defeat, who were doing anything but
commending the Gospel and glorifying the Lord Jesus,
while on the other hand there were those who were
overcoming the very things which encircled them, and
which in character were contrary to the Lord’s mind.
In all the churches there were the “overcomers”
and the “undercomers”!
The
appeal is always to the full thought of the Lord, and
almost invariably, if not always, the letters are so
introduced that the complete standard in Christ,
God’s full thought concerning the saints in Christ,
is placed right on the threshold, and everything which
follows moves from that and to that. It becomes the basis
of the appeal, the basis of the exhortation, the basis of
the warning, of the entreaty, the rebuke, the counsel,
the instruction. It is all in order that that which is
representative of God’s full will for the saints
might be expressed in all the saints.
The Example of Levi
Turn
to Deuteronomy 33:8-11. Verse 8 reads, “And of Levi
he said, Thy Thummim and thy Urim are with thy godly
one...” (the margin has “him whom thou
lovest”). Levi is an Old Testament illustration and
type of the overcomer of the New Testament, and in these
verses containing the blessing of Levi we have the
foundations of the overcomer, the nature of the
overcomer, and the function of the overcomer.
Levi
is represented as expressing a very full thought of God.
There is something about this statement concerning Levi,
which puts Levi in a very honoured position, in a class
by themselves. There is a contrast between the tribe of
Levi and the other tribes. That contrast was brought out
very clearly in the day of Israel’s departure from
the Lord, when Aaron made the golden calf while Moses was
in the mount with God. You will remember how in coming
down from the mount Moses heard the noise of the revelry
in the camp and discovered the apostasy of Israel, the
spiritual declension which had taken place. There had
entered in something of the past life, the life of the
world, the life of Egypt from which God had separated
them, and they had taken a much lower spiritual level. As
soon as Moses reached the camp and had taken in the
situation, he immediately went and stood in the gate of
the camp, and cried: “Whoso is on the Lord’s
side, let him come unto me.” Then the sons of Levi
went out of the camp to Moses, and Moses said: “Put
ye every man his sword upon his thigh, and go to and fro
from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man
his brother, and every man his companion, and every man
his neighbour.” (Exodus 32:27). It was to be a
complete slaughter, without respect of persons, and the
Levites went into the camp and dealt with those with whom
they were personally associated and with whom they had
responsibility. Their attitude was so uncompromising for
the Lord that it was possible for these words to be said
of them: “Who said of his father, and of his mother,
I have not seen him; neither did he acknowledge his
brethren, nor knew he his own children...” (Deut.
33:9). For the Levites the Word of the Lord took a place
above all natural relationships, affections, and
considerations, so that everything which was in the realm
of the natural life was subjected to the known will of
God, and was not allowed in any way to influence where
the question of the full thought of God was concerned.
Were we to consider this thing purely on the human level
we should say that these Levites slew their own hearts,
in so far as their hearts were apart from the revealed
will of God. They smote themselves in the realm of all
their natural affections and interests, dominated by the
full thought of God’s will.
The Cause of Failure at Corinth
Here
is our link with what is before us. When you come to the
first letter to the Corinthians and the second chapter
you find that is the principle underlying what the
apostle is saying about the natural man and the spiritual
man. God’s full thought at Corinth is represented in
the introductory words “...sanctified in Christ
Jesus, called... saints.” That true, full thought of
God is violated, destroyed in Corinth, because of these
natural elements which are governing the lives of His
children there. They have not slain the natural wisdom,
the natural mind, the natural heart in its affections and
its desires. The devotion to all that God has set before
them is not such that every merely natural influence is
set on one side. The apostle is obliged to say all that
he does about the natural heart and mind governing
because there are merely natural considerations
influencing these people and keeping them and the
assembly back from God’s full thought. The result is
that you have a situation revealed later in the letter
which corresponds to what happened while Moses was in the
mount: that is, a departure from God, spiritual
declension, idolatry, sensuality, and all such things,
for we do not know all that happened when Aaron set up
that molten calf. It is necessary to look into the Bible
a good deal more fully to have a true inkling of what
happened at that time. Read Acts 7, and you will have a
little more light upon it. The narrative in the Old
Testament immediately connected with the incident is very
brief and incomplete. You must remember that there was
distinct gross sensuality associated with the worship of
the molten calf. They stripped themselves of their
clothes, and their behaviour was most unseemly in that
worship. It was a real drop into heathen debauchery. It
was a terrible situation.
In
Corinth you have a very serious and bad situation of sin
and spiritual declension revealed, and in both cases the
cause is the same, namely, the coming into the realm of
the things of God of the natural man, the old man. Levi
put all that out. The natural affections and the natural
mind were entirely cut off, with God’s full thought
in view. That is the overcomer. The Levites left that
sin, that state, and went out of it, outside of the camp,
and first of all spiritually separated themselves from
it, and then from a position of spiritual separation
dealt with it. That is always the way. You can never
register an effective blow against corruption while you
are involved in it. You have to be spiritually apart from
it before there can be an influence registered upon it.
A Positive Attitude Against Evil
Essential
This
is an assembly principle. No assembly can deal with evil
in its midst until it has spiritually separated itself
therefrom and repudiated it. Whenever unrighteousness is
known to be in the midst a stand must be taken where that
is recognized as evil and an uncompromising attitude
adopted toward it.
We
cannot on the ground of sentiment, or through any kind of
natural consideration, be in any way involved in that.
That is evil. God is not in it. God is not with it, and
therefore we must spiritually be apart from it. Until
that utter cleavage, that utter separation in spirit and
in mind, has taken place, there can be no dealing in
spiritual power and authority with evil. That is to say,
evil will obtain, will hold, will maintain its grip,
until there is a spiritual separation from it. The
Levites separated themselves, and then from a position of
spiritual separation dealt with the thing. That is
God’s order. That is the overcomer, the one who is
spiritually apart, and who, being in that place of
separation with God, is a mighty, effective testimony
against evil, not in word but in power, even when that
evil is amongst the Lord’s people.
Levi
is an excellent illustration of New Testament things, and
we can see the Levitical principle at Corinth just as we
see it elsewhere, a SPIRITUAL separation in a day
of SPIRITUAL declension. It must be a spiritual
thing. It is not enough that it should be merely a
geographical thing. You can separate yourself from other
Christians, and be yourself a carrier of the same kind of
trouble, and have nothing but repetitions of the same
thing. It must be first of all a spiritual separation,
whatever else may become necessary, whatever else may
follow. It is a matter of the heart.
What
is this separation? In other words, what is it that
characterizes the overcomer? It is heart separation unto
the Lord for His full thought, whatever it may cost. That
may mean an uncompromising attitude toward your own
sentiments, your own natural reasoning about things.
God’s full thought demands that there shall be no
argument whatever in favour of a thing which is against
God.
The Reward of Faithfulness
Then
note what follows. We have seen the nature of the
overcomer, the nature of the Levite; but what follows
when that state obtains, when the Lord has a people whose
hearts are circumcised in that way? The Word in
Deuteronomy says: “Thy Thummim and thy Urim are with
him whom thou lovest.” (RV margin) We will not stay
to go into details with regard to the Thummim and the
Urim (Lights and Perfections), but we know they were the
means by which Israel got to know the mind of the Lord,
and that is sufficient for our present purpose. So the
Lord puts Himself in a special relationship to the
Levites, and that special relationship is for the purpose
of making Himself known to them, in order that through
them He may become known to others. That is what follows.
“They shall teach Jacob thy judgments, and Israel
thy law: they shall put incense before thee, and whole
burnt offering upon thine altar.” (Deut. 33:10).
The
overcomer, then, becomes the instrument and the vehicle
of divine revelation, divine instruction. Come to 1
Corinthians again, and mark how over against the natural
man you have the spiritual man. And both these terms, let
us note, have to do with believers in the assembly.
“Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the
Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him (in
other words, he has no Thummim and Urim). But he that is
spiritual judgeth all things, and he himself is judged of
no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he
should instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ”
(1 Cor. 2:14-16). The spiritual man, who has
discriminated between the natural mind and the mind of
the Spirit, is the man with whom the Thummim and the Urim
are found, the knowledge of the Lord.
So
then there is a great and privileged position to be
occupied by those who, setting aside the whole of the
natural life in its judgments and its affections, will at
all costs stand for God’s full thought. This great
and privileged position is that of being God’s
vehicle of illumination to others. How are we going to be
those who teach Jacob the Lord’s ordinances and
Israel His law? How is this ministry going to be
constituted? It never comes by mere studying. A minister
of revelation is not merely one who has studied the Bible
very thoroughly, and all relative books and subjects, and
has become very highly versed in Scriptural matters. Such
are not the instruments of divine revelation, of making
God known to others. Those who will fulfil such a
ministry of revelation, where it is not they themselves
who are revealing God, but God revealing Himself through
them, are those who have come clear of the natural mind,
and of all that which is represented by the term
“the natural mind”. Such are in the place of
the spiritual man, with God’s full purpose
dominating their hearts and mind. They are standing for
that — and it costs and they are paying the price.
The Cost of Faithfulness
Do you
think that while Levi shut their eyes as it were to what
they were doing it cost them nothing? You do not cut off
your own children without feeling it, your own kin,
without suffering yourself as much as they suffer. It was
no mere cold, unfeeling brutality which governed Levi. It
was, if we may use the word, the stringing of themselves
up to a point where jealousy for the one thing prevailed,
namely, God’s honour. God’s glory must get the
better of natural feelings in this matter, and it costs
to come thus right out from the realm of nature. It costs
to stand in that position where Christ is your wisdom,
and Christ is your strength, and you have none of your
own. You might have strength in nature; you might have
wisdom in nature; you might have position, reputation,
influence amongst men; there might be all that in the
realm of nature, but you deliberately look beyond that
realm. You have to be a fool for Christ’s sake, and
a weakling for Christ’s sake, and altogether outside
of the camp of this world for Christ’s sake. You
might have had reputation and influence had you gone the
way of nature, but God in His full desire and purpose and
thought has become dominant, and you have cut this other
thing off; you have repudiated it. And now from this
world’s standpoint, and from your own estimate of
your natural state from your position in Christ, you know
that you are a fool, that you are a weakling, that you
are nothing, of no account at all, but you are for God.
Christ is now your wisdom. Christ is the only strength
you are ever going to count upon. Christ is everything.
You do not get there without feeling things keenly at
times. It is very often brought home to you what a
position like that means of suffering and reproach. To
the natural man, to the flesh, weakness, dependence, is
no pleasant thing. To the flesh competence, ability,
capability are the things which gratify, and which we
love. It is a terrible thing to feel ourselves so utterly
dependent, but it is glorious to see the Lord coming in
all the time, and being the full resource. Yet we know
that the sense of dependence has to be maintained. It is
along that line that God gets His full thought.
It was
because there was not that basis, that foundation fully
and finally established at Corinth that God’s full
thought was not expressed and represented by the whole
assembly there. The overcomer is the one who is in that
position where Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the
First and the Last, and everything in between. When you
get there, or when God gets an individual or a company
there, then there follows a ministry in and by which He
is revealed.
That
is the kind of training for ministry that the Bible
speaks of. It is not a pleasant training, but it is the
best, the most effective. We can give out a lot of
information, a lot of knowledge, which may please and
gratify the mass of people, and they may think it to be
doing them great good, but in the day of the test, the
day of the fire, when the question is, How much of Christ
has entered into the very fabric of the being? We shall
see that information does not do that, book-knowledge
does not accomplish that. But a ministry of revelation
will do that, if it is revelation from God; not our
revealing of God, but God showing Himself through the
instrument. That is true ministry, and that is
preparation for ministry. It will explain some things to
us. When we have handed ourselves over to the Lord our
real preparation comes along the line of the destroying
of the natural fabric, and the constituting of Christ as
life, as wisdom, as strength, as everything. God’s
most powerful instruments in the history of this world
have always been those who have gone out in fear and
trembling and much weakness.
Are
you prepared to accept a life like that? There is
something for the Lord in an instrument like that. It is
first of all vocation, ministry which is realized. Please
do not make a technical thing of that word
“ministry,” and think of it as applying to
platforms or public meetings. If you are wholly for God,
standing for God’s full thought on the ground we
have just mentioned, you will be the means of God coming
to other lives, no matter where you are. It is not a
question of what you are going to say to them. You may be
troubled often as to what you will say, or as to how you
can say anything in the position in which you are, in
that you feel that people would not listen to you, would
take no notice of you. The question is not what you are
going to say. God very often says His loudest things
through most silent people. God can register an impact of
Himself by your presence. It is not always a matter of
words. It is a question of the Lord expressing Himself
through those who are standing with Him in this way: that
is ministry.
“They
shall teach Jacob thy judgments, and Israel thy law: they
shall put incense before thee...” If you like to
paraphrase that, you may make it read like this: They
shall prevail with Thee in prayer: they shall fulfil a
holy and effectual ministry of intercession. “They
shall put incense before thee (the Revised Version margin
says “in thy nostrils” — that is God
smelling a sweet savour), and whole burnt offering upon
thine altar (that is surely setting forth the ground of
full acceptance). Bless, Lord, his substance, and accept
the work of his hands (here is a blessing!): smite
through the loins of them that rise up against him, and
of them that hate him, that they rise not again.”
The Lord is on the side of those who are utterly for Him.
The Lord will watch over them because His own interests
are bound up with them. Sooner or later it will be seen
that they are the Lord’s anointed, and no hand can
be reached out against them without being answered by God
in God’s time. Levi had a very close relationship
with all Israel, and all Israel owed their standing
before God to the Levites. The overcomers are appointed
of God to lead the way for the rest into His presence.
May
the Lord show us that what He needs, what He desires,
what He is seeking to have in His people, is that state
of heart which is content with nothing less than His
whole thought. The people who are going to count for God
are those who pay the price, even if it means going
outside the camp bearing His reproach, who accept that
cost, and go with the Lord, even against themselves in
all that is of nature.