"They that are of faith, the same are sons of Abraham, and the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith,
preached the gospel beforehand unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all the
nations be blessed. Now to Abraham were the promises spoken, and to his seed. He saith not, And to
seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ." (Gal.
3:7-8,16).
"For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision
which is outward in the flesh: but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and
circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit not in the letter; whose praise
is not of men, but of God." (Rom. 2:28,29).
These passages lead us from Abraham to Christ, and show that the seed of
Abraham is really Christ and those who are of Him. In this dispensation the
earthly natural seed of Abraham, called the Jews, are not in view with God as
such. It is a spiritual seed, a heavenly people.
Now, this transition from Abraham to Christ makes it necessary for us to
understand what Christ is as God's heavenly Man, the first of this heavenly
race, this heavenly and spiritual people to whom all others in Him and of Him
are to be conformed. And then it becomes necessary for us to know how Christ is
reproduced in a heavenly people; that is, what the people of God really are. We
have been seeing how this two-fold truth is worked out in the experience of
Abraham. The previous chapters very largely dealt with the basic, the
fundamental and inclusive severance of Abraham from all that belonged to him by
nature in his old relationships and constitution in Babylon.
Now with Christ in full view as the heavenly Man, we are going to follow
this a little further in its details as to how the inworking of that principle
of severance took place in Abraham's life, bringing him onto the ground of
Christ. That brings us back to the chapters in Genesis, the end of chapter 11,
on into chapter 12 and over a number of other chapters, but for this chapter
probably only the first part of chapter 12.
An Earthly Man Trying to Work Out a Heavenly Vision
Chapter 12, as it is marked in the chapter divisions of our Bible, begins
with a throw-back. "Now the Lord said unto Abram..." and it is important
for us to see exactly what that statement means. In the Authorized Version it is
more helpfully translated. It says, "Now the Lord had said unto Abram".
The revisers have taken the significance of the statement without using the
exact word of the past tense "had". The meaning is still here. "Now
the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred,
and from thy father's house", and you have to put that back before verse 27
of chapter 11. "Now these are the generations of Terah". Terah was
Abram's father, and if you put these beginning words of chapter 12 back there,
it is like this: "Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out". The "thee"
is emphatic in the original language. It really means: 'Whatever other people
are going to do, this is My word for you,
this is what you have got to do, this is personal to you'. That had been said,
in that personal, direct way to Abram. The next thing you find is "Terah took
Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran, his son's son, and Sarai his
daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of
the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran and dwelt
there. And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years: and Terah died in
Haran".
You see what has happened: Terah has taken hold of the vision and revelation
given to Abram, he has taken hold of it, collected up all his family and essayed
to go forth to put that vision and that Divine purpose revealed to Abram into
operation to realize it. But it was never said to Terah, it was never said to
any of the others. It was said to Abram, but Terah took hold of it. Abram's
father, the old man, took hold of it and tried to fulfil it, to realize it, and
you are not surprised, therefore, that there comes a halt on the way. They got
to the frontier town of Haran, and stayed there probably for about twenty-five
years. I say 'probably' because you have to put certain things together to
arrive at the exact time. But that seems to be the result, that they just came
under arrest, to a halt, at Haran for twenty-five years until Terah was
finished, until he was out of the way, until the vision, the Divine revelation
and purpose had got out of the hands of Terah. He was dead and immediately
everything is released and on they go in the Divine purpose.
Now, that is the first thing that you and I, as those called into this
heavenly relationship with the Lord Jesus, have to learn. It is a part of the
fundamental movement. It is what you might call the first practical stage and
aspect of that basic thing. Leaving the whole realm of nature, the whole world
to which we belong by natural birth, we have got to recognise something or
before long we shall come under spiritual arrest. There will be a long delay in
our spiritual progress in the Lord Jesus and we want to keep Him before us even
more than Abram.
In the Lord Jesus, we have this thing in perfection and completeness, a full
presentation of the heavenly Man, and, as we pointed out in our previous
meditation, the one thing that He was constantly saying Himself was that He did
not belong to this earth and this world and this system of things. "Ye are
from beneath; I am from above"; "I am come down from heaven"; "the
Son of man who is in heaven". It would do you great good if you went through
the Gospel by John alone with that word 'heaven' and 'heavenly' in view. See how
large a place it occupies and how much the Lord Jesus makes of it as the
essential basis of everything that He is doing and saying. There is a lot of
deep instruction here.
Heaven Reopened in Christ the Heavenly Man
To me, it is very wonderful and very engaging. Just this little fragment, for
instance. We said that the earliest name of Babylon was The
Place of the Tree of Life, and right on as far on as the time of Alexander
the Great, their symbol was the Tree of Life. It was imposed or carved upon the
coffins, as late as that. We know what happened to produce The Place of the
Tree of Life. We know what happened to Paradise, the Place of the Tree of
Life, when man fell away from God and entered into that alliance with God's
enemy, not only outwardly but in an inward way in his very nature. Paradise was
closed, the Tree of Life was made a reserve and disappeared from the earth and
reappears in the Lord Jesus. So far as man on the earth is concerned, heaven is
closed, there is no entrance. It is an enclosed reserve, there is no coming to
God any more and walking with God after that.
The place of fellowship and communion with God, the place of eternal life, is
removed from the earth, and in the New Testament it re-appears in the person of
the Lord Jesus. He is the Tree of Life, He is the place of communion and
fellowship with God, He is the place of the opened heaven for men of faith. So
early in the Gospel of John that comes into view: "Ye shall see the heaven
opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man"
(John 1:51). That is Paradise reopened, and Christ, the Tree of Life, is the
centre. The communication of man with God is a heavenly thing now in the Person
of the Lord Jesus.
But you see in Babylon they were still clinging to a dead tradition. It was a
religious thing; they were holding on to their symbol of the Tree of Life which
no longer existed amongst men. We come, in this new dispensation, as shown us
here in this Gospel by John, to see that the true Tree of Life is still alive in
the heavenly Man. All the heavenly seed of Abraham have to leave the realm of
dead tradition and religion and come into a living, personal relationship with
the heavenly Man, and partake of His heavenly nature, and for them the heaven is
opened. Abram, under Divine command, in the obedience of faith, left the realm
of Babylon, the realm of mere dead tradition, where it was only symbol, not
reality, where it was a dead thing altogether. When he came right out, he came
into the place of the opened heaven, and from that time God was constantly
appearing to him. He was living under an open heaven, except on one or two
occasions when he lapsed, and we shall see the meaning and value of that.
Now you see, all this is summed up in the heavenly Man, the Lord Jesus. And
we come into the good of the open heaven, of the renewed fellowship with God in
the heavenly Man, as we become His seed, the spiritual seed of Abraham, which is
Christ; that is, as we become a heavenly and spiritual people.
We were saying Terah essayed to take up this heavenly vision, and it was
found that an earthly man can never do that. You have to become a heavenly man
in order to go through with the heavenly vision. Terah brought everything to a
standstill because, as a natural man, a man of the earth, a man who had not come
into that personal relationship with God in a heavenly way, he tried to take
hold of heavenly things and brought everything to a standstill. I was saying
that that is one of the first great things we have to learn, and there is a lot
of history bound up with that. Some of us were in the place of Terah for many
years. We had taken hold of Divine things, we were trying to do God's work, we
were trying to fulfil a Divine programme, we had got hold of some idea as to
what the Lord wanted done, and we threw ourselves into it. We took hold of this
thing, we pursued it, we pressed it, we worked at it. The Lord had pity upon our
innocence and our ignorance, but He did not accept us on the ground of our
taking hold of Divine things naturally, with natural strength, with natural
wisdom, with natural energy and natural enthusiasm. And the time came when a new
crisis arose, where we had to accept the implications of our death with Christ,
that it was not only the taking away of our sins, but it was the taking away of
ourselves; where we had to die, and die to all that was of God.
That sounds strange, but there is a sense in which we have to die to all that
is of God. This is the sense: that the natural man cannot live in the Divine
realm. He has to accept that he is dead, and it is impossible to apprehend
Divine things, and fulfil Divine purposes. It is not in him, he has not the
capacity or the ability to come into the realm of heavenly things; it cannot be
done. We have to come to that crisis where we accept our death to ourselves,
even as to the work of God, even as to the things of God; the place where, if
there is going to be anything known, anything done, it must be the Lord Who does
it on an altogether new basis, a new creation basis, a resurrection basis; where
something has happened that has put us out naturally.
That is not fresh information to most of you, but there are perhaps those
here who are not quite clear about that and Terah is brought into the Scriptures
in this way to say to us, Oh no; you may hear about Divine things, it may be
told you, someone may have been like Abram and given the information and told
what they have heard from the Lord and what the Lord has said to them, you may
have heard it in the meetings, in the addresses, in the teaching, and then you
may have taken hold of it and said, I am going for that, I am going into that, I
am going to follow that out! And you find it does not work, you get into a false
position, and while you believe the thing in a way as being quite right and
quite true, nothing is happening, there is a pause inwardly. Do understand the
importance of recognising the meaning of Terah, the old man, the old Adam, the
natural father, the one from whom all the natural springs. He cannot take up
heavenly things and follow through. No, the natural man cannot fulfil the
spiritual.
Nicodemus an Illustration of the Inability of the Natural
Man
That is exactly the teaching we have in John chapter 3. Here comes Terah; his
name is changed to Nicodemus. He comes to the Lord Jesus to discuss heavenly
things, Divine things. He has heard, he has reports, he has been listening to
things that the Lord Jesus has been saying, and he has come along to talk over
those things, for "no one can do these signs that thou doest, except God be
with him". So Nicodemus (Terah) begins to take hold of heavenly things, as
he thinks, or essayed to do so, and there comes a terrible pause. "Jesus
answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except one be born
anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God... Most truly, most truly, I say unto
thee, Except one be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the
kingdom of God". Here is the double 'cannot' written large by the Divine
hand upon Terah and all his company, Nicodemus amongst them. "That which is
born of the flesh is flesh" and
remains flesh, whether it has stepped across the frontier and essayed to take
hold of Divine things or not; that is, whether it has listened to the teaching,
to the truth reported from an Abram who has really got the thing firsthand from
the Lord. Whether he has believed that the teaching is quite right, true and
sound and on that basis has moved to do something about it, Nicodemus cannot, he
just cannot; he can get no further. That which is born of the flesh remains
flesh, still is flesh.
"That which is born of the Spirit is spirit". Listen! "If I told
you earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you
heavenly things? And no one hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended out
of heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven." What a conundrum for
Nicodemus, or Terah, or anybody! What is the Man talking about, what does He
mean? Who descended out of heaven and is here, and yet is still in heaven? What
are you going to make of it? This heavenly Man is incomprehensible, is beyond
all natural power of understanding and grasping. 'If I told you heavenly things,
how would you believe?' You see the heavenly side being brought in as showing
that the natural man is slain, he is out of it. Then you have to cut out a
portion of this chapter from verse 22 to verse 30. The narrative is taken up
again at verse 31. It should follow on verse 21. "He that doeth the truth
cometh to the light, that his works may be made manifest, that they have been
wrought in God... He that cometh from above is above all: he that is of the
earth is of the earth, and of the earth he speaketh: he that cometh from heaven
is above all. What he hath seen and heard, of that he beareth witness; and no
man receiveth his witness (no man can receive, is capable of receiving, his
witness). He that hath received his witness hath set his seal to this, that God
is true. For he whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God: for he
giveth not the Spirit by measure." It is all this heavenly Man speaking
heavenly things, and the earthly man totally incapable of grasping,
apprehending, understanding, following through.
That is Terah, that is Nicodemus, and that is you and me by nature - the
impossibility of entering into and fulfilling any heavenly thing until we become
a heavenly people. So the Lord is saying to Nicodemus in other words, If you
want to understand heavenly things, if you want to have an opened heaven, if you
want to be able to know what I am talking about and what I am doing, you must be
born (it does not say 'anew', the word really is 'from above') you must be born
from above, you must become a heavenly person, and a heavenly person is one born
of the Spirit; that is, a spiritual man and a spiritual person.
The Lord has been showing to me the inner meaning of this circumcision of the
heart in such a way that I can say to you I have never seen it like that before.
It is out of that that I am speaking and we shall never exhaust this truth, we
shall never get beyond the possibility of new applications of the truth of the
Scriptures in what we are calling inward circumcision, that is, a deep down
separation between what we are by nature and what Christ is. We will never get
beyond that, and it is going to be applied more and more as we go on, because we
are called to be this heavenly people. Oh, the ramifications of this natural
life of ours! How deep they are! How complex they are! How comprehensive they
are!
The Lord's Need of a Crucified People
This work of the Spirit, dividing, inwardly dividing; what is it, after all,
that the Lord is trying to get at? In a word, it is this. The Lord must have for
His full purpose, the realisation of what is fully in His heart, He must have a
thoroughly crucified people. That means a people thoroughly and deeply separated
from themselves by the Cross of Jesus Christ; not only separated from the world
in an outward way, but separated from this old man Terah who is inside us. God
must have a deeply crucified people.
What is needed on this earth is a crucified people. The trouble is people,
the trouble is Christians, the trouble is Christian workers. I am not going to
say much about that, but take that as a statement. We are the trouble to the
Lord. There is a Christianity, an organized Christianity, which is the greatest
enemy that Christ has on this earth, and is standing in His way. It is standing
in the way of many being saved. It is a caricature, a false Christianity, a
false Christ, it is a most terrible thing. But that is speaking very generally
in a larger realm, but even with ourselves, we are the trouble to the Lord's
interests, we are in the way, we are not crucified sufficiently to make it
possible for the Lord to go right through with His purpose. There is too much of
Terah holding on still in us to the things of God and getting in God's way, and
therefore holding up everything. Oh, suffer this word, it is very necessary.
What is needed is a deeper inward cutting clean in between the life of the
flesh and the Life of the Spirit, the life of the earthly and the Life of the
heavenly, the life of Adam and the Life of Christ; a severance as utter, drastic
and terrible as the Cross of the Lord Jesus. I say "terrible" because there is
no doubt about it that the most terrible moment in the whole history of this
into which the universe and eternity were crowded, and in which the heart of
God's beloved Son was broken, was when He cried, "Thou hast forsaken Me!" It was
because in that moment He stepped right into the place of man by nature, you and
me and the whole race, to carry it under judgment out of God's sight,
inclusively, basically, fundamentally. And God turned His back on that, turned
His face away from His Son when He was made sin in our place and made a curse
for us. God abandoned Him because at that moment He stood in that place. We have
to recognize that that world which God abandoned as represented by His Son in
that moment, still is abandoned by God. He has never brought it back, not one
bit of it, and, although He is very longsuffering, patient and forbearing with
the remaining traces of it in us while He deals with us to get rid of it, His
attitude to it all is still the same as in that moment on the Cross. He has
nothing to do with it, He will not accept it. Yes, the need is a crucified
people, crucified workers for God, crucified, deeply crucified, and the
crucifixion is the severance between what is nature and what is the Lord.
We do need to face this matter. Do believe me that so much of the trouble is
found in many of the Lord's people who are not just simple believers but who are
in positions where they have responsibility and where they are taken note of,
where they are seen, where they are prominent, and it is just there in so many
cases that the Lord cannot get on, and the things of the Lord are being brought
into shame, confusion and dishonour, and the Lord Himself is being dishonoured.
Oh, the story of the breakdown and failure of us Christians and of us Christian
workers... the constant seeping in, the creeping in, of some form of our natural
life, self-interest, possessiveness, where we meet one another. We have not seen
the awfulness, the depth of what there is in us even in matters like
stubbornness. Let us look at it again at 1 Sam. 15:17: "Though thou wast
little in thine own sight, wast thou not made the head of the tribes of Israel?" You
see the attitude of the Lord, and now, by inference Saul left that ground of
littleness in his own eyes. He has become something and this is what it amounts
to: "To obey is better than
sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of
witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry" (vv. 22,23). Rebellion and
stubbornness are directly linked with the evil powers. Witchcraft is a link with
fallen spirits. Will any one of us say that there is no old man stubbornness, no
old Adam rebellion in us? It is there! This Scripture says that kind of thing is
immediately linked with the evil powers, the fallen spirits, the demons, it is
satanic. When that comes up in Christians, how can the Lord go on? There is
bound to be some kind of arrest, and there is bound to be some kind of
dishonouring of the Lord, as there was with Saul.
How we do need this heart circumcision deeper and deeper, especially as
Christian workers. I say again as I close, the great need today is a heavenly
people, a spiritual people. Let us ask the Lord to make us, not workers, not
preachers, but people like Christ.