Proverbs
29:18; 1 Sam. 3:1; Zech. 4:1-2; Acts 26:16-19; Rom.
1:1-3.
Were I asked what I
considered to be a need which embraces the greatest
number of vital issues amongst the Lord's people, I
should sum it up in one word, "vision," vision
God-given. If you reflect for a few moments you will see
that the Bible is almost entirely a matter of vision,
that the whole of the New Testament Christianity is a
matter of vision, that all Christian life and service
which is that in truth is a matter of vision.
Vision, of course, has
two parts. It means something seen, and it also means a
capacity for seeing; something presented to be seen, and
the power of seeing that which is presented. That is
vision. There may be a vision in the first sense which is
not seen, a presentation not discerned. It would be very
difficult indeed to estimate the value and the importance
of vision Divinely given.
In the New Testament
another word is used for vision. It is the word
"revelation." That is a very comprehensive
word. No matter at what point we touch the New Testament
Christian life we touch vision or revelation.
The
Initiation of the Spiritual Life
The initiation, or the
initiatory stage, of the Christian life in the New
Testament is seen to be a matter of revelation or vision.
It is a presentation to the heart and a heart
apprehension of the Lord Jesus, and unless that is the
nature of the beginning of the Christian life there is
something essential and vital lacking. Any Christian life
which is simply a matter of giving a mental assent to
certain propositions of Christian truth, and the writing
down of the name, for instance, upon a slip of paper,
saying that you become a Christian, lacks something which
is essential to make that Christian life a mighty force.
In the New Testament the beginnings of the Christian life
are a revelation of Christ to the heart, and a heart
apprehension of Him. It is a matter of inward spiritual
vision. It may be of a very elementary character; it may
be very imperfect so far as the fulness of Christ is
concerned; but it is sufficient for its immediate
purpose, and it is tremendously real to those who have
it; to those who are able to say in any form of words: I
have come to see the Lord Jesus as my Saviour! When that
can be said in reality it represents vision, if it is the
vision of the heart. When you touch the beginnings of
Christian life in the New Testament you are touching
vision.
The
Continuance of the Spiritual Life
When you touch the
continuance of Christian life in the New Testament
you are touching vision. The continuance of Christian
life is the development, the increase, the progress,
which means the greater fulnesses of Christ; and whenever
you touch some fuller meaning of Christ in the New
Testament, whenever you come to some progress, some
movement, some advance, some development, some increase,
you will always find it is by fresh vision or revelation.
It is a further unveiling, a fuller revelation. It is a
new heart apprehension of something presented, and
something seen by the enablement of the Holy Spirit. It
is so different from merely an intellectual grasp of
Christian doctrine, which may fall altogether short of
that dynamic power of enlarging the spiritual life. True
progress as we find it in the New Testament is on the
basis of a fresh revelation, a fuller revelation, a new
vision. So that the true, living believer marks his or
her progress by being able to say, as at the beginning, I
have come to see the Lord in a new way, in a fuller way;
and that with the eyes of the heart being enlightened.
The
Consummation of the Spiritual Life
What is true of the
initiation and the continuation is true of the
consummation of the spiritual life. If you touch the
consummation of the spiritual life in the New Testament
you find it has to do with an unveiling of Jesus Christ.
What is the consummation of the spiritual life? It is His
appearing, and with His appearing there is closely and
inseparably linked the completing of our spiritual
progress. "Behold what manner of love the Father
hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the
children of God." That is the initiation. "It
doth not yet appear what we shall be, but when he
shall be manifested we also shall be manifested with
him... we shall be like him for we shall see him
as he is." That is the consummation of the
spiritual life. We shall be like Him because we shall see
Him. There is a marvellous changing power in seeing the
Lord from the beginning to the end.
Vision
Needed for Service
The same thing holds
good in service. Touch service in the New Testament, and
you find that is bound up inseparably with vision. If the
Apostle Paul is an inclusive representation of the true
spiritual service, it is patent that the basis of it all
with him was vision. He says: "I was not disobedient
unto the heavenly vision." He was constituted a
minister and a witness because the Lord appeared unto
him. He referred to that in his letter to the Galatians,
in words very familiar to us: "It pleased God... to reveal
his Son in me, that I might preach him among
the nations." Service is bound up with vision.
Vision
Emancipates
How important is
vision, then, if it really is the background, the
foundation, the basis of life and service in relation to
the Lord Jesus. Vision has a wonderful power amongst the
Lord's people. One of the effects of true vision,
God-given vision, is to emancipate them from all that is
less than the Lord, and that is no small effect. It is an
emancipating power. This is where vision is needed so
badly today. The Lord's people are so cramped, so small,
so narrow, so bound, so shut in, hedged in, so parochial
in their spiritual horizon. They are so limited by the
common traditional acceptances, by "as it was in the
beginning, is now and ever shall be" so far as a
system is concerned. That is something which has become
static, fixed. Paul himself moved in a very rigid and
fixed realm, the realm of "Thou shalt," and
"Thou shalt not," which had almost countless
points of application in the sphere of a very rigid
system of religious life, which mainly held him down to
this earth. Then he had the vision of the Lord, and in
the day in which he received his God-given vision he was
emancipated from this earth, emancipated from everything
earth-binding even in a religious way. He was emancipated
from all that which had so rigidly and firmly, and with
such terrific power, bound him all his previous life. It
is - and we have often referred to it - one of the
miracles of the New Testament how a rabid Pharisee, such
a deeply dyed Jew as was Saul of Tarsus, should be
stripped of the whole of that tyranny and bondage of
Judaism, and come right out into a clear place where he
said such a thing as this: "For in Christ Jesus
neither circumcision availeth anything, nor
uncircumcision, but a new creation." Think of a man
like Saul of Tarsus saying that, with all the history
behind him, the birth, the upbringing, and the training.
It is not easy to get rid of a thing which is in your
blood, and has been in your blood for countless
generations. It is you to be that; you can never
think of anything else. It is no passive thing, but an
active, energetic thing in your very being to take that
course. That was Judaism. All that tremendous vehemence
of Saul of Tarsus as he was, more zealous than the rest;
"I advanced... beyond many of mine own age... being
more exceedingly zealous...," he said - all that was
in the man's blood. And then you find that man out of it,
repudiating it and turning upon it, ready to fight it,
with a new force and a new power to lay it low. What has
done that? Vision! Not just a mystical vision, but
something more than the psychical. It is the miracle of a
revelation of Jesus Christ, and nothing other than that
will do it. This kind of vision emancipates from all that
is less than the Lord, even though it be of a religious
order.
Vision
Unifies
Then
again, vision, true, God-given vision, is a wonderful
unifying and consolidating power. The passage we have
taken from the book of Proverbs touches that. The
Authorised Version reads: "Where there is no vision,
the people perish," but the word "perish,"
while it is very good, does not really indicate what is
there in the Hebrew. The Revised Version is a little
better perhaps, but it only just seems to touch it:
"Where there is no vision, the people cast off
restraint." More literally it is this: Where there
is no vision, the people disintegrate; if you like, go to
pieces, fall apart, lose their cohesiveness, lose their
solidity. That is very true. You have only to look to the
days of Samuel. "In those days there was no frequent
vision," and what were those days? Tragic days,
terrible days! One of the tragic fruits of those days was
that people said, "Make us a king like unto the
nations," by which request they repudiated the
theocracy, the Kingship of God, and wanted a man in the
place of God. That is always disastrous. Up till that
time God had been their King, their Lord; He had been on
the Throne, but now they have lost their vision and put a
man in His place, and what tragedy it was. The people
went to pieces in those days. The Philistines got the
upper hand, the Ark went into captivity, everything was
marked by weakness, disintegration, the people fell to
pieces, there was no vision.
There is a
pathetic lack of that cohesion amongst the Lord's people
today. Why all this disintegration, these fragments,
these scattered parts? Why is there all this division
amongst the Lord's people? Why? Because man's
interpretations have taken the place of the Holy Spirit's
revelation. Is that the truth? Oh, yes, that is true!
When the Holy Spirit is in His place, and the people are
being illumined and taught by Him there are no two minds;
there is one mind, one vision, a wonderful integration.
This is a tremendous need today, that there should be a
new revelation by the Holy Spirit to the heart of God's
people, so that they come into that revelation of Christ
which the Holy Spirit gives, and with revelation they
become one people, dominated by one vision. That is how
it was at the beginning. You say: You are putting forth a
counsel of perfection, something for which we dare not
hope in these days. Well, I do dare to hope for it; not
as embracing all the Lord's people, but I believe a far
greater measure of this is possible than now exists. We
are called to prayer that the Lord will give a vision to
His ministering instruments in this day which will bring
His people into a new revelation of Himself, and thus
bind them together, not as an organisation, nor as a
multitude of people who are accepting a certain
interpretation, but bind them together by spiritual ties,
because they have come to see the Lord in a new way. And
all that we are asking for is that there shall be such a
ministration of Christ by revelation of the Holy Spirit
in this earth, that all that is less than Christ will go,
and people will be bound to the Lord Himself. And if they
are bound to Him, then there will be oneness, the falling
apart will cease.
Vision
Sustains
Then
again, what a sustaining power vision is. Take the
Apostle Paul again as an example. What was it that kept
him going? If ever a man (speaking naturally) ought to
have given up, it was he. I can conceive of Paul having
resigned at quite a few places. If you or I had been the
pastor of the Church at Corinth I think we should have
resigned very quickly. Perhaps at some of the other
places too we should have chosen a roving pastorate (if
that is not a contradiction of term), because we could
not endure it. But Paul stuck to it to the end; even when
they gave him up he did not give them up. And how much he
suffered, how much there was to make him break-down, but
he went through until he could say: "I have finished
my course, I have kept the faith." I can hear an
echo even of the Master's words in that, in another
sense: "No man taketh it from me, I lay it down of
myself." It is a continuing unto the end by the
power of God. But what was it that kept him going
through? It was his vision of the Lord. It was the
heavenly vision. It is a great sustaining power, this
unveiling of Christ.
The
Nature of the Vision
To say
that it is a vision of Christ that we need may not get us
very far, although we may see the need of it and the
value of it. Paul says here that by the prophets
concerning His Son revelation has been given in the
Scriptures. But what we want to see, what we need to see,
is that in the New Testament we have a gathering up in a
spiritual way of the deeper meaning of the visions of the
prophets. In this word at the commencement of the Roman
letter, where the Apostle says that we have received that
which was promised through the prophets concerning His
Son, we have at least the suggestion that what is in the
New Testament is the spiritual value of what the prophets
saw, of what is in the vision of the prophets. We can
only stay to indicate what we mean, and illustrate it in
one or two instances.
We have
said that in the New Testament we have in a spiritual
way, for our own apprehension of Christ, that which was
behind the vision of the prophets in truth and in
principle. Let us take perhaps four illustrations from
the prophetic vision.
The
Vision of Christ as Sovereign Head of the Church
We turn to
the prophet Isaiah, in chapter 6 of his prophecies, and
read that which is very familiar: "In the year that
king Uzziah died I saw the Lord, sitting upon a throne,
high and lifted up, and his train filled the
temple." The Gospel concerning His Son, promised
through the prophets in the Scriptures. What is the
Gospel in that? That is vision! What is our New Testament
value of that? The New Testament is full of the Lord high
and lifted up, sitting upon a Throne, and the New
Testament is full of His train filling the Temple. What
is that in other terms? It is the absolute Sovereignty of
Jesus Christ as Head of His Church. "...raised him
from the dead, and made him to sit at his right hand in
the heavenlies ("sitting upon a throne"), far
above all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion...
("high and lifted up") and gave him to be head
over all things to the church, which is his body, the
fulness of him that filleth all in all ("his
train filled the temple")." It is a revelation
of Christ in His Sovereign Headship over all things to
the Church which is His Body, which is to be the fulness
of Him.
Get a vision of that.
Get a revelation of that to your heart by the Holy
Spirit, and see its emancipating power and its sustaining
power. And that is for present revelation to the heart.
That is the thing which the Lord has been seeking to
reveal to our hearts more and more for a long time.
The point
is this, that, inasmuch as that is the side of vision
presented, you and I have to seek the Lord for spiritual
capacity to see it. And that leads us to that other
fragment in the same letter, from which we have just
quoted: "That he would grant unto you a spirit of
wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him, the eyes
of your hearts being enlightened...". "The eyes
of your hearts being enlightened"! That is the other
side of vision.
Will you
pray this for yourself? Will you pray this for all God's
people? When the Lord's people get a new spiritual Holy
Ghost revelation of the Sovereign Headship of Christ, and
begin to hold fast the Head, they let go of everything
that is local, and personal, and different, and scattered
on the earth. That is the place to which to come for
unity. We cannot be at variance with one another as the
Lord's children if Christ is absolute Sovereign Head in
our lives. When the Lord Jesus gets the complete mastery
as Head in our lives, then all independence of action,
and life, and all self-will, self-direction,
self-seeking, self-glory and self-vindication will
go. These are the things which set us apart from one
another.
You pass
from Isaiah, and as you do so you remember that you have
the results of such a vision seen in this man Isaiah.
Such a vision immediately has the effect of humiliating
him to the dust. Oh, yes, we lose all our pride, all our
importance when once we see the Lord in glory. "Woe
is me..." That is humiliation! Then,
after humiliation, there is consecration: "Lo, this
hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away,
and thy sin purged." And, after humiliation and
consecration, there comes vocation: "...who will go
for us?" "Then I said, Here am I; send
me."
A life
suitable to the Lord's purposes in service is altogether
the result of a revelation of the absolute Sovereign
Lordship and Headship of Jesus Christ. It comes out of
that. So it was in the New Testament. Go to the book of
the Acts and you will see that the service which flowed
out there flowed out from the exaltation of Christ
which they had seen.
The
Vision of Christ in Universal Dominion
Passing,
then, from Isaiah, and Ephesians, and Colossians, we move
to Daniel. We have to be fragmentary. We cannot go right
through Daniel's visions, but, summing up the visions of
Daniel, what is the main result? Is it not the course of
this world's history moving toward Christ as its
consummation? The empires pass like a pageant before the
spiritual eyes of this prophet. In swift succession by
this vision he sees these mighty world empires, each one
going down before its successor. And then at the end he
sees a stone, cut without hands, break into the history
of this world, and a Kingdom set up, the end of which is
not seen and never will be seen; and the dominion, and
the authority given to the people of the Most High, and
Him coming to reign Whose right it is to reign; the
consummation of the history of this world. The pageantry
of empires all moving toward Christ. That is a great
thing to apprehend spiritually, but the spiritual value
of that is caught up immediately in the letter to the
Colossians as well as in other places in the New
Testament, and there it is made perfectly clear that
God's predestined purpose for this world is that Christ
shall at the end be All and in all, absolutely
pre-eminent universally, and that, although it may seem
that other powers are controlling this world's history,
there are mighty forces coming in and swaying it, and
seeming to touch its destiny. As Daniel saw these forces
at work, as he saw, for instance, the conquests of
Alexander the Great throughout this world, no doubt he
wondered what the end of this was to be. This man had
captured and conquered everything, subdued everything,
and he had no more worlds to conquer, he had absolute
dominion. And then Daniel saw Alexander the Great smashed
with a blow, cut off before he reached middle life, and
another power coming in. And Daniel looked on! What will
the end of this be? He sees the end in the hands of the
Son of Man.
You look
out on the world today, and you might well say, looking
at it naturally: Well, what will happen next? Things are
going from bad to worse! Look at the state of things!
Look at that awful thing which has its home in Russia,
and what it is able to do; the millions of its own
children within its own borders done to death on the
slightest pretext of allegiance to God! You see that and
other things in this world, and you say: What will the
end be? Well, the end will be Jesus on the throne of
universal dominion; nothing can hinder that! Get that
into your heart, and see what a power that vision will
have. Vision has mighty power. Where there is no vision
the people will certainly go to pieces. You would go to
pieces if you were left a prey to these world conditions,
and if they were all that you could see; men's hearts
truly failing them for fear; but it makes all the
difference when you have vision.
Colossians
1 settles it once and for all. "In him were all
thing created... all things have been created through
him, and unto him; and he is before all things, and in
him all things hold together," and He is destined by
the eternal counsels of God ultimately to have
pre-eminence in all things. The first chapter of the
letter to the Colossians is the spiritual summing up of
the visions of Daniel.
The
Vision of the Church which is His Body
Pass
swiftly from Daniel to Ezekiel, and amongst many visions
of God which Ezekiel had we just select one with which we
are very familiar, from chapter 40, the vision of the
temple which never has been yet, the temple which is for
the end. The vision there is of an angel with a measuring
rod - a reed - going in and measuring the court,
measuring the temple, putting down precisely to a detail
the measurement of everything related to that temple; the
walls, their height, their length, their breadth; every
passage, every corridor, every chamber, every vessel; all
put down in its exact dimensions. Then it is precisely
stated what these things are for; what this chamber is
for, and what that chamber is for. Everything is
described in its nature, its dimensions, and its purpose.
And then out from the temple the river, from beneath the
altar, issuing, gaining volume, depth, width, strength as
it goes on and on. The trees on either side, bearing
fruit continually, with leaves never fading. You say:
What is the Gospel of that? Well, again you look to the
letter to the Ephesians, and you have the whole thing
quite clearly and precisely described and explained for
you.
This
temple has its counterpart spiritually in this
dispensation in the Church which is His Body; and here in
this temple we have Christ presented as the Church, and
the measurements of Christ into which His people are to
come, so that every one has to function, as Paul says in
that letter "in due measure" (Ephes. 4:16).
That is your measure in Christ. Do not fall short of it,
and do not try to exceed it. And then coming up to our
measure when we are together; Paul, says, "Till we
all attain unto the unity of the faith... unto a
full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the
fulness of Christ."
Not only
have we a degree, but we have a place in which to
function in Christ, for there are in this Temple the
places of ministry, and every one has his appointed place
in ministry, and every joint is to function, every member
to fulfil his office: "For as the body is one, and
hath many members (1 Cor. 12:12) "...and all the
members have not the same office" (Rom. 12:4), yet
they all have an office; not all the same, but all
having a ministry.
Then there
are these chambers for rest for the servants of the Lord.
The resting places! And you and I have come to rest in
Christ. We are so familiar with this that it strikes no
new note of wonder in our hearts, but the Gospel is there
in it all, and has come by revelation through the
prophets.
If only
you and I had that vision, of the Church which is His
Body, the wonderful heavenly order, that every one of us
is given a measure "according to our measure,"
and that we have to be effective in that measure! Every
one of us is given a place in Christ, and every one of us
is given a ministry in Christ, and every one, because we
have a place and a measure, and a ministry, may know our
own rest in Christ. The spiritual revelation of the
Church as the Body of Christ is a wonderful thing, and
when we see the Church like that how we feel ashamed of
ourselves that ever we thought of some institution down
here on this earth being the Church. In this heavenly
revelation of what the Church is; all the saints in
their place, respectively, coming up to their
measure in Christ, fulfilling their ministry in
Christ; that is the Church, the Temple, "a holy
temple in the Lord." Will you pray for that vision,
that revelation? Will you pray that the Lord's people
everywhere may have that brought to them? It is something
to pray about! That is a need today.
The
Vision of the "Overcomer" Vessel
We close
with just a word from Zechariah. Amongst the visions of
Zechariah is that one from which we have already read in
chapter 4. "And the angel... waked me, as a man that
is wakened out of his sleep. And he said unto me, What
seest thou? And I said, I have seen, and behold, a
candlestick all of gold...." A candlestick all of
gold! What is that in New Testament
revelation? It is an instrument here on this earth which
is wholly of God for bearing the Testimony of Jesus;
something wholly of God; not man-made, man-constituted,
but something which God has produced, in which
there is the flaming Testimony of Jesus by the oil of the
Holy Spirit.
Who shall
say that the Lord does not need that today? Who will say
that the Lord's people do not need to come back to that,
or to go on to that, be for Him a vessel, an instrument,
which is wholly God-constituted, made up of those Divine
elements of the pure gold in which the Testimony
flames and burns, and does not go out, because the
unceasing oil of the Spirit is flowing unhindered? It is
not impossible! It is not beyond the Lord's will for now.
These are
parts of the vision of the Lord Jesus. They are only
aspects of Christ, are they not? This is what we mean by
the revelation of Jesus Christ. You see Him Head of the
Church, Sovereign Lord, so related to His Body that He is
the Body and His Body is Himself spiritually. And then
all that that means of place, and measure and ministry
and enjoyment, of the Lord. Then the Lord as here
expressed in a vessel which is all of Himself, with His
Testimony livingly, flamingly in it.
Let this
not be merely visionary. Ask the Lord to save you from
the thing becoming visionary in that sense, but, oh, do
pray that this which is Christ may become a living
revelation in your heart. It is not something of the mind
or of the imagination. Beloved, this is real! It can be
put in colder language and terser terms, but this is the
thing which has become the passion of some of our hearts;
this is the thing which has emancipated some of us; this
is the thing which is sustaining some of us; this is the
thing which is constituting the ministry of some of us;
and so we can say this is the thing which is holding some
of us together, whereas nothing else would hold us
together. It is the Holy Spirit's enablement of us to
apprehend Christ.
We will
close by asking the question of the angel: "What
seest thou?" What is your vision? In the first place
have you got a vision? Everything of life, and progress,
and ministry springs out of vision, otherwise it counts
for nothing. What seest thou? It is also important, when
we have a vision, to be able to declare our vision. If
you have a vision, can you state it? Can you declare it?
Is it locked up in you?
All this
leads, then, for the future to very definite prayer. This
is the direction for prayer - the Lord's Testimony in
reality, a vessel for that Testimony, true spiritual
vision, the revelation of Christ to the heart. The Lord's
people everywhere need vision. Let us pray that their
eyes may be opened, that we may be, as far as possible,
given an eye-opening ministry, that it might be true of
us: "...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, that they may receive remission
of sins and an inheritance among them that are sanctified
by faith in me." "Where there is no vision, the
people perish." "I was not disobedient unto the
heavenly vision." Let us ask the Lord to give us the
vision Himself.