We are
going to resume our meditations on union with Christ.
Having been occupied with Christ Himself, the meaning of
Christ, seeking to set the background, lay the
foundation, in some little understanding of His greatness
and of His place, we now should be able to follow on with
the meaning of our union with Him. You will see that the
New Testament gives us various conceptions of that union.
These are not different unions that is to say, the
similes used of these unions do not apply to different
bodies of people. They are only aspects of the one union,
but each one has its own particular significance and
value.
So we begin with
1.
Eternal Union with Christ
Let us first of all
look at the first chapter of the letter to the Ephesians:
"Even
as he chose us in him before the foundation of the
world" (verse 4).
"Having foreordained us unto adoption as sons
through Jesus Christ unto himself, according to the good
pleasure of his will" (verse 5).
"In whom also we were made an heritage"
(verse 11).
And if you ask, When
were we made a heritage?
"Having
been foreordained according to the purpose of him who
worketh all things after the counsel of his will"
(verse 11).
"To them that are called according to his purpose.
For whom he foreknew, he also foreordained to be
conformed to the image of his Son" (Romans 8:28-29).
"Elect... according to the foreknowledge of
God the Father" (1 Peter 1:1,2).
"...The men whom thou gavest me... thine they
were, and thou gavest them to me... Keep them in thy name
which thou hast given me" (John 17:6,11).
I ought at once to say
that we are not embarking upon a theological discussion
or argument. This matter of election or foreordination or
predestination has passed almost entirely into schools of
doctrine and has split the Church into parties through
the ages, and it still remains largely an academic
subject, to be debated, argued, wrestled with
intellectually. For our part we will have none of it. It
would be unprofitable, it would get us nowhere and we are
not moving in that realm. We are seeking spiritual
values, practical values for our own spiritual lives, and
so we lift this matter right out of the realm of argument
and debate and seek to see it in the light of Christ. It
is entirely governed by Christ, for it is only in Christ
that it exists.
But, before we go
further, I want to say this. This matter of election
relates to the Church and must be confined to the Church.
(I would prefer to call the Church by the name
of "the elect," because the very word
"Church" has become an ecclesiastical
conception.) It belongs to the Church, the Church belongs
to it, and its real meaning has only been divulged in
this dispensation. We are given to understand by the Word
of God that all previous dispensations were pointing to,
leading to and heading up to this dispensation, as though
there were a drive behind them to reach a dispensation of
fullness or completeness. They were all partial,
imperfect, unsatisfactory, all just reaching a certain
point and then fading out and waiting for the next phase.
So phase passed to phase, and on to another phase, and
still there was the waiting, the hoping, the expecting,
the requiring, and then this age or dispensation came. It
is called in the New Testament the "dispensation of
the fulness of the times" (Eph. 1:10). That is a
very significant little phrase. The times are made full,
all the times are made full, in this one. All those which
lack fullness and finality are filled up in this one.
This one gives that which they lacked and needed; this is
the dispensation of the fullness, or completeness, of the
times. This is what the Apostle calls "the ends of
the ages" (1 Cor. 10:11).
Now, it is helpful if
you can arrange the ages as segments of a circle rather
than in a straight line. If you take the straight line
idea, you leave a lot of unfinished ends, one after
another, but if you arrange them in a circle, then you
find them all meeting at one point. They are not just
unfinished ends in themselves, but they find their
fulfillment at one point: all the ages gather round and
meet at one center - the age in which all the ages meet.
"Upon whom the ends of the ages are come": that
does not only refer to past ages. It refers also to
future ages: for they come into this, they take their
character from this age, they take their meaning from
this age, so that ages past and future are centered in
this dispensation. And when this dispensation comes in in
fullness - for, although it was introduced in a way by
the coming of Christ in the flesh, the age did not come
in fullness until the day of Pentecost: it would seem
that on the day of Pentecost heaven could wait no longer,
the Holy Spirit could wait no longer, all Divine purposes
could wait no longer; and immediately they had the signal
- the signal being Christ taking His seat at the right
hand of the Majesty in the heavens - immediately they got
that signal, it was as though they all rushed in and
brought this marvelous sense of arrival, of having come.
There is a lot in that - "When the day of Pentecost
was now fully come": it has probably a larger sense
than that it was well into the hours of the day. It
proved to be as though everything had been waiting for
this everything had been looking for this, everything had
been breathless in its suspense for this, and there was
such fullness in that day and with the coming of that day
that it has overflowed backward and forward into all the
ages - fullness of meaning to the past and fullness of
character to the future. It reached back to past eternity
and it reached on unto the ages of the ages. What the
fiftieth year and day meant in the Jewish economy was far
transcended on this "Day of Pentecost."
And what happened on
the day of Pentecost? Well, the Church was born: the age
of the Church in fullness commenced. We are told
distinctly by the Apostle that this whole thing, this
mystery, had been "hid for ages and generations; but
now hath it been manifested," and that the ministry
is "to make all men see what is the dispensation of
the mystery which from all ages hath been hid in
God" (Col.1:26; Eph. 3:9). You see, it is this
"elect" which is the heart of the ages and of
the universe.
(a)
The
Fact Governed by the Meaning of Christ
And why therefore is it
so important? Why all this? Why is this age such a great
age, and why is it that in this age heaven's fullness has
been poured out? Why all this excitement, if we might so
put it, on the day of Pentecost and thereafter? Well,
that is just the point in our whole meditation. It is all
governed by the meaning of Christ. Christ is God's Son
and He is called "the firstborn of all
creation" (Col. 1:15), God's Firstborn, and
everywhere in Divine revelation that designation means
the HEIR. He is the "heir of all things"
(Heb. 1:2). He must have an inheritance. The idea of the
Firstborn is nonsense if there is no inheritance. Its
very sense is that He must have an inheritance. "In
whom also we were made a heritage" (Eph. 1:11). What
is the "also"? Look at the context. "To sum up all things in Christ...
in whom also we were made a heritage."
"We" - who is meant by the "we"? The
Church. The Church is a part, the central part, of the
vast inheritance of God's Son on which we have been
speaking earlier in this series. "The Church is the
main part, the most important part, of those all things
that form the inheritance of God's Son. "In whom
also we were made a heritage". Simply, it was this.
God determined an inheritance for His Son. God knew what
that inheritance would be - we will at least cede Him
that. Even an earthly father intending and deciding to
give his son an inheritance would have some idea of what
it would be. And then he would certainly not leave it to
chance: he would secure it, he would see to it that there
was an inheritance to have. So God created all things
through and unto Jesus Christ His Son. He made His Son
the horizon of all things. That is, the whole inheritance
was horizoned and circled by His Son; He made "in
Christ" to be its sphere.
Now, that is very
important, because it is not only a statement of a
comprehensive truth. It is a statement of a
discriminating truth. The Bible, the New Testament, makes
it perfectly clear that there is that which is not in
Christ and there are those who are not in Christ. That
"in Christ" is quite discriminating. There has
been a good deal of playing fast and loose with these
fragments. "As in Adam all die, so also in Christ
shall all be made alive" (1 Cor. 15:22), and that
has been given a comprehensiveness which it will not
carry. In Christ you shall be made alive; out of Christ
you will not. "He that hath the Son hath the life;
he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life"
(1 John 5:12). "This is life eternal, that they
should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou
didst send, even Jesus Christ" (John 17:3). "In
Christ" is a discriminating sphere as well as a
comprehensive inheritance. There is also all "out of
Christ."
Well then, allowing God
to choose for His Son an inheritance, to define the
inheritance, to create the inheritance, to determine that
the inheritance should come to Him, we surely will allow
that, being God, He foreknew the "in Christ"
people. That is as far as I am going to carry the
argument side of it.
Of course, there is all
the time pressing in and insinuating itself the question,
How do we know? That is where we move, if we will, right
out of the realm of mere doctrinal discussion. All that
argument, discussion, analysis and so on is largely due,
either to man's insatiable curiosity or to his
unfathomable pride - that streak in man which will not
let God know anything unless man knows it. God must not
know anything, do anything, unless we can explain it.
Now, God's explanations are always practical; they are
never theoretical or intellectual. They are always
practical and they are always spiritual, and when you
recognize that, you realize why it is that you can argue
and debate and discuss and analyze, and pursue the whole
thing along the line of reason and intellect until you go
to the grave, and have never settled the thing finally at
all. The reason for this, as you well know, is that God
has never intended to explain Himself intellectually at
all.
And yet
there is a more complete and utter and glorious answer to
all the problems and all the questions than the
intellectual one. When you come to peace and rest and
assurance and satisfaction in heart, that is a better
argument than anything else. Someone put the whole matter
of predestination and election this way. You come to a
door, and that door is Christ, and on the outside of that
door is written, "Whosoever will may come"; and
you pass through the door, and look on the other side,
the inside of the door, and you see, "Chosen... in
him before the foundation of the world" (Eph. 1:4).
It is inside that you discover the reality of election,
never outside. You will never have the answer to that
question, Am I of the elect? outside. You have to put
away all your questions and come to the Lord Jesus: the
answer is experimental, it is spiritual. The question
vanishes then; it just disappears. We shall come back to
that presently. What we have been saying is that the fact
of eternal union is governed by the meaning of Christ,
and by that which He inherits, as a Son.
(b)
Transcending
the Fall of Man
Eternal
union transcends the fall or rebellion of man. Man's
rebellion does not cancel God's purpose concerning His
Son; his fall does not denote God's defeat - not by any
means. God, from His side, though He is revealed as hurt,
saddened, grieved, and involved in a new situation,
nevertheless, as sovereign God, goes tranquilly on. Man
has rebelled, man has fallen. It makes no difference to
God's purpose, not a little bit of difference. He
continues quietly on the heavenly line and begins to lift
man on to the heavenly line again through faith. That is
the story of the Old Testament - men being lifted back on
to the heavenly line through faith.
Faith
has one function. The function of faith is to lift
out of the ruin; out of the ruined race, out of the
ruined world - out of time back into eternity. It is to
lift us out from here, from ourselves and what we are and
what we are involved in, up on to the heavenly level. The
Old Testament shows that that is the function of faith
all the way through. Every time God called for an
exercise of faith it brought a man out of where he was
and put him into union with God in heaven. Abraham;
Israel, a heavenly people: with that bit of blue on the
border of the garment of every man in Israel saying that
he did not belong down here, he belonged up there, in
heaven: he was walking by faith. Faith's one function is
to regain heavenly ground. That has, of course, a
multitude of aspects and applications, but do remember
that. Every time there is a challenge to faith, that is
the issue. Am I going to stay in myself or am I going to
stay in God? Am I going to stay in this world or am I
going to abide in heaven? That is always the issue with
faith, right down to its minute details. Dispensations
are only different forms of the operation of faith. Faith
is the same in every dispensation. Different forms of
faith's operations are represented by different economies
from time to time, but faith is the same, faith is
timeless, dispensationless. Faith is above all
dispensations and yet it embraces them all.
You see
what that means. Faith makes a heavenly people in every
dispensation. Faith has the same effect all the way
through history. It counters that drop into something not
of heaven, not of God. It counters that, contradicts,
denies, works against it. Faith at once brings you back
before the Fall. It transcends man's rebellion and man's
fall. That is the argument of Paul in the first chapters
of the Roman letter. Faith puts you back somewhere. It is
called justification. It makes you right, puts everything
right for you and with you, positions you again as though
you had never fallen, "in Christ." Faith
counters it all. The order of faith commenced immediately
man rebelled and sinned, and by faith Abel, Enoch, Noah,
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all the others were heavenly
men. God reacted in that way, and so the eternal union
now transcends the Fall, through faith.
(c)
Enhanced
by the Redemption of Man
Eternal
union is enhanced by the redemption of man. When man
fell, God was not defeated. It only meant that He brought
into operation a provisional measure or economy which He
had already worked out. Just at that point some terrible
things have been said in order to try to support an
erroneous teaching. I have heard it dogmatically stated
that the Fall was in the Divine intention. God intended
man to fall in order to show His grace. If you can accept
that man had to fall, that it was in the Divine plan that
he should do so in order that grace might be revealed -
accept it, if you like; I cannot. What I see is the Fall
not being in God's intention or will at all: He would
have had it otherwise. But He had foreseen it and had
provided for it, and when it took place He brought in His
provisional measure of redemption, a measure which He had
already worked out, the Lamb slain from the foundation of
the world - He put that into operation.
Just as
the higher qualities of any person come out in an
emergency: it is in an emergency that you discover what
people's qualities are, and sometimes emergency reveals
something you never suspected: just as this is so in the
human realm, so transcendently was it true in the Divine.
The emergency brought out something very wonderful in
God. It brought out grace, and two words from that time
were combined. Before that it was one word: sovereignty.
After the Fall it was sovereign grace, sovereignty
working through grace, grace the handmaid of sovereignty.
No, God did not intend the Fall. At least, that is my
conviction. But God is always, always has been, more
magnificent in an emergency. We have discovered that. It
is the excellence of God that comes out in our
emergencies. It was like that with the Fall. Grace came
to light.
Perhaps
you are still wanting to enter into the argumentative
realm. If man had never fallen, look what we should have
lost. We should never have known the magnificence of
grace. How are you going to answer that? Well, let us
look at the human family for a moment. Here is a father
and there is a little child. Does it require that all the
wonderful, gracious gifts and endowments of the father's
love be lavished in order to draw out the love of the
child for its father? Not at all. The little child loves
the father, and, where it is an ideal case, loves the
father without the father having to do all sorts of
gracious things to win that love. It loves the father,
because, well, it does love the father, and the father
could not wish for anything more than that. Translate
that into the realm of God and the children. We, if we
had gone on, if there had been no Fall, would have gone
on in utter love and devotion. That is what the Father
wanted - and, mark you, God is always trying to get us on
to that plane of loving Him just for Himself and not for
what He does for us. That is the highest love. We do not
get there, but that is what He is after. Have we said
enough on that matter? We must hasten to a close.
The
Holy Spirit the Custodian of the Eternal Purpose
The Holy
Spirit is eternal; He is related to purpose; He is the
link with Christ; and He is the earnest of the
inheritance. That is to say, when we receive the Holy
Spirit, we are at once joined to Christ: therefore we are
joined at once with God's purpose concerning Christ. We
are therefore linked with eternity and have left time. Is
that too fine a way of arguing? We are linked with
eternity, for the Spirit is eternal. The Spirit has not
just come to be here with us for the little while of our
life here, just a temporary guest staying for a night and
departing. The presence of the Holy Spirit within at once
links us with timelessness, and in that timelessness with
the eternal purpose of God concerning His Son, and in
that purpose with the Son Himself as governing all; and
when we receive the Spirit we receive the earnest, the
token, the security, of the inheritance of Christ. That
is wonderful. That is where we come back to what we were
saying. We have been secured by the indwelling Spirit as
Christ's, as belonging to Christ, and Christ is secured
to us for ever. The Spirit is the earnest of the
inheritance. This is the inspiring answer of God to all
questions about election. Have you received the Spirit?
If you have not, you have no answer to any questions. If
you have, you have the answer to every question, and
particularly to this one. Union with Christ is the answer
to all our questions.
Union with
Christ is a crisis, a definite act, instantly giving a
sense of - This is the answer to everything: all my
questions are answered, not in my brain but in my heart;
to everything that I have tried to understand and grasp
and comprehend I have the answer inside. It is like that.
Yet note this. The receiving of the Holy Spirit, while
bringing that immediately - "The Spirit himself
beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of
God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and
joint-heirs with Christ" (Rom. 8:16,17) - while
that is true at the inception of the Christian life in
union with Christ, note this: that a life in the Spirit
and with the Spirit is a continuous course, or
succession, of proofs of election.
Perhaps
you have never thought of that. If we do really walk with
the Holy Spirit, we find that He is leading us into
things that we never thought of, never intended - but, as
He does it, we have to say, This is not something that
has just arisen, this is something that was intended by
God; I am just coming into a program; the Lord has not
shown me the whole program, but this is like item after
item on the program. Is that not the story of the book of
Acts? The Holy Spirit has a program. He has not revealed
it, but as they move in the Spirit, how the whole thing
is a mosaic. How wonderful it is! This thing was ordained
from eternity. You could not avoid it. God is working to
it and holding us to it. "We are his workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore
prepared that we should walk in them" (Eph. 2:10).
You look
back on your life. You may be disappointed in many ways
with your part in the business. You may be able to see
many falterings and blunderings and mistakes that you on
your side made. You may have sometimes felt that you were
not the person for that job; God had made a mistake. Some
of us have felt like that. And yet, as we look more
deeply into God's ways with us and know God's principles,
we see a wonderful logic in it all. You and I are called
for something, laid hold of by God for something, put by
God into something, and we feel, God has made a mistake:
I am not the person for this, I ought never to have come
into this, I have no qualifications for this, I am
altogether the wrong peg here! And yet, somehow or other,
God does it. He enables you, He carries you through, He
accomplishes the work to your own surprise and wonder. As
you lay hold of the Holy Spirit, it is done - that is, if
you do not sink down into yourself and give up and draw
out because of what you are - but you lay hold of the
Holy Spirit and you get through and marvel that you have
got through, that the Lord has done this thing through
you, through me.
That is
very consistent with God's principles, that is no
contradiction. It is most consistent with the deepest
principles of God. No flesh shall glory in His presence.
It is all coming back to Him. God - mark you - elected
"the foolish things of the world... the weak
things... the things that are not" (1 Cor. 1:27,28).
It is the same word; He has elected. It is quite
consistent.
Yes, His
ways are past finding out. "God moves in a
mysterious way His wonders to perform," but He is
consistent with His principles. A life in the Spirit is
one succession of confirmations that God is working out a
plan. Only rebellion, stubbornness, self-assertiveness
and all forms of self-life will hinder or arrest; but a
life in the Spirit will be a constant succession of
proofs, of evidences, that you were chosen for something.
God is not dealing with you just from hand to mouth,
piecemeal. It is all worked out. Good works foreordained,
"afore prepared, that we should walk in them."
If we walk in the Spirit, we walk in afore prepared
works; whether we see it or not, it is a fact. But it
comes out, wonderfully so, and we have to go down and
say, Well, Lord, forgive us for arguing, forgive us for
discussing the matter, forgive us for putting over our
minds and what we think about it against You: You are
wonderful, Lord. And we worship, and that is the proof of
election, and you do not want better proof than that. It
is all inside of Christ by the Holy Spirit.