When the writer of the
letter to the Hebrews had been saying many things, he
evidently had a feeling that it all needed to be gathered
up into one clear, precise statement, and so he wrote:
"Now in the things which we are saying the chief
point is this". The margin says, "Now to sum up
what we are saying..." (Heb. 8:1). Such a need is
present with us at this point, so let us try to collect
and to focus what we have been saying thus far.
Divine
Reactions
The history of God's
work is the history of movements and counter-movements,
of action and reaction, of incline and decline, of
advance and arrest or reverse. In one of the earliest
books that we published, these words occurred at the
commencement: 'There are two things which it is very
important that we should have clearly before us. These
two things, as we put them, may seem to contradict one
another or to be paradoxical. One is that all the way
through the ages God has constantly done a new thing. The
other is that what has always been God's new thing from
man's standpoint, has not been new from His own.'
And then we went on to
point out that God always begins from completeness. He
has everything in Himself fully and finally before He
makes a beginning, and all His subsequent activities are
really working backward to fullness, although to man they
appear to be the new things of God. The course, then, has
been that God begins with fullness. Man falls away and
loses that fullness. Then God reacts and steadily moves
in progressive and gradual recovery of that fullness.
And every fresh movement
of God is marked by two features.
In the first place,
intrinsic fullness; that is, although it may be for the
moment a partial thing only, it has intrinsic values in
it. It is something which has all the potentialities of
the whole, because everything that God does, however
small it may be at the moment, has all His mind in it and
behind it. God is not just occupied with fragments as
though they were the whole, but with parts in which the
whole is potentially included.
And then, in the second
place, His movements are always an advance upon those
which preceded them. That is, every movement of God sees
an addition to what He has done before. Although He may
have taken these steps from time to time in the way of
recovery, it has been progressive, and now the next step
will represent something added, something more, a stage
further on in His work of recovering the original
fullness. I hope that is clear. It is very important to
get that background and that foundation.
Then we find that there
are some inclusive or major factors in these movements of
God - what we have called, in the title of the volume
just quoted from, The Divine Reactions. One of
those major factors is an instrument raised up by God
in sovereignty, with God's vision and God's passion;
an instrument raised up by God in sovereignty - which
means that this is an act of God, and, being a sovereign
act, may have nothing at all to account for it from any
other standpoint. It is not that the instrument is one
which all observers would say was the right instrument;
not that the man or the vessel is such as would win the
approval of the world's mind. God acts sovereignly, and
very often in these reactions He has chosen instruments
which, both in their own judgment and in that of others,
were not the ones to have been chosen. They themselves
were very conscious of their own lack of qualification
for their calling, and very often other people had the
same kind of thought about them - that they could do
better, that they were not doing what was expected of
them and in the way in which they should do it. But God
sovereignly chose them, in His own wisdom, and stood by
them, and proved that this was of Himself.
A
Vessel Marked by Vision and Passion
But such a vessel, be it
personal or be it collective, has always been in
possession of God's vision. Such an instrument had seen
the Lord, seen the mind of God, seen the purpose of God,
become captured and captivated by that thing which God
had purposed from eternity, and seen it in very much
greater fullness than others: not only seeing, being in
principle a 'seer' of the mind and will and purpose of
God, but also being mastered by the passion of God for
it, brought into what we have earlier in these
meditations called the travail of God unto His end. These
are major factors in all Divine movements. Every fresh
step that God has taken has been marked by these two
things. Let it be recognized, because it explains so
much.
The
Peculiar Treatment of the Vessel
Then this vessel, that
has seen the purpose of God - this calling, this
"great work" embodied in any present movement
of God - has its own very peculiar history under God's
hand. It is something to take very careful note of, that
God deals with such an instrument as He deals with no
other. He deals with that instrument - again I say, it
may be personal or it may be a collective body, a company
- God deals with that instrument called for this specific
end of His in a peculiar, a strange way. He deals with it
differently from all His dealings with other people and
other things; it is never safe for any called into the
full purpose of God to judge the dealings of God with
them alongside of His dealings with other people. That
will always be dangerous. His ways with such a work and
such an instrument are His own peculiar ways, and
therefore vessels for this purpose, instruments to this
end, have their own peculiar perils. They become involved
in peculiar conflict, strange pressure, strange
happenings, strange ways of God. God is dealing with them
in relation to specific purposes.
Now, the book of
Nehemiah, with which we have been occupied, the last book
of Old Testament history, is an inspiring and instructive
representation of all that we have just said. We have
said that the natural divisions of that book are in
relation, firstly to the wall, the rebuilding of the wall
of Jerusalem, secondly to the work and the workers, and
thirdly to the involved warfare. We have spent most of
our time so far with the wall. Let me quickly go over
that ground again, perhaps in a slightly different way
from the way we have so far taken.
The
Wall of Jerusalem A Figure of Christ
What is the wall? The
wall of Jerusalem is a figure of Christ - first of all in
the sight of Heaven, in the light of Heaven, in the eyes
of Heaven; how Christ is from Heaven's standpoint. That
is always the starting-point of any appraisal or
judgment. The wall is also a figure of Christ as
presented to the world, and then as presented to the
kingdom of Satan, the hostile forces. It is Christ in
those three outward senses - toward Heaven, toward the
world, toward the forces of evil. They are all very
interested in this wall. You can see that in the book of
Nehemiah.
Heaven is very
interested in this wall. That is where we begin. God
acts, and it is a grand thing when the wall is finished.
And all those hostile forces were so angry that Nehemiah
was able to say - and they were compelled to admit - that
this work was of God. God was interested, Heaven was
interested; it was something in the light of Heaven.
Then, as to the world, the wall had its own testimony.
its own declaration; we will not stop with that for the
moment. So far as the kingdom of Satan was concerned, it
is very clear that that kingdom was intensely interested.
We shall probably occupy ourselves later almost entirely
with that aspect, when we come to the warfare.
But then there was a
fourth aspect, namely, what the wall means to the Lord's
own people: in other words, what Christ means to the
people of God as a great, inclusive, defensive
stronghold, and in the glorious impartation of His
excellences and perfections to His own people. The last
mention of walls in the Bible is of a wall of
magnificence, a wall of gems. It is the perfections, the
glories, of Christ, and the people of God in the good
thereof before God.
So, then, the wall is a
figure of Christ in this fourfold aspect.
Going back, you remember
that Abraham, or Abram, as he was then, was separated
from Babylon and Chaldea and all that that meant, and we
are told that he 'looked for the city which had the
foundations' (Heb. 11:10) - the type of that heavenly
city, that new Jerusalem, which eventually, in its
completion, will 'come down out of heaven from God,
having the glory of God' (Rev. 21:2). Abraham's vision of
a city was the type of that heavenly Jerusalem. These two
cities, Babylon and Jerusalem, have always been in
conflict. When the Lord's people declined from His
glorious conceptions and intentions concerning Jerusalem,
the only alternative for them was Babylon - the false
thing from which God had called them out in their very
father, Abraham. They were going back into that from
which they had been separated in Abraham. As we have
pointed out, the Lord let them have a taste of that, and
for many of them the taste was too much. They were glad
to get back to Jerusalem at any cost, however Jerusalem
might be at the time.
Now, when the Lord Jesus
came, He did two things. He repudiated the world, as
represented by Babylon, the false kingdom, and He
repudiated the earthly Jerusalem, because it no longer
expressed the Divine thought; and He gathered into
Himself all those Divine thoughts as to what the city was
meant to be. He not only personally took the place of the
temple, but He took the place of Jerusalem, in a
spiritual way. He was and is the embodiment of all God's
thoughts about this city, as encompassed and delineated
by the wall. So that if we enquire into what this wall
means and what this city means, we shall not be merely
studying a theme, or some object; we shall be called to
contemplate the Lord Jesus.
It is very important
that we should forget our illustrations sometimes, get
behind our types and our figures, and look straight at
that which they represent - shall I say, straight at Him
whom they represent. A critic of Francis Thompson, the
poet who wrote The Hound of Heaven, said that you
could not see his landscape for his churning sea of
metaphor. And sometimes our typology veils, hides,
obscures, that which is typified. I hope that when we
speak of the wall and of Nehemiah we are not going to
fall into that snare, but that our eyes will all the time
be seeing through Nehemiah, through the wall, to Him who
is the One really in view.
The
Correspondence Between Nehemiah and the Book of the Acts
Well, we have to move on
still further, because God did recover His testimony in
fullness on the day of Pentecost. It is helpful to see
how there is a correspondence between the book of
Nehemiah and the book of the Acts of the Apostles. The
testimony is raised again in fullness; the testimony of
the Lord, "the testimony of Jesus", came into
completeness and fullness on the day of Pentecost, and
all the features of the book of Nehemiah are found in the
book of the Acts, especially in the first chapters. We
shall look at that more closely in a moment. I mention it
because it may be helpful to you, in reading the book of
Nehemiah, not just to read it as a book of history, or
even as the last historical book of the Old Testament,
but to read it with the book of the Acts before you all
the time, and just see how these two books correspond all
the way through.
But what I want to say
here, before going further with that, is this: that,
although the Lord, on the day of Pentecost, recovered His
testimony in greater fullness than ever before (except
for His original intention, which was in His view before
all things), it was not very long before the
counter-action set in again, the decline. Before we are
through our New Testament we are beginning to see gaps in
the wall, weaknesses in the testimony. We can indeed go
much further than that, for when we read the first letter
to the Corinthians, and see all the rubbish there, we
would say that the testimony seems to have been almost
completely destroyed. What rubbish is revealed in that
first letter to the Corinthians! What a state of wreckage
and breakdown! And when we come to the end of the New
Testament letters and take up the book of the Revelation,
with its messages to the seven churches in Asia, we have
undoubtedly a yet further picture of a broken wall: the
testimony is disrupted again, there is nothing whole.
"I have found no works of thine fulfilled"
(Rev. 3:2). The testimony is broken, there are big gaps
in it, and that is its state as the New Testament closes.
Since then, not once nor
twice, but many times, God has acted again to bring back
bit by bit His original purpose and testimony. I am not
going through the history of those past centuries. You
meet the testimony in various forms, but you know that
God has not given it up. God has not abandoned it; God
has come back, and He has come back again, seeking to
recover now this, now that, now something else; ever
moving towards the original fullness, to have it in
completeness. Thank God that today there is very much
more of His testimony than there was in the Dark Ages.
Today many of the great things of the New Testament are
established in the Church. They are great factors. It is
not necessary for me to mention them, but God has moved
on steadily with His remnants, ever bringing something
back.
The point with which we
are concerned is this. Is He not at this very time in
need of further recovery, and giving Himself to it? and
might it be, in His sovereignty and in His grace, that we
are related to the present movement of God in recovering
the wall in fullness and in completeness? It may not be
ours to build it, it may not be given to us to make it
full; but it may be our calling to add something to do
something toward this matter of finishing the testimony
of Jesus; and if this time corresponds to the book and
work of Nehemiah, that is, the end of the dispensation,
we may feel that we are in the last stages and the last
phases of the testimony of Jesus. We are, indeed, not
without some reason for thinking that that is so.
Now let us come back and
look more closely at this matter of the correspondence
between Nehemiah and the book of the Acts, for we shall
now be engaged not so much with the wall as with the work
and the workers.
A
Movement From Heaven
In the first place, as
you take up both of these books, Nehemiah and Acts, you
become aware of the fact that there is a movement from
Heaven, that the brooding, all-pervading Spirit of God is
on the move. In the book of Nehemiah, it has commenced
there in Babylon. The Spirit of God has started to move.
First of all, He stirs up the spirit of Cyrus king of
Persia to make that facilitating decree and provision.
There is a movement from Heaven. And then it has moved
into the heart of this man Nehemiah, and has created this
deep concern and unrest, this discontent with things as
they are. The Spirit of God is on the move. And then, by
the facilitation, Nehemiah comes to Jerusalem, and the
spirit that is in him, that urge that is in him, spreads
- first to some brethren and then, with very few
exceptions, to all the people. It is said of some that
they "put not their necks to the work" (Neh.
3:5), but they are the exceptions. The Spirit is on the
move, creating first of all this dissatisfaction with
things as they are, this unrest about the situation, this
sense that things ought to be different. It is not, as I
have said earlier, just a spirit of grumbling and of
criticism; it is a work of the Spirit. It is positive,
not negative; it is constructive in its object and not
destructive. The Spirit of God is on the move again, as
He was in the first earthly creation, brooding and moving
to bring order out of chaos. Here it is again in the
beginning of this book of Nehemiah.
You pass to the book of
the Acts, and you know only too well that Heaven is on
the move, the Spirit is on the move. Something is
happening: the long night seems to be passing, streaks of
light are shooting across the horizon, there is a sense
of awakening and movement; and on that great day the
thing breaks - Heaven is cleft, the Spirit descends, and
the Spirit's movement begins. It begins with a nucleus,
but then through the nucleus the Spirit moves out and
lays hold of others and brings them into the one vision
and the one passion of the heart of God. In Nehemiah we
have it put this way: "for the people had a mind to
work" (Neh. 4:6). But now look at the book of the
Acts and see these very people! That is the only way in
which you can describe those early chapters: "the
people had a mind to work".
The
Governing Motive of the Full Testimony of the Lord
The purpose - the full,
complete testimony of the Lord - is common to Nehemiah
and to the book of the Acts. We could dwell with that,
but I think it is only too obvious, from those early
chapters, that those early proclamations, that early
preaching of the Church and the apostles and the
evangelists, was a testimony to the absolute supremacy,
fullness, completeness, sufficiency and finality of
Christ. It was to that, in figure and type, that Nehemiah
and the people were committed in their day.
But let this thing take
hold of us. Let us not be thinking back centuries,
but bring this right into our own present. Are we people
with a mind that there shall be a full, unlimited and
unbroken testimony of the Lord - people dominated by
God's purpose and moved with God's passion? Are we?
The
Government of Christ as Lord
Now let us look at some
of the factors involved. Firstly, it is a very impressive
thing how everybody submitted to Nehemiah. That is saying
more than you realize unless you have read very carefully
the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. If you read the book of
Ezra, you will find that there were a good many
recalcitrant people and rulers and priests, who had their
own mind about things and their own will and their own
way. They were just not going to have Ezra, and his
ideas. There is a good deal of the personal and the
selfish coming out and asserting itself. But when you
come to Nehemiah, that is all gone. When this man comes
in, everybody seems to give him his place, everybody
seems to recognize that he is the man: they all do as
they are told, they fall in - he can do what he likes
with them. You see, some of these rulers have bought the
people's property and land: they have enriched themselves
at the expense of the people, and the poor people are in
a grievous state because of them. And Nehemiah says, Now
then, you give it all back, every bit of it; you refund
every penny!' You put that suggestion to any man of the
world and see what you get! But these people do it: it
seems that it does not matter what Nehemiah requires or
demands - they do it.
Come over to the book of
Acts. Here all recognize that Jesus is Lord and subject
themselves to Him. There is only just the one rebellious
element, in Ananias and Sapphira; but it did not pay them
to break the regime of Christ's lordship - it broke them.
But for the rest, everything went - properties, lands,
money, themselves, everything - all came into wonderful
subjection to the Lord Jesus; and you will never get
anywhere with His full testimony until He takes
pre-eminence and precedence over all life and all that
life contains.
There is a corresponding
factor which is perfectly clear. The people, the priests,
the rulers, all gave Nehemiah the place of headship. In
this other movement of God, everybody gave Jesus Christ
His place as Head. He was indeed not only preached as
Lord, but was yielded to as Lord with everything.
A
Master Passion For the Testimony
And then another thing
common to these two books is how the testimony mastered
everything and everybody. It was not only Nehemiah, but
the thing for which Nehemiah stood. This is seen in two
respects.
Firstly, the wall: how
the wall became the dominating object and interest of
everybody. If the wall is a type or figure of the
testimony of the Lord Jesus, it just means that the
testimony of the Lord Jesus in fullness became the
master-concern of everybody. They had nothing else, for
the time being, for which to live, but His testimony. The
wall overshadowed everything and everybody. And so it was
in the first days of this dispensation. The testimony of
Jesus so overshadowed everything else that they lived for
its furtherance. They just lived and thought and planned
and dreamed of the furtherance of this testimony.
The
Voice of the Spirit
But then you notice that
there was another factor in Nehemiah. It was the trumpet.
The man who had the trumpet was stationed by Nehemiah,
and you remember the words: "In what place soever ye
hear the sound of the trumpet. resort ye thither unto
us" (Neh. 4:20). The trumpet was in charge. What is
the trumpet? I think that the trumpets of the Old
Testament are always types of the voice of the Holy
Spirit; in other words, "what the Spirit saith unto
the churches". It was by the sound of the trumpet
that Israel moved through the wilderness, whenever they
were to move, the trumpet sounded. In figure, they moved
by and in the Spirit, under the government of the Spirit.
That is, of course, too
obvious in the book of the Acts - the government of the
voice of the Spirit. We cannot too strongly stress that.
Perhaps I am in peril of trying to crowd too much in,
without giving due consideration to every point. But do
give heed to this. I am saying a very terrible thing now,
but I am perfectly aware of what I am saying. I have
tested it well over a wide area of this world. There
are very few Christians indeed who know the meaning of
life in the Spirit. Multitudes know what life in the
Christian soul is, with all its emotions, its feelings,
its impulses. To know "what the Spirit saith",
to know life in the Spirit, to be guided by the Spirit,
to be checked up by the Spirit, for the Spirit within
them to say 'No' or 'Yes' - they know very little about
it; very few know anything about that. They are either
guided by tradition, how it has always been done; or they
are guided by some set and fixed system of truth or
doctrine, by what is 'the done thing'; or they are guided
by the present crystallized, organized form of
Christianity, which is so rigid and established that
nothing else can be allowed to have any place: if they
were to deviate one hairsbreadth from the way it is done
in 'Christianity', they would be wrong - they would be
heretics. They are governed and guided like that. They do
not know life in the Spirit.
I am not saying that
life in the Spirit is a contradiction of truth, or of the
Word of God, or of anything that is vital to God, but I
am saying there is something more than just a set
traditional system. There is such a thing as being led of
the Spirit of God, and if the book of the Acts says
anything, it says this, that you are not allowed to
settle down into an immutable, irrevocable position,
which is fixed and final.
That is one of the great
movements in the book of the Acts. The Apostles were all
disposed to make Jerusalem the 'headquarters' of
Christianity. Jerusalem was going to be the centre of
everything for the world, and so the thing was being
built up and consolidated in Jerusalem. The Holy Ghost
stepped in and said, 'No - headquarters are in Heaven,
not down on this earth at all', and just rooted them out,
drove them out from Jerusalem. They were scattered abroad
everywhere. The Apostles remained there to stand by
something for the Lord, but it was no longer
headquarters, although they fought to have it as
headquarters. For quite a time they tried to rule
everything from Jerusalem, but the Holy Ghost was against
them. This great world work was never afterward centred
in Jerusalem.
No: the Holy Spirit is a
great 'decentralizing' factor when men try to establish
something on this earth. Get into the Spirit, and you do
not know what is going to happen next or where you will
be next. You cannot say, 'I am going to be here, or
there.' The Holy Spirit has His own way: He "bloweth
where he listeth" (John 3:8). That is the great
truth here. Life in the Spirit is like that. You can
never say, 'Well, I am going to be in such-and-such a
place for so many years, and then I will change my
location.' You may be altogether surprised by what the
Lord will do. Even the most spiritual men in the New
Testament were not given their programme in advance. They
were only allowed to take their course so far, and then
they were interrupted by the Holy Spirit. When they
essayed or sought, the Holy Spirit suffered them not.
These men are under the dominion of the Holy Spirit. He
has things in hand; headquarters are in Heaven.
That is how it was,
then: all things under the government of the trumpet, the
voice of the Spirit.
The
Corporate Relatedness of all in the Testimony
Then, further, all other
things were brought into line with and made subject to
this one thing - the testimony. I am impressed - as I
think, if you read the book of Nehemiah again carefully,
you will be impressed - with this wonderful movement.
There were all the trades, all the callings, all the
professions and all the positions. There were priests and
there were goldsmiths and there were apothecaries and
there were rulers; and it speaks of a man and his
daughters, who all became stonemasons! The priest did not
say, 'Oh, it is beneath my dignity to take a trowel and
mortar.' The goldsmith did not say, 'I shall spoil my
hands for my fine work with gold if I go and do
stone-heaving.' The rulers did not say, 'Well, you ought
to give me a foreman's job - I can stand by and see that
it is done properly; to go down and do it myself!' Not
one of them. Everyone - the priests (I was impressed with
the fact that a dignitary built the Dung Gate!),
goldsmiths, apothecaries, rulers, men and their daughters
- all came into this work. Everything, position,
vocation, qualification, was subjected to the one
interest - the testimony.
I expect, when the wall
was finished, they went back to their jobs; I hope they
did. If the Lord does not fill your hands continually
with that full ministry in His testimony that demands
your separation for the time being, do not think that you
do something wrong if you go back to your job. You still
remain an apothecary, or a goldsmith, or whatever you may
be. Paul remained a tentmaker to the end; you have no
point noted in the record of his life at which he gave up
making tents. He used it, apparently, alongside of the
testimony, and for the testimony, all the way through. Be
clear about this. Do not get that false idea about
'full-time ministry'. Be what you are. Use it for the
Lord, but make it subject to the dominating interest of
the Lord's testimony. That is what happened here.
In the Acts, it seems to
have been like that. Although all their trades and their
positions are not detailed, you have quite a considerable
mention of these things in the letters of Paul, as to who
people were, and what people were, and so on. But they
were all gathered in, so to speak, within the 'wall':
they all governed by the testimony, and everything is
made to serve the testimony. No one says, 'No, I am
superior, it is beneath my dignity', or, 'That is not my
calling - I am called for something else.' Everybody is
seeing that, no matter what they are or what their
qualifications are in this world, the thing that matters
more than anything else is this testimony.
In Nehemiah 3, you see
coming out this beautiful feature, the corporate
relatedness of all in the testimony. You notice the
little phrase, so constantly recurring through that
chapter - "next unto him", "next unto
him", "next unto him". Now that is just
the repeated statement of a fact, but you are always
allowed to use your imagination when you are reading the
Bible, and it will always be a good thing if you do. We
have the bare fact stated, but I venture to suggest that
there was probably very much spiritual history behind
those facts, the history of many a personal victory. 'I
do not like working alongside of him - put me next to
someone more pleasant, someone I could get on with
better!' The fact is just stated - "next unto
him", "next unto him". For all we know, in
the natural they may have been people who could never get
on together at all, never work together. But they work on
in this corporate relatedness, and this surely speaks of
the great victory within them which the wall was to
represent when it was finished.
For it was a great
victory when that wall was finished. It was a great
victory over all personal interests, over natural
dispositions, likes and dislikes. What a victory it was
in every realm! That wall was the testimony to victories
in the personal life, victories in relationships -
"next unto him" and "next unto him"
and "next unto him". And it may be, if you
allow your imagination to go, that you would find real
contradictions in the positions and qualifications and
callings of these people who were next to one another. I
will not say what I could say there, as to who might be
alongside of the other, but looked at from the world it
was a glorious mix-up: there was nothing that tallied -
priests and goldsmiths and apothecaries and so on, nobles
and commoners, all working together alongside of one
another. It was no mix-up at all. It was a glorious
harmony, because of the victory in their own hearts. What
a grand testimony!
Come to your New
Testament. How true that was in those first days in the
first chapters of the Acts! Personal interests set aside;
people of different positions, different qualifications,
different outlooks on life, different constitutions and
temperaments, were all brought together. Is not that band
of twelve men, the nucleus, a glorious and marvelous
proof of a mighty victory inside? When you think of what
they were naturally, and how they had been before - how
they had quarrelled with one another, argued with one
another, disputed with one another as to who should be
first, and so on - and yet now they stand together; they
are as one man. Something has happened, there has been a
victory inside, to make this "next unto him"
relationship true. When the Apostle Paul brings before us
the fullness of God's thought as to His Church, he
presents that relationship so beautifully in his picture
of the Body of Christ, with the relatedness and
inter-relatedness of its members. Every part is in the
place appointed by the Lord, and working in relation to
every other part. Oh, for this victory in the Lord's
people! This will be a testimony - no jealousies, no
rivalries, no criticisms, no malice, no personal
considerations or feelings; nothing of this kind at all.
The Lord's interests come first. The testimony to the
Lord Jesus rules all these things out.
Let us ask the Lord to
give us a mind like this, to come under this pervading
influence of the Holy Spirit, this passion of God, for
such a testimony. And let us take the practical aspects
of it very seriously to heart. It means all that we have
been saying. Again I appeal to you to get away from the
types, the figures, the illustrations, to the practical
spiritual realities. We are called, in the grace of God,
at least to add something to that which has been the
Lord's concern through the ages - the bringing of the
testimony nearer completion; but in every age the same
principles are involved, the same features must
characterize - all these things must be true.