(a) Personal Interests
Next
we must consider Zion, and the testimony of Zion, in relation to
the realm of Christian profession and tradition - that realm in
which, with the name of Christian or of Christ, the natural soul
has its kingdom. It is a terrible thing to say, but it is true,
that right there, with the Christian title, there is that which
is after all only the kingdom of the soul of man, the natural
life. You find - we say it with grief - that there is
correspondence, in principle, even there in the realm of
Christian profession, to all that you have in the world. All the
same elements are active, commercially and socially. Whence come
jealousies, rivalries, ambitions, personal interests? You find
them all rife and in riot in a certain realm called Christian.
They do not come from God, they do not come from the Spirit of
God, they do not come from heaven.
Yes,
there are rivalries in Christianity, in Christian work, in
Christian interests; jealousies for Christian things; personal
interests to bring men into position, into reputation, into
influence. You touch them, and you meet something - a kickback.
Christianity is a sphere of many selfish, natural, personal
ambitions. Men sport themselves in the realm of Christianity, to
get advancement, to gratify their own natural desires. One
grieves to say that, but it is a fact. We know it so well. That
is one aspect of the realm of Christian profession. The 'eyes as
a flame of fire' see through it; they know all about it.
(b) Zeal Without Knowledge
Another
aspect is that it is a realm of 'zeal without knowledge', and
that is a terrible realm, a terrible kind of thing. "Zeal...
but not according to knowledge" (Rom. 10:2): a kind of
shadow land where men are seen "as trees walking" -
that is, there is something indistinct in spiritual apprehension,
there is no power or capacity or faculty for discriminating
between what is spiritual Christianity and what is 'soulical'
Christianity; things are all mixed up and confused. In so much
that is going on, you cannot draw even a thin line between man's
soul and its ambitions and its activities and its heats, and what
is really purely of the Spirit of God. It is all so mixed up;
there seems to be no ability to discriminate or discern between
the two. Therefore many innocent people are carried away by the
semblance of things, thinking that it is something quite good and
quite right. But everything is indistinct, confused, with very
limited revelation.
This
was the kind of thing with which Paul had to do in Judaism: a
confusion of the old covenant with the new, an attempt to mix
them up and make a Jewish Christianity, making one thing of
Judaism and Christianity; Judaizing Christianity and
Christianizing Judaism, leaving no gap between and no difference.
Paul was up against that. No, these two things belong to two
different realms and kingdoms altogether. One belongs to the
realm of the soul, and the other belongs to the realm of the
Spirit, and there is a cleavage to be made between these, a
discrimination, a cutting through.
Much
is being fought for that is believed to be the truth - and yet
after all it is only a legalistic interpretation of the truth.
There is so much failure and so much inability to grasp the
meaning of the truth. Need I point out that there is a vast
difference between the statement of a truth in Scripture, and
God's meaning in that statement? If you are not able to
discriminate between these two things, you will be in constant
confusion.
That
is just what we find. Here is the letter, but what did God mean
by that? If you cannot discriminate, you can take that letter to
support a thousand different opposing things; you can take any
bit of Scripture and use it to support something that is entirely
in conflict with another thing based upon the same Scripture. It
needs the Holy Spirit's enlightenment, interpretation, witness
and government, to bring us to the truth of the Word.
Now,
God has a controversy with that sort of thing. For His true
testimony, He will have a controversy with what is called
Christianity as surely as He had with Judaism. He will indeed,
and very likely it will rage in greater intensity in that realm
than in any other. I cannot follow that further, but this is a
matter about which the Lord has very real concern. Zion
represents, amongst all the other things which it represents, the
transparent light of heaven. Zion's light - "thy light is
come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee" (Is.
60:1) - is absolute transparency, clear seeing of issues, clear
discrimination. That is what Paul meant when he spoke about
discerning the things that differ (Phil. 1:10). As you know, he
was speaking about, not the wrong and the right, but the good and
the best. Zion represents the best; God will not be satisfied
with anything less than His full and ultimate testimony.
(3) The Controversy as to the
Ministry of Zion
Now
we come to the third application or realm of the controversy -
that as to the ministry of Zion. Of course, this includes the two
that we have already considered - the conflict with the nations,
and the conflict with tradition and formal Christianity - but
when it comes to the ministry of Zion it becomes very much more
inward. This controversy rests upon some things that we may seek
to understand. The ministry of Zion is a greatly disputed thing.
The ministry of Zion is something around which the battle circles
more hotly, perhaps, than it does around any other issue. This
whole matter of ministry in relation to God's full purpose - what
a battle! Paul knew something about this. How he besought
believers that they would pray earnestly that he might be given
utterance to open his mouth to speak the mystery (Eph. 6:19),
that a door might be opened to him to speak the mystery (Col. 4:3).
This is not something about which you can get up an address, and
go out willy-nilly and begin to give it out. If it is rightly
constituted, it is fraught with the most terrific conflict. This
ministry, if it is the true ministry of Zion, first of all rests
upon, and is constituted by, the sovereign apprehending of a
vessel for it.
(a) Sovereign Apprehension
Of
course, that is so true of the historical Zion, God's sovereign
choosing of Zion. It is there in the Scripture declared and made
clear very positively. It was a sovereign act of God that chose
Zion. But Zion is a vessel, a symbolic vessel; and a vessel for
this specific ministry - the fulness of the significance of
Christ and His work and His place in God's universe - is
something sovereignly apprehended by God, raised up by God. When
I say 'sovereignly', I mean that there is no explanation for it
other than that this is of God. You cannot account for it in any
way whatever but by the Lord. Touch it, you meet the Lord. Be
amongst it, you meet the Lord. Somehow or other, the Lord is
responsible for this. Whether it be collective or individual, it
is something sovereignly raised up by God.
You
have no choice in this matter of ministry. You cannot do this by
choice, you cannot aspire to it, you cannot walk into it, you
cannot put your hand upon it. You cannot just 'take up' this
ministry. Oh, it is such a sifting and discriminating thing. Many
people like it; they like the ideas, and they think they are
going to propagate those ideas, to take up this thing and make it
theirs; but it just does not do. Either they get into confusion
or other people do. Something happens that it does not work out.
You have a caricature, you have a contradiction, you have the
absence of the vital thing. It is something that you cannot, just
like that, take up at your own will. If God Himself has not
apprehended you for that purpose - He may have apprehended you
for something else - then it is no use; keep out of it. It is
something out of the sovereignty of God.
How
many things that touches! It amounts to this, that the question
of such a testimony is a matter of life and death with us;
nothing less of an issue than that. It is not something we can
take up and drop. It is not something that we can come into, and
then not like it, and be offended and draw out. It is a matter of
life and death: I am there because my very life is found in my
being there, and it would be committing spiritual suicide for me
to drop out. That is very utter. I am not saying that God's
sovereignty operates only in this ministry or that ministry of
utter fulness of Christ. It operates in other ways. But I am
saying, as to the testimony of Zion: first of all, it is
something right out of the sovereignty of God, and man has no
place in it other than that of faith and obedience. Man has no
proprietary interest in this, no possessive place, no controlling
place in this. It is the Lord, wholly, utterly the Lord, and if
it should cease to be that, everything goes. Man just cannot
carry that on. He can carry on the framework, but he cannot carry
that ministry on. He can still have the tabernacle in Shiloh, but
the glory has departed. It is the Lord. That is a very solemn,
very searching word.
This
ministry of Zion is constituted, then, by a sovereign
apprehending of God.
(b) God's Sovereign Government
Behind the Vessel's History
Then,
in the second place, there is a sovereign government of God
behind the history of the vessel. Of course, that needs
explaining. It can be illustrated. When the Apostle Paul said,
'It pleased God, who separated me from my birth, to reveal his
Son in me' (Gal. 1:15,16), he touched this very point.
'From my birth'. 'My birth, was
into a Jewish family, my birth was utterly, one hundred percent
Jewish; but right there, while I was like that, in a most
complete and utter Jewish setting - birth, blood, training,
education; while all that heat of antagonism to Christ was still
in my blood, although it had not come out until it was provoked;
while my hatred of the Gentiles, whom I called the 'dogs', was in
my constitution - God had already separated me to be the
messenger of Christ to those very Gentiles, to have all that heat
in my blood against His Son quenched - or rather, to have a new
fire kindled in love for that Son'.
The
point is this, that right behind that man's earthly history was
the sovereignty of God, foreseeing him, foreknowing him,
forechoosing him, and arranging everything in line with his
ultimate calling and the purpose of his life. It is difficult to
believe that it is like that, and yet when God has a vessel for a
purpose in view, it is no afterthought. It does not just arise,
at some point in time. God has foreseen it, known all about it,
and worked in relation to it, and its very birth and environment
are under His sovereignty to some good purpose in relation to
ultimate meaning. We may have to live a long time before we
discover what that is.
Let
me put it this way. We have to get right into line with God's
purpose and God's thought, before we are able to see that our
very birth and constitution and environment have had a definite
relationship to the thing to which we are called. If you cannot
understand and grasp that, do not worry about it; but it is a
fact. It is the sovereignty of God, lying behind our earthly
experience and history, in relation to purpose, that constitutes
this vessel.
(c) A Deep Work in the Vessel
And
then, in the third place, this ministry of Zion is constituted by
a deep and drastic work in the vessel. This is not something that
we can take up apart from something that has been done in us -
that God is doing in us: the undoing of us, the taking of us to
pieces, the stripping of us, the emptying of us, the bringing of
us to zero and starting from there all over again with us. That
is the sort of thing that is connected with Zion and Zion's
ministry.
Do
not make any mistake about it. This ministry, the ministry of
which we are speaking, the ministry of Zion, is something utterly
different in its nature and its realm from all other ministries.
It is possible to look on and admire. It is possible to walk in
and out, or sit down inside, and to appreciate the truths and
agree with the ideas, and to recognise something of the values,
and to desire the benefits, and to seek to participate. It is
possible that all that may be so - and then that there should be
a great dividing 'but'. With all the agreement and admiration and
recognition and desire, there may yet be lacking the constitution
of Zion. The constitution of Zion is - what? That God has broken
clean through all natural faculties and abilities for
understanding, and, by revelation, has planted right deep down in
the centre of the being a knowledge of a spiritual kind which is
different from natural knowledge. It is not taking up the
phraseology and the ideas, and all that sort of thing, and
appreciating and valuing and agreeing, and then going and
repeating. It is something that has been done inside, and the
thing has come by revelation of the Holy Ghost.
That
is the ministry of Zion; and I say - that discriminates, that
divides. And it is because things are like that that you have so
much conflict. You find the conflict in the very realm of that
ministry. It arises there. It arises in the realm where people,
while they agree, they accept and they repeat and they look and
they want, and so on, yet they are not constituted. Violent
conflict arises in that realm. If you only take the matter of
ministry itself - I mean public ministry - you find it is the
most controversial point in all Christianity. More trouble has
arisen over platform ministry than over anything else. But in
Zion no one has a right to minister, no one has a qualification
for ministry, who cannot quite easily sit back and do no ministry
at all if the Lord wants it. It ought to be just as easy for a
minister of Zion to take a back seat, and wait for the Lord and
watch for the Lord, as it is for the natural soul to want to be
on that platform.
What
I am saying may have application to a very limited company, but I
focus upon this matter of ministry, the ministry of Zion. It is
of a quality, of a kind, of a constitution that is not studied,
that is not the result of going to books and extracting the
truths, of observing and hearing, and then reproducing. It is
something inwrought. But oh, how the devil rages over a ministry
of that kind - because it is going to do something, it is going
to touch God's ultimate purpose, and if he can he will destroy it
and destroy the vessels of it. He will stop at nothing to bring
an end to that kind of ministry. It is true. Here the "controversy
of Zion" rages. It rages over the ministry of Zion.
You
see, the whole point of the controversy and the conflict is its
reality, its essence, its essential value; the very life of it,
the very power of it, the very distinctiveness of it: for if
Satan focuses upon one aspect of such a testimony more than
another, it is to destroy its distinctiveness, in some way to get
it drawn out into a generalisation, conform it to a recognised
system, take away that distinguishing definiteness; and it is a
terrific battle all the way along to keep the testimony clear,
distinct, unmixed. You may not know all that I am saying, but it
is quite true. It is something in a different realm from mere
mental apprehension. You can have the same truths by study, but
there is a difference between that and having them by revelation
of the Holy Ghost.
(d) Spiritual Discernment
I
close upon what I regard as one of the most important factors in
the testimony of Zion, and that is spiritual discernment. This is
the greatest gift that God gives to His Church. It is impossible
to overrate the value of people of spiritual discernment, who see
the differences, the fine differences; who 'register'; who read
right through the semblance to the reality; who sense, perhaps -
'Yes, that is all according to the book, but there is something
lacking'; or, on the other hand - 'Ah, they have not got that by
reading, by studying; they have come to that through something
the Lord has done in them.' That capacity for discernment is of
the greatest value to such a testimony. Oh, for more men and
women of that discernment, able to discriminate - not to
criticize by their discrimination, not using their discernment in
order to denounce, but able to guide and help because they know
the Lord has done something. They have not built up a standard
from which they judge, but God has done something in them, so
that they recognise where God has done something in others, and
at the same time register a sense of hurt and grief where they
only meet with an imitation.
The
Lord give us such understanding!