Reading: 1 Corinthians
1:18-31; 2:1-5.
1 Cor. 1:18: “The Word of
the Cross... is the power of God.”
1 Cor. 1:23: “We preach
Christ crucified... unto them that are called... Christ the power
of God.”
1 Cor. 2:2: “I determined
to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”
“The Word of the cross,” not as in the A.V. “The
preaching of the cross,” that is quite an unfortunate translation, for here it is the
Logos of the Cross; the same word and title as given to the Lord
Jesus in the beginning of the Gospel of John, “In the
beginning was the Word” (the Logos). And you will have
noticed from the context and the other passages that we have
read, what is in view, it is Christ crucified, Jesus Christ and
Him crucified. It is not a doctrine, a teaching, it is a Person,
and that Person crucified is the power of God and the wisdom of
God. The Word of the Cross. That is comprehensive and includes a
very great deal, but there is one specific emphasis in my own
heart for this particular hour in relation to the times in which
we are living.
It is said in the Word that
“in the last days perilous times shall come,” and I
think most of us, certainly those who have spiritual perception,
will agree that these are very perilous times. Perilous times
spiritually, perilous times for the people of God, and a very
special word from the Lord seems to be necessary for His own
people in these times to secure them, to establish them, to hold
them, to make them safe, and bring them into a place where they
are established, because the peculiar nature of the peril of
these days is that of deception, delusion. What is delusion?
Well, it is to lead from truth into error. It is to mislead the
mind or the judgment, to beguile, to lead astray, to cheat, to
frustrate, to disappoint, to impose upon; something that is
not the truth; and these are days peculiarly marked by that peril.
There is a sense in which we may say that the gospel itself has
as one of its main features, the deliverance of man from
deception. Of course, it is delivering them into the truth, into
the light, but in a very real way it is for their deliverance
from deception, and we shall see, I trust, in a little while how true that
is. I feel, beloved, that the Lord has a very great need of a
ministry by which His own people will be safeguarded in a day
when deception and delusion is so widespread, many-sided,
persistent, and so extremely subtle. The Lord surely would serve
His Body by such a ministry, and so it may be that we gathered
here are in line with that desire of His, both to safeguard us,
make us sure, put us in a safe position by light, and through us
minister to others who are in peril of making shipwreck of their
faith and being led astray by what is abroad today as the
imitation of the truth.
Now that would lead me just at this point to move right on to the end, to see exactly what happens at the end of the
dispensation. We find at the end that a great angel descends
having a great chain and he lays hold of the dragon who is the
Devil, and Satan, the Deceiver, and casts him into the abyss that
he shall deceive the nations no more. There you have the titles
of the adversary: the Dragon, the Serpent, the Devil and Satan,
and the Deceiver, and his work of deceiving the nations. Now such
words occur more than once in the Book of the Revelation if you
care to look them up, almost the identical words occur on two
occasions. You have it in the 20th chapter, the other
occasion is in the 12th chapter where, the Man-child reaching
the throne, the Dragon is cast down and there is no more place
found for him in heaven, he is again designated Dragon, Serpent,
the Devil, Satan, the Deceiver.
We could gather a very great
deal of Scripture containing the very same thought and
expression, as to the universal activity of the Adversary as
being the work of deception and delusion, and the Lord Jesus
related that activity in a special and intensified form to the
end time. “Many shall come in My Name saying I am Christ
and shall deceive many.” “There shall arise false
Christs and false prophets and shall show great signs and
wonders so as to deceive, if it were possible, the very elect.”
“He doeth great signs, that he should even make fire come
down from heaven upon the earth in the sight of men, and he
deceiveth them that dwell upon the earth.”
Now these are marks of the end
time and it is but one strong emphasis and stress upon this, that
the end times (and we believe that we are in those times) are
going to be marked particularly by an intensified activity on the
part of the enemy along the line of deception, and deceptions are
deceptions. That is, they are with very great difficulty
detected, and require a very keen, clear insight and perception
to recognise that there is a deception there. This, of course, is, while true in a special
way at the end, true of all times. The chief peril of all ages
has been deception. Paul tells us that it was so. In a reference
to what happened at the beginning he said: “For the man was
not deceived, but the woman”; deception was the first weapon
of the enemy against God, and the first method of the enemy by
which he would secure his end, attain his object, accomplish his
purpose, and as the result of man’s complicity and sanction, or
failure to resist what he knew to be contrary to the express will
of God, the whole race has become a deceived race. The race is
deceived universally. Deception is not something now that is out
in the air, objective, apart from man; deception is now something
in man as a part of him. “The heart is deceitful above all
things, and desperately wicked.”
Beloved, deceitfulness was not a
constituent in the man that God made. Deceitfulness is something
that has come into the nature of man, a foreign something, and it
is in the race. It is in man, it is a part of his very nature.
God’s greatest opportunity is always with the honest in
heart, and God never stands a chance when there is not honesty of
heart. His beginnings are there. A contrite heart, an
honest heart, the open spirit, where there is no covering things
over; for that was the very first thing that happened when
deceitfulness found a lodgment in the race, man went to hide himself, and
deceitfulness is always that which is hiding something, keeping
something under cover, not transparent, clear, open before
heaven. God always demands absolute openness and honesty before
He begins negotiations, and God can always get on very rapidly when
He has an honest heart to deal with, and that life with an honest
heart will go ahead with God by leaps and bounds, and those who
will not be honest with God, meaning business whatever it costs,
will make no progress. (That is somewhat aside, we want to get to
the real main factor in all this.) We have said that deception is
a universal method of the Deceiver. It is universal, but it is
adapted to the special realm in which he may be active; that
is, his deceiving work is suited to those with whom he has to
deal, and there are, I think, mainly three realms.
Three
Realms of Deception
There is the realm of the
ungodly, there is the realm of the religious and there is the realm of the
spiritual. In every one of these realms the Deceiver works
projecting his deceptions, but he adapts his deceptions to suit
the realm.
We touch lightly upon the first
and the second in order to come to the third more specifically.
1. The Ungodly
The deceiving work among the ungodly, for “the
whole world lieth in the Wicked One”, and “the god of
this age hath blinded the minds of them that believe not”,
they are in the “kingdom of darkness”, they are utterly
deceived though they know it not. So utterly deceived
that this letter to the Corinthians in its earlier passages tells
us that in its very wisdom, at the very height of its
wisdom, it slew the Lord of Glory, it killed the Prince of Life, so
blind was it. Saul of Tarsus was an excellent specimen of the
wisdom of this world in setting his hand against the Lord, and
the Lord’s own, to hound them to death, and when the light came
and he was undeceived, how completely he saw the blindness in
which he had been; but the ungodly are even more deceived than
that. Many of them before they close their earthly course wake up
to the fact that they have been deceived, and you find in the end of
their life so frequently they realise that they have been out
full stretch in quest for something to make life complete, to
make it full, to satisfy themselves, and now, well, in some cases disaster
has overtaken them, calamity has befallen them and all that they
set their hearts upon has been lost, and they have nothing left of
time or ability or strength or any kind of resource to begin
again, and life has gone and now laughs back at them. Everything
was put out to reach an end which has eluded them, which they
have missed, and the only thing that they can honestly say is,
that they have been deceived. On the other hand many reach their
goal, accumulate wealth and possessions, position, influence,
power and still heart-hungry they end their lives.
Well, we have had many instances
of late. We have read of one who took his own life, not because
things had gone wrong, he had accumulated his wealth, he
turned his hand upon himself because he had nothing more to live
for, and if that is not deception what is? Oh, yes, beloved, the ungodly
are in the grip of a mighty deception and in the end the Deceiver
is going to laugh at them whether they succeed or whether they
fail in what they set their hands to in this life. In the end
they are going to discover that the thing for which they were
given a being has been missed and life has been just one
delusion. That is the meaning of the commission given to the
Apostle Paul. He had had his eyes opened and the Lord said to him
“Thou shalt stand before kings and rulers, and nations 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.”
Turning from the power of Satan unto God, from darkness to light,
is the result of having eyes opened; thus becoming disillusioned,
undeluded by having eyes opened. They are blind and the blindness
is the work of one who has got them in his grip. Kings, rulers
and people, yes, many of them repudiating any such suggestion
that they are blinded or deluded, but the Lord knows “to
open their eyes”. That is what we meant when we said that
the Gospel in a sense is peculiarly for delivering men from
deception, universally. So much for the
ungodly.
2. The Religious
A word about
the religious, for the same thing holds good here adapted by the
Deceiver to the realm in which he is working, the type of people
with whom he is dealing, the religious. Yes, religiously
deceived, to put it in another way, deceived by their very
religiousness, and that is a strong and a mighty delusion. There
is power in that delusion that seems so often to defy every kind
of attempt to deal with it. Deceived by
religiousness. What more can be expected than the recognition of
the fact of God and the giving to God of reverence,
acknowledgment, and recognition: of taking active interest in
things which relate to God, attending religious services, and
being very busy in religious activities and interests, and
finding your chief interest in religious things and the religious
realm? What more can be expected? What is the matter with that?
Be patient, bear with me if I say with very great emphasis: that
may be one colossal delusion. So often that very thing
obscures one fundamental thing, a true and living relationship
with God. “Ye must be born again”, and religion very
often obscures that issue. Oh, religion is no argument for
salvation. Religion can be found in the darkest places of the
earth. Universally there is religion; depraved and very low in
many places, but universally there is the consciousness of
standing in relationship to some supreme object of worship,
demanding worship; and then men's minds or imaginations get to
work to give some kind of expression to that consciousness, of
that supreme object of worship, and the imagination produces that
sometimes out of a tree, a stone, or in the heavenly bodies; somehow it is expressed, but it is the thing that is there,
behind all the forms of expression which is universal. All the
highly civilised forms of that brought into the realm of
Christendom are only the same thing developed. It does not say
that Christendom’s more intelligent, civilised, educated
interpretation of God, even though it gets its ideas from the
Bible, is salvation. It may be a mighty delusion and very often
is.
I have asked people if they have
been born again, and they have said “It is not necessary; I
have been confirmed.” Such may be an extreme case, and I do
not take it up for criticism but by way of illustration. You may
take on religion because you have got a religious temperament and
that does not mean that you are saved. The devil may be holding
you just as firmly, tightly, in the grip of an unsaved state by
your religion as he does the worldly by his pleasures. He does
not mind how he holds you. By the most aesthetic religious
activities, self-denials and such like, so long as he can keep
you from the main thing. Now one could pursue that for a long time, there is so much more, but it is merely indicated. It is the deception that we are getting at. There is a vast difference, beloved,
between vital union with God in Jesus Christ and religious
formalism, and as we said at the outset, there is a very great
need for a ministry by which deception, even amongst religious
people, shall be shattered and broken and the fact of an
essential, vital union with God by new birth shall be brought
home to religious people. Along that line the enemy is destroying
the whole testimony of the Church by packing it full of active,
energetic, unconverted people. That is where he is sapping the
strength of the Testimony of God.
3. The Spiritual
Now we come to the third,
the spiritual people, and we are now dealing with the truly born
anew children of God, the spiritual people. The enemy will adapt
his work of deception to this realm as cleverly and even more
cleverly and ingeniously than to any other realm, but he does not
give up the children of God as incapable of being deceived, for
it is here that we find delusion and deception in its finest, its
most acute forms. It is here that so often dear children of God
have been utterly led off into error by something which bore all
the semblance of absolute Gospel truth. It is in this realm,
amongst the Lord’s own children, that the deceptions of
today are most rampant and active.
What is the mark, the peculiar
mark of the Deceiver’s deceiving work for the Lord’s
own people? It is the counterfeit of all that is of God. The
counterfeit system which includes anything that is of God. Now if
you will get down with your Bible you will be able to trace that
counterfeit system as it moves into every connection with God.
First of all you will see that there is a counterfeiting of the
very Godhead. That is saying a terrific thing, but it is true. A
counterfeiting of the very Godhead, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The counterfeiting of the first Person in the Trinity, God. What
does the Scripture have to say: “The god of this age hath
blinded...” The god of this age, and Satan is seen in the
Word of God to set himself up all the way through as the supreme
object of worship to draw away from God Himself. You have not to
go very far into the Bible to see that. It is implied in his very
first act. “Hath God said?” Well, “I am a greater
authority than He is.” That is what is implied in that.
“You listen to me,” and so by subtle insinuation he
captured God’s place of reverence, of fear, of
acknowledgment, in the heart of man and in so doing became man’s
god, you see, getting worship. His subtle insinuation by which he did it
was, “God knows if you do that, you will be as God knowing
good and evil, and God forbidding you to do that is simply
robbing you of something which, being yours, would make your life
fuller and larger and greater; and so God after all is not
favourable to you, and is keeping something back. He is making
life smaller and narrower than it need be, and if you will only
do as I tell you, you will have a life higher than that.”
Yes - become a Christian, give your life to God, and life will
become a narrow, mean thing, and you will have to give up this
and that. That is always the insinuation of the enemy, he never
lets you know what you are going to gain by going on with God,
and the deception works, that instead of gaining you lose, when
you give heed to the enemy. “The god of this age hath
blinded.”
When Israel came out of Egypt,
the supreme object of their coming out was not the coming into
the land or the wilderness, but that they should come out to the
Lord, belong to the Lord, be His people. “Let my son go”;
that was the word: coming out to, belonging to, the Lord. They
had not been in the wilderness very long before Moses went up
into the mountain for a period with the Lord, and the enemy broke
into the company. What was God saying to Moses in the mount?
“Let them bring me gold and silver and brass and precious
stones and fine linen, and let them make me a sanctuary.”
The enemy broke in at that time and said in effect: “Not if
I can help it,” and he provoked the people to bring their gold
for a molten image, taking the gold away from God. What is gold?
That which is representative and typical of God Himself -
the Divine nature. This thing runs all the way through. Same principle back of things: the
god of this age is seeking to get the worship due to God, and he
simulates the first Person of the Trinity, imitates, counterfeits along the line of religion to get worship. Then the
second Person of the Trinity (you realise that we cannot stay to thoroughly exhaust each one of these) is the Lord Jesus, God
Incarnate in the Son. We read: “Many shall come in my name
saying I am Christ and shall deceive many.” Antichrist is
the simulation of God Incarnate. Taking the place of god amongst
men in human form to capture the worship of men’s hearts.
Sitting in the temple of God giving out that he is
God. Christs many, “there shall come false Christs.” The Deceiver is
out to counterfeit Christ, simulate Him even to the point of
incarnation, the devil incarnate, Antichrist. As far as possible
he takes all the semblance of Christ.
Counterfeiting
the Holy Spirit
Then, as to the third Person
in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, so much should be said here. He is out along
this line to counterfeit the Holy Spirit, there is no doubt about
it. If this is the dispensation of the Spirit, this is the
dispensation of the counterfeit of the Holy Spirit. What is the
work of the Holy Spirit? Well, it is many-sided, but, beloved,
the enemy can give false signs, which are an imitation of the
signs of the Holy Spirit. The enemy can give false guidance which
is an imitation of the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Experiences?
Yes, you can have experiences, supernatural experiences, which
are a counterfeit of the Holy Spirit. Teaching? Yes, teaching
as from the Bible: doctrines of demons, false doctrine. But they
would not be deceptions, delusions if they were not based upon
Biblical content. Yes, imitating the Holy Spirit. Miracles, working great signs and wonders, calling
down a fire from heaven to deceive them that are on the earth.
Miracles, signs, wonders, power, yes, and even life, to give life
unto the image, power to give life unto the image, and - now listen -
conversions: apparent new birth, changing lives; and here we are on
perhaps the most terrific ground when we say that. The question
would at once arise: “Does the devil make men pure and turn
men from godlessness to a life of God-interest?” “Does
he really change men for the better?” Is that true? He will
stand at nothing if he can get his ultimate end. If he can give
you a false baptism of the Holy Spirit so that you have a
wonderful experience, full of wonderful sensations, sublime
sensations, and accompanied by remarkable gifts, powers,
supernatural abilities; if he can give you that and let
you glory in that for a time and then withdraw it, and with the
withdrawal suggest to your mind at once “you have sinned
against the Holy Ghost,” “you have committed the
unpardonable sin.” Thus he has cut from under your feet the
ground of any hope whatever. The power of the precious blood of
Jesus Christ is no longer of any value to you because there is no
more pardon. What is the good of the blood if there is no more
pardon? All the atoning work of Christ is slain for
you if once you take that suggestion on. Christ and His Cross
have lost their value for you.
Yes, Satan will stand at nothing
if only he can really strike a vital blow at faith in Christ, and
he has done that with many, and he is doing it. There are many
dear children of God who, if only they knew, if only they had
light and the knowledge, would be saved from the most awful state
of mental hell today under that pressure of accusation from the
enemy that they have sinned beyond forgiveness, they have
grieved the Holy Spirit from them. There are many
dear children of God like that today. I say we need help in these
days for the people of God to be made secure, to be saved from
these awful deceptions. And in many other ways the Deceiver is
imitating. He can use Scripture as much as anybody. He can
provoke worship, he will set up his own church, “the
synagogue of Satan”, imitating; he will teach wonderful
teachings, Biblical truth, to get people in a corner and
bewildered and eventually get them into such a mess that they do
not know where they are, they get into a place of fatal
inertia - can they ever believe anything again? You
see, delusions!
The
Ground of Deception
Well, now, that is the position.
Unfortunately, having said all that, I only get to the beginning
of my message because at this point, beloved, we have to say that
not one scrap of that deceiving work of the devil has the vestige
of a chance apart from something in man himself. There must be
some ground for all this in man or it could never, never work. It
would stand no chance of success. Deception is not something out
there that is put upon us willy-nilly, or in spite of ourselves.
All deception has its own ground in man. What is that ground? It
is the fact that man is now a psychical being. Now if you can get
to the bottom of that, if you can apprehend that, you will
understand the whole thing.
The ground of all this is in the
fact that man is a psychical being, and when Satan interfered
with man at the beginning and man consented along the line of his
own soul-life, Satan made man suitable to his own government. It
was not that he came and set himself up as man’s ruler and
subjected man by sheer force to his own government. How did he do
it? By breaking into that realm in man’s being where man was
linked with God, and that was in the realm of man’s spirit.
“He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit” and man
was in fellowship and communion with God by means of his spirit,
not his soul, not his body; these two were under the government
of his spirit. The enemy, the Deceiver came to man’s soul,
and instead of man reacting by his spirit-fellowship with, and
knowledge of, God, he dropped down on to his soul, came out of
his spirit and reacted in his soul. What is soul? Reason,
emotion, feeling, desire, and then, of course, choice, will; and
the enemy reasoned through the desires and captured the will by
deception. You see what happened when man violated the very organ
of his union with God, his spirit. He was in the deepest sense,
in his unfallen state, a spirit having a soul and a body, but he
violated that with the result that it was severed from God, and,
as a means, an instrument, a vehicle of Divine fellowship, it
died. It does not mean that it was annihilated, or it ceased to
have an existence, but it fell out of fellowship with God, and
that is spiritual death to fall out of union with God with the
result that the soul has taken ascendency, and from that time man
is another species from that which God created. He is now a man
of soul, and in securing that the enemy had adapted man to his
own government, and the enemy governs man, and the whole of the
race now through the nature of the soul-life. What is the basis
of deception? It is just that! How do you get a counterfeit Holy
Ghost operating? By reason of your psychical nature. You can
become mediumistic in your very psychical nature and open all the
avenues of your being to supernatural guidance and come under the
power, the sway, dominion, of deceiving spirits operating in a
multitude of ways. You can so suspend your soul and come into a
state of utter passivity that you are open to everything to play
upon you. You can have your quiet hour in your soul, which is the
most perilous hour of your life. That happens by suspending all
spiritual activity and becoming utterly passive and opening your
psychical being - a dangerous thing.
God never asks you to become
spiritually passive. Waiting upon God is not being spiritually
passive. God wants us active in spirit even when waiting on Him
in silence. You see what I mean. It is the very nature of man,
now adapted by the enemy to his government, that has made
possible all this mighty system of counterfeit in its success.
Now leaving a whole mass of evidence I come to the point.
What
Christ Did at Calvary
What did the Lord Jesus do in
Calvary? He took that man to death and made room for a spiritual
man; and in Christ Jesus we are no longer soulical men, we are
spiritual. That is the whole argument of the first Corinthian
letter. Now, says the Apostle, “the soulical man (he is the
‘natural’ man) receiveth not the things of the Spirit
of God, they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them.”
“The Spiritual judgeth all things.” In the new birth of
a man his spirit is brought back from the realm of spiritual
death and banishment from God, into new creation union with God,
joined to the Lord one spirit, and the right organ of Divine
government is re-established to bring man’s soul and his
body under Divine control, and the Holy Spirit takes up residence
within the born-anew spirit of a man to govern his desires, his
thoughts, his reasonings, his decisions.
What I want to close with is to
remind you of the tremendous thing that Christ did in His Cross.
We have never fathomed Calvary yet. It is a blessed thing to see
Him taking our sins and bearing them in His own body on the tree,
but let us see that He took the whole ground of
satanic activity in man, He took that to the Cross and put that
aside, and the deep meaning of the Word of God is just that we
were crucified, we were buried with Christ. He did not deal with
sins alone, He dealt with man, the race, and put it aside; not
just to bring a race to an end, but to bring the sphere of the
devil to an end; not to end man in his fallen state, but to break
the power of Satan and destroy his work as Deceiver. He did that
in the Cross.
It is a tremendous thing to see
that the Lord Jesus was not just striking a fatal blow at man in
dealing with the flesh, but in dealing with the whole body of the
flesh He was striking a blow at the satanic activity in man. That
is the word of the Cross. What is the bedrock truth for the
people of God in perilous times? This, that they should come to that
and recognise the fact that the backbone of nature has got to be
broken by the Cross of the Lord Jesus, and that every one of us
in Christ must come to the place where we know that the backbone
of nature has been snapped and that no longer can we, dare we,
follow nature in things, reasonings, desires, affections, choices
and decisions. All must now come out from God, to be given by the
Holy Spirit to govern our lives, and we must not in any way lean
to our own understanding. Nature’s backbone has got
to be broken and we have to be men who, like Jacob, go for the
rest of our days leaning upon our staff because the sinew of our
natural strength has been touched, broken, dried, withered. Yes,
to carry the testimony of Calvary all the days of our lives to
the fact - “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no
longer I...” I have been met and smitten and there must
be no insinuating of “I” any more. It is no longer
“I”.
We have perhaps thought of the Cross, death-union
with the Lord Jesus, in the hard light of having to let go,
having to give up and having to die; being crucified, and all the
pain of it, but, beloved, it is to translate us out of the
kingdom of darkness into that of the Son of His love; from the
power of Satan, to deliver us from deception. Now unless our
soul-life is met in the power of the Cross, and subjected to God,
and we know what it is to live in and walk after the Spirit, we
are exposed to deception. You will find where the counterfeit
Holy Spirit works, there is a tremendous amount of
soul excitability, soul emotion, lack of soul control and
sometimes indecency; and yet supernatural things - yes, but that
is not the Holy Spirit. There has been a reaching out of soul in
an intensified quest for some kind of experience, a supernatural
experience. That has opened the being to the other and you can
get anything. You can get guidance, you can get miracles,
anything along that line; but beware! The counterfeit, beloved,
has its ground of success in the very nature of us, and nature must be
broken. That, of course, must be applied more carefully, but do
take the truth of that, and if the Lord is going to save His children
in these days from delusion and deception, He has got to bring
them back to the bedrock truth of identification with Christ in
death, burial, and resurrection, and what that means as to the
passing of one kind of man and the coming in of another kind of
man.
In this matter, as amongst many
others, we see that Christ crucified is the power of God and the
wisdom of God.