Read: 1 Chronicles
28:2–7,11–13,19; 29:3–5; 2 Chronicles 2:1,2;
Ephesians 1:4–6,11,12,17–23; 2:7,19–22;
3:10,11,20,21; 4:1,4,5,13–15; 5:25–27.
So we come to the third of those
greatnesses of Divine revelation—the greatness of the
Church; a greatness which, it is regrettable to think, so very
few of the people of God have seen. There is a painful
slowness amongst Christians to apprehend the great purpose and
intent of their salvation, to know and to understand the nature
of their high calling; and it is in this connection that there is
a great divide between the people of God. Christianity at
its best has very largely become a general thing, a matter of
being saved and of going on in a general way as Christians, but
not recognizing that in God’s mind we are saved with a
mighty purpose, which is not just to be saved and then to be
occupied with getting others saved, and stopping there.
Both of those things are good. They are fundamental and
essential, but they are only the beginning. From that point
something quite different begins—what Paul refers to here
when he says: “I... beseech you to walk worthily of the
calling wherewith ye were called”; and around that phrase:
“the calling wherewith ye were called” he gathers all
these immense things about the Church which, as to the backward
aspect, reach far back over the ages; as to the upward
aspect—“in the heavenlies,” with a vocation which
is now heavenly; and then the onward aspect—“the ages
to come.” These are phrases which indicate the calling
wherewith we are called, but how few of us have really
apprehended it! We could say very much about the tragedy of
the loss of that vision and Divine revelation, and of the
building up of something which has made it well nigh impossible
for multitudes now to move into that calling, bound hand and foot
as they are by a tradition and by a system which leaves
responsible people not free and too much involved, for their very
livelihood, to move into God’s full thought. We shall
not pursue that line. It is better for us to keep to this
positive presentation of the thought of God and to use our time
in seeking to approach—for it will hardly be more than
that—this matter of the greatness of the Church.
We have been thinking about the
greatness of Christ and took several chapters over contemplating
that greatness; then came the greatness of the Cross—the
range and the content of the death and resurrection of Christ.
When we come to consider the greatness of the Church, we find
that greatness is because the Church takes up those other two
greatnesses; that is, the greatness of the Church is the
greatness of Christ and the greatness of His Cross. They
give the Church its real character. We took the type, with
its magnificence and fulness of presentation, its redundance of
wealth—Solomon, as bringing Christ into view typically,
remembering the Lord’s own word: “a greater than
Solomon is here” (Matthew 12:42). But we need to
remember also that Solomon came forward and into view in relation
to the house of God. That was really what brought him to light,
and was the reason, the occasion, of Solomon’s
prominence. David had it in his heart that a house should
be built, and that was a Divine thought: “Thou didst well
that it was in thine heart” (1 Kings 8:18). It was in
his heart from the Lord, and so much so that the Lord entrusted
him with a revelation, in fulness, completeness and detail, of
that house. David made a remarkable statement: “All
this have I been made to understand in writing from the hand of
the Lord” (1 Chronicles 28:19). You cannot explain
that! It was clearly a Divine intention, and it was out of
that Divine implanting and unfolding that Solomon came on the
scene at all. He was to be the one to whom it was entrusted
for fulfilment. His glory was intended to be a related
glory, his greatness a related greatness. In other words,
the house which he would build would be the embodiment and
presentation of his own glory and splendour. What Solomon
gathered, and was given by the Lord in every way, would come and
find its central embodiment and manifestation in the house which
he would build.
Of course, we at once leap over
to that superlative utterance of the Apostle: “...unto Him
be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all
generations for ever and ever” (Ephesians 3:21; ASV).
This letter to the Ephesians is the counterpart of this narrative
in Chronicles in showing that the Church, as the Body of Christ,
is the vessel chosen of God, and appointed and revealed by Him,
to be the embodiment of the glory and greatness of Christ.
It is the vessel, the vehicle, by which all that Christ is will
be made known through the ages of the ages; and there is a true
sense in which the revelation of Jesus Christ and the bringing of
Him into view by God is a related thing. The reason for it
is to get this elect, foreknown and foreordained company in which
God in Christ would be made known to a wondering universe.
“...now unto the principalities and powers... through the
church...” (Ephesians 3:10). So, as the house was the
manifestation of Solomon’s greatness, the Church is
conceived by God to be the manifestation of the greatness of
Christ.
Having said that as giving just
a glimpse of this greatness (and, of course, for anything like an
adequate appreciation it requires all that we have been saying
about the greatness of Christ), we remember also the greatness of
the altar and the sacrifice which came into view with
Solomon—the immensity of the offering made to God at that
time. The greatness of the work of Christ in His Cross
indicates how great the Church must be. If Christ loved the
Church and gave Himself for it, and if that was a sacrifice, an
offering, compared with which the tens of thousands of bullocks
and sheep offered by Solomon are as nothing, a sacrifice so great
that the type pales in comparison; if the work of the Cross of
the Lord Jesus was so great, is not that a further indication of
how great the Church must be? It has, by His own parable,
been called a “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:46),
and to secure it He, the Divine Merchantman, let go all that He
had—and He had an ‘all’ which no merchantman in
the history of this world has ever possessed, a wealth and a
fulness, a glory which He had with God before the world was,
something indestructible, great and wonderful. Seeking
goodly pearls, when He had found one of great price He sold all
to get it. We cannot understand that, for it is beyond us,
but there it is; it is Divine revelation. And the Cross was
the price of the Church. For some unspeakable reason, the
Church stands related to God in value like that. Christ
loved the Church, “the Church of God which He purchased with
His own blood.” It is evidently a very great and
wonderful thing.
Features of
Christ Taken up in the Church
Now we must look at some of
those features of Christ which are taken up in the Church, in
order that we may know what this Church is that we are talking
about. What is it? Well, if it takes up the things which
are true of Christ, then what is true of Him is, in the mind of
God, to be true of the Church; and it is true of the Church which
is in God’s eye.
(a) His Eternal Being
And the first feature of Christ
upon which we dwelt when we were considering Him was His eternal
being, the eternal conception. We need not go again over
the ground of the eternal Sonship of Christ. All we need
say about that is that He was before the world was; He was before
the order of time was instituted in the establishment of those
heavenly bodies by the government of which time exists—years
and months, day and night, summer and winter. These are all
governed by heavenly bodies, and these are time factors.
Before they were, He was, for He created all things. This
word ‘eternal’ in our usage simply means that going
back and going on beyond time, beyond marked periods, beyond
history. That is true of Christ. The letter to the
Ephesians says that in the mind of God the Church existed
before the foundation of the world. It does not necessarily
mean that the Church actually existed as Christ did in eternity
past, but it was “foreknown.” “He chose us
in Him before the foundation of the world... having foreordained
us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto Himself”
(Ephesians 1:4,5). As we have pointed out before, this
letter to the Ephesians is not set in time; it will have its
effect upon time matters, the practical matters of everyday
life, of our walk and conduct here on this earth; but it is set
in the timeless realm. It goes back, and it goes on; it
bridges all time in the Divine conception. That is where
this letter is set, and, until we recognize the implications of
that, we have no real apprehension of the Church; and when we do
recognize that, what nonsense all this ‘churchianity’
becomes, how small and petty, and how we feel that from
God’s standpoint we are just playing at some game of
churches when we make so much of what has traditionally come to
be called ‘the Church!’ If we have one real
Divine glimpse of the Church, all that other becomes paltry,
petty, foolish, and a mighty emancipation takes place inside
us—but it requires illumination.
The Church takes the feature of
the absolute stability of Christ. It is something outside
of time, chosen in Him before the world was. The stability
of the true Church, according to God’s mind, is the
stability of Christ Himself. This thing, on God’s
basis and in His realm, is an immovable and undestructible
thing. That is not true of anything else. Oh, the
stability of being there in God’s thought! Survival is
certain, and, indeed, more than survival. We sometimes sing
the old hymn:
“Crowns
and thrones may perish,
Kingdoms rise and wane;
But the Church of Jesus
Constant will remain.
Gates of hell can never
‘Gainst that Church prevail.”
“I will build My church;
and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it”
(Matthew 16:18). The Church embodies the eternity and
indestructibility of Christ’s very life.
(b) The Mystery of His
Heavenliness
Next we spoke of Christ in His
heavenliness. “I came down from heaven” (John
6:38). Again you need to gather up that constantly
reiterated statement which He made about His heavenly
origin. Here in this letter the Church is set forth so
strongly, with such emphasis, as being like that.
“Raised us up with Him, and made us to sit with Him in the
heavenlies, in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6). We spoke
about Christ’s word to Pilate—“My kingdom is not
of this world” (John 18:36). I was struck by the last
few words of 1 Chronicles 28:5: “He hath chosen Solomon my
son to sit upon the throne of the kingdom of the Lord over
Israel.” It was not the kingdom of Israel; it was the
Kingdom of God over Israel. “My kingdom is not of this
world.” In other words, ‘My Kingdom is God’s
Kingdom— much bigger than this and beyond this: not of this
world, that is, not merely temporal.’
We sought to point out the
perfect ‘otherness’ of Christ from everyone else in
this race. How utterly other He was, and is; out from
another realm altogether! And that is true of the
Church. It is quite other, something altogether different
from that with which we are familiar. Our word about Christ
is true of the true Church—that He passed through this world
unrecognized, unknown, making the positive affirmation that
“no one knoweth the Son, save the Father” (Matthew
11:27). There is a mystery here. That word
‘mystery,’ used so much by the Apostle, particularly in
this letter, is a most difficult word to explain. We have
to resort to a paradox whenever we try to explain it, for
mystery—‘mysterium’—simply means
manifestation in a hidden way. That is a contradiction, a
paradox, but that is the essence of the word. God is
manifested, but in a hidden way. “No one knoweth the
Son, save the Father,” and yet: “He that hath seen Me
hath seen the Father.” He is manifested as God in
Christ, but in such a hidden way that it demands an act of God in
specific revelation to see Jesus Christ. You cannot truly
see who Jesus Christ is unless God acts sovereignly and opens the
eyes of your heart. That has been demonstrated by His whole
life here on this earth. When one Apostle was able, in a moment
of revelation, to say: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
living God,” the rejoinder was: “Blessed art thou,
Simon Bar-Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto
thee, but My Father” (Matthew 16:17). But the moment
passed, for not long afterward the man who had had the revelation
was found denying that One with oaths and with curses, and that
three times. If the revelation had been an abiding one, how
could he have done that? It was a moment of Divine,
sovereign action when the mystery was disclosed and he saw.
God was manifested in a hidden way while that instant lasted; but
then the veil fell again, and the mystery continued.
And what is true of Christ is
true of the Church. It is heavenly, it is unrecognized and
unknown unless God reveals it. I want you really to grasp
this. I know in what a realm of helplessness it places us
on the one side, and it is well that this should be so; and
therefore what it makes necessary on the other side is that God
should have a Church which exists on the basis of His own
sovereign act of revelation. The purity of it demands
that. If everybody could see and understand and comprehend,
and the Church could be brought right down to the limited compass
of human apprehension, what sort of Church would it be?
That is exactly what the devil has sought to do—to bring the
Church within the compass of anybody’s range of
comprehension, so that anybody can be in it, or think they are in
it. What havoc the devil has made by getting rid of this
great fact! They have done it with Christ, and made Him the
Jesus of history, with unspeakable loss. Very largely,
Christianity is in its appalling state today because of this
mishandling of the Person of Christ, this trying to constitute
everything upon the basis of the Jesus of history. The cry:
‘Back to Jesus!’ (meaning, away from Paul) is simply to
try to bring things down to this earthly, human level which
everybody can understand and grasp. ‘We cannot follow
Paul. He is so mysterious, otherworldly, remote. Let us get
back to the simple Jesus of history, the Jesus of the
Gospels!’ This is simply jettisoning the thing which
is essential for bringing to God that upon which His heart is
set. “No man can come unto Me, except it be given unto
him of the Father” (John 6:65), said the Lord Jesus.
“No man can come unto Me.” It demands a
Divine, a sovereign, act on God’s part to bring any man or
woman really to Christ. You cannot just choose or decide to
come. It is not with anybody to say that they are going to
be a Christian. God has to do something in every case, and
it is His own sovereign act. Do not cheapen the
Gospel! If we do, we shall open the door so wide that we
shall be glad after a time to get rid of that which has come
in. The Church, in its heavenly character taken from
Christ, is something that can only be entered by revelation,
because it can only be known by revelation. “No one
knoweth....” We can only state these facts. No
teaching can accomplish it, and we are powerless in the
matter. All that is given to us is to state Divine facts,
and it is for God to reveal. But, thanks be unto God, He
has revealed and He does reveal. Some of us can say that He
has shined into our hearts in this matter, and the revelation of
Christ and of the Church has made an immense difference in every
way. Of course, this faculty of ‘seeing’ is
inherent in the new birth by the indwelling Holy Spirit.
(c) Manifesting the
Features of the Divine Person
The revelation of God in Christ
is carried on in the Church in exactly the same way as with Him,
in this sense—that God has revealed Himself
Person-wise. The Letter to the Hebrews opens with:
“God... hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in a
Son”—Son-wise, and that is only another way of saying
‘Person-wise.’ The only adequate revelation of
God is personal. God cannot be really known by the things
which He says, however many they may be. There is such a
difference between a mental, intellectual apprehension and
conception of God, and a living, heart-transforming apprehension.
God must come to us Himself in a living, personal way if we are
to know Him livingly and actually. You may read a biography
or an autobiography, and you may afterward say that you thereby
know the person concerned; but how often it is true that, when
you actually meet that person, there is something that was not
there in the book and which makes all the difference. You were
not really changed and transformed by reading the book. You
had impressions, but they did not make any difference to you
actually in your very life and nature; but you meet the person,
and the impact of that person makes a deep impression and has a
great effect. That is so often the case; but it is a poor
illustration. God’s revelation unto life has had to be
Person-wise. He has come in the Person of His Son,
incarnate, and if you really touch the reality of Christ in the
Spirit there is a tremendous result. You know how this is
borne out in the accounts in the Gospels. There were times
when crowds thronged Him and pressed upon Him in closest touch,
but nothing happened to the crowds. But in the crowd there
was an individual in deep and desperate need who had faith, and
said: “If I do but touch His garment, I shall be made
whole” (Matthew 9:21). There was some spiritual link
between that one and Him which did not exist between Him and the
rest of the crowd thronging Him, and that one by the touch found,
not the Jesus of history, but the Christ of God, not merely the
Man of Galilee, but the real Divine Person. It is difficult
to explain and define, but you can see there is a
difference. That is the only sufficient revelation of
God—Person-wise.
That is taken up in the Church
and is the real meaning of this definition of the Church:
“the church, which is His body”; “gave Him to be
head over all things”—not: ‘of the
church,’ though that is true—but “to the
church.” The Church, coming under that Headship, into
that vital relationship with Him as Head, comes into the
‘all things’ that are in Christ, and, as His Body, it
embodies Him.
Now, the greatness of the Church
is here: that God has ordained and appointed that the Church now,
in this dispensation, should be where He can be found, where He
can be met, where He can be touched, where He makes
self-manifestation. “Where two or three are gathered
together in My name, there am I in the midst of them”
(Matthew 18:20). God can be met, found and touched
there. There is the vehicle of His manifestation.
So the Church is called to be
here in this dispensation, and in the ages to come to be the very
Body through which God in Christ manifests Himself and makes Himself
known. Is that the Church that we know, that is commonly
called the Church? Oh no! But that is God’s
thought.
I have been reading a book by
Adolph Keller, a man who travelled all over the world to visit
all churches and see what could be done along the line of church
union. I came on something like this in his book: “I
must admit,” he says, “that ofttimes when I sat in
magnificent church buildings, with their stained glass windows
and carved organs, I was less conscious of being in the church of
Christ than when, for instance, I was in one of those Ukrainian
peasant-rooms crowded with men and women who had come barefoot
from afar to hear the Word of God. These poor little
congregations and churches, widely scattered in the hills of
Jugoslavia, in the lonely villages of Wolhynia, in the
coal-mining districts of Belgium, in the taverns and barns of
Czechoslovakia—these churches truly humble us, because they
show us again and again the true poverty and the true riches of
Christ, and that in a way impossible in the securely established,
self-sufficient church that we know today.” Then he makes
this statement: “The entire Church no longer represents its
nature as originally intended, neither is it able to do
so.” How different from the Church of God’s
thought! The true Church is nothing less, in the intention
of God, than Christ Himself present and going on with His work
without those earthly limitations of His life before His death
and resurrection. The Christ risen, ascended and exalted in all
the fulness which God has put in is in the true Church. I
say that you cannot identify it. You can only see where two
or three are gathered. You cannot say of this, or that, or
some other thing called ‘the Church’ that is the
Church. No, the true Church is still this mysterious
thing. It is Christ in active expression. How great
is the Church if it is Christ!
I say that we can only state the
facts, and there they are. What we have to do next is to
pray to the Lord: ‘O Lord, reveal the true Church!’
(d) A Vocation for a
Day to Come
There is one last word just
now. It concerns that always-present and always-governing
factor about Christ which is not taken sufficient account of, I
think, in its meaning. You notice that when Christ was here
His aspect was always the forward one. He was always
thinking and talking of a time to come. That is a governing
factor and feature of Christ. “In that day...”
(Matthew 7:22, etc.). He is looking on to and talking about
a coming day. All the time His eyes are upon the distant
horizon and He speaks of what will then be: ‘Then you shall
know, then you shall see, then all will be manifested, then all
that has been so hidden and mysterious will be perfectly
clear.’ That related, in the first instance, to the
coming Holy Spirit, but when you pass into the Epistles you find
the same thing dominant in the case of the Church. There
are mighty things now, big possibilities now, big issues and
responsibilities now, and the Church is now, even now, unto
principalities and powers an instrument of the revelation of the
manifold wisdom of God (Ephesians 3:10). But the onward
look is prominent and governs everything. “...that we
should be unto the praise of His glory” (Ephesians 1:12);
“that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches
of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus”
(Ephesians 2:7); “...unto Him be the glory in the church and
in Christ Jesus unto all the generations of the age of the
ages” (Ephesians 3:21).
I am only bringing that in here
at this moment with this object: to remind you of the tremendous
end to which the Church is called. How great the Church is
in the light of the vocation which it is to fulfil! What a
great vocation! We might spend much time considering what
the calling of the Church is, or is going to be in the coming
ages, but we must be satisfied for the present with making this
one observation. It is one thing to be a citizen, and a
blessed citizen, of a noble country and of a noble king.
There may be many blessings in that for which to be grateful, but
it is an infinitely greater thing to be a member of the
king’s household and family, a member of the reigning
house. And that is the calling of the Church: not only to
be inhabitants of the land, but to be members of the reigning
family. We are called with that calling, to be in that
inner circle. “The nations... shall walk in the light
of it” (Revelation 21:24) is a way of putting it. The
Church is this specific company, elect from all eternity to all
eternity, not just to be something in itself and to know
satisfaction and gratification, but to be instrumental in the
hands of God in serving Him in His universe throughout all the
coming ages, in close relationship with His Throne. How
great the Church is! Well might the Apostle, in seeing far
more than we have ever seen, say: “I... beseech you to walk
worthily of the calling wherewith ye were called, with all
lowliness and meekness” (Ephesians 4:1,2). Then he
brings that walk into touch with common things of everyday
life, and says: ‘If you are a true member of the Church and
have a true apprehension of it, you will not be a bad father or
mother, a bad husband or wife; you will not be a bad master or
mistress or servant. All this will be affected by your
spiritual apprehension.’ How practical it is!
There are so many people who have high doctrine, and they are
poor Christians; who have all the truth, but they are bad
employers. That is not the Church.
May the Lord Himself open our
hearts and give us that touch of sovereign grace, that we
may see the truth and be conformed to it.