We are seeking to see
what came in with the day of Pentecost, that is, the
deeper and fuller meaning of what was introduced into
this world on that day. We have been saying that it did
mark a new day in this world's history. When we say 'day'
we mean 'age,' a 'dispensation.' That is a big and
difficult word: it simply means the order of things
obtaining at any given time - that is a dispensation.
What is the order and nature of things which was
introduced on the day of Pentecost, as different from all
other ages in the past, and as represented by the book
which goes by the title of "The Acts"? Let me
say again, that title, was never given to it by its
writer. Many, many years after the book was written
someone gave it the title of "The Acts of the
Apostles," but Luke, who, wrote it, did not call it
that. It is a very handy title, but it can be rather
misleading, because it tends to confine attention to the
things done, without an adequate recognition of the
nature of what was happening, which is the important
thing. That is what we are concerned with - the nature of
things brought in to characterise this new age.
Now just another word.
We have said before that this book of The Acts was not
written until after all the letters of the Apostle Paul
were written and in circulation. That is interesting,
and, has a meaning. If you were to arrange the, New
Testament in the order in which the books were written,
you would have to change the common order completely and
put Paul's letters before The Acts. That means something.
It means this very thing that we are seeking to show -
that all that is in the book of The Acts has spiritual
meaning, is explained in the letters of Paul, and in
other letters in the New Testament; and it would be very
interesting if you could take the letters first and read
them, never having looked at Acts - read them carefully
until you knew what was in them, and then for the first
time pick up the book called Acts and begin to read it.
What would be the value, of that? I think it would be
this. When you came upon certain things in Acts, right
from the beginning, you would say: 'Oh, I understand what
that means now - that means what Paul has said here and
here in his epistles. I can see that it is not just
something that has happened, but it has a meaning and I
can see what that meaning, is.' That would be the value
of it; and I take it that that was the value to those who
got the book of Acts afterwards. They had the epistles
and were able in the light of them to say: 'We see the
fuller meaning of all that took place at the beginning
now, we know what that meant.'
Before we proceed
further with that let us say a word to explain why the
books of the New Testament are arranged as they are. We
say that men decided to put the books of the Bible in
their present order, but there is surely another factor
to be allowed for. I think the Holy Spirit was behind
that. Why, then, is the book called Acts where it is,
near the beginning? For this greatest and most impressive
of all reasons - that you must have the Person before you
can have the doctrine, because all the doctrine comes out
of the Person and points to the Person and comes back to
the Person. You see, it is the Lord Jesus Who is in full
view when you begin to read the book of the Acts - the
Lord Jesus risen, ascended, exalted, glorified - and
everything has to be seen in the light of Him, as
belonging to Him, as revealing Him, as explaining Him.
The Person first; everything comes from the Person. And
that is why this book is where it is, and we would all
agree that the Holy Spirit had a hand in that
arrangement. He is always concerned with bringing the
Lord Jesus personally into the first place.
Now let us go on to a
further opening up of this that is before us. We took at
the outset a fragment from one of Paul's letters - 1 Cor.
15:46 - as our key to this whole matter, and we again
note that this was written before the Acts. It was
written and it was known wherever that letter to the
Corinthians may have gone or wherever what was in that
letter may have been made known. It was already known
that this was said - "That is not first which is
spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is
spiritual." Now can you not see how, in the light of
that, what I have just been saying would be very true?
It had been said "first... that which is
natural." That belongs to all that is passed, all
that has been. God made a material and natural creation -
that is first. "Then that which is spiritual" -
now a new creation which is spiritual. God did numerous
things which could be seen and handled, but He did them
with another thought in them which was not always seen.
The first creation was in the natural realm. Now it is
all in the spiritual realm - "then that which is
spiritual" - and if these people who had had the
letters picked up this book of The Acts and read it in
the light of the letters they would see at once that it
expressed that 'afterward' - that God is not doing things
now as He did them in past days. He is doing them in a
new realm, on a new principle, on a new basis. It is
spiritual now; the Holy Spirit has come, and everything
is of a spiritual value and significance.
In our previous
meditation we got to the point of the spiritual seed of
Abraham. In the early chapters of Acts, Abraham has quite
a large place, and all that is said of him must be read
in the light of the letters. But what is being said in
the letters in relation to Abraham is that the true seed
of Abraham is not that which is his natural seed, but
that which is his seed spiritually by faith. What God is
doing in this dispensation is to get a spiritual race. We
said before that the seed of Abraham means a new race of
people, a race of people taken by God and separated to be
a peculiar people unto Himself. We have pointed out that
this age sees that natural seed of Abraham set aside so
far as concerns what God is immediately doing, but a
spiritual seed is brought in, that is, a new race of
which Christ (Who is not only the natural seed but also
the spiritual seed of Abraham) is the Head, the first. I
will not stay with that. I have to say that because it
links at once with the next fragment.
Israel
a Royal Nation
You will notice here
with the introduction of this book of The Acts that
another phrase is used - "Ye men of Israel."
That is the word of Peter on the day of Pentecost. Israel
comes into the picture; not only Abraham, the seed of
Abraham, but Israel. We said before - and this is what we
are going to open up a little more fully now - that there
is a difference between the seed of Abraham and the
children of Israel in this sense, that the seed of
Abraham is racial; the term relates to a race; and, while
the children of Israel are of that race, the term
"the children of Israel" belongs essentially to
a nation. In the race sense, the seed of Abraham is
Isaac. "In Isaac shall thy seed be called"
(Gen. 21:12), and Isaac in type stands for the man of
resurrection. By a miracle in a very true sense, Abraham
received Isaac back as from the dead, and Isaac stands
for resurrection. Now then, Peter says, "Blessed be
the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who
according to his great mercy begat us again unto a living
hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the
dead" (1 Pet. 1:3). You see, resurrection is a
begetting, we are the children of God on the ground of
resurrection union with Christ. That makes a race
begotten in resurrection. That has to do with the term
"the seed."
But when you come to
"the children of Israel" you advance upon that;
the term is not racial, it is national, and is connected
with Jacob; not with Isaac, but with Jacob now, for it
was Jacob whose name was changed to Israel, which name
was taken over and given to this nation - "the
children of Israel." But what is the particular
significance? It is not birth, it is not just race that
is involved. Israel is a prince with God. "Thou...
hast prevailed," said the angel to Jacob on that
night of Jabbok and Peniel. 'Thou hast prevailed as a
prince with God' - that is the meaning of Israel. So this
nation which includes the seed, which is the seed, means
a corporate people - not so many individuals all born of
one father but a collective people brought together in
nationhood, who stand upon the ground of God's
determination that they shall be the people who govern,
who rule, who are in dominion. The prophecy concerning
them was - "The Lord will make thee the head, and
not the tail" (Deut. 28:13), and, while they were in
right relationship with God, there was no nation on the
earth that could stand before them. The mightiest nation
of the then-known world and the mightiest king - Egypt
and Pharaoh - simply went down because of God's destiny
bound up with these people. No nation could stand before
them. They were a royal nation in principle - that was
God's thought. The children of Israel, sons of a prince
with God who has prevailed - that was God's thought
concerning Israel. It meant ascendancy above all the
nations.
The
Tragedy of a Lost Position
Well now, we do not
find it like that in the beginning of the book of the
Acts. Although it is - "Ye men of Israel" -
there is the tragedy of a lost position and influence,
lost spiritual life and power; but the Holy Spirit is
come, and with Pentecost a new age is brought in, and
with that new age a new house of Israel, a spiritual
house of Israel. I am not saying that the Church is a
spiritualised Israel. There is a great difference between
a spiritualised Israel and the Church. I am not going to
take time to explain that difference, but I mention it in
case it should be thought that I am implying that. The
Church is something unique. In the eternal thought and
counsels of God it stands supreme, far above Israel after
the flesh. There is, in one sense, no comparison between
the Church and Israel. Even in the days of its
restoration and glory which are to come, Israel will be
but an earthly people; the Church will be something far
above that. But what I am saying is this, that God has
ever done His works, whatever they have been, with
spiritual principles governing; and when He chose Israel
after the flesh and constituted Israel a nation, He did
so with spiritual principles and thoughts in mind, and it
was because Israel never recognised those spiritual
principles that the tragedy of their present setting
aside took place. That is exactly what the Apostle is
saying in the letter to the Hebrews. "Wherefore I
was displeased with this generation" (that is,
Israel in the wilderness), "and said, They do alway
err in their heart: but they did not know my ways."
They had not an inner perception of God's meaning, of
what He was after, why He was doing this and that. They
did not see the spiritual meaning of their deliverance
from Egypt, they did not see God's meaning in the passage
of the Red Sea, and in His manifold dealings with them in
the wilderness. "They did not know, my ways."
All they were doing was simply moving in a kind of
mechanical way: 'Well, the order today is to march so we
march; the order tomorrow is to stop so we stop.
Circumstances today are such-and-such; we do not like
them, we do not want them... Now things are a little
better; we like this; let us have as much of this as we
can.' They were governed by how things affected them
outwardly, moving according to a programme imposed upon
them, with no intelligence, no understanding, no enquiry
or perception as to what God meant by it all. "They
did not know my ways," they erred in their hearts.
That is the statement about their history through those
forty years.
Now, God had a meaning,
God had thoughts in it all. We have come to see something
of those thoughts. It is not my intention to take up all
the history of Israel in its typology. I am after one
thing - that is, by all these means to try to bring home
to you, with the Lord's help, this one fact - that in the
day in which you and I live, because the Holy Spirit is
the predominant factor, God is after a spiritual state of
things in His people, He is after a spiritual people; not
just a religious people but a spiritual people. I want to
try and show you what that means.
Recovery
Possible through the Grace of God
Well, the children of
Israel were, as we know, firstly an elect nation. That
word "elect" is used by Peter and by Paul of
the Church. "...elect... according to the
foreknowledge of God the Father" (1 Pet. 1:1-2);
"Put on therefore, as God's elect..." (Col.
3:12). "Elect" - something which exists by the
sovereign act of God and in the sovereign grace of God.
That is a truth which lies behind Israel's history, but
it is missed. It lies behind the Church which, in this
dispensation, takes the place of Israel and (because it
is a spiritual thing) far transcends the natural Israel.
An "elect" something chosen in the sovereign
grace of God. That is the foundation of things. We shall
never be allowed to get away from this fact: it will be
brought home to us increasingly as we go on in the
Christian life: however long we may stay here on this
earth, however much we may come to know of the Lord and
His things, however large may be our spiritual measure,
the one thing which God will make us know more and more
is that we have our standing with Him on the basis of
pure grace; that even after fifty, sixty, or seventy
years of the Christian life, it is a poor look-out for
us, but for the sovereign grace of God. We are so slow
really to get the significance of that. He has given us
Israel's history by way of impressing us with this
spiritual truth. Israel never saw it, they erred in their
hearts in this matter. If they had seen it, they would
have been a broken people, but they were a proud,
stiff-necked people because they never saw the grace of
God in their existence; but the Lord has preserved their
history for us. "Whatsoever things were written
aforetime were written for our learning" (Rom.
15:4). I do not know how you feel when you read the Old
Testament. Read the story, the different accounts of the
forty years in the wilderness, and then read the
prophets. Do you find very much pleasure in reading
through the prophets? Do you enjoy Jeremiah? I cannot say
that, just reading it as a record, I find very much
delight in it. Then Ezekiel; then what are called the
Minor Prophets. There is so much there that is not very
pleasant to read. It is an awful story. Think of Hosea;
there are beautiful things there, but, taking it as a
story, an account of Israel's condition, how terrible! It
is the most awful unveiling of human nature - the
persistence, the inveteracy of human pride and self-will
and rebellion. And God has never for one moment sought to
cover it up and say, These are my people, hide all that,
do not let it be known, it is such a disgrace. He has
opened it all up; there it is all gathered up. Stephen
recounted to the rulers of Israel the whole course of
things from the appearing of the God of glory to Abraham.
He went through the history and brought it right up to
the slaying of Jesus Christ. He summed it all up in this
- "Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and
ears, ye do always resist the Holy Spirit: as your
fathers did, so do ye" (Acts 7:51). That has been
the story all the way through; and yet what beautiful
things come out in the midst of that story, especially in
that little book of Hosea! The broken heart of God which
is never going to give this people up! "I have
loved..." "I have loved...": and that is
all there is to be said. 'My love is an everlasting love,
when I love it does not matter what happens; I love, I go
on loving.' Israel's is an awful story right up to the
death of Christ, and it is a tragic story since. We need
not romance about it, it still goes on. But there is a
day still for Israel in the purpose of God, because He
has loved; and love is only grace in action. I say often
to myself; If the Lord will bear with so and so, if the
Lord will hold on to that, there is hope for me yet! I
find that comforting. We may be as bad as Israel; we
could hardly be worse. If the Lord can go as far as He
has with them, He can go even to our length! It is the
grace of God. Remember that.
Grace
Basic to Spirituality
And it has always got
to be like that, the full consciousness that the grace of
God is basic to everything; and that is the very essence
of spirituality. Do you want to find a truly spiritual
person? You will not find him proud, arrogant,
self-sufficient, assertive. If you want to see the grace
of God, you will see it in a Barnabas; and the name of
Barnabas comes out particularly in connection with his
letting everything go for his Lord's sake. "Having a
field, sold it, and brought the money and laid it at the
apostles' feet" (Acts 4:37). Everything has gone for
his Lord's sake; he is holding nothing for himself. Grace
is humility, selflessness. It is the result in our hearts
of the realisation of how great is God's love, and of how
much we owe to His grace - that we have nothing to stand
upon but the grace of God. That is true spirituality; we
begin there.
It is the great thing
about the children of Israel. How will they really come
into ascendancy? This is the point. Who is a prince with
God? What is the true spiritual house of Israel, to
prevail with God? It is that which consciously rests
wholly and solely upon the grace of God. Do you want
spiritual power and influence? Do you want real spiritual
ascendancy? Do you know how it will come about? It will
come about by your breaking, as with Jacob. It will come
about by your self-emptying. The weakness of so many is
their strength; they are not broken, they are not utterly
conscious of their dependence upon God for everything.
That is the secret of spiritual prevailing. That is very
simple, but it is very important. So the Lord would lead
spiritual people through very deep ways, emptying and
breaking and weakening and undoing, and turning them
upside down and inside out so that they do not know where
or what they are. All that they can say is - Well, the
Lord is gracious, the Lord is faithful, I believe God,
and that is my only ground of hope. People who get there
are in the way of knowing the power of God resting upon
them. This true spiritual Israelite, who had been a
natural Israelite - Paul - said, "Most gladly
therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the
power of Christ may rest upon me... for when I am weak,
then am I strong" (2 Cor. 12:9-10). That is Jacob
translated into spiritual terms. It is important. You
feel the Lord is undoing you, breaking you, emptying you.
Do not think, as the enemy would have you think, that He
is against you; He is for you, He is seeking to do
something to lead you on. The way down, is the way up,
under the hand of God. Elect according to grace,
His sovereign grace.
The
Power of the Name of Jesus
In that connection, do
you not think it is rather remarkable that in the Holy
Spirit's governing of the arrangement of this record in
the book of The Acts, so quickly - in the third chapter -
we come upon the lame man lying at the door of the
Temple? He had been lame from his birth and had been
lying at the door for many years. Why at the door? Well,
you say, people going in and out would see and take
compassion. I suppose that was the strategy of these who
put him there; but there is something else in it. The man
was a parable. No lame man was allowed to enter into the
privileges of priestly service in the house of God,
according to the law of Moses (Lev. 21:16-21). He was
under an embargo; he must stay outside. I think it is
very wonderful that we come on that so soon, because the
appeal is to "ye men of Israel" - that princely
people who were called to the position of highest
privilege with God; and how are the men of Israel after
the flesh, naturally, at the time when those words are
addressed to them and when these things are taking place
in the midst of them? Oh, they are in the position of
that poor man. They may not believe it; they may be
thinking very much otherwise about themselves; but
actually and truly their position before God is that of a
poor lame thing, unable to stand up before God and enter
into His presence. Outside - that is their condition.
Here is this poor lame man, who is said to be more than
forty years old (Acts 4:22), representing Israel still
crippled despite their forty years in the wilderness,
unable really to walk straight, or to walk in the Spirit
at all, helpless, living a life of impotence, spiritual
incompetency, still outside. A great psalm was sung when
they came out of Egypt, including a reference to entering
into God's holy habitation. He had brought them out to
bring them in to His holy mountain (Ex. 15:1-18). After
long years they are not in yet; they are still outside
the door of His holy habitation.
Now it is a new day,
but it is a spiritual Israel, and so Peter and
John proclaimed the name of Jesus to this man, and then
taking him by the hand, said to him, "In the name of
Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk." Have you got it?
The spiritual Israel is that which stands in the
authority of the name of Jesus, stands into all the power
and virtue of that name. That is where your prince with
God is, that is the Israel - one who prevails in the
Name. Everything is in that name. We have a lot to learn
about the virtue of the name of the Lord Jesus.
"Jesus, the
name high over all,
In hell, or earth, or sky."
The all-prevailing Name
constitutes an Israel after the Spirit indeed in
spiritual ascendancy, and so this book of The Acts is
just a record of their going forth for the sake of the
Name, in the power of the Name. "In what name have
ye done this? ...Be it known unto you all... in the name
of Jesus Christ of Nazareth...." It was all "in
the name." This is the new spiritual Israel -
"in the name"; by the grace of God, in all the
meaning of that mighty name.
They are the two first
steps into the new age - the grace which hath appeared,
and the name of Jesus which is above every name. I can
imagine those saints at Philippi receiving Luke's record
in The Acts and reading these chapters about the Name,
and saying, 'Well, Paul wrote to us some time ago and
said, "God... gave unto him the name which is above
every name; that in the name of Jesus every knee should
bow" (Phil. 2:9-10). Oh yes, we know about that
name!'
Deliverance
from the Self-Life by the Cross
The spiritual Israel is
that which is delivered from its incapacitation through
the flesh. It was the flesh predominant in Israel in the
wilderness which kept it out of the land. It was the
self-life asserting itself in all kinds of ways which
simply crippled them. It was living unto their own
interests that did it. Believe me, in the measure in
which we are actuated at all by personal, natural or
worldly considerations, we are spiritually crippled. That
is unfortunately the story of the Church today. What is
called the Church today has got very largely into the
condition of Israel in the wilderness, and that is why
Paul takes that very thing and uses it against the flesh
that is in the church at Corinth (1 Cor. 10:1-12). There
is a warning. It is taken up quite a number of times, as
we know, in the letter to the Hebrews. "They failed
to enter in..." (Heb. 4:6); the flesh prevailing,
the Spirit was quenched, resisted. The truly spiritual
people of God are those who have been delivered from that
handicap of a predominant self-life through the Cross of
the Lord Jesus; who have passed through the Jordan,
baptised into His death and into His resurrection. That
is the kind of people that the Lord is after - those who
can go up and possess, before whom the forces of evil
will give way, a people truly crucified to the flesh, a
spiritual Israel indeed. This lame man came into the good
of that; he rose up and leaped and walked and entered
with them into the Temple, leaping and praising God. What
a change! Yes, it was a new day, a new dispensation had
arrived for him, a dispensation of Jesus Christ known in
the power of the Holy Ghost. When we say the Lord is
seeking today, in this dispensation, to have a spiritual
people, we mean this.
Inward
Government by the Spirit
Now, you can be a
Christian, you can decide for Christ, you can give your
life to Christ, to be His henceforth, and then everything
of the Christian life for you may become something
outward. A Christian 'goes to Church,' and reads the
Bible, and prays; a Christian believes certain things -
the inspiration of the Bible, that Jesus is the Son of
God, and so on. This is what Christians do, and you may
do it all. That is very largely the Christian life for
multitudes. It is simply the entering into an already
framed and moulded and fixed system of things - what you
do or do not do because you are a Christian. That is not
what the Lord is after. If you are what the Lord is
after, of course you will believe in the inspiration of
the Scriptures, and that Jesus is the Son of God, and you
will pray and read your Bible; but you will not, by that
alone, be what the Lord is seeking. What is He wanting?
He is wanting you to have the Holy Spirit dwelling within
you as your personal Teacher, to be as real to you as any
human adviser or counsellor could be; that you may know
in your own heart that the Lord Jesus by the Holy Spirit
is telling you this and telling you that, and saying,
Yes, to this, and No, to that, and you are increasingly
coming to know that the Lord Jesus is not only a living
Person in heaven, but a living Person in your own heart,
and you are learning from Him inside. He may
tell you through His Word, but you know it is more than
mere words in a book; there is a living Person Who is
saying something to you. You are increasingly coming to
understand the mind of that Person, really gaining
intelligence about the things of God. That is a spiritual
person, and there is all the difference between just
being a Christian in the way of things outward, and
walking by the knowledge of the Lord in your own heart. I
have said that simply for the sake of younger people, but
there is not one of us who can do without that reminder.
This is the age of the Holy Spirit's government. It is
not, What is the thing that is usually done? What is the
accepted thing? What do Christians do? What is expected
of us? It is not that. Never for a moment are we, in the
first place, to take our cue from an established
Christian order and system; we have to go to the Lord. If
everybody who came into the Church came in on this ground
- that every step was something which the Lord Himself
had ratified in their own hearts: they had not just taken
it and accepted it because they were told they ought to:
it was a living issue between themselves and the Lord -
what a living Church there would be! That is the heart of
what the Lord is trying to bring us to - we live in a
spiritual age requiring a spiritual people, which means
knowing Christ after the Spirit, by the Spirit, and
knowing Him so increasingly.
We leave it there for
the time being. The Lord has yet far more light and truth
to break forth from His Word than those who know most
ever imagined. Do not close yourself up and say that you
know all truth, that you have got it all! You do not know
anything yet! There is no one on this earth who really
knows anything more than the beginnings of what there is
to be known of Christ. It is going to take us eternity to
know Him in His fulness. But He can give His fuller light
to those who are spiritual, who are taught of the Spirit
and alive to the Lord for Him to reveal more to them. May
we be after this kind, a true spiritual Israel.