"And, behold,
the glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the
east: and his voice was like the sound of many waters,
and the earth shined with his glory. And the glory of
Jehovah came into the house by the way of the gate whose
prospect is toward the east. And the Spirit took me up,
and brought me into the inner court, and, behold, the
glory of Jehovah filled the house" (Eze 43:2, 4-5).
"Then he
brought me by the way of the north gate before the house;
and I looked and, behold, the glory of Jehovah filled the
house of Jehovah: and I fell upon my face" (Eze
44:4).
"And he brought
me back unto the door of the house, and, behold, waters
issued out from under the threshold of the house eastward
(for the forefront of the house was toward the east); and
the waters came down from under, from the right side of
the house, on the south of the altar" (Eze 47:1).
"In him was
life; and the life was the light of men" (John 1:4).
"Again
therefore Jesus spake unto them, saying, I am the light
of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in the
darkness, but shall have the light of life" (John
8:12).
"Jesus answered
and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee,
Except one be born from above, he cannot see the kingdom
of God" (John 3:3, margin).
"When I am in
the world, I am the light of the world" (John 9:5).
"Now there were
certain Greeks among those who went up to worship at the
feast: these therefore came to Philip, who was of
Bethsaida of Galilee, and asked him, saying, Sir, we
would see Jesus. Philip cometh and telleth Andrew: Andrew
cometh, and Philip, and they tell Jesus. And Jesus
answereth them saying, The hour is come, that the Son of
man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you,
Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it
abideth by itself alone, but if it die, it beareth much
fruit" (John 12:20-24).
"I am come a
light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me may
not abide in the darkness" (John 12:46).
" . . . in whom
the god of this world hath blinded the minds of the
unbelieving, that the light of the gospel of the glory of
Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn upon
them" (2 Cor 4:4).
"That the God
of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give
unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the
knowledge of him; having the eyes of your heart
enlightened, that ye may know what is the hope of his
calling, what the riches of the glory of his inheritance
in the saints, and what the exceeding greatness of his
power to us-ward who believe, according to that working
of the strength of his might . . ." (Eph 1:17-19).
The light of life!
Before coming to a closer consideration of this matter of
the light of life, may I just ask a simple but very
direct question? Can we all say with truth of heart that
we are really concerned to be in God's purpose; to know
what that purpose is, and to be found in it? Everything
depends upon whether we have such a concern. It is a
practical matter. It should immediately swing us clear of
just being interested in truth and increasing our
knowledge or information about spiritual things. As we
look into our own hearts at this moment—and let us
do so, each one of us—can we really say that there
is a genuine and strong desire to be in the purpose, the
great eternal purpose of God? Are we prepared to commit
ourselves to the Lord in relation to that in an utter
transaction, by which we now have an understanding with
Him that He will stand at nothing so far as we are
concerned to secure us in His eternal purpose, whatever
it may cost? As the Lord's people, are we ready to just
pause and face that, and get right into line with God's
end? I know that some of you are there, and that for you
there is not much need of exercise about it, but it is
quite likely that there are some who have taken things
pretty much for granted. That is to say, they are
Christians, they are believers, they belong to the Lord,
they are saved, they put their faith in Christ, they have
had association with Christian institutions and matters
for so long, perhaps even from infancy. It is to such
that I make this appeal at the outset. Here in God's Word
that very phrase is used repeatedly—"according
to his eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus
before the world was". Is that the thing which
stands foremost on our horizon or is it something remote,
dim, in the background? I press this, because we must
have something upon which to work. God must have
something upon which to work, and if that is the
position, then we can go on, and there will be a drawing
out of revelation as to that purpose and the way of it.
But unless we are in some quite positive position and
attitude about it, you will hear a lot of things said and
they will simply be things said, more or less of account
to you.
THE
PURPOSE OF GOD
Well now, given that
there is that concern, at least in some measure, which
justifies our going on, we ask, What is the purpose of
God? What is God's end? And I think it can be put in one
way amongst others. We can say that God's purpose is that
there shall come a time when He has a vessel in which and
through which His glory shines forth to this universe. We
see that intimated in the case of new Jerusalem, coming
down from God out of heaven, having the glory of God, her
light like unto a stone most precious, as it were a
jasper stone, clear as crystal. "Having the glory of
God!" That is the end which God has in view for a
people; to be, in a spiritual sense, to His universe of
spiritual intelligences what the sun is to this universe;
that the very nations shall walk in the light thereof, no
need of sun, no need of moon, for there is no night; and
that is only saying that God wills to have a people full
of light, "the light of the knowledge of the glory
of God." That is the end, and God begins to move
toward that end immediately a child of His is born from
above; for that very birth, a new birth from above, is
the scattering of the darkness and the breaking in of the
light.
All along our way in the
School of Christ, the Holy Spirit is engaged upon this
one thing, to lead us more and more into the light,
"of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of
Jesus Christ", that it shall be true in our case
that "the path of the just is as the shining light
which shineth more and more unto the perfect day"
(mid-day) (Prov 4:18) Many people have thought—and,
thinking so, have been disappointed—that that means
it is going to get easier and easier, brighter and
brighter, the more cheerful as we go on. But it does not
work out that way. I do not see it to be true in the
circumstances and outward condition of saints anywhere at
any time. For them the path does not become brighter and
brighter outwardly. But if we are really moving under the
Spirit's government, we can say with the strongest
affirmation, that in an inward way the light is growing.
The path is growing brighter and brighter; we are seeing
and seeing and seeing. That is God's purpose; until the
time comes when there is no darkness at all, and no
shadow at all, and no mist at all, but all is light,
perfect light: we see not through a glass darkly, but
face to face, we know even as we are known. That is God's
purpose put in a certain way. Does that interest you? Are
you concerned with that?
And that has a crisis
and is also a process in spiritual life with a glorious
climax in rapture. What I am especially concerned with
now is the process.
We read in Ezekiel about
the glory of the Lord coming and filling the House, and
we have been seeing in previous meditations that the Lord
Jesus is that House. He is the great Bethel of God on
whom the angels ascend and descend, in whom God is found,
in whom God speaks (the place of the oracle), in whom is
the Divine authority, the final word. He is the House,
and the glory of the Lord is in Him, the light of God is
in Him.
THE
PLACE OF THE SHEKINAH GLORY
Looking backward at that
tabernacle or that temple of old where the Shekinah glory
was found, we mark that that light, that glory which
linked heaven and earth like a ladder, had its expression
in the Most Holy Place. You know that in the Holy of
Holies, everything was curtained around and over,
excluding every bit of natural light, so that the place,
entered into apart from the Shekinah, would have been
black darkness, without light at all; but entered into
while the glory rested upon it, it was all light, it was
all Divine light, heavenly light, the light of God. And
that Most Holy Place sets forth the inner life of the
Lord Jesus, His spirit where God is found, the light from
heaven, the light of what God is in Him. His spirit is
the Most Holy Place, in the holy House of God, and it was
there, in that Most Holy Place where the light of the
glory was, that God said He would commune with His people
through their representative. "I will commune with
you above the mercy seat between the cherubim" (Exo
25:22). The place of communion—"I will
commune". What a lovely
word—"commune". There is nothing hard,
nothing terrible, nothing fearful about that. "I
will commune with you." It is the place where God
speaks; in the communion God speaks, makes Himself known.
It is the place of speaking. It is called the place of
the oracle, the place of the speaking; and that is the
Propitiatory, the Mercy Seat, and that is all the Lord
Jesus. He, we are told, has been set forth by God to be a
propitiatory (Rom 3:25), and in Him God communes with His
people. In Him God speaks to and with His people.
But the underlining must
be of those words "in Him", for there
is no communion with God, no communion of God, no
speaking to be heard, no meeting at all, save in Christ.
That would be a place of death and destruction for the
natural man; hence the terrible warnings given about
coming into that place without the right equipment, that
symbolic equipment which spoke of the natural man having
been altogether covered and another heavenly Man having
enfolded him as with heavenly robes, the robes of
righteousness. Only so dare he enter into that place:
otherwise it was "lest he die . . ."
If you want to know
exactly how that works out, come over to the New
Testament and take up the story of the journey of Saul of
Tarsus to Damascus. He says, "At midday, O king, I
saw on the way a light from heaven, above the brightness
of the sun . . . And when we were all fallen to the
earth, I heard a voice saying unto me . . . Saul, Saul,
why persecutest thou me?" Then you will remember how
they lifted him up and led him into the city, because he
was without sight. By the mercy of God, he was without
sight only for three days and three nights. God
commissioned Ananias to go and visit that blinded man,
and say to him, "Jesus, who appeared unto thee in
the way which thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mayest
receive thy sight." Saul of Tarsus would otherwise
have been a blind man to the end of his life. That is the
effect of a natural man encountering the glory of God in
the face of Jesus Christ. It is destruction. There is no
place for the natural man in the presence of that light;
it would be death. But in John 8 we have those words,
"the light of life", over against the
darkness of death. Well, in Jesus Christ the natural man
is regarded as having been entirely put away. There is no
place for him there.
NO
PLACE FOR THE NATURAL MAN
That means that the
natural man cannot come into the light, nor can he come
into God's great purpose and be found in that House full
of His glory, that vessel through which He is going to
manifest that glory to His universe. The natural man
cannot come in there: and when we speak about the natural
man, we are not just referring to the unsaved man, that
is, the man who has never come to the Lord Jesus. We are
speaking about the man whom God has reckoned as being put
aside altogether.
The Apostle Paul had to
speak to Corinthian believers along these lines. They
were converted people, saved people, but they were
enamoured of this world's wisdom and this world's power;
that is, of natural wisdom, knowledge, and the strength
that comes by it, and their disposition or inclination
was to try to seek to take hold of Divine things and
analyze them and investigate them, and probe into them
along the lines of natural wisdom and understanding,
philosophy, the philosophy and wisdom of this world. So
they were bringing the natural man to bear upon Divine
things, and the Apostle wrote to them, and in their own
language he said, 'Now the man of soul' (not the
unregenerate man, not the man who has never had a
transaction with the Lord Jesus on the basis of His
atoning work for salvation; no, not that man) 'the man of
soul receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God,
neither can he know them' (I Cor 2:14). The man of the psuche,
that is the natural man. The newest of our sciences is
psychology, the science of the soul: and what is
psychology? It has to do with the mind of man; it is the
science of man's mind; and here is the word now—I am
paraphrasing this because this is exactly what it
means—Now the science of the mind can never receive
the things of the Spirit of God, neither can it know
them. This man is very clever, very intellectual, very
highly trained, with all his natural senses brought to a
high state of development and acuteness, yet this man is
outside when it comes to knowing the things of God: he
cannot, he is outside. For the first glimmer of the
knowledge of God a miracle has to be wrought, by which
blind eyes which never have seen are given sight, and by
which light comes as by a flash of revelation, so that it
can be said, "Blessed art thou . . . for flesh and
blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which
is in heaven."
This is stating a
tremendous fact. Every bit of real light which is in the
direction of that ultimate effulgence, the revealing of
the glory of God in us and through us, every bit of it is
in Christ Jesus, and can only be had in Him on the basis
of the natural man having been altogether put outside,
put away, and a new man having been brought into being
with a new set of spiritual faculties: so that Nicodemus,
the best product of the religious school of his day and
of his world, is told, "Except one be born anew (or
from above), he cannot see . . ." He cannot see.
Well, it resolves itself into this, that to know even the
first letters of the Divine alphabet we must be in
Christ, and every bit that follows is a matter of
learning Christ, knowing what it means to be in Christ.
HOW
WE GET THE LIGHT OF LIFE
(a) THE
CRISIS
That brings us to this
question. What is the way into Christ, or how do we get
the light of life? Well, the answer is, of course,
briefly, to have the light we have to have the life. This
light is the light of life. It is the product of life.
All Divine light, true light from God, is living light.
It is never theoretical light, mere doctrinal light, it
is living light. And how do we get this light of life?
We have these two things
brought very much before us in this Gospel of John,
namely, Christ in us, and we in Christ. The Lord has
given us a beautiful illustration of what that means, and
that illustration we have read in chapter 12. What is it
to be in Christ? What is it to have Christ in us? What is
it to be in the life and in the light? What is it to have
the life and the light in us? Well, here it is. There is
life in that grain of wheat, but it is just one single
grain. I want to get the life that is in that single
grain into a whole host of grains, enough grains to cover
the earth. How shall I do it? Well, the Lord says, put it
into the ground: let it fall into the earth and die; let
it fall into the dark earth, and let the earth cover it
over. What happens? It immediately begins to
disintegrate, to fall apart, to yield itself up, as to
its own individual and personal life alone. Presently a
shoot begins to break through the earth and up the stalk
comes, and eventually there is an ear, a heavy ear, of
grains of wheat; and if I could actually see life and
look into those grains of wheat, I should see that life
which was in the one in every one of them. Then I sow
that ear, be it one hundred grains I sow, and I get ten
thousand; and I sow them again, and they are multiplied a
hundredfold, and so on until the earth is full; and if I
could look with a magnifying glass into every one of
those millions and millions of grains, and life was
something visible to the eye, I should see that that same
original life was the life of every one of them. That is
the answer.
How does this life get
into us, this light of life? The Lord Jesus says that
death must take place, a death to what we are in
ourselves, a death to our own life, a death to a life
apart from Him. We must go down with Him into death, and
there, under the act of the Spirit of God in union with
Christ buried, there is a transmission of His life to us,
and He, coming up no longer merely as a single grain of
wheat, comes up manifold in every one of us. It is the
miracle that is going on every year in the natural realm,
and it is just exactly the principle by which the Lord
gets into us. You see the necessity of our ceasing to
have a life apart from the Lord, the necessity of our
letting that life of ours go absolutely. That is a crisis
at the beginning, a real crisis. Sooner or later, it has
to be a crisis.
Some may say, I have not
had that crisis. For me becoming a Christian was a very,
very simple thing. As a child, I was simply taught, or,
At sometime I simply expressed my personal faith in the
Lord Jesus in some way, and from that time I belonged to
the Lord; I am a Christian! Are you moving on in the
growing fullness of the revelation of the Lord Jesus? Are
you? Have you an open heaven? Is God in Christ revealing
Himself to you in ever greater wonder and fullness? Is
He? I am not saying that you do not belong to the Lord
Jesus, but I am saying to you that the unalterable basis
of an open heaven is a grave, and a crisis at which you
come to an end of your own self-life. It is the crisis of
real experimental identification with Christ in His
death, not now for your sins, but as you. Your open
heaven depends upon that. It is a crisis. And so with not
one or two but with many this has been the way. The truth
is this, that they were the Lord's children; they knew
Christ, they were saved, they had no doubt about that;
but then the time came when the Lord, the Light of Life,
showed to them that He not only died to bear their sins
in His body on the tree, but He Himself represented them
in the totality of their natural life, to put it aside.
It was the man, and not only his sins, that went to the
Cross. That man is you, that man is me: and many, after
years of being Christians, have come to that tremendous
crisis of identification with Christ as men, as women, as
a part of the human race; not only as sinners, but as a
part of a race; natural men, not unregenerate, but
natural men, all that we are in our natural life. Many
have come to that crisis, and from that time everything
has been on a vast, a vaster scale than ever before in
the Christian life. There has been the open heaven, the
enlarged vision, the light of life in a far greater way.
How does it come about?
Just like that, and that crisis is a crisis for us all.
If you have not had that crisis, you ask the Lord about
it. Mark you, if you are going to have that transaction
with the Lord, you are asking for something, you are
asking for trouble; for, as I said before, this natural
man dies hard; he clings tenaciously, he does not like
being put aside. Look at that grain of wheat. When it has
fallen into the ground, look at what happens to it. Do
you think it is pleasant? What is happening? It is losing
its own identity. You cannot recognize it. Take it out
and have a look at it. Is this that lovely little grain
of wheat I put into the ground? What an ugly thing it has
become! It has lost all its own identity, lost its own
cohesiveness; it is all falling to pieces. How ugly! Yes,
that is what death does. This death of Christ as it is
wrought in us breaks up our own natural life. It scatters
it, pulls it to pieces, takes all its beauty away. We
begin to discover that, after all, there is nothing in us
but corruption. That is the truth. Falling apart, we are
losing all that beauty that was there from the natural
point of view, perhaps, as men saw it. It is no pleasant
thing to fall into the ground and die. That is what
happens.
"But if it die . .
." "If we died with Christ, we believe that we
shall also live with him" (Rom 6:8). We shall share
His life, take another life, and then a new form is
given, a new life; not ours, but His. It is a crisis. I
do urge upon you to have real dealings with the Lord
about this matter. But if you do, expect what I have
said, expect that you are going to fall to pieces, expect
that the beauty you thought was there will be altogether
marred; expect to discover that you are far more corrupt
than ever you thought you were; expect that the Lord will
bring you to a place where you cry, Woe is me for I am
undone! But then the blessing that will come will just be
this—O Lord, the best thing that can happen for me
is that I shall die! And the Lord will say, That is
exactly what I have been working at, I cannot glorify
that corruption. "This corruptible must put on
incorruption" (1 Cor 15:53), and that incorruption
is the germ of that Divine life in the seed which yields
its own life up, that is transmitted from Him. God is not
going to glorify this humanity. He is going to make us
like Christ's glorious body. That is far too deep, and
too much ahead, but our point is that there has to be
this crisis if we are coming to the glory, God's end.
(b) THE
PROCESS
Then there is going to
be a process. The Lord Jesus said, "If any man would
come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his
cross daily, and follow me", and in so saying He was
not wrong in principle. That the Cross is something taken
up or entered into once for all is true, as to the crisis
in which we say, Lord I accept once for all what the
Cross means! But we are going to find that after the
crisis, the all-inclusive crisis, day by day the Cross
has to be adhered to, and the Cross is working out in
those afflictions and sufferings which the Lord is
allowing to come upon His people. He has put you in a
difficult situation in His sovereignty; a difficult home,
business, physical situation, a difficult situation with
some relation. Beloved, that is the outworking of the
Cross in your experience, in order to make a way for the
Lord Jesus to have a larger place. It is going to make a
way for His patience, the endurance of Christ, for the
love of Christ. It is going to make a way for Him: and
you have not to go to your knees every morning and say,
Oh, Lord, get me out of this home, get me out of this
business, get me out of this difficulty! you are to say,
Lord, if this is the Cross in its expression for me
today, I take it up today. Facing the situation like
that, you will find there is strength, there is victory,
the co-operation of the Lord, and there is fruit and not
barrenness. It is in that sense that the Lord was right
in principle in making the Cross a daily experience.
"Whosoever doth not bear his own cross, and come
after me, cannot be my disciple"—one of My
taught ones, one learning Me! So that the taking up of
this difficulty, whatever it be, day by day, is the very
way in which I am learning Christ, and it is the process
of light, the light of life, coming to know, coming to
see, coming into fullness. You and I can never see and
know apart from the Cross. The Cross has to clear the
ground of this natural life. The Lord knows what we would
do if He lifted away the Cross from us every day. I
wonder what we would do.
It may not be just the
later New Testament phraseology, or way of putting it, to
speak of our daily cross, bearing my cross daily. The
principle may more truly be that it is the Cross which is
given to Him and becomes mine daily. That may be true,
but it just works out this way. If the Lord lifted that
which is the expression of the Cross for us day by day
and took it off our shoulders, it would not be for our
good. It would at once clear the way for the uprising of
the natural life. You can see when people begin to get a
bit of relief from trial. How they throw their weight
about! They get on stilts, they are looking down on you;
you are wrong, they are right. Pride, self-sufficiency,
all comes up. Well, then, what about Paul? I look up to
Paul as a giant, spiritually. Beside that man we are
puppets spiritually, and yet, Paul, spiritual giant that
he was, humbly confessed that the Lord sent him a
messenger of Satan to buffet him, a stake through his
flesh, lest he should be exalted above measure. Yes,
spiritual giants can exalt themselves if the Lord does
not see to it and take precautions, and in order to keep
the way of that great revelation opened and clear, that
it might grow and grow, the Lord said, 'Paul, I must keep
you down very low, very much under limitation; it is the
only way: immediately you begin to get up, Paul, you are
going to limit the light, spoil the revelation.'
Well, there is the
principle. The light of life. It is His life: and so
again the Apostle says,
"Always bearing
about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life
also of Jesus may be manifested in our body" (2
Cor 4:10).
His life is what we
need, and with the life comes the light. It is light by
life. There is no other real Divine light, only that
which comes out of His life within us, and it is His
death wrought in us that clears the way for His life.
I must close there. See
again God's end; light, glory, the fullness coming in. It
is in Christ. The measure of the light, the measure of
the glory, is going to be the measure of Christ, and the
measure of Christ is going to depend entirely upon what
space the Lord can find for Himself in us; and, for space
to be made for Him, we must come to the place where the
utterness of the setting aside of the self-life has been
accomplished: and that takes a whole lifetime. But,
blessed be God, there is the glorious climax, when He
shall come to be glorified in His saints and to be
marvelled at in all them that believe. Marvelled at!
Having the glory of God! Oh, may something of the light
of that glory fall upon our hearts now to encourage and
comfort us in the way, to strengthen our hearts to go on
in the knowledge of His Son, for His Name's sake.