We just continue in the
consideration of the pathway of the glory. We have traced the
glory through the book of the Acts up to a certain point, more
especially in the life of the apostle Paul. When we come to the
end of that book, we find ourselves in the presence of a
consummate and inclusive revelation, expression, manifestation
of the glory at the end of the earthly course of the Lord's
servant Paul. It is impressive to note on the one side what an
accumulation of opposing forces is represented in the last
chapter of that book.
Way back there in Palestine, the
imprisonment in Caesarea for two years, the tremendous uprising
of the whole Jewish regime and hierarchy, and Gentile
corroboration as in the case of the Lord Jesus, bitter animosity
and hatred and scheming to destroy him, leading at last to his
being sent to Rome for the final judgment - that putting into
effect of all that uniting of earth and hell to have this man
and what he represented done away, finished. In the midst of it,
when everything seemed so flattening, particularly threatening
to the one ambition of his life to preach the Word in the great
imperial centre of the world, Rome, every circumstance seemed to
say, "That will not be. That cannot be. You never will realise
that life desire". The Lord just stood by him and said, "Fear
not, Paul. As thou hast testified of Me in Jerusalem, so must
thou bear witness in Rome and through it all, the storms
naturally and the storms spiritually". Then the word is, "And so,
we came to Rome..."but in Rome: a prisoner. All the adverse
forces, spiritual, satanic and human determined to bring that
ministry to an end by bringing that man to an end. Over a wide
area things moved toward that. In churches in Asia, which owed
their existence instrumentally to this man and owed all that
they had spiritually to him under the Lord. They turned against
him, "All they which be in Asia be turned from me". False
brethren betrayed him. What an accumulation of evil things
gathered and focused upon that prison in Rome, all saying with
their own meaning: limitation, curtailment, shortening of
tenure, of influence, and life. That's the natural, satanic
situation very imperfectly described and set out.
On the human side, looked at just
purely as a natural situation, everything in that prison and
those chains seems to say what the enemy meant, and what men
meant: this is an end and this is a curtailment in every way.
And yet, looked at from heaven's standpoint, and from history's
standpoint, it is the most glorious chapter of the whole book.
They said: limitation - heaven said: enlargement. They said:
narrowing down, curtailment - heaven said: expansion. They said:
death, agony - heaven said: a new beginning, not only of the man
in heaven, but of his ministry. For it was out of that prison,
imprisonment and all that which was set for the ending of that
ministry, out of that has come the greatest ministry that he
fulfilled.
These letters from that prison embrace a fulness of Divine
revelation that can be found no where else - an enrichment for
the Church beyond, beyond our telling - an expansion of ministry
far, far beyond the whole range of his missionary journeys
personally. Today, in every country of this world Paul is known;
perhaps not in every spot in every country, but in every
country. From far East to far West, far North to far South, that
man is known, and his ministry has gone.
And today, through all the battle
and the controversy over what is called "Paulinism", the
theological world through all the battle of the years, Paul is
on top, you know. They just cannot cope with this man; they
cannot silence him, they cannot account for him. You probably
will not know a great deal of that battle. Those of us who have
read and studied through many years of this conflict of
ideologies and philosophies and theologies focusing upon this
man Paul, know how at one point the whole thing became just this
issue: "Away from Paul, back to Christ," back to Christ, or
"back to Jesus" as they put it, away from Paul. "Paul has
betrayed Christianity..." this sort of thing, a terrific battle
on that ground. But today, the very schools that were
represented by that position are saying Paul is the interpreter
of Christ, the supreme interpreter of Christ. So it is. That
just by the way as pulled into the whole situation.
You see, this man's life started
in a blaze of glory. Glory descended and struck him. As we said
earlier, that glory went right through his life, he never got
away from that. Never got away from that, he had seen the glory
of the Lord and although the end of his earthly course seemed
naturally to be so inglorious, so much speaking for apparent
triumph of the forces which were against, two thousand years
have not quenched that glory and he shines with it today. And
we, a little minute fragment of a very great worldwide whole,
are here at this time glorying in the glory which has come
through that man. So, I say that the last chapter of the book of
the Acts is just the consummate and inclusive setting forth of
the whole book, showing the pathway of the glory. And just on
that I want to close this time.
What is the Pathway of the Glory?
It has two sides. The one side
is: the reduction of the natural, human element. It
demands that; it will always work that way: the reduction, the
nullifying, the weakening, the emptying, the undoing of the
natural human element of man. Running alongside of that: the
positive increase of Christ.
The pathway of the glory is,
on the one side, an increasing, ever-increasing setting aside of
the natural man, even as a Christian and in the work of the
Lord, leading more and more to the consciousness that it must be
the Lord, or there will be nothing at all. The human factor is increasingly
of no account. That's the pathway to glory. Not a very happy thing, perhaps, to
contemplate, if you look at it on that side alone. But it is
true. Here is this man Paul, naturally and humanly in weakness,
naturally and humanly in limitation, as a man in bonds. But
there's the other side: the enlargement of what is of the Lord -
the mighty, marvelous enlargement of Christ, so that these
letters from the prison are a matchless setting forth of
the greatness of the Lord Jesus. You only have to read
the first chapter of the letter to the Colossians to see it -
the place the Lord Jesus is given.
Now, you can see this, and it's as
well that we do take at least a glance at it, by the opposite:
go right through your Bible and you will see that whenever man
put forth his hand upon Divine things, the glory went out. That
is a word written over Eden isn't it? The Lord's precaution:
"Lest he put forth his hand..." - lest he put forth his hand!
The Lord knew quite well that if he put forth his hand
on Divine things, that was an end of the glory, and that's
exactly what happened. Right through your Old Testament, you can
see this: case after case, when man pressed in, pressed in and
put his hand upon Divine things; the glory went out.
You know how Isaiah says, "The day
that king Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and lifted up,
seated upon a Throne and His train filled the Temple" but, the
tragedy of Uzziah! You remember that was the man, and one of the
greatest, an idol of the prophet Isaiah himself, who
reached great dimensions of power and influence and earthly
glory, and then presumed upon it and forced his way into the
Temple, to the Sanctuary, to the Altar. Fear came upon men and
they said, "It does not pertain unto you, king Uzziah, to offer
incense," but he spurned the warning and was smitten a leper and
died in shame with all his own earthly glory gone. He forced
himself in to lay his hand upon Divine things and so far
as he was concerned, and for that time, the glory departed. It
was a great reversing of the situation when Isaiah saw the Lord
on the Throne, no longer Uzziah - the Lord on the Throne. Then
the glory comes back. When man usurps the place of God, the
glory goes out. That's one instance.
You remember David, with the best
of motives... remember the Ark (and the Ark is always the Ark of
the Glory; remember that, always the Ark of the Glory) the glory
of Israel is focused upon and centered in that Ark. David, with
the purest and best of motives, thought of bringing the Ark to
Jerusalem and mistakenly formed a new cart after the Philistine
manner; a new cart, and put the Ark on it, contrary to the
Divine Word to bring it up to Jerusalem. And they were
apparently having a very good time on the road until they
reached the threshing floor and the oxen stumbled, and Uzza put
forth his hand upon the Ark... his hand... on the Ark. And the
Lord smote Uzza; it's there that he died. The Ark was turned
aside and for long, long weary months, it says, "The time was
long..." it was in the house of Obed-edom and Israel were weary.
The glory had gone because man had put his hand on Divine things.
And so we could go on, like that. But there it is.
When the glory of life, glory of
joy, glory of spiritual fulness, glory of Divine power departs
and comes under a shadow or is eclipsed, or limited, it is
usually because man's hand has touched the testimony. Man's
nature has insinuated itself; that is, his judgment, his
ideas, his thoughts, his will, his
emotions - David's mind got to work, David's emotions got to
work, and it was a very emotional scene that. A very emotional
scene. And David's will got to work, so that his soul, mind,
heart and will came out to touch Divine things. It was man. And
whenever it's like that, if our judgments, and our emotions, and
our decisions lay hold of the things of God, we will be left
without the glory. The glory will depart, or the glory will be
under eclipse, or the glory will be limited. It's a long story:
"Lest he put forth his hand."
Well, that's the dark side, it's
just as well, I say, that we take a glance at that, because that
is so largely the trouble today. There's an absence of the
glory, or a limiting of the glory, and our hearts cry for the
glory to return. We are always asking and praying that the glory
of the Lord may be manifested, known and felt. We've
got to get out of the way before that can be - give the
Lord all the place to be all the Lord.
So, on the one side, there is the
limiting of human abilities and powers of mind and will,
ability. The other side, by that limiting or excluding: the
coming in of the Lord, the increase of Christ, that Christ
is our wisdom, Christ is our strength, Christ is
our will, Christ is all. Dear friends, that is the pathway of
His glory it's painful to the flesh, very painful, because this
flesh is very strong, stronger than we would believe; it's
there.
But we must finish, and finish on
perhaps a happier note, a much happier note. While we must
understand what the glory demands and see the way of the glory,
we do want to have at the end a final look at the ultimate
glory. To do that we remember Peter's word, "When the Chief
Shepherd shall appear, you shall receive a crown of glory" - a crown
of Glory... that's the end. It's a symbolic word, of course, a
crown of Glory, I'm not very ambitious to have a literal crown
put on my head, and for the life of me I don't see how I'm going
to ever have three crowns on my head, literally; and there are
three crowns mentioned in the Word. It means being crowned,
having your life and your work crowned, capped if you
like, with glory. That's the last picture: the crown of glory.
What is it? Well, I've mentioned that there are three crowns,
and you know them well probably. There is "the crown of
righteousness" that we are to receive on certain grounds. "A
crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge,
will give" Paul says. "There is laid up for me a crown of
righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give
to me, and not to me only...". What was he meaning? Know that
the last part of his life, one of his prison letters, was that
beautiful letter to his beloved and longed for children in
Philippi, and he said, "Leaving the things which are behind... I
press toward the mark for the prize of the on-high calling of
God". But then, "I count not myself to have attained, neither am
I already perfect: but this one thing I do, if by any means I
may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of mine own, but
the righteousness which is of God through faith".
The last, longing cry of the
apostle was that the righteousness of God through
Christ should adorn him; he should attain unto it; that is,
that he should stand before the Throne of the eternal burnings
without any qualms, any fears, any flinchings; stand justified,
stand in a righteousness not his own: perfect, perfect in
righteousness. And that is what he meant by "the crown of
righteousness," - to stand at last before the eternal Throne of
Infinite Holiness, clothed with Divine Righteousness, with all
his own unrighteousness and imperfection gone forever. "Robed in
righteousness," that, he called the crowning thing for his life;
the fullest realisation of his ambition, "That I may stand
perfect, lacking nothing... I'm not already perfect, I have not
already attained, but if only I can attain to being found in
Him, not having a righteousness of my own, but His
righteousness." A glorious end!
That's a crown to covet, that's a
crown to suffer for, to live for, to be abandoned for. A crown
indeed of glory that! For, dear friends, you and I are in
agreement on this, that if there's one thing we long for it is
the full and final escape from our own sinfulness, this accursed
fallen nature and all that it carries with it. The crown of
righteousness... and then the crown of Life. "Be thou faithful
unto death," said the Lord, "and I will give thee a crown of
life". A crown of life - what is that? "Faithful unto death" -
to be answered with a crown of Life! All right, that's perfectly
clear, isn't it? The crown of Life means that death has no power,
is robbed of its power, death as a power is destroyed, and Life,
Divine Life, resurrection Life, is mightier than all the power
of death - stand in "the power of His resurrection".
In that same letter, in the same
part of that letter, as we have quoted in the Philippian
letter, Paul utters those words so familiar to us, "That I may
know Him and the power of His resurrection". The cry at the end
of his life: "the Power of His Resurrection". That is the
ultimate and final nullifying of death in all its forms and in
its whole power; standing in the good of a Life which can never,
never be touched by death again. Move over to John and the
Revelation: "There shall be no more death," - "a crown of life."
And then the third crown is the
one we are speaking about, "the crown of glory". You know what
we've said about glory. Glory is the expression of the full
satisfaction of God's nature. Can that ever be for me, for you,
that crown; the full satisfaction of God's own nature? That is
what He has called us to, redeemed us for, is working in us
unto, and will work to the end for this crown of glory. And
although perhaps at the end of our longest life, we shall not
have reached the place where we do at that point utterly,
fully, and finally satisfy the nature of God, well, in our last
moments, in our last breath, there will still be a lot of
imperfection about us; but, remember, when He takes the
responsibility of ending the process, He makes up all
that would have been if He hadn't done so.
There is in a moment, the twinkling of an eye, "we shall be
changed". All that we lack then will be added. All that would
have been if we had lived on and on and on under His grace,
under His power and working, will be put to our account. "I
shall be satisfied when I awake in Thy likeness." I go to sleep
not altogether in Thy likeness, but "I awake in Thy likeness".
It's just that, the mighty thing that God is going to add to
those who are faithful, faithful to the end; not perfect, but in
the way of being changed into the same glory, from one degree to
another, from one image to another. The crown of glory is God's
final approval. God's final approval, "Come, ye blessed of My
Father, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord".
And, believe me, the Lord will
never be joyful, really, over what is not
according to His own nature. But when He says, "The joy of thy
Lord," He will have got what His heart had been set upon, and
the crown of glory, God's full and complete approval,
satisfaction. Oh, what a wonderful, almost unbelievable,
prospect there is along the pathway of glory.
Well, I must leave all the rest
with you; all the other connections of riches, and this very,
very imperfect and limited setting forth of the riches of His
grace and the riches of His glory. May the Lord just Himself
follow on and teach all that we cannot teach, that we're yet to
know about this, and use even this for our help, for our
encouragement, to go on in the way of the glory, unto the
everlasting glory.