“And he goeth up into the
mountain, and calleth unto him whom he himself would: and
they went unto him. And he appointed twelve, that they
might be with him, and that he might send them forth to
preach” (Mark 3:13,14).
The
thought of “apprenticeship” is, of course,
something included and implied in the words
“disciple” and “discipleship”.
“He appointed twelve, that they might be with him,
and that he might send them forth…” You will
notice the very precise terms in which this statement was
made. This choosing of the twelve was a quite deliberate,
calculated, considered, far-reaching and significant act.
At another time the Lord Jesus said: “I know whom I
have chosen” (John 13:18). And again: “Did not
I choose you the twelve?” (John 6:70). From
Luke’s account (Luke 6:12,13) we know that His
choice followed a night spent alone with His Father in
prayer. Yes, it was a very deliberate act, prayed over
and considered, with a very large background in His own
mind; it was far from casual. These are not just
independent comments upon it or statements about it; they
are supported by, and are indeed the very teaching of,
the Scriptures. We shall see that as we go on.
“And
he chose… twelve” (Luke 6:13). What a dangerous
thing for Him to do! But what a significant thing for Him
to do! That number was a well-understood number in
Israel. Were there not twelve Patriarchs? Were there not
twelve tribes? Twelve is one of the great, dominant
numbers of the Bible, particularly in relation to Israel.
Now that is deliberately laid hold of by the Lord Jesus,
and brought over as the very beginning of the movement
into the new dispensation; and so we have the twelve
apostles. And in many other ways that number comes into
view, both in itself and in its multiples, in relation
first of all to Israel. In the new Jerusalem, at the end
of the Revelation (Rev. 21:10 - 22:5), we have twelve
foundations to the walls. The city itself is 12,000
furlongs in each direction. It has twelve gates of twelve
pearls. There are twelve angels. In the seventh chapter
of the same book the number of the sealed is a multiple
of twelve: 144,000 —twelve times twelve thousand.
And so we could go on.
Are
you beginning to see something more in this deliberate
act of the Lord Jesus? I say, it was not casual. He knew
what He was doing. When He did this, He was doing, in one
sense, the most dangerous thing that He could do. For of
course all the nation of Israel, and especially their
rulers, would jump to but one conclusion from this that
He was doing. In their minds there would at once arise
the thought: “Oh, he is setting up another Israel,
is he? I see!” AND SO HE WAS! That is just
the point. With Him, the Israel that has been is set
aside and repudiated. With Him another is brought in. To
the twelve He said: “You shall sit upon twelve
thrones” (Matt. 19:28). Now this number, twelve, in
Bible symbolism, as you probably know, is the number of
government, of administration. Israel knew that, and so,
of course, immediately grasped the implication of
choosing twelve. “He is setting up a new government,
a new administration!” Yes, He was! — but a
very different one, as we shall see.
Twelve
is the number of government. Consider its factors —
three and four. Three is always the number of heavenly
government, divine fullness of government, the very
Godhead over all. Four is clearly the number of earthly
government: earthly conditions are characterized by the
number four. North, south, east and west comprehend the
earth; spring, summer, autumn, winter comprehend the
seasons; and so we could go on. Heavenly and earthly
government are embodied in this number twelve. And that
is very significant as to this act of the Lord Jesus. We
recall that, when the covenant was made to Abraham, he
was told that his seed should be as the sand on the
seashore, as the stars of the heaven (Gen. 22:17). But
now we call back the words of Paul: “To Abraham were
the promises spoken, and to his seed. He saith not, And
to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed,
which is Christ” (Gal. 3:16). Heavenly and earthly
government meet in Christ.
The
choice of twelve, then, brought into view, first of all
the new Israel, and then the new government by that
Israel of heaven and earth; and that new Israel is the
church, as represented by the twelve. But this Israel, we
repeat once more, is something very different from the
old. It is a spiritual posterity, the fruit of His
travail, the seed that He should see because of it
(Isaiah 53:10,11). It is spiritual, as being a people who
inherit, take over, the real spiritual meaning of that
nation that was called “Israel” —
“prince with God” (Gen. 32:28). There, inherent
already in the very name, is the governmental element.
Now,
of the “Israel after the flesh” many things
were said, as to their pre-eminence, being the head of
the nations, “the head, and not the tail”
(Deut. 28:13), and so on. As we know, they failed in
this. But God’s principles do not go when His
instruments fail. When anything which God chooses, in
order to express His principles, fails to do so, He does
not abandon the principles. He may have to abandon the
vessel or the instrument, but He will go on with His
principles. And so it is in this case: the principle is
taken over, and the fulfilment of this conception —
a prince with God, the head and not the tail, the head of
the nations — is found in the new Israel.
That,
then, is the setting. Let us get closer to it. It has two
major aspects: firstly, the essential nature of this
Israel, and then the essential apprenticeship unto the
Kingdom.
The Essential Nature of the Israel
of God
We
have said that this seed of Christ is spiritual in
constitution. We spent some time on that, as seen in John
3, in our last meditation, but let us just touch on it
again. In the Israel after the flesh, you have an actual
people on this earth whom you can recognise. You can see
that they are — physically and in other ways —
a nation, a people. Now, however physical features may
manifest themselves in us, the constitution of the new
Israel is not a physical constitution, a constitution of
physical features: it is essentially a spiritual
constitution. That is, it has in the first place nothing
to do with anything outward at all. It has to do with CHARACTER.
This Israel is constituted on the basis of another
character, and that character is Christ. Its very
constitution is Christ.
A New Knowledge
It is
a nature constituted, in the first place, with a faculty
for KNOWLEDGE which is altogether outside of the
reach and range of any other kind of person. Here again
we come back to John 3. “Except a man be born anew,
he cannot see… Except a man be born of water and the
Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom…” This
thing is beyond him in sight, in knowledge, in
understanding, to say nothing of inheritance. This Israel
is an Israel that has a seeing capacity which the old had
not and no other has. It is constituted this way.
This
is, mark you, not merely a statement of truth. This is
something very searching for US, as to our
being children of God, being the spiritual children of
the travail of Christ. This is not something that is
extra to the Christian life, or for those who advance to
certain heights and degrees. Right from our new birth,
you and I, every one of us, ought to have a faculty of
spiritual understanding and perception and knowledge that
is possessed by no other person outside this Kingdom! We
could spend much time in pointing out the tragedies that
have come into Christianity because of failure to
recognise or live up to this. I would go so far as to say
that the largest proportion of all the trouble between
Christians is due to either a lack of, or a failure to
live on, the basis of spiritual understanding, spiritual
discernment, spiritual perception, spiritual knowledge.
There is any amount of natural knowledge in the Christian
world: Bible knowledge, prophetic knowledge, and what
not. But spiritual knowledge is a rare commodity; and yet
it is supposed to be a constituent of our new birth from
above, a faculty that we ought to have.
Now,
if you are thinking: “Then woe is me — I
don’t know much about that!”, the Lord is
simply saying to you: “Look here, this is yours by
rights. It is not some extra thing to which you attain by
struggle and effort, or by years of laborious Christian
living, or by some specific act, some terrific upheaval
in your spiritual life. It is a BIRTH thing, it is
a BIRTH right: you have a RIGHT to
this!” But it may be that, after all, you DO know
in this way, although you do not know that you know! You
have a new sense, a new faculty, a new
“something” in you, that causes you to know
— in some measure at least — what is of the
Lord and what is not, what is spiritual and what is not.
But oh for the increase of that! It is the development of
THAT, the increase of THAT, which is the
apprenticeship in the school of Christ. We learn by
mistakes, we learn by blunders, but the thing that we are
learning is not something objective. We are learning
inwardly that such and such is not the way of life and we
should do well to avoid it; and that such and such IS the
way of life, and that is the way for us to go. We learn
it inwardly. It is a new kind of knowledge.
A New Power
This
spiritual Israel is constituted also with a new kind of POWER.
This particular kind of seed, or divine progeny, has
a power, an ability, a strength, which is quite
different. One of the things that we learn in this
apprenticeship, in this school, if we are apt pupils, if
we are really abandoned to know the Lord, is that the
Lord will deliberately undercut and undermine our natural
strength. He will bring us to positions where the very
best natural strength of any kind cannot cope with the
situation; where, if we are to go through, we shall
require a strength that is not in us by nature at all,
even though we might be the very best specimens of
humanity. We come back to Nicodemus. “You just
cannot”, said the Lord to Nicodemus, “you just CANNOT.
You may be as willing as anybody could be, you may be
as anxious and as interested, but what stands over you is
CANNOT.” The great question, arising again and again
from Nicodemus’ lips, is: “How…?”,
“How…?” He cannot. But this seed has
something of a strength which is different, quite
different from all that. Peter speaks of it as: “the
strength which God supplieth” (1 Pet. 4:11). It is
an ability of another order.
And so
we could go on with the constitution. But it will all
amount to this — that it is of another generation.
It is of the generation of Christ. There are here
capacities and possibilities and resources which are from
Heaven, which cannot be accounted for on earth at all.
In
point of fact, the old Israel was put onto that basis,
though in a symbolic or typical way. We pointed out in
our last study that they were put onto the basis of
Christ, and we saw just what it meant for them to be put
onto that basis. When everything went wrong with them
spiritually and morally, and they were unworthy of the
name of Israel, they were just rooted up from the land.
Those twelve sons of Jacob, behaving as they did —
putting Joseph in the pit, deceiving their father, and
even counselling murder, and then the exposure of them
before their brother whom they did not recognise in Egypt
— it is a sorry tale. What breakdown! What failure!
And so Israel must be put on to the ground of Christ,
through death and resurrection; they must come into the
meaning of His travail, be born out of it. Then their
life afterwards must be constituted on the same basis,
the basis of Christ, so that, for those ensuing forty
years in the wilderness, there is no accounting for their
bread or their water, or for anything else, on any other
ground than that of heaven. “It was not Moses that
gave… the bread…; but my Father…”
(John 6:32). It was heavenly. You see the point: they
were constituted according to Christ, with resources that
are not explicable on any other ground than that they are
from heaven.
Thank
God for that! It is the most wonderful thing to live on
Christ — to live on heavenly ground! Perhaps you are
thinking that this spiritual life must be a very
difficult one. Well, for the flesh, of course it is! For
the natural man, of course it is! To the self-life, it
certainly is. But the spiritual life is a romance. What
the Lord does — oh, it is just wonderful. How my
heart went with a brother whom I recently heard speaking
about ministry! Would not our flesh always like to have
everything well worked out and mapped and planned in
advance — have it all there, so that to give the
word is really no trouble at all! But the Lord shuts us
up and holds us up, and gets us into a perfect travail
over a message, waiting so often until the very last
minute — and then it comes! That is a personal
testimony of over thirty years. It is something
wonderful. This is no theoretical matter. It is
marvellously real, and really marvellous.
That
is the nature and constitution of this new Israel. This
seed is a mystery, this Israel is a mystery; everything
to do with it is a mystery. It cannot be understood by
natural means at all. But do not take that the wrong way,
interpreting it to mean that we have got to be very
“mysterious” people! There are many people
trying to be mysterious, under the mistaken idea that
that is spirituality. But this mystery is the mystery of
a LIFE.
The Mystery of Spiritual Life
Of
course, even life in the natural is a mystery. We cannot
explain life; we do not know what life is. It is the
greatest reality, and yet it is the thing which is most
impossible of explanation. But in the real realm of the
spiritual there is another life, and this life is an even
greater mystery. It is a life that persists in spite of
everything that can be set against it. The mystery about
the church, about the people of God, is the mystery of
this life — how it survives, how it goes on, how it
increases. There is nothing in all this universe which is
so assaulted, so set against, as this life of the people
of God. All the dark, sinister forces of Satan seem to
have but one ultimate object — namely, in some way
to quench this life. All the experiences through which
the Lord allows His people to go (and sometimes takes
them), which, looked at naturally, could be said to be
death, are only allowed in order to bring out this
wonderful reality — that there is a life which, when
put to the test, subjected to every kind of trial,
survives, overcomes.
The
power, persistence, and progress of this life are a
mystery. The more the children of Israel were oppressed,
the more they grew. Carry that over into the spiritual
Israel. It looks today very much as though the evil
forces — hell and men — are reducing the
church, by putting to death, or by driving out of
triumphant faith, many of the Lord’s people. Ah, but
that is not the end of the story. These blind instruments
of evil are fools — they cannot read history. If
they could, they would see that what they are doing is
the very thing that is going to accomplish what they are
trying to frustrate. Oh, no — make no mistake about
it: long centuries of terrible ordeal have proved this,
that there is a persistence and an increase here that is
a mystery; you cannot explain or account for it naturally
at all.
That
should be true of every child of God. So take hope, take
heart, dear tried one. If you are feeling that your way
is more death than life, that the ordeal is tending to be
one of total reduction, remember that that is not the end
of the story.
The Essential Apprenticeship for
the Kingdom
I come
now to this matter of the “essential
apprenticeship”, as I am calling it, for the Kingdom
of God. That is, the Lord Jesus chose twelve — and
we have seen the significance of His act —
“that they might be with him, and that he might send
them forth”. Here are two halves of one thing,
essential halves. “Be with him” — why?
That He might teach, that He might instruct, that He
might equip, IN ORDER THAT He might send forth.
All going forth must issue from the closest association
with Christ in His school. And all association with
Christ in His school must issue in going forth! The Lord
does not want people shut up in monasteries and
cloisters, and places like that, always studying and
learning, accumulating knowledge of things, even though
they might be heavenly things. Every bit of God-imparted
knowledge is to be for practical purposes. And no
practical activity which does not come out of
God-imparted knowledge will affect the Kingdom of God. So
these are the two things.
Note
that all Christ’s teaching, instructing, training of
the twelve came out of His own spiritual life. It did not
come out of books; it did not come out of the schools.
This was a thing that baffled the scholars of His day.
“Whence… hath this man all these things?”
(Matt. 13:56). “How knoweth this man letters, having
never learned?” (John 7:15). He was not a man
of the schools; He was not a man of the library, of the
study. It all came out of His own spiritual life. He had
a spiritual knowledge which was unique. It differed
entirely from every other kind of knowledge.
The Fatherhood of God
For
one thing — and this was the basis of everything
else — His knowledge of the Father was unique.
Consider this statement: “No one knoweth who the Son
is, save the Father; and who the Father is, save the Son,
and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him”
(Luke 10:22). “No one knoweth who the Father is,
save the Son”. That is a sweeping statement, a
tremendous claim! But His unique knowledge of the Father
sprang, not out of studying, not out of contemplating,
but out of the inward spiritual oneness between the
Father and Himself.
Now
note this: the Fatherhood of God was not a DOCTRINE, preached
by Jesus to the general public. You can confirm that from
the record in the Gospels. It was a MYSTERY, disclosed
to His disciples in private. The Fatherhood of God was no
doctrine with Jesus, no theory: it was a reality in His
own spiritual life and in His own spiritual being. To the
twelve He made the Fatherhood of God real — not by
argument, nor by much speaking, but because the Father
was to Him the supreme reality in His life. All His
training of the twelve came out of that; His teaching
came out of that. And you note how much there was in His
teaching of them and training of them which centred in
the Father. How often did He refer to or address the
Father! If you are not impressed, look it up again. This
was the heart of everything in His training of these men.
His teaching on prayer was all based upon that.
“After this manner… pray ye: Our
Father…” (Matt. 6:9). I repeat: this was not
for the general public. It was something on the inside of
the school; it was a mystery disclosed alone to those on
the inside. But it was made real.
This
new Israel has to be constituted on that basis. Just as
the Lord Jesus trained the twelve on the basis of His
union with the Father, so all our training will be
through our union with Christ — a union as vital as
was His with the Father: so that we, in union with the
Son, may ourselves come into the mystery and wonder of
the Fatherhood. It is a secret within this spiritual
seed, within the Israel of God: the wonderful secret of
the Fatherhood, not as a title, but as a great reality.
How much we should be saved from if that became as real
in our beings as it was in His! From beginning to end His
reference is to the Father, His deference is to the
Father; His appeal is always to the Father. The
controlling reality in all His movements is the Father;
everything for Him comes from the Father. The last words
that He uttered were addressed to the Father:
“Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”
(Luke 23:46). It was this that kept Him strong, it was
this that kept Him right. It was the great motive force
in His refusing everything that the Devil offered Him; it
was His motive power in enduring suffering. The Father
was everything to Him, in every way — “all in
all”; a deep inward reality.
I
suggest that we lack something vital in constitution if
we lack an adequate sense of our spiritual union with God
as our Father in Christ Jesus. When we get as near to Him
as that, or get Him as near as that, we begin to see
something. Because, you see, the Lord Jesus sought to
inculcate into the disciples, the new Israel, the meaning
of this relationship between Himself, as Son, and the
Father. It was something of practical account in their
relationship with one another. For He was not
constituting a kind of clientèle or following, a
new movement of people of common interests: He was
constituting a family
That
is made so clear by the writer of the letter to the
Hebrews: “He is not ashamed to call them brethren,
saying, I will declare thy name unto my BRETHREN…
I and the children which God hath given me”
(Heb. 2:11-13). In effect, and in definite statement, the
Lord is saying: “Now, I want you to realise that you
are all brethren, you are all of one family, because you
are children of one Father in the deepest reality of your
constitution. That is the basis on which you should
regard one another and behave toward one another. You are
to cherish and care for one another, even as I have loved
you.” You see, this is the same thing: “Having
loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto
the end” — to the uttermost (John 13:1). That
was only making practical in their corporate life the
relationship between Himself and His Father, the Father
and Himself. It was a training.
Discipline
Mark
you, it was a discipline, too, a real discipline: for if
ever there were twelve diverse kinds of people on this
earth, it was these twelve. Yes, there was something
there of every kind. Temperamentally, constitutionally,
naturally, they would fly into fragments at any moment.
There is nothing here naturally of cohesion, integration.
But under His hand, in His school, something is going to
happen. At any rate, if the symbolism of the book of the
Revelation means anything at all, there is something
fairly solid in its last chapters! For we read that
“the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on
them twelve names of the twelve apostles of the
Lamb” (Rev. 21: 14). Here they are making one solid
basis for the everlasting Kingdom. Something has
happened.
Now
that is what the Lord is trying to do with us. If you
feel that you cannot get on with another child of God,
just ask Him to move them away, or move you away, and see
what happens! You will find that you have got into the
realm where the Lord takes no notice of your prayer
— at least until something has happened in you. The
Lord lets us go through all the “sand-papering”
and difficulty of these contradictory dispositions and
temperaments amongst His children. We think: “Oh,
wouldn’t it be good if only He would take that very
difficult person away!” But it seems that the Lord
does nothing about it, on the outside. No, He is going to
do something on the inside. He may eventually take them
away, but not until that something inside has been done.
That is a part of the apprenticeship to the Kingdom. How
can we rule or reign together in the Kingdom, if we are
all in a state of mutual contradiction and conflict? No,
the Lord is not going to have a kingdom like that, nor a
government like that.
So,
their being “with Him” was for the purpose of
deep practical instruction and teaching in all this
meaning of the Fatherhood of God, that this deep secret
and mystery might find its expression in a corporate
life.
This
matter of training covers a vast amount of ground, and
many other aspects than the one that I have mentioned.
Let me just point out this. While it is true that the
Kingdom came on the day of Pentecost, the New Testament
speaks of the Kingdom in three tenses — past,
present and future: it has come, it is coming, and it has
yet to come. It is with a view to that coming now and yet
to come that you and I are being trained. We are in
school now for the present coming of the Kingdom. It will
not come, except through the discipline of those who are
called into fellowship with Christ. And the final
manifestation and appearing of the Kingdom is something
for which a great preparation is going on, a preparation
of us all. Whatever may be involved in this
apprenticeship, this training, in relation to the
Kingdom, in every one of its aspects, it is of the
greatest importance that we recognise this. We are in
school with a view to the Kingdom.
No Realisation Without the Cross
Whatever
may have been the aspect of the training in the case of
the disciples, notice how Jesus held everything to the
cross. He leaves the multitude, He leaves the world, and
takes these men apart with Himself: He speaks to them of
deep things, wonderful things — and then He heads it
all up to His going to Jerusalem, being delivered into
the hands of the rulers and crucified. (See Matt. 16:21;
17:22,23; 20:17-19; Mark 10:32-34; Luke 18:31-33.) That
was something they could not accept, they could not
understand; that was the thing that stumbled them. But He
held everything to that, as though He would say:
“All this that I have been saying to you, all this
that I have been holding up to view, all this for which I
have chosen you, all this for which you have been in the
school with Me, is based upon the cross. Not one bit of
it can be realised apart from the cross. You can come
into not a fragment of it, except by way of the cross.
The cross is essential to your being this Israel. You
will be born out of that travail, and before that you
will be scattered, every man of you.”
How
true it was! But out of His travail, out of His tomb, out
of His resurrection, they were born as an organic entity.
How they stood up together on the day of Pentecost! I do
not think they had ever been together quite like that
before. This is a new togetherness. They are born on the
day of Pentecost. The new Israel is here. It has been
spoken about and prepared for; it has had much
instruction, much teaching, and much handling; but it
required the cross to produce it.
So for
the Israel of God the cross is essential. The cross is
essential to the Kingdom, the reign; the cross is
essential to the service, the administration. I am deeply
impressed by something in that part of the prophecies of
Isaiah from which we have taken our basic passage —
Isaiah 53:10,11. The real beginning of that chapter is,
of course, not as marked in our arrangement, but at verse
13 of chapter 52: “Behold, my servant…”
And then we read on about the suffering Servant. But what
is said of Him immediately? “He shall be… very
high.” How? The next verse says: “His visage
was so marred more than any man…” A few verses
later we read: “He was despised, and rejected of
men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: we hid
as it were our faces from him…” “WE did
esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.”
But we were wrong: “He was wounded for our
transgressions…” And then on to our passage:
“When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin,
he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the
pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall
see of the travail of his soul, and shall be
satisfied.”
Who is
this? The Servant of the Lord. “Behold, my SERVANT”.
And He chose twelve who were to be “with Him”
in the service of the Kingdom. They were to be the
servants of the Kingdom — His fellow-servants. You
notice from the margin that some authorities add (as in
Luke 6:13): “whom also he named apostles”.
Here, then, is the whole service of the Kingdom fully in
view: but it is only, as in Isaiah 53:10,11, by the
travail. It all comes out of the travail — there is
no other way. The natural disposition has to be undone by
the cross, disintegrated, broken up and scattered. It is
a false thing that cannot stand and will not go through;
it is proved to be unsubstantial. Another thing must be
brought in which is spiritual — that is, of the
Spirit — and which can go through. The cross is the
instrument of God to bring about the new Israel, the new
Kingdom, and the new servants of the Kingdom.
May
the Lord say something to all our hearts: show us what
kind of people He is after, and why He is taking the way
with us that He is. He has in view a service — here,
and more so hereafter — which requires a people
after this kind. The Lord make us like that!