Reading: Judges 4; 5:1-9.
Spiritual Judgement
One of the greatest needs of our time is that we should know what
are those factors which make for the recovery of the Lord's people
to His full thought, in a day when that thought in its fulness has
very largely been lost. You will, no doubt, understand and agree
that one of the factors of greatest importance is that of
spiritual judgement, or spiritual administration.
We might approach it by recalling the opening chapters of the
prophecy of Isaiah. The early chapters have to do, on the one
hand, with the judgement of the nations, including Israel, because
of apostasy, idolatry and failure to recognise the rights of God;
on the other hand, with the bringing into view of a remnant. Much
is said about the remnant of the Lord's people who will come to
the place where His full thought has an expression, who will be
the vessel and means of the expression of His mind in greater
fulness. When that is borne in mind as to the nature of the early
chapters of Isaiah, you find connected there with those remarkable
Messianic prophecies, among them these familiar words: "And there
shall come forth a shoot out of the stock of Jesse, and a branch
out of his roots shall bear fruit. And the Spirit of the Lord
shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the
spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the
fear of the Lord" (Isa. 11:1-2). Just prior to that there are
those other, even better known, words in chapter 9: "For unto us a
child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be
upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful,
Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of
the increase of his government and of peace there shall be no end,
upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to establish it,
and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from
henceforth even for ever" (Isa. 9:6-7).
You will recognise the connection. The Lord has been disappointed
as to all that He desired and intended in this earth in and
through a people, and failure marks everything here that is
supposed to represent the Lord. The causes of the failure are
brought into view for judgement. Out of the judgement there arises
a new state in a purged remnant, and in connection with that new
state this One is seen; the Child is born, the Son is given, and
upon His shoulder is made to rest the government. Among His titles
there is that of Counsellor, and then it is said that the Spirit
of the Lord shall rest upon Him, the Spirit of wisdom,
understanding and knowledge. Thus it becomes perfectly clear that
administration by judgement is vested in Him as Head. What follows
is that that judgement, that administration, is to be expressed by
the same Holy Spirit in and through a spiritual instrumentality, a
vessel, a remnant.
When we carry that away from Israel, and see the other side of
that prophetic foreshadowing, this is what arises. Christ,
invested by the anointing with the Spirit of government,
judgement, counsel and might, is exalted to God's right hand, and
all rule and authority is made subject to Him. Then, by means of
the same anointing an instrumentality - the church, His body - is
brought into association with Him for the purposes of that
spiritual administration.
Note that it is spiritual administration, or spiritual judgement.
There is all the difference between natural judgement and
spiritual judgement, between what we would call administering as
here on the earth among men, and that which is by reason of
spiritual understanding resulting in a ministry which is able to
point out the difference between that which is man's mind and that
which is God's. It is being able, by reason of spiritual
understanding to check, arrest, and bring back those drifts,
departures, declensions which are the result, not only of wilful
and determined rejection of the Lord, but of the imposition of the
mind of man into the things of the Lord. Look at the history of
the things which bear the Lord's Name, and you will see quite
clearly that the departure from the full thought of the Lord, and
subsequent failure and weakness on the part of the people of God,
has this one thing as its cause; that man, with every good
intention and desire to further the interests of the Lord, has
become the Lord's counsellor in His things, and the Lord has
ceased to be His own counsellor.
Let us put that in another way. Man has sought to carry on God's
work by his own (as he would call it) consecrated judgement,
understanding, thoughts, ideas and intentions. And all
unconsciously and imperceptibly, the Lord, as to the
immediate and direct government of His own affairs, has been edged
out, set back. In the course of time there comes a consciousness
of weakness and failure, of paralysis, of arrest, of
impotence, and the Lord's people awaken to the fact that
other powers, with which they can no longer contend successfully,
make it impossible for them to go forward triumphantly with the
Lord's interests, and they are brought largely to a standstill.
When the thing is investigated, what is the invariable result of
such an enquiry? "We need a greater fulness of the Holy Spirit."
That is how it is put. "We need the Lord to come in in a new way.
We need to bring the Lord in more than we have been doing." These
are only ways of expressing it, and these could be multiplied, but
what is felt and recognised is this, that the Lord is not there in
evidence, in fulness, as He ought to be. You ask, "Why?" If you
are honest you will say, "He has been edged out. Man has taken His
place. Man has become His counsellor."
Let the ultimate issue determine if that is so. When you come up
against a situation of spiritual weakness, failure and defeat,
against forces with which you cannot cope in the work, the
interests and testimony of the Lord, what is the conclusion of the
whole matter? What is the judgement that is passed? Well, we need
the Lord in a way in which we have not had Him. That is a simple
way of putting it. Why should we need the Lord in a way in which
we have not had Him before? Why should that need exist? Is it
because the Lord was not willing to be with us as fully as was
necessary? Can we for a moment lay it to God's charge? Never!
Then what is the cause? Somehow the Lord's place had been taken by
something or someone else. How? What? We have been carrying on the
things of the Lord with our own resources of mind, strength, and
will, and it cannot be done. Sooner or later we are bound to come
up against the fact that unless the Lord Himself is really on the
Throne in full command, with all His resources being
projected into His interests, deadlock is inevitable.
What then does that mean? It means that which we said at the
beginning, that the great need in such a time of weakness and
failure, in a time when God's fullest thought concerning His
people and His work is not found in expression, is a ministry of
judgement, of spiritual administration. What is needed are
those in such a relationship with Him as to be able to discern
what is and what is not the Lord's thought.
You will not, of course, allow yourself to sit in judgement of
one another, but there is such a thing as a people being clear in
spiritual perception, who are very clear as to how the Lord would
do things, and how the Lord would not do things; when the Lord
would do things, and when the Lord would not do things. That is
discriminating between well-intentioned activities of His people
for Him, and what is the pure, original, immediate mind of God
about His own things.
I believe that the book of Judges has to do with that whole
matter, and I think the Lord will say something to us out of that
book as we turn to it. Before we do so we must be quite sure that
we see what we are getting at, because it is so easy for the
Scriptures to become an interesting study and for us not to be
gripped by the real issue on hand. Have we grasped what has
already been said? It is difficult to express it in few words. Are
we impressed, in a day like this, with the need for a
ministry of discrimination in the things of the Lord for the
people of God, so that they have available that discernment,
perception and judgement of which Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 2
concerning "he that is spiritual" judging all things? That
judgement, that insight, will deliver from the inevitable and
subsequent failure of all that is done in the best of intentions
for God, as over against God doing His own work in His own way. It
is a very important difference. The Bible is full of that
difference, and to provide Himself with an instrument for that
purpose is a matter of very special concern and care on the part
of the Lord.
If the Lord is to have a vessel like that, that vessel will have
to go through the depths. The Word of God divides between soul and
spirit. That division represents very largely this discrimination:
what man does out of his own soul, reason, will, his feeling for
God; and what man does in his renewed spirit as directed
immediately by the Spirit of God. They are two entirely different
realms, and the consequences of each are as different as two
worlds can be. In the end, one is bound for failure, the other is
bound to be effective.
The Lord needs an instrument, a ministry through a people, which
is of this character, so that it can, because of its understanding
in the things of the Lord, call back the Lord's people to the
true, pure basis of God's own way of doing things. Such an
instrumentality will go through the fire, through a very deep way
in order that it may have such perception. It means that that
which is of the natural life, its judgements and its ideas, will
be pulverised. Attempts, efforts, activities, enthusiasms in the
things of God will meet such a smiting that there will be no hope
for those who go that way to do anything more for the Lord. They
will come to the place where unless the Lord does it, it is no use
attempting it, and if they are going to be His instruments they
will know what the Lord wants done and how He wants it done. We
need spiritual understanding in the things of the Lord.
Dealings of the Lord
This will explain the Lord's dealings with those who will really
put themselves into His hands. He will take them through
experiences in which they are able, in their own history, to see
the tremendous difference. He will allow them a history of the
most utter devotion to Himself with the results of that devotion,
but nevertheless springing from themselves. He will allow them a
great deal of experience of work for Himself, activities in the
name of the Lord, perhaps bring them into a very large place of
what men would call "usefulness to the Lord", and then smash the
whole thing, shatter it, like a potter's vessel, to smithereens.
These people will see their work go, and all their capability to
do any more, and then the Lord will begin to do something else, a
different thing. It will not be anything that can be written
up like before, or that can be talked about; nothing that men
can take account of, nothing of a purely public character, but He
will be getting right down to the place where every bit is of
Himself, and they know it. While they may be used, nevertheless
their deepest consciousness is of being spectators of what
God is doing through them; it is God doing it, and not their doing
it for God. There is a tremendous difference between those
two things, and those two sides of a history are two sides which
the Lord allows, in order to prepare such a vessel of spiritual
understanding. We do not really spiritually understand without
experience; we do not come into these things without going through
something; we are battered into them. It is regarding this that
the Lord wants to speak to His people, and we must listen to what
He has to say.
Perhaps we shall get a little nearer to the matter if we turn to
the book of Judges. We must first of all remember the connection
between the books of Joshua and Judges, because the connection is
maintained, and it is important to recognise that the connection
is maintained, although the situation is so different.
Joshua - Ephesians
We may say that Joshua in the Old Testament corresponds to
Ephesians in the New Testament. Joshua is the passing over Jordan
and coming into the land, and going from strength to strength in
victory, in the power and energy of the Holy Spirit. It is, in the
language of Ephesians, in the heavenlies in Christ, warring a
mighty warfare by the equipment which God gives against
principalities, powers and world-rulers of this darkness and
spiritual hosts of wickedness. It is the people of God through
union with Christ in death, burial and resurrection coming into
the realm of His sovereign triumph. That is Joshua. It states the
position of the Lord's full thought for His people; they have
tasted of it, they have some experience of it, they know the
meaning of it. In the beginning, before the Epistle to the
Ephesians was written, the church was known; that is, it was
expressed. In the first days, the days of Pentecost, there is this
thing in a living expression. They had to have the explanation in
doctrine as God's thought presented to them in a concrete and
crystallised way, so that they should always know from whence they
had fallen, and that to which the Lord would have them come. But
in experience they knew Ephesians at the beginning, victory over
the powers of darkness, a living in spirit in heavenly union with
Christ, blessed fellowship, a Holy Spirit ordered ministry, and
all else that is in Ephesians.
Judges - Timothy, John's Epistles,
Revelation
When you come to Judges you have a drop from the Ephesian's
plane, and come down to much that you find in Timothy, and in
John's Epistles, and in the book of the Revelation at the
beginning. The people of God have dropped out of their heavenly
position and come down on to an earthly position spiritually, with
disastrous consequences. That is how you find it in the book of
Judges.
When we remember that, and then read this book of Judges, it is
difficult for us to fail to be impressed with similarities between
that time and our own time; this dispensation since the days of
the apostles. The book of Judges is a long period of over three
hundred years, and only with big gaps between do you find anything
of Joshua or Ephesian conditions. If you study the technique of
the book of Judges you will be very much impressed with that. It
is difficult when reading such a short book, with the very brief
accounts of things there, to realise the time factor. You have to
spread the thirteen judges over more than three hundred years, and
have to crowd into a simple statement like this a period of
probably forty years: "And the children of Israel did evil again...
and the Lord delivered them into the hands of...". The range of
these times of subjection to other powers is from six to forty
years and is very often crowded into a single sentence. Then when
it says the Lord raised up a deliverer, a saviour, and these
judges were instrumental in bringing them out of those conditions,
it only lasted a little while or for a longer period of perhaps
forty years, but you can see that the Joshua conditions were
spasmodic over a long time.
Is that not true of this dispensation? At the beginning you have
Joshua conditions, Ephesian conditions: victory, heavenly life,
glory and power; the power of the enemy broken; then a change, and
at intervals spread right over this age, a glorious break of
recovery, and for a time the testimony glowing again, triumphant
conditions, then a lapse again, and a long period of declension
and paralysis. That is the story of the church through this
dispensation. If we look at things today as a whole, how do they
appear to us? Would the most sanguine and the most optimistic, and
the one who wanted to say the best thing today, say that the
church as a whole is in Joshua or Ephesian conditions? The most
evangelical minded today are saying this is impossible. It is no
use aiming at such a high standard as Ephesians today for the
church. We had better content ourselves with things as they are,
and make the best of a bad job. No one would argue that we are
more in a Joshua state than in a Judges state in this time, and we
are being pressed more and more to that position. Everywhere
leaders among the Lord's people are confessing to paralysis,
defeat, arrest, to the impossibility of just going right on in
glorious triumph. There is a state of defeat and weakness like
that today, and we are going more and more to have to recognise
it.
We do not assume the role of prophet, but we do feel very
strongly that the time is not far off when organised Christianity
will have to own itself defeated before this world order. There
will be retrenchment, there will come about in the heart of the
mass of God's people a cry for recovery of original conditions.
And is not this cry already going out from so many parts of the
world among the Lord's people for a new visitation of the Holy
Spirit coming from the consciousness that that, and that alone,
can meet the need? Is it not a confession? It is a confession of
failure. We need not force this thing, that the Judges condition
is very largely the condition today; mainly weakness, mainly
defeat, broken by periods of power and patches of victory.
Two Glorious Things from Judges
What does the book of Judges bring up before us for such a time?
It brings up two glorious things. One is a very glorious thing,
and the other is a glorious thing inasmuch as it is God's key to
the situation. The first thing is this, that the Lord is always
ready to give to His people the Joshua or the Ephesians state of
things if they will turn to Him with all their heart. You are
impressed as you read this book. It does not matter how far they
have gone away. Terrible things are said about Israel in this
book, about turning to idols, all that they did against the Lord,
and it only says: "But when the children of Israel cried unto the
Lord, the Lord raised them up a deliverer...". It seemed that God
was standing right there ready to do it. Why? (Now this is why we
said that the link between Joshua and Judges is maintained).
Because God has secured that position for them. He has it, as it
were, in His hand, and He is saying: I have that position. It is
yours. You have only to come to it. Jordan has secured this. The
cross has secured it. It is here already. I have not to do
anything to give it to you, but you have just to come to it; it is
ready for you. That seems to be what the Lord says. If His people
come on to His ground, then His ground is that of Joshua
conditions, victory at once.
See how these men led out their feeble, crushed, despised armies,
things which were not of this world: Gideon and three hundred,
Deborah and Barak and their little army compared with Sisera; and
how mighty a victory. How much the Lord took of this matter in His
own hands to see it through! That speaks for itself. Let us
remember that there is no need to struggle towards what we call an
Ephesian position. This is not something that has got to be
achieved, agonised unto; it is ours. The life of heavenly union
with Christ is ours; God has secured it by the cross for us. All
we have to do is to come on to God's ground and we have it. What
is God's ground? Well, that is just the whole purpose of the book
of Judges.
Another thing which the book says is that there must be this
ministry of discrimination in the interests of the Lord's people,
that they should come on to the Lord's ground of victory and
heavenly fulness. The Judges represent those principles of
spiritual recovery in a day of declension, and they are this
inclusive principle, that they judge in the things of the Lord.
It is necessary to understand what these Judges were doing. It
was not just to judge for man. That was not their business at all.
When they gave judgement it was not just in the trivialities of
ordinary daily life among people, to get them out of difficult and
inconvenient circumstances.
Their business was to judge for God, not for men, in the first
place. There was a revealed mind of God in existence, there were
the statutes and the laws of the Lord governing the life of His
people. That was laid down, and there could be no departing from
that. That was to govern. Now the Judges sat to determine
everything in the light of the revealed mind of God. They judged
for God. They said: "That is not of God, it must go; this is what
the Lord requires, it must be established." They judged for the
Lord on the basis of a revelation of God's mind. That means that
they had understanding in the things of the Lord, they had a
spirit of judgement, a spirit of understanding, a spirit of
knowledge, a spirit of counsel in spiritual things. They were able
to say, "That is not the Lord's mind"; "The Lord would not have
that"; "The Lord requires this, and in this way." That was the
work of the judges. They were, in effect, spiritually minded
people to judge all things. "He that is spiritual judges" (or
examines; the word in the Greek cannot be fully translated into
English, it is a word which means the ability to look into a
matter, dissect it, and discriminate as to the right and the wrong
of it, and pass the verdict). The spiritual person is divinely
given a faculty for that. That is what Paul is saying in this
passage from 1 Corinthians 2:15. The spiritual man has a divinely
given faculty for looking into a matter and dissecting it, and
seeing what is of God and what is not of God in that thing, and
passing a verdict from God's standpoint on that matter.
These were the Judges in Israel, equipped by the Holy Spirit for
that work, and they saved Israel in a day of declension. They were
the deliverers of Israel in such a time. Now is not that an
important matter? Does the Lord not need something like that in a
day like this? That is what comes out in this book.
We close this meditation by mentioning one other general thing in
the book. These judges were very ordinary people in themselves.
They had no title to their position, they had no rights, status or
lineage, it was not an hereditary thing. It seems the Lord went
anywhere, and put His hand on anyone and the people taken up were
usually the most surprised. Gideon said, "I am the least in my
father's house". Jephthah was an illegitimate child, cast out by
his people because of illegitimacy and driven away, then brought
back and made judge. Deborah was a woman. That is not to despise
her, but it was not the usual way of God, but something quite
unusual. What was governing all this? These very ordinary people
in themselves, out-of-the-way people, despised among men, were
constituted the judges of the Lord's people upon a basis which was
entirely spiritual, nothing natural, not what they were in name or
title or position. It was a purely spiritual thing, and the Lord
dealt with them entirely upon that basis. The Lord never for a
moment covered their natural and human weaknesses and defects, but
told the whole story. We grieve to read of Samson the Judge of
Israel, but God does not cover it up. He lets it be seen in clear
light what they are by nature. It was their relationship to Him
which determined everything. If they failed in their spiritual
fellowship with God, they did not stand just because they were in
office.
God does not spare Samson. You would say: "Oh, here is Samson,
the judge of Israel, the one man in all the world representing
God: surely God will cover Samson and all his defects. If Samson
goes wrong God must be specially lenient with him because of the
special responsibility resting upon him." Not a bit of it. If
Samson goes wrong he will be caused to bear the results of his
wrongdoing, and he will go out of his position. God is dealing
with people this time entirely upon a basis of their spiritual
relationship with Him, and that is spiritual government; it is
never official. It is never given to anybody because of what they
are in themselves, it is never by some official appointment of God.
Anybody who among men may be worthless, outcast, rejected,
who has a relationship with God spiritually becomes a part of His
instrument for correcting the things which are wrong among the
Lord's people, and bringing back to the full thought of God.
By this we are seeking to emphasise that God needs a spiritual
vessel, not a great, public, official thing. He will pass by
the traditional thing, He will pass by the official thing, He will
look for spiritual men and women. He will take pains to make us
spiritually minded because of the value of this. There is a larger
meaning than lies on the surface. Its full ministry is not going
to be fulfilled here in this dispensation. These various judges
(leaving out Abimelech, who was altogether wrong), represent
aspects of that full-orbed government which is gathered up
eventually in the king. The last of the judges, and the fullest of
them, was Samuel, and it was as though he gathered up all these in
himself and handed it all over to the king, brought in the king.
It is remarkable that the end of the book of Judges is: "In those
days there was no king in Israel...". And Samuel brought in the
king. But Samuel took up all these spiritual things in his own
person. Samuel was a glorious judge.
The King is coming, and He is coming into His position of
universal administrator. He will need an instrument through which
to administer, and that instrument will have to have spiritual
understanding, a spirit that has been developed in the
understanding of the Lord. So the Father of our spirits is busy
with us now to bring us to a place where spiritually we understand
for the purposes of administration later on.
That is a little extra word. It does not come immediately into
our consideration, but otherwise it is difficult to explain why,
when we reach any little measure of spiritual maturity, the Lord
takes us to glory. Just at the time when a saint has become mature
and is needed by the church, has insight and perception, then he
is taken home, and the church here says, "Why did the Lord take
all those pains to get a man there, and then take him away?"
Because his ministry is yet to be fulfilled. The King is coming,
and the King will need those who are around Him sharing in His
counsel, also clothed with a spirit of counsel and understanding.
This is all very general and imperfect, but it may help us to
begin to see why the Lord deals with us as He does, and perhaps
what the Lord is after in a day like this.