Come out of her, My people, so that you don't participate in her sins and also suffer from her diseases.
(Revelation 18:4 ISV)
What is the spiritual life in the matter of
worship? Oh, it is not ecclesiastical architecture, it is not vestments, it is
not ordinances, and it is not rites. They pass out with Calvary; the perpetuating of
anything like that is a contradiction of Calvary. See where we are today. The
maintenance of that sort of thing is because of a failure to perceive what the
Lord Jesus has brought in.... Why, then, perpetuate a thing which God has
dismissed in the Cross and, by keeping to the lower, fail to reach the higher?
Do you see where things are astray today? I know how sweeping this is, but all
this has to do with worship. Now note that when there is a failure to recognize
the spiritual meaning of all this and to enter into it... and a maintaining of
the old thing... you are still on a soul level, and you are open to deception;
the whole thing may be a ghastly deception. And how does that deception work? In
this way: that so many good Christian people are absolutely in bondage to a
traditional system which is cutting clean across Divine revelation for them. It
is their traditional system which is simply barring the way to spiritual
revelation, whereas the Cross of the Lord Jesus represents the liberty in the
spirit for God to lead into the fullness of His Life and Light.
That is the whole purpose of the Letter to the
Hebrews. It was for that very purpose. Here were a people that had received light
concerning the true nature of fellowship with God in Christ – that the Lord
Jesus had taken the place of the Temple and the priesthood and the sacrifices
and the ordinances... and even the Sabbath. Now it is no longer a matter of
form, ceremony, external rites, buildings, priests, sacrifices; it is all
Christ. They had seen that. The writer had called upon them to go outside the
religious, formal, historic, traditional camp, and that brought persecution,
ostracism, isolation, loneliness, and all manner of things. The official
religious people made it very hard for them because of that. The price to be
paid for what is truly spiritual and heavenly was... and is... great, and they
were dangerously in peril of going back to the old thing. The Letter to the
Hebrews was written just to save them from that peril and to tell them more
fully about the great change that had come about in the Cross – the work of the
Lord Jesus... to tell them that one system, the earthly representation, had
passed and the other, the heavenly reality, had come in.... To know the Lord in
Life, we must be free from the grave clothes of outward systems. Why, then,
perpetuate a system? The Lord Jesus put all that away in His Cross; it is all
gone.