"Now these are
the generations of Terah. Terah begat Abram, Nahor, and
Haran; and Haran begat Lot. And Haran died in the
presence of his father Terah in the land of his nativity,
in Ur of the Chaldees... And Terah look Abram his son,
and Lot the son of Haran, his son's son, and Sarai his
daughter in law, his son Abram's wife; and they went
forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees to go into the
land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt
there. And the days of Terah were two hundred and five
years: and Terah died in Haran. Now the Lord said unto
Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred,
and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will
shew thee" (Genesis 11:27,28,31,32; 12:1).
We are seeing in these
messages that the spiritual life is a pilgrimage, and
that the Christian is on a journey which begins in the
world and ends in the heart of God. God's verdict on the
life of Abraham was: "Abraham, my friend" (Isaiah
41:8), that friendship meaning that Abraham had really
entered into the heart of God. We are seeing that this
spiritual pilgrimage has eight steps and stages, and we
have already seen that the first major step is in these
words: "Get thee out". It is a call of
God which allows no compromise. There has to be a point
to which we come when we step over a line and are out
from the world into the way of God. It is a very clear
and unmistakable decision to be separated completely from
this world unto God. That is where we were in our last
meditation. The first decisive step is oneness with the
heart of God in His repudiation of the world.
Now we come to the
second phase in this pilgrimage, which is oneness with
God regarding the natural man. When we have come to the
great decision to go with God and to obey His call,
everything is not finished: the battle is not all over
when we have decided that this world is no longer our
world. We find that the battle only takes on another
form, and we are brought face to face with another issue.
Our first crisis was concerning the world outside
ourselves; the second phase in our pilgrimage is conflict
with the world inside ourselves. Indeed, this issue is
just with ourselves as ourselves, and this is the
beginning of a new battle which may involve all that has
gone before: if we fail in this battle we may just undo
what we have done before.
It is the conflict with
the natural man, and this natural man is a very deceptive
thing. He can be a very religious and very zealous
natural man.
I think that you will
have heard the story about the great preacher, Charles
Spurgeon, who had a college for training preachers. One
of the subjects in that college was on how to preach, and
every student was given a text from the Bible on which he
had to preach a sermon. One student was given the sixth
chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians: "Wherefore
take up the whole armour of God", and then come
all the parts of the armour. Well, this student got busy
with his text. When the day came for preaching his trial
sermon, he stood in the pulpit, pulled himself together
and began to describe the armour. He represented himself
as a soldier, and, in a very self-confident, strong way,
he described the armour and himself as putting on that
armour. He was going to make a great impression on his
audience! He stepped forward, clad in all the armour,
drew the sword and cried: 'Now where is the devil?' Mr.
Spurgeon, who was sitting near him, just put his hands
over his mouth and said: 'The devil is inside the
armour!'
Now, that story does
illustrate this point. We may have made the great
decision to come over on to the Lord's side, to leave the
world and follow Him, but it is just then that the real
battle inside begins. There is an enemy inside, and that
enemy is ourselves, what the Apostle Paul calls "the
natural man".
Notice our Scripture.
The Lord had said to Abraham: "Get thee out of
thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's
house, unto the land that I will shew thee",
and then we read that the whole of his father's house
went with him! Terah, his father, took Abraham out.
Abraham's brother went with them and so did his nephew,
the son of his dead brother, and later we are led to see
that the whole household went. They all went out with
Abraham, and yet the Lord had said: "Get thee
out... from thy kindred, and from thy father's
house".
You see, in type the
natural man had taken hold of the divine purpose. Terah
and the family not only went out with Abraham, but they
took him out. You are not, therefore, surprised that they
did not get very far! They came to Haran and there they
stayed, we are not told for how long, but probably quite
a time. We are told that Abraham was seventy years old at
that time, so quite a lot of time was lost.
This was the first
delay in the progress of this spiritual pilgrimage. They
came to Haran, and there they stayed until Terah died.
Terah, it says, was a very old man, and "the old
man" does take a long time to die! But it was not
until Terah died that they were able to resume their
journey. Terah was the main factor in this spiritual
hold-up, but even when the crisis of Terah was
passed, there was still something clinging to Abraham. It
was this man Lot, who was a perfect nuisance all his
life: this something of the old life which continues to
cling and is always threatening to hold up spiritual
progress. The whole history of Lot reveals that which can
limit the purpose of God. Lot ought never to have been
there, and his presence is always a menace to the
spiritual life. That will create the necessity for
another crisis, for the last thing that belongs to that
old natural life has to be cut off. Lot will have to go.
What is this man Lot?
Well, you remember the crisis between Abraham and Lot,
when their herdmen quarrelled amongst themselves and
Abraham, who represents the spirit of grace, said to Lot:
'Let there be no strife between your herdmen and mine.
Lift up your eyes and see the whole land. It lies before
you. You choose what you would like and I will have what
is left. If you go one way I will go the other.' So Lot
lifted up his eyes and surveyed the whole country, and
seeing the well-watered land around the great cities of
Sodom and Gomorrah, he said: 'I choose that.'
So Lot moved his tent
in the direction of the city of Sodom. He pitched it for
a time outside the city, and then the attractions of that
city drew him inside. He yielded to the call of the city
of Sodom. Not satisfied with getting outside, and then
getting inside, he had to become an important person in
the city, and so we eventually find him sitting in the
gate of the city, the gate being the place where all the
important people met to discuss the affairs of the city.
So Lot is at last an important official, and it was not
long before trouble began. Certain kings made a raid with
their armies upon the cities of the Plain, and Lot, with
his whole family and all that he had, was carried away
captive, and it was Abraham who had to go and rescue him.
Then Lot went back into the city and became so much a
part of it that when the angels came down to declare that
Sodom and Gomorrah were going to be destroyed by fire, he
was so reluctant to leave that the angels had to take him
by the hand and pull him out.
Well, we are all ready
to condemn Lot. We think that he was a poor sort, and not
much good. But really he is only a type of the natural
life in all of us. Anyone who really knows himself or
herself knows that there is something like that in their
natures. It takes the very mercy and power of God to get
us separated from ourselves. Yes, this self-life is a
terribly strong thing and will always gravitate in the
opposite direction to the spirit. It will always work to
keep us back from going on with God, and there has to be
a very real crisis in this matter. That crisis came in
the life of Abraham when Lot was separated from him. On
the very same day that Lot decided to leave Abraham, and
Abraham was separated from Lot, the Lord appeared to
Abraham and said: "Lift up now thine eyes",
and He showed him all the universe and said: "I
will make thy seed as the dust of the earth"
(Genesis 13:14-18). That is only another way of
saying: 'Now we can go right on to the fulness of My
purpose.'
The great crisis of
separation between what is of the spirit and what is of
the flesh has taken place, and that is the great crisis
of the sixth chapter of the Letter to the Romans. You
must remember that that chapter was written to
Christians, not to people who were still back in Ur of
the Chaldees, that is, to people who were still in the
world. It was to people who had taken the first great
step in decision for the Lord but had evidently not
recognized all that that step involved. The Apostle Paul
is not saying: 'You must be baptized as a testimony of
the fact that you have come right out for the Lord', but:
'We were crucified with Christ. We were buried
with Him in baptism.' That is what is meant when we were
baptized. Our old man was crucified with Christ - but we
have brought out Terah and Lot and all the rest with us.
We have not recognized all that it meant when God said:
"Get thee out!" There has to be this new crisis
in our lives when we not only say farewell to the world
but we say farewell to ourselves: "I have been
crucified with Christ; yet I live; and yet no longer
I" (Galatians 2:20).
Now most of you know
all about that. You know the teaching of Romans 6 and
perhaps you know it so well that you are not very
interested in hearing about it again. It is not for me to
judge you, but if you really have passed through this
crisis, it never becomes a thing without interest. It
stands out in your life in such a way that it is bigger
even than your conversion.
Now, let me get this
matter quite straight so that there is as little
confusion as possible. It must be recognized that we are
dealing with a situation which is due to an imperfect
apprehension of the meaning of the great crisis of the
Cross: the crisis which really involves and includes
everything from the initial step to the final step; from
the basic 'out' to the ultimate 'in'. With God all that
is present and implicit at the beginning. With God the
journey from Egypt to the Promised Land was no more than
eleven days; but with Israel it took a generation, a
lifetime. On the 'out' side of the Red Sea the song
contained a clause which supposed that they had already
come to God's Holy Habitation (Exodus 15:13) but, while
that was present and inherent with the Lord, they had a
way to go before it was realized. That delay was due to
"the mixed multitude" (Exodus 12:38), that is,
mixture in Israel, two things which are from two sources.
This is a parable.
It is Lot and Abraham,
one of the flesh, the other of the spirit: of faith and
not of faith. With God, these two things are fully and
utterly separated in the death and resurrection - the
Cross - of Christ, but with His people it is a long
history of many applications of the principle through a
crisis and a process, or a series of minor crises.
Perhaps we have not
been sufficiently aware that the New Testament in its
teaching books or letters, as well as in its history,
stands wholly related to these two aspects, a basic,
all-inclusive crisis, and a process marked by many
particular applications of that content; progressive
illumination and successive challenges. This is the
explanation of the whole evangelical convention movement
in the last fifty years and more. It is based upon the
imperfect understanding of the fundamental implications
of the Christian life. Therefore the two things implicit
in true spiritual conventions are illumination and
challenge, resolving into a further crisis.
These crises created by
the conflict between the natural man and the spiritual
man in us all are represented in the case of Abram by
Lot, Egypt (Genesis 12:9-20), Abimelech (Genesis 20),
Hagar (Genesis 16...), all of which represent
outcroppings of the natural man in his own wisdom,
strength, effort and weakness. These will come up again
in these studies, but they are recorded for our
instruction in what has to be brought back to the initial
transition. Abraham was called the Hebrew, and that
means: the Man from Beyond, that is - beyond the river
(Euphrates). A river lay between his old and his new
realm.
The Christian has a
river, like the Red Sea or the Jordan, which is a
dividing line; and spiritually it declares what does and
what does not belong to each side. According to Romans 6,
that dividing line is the Cross of Christ, and baptism is
there said to be the believer's spiritual acceptance of
that great divide. The point is that the Cross goes with
us throughout our lives and challenges the presence and
action of everything belonging to the 'beyond' as not to
be tolerated here. This history of denying our selfhood
is the pathway which brings us ever nearer the heart of
God. Every fresh expression of Christ's victory over the
world is a further step into the heart of God. As His
'being made perfect through suffering' meant a
progressive and final repudiation of the world and the
self, so that He arrived at last in the heart of His
Father, attested and declared "My Beloved Son",
so every believer is called upon to make the same
spiritual pilgrimage to the same most blessed destiny. It
is the way of the continuous
"Not I, but Christ",
but this way of His Cross leads right on into
God's heart, when and where He will say "My
friend".
We may have come out
for the Lord and may be working for Him, and yet there
may be something of that self-life which is holding up
our spiritual progress, something of our natural life
which has come out with us. We are not willing to let it
go. We argue for it and say: 'There is no harm in it.
Other good people do it', but that is not good enough for
the Lord, and many Christian lives are under arrest for
they are not just going on fully and freely with the Lord
into all His purpose because there is something like Lot
in the life.
We are here that the
Lord may get a full, free way in every life. Let us say: "Search
me, O God, and know my heart: Try me, and know my
thoughts: and see if there be any way of grief in
me" (Psalm 139:23,24).