When we
were thinking about this matter in its wider range of the
second man, the last Adam, our key phrase from Scripture
was 1 Cor. 15:45 - "The last Adam became a
life-giving Spirit." Then we proceeded to be
occupied with the uniqueness of the Son of Man. We added
to that 2 Cor. 5:16 - "Wherefore we henceforth know
no man after the flesh: even though we have known Christ
after the flesh, yet now we know him so no more" -
implying that Christ has to be known in another way than
after the flesh.
Now we move on to the
third phase, and we add another well-known passage from 1
Cor. 2:1,2:-
"And I,
brethren, when I came unto you, came not with excellency
of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the mystery of
God. For I determined not to know anything among you,
save Jesus Christ, and him crucified."
The meaning of Christ?
- Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
The
Undercutting of a False Man
Although we have not,
by a very great way, covered the meaning, for ourselves
individually and for the Church, of His incarnation and
earthly life, we have to move on and come anew to the
meaning of Christ in the terms of His Cross - again
something far beyond the possibility of our compassing
within a short time, and of necessity to be looked at
perhaps in only one particular; and that is, that the
Cross of our Lord Jesus was the undercutting of a false
man to make way for a true man. We have seen how that
true man was brought in, and there is so very much more
contained in those statements of His which, on the face
of them, seem so simple and commonplace. "I am the
way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6) - that
comprehends everything for the new creation. The central
word alone - "I am the truth" - quite clearly
indicates that the truth is a Person, and not a system of
teaching, not a philosophy; it is a Person. In other
words, the Lord Jesus was saying, I am the true Man
according to God's mind; all other men now are false to
the Divine thought, a contradiction; there is one great,
corporate, false man here; I am the truth as to God's
idea about man, and I am the first of a great,
comprehensive, corporate, true man, the one new man.
The true Man according
to God's thought and intention was brought in in
incarnation; He had grown up and lived His life by the
Spirit; He had been tested, and through testing had been
perfected; and then had been attested, and then placed,
established, in heaven - there as the firstborn among
many brethren, the standard and type and pattern to which
the Spirit sent would work in a multitude of men. But,
before that could be done, something had to take place to
dispose of the false man, and so at a certain clearly
defined point a new phase of His life was taken up - the
phase of the Cross. That point is clearly discernible.
Everything before had moved steadily up to one climax,
and that was the climax of the transfiguration; the Man
brought in, tested, perfected, and attested as seen in
the Mount of Transfiguration. So far as He Himself was
concerned, it finished on the Mount of Transfiguration.
He is glorified, He is attested from heaven, He is
clothed with heavenly glory; for Himself there is nothing
whatever to stand between Him and entrance triumphantly
into heaven; but He turns and comes down the Mount, and
takes up this further phase of His meaning in relation to
the false man, the man who is in a place from which he
has to be removed to make room for the new corporate true
man. Thus He descends and from that time He moves toward
that point where He stands as the representative of the
false man. On one side of His Cross, it is that. (There
is another side, where He is offering Himself without
spot unto God. There are two sides to the Cross.) But on
this one side, He Who knew no sin was made sin in our
stead that we might become the righteousness of God in
Him (2. Cor. 5:21). How utter that statement is! It goes
deeper than any other statement about the Cross. You have
the statement that He "bare our sins in his body
upon the tree" (1 Pet. 2:24), but here it is more
utter than that - He is made sin in our stead, meaning
that we are sin: we not only have sins but we are sin:
and He is made sin in our place (not inherently but
representatively). The other half of the statement bears
that out in its own way - "that we might become the
righteousness of God in him"; not that we might
receive as upon us the righteousness of God, but that we
might become the righteousness of God in Him. He
is the righteousness of God, but not only as a virtue, as
a characteristic, He is the righteousness of
God, "That we might become the righteousness of God
in him" - that is the statement, an utter
statement. He was made sin for us. He therefore stands in
His Cross as representing the false man, and comes
under the stroke of Divine judgment, dismissal,
cancellation: He is put away. If we want to see and know
what God's attitude is toward ourselves and this creation
ultimately if we are not found in Christ, listen -
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
(Mark 15:34.)
That is God's attitude
toward us ultimately, outside of Christ. Now, thank God,
it is the day of grace, and He is waiting, giving us a
chance; but that is the actual and positive destiny of
all those who have been in the way of being saved, and
have refused, have not acted upon their opportunity; it
is their destiny to know what He knew in that awful
moment, the most awful moment in the history of any man -
God forsaking him. You may have intellectual problems and
difficulties about eternity and eternal punishment, but
do not try to resolve that into human understanding, even
by using human language of age and ages and eternal ages
- no human language can convey that. Taste
God-forsakenness, and though it be, in time, but for an
instant, it will grey you like an old man, it will put
years upon you, it will be like an awful eternity. Lose
God for an instant, and it is an awful thing. Well, in
that moment, He stood in the place that we shall occupy
if we are not found in Him. In order that we might not be
in that position, the grace of God in Jesus Christ is
available to save us from it. But the point is, He was
swallowing up the destiny of the false man, swallowing it
up in His own person to get that man out of the way, to
make room for a man who would never know that at all. Oh,
thank God we in Christ inherit the countenance of God for
ever - no face turned away from any child of God abiding
in Christ, because it was turned away from Him for that
awful, that eternal, moment.
A
Threefold Sequence in Experience
But we must keep
closely to the specific thing we have in view. He has
entered upon this new phase, taken up in His Cross the
representation of the false man. While this is a clearly
defined new phase, it is, after all, but the climax of
underlying purpose, for this has been underlying the
whole course of things - especially from that day when He
came to the river Jordan to be baptized of John. All that
was crowded into the three and a half final years of His
life here was with the Cross underlying it. At His
baptism He definitely and deliberately, in a figurative
way, accepted the Cross, made the Cross the basis and
background of everything to follow. There are two high
peaks in the three and a half years with a deep valley
between. The first is His baptism and the open heaven,
and, looking across the valley, the second is the
transfiguration. Those two things are joined and are in
sequence. The baptism in figure is the Cross; the
transfiguration, the glory that should follow. Between
those two lies the deep valley of the temptation,
immediately brought in after the baptism; the testing
which, while it had a particular and peculiar form and
inclusiveness at the end of those forty days in the
wilderness, went on for the whole three and a half years
in many other forms. The end of that valley is on the
next high peak of transfiguration. I want you to see the
sequence in those things; baptism, temptation,
transfiguration. First the acceptance of the Cross; then
the bringing home of what that acceptance meant
continually through a lifetime, the working in of the
Cross in principle, coming to know what He had accepted
in a very practical way along a thousand lines; issuing
in a glorious triumph so far as He personally was
concerned, and heaven attesting Him as triumphant.
Now He is actually
going to the Cross to make all that good for us, and
possible of transmission to us; to bring us to the
acceptance of the Cross; then through the working out of
the Cross, unto that triumphant issue in glory. You see,
this last phase is not for Himself, it is for us, every
part of it. That threefold sequence is now taken up in
the Cross to be made good for others, for His Church, for
the one corporate new man. So we are immediately brought
to the Cross of our Lord Jesus on one principle. It is
the principle that came in to govern when He went to
Jordan - that we, after nature, after our Adam
relationship and life, are altogether put out. From the
Jordan onward, in the more specific and positive way,
with Him everything was - the Father. "Not my will,
but thine" (Luke 22:42). "I delight to do thy
will" (Psa. 40:8). Everything was referred to the
Father, and Satan's effort all the way through those long
three and a half years was to get Him in some way to act
on His own ground, His own choice, according to His own
judgment, after His own feelings: to allow Himself to
direct and govern His Procedure, His activities: to do it
of Himself independently, out from Himself; and the one
persistent attitude and determination of the Lord Jesus
through the whole course was to refer everything to the
Father, and to defer to the Father about everything. The
governing thing was - "My Father"; it was
"Father, Father," all the way through.
"No
longer I, but Christ"
Now that is taken up
for us in this way, that it is "no longer I, but
Christ." I have been to Jordan, I have been to the
Cross, I have been crucified, I have been put into a
grave and have been dismissed, I have been ruled out,
I have been cancelled, I am something not acceptable to
God, I am false. It can only be Christ now; all must be
referred to Him. In every thing, whether I understand or
not, whether it is painful or otherwise, I must refer it
to Him, I must defer to Him, I must judge nothing of
myself, decide nothing myself, I must not come into the
picture at all independently. It must be Christ, only
Christ. That is the meaning of the Cross. I have gone out
and He has come in - the new Man. I am on other ground,
altogether other ground, and that Cross is the great
divide.
It stands there to say
"Finish" to a false man, and to bring in
another. I am not going now to begin to analyse the old
and the new man. I am simply stating facts. In His Cross
the Lord Jesus has undercut a false man and ruled him
out. We are that; dear friends, we are false, we are not
the true thing that God meant when He made man. We are
different, we are other, Satan has interfered and made
man altogether other than God intended, and man is a
false thing. But Satan is seeking to keep and preserve
and propagate and maintain and minister to a false
humanity. God has closed the door, in the Cross, upon us.
Oh, that even Christians recognised this more! Here is
the realm for our repentance - not only of our sinful
life of the past, and our sins, whatever they may be:
vices and evils and so on: but repentance that we have
come in at all, that we have allowed so much of ourselves
to come in, even for God. We cannot fail to be impressed
with this, that inside of the whole system of
Christianity the old man is sporting himself; he is
making a name for himself, getting a reputation,
gratifying himself, using the very service of God to
bring himself into the limelight, to express himself, to
realise himself; and that is the reason for the lost
impact. "Can Satan cast out Satan?" (Mark
3:23). Can the old man cure the old man? Can the false
make the false true? No! We have to get out of the way.
We are getting in the way all the time. We are meeting
the old man so much in one another. We see it, it almost
obsesses us, we know it about ourselves. It is something
about which we must continually repent, something we must
continually repudiate, and ask the Lord to deal with in
the power of the Cross - more and more to dismiss that
which He has dismissed, to make good the mighty dismissal
when He turned His face away, and said in effect, You are
dismissed, I have done with you, you no longer stand
before My face. Now, that refers not to a gross, vicious
sinner, but to a man, a kind of humanity which has to go
in order to make room for this other Man.
Why? While that is, in
a sense, the negative side, it is very positive in its
working, and we have stayed long with it because that is
the realm of all Christian experience, right through the
Christian life; it explains what the Lord is doing with
us, and why He deals with us as He does. He is getting
rid of us; He got rid of us, and He is getting rid of us.
He is working out the riddance of this rubbish. The more
we know of ourselves, the more we agree that it is
rubbish; the more the Lord lets us see ourselves, the
more we agree that the best thing is for us to be got rid
of, and very often we would get rid of ourselves in the
light of it. But, thank God, He has done this in the
representative and inclusive Person of the Son of Man,
and now He is working it out. We can trust Him to work it
out. Do not put your hands on other people and try and
work out their death - the Lord will do it. Do not put
your hands on yourself and try to work out your own
death; hand yourself over to the Lord, He will do it.
The
Reproduction of Christ through Death and
Resurrection
But as He does it,
there is the other side. As the one is removed, the other
comes in. The movement goes on in even balance, making
room for the true man, for Christ. He went to the Cross
to get us out of the way representatively and inclusively
in Himself, but He also went there in order to make
possible a reproduction of Himself as He was truly; not
as He was made in that moment - sin: but as He was truly
in Himself. I am not talking about His Deity; please
leave that out of the question. I am talking about the
Son of Man. He went to the Cross in order to make
possible a reproduction of Himself as He was as Son of
Man, and reproduction remains inseparably upon the ground
of the undercutting of the false man and the installing
of the true. In other words, it remains upon the ground
of death on the one side, and resurrection on the other.
There has to be the continuous working of His death in us
to get rid of that which is false and can never satisfy
God or be used by God, that there may be a continuous
working of resurrection to bring in more and more of
Himself. It is the way of the Lord's reproducing of
Himself. We know that from the law of the grain of wheat
- "Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and
die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it
beareth much fruit" (John 12:24). But this for us is
a thing which has repeated crises. I do not want to
dishearten or discourage you, but I must say this, that
these crises do not become less acute: they become deeper
and deeper as we go on. Sometimes we think that we have
touched bottom, and that we can never go lower, but we
have lived to prove that we can go deeper yet, that there
really is no bottom to this thing so far as this life is
concerned. Well, do not lose heart about that statement.
I am trying to say this, that the Lord is out to bring in
His Christ in ever-growing fulness, and in order to do
that, room has to be made for Him by getting rid of the
fallen man which is in His place. The meaning of Christ
is that, for one thing - reproduction. What is the most
reproductive, vessel and instrument of the Lord,
reproductive of Christ? It is the most crucified vessel
or instrument, the most dead to the old man, to the life
of nature: that which has had taken from it its own
competence in the most utter way, which has been brought
most completely to the place where it has nothing in
itself but everything in Him. That is the most
reproductive vessel; and do remember that the Lord is
after a reproductive vessel. "It is not good that
the man should be alone" said the Lord about the
first Adam, and He says the same about the last Adam. So
God made the woman, and she was called Eve -
"because she was the mother of all living"
(Gen. 3:20). But that was within the limited realm of a
certain life which was not eternal life, for they had not
partaken of the Tree of Life to live for ever. Christ is
the last Adam; the Church, His Eve, having taken of the
Tree of Life, is His vessel of reproduction, and she
comes in by way of the Cross. It is after Calvary, that
the Church comes in and becomes the Jerusalem which is
above, which is the mother of us all (Gal. 4:26), the
vessel through which Christ reproduces Himself. But my
point is this, that the Church which is really going to
reproduce Christ is the Church which has been to the
Cross, has come out of the Cross, and is continually
coming out of the Cross. This is only saying in other
words that the law of enlargement is the law of death and
resurrection continually operating. Oh, do we not know it
in our own personal experience? It is true that any
additional measure that we have of the Lord has come ever
and always by some deeper experience and working out of
our own undoing, our own dismissal.
And what is true of the
individual will be true of any local company. It is
possible for a local company to be put again and again
ever more deeply into His death, and, as it is so, to be
enlarged with spiritual measure, and with Divine
reproductiveness. Oh, that the whole Church were
conformed to that law! What a different situation there
would be today. In the beginning it was a crucified
Church, and it rapidly multiplied, reproduced.
The
Reproductive Vessel
(a)
Corporate, Not Individual
Now, this introduces
something perhaps beyond what we ought even to touch now,
but let me hint this to you. This is why everything in
the New Testament was upon a Body basis. By this I mean a
Church basis. Nothing was individualistic, nothing merely
personal; all was corporate, on a Body basis. Even Paul,
the great Apostle, foreknown and chosen before his birth
(Gal. 1:15) for his great ministry and having it
announced to him right out of heaven by the glorified
Lord Himself, has to be brought into the Church and to
move out to that great work on Church ground, on Body
ground, and everything has to be held on that basis.
Why? - because it is the Church that is the Eve of Christ,
the mother, the vessel through which Christ reproduces,
and it is the Church which is born out of His death in
His resurrection. You see a governing law, you have the
clue to the increase, the enlargement that took place at
the beginning. It was on that basis then; and the
multiplication took place and the reproduction went on
marvellously then because it was a well-crucified Church,
and a well-resurrected Church in Christ, and it was
moving on that basis all the time. Now, perhaps that is a
little beyond what we ought to touch now, but it is worth
noting.
(b)
Organic, Not Organized
Let us come to the
simple principle itself. Christ went to the Cross to
dismiss the false man, to undercut him, to get him out of
the way. We are that. Christ, when He died, not only took
our sins and not only took us as sinners, as we would
regard ourselves, but He took us as people to the
Cross. We are so mixed up and tangled, that you cannot
separate between us and our sins, you cannot get in
between something called "us" and our
sinfulness, and separate the two. It is necessary to get
rid of the lot and bring in another man, and Christ is
that other. God is working on that principle all the
time. He is not trying - He never does try - to make us
something new in ourselves, and by ourselves apart. His
method is to bring Christ into us, and build up Christ in
us; and as Christ is built up, we go out, because we have
gone out in the thought of God. That is God's intention,
made so clear - that Christ is to be all and in all. Do
you want your life to be fruitful? You will have to die,
you will have to know the Cross ever deepening in its
work. That is the way of fruitfulness. It is a painful
way, but we can reproduce only after our kind. Christ,
has to reproduce after His kind. He will do it and He
will do it through the Church. I see a lot more than I am
trying to say about the place of Eve taken by the Church
as Christ's vessel to reproduce Himself. One thing that I
wish you could see is this, that the Lord's method of
reproducing is not by machinery and organisation, but by
a living Body which knows in a living way death and
resurrection. Any kind of institution that has not been
born out of a death in which the stricture of God against
the flesh and the old nature has been registered is not
going to reproduce after Christ's order. It may grow, it
may get a great many adherents, it may become a great
multitude, but it is something of the old creation, it
cannot stand before God. It is "this great Babylon
which I have built"; I am going to violate grammar
and say, which "I" has built, and it will not
stand. Babylon the Great will fall, but the new Jerusalem
will rise at the fall of Babylon.