Reading:
Numbers 13:1-3, 17-23, 27-33; 14:1-3.
We have been considering
the fact and nature of the heavenly way. The Bible begins
with the creation of the heavens and the government of
the heavens. It ends with the emergence from heaven of
that which has been formed by heaven, according to
heavenly principles: the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming
down from God out of heaven, fulfilling this word which
we have read in Hebrews 11:16 - "God hath prepared
for them a city".
THE
CLASH BETWEEN THE EARTHLY AND THE HEAVENLY
We remind ourselves here
that a characteristic of the Old Testament at every stage
is the clash and contrast of two worlds, of two orders:
the heavenly and the earthly. All the way through the Old
Testament we have this element - of heaven challenging
this world, and apprehending, in this world, that which
it will take out and constitute according to its own,
heavenly, order and nature. It does not require a very
profound knowledge of the Old Testament to confirm that.
Your minds run quickly over its story and you recognise
that you are in the presence of a clash all the time, a
conflict. It is this conflict between heaven and earth.
Heaven is not satisfied with this world - very much to
the contrary. Heaven is against what is here in this
world; but heaven is seeking to take what it can out of
this world to reconstitute according to its own
standards: and so, while you find the opposition of
heaven, the challenge of heaven, you at the same time
find heaven, right from the beginning, as it were laying
hold of people - a line of individuals and a nation - in
order to detach them from the world, even while here in
it, and by a deep process to make them a completely
different type and kind of people from everyone else;
apprehending them, in other words, for heavenly purposes.
The Old Testament men
were pioneers of the heavenly way. We have already
seen a little of what that involves, but it is upon that
particular point that we want to focus all our emphasis
just now. It is not only that there is a
heavenly way which is different - we know that, we know
it in our hearts if we have been born from above, we are
learning as we go on how different the heavenly way is
from every other way - but the focal point at this time
is this: that there is such a thing as pioneering that
heavenly way, being called into a relationship with
heaven in order to cleave a way, to take possession,
to make it possible for God's full meaning to be
understood, interpreted; a ministry to others who shall
follow on. We said earlier that there is a sense in which
everyone born from above is a pioneer, because for every
such one the way is a new way, which they and they alone
can follow: no one can do it for them; it is a new way
for everyone. Our present occupation is with the
vocational aspect of this.
There is no doubt about
it that the majority of the Lord's children know little,
very little, about the heavenly way. Organized
Christianity has become very largely an earthly thing,
with earthly standards and conceptions and resources:
therefore it has become spiritually very limited. In
comparison with the heavens, this world is a very, very
small thing. I mean that spiritually as well as
illustratively. The kingdom of the heavens is a vast
thing, far greater than any conception of man. God's
thoughts are as the heavens are high above the earth in
range, outbounding all earthly conceptions, and not until
we get well away from this earth do we realise on the one
hand how miserably small we are and on the other hand in
what a very much greater realm it is possible to move
than that in which we do move - I mean spiritually. The
great, great need of this time is that the people of God,
the Church of God, should come into its true heavenly
position, with its heavenly vision and vocation.
Now there is a great
deal in that statement, but it all means that someone,
some people, have got to pioneer the way for the Church
back again to the realm where it once was at the
beginning, the realm which it has lost in succumbing to
that persistent tendency earthward. I say, a pioneering
instrument is needed, and the way is a costly way.
Now let me repeat, the
Old Testament men were pioneers of the heavenly way. That
is what is explicitly stated by the writer in this letter
to the Hebrews, particularly in the passage which we have
read. Heaven has its own standard and basis, and earth
cannot provide that. One of the great key-words of the
Old Testament is 'sanctify', and sanctify means to
separate, make holy, consecrate, set apart, and in the
main that is a spiritual and inward thing, dividing
between heaven and earth. God has divided those two
things, put them apart, and there is to be this putting
apart in a spiritual way, inwardly, also. So you find
that these men of the Old Testament were men who were set
apart in this sense: something was done right at the very
centre of their being which separated them from this
world and committed them to a course which was altogether
different from and contrary to the course of this world;
and if, under pressure, under strain, by deception
inadvertently, consciously or unconsciously, they touched
this earth, they were at once in confusion - they knew at
once in their inner being that they were out of the way,
and the only thing was somehow to get back. You see that
again and again. Heaven witnessed against their position;
they were in trouble. Not until they got back could they
go on. They were being ruled by another standard, but oh,
how different was that standard, and how difficult to
understand!
Consider Cain and Abel.
From this world's standpoint, Cain's was a very worthy
procedure. Looked at from the standpoint of the religious
man of this world, it is difficult to see what was wrong
with Cain, or how much more right was Abel, or how
absolutely right and absolutely wrong these two were. Yet
how utterly right Abel was is shown by the issue. One got
through to heaven. That is the fact. He got through to
God and he got through to heaven, and the other one had a
closed heaven and a rejecting God.
You say, What is the
standard? Just the difference between heaven and earth,
that is all. Heaven's basis and standard of access is
altogether different from earth's - even religious
earth's. The religious man may have the same God, worship
the same God, bring his offering to the same God, and yet
get no way to heaven, no way at all on the heavenly road.
Heaven has its own basis and standards and provision, and
earth can neither find nor provide that. It is different.
That is the fact that we are up against when it is a case
of getting to heaven. I am not talking about geographical
location, but about getting through to God, finding an
open way with heaven. You can only come on heaven's own
provision, and that will entirely and utterly upset all
your own natural calculations. You have to find something
that nature cannot provide. If you, like Cain, reason
this thing out according to religious reason, and come on
that ground, you do not get anywhere. "By faith
Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than
Cain, through which he had witness borne
to him that he was righteous, God bearing
witness in respect of his gifts" (Heb. 11:4). Heaven
attested.
I am not dealing
with all the nature and detail of these things. I am pointing
out a fact - that heaven's standards and judgments are
altogether different, and they are going to throw us
completely into confusion when we try to come, even in a
religious way, into heaven. Nicodemus may be the most
perfect representation of the religious system, but he
cannot get anywhere where heaven is concerned. Heaven
makes its own provision for access, and you have to have
heaven's provision. You may ask a thousand Why's. There
is the fact.
PIONEERS
ARE LEADERS
Let us now turn to our
reading from the book of Numbers. It is at the point of
the sending over of the spies, and the focus of the whole
incident is upon two men: Joshua and Caleb. Now, mark
you, all the twelve heads of fathers' houses - princes in
Israel (a significant term), typically representative men
- were called to be pioneers of the heavenly way. The
principle of their headship and princeliness was that
they were to be pioneers. That is the pioneer principle.
If you are a true pioneer, you are a leader, you are a
prince in character. But only two of them justified their
calling; only two of them became what all the rest were
supposed to be - pioneers. Very often it just works out
like that. It is the minority, the very, very clear
minority, that does the work. The others have the name,
but they are not doing it; the others have the official
position, but they are not doing it. The point is - where
is it being done? Here it was Joshua and Caleb.
A LINK
WITH THE PAST
Now let us spend some
time in taking account of the significance of these two
men, Joshua and Caleb. To begin with, we will look at
them as a link with the past. The intention of God which
was taken up by them harked back to His covenant with
Abraham, so that with Joshua and Caleb Abraham comes very
much into evidence. You are at once compelled to look
back and take fresh stock of the significance of Abraham,
as taken up by these two: because, you see, the point at
which Joshua and Caleb came into view was a critical
point, an hour of very great crisis. The whole question
now is - Is God's purpose going to be realised in this
people, or is it not? That is no small issue; a real
crisis has arisen. And they are the deciding
factor.
There are three features
of the place of Abraham as it comes in here.
A
SPIRITUAL AND HEAVENLY SEED
First of all, there is
the feature of a spiritual and heavenly seed. Do get that
- a spiritual and a heavenly seed. We, today, are in a
position of very great advantage. We have now, through
the Holy Spirit, the full significance of Abraham. We
have our New Testament and all that the New Testament
says about Abraham. We have the full revelation through
the Apostle Paul, and we are now able to see from our New
Testament - we have not to go back to the Old Testament
for all our knowledge - we can see now, with our New
Testament in our hand, the full significance of Abraham;
on this point we have much extra light.
A spiritual and heavenly
seed. You see how that bears upon Joshua and Caleb, and
how they take it up. But this other seed of Abraham is
not spiritual and it is not heavenly. It has come down to
earth. In these thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of
Numbers that we have read, the reactions of this people -
how gross they are, how earthly, how lacking in spiritual
vision and life and aspiration! They are swayed entirely
by the earthly - by the sight of the eyes, by things
here, the difficulties, the people, the mountains. For
them there is no way. For Joshua and Caleb the mountains
were a way, not a hindrance. There was a heavenly way.
But these others see nothing of that, they are earthly.
A heavenly and spiritual
seed - that is the thought of God in Abraham made clear
to us in the New Testament.
AN
EXCLUSIVE SEED
But what more light have
we got on this? That it was something exclusive. Paul
argues that out in his letter to the Galatians. "Now
to Abraham were the promises spoken, and to his seed. He
saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one"
(Gal. 3:16). It was exclusive. We will see in
a minute where that led to; but note that this, so far
as Abraham was concerned, was tied up
inseparably and exclusively with Sarah. It was
permissible in those times for a man to have more than
one wife, but God was shutting this thing up to Sarah.
Abraham, under stress and pressure, tried it along
another line, by another means - with Hagar; but here was
one of these points of which I was speaking a little
earlier: a failure, a slip, a mistake, a blunder, under
trial, under pressure, under duress; getting off the
heavenly line and rueing it - and history has rued it to
this day. He had to get back to Sarah. God has shut this
thing up, it is an exclusive matter. Not Hagar, and not
others, but this one.
SUPERNATURAL
IN BIRTH AND MAINTENANCE
And this seed carries
all the marks of the heavenly. It is supernatural in
birth; impossible along the line of nature. That is
Isaac: and Abraham was shut up to that, shut up to an
intervention of heaven. This cannot have an existence,
let alone a history, unless heaven sees to it. God was
very particular about that. Sometimes God shows how
particular He is about the right thing by letting us see
the awfulness of the wrong thing. God does not just let a
wrong thing go; a mistake, a slip, go as such. We are
plagued sometimes to the end of our lives by a wrong
step. God will keep that, so that we may see - No, the
right way is an important way; it is not just an option.
The heavenly is the way, and any alternative to
that is not just allowed to pass as though it did not
matter. We discover that it does matter; and so it was
here. Heaven must do this, or it will never be done,
because it is in the heavenly way. What a lot we have to
learn, and are learning, about that principle! It
explains a great deal that is happening in our lives. God
has us in hand.
THE
PRINCIPLE OF DEATH AND RESURRECTION
Yes, but not only was
Isaac a heavenly product by the intervention of heaven,
by a miracle, but you see God is going to press that
right through to the ultimate in demanding the offering
of Isaac as a sacrifice. Isaac was born by a miracle, by
the intervention of heaven, but something still further
had to be done: he had to die and be raised from the
dead. This mighty thing of God must come in and ratify
that. What Paul says in Romans 1:4, "declared to be
the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of
holiness, by the resurrection of the dead", could
well be rendered 'ratified the Son of God... by
resurrection'; and that is Isaac, ratified heavenly.
That has very much of
our own spiritual history in it. We have not only been
born again by a miracle and heaven's intervention; this
has been ratified all the way along. God is demanding the
maintenance of that by resurrection life, and
resurrection life has no meaning unless we know something
of death. God is keeping us on heavenly ground. That is
the meaning of Isaac: not only putting us on heavenly
ground, but keeping us on heavenly ground by constant
expressions of resurrection, when only resurrection will
save the situation.
After all, no matter
what it was at the beginning of our Christian life - that
we had a wonderful experience of conversion and can put
down in a notebook when it happened and where - that may
be good, but it has to be ratified continually by the
expression of resurrection. We have got to be kept on
that ground. And that is the pioneer way. The way of
pioneering the heavenly way is knowing again and again
the meaning of death and its direness, in order to know
the meaning of resurrection and its greatness. It is the
pioneer way. The Church has gone that way; many a
revelation of God has gone that way; many a child of God
has gone that way - in order to keep the heavenly way
alive and stop this 'dry-rot' of earthliness which is
always seeking to sap the Christian life. We know how
true that is.
Abraham came to know
that his real inheritance was in heaven. I always think
it is a very wonderful thing, this aspect of Abraham's
life and experience, under the hand of God: that no doubt
when he first set out, at the command of God, he
interpreted those promises in a very earthly and limited
way. No doubt to begin with his expectation was that they
would be fulfilled and realised in this way and in that;
but the longer he lived the more he became aware that it
was not this way or that, it was something more than he
had thought when he started, something very much more and
very much other. He went on, and he is one of those here
included in this word - "These all died in faith,
not having received the promises, but having seen them
and greeted them from afar.... But now they desire a
better country, that is, a heavenly". When God
said, 'I will bring you to a country' (Gen.
12:1), Abraham in the first place thought that
that was earthly; in the end he saw it was not. He
came to see, to have perception: for the Lord
Jesus said, "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see
my day; and he saw it, and was glad" (John 8:56).
"Having seen them and greeted them from afar". And
so Paul brings us back here, in his letter to the
Galatians - "to thy seed, which is Christ".
"He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of
one, And to thy seed, which is Christ" (Gal. 3:16). Christ
was the answer to everything of inheritance for Abraham.
But Christ, the heavenly
Christ, is the very embodiment of all that is heavenly.
We know not Christ after the flesh. Christ is essentially
heavenly. You see the heavenly nature of this seed. You
can crowd all that into Joshua and Caleb. Who will be the
people that will inherit, go over and possess? Not this
earthbound, earth-minded crowd. They will perish in their
earth, their earth will be their prison and their tomb.
They will be replaced by another generation with a
different constitution - represented by Joshua and Caleb,
the first of a new generation - who will possess. They
are the pioneers of the heavenly way and the heavenly
fulness. But how deeply they had to suffer for it. "All
the congregation bade stone them with stones" (Num.
14:10). Pioneering is always a way of suffering and
cost, even amongst - not the worldlings - but those who
go by the name of the people of God.
Well, the pioneer of the
heavenly way will always be like this: heavenly as a
seed, and constantly ratified as heavenly by the
necessity for repeated interventions of heaven to
extricate, to deliver, to keep going. It is true to the
spiritual life. We would not have gone on more
than a little way, we would have stopped, it would have
been again and again the end of us, if heaven had not
intervened, if it had not been that God had ratified the
fact that we belong to heaven. And He is doing it.
Well, all this is so
clearly seen to be fulfilled in Christ, this Heavenly
Seed. His birth was by heaven's intervention, a miracle.
At His baptism heaven broke in again and ratified,
"This is my beloved Son". His Cross? - that
does not look very much like an intervention of heaven.
But wait a minute: do not forget that the New Testament
never talks about the Cross of Christ on the death side
alone. In the New Testament the Cross has twin sides -
death, resurrection. "Ye by the hand of lawless
men did crucify and slay: whom God raised
up" (Acts 2:23-24). The world has done all that
it can do, has exhausted itself upon Him. The powers of
evil have exhausted themselves. What more can be done?
Ah, now heaven comes in and spoils it all and raises Him:
ratifies that He belongs to heaven and not to this world.
He is not the property, the plaything, either of this
world or of the evil powers that govern this world. He
belongs to heaven: and heaven intervenes, and not only
raises Him, but takes Him up and out and sets Him over.
His spiritual history is
the spiritual history of the pioneer of the heavenly way.
He is the Pioneer. "Within the veil; whither
as a forerunner Jesus entered for us" (Heb.
6:19-20), says this letter to the Hebrews.
A LINK
BETWEEN FAILURE AND REALISATION
One other thing with
which to close this present phase as to the backward
aspect of Joshua and Caleb to Abraham. They, like Abraham
and all the pioneers, were a link between failure and
realisation. You look at the world at the time when
"the God of glory appeared unto our father
Abraham" (Acts 7:2) in Ur of the Chaldees. You look
at the world and you look for that which is of heaven,
and where will you find it? Where is all God's
thought for something heavenly? It seems that once more
it has disappeared. There seems to be no testimony at all
to this heavenly thought of God - a heavenly people, a
heavenly testimony, something that represents and
expresses heaven's thought. Where is it? "The God of
glory appeared unto our father Abraham", and he
became the link between the failure and the realisation.
Joshua and Caleb took
that up. Here is the story of the failure in the
wilderness. But for them, where is the heavenliness? But
for them, where is God's thought? Yet God has not given
it up. It may seem to have well-nigh disappeared; it has
been like that again and again. But heaven intervenes,
and secures a link between the failure and heaven's
triumph. That link is the pioneer. The Lord must have an
instrument like that to set over against the failure and
to open the heavenly way again to realisation.
You are probably
wondering, 'What has this to do with me?' You are saying,
'Yes, these are all wonderful ideas: it is quite true, it
is quite clear that it is true in the Bible: but how does
it affect us?' Well, it just does. One does not like
dwelling in a critical way upon a situation, and whatever
is said in this direction always leaves room for
something very precious of the Lord still in the earth.
It is to speak quite broadly. We will put it this way.
The great need of Christians today is to be recovered for
the full heavenly thought of God. They have settled down
to something less. They have become involved in something
less and largely other. It has always been like that. The
New Testament was written almost entirely because of it.
The Lord's people are always at least in peril of doing
that - at least in peril. They do gravitate spiritually
toward this world and lose their heavenly testimony in
one way or another. The pressure is always there to bring
down, and the Lord needs lives that have seen - that have
become like those of whom we were thinking in our last
meditation, for whom the centre of gravity of life has
been transferred from this world to heaven, within whom
there is this sense - whether they can interpret it or
not, whether they can put it into a system of truth,
doctrine, Bible teaching, or not - there is this sense
that they are in the line of some great destiny which is
beyond what this world can provide, that they have been
gripped by something that they can only say is the
heavenly calling, which has held them. I am going to say
more about that later on; but the Lord needs a people
like that, who just cannot be satisfied with things as
they are: it is not just a matter of the mind, of the
reason at all. It is inside of them; they know that God
has done something. Because God has done something, they
are committed to something far greater than the poor
limits of this life and this world. They have been
inwardly linked on with something tremendous. I say
again, they may not be able to preach it, but they know
it. We shall never be useful to God beyond our vision,
our true God-inwrought vision, beyond our own reach of
heart. Our measure of vision will determine the measure
of our usefulness. Oh, for the immeasurable measure of
heaven in the heart of a people! That is the need today.
Let me close by saying
again that, while that is the heavenly calling of which
the Apostle speaks so much, it is the most difficult way
- it is fraught with every kind of difficulty; but it is
the real, it is the true, and it is the ultimate, for
heaven is a nature, a power, a life, an order, which is
destined to fill this world and this universe.