"And about the ninth hour Jesus
cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama
sabachthani? that is, My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46).
"And Jesus, crying with a loud
voice, said Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit"
(Luke 23:46).
"God hath fulfilled the same unto
our children, in that he raised up Jesus; as also it is
written in the second psalm, Thou art my Son, this day
have I begotten thee" (Acts 13:33).
"Who was declared (to be) the Son
of God with power, according to the spirit of
holiness, by the resurrection from the dead; even
Jesus Christ our Lord " (Rom. 1:4).
"For unto which of the angels said
he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten
thee?" (Heb. 1:5).
The matter which is brought before us by
these passages is more for meditation than for speaking
about: it is something to dwell upon quietly and
thoughtfully. I shall do little more than bring it before
you with a few observations for further meditation on
your part.
Going back to those passages in the
Gospels, we have first of all the cry of desertion and
forsakenness and the term used by our Lord at that moment
was "My God, my God..." In the next passage, we
come to the last cry, the final cry of the Lord on the
Cross, and the term used was "Father..." When
the Lord Jesus rose from the dead, among the first words
that He spoke, as far as we can tell, were these:
"Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended unto the
Father: but go unto my brethren, and say to them, I
ascend unto my Father and your Father, and my God and
your God (John 20:17), bringing both of these cries from
the Cross together. "My Father... my God";
"your Father... your God." Therein lies a whole
wealth of wonderful spiritual truth.
In the first of those two cries - "My
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" sonship has
been suspended, it is not there; the cry is "My
God." At the last cry, the battle is won; all that
the former cry meant of sonship being obscured has been
set aside. In perfect tranquility, peace, rest, it is now
"Father"; sonship is back. Now it is "My
Father and your Father, My God and your God." Both
"God" and "Father" were eclipsed; but
later it is "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ."
Sonship in Resurrection in a
Representative Man
There must, I think, have occurred to your
minds at some time a difficulty over these passages - the
passage from the second psalm, quoted in the New
Testament: "Thou art my Son, this day have I
begotten thee and declared to be the Son of God by the
resurrection from the dead." Probably the
intellectual difficulty is this - was He not always the
Son of God? What about the eternal Sonship? Was He not
God's Son before the resurrection? If so, in what way is
He Son in resurrection? What does it mean, "This day
have I begotten thee"? These words quite evidently
refer to His resurrection, and that is borne out without
any question, I think, by the first and second chapters
of the letter to the Hebrews. If you look at the context,
there is no room for any doubt about it, that "this
day" is the day of His resurrection, and on that day
He was begotten and on that day He was called
"Son." Where then is the difference? Was He not
Son? If so, in what way is He Son in resurrection?
Let us say at once that the matter is
altogether related to the first and the last Adam. The
first Adam was called God's son in the genealogy -
"Adam, the son of God" (Luke 3:38). There is a
sense in which the first Adam was the son of God, but
there is a sense in which that sonship was never fully
realised - all its meaning, all its potentiality, all the
Divine intention, was never known. It was sonship on
probation before determination. (You notice the marginal
word in Rom. 1:4 - "determined the Son of God with
power"). Well, the first Adam failed, and in him the
whole race lost its sonship. As we so well know, in the
Cross the Lord Jesus came into that position as
representative of the whole race in Adam, to meet the
final consequences of that lost sonship. Those
consequences were known in that eternal period of
unspeakable agony when there was the awful
consciousness of what it means to be abandoned by God. By
nature we are out of Christ, without God and without hope
in this world, but we are not aware of it fully nor of
the full extent of what it involves. In that phase of the
Cross, the Lord Jesus was, so to speak, projected into
the full realisation of that complete consciousness of
what God-forsakenness really means, that which is the
terrible, terrible destiny of all deliberate and
conscious rejectors - to be rejected. There He stood in a
relationship to lost sonship in its full and final
meaning, and suffered the consciousness of being
abandoned by God.
Well, having suffered that judgment, that
consequence, and having carried all the agony of it to
the extent that He died not by crucifixion but by the
very disrupting of His soul and the breaking of His heart
(for when the soldiers came to inspect they found He was
dead already, while those crucified with Him were still
alive) - when that was accomplished He came to the
moment, shall we say the eternal moment, of consciousness
that judgment was past, it was all borne, and He could
return and use again the word "Father," but now
with a meaning which it never bore for man before that
time; and the last word of the Cross is not
"forsaken" but "Father." Sonship has
come now on to a new ground of resurrection, restoration;
the alienation of the race has been overcome in Christ,
restoration is made for the race in Him, and so it is
"Father" with which everything begins; it is
"God" and "Father." "The God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Eph. 1:3) - what a
wealth that phrase holds when you look at it in the light
of the Cross! It is the ground of our approach, our
appeal. It is the full meaning of the triumph of His
Cross over all the alienation that had come to the race
with the loss of God's meaning of sonship.
Briefly then, that is the doctrine and the
explanation of "This day have I begotten thee."
It is a begetting, not of the eternal Son, not of Christ
as God the Son; it is the begetting of the Son of man, of
the last Adam, of sonship for man in Him, for us in Him;
and so Peter cries, "Blessed be the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great
mercy begat us again unto a living hope by the
resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto an
inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth
not away, reserved in heaven for you, who by the power of
God are guarded through faith unto a salvation ready to
be revealed in the last time (1 Pet. 1:3-5).
Sonship a Testimony Continuously
Manifested
But then, for our present spiritual
benefit there is this other word. While our sonship,
standing in all the value of that work of the Cross and
in Christ risen, is to be appropriated and entered into
by faith as an act, yet for the purpose of testimony here
- the testimony of Jesus: that is, the testimony as to
that great truth of what He has done - it is something
that has to be continuous and of continuous spiritual
experience. It is accepted in an act, but it has to be
borne out in a continuous process. Sonship, as you will
see if you study it in the New Testament, while it
relates to a beginning, is something which relates to the
whole life of the believer in a practical way of
expression, so that, inasmuch as it is inseparably bound
up with resurrection in the case of the Lord Jesus, it is
always worked out on the basis of resurrection. How is
sonship declared as a testimony? How do we know sonship?
Well, we say, we believe; there was a time when we
believed and in believing we were made children or sons
of God. "Ye are all sons of God, through faith, in
Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:26). Because we believe, we
have that sonship. That is very good, and of course we
have always to cling tenaciously by faith to the fact
that it was so, so many years ago. But do you always find
that a tremendous present support? Did the Lord just mean
it to be something in our past history, something that
took place so many years ago? We have always to hold on
to that transaction with the Lord and believe, but does
it not call for a reinforcement as we go along? Is there
not some place for it to be more and more confirmed?
Surely that is the teaching of the Word on this matter;
and so not only the origin but the experience of the
believer should be that of sonship being freshly
demonstrated and manifested on the same ground as its
origin - that is, resurrection.
Sonship in Believers - The Power of
Resurrection
What is God's confirmation of our sonship?
It is that He does continually raise us from the dead. He
has left us here in a setting and a background of death,
we are called upon to live and to walk amidst death. This
world is a tomb, which will sooner or later engulf all
those outside of Christ; but here we are in this very
tomb, this scene and realm of death, living; not a part
of it, but living; and that is the testimony, and that is
sonship. Sonship is something for manifestation. The end
of this process is the full manifestation of the sons of
God according to Romans 8:19. Here, in a spiritual way,
the manifold wisdom of God is shown in the Church - to
ourselves, to one another, and to all who have any
perception (either to their salvation or to their
condemnation), - and, if Paul's word to the Ephesians
means anything at all, to the confounding of
principalities and powers.
Now we begin at our new birth. You notice
Hebrews 1 and 2 - how rich they are in this connection.
"Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten
thee." Then those two chapters are set definitely in
the death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.
"Made perfect through sufferings" (2:10);
"he should taste death for every man" (2:9).
Then various quotations, and amongst them the little
fragment from Isaiah, "I and the children whom God
hath given me" (2:13). "I will declare thy name
unto my brethren" (2:12). You note the completion,
of the statement in Isaiah: "Behold, I and the
children whom God hath given me are for signs and for
wonders in Israel" (Isa. 8:18). "I and the
children" taken over from Isaiah, related supremely
to the Lord Jesus. Christ says, "I and the children
whom God hath given me." How? - in resurrection;
"begat us again unto a living hope by the
resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." It is
the corn of wheat; "I and the children." In
resurrection, we are the children of Christ, given to Him
in resurrection. "I and the children whom God hath
given me are for signs and for wonders in Israel."
What signs and wonders? "An evil and adulterous
generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign
be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet"
(Matt. 12:39). What is that? - death and resurrection.
"As Jonah was three days and three nights in the
belly of the whale; so shall the Son of man be three days
and three nights in the heart of the earth." Signs
and wonders - resurrection every time. What signs and
wonders are you wanting to be able to give the world? If
you are spiritual, any sign given will be a spiritual
one, and it will be this again and again - that God
raised you from the dead; and all who have spiritual
intelligence are able to see that. And there are those
other than men who have very much spiritual intelligence
- principalities and powers are seeing signs and wonders
in us in this repeated act of resurrection. There is no
other way of accounting for the continuance of the Church
through the ages; all the powers of hell and death have
come like a deluge upon the Church through the centuries,
sometimes seeming almost to quench its light, but it has
sprung up again, it has broken forth again, it is greater
than ever after every such time.
What is true of the Church, as a whole is
true in its smaller ways in our own experience. We know
in our own hearts how we sometimes become
compassed by death, how we almost fear for our own faith
at times wondering if we shall spiritually survive; but -
marvellous testimony! -we have gone on; we do not know
how, but here we are still going on; it is just that
working of "the exceeding greatness of his power to
us-ward who believe" (Eph. 1:19). It is not our
endurance, it is the power of His resurrection. That is
the testimony - "for signs and for wonders."
The story is not to be read openly; it will one day be
read to His glory. I mean that what you and I go through
in secret in this way is not known generally to others -
those dark and terrible hours and days and weeks and
sometimes months when we wonder if we shall ever come out
of this trough. It is a hidden story. Everyone knows his
own dark, deadly hours in the spiritual life, and in
other ways too. Well, we begin on resurrection, we go on
on resurrection, and we shall end on resurrection - that
is the testimony.
Why? Oh, for this reason. When God forsook
His Son, that was the final forsaking of man IN
CHRIST, - no more forsaking, no more tasting of death
for those who are IN CHRIST. Spiritual death is
the complete consciousness of what it means to be finally
abandoned by God. He tasted that for every man; there is
no more of that for those who are in Christ; that death
has been swallowed up in Him. So we go on on the ground
of that, the ground of tremendous promise. The Lord give
us strength to stand on that ground in the darkest and
most deadly hour. If we are children of Christ by
resurrection, we are for signs and wonders in Israel. Let
us believe that for ourselves and for those for whom we
have responsibility here. The situation may seem very
grim, but it is an opportunity for the signs and wonders
of resurrection.
Originally published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine in May-Jun 1947, Vol. 25-3. This version from "This
Ministry" Messages given at Honor Oak - Volume 3.