I am going to enlarge upon one
or two things which were little more than stated in our last
meditation on “The Christ, The Antichrist, and The church”.
We pointed out that there were three things which are common
features of these.
Firstly, a particular and
peculiar type of creation, namely, man. This, as we have said,
has reference to Christ, to Antichrist, and to the church, which
is “one new man”. It is in connection with this that I
want to say a few further words at the outset.
We have to get behind everything
with one word and one inquiry, and that as to purpose.
The
Worship of God
We ask, first of all, what is
the divine purpose in the creation of man? The answer is that God
may receive, may have something in this universe which is to His
own glory. I know that is a very comprehensive statement, and I
can do little more at this time than say that. For some reason,
in the mystery of His thoughts and ways, God had an investment,
an inheritance in man. There was that which He determined to
display, which would bring back to Him glory and honour, and
thus, for His own glory, He made man, so that in a moral way,
that is, in a responsible way, a creation should be worshipping
God, in the fullest sense of that word “worship”. I am
not sure that we have yet grasped the real meaning of worship.
Sometimes we think of it as singing hymns and praying, or saying
prayers; as going through a religious form, maybe in the offering
of thanks, praise, or letting the heart go out to the Lord. But I
think there is something more than that, much more than that in
worship. However, we will come back to that again. The point for
the moment is that all that worship means in bringing back to God
that which is to His glory, to His honour, to His praise, to His
satisfaction, was evidently the object which motivated God in
creation, in the creation of man.
Man A
Unique Creation
Now, in order that it might be
so, man would have to be constituted in a peculiar way. He would
have to be so constituted that there was that in him which was
also in God, and which formed a link between God and himself,
that which was of the same order as God. I am not speaking now of
Deity or Godhead, but of nature, of constitution. So man was
created and, in the deepest reality of his being and
constitution, there was the human spirit, the spirit of man,
which was the faculty for communion with God, who is Spirit, and
who cannot be communicated with, only in spirit, cannot be
worshipped (using that word again in all its content), cannot be
worshipped, only “in spirit and in truth”. Thus man was
a peculiar creation, constituted in this particular way, so that
there should be a definite point of relatedness with God, a link
of a likeness in constitution. The New Testament word is, “He
that is joined to the Lord is one spirit”, and, “There
is a spirit in man”, is an Old Testament statement. Well
now, while that relationship exists, all God’s purpose is
possible of realisation, and God has the ground upon which to
proceed toward His great end. That is man, a peculiar creation, a
particular type. It is between man so constituted, and God who is
a Spirit, that the Spirit of God moves as the directing,
governing, illuminating agent of the purposes of God.
We know what happened with the
first Adam; we know the result of his failure in faith and
obedience. It was that he became severed from God, which means
that the instrument or faculty by which man was in union with
God, in communication with God, was severed from Him, and in its
severance became dead, in the Bible sense of the word “death”;
not nullified, not annihilated, but severed from God, out of
union with Him who is its life. But something else had happened,
and this is where Antichrist comes in.
Satan’s
Adaptation of Man to His Own Ends
Here is another in God’s
universe who has set his heart upon being worshipped, who has set
his heart upon universal dominion, and who also recognises that
he can only get his end through man. Moreover he recognises that,
just as God, to reach His end, must have a man, or man peculiarly
constituted, in relationship with Himself spiritually, so he must
also have man peculiarly constituted to be in relation with him
for his ends. Thus, behind the understanding of Adam, Satan
operated to constitute man in a different way for his own
purpose, or to interfere with God’s man, God’s type.
The result was that, just as Adam before his disobedience was, by
his spirit, in union with God for divine purposes, now, through
his soul, he is in union with Satan for his purposes; because it
was the soul that Satan captured. If reason, desire and will are
the components of the soul, all these three were captured by
Satan, and the result is that there is in the Adamic race now a
type of being which has been adjusted to Satan’s purposes,
and with which Satan is allied. That is the tragedy of this
creation now, as outside Christ. It is not only a fallen
creation, a broken thing, an impaired thing; it is not only a
sinful thing, a weak thing, and a thing in which are the seeds of
corruption, but, more than that, the positive aspect is that
Satan is allied to it. There is an alliance; not by man’s
conscious consent necessarily, but the fact is there. Oh, the
fact is there, and, deeper than reason or thought or
consciousness, facts lie right down at the root of the nature of
things.
We need to remember that this
applies just in the same way in the other direction, and that
when there is a new creation in Christ Jesus; when God has
recovered that union with us through regeneration; when that
spirit lying in death has been quickened and raised together with
Christ and “joined to the Lord... one spirit”, the
union is deeper than reason, deeper than thought, deeper than
feeling. It is a fact in the very nature of things. If only the
people of God would believe that!
Now, you ask any respectable,
decent, unconverted man of this world whether he is in alliance
with Satan, whether the Devil is really bound up with him and
there is a union between them, and what will he answer? You
hardly dare suggest it. You will be a bold man if you do. Why? He
does not feel it, he does not see it; it never occurs to him,
never enters his head; nevertheless, it is a fact. It is deeper
than his consciousness, deeper than his belief: and oh, how
often, I fear, it is like that with the saints; that the union
which is deeper than everything sometimes gets even deeper than
belief. I mean the saints are sometimes tempted to disbelieve or
to doubt that the union holds good because of the absence of the
sense of it, because they are not able to see or to feel it: but
it is there. Well now, I have gone a little aside, and we must
turn again to our main consideration.
For the two things, God’s
end and Satan’s end, there must be a type which is suited to
those ends, adjusted to those ends, and with which the one
concerned with dominion is in relationship, vital relationship;
there must be a union. We saw in our previous meditation that all
the rights of God are bound up with man. That is but using
another phrase for worship — all the rights of God in this
universe. So all that Satan would claim as his rights is also
bound up with man.
The
Embodiment of Rights
That leads us to the second
thing. There must be an incarnation or embodiment of those
rights, or those assumed rights, as the case may be, an
incarnation. Well, Adam was made. But that is not enough.
Innocence is one thing, triumphant moral responsibility is
another thing. God can never be satisfied with having so many
innocents. If He were, He would have made us all little tiny
babies and never have let us grow up! But that is not God’s
thought. God’s thought is moral responsibility; that is
sonship as over against childhood. So Adam must be tested on this
principle of responsibility for God’s rights, inasmuch as
they are vested in him, and he is the custodian of them. God has
an inheritance in him, and he is put to the test and fails, and
drags down the race with him. Satan thus captures that race for
his own kingdom, his own dominion, his own ends, his own worship.
Oh, how he craves that worship. “All these things will I
give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.” That, to
the Son of God! If only Thou wilt worship me!
Then a second man came to the
rescue. To the rescue of what? Man? Yes: but more than that, He
came to the rescue of God’s rights to redeem the purchased
possession, the inheritance. What a marvellous fragment that is
of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: “What the riches of
the glory of his inheritance in the saints”. We have never
been able to cope with that. We look into ourselves as we are and
all... draw back from such a word. The riches of His
inheritance in the saints — in us? But take a wider view.
See God’s original thought, and you will see a creation
which ultimately, in oneness with God, will embody all the divine
thoughts; where, through that creation, God is getting in this
universe all His rights and worship — His inheritance in the
saints. I think that is what Paul means in that glorious burst of
doxology in that same letter, “Unto him that is able to do
exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to
the power that worketh in us, unto him be the glory in the church
and in Christ Jesus unto all generations for ever and ever”.
Glory in the church and in Christ Jesus! That requires an
incarnation of the divine rights, and that brings us to where we
were in chapter one.
The Issue
Fought Out in Christ
The last Adam, coming to the
rescue of the inheritance in man, becomes the embodiment of the
divine rights and moves out into the arena of the universe to be
assailed by all the wild, anarchical, lawless powers of him who
is against the purpose of God, and has his own kingdom in view,
and by him this last Adam is put to the test. In a full and
universal sense, He is tried out as to the rights of God. The
issue is brought down to one terrible, though simple, issue
— Myself or Thyself? That is all it amounts to, if ever you
can fathom or range that. But that is what it is: Myself,
Thyself? My will, Thy will? It is a question as to whether He
would, for any reason, in any circumstances, on any condition,
move away from the ground of utter and absolute loyalty to God.
That is the question. Can He be driven from that ground? Can He
be pressed off that ground? Can He be tricked to forsake that
ground? Can anything that Satan can do — and that is saying
a terrible thing — can anything that Satan can do, with his
wide, deep range of resource, get that Man to move off the ground
of loyalty to God, and God’s rights? If so, what has happened?
The very Christ has in principle become the Antichrist. He has
been turned round on Himself to defeat Himself. Antichrist has
scored. It seems almost inconceivable that Satan should ever
think for an instant that he could capture the last Adam and make
Him the instrument of serving his ends; and yet why should he
offer such a bait, such a bribe, and make such an appeal so
persistently — If only Thou wilt worship me! What a lot
there must be in man, if the kingdom of God throughout countless
ages is bound up with man, and if the kingdom of Satan, with all
that it means, is bound up with man! Well might the question be
asked, “What is man, that thou makest mention of him?”
What a lot there is in man!
Well then, no wonder there is a
big battle for man. No wonder that there was a terrific,
universal, eternal battle fought out on the ground of the soul of
“the man Christ Jesus”. But what a victory! A victory
for all time, and for eternity, and for all the universe; a
victory for all God’s purpose. What a victory! And if it was
of such a range and of such consequence, then how bitter it must
have been. Who will ever know the depth of that conflict, the
awfulness of that darkness? We can never exaggerate what the Son
of God went through. Thus the rights of God have become eternally
incarnated in “the man Christ Jesus”. He not only came
in the flesh, He came in flesh. I want you to notice that
in John’s epistle. Strike out the word “the”; it
is not in the original at all. It is not that He just came and
took flesh form to serve a purpose and then abandoned it; He is
yet the Man. “There is... one mediator between God and men,
himself man, Christ Jesus.” You notice in the Book of
Revelation, the Lord Jesus speaks of Himself, or presents
Himself, as “I Jesus”. Jesus is always the title of His
humanity, and here in a Man the rights of God are embodied,
incarnated, secured triumphantly.
Satan’s
Counterfeit of Divine Purpose
But still Satan has his kingdom
in fallen man. He has his kingdom, has his connection, and is
getting what he desires. But this is the point: he is also
steadily moving and working toward a concentrated embodiment and
incarnation of his rights; and so, as we saw in our previous
meditation, we have these three stages in John’s first
epistle, concerning Antichrist. We have Antichrist as a spirit:
“Every spirit that confesseth not Jesus is not of God: and
this is the spirit of the antichrist.” Then it is said,
“...there are many antichrists.” That is Antichrist
corporate. (You will see that links us with the church on the
other side.) Then we have the definite statement, “This is the
antichrist...” So that it is all heading up into one supreme
incarnation and embodiment of the spirit of Antichrist. If you
have any doubt about some of the things I have just been saying
with reference to relatedness, read again 2 Thess. 2:3-9: “...whose
coming is according to the working (energising) of Satan with all
power and signs and lying wonders”. According to the
energising of Satan! Antichrist is energised by Satan, just as
the Christ (as is the meaning of the anointing) is energised by
the Spirit of God. Just as the church, which is His Body, is
energised and actuated by the Holy Spirit, so the Antichrist is
energised and actuated by Satan.
What is the first object of
Antichrist? It is, as John says, to nullify Jesus Christ. I want
you to have this; this is precious. 1 John 4:3, “Every
spirit which confesseth not Jesus...”. The margin renders
it, “Every spirit which annulleth Jesus”. There
is some dispute over the actual words in the original, but I
think the significance of this marginal rendering is altogether
in favour of its being the more correct one — annuls or
nullifies Jesus, rules Him out, discounts Him, puts Him aside.
You look at the context, and you see, of course, that it is not
merely a question of Jesus as an historic figure, but of who
Jesus is; that is the point at issue. The context makes that
perfectly clear, and you will see by the other references to
Antichrist in this letter that it is a question of the Father and
the Son. The second chapter very plainly shows that to be the
occasion. Now, it is an annulling of who Jesus is, that is the
first work of Antichrist. Just what does this mean? Well, Jesus
is the Son of God incarnate. That is who Jesus is, God manifest
in the flesh. To nullify all the meaning of the incarnation is
the first object of Antichrist. Why? What are the elements of
that?
Well, obviously it is first of
all God reacting to the fall, God reacting to what Satan did at
the beginning, God coming out in Christ. “God was in Christ
reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses
unto them.” It was God manifest in the flesh, reacting to
all that had come about through Satan’s interference. Very
well then, the only way to counter that is to nullify who Jesus
is. But it goes further. It is not only the annulling of God in
His reaction, but it is the annulling of the issue that is bound
up with that divine reaction: and what is this but the heirship
and kingdom of God’s man. Man is the heir: the kingdom is
his inheritance. “It is your Father’s good pleasure to
give you the kingdom.” We are “heirs of God... joint
heirs with Christ.” “Thou madest him (man) to have
dominion.” The man after God’s own heart is the heir of
all things; the kingdom is his inheritance. Well, to annul Jesus
is but another way of saying, “This is the heir: come, let
us kill him, and the inheritance shall be ours.”
Therefore, nullify Jesus.
Now perhaps you wonder why I was
so happy a moment ago in calling your attention to this. It is
because of what we see in 2 Thess. 2:8: “Then shall be
revealed the lawless one, whom the Lord Jesus shall consume (or
annul) with the breath of his mouth.” Antichrist’s
first business is to annul Jesus, and the last thing that happens
is that, in the appearing of Jesus, he himself is annulled. That
is great, is it not? That is divine reaction.
The
Outworking of Divine Purpose in the Church
Where in all this does the
church come in? The church is Christ’s Body: we are members
of Christ. In this connection we have that utter statement by the
Spirit through Paul, “As the body is one, and hath many
members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one
body; so also is the Christ” (1 Cor. 12:12). The article is
there in the original, “the Christ”. Now, we have seen
that Antichrist is a spirit: Antichrist is also a corporate body.
There are many antichrists, many incarnations under one spirit;
an imitation of God’s one Body, all heading up to one great
supreme manifestation. “So also is the Christ”: a Body,
many members, and every member of that Body is called into the
purpose of God for the incarnating of His rights, in vital union
with Christ as the Head of the Body. So that the church is chosen
in Him before the foundation of the world to be the ultimate
vessel and instrument in which all God’s inheritance is
secured; to use Paul’s words, to be “the fulness of him
that filleth all in all” — God’s inheritance in
the saints. Beloved, this explains exactly what is happening to
saints; and oh, that saints recognised this one thing a little
more clearly, that the supreme thing with God now is not what
they do for Him, their work in this world in the sense of
activities and enterprises, but the supreme thing with God now is
their conformity to the image of God’s Son, the inworking
into the saints of that which has been made perfect in Christ.
“He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of
one” (Heb. 2:11), and that which has been consummated in the
Head, in that representative, first-begotten Man of this new
race, has to be wrought into every one of His members. That
involves, on the one hand, triumph over Antichrist as a
principle, as a law, as a nature, as a power, and, on the other
hand, the manifestation of God’s glory: and that is what is
going on.
I said that I wish we recognised
more clearly how much more important it is to God that we shall
be conformed to the image of His Son than that we should be doing
all sorts of things for Him. We seem to put the greatest value
upon what we are doing, so much so that, if the Lord cuts us off
from the doing and shuts us up to testings and trials in an
inward way, where every divine virtue is made necessary, and all
our own virtues are proved worthless, we revolt and want to be
doing something. Let us get out of this and do something, be at
work! It is so often the case when we are laid aside in suffering,
and the Lord is trying to produce something more of Christ:
patience, forbearance, love, sympathy. We want to get out of that
quickly, to be doing something. That is not doing anything!
Yet it is true that, when the Lord really gets a purchase upon a
life, He occupies far more of His time with the changing of that
life into His own likeness, than He does in trotting that life
around the world doing all sorts of things. What is it that God
is doing? He is preparing the church for dominion. He is making
the kingdom an inward thing, before it is an outward thing. He is
doing a secret thing, before displaying it to a wondering
universe. He is building Christ within unto the day of the
manifestation of Jesus Christ. If you doubt that, there is one
Scripture that will prove conclusive: “...when he shall come
to be glorified in his saints, and to be marvelled at in all them
that believe” (2 Thess. 1:10); not by all them that
believe, but in all them that believe. That is the day of
the manifestation of the sons of God; not the children of God,
but the sons of God. Upon that deepest, and, from our standpoint,
most difficult work, God is diligently and painstakingly engaged
now. If Paul is a type for the dispensation, the most fruitful
part of Paul’s life was not when he was running about the
world, but when he was shut up in prison and wrote letters. The
greatest revelation that has come to us of Jesus Christ has come
through those final letters of the imprisonment. We are taken
back into the “before times eternal”, taken through the
ages, taken on to the ages of the ages; we are given marvellous
unveilings. The wonder of those prayers of Paul is enough to
leave us breathless. “That ye may know what is the hope of
his calling...” (Eph. 1:18). Sit down with that. That is
only one of the petitions. We can gather an enormous amount in
that fragment, “the hope of his calling”. But that is
only one thing, and upon that there follows, “what the
riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints...”
Think of that! David would say, Selah! Then further we have,
“and what the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward
who believe, according to that working of the strength of his
might which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the
dead, and made him to sit at his right hand in the heavenly
places, far above all...” (Eph. 1:19-21). Three fragments of
one prayer! Can you comprehend that, can you fathom that? What a
revelation! What a concentrated essence of divine thought! But
Paul had to be locked up and stopped from all outward activity
for that revelation to come through. Yes, I believe he had to be.
The
Reversal of the Antichrist Principle by the Cross
I am going to close by reminding
you again of one thing in connection with this that is going on
in us. I would put it in this way, that God is seeking,
definitely, deliberately, persistently, to undercut Antichrist in
us, by working out the principle of the cross; because, until the
cross has been wrought into us, we are energised by a soul-life
with which the adversary is linked up. Our reason is so
energised. All is just soul activity in the mind and the reason.
The natural man is altogether estranged from God and cannot know
the things of the Spirit of God, and thus all the reasonings of
the natural man fall short of God’s thought. It is,
therefore, antichrist in principle. Something has happened: it
cannot get through to God; it is missing the way all the time.
Yet men are bringing the power of their own reason to bear upon
the things of God and the result is rationalism and the
nullification of Jesus. Is not that the fruit of rationalism; the
nullification of Jesus, as to who He is? Even in the realm of
religion Antichrist operates, through an uncrucified human reason
taking the place of the illumination of the Holy Spirit. In every
way, not only in the reason, but in the emotion, in the will of
the natural man, God is seeking to undercut the principle of
Antichrist. And even the children of God can lapse grievously and
lamentably there, so that in spirit that principle can get an
advantage; because the spirit of Antichrist has such a range,
from that of simple and ignorant desires or acts, right on to the
positive expression of a fully developed policy, a creed, a
philosophy, or a science. That is what we are in today. The
spirit of Antichrist has produced a policy, a creed, a philosophy
of life, a science. You see it developing in the world; the
potentialities and destiny of man, man as he is, without God,
without the necessity for God, without a need for the Spirit of
God, without any need for regeneration. Man — what a
wonderful creature he is, and what he can do! That is the creed
that today is rising and gaining power in this world. The whole
trend is towards the gathering of the dominion of this world
under a few supermen, and then heading up into the one. It is a
conception of man as having all resources in himself, the root of
the matter in himself, and all that turned into a creed, and into
a policy. That is where it ends; but, beloved, it begins very
often in something very simple and it very often manifests itself
in the simple or ignorant desires or acts. In one case that very
thing leads to murder, in the case of Cain. It is all one spirit,
one principle. You see Cain set aside the blood, the atonement,
the need of a death by substitution. All that the Christ means
for reunion with God, Cain set aside, and brought in his own
works, his own resources, his own potentialities, and thought
that God could be communicated with on that basis. That is the
spirit of Antichrist, and when that met the judgment of God, it
issued in murder; that is, when it was found that God rejected
that, the spirit of Antichrist went out in murder.
You say that is very terrible;
no saint would ever be caught there. I am not thinking that you
are likely to go and literally slay some brother because of this
thing. But the principle and the spirit is this, that some child
of God, some servant of God, some Christian worker, begins to
assert himself and to employ his own resources and strength and
wisdom in the things of God, and, coming sooner or later to a
deadlock, finding that is not getting through and the blessing of
God is not there, a spirit of resentment and bitterness rises
into the heart and someone is going to suffer for that, some
simple child of God is going to come under the lash for that. We
see it. This false assertion will at some time or other involve
other people in malice, in hatred, in a spirit of murder. If you
cannot accept that, let me remind you of David. Yes, David was a
saint; David was a man of God, David knew the Lord from his
childhood. But you remember that painful, that terrible, tragic
episode in David’s life when he numbered Israel. Even Joab,
that carnal man, saw the danger and pleaded with him not to do
it. But no, in strength of will he put Joab aside. “I have
made up my mind to do this; let it be done.” It was done as
he desired, and then the angel of the Lord said, “Choose one
of three things, famine, war, or pestilence.” A sword of
judgment was unsheathed, and the scourge went over the land: the
inhabitants of Israel were mown down by pestilence, till David,
heart-broken, cried to the Lord: “O my Lord, I am the
responsible one. What have these sheep done? Let your wrath be
turned against me.” That was a terrible occasion. Why? What
was wrong with numbering Israel? For one thing, the numbering of
Israel had always been according to the state of redemption. They
were only numbered on redemption ground, that is, regarding their
value to God as redeemed ones. That is the only valuation that
ever rests upon anything; what they are to God as redeemed ones.
David had taken no account of the shekels of the sanctuary, the
redemption money. What he was after was to know his own resources
of man-power, how great a kingdom he had. That is Antichrist in
principle. A saint is trapped and caught in a snare with most
tragic consequences. How necessary it is then to walk in the
Spirit. How necessary it is for the Lord to keep the cross
operating against this flesh, lest ambition arise,
self-assertiveness, strength of nature; and all that is Satan’s
ground, on which he encamps: and to do what? To dishonour the
Lord, take His rights from Him, and that through the saints.
One of the greatest tragedies is
that the church has served Satan’s purpose so well, because
it is not a crucified church. Oh, there must be a subjective
state of circumcision, if He is to get His end and have the
glory. I mean subjective state of circumcision, circumcision
which is of the heart, which Paul says is the putting away of the
whole body of the flesh. Well, you see, Antichrist moves a bit
nearer to us. We have only thought of Antichrist as some person
arising at some future date according to prophecy, and of certain
things happening. Yes, quite true, but John says Antichrist in
the first place is a spirit, and then he says that Antichrist is
constituted a corporate body. This latter is Satan’s
imitation of the Body of Christ: a corporate thing by one spirit,
in order to bring in his kingdom, to bring in his man. When that
man comes in and has his short season of reigning, dominion, it
will be a very terrible and very real one, as is made quite clear
in the Book of Revelation. But the matter comes nearer than
prophecy, and I think that any prophecy which has no immediate
spiritual application has missed its object. Prophecy has to come
right home to us now. Antichrist is very near to the nature of
every one of us.
Well now, what is to be the
issue of all this? It must bring us at once to the point where
the Lord Jesus started: “Lo, I come to do thy will, O my God”;
“I delight to do thy will”; “Not My will, but
thine, be done.” In a word, it is abandonment to the Lord;
not abandonment to the Lord for service, in order to be used,
that is, not abandonment to the Lord for blessing, to get
anything, but just abandonment to the Lord for His glory in any
way in which He sees He can get it. All that matters, or should
matter, is that the Lord is getting the glory. If by my doing
nothing the Lord can get glory, all right; or if the Lord wants
me to go at great cost to the ends of the earth and can get glory
in that way, all right. It is not whether it is here or there,
this or that; the consequences do not matter. The thing that
matters is that the Lord is getting what He is after in me. That
is the spirit of the Christ, and anything other than, or contrary
to that is Antichrist in spirit.
Now you understand what the Body
of Christ is, and is for, and what the Lord is seeking to do in
it. Well, that brings it right out of the realm of mere doctrine,
teaching, theory, and makes it an immediately practical thing,
and I trust it will be fruitful in us at this time.