Reading: Hebrews 12:26-29.
We
come back to this letter to the
Hebrews, and we can narrow the whole thing down to it. In the first
place, is there not some peculiar and wonderful significance about the
preservation of this letter in particular? You see, it was written for
a special occasion, and that occasion was one historically very near to
the time of its writing. If, as many believe, its date was between 66
and 70, then it was very near in time to the actual carrying out or
fulfilment of the thing for which it was written; that is, it was
written because Jerusalem and Judaism in the order in which it then
existed was about to be shattered to pieces and scattered to the ends
of the earth, it was preparation for that, and that took place in 70.
So the letter, written so near to the occasion, fulfilled its purpose
within a very short time.
Why,
then, should it last out till now?
Why should it occupy the place that it occupies now in the preserved
and protected writings of the New Testament? Some have been lost, we
know. Why did not the Lord let this be lost, seeing that it had
fulfilled its purpose? I venture to say
that this letter is living now. It is not a letter that has no life in
it, as though
it had served its purpose and could now be put aside. It is a
tremendous letter as a spiritual document today. What does it mean? Why
was it written? Certain Jews had turned to Christ, and in turning to
Christ had turned to the fulfilment of all their Jewish patterns, all
their Jewish types and figures and shadows, passed from the substance
to the reality. Then ardent Jews came along and sought to make it very
hard for them. It meant ostracism, boycott, persecution, and much
suffering; and a great effort was launched to Judaise Christianity,
that is, to link Christianity on with Judaism and preserve, maintain,
perpetuate all the Jewish orders in connection with Christianity.
The
letter, as you see, was written
against such a movement, and to strengthen those believers in the
faith, and it set forth the fact in a very comprehensive way that Jesus
fulfilled, embodied, transcended all the spiritual values of the Jewish
foreshadowing and types, and put them aside, and that henceforth for
the Lord's people it was not a matter of a tabernacle or a temple, an
altar and its sacrifices, a priesthood in rota and all that outward
order of things, but it was all in Christ in heaven, of spiritual value.
That
was the content of the letter in
brief. Its object was immediate. How far it achieved its object we do
not know. It is possible that some of those believers went back in
spite of the repeated warnings, and perished with Jerusalem and Judaism. It is probable that many of them
were saved by this letter, so that when Jerusalem, the temple and the
Jewish system was shaken, as the Word says, and ceased to remain, their
link was with heaven, with a living, risen, exalted Christ, and it
meant nothing to them of loss that all that did go. The immediate
purpose was accomplished. Why maintain the letter? Why keep it alive?
Why preserve it? That is the question we have to answer, and the answer
is that the letter does not merely deal with an historic instance. It
deals with an abiding tendency. It is something which is always the
peril of God's people, whether they be Jews or Christians. The value of
this letter today is that it is a letter no longer to Jewry, no longer
to Israel but to the Christian church, and that is why it lives,
because God knows that that tendency is a persistent one in the
direction to which these Hebrew believers were being tempted, and in
the direction to which they were almost being driven. So that something
very concrete arises. It is this: that Christianity can become exactly
what Judaism became, and God is against that. And it brings us back to
the central point of our earlier meditation. It is one of the
master-strokes of Satan against the Lord Jesus, and the principle
result of his work is tradition. By that I mean the making of things
into a system run by man. Now that covers a lot of ground, a lot of
history. Christianity has become a repetition of Judaism. Organised
Christianity today is what Judaism was when this letter was written: an
historic thing, a systematised thing, a whole system of beliefs,
truths, doctrines, activities, movements, which are very largely but an
imitation of something.
We
come to the New Testament. As to the
things taught in the New Testament, we say these are the New Testament
doctrines and we are called upon to subscribe to these doctrines. Now
we are not going to attempt to cover the ground of what the New
Testament doctrine was. Fundamentalism as such draws a circle around
New Testament doctrines, but then there are a good many that go beyond
that. Then we come to the New Testament and we see not only doctrines
but practices, and we say, This is the practice of the New Testament.
Then we come again, and we see the activities, what we may call the
work which was carried on or carried out in New Testament times by the
apostles, by the church. And then we come again and we see what the
church was in New Testament times. We have a presentation of the church
as it is here on the earth.
Now
those four things since New
Testament times have been taken up as a system and imitated: that is,
there has been the forming of the doctrine into the creed, the
Christian creed, and it is accepted, and we say, I believe in
so-and-so! Why do you believe in it? Because it is in the New
Testament. Well, that may be quite good so far, but you proceed beyond
that. This was the practice of the church in New Testament times:
therefore we can do likewise. This is how the church was organised (I
am doubtful about that word, but we will use it for the moment) in New
Testament times. This is how the church came into being, and how it was
ordered and arranged in New Testament times, therefore we do the same.
We have our churches on that basis, we imitate. And then as to the
work, whatever it might be, evangelism and all the other activities on
the side of the work of Christianity as a movement, we see this is what
happened, we do the same, we imitate. And so for centuries the thing
has become a system like that, of imitation, and that is what I mean by
tradition.
That
can just be Judaism repeated in
Christendom. That is what Judaism was. Remember that Judaism came from
God out of heaven at one time; it came by revelation, and it came in
power, and it was accompanied, as this letter points out, with the
voice of a trump, with fire and smoke, shaking and earthquake. It came
with the accompaniments of God Himself, all terrible, a consuming fire:
and yet it became that, a thing which had to be overthrown, for the
overthrow of which God had to shake the earth. It became the thing
which was the occasion of the chief conflicts of apostolic times.
Paul's battles were on the field of Judaism. Yes, a thing which
originally came from God, now one of God's main difficulties, doing
more harm than it is worth, set aside, repudiated. You have only got to
look at Jewry today and see how much respect God has for Judaism as
such. Well, Christianity came from God, out of heaven, and this letter
says that Judaism came through man but this faith came from the Son of
God Himself. That is the comparison. He that spoke then on the earth,
Moses; how much more in the case of Him that speaks from heaven. "God,
who in time past spake unto the fathers in the prophets... hath at the
end of the times spoken unto us in his Son..."; yet the peril and
possibility and tendency is exactly the same in both cases, the end can
be similar, and God will yet shake Christendom to its foundations, that
it shall be shattered as He has done with Judaism. That is the
testimony here. Yes, all our creeds, all our imitation of the New
Testament. God never meant anything of His in this dispensation to be
an imitation. He meant it to be the real thing. The difference between
the real thing and the traditional is
between life
and death. Tradition is in one realm and life is in another. It depends
entirely upon whether it is earthly or heavenly.
I am impressed with that phrase, "...as
of things which are made..."; that is, things shaken, passing. "Things
which are made"; imitations are always made. The original is never
made: that comes out from God Himself. What then is the truth? What is
it that God is after? Well, you turn to the beginning of this letter
and it all becomes very clear at the outset. "God, having of old time
spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in
divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us Son-wise."
It is not just what Jesus said: it is what Jesus is. The revelation is
not of something, it is a Son-revelation, and if you pursue this
thought - and you will have to seek to follow closely - into this
letter a little further, you will find that this word "Son" is a term,
not
only a personal designation. It belongs to Him in a unique way, in a
specific and peculiar way, in a way which has that in it which is not
shared by any other, and yet there is that in it which is an imparted
thing, and God speaks first of all Son-wise in the absoluteness and
finality of His Son.
Then
it is not long before you find
yourself being engaged with a secondary thought; that Son's relatedness
to the race, and bringing out of the race sons, and bringing them to
glory, so that a family issues, "Wherefore, holy brethren, partners in
a heavenly calling..."; "...bringing many sons to glory..."; "...he is
not ashamed to call them brethren...". And then you move on from what
lies between, and you come to chapter 12: "My son, despise not the
chastening of the Lord... whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and
scourgeth every son whom he receiveth." We gave to the fathers of our
flesh reverence: how much more unto the Father of our spirits. There
you have got to the heart of things. What is the essence of living
Christianity? What is the thing that God is after, which will be
established, which will be eternal, which will satisfy His heart, which
will fulfil all His intention, and which will be the very occasion of
His shaking the heavens and the earth to get rid of all else? It is
Sonship.
It is in Sonship that we have all that
God means, and so here you see it is a matter of living union with the
living Son of God as raised from the dead and exalted to God's right
hand: for that is what this chapter says. "Unto which of the angels
said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee?"
Turn to the book of the Acts, chapter 13 and verse 33: "He raised up Jesus, as it is
written, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee." Now He was
the Son of God from eternity, He
was the Son of God when He was born at Bethlehem, He was the Son of God
in Jordan's waters, attested there, but here is something peculiar,
related to Him in Sonship: He is declared, says Paul, the Son of God
with power according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection of
the dead. God raised Him, as it is written, "Thou art my Son, this day
have I begotten thee."
There is a Sonship connected with His
resurrection which is of peculiar significance, because when Jesus was
dead (if I may put it this way) that was an end of everything,
everything as to the thoughts and intentions and purposes of God. If
Jesus had remained dead, all God's eternal purposes would have ceased.
When God raised Him from the dead and He lives again, it is Sonship,
but it is Sonship in an inclusive way. All God's purposes and thoughts
and intentions spring to life again, have realisation, and this very
principle of Sonship is a related thing, is a family thing, is that He
should not be the only begotten but the first begotten; that He should
be the firstborn from among the dead, that He should be the firstfruits
of those that sleep, "Bringing many sons to glory". And so Sonship has
a very far-reaching significance in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.
Now then, Sonship embodies, as you may
see, all the thoughts of God, all the purposes of God, all that God has
before ordained and intended. It is in the Son whom He appointed heir
of all things, through whom He made the ages. Now the Spirit of God's
Son, of that risen, living Son, is given to believers for the purpose
of realising all those intentions and thoughts of God in the church,
and that is God's method. God's method is not to call upon you and me
to accept certain doctrines, prescribe to certain things set forth as
New Testament truths, to act in a certain New Testament way, and do a
certain kind of New Testament work. God's all-inclusive thing is that
you and I should receive the Spirit of His Son, and from that time
everything is in His hands. We do not take on anything from the
outside; everything begins from inside. And anybody who simply takes
Christian truth as in the New Testament from the outside, accepts it,
adopts it, and assents to it, will become a traditional Christian and a
dead one, and anybody who tries to conform to the New Testament order
of things has put on a mould, a garment and will simply get into what
the New Testament describes as "dead works". Anybody who tries to do
the work of the Lord, because that was done, and it was done in that
way, in the New Testament, will find that they have a long way to go in
the matter of power with which to meet the demands. Unless the Son of
God does it all, and that from within, in the end it will be lost, it
will be shaken, and it will fail to possess. Everything
becomes inward by Sonship. Christ is the sum total of God's thoughts, God's desires,
God's intentions.
By the Spirit of sonship indwelling,
those thoughts, those desires, those intentions become an inward thing
in the believer, and then begins our real history spiritually. What is
spiritual history? Spiritual history is not what we believe as
doctrine; there is no history in that at all. Spiritual history is not
in what we do as practice. There is no history in that. Spiritual
history is our testing, our trying in relation to the thoughts, desires
and intentions of the Lord.
Now that is difficult to grasp. How can I
put it clearly to you? The apostle Paul, after he had met Jesus of
Nazareth on the Damascus way, went away into Arabia for two or three years. He got new
things revealed in him by the revelation of God's Son in him. God's
thoughts in Christ, God's intentions in Christ were revealed to him. Up
to that time Paul had been pursuing a course dictated by outward
acceptances. If Jewry said a certain thing ought to be done, because
Jewry said it Saul did it. He conformed to the outward system. It was
something imposed. But now the whole initiative had been taken out of
his hands, the authority had been taken away from him, and from a
system. Now his relationship with the living, exalted Jesus of Nazareth
meant that he could no longer adopt his own course, follow his own
thoughts, be governed by any outward order or system. Even though that
thing had originally come in through and from God no longer could it be
the governing thing in his life, the thing now is, "Lord, what wilt
thou have me to do?" Then there was a new Lordship, a new mastery, and
on his side a new imprisonment, and he was going to be tested all
through his life as to that basis. He had the Old Testament, but I
challenge you to find in the Old Testament what Paul found in it,
without special revelation of the Holy Ghost. I could give you one or
two passages quoted by Paul, and ask you if you could see that in the
Old Testament. There is every justification on the natural line and
ground for what his opponents said, that he was just reading into the
Old Testament his own ideas. But we do not believe that. With spiritual
illumination you see that that is what God meant, but it is
extraordinary that God meant that: it never looked like that at all.
Judaism said that God said it meant this. Now then Paul, you are going
to be tested by God's thoughts as interpreted in your heart by the
Spirit of God's Son.
That brings us right back to this first
chapter of the letter to the Hebrews, Jesus Christ, God's Son, is
absolute Lord, and that Lordship has got to have its expression in the
believer in the power of the Holy Spirit, so that the believer is not
governed by anything but the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the living,
exalted Christ, and that is the only
safe way; it is the only true way. It is made so perfectly
clear, with an abundance of evidence in the Word. You go through this
letter and see what it says about the new covenant, for instance. And
then you take up other parts of the New Testament which deal with the
new covenant, like the second letter to the Corinthians, and see what
the new covenant is. Well, it is quoted from Jeremiah 31:31: "Behold,
the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the
house of Israel, and with the house of Judah." What is the nature of
the new covenant? "I will write my laws in their hearts, and upon their
minds will I write them." Paul says in 2 Corinthians, "Not on tables of
stone with pen and ink, but upon the tables of the heart by the Spirit
of the living God". This new order of things is the inward writing of
God's Spirit in the heart of His people as to what He wants. John
writing his epistle says, "The anointing which you have received
abideth in you, and ye have no need that anyone teach you, for the
anointing which abideth in you teacheth you...". You say, that is
dangerous; that makes everybody a law to themselves; that is setting
the Word of God on one side. Do not think that. There is one Spirit,
not so many Holy Spirits as people who receive Him. The Holy Spirit
will never take us away from the Word of God, but He will fulfil it in
us, and we will come to know the Word of God as we can never know it by
the most ardent application and study; and believe me, no Holy Spirit
governed life will at any point contradict the Word of God. It is
because of this other kind of thing that reading any part of the Word
of God results in a hundred or five hundred or a thousand different
interpretations of it, and applications of it, and practices concerning
it. There is all the difference between the thing made and the thing
not made. The thing made is mechanical, the thing not made is organic;
it is living.
So that God's thoughts and intentions
become the testing ground of a believer. Oh well, God has a plan, and
He does not reveal His plan to us all at once: but as far as He goes as
a rule - even with His most devoted, consecrated, sacrificing servant -
is the next step. And so Paul, with all his revelation, and all his
vision, and all his walk with God, and all his knowledge of the Lord,
would just be allowed to go to the border of a country with his own
feeling that that is the direction, that is from where the call comes,
that is where the need lies, and that is the thing to do. Yes, he is a
devoted man, he is a consecrated man, but he has thought that this is
the present movement, this is the present direction, this is where the
present need is, this is where the call is, and just there he gets a
showing from the Lord that night that it is in another direction
altogether, and when he explains it he says: "Assuredly gathering...".
(That is, "concluding.") And so he leaves that about which he had such
strong convictions and for which he had such good arguments, and goes
this other way. He has been tested as to whether he will follow outward
dictates, the dictates of appearances and seeming demands, or whether
the voice of the Spirit in him will govern him.
Now
we can organise our movements, lay
our plans, draft our schemes. We can lay it all out according to the
New Testament and it can be dead, ineffective. God is merciful, God is
gracious, and God is sovereign, and in so far as there is devotion to
Him, and in so far as His interests are at our hearts, and in so far as
there is a possibility of something being accomplished for Him, He
blesses; but that is not the point at all. The thing is, can God go all
the way with this? Is this ultimately God's way, God's thought? Will
not a very great deal of that go when the shaking comes? That is the
point. The thing is now what God Himself through the Spirit of His Son
is doing in a living way. Every life, and every assembly has to be
constituted directly and immediately upon the basis of the living
expression of the thought of God, and that thought as wrought into the
very life by testing. A thought from God, a divine thought is not
enough. It is not enough to carry us through. It is not enough to act
upon. That thought has got to test us, try us, until we are constituted
by that thought. You are dealing with tremendous principles. It is not
enough for me to say to you that the Word of God means this, and for
you to take it and straight away in accepting it, try to make it a part
of your order of things. It may be the truth, you may have to believe
it, you may have to adjust yourself to it, you may have to obey it, but
it has not become a living power in you until you have been tested on
it, tried on it, taken through the fires by it, and that thought of God
has become a part of your very being, that you are constituted
according to it in perfect oneness with the living Lord. It is thus
that the believer's life becomes a living expression of those thoughts
and desires and intents of God. It is thus that the church is
constituted. You cannot imitate apostolic methods. The Holy Ghost must
do this. He must constitute the church.
You see the difference between a
traditional system, whether it be Judaism or Christianity, and a living
thing coming all the time in a living way out from the Christ Himself
by the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit Himself doing it. Well, this is
going to cost something. See what it meant for these people. At the end
of this letter you come on this: "Wherefore, Christ also... suffered
without the camp. Let us therefore go to him without the camp, bearing
his reproach." The camp was Judaism, and He suffered without the camp
because He repudiated Judaism and stood for the realisation of all God's
thoughts as in Himself personally. He gathered up everything into His
own person, "I am." It is the Christ who is the full sum and embodiment
of all God's thoughts and ways, and that takes the place of Judaism,
and He, therefore, repudiated Judaism and suffered without the camp.
Let us go to Him without the camp.
If, as we were saying at the beginning,
this letter's preservation has any significance at all from God's
standpoint, then its significance is that it applies to the same
tendency in Christianity as there was in Judaism. What is the issue? If
you are going to take this line you are going to repudiate organised
Christianity, going to repudiate Christendom as a traditional system,
going to repudiate that order of things which is made, and going,
therefore, to suffer reproach and be outside of the camp suffering His
reproach. In other words, in line with what we have said earlier, we
are immediately going to come up against that force of antagonism to
stop what has come in through the death and resurrection and exaltation
of the Lord Jesus, the heavenly thing. Is it not sad that these people
met it through God's historic people, the people who claimed to have
the oracles, to be the elect, to be the favoured of the Lord? It is
always like that. "A man's foes shall be those of his own household."
Do not narrow that down to the limits of a family where one is a
Christian and all the rest are not. That is not the point at all. It is
his own household, the Christian household. You will meet the
antagonism to what has come in from heaven as a heavenly thing; you
will meet the antagonism amongst those who are the traditional people
of God in this dispensation. That is how it will be. That is going to
be the cost of a walk in life with the Lord and not with man, knowing
the Lord for yourself.
Now what will be the form? Why all this
difference, this separation? Well you see, it is so difficult to
understand, and yet the fact stares you in the face that organised
Christianity as it is today cannot understand anything that is not
organised, that is not advertised, that is not run. It must have names
that carry weight, that mean influence. If you can get people with some
title you are going to have the guarantee of success for your Christian
enterprise. And so the letters and the titles strung on are a necessary
requisite for the success of the Lord's work. You must write it up in
the press, you must give a report of it, you must be able to make some
kind of return that people can read, and say, This is a successful
thing. If you cannot do that the whole thing is doomed to failure. They
say, you must advertise, you must have publicity, you must organise,
you must bring in all these things to support it, to carry it on. If
you did none of those; if you were never heard of in the press; if you
never had a report; if you never had any names; if there was nothing at
all that came out in a public way for people to take account of, what
is the verdict of organised Christianity? Nothing is being done. You
are doing nothing. It is a-hole-in-a-corner sort of thing. Is that
true? What must we say about that? There was a striking absence of all
that in the beginning, and a marvellous manifestation of power, of
progress, of effectiveness, so that nothing could stand in the way. We
must only conclude, we are driven to this extremity, that the Lord can
do His own work. Evidently the risen Lord is able to carry on His own
work, the Holy Ghost knows how to manage things. What a surprising
discovery! Forgive my irony. I say, this is that upon which Hebrews
12:26-28 is fixed. "I will shake the earth and the heavens"; that which
can be shaken will be shaken; that which cannot be shaken will remain;
and what is that? It is what God has done. "Whatsoever God doeth, it
shall be for ever." What God does is done in a spiritual way; it is spiritual, it is heavenly, it is eternal.
That may leave you perhaps in a vague,
perplexed position, not knowing where you are, but I have no doubt
about the truth of the message. If you do not feel you can accept it;
if you disagree; if you revolt; if you feel it cuts clean across all
your training, all your acceptance; if you feel that it runs counter to
all that you know, all I ask of you is honesty with God. I ask you to
come and ask Him to open to you the meaning of the letter to the
Hebrews, why it was written, what its significance is, why God has
preserved it, what its application is now. Have honest dealings with
the Lord. Please do not go away hot in spirit, antagonistic; do not lay
this at the door of any man. At least give God a chance. It may be
costly, it may be that you will have to be prepared to accept the
position that God's greatest work through you is something hidden,
something secret, something that no one can read about, perhaps no one
can discern what is going on; and it is the mightiest work that God is
doing. But, oh, this natural life - how it must see, how it must be in
things. That is just the point. Where the cross has done its work to
slay that natural craving of ours to have some feeling, some place of
some kind in the things of God, not prepared for God to do His work
through us without our coming in some way personally into it.
May the Lord give us His own
interpretation, give us honesty of heart, and show us His meaning in
having brought us to this consideration.