"Walk about Zion, and go round about her; Number the towers thereof; Mark ye well her bulwarks; Consider her palaces: That ye may tell it to the generation following. For this God is our God for ever and ever: He will be our guide even unto death." (Ps.
48:12-14).
"For he looked for the city which hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is God." (Heb. 11:10).
"For other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ." (1 Cor. 3:11).
"His foundation is in the holy mountains. The Lord loveth the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob. Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God. Selah. I will make mention of Rahab and Babylon as among them that know me: Behold, Philistia, and Tyre, with Ethiopia: This one was born there. Yea, of Zion it shall be said, This one and that one was born in her; and the Most High himself will establish her. The Lord will count, when he writeth up the peoples, This one was born there. Selah." (Ps. 87:1-6).
In our contemplation of Zion or
of Christ, our first occupation is with foundations, and we were
speaking about spiritual stability as wrought out in Christ while
here on earth, under every kind of adversity, and then perfected,
and brought to us in the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, to
make us in that particular respect like Himself - steady,
unmovable, reliable, quiet, confident, assured - a work of the
Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
This is an additional word on
foundations in that connection of stability. It is obvious that
we shall never get very far if we are unstable. Until the Lord
has got us to the place where we are, to some real degree,
grounded and settled, fixed and steady, He will not be able to
put upon us the responsibility of His house. His house is not a
material structure to be built upon material foundations. It is a
spiritual thing. It is spiritual responsibility, spiritual
ministry, spiritual life, spiritual fellowship, all that
is represented in the House of God, and it cannot be placed upon
our uncertainty, our uncertain souls, our wavering, our
unreliable selfhood. It can only be placed upon what is of Christ
in us in the sense of stability.
How important for carrying
responsibility with and for the Lord is this matter of coming to
the full assurance of faith, this confidence in God!
A Family
Constituted by a Life Triumphant Over Death
Now we pass on to another aspect
of the foundations, for the foundations themselves are manifold,
although one. You know from the Revelation how manifold the
foundations are: all manner of precious stones in the foundation,
and the next thing that we shall consider for a little while in
relation to foundations is that the foundation is a matter of a
family constituted by life, and that life as the life which has
conquered death. That is a rather vague statement, I know, but we
can quickly explain. As we indicated in the last chapter that
Abraham, who was looking for the city which has the foundations,
had to go to Mount Moriah and there offer Isaac and receive him
as from the dead, and God had said “In Isaac shall thy
seed be called” (Gen. 21:12). So it is quite clear that
the family had to be out from a triumph over death, a life which
had overcome death, which had vanquished death, and wherever you
come to Scripture bearing upon the heavenly family, the divine
family, you will find that death and resurrection are always in
the near neighbourhood, very closely in touch. There has to be
that which really is the mighty vanquishing of death in order to
bring in this heavenly family so that it is constituted on that
ground. And it is a family, every member of which, in the first
place, possesses the life which has overcome death, and is
learning to live by that life, and is called upon to prove right
through the whole course of this earthly sojourn where death
remains, to prove right on to the end the power of that life in
terms of overcoming death.
It is something into which we
are called as our experience, as the ground to be proved and to
be established. It is foundational that you and I not only
possess that life in Christ, but continually prove its worth,
prove its power, know it as the power of His resurrection. That
is in the very foundation of things. If Abraham is the father of
all them that believe, if he is the father of a spiritual and
heavenly seed, then he is the foundation in principle. And if it
was in Isaac that his seed should be called, it is quite clear
that it was on Mount Moriah that in principle the family was
secured, secured by death being set aside and life triumphing.
The same thing happened on Moriah so many years afterwards in the
case of David. He had brought death upon the land; death stalked
through the land, cutting down on the right hand and on the left
many thousands through David’s folly and sin. At length in
the threshing floor of Ornan, Mount Moriah, the sacrifice was
offered, the sword was sheathed, death was stayed, life
triumphed, and it became the foundation of the house of God, the
temple in which the supreme characteristic is life triumphant
over death.
I was interested to notice that
this last clause in Psalm 48 - “This God is our God for
ever and ever: He will be our guide even unto death” -
is not a correct translation. The correct translation is: “He
will guide us across the gulf of death.” Now “Walk
about Zion”, and the last thing is: “He will
guide us across the gulf of death”, not even unto death
but over death, across death, the other side of death.
When we come to think of this in
the light of the Lord Jesus, of course, again it is quite patent
that it was in the hour of His resurrection that He said, “I
ascend unto my Father and your Father, and my God and your God”
(John 20:17). What He had said on that wise before - their Father
and His Father - only became, in its full spiritual meaning and
value, true in His resurrection. They were begotten again “unto
a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead”
(1 Pet. 1:3). It is a family embodying this great reality of
triumphant life, and it is concerning that that the apostle used
those words which are very familiar to us in 2 Corinthians 2:15 -
“We are a sweet savour of Christ unto God” and,
leaving out the other details, we come to this: “a savour
from life unto life”. “We are a sweet savour of
Christ unto God”; that is, we are bringing to God that
which is of Christ which is precious and acceptable to Him,
something in which He delights. It is Christ, and what is it? A
savour of life unto life in others, that we are bringing the
message and the power of this life triumphant over death to
others. That is a sweet savour of Christ unto God. It is a family
in the power of life.
God
Builds on the Family
As to foundations, what is it
God builds upon? What only can He build upon? The answer is quite
definitely: God can only build upon life, and He can only build a
family upon life. One of the very precious things, I think, of
the Word of God, the divine truth, is just this: that God’s
foundation in spiritual essence is the family. We think of
building by and on quite a lot of things, and it is here that so
much confusion is brought about. We think of building in terms of
truth, of doctrine, of knowledge, of light; we are all the time
making those the criteria, and very often these things destroy
the family spirit by misapprehension. We divide the Lord’s
people when we make truth and light a matter of relationship, of
fellowship. Even unconsciously, almost unconsciously, springs up
something divisive: superiority, difference in measure and
apprehension. There comes about a phraseology: they have not
seen! They have not got revelation! And the way in which it is
said implies they belong to one category, and we to another. It
is so subtle, and we are making the measure of our light the
measure of our fellowship. The result? Well, quite without
intention, the effect is division, is distance, is difference.
How can you and I and all the
Lord’s people make a good beginning in hope? Now, you can
rule out a whole host of things and say, it cannot be that. We
cannot make a good beginning with any hope if it has to be the
same measure of light, everybody having the same apprehension of
truth, the same interpretation. That cannot get us anywhere. But
I venture to say that if we take this attitude and hold fast to
it - We belong to one family, we are members of one family, we
have one life, one Christ, within all of us - if we would hold to
that, we would get a long way. You may not agree with me on quite
a lot of things, (I expect you do not) but is that going to cause
you to go away, wash your hands of me and have nothing to do with
me? Then you are making things such as teaching, doctrine or
interpretation the basis of relationship and fellowship. If you
say, ‘Well, I do not see eye to eye on certain matters,
quite a number of matters, but we belong to one family, there is
one foundational thing about us, we are members of the same
family’, that gives us a good starting point, and will at
least form a foundation for seeing just how far we can go
together. Get the foundation right, see what the foundation is,
and it is not that, that and that, but it is this: we share one
life, we are members of one family, and in any family worth the
name there is at least an effort made to get on together because
they are a family. That is very elementary. It is hardly worth
mentioning, but I see that it is just there that the test of the
power of this life comes in. That is what I am getting at. We say
we share one life. Yes, but what kind of a life is it? Is it
abstract, just something that we have got in common, we call it
eternal life? We have never defined it any more than that it is
going to outlast this life and carry us on through eternity.
But there is something in the
life that you and I share that has proved more than a match for
all the disruptive forces of this universe. They were
concentrated at the cross of the Lord Jesus, they were out to
destroy, to disintegrate, to divide, to scatter. In His
resurrection, that life proved more than a match for all those
disruptive forces, and on the day of Pentecost, you see what that
life did. They were all scattered in the night of His betrayal.
On the day of Pentecost, they were together and it says of those
who were saved that they continued steadfastly in fellowship.
Something has happened. The disruptive, disintegrating forces of
death and spiritual forces have been been met. A beautiful family
in fellowship has been born in His resurrection, and there is
that in this life which is not just passive, abstract life; it
has in it the power of unifying and overcoming disruption. It is
the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
Oh, how easy it would have been
for a complete breakup of that band before His cross! How easy it
would have been for them to have been alienated from Him and from
one another, for the whole circle and group to have split up,
divided and gone! How easy it would have been for Him to have
just given them up as a hopeless proposition, wash His hands of
them, saying, I can make nothing of these men, I can never bring
them into any kind of oneness. There were all the makings of a
situation like that, but “having loved his own that were
in the world, he loved them unto the end” (John 13:1).
He did not let them go. He did not give them up. He did not wash
His hands of them. He did not say, They are impossible! He did
not say, I have no room for So-and-so, he is such an impossible
person! He did not allow disintegration to come in. He held them
together to Himself by His love to the end.
The Spirit of Jesus Christ has
come to work that same thing in you and in me so that we do not
so easily let one another go because of our faults and
imperfections and all that kind of thing which would alienate us,
separate us, divide us. We are not so ready to let other people
go because they do not see as we see. We are not so ready to let
the Lord’s people go because they have not got revelation.
You see what I mean. No, the Spirit of Jesus Christ is the Spirit
of the family, and the family is not just composed of those who
see alike, who gather in a certain place and are occupied with a
certain interpretation. No! The family is much larger than that.
Anything in the nature of exclusivism is a violation of the
family spirit, the family nature, of the Holy Spirit Himself.
Where would any of us be if the Lord had treated us
according to what we are in ourselves, according to the measure
of our apprehension of His thoughts and His will, our likeness to
Christ? What we owe to His infinite forbearance and longsuffering
as with very wayward children, very slow-to-learn children - yes,
and very sinning children! What we owe to His longsuffering and
forbearance! Do not let us make external things the basis of
fellowship. The family is something altogether different from
that. Do not let us make ‘things’ at all the foundation
of relatedness. Let us recognize that it is Christ Who is the
foundation and Christ in terms of love and life which have met
the full force of hatred and of death and conquered. That
life is in you and in me to prove its power and its value in the
realm of all those works of evil along the line of division and
death. The foundation is life, Christ as life, Christ as
victorious over the work of death. You know that in nature, where
death has taken place, disintegration will soon follow. Where
life is, there is still hope - the basis of it holding together.