We have been giving ourselves to
a seeking to see and to grasp something of the significance of
the Lord Jesus Christ and His work in relation to the whole
created universe. We are really gathered around one thing: that
He is the key to everything and that only as He comes into His
place will the creation find the explanation and answer to its
existence. That has taken us out along several lines. We have
seen that there was a primeval order in the creation, of which He
was the centre and the sphere, as the Son eternally appointed the
‘heir of all things’. There was an order expressive of
God, who is the God of order. We have seen that all progress, all
fruitfulness, all satisfaction, all fullness, is a matter of
Jesus Christ; and that, so far as we are concerned, Christians or
mankind, it is a matter of knowing Him.
We have dwelt much upon this
matter of order as essential to life, to progress and to
the realization of God’s end. Order is a key to everything.
We went on to see something of
the disruption of that order, the interference with it and the
breaking in upon it. The result: disorder, and all its baneful
consequences — pain in the creation, spiritual pain as well
as physical pain. The Apostle has put it like this: "The
whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain" (Romans
8:22), because things are out of order. We traced the course of
that disruption and dislocation, which began, apparently,
somewhere outside of this present world — in heaven, where
there was an uprising of a leader with a great following of
angels, apparently in revolt against God’s destined place
and purpose for His Son as ‘the heir of all things’. It
was a bid for that position of equality with God, a bid to
displace God’s appointed One. That brought disruption in
that realm, and the leader and his followers were cast out —
"angels, which kept not their first estate" (Jude 6).
We saw the leader of them, no doubt with his following, invading
this earth and breaking in, so that the beautiful order of the
creation was upset. In the first place, the order in the man; the
balance, the symmetry, the beautiful harmony in the man’s
own life and constitution were upset and disorganized. Then
immediately to the corporate — in the man and his wife, so
that you can, in almost the first mention, detect something that
has come into their fellowship. The one blamed the other for what
had been done, and that momentous ordinance of God with so much
bound up with it in His purpose — the two as one — is
severed. And then of course, the family. The family has this
schism in it, working out to one brother murdering the other.
Jesus went right back to that and said of Satan: "He was a
murderer from the beginning" (John 8:44). From the family to
the race, and that book which records all this brings us to the
whole race in confusion in every way. The order, universally, in
the upper realms of this earth, in the lower heavens, the earth
and its environs, what we mean by the cosmos is shot through and
through with this disruption, this schism, this strain, this
conflict, and is just shattered to pieces. Spiritual progress in
the purpose of God is arrested and all the beauty of the Lord is
marred.
Well, that is where we were in
our earlier chapter.
Now we come to the significance
of Christ in His Cross in relation to that. The Cross of the Lord
Jesus stands right at the very centre and heart of that whole
cosmic disruption. The Cross is the heart of redemption, but
redemption relates to the whole range of Satanic interference
with the order of God. The Cross, and redemption, and salvation
are far, far greater things than dealing with men’s sins.
They deal with sinfulness, which is much, much more than sins,
and sinfulness is traced right to that one who made this assault
upon God’s appointment, God’s economy and God’s
order. The Cross of the Lord Jesus stands related to that whole
realm and range of disruption and disorder from centre to
circumference. The Cross is not a small thing; it is an immense
thing, and it reaches as far as this thing that has happened in
the universe reaches. And we must look upon the Cross and upon
redemption in the light of this once existing Divine order, then
its upset and disruption, and then its recovery and eternal
establishment beyond any more fear of the thing happening again.
So far the Cross reaches, and so far Christ crucified has His
significance.
The Realms of
Disruption
(1) The Cosmic
Realm
The redemptive work of the Lord
Jesus in the Cross follows the whole path of this mischief. It
follows that very course, and it is important that you and I
should recognize the order and sequence of this thing. The very
first realm in which the Cross has its application is the realm
of the spiritual hierarchy of evil. It begins there. On the day
of our Lord’s crucifixion, or death, the very heavens were
affected: "Darkness was over the face of the earth";
"there was a great earthquake"; "the veil of the
temple was rent, from top to bottom". Heaven is involved and
is breaking in, and there is a tremendous thing happening in that
realm. When we read the Gospel account, of course, we only have
the events and the associated happenings, but there was a man who
was given an insight into something more. This was not in the
Gospels and could not at that time be revealed. He tells us that
in the Cross ‘He stripped off principalities and powers and
made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it’
(Colossians 2:15). That is where redemption begins. The very
heavens (by that, I take it, the lower heavens, not God’s
Presence) were defiled by this revolt, and they were purged by
the Cross. The disrupting forces of the order of God were met in
the spiritual world by God’s Son on the Cross. It is far too
deep and full a matter for us to dwell upon at length, but there
is a very real practical value in this, for, after all, we are
not dealing in the first place with circumstances, nor
conditions, nor with effects and results. We are dealing with
causes. When there is a breaking in, in any realm, of those
disruptive, schismatic, disordering forces, in an individual
life, or in a community, or anywhere, the usual way is to find a
scapegoat, to blame somebody, to begin to look at one another, to
put it down to this, and that, and something else, and in so
doing we are missing the point and missing the way, and we will
never clear it up like that. We will only make it worse. We have
got to get behind it, for there is something behind it all —
ah, there is someone behind it all.
I do not know what you feel
about it, but with all the desire that we may have — and it
is a very real one — not to become demoniacal-minded, you
are just more and more forced to realize that there is a whole
system of iniquity and animosity to the things of God at work in
this universe, and it seems that these forces are more and more
at work. They come very near and are like a blanket upon you,
especially when there is something of the Lord on hand. It just
recurs like the seasons when the Lord has something more in view.
It just happens. It is not coincidence, nor chance, nor
imagination, for the thing is far too desperately real; it is
calculated to put you right out of the fight, and strategically
so, at a very, very important moment. Well, we could say much
about it, but this is in a realm that is over things, that
encompasses ‘things’, circumstances, happenings,
feelings, and all that. They are secondary. It is what is around
as the source of them that it is important to recognize.
Now, the Lord Jesus, in His
Cross, has something to say to that realm, and you and I will
never know victory over things until we know the value of the
Cross and the Blood of Jesus in that ground and realm. The
victory has got to be won in that realm, or applied in that
realm, before ‘things’ will give place. Oh, take that
to heart! Remember that! For we are just being ‘played with’
by these evil forces, and being made to do just as they want us
to do, because we have either lost, or never have had, this key
to the situation: that Calvary touches the cosmic realm of evil.
That is where the path of redemption begins, as that is where the
trouble began.
(2) The Realm of
Man
The next thing on the way, as
you noted, is man. This whole thing, great and far-reaching in
its range, and terrible in its nature, is focused down upon man.
He is the next point of assault, to disrupt him, divide him, and
make him, in himself, incapable of functioning simply because he
is divided. You know that it is true, if you are divided in
yourself, or amongst yourselves, you cannot do anything. You are
just paralysed and cannot get anywhere. That is a fact, and the
devil knows it, if you do not! And so he comes in from the
outside and brings this disruption down to man himself, and man
becomes a paralysed creature simply because he himself is in
division. His nature is divided. The order, the beautiful order,
balance and symmetry of his own personality is upset. Man was
created in an order. I am not staying with the order of spirit,
soul and body, but there is an order, and if that order obtains
in Christ, you have a man in peace, in rest, in strength, and a
man who is accounted for something. Upset that man in himself, in
his own constitution, and throw him all out of gear and out of
order, and where does he get? Well, that is what the Bible means
by vanity. "The creation", says Paul,
"was subjected to vanity" (Romans 8:20). That is,
‘You shall not get through!’ It is imposed and
you cannot get anywhere.
Redemption by the Cross of the
Lord Jesus is intended, dear friends, to come to us individually
to recover and restore a harmony in ourselves. It may be a long
process, but we do know that a beginning is made when new birth
takes place; when we come to the Cross of the Lord Jesus as to
our condition, our need as to ourselves, and that Cross becomes
effective just at the beginning of the Christian life. The
testimony of all that have come that way is that there is a
wonderful sense of peace that comes into the heart. Peace is only
another word for harmony, you know. It is not just that
everything has quietened down. Oh, no! It is that now you have
got into true line with the purpose for which you were made. You
are on the path now. You have been all over the place, but now
your feet are on the way and something of the peace of the end
comes into the beginning. You are going to have many conflicts
presently, but the beginning is like that. Even with a little
child it is wonderful. A child does not understand all your
theology and doctrine of atonement and justification, but a
little child can know what it means to receive Jesus into the
heart. And when that is done with a little child you at once see
something. Something has happened, and it is not imagination. It
is the beginning of a life re-adjusted, re-harmonized. The
conflict has gone out, so far as the person is concerned. It is
like that in new birth. It is the beginning of the new creation
which, in its completion, will be a beautiful reproduction of a
lost harmonious order.
The Christian life, from that
beginning, from that starting point, is just the school in which
we learn the way of harmony, the way of life. What is it? It is
everything centred in, and governed by, the Lord Jesus. You see,
we have these statements here. We are so familiar with them that
they have almost lost their real meaning to us. "In him all
things hold together." He is the integrating centre of this
universe. He brings the broken parts together, and forms again.
He takes hold of the chords which are all out of tune and tunes
them again into a harmony. ‘In Him all things consist.’
When Jesus has His place, things begin to be like that. There is
a re-conciliating. And, I say, the Christian life is the school
of learning to let Jesus have His place, and when He has His
place you know, as well as I do that, so far as our inner life is
concerned, things are far more restful, more sure, and certainly
more fruitful. It is just that, but that is a tremendous thing,
because we say: ‘Jesus has His place!’ It sounds so
elementary, but you see how comprehensive it is. He is the centre
of a harmonized universe, and when He has His place, He begins to
harmonize the inner life. And the more place He has, the more
unified we are, and the more at peace we are. We know quite well
how true it is in the opposite: that when He is not getting His
place in everything, everything is under a strain.
For the individual, and His
significance there as the unifying of the heart — one
heart, not a divided heart — it is a deep work, a great
work, and perhaps it is a long work, but that is the business of
life: the unifying of everything in Christ. That is, Christ
becoming the single Factor who makes of everything a single
factor: ‘For to me to live is Christ,’ a single factor
unifying the whole life. Satan is not going to leave that alone.
He is going, by every possible means, to assail it, to interfere
with it if he can. But, you see, he cannot, for he just cannot
destroy Christ. He has been destroyed by Christ! And the work of
the Cross of our Lord Jesus is the ground upon which we stand,
and must stand, against all that interfering work of the evil
forces to bring us again into inward confusion and uncertainty.
Satan is trying it all the time. Stand your ground on the Cross!
Stand your ground under the Blood when he tries to rob you of
that quiet assurance that all is well, because of what the Lord
Jesus has done in His Cross.
(3) The Marriage
Realm
You move from the personal into
the corporate life. This is the pathway of the evil forces, and
this is the pathway of the Cross. Yes, into this most sacred
relationship which was the true ordinance of God at the beginning
— husband and wife. Is it necessary for me to say to young
people who are contemplating that union: ‘Be sure that it is
in Christ! Be sure that it is in Christ to begin with!’
There is no guarantee or even hope for all that it means in the
purpose of God unless it is in Christ. And there are tremendous
things bound up with that relationship in Christ. But,
if it has taken place, this is one of the sacred things that the
evil forces and the evil one will never cease to assail. You,
perhaps, have not realized the tremendous damage that the devil
can do when he can separate two in that relationship. It is a
focal point of his constant attack to divide there. That
relationship is a real battleground through life, for there is so
much for the Lord in it. If it has in any way been interfered
with, how are you going to put it right? Not by mere human
attempts. You have got to get back into Christ, for it is only
getting back on to the ground of Christ that will put that right.
It may be that the man is pulling in one direction and the woman
in another. There is no real togetherness. One has one mind, and
the other has another: one will, and another; one interest, and
another; one like, and another. And you know it is weakening, it
is frustrating and it is desolating. It is only when the two get
on to the ground of Christ crucified that that thing can be dealt
with and put right. Every one has got to let go their natural
ground and take the ground of Christ crucified as to themselves.
But, dear friends, the Word of
God makes it perfectly clear to us that, in the beginning, that
ordinance of God, that relationship, was a representation of
something far greater. This, in its testimony, is a Church
matter. ‘I speak of Christ and the Church’, says the
Apostle in speaking of that relationship. The real principle in
the principle of ‘corporate life’ anywhere, anyhow, in
Christ — maybe the two, the three, the local company, or the
larger company of the Lord’s people. The principle is one
principle. The enemy will stand at nothing to get in between, to
divide. And the only — but the sure — means of
preserving that unity is the Cross of the Lord Jesus at work in
an inward way in us all. That is a tremendous thing! But it will
do it. If only that Cross becomes really a subjective reality in
all concerned, that is the end of all divisions.
(4) The Realm of
the Church
We can easily see, without
dwelling upon it, that this extends, beyond the individual,
beyond the two and three, beyond the little group and company, to
the Church universal. We can see that, eventually, it will reach
the whole inhabited world, when Christ has His place. ‘All
the great multitude, out of every diversity of nationality, and
tongue, and clime, and kindred’ will be on the ground of the
Lamb slain, the Cross of the Lord Jesus. They will be ‘singing
one song’ in harmony. The high notes, the low notes, and all
the notes between will be ascribing worth to the Lamb. Glorious
chorus! Redemption follows that course. The Cross of the Lord
Jesus relates to that one thing, to an end where all is reunited
in Christ.
We have placed John 17 as the
foundation of this message, and you know the great, perhaps the
highest, note of that chapter is in a little clause: ‘that
they may be perfected into one’. Perfected
into one! That is the end of His prayer, the end of His travail,
the end of His redeeming work — perfected into one!
Then the great arch-adversary of the Divine order can do no more.
His work is finished, his power is destroyed, for the Cross
stands victorious over this long history of disruption.
I see no hope for unity anywhere
other than in the Cross of the Lord Jesus: Christ crucified, put
in His place. And although the battle goes on and the enemy is
always trying to make a show of disruption and disorder, if the
Cross has really done a work in human hearts, there is a basic
something that will triumph over all that.