Reading: 2 Corinthians 12
In
pursuing this matter of life and incorruption, we shall
now consider particularly a little phrase used by the
Apostle Paul about himself, occurring in 2 Corinthians
12:2: "I know a man in Christ". "A
man in Christ." I want to link with
that one very small and simple clause, which occurs in
different connections at different places. We begin right
at the end of the Book of the Revelation.
"I
JESUS have sent Mine angel to testify unto you these
things for the churches" (Rev. 22:16).
It is
just that single clause at the beginning - "I
Jesus". Then working backwards, we have
"I
JOHN, your brother and partaker with you in the
tribulation and kingdom and patience which are in
Jesus" (Rev. 1:9).
"Now
I PAUL myself entreat you" (2 Cor. 10:1). "Behold,
I PAUL say unto you" (Gal. 5:2).
"I DANIEL, understood by the books..." (Dan.
9:2).
"I
Jesus", "I John", "I Paul",
"I Daniel"; and that is not only permitted but
evidently inspired by the Holy Spirit, a fact which
carries its own significance.
The
object of our consideration, then, is "a man in
Christ", or manhood in relation to the Lord's
testimony.
We have
already said that man-hood, or humanity, is a Divine
conception, something taking its origin in the mind of
God. Being, then, in the eternal thought of God, it has
come to stay. There is nothing in all the Scriptures to
indicate that God at some time, at some point, is going
to finish that order of things and replace it with
another order - an angelic order or some other conception
of His mind as to the inhabitant or occupant of His
creation. No, manhood has come to stay. It is of the
substance of incorruption, the undying, the permanent,
and in God's thought therefore manhood or humanity must
take a very high place - higher than the angelic order,
so the Scripture makes clear. In the Divine thought,
manhood is a very noble thing with a very great and high
destiny. Hence God is greatly concerned with our
humanity.
The Dignity Of Man In God's Thought
Now in
this chapter we shall be largely occupied with the
correcting of faulty ideas in order to get at the true.
Our ideas about man have become a little confused; there
are many defects in our conception of man. Evangelical
Christianity has placed a very great deal of emphasis
upon the total depravity of man. It is a fundamental
doctrine of the Evangelical position. I have nothing to
take from that; we can support that quite strongly; but
we need to remember that every truth runs so very close
to a peril and an error. It is just as true on the other
side, that man is a very wonderful creation,
"fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm
139:14). Humanity is something very, very complex and
very wonderful. We are constantly discovering new factors
and realms within the human soul, and it is the soul of
man which is the very core of humanity. I am not going to
embark upon an analysis of the human soul; but are we not
sometimes ourselves surprised at what there is in us, all
unsuspected, of capability and capacity, of unsuspected
forces at work? There are two sides to this matter of
humanity, the one, which is perfectly true, man's total
depravity; the other, the wonderful dignity of man, the
dignity of the human idea in the mind of God; and these
two things have somehow got to be balanced, or many other
evils will result.
So there
is a faulty idea which must be corrected before we can
get to the real thought of God about man. Let us be
careful.
Our Individuality Not Annihilated By
The Cross
Now running closely alongside of what is
so often our unbalanced and one-sided conception of man,
there is our conception of the meaning of the Cross as to
man. We place a great deal of emphasis upon that side of
the Cross which relates to our identification with Christ
in His death: not only the removal in that death, by that
Cross, of our sins, but of ourselves, the putting away of
one kind of man wholly and utterly; and there is nothing
to take from that. That stands, and we can add nothing to
it; it is true. But again, there is a very great peril
running immediately alongside of that fact. Our
individuality is not annihilated by the Cross. We as
human beings do not go out in the Cross. The Cross does
not destroy our entity. It deals with the basis of our
humanity upon which we are living now in relation to
Adam, but it does not destroy us, and we have to be very
careful how we carry the Cross into realms where it is
never supposed to be carried. Some people seem to think
that the apprehension of the meaning of the Cross, as our
identification with Christ in death and burial, means
that somehow or other we have to disappear from the
universe and never in any way be seen or known or
recognised or felt. There is to be a kind of vacuum
between our very existence and this world. We have to
walk as - well, not existing at all! The Cross is not
meant to create or minister to asceticism. You can carry
this matter into a realm which is wrong. Let me repeat,
our personality and our individuality is not touched by
the Cross in the way of destroying it. Now you will have
to sit down and think about how these things are to be
balanced. I am making these statements because we are
getting at a very important matter.
Our Individuality Not Lost In The Body
Of Christ
Then we must correct another faulty
conception. I have referred to the Cross. Now I refer to
the Body of Christ. Well, a great truth, a great reality,
a wonderful thing, is the Body of Christ. There is
nothing that we need to take away from all the revelation
and truth and doctrine of the Body of Christ. But we must
be very careful how that affects our thoughts, because a
false conception of the Body, "the Church, which is
His body", may result in our having the idea that
individual distinctiveness is destroyed and that we all
merge as it were into a general lump; that all the
identification of us passes out, and we lose any personal
form, in some thing called the Body. Now Paul himself was
very careful to point out the fault in any such idea.
"If the whole body were an eye... If the whole were
hearing..." (1 Cor. 12:17). That was his way of
approaching this peril - the peril of supposing that the
Body involves generalisation, leading to the loss of
individual distinctiveness.
And again we have only to consider our
bodies, both inside and out, and we will find that down
to the smallest part, the smallest organ, there is
something absolutely distinctive. Each has a distinct
form and a distinct function, something that belongs to
it and is quite distinctive. One of the effects of
disease is to destroy the distinctiveness of an organ, so
that it loses its own particular and peculiar function
and characteristics. That is disease in the human body.
We must therefore adjust our minds about this matter of
the Body. We confuse INDIVIDUALITY with INDIVIDUALISM,
and that is just where we go wrong. Yes,
individualism has got to go out; but individuality -
never!
Need we pursue that to the creation? Why
this vast and inexhaustible variety in God's creation? It
is one of the wonders of creation, its endless variety.
And yet the whole of creation is interdependent: every
branch depends on another branch - the flower on the bee,
and the bee on the flower, and so on. This principle is
shot through the creation, one form, one department, one
organism, being absolutely dependent upon another for the
justification of its existence and the realisation of its
destiny.
And what is true in the whole creation is
peculiarly true in our bodies. When the body is taken as
a figure of the Church, it is like that, a vast variety.
There is at the same time a wonderful unity, but each
part has its distinctiveness of contribution and
function, as something which belongs to it, which is
indispensable, and this is the argument of Paul to the
Corinthians. 'We cannot say that we have no need of this,
we cannot dispense with that.' The whole depends upon and
demands that, because it is something in itself of value
to the Lord.
God's Idea Is A Man
Then
there is a further matter that needs to be corrected - a
faulty idea that has to do with being a thing rather than
a person - and when I say a 'thing', people who bear the
designations that I am going to mention will need, of
course, to be very forbearing. It is possible for some
people to be 'teachers' and 'missionaries' and
'ministers' and 'Christian workers' and 'helpers' -
designations, titles - and they become just that: a
preacher, a Christian worker, or what not, falling under
one or another of the many possible titles or
designations. They cease to be persons, and become
things, and when you meet them you meet the teacher, you
meet the preacher, you meet the minister, you meet the
Christian worker. That has in many cases resulted in
wearing special kinds of clothes, both men and women. You
meet the minister, the clergyman, the deaconess. You are
meeting some THING; it is so easy for us to
become a thing, something that belongs to a platform or a
class, and that thing wipes out our personality. That is
to say, we are not met as persons, and we do not meet
people as persons, as men: we meet them as that or that
or that - some THING - and this is a faulty
conception that needs to be adjusted and corrected,
because God's idea is a man. God's idea is not a
preacher, not a teacher, a Christian worker, a
missionary. God has never yet sent out a MISSIONARY.
God has sent out a man and He always sends out a man. If
God has His way, He will see to it that it is a man He
sends, not a missionary. You understand what I mean. Men
with their organizations send out missionaries, send out
preachers, send out workers. God always sends out people,
and He is very particular that it is people, not things.
Occupations can become more than persons, and that is
always a danger. The thing with which we are most
occupied becomes the thing which veils the person, stands
in front of the person.
God Wants Originality
Then
again as to the matter of originality. Here is a very
important point - and you will recognise that here we are
getting more closely to business. This matter of
originality - of course it is quite true that there is
nothing in itself original. But while that is true as
Solomon said, "There is nothing new under the
sun" - yet God can do that IN US which
makes "all things new". Things may have existed
for long, many others may have known and wondered at
them, but not until there is a touch of the Divine hand
upon our eyes or hearts do they spring into real being
for us, and are as though they had never been. We exclaim
- "I never saw THAT before!'' So it may be
with the Word of God which was written centuries ago. It
might only have been written today when that touch of
God's hand rests upon our eyes. That is what I mean by
originality. For all its value it might not have existed
at all. But now, from mere existence, things become
experience.
How is
that? It is not because someone has thrown some new light
upon it, but because the Lord has done something. The
Lord has done something in us, so that out from the realm
of the long-existent there has come something that might
never have existed before. There must be something in us
which makes everything original. We cannot take these
things at their face value, merely as things. We are not
supposed to be like tape-recorders. When I speak into the
microphone, it all goes on to the tape. Presently, if
occasion requires, I can just turn it back and it will
all come through again. You would hear my voice and every
word that is said, but that is not a personality. It has
got it all, all the message, all the truth; in a sense it
knows it all, it contains it all; but there is no
personality there, and there is no originality there - it
is mechanical.
The Lord
does not want us to be machines; He wants nothing
mechanical, no kind of tape-recording of truth. He wants
originality, and originality relates to ourselves and not
to our matter. You may have all the information in your
notebooks, just as the tape has it; but until it gets
somewhere else it is of no use to you - there is no real
value about it. It has to get into you, to become you.
Something has to happen, so that you are able to say,
'Well, I have all that; I know the words, the phrases,
the sentences, the ideas; but I have something much more
that has become a part of my being, something on which I
live.'
The Principle Of Spiritual Authority
This is the very principle of spiritual
authority. When it was said of the Lord that He spoke
with authority and not as the scribes (Matt. 7:29), that
did not mean that He had more ordinary knowledge than the
scribes. Probably they had a great deal more knowledge -
school knowledge - than He had. He did not have the
knowledge of the schools. They had all that. Their
authority was academic or technical authority. When they
made His authority superior to that of the scribes, what
they meant was: 'This man is talking out of his
experience, he is talking out of what he knows in
himself, this is coming from him, not from books; this is
not the latest address he has heard, the latest book he
has read, not something that has caught on with him, that
he has got from someone else, that he thought was a
bright idea and developed. No, this is the result of
something God has done in him, and it comes from Him.'
This is all getting down to this whole
matter of manhood in relation to the testimony of the
Lord, a man in Christ.
God Demands History Behind Everything
Now because the Lord is so concerned about
this, that we will call the HUMAN factor in His
testimony; because this is His own Divine idea, and
therefore has in it the element of the incorruptible,
that is, that which is to be eternal, because God made
man for incorruption and for glory, and that eternal
thought is bound up with man: because it is so, HE
DEMANDS HISTORY behind everything else. That is, He
demands history behind all that we say. If we are giving
out truth, if we are teaching or preaching or working or
in any way seeking to influence other lives, if we are
here in relation to the whole purpose of God in relation
to other lives, our part, our place, our influence must
have a history behind it. We are not here just to stand
as a kind of middle man and to take from a store and pass
on to others in that mechanical way, to study up
subjects from the Bible and pass them on, retailing
Divine products. God demands history behind everything,
and only as there is a history will there be a real
value. The testimony is constituted not by words, ideas,
truths, but by history in relation to them. God is very
careful about this and very intent upon it, that you and
I shall never go beyond ourselves in truth, that we are
never found talking beyond ourselves, because, if only we
knew it, we ourselves are the measure of the truth that
we are uttering. There is something there behind the
truth which gives to that truth its incorruptible nature,
that makes that truth living and permanent and effective.
It is not the truth itself - it is knowing the truth; the
knowing is the knowledge of experience. The real value in
all our teaching and speaking and trying, as we say, to
further the testimony, to stand for the testimony - I do
not know that I like the phraseology, but that is how we
talk or what we mean - is that everything has to have
spiritual history behind it.
It is, as I have said before, spiritual
history which makes authority, and nothing else can make
authority. And it is spiritual history which creates
originality. Do not forget that originality is essential.
Everything has got to begin with us before we can give it
to others with any effect or value. The words of the Lord
to Pilate might very often be addressed to us:
"Sayest thou this of thyself, or did others tell it
thee concerning Me?" (John 18:34). "Sayest thou
this of thyself?" It has to begin there, it has to
come up out of our own history. The fact is that
thousands and thousands may have gone the same way as we
are going under the hand of God, but for all practical
purposes no one might ever have gone this way before. We
just cannot live on the experience of others, though
there be thousands of them. When God gets us into His
hands it is as though no one had ever gone this
way before. We are alone in this, this is something
original. For us the sense is that no one HAS ever
experienced this before, they cannot have done - 'I am
the only one who has ever had anything like this!' - and
yet thousands have gone this way. You see the point of
originality. The Lord makes spiritual experience to be to
us as though no one had ever had it before.
"I
Jesus." Does it not impress you, that right at the
end of the Bible the last utterance of the Lord Jesus,
speaking to the churches, should be couched in that Name?
Not 'I the Lord', but "I Jesus". You Bible
students know quite well that the Name 'Jesus' invariably
belongs in the New Testament to Him in the days of His
humiliation. After His exaltation they called Him 'Lord',
'the Lord Jesus', 'the Lord Jesus Christ', 'Jesus Christ
our Lord', but when 'Jesus' is used by itself it always
in some way relates to, refers back to, His life of
humiliation when He took the form of a man. He was
"found in fashion as a man" (Phil. 2:7). The
word 'fashion' is an interesting word there. It means
that in all outward appearance, according to all outward
judgments, He was like other men. There is another word
used of what He was inside; that was something other. But
here He is having taken outwardly the form of a man, and
in so doing He took the Name Jesus, the name which was
the most common name in Palestine, Jesus, Jeshua; so that
Name carries back to the day when He was going through
all that which made spiritual history in Himself - tried,
tested, tempted in all points like as we (Heb. 4:15); so
that, strangely enough, it could be said of Him that He
was made "perfect through sufferings" (Heb.
2:10). "Though He was a Son, yet learned [He]
obedience by the things which He suffered" (Heb.
5:8). History was being made in His humanity. It was a
man learning. No one will think that I set aside His
Deity; yet here is a man, a human being - God incarnate,
true, but here in the form of a human being - knowing all
about human life, having spiritual history made, out of
which, as we have sought to point out so much in these
pages, should come those intrinsic values that should be
for all the ages of the ages. That was all being done in
manhood, and now at last He presents Himself to the
churches - "I Jesus" - the sum of spiritual
history in a man's life, something completed in humanity.
"I
John". Yes, John is permitted to say - on a much
smaller scale, it is true - 'What I am writing, what I am
going to write, is not just something that has
mechanically come to me, but things which our eyes saw,
our hands handled, something that has come into vital
relationship with ourselves, become a part of us, so that
we are now in a position where we are allowed to mention
ourselves in relation to the testimony of Jesus.' "I
John... for the testimony of Jesus."
And Paul
- "I Paul": he is allowed to bring himself into
view with the authority of a man who has history behind
him. "I know a man... caught up even to the third
heaven. And... he... heard unspeakable words" (2
Cor. 12:2-4). 'This has become the substance of my very
being. I am not talking to you about abstract truths; I
am talking to you about something that has happened to
me. I have been taken into it and it has been taken into
me. In effect that has become me and I have become it:
therefore I am allowed to say "I Paul say unto
you".'
Was that
not true of Daniel? "O MAN greatly
beloved" (Dan.10:19). Not 'O prophet greatly
beloved', 'O servant of the Lord greatly beloved', 'O
exponent of Divine truth greatly beloved', but "O MAN
greatly beloved". "I Daniel": you see
the man - it is the man of God, the man in the Lord, the
man in Christ.
When I
use the word 'man', I am of course speaking of humanity -
that includes the woman. It is what God was after. These
were all human beings. John was a human being. Paul was a
human being. Daniel was a human being. Christ had been a
human being; He was a human being plus - the mighty plus
of Deity. It is where God makes something of Himself a
part of a human life, and in so doing constitutes the
testimony of Jesus.
Well,
you see what God is after. God is not after making you a
Bible teacher, a preacher, a missionary, a Christian
worker. Those things may emerge, that may be just a form
which the other will take, but before, over and through
and after all, it is us, ourselves, that the Lord is
after, and therefore He takes infinite pains with us. Do
understand that, because you will misunderstand the Lord
unless you recognise that. You are after your work all
the time, you are after your job, you are after your
function; you are troubled about things. The Lord is
troubled about YOU, and if the Lord is
suspending the things, do not just get worked up into a
terrible state about it and get upset with the Lord. He
is after you. He is more concerned with your humanity
than with anything else. If He has that in Christ,
according to Christ, the other will spontaneously flow.
You will not have to don any uniform, take any title or
name; you will not have to be called by any particular
designation. You will be that, and what does the other
matter? It does not matter at all. Oh, let us see the
emptiness of names - minister, pastor, teacher and all
that - if there is not there the thing that it means. But
if that is there then the other is unnecessary.
"I Jesus", and then standing
alongside Him as the great Head, "I John",
"I Paul", "I Daniel", and 'I-' - you
may put your name there if this is true.