"The mystery of the gospel" (Eph. 6:19).
"I shrank not
from declaring unto you the whole counsel of God"
(Acts 20:27).
"...in whom
also we were made a heritage, having been foreordained
according to the purpose of him who worketh all things
after the counsel of his will" (Eph. 1:11).
We have remarked that
the mystery of the gospel relates to the deep and hidden
counsels of God before creation. If we want to know what
those counsels were, we have that given to us mainly in
this letter to the Ephesians. There are three aspects of
this whole counsel of God, or of this mystery of the
gospel. In dealing with it we are, of course, touching
perhaps the most controversial matter that has ever come
under the discussion of the Church and probably the most
difficult thing that has to be resolved; indeed, I do not
think that it can be resolved. We have simply to accept
statements of fact. You will see what I mean as we go on.
The
Mystery of the Eternal Counsels
There are three aspects
of this whole counsel of God, or of that which is called
the mystery of the gospel, the mystery or the secret of
the good news. Now, a secret is not a thing which lies on
the surface; you have to get deeper down to find a
secret. It means that there is something here in the good
news of God that has a very deep meaning. If God has a
secret, you may be sure that it is not some trifling
matter. No, it is something tremendous; and the first
aspect of this mystery, or secret, or whole counsel of
God, is the mystery of the eternal counsels. What are
those counsels? We must, of course, speak after the
manner of men; but we must not try to bring such things
within the limits of our understanding and knowledge. We
do not know exactly how it happened, but what we do know
as a fact is this, that before the world was, God is
represented as taking counsel with Himself, projecting an
intention - a great, comprehensive intention - which is
called here 'the purpose', 'the eternal purpose'; a
purpose, an intention, which has a centre and a
circumference with a good many aspects of outworking and
realization.
The centre was God's
Son, known to us as the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the
pivot; that in the fullness of the times God should "sum
up all things in Christ" (Eph. 1:10). That
is very comprehensive, for if you have "all
things", you have all; you cannot add to that.
"To sum up all things in Christ". That is the
heart of the purpose and of the counsel.
But then there is the
marvellous statement - words around which there is so
much controversy - that He saw us, He had us
in His eye. When I say 'us' I refer to an elect company
which at a certain time, in a certain dispensation in the
history of this world, would be gathered out of the
nations; and He foresaw every one of them. Now this is
the mystery of the gospel, and it is beyond us.
Imagination reels here; the statement seems almost
fantastic. If the word means anything at all, those
concerned were individually foreseen, foreknown and
chosen in Christ, and foreordained and predestinated.
Those are words you cannot overcome; every member of that
elect body was foreknown, every member was predestinated.
Now listen: predestination was not to salvation or
otherwise - that is where so much interpretation has gone
wrong. Predestination has to do with specific purpose,
not with salvation. It is according to His purpose in
Christ Jesus that we were foreknown and foreordained "to
be conformed to the image of his Son" (Rom. 8:29).
We were predestinated with a purpose, and -
marvellous to relate! - given to Christ. It is as though,
before ever we had a being, before the creation, the
Father had the Son and brought each one of us and gave us
to the Son as His. Does that sound extravagant? Well,
what is the meaning of the Scripture? Have you read
thoughtfully through the seventeenth chapter of John?
What is the thing which is constantly recurring in that
chapter? Repeatedly we read there of "those whom
thou hast given me". And in another place He has
said, "All that the Father giveth me shall come
to me" (John 6:37). It is tremendous in
its implication. Those are the eternal counsels, this is
the mystery of the gospel; and although that mystery,
that secret, is said to be disclosed now, who of us has
got to the bottom of it yet? I doubt whether any of us
will get to the bottom of it in this life, but we have at
any rate got it opened up. But this mystery of the gospel
is so boundless, so unfathomable. Here are statements of
fact concerning a people given to Christ in God's
foreknowledge. I know, of course, your mental problem
about election, but wait a minute; let us begin there,
and we will come to the other in a minute.
That, then, is the
first thing about the mystery, the wonder, of the gospel,
the secret of God which was hidden from ages and
generations but now made known (Col. 1:26). I say, that
startles our imagination, but there it is; and we can do
no more than point it out.
The
Proclamation of the Mystery
(a)
Essential, Despite Divine Foreordaining
The second thing about
it is the proclaiming of it. "I shrank not from
declaring unto you the whole counsel of God".
And here in the end of this letter Paul is asking for
prayer from believers that he may be able to open his
mouth to utter this mystery, that he may have boldness to
speak it (Eph. 6:19); and does it not want boldness to
say things like that! See what such preaching makes of
Jesus Christ, see where it puts Him; all things summed up
in Christ! Go out and say that to Mohammedans and see
what they will have to say to you! Well, you want
boldness to declare that to those who have not seen.
However, the Apostle is concerned with the proclamation
of the whole counsel, the mystery of God.
That proclamation
brings us up against another matter. If eternal counsel
is all this - foreseen, predestinated, given - then why
proclaim the gospel? Surely it must happen if God has
decided upon it! If it is all settled like that and they
are given, why proclaim? Immediately you introduce the
question of man's responsibility, and that seems to be a
contradiction. That is the great theological trouble; but
all I am going to say about that is this, that
responsibility in this matter of proclaiming does not
undercut what we have just been saying about
predestination. It does not mean for one moment that in
putting before people an option you rule out
predestination. No, you are put into the position of
responsibility for declaring the whole counsel of God,
and people are put into a responsible position by hearing
it. The one truth does not neutralize the other.
It is the same in
prayer. If God knows what He is going to do, why pray?
Will it make any difference? But we cannot argue like
that. We are told we have to pray, that is all. The
responsibility comes back on us, although there is all
this other side concerning the Divine counsels.
(b)
A Full Gospel Essential to Full Growth
Then - and I want to
say this very precisely - the full counsel of God is the
only safe thing. I wonder if a very poor spiritual
condition in converts, in Christianity, is not due to
very inadequate preaching. Men are afraid to go too far,
and they say, 'Preach the simple gospel of sins forgiven
and judgment past and hope of heaven' - making the
individual in question the object of it all instead of
God's eternal counsels. Yes, the poor state amongst
Christians is due to their not having been taught the
whole counsel of God at the beginning. I do not believe
that it is necessary to reserve the whole counsel until
they reach some stage along the road where they can
accept it. Why should we not go and declare to unsaved
men that God from all eternity had them in view and has
now come to tell them so, and to tell them why He had
them in view, and what the great goal of it all is - His
Son Jesus Christ? I think we should get better converts
and a far better state in the Church. I believe that
people should be very much better born than they are.
Many are very poorly born, and their infancy is far, far
too much extended in time. Well, Paul said to the
Ephesians, "I shrank not from declaring unto you the
whole counsel of God"; and that was before he wrote
his letter to them. Yes, a full counsel is the only safe
thing. I must leave that there, we have a long way to go.
(c)
The Message Essentially Spiritual and Heavenly
The next thing about
this proclamation is that it must ever be kept in mind
and in view that the gospel is an essentially spiritual
and heavenly thing. When Paul speaks about the mystery of
the gospel he does so in relation to all that he has been
saying about "in the heavenlies in Christ".
"The heavenlies" is not merely a matter of
location, it is the nature of things. Again, the trouble
with ninety-nine out of every hundred Christians is that
they are so earthly in their Christianity, so earthbound,
and the gospel has become after all such a matter of
temporalities - how it affects things here in time, and
the temporal and material outworkings of Christianity. As
we were saying in our previous meditation, the real
measure of Christianity is the measure of spirituality,
and that means the measure in which the Lord Who is in
heaven is known and manifested in us here. Everything
takes its rise from a Christ ascended to glory outside of
this world. While He was here, He was limited - limited
by everything, and most of all limited in the
apprehension of those in closest association with Him.
When He went to heaven and the Spirit came, they received
marvellous enlargement of apprehension of Christ. It was
no longer an earthly one, a temporal one. It had to be a
spiritual one because He was outside of this world, He
could not be seen with natural eyes; in no way was it
possible to have any link or communication with Him other
than by the Holy Spirit. It is a very wonderful statement
that Peter makes in his letter - "whom not
having seen ye love; on whom, though now ye see him not,
yet believing, ye rejoice greatly with joy unspeakable
and full of glory" (1 Pet. 1:8). You do not see
Him, yet He is most real to you. How does that come
about? Because you went to Jerusalem or Capernaum and had
an interview with Him? Not at all, you do not know Him in
that way; your knowledge of Him is entirely spiritual.
That may be true, of course, right at the beginning of
the Christian life, but the principle of spirituality and
heavenliness ought to mean more and more to us as we go
on, as Paul wrote to the Colossians - "If then ye
were raised together with Christ, seek the things that
are above, where Christ is, seated on the right hand of
God. Set your mind on the things that are above, not on
the things that are upon the earth. For ye died, and your
life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our
life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be
manifested in glory" (Col. 3:1-4).
And the need today of
proclaiming the whole counsel of God lies firstly in the
direction of the Lord's own people. They must know the
whole counsel of God; they ought to have known it at the
beginning. And then beyond them, the whole counsel of God
must reach to the unsaved. But what do we find? We find
this sad state in the Church, and therefore the Church
cannot lift the unsaved higher than its own level. We
find the Church earthbound, tied up with things here in
all sorts of ways, with vision purely earthly, on this
low level. The great heavenly vision of that eternal
purpose of God concerning His Son is not the thing which
the Church has seen and is seeing and is therefore
ministering. No, the Church has to be saved from its own
earthly condition and to come to the original position of
the Church, a purely spiritual and heavenly thing. The
whole ecclesiastical system proves the truth of this.
What a thing of earth the Church has become in respect of
its ecclesiastical architecture, its buildings! And that
is pointed to as evidence that the church is something!
The more ornate, elaborate, impressive, the building, the
greater evidence that the church is something! But that
is purely earthly, it is not a bit necessary to real
spiritual life and effectiveness. Indeed, very often the
real spirituality is found in places very different, or
in no place at all - the Lord's people gathered to Him
under an opened heaven. That is where the testimony is.
(d)
Preaching Directed by the Holy Spirit
Then in this
proclamation, the preaching must be directed or
precipitated by the Holy Spirit. Why? For this very
reason - and it is a principle that is borne out and
shown us clearly in the book of the Acts - that only the
Holy Spirit has the Divine knowledge as to where there
are those given to Christ who are ready to come to Him.
You cannot just go out willy-nilly and be sure of
results. We have cited Paul in this matter and here is
the principle stated. They were "forbidden of
the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia, and they
assayed to go into Bithynia; and the Spirit of Jesus
suffered them not" (Acts 16:6-7). Paul might go
to Bithynia and Asia at another time, but not then. The
Holy Spirit is in charge. "Forbidden of the Holy
Spirit... the Spirit of Jesus suffered them not".
Why? - that is for the sovereignty of God. When Paul came
to Corinth, he was up against a terrific situation and
the Lord the Spirit said to him, "Be not
afraid... I have much people in this city" (Acts
18:9,10). "I have", not 'I am going to
have'. Do you see the working of eternal counsels and
foreknowledge?
The whole book of Acts
is constructed upon that principle. There is a lonely man
crossing a desert. God in heaven has seen him and known
that he is ready for the gospel, and sends Philip to make
contact with him. "Go near, and join thyself to
this chariot". The issue is
straightforward immediately (Acts 8:26-40). Then away up
in Caesarea there is a man praying; he is evidently
asking the Lord to lead him on, to show him all His will.
He is living up to the light he has, but he wants more.
The Lord in heaven is taking notice of him. To Peter,
away at Joppa, the Lord says, 'Go, make contact with that
man who is ready' (Acts 10). This is the sovereignty of
the Spirit in relation to eternal counsels and
foreknowledge. The point is that the Holy Spirit must
precipitate the proclamation and govern it, or we waste a
lot of time and effort. You cannot do this sort of thing
by having committees and drawing up programmes. You must
be a Holy-Spirit-governed instrument for this work.
"It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us"
(Acts 15:28). It is like that all the way along. It must
be a matter of the Holy Spirit in charge of things; the
proclamation must be entirely governed by Him like that,
and precipitated by Him.
The
Responsibility of the Hearers
Yes, but then, you see,
we come to this next thing - the responsibility of the
hearers. In the mental realm this is another problem in
the light of what we have been saying. Never mind, put
that aside. The responsibility of the hearers. First of
all, look at it in this way - the sovereignty of God
which lies behind the very fact that the message has come
across your path. It may be at work here at this very
moment. Yes, away back there in those eternal counsels
(this is no stretching of imagination) God saw you, and
He said, 'I want that person for My full thought
concerning My Son'; and here you are being told it and
all the eternal counsels of God may sovereignly be behind
your receiving this message. But the point is this, you
are here where the message is being proclaimed. Do you
just happen to be here? God is consistent, and if He
decides upon a thing in His counsels He works to it and
there it is. You say it just happens; but there it is -
we are here, and it is that which begins our
responsibility. Responsibility begins when God
sovereignly puts His plan into operation and brings it
across our path.
But you are saying,
'Man has a free will and he can refuse in spite of God's
predestinating'. That is where the clash comes. Yes, he
can; but we are not talking about salvation at this
moment, we are talking about the purpose of our
salvation. Oh yes, we can refuse our salvation, and the
clash is there between God's foreknowing and
predestinating, and our free will; we cannot resolve
that. But here is the fact - that at this very moment God
is telling us that we were called with a holy calling,
that there is a tremendous thing bound up with our being
saved. We can refuse the Lord what He intended; we can
forfeit that which He had in view. You cannot reconcile
these two things, but there they are, and there is a
responsibility laid upon us. That is where that other
side of the New Testament comes in, all the time warning,
warning - "if", "if", "if" - and it is said every time to people who are
already saved. There is a mighty 'if' constantly being
pressed upon them; and are you going to say, as some,
that you never know whether you are saved till you get to
heaven? I am not going to accept that; I know I am saved.
It is not a question that if you do something, you will
be saved; and, after you are saved, if only you do
something else you will keep your salvation. The 'ifs'
relate to this purpose of your salvation, and you can
miss that. That is where responsibility comes in on the
side of the hearers. It is a mystery, true; but it is a
fact.
But what does this
amount to? what are we saying? Well, here you are; you
believe in the Lord Jesus and believe you have eternal
life; you are saved. But then the Lord comes along to you
in His sovereignty and shows you that there is an 'unto'
as well as a 'from'. It is a great thing to be saved from
hell, from sin, from Satan, but now the Lord is saying
that you were saved unto something; and if there is a lot
from which to be saved, there is infinitely more unto
which to be saved. Oh, it is the mighty 'unto' that
governs this mystery of God. You see, the 'from' is
incidental, the 'unto' is eternal. The mystery of God,
our salvation, does not date back simply to when sin
entered, the beginning was not the fall of man. Salvation
overlaps that point and goes back to purpose - all these
counsels of the Godhead before the creation and therefore
before the fall. That is the object in view in the end,
and God is working to that. He would have worked straight
on to it but man sinned and fell. Now God must make a dip
in His course and reach down with salvation to bring back
to His original intention. Salvation is in relation to
the eternal purpose which was before the fall. It is
'unto' more than it is 'from'. 'From', I say again, is
incidental - terribly, tragically incidental, but
incidental; it is not the eternal. It is the 'unto' that
is governing everything, that purpose of God. Of course,
in the 'from', God clothed Himself with extra glory. In
the letter to the Ephesians, we have the two things - "that
we should be to the praise of his glory" (1:12),
that is one thing; "the glory of his grace"
(1:6) is another thing. The glory of His
grace is the extra that God gets when Satan interferes
and man goes wrong. God is never beaten by wrong, He
always gets more. So through grace, He adds to His glory.
But, mark you, that was
not His intention in the beginning. I have had it said to
me that God was glad when man sinned and fell, because it
gave Him the chance He wanted of showing He was a
gracious God. I repudiate that. No, not at all!
Nevertheless, God cannot be defeated, and interference
with His purpose cannot leave Him just where He was - He
will get more every time. It will be the interferer who
loses, and man's sin has only made possible extra glory
to God along the line of grace; but it was not His
intention, it was His triumph. And He is doing that with
us all the way along; He is making good our need of grace
in order to get extra glory to Himself. Through grace, He
is getting glory where we are concerned.
God's
Need on Earth of a Representation of His Full Counsel
(a)
Experimental, not Theoretical
Now, God has set His
heart upon having His whole counsel represented - that is
the real heart of these meditations. God must have that
whole counsel found in representation or He is defeated,
and so He sets to work to bring those who will come, who
will pay the price, into this position which, in the
first place, satisfies Him, and in the second place,
serves Him in that purpose; and a basic essential is a
passion in our hearts for God's fullest thought. If He is
going to lead us into it, He must have that response in
us for His own satisfaction. Now in His dealings with us
in this connection, He may lead us by permissive ways -
ways, that is, which are less than His ultimate and full
thought, and yet, in His permissive will, He will lead us
by those ways. We find that in the sovereign government
of our life we are led into something that is not wholly
God's thought. That is true.
If you will allow a
personal testimony, I can say with the utmost confidence
that the years I spent as a denominational minister were
the sovereign permissive will of God. It was right for me
to be there at that time, although, as I came to see
later, that realm of things was not God's full and final
thought for me. But my coming to that fuller thought had
to be on the basis of experience and not of theory. In
that narrower realm I learned something of weakness and
limitation and disappointment, both in myself and in the
sphere in which I moved, which made me reach out for
something better - I knew not what, and I would not have
sought it but for the experience of disillusionment in
the lesser realm. It was the lesser thing that made me
cry out for an opened heaven, and for an order of things
where I would not have to preach so many times a week
simply because it was required of me as a duty, with all
the terrible labour of trying to work up something to
preach about - an order of things where ministry would be
by revelation out from heaven, and only as and when the
Holy Spirit gave and required it. Oh, the heart cry for
deliverance from that old realm and order! And God in His
mercy brought me through to something else on an
experimental basis. Yes, God, in His sovereign permissive
will, leads us in certain ways which are not His full
thought at all in order to make our ultimate position to
be based upon a real spiritual experience, and not upon a
doctrine or a theory that we have taken on or that has
been imposed on us. There are multitudes of Christians in
doctrinal positions today which they know nothing about
experimentally. They have accepted a tradition, a system
of teaching; they are in it, they believe in it, but they
know nothing about it in their own experience. That is
not God's way.
The point for the
moment is that we must be very careful that we do not
take God's permissive will as His ultimate will. We must
not say, 'The Lord led me into this, therefore I must
stay and I must never move'. Be careful; you must always
give God a free hand. He will not explain Himself at the
time; He will seem to be contradicting Himself sometimes;
you will understand later on. The thing is, never fix
anything for God. If there is one thing that is made
clear in the book of the Acts, it is this - God is not
going to be tied up to men's ideas as to what He ought to
do. That sheet let down from heaven in Peter's vision is
a declaration that in heaven things exist which men will
not allow here. Heaven's view is very different. Peter is
going to argue this thing out with the Lord: "Not
so, Lord". He might have added, 'and I can give
Scripture for it! Lord, look at Lev. 11'. And the Lord
makes it perfectly clear that He is not going to have
anything of that. Sovereignty demands a clear road. God
is always doing that sort of thing, and He demands that
we shall be in such a position that He can do as He likes
with us and we will not argue. That is the only way to
fullness. If you are tied by your tradition, by your
upbringing, by the thing that may have been of the Lord
at one time, if you are tied with it and you say of it,
'as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be',
you cut clean across the path of the Spirit of fullness.
It is only as we are open to the Lord without prejudice,
without fixity, stretched right out to the Lord, only so
shall we come into the full counsel of God.
(b)
The Purpose, Not Self, Dominant
You see the real
starting point - the point which is the guarantee of
fullness - is this, that everything is governed by God's
purpose and God's will, and not by our need or our
desire. We are called unto His eternal glory, we are
called according to His purpose. If we are going
to limit the gospel of salvation to just the meeting of
our need, we are going to limit things. The full thing is
not just to be saved from a fall, it is to be saved back
to that which we missed in the fall - and that is not
just a life marked by a certain kind of behaviour, but a
mighty purpose of God. It is when we see that, and only
as that becomes a dominant thing - God's will, God's
purpose: not even my need, and certainly not my desire -
only then are we on the highway to God's fullness; and
you will find, if you are going to be entrusted with the
fellowship of the mystery, that will be the way the Lord
will take you. You will constantly be coming up against
this. We have to be governed by eternal purpose, not by
what we think necessary, not by what we would like, even
for the Lord.
This mystery of the
gospel - we realise even now how it defeats every attempt
to explain it; but if we cannot grasp the terms, that
is, if it does defeat our minds, let us open our hearts
to the Lord on this simple but very sound basis - 'Lord,
there is something very great in Thy thought; I see it is
something infinitely more than that I should be saved. I
do not grasp it, I cannot explain or understand it; but
it is something very great to which Thou hast saved me
and called me in Christ; and I want it, and I commit
myself to Thee for all that. I trust Thy grace in
whatever it may cost; I trust Thy power to perfect that
which concerneth me, to work it all out; I commit myself
to Thee for all Thy will, for all Thy purpose, for the
whole counsel, for all that is so far beyond my
apprehension; Lord, work in me that which is
well-pleasing in Thy sight'.