The Octave of Redemption
by
T. Austin-Sparks
Chapter 4 - The Forty Days
“I came to cast fire upon the earth; and what
will I, if it is already kindled? But I have a baptism to
be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be
accomplished!” (Luke 12:49, 50). (The real
sense of the first sentence is perhaps better given in
the American Standard Revised Version: “I came
to cast fire upon the earth; and WOULD THAT IT WERE
already kindled!” )
“To whom He also shewed Himself alive after His
passion by many proofs, appearing unto them by the space
of forty days, and speaking the things concerning the
kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3).
“And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as one
dead. And He laid his right hand upon me, saying, Fear
not; I am the First and the Last, and the Living One; and
I became dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore, and I
have the keys of death and of Hades”
(Revelation 1:17–18).
We approach this particular aspect with the same question
as that with which we have approached the others, and
ask: Why the forty days? We shall sum up our answers to
that question in three ways, although there are many more
details than we can at present cover.
It is evident that those forty days were very much fuller
than the records indicate. We have only ten recorded
appearances of the Lord during the forty days, and five
of them took place on the first day, leaving thirty-nine
days for the remaining five (if ten were the full number
of the appearings). But John, in speaking of the
Lord’s appearance after His resurrection, did say:
“Many other signs... did Jesus in the presence of
the disciples, which are not written in this book”
(John 20:30), and I think the context would lead us to
conclude that these “many other signs” were
done after His resurrection. This receives support from
Luke, when he speaks of the forty days as containing
“many proofs”. So, they were evidently very
full days, and that being so, the period was one of very
great importance. It is not our purpose to stay with the
various appearances, but to seek to understand the
significance of the whole.
Now this note in the Octave of Redemption has not been
struck nearly so strongly and firmly as it ought to have
been. We know how sometimes, in a piano, a hammer becomes
slightly worn or damaged, and when you go up the scale,
that particular note is weaker than others, and you sense
it. In the same way, I think that this note of the forty
days has lost a good deal of its strength, or has not
been given the strength and positiveness and fulness of
volume which it ought to have been given. I trust that we
shall see that as we proceed. For this was the great
turning-point, and everything for Christianity rested
upon this aspect of redemption’s plan.
We can mention only a few of the things that rested upon
these forty days, but they are sufficient to indicate
what a tremendous period this was. Let us, however, note
firstly that this is one of the great ‘forties’
of the Bible. It is not an accident that there were forty
days after His resurrection. There are eight major
‘forties’ in the Bible—I leave you to look
them up—but I mention some.
There was the great forty years of the life of Moses in
Egypt, a time of deep preparation and testing, especially
the testing of his heart. If all the wealth and treasure
and learning of one of the greatest empires in history is
open to you, at your disposal, your attitude to it
constitutes a very good test of where your heart is! And
Moses came through just such a test as that. At the end
of those forty years, it was seen that his heart was not
in that: his heart was for God and God’s interests.
Forty is always the number of probation, of testing and
proving and deciding, and it was fairly decisive, was it
not, with Moses at the end of those forty years.
But then commenced another forty years for Moses, in the
land of Midian; and if the first forty was a testing of
his heart, the second forty was a time of testing of his
faith. What a tremendous probation that
was—disappointed undertakings, disappointed hopes
and expectations, and the consciousness that he was in
the main responsible for it by his own folly. It was a
tremendous test of faith. But he emerged.
Then there were the forty days and forty nights spent by
Moses in the Mount. And what a time of testing that was
for Israel down below! Yes, it was meant for that, I
think, to find them out; and we know how they emerged
from that time. They were proved, beyond any question.
This issue was decided very definitely, and out from that
God had to make His great movement concerning the
Levites. That is a subject full of instruction; but we
must leave it there.
And then there were Israel’s own forty years in the
wilderness. What a time of testing, probation and
decision it was!
There are other forties, but we leap right over from
there to the New Testament, to our Lord’s testing
for forty days in the wilderness—a time of
unexampled testing; and, finally, to these forty days
after the Resurrection. You see the character, the nature
and meaning of forty, as a time of testing and proving,
of establishing, deciding and settling. All that was
gathered into the forty days that we are now to consider.
But look at some of the factors included in this period,
as affecting Christianity, the Church, the future. All
the work of the apostles hung upon this, as we shall see.
It is so very clear. Of what good were they before the
beginning of those forty days? What could they have done
in the state they were in while He was in the tomb? He
might have risen and gone to Heaven without their seeing
Him, and then, in some way, it might have come to them
that He was in Heaven—ah, but there would have been
something of very great importance lacking if it had been
like that! The door would have been open for all kinds of
things to come in. But the Lord did not leave it like
that. Their future work rested upon these forty days. The
Lord was laying the foundation for everything with them
during that period.
And the very existence of the Church rested upon the same
ground; it demanded these forty days. That we shall see
again presently, more fully. The ability of Christians to
suffer, to endure and to conquer required these forty
days. The many proofs—the ground soundly and solidly
established—for the fact that He was alive, were
essential for the steadfastness and overcoming of
believers in all the sufferings of the days which lay
ahead.
Again, the assurance of an eternal future for believers
rested upon this. That death is not the end; that there
is a life which has conquered death; and this life is for
them, and that an eternal future is secured—it
rested all upon these forty days.
Again, the very nature of the believer’s
resurrection body is established by these forty days. The
Apostle Paul makes that quite clear. In 1 Corinthians 15,
it is positively stated that this mortal and corruptible
shall be put off and immortality and incorruption shall
be put on (vv. 53–54). The believer’s body is
to be “conformed to the body of His glory”
(Phil. 3:21). But what is that body like? Have we
anything to go upon? Is there any solid ground for
believing that after resurrection we have a body? Well,
the Lord was taking great pains to make it perfectly
clear that He was no phantom, no disembodied spirit.
“Handle Me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and
bones, as ye behold Me having” (Luke 24:39). Our
knowledge of a resurrection body, its features and
nature, was established during those forty days.
And what of the hope concerning those who are asleep?
That hope is established by this period. Still other
factors could be mentioned, but the mention of these
alone is sufficient to indicate that this was no
unimportant phase of the great octave of redemption. It
is truly redemption that is focused upon in this
period. Everything had to be well founded and grounded,
with “many proofs”. As we said earlier, Luke
was a meticulous historian: he tells us that he had taken
pains to ascertain and make sure of the facts that he was
recording; and he says that the Lord Jesus “showed
Himself alive” to the disciples “by many
proofs”. As we have already seen, John said that the
Lord did “many other signs... in the presence of His
disciples”. The object? To set the evidence, to
leave things—or rather, one thing—beyond any
doubt. What is it? The fact that Jesus lives—Jesus
lives again after death! In other words: The Lord is
risen!
So much for the more general side of this matter. We come
now to look at the three more specific things which, to
some degree at any rate, sum up the answer to the
question: Why the forty days? What we have already seen
provides, of course, a good answer, but that is not the
whole answer.The Release Of The
Lord
Firstly, what did the Lord Jesus Himself conceive to
be the particular value to Himself of His
resurrection? The answer is in those words which we have
read from Luke 12:49,50: ‘I came to scatter fire on
the earth... O that it were already kindled! ...I have a
baptism to be baptized with, and how I am pent up until
it be accomplished!’ There is no doubt that He is
speaking about the baptism of His Cross and passion; and
He is looking through the baptism and thinking of the
other side as His release. So the very first thing about
these forty days is that it meant the release of the
Lord. ‘How am I straitened, how am I pent up, how am
I confined! I have come to scatter fire—to broadcast
the fire over the whole earth: but here I am, tied to
these few miles of a little country, tied to time, tied
up to all the conditions of life here.’ Oh, how
limited He was! limited in His own movement, limited in
His disciples, limited in every way. He was longing to be
free, to be out, to be released. He looked upon the
resurrection as His release, and upon the Cross as the
way of it.
Now, the Lord had, at the commencement of His ministry,
made a great announcement. You remember that His first
recorded ministry was in Nazareth, when He took up Isaiah
61 and spoke of the sevenfold aspect of His ministry:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me... He hath sent
Me to proclaim release to the captives... to proclaim the
acceptable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:16–19).
Now there is little doubt that in His mind He was
thinking of the year of Jubilee: because those words of
Isaiah are an echo of the words used in Leviticus 25:10
concerning the Jubilee year, the fiftieth year, the year
of release, when everything that had gone into
bondage—man, woman, child, houses, land, or anything
else—had to be released. And so, right at the
commencement of His ministry, He said: ‘I am come in
relation to God’s jubilee, God’s fiftieth year,
the year of the Lord’s release.’
From the exodus of Israel to the beginning of the
ministry of the Lord Jesus there were thirty
jubilees—an interesting piece of Bible study for
you, if you like! Here is the thirtieth jubilee
beginning. Now, when the Lord Jesus made the declaration
in the words of the Scripture—“release to the
captives... recovering of sight to the blind... liberty
[to] them that are bruised”—He knew what He
meant. He made the announcement that He had come to bring
in the greatest of all the Jubilees. The realization, the
actual fulfilment of that, was still a little way
ahead—perhaps three-and-a-half years ahead—but
it took effect during, and as the outcome of, the forty
days.
It took effect, first of all, as to Himself. By the
resurrection He came into His own release, His complete
emancipation. He was set free. See Him now: no
geographical confinement can hold Him;—He is outside
of all that. No time limits can hold Him; none of those
old features of limitation and straitness now obtains.
Time does not matter, distance does not matter: He is
out. On the day of His resurrection He walked with two to
Emmaus, broke bread with them, and... disappeared! They
raced for their very lives back to Jerusalem to
tell—but He was there before them! It was like that
all the time. It is an instructive exercise to tabulate
all the marks of His release during those forty days.
See now what He is doing with these disciples, the larger
company who are to be the nucleus of His Church. He
appeared to above five hundred brethren at one time, says
Paul (1 Cor. 15:6). What is He doing? He is establishing
the evidence for the fact that now He knows no
limitations, He knows no bounds or bonds—He is free!
That is a tremendous inheritance for the Church, for us.
How glad we are of that today!—to realize that
geography does not matter, whether it be fifty, or five
hundred, or five thousand miles; that time does not
matter—none of these things matter: He is free! It
is a tremendous thing for the Church to have it
established by “many proofs”. Our King James
Authorized Version used to put in another word
there—“many infallible proofs”.
Even if it is not in the original text, the epithet is
fully applicable.
The Release Of His Own
That was His side. But He had not only come to
proclaim His own release and to secure it through the
Cross. There was the other side, the release of His own:
the release of the men and the release of the Church.
Look at the men before: they were terribly tied up in
themselves, were they not? They were manifestly limited
in every way: in their capacities for spiritual things,
in their understanding, in their spiritual intelligence.
Paul’s word to the Corinthians might very well have
applied to them: “ye are straitened in your own
affections” (2 Cor. 6:12). But look at their release
in these days! There is no doubt that it has
happened—and it is happening all the time: you can
see it growing! They have been released. You have only to
think of the difference between Peter in the judgment
hall and Peter on the day of Pentecost. One man limited,
bound, straitened, defeated; the other man out, right
out—a man emancipated.
They are all like that. It was the year of jubilee for
them! The Lord Jesus had proclaimed it; by His
resurrection He had brought it in; and by the sending
forth of the Holy Spirit on the jubilee day, the fiftieth
day (‘Pentecost’ means ‘fiftieth’),
He had finally sealed it. The fiftieth year is jubilee,
and Pentecost is the fiftieth day. Yes, it is jubilee, it
is release; everything bears the stamp of that. And so
Pentecost was the crown of those fifty days, and the
making good especially of the values of the forty. It was
their day of release!
If you and I were really in the good of these forty days,
we, too, should be liberated and released men and women.
Think of Thomas. Was ever a man more tied up than Thomas?
He was tied up with himself, and tied up with his own
temperament. He had that kind of temperament, you know,
that does not believe anything unless it has absolute
proof. It can never take anybody else’s word for
it—it must have everything proved and demonstrated.
What an unhappy fellow he was! “Except I shall
see... I will not believe” (John 20:25). That shut
him up to a little prison of his own soul. No Gospel, no
good news, not even the very best news that you can
bring, is any good to one like that, because they
won’t have it, they just can’t believe it.
‘Yes, but that is, after all, only what you
say’—that is their reaction. ‘You say
that, you believe that: I have no proof that it is
so.’ Poor Thomas is representative of a whole
temperamental class.
But look at the man a few days later. The Lord soon
settled all that for Thomas—settled it so thoroughly
that when, eight days later, he was invited by the Lord,
with the words: “Reach hither thy hand...” , to
consider and test the evidence for himself, it is never
recorded that he did so. He could only say: “My Lord
and my God.” He is overwhelmed—but he is a man
released. The same thing was true of them all: each one
of them needed release—and that release came during
the forty days. Then they were men out! There they were,
standing up together on the day of Pentecost—men who
were free! The resurrection of the Lord Jesus ought to
have that effect in you and in me. It ought to release us
from ourselves and our own little world—and thank
God it does, if we come vitally into it. If you do not
know that in experience, that is nevertheless your
inheritance. These forty days are not just a chapter in
history; the value of them is your inheritance: it is for
you—for us all. This is not a point of Christian
doctrine; this is an up-to-date power for every life,
offered to our faith to take hold of, for our release
from ourselves. It was the year of their release, but it
is also the year of our release, the Church’s
release. The jubilee is not over yet.
The Integration Of The
Scattered Flock
We come now to the third thing. The Lord Jesus had
said to them, as He was going to the Cross, as He was
with them on the mount of Olives in the last hours before
the Passion: “All ye shall be offended in Me this
night: for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and
the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad”
(Matt. 26:31). What a scattering took place! They one and
all forsook Him; they were broken up into fragments,
‘all over the place’, as we might say, like a
shattered vessel. They were outwardly in pieces, as a
band, and inwardly in pieces, as men. His word
“scattered” was very truly realized. Now look
at the forty days. What is He doing? He is bringing
together again all the pieces, He is collecting all the
fragments. Here, and there, and there, He is finding
those pieces. Two have gone off in this direction, one is
here, others are there; there is no sign of any oneness
about them. But now, during the forty days, He is finding
them all, collecting them up, bringing them all together.
At the end He has got them all together, and in a
‘togetherness’ that had never been before, in a
oneness that they had never yet known. This is the value
of the forty days.
But remember, things could not have been otherwise. There
were all the elements of disintegration in them before,
and so it had to be—it could not be otherwise. Now
that wants thinking about, because in those eleven men
you have the Church in representation. They are a picture
of the Church in division, all broken up into fragments,
with no mutual confidence—doubting one another,
suspecting one another, not believing one another—a
broken-up Church, a divided Church, a scattered Church.
That is how they were, simply because of the conditions
which were in themselves before the Cross; the ground was
there for it. But just think: they had had an association
with Him for three-and-a-half years, they had companied
with Him during that time, they came under His influence
and His spell, they heard all His teaching, they saw His
works—they were His disciples; and yet, and yet,
there was all that latent which made possible these
divisions and suspicions and questions.
If our relationship to the Lord Jesus is something merely
objective and outward: if it is a matter of knowing His
teaching—of course believing that His teaching is
right—and of having some measure of devotion to Him:
all that kind of doctrinal, theological, historical
relationship to the Lord Jesus, but falling short of
something deep and drastic wrought inside; falling short
of that tremendous action of the Cross to break the
natural man and open up the way for something other from
Heaven: then such conditions can and will obtain. In
saying this I am saying more than my words perhaps
convey. But very often that is the ground of all the
scattering and the division and the quarrelling and the
suspicion and the questions, and everything else. The
Cross has not done its work to break the natural
man—even in his relationship to Christ, in his
apprehension of the things of Christ; to break all his
natural life and so to speak split him wide open for
something from Heaven. There is a long, long story bound
up with a statement like that, and a terrible story. And
so that is why I say that their disappointment and
scattering was not just because Christ was crucified: it
was because the seeds of that scattering were in
them—the ground was already there.
But now what has happened? They have been broken and
shattered, and now a new ground is being put in, the
ground of another life and another kind of knowledge of
the Lord. That is the great thing about the forty days.
They have never known Him like this before. Indeed, they
are finding it sometimes difficult to believe that this
is He at all. “When they saw Him... some
doubted” (Matt. 28:17). ‘Is it He?’ When
He first met them coming from the tomb, He had to say:
“Fear not...” (v. 10). No, they were not sure
yet. This is another kind of knowledge of Him; it is
knowing Him on another ground. Paul said: “Even
though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we
know Him so no more” (2 Cor. 5:16). In that way, no
more! This is a different kind of knowledge of Him,
as the essential basis of a true oneness: a knowledge
which has come, on the one side, through a terrible
shattering of all natural knowledge, and, on the other
side, through a new coming of the Lord, personally, to
those who have been shattered. It is always like that.
Until we have been broken, we are not in a position for
the Lord to come and show us the greatest things, the
deepest things, the truest things. These are abiding
principles.
And so He gathered them—or shall we say regathered
them—and then, upon the basis of a new kind of life,
upon a new kind of knowledge of Himself, He established
among them an altogether new oneness. They are off the
ground of their own life now; they are on the ground of
His life. Their life was a divided life; His
life is a uniting life. It is all very well for us to say
that we are ‘all one in Christ’ because we all
share one life. Of course, that is true, but it might be
quite a superficial statement. We really only come into
the practical value of that one life if the Cross has
done something in us. The practical expression
of the oneness of that life demands this deep work of the
Cross. That we are all one in Christ, because we share
His one life, the eternal life that He has given, may be positionally
true; but the expression of it may still be waiting.
Is that not true today? We can say that all true
believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, who have received the
gift of eternal life, are one—one by reason of the
one life that they all share with Him and in Him. Yes,
but look at the expression of it amongst Christians!
Where is the manifestation of the oneness of that life?
That is tragically lacking. With the disciples, the
manifestation of it came about when the Cross had done
its deep, breaking work in their natural life, and had
turned them over on to another ground, where all their
apprehension and knowledge of Him was a spiritual one. It
was on the ground of something tremendous that was
happening in them. These forty days were not
only days of things happening to them: you could
see something correspondingly happening in them all the
time. Before, when He made the slightest allusion to or
gave the least hint of His departure, they were thrown
into consternation and terror. Now, they are moving
rapidly toward the place where, far from feeling
consternation that He is going from them, they are quite
happy about it—even full of joy. All that fear has
gone; it is all right now. As He appears, during these
forty days, something is happening inside them.
The New Scattering
There is another factor here that to me is of very
great significance and comfort. You remember that it was
not so very long after this that the persecution arose
over Stephen, and they were all scattered once again
(Acts 8:1,4; 11:19). They were all scattered—and now
it is perfectly safe for them to be scattered. The old
scattering was a devastating thing: all loss, all
weakness—all wrong. But they can be scattered
anywhere, all over the world, now, and it is as safe as
eternity. Once the thing is done inside, it is all right,
it is all to the good. An Ethiopian no longer needs a
Philip to lean upon: he can go his own way, rejoicing,
without Philip or anybody else, when the thing is done
inside. When that has happened, we can have every
confidence that people will go on. Thank God that it is
like that! There may be persecution, scattering,
imprisonments, but they are going on.
These, then, and many others, are the values that sprang
out of those forty days. But let us remember that this is
here in the Word for us, it is handed down to us.
It is not just history, Church history, of what happened
long ago. This book of the Acts—which, as we have
said, might very well be called ‘The Book of the
Lord’s Release’—is given to the Church as
the very basis of the Church’s life. It is for
ourselves, and we have a tremendous heritage in these
forty days. If only we were really established upon those
values, what a difference it would make!
Let me emphasize once more that factor of the
re-gathering and the consolidating in a new fellowship.
That is what is needed. Is not the present deplorable
situation amongst Christians, with all the fragments and
divisions, all the questions and suspicions, and so on, a
clear proof that believers are not really standing in the
meaning of what has been done by the Cross, in destroying
the natural ground and the natural life, and in making
room for the spiritual and heavenly? That is where it all
focuses. The deeper the Cross goes in us, in dealing with
our natural life in all its forms, and the more we are
open to the heavenly life, so the more we shall be drawn
together and established. That is a statement of fact,
but it is also a very real test of our own position.
I trust that I have said enough to show that these forty
days were very, very important, and that they stand for
all ages as a most significant epoch for the life of the
Church.
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