"So also it is
written, The first man Adam became a living soul; the
last Adam... a life-giving spirit. The first man is of
the earth, earthy: the second man is of heaven" (1
Cor. 15:45,47).
"Wherefore we
henceforth know no man after the flesh: even though we
have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so
no more. Wherefore if any man is in Christ, there is a
new creation" (2 Cor. 5:16-17).
I am returning to our
previous meditation in relation to the incarnation and
life on earth of the Lord Jesus as representative of the
new creation. Let us at the outset understand Paul
aright. When he said 'Henceforth we know Christ no more
after the flesh' he did not dismiss the incarnation and
the earthly life as being of no value and meaning. He
meant that we no longer take account of Jesus of Nazareth
simply as a man, or as a prophet, or (as many believed)
as an impostor: as a man who had come into the limelight,
made great claims, done many things difficult to
understand and said many things which were extraordinary,
and then had been taken by the Jews and delivered up and
crucified: knowing Christ after the flesh, as we might
know any other man. You notice that the immediate
connection is with knowing people just as they are
naturally on the earth, and Paul says that neither other
men nor Christ do we henceforth know on that level. The
other, and positive, side is that our knowing now of one
another and of Christ is in the new creation, their place
and meaning there - that is the realm in which we take
note, recognise and appreciate, that is the thing with
which we are occupied. I have sought to make that
perfectly clear, because, to go back and dwell much upon
the incarnation and earthly life of the Lord Jesus might
otherwise look like a contradiction. Some might think
that that is knowing Christ after the flesh, and that is
the very thing we are seeking not to do, even while we
dwell upon His earthly life. What we are really seeking
at this time is that knowing of Christ - even in His
earthly life - after the Spirit, getting through to the
inner significance and meaning of Christ, and by coming
into vital contact with the Divine, the heavenly, the
spiritual, the eternal meaning, find a registration upon
ourselves - what we have called an impact, a challenge,
and the setting up of something to which we have to be
adjusted and conformed.
But added to that, let
me say this, that, when the Apostle speaks in his letter
to the Romans about our being predestinated to be
conformed to the image of His Son (Rom. 8:29), he is not
referring to some image which Christ entered into when He
went into heaven. Perhaps because we have not thought
about this carefully, we have a way of thinking of Christ
in heaven as altogether different from Christ on earth,
and that we are conformed to that Christ in heaven, and
not to this Christ on earth. I want to correct that. The
Christ in heaven, glorified, is only the glorifying of
the Man Who was here, or the glorifying of that which was
true of Him here, taking it up into glory and
establishing it there in the presence of God, attested
and sealed with glory. It is the perfection of what was
here. He was perfected through sufferings, and the
arriving at a position of fulness (which is the word
'perfection', completeness) brought the seal of God in
glory. It is not another Christ in glory, it is the same
One - the Man in the glory, perfected and glorified - and
it is that nature, that disposition, that conduct of His
which were here on the earth, with all their features and
characteristics, which are taken up into glory and
established there. We are to be conformed to Christ as He
was here inwardly, so that we also share His glory when
perfected together with Him at the end. We have not to
try and study a Christ of a mentality up there, but to
get, by the Spirit, to the inside of the Christ Who was
here, and as He was here: not the imitation of Christ
according to Thomas a Kempis (that is mysticism,
asceticism) but the inward revelation of Christ to our
hearts, according to the hymn that we often sing - that
which results in extinguishing our tapers because the sun
has risen, the discarding of our winter garments because
the summer has come, the smashing of our idols because He
has filled the heart. That must become the spiritual
experience, and progressively so. So we come to all that
is recorded about Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Man, and
ask the Holy Spirit to teach and to show us Christ from
the inside. If the Holy Spirit does give us an insight
into the Lord Jesus as He moved on this earth, there will
be a tremendous effect upon our lives and a tremendous
challenge. It will be the Spirit's method of conforming
us to the image of God's Son.
A
Universal, Collective Person
Therefore we must begin
by recognising the uniqueness of the Son of Man;
everything begins there. When we use that word 'unique'
we are always tempted to violate the laws of English
grammar. You find people saying that a thing is
'absolutely unique'. Here you feel you want some emphasis
on that word 'unique', but it will not do. There are no
degrees of uniqueness. 'Unique' is complete and final in
itself. When a thing is unique there is nothing else in
the universe like it, it stands alone. So we must
recognise the uniqueness of the Son of Man. There never
has been another Son of Man in the sense in which He was
Son of Man. His uniqueness is found in this, that all
that is in the thought of God, all that is heavenly in
thought and conception, value and meaning, all that
expansiveness of the universal which God is, is crowded
down into this one Person; and as the Spirit leads you
into Christ, you find that you have been led into an
utterly boundless ocean, you have been lifted completely
out of every kind of limitation into what is universal.
More, you have been brought into touch with that which is
not of this earth at all. You cannot find its like here,
you cannot find anything of its order here. It is another
order, a heavenly order, crowded down into this one life.
You find that Christ, the Son of Man, is not just a
single Person. Yes, here He is, in a sense one, but He is
a race crowded in, He is a collective Person, everything
is gathered into Him. If you get your feet on the road of
the revelation of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit from
the inside, you will find as you move along that road
that you come into the vision that the Apostle Paul had,
that entrancing, enthralling, captivating vision which
simply possessed Paul as he saw at length all the
scattered, broken fragments of the creation gathered
together and made one in Christ, the restitution of all
things in Christ, all that which was divided and broken
and scattered, gathered together in the new creation in
Christ; and you begin to see how that can be, because
here is such a comprehensive, all-embracing Person.
You know how impossible
it is to put Christ down into any one of the sections of
human life or of this world order and bind Him to that,
and make Him the property of that alone. Can you really
put Christ down into any one nation and say that He
belongs to it? Yes, a Syrian by birth, but He belongs to
all the nations, and all the nations have found Him just
as much one of themselves, in meeting their need and
answering to their hearts and challenging their
conditions, as His own nation by birth. All nations shall
call Him blessed. He is the desire of all nations. Can
you put Him into any quarter of the earth? Take the four
quarters. Take the West with its energy, its genius for
getting things done. Well, what does Christ say to this
active, energetic, Western world? He is not out of place
here, and yet He would say something corrective to us
about rest and patience. But He would not say, You must
slow down in order to know rest. He would say, You can
know rest in toil, in activity. Do you see what I am
getting at? Christ does not say to us in this Western
world, with all the fret and rush and drive and activity,
All that must of necessity stop when you come to Me; but
He says, You have to find the secret of rest in the midst
of it all: for rest is not ceasing from doing, rest is a
matter of the heart, and "you shall find rest unto
your souls" (Matt. 11:29). Yes, He comes in, He is
not out of place here.
Or go to the East.
There you have slow and pensive patience, quiet,
everlasting jog-trot - hardly that. What will He do with
that? He fits in perfectly. He does not say, You must
become energetic, and throw off this sloth, and so on;
but He also has a corrective for that world. There is a
lot in the New Testament about being not slothful in
business, being fervent in spirit. You do not find a
great deal of fervour of spirit on that side of the
world. They are very easy-going, taking things as they
come; but He will speak about fervour of spirit. He fits
in, He has something to say. He is no stranger.
Go to Northern climes
where things are hard and rugged, serious and grim, and
you will find the Lord Jesus fits in and relieves the
strain and smooths the ruggedness, and you will find
beauty brought in there by Him. Go to the South with its
passion and heat; you find saints in the Southern climes,
and by the corrective of His presence that passion is
changed to true love. The Lord Jesus, you see,
comprehends all, and it would be, perhaps, interesting
and profitable if we were to pursue that line further.
The
Divine Answer to Universal Human Need
What I am trying to get
at is this, that He brings in the fulness of heaven in
His one Person, and we find that He comprehends the race
and meets the need of the whole, and challenges the
condition of the whole. He is not outside of anyone as a
stranger, He is a universal Christ, a heavenly Christ,
there is not another like Him. Other prophets belong to
certain realms and environments and constitutions, and
they are suited to those; but He, the Son of Man, is
unique.
But you can bring that
down to smallest details. Here we are, enough to
represent a fair variety of dispositions and
constitutions and temperaments. There are many
differences among us. In medicine, the thing which
differentiates people from a certain standard of law is
called an idiosyncracy. Can you find any idiosyncracy in
Christ? You will not find one, He has not got one. He
utterly conforms to standard, and yet He meets us in all
our variety, in all our differentiations. Not two of us
are exactly alike, but we can everyone of us say that the
Lord Jesus has exactly met our need, met us not in
outward things - we are not talking of temporal things -
but met us as we are. Not one of us can say, He may be
all right for so-and-so because their make-up and
temperament is just what He suits, but He does not fit in
with me. We can, if we do not already, know Christ for
ourselves as exactly meeting our particular make-up; and
that can be spread over millions and millions of
different people, all of whom have an idiosyncracy,
something which makes them different from everyone else;
the Lord Jesus perfectly meets everyone in their inner
life and becomes the answer to their particular need. To
know Christ after the Spirit means to know Him in this
way, how He meets our particular need and becomes a
living reality in our particular make-up.
Take heart, dear
friends. You may think that yours is the most difficult
nature that God ever had to deal with, and you may have
despaired of yourself. Ah, but here is One Who
comprehends all. He is not just a single Person to meet
some particular kind of man or woman, He is a combination
of all and yet outside all in that heavenly
distinctiveness. When He was here on earth, the poor were
able to say, He is one of us; arid yet He was at home as
much with the rich as with the poor. There was no strain
with Him, whatever circle He moved in. He was perfectly
comfortable with the most learned, and with the ignorant.
He embraces all. To learn Christ after the Spirit is to
learn how He meets our personal need and the need of
everyone.
The
Restorer of True Unity in a New Creation
Then to recognise how
He is going to gather up into Himself all the broken
fragments. Is not the race a shattered, broken, scattered
thing? It is all fragments. How will that new creation
man, that new creation race, be one? We begin to see it
is one in Christ. It is going to take His likeness, be
all-inclusive. It is a mystery, difficult to present, to
speak about. Do you glimpse it? There is One Who takes up
all these shattered fragments in His own uniting Person
on a higher level, and in His own Person makes them one,
so that they are all complements of one another instead
of at variance with one another. Oh, temperaments are so
different, they will never get on together! Christ is of
no one temperament. Tabulate the temperaments as we know
them and see where you fix Him! He was not temperamental
at all, He was above it. Now gather into Him in a
spiritual way and partake of His nature, and you can see
a single Body fitly framed together, a beautiful harmony.
Do you see through the spiritual meaning of Christ? He is
going to gather the scattered children of men into one.
How? Not geographically, calling them together from the
ends of the earth and doing it from the outside. He is
going to do it by the revelation of Himself first of all
to their hearts, and then the work of His Spirit upon
that revelation. When that happened at the beginning, it
was a beautiful token of what it will be at the end. You
see it in Jerusalem in those days. Oh, the love, the
harmony, the selflessness, the self-forgetting! -
continuing together, calling nothing that they had their
own; just a foretaste of what is going to be - of what
Christ means, in fact, when first of all He is seen and
then the Holy Spirit acts upon that in the heart. Well, I
have only started on that. May that glimpse mean
something. What we need, first of all, is to see the
Lord, yes, to see Jesus, by the Holy Ghost, and then to
have His Spirit at work upon that revelation to conform
us to His image. We know Him no longer after the flesh.
Oh, to know Him - but to know Him as He really is! The
Lord give us that knowledge, and, by even our brief and
so stammering attempt at touching upon Him in His
reality, stir our hearts to see that here is One in Whom
is all the possibility of solving every problem,
answering every question, and doing what no armies or
organisations or leagues can ever do - gathering together
into one: not organised oneness, but organic oneness. The
Lord open our eyes!