Reading: Hebrews 5:11-14;
6:1-3.
That portion which could be
accompanied by a very great deal more from the letters to the
Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, and from Peter’s
letters, brings one very foundational thing into view.
Foundational because it is addressed in this case to very
religious people, and to those who inherited the whole of that
system which God Himself produced. It brings into view the fact
that with Christ, and a true relationship to Christ, everything
begins over anew. Everything else, it does not matter what it is,
comes to an end. It makes clear what Paul was so fond of saying,
that with the death of Christ everything finished, everything!
The central thing religiously, so far as the old order was
concerned, in type, was the veil of the temple; everything met in
that veil. With the death of Christ, from heaven that thing was
ripped and split in twain by the hand of God. The old order was
struck right at its centre. The death of the Lord Jesus did bring
an end to everything—religiously and otherwise—of the
old order and system and creation. The resurrection of the Lord
Jesus was God’s starting all over again right from zero. And
not one fragment or fraction of the old creation was carried over
into the new.
Resurrection
more than Elevation
I think that a good many people
have the idea, even if they have not thought it out and put it
into positive shape, they have a mentality that to become a
believer, a child of God, a christian, is to come to a certain
point in one’s history where you, metaphorically speaking,
go up in an escalator on to a higher platform and proceed. It is
in the nature of continuing life on a higher storey. That is,
that now you have interests, religious interests, christian
interests, which you did not have before, your activities and
your energies are directed along lines in relation to Christ,
which did not obtain before. You are simply going on now on a
different level of life, and thus they confuse resurrection with
elevation, and elevation with resurrection. Now it is
tremendously important (and I am not careful about being too
elementary) that we should recognise that when we become children
of God we have come to the place where we have not gone up on to
a higher storey as in an elevator, but where we have tumbled into
a grave and been buried, and so far as God is concerned, never
again to be seen as we were before. You say: Here we are, it is
the same old I, the same old ego, the same old personality. That
may be from your standpoint, but from God’s standpoint, No!
What you and I have to do is to accept God’s standpoint.
That is what Paul means by: “...reckon ye also yourselves to
be dead...” That is, accept God’s standpoint. Once you
have accepted that intelligently and deliberately you are
destined to come continually, progressively, increasingly to know
that God’s standpoint is a real one. That is, that God had
reckoned you dead, and does reckon you dead, and He does not want
to have anything to do with you on that old level; and inasmuch
as you bring anything in from the natural, you have a bad time,
and find God is up against you. You come to these crises, and you
say: What is the matter, Lord? And the Lord says: That was ruled
out in the beginning! You see it is an accepting of God’s
standpoint once and for all, and discovering it is not a theory,
not a doctrine, but a reality.
When Did You
Die?
I picked up a little book this
week. The title on the cover rather struck me. Probably many of
you know it. “When did you die?” I have only seen the
first few words of it, and the writer says: “A strange
question to ask any one”, and then a little while and he
says: “You died as long ago as the Lord Jesus died on the
Cross.” I know, of course, what he will have to say about
that, I know what will follow, but that is the truth which the
Lord requires that we shall accept. The Lord’s standpoint is
that you and I died before we were born, before we came literally
into this world. So far as the old creation is concerned, we
died, we died with Christ, and the Lord has nothing whatever to
say to us or do with us until we have accepted that position. The
first word to any man from the Lord is “repentance from dead
works.” Everything is dead until you know resurrection union
with Christ, no matter what it is, religion or anything else.
Everything is dead until you know union with Christ in
resurrection life.
That is God’s position,
and the Cross of the Lord Jesus presented to any man or woman
represents so far as that man or woman is concerned an absolute
end, and on the other side a beginning of an entirely new order.
Paul calls the different order: “… the newness of
spirit.” That is not the newness of the Holy Spirit, that is
the newness of our spirit, that our spirit has become a new thing
and out from that everything else works. You can see it in his
own case. If ever there was an illustration of what newness of
the spirit means, Paul was such. Why, it came about swiftly with
him. One day he is breathing out threatenings and slaughters
against members of Christ, and on his way with a passionate
burning determination to destroy these Christians, and in a few
hours he is humbled, before a little assembly in Damascus, which
he was going to destroy, taking his instructions for the rest of
his life.
That is a change of spirit, is
it not? That is newness of spirit. And you find that tremendous
change manifested in all kinds of directions. Think of this
Pharisee of the Pharisees and his attitude toward gentile
“dogs”, as he would call them (anybody that was not a
Jew was a “dog” in the eyes of a Jew). See this man in
whose very blood that was, now putting gentiles at least upon an
equal footing with Jews, and giving his life in continuous
suffering that those gentiles might come into the enjoyment of
Christ. Something has happened inside, a new spirit! That only
comes through the crises of a death in one realm and a
resurrection into another realm; something that only God can do.
And all that is not of that newness of spirit is of the old
creation and it means the impassable barrier of the Cross of the
Lord Jesus whenever it arises. Let any of our old man, whether of
our old temper, our old way of judging, our old disposition, any
of it come up at all, if we are children of God, we know quite
well that at that point a barrier is set up and we cannot get
past, we are held up in our spiritual life and we have to go back
and have that thing cleared up. It is as real as any other thing
in the universe to us. At that moment we stand still spiritually,
and the flaming sword is across our path. There is no way for
that here. Bring that here and you will be judged. You will meet
the judgment of God. You will be broken. It is coming up against
the fact that God finished with all that long ago and we have to
accept God’s standpoint. When we have accepted it then the
thing works out, it continually works out. We take that position,
we accept the truth. We cannot bring an actual end to the old
creation ourselves, but we say in a positive way: I reckon as God
reckons. Well then we shall find as we go on that God having put
all that under death, death rests upon it, and if ever it shows
its head again the sentence of death is met. If we begin to work
for the Lord with our own natural strength we meet death and
before long our natural strength will come under death. If we
begin to use our natural judgment in the things of God we shall
meet an arrest and before long we shall come to a deadlock,
unable to get through. Anything which we bring of nature into the
things of God will bring us up against—not some new issue
but—the old issue, death which was made to rest upon the old
creation. In so far as we move in the newness of life, work by
the Spirit of God, walk after the Spirit, death is done away and
we are in life and we can go on and can get through, no matter
how much there may be of handicap and weakness in nature, we can
get through as we go on in the Spirit. “The law of the
Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin
and death”. We are free!
Death —
God’s Starting-place
Now that is all old familiar
ground to many, and yet something which we have continually to
remember. It is the foundation. Unless we have the foundation
thoroughly well laid, we shall come to a hitch. We know of many
children of God who have been the Lord’s children for years
and they have been working for the Lord many of them, and yet
they have come to a standstill, they have come under an arrest.
Why? Well in some way, at some point, somehow, something of
themselves, their old self has come up, has come into evidence,
has come into the way. It may be some of their old mind, some of
their old will, some of their old affections, desires and
feelings. They are in their own way somehow. They are in the
Lord’s way. What is needed is not that they should die
again, but that they should come to accept their once-for-all
death in Christ in relation to whatever that may be that has come
up, and let it go and be set free from that law of sin and death.
“Repentance from dead works.” That is exactly what the
apostle is saying to these Hebrews: You have come to a
standstill. You simply ceased to go on. You went so far, now you
have got to a certain point and for years you have not budged a
bit from that position. You have never got past foundations, you
are not going on to full growth. You have not settled it once and
for all that you died when Christ died. You ended the whole
system and order of the old creation religiously and otherwise
when you came to Christ. Christ is the end of the law and Christ
is the end of the old creation, and He is the beginning of
everything new. Do not be wearied at repetition of old truths,
they are very important as foundations, and this is foundational.
We are destined, whether we now
accept it or not, whether we like it or not, we are destined to
discover that God’s foundation stands. This is true, and no
one will ever get through in relation to God and His things while
still bound by the old creation, on the old creation level. This
new way of life is so narrow that we cannot take ourselves into
it, we have to leave ourselves behind.
Well, now, that is a position
taken up, and what those who are being baptised are doing is to
declare in the practical way that that is the position they have
taken. What they are going to discover is that they have not just
obeyed a form of doctrine, but that they have entered into a very
live situation and from henceforth the Lord is going to make good
the implications of this. He is going to say: That died, you
cannot bring that along, don’t bring that out of the grave,
put it back. And they will find all the way along that the Lord
just puts His finger upon things which He reckons as ended in the
death of His Son. But, of course, whenever there is acceptance of
the Lord’s attitude and position to those things on the
death side, we get more of Christ as we get rid of ourselves.
I do want you to recognise that
every one of us from the wisest to the most foolish, as we judge,
every one of us when we really come into Christ, has got to learn
everything all over again. It is true that we may have a
tremendous amount of knowledge and information as this world can
give it, and yet the wisest, the wealthiest in knowledge or in
any other way, coming into Christ has got to learn the ABC in
spiritual things. They will discover that. Everything has got to
be learned from the infant class, from the cradle roll of the
spiritual life. It is no use our coming unto the Lord and
thinking we know something. It will not be long before we are
made to know that we do not know anything. The Lord said:
“How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the
kingdom of God!” I think if He had been in another world
from the one in which He was at the time, if He had been in the
Western world He would probably have said: How hardly shall they
that have knowledge enter the Kingdom. The boasted knowledge,
wisdom, intellect of the Western world is the great obstruction
to the Kingdom. It is not prepared to know anything. When Paul
got outside of the Jewish world that was the kind of thing he was
saying all the time, that the wisdom of this world was the great
hindrance. With the Jews, gain along the line of wealth; to the
gentiles, gain along the line of knowledge was the hindrance, and
anything that appertains to nature has to be set aside. It is a
hindrance to our coming into the Kingdom. The longer we live in
relationship to the Lord the more we know that we know nothing.
One piece of knowledge we have is that we do not know anything at
all, and we are just longing all the time to get some knowledge.
There is no royal road to spiritual knowledge, we have to start
right at the beginning and learn the things of the Lord as we go
along. When we start as young Christians we do think that we know
something. But, of course, that is the folly of youth. We are
learning everything all over anew. With all the knowledge that we
might have naturally, if it should be anything, it does not count
here. Spiritual knowledge is a different thing. We have started
all over again, but when we accept that place: Now I have
everything to learn, I am open and eager to learn, I know
nothing, then the Lord can teach. It is the proud one that never
learns anything. The Lord show us what it means to begin, what
the meaning of the Cross is in our end to the old and beginning
to the new.