Reading:
Gen. 4:3-6, 8-10; I John 3:12; John 7:44; Acts 7:52; John
4:23; Romans 8:2.
In our
previous meditation we were drawn to take account of the
sevenfold working of the law of life. We spoke of the
Lord Jesus as the prism of life, in and through whom life
is broken up into its components, in whom we are able to
see the working of life. Yet, as we contemplate, the
figure changes, and that of a seven-branched candlestick
or lampstand looms into view, and we see that it has one
central root and stem, and out from it, as part of it, on
either side go the six branches. In our previous
meditation, which was upon the law of the Spirit of life
as brought out first of all in Adam, we have the central
root and stem which includes all the others, out from
which all grow or radiate, to which all come back; for
the beginning of things is very comprehensive, and what
we shall see as we go on is that each of these remaining
aspects of the law of life is but an outgrowth or
outworking of what we have comprehensively and
inclusively in Adam. I say that because of the unity of
the whole, the oneness of all the parts. This oneness is
a very remarkable and a very wonderful thing. How all of
a piece this matter of life is! You never really get into
anything that is fragmentary, detached or unrelated. You
can never deal with any one aspect as though it were
something in itself. One thing leads to another and that
other leads you back again, so that all the time you are
dealing with the same thing and yet growing. That may not
be quite clear to your comprehension now, but you will
see what we mean as we go on.
What Cain and Abel Represent
We come
to the second of these outworkings of the law of life in
Christ, brought to us in the second of the seven personal
representations of the Old Testament, or of the book of
Genesis, and we have now before us Cain and Abel. Here we
see the law or principle of life manifesting itself in a
contrast and a conflict. Where there is life - and you
understand that I am not speaking of ordinary human life,
I am speaking of Divine life, spiritual life, that unique
and peculiar life which Christ is and which is Christ
where that life is, this antagonism will inevitably come
to light. It always is the case, and you can neither
avoid the clash nor suppress it without doing despite to
the life. Immediately the life of God is found anywhere,
an antagonism manifests itself, conflict begins.
Here,
then, we find that life; and we are speaking now in the
realm of types. Life was found along Abel's line and
death was found along Cain's line, and we have to
investigate the difference. What was the difference? Let
us look at Cain very carefully.
We can
be superficial about Cain and come to conclusions which,
while they may be quite right and true, are inadequate.
Let us be quite fair, quite precise about Cain. Cain did
not ignore God, nor was he one who was outwardly opposed
to God. Cain recognized God; he acknowledged Him to be
the object of worship. Cain brought to God, as an act of
worship, the best that he knew and the best that he had.
I say the best that he knew, not the best that he could
have known. In this realm, what Cain brought was good and
was costly. Until we recognize that, and put it like
that, we are not on the way to understanding the
difference between death and life. It is of no use our
painting what we would call the way of death all in black
or dark colors and thinking of the way of death as
necessarily being that which is marked by the most
atrocious outrages against God. We must not suppose that,
to be in the way of death, it is necessary to be openly
and positively antagonistic to God, or to ignore God, or
to refuse some practical acknowledgment of God. It is not
necessary that these things should obtain in order to be
in the way of death. The way of death is something deeper
than that, something very much deeper than that, and we
shall see that this is so as we go on.
You see,
Cain brought the fruit of his natural life, and that is
all there is to it. When you have said that, if you
understand it, you have got near the heart of the thing.
In
Abel's case, his attitude was that we must die to live.
We have nothing that is acceptable to bring to God, only
a life to be repudiated. Abel recognized sin and saw that
the sinful soul must be poured out unto death, not
offered to God, neither it nor its works or fruits. You
see, on the Cain side, the soul seeks to be accepted on
the ground of what it deems to be its own good. On the
Abel side, the soul seeks to die to itself.
Christ Jesus and the Jews
Now, we carry that over immediately to
Christ Jesus and the Jews. You notice that we read of the
Jews in John's Gospel in the exact terms used about Cain
- a terrible thing. But the point that we and all the
Lord's people need to grasp is this, that we are not
necessarily dealing with what we call the ungodly, as
standing in the place of Cain, and the godly, in the
truest sense, as standing in the place of Abel. We are in
a much narrower compass of things than that. There is an
Israel after the flesh and there is an Israel after the
Spirit.
So we turn to Christ and the Jews in His
day. The Jews worshipped and they murdered, a terrible
combination. Their worship, which in its realm was very
devout, and costly in a way, was nevertheless but an
outward thing. It is not necessary for me to call to your
remembrance various passages which passed through the
Lord's lips about that. "Ye make clean the outside
of the platter": "They make broad their
phylacteries": "You make long prayers":
they delighted "to be seen of men to fast"; and
so on. It was outward. Their worship was their own glory
and works. As they worshipped they drew attention to
themselves, and made their very worship an occasion of
self-glorification. It was all a matter of forms, into
which they threw themselves maybe very heartily, but by
which none the less they sought to gain benefits for
themselves. Even worship was toward themselves all the
time, not really toward God, but for their own favor and
good. It had nothing to do with the heart of God. God's
satisfaction was not the one and only consideration.
Now, look at the Lord Jesus, who stands
always in opposition to the Jews, and they to Him. The
opposition is found, not in the outward at all, but
deeper down. He worshipped; but He worshipped by a life
wholly yielded to God. But more, He worshipped by a life
governed by the very nature of God. By that I mean that
God's nature was the thing which characterized His
worship. God is holy, God is righteous, God is altogether
without mixture; He is pure. God is light. In Him there
is no darkness at all, no suspicion or suggestion of
darkness, cloudiness, or lack of transparency. It was
what God was, what God is, that governed the worship of
the Lord Jesus. That is to say, He saw that it was
not possible to worship God in truth, unless you
recognized what God was, what God is, and forever
abandoned anything and everything that was not like God.
You could not come on to God's ground to worship God and
bring there something unlike God, something contrary to
God. You must worship God in truth. There is so much that
is false, so much that is a lie, so much that is a
contradiction, so much that is untrue and unreal and
make-believe about human nature, and you must part with
it all if you are going to be a true worshipper, and
recognize that here you cannot play with God, cannot
deceive God, cannot have fellowship with God while there
is anything like that about you. You are governed
entirely by the consideration of what God is. To do
otherwise is like coming into the presence of an
extremely sensitive person and just saying or doing those
things which create agony to that sensitive person. If
you are a musician, a musical person - I do not mean if
you played music! - if you were a musical person, if you
had a high, keen sense of music, and anyone came into
your presence and strummed and struck constant discords,
you know what agony it would be. You would go hot and
cold. If you knew a certain person to be keenly, acutely
strung to true music, and you were not in any special way
musical, it would be the last thing that you would do, if
you had good sense, to attempt to play in the presence of
such a one. I remember a man who played the violin fairly
well and he went to hear someone who played the violin
very well. He came to me after and said, I am going to
put my foot through my violin: I will never play again.
If that man heard me play, it would drive him mad! You
see what I am getting at. The point is that this is how
the Lord Jesus was attuned to God, and the thing which
weighed with him was the nature of God. What does God
require of a worshipper? Does He want certain forms? His
worship was by a life laid down as a testimony against
sin. Remember that! The death of the Lord Jesus has
various aspects, but this is a very vital one. It was a
laying down of His life as a testimony against sin.
It would be impossible for there to be any
fellowship with God while there was sin: and there was
sin. What are you going to do with regard to it? You
cannot clean up sin. It must die. But, seeing that sin is
not some abstract thing, but that man is become sin, then
to deal with human nature, from which you cannot pluck
out or eradicate something called sin, you have to bring
in another human nature in which there is no sin. What is
to happen to us then? Not to have sin plucked out, but to
die and to have Christ come in our place. "I have
been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I, but
Christ." Well, His worship was by a life laid down
as a testimony against sin.
You see the working of that in Abel. Of
course, Abel did not lay down his life. That is where the
type falls short, but the principle is the same. The
death of Abel was a testimony against sin - "The
voice of thy brother's blood crieth..."
Now, you see this conflict and the
conflict is perfectly clear. There is a Cain line of
death, full of worship, full of acknowledgment of God,
full of gifts to God, full of splendid things in its own
realm, and there is Abel's line of life. This latter
works out in an offering, not of things, but of self, and
that upon an altar. The creature must die.
The Sphere of the Conflict
(a) The Warfare is Between
Two Kingdoms
Now we can get very quickly to our point.
This conflict operates in two realms. Firstly, it
operates in the realm where there is that which is of God
and that which is of Satan. We all know that. That is the
simplest and most obvious realm of the operation of this
antagonism. I mean, it is the realm where every born
again child of God moves immediately they receive this
life. We all know that immediately we become the Lord's
and are filled with His joy, and then go back to our
business or our sphere of life in this world, expecting
that everybody is going to be very pleased and to respond
to this, we find instead that, without so much as
breathing a word about it, suspicious looks are cast in
our direction and the atmosphere is full of something.
You never have to say a word - it is there. More often
than not, the moving about of a child of God in this
world draws out into the very atmosphere an antagonism, a
conflict, without any words being spoken. It is not
imagination, it is there, and the more strong the
soul-life on the other side, the quicker the discerning
of that which is in us; the more shrewd is the arrival at
a conclusion that there is something, and the more
definite the antagonism. I mean that simple, artless
people, while they do not understand you and cannot go
with you, they do not give out to you what comes out from
those other people of a strong soul-life. We know that
realm of the outward, where the antagonism becomes
manifestly between what is of Satan and what is of God. I
need not follow that, it is known so well.
(b) Man Himself the Real Battle
Ground
But there is this other realm,
where in an inward way conflict arises between that which
is of God and that which is of self. The point is this,
that the realm, the real realm, of this battle is man
himself. That is where the battle really rages most
fiercely. Most of us come very quickly to recognize the
difference in the outward realm, where the conflict is
between us and those who are not for God, and we accept
it. But when this thing gets inside, it is far more
difficult to deal with. When it arises within us, it is
very difficult to accept it, because we do not understand
it. We find the conflict within ourselves and that
conflict has been precipitated by the very presence of
life in us. It is the outworking of the law of life in
Christ Jesus. It may be comforting in one respect to know
it is that. So often, when the thing becomes acute, the
tempter gives his own interpretation to it and would have
us believe that everything is wrong and that there is
nothing of God there at all; whereas the fact is, it is
because there is that which is of God that the
conflict has arisen within, and we ourselves have become
the battlefield. "The flesh lusteth against the
Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: for these are
contrary the one to the other" (Gal. 5:17). But what
is it, what are the two things that are in conflict? Now
a very elementary and superficial answer would be, of
course, that it is the flesh and the Spirit, the old man
and the new man. That is quite true, but it is not an
adequate answer. It really does not get right to the
heart of this thing, and I do want that you should see
the core of this matter. It is most important. For want
of discernment in this matter, many of the Lord's people
are rendered helpless, impotent, bewildered. You see,
beloved, the real battle is between soul and spirit.
Now, you cannot simply say soul is flesh,
soul is old Adam. That is not true in the full sense. You
have to be careful. If you say that, then you are going
to embark upon a line of killing the soul and you must
not do that. The soul itself is not a wrong thing. It is
not wrong to have a soul. The Lord tells us that the soul
has to be won. "In your patience ye shall win your
souls" (Luke 21:19). "We are not of them that
shrink back unto perdition; but of them that have faith
unto the saving of the soul" (Heb. 10:39). And yet
the conflict is here between soul and spirit. From this
you may recognize the nature of the Fall, as being a
violation of spirit by soul. In our previous meditation
we noted the attack upon man's soul, that is, upon his
reason, desire and will, and we saw how man's reason,
desire and will were taken out of their place and made to
exercise and function independently of God. Man has a
spirit, and by his spirit he was put into communication
with God, who is Spirit. He knew God, not through his
soul: in that unfallen state, he had not to come to
reasoned conclusions about the will of God; he had not to
sit down and reason out what God wanted. In his unfallen
state, he perceived, he sensed, he intuitively knew, and
that is why conscience arose and smote him, because
conscience is not a faculty of the soul, but a faculty of
the spirit. Well, man disregarded the organ of communion
with God when he disregarded God as the final court of
appeal on all matters and, acting on the ground of his
own soul, violated his spirit. Then that conflict arose
in man which has gone on ever since. He is a house
divided against itself, which cannot stand, and you have
these two sides as in the one, soul and spirit. By nature
he is essentially now a soul man. In the New Testament,
unfortunately, he is called "the natural man,"
but everybody knows the word there is
"soulical" man; man who is governed and
actuated by soul, that is, by his own self-reasoning, his
own self-discerning, his own self-willing. That is the
type of man he is, and over against him in the New
Testament you have placed the spiritual man, "he
that is spiritual." Thus there arises the conflict
between these two "men" as in the one, the
conflict between soul and spirit, spirit and soul; what
is of God, God's thought, as against our thought; God's
reasoning, if we may use that word, or God's reason as
over against our reasoning; God's will as over against
our will; God's feelings, affections, desires, as over
against our feelings, affections and desires. These two
things now come in, not into the unregenerate man, but
into the regenerate man. We are not talking now of the
man out of Christ, we are talking of the carnal man. The
carnal man is the Christian in whom there is flesh, and
who is actuated by it.
Now, you see, the soul is the place where
the flesh resides, for flesh in its spiritual sense (not
the physical sense) is an evil thing. It is self-willed,
self-guided, actuated by Satan. That is flesh. It is that
which lusteth against the Spirit, and you know how much
the New Testament says about flesh as an evil thing. It
is resident in the natural soul. The spirit reborn in new
birth becomes the vessel for the indwelling of that which
is of God.
Now, this conflict is set up. You say, I
know it all too well, although perhaps I should never
have analysed and explained it like that; but I know it!
We do know it! But the trouble is that so many have not
got past that. They are still in it. We have not yet come
to the point but I might as well say right away that it
is not God's will that this conflict should go on in
perpetuity throughout our spiritual life, that we should
always be in this conflict. We shall speak of that
another time.
Divine Life Demands a Walk after the
Spirit
Here we have to sum up what we have been
saying in a phrase or two. The aspect of the basic matter
with which we are dealing here is that the law of life
demands a course in the spirit, and not in the flesh or
in our own soul. It demands a heavenly union with God in
our spirit, and not the soulical religious life according
to our ideas. That is the difference between Cain and
Abel. Oh yes, Cain was a religious man, Cain was a
worshipping man, Cain brought what, in its realm, was
good, precious, costly. Cain, in his way, was devout in
his acknowledgment that God is to be worshipped, but his
understanding was darkened, and so is the understanding
of our souls. We, by nature, do not know God's thoughts.
"The natural (or soulical) man receiveth not the
things of the Spirit of God: ... neither can he know
them, because they are spiritually discerned" (I Cor
2:14). Thus Cain, with all his devoutness and all his
worship and his religion and his acknowledgment of God,
was still in the darkness of a darkened understanding:
his judgment was all out, his ideas were all wrong, he
was missing the mark and nothing got through above the
altar. God had not respect unto Cain's offering. The Jews
stood in that position, and, to prove it, the Jews
murdered, even as Cain murdered. To prove it, challenge
the worship of the soul-worshippers, of the religious
people who are not spiritual, and you will find something
flare up. They cannot bear to have it interfered with,
challenged or touched. To a true worshipper, to one who
worships in spirit and in truth, you can say or do what
you will, and you will find no spirit of murder rising
up, or anything akin to it. Like Abel, such a one will
lay down his life, even at the hands of the worshippers,
the religious. That is the difference here between the
soul and the spirit.
Now, I said before that we are in a very
much narrower circle than that which embraces believers
and the ungodly. Beloved, life, that which gets through
and goes on, that which is the seal and mark of God, of
what is of God and what is acceptable to God; life is
along the line of the spirit. Death, though it may have
all the outward semblance, forms, worship, acknowledgment
of God, religion, is none the less death. It does not get
through: it does not go through. Oh, you say, surely you
are speaking out in a very wide realm of things? We know
what you are thinking about, of the merely religious
people who go to church and say formal prayers. I am not!
There is an application no doubt that can be made to them
from such words, but that is not what I am thinking
about. I am not dividing these things up so utterly and
finally as to put them into pigeon-holes. I am saying
that there are overlappings of these things in most
believers, and therefore there is a limitation of life.
Why is it that missionaries can come back from mission
fields after twenty-five or thirty years' service, and
say, The whole thing has broken down, the promises of God
have become dust and ashes to me! Let us be quite frank.
They are doing it. Some are known to us. Why is it? There
comes a point where, because of the unreality and because
things do not work, do not go through, do not reach
Divine ends, so many just come to an impasse and have
questions, and justifiable questions, about the reality
of things. Why? Now, I am leaving out certain other
things. I know all about physical and nervous breakdowns,
depressions, melancholia, and all those things which come
in sometimes to becloud. I am not talking about that. I
am speaking about that realm where what is spiritual is
not working out, where there is no seal of God that is
adequate. For the much pouring out, the much giving, the
much doing, no spiritual life is really to be seen as the
fruit of it. The absence of life! Oh, it is possible,
beloved, for us to be under the hand of God in chastening
and disciplining, where we see no fruit of our labors, no
results of our work, and where everything, so far as our
senses are concerned, our souls, is hidden, darkened,
obscured, and yet all the time for life to be working in
the power of resurrection both in us and through us, and
for others to be getting the benefit of it, though we
neither see nor sense it. That is one thing, but that is
not what I am talking about. I am talking about absence
of life, where things are dead spiritually. What is the
trouble? Well, the answer is in Cain and Abel. The
explanation is here in the difference between soul and
spirit. The soul is not a wrong thing, but for it to
govern is another matter. If that which is of soul gets
the upper hand, then it is self getting the upper hand,
and the works are out from ourselves, the energies and
activities of our own souls, and not the energies of God
through our spirits.
In saying such things, do not let anyone
think for a moment that, when you live on the level of
the spirit, where all things are to be out from God and
nothing out from yourself, there is never going to be
anything doing. A lot of people think there are going to
be no works, no activities at all. The only difference is
in the kind of activities. You do not do less, you do
other. It is different, but the end sees much greater
gain than all the self-propagated activities for
God. In the hidden depths everything must be toward God,
not toward self. We do not know how deeply rooted in our
own souls is that self. We discover something of it when
we can no longer do, when God puts His hand upon us and
says, Stop doing for a month or two, and puts us out of
action. Then we discover how great a measure of
self-gratification was in our doing, and, with its
cessation, we are no longer gratified. We have lost our
gratification, and we have nothing in its place, and what
the Lord is seeking to do is to take away our
gratification with things and doings, and for Himself to
be our gratification; that, whether we do or do not do,
even if there is nothing that we can do, we have the Lord
and are satisfied. I am perfectly certain that is the
crux of the whole matter. It is what the Lord is to us,
not what our work is to us; not what anything is to us
which has its seat or spring in our own souls. We have
the Lord and we are satisfied. I wonder if there is one
of us who has absolutely got there? No, we have still to
have patience unto the winning of our souls. These souls
have still to be brought over in ever fuller degrees to
where God is their only gratification. Through many, many
bitter tears we may come there, but when we do come
there, the tears will be wiped away. You see, the tears
are associated with getting somewhere. They are never
there when you arrive. The little girl who said, If God
is going to wipe away all tears, He will have to have a
very big handkerchief, had a wrong idea as to how tears
are wiped away. Tears have to do with processes and the
wiping away is simply the result of arriving. They pass
away. "In your patience ye shall win your
souls."
The Necessity for Enlightenment
But the understanding must be
enlightened - "having the eyes of your heart
enlightened" - the understanding must be
enlightened, so that instead of Cain's way, which is a
way in the soul, where even in its devotion to God, even
in its acknowledgment of God, the soul yet draws
everything to itself, there may be a life which is in the
spirit. Cain would not have admitted it was so. No
soulical life would admit that it was drawing everything
to itself. It is the most difficult thing for anybody to
accept that, yet that is the nature of the soul. The
spirit is just the opposite. The spirit is always toward
God; the renewed spirit, that is. The Lord Jesus poured
out His soul unto death; He committed His spirit to God.
That touches a new field of contemplation.
The soul-life as such must come under, the spirit-life
must come up. In so far as the soul-life governs, there
is death. There may be a lot of emotion, a lot of
sensation, a lot of pleasing, a lot of activity, but the
end is death. Inasmuch as the spiritual life governs, the
life of the spirit, there is life, and "the law of
the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus" is the law of
life.
Now, do not bother about the technique,
about the way in which this word has been expressed in
its details, but ask the Lord to enable you to grasp the
conclusion. As one in whom the life is, I am made aware
of two things. It is an inevitable result of the life
that the conflict within arises. I have, further, to know
the nature of that conflict, and, when my understanding
is enlightened, I see that it is the conflict between
myself on the soul side and myself on the spirit side. It
is a conflict between my own soul and what is of God in
me. That is a house divided against itself: it cannot
stand. It must sooner or later crash, and we are seeing
the crash of such divided houses all around. That is not
God's thought. There is a way out. We shall see later, if
the Lord wills, what that is, but here we recognize the
fact. Let us seek the Lord that we may walk in the
Spirit, walk by the Spirit, have our life in God and not
in things, and not out from ourselves; for this natural
life is a false life and it deceives because it is
deceived. But His life is true, and He is true who is the
life. Because He is life, He is also the light. Because
He is the light, He is the life.
Let us ask the Lord to make the meaning of
this clear.