We have been seeking to
bring into view that essential heavenliness of the Church
which is a basic and governing law of God's purpose for
her. This we have seen to be a factor of tremendous
importance in God's dealings with Jerusalem. The more we
read and meditate upon the matter, the more we see that
this lies behind Jerusalem's history. Jerusalem and
Palestine present for us a solid block of evidence on
this matter. When we pass our eye over the Old Testament,
we see that Jerusalem's coming into position, her
ascendency or her revival, always related to those
elements which speak of heavenliness, just as, on the
contrary, her loss of place, of power, of glory, was due
to earthly and worldly elements getting the upper hand.
Jerusalem reached her
supreme crisis, when the Lord Jesus came into her midst.
It was then that two things in an outstanding way marked
the crisis of her history; the first, the heavenliness of
His Own Person and life, ministry and mission; the
second, the earthliness of Judea's vision, interests, and
associations. This contrast is one of the most
outstanding elements of the Gospels. Never was
Jerusalem's earthliness, earthboundness, more apparent,
more conspicuous, than when the Lord was in her midst. He
brought heaven in His Own Person. He was the embodiment
of everything heavenly, and by reason of His presence the
opposite state was dragged out into the light and made
unmistakably clear.
The
Heavenliness of Christ and His Own.
As to the first of
these two things, the heavenliness of His Person, life,
ministry and mission, John's Gospel more than any other
brings it into view. We know that the Gospel by John is
mainly concerned with matters within the compass of
Judaism, and we know that in that Gospel Jerusalem
figures very largely, and in a special, intensive way.
Against that fact we see in this Gospel the heavenliness
of Christ, as that which represents Him more particularly
than anything else. Then, so far as His Own people are
concerned, that Gospel makes the spiritual life of the
believer a heavenly thing at every point. That is to say,
the spiritual life of the believer is seen there to have
its beginning in heaven; he is born anew, or from above.
That life is seen to be sustained from heaven. All the
relationships of that life are seen to be heavenly. In
that Gospel the Lord takes pains to woo His own from this
world, and allows the shadow, if it must be so termed, of
His going, to fall very heavily upon them, until their
hearts are much troubled and distressed by what He says
about His leaving them and going to the Father within a
little while. All this, however, is with the definite and
deliberate purpose of showing, firstly, that their life
is to be a heavenly life, their hope a heavenly hope, not
an earthly one - for their trouble of heart was largely
due to disappointment as to their worldly expectations in
relation to Himself - and He carries them away from the
world, from the earth, and fastens their hope upon
Himself in glory. That is to say, their's becomes a
heavenly hope and not an earthly one. Their service is
also set forth as a heavenly service. "As the Father
hath sent me, even so send I you" (John 20:21),
making their commission a heavenly one upon a heavenly
basis, and settling it for all time that the nature of
His Own mission here was equally the nature of theirs, a
heavenly mission.
We know how all that is
gathered up into one heart cry in chapter 17, and how
repeatedly in that prayer the statements are positively
made concerning both Himself and them, that they are not
of this world. His prayer moreover was that they should
be kept, while in the world, from the world, and from the
Evil One, as the one who governs the evil world. The
heavenliness of Christ and His own is brought very
clearly into view right in the midst of Judaism at its
official headquarters in Jerusalem, and it was on that
ground that the earthly Jerusalem reached its supreme
crisis.
The
Earthboundness of Judaism.
As to the second thing,
that is, the earthboundness of Judaism in all its
aspects, there is no doubt that this was the background
and the cause of its rejection of Christ, and John's
Gospel brings that also very clearly before us. That
earthboundness of theirs, the grip of historic tradition
upon their minds, resulted in spiritual blindness to all
that was heavenly. This became manifest, as blindness
always is manifested, in various ways. The Gospel by John
gives us a clear unveiling of the out-working of that
spiritual blindness in jealousy, envy, prejudice, hatred,
smallness and pettiness, suspicion, passion. These all
run riot in the Gospel by John, and the Jews are seen in
a very bad light there. And when you reflect upon that in
connection with this dominating feature, the heavenliness
of everything in relation to Christ, you see how utterly
blind they were to all that was really heavenly. That
blindness, working out in all these ways, led that nation
to a full and final rejection of Him, and Jerusalem
became the centre, and the seat, and the focal point of
that intensified religious earthliness in its
out-working.
It may be well for us
to remind ourselves at this point, that we are having to
do with the Church. You and I are supremely interested in
the Church. Our great concern is the Church, which is His
Body. And that being so, you and I are very deeply
exercised, or should be, to know the nature of the
Church, what it is that spiritually constitutes the true
Church. If these things are true about the earthly
Jerusalem, and stand at length in such vivid contrast to
the heavenly Christ and the heavenly Church, they lead us
to see quite clearly that jealousy, envy, prejudice,
pettiness, suspicion, passion, hatred, and such like
things, are marks of spiritual blindness. At very best
they are marks of spiritual shortsightedness. Conversely,
that means that spiritual vision and spiritual revelation
should always work out to the absence of such things as
jealousy, and envy, suspicion, and prejudice. It is a
contradiction to say that we have heavenly light,
revelation, that the heavenly Christ has broken upon our
hearts, and to have any of these things. That in which
they are found is not the heavenly Church.
The state to which we
have just referred, obtaining in the earthly Jerusalem in
the days of Christ, has been the state of that Jerusalem
and of Judaism ever since, and is their state today. In
Christ risen from the dead two things can be noted: (1)
He did not again appear to Jerusalem nor to official
Judaism; (2) He took the Church away from the earth
spiritually, and centred it in Himself in heaven. But
then history began to develop upon two planes, and along
two lines, a true and a false; firstly, the Church as a
spiritual and heavenly thing, developing under the direct
government and control of the heavenly Holy Spirit; that
is, its entire management became a thing as out from
heaven; secondly, a false expression of Christianity as
an earthly and man-governed system. Along these two lines
history moved after the resurrection of Christ. Very soon
in the Apostolic age this point of departure could be
recognised.
The Jerusalem beneath
has from very early in this dispensation become the seat
of the most intensified expression of this false idea,
this false conception of the Church. Palestine itself has
since Christ's day seen the greatest outrages on the
heavenly conception of the Church. We concluded our last
section of this meditation with a citation from the
history of Islam's conquest of Christianity, with this
focal point in Palestine, and we saw then how that Islam
triumphed over Christianity because of the corruption of
Christianity, evidenced by these very things of which we
have spoken; divisions, warrings, jealousies, factions
amongst Christians. And Islam as a solid body, presenting
a solid front, knowing nothing of such factions and
divisions, was able to overwhelm that divided thing, that
schismatic thing, that internally disintegrated thing;
and that overwhelming had its seat in this very country,
around this very city of which we are speaking. That in
itself is a very forceful lesson; that the subjugation of
the earthly Jerusalem, being the result of weakness
produced by spiritual division, points to the absolute
necessity for the Church's oneness in spirit as the
heavenly Jerusalem, if she is really to rise to her place
of universal supremacy. We know how very much is
connected in the New Testament with that truth. Oh, if it
is true that the Lord Jesus was moving out of this world,
and taking His Church spiritually with Him, recognising
that Jerusalem's undoing was coming because of these
unhappy and unholy conditions, how essential it was that
He should pray, "that they may all be one"
(John 17:21). Error, whether it be Islam or any other
error, ancient or modern, known or something quite new,
will always gain its advantage by the spiritual weakness
produced by division amongst the Lord's people. Such
things are only kept at bay as the people of God stand
together in spiritual oneness.
We said earlier that
the history of Jerusalem presents to us a solid block of
evidence, that the governing law of God's Jerusalem is
heavenliness, and heavenliness is most certainly
spiritual oneness, and spiritual oneness is heavenliness.
To put that in another way, immediately you and I come
down to earthly considerations, earthly levels of things,
our oneness is bound to be assailed, to be broken, and
therefore God's Own thought for His people is set on one
side.
The
Earthboundness of Christendom.
Not only is this seen
so clearly in the triumph of Islam over Christianity, but
one other page of history affords very strong evidence
and very clear illustration. We refer to the history of
the Crusades. Lasting a hundred years, they are really
the story of one of the most disgraceful happenings in
the history of Christianity, destined, of course, to
fail, as indeed they did. As children we were primed with
the heroics and the romance of the Crusades, of Richard
Coeur de Lion, and such like. But since we have grown up,
we have read the story for ourselves, and all our
childish glamour has disappeared, and the more we come to
understand things from God's standpoint, the more we
blush with shame as we look back upon that page in the
history of Christianity, when mighty armies were gathered
and lives slaughtered wholesale, desolation and carnage
brought about in the name of the Church, to try to
recapture Palestine for Christianity. No! That is not the
heavenly way of doing things. Our warfare is not with
flesh and blood, and the weapons of our warfare are
not carnal but spiritual. "My kingdom is not of
this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would
my servants fight..." (John 18:36). These are
bed-rock laws of the heavenly Jerusalem. Palestine today
is a nauseating spectacle. Every place connected in any
special way with Christ's earthly life is marked by
something which is more than a tragic misrepresentation
of Christianity, a shameful misrepresentation is nearer
the truth, something called a church in which rivalries
run so high that even soldiers have to be kept, either on
the premises or in the vicinity, for safety's sake
amongst the Christians.
I expect many of you
have been reading Morton's book, In the steps of the
Master. I will give you one or two fragments from
it, to illustrate what I mean. He is speaking here of his
visit to Jerusalem, to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
This is what he says:-
"The church
gives one an overwhelming impression of darkness and
decay. There were passages so dark that I had to strike
matches to find my way. And the decay everywhere of
stone, of wood, and of iron was fantastic. I saw pictures
that were rotting on their canvases, and I even saw
canvases still framed, that were bleached white: the last
fragments of paint had peeled off, but they were still in
position. There were ominous cracks and fissures in stone
and marble. I thought how odd it is that extreme devotion
can have exactly the same effect as extreme neglect. The
Church of the Holy Sepulchre wears its air of shabby
decay for the simple reason that the re-hanging of a
picture, the repair of a stone, and even the mending of a
window, assume such gigantic importance in the eyes of
the communities, that they provoke a situation capable of
indefinite postponement.... Art and vulgarity stand side
by side. A priceless chalice, the gift of an emperor,
stands next to something tawdry and tinsely that might
have been pulled from a Christmas tree. And hundreds of
ikons, glimmering in old gold, receive candle drippings
on the stiff Byzantine figures of saint and king.
"The Greek
monks swing their censers towards the blaze of
candle-light, and the blue clouds of their incense spurt
out to hang about the ikons and the gilded screens. The
worshippers, kneeling on the marble floors, seem to be
prostrate before a series of exotic jewellers' shops.....
"This was the
hill of the Crucifixion: Calvary, the holiest place on
earth. I looked round, hoping to be able to detect some
sign of its former aspect, but that has been obliterated
for ever beneath the suffocating trappings of piety. The
chapel before which I was kneeling was the Chapel of the
Raising of the Cross, the chapel next to it was the
Chapel of the Nailing to the Cross."
Turning to his visit to
Bethlehem he speaks of his entering the Church of the
Nativity, and of this he says:
"The church is
built above a cave which was recognised as the birthplace
of Jesus Christ....
"Fifty-three
silver lamps lighten the gloom of the underground cavern.
It is a small cave about fourteen yards long and four
yards wide. Its walls are covered with tapestry that
reeks of stale incense. If you draw this tapestry aside,
you see that the walls are the rough, smoke-blackened
walls of a cave. Gold, silver, and tinsel ornaments gleam
in the pale glow of the fifty-three lamps....
"This church,
like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, suffers from
divided ownership. It is in the hands of the Latins, the
Greeks, and the Armenians.
"So jealous
are the various churches of their rights, that even the
sweeping of the dust is sometimes a dangerous task, and
there is a column in which are three nails, one on which
the Latins may hang a picture, one on which the Greeks
may do so, and a neutral nail on which no sect may hang
anything.
"In the floor
there is a star, and round it a Latin inscription which
says: 'Here Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary.'
The removal of this star years ago led to a quarrel
between France and Russia which blazed into the Crimean
War."
My point is this, that
that place which rejected the heavenly Christ has become
the scene of the expression, the most intensive
expression, of the false Church, the false conception of
what that Church is. We have said that in Jerusalem the
delusion of Christendom has its intense expression, but
it is only an explanation of how far a failure to
represent God's thought really can go. The degree may
vary; the principle remains the same. If man, apart from
the dominion of the Holy Spirit in any measure however
minute, intrudes into the things of God, be it in
thought, intellect, reason or feeling, desire, emotion or
will, determination, possession, the effect will be a
proportionate measure of death, division, confusion and
contradiction.
I have carefully
written that statement, so that it should be precisely
presented. I am going to repeat it, because upon that
everything hangs. The degree may vary; the principle is
the same. If man, apart from the dominion of the Holy
Spirit in any measure however minute, intrudes into the
things of God, the effect will be a proportionate measure
of death, division, confusion and contradiction!
Therefore, man must go
out as man: Christ, the heavenly Man, must be the Son
over God's House, must be the Head of the Church, and His
Headship must be administered only by the heavenly Holy
Spirit. Herein, also, lies the necessity for the Cross as
a constantly working and active reality by which that
whole realm, and range, and tissue of carnal man is ruled
out, and kept out. Herein, then, is the necessity for the
fulness of the Holy Spirit, if the Church is to come to
that place seen for her, as coming down from out of
heaven, to be the centre of God's universe, God's
government of this universe.