Reading:
1 Kings 19:9-10; 2 Kings 19:29-31; Isaiah 59:17; John
2:14-17
The
word we see to be common to those passages strikes the
keynote for our present meditation, The Zeal of the Lord,
or The Way to Heavenly Fulness. Heavenly fulness in
a very real and special way is set before us in the life
of Elisha. This fact will impress us every time we
read that life, or anything in connection with
it. From beginning to end, wherever Elisha is seen
to come into a situation, the result is fulness, living
fulness, fulness of life. That fulness is heavenly
fulness because it came out from heaven, had its rise in
heaven. It was when Elijah went up by a whirlwind
into heaven, and his mantle fell upon Elisha, that
Elisha’s real life and ministry commenced. So
that it was a heavenly fulness, and it is of this that
his life speaks to us.
Elisha,
then, was the outcome and fulness of Elijah. Elijah
laid the foundation and provided the ground for
Elisha’s ministry, and in spiritual things Elijah
indicates, therefore, the way, the basis, the foundation
of heavenly fulness. Elisha required Elijah. In
a very real sense he sprang out of Elijah. But Elijah
also needed Elisha. He needed that which would be
the increased expression of his own life. Here you
have part and counterpart. Here you have the ground
or foundation, and the superstructure. Here you have
the seed, and fruit, and fullgrown tree. You need to
know the nature of the seed, to know exactly what it is
you are planting or sowing, and it is likewise important
to recognize what Elijah stands for, in order that you
may get the Elisha result. It is very nice to take
up what is presented to us of heavenly fulness in Elisha,
and be drawn out to that, and to say: Well, we
desire with all our hearts to have the heavenly fulness,
the resurrection life, the power of His resurrection as
brought out by Elisha; but it is quite impossible for us
to enter to that, to know anything about the heavenly
fulness, unless we stand upon the Elijah ground which
provides for it.
The
Starting Place Of Heavenly Fulness
We
therefore look to Elijah, to see the starting place, the
foundation, the basis of heavenly fulness. Before we
go on in our consideration of Elijah in this particular
connection—and there is no doubt whatever that that
is the meaning of the life of these two viewed as one
life; seed and fruit; foundation and building; root and
branch—there are one or two preliminary words of a
general character to be said, though they are of great
importance.
God
has a fixed starting place. God never changes that
starting place, nor does He move from it. The
importance of recognizing that to be so is that
everything in the matter of progress is determined by the
starting place. The starting place governs all the
later life. That means that if we take up things at a
point beyond God’s starting place, we shall have
that much to go back upon and to undo, or we shall
otherwise be limited as to the measure of Divine fulness
forever after.
I
am sure that strikes you as being of some significance,
for there are undoubtedly a great many who take up things
of the Lord a long way beyond God’s starting point,
and therefore a great deal of time is occupied by the
Lord in taking them backward rather than forward, in
undoing a great deal of history. They do not
immediately move on from the point at which they sought
to begin, but we find them being humbled, undone, and
their movement for a long time seems rather backward than
forward, rather down than up. The explanation is
that they have taken things up elsewhere than at
God’s starting point.
On
the other hand, where there is not the yielding to that
work of God, that work of the Spirit which seeks to bring
back by undoing, but rather a forcing on, a taking of
things up at a point other than at God’s starting
point, if there is an unwillingness to be brought right
back to God’s basis, and a pressing on and
determined taking up of work on the part of such, there
remains to the end a limitation. This would explain
many difficulties and problems which arise.
There
are many who refuse the work of the Cross in its deepest
meaning, who will not have it, who have yet taken up the
things of God, and the work of God, without that deep
work of the Cross in their lives, the need of which they
refuse to acknowledge or to recognize. They seek to
force their way onward, and to forge ahead with the work
of God. They build. What they build may reach
great dimensions, and according to the standards of men
may appear to be something successful, something big,
something full of activity and energy, but when you come
to measure it with the golden reed, that is according to
the Lord’s estimate of its spiritual value, it is
very limited, very thin, very superficial, and represents
but very little of the fulness of Christ in the lives of
those concerned. These builders are full of
activity, but they are babes in spiritual intelligence
and understanding. The trouble is that things have
been taken up somewhere beyond God's starting point, and
there has not been a yielding to the Spirit to bring back
to that point, and therefore there is a remaining
limitation to the end, and tragically enough forever.
These
are alternatives which arise from recognizing the fact
that God has a fixed starting point which He never
changes, and from which He never moves. It is
necessary, on the one hand, to come to His starting
point. Right at the beginning is the best time to
come there, but if by reason of lack of knowledge,
understanding, proper teaching, or because of our
ignorance, we have been drawn into things without knowing
of God’s starting point, then in His faithfulness to
Himself, and in His faithfulness to us, but always with
the highest and fullest interests in view, God will take
in hand to bring us back, to undo, if we will let
Him. On the other hand, unwillingness and
unyieldedness leave the other alternative open, which is
to go on, but to be forever in limitation, which God
never willed for us.
Two
Practical Issues
Now
there is another thing to remember in this connection and
it is that, while God’s starting place is
unalterable, on our side there are two things of a
practical character in relation to it.
(a)
An Acceptance of God’s Position
Firstly,
there must be an acceptance of all the implications of
the fact in one definite act of faith and
consecration. You and I will never know at any one
time all the implications. We shall never be able to
see all that God means in laying down this law of a fixed
starting place. Everything, from the Divine
standpoint, is bound up with that, and takes its rise
from that, but we shall only realize this as we go
on. It is for us to take the attitude of faith and
consecration toward all the implications of it, though we
do not fully know what they are. In one definite act
we have to come to the place where we say: Now Lord, what
You mean by bringing me to Your starting place, and all
that is bound up with that, I stand into by
faith. It is one definite act of commitment,
acceptance, and consecration.
Many
people have a very insufficient conception of the meaning
of consecration. So often it is thought to be just a
handing over of the life to God, a giving of oneself to
the Lord in complete surrender. Well, of course, it
is that, but there is far more in such an act of
consecration than is generally recognized. Complete
consecration means that we are going to allow the Lord to
do all that He means by consecration, and not merely what
we may think it to mean. When the Lord gets both His
hands upon a life, as it were, and that life is
completely in His hands, the Lord does extraordinary
things with, and in, that life; strange things; deep
things; many things which were not looked for, not
expected; things which are very unpleasant to the flesh
and very mysterious, which the natural mind can never
reconcile with the wisdom of God, nor with the love of
God. That is all a part of
consecration. Consecration means that we are
henceforth in the Lord’s hands for Him to do what He
sees is necessary. It is rather the surrender of an
inner life, an inner being to God, than the mere
superficial idea of just putting your life into the hands
of God, with the thought that now God is going to use you
mightily. There is something very much more in
consecration than that, and from the standpoint of God,
Who knows us, knows the requirements, knows what is
necessary, there are many implications bound up with
coming to God’s starting place.
You
and I have to recognize that, and in one act of faith
hand ourselves over to all the implications which are
clear before His eye, and not only to what we may see of
them at the moment. We find that as we go on, and
things which we never thought of, never imagined, never
anticipated, begin to arise in our experience, and we
come to crises, to something in the nature of an impasse
with the Lord, where we have a controversy over the
Lord’s ways with us and come face to face with the
Lord in a challenging attitude, the Lord will wait until
we soften toward Him, and then He will say to us: But
this was in the original reckoning! This is nothing
new! This is not something that has just come in by
the way! This was all in the original reckoning, and
you told Me I could do just exactly what I
liked! Are you prepared to stand on your original
ground? This is what consecration and surrender
means, and you accepted it for all that it
meant. Are you going to stand there now?
Many
of you know what is meant, although you have not had it
presented in this way to your minds. You know that
every fresh crisis only takes you back to your original
position with the Lord. It at once recalls you to
the place where you started, where you gave yourself to
the Lord for all His way and will. Now you are
saying: But I did not think it meant this! But the
Lord did mean this, and He has thought a great deal more
than we have ever yet conceived. God’s starting
place has to be accepted in all its implications in one
act of faith in Him.
(b) A
Progressive Outworking
Secondly,
there is the other side of this. There will be a
progressive working out of the implications. God
does not bring us in experience in one complete act into
all those implications. They are all settled in Him,
all perfected in Christ, but in us the implications will
be worked out progressively. This, however, will
only be on the ground that we have given the Lord full
permission to work them out, and given Him an open
way. Then He will work out progressively the
implications of God’s starting place.
For
different people that will mean different
things. For some it will mean going back a bit,
being taken back over the road traversed in order to get
back to God’s starting place, to the end that they
might have a greater fulness of the Lord and be released
from the present limitation. That necessitates
humility of spirit. It means that we shall have to
let go a great deal of our assumed spiritual position;
that we shall have to have our ideas about things very
greatly changed. We have the generally accepted
ideas, and conceptions, and definitions of spiritual
things and work, the work of the Lord, ministry, and all
such things, and now that system of thought and ideas is
going to be ruled out, and we are going back to the
beginning to discover that ministry is not the
professional sort of thing that we had imagined it to
be. Ministry from God’s standpoint is simply
the outworking of what God has been doing inwardly, the
fruit of spiritual history. Our ideas have to be
entirely transformed, turned upside down, and we have to
come back to God’s standard. Some of us know
what all this implies. For years we had a certain
idea of what ministry was, and then we had to come to the
place where we started all over again with God’s
idea of ministry; but it has been worth while. We
regard ourselves as such fools now for having thought
that what we formerly cherished was God’s idea of
ministry. Oh, blessed be God, He has met us at a
point and caused us to traverse the past backward and
come right to the beginning of ministry all over again on
a different level, from a different standpoint, with a
different idea. What a different ministry!
We
use ministry as an illustration of what we mean in the
application of this law. When we get into the hands
of the Lord we recognize that He has a starting place,
and He never leaves His position or His ground to come to
find us where we are and to take us up for His service at
that point, but we always have to come back to His
starting place. It is one tremendous act, one deep
act with God, one acceptance, perhaps in an
agony—for it may well be we would never come to the
point of acceptance save through an agony, the agony,
maybe, of despair over our own spiritual lives, or
despair as to our own present service, work,
ministry—and we come to the place where there is an
end, and where a new beginning has to be. We are
confronted with the challenge as to whether we are going
to let the Lord order everything according to His mind,
and as we accept God’s starting point in one
full-orbed acceptance, though we may have been in things
for many years, all kinds of changes now begin to come
about: changes of ideas, changes of conceptions, changes
of mind, changes of manner, changes of
activity. Things are changed, but they are changed
from limitation to fulness, from earthly bondage to
heavenly liberty; we have found God’s starting place
to heavenly fulness.
Let
us remember, then, that God has a starting place. He
will not leave it to come to any self-chosen point of
ours, but He will require that we come to His, and that
we accept by faith all that that means, and then allow
Him to work the principle out and yield ourselves to it
as it works out progressively.
The
Divine Treasure In The Earthen Vessel
Now
we are able to come to Elijah as representing God’s
starting point for heavenly fulness, and we will consider
for a moment or two the man himself. Read through
the life of Elijah again. It is one of the fullest
lives, yet so far as narratives are concerned packed into
the shortest compass. You are surprised, when you
remember the significance of Elijah, the tremendous place
that he occupies, how quickly his story is told. You
are through the story in almost a few verses. Yet
what a life! As you read it through, one thing that
should impress you is the amount there is in it that
speaks of human weakness and dependence. That is
rather changing the point of view, for when we think of
Elijah we always think of power, of wrath, of something
terrific; we almost feel that we are in the presence of
an earthquake. Yet if you read the story again you
will be impressed with how much there is that indicates
weakness and dependence.
Take
the name of this man—Elijah! It means “Jehovah
my strength.” That brings you at once to an
utter position. Jehovah my strength! You can
almost hear an echo of the words in the case of the
Apostle Paul when he said: “...I live; and yet
no longer I, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which
I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which
is in the Son of God.... ” Jehovah my strength!
Then
as you touch his life at different points, you see
hallmarks of weakness and dependence. Go with him to
the brook Cherith. “Get thee hence, and turn
thee eastward, and hide thyself by the brook Cherith,
that is before Jordan. And it shall be, that thou
shalt drink of the brook; and I have commanded the ravens
to feed thee there.” What a position for a
mighty man of God, a position of weakness, of
dependence. The very fact that God commanded ravens
to feed him showed how dependent he was upon God, because
ravens are not given to feeding other people, it is not
their disposition; it requires some sovereign act of God
to make a raven look after someone else. If there is
one outstanding characteristic about a raven it is
“myself first!” So the very power of God
was necessary there to transcend this course of nature,
and it was doubly so in that any creature should be the
means of sustaining this prophet, this man of God.
Then
the Lord let the brook dry up, and on its drying up He
said: “Arise, get thee to Zarephath... I have
commanded a widow woman there to sustain
thee.” A widow woman! And when Elijah
arrived at Zarephath what a state of things he found. The
woman was on her last morsel, in a state of weakness, and
her resources exhausted. What dependence upon
God! What a state of weakness in himself!
Or
pass on to that later point in his career, to the
incident at Horeb, in which there occur the words for
which we have such a liking, “...a still small
voice” (the sound of gentle stillness). Elijah
came to Horeb and entered into a cave. The Lord
passed by, and there was a mighty earthquake, thunder and
lightning, and a whirlwind, so that the very mount must
have rocked and the rocks well-nigh split. There was
a terrific sense of power, force, energy, and
might. But God was not in the earthquake, God was
not in the whirlwind. There followed a sound of
gentle stillness, a still small voice, and God was in
that. There was tumult in Elijah, resultant from
Jezebel’s threat and Elijah’s fear. That
tumult in Elijah seemed to be shouting for some mighty
manifestation of power which should defeat Jezebel, cheat
Jezebel of her object and save the Lord’s servant
from her clutches. He was seeking escape from the
clutches of Jezebel, from her threat, and what he needed,
he felt, was some mighty exercise of power to deliver
him. But the Lord was not in the earthquake, the
Lord was not in the whirlwind, He was in the still small
voice, the sound of gentle stillness. But what came
out of the sound of gentle stillness? “Go, return on
thy way to the wilderness of Damascus: and when thou
comest, thou shalt anoint Hazael to be king over Syria:
and Jehu the son of Nimshi shalt thou anoint to be king
over Israel: and Elisha the son of Shaphat of
Abelmeholah shalt thou anoint to be prophet in thy
room.” What was the outcome? Ahab was
overthrown, and Jezebel was destroyed. All that came
out of a sound of gentle stillness. The weakness of
God is greater than men. Very eloquently God was saying,
This whole thing is in My hand. Who is
Jezebel? Who is Ahab? My little finger is more
than their combined might! A sound of gentle
stillness can produce something that will bring
Ahab’s career to a very speedy end and Jezebel to a
very humiliating one. It is a mighty lesson. It
does not require God to come in an earthquake and a
whirlwind to deal with a situation like
that. Elijah, what are you doing here? Have you
forgotten what your name is? Have you forgotten that
in your weakness I have again and again made My strength
perfect? My weakness is greater than all the
combined force of the enemy. Elijah’s life is
gathered up from the standpoint of the man himself in one
great reality, namely, that it is God, not the man.
God’s weakness associated with a man is more than
all the strength of men against that man.
We
have perhaps in measure been in the place of Elijah,
conscious of the tremendous forces against us, human and
diabolical, and have felt the need of some putting forth
of mighty power, of God to rise up in an earthquake, in a
whirlwind for our deliverance. We have looked for
that, and, not seeing it, we have been discouraged, and
have thought that the Lord had failed us, and we have
begun to tell the Lord all about our devotion and our
faithfulness—“I have been very jealous for the
Lord....” The Lord has never come to us in a
whirlwind, nor in an earthquake. I doubt whether
anybody has ever been delivered by an earthquake or
whirlwind coming from the Lord, but we have been
delivered, we have been set on high, we have been brought
out of that tempest of Satanic antagonism again and
again, and the Lord has done it in such a quiet
way. The Lord has not seen the need for an
earthquake to deliver us. His weakness is greater
than all other strength. He would teach us that,
while we are what we are in ourselves, weak, in
dependence upon God, we can be set over all the power of
the enemy. It is so good that the Lord put it in the
way of Elijah to go and do the things which were going to
bring both Ahab and Jezebel to their ignominious
end. It was as though the Lord said, All right,
Elijah, just go along and anoint Elisha and anoint Jehu,
and that is the end of Ahab and Jezebel, and you have no
more to fear than that: “...him that escapeth from
the sword of Jehu shall Elisha slay.” You see
how the Lord is master of the situation, and how He
brings His feeble, weak, consciously dependent servant
into fellowship with Himself to bring an end to the
enemy. There is a lot of history in that.
The
Power Is Of God, And Not Of Men
The
Lord never covered up the weaknesses of His
servants. The Lord has not drawn a veil over that
paragraph in the life of Elijah, His beloved servant to
whom He refers many times, whom He brings into view at
the most critical times, not only in ancient Israel but
also in New Testament times. John the Baptist came
in the power of Elijah. Then Moses and Elijah appear
on the Mount of Transfiguration in connection with that
other great crisis, the exodus which the Lord Jesus was
about to accomplish at Jerusalem, the greatest crisis in
the history of this world. No wonder the people,
when they heard what the Lord Jesus was doing, somehow or
other mixed up John the Baptist with Elijah in their
mentality. Herod himself said that John was risen
from the dead. That implied something rather bad for
him in his consciousness, for he was much in the same
place as Ahab.
However,
the Lord has not covered up the weaknesses of His
servants, or drawn a veil over such incidents as that
where Elijah is seeking for a juniper tree and casting
himself down, and complaining to the Lord, and asking for
his life to be taken away. It is a painful scene,
and yet the Lord brings it out in full, clear relief.
Why
does the Lord not hide from others our weaknesses? Why
does He not hide those wounds which shame would hide,
those things about us that we would like to be kept
covered up for pride’s sake? Why does the Lord
let them come out? Well, if the Lord uses a man or a
woman He is going to take good care that it is always
known that the power working through them is not of
themselves but of Him, and that if they for a moment get
out of touch with Him it is very clearly revealed what
they are, and that stands over against what He
is. It is shown that these servants of His are not
something in themselves, but that He is their strength.
You
and I will never get to the place where the Lord will
allow us to be something in ourselves. If ever you
and I are in danger of getting there the Lord will very
soon let us know that our usefulness to Him is altogether
a matter of our dependence upon Him. Usefulness to
God in a true way is always arrested when we lose the
sense of dependence upon Him.
If
Elijah stands out as one of the great peaks of usefulness
to God, one that you can never miss as you scan the
skyline, there is alongside of that this that we read of
him, and you cannot shut your eyes to the fact. You
feel you have somehow or other come down from great
heights to great deeps when you read this passage about
the breakdown of Elijah. Surely, in view of his
faithfulness to the Lord, it would have been kind of the
Lord to have covered that up and not inspired the
recording of it! No! Elijah’s name means,
“Jehovah my strength.” The incident
under the juniper tree proclaims what Elijah is in
himself. What is to be seen of value and effect in
the life of Elijah is to be ascribed to the Lord in
Elijah. So it is with Moses, and so with David, and
so with all the others. The Lord has allowed the
dark passages in their lives to be recorded just to show
that men greatly used of God are only so used because of
their dependence upon Him, and such records as these are
necessary to us.
So
then we are beginning to see the starting place of
heavenly fulness. That is the first
thing. Perhaps it is going a long way round, and
saying a lot to indicate just one thing, but how
important that thing is! The starting place of
heavenly fulness is our emptiness, our dependence, our
weakness. The Lord may have to take us right back
there. If we have started at any point beyond
dependence, beyond emptiness, beyond weakness it is a
painful way back to God’s starting point. But
it is not all a backward march, for that very process of
emptying is the way to the fulness. It is only
making real to us what is already so clear to
Him. It is, in a word, the bringing of us to the
place where we know that all the fulness is in Him. Our
fulness is in Him, but we never appreciate it, never
enjoy it, never profit by it, never really enter into it
in a living way, until that has been done in us which has
made us conscious that it is so, and apart from this it
is a bad look out for us.
It
is so easy to say that all the fulness is in Him, to view
it in an objective way, and to sing about it, but, oh, to
come to the place where, knowing in a deep and terrible
way how utterly futile we are in ourselves, we suddenly
realize, in the presence of that deep poignant
consciousness of our weakness, that that is only one side
of things, and that the fulness is in Him for us. We
need not stop because of our emptiness and weakness, we
need not remain at the end, but that rather can be the
place of beginning, and we can go on from there. The
very emptiness and weakness is the ground upon which to
move into a discovery that will ever keep us in a place
of worship and wonder.
The
Lord speak that word to our hearts.