Reading:
Romans 8:2,17. Philippians 3:10.
We now
come to the last of the seven out-workings of the law of
the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. We have followed the
stages of that operation as illustrated for us in men in
the book of Genesis, from Adam to Jacob; and now we come
to Joseph, the seventh and the last. Joseph gathers up
into himself all the preceding six and carries them in
himself to the final fullness of life.
Let us
ask whether in Joseph's case there was the first thing,
namely, everything as unto the Father. You see, it is
just on that matter that Joseph is introduced to us. The
beginning of the narrative about Joseph is that Israel
loved Joseph more than all his sons. Why was this?
Because, as you will see manifested very soon after,
Joseph had a special concern for the father's interests.
He took up that first thing - all as unto the Father.
Did
Joseph further take up the matter of spiritual
discernment and understanding in respect of what would
please the Father? Was not that the cause of the trouble
between him and his brethren? His brethren were doing
things very contrary to the mind of the father, and
Joseph saw and felt how dishonouring this was to the
father. He discerned what was wrong with his brethren.
There was trouble about it, and he himself sought not to
walk thus, but to walk well-pleasing unto the father, in
the spirit and not in the flesh.
Then you
can clearly see how the resurrection principle was
operative in Joseph's case. His life was largely based
upon that principle. Did he go into death? Yes, but he
knew resurrection. It is a great factor in Joseph's
history, the resurrection principle.
As for
faith, if ever a man had his faith tested, Joseph did.
All through those years in Potiphar's house, in the
prison, in the dungeon - oh, how great was the test of
faith! The Psalmist says that his soul entered into iron,
the word of the Lord tried him. Yes, faith was both
called for and tried, and it is wonderful how he trusted
God. We see no trace of bitterness, resentment,
rebellion; faith is triumphant in Joseph.
Yes, he
is a true son. The spirit of sonship is there, in his
giving of himself in service for the House of God, as
represented by his brethren. He was concerned for his
brethren's well-being. He went to see how they fared. He
took them bread. The great goal of his life was service
to his brethren as is seen later in Egypt.
Well, it
is quite clear that Joseph embodied all these former
things: and then what? Then he carries them through;
through suffering to reigning, through rejection to
exaltation, through humiliation to the throne. Oh,
beloved, if the life of the Lord Jesus in us has a free
way, it will produce all those things. That life will
take the way which is all unto the Lord spontaneously. It
will take the way of growing spiritual discernment as to
what is of the Lord and what is not, and you will never
have to say, You must give up this, and not do that. The
law of the Spirit of life will teach what is not the mind
of the Lord. It will separate us from the world, and we
shall find that we are separate. It will not be a case of
our having to give up the world, but of the world giving
us up: we are out of it, we are strangers in this world.
The law of the Spirit of life produces that. Test
yourself by this law. If you can be happy, comfortable
and satisfied in this world and in your own natural life,
then you have serious cause to question whether the life
of the Lord Jesus is in you at all. You will find that,
as that life works in you, you will more and more be a
stranger here. You will find yourself more and more, in
spirit, outside of things, and sometimes you will be
subject to the most terrible shocks.
Yes, you
realize how far you have moved from that world by going
on with God. What a far-removed world it is! That is the
working of life. It is going to be like that. It is going
to make for difficulties, but that is how it is going to
be. The law of the Spirit of life will ever more and more
widen the gap between you and the world and this life
here on this earth. It is bound to do that. It will
inevitably put you outside. Then, of course, when you are
in that position, what have you to count upon, what
support is there for you but God? He has become your
life, your resource. The world's pleasures have receded
and He has become your pleasure. For everything you have
to look to Him; and that is a life of faith. No longer is
your satisfaction here. But life brings it all about,
brings you to the place where you discover God as your
exceeding great reward, as Abraham did; God, El Shaddai,
the mighty pourer-forth of fullness.
The Throne and True Destiny
I must
come to Joseph very closely. All this working of life
along these various stages, bringing spontaneously these
various things to be the realities of the child of God,
is all moving toward one destiny, one end. This law of
life, given free course in us, is going to bring us to
the throne. It is going to issue in the throne, in
reigning with Him. But how? Through suffering, through
humiliation, through rejection. That is the way of this
life to the throne. This is what Joseph sets forth.
The Unique Relation of the Chosen
Vessel to God
But
notice that Joseph had a very special place in the
father's affections. It is as well to establish that
before you begin to take up the trials of Joseph.
"Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth," and Satan
always contends against that. When we are in
difficulties, in sufferings, in humiliations, in
rejections, there is always a voice at our ear to tell us
that the Lord does not love us. So it is as well to
notice that Joseph had a very special place in the
affections of the father. Why? Well, for the reasons that
we have already seen. First of all, he was the result of
that double labour. The father had laboured twice over
for him. It had been a very costly thing to bring Joseph
in; and the Church, which is Christ's Body, is the fruit
of the deepest anguish of the Father's heart. God was in
the agony of securing the Church. It is the Church of
God. What a wonderful statement! So often it is termed
the Church or Body of Christ, but here the designation is
"the church of God, which he hath purchased with his
own blood" (Acts 20:28). That is why the Church is
dear to Him in a special way. But not only because the
Church is the result of His double service or agony or
labour is this so, but also because it is the fruit of
His Spirit, that which comes out of the travail of His
Spirit, that which answers most deeply to His innermost
being. It is a wonderful thing. That is how God views the
Church. He does not view us as we are in ourselves, but
He views us as we are in Christ and will be in eternity.
A marvellous thing!
One most
astonishing illustration or foreshadowing of that is in
the case of the compelled utterance of Balaam over
Israel, where Balaam was not allowed to speak his own
words, but compelled to speak God's words; when under
compulsion which he could not resist, as he looked from
the mountain across the valley where Jacob was spread
abroad, he said, "He hath not beheld iniquity in
Jacob". Look at Jacob, look at the life in the
wilderness, look at the rebellion, the murmuring, the
turning back in heart to Egypt, the unfaithfulness, and,
in face of all that, this astonishing statement right
from the very heart of God forced through the reluctant
lips of an unfaithful prophet: "He hath not beheld
iniquity in Jacob." What grace!
So the
Lord looks upon His Church as the fruit of grace, as the
fruit of His travail, and the Church somehow answers to
His heart in a way that is difficult for us to express.
"Christ loved the church." He loved, and loves
the Church, because, in some mysterious way, in the
Church He gets what His heart desires. May we be inspired
more deeply with the desire that He should have it in us.
There, you see, is the placing of Joseph with the father.
The Outworking of True Vision
Then
what follows? Suffering, rejection, humiliation! But this
is not a contradiction of what we have just said, not a
denial of the father's love. That the Lord Jesus went the
way of the Cross was no argument against the love of God
for Him. Not at all! Why did Joseph suffer? How did
Joseph suffer? Well he was hated of his brethren to begin
with. He suffered their hatred. Why? Well, there are two
sides to that. On the one hand, he suffered because they
were carnal; on the other hand, because he stood against
that which he perceived to be the way of grief and
dishonour to his father. This is a difficult thing to say
without incurring misunderstanding: nevertheless it is a
true position. That which really goes on according to the
law of the Spirit of life, and in which that law is
operating, will have spiritual discernment in respect of
carnality in even the Lord's children, the Father's
family, and, because it has such discernment, will
inevitably come to a place where it cannot accept that,
but has to repudiate it, has to stand against carnality
in the people of God; and immediately you do that, you
are ostracized, you are regarded as thinking yourself
superior. You are cut off and put out; you are rejected;
you are made the object of sneer and reproach; you come
into suffering. Carnality hates to be exposed. Well, that
is why Joseph suffered, and that is the way of suffering.
It is standing for God's best, which ever means standing
against that which is less than God's best.
Then,
you see, there was this further thing with Joseph. His
aspirations were too high. His heart was set upon a
throne. He dreamed dreams about a reigning life. These
principles are wrapped up in a very human story. The Lord
is not one to give Himself to painting artificial
pictures. Were we writing this for the sake of bringing
out spiritual principles, we should write it very
differently. The Lord, for His part, tells the story in
very human terms, and He just lets us have all the
details of the unfortunate way in which Joseph went to
work with his brethren. But, nevertheless, hidden behind
this very human story, in which all the defects of this
one are seen even while he is standing for the highest
thing; hidden behind the human story are principles.
Behind those dreams and the telling thereof, there is a
principle. The throne is in view as God's intention and
purpose for those who will go all the way for Him. The
throne is God's destiny for that life which has come out
from Himself. It must, if it has its way, come back to
its source: it must return to the One from whom it came.
The only thing that can come back to God is His own life,
that which is of Himself, nothing else. That life has
been given to bring us through the sanctifying process of
suffering to the throne. That is the destiny of that
life, and it was that principle that got Joseph into
trouble. Oh, this reigning life, this throne life, this
overcoming life, what hostility it provokes - You
evidently think you are going to be something special,
something better and higher than everyone else! In such
terms will men rail at you.
The Animosity of Satan to the Chosen
Vessel
I think
there is something deeper than that about it. If Joseph
was a type of Christ, and there is no doubt that he was,
he was destined, like Christ, to come to the throne. But
there is someone else who has aspired to that throne,
someone else who will make things impossible for the
aspirant to that throne, someone else who will stand at
nothing to make the life of those called to that throne a
life of suffering and agony. I think, lurking in the
shadows behind this whole scene, there was ever one who
saw what this was illustrating, what this was
prefiguring. I think Satan can always discern Christ
anywhere, even in a shadow, in a figure; and this was, in
a figure and a shadow, God intimating that there was One
who was coming to the throne most surely. Satan is
against that and he will use all carnal means to make
that impossible and to frustrate that: and here were
carnal brethren giving Satan just the ground that he
required to turn upon this one whose eyes were toward the
throne. His aspirations were too high for Satan. If the
Church has aspirations like that, according to God's
intended purpose, the Church will have a bad time at the
hand of Satan, not only directly but through carnal
Christians. The greatest obstacle and hindrance and cause
of suffering to those who are going right on with God
will be carnal Christians. You will suffer more at the
hands of the professing Church than you will at the hands
of the world, if you mean to go right on with God. This
is a suffering way, the way to the throne.
The Spiritual Preparation Wrought by
Suffering
But then,
you see, God was in the sufferings of Joseph. We see the
necessity of the suffering under the sovereign hand of
God, as being that which was to prepare him for the
throne. We reign if we suffer; but not because of the
mere fact of suffering, but because of what the
sufferings accomplish in us. The sufferings of Joseph
were effecting great things in preparing him for the
throne.
He had
to learn how to serve, because service is the mark of the
throne. When at length he came to the throne, it was to
serve his brethren. Let us not think of our eternal
destiny as being just a life of idle leisure. The glory
of it will be service. "His servants shall serve
him." He had to learn service and he learned it in a
hard school. Potiphar's house was the school in which
Joseph learned to be a servant. His was a very hard and
difficult school - a servant down there in the house of
an Egyptian; a child of a prince with God, the son of
Israel's heart, learning subjection in service in
Potiphar's house; emptied of everything in order that he
might learn how to reign and how to have fullness without
pride. Emptied to be filled; humiliated to be exalted;
serving in humiliation in order to serve in exaltation.
The sufferings were effecting something. I cannot go over
all the sufferings of Joseph, but there they are as the
way to the throne.
Joseph
represents, then, the true spiritual Church and its
destiny, which is, to reign with Christ: and in the
meantime its pathway to the reigning position is the
pathway of rejection, of suffering, of denial, of
humiliation, and that largely at the hands of the carnal
elements amongst the people of God, the unspiritual.
Well
now, what more can we say? We have reached the end when
we have reached the throne. We see the way of life, we
see the working out of life.
A True Foundation and its Issue
I think the last thing that I would say by
way of repetition and re-emphasis is just this, that, in
the first place, we have to make sure that we have
received Christ as the life and as our life. "The
free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our
Lord." To have received the gift and then, as we go
on, to remind ourselves of the exhortation "Lay hold
on eternal life"; for the whole thing is so grimly
and terribly withstood that at times it would be easy to
accept death. I mean that literally. There are times in
the life of the Lord's people when Satan offers them
death and makes them want to quit this scene, to accept
an end of everything, to say, It is all finished! and to
begin to ask the Lord to take them out of things
altogether because they have come to a place of despair.
Sometimes you get there. I do not know whether you
understand what I am saying: Satan stands at nothing. He
gets them under depression and wants them to accept
death. Thus, again and again we have to lay hold on life
by an act of faith, and as our attitude is one toward
life, one which lays hold on life, one which responds to
the law of life, one which goes on with that which is
bound up with that life, that life will bring us through
all its successive stages of development. That very life
in us, which Christ is in us, will prove not only the
hope of glory, but the realization of glory in the
throne. There is that in you and me which is destined to
bring us to the throne if we will let it.
May the
Lord teach us how to comply with the law of the Spirit of
life in Christ Jesus.