“It
is eleven days’ journey from Horeb by way of mount
Seir unto Kadesh-barnea” (Deut. 1:2).
“Thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy
God hath led thee these forty years in the
wilderness” (Deut. 8:2).
This
is not a new thought. We are familiar with both the fact
and the reason of the extension of what could have been
in eleven days to forty years, but that meaning and
significance has been pressing in on me somewhat more of
late, and I feel that so far as I am concerned any word
for this moment arises out of this. It is what we might
term the distance, not of space or geography, but the
distance of difference. If the Lord had been only
interested in getting a people to the point where they
gave Him some simple gesture of trust in His salvation
from the world, its master and its tyranny, its bondage
and its conditions, to become His people by desire, then
there is no reason at all why He should not have
transported them by the short route, the direct course,
and have landed them in eleven days in the place which He
had already chosen for them. The Lord could do that sort
of thing if it were all objective or outward. If today He
presented to us the values of the blood of His chosen
Lamb and called for that simple gesture of faith in that
blood which appropriates its efficacy, and we in our
hearts thereby signified that we desired to be the
Lord’s people; if that were all, then we could enter
tomorrow into everything that He had designed for us,
everything in His purpose, we could go straight in.
But
few, very few, there have been who have gone that way. It
has not, in the vast majority of cases, worked out like
that. There is a necessity which sets up a barrier of
impossibility. While the Lord would have it so, and has
provided for it to be so, the actual position is such
that it cannot be. The eleven days are extended to forty
years, and then — and then a death! No, it is not
the distance even of years of time or of measurement in
the natural sense. It is the distance of difference and
it is the measurement of the difference between Christ
and ourselves, and that is a lesson which it takes most
of us a very long time to learn — the greatness of
the expanse, the long, long way which lies between
ourselves as Christians and Christ, between the
“spirituality” (?) of the flesh and the
spirituality of the Spirit, between being Christians
after the flesh and Christians after the Spirit. That
lesson is a long one, a deep one, a painful one. Indeed,
it is a lifelong lesson. It takes a whole generation to
learn it, and when at last it is learnt, the wholehearted
acceptance of a necessity is made, and that necessity is
to die.
I mean
this, that in this way you and I come more and more to
the place where we feel it is necessary to die, that the
only thing for it is to die. You know what I mean by
that, not physically just to abandon everything, but that
we die out, what we are in ourselves, the self-life;
there is nothing for it but to die. The longing to die in
that sense grows.
Transplanting
this truth from the Old Testament to the New, you can see
it coming up in more than one connection. It came up with
the disciples while they were with the Lord, when He was
here in the flesh. They were His, they belonged to Him:
He said, “Ye did not choose me, but I chose
you” (John 15:16); they were His. But there is a
tremendous distance between them and Him, a distance
which it was impossible to bridge. Mentally there was the
distance of this great expanse between Him and them and
between them and Him. His whole thought, mind, ideas,
judgments, His entire mentality was different from theirs
and they could not follow Him. Disciples, yes, in an
outward way, but in a wilderness. They could not follow
Him in mind. He had to intimate some things and at once
their mentality revolted. Never! — was their
reaction. This shall never be! “Thou shalt never
wash my feet” (John 13:8). The mentality of
Christian disciples in relation to the Lord is: Never!
— only another way of saying: Impossible, it cannot
be. We cannot see it, we cannot conceive of such a thing,
it is altogether foreign to our idea of things! The
distance of difference in mind.
In
heart, they could not follow Him. Their desires were so
different, so far removed. In will it was just the same.
Their whole being was far removed, and although a crisis
came and a tremendous change took place with the Cross
and the resurrection and the coming of the Spirit, the
whole thing was not done then. Years afterwards, Paul has
to withstand Peter to the face (Gal. 2:11). You can see
there is room yet for approximation, even in the
innermost apostles; they are still on the journey, they
have not yet arrived, and with their latest breath they
will say, “Not that I have already obtained, or am
already made perfect; but I press on” (Phil. 3:12).
Again
the truth is seen in companies of the Lord’s people.
We think of the Corinthian company, not necessarily only
of those resident at Corinth, but all whom they
represent, a Corinthian kind. They were the Lord’s,
blessed with many blessings, having the Spirit, but oh,
what a gap between them and Christ! So much so, that Paul
himself in visiting them resolutely determined to keep
utterly to Christ and Him crucified, because of the
distance, accounting that to be the only thing that could
meet the situation.
And is
it not this very thing which arises again in connection
with the churches as we find them at the beginning of the
Revelation? Here is the Lord Himself presented to them,
first of all in that very full way with those symbolic
features, and then to each of the churches in a
particular way, and both in the general and the
particular it is a challenge. It is intended to be a
challenge, a challenge to this distance which lies
between them and Himself, this difference, the distance
which has come about because of difference, the
difference which has made a distance.
The Difference Between the Lord
and Ourselves as Christians
Well,
what does all this amount to, to what does it bring us? I
think it brings us to everything. We cannot touch
anything but what we find this applies to it. But the one
thing which perhaps will help us most now will be this
lesson that you and I have to learn, which the Lord is
trying to teach us and which we are bound to learn if we
are going on with the Lord, and which we shall not
escape, namely, the utter difference between the Lord
Jesus and ourselves even as Christians. Perhaps we have
thought that having reposed faith in the Lord Jesus, in
His redemptive work, His atoning blood, and having
declared ourselves for Him, that simply opens the way for
us to go right on straight away in full acceptance in
every sense, and that the next thing to do is to turn
outwards and begin to do everything and anything that we
can think of, that our minds and our wills and our
hearts, our emotions and our enthusiasms can possibly do
for Him, and we begin to do it.
Now I
do not want you to misunderstand what has just been said.
Acceptance in Christ is complete, is utter. In Christ we
are accepted from the beginning. But there is another
sense in which there is a vast amount that is not Christ
which is not accepted, never is accepted, and the lesson
of our lives is that of learning what is not accepted by
God even though we are in Christ, and it is a terrible,
grave mistake for us to think that, because we have
become Christians and now belong to the Lord, that
anything we may do, anything we can think of, anything
that rises as a generous impulse for the Lord within us,
and any plan that we can put into operation and any zeal
that we can exercise for the Lord, is acceptable. That is
a grave mistake.
To be
Christians after the Spirit is altogether a different
thing from being Christians after the flesh. It is this
Christianity after the flesh which has brought into being
a vast system of things on this earth today which is not
really serving the Lord, which is not really of vital
consequence in this world, which is but an outward formal
thing, which not only occupies the ground but is a menace
to the genuine, the true; for so many say of it, If that
is Christianity, I have no room for it! So the true is
rejected and refused because of the false thing which is
“Christian”.
No,
that which is after the Spirit is very different even
from Christianity after the flesh. This latter can carry
us a long way. We can have the very fullness of Christian
teaching and truth in words, we can go right on to the
fullest presentation of Christian doctrine and truth,
getting right into what might be called the deeper things
of the Word of God, and it may all amount to nothing more
than our own natural interest in spiritual things. It is
possible for us, for instance, to take up such a matter
as the Scriptural difference between soul and spirit and
to have a grasp of that as truth, as doctrine, and be
able to analyse and present the analysis of that
difference, and for it still to remain our natural mental
interest, a fascinating subject, something of interest,
and for the thing to be without the unction of the Spirit
to precipitate a crisis, to effect something of God. That
is only by way of illustration. We can preach the gospel
in the flesh and make it of none effect, said Paul,
because it is preached in the wisdom of words, in the
wisdom of men. (1 Cor. 1:17). The very thing preached is
nullified because of the source from which it comes, a
natural interest, a natural drawing to that kind of
thing, mystical Christianity; it does not get anywhere,
it goes round and round in the wilderness. That which is
of the Spirit creates a crisis, that which is of the
Spirit takes a direct course, a direct route. That which
is of the Spirit is a straight way.
Dear
friends, what is the Lord doing with us? That is what we
want to know. What is He doing with you and me, and with
those who are really in His hands? — Is He not doing
with us that which He has done with all who have come
completely under His hands, that is, leading in a way and
realm where human understanding and ability are
completely confounded and exhausted, where it is totally
impossible to cope mentally with His ways, or to explain
Him? We cannot see, we cannot understand; neither is it
in us to do, to achieve. We are learning that all our
resources are of no avail, and that everything depends
upon the Lord Himself; HIS wisdom, HIS
strength, HIS grace.
Well,
if it is your experience so far and at this time,
understand that it is quite right, it is not all a
mistake. True, it is very painful, it is testing. It is
testing up to that point where your feet have to touch
the very brink before you prove God. You have to come to
an utter end of one way and to a beginning which is a
beginning even to the point of lifting your feet to take
a step to prove God, for God to come in. You say that is
very utter. Yes, but it is this utterness of the
difference between the Lord and ourselves that we have to
learn, and that is going to set us over against the
colossus of false doctrine, of the iniquitous lie which
is being built upon this earth up to heaven, the lie of
humanism.
That
is the greatest lie that has been brought into this
universe, that it is in man to be his own saviour, that
it is in man to rise to perfection, it is in man to be
God. It is all in man, the roots are in himself. That is
Satan’s colossus of iniquitous untruth, and God is
working out the contradiction of that in a company, in
His church. It is being wrought, worked out, in the
unseen, and, while it is so difficult to accept it in the
day of suffering, weakness and darkness and inability to
understand, if we knew the truth, the probability is that
it is just this: God is doing with Satan in and through
the church what He did with Satan in and through Job,
answering his challenge and his lie. Here is a broken,
shattered, helpless little vessel of saints, bewildered,
stripped, thrown back upon their God, unable to do or to
understand, clinging to Him and seeking to prove Him, and
through that the greatest iniquity in this universe is
being assailed by God and answered.
The
lie! There never was a time when that lie has reached
greater proportion than it has today. Of course, it
represents the greatest enigma that confronts us, when
what is going on shouts at the top of its voice what kind
of creature man is after all, yet at the same time men
are pinning their faith to humanism as never before. But
in you and in me, poor broken ones, God has His answer,
and it does mean something to the Lord that we have been
emptied out to the last drop, thrown back upon Him, where
He is our wisdom, He is our strength, He is our life, He
is our very breath. That means something to Him.
The Otherness of Christ
To
return to the central issue of this whole matter, namely,
the great lesson of the vast expanse, the desert expanse,
which lies between Christians in themselves and Christ.
Karl Barth has coined for us a phrase which has gained a
great deal of strength and place, and it is a very useful
one — “the altogether other-ness of
Christ”. Oh, that goes much further than we realize,
certainly much further than most people are prepared to
believe. Even yet in evangelical Christianity there is a
clinging to the idea that we transfer every thing to
Christ and to Christianity when we are born again. We
transfer all our faculties and our powers over to the
interests of Christ and then, instead of using them for
ourselves and for the world, we use them for Christ. That
is the meaning of consecration, of surrender, as the
terms are used so largely today in evangelical
Christianity — the consecration of ourselves, our
gifts, our faculties, our everything, to the Lord and to
His service. But that falls short of something, and that
is the meaning of the forty years in the wilderness. If
that were all, then the eleven days would be enough. But
no, it is not. It is not the transference and the
consecration of everything that we are to the Lord to be
used straight away as it is over on His side, for His
interests instead of in the world. Christ is other yet,
Christ is still different yet from consecrated natural
life, oh, so other! Something has to happen, our entire
mentality has to be changed, transformed. The mind has to
be renewed, we have to have an altogether different kind
of outlook, even about the things of God. It is a
constitutional matter, not merely a directional one.
You
have heard this many times and I want to emphasize it, I
must emphasize it, because this is the meaning of the
Lord’s dealings with us, namely, to get a new
mentality, a new conception, another, not our old one
transferred, but another, and the distance, I said, is
not the distance of time or geography necessarily, it is
the distance of difference, and we make faster or slower
progress spiritually according to how we learn this
lesson. It need not be forty years, the Lord has not
fixed it at forty years; He never did. It need not be.
The Secret of Spiritual
Progress
What
is the secret of it? What is the secret of spiritual
progress? It is the letting go of our own will and mind
to the fact, to the truth, that after all, though
Christians at our best, wanting to be a hundred percent
for the Lord, it is not in us either to be or do. Our
will can never do it, our reason can never accomplish it,
our impulses and desires can never get us there. We have
to come to a brokenness and yieldedness where nature is
laid low in the dust and all our treasure is with the
stones of the brook and the Almighty becomes our treasure
(Job 22:24-25); the Lord alone our wisdom, our strength
and vision, our desire. Until you and I have learned the
lesson of that utter brokenness and yieldedness and
letting go to the Lord, spiritual progress is delayed.
You
look at all that came into the forty years in the
wilderness, and you will see it was but the working out
of that principle. The Lord was working to keep them
close to His Christ, to make His Christ the basis of
everything, but they wanted it in themselves, for
themselves, and so that generation never attained. The
strong word so often repeated in the New Testament about
that episode is that they could not, they could not enter
in — “So we see that they could not enter
in” (Heb. 3:19). Why could they not? It says,
because of unbelief. But what is the basis of unbelief?
Is it not desire to have it in ourselves, to see it, to
feel it, to know it, to have it according to our minds?
What is faith? Well, faith has nothing under its feet but
God, just God. It is the Lord.
May
the Lord just indicate the meaning of the word, show us
the great distance that lies between ourselves as
Christians and Christ, and give us a heart that yields to
the Spirit’s work in teaching that lesson and making
it good and bringing us more and more to the measure of
His Son.