We are now to consider the forty days, to which we
have already referred, the forty days after Christ's
resurrection. In these we have a concrete setting forth of
all that we have already said; that is, as to that which is
spiritual and outside of this world as such. In His
movements during the forty days, Christ set forth the
meaning of spirituality, and the advent of the Holy Spirit
established the Apostles and the Church upon that basis.
It is important to recognise the connection between the
two, that in the forty days the Lord Jesus was setting
forth something, and the coming of the Holy Spirit was
to establish the Apostles and the Church upon the basis
of that. If we ask what that was, and is,
comprehensively, we shall say it is a matter of how
Christ is present and how Christ is known in this
dispensation. "Forty" represents for us a phase of
spiritual life which has to do with our education, as to the
reality of the Lord's presence.
The New Order of Faith
In the narrative in the first chapter of the book of the
Acts there is an upward movement of the Lord, and
then a cloud intervening. That is the first thing. The
intervening of that cloud when the Lord has been
received up represents and constitutes an entirely new
order. It is the order of faith, but faith which has as its
background all that the forty days have contained. That
is very simple to grasp.
You will call to mind the appearances and the
disappearances, the taking of the disciples by surprise
again and again in various places, at considerable
distances apart, with remarkable proofs that they were
having to do, not with a disembodied spirit, not just an
apparition,
but a living Person, Himself. We recognise that it was all
with a definite object. This was no mere playtime with the
Lord; He was not playing tricks upon them. There was a
solid, serious object in His movements, in His activities, in
His appearances and their manner through forty days.
Having all that as the background, then in their presence
He ascends up into heaven and a cloud intervenes. The
Holy Spirit does not use words just for artistic effect, He
uses words with meaning; and if the Holy Spirit thinks it
worth while to put that little phrase in, He is not just
painting a pretty picture, and saying, There was a cloud.
He is saying something more than that, with spiritual
meaning. He is saying that now the order which has been
reached is an order, not of sight, but of faith. That cloud
speaks of a new order which has been introduced, the
law of faith as the governing principle of the dispensation.
Upon what ground? Upon all that the forty days have
held; faith that believes that what has happened through
the forty days is so real, is so true, is so solid that they
can go forward on that basis; that, although they do not
see Him, although a cloud has intervened, He is just as
truly present and can be just as truly known now for the
future as He has been during that time. That is what He
was seeking to constitute during that period.
This cloud, bringing in the order of faith, was intended
to bring them to the place where the order of the forty
days became the normal order of their lives, the normal
conditions of things.
The Presence and Knowledge of the Risen Lord
Were we to use our imagination (and I think it is
permissible sometimes in these connections)
to try to put ourselves into the place of these apostles,
how should we come back to the upper room.
Remember the apostles had been in that upper room
not so very long before with Him in the breaking of
bread, in the Passover. He was there, and they saw Him.
One of them was in such close touch with Him as to lean
upon Him. They heard Him; there is no mistake about it; He was there on that Passover night. Now all these
strange things have happened, the Cross, the
resurrection, the forty days, and they come back to that
same room. How do they come back? What are their
feelings?
Now, you may have been with a beloved friend on the
earth on a memorable occasion, when things were said
and transacted between you which were outstanding in
their nature, particularly impressive and significant. That
friend maybe has since died, a short time elapsed, and
that friend is no more with you in that way. You go back
into the room for the first time after the departure and
what is your feeling? Your feeling is that a death has
taken place; there is a gap. Memory floods everything
with what took place then, but the friend is no more; all
that has gone, and a great sense of loss, of pain, of
sorrow falls upon you; something of a tragic atmosphere is
in that place. That is how it is naturally.
These disciples went back. How did they feel? Did
they after all this go back into that room feeling as though
a death had taken place, a friend had gone, the world
was empty, everything was unreal, life was hollow?
No, not in the least. They went back into that upper
room conscious that He had gone, but that He might be
there at any moment. He had gone, and yet He had not
gone. He had died, but He was alive. They had lost Him,
and yet they had Him. The effect of the forty days was to
make them know that He was as much with them as
ever. That was what the Lord was after, to create that
state with them that, although He had died He was alive,
and although He had ceased to speak in audible voice
they could know Him, and could go on knowing Him.
They did not come back into that upper room like men
who had lost their Master, but as those who were going
on with Him; it was not that He had ceased working, but
He was going on working; not ceased speaking, but was
going on speaking. We find them again in the upper room
as in the presence of the Lord. He has brought them to
that position by the forty days.
You see the object, and you see faith's basis for the
dispensation; it is the nature of the Lord's presence, and
how He can be known. That is spirituality. Upon that
basis the Holy Spirit came to establish the Church; and if
you and I, or any company of the Lord's people, really
do come under the government of the Holy Spirit, that
will be an upper room in the full sense of what is here;
that is, the realisation of the Lord's presence and the
Lord making Himself known to us. That is very simple,
but that is the basis of spirituality, the nature of spirituality
at the outset. It is that which constitutes the Church, and
makes the Church spiritual. The spiritual nature of the
Church is consequent upon the Lord's living presence,
and the Lord making Himself known.
He made Himself known to them; He appeared unto
them by the space of forty days. Having had that laid
down in the forty days there comes the departure, and
the cloud intervenes, and they see Him no more.
Subsequently the Holy Spirit comes, and upon the basis
of the forty days, as to what those forty days mean of
the Lord's own living presence and the Lord's
continuous making of Himself known, the Church is
established. You can see the truth of that in the New
Testament, and at all times since, when the Holy Spirit
has something entirely under His hand. The Lord is
there, and there is a continuation of the making of
Himself known.
Adjustment to the Risen Lord as Man in the
Throne of Heaven
Now we shall simply take fragments of the chapter.
"And while they looked stedfastly toward heaven
as he went up, behold, two men stood by them
in white apparel; which also said, Ye men of
Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?
this same Jesus which is taken up from you
into
heaven..."
"Ye men of Galilee..."; "Two men... in white apparel".
Again, the Holy Spirit makes no mistake over words.
The Holy Spirit could have said two angels, but He did
not; the Holy Spirit said, "Ye men of Galilee..." and
then, "Two men... in white apparel". You have the
earthly men and the heavenly men, and the earthly men
are put right by the heavenly men,
or the heavenly men adjust the earthly men to heavenly
realities. "Ye men of Galilee". Now, to be called
Galileans was a term of reproach, it was something used
to signify contempt. There was something in the mind of
others about the Galileans which regarded them as
somewhat inferior. So that here we have earthly
reproach and heavenly glory brought together by
heavenly government. Here there are two men who
were really angels: "Are they not all ministering spirits,
sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of
salvation?" (Heb. 1:14). That is government, the
administration of heavenly things.
By these two men the heavenly government has
come in to put right what is here amongst men of the
earth, and the heavenly glory has come in to adjust men
of earthly reproach to itself. The Scriptural meaning of
two is testimony - "In the mouth of two witnesses"; "He sent them forth two by two". Wherever you find
two you will find the Lord's minimum as to testimony,
but the Lord's sufficiency for testimony.
Now let us consider what we have in these fragments.
Two men from heaven are putting things right with the
men who are to come under the power of the Holy Spirit
to be heavenly men. They are being adjusted to heavenly
realities,
so
as to become spiritual men. They stand
stedfastly gazing up into heaven. What is their mind?
What is in their faces? Perhaps it is a big question that is
surging through their hearts, all sorts of emotions, hopes,
fears: 'He is going'; 'We are losing Him'; 'We are being left'. It is as though
that cloud were, after all, going to make the great divide between Christ in
heaven and Christ on earth. The words of the two men must be taken as answering
what was going on in them at that moment, as being an answer to their gaze and
to what was behind their gaze in their hearts, "...why stand ye
gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus..." The two men did not say, That Jesus
that was, but - This Jesus that
still
is. In effect they said:
'He is just the same; though received up from you He is
still Jesus'. Thus the disciples were adjusted by these
heavenly men to the fact that this Jesus is alive in
heaven, and that they must from this time go back (for
this is clearly what they concluded from the words of the
two men) and proceed on the basis that Jesus is not
changed, but is
still
Jesus in heaven; He is coming back
again, but He is still Jesus in heaven.
You may think this is pressing things and analysing
very finely, but there is a good deal more in the
background than there is time to indicate.
The Instrument and Character of Testimony
Mark the fact that from the moment the Holy Spirit
thrust them out into testimony you have these two
features, that the Holy Ghost constituted two men
again and again the instrument of testimony, and their
testimony ever and always was 'Jesus of Nazareth, whom God raised and exalted to His own right hand'.
Where did they get that? How was it that the Lord
ever saw to it that two of them represented His order? Paul and Barnabas were sent out together, and when
there came a break-down, then Paul and someone
else. The Lord sought to maintain a minimum of two
for the testimony, and the testimony was always Jesus
of Nazareth; not that was, but that is: "...Jesus, whom
ye slew, and hanged upon a tree. Him hath God
exalted with his own right hand..." That was
established by the two men from heaven. "This Jesus" - He is alive and He is in heaven exalted. Two men
brought them into line with a heavenly testimony to the
fact of the risen life and heavenly exaltation of Jesus of
Nazareth for the dispensation.
This governs the dispensation. In two there
is
testimony, and the testimony is to the fact that Jesus
is
glorified at God's right hand. Now the Holy Spirit comes
and constitutes the Church, and the believer, upon that
basis, so that the Church and the believer become the
embodiment of that truth, that Jesus is alive; not
something merely to be announced as an objective fact,
but to be represented in a vessel. 'How do you know
He is alive? You have never seen Him'. 'It is by faith'.
'Oh, well, faith is surely an abstract thing; how do you
prove it?' 'I am the embodiment of the fact'. 'Oh, that is
egotism, that is setting yourself up to be something'. 'All
right, I will live here on that basis, and we shall see'.
The Lord will deal with you on that basis. He will break
your natural life, He will break natural resources, bring
them to an end, wind up natural knowledge and wisdom,
until there is nothing left; and then He will do things on a
basis which can take the strain, which can produce that
work. That is the testimony, that Jesus is embodied in the
believer and in the Church. That is God's
thought for His Church. What a long way the
Church has departed from that. The Church
was intended to be the testimony of Jesus
embodied, worked out. It was like that at the
beginning. God chose such as in themselves
could not stand up to this world's wisdom,
this world's power. They in themselves were
altogether at a discount, and should they have
had a history in this world, such as that of Saul
of Tarsus, which made them something amongst
men, the Lord when He got hold of them took
all that from them, and brought them to the
place where they despaired of life, and had the
sentence of death in themselves, that they should
not trust in themselves, but in God who raiseth
the dead. He did it again, and again; and they
were the testimony, the very embodiment of
that testimony.
You see the departure. You see what God must have.
That is spirituality. Spirituality is not being occupied with
the high truths, advanced teaching. Spirituality is, by the
Holy Spirit, the embodiment of Christ risen, and Christ
glorified. Meet that, and you meet the indestructible.
That is what the Lord has His heart set upon in this
dispensation. In ourselves we are nothing, and less than
nothing. The Lord is breaking down, grinding to powder,
emptying out, confounding us in our wisdom; we are
coming to the place where all that does not avail, and we
cannot proceed upon that basis. We try, and we cannot
go on with it; we are at an end. Then the Lord is all the
time coming in, being
our life, our wisdom, but a wisdom which does not take
shape in our brains, in such a way that we understand it,
comprehend it. It is simply a working, and by the result
you know that it is the wisdom of God. You cannot see
how the Lord is doing it; you cannot understand the ways
of the Lord even in yourself and through others, but in the
end there are such results as prove that that was God and
not you. How some of us have cried to the Lord to give
us ability in certain directions; for administrative purposes, for example, and we found ourselves totally
incapable of doing the Lord's work on the old basis of
organisation, decision, judgment. All we have been able
to do has been just to do what the Lord told us to do
next, not knowing why He told us to do that. We went
out not knowing whither we went, on that particular
move, but we knew the Lord had indicated that way.
What was the issue? Simply that we could
never have accomplished that by our wit and wisdom,
but it was something which bore the stamp of God, and
it will stand for eternity. It is a wisdom that is not of this
world, not of ourselves.
We have simply lighted upon that point to indicate
what we mean. This thing is comprehensive, it has
many aspects. Two men from heaven adjust the other
men of earth to heaven.
The Understanding and Establishment of the Heavenly Relationships and Laws
Now see the outworking. The immediate result was
that they acted with understanding. They returned to
Jerusalem and went to the upper room and continued in
prayer. They had perception of what they ought to do.
Did they prove right? They certainly did. They were acting now under heavenly
government in relation to heavenly movements. It was there that the Holy Spirit
found them. It was there that the Holy Spirit lighted upon them, and commenced the new dispensation. They
were in the right place for the Holy Spirit. They were
moving with an understanding of how they ought to
move, of what the next step was. That is spirituality in
intelligence.
"Two men stood by them in white apparel".
Stood by! Again, we need not feel that we are
exaggerating words and phrases if we recognise that
there is a value in that very small clause. Take up the
occurrences of that phrase "stood by". For instance,
look at it in 2 Tim. 4:17. "Notwithstanding the Lord
stood by me, and strengthened me..." What was the
standing by for? It was to support whoever was concerned in a new position. They had come into a strange
position, something altogether new;
they had never been
in that position before; they had no history along that line;
nothing to fall back upon, no experience to appeal to.
The book of the Acts is a
book of spiritual principles, and the Lord shows in remarkable, supernatural,
extraordinary ways that those disciples are established. It is unnecessary
throughout the dispensation for the Lord to associate with
the principles the same demonstrations. He has done that at
the beginning for the establishment of those principles. For instance, there is
a
principle
violated by Ananias and Sapphira.
That principle is the absolute sovereignty of
the Holy Spirit in the Church. Because of the violation of that principle when
it is first laid
down, the Lord brings alongside of the laying down of
the principle a most conspicuous establishment of it, and
Ananias and Sapphira are slain. Many men and women
have done exactly the same thing through this
dispensation, and have never been smitten in the same
way, never died on the spot. Does that mean that the
principle is weakened with God, that He has changed
His attitude toward it? Not at all. You can never violate
a principle without suffering in the realm of your spiritual
life, and most likely in your physical life. Paul refers to
this in his letter to the Corinthians: "For this cause many
are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep".
People were in bodily sickness, and there were deaths
taking place at Corinth, resultant from the violation of a
spiritual principle. We can take it that, whether instantly
we violate the principle the Lord steps in with judgment
and smites, or whether He stands back in patience, His
attitude toward the principle is exactly the same.
Take another example. The accompaniment of the
Holy Spirit being given was the gift of tongues. It was
the establishment of a principle. That does not mean that
right through the dispensation the presence of the Holy
Spirit must invariably be accompanied by tongues. The
Lord gave what was phenomenal to establish His
principle: that the presence of the Holy Spirit means that
you are lifted above the level of nature, that you are put
into a new realm where you have new capacities,
powers for doing what you cannot do by nature. If, for
instance, it is the gift of a heavenly tongue, understood
by men of all different tongues on the earth, what does it
suggest? It suggests that when we reach the end of
God's work in a new creation we shall all speak one
tongue, and shall all understand one another; or, to put
it the other way, the curse which fell upon men through
sin, the consequence of which
is
division, and confusion,
will have gone for ever. This is the earnest of the Spirit.
The Lord has established that principle at the beginning
by extraordinary associations, to show that He lays
down that principle most definitely. We are not to look
always for the association every time, but we are to
recognise the law and see that we do not violate the
principle that is in view at that point.
We have somewhat diverged in order to illustrate
that the Lord, represented in these two men, stood by
to establish something that
was quite fresh, to support in a new position. These two
men came alongside to get these disciples established on
a heavenly basis, the basis of Christ alive and exalted.
These two men said: "This Jesus". Why did they not
say, This Lord, This Son of God? They could have said
that with absolute truth. Again, the Holy Spirit describes
the two messengers as two men, not two angels, not two
celestial beings. That might have been said quite truly. Do
you see the basis? It is setting forth so clearly the fact
that God has instituted and constituted for the
dispensation a Man in the glory as the Head of a new
race, and it is our union with Him as the Man in the glory
which is the order of this dispensation. God has a new
Man, and He is bringing men into conformity to that new
Man. That Man is God; but He is Man.
The dispensation is to get men adjusted to the Man,
and so two men come from heaven to adjust men of the
earth to a Man in heaven. The Holy Spirit has come to
constitute men of earth according to the Man in heaven;
to bring men of earth under the government of the Man in
heaven, and to make men of earth like the Man in
heaven. The Apostle Paul brings that out clearly in his
letters. His whole object is to present every man perfect
in Christ. Christ in heaven is governing, but not in an
official sense. His government is spiritual, and when you
and I say that we are being governed by spiritual
considerations, it is in that same sense that Christ is
governing. He
is
the perfect expression of God's thought;
therefore that perfect expression of God's thought has to
govern us. What is God's thought? It is not an abstract
thing in our mentality. God's thought is a Person. What is
God's will? God's will is a Person. Look at the Lord
Jesus and you see God's mind to the full, God's will to
the full, perfect. To be constituted according to Christ is
to be constituted according to God's thought and God's
will; and the Holy Spirit is not bringing truths to us, He is
bringing Christ to us, and bringing us under Christ; conforming us in a spiritual way to that Man who is the
full expression of the thought of God.
That is so for the individual believer, but in the full
sense it is for the Church, the one "new man", to come
to the full measure of the stature of a man in Christ.
God is after manhood as in Christ in glory taking
precedence over the manhood that is here. The
testimony is to a heavenly Man in men here, not in words, but in the
expression of that Man in heaven. He said, "Ye shall be
witnesses unto me". What is a witness? A witness is
not one who gives out information. Try that in any
court of law, and see if it will be accepted. If you are
called as a witness in a court of law and begin to give
information that you have received, you will very quickly
be told that it is no use telling what you have heard, you
must tell what you know, and that if you do not know,
and cannot tell what you know, you must give place. A
witness is one who is at first hand the embodiment of the
truth.
This is a testimony to the heavenly Man reaching from
the ascension to the return of the Lord, marking the
dispensation, and that is spirituality. The Holy Spirit has
come to constitute us according to Christ on the basis of
His resurrection and His heavenly life, so that there is expressed
by us the fact of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus by
means of His risen life in us. Spirituality is that you and I
are marked by the risen life of the Lord.
We have said that this is a crisis and a process. The
crisis is that of being born again; the process is that of
the increase of that life, and our coming more and more
to live by the risen life of the Lord, and less by our own;
and then, with that intelligence concerning Christ, the
knowledge of Christ growing. What a tremendous fulness there is in Christ in heaven! We shall ever go on
learning what Christ is as expressive of Divine thought in
a Man. Spirituality is to be progressively taking Christ as
to what He is according to God, and making Him our
life.