27 February 1957, at Kaohsiung,
Taiwan.
As we are going to continue this evening
where we left off last night, I think I had better just go back a
little way over the ground we have covered. We saw last night that
Jesus seems to have been following the pattern of Israel. The
people of Israel as a nation were the seed of Abraham. Jesus said
to a leading member of the Jewish nation, "You must be born
again". In saying that, He seemed to be setting aside the seed of
Abraham and introducing another seed. That is the only conclusion
to which the Jewish rulers could come. They would say, "He is not
accepting us as the seed of Abraham! He does not recognize us; and
He said that as the seed of Abraham we cannot enter into the
kingdom of God. He is saying we must be born again; that is, we
must become a different race."
So Jesus in the very first place seemed
to be introducing a new nation and, of course, He was. And then we
saw that Jesus chose twelve apostles. That was another idea taken
from Israel. There were the twelve sons of Jacob, there were the
twelve tribes of Israel and now Jesus chose twelve apostles. To
the Jews, He seemed to be taking away their number twelve and
transferring it to another people. He seemed to be building
another kingdom upon the principle of Israel, and of course, He
was!
Then He chose seventy and sent them out
and that was another idea in Israel. Moses chose seventy elders.
He gathered seventy men around him, and those seventy men were the
heads of the father's houses in Israel. And they came to Moses to
obtain the mind of Moses and then Moses sent them back to their
own places to make known his mind there, so that all the house of
Israel was governed by the seventy sent from Moses. Now Jesus had
taken over that idea. He had put Himself in the place of Moses and
He had chosen seventy to represent Him and to send them out to
speak about Him.
Well, that is almost as far as we got
last night. We are going a little further this evening, but before
we go further, I have some more to say about that.
Christ Always in View
The important thing for us to recognize
is that Jesus was not really imitating Israel, but what He was
really doing was showing that Israel was an imitation of Him!
Where would those ideas in Israel have come from? It was God who
chose Abraham. It was God who made Abraham the father of that
nation, it was God who made Israel the seed of Abraham. It was God
who arranged the whole matter of the twelve tribes of Israel. It
was God who gave words about choosing the seventy elders. All that
did not start with Israel; it started with God. All of these came
out of the mind of God and when you get into the mind of God, you
only find one thing. The mind of God is not centred upon a lot of
things, there is only one thought in the mind of God. God has
never done anything without His Son in view. So that when He chose
Abraham, He had His Son in view. When He chose the seed of Abraham
He had His Son, the Lord Jesus, in view. When He arranged the
nation of Israel into twelve tribes, He had His Son in view. We
shall see that more fully in a few minutes. And even when God
directed the choosing of the seventy elders, He still had His Son
in view.
God has never done anything without the
Lord Jesus in mind. So we have to say that Jesus was not imitating
Israel, but everything in Israel was an imitation of Christ. To
put that in another way, all those things in Israel were but a
passing illustration of the Lord Jesus in some way, they were
pictures of the Lord Jesus. But when Jesus comes, He is the
reality and not the picture. All those things were but earthly
figures, He is the heavenly reality. So let us look again for a
few moments at this matter of the Divine Seed.
The Divine Seed
We have seen that Israel after the flesh
was the seed of Abraham that was chosen of God's seed. The Lord
Jesus is God's Seed in a Divine way. What Abraham and his seed
were on the earth, the Lord Jesus is in heaven. He is God's Divine
Seed. He is the Son of God. Jesus did not begin in this world at
all. His home was not on this earth and how often He said, "I am
come down from heaven, I am not of this earth." His home was in
heaven. This Divine Seed does not belong to this world. Now,
Abraham was an illustration of that. God said unto Abraham, "Get
thee out of thy country and out of thy father's house into a land
that I will show thee." Now I expect some of you know the meaning
of the name "Hebrew". You do know that the Jews are called
Hebrews, and "Hebrew" simply means "the man from over there", that
is, the man from the other side of the river. There is a
suggestion in that. You see that the seed of Abraham were a people
from beyond; the people who do not belong here, but they come from
somewhere else.
Now this Divine Seed, Jesus Christ, does
not belong here. He is the true Hebrew who has come "from over
there". He said, "I came down from heaven." This is the spiritual
Seed of God. Now keep that in mind, because we are coming back to
it in a minute.
When Jesus was born here on this earth,
it was not the act of man, but the act of God. Let us go back to
Abraham. What was the word of God to Abraham? He said to Abraham,
"In Isaac shall thy seed be called" and what is the great truth
about Isaac? It is that Isaac was absolutely impossible in a
natural way. I need not stay with the details of that, but those
of you who know the Bible, you know that God made it impossible
for Isaac to be born naturally. When Isaac was born it was a
distinct act of God which was impossible for man. When Jesus was
born, it was God's act and not man's act. Now Jesus said to this
leading Israelite, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and
that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." Earlier in his
Gospel, John had said this: "He came unto His own and His own
received Him not. But to as many as received Him, to them gave He
the right to be sons of God which were born not of the will of the
flesh, nor of man, but of God." These children of God are born of
God and not of the flesh. They are the result of God's own act.
That is the great truth about the birth of the Lord Jesus. It was
something that God did and not man.
And then there is another thing about
Him. In His manhood there is always a mystery. There was something
about Him that other men could not understand. Jesus was always a
great problem and mystery to all other people. Around Him people
gathered with a lot of questions and especially the Jewish
leaders. They were always asking questions about Him. They said,
"Whence has this man this knowledge?" He had never been to school,
He had never been to college, He had none of the learning that
they had had and yet He knew a great deal more than all of them
put together. They were always trying to use their wonderful
intellect to get him into a corner. They gathered around Him and
then by putting certain questions to Him, they would say, "Now we
will get Him, now we have got Him into a corner!" and He just
walked clean out away from them. He has answered their questions
in such a way as to just leave them standing. They did not know
what to make of this Man, and in every other way, He was a
mystery.
There were three realms in which He was
known. God knew Him. He was known by His Father. His Father said,
"The Father loveth the Son and sheweth Him all things." The Father
knew who He was and angels knew who He was. More than once angels
came to minister to Him. Heaven is a great place and is quite a
big place, and here is one Man right down in the middle of
millions of people on this earth, but the angels knew exactly
where He was. They knew exactly what His needs were and they came
right there and ministered to Him. The angels knew who He was, and
demons knew who He was. "I know thee, whom thou art" they cried,
"The Holy One of God." All spiritual intelligence said they knew
whom He was, but man did not know Him. If on one occasion man did
recognize Him, as when Peter said, "Thou art the Christ, the Son
of the living God" Jesus said to him, "Flesh and blood have not
revealed that to thee, but My Father above." It requires an act of
God to recognize who Jesus is.
God's Children
Now, we know of course, that Jesus was
the Son of God in a special way. That is, in a way in which no one
else can ever be the Son of God. At the same time, we read of the
Seed of Christ. We read it last night in Isaiah 53:11, "He shall
see His seed, He shall see of the travail of His soul and be
satisfied." I want to make this perfectly clear: when I speak
about the children of God, when I speak about the Seed of Christ,
I am not meaning that we become what He was in that particular
kind of sonship. There is a sense in which He is the only begotten
of the Father. He stands alone in that position. But if we
understand that, we are able to go on to this other aspect: Jesus
has spiritual children. There is a phrase in the prophecy of
Isaiah which was transferred to the Lord Jesus. You have it in the
beginning of the letter to the Hebrews. It is this: "I and the
children whom God has given Me". So Jesus had spiritual children.
That is the meaning of these words, "He shall see His seed... He
shall see of the travail of His soul."
Now, when we have seen that, we can come
over from Him to His children and we have not got to go very far
to find them. They are in this hall tonight. I hope it can be said
of everyone here that he or she is of this family of the Lord
Jesus. If that is true, those things which are true of the Lord
Jesus, are true of us. We said that He came down from heaven; if
we are truly children of God, we have been born from above. Our
real home is in heaven, our names are in the Lamb's Book of Life
which is in heaven. The Apostle said that our citizenship is in
heaven. The first thing about us is that same truth of Jesus:
that we do not belong here, we have come from above. Now, how do
you feel about that? Because that is a very real test as to
whether you are a child of God, as to whether you are of this Seed
of the Lord Jesus. Do you realise inside of yourselves that you
belong somewhere else, that you do not belong to this world?
Something has happened inside of you which has related you to
heaven, and heavenly things are the things which suit you best.
Now, we are out here in China, and one
thing we are constantly made to realise is this: that your Chinese
food is not the food that agrees with us best! And dear friends
have been providing us with European food, but some of you
brothers have been coming to our meals and we have been sorry for
you trying to eat with a knife and
fork instead of with chopsticks and I am quite sure you are not at
home with all this. This is not what we are used to. You see the
point of the illustration. The things that belong to the country
in which you were born are the things which suit you best and you
cannot enjoy the food of another country as you do that of
your own country. Here is a simple test as to where you belong
spiritually. If you have been born from above, it is heavenly food
that suits you best. That which this world feeds upon just does
not suit you. You are as miserable with it as a Chinese is with
European food.
Now, if you belong to heaven, it is
heavenly food that suits you and it is what you need. I could
enlarge that principle in many ways. There are many ways in which
we can test where we belong. But a true child of God knows quite
well that he or she does not belong to this world. They belong
somewhere else. This is not their native land. Their hearts are
always going above. The Apostle puts that in a very definite way,
he said, "If ye be risen with Christ, set your affections on
things above where Christ is; for ye died and your life is hid
with Christ in God. Set not your affections on things beneath, but
on the things which are above." A true child of God always does
that and I am quite sure many of you understand that.
You see, this is one thing which was
true of the Lord Jesus and is true of all His Seed. I said that
the birth of the Lord Jesus into this world was God's act. Man had
nothing to do with it. That Holy Thing was born of the Holy
Spirit. That is the statement of the Scripture. Now, in our own
way, this is true of the children of God. If we are children of
God it is because God has done something that no man could ever
do.
I said with regard to Abraham that God
had deliberately made it impossible for Isaac to be born. So that
Isaac should be God's work, and no one else's. That is a principle
which is carried over to Christian life. How many of you, before
you were born again, did try in every way to become a different
person? I think you would never have come to the Lord Jesus if you
had found that you could be that different person! You tried in
every way to make yourself different and perhaps many times you
said, "Now, I am going to change my behavior. I am going to stop
doing this thing and I am going to do the right thing." Well, how
did you get on? You tried to change yourself and you found that it
was impossible. Perhaps you tried to get other people to help you
to change yourself, perhaps you began to go to church. You might
have asked other people to help you, but it didn't do what you
wanted, and no one could do it for you. There was nothing that
could make you the different person that you wanted to be. You
see, God was making it impossible for you or anybody else to do
that, except Himself.
If we are true children of God, we are
the result of something that only God can do. Every Christian
ought to be able to say that I tried in vain a thousand ways. I
did everything that I could to make myself a new man or a new
woman, but I found that it was impossible. And then I came to the
Lord Jesus and God did it. This is something that only God can do
and that is what every Christian ought to be: the result of a work
that only God can do and that was true of the Lord Jesus and it
has to be true of us.
There might be in this place tonight
someone who does not know the Lord Jesus. Let me stop here to say
a word to you. Perhaps you are one of the people trying to make
yourself better; perhaps you are trying to get other people to be
better. Let me say first of all that it will never work; for it is
only God who can do it, but then let me add this at once: God
has done it thousands of times in thousands of cases. He has done
it in most of the people here tonight. He can do it for you and He
will do it for you. Only God can do it, but that is the very thing
that He wants to do.
God's Mystery
And then there was a third thing that we
said about the Lord Jesus. He was a mystery to all other people. I
wonder if you realise how true that is of you if you are a child
of God. I think we realise that that is true. The people of the
world look at us and they look at us as though we were people from
another world. They just don't understand us and they cannot make
us out. That ought to be true of every one of us. Jesus in His
great prayer for His disciples said this, "They are not of this
world even as I am not of this world. I have given them Thy words
and the world has hated them because they are not of the world."
The world cannot understand the true children of God. There is
something mysterious about such, and what we said about the Lord
Jesus is true of the children of God in this respect.
If you are one of the children of God,
how are others going to be able to understand you? They will only
understand you when they receive the same Spirit as the Lord has
given to you. You see, Peter said, "Thou art the Christ, the Son
of the living God." And Jesus said, "Blessed art thou for flesh
and blood have not revealed this to thee, but My Father in
heaven." That meant that just at that moment, the Spirit of God
had shown Peter who Jesus was. Just at that moment, Peter had
received the touch of the Spirit of God and he understood who
Jesus was. We only understand one another when we have received
the same Spirit. We do understand one another because we have the
same Spirit. This is one of the wonderful things about Christians.
You see, we don't understand one
another's earthly language. There are a lot of things about us
that people on this earth cannot understand about one another. I
don't understand your Chinese way of life and I expect you don't
understand our European way of life. Here we are and we don't
understand one another's language, but there is a way in which we
do understand one another, there is a language which we all speak
and understand, and it is the language of the Spirit. We
understand one another because we all have the same Spirit. The
world has not received the Spirit, therefore it doesn't understand
the children of God.
Government and Authority
Now we go on to this matter of the
twelve apostles. Last night we pointed out that the number twelve
in the Bible means government. It is the number of government. The
nation of Israel was made up of twelve tribes and the nation of
Israel was intended by God to govern all the nations of this
world. The number twelve is the number of government. You may like
to look at that number in the many places that it occurs in the
Bible. You will see that it always referred to government.
Now let us look at the Lord Jesus. He
has constructed His new kingdom upon the principle of spiritual
government. Jesus had an authority which was greater than the
authority of this world. He had spiritual authority. You remember
what the people said about Him, they said, "He spake as one having
authority..." and not as their scribes, and yet the scribe was
supposed to be the authority in Israel. If anybody wanted to know
what the Lord said, they went to the scribes. If anybody wanted to
know what the last word on any matter was, they went to the
scribes. The scribes were the seed of authority in Israel, but the
people said about Jesus: "He spake as one having authority and not
as a scribe." They recognized in Jesus an authority which was
superior to the authority of this world.
What was the nature of the authority of
Jesus? The authority of Jesus was that He had a knowledge which
was personal and first hand.
His was not a knowledge that He had got from the schools or books.
Jesus knew in Himself. He never had to say, "Now, So-and-so said..."
He said, "I say unto you." He knew the Father in a personal way.
Everything that He knew, He knew in His own heart. That is the
kind of knowledge that gives authority. If you and I can say, "Now
look here, I never got this out of any books, I never got this
from other people. God showed me this Himself. God has made me to
know this in my own heart" then that puts you in a position of
real authority.
Let us take a simple illustration from
the New Testament. Here is a poor man who was born blind. You have
the story in the ninth chapter of John. This man is brought into
touch with Jesus and Jesus gives him his sight. Then all the
important people in Israel gathered around. Mark you, these are
the people who claim to have authority; these are the people who
think they know everything. They begin to ask questions. They
cannot explain this at all and they are completely at a loss to
know what to do with this matter. Mark you, they are the people
who were supposed to know, and here in the presence of this
miracle it is quite clear that they do not know. With all their
knowledge, they were in a position of absolute weakness and
defeat. Here is this poor man, he could never have been to school,
he could never have read anything; probably he knew very little or
nothing in this world and certainly no one would look upon him as
an authority on anything. But listen to what he said, "There are
many things that I do not know and that I do not understand, but
there is one thing that I do know, whereas I was blind, now I can
see!" I want to say that that man was possibly in a way higher
than all those people that were around him. All their wonderful
intellectual knowledge could not help them in this situation and
right in the midst is a man who said, "I know! And if you ask me
how I know, I can't explain it, but I know. The fact is I was
blind, now I see." I suggest to you dear friends, that that is the
best kind of authority. It put that man in a very much stronger
position than all those around him.
We are dealing with the number twelve
which means spiritual government. There are many things that I do
not know, there are many things that I cannot explain, but one
thing I know is that the Lord has given me new eyes and I can see
now what I never saw before. That is spiritual authority. You see,
that authority makes the wisdom of this world very foolish.
I will just say one other thing before I
close. It is another side of this authority; the authority which
makes this world just serve the Lord Jesus. When He rose from the
dead and He met His disciples, He said, "All authority has been
given unto Me in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go ye into all
the world and lo, I am with you all the days." Now just see the
point: "All authority is Mine: for that reason, you can go all
over the world and I, with all the authority of heaven and earth,
shall be with you." Did that prove to be true? I ask you to read
the Book of the Acts; we have that whole book in the Bible which
is devoted to this one thing. It is the book which showed that
Jesus has all authority in heaven and on earth. I cannot take you
through that book, but you can read it and you can see how Jesus
was making this very world serve His purpose.
This world set itself against Him and
His people, intending to stop the spread of the gospel. It threw
His apostles into prison, it killed some of them, it persecuted
the whole church, but what was happening? Jesus was using all that
to further the gospel. Here is the company of believers in
Jerusalem. It had become a large company of thousands. So that the
devil said, "We will destroy them." And there arose a great
persecution, then they were scattered abroad and because of
persecution they spread the gospel. Satan said, "I will stop
them!" and Jesus said, "I will use your very work to go on." That
has been happening again and again. Jesus is making the work of
Satan serve His kingdom. Jesus used the persecution of this world
for the furthering of His gospel.
The Apostle Paul told us that this had
happened in his case. He suffered many persecutions, he suffered
stripes and imprisonment, he was hated by this world, but he just
wrote this: "I will have you know that the things that befell me
have only been for the furthering of the spread of the gospel."
Now he has brought us to this authority. The history of the church
is just that. The history of the Christian life is just that.
Satan is against us and he causes us much suffering because we
belong to the Lord Jesus. The world is against us and we have many
difficulties because the world is against us, but what is it doing
to us? Instead of killing us spiritually, it is only increasing us
in our spiritual life; instead of driving us from the Lord, it is
driving us nearer to the Lord. All this is the growing of the
character of Jesus in us.
Jesus is using our suffering for His
furtherance of His work and for our spiritual increase. We are in
the authority of Jesus and He has said to us, "In the world you
shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the
world. Because I have overcome, ye shall overcome also." So we see
in the Lord Jesus that there is this spiritual side to the thing.
This is the real thing. What was in Israel was only an
illustration. What is in the Lord Jesus is the real thing. The one
thing that you and I ought to be able to say if we are children of
God is that it is a very real thing. This life with the Lord Jesus
is far more real than anything else. This is not a theory, this is
not a doctrine, it is a great reality.
May the Lord give us understanding in all this.