The Ultimate Things
by
T. Austin-Sparks
Chapter 1 - The Blood
"I am God... declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient
times things that are not yet done" (Isaiah 46:9,10).
Note: I desire to make it clear that in all that is said in the
following there is no intention of assailing people as such;
setting any one nation over against another; nor descending to a
carnal level of warfare. The one object is to get behind people
and things to discover the spiritual factors which rule in and
produce "this darkness".
When our Lord, in His parable of the wheat and tares, represented
the owner of the field as saying "Let both grow together until the
harvest," He enunciated a principle which lies behind and governs
the entire history of this world since sin entered it. The principle
is this: as the time of the consummation approaches there will be a
steady but very definite process of intensification, by which the
opposing issues which have been largely undiscerned or misunderstood
will become pronounced and very clear. The parable also makes it
clear that, although God knows from the beginning and all along
which is the true and which is the false, He does not act on His own
personal knowledge and destroy the evil right away. Rather does He
require the process of intensification unto manifestation, so that
all intelligent beings see, firstly, the nature of all that has been
going on for so long, and then, by being involved in the
consequences or outworkings, are able to take an attitude to the one
or the other. A further feature of that parable is that the
intensification unto manifestation indicates the imminence of
judgment. The greater the manifestation of evil, the nearer is its
judgment. But the thing to which I want to draw the fullest and most
particular attention is that that which is essentially and truly of
God will become by intensification the battleground the
nearer we get to the consummation. This means that the nature and
meaning of the work of the "enemy", which has had deceitful purpose,
will become more and more pronounced.
To spiritual observers the time in which we live is, but for its
horrors, almost fascinating in the uncovering development which is
taking place. The true nature of things which have been powerfully
working for a very long time by deception is now becoming clear to
all but those who are gross in their blindness, or whose blindness
is due to some grossness in their natures. The one thing which most
people recognise about the present situation is its spiritual
nature. That is to say, that it is not the upshot of merely
political and natural rivalries, but that it is inspired by deep and
mighty spiritual forces related to human life and destiny with a
meaning infinitely transcending questions of material resources and
territory. The very being and nature of God is involved in this
situation. So also is His Son, His Word, the Church, and
Christianity. But I want to get down more deeply to the nature of
things, and to uncover the issues which lie behind this age-long
conflict which is now so much nearer consummation. Let it be fully
realised that this thing that has risen up out of the earth is not
something new. Many seem to think that it is something which has
sprung into being in the last few years, the home or fountain-head
of which is Germany. But this is not so. Although it may be true
that Germany has become a particular channel of it, and the
vehicle of it in its present fuller manifestation, even there the
history of it is much longer than the present regime. But the thing
itself is traceable back through all the centuries and lies at the
root of all the conflict between heaven and hell. It has now, in the
present phase, been precipitated in a definite and deliberate
declaration of an ideology (Science of ideas; visionary
speculation). This ideology is
The Ideology of Blood
and this goes to the heart of everything.
Briefly, this is the position. The government of this world is to be
in the hands of a people or nation chosen and destined for this
purpose. Such a people must be of pure and unmixed blood. It cannot
and must not be Semitic blood, and particularly not Jewish as
amongst Semitic peoples. It cannot be Negro blood. It must not be
Latin blood. It can only be Nordic or Teutonic - and this means
German blood. Hence the hatred of the Jews and the abomination of
intermarriage with them. Hence also the contempt for the Latin
peoples; the despising of the Negro; the fear of the Anglo-Saxon -
as the greatest and nearest rivals. This also lies behind the
antagonism toward Christianity, because it is said to be of Jewish
origin for one thing. But of course there is a deeper reason, as we
shall see, yet one which may not be recognised by those concerned.
Above all, perhaps the feature most significant is the repudiation
of Christ, and the determination to supplant Him and give His place
to another. Lest anyone should think that all this is of our own
imagination or imputation, some quotations will be given from the
writings which constitute the charter of this ideology. And let it
be understood that there are literally hundreds of books by numerous
German authors on this philosophy, not only by its chief exponent
and high priest - Rosenberg.
Here are some specimens -
"All German education must be based upon the recognition
of the fact that it is not Christianity that has brought us
morality, but Christianity that owes its enduring values, to the
German character." Rosenberg.
"But today a new faith is awakening: the myth (mysticism) of the
blood, the faith of defending with blood the divine essence of man
as well: the faith embodied in the clearest awareness that Nordic
blood represents the mystery that has replaced and overcome the
old sacraments." Ibid.
"It is only on one or two exceptional points that Christ and
Hitler stand comparison, for Hitler is far too big a man to be
compared with one so petty." Julius Streicher.
"In addition to the denominational youth and the relatively small
group of liberal Christians a third Front is now coming into
existence which in these days is becoming stronger and ever more
clearly defined. This Front refuses to call itself Christian. It
presents itself especially to the German youth as the German Faith
Front, and claims that the knowledge of God based on Blood and
Race is the only form which is truly suited to the German people.
From the very fact that they feel that it is something essentially
new and young and that the future belongs to it, large numbers of
young Germans have a large readiness to accept the doctrine of
this German Faith." Martin Hieronimi.
"I believe in our own divinity when millions of Germans are
leagued around one Leader. I know God to be in the Force (Kraft)
of our blood alone." Professor of Faith of the Völkische Aktion.
"I completely agree with the German Christians who teach that the
doctrine "Love thy neighbour as thyself" is valid only
conditionally. The neighbour we shall love must be connected with
us by blood and race." Hans Kerrl.
"I am absolutely clear in my mind, and I think I can speak for the
Führer as well, that both the Catholic Church and the Evangelical
Confessional Church, as they exist at present, must vanish from
the life of our people." Rosenberg.
"I am tempted to believe rather in a Germanic God than a Christian
one. We are not working for the next world but for this one." Dr.
Goebbels.
"The good God would not have given himself so much trouble over
our German country if he had not reserved a great destiny for us.
We are the salt of the earth... God has made us for civilising the
world." Kaiser William II. 1906.
"We must dominate or be slaves... Let the world once more be
regenerated by German genius! That is our mission in the history
of the world; no power can take it from us." Karl Lamprecht.
"Remember that you are a chosen people! The spirit of the Lord has
descended upon me, because I am Emperor of the Germans! I am the
instrument of the Most High. I am His sword, His representative.
Woe and death to all those who resist my will! Woe and death to
those who do not believe in my mission! Let them perish - all the
enemies of the German people! God demands their destruction - God
who, through my mouth, commands you to execute His will." (Kaiser
William II." 1914).
"We want to become a world-people. Let us remind ourselves that
the belief in our mission as a world-people has arisen from our
originally purely spiritual impulse to absorb the world into
ourselves." Friedrich Meinecke.
"Germany ought and wishes to remain alone. The Germans are the
chosen people of the earth. They will accomplish their destiny,
which is to govern the world and to direct other nations for the
good of humanity." Prof. von Seyden.
"Germany is the centre of God's plans for the world." Pastor
Walther Lehmann.
It would be easy to compile a considerable volume of citations such
as the above, and more may yet be called for in particular
connections, but these given here will serve at least to indicate
the mind behind the course adopted and being followed. The upshot of
it all is just this. Here is a nation which - for at least one
hundred and fifty years - has been taught from within to believe
that it is an elect race, to fulfil the supreme destiny of world
domination. In order to fulfil this destiny she must cultivate pure
blood. Thus there will issue a people of this world, bound together
by the mighty tie of blood - a common life and motive-force - having
universal supremacy, with all others in subjection as the servants
of this master-destiny. Such a doctrine has been preached with ever
deepening fulness and strength for so long, and the sense of this
peculiar superiority and Divine mission has become almost a
constituent in their temperament. Let me say again that I am not
attacking the German people as such, and the recognition of a very
evil thing does not result in a hatred of a nation in general. God
forbid!
To the spiritually discerning what has been pointed out above is
full of significance, and the significance is very clear. This is
what I meant when I said that the present developments are almost
fascinating. We are brought immediately to several great facts which
- as said before - govern the whole history and destiny of this
world.
The Testimony of the Word of God to an "Elect
Race"
Firstly: it is a primary truth of Divine revelation that the
ultimate government of this world is - by foreordination and
predestination - bound up with "an elect race", "a holy nation", "a
people for God's own possession".
But it is made equally clear that it will not be one of the nations
of this world, but a people taken out of all the nations and
constituted a heavenly people. That nation has been in process of
formation for many centuries. A great section of it is now "with
Christ", and another great part is in all the nations, but in their
essential new nature they are apart from the nations. That is to
say, in the deepest reality of their being, because of regeneration,
they are not British, German, American, Chinese; Teutonic, Latin,
Semitic, etc; they are "All one man in Christ", "One new man". There
is that which they all have in common which at once leaps to mutual
recognition without formal introductions.
Blood and the Word of God
Secondly, then, the Divine revelation does make this
ultimate issue one of blood; pure, uncorrupted and incorruptible
blood. No one who has any knowledge of the Bible needs to be told of
the great prominence given to blood from Genesis to the Revelation.
If we take the Bible as it stands, then everything related to the
destiny of man now rests upon or is governed by blood. There are two
main features of this teaching with regard to blood. Firstly there
is the sacredness and significance of blood in general. Then there
is the blood which is particular and peculiar; blood which is other
than and different from the blood which is common. These two things
are recognised by the Aryan ideologists, but, as we shall see, how
Satan does simulate the most sacred things of God! When these two
aspects of blood in the Scriptures have been followed through to
conclusion, the issue that emerges is that blood is a universal
basis of life; but since sin entered into the human constitution,
blood as in the Word of God is a representation or type of something
which is other than the human life of fallen man, and it is that
otherness that constitutes a people for the fulfilment of the great
destiny of Cosmic dominion.
What we have in the Bible on this matter of blood can be set down
concisely thus:
1. The prominence of blood in both Old and New Testaments.
2. The sacredness of blood, as seen everywhere, commencing with Cain
and Abel.
3. The sacredness of blood because it is the life. By the pouring
out, or shedding, of the blood, the life in it is not destroyed,
though it is separated from the organism which it has quickened. The
more recent branch of medical science in blood-transfusion is a
powerful testimony to an underlying truth of Scripture, that life is
transmitted by participating in blood-communion. Noah revivified the
dead earth by shedding blood upon it after leaving the ark.
4. The blood is the nature; the essential elements of the nature.
5. The strong and repeated forbidding to shed or drink blood.
6. The blood is the instrument of a covenant. In the covenant of
blood there is fellowship, inter-communion, sharing of nature, and
oneness of life. (Surely this is the very heart of the Incarnation
and its meaning.)
7. Blood is always God's sacred prerogative. Throughout the Old
Testament there is His reservation set upon it. Particularly did He
forbid the drinking of it. But in the New Testament - especially in
that part where the Divine nature of Christ is most emphasised - the
drinking is set forth as the only way of life. (See John 6:53.) The
significance of this seems clearly to be that in fallen man there is
no life, no Divine nature, no fellowship with God, but in Christ all
these abound, all are reserved by God unto Him, the beloved Son, and
can alone be known - as Paul puts it - "In Christ".
The Scriptures Present a Two-fold Conclusion
in Relation to the Blood
But when we have surveyed the entire ground of blood in the
Scriptures we are brought to one double-sided conclusion. The Bible
comes down squarely and firmly upon this decision, and it is
consistent throughout on the point. It is that in relation to blood
there is a repudiation of one life and the appropriation of another,
an "altogether other"; the "putting away" or "cutting off", and a
bringing in or "putting on". One "whole body of the flesh" or "old
man" is put away, and a "new man", "after the image of him that
created him", is put on. The "putting away" is in judgment:
therefore life is taken. The "putting on" is in righteousness:
therefore it is unto life and peace.
Two Outstanding Embodiments of the Truth
Two of the outstanding representations of this in the Old Testament,
which are taken up in their spiritual meaning for permanence in the
New Testament, are Circumcision and the Passover. The Apostle Paul,
who knew something about it, has given a fairly clear
interpretation. In his letter to the Colossians (2:11,12) he says -
"...in whom ye were also circumcised with a circumcision not made
with hands, in the putting off of the body of the flesh, in the
circumcision of Christ; having been buried with him in baptism,
wherein ye were also raised with him through faith in the working of
God, who raised him from the dead."
In a passage with similar words (Romans 6:3-6) he says - "...all we
who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death...
We were buried therefore with him through baptism into death, that
like as Christ was raised from the dead... so we also might walk in
newness of life... knowing this, that our old man was crucified with
him, that the body of sin might be done away."
Circumcision then was a sign. It meant the putting of a divide by
blood between one order of life and another. Paul makes both a
statement and an implication in this connection. The statement is
that Christ's death was the counterpart of circumcision and it meant
the (representative) putting away of the body of the flesh. The
implication is that baptism takes the place of circumcision and
means identification with Christ in death and resurrection. Thus
Christ is set forth as having, on the one hand, related Himself to
an order that was to be put away in judgment and have its life taken
from it. On the other hand, in resurrection, Christ represents an
order wholly acceptable to God. We emerge from this consideration
with the one all-governing principle of Israel's origin (in type)
and the Christian's life, in fact; namely, that God has put a great
divide between two orders of life; that of the natural man, and that
of the spiritual. That divide is represented by the blood shed, the
life - or soul - poured out unto death. The divide cannot be
bridged, it is a great gulf fixed. The most severe penal judgments
rest upon any mixing of these two. The great end in view, government
of the world to come as vested in a people of one unadulterated
life, is jeopardised wherever that divide is not observed and
maintained. All this is so patent in the life of Abraham and Israel,
the covenant-sign of which was circumcision.
The Passover took up all these elements and made them the basis upon
which Israel was corporately brought on to the ground of
covenant. In the Passover for the first time we have recorded the details
of God's covenant means. (Exodus 12)
1. The Lord commands the choice.
2. A lamb.
3. Without blemish.
4. A male.
5. Of the first year. (Faculties co-ordinated, settled. Features
determined.) Typical in qualities. Representative in selection.
6. The blood, put on the two side posts and on the lintel of every
house, made a circle around every passer through. It was a
circumcision in suggestion.
7. "When I see the blood (token of My covenant with Abraham) I will
pass over you"... etc.
8. The flesh of the lamb to be eaten, reverently, as an indication
of that intercommunion which the covenant secured.
Thus, the ground of judgment was removed, and the ground of
fellowship in life provided and occured. This is taken up in the New
Testament, and its spiritual values are represented in the
"Communion" or "Lord's Table". "The new covenant in my blood."
The Issue Joined - Methods of the Adversary
Now, all this is very much in line with our outset. Right through
the history of this world there has been a persistent and bitter
antagonism to this testimony to the blood of the Lamb. It has taken
various forms, but behind all there has ever been the recognition on
the part of spiritual and cosmic forces of the significance and
implications of that blood. It is no less a question than that of
the ultimate control and dominion of the entire cosmic order.
Something over a hundred years ago this antagonism assumed a certain
form in Germany. It has become known as "The Higher Criticism", or
"Liberal Theology", or again "Rationalism". The Word of God was
dethroned from its place of final authority and made subject to the
enthroned reason of man. Thereafter nothing escaped the destructive
activity of this intellectual pride. The Word once robbed of its
authority, nothing was safe. So the Person of Christ was stripped of
deity; the blood of Christ was called "the gospel of the shambles";
in fact, everything that God had exalted was abased, and the way
was cleared for the exaltation of what God had abased. Humanism -
the doctrine of man's essential goodness, virtue, and glory, gained
a free course. Psychology - the science which rules out the
supernatural, and accounts for everything on the ground of man's
mind or soul, making him his own Saviour and Lord - secured the
reins of direction. Thus the principles of Babel and Babylon took possession in the religious and theological
kingdom. "Let us make us a name." "See this great
Babylon which I have made!" All this has resulted in a most
conspicuous fulfilment of a passage of Scripture which runs thus -
"..because they received not the love of the truth, that
they might be saved... for this cause God sendeth them a working
of error, that they should believe a lie; that they all might be
judged who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in
unrighteousness" (2 Thessalonians 2:10-11).
The "lie" in this case is the false blood ideology, and this
brings right into line with that judgment which must come
upon those who stand in the way of God's eternally determined end
with regard to His Son. But the tragedy is that this basic
antagonism to the blood of the Lamb as back of rationalistic
theology has gained a strong foothold by the same means in all parts
of the Christian world, through Britain and America. It will
therefore not be possible for God wholly to take sides. These latter
countries will suffer judgment, and their real enemies will be - not
ultimately Germany and Germany's allies - but the religious leaders and
followers who have given an open door to spiritual forces the one
object of whose age-long and relentless activities is to secure the
dominion of this world as against the Lordship of God's Christ.
Whether this present phase is the final one is not for us to say.
There may be a respite. But some things are certain. This is
something in advance of anything ever yet. This thing is clearly
heading up to the whole world coming under a single domination. It
does not take years now to change the whole face and aspect of the
world government. This final issue is bound up with the blood of
God's Lamb. Satan hates that blood. It is the greatest menace to his
world-kingdom. Truly spiritual people will have an ever deepening
appreciation of the meaning and value of that blood. The blood is
the life, the incorruptible life. It constitutes a people of a
heavenly order, and challenges all mixture, bringing ever and always
into conflict with "the world rulers of this darkness".
"And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels going forth to
war with the dragon; and the dragon warred and his angels; and they
prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. And
the great dragon was cast down, the old serpent, he that is called
the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world; he was cast
down to the earth, and his angels were cast down with him. And I
heard a great voice in heaven, saying, Now is come the salvation,
and the power, and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his
Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, who accuseth
them before our God day and night. And they overcame him because of
the blood of the Lamb, and because of the word of their testimony;
and they loved not their life even unto death. Therefore rejoice, O
heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe for the earth and for the
sea: because the devil is gone down unto you, having great wrath,
knowing that he hath but a short time." (Rev. 12:7-12).
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