"...no one knoweth the
Son, save the Father..." Matthew 11:27.
"...it was the good
pleasure of God... to reveal his Son in me..." Galatians
1:15-16.
"...I count all things to
be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my
Lord..." Philippians 3:8.
"...that I may know
him..." Philippians 3:10.
"Having made known unto us
the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he
purposed in him unto a dispensation of the fulness of the times,
to sum up all things in Christ..." Ephesians 1:9-10.
That little clause in verse ten
is the word which will govern our meditation - ALL THINGS IN
CHRIST.
These scriptures speak for
themselves. As we listen to the inner voice of the Spirit in
these fragments of the Divine Word, surely we shall begin to feel
a sense of tremendous meaning, value and content. We should feel
like people who have come to the doors of a new realm full of
wonders - unknown, unexplored, unexploited.
The Necessity
for Revelation
We are met at the very
threshold of that realm with a statement which is calculated to
check our steps for the moment, and if we approach with a sense
of knowing or possessing anything already, with a sense of
contentment, of personal satisfaction, or with any sense other
than that of needing to know everything, then this word should
bring us to a standstill at once: "...no one knoweth the
Son, save the Father..." Maybe we thought we knew something
about the Lord Jesus, and that we had ability to know; that
study, and listening, and various other forms of our own
application and activity could bring us to a knowledge, but at
the outset we are told that "...no one knoweth the Son, save
the Father..." All that the Son is, is locked up with the
Father, and He alone knows.
When, therefore, we have faced
that fact, and have recognised its implications, we shall see
that here is a land which is locked up, into which we cannot
enter, and for which we have no equipment. There is
nothing in us of faculty to enter into the secrets of that realm
of Christ. Then following the discovery of that somewhat
startling fact of man's utter incapacity to know by nature, the
next fact that confronts us is this: "...it was the good
pleasure of God... to reveal his Son in me..." While God has
all that locked up in Himself, in His own possession, and He
alone has the knowledge of the Son, it is in His heart,
nevertheless, to give revelation. And, given the truth that we
are so utterly dependent upon revelation from God, and that all
human faculty and facility is ruled out in this respect, since
such revelation can only be known by a Divine revealing after an
inward kind, we are making it to be very evident that everything
is of grace when we renounce all trust in works, when we turn
away from self-sufficiency, self-reliance, from all confidence in
the flesh, and any pride of advance and approach.
Read these two passages in the
light of what Paul was when known as Saul of Tarsus, before the
Lord met with him, and afterward as Paul the Apostle, and you
will gain something more of their force. Saul of Tarsus would
have called himself a master in Israel, one well-learned in the
scriptures, with a certain strength of self-assurance,
self-confidence, and self-sufficiency in his apprehension and
knowledge of the oracles of God. Even such a one as he will have
to come to the recognition that none of that is of avail in the
realm of Christ; where he realises that he is utterly blind,
utterly ignorant, utterly helpless, altogether ruled out, and
needing the grace of God for the very first glimmer of light; to
come down very low, and say: "...it was the good pleasure of
God... to reveal his Son in me..." That is grace.
That marked the beginning, and
for this present meditation we are considering the unexplored
fulness of what God has Himself placed within His Son, the Lord
Jesus, actually and in purpose, as being the object of His grace
toward us. His grace has led Him to seek to bring us by
revelation into all that knowledge which He Himself possesses as
His own secret knowledge of His fulness in His Son the Lord
Jesus. ALL THINGS IN CHRIST.
Paul's
Revelation of Christ
It is never our desire to make
comparisons between Apostles, and God forbid that we should ever
set a lesser value upon any Apostle than that which the Lord has
set upon him; yet I think that we are quite right in saying that,
more than any other, Paul was, and is, the interpreter of Christ;
and if we take Paul as our interpreter, as the one who leads us
into the secrets of Christ in a fuller way, we mark how he
himself embodies and represents that of which he speaks. It is
the man himself, after all, and not just what he says which
brings us to Christ in fuller and deeper meaning.
The thing that has been very
much pressing upon my own heart in this connection is Paul's
ever-growing conception of Christ. There is no doubt that Paul's
conception of Christ was growing all the time, and by the time
Paul reached the end of his earthly life, full, and rich, and
deep as it had been, Paul's vision of Christ was such as to lead
him to cry even at that point, "...that I may know
him..." Yes, at the beginning it had pleased God to reveal
His Son in him, but at the end it was still as though he had
known nothing of Christ. He had come to discover that his Christ
was immeasurable, beyond his thought and conception, and he was
launched into eternity with a cry on his lips: "...that I
may know him..."
I believe (and not as a matter
of sentiment) that will be our eternal bliss, the nature of our
eternity, namely, discovering Christ. Paul as we have said, had a
great knowledge of Christ. At best here we find ourselves
shrivelling into insignificance every time we approach him. How
many times have we read the letter to the Ephesians! I am not
exaggerating when I say that if we have read it for years, read
it scores, hundreds, or even thousands of times, every sentence
can hold us afresh each time we come back to it. Paul knew what
he was talking about. Paul's conception was a large one, but even
so he is still saying at the end, "...that I may know
him..." I do not think we shall know Christ in fulness
immediately we pass into His presence. I believe we are to go on
- governed by this word, "the ages to come" -
discovering, discovering, exploring Christ. That ever-growing
conception of Christ was the thing which maintained Paul in life
and maintained Paul's ministry in life. There was never any
stagnation with him. He never came to any point or place where
there was the suggestion that now he knew. What he seems to say
is this: I do not know anything yet, but I see dimly, yet truly,
with the eye of the spirit, a Christ so great, so vast as to keep
me reaching out, moving on. I press on; I leave the things which
are behind; I count all things as refuse for the excellency of
the knowledge of Christ Jesus, that I may know Him! In this
growing conception of Christ, Paul moved a long way from the
position of the Jewish teacher, or of the Jew himself at his
best.
Paul began with the Jewish
conception of the Messiah, whatever that was. It is quite
impossible to say what the Jewish conception of Christ was. You
have indications of what they expected the Messiah to be and to
do, but there is nothing to indicate exactly what their
conception of the Messiah was in fulness; it was undoubtedly a
limited one. There is a great deal of uncertainty betrayed by the
Jewish thought beyond a certain point about their long looked for
Messiah. Their Messiah represented something earthly and
something temporal; an earthly kingdom and a temporal power, with
all the earthly and temporal advantages which would accrue to
them as people on this earth from His kingdom, from His reign,
from His appearing. That is where we begin in our consideration
of Paul's conception of Christ. This Jewish conception, it is
true, did not confine the thought of blessing to Israel alone,
but allowed that Messiah's coming was, through the Jews, to issue
in blessing to all the nations; yet it was still earthly,
temporal, limited to things here. If you read the Gospels, and
especially Matthew's Gospel, you will see that the endeavour of
these Gospels, so far as Jewish believers were concerned, was to
show that Christ had done three things.
Firstly, how that He had
corrected their ideas about the Messiah.
Secondly, how that He had
fulfilled the highest hopes that could have been theirs
concerning the Messiah.
Thirdly, how that He had far
transcended anything that ever they had thought.
You must remember that these
Gospels were never written to convince unbelievers. They were
written to interpret to believers, to help the faith of believers
by interpretation. Matthew's Gospel, written as it was at a time
of transition, was written in order to interpret and confirm
faith in Christ by showing what Christ really was, what He really
came for, and in that way to correct and adjust their conceptions
of the Messiah. Their conceptions of Him were inadequate,
distorted, limited, and sometimes wrong. These records were
intended to put them right, to show that Christ had fulfilled the
highest, and best, and truest Messianic hopes and expectations,
and had infinitely transcended them all. You need Paul to
interpret Matthew, and Mark, and Luke, and John; and he does it.
He brings Christ into view as One in Whom every hope is realised,
every possibility achieved. Were they expecting an earthly
kingdom, and deliverance and blessing in relation thereto? Christ
had done something infinitely better than that. He had wrought
for them a cosmic redemption; not a mere deliverance from the
power of Rome or any other temporal power, but deliverance from
the whole power of evil in the universe - "Who delivered us
out of the power of darkness, and translated us into the kingdom
of the Son of his love". Matthew had particularly stressed
the fact of the kingdom, but the Jewish idea of the kingdom with
which he was confronted was so limited, so earthly, so narrow.
With a new emphasis Paul, by the Spirit, brings into view the
nature and immensity of the kingdom of the Son of God's love.
Now we can see something of
what deliverance from our enemies means. We shall not follow that
through, but pass on with just that glimpse of it. Such an
unveiling as this was a corrective. It revealed a fulfilment in a
deeper sense than they had expected, but it was a transcendence
of their fullest hope and expectation. Paul interpreted the
Christ for them in His fuller meaning and value. He himself had
begun on their level. Their conception of Christ had been his
own. But after it pleased God to reveal His Son in him a
continuous enlargement in Paul's knowledge of Christ began
through an ever-growing unveiling of what He was.
Of course, as Saul of Tarsus,
Paul never believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah. This
takes us a step further back in his conception. He believed that
Jesus was an impostor, and so he sought to blot out all that was
associated with Him in the world.
Paul, then, had to learn at
least two things. He had to learn that Jesus of Nazareth was the
Messiah, but he also had to learn that Jesus of Nazareth far
transcended all Jewish conceptions of the Messiah, all his own
ideas, all his own expectations as bound up with the Messiah. He
not only learned that He was the Messiah, but that as Messiah He
was far, far greater and more wonderful than his fullest ideas
and conceptions and expectations. Into that revelation he was
brought by the grace of God.
The
Progressiveness of Revelation as Illustrated in Paul
I do not think the point needs
arguing, for it is hard to dispute that there are evidences of
progress in Paul's understanding and knowledge of Christ, and it
is clear that progress and expansion and development in his
knowledge of Christ led to adjustment. Do not misunderstand. They
did not lead to a repudiation of anything that Paul had stated,
nor to a contradiction of any truth that had come through him,
but they led to adjustment. As his knowledge of Christ grew and
expanded Paul saw that he had to adjust himself to it.
This is a point at which many
have stumbled, but it is a matter about which we should have no
fear. There are so many people who are afraid of the idea that
such a man as the Apostle Paul - or any man in the Bible who was
Divinely inspired - so utterly under the power of the Holy
Spirit, should ever adjust himself according to new revelation.
They seem to think that this necessarily means that the man
changes in such a way as to leave his original position and more
or less repudiate it. It does not mean anything of the kind.
Take an illustration. Paul's
letters to the Thessalonians were his first letters. In those
letters there is no doubt whatever that Paul expected the Lord to
return in his lifetime. Mark his words: "...we that are
alive, that are left unto the coming of the Lord..." In his
letter to the Philippians, Paul has moved from that position,
while in his letters to Timothy that expectation is no longer
with him: "...I am already being offered, and the time of my
departure is come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished
the course..." He had anticipated Nero's verdict. He knew
now that it was not by way of the rapture that he himself was to
go to glory. Are we to say that these two things contradict one
another? Not at all! In going on with the Lord, Paul came into
fuller revelation about the Lord's coming, and of his personal
relationship thereto, but this did not set aside or change any
fact of doctrine or teaching which had been expressed
earlier in his letters to the Thessalonians. All that had been
set forth there was fully inspired, given by the Holy Spirit, but
it was still capable of development in the heart of the Apostle
himself, and as he saw the fuller meaning of the things that had
come to him earlier in his life, so he found that in practical
matters he had to adjust himself. No fresh revelation, nor
advance in understanding, ever placed him in the position of
having to repudiate anything that had been given him by
revelation in earlier days. It is a matter of recognising that
these differences are not contradictions but the result of
progressive, supplemental revelation, enlarging apprehension,
clearer conception through going on with the Lord. Surely these
are evidences that progress in Paul's understanding and knowledge
led to adjustments.
The Eternal
Purpose of God in His Son
Now the great effect of Paul's
discovery concerning the Lord Jesus on the Damascus road was not
only to reveal to him the fact of His Sonship (he undoubtedly
discovered there that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God, as
his words in Gal. 1:15-16 show), but to lift Christ right out of
time and to place Him with the Father in the "before times
eternal." That does not perhaps for the moment appear to be
very striking, but it is a very big step toward what the Lord
wants to say to us. Christ has been lifted out of time. The
"time" Christ, that is, His coming into this world in
time, becomes something like a parenthesis; it is not the main
thing. It is the main thing if we look at the whole in the light
of the fall and need for recovery, but not the main thing from
the Divine standpoint originally. I want you to grasp this,
because it is at this point that we come into that greatest of
all revelations that have been given to us concerning the Lord
Jesus. This effect of his experience on the Damascus road, this
lifting of Christ right out of time and placing Him in eternity,
came in Paul's conception to be related to eternal purpose, and
in eternal purpose there was no fall and no redemption. That is,
so to speak, a bend down in the line of God through the ages.
God's line was to have gone straight without a bend, without a
break, but when it came to a certain point, because of certain
contingencies which were never in the purpose, that line had to
go down, and then up and on again. The two ends of that line are
on the same eternal level. You may, if you like, conceive of a
bridge across that bend, and of Christ thus filling the bend, so
that what was from eternity is not interrupted at all in Him; it
goes on in Him. The coming to earth and all the work of
the Cross is something other, the result of a necessity by reason
of these contingencies; but in Christ from eternity to eternity
the purpose is unbroken, uninterrupted, without a bend. There is
no hiatus in Christ. This came to be related to purpose. That is
a great word of Paul's: "According to the eternal purpose
which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord..." (Ephes.
3:11); "...called according to his purpose." (Rom.
8:28.) These are eternal conceptions of Christ, and this purpose,
and these Divine counsels were related to the universe, and to
man in particular. Let us get across that bridge for a moment,
leaving the other out; for I want you to notice the course that
the letter to the Ephesians takes. The letter begins with
eternity. It says much of things that were before the world was,
and it comes back to that point. Just in between it speaks of
redemption, and it never speaks of redemption until it has the
past eternity in view. Redemption comes in to fill up that gap
and then we go on to eternity again.
Now just leave the gap for a
moment. Of course it concerns us tremendously and we shall have
to come back to it, because everything is bound up with
redemption so far as we are concerned in the eternal purpose; but
leave it for a moment and turn your attention in this other
direction. It is stated definitely and clearly that the whole
plan of God without redemption was completed in those eternal
counsels concerning His Son, Jesus Christ, and in that plan the
ages were created: "...the fulness of the times..." is
the phrase used here in our translation.
I have heard such phrases in
the New Testament as these interpreted as being the dispensations
as we now know them in the Bible; the dispensation of Abraham,
the dispensation of the Law, the dispensation of Grace. I wonder
if that is right? Mark this expression: "...through whom
also he made the ages" (Heb. 1:2. R.V.M.) Let us think
again. Are we right in saying that applies to what we call the
dispensations as they are shown to us in the Bible? Without being
dogmatic about it, I have a question. Are we to say that in those
eternal counsels of God, in relation to the eternal purpose of
God concerning His Son, a dispensation of Law had a place, an age
like the Old Testament age, those periods of time from Adam to
Abraham, Abraham to Moses, Moses to David, David to the Messiah?
Are those the ages referred to? Did God create those in relation
to the eternal purpose? Remember all this creative work was in,
and through, and unto His Son, according to the eternal
purpose.
There are ages upon ages yet to
come. There are marks through eternity which are not
"time" marks in our sense of the word, but represent
points of emergence and development, of progress, increase,
enlargement. Had you and I been born on the Day of Pentecost, and
were we then to have lived through until the return of the Lord
(that is a dispensation according to this world's reckoning and
order) we should never have discovered all the meaning of Christ.
We should have discovered something and have reached a certain
point in the knowledge of Christ, but we should then want another
age under different conditions, to discover things which it would
never be possible to discover under the conditions of this life;
and when we had made good that next possibility, probably beyond
that there would be new possibilities. There will be no
stagnation in eternity - "...of the increase of his
government... there shall be no end..." (Isa. 9:7).
Now leave the sorry picture of
this world's history from the fall to the restitution of all
things aside, and you have the launching of ages in which all
God's fulness in Christ could be revealed and apprehended
progressively, on through successive ages, with changing and
enlarging conditions, and facilities, and abilities. That is the
meaning of spiritual growth. Our own short Christian life here,
if it is a right one, moving under the power of the Holy Spirit,
is itself like a series of ages in brief. We start as children,
and acquire what we can as children. Then we come to a point
where we have increased capacity, where our spiritual senses are
exercised. This again issues in a larger apprehension of Christ,
and then a little later, as we have gone on, we still find these
powers enlarging, under the Holy Spirit, and as the powers
enlarge we realise there is more country to be occupied than ever
we imagined. As children we thought we had it all! That is, of
course, one of the signs of childhood and of youth. The saving
thing in our old age is that we recognise there is a big, vast
realm ahead of us to beckon us on and to stop us from settling
down. That is eternal youth!
Thus, leaving the whole of this
broken-down state in the creation, you can see the creating of
ages in Christ, by Christ, through Christ, according to God's
eternal purpose that all things should be summed up in Him; not
just the "all things" of our little life, of our little
day, of our individual salvation, but the "all things"
of a vast universe as a revelation of Christ, all being brought
by revelation to the spiritual apprehension of man, and man being
brought into it. What a Christ!
That is what Paul saw; and this
may well be summed up in his own words: "...the excellency
of the knowledge (that knowledge which excels) of Christ Jesus my
Lord". It is Paul the aged saying, "that I may know
Him". Christ is lifted right out of time, and time, so far
as Christ was concerned, was only related to eternity by the
necessity of redemption unto the eternal purpose.
We must break off here for the
time being, but in so doing let me say this, that with his
ever-growing conception of Christ, there was a corresponding
enlargement in his conception of believers. Believers came to
assume a tremendous significance. The saving of men from sin,
death, and hell, and getting them to heaven, was as nothing
compared with what Paul saw as to the significance of a believer
now. All that which he has seen concerning Christ in His eternal
purpose - eternal, universal, vast, infinite - now relates to
believers: "Even as he chose us in him before the foundation
of the world, that we should be... unto the praise of his glory"
in the ages to come (Ephes. 1:4,12). Believers also are lifted
out of time, and are given a significance altogether beyond
anything here. We shall have to speak further of that.
There was a third thing. He was
able rightly to apprise the range and place of redemption.
Redemption could be seen in its full compass and as being
something more than what is merely of time. It is called "eternal
redemption". Redemption is something more than the saving of
men and women from sin and their sinful state. It is getting
behind everything to the ultimate ranges of this universe, and
touching all its powers; linking up with the eternity past and
the eternity yet to be, and embracing all the forces of this
universe for man's redemption. Paul is able rightly to apprise
the meaning, value, and range of redemption, and also to put it
in its right place, and that is important.
Now these are big things. They
all need to be broken up, and the Lord may enable us to do this,
but if you cannot grasp what has been said you will be able to
appreciate this, that Christ is infinitely bigger than you or I
ever imagined. That is the thing that comes to us so forcibly
through Paul. He started with a small Jewish Messiah; he ended
with a Christ so far beyond all that ever he had yet seen or
known, that his last cry is, "...that I may know
him..." and that will take all eternity. What a Christ!
It is Christ Who will lift us
out, Christ Who will set us free; but let me say this, that it
will not be by His coming and putting His hands under us and
lifting us out, but by being revealed in our hearts. How did Paul
come out of his narrow Jewish conceptions about the Messiah?
Simply by the revelation of Christ in him, and as that revelation
grew his liberation increased. There were some things which he
did not shake off for a long time. He clung to Jerusalem almost
to the last. He still had a longing for his brethren after the
flesh, and made further attempts for their deliverance on
national grounds. But at last he saw the meaning of the heavenly
Christ in such a way as to make it possible for him to write the
letter to the Ephesians, and the letter to the Colossians, and
then Judaism as such, Israel after the flesh, ceased to weigh
with him. It was the revelation of Christ which was emancipating
him, leading him out, freeing him all the time. In that way
Christ is our Deliverer and Emancipator. It is just the Lord
Jesus that we need to know. Everything small will go as we see
Him. Everything of earth and time will go as we see Him, and in
the background of our lives there will be something adequate to
keep us through difficult and hard times. We shall see the
greatness of Christ and the corresponding greatness of our
salvation "...according to his eternal purpose".