"Paul, an apostle (not
from men, neither through man, but through Jesus Christ, and God
the Father, who raised him from the dead)... I make known to you,
brethren, as touching the gospel, which was preached by me, that
it is not after man. For neither did I receive it from man, nor
was I taught it, but through revelation of Jesus Christ... it was
the good pleasure of God... to reveal his Son in me... I
conferred not with flesh and blood: neither went I up to
Jerusalem to them that were apostles before me: but I went away
into Arabia; and again I returned unto Damascus... they only
heard say, He that once persecuted us now preacheth the faith of
which he once made havoc" (Gal. 1:1,11-12,15-17,23-24).
I want to seek, as the Lord
enables us, to get still closer to this matter of sonship, and I
think there is no doubt that Paul, as he comes before us in this
letter to the Galatians, himself stands as an example of what
sonship is. There is no doubt that much of the nature of sonship
is resident in these statements of his about himself - "not
from men, neither through a man, but through Jesus Christ, and
God the Father, who raised him from the dead", and other
passages which are similar.
"An
Apostle, not after Men"
The question arises - and it is
a very simple way I think, of getting to understand what is
indicated - the question arises, How might Paul have been an
apostle other than by this method, other than in this way -
"an apostle not from men, neither through a man: the Gospel
which I preach not after man, neither did I receive it from a
man, nor was I taught it". What did he mean? Well, there
were two ways in which Paul could have become an apostle and a
preacher of the Gospel. There were the apostles at Jerusalem with
whom he went up later, and if he had been an interested inquirer,
he might have gone perhaps to one of their meetings, or might
have called upon them for an interview, and they, Peter, James
and John, and others, might have told him all that they knew
about Jesus, and have given him a good deal of what they had
heard him say through the three years, and also of the many and
mighty miracles which He wrought; and then about His death; and
then with tremendous earnestness, passion, zeal and fire and
enthusiasm, of His resurrection. Thus they might have given Saul
all those facts, and given them in such a way, with such fire and
such earnestness as to be tremendously persuasive. The young man
might have fallen to that because the thing seemed to be
indisputable, so real, so wonderful to them. He might say, There
is no doubt that these men have seen something, and they know
something, and what they say is true! Then, as a result of it
all, he might have said, Well, what can I do but accept what they
say, believe that they are speaking the truth, and myself just
become a follower of Jesus Christ and, accepting these facts and
believing them, go out and declare them to other people? He might
have become an apostle in that way. That is what he meant when he
said, "of men", "through a man". It might
have been like that. It could have been like that, and it has
been like that in multitudes of cases; not just the acceptance of
the argument, but the contagion of someone else's belief,
becoming enthused by the others.
It is not a question of whether
they were right, or whether what they said was the truth. That is
not the point at all. Nor is it in question whether their
experience was a true one. There is no doubt at all regarding the
truth and reality of their experience. Yet other people may have
an experience, and be in a perfectly true and right position; it
may be the most living and real thing with them; and their zeal
and their passion and their conviction, and all that they know,
the truth which they possess, may be given to you, may be passed
on to you, and you may accept it quite honestly and sincerely,
and in a sense you may believe it, and in that way go on with the
Lord Jesus and become a Christian and a servant of Christ: and it
is just between that and something else which, after all, is
altogether different, that this whole matter of sonship arises.
The Need for
a Revelation of Christ in the Heart
Paul says, "It pleased
God... to reveal his Son in me". It pleased God likewise to
reveal His Son in Peter, and in James and in John. Yes, but that
is not good enough for me, and, while I may not question or doubt
their experience or their knowledge, or the facts which they
state, sonship in my case demands that God shall reveal his Son
in me, and that I do not get it even from those who are reputed
to be something, pillars in the Church, Peter, James or John.
"It pleased God... to reveal his Son in me." I received
it not from men, be they the twelve Apostles; neither through a
man, be he Peter, but through revelation of Jesus Christ.
That is very simple and
elementary, but it sets forth the difference; and that is what
Paul is drawing attention to. He does not, in so many words, say,
Now, this is what sonship is, it is a revelation of God's Son in
the heart of a person. He does not put it quite precisely like
that, but that is what this letter stands for, and that is what
the New Testament makes perfectly clear as being the real nature
of sonship. It is that this whole matter of the Lord Jesus has
become a personal and, in a right and proper sense, an
independent thing in our own hearts. Our testimony must be, not,
I was brought up in a Christian home, and sent to Sunday School
and taken to church, and instructed in these things of the Lord,
and given a sound Bible teaching; not that - that may all be
receiving it through or of men, or a man. There has to be
something more than that. We have to be able to say, "God
that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, hath shined into
our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of
God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Cor. 4:6).
"In our hearts" -
that is where sonship begins, and it is that which is sonship
from beginning to end; an initial thing where we leap clear of
everything that is second-hand and the thing becomes first-hand,
and where it grows and grows and never stops growing as a
first-hand thing. That is sonship. If you understand and can
grasp what that means, then you know what sonship is.
You see, about every fresh case
of revelation there is a sense in which everything is quite new,
as though the thing revealed had never been before, and no one
else in all God's universe had ever heard or seen it. When you
really come to have that experience, that knowledge by revelation
of the Lord Jesus may be very imperfect, it may be only one thing
about Him, but it is the revelation of the Lord Jesus in some
particular way, at some particular point, some particular
significance; and when you come in this way of revelation into
possession of that it is to you as though it is something that
has just come out of heaven newborn, and no one else in all the
world has ever had it before. That is the effect of it. You want
to tell it to other people, and old stagers who have known it for
years and years have become your pupils. You begin to teach them
something they know about as though they knew nothing of it at
all. That is the effect of it. Of course, they do not let on;
they do not smile benignly, and say, Poor creature! Inwardly they
may smile, but it is a smile of gratification. They know that is
how it ought to be with you. But they know quite well exactly
what has happened. It is just like that. Some of us know that,
when we did, by the grace of God and the operation of the Holy
Spirit, leap clear of all that we had known in that other way,
that traditional way, into the knowledge of the same thing in a
living way by revelation, then we began to talk about it, and it
did not matter to us at all that there had been people saying the
same thing for years, or that it could be found in a good many
books. To us it was as though they knew nothing about it at all.
We were the only ones who knew anything about it! That is quite
pardonable. If it really is of the first-hand order, there is
something which is quite new and quite fresh, as though it had
just come for the first time out of heaven. That is sonship.
Oh, if we lived there right up
to date all the time, how different things would be. I mean, how
much of our knowledge is, after all, what we have got through
men, or of a man. And Paul is saying, Now, I could have got it
all from the elders and apostles at Jerusalem and become a good
Christian and an apostle, a servant of Jesus Christ like that.
But no - "Paul an apostle (not from men, neither through a
man, but through Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him
from the dead)."
Revelation
Makes for Stability
Now we want to see how this
connects with the whole object of the letter to the Galatians.
These Galatians had, as the apostle said, started well, and for a
little while they had run well, and then they had stopped because
the traditionalists, the Judaizers, had come in and bewitched
them, and their going on had been arrested; they had proved
unstable. "I marvel", says the Apostle, "that you
are so quickly removing from him that called you in the grace of
Christ unto another gospel" (1:6). I marvel! "O foolish
Galatians, who did bewitch you... having begun in the Spirit, are
ye now perfected in the flesh?" (3:1,3). They had proved to
be fickle, unstable, unreliable: and such features are not the
features of sonship. They are just the opposite; they are the
contradiction of sonship.
Now what is implied, if it is
not directly stated, by the Holy Spirit through the Apostle is
this, that when it is after this kind - "God revealed his
Son in me" - when it is first-hand, immediate, direct,
personal, the revelation of God's Son in us, it makes for
stability, it makes for assurance, it rules out all fickleness.
Immediately you get on to second-hand ground, you get on to
dangerous ground, so far as your stability is concerned.
Presently a storm will arise, the rains will come, the winds will
blow and beat upon that house, and it will fall: and great will
be the fall of it, because it was built upon the sand. You
remember what our Lord said: "He that heareth these sayings
of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man,
which built his house upon the sand". It implies something
that is not rooted in experience, not rooted in ourselves,
something we have heard and that is as far as it got. We have got
it second-hand. The Galatians met the adverse winds and rains of
the Judaizing assaults and crashed. Paul then, says, by
implication, Stability, assurance, trustworthiness in the
spiritual life, demand that we shall have this first-hand
knowledge by revelation of the Lord; and if it is a demand, it is
a possibility, it is meant for us; and it is just that freshness
of things by first-hand knowledge and revelation which brings the
element of wonderful freshness and life into every case
concerned.
There is all the difference,
you see, between that Christian life which is a labouring under
the burden of an imposed Christian order and system, requirement
and demand, and the free life of a son in whom the joy of the
Lord is the strength. I cannot help asking this question of you,
Is your Christian life a burden? Are you under a strain because
you belong to the Lord? Have you come into a realm - you may use
phraseology and call it "the testimony" or something of
the kind - into a realm which has brought you into a strain and
you ever wear a look of strain on your face, and go about as
though you were carrying a great burden: this testimony is
something so exacting and you have to be so careful? Has your
Christian life become anything like that, a strenuous burdensome
thing which takes the real joy out of your life, and people feel
that you are all the time trying to live up to something, to keep
up a standard, to maintain something? That is all wrong, every
bit of it is wrong. That is not sonship; that is slavery. That is
what Galatians deals with, the great difference between the son
and the slave. Sonship carries with it in the heart always the
sense of wonder, of freshness of life. It does not mean you have
no burdens and trials, but it does mean that your relationship to
the Lord is a thing which is so real, so first-hand, and your
knowledge of the Lord is so fresh, that you know that you are on
the borders of a land of far distances. You know in your own
heart what these words mean - "Thine eyes shall see the king
in his beauty: they shall behold the land of far distances"
(Isa. 33:17). I am not exaggerating and I am not straining to
make this mean something. To some of us it is just like that. For
us we know that we have come to the land of far distances. That
can be put in other words. We are seeing so much, sensing so
much, that we realise quite well we will never get through it,
and never be able to give it out or even to exhaust it, though we
were to go on here for many a lifetime. It is like that.
Is it like that with you, or
are you living on the last crumb, hardly knowing how to make ends
meet spiritually? It is the difference in sonship, you see.
Sonship implies an open heaven, sonship does bring in this
element of wonder. Oh, friends, it is very true; and I would not
say that to you if it were not true in my own case. I know this
tremendous difference. Life is cut in two for some of us. On the
one side of life, there was that strain to get something, to meet
the demand, working hard to get some fresh idea, buying the
latest books in order to try and keep fresh in our preaching,
getting new ideas. People who were the most suggestive or
provocative of thought and idea were our favourite authors. Then
came the dividing of life with death and resurrection, with the
Cross, and the other half of life, the growing revelation of the
Lord Jesus that, no matter how long you go on, you feel that you
have not started, but are still right at the beginning. It is a
wonderful thing to feel you have the land of far distances, and
are seeing the King in His beauty. That is the inheritance of
sons. Christ is the land of far distances, He is the King in His
beauty; and the land is our inheritance; we are brought into the
land. It is a wonderful land.
Revelation
Leads to Loneliness
Yes, that is quite true, that
is all true, and yet there is something else about sonship which
is equally true though not perhaps so happy. This revelation of
Christ in us, when it is a true, real, living revelation, not
only leads to and makes for stability and assurance and
confidence, wonder and freshness and life, but it leads to
loneliness, and I should be false to you if I did not say so, and
indicate what that means; because the majority even of Christians
are still hide-bound by tradition. They are still all of that
other kind: what they have received they have received through
men or from a man; they have taken on an already completed,
rounded-off system of truth and teaching called Christianity.
They have entered into it and taken it up, and they cannot see
beyond it. You do not question their sincerity, nor do you doubt
their earnestness, but there is that about all they have which is
so second-hand. It is something which has existed through the
Christian centuries, developed by this one and that one, shaped,
formed and phrased by different teachers. It has become the
evangel, evangelical Christianity in all its set terms,
phraseology and forms. They do not see beyond it. And when one
moves out of that realm into a personal, direct knowledge of the
Lord through what we often term an open heaven, - but not, mark
you, through a new or different revelation of Christ that is
something apart from the Scriptures - into that experience, where
we can say, "It pleased God to reveal his Son in me,
and with me it is so real that sometimes I wonder if anyone has
such a knowledge, such an experience"; when we move that way, we
move into a lonely realm. The majority cannot follow, cannot go
with us, and cannot understand.
It does seem to me
that there was something of that about Paul, that even other
apostles were not able to grasp or apprehend Paul. He seemed to
be very much one by himself. Yet here too we see the wonderful
grace of God. Regarding what I said to you in our previous
meditation about Paul and Peter having to have it out, and Paul
resisting Peter to his face, I think I ought to add a word which
improves on that situation. It is quite true Paul had a very
straight talk with Peter. That is putting it mildly, I think. The
words are strong words - "I resisted him to his face".
But I think it is a great thing that years after when Peter wrote
his letter he writes of him as, "Our beloved brother
Paul" (2 Pet. 3:15). It is all right. It shows the grace of
God; the final offence has not been taken, fellowship has not
been broken. "Our beloved brother Paul." Peter coming
back after being resisted to his face. Well, we just add that
word and leave it.
But, you see, it
does seem that even Paul, surrounded though he was by all the
other apostles, had to go a lonely way, because this revelation
was to him something so personal. It does mean that: understand
that; and probably some of you do understand it in your
experience. It will put you very largely into a lonely position,
so far as the majority of other Christians are concerned, if you
are going this way.
A Word of
Warning - What is Meant when we Speak of Revelation
But I will step
back a little, to safeguard and cover something. You have to be
very careful about this matter of revelation, and I am not
thinking for one moment of a revelation which is a different and
a fresh revelation of the Lord Jesus from that given to the
Lord's people in our own time or in other times. I am only
speaking of it coming to us as revelation. Let us be very careful
that we do not give the impression that we think that we are
constituted by a special revelation which none of the Lord's
people elsewhere have had or have. That is not the case, nor is
that our idea at all. What we do seek to stand and live for is
that the full revelation of the Lord Jesus shall come in our case
in such a living way as to remove us altogether from merely
traditional ground, and put us on to living ground. That is what
it means, that the thing is living.
It is a
difference, beloved, in another sense, in the sense that the Lord
has done something by which it has been possible for Him to make
His truth living in a fuller way than is true of that which is
merely a traditional and set system, and an old order of things.
That is the difference here in the letter to the Galatians. What
Peter, James and John and all the others had was perfectly right,
and Paul was not in any way different from them in any
fundamental matter, or in the manner of his knowing, though in
the measure of revelation he may have far outstripped others. But
the point is, that whatever the other apostles may have had, and
whatever Paul may have learnt from them, all that had to come to
him likewise by revelation; he had not just to receive it
second-hand. That is the difference; and it is that which makes
for these things of which I have spoken, and it is that which
makes for real helpfulness and power. We are not really helped by
second-hand truth, second-hand revelation. It may be a very fine
address, the substance of it may be perfectly true, and we may
see that the person who gives it really knows it; but oh, then
there is the gap! What do we need? Not just to adopt it because
they see it and believe it, and because it is true in their case,
but it has to be made as true in our case. And when it becomes
like that, true sonship in that sense, then we are in a position
to be really helpful to others; for, while we cannot give them
our experience, we can help them very much to see that there is
such an experience, and that it is for them.
First-hand
Experience Alone Makes a Servant of God
I have just said,
in very simple language, another thing which is very far reaching
and compasses a great deal of ground in the Word of God. Real
service does not come by being "trained". We are never
made servants of God by going to Bible Institutes. They may be
good things, very helpful, very useful, but they do not make a
servant of God. You cannot be trained to be a servant of God in
this academic sense. "It pleased God... to reveal his Son in
me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles." It pleased
God to send me to College, that I might preach Him? No, it
pleased God to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him.
Real service of the Lord comes out of that sonship. In the Word
of God, sonship always lies behind service - The Levites and
priests, sons of Aaron; service, sonship.
The
Testing and Perfecting of Sonship in the Wilderness
Now, Paul says,
"When it pleased God... to reveal his Son in me...
immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood: neither went I
up to Jerusalem to them that were apostles before me; but I went
away into Arabia". It seems to me that what Arabia stands
for is always very closely related with sonship. Moses had forty
years of it. Well, he was truly far more a son when he came out
than when he went in, in a spiritual sense.
"The heavens
were opened... and a voice... said, Thou art my beloved Son; in
thee I am well pleased... Then was Jesus led of the Spirit into
the wilderness" (Luke 3:21-22; 4:1). Sonship was being dealt
with there. "If thou be the Son...." That is the basis
of the wilderness. Somehow or other, in the economy of God a
wilderness has a great relationship with sonship. It is a
principle. "I went away into Arabia." What is Arabia?
You do not get very much help from the world in Arabia, nor do
you get very much help from the flesh. The flesh has nothing to
thrive on in the desert; the natural life is starved in Arabia.
You are alone with God: that is the point. Moses was alone with
God in the desert for forty years. The Lord Jesus in the
wilderness was alone with God. The Devil was there, it is true
but He is now being tested and proved on this matter of His
relationship with God without any help from the flesh or the
world. Paul went away into Arabia. I have no doubt that during
that time - some say two years - the sifting out of this position
took place, the adjustment of things, the handing over of the old
traditions to the new facts of experience. Perhaps you know
something of Arabia. You can live in a great city and be in
Arabia. You may be here right in this meeting and be in Arabia at
the same time. You are knowing something of the dry desert, the
wilderness; that is, you are not finding a great deal upon which
your natural life can thrive, a great deal to support you
naturally in your relationship to the Lord. All that is being
withdrawn, and you are coming to the place where it is the Lord,
and only the Lord, and all other things are taken away. Beloved,
the desert, Arabia, has proved again and again to be a school of
sonship, and a very valuable school. Some of us know a little bit
about Arabia. Oh, the desolation for the flesh there! "I
conferred not with flesh and blood." No, it is coming, under
desert conditions, to know the Lord. That is sonship, where the
Lord alone is our resource, and where, if it were not for the
Lord, we would die, our carcasses would fall in the wilderness;
but we are proving that He can prepare a table in the wilderness.
That is sonship. You will see the thing in principle and in
spiritual meaning if you cannot follow or wholly grasp the way in
which it is put. What the Lord is set upon is having us like
that, sons in a true sense. May He have it so with us!