"Jesus
said to him, 'I am the way, and
the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but
through Me'" (John 14:6).
"Saul...
went to the high priest, and
asked letters from him to the synagogues at Damascus, so
that if he found any
belonging to the Way, whether men or women, he might bring
them bound to
Jerusalem" (Acts 9:1-2).
"Following
after Paul and us, she kept
crying out, saying, 'These men are bond-servants of the Most
High God, who are
proclaiming to you the way of salvation'" (Acts
16:17).
"But when
some were becoming hardened and
disobedient, speaking evil of the Way before the people, he
withdrew from them
and took away the disciples" (Acts 19:9).
"About
that time there occurred no small
disturbance concerning the Way" (Acts 19:23).
"And I
persecuted this Way to the death,
binding and putting both men and women into prisons" (Acts
22:4).
"But this
I admit to you, that according
to the Way which they call a sect I do serve the God of our
fathers" (Acts 24:14).
"But
Felix, having a more exact knowledge
about the Way, put them off" (Acts 24:22).
The Lord
Jesus said of Himself that He
was the Way. Almost immediately after He had gone back to
heaven and the events
of the day of Pentecost had inaugurated the new era,
Christianity became known
as "The Way". Christ, Who always had to speak in a kind of
parabolic way without
giving explanations because the Holy Spirit had not yet come
as the
Interpreter, meant that He was the Pathway. Just simply,
undefined,
unexplained, He was the Pathway. Christianity took that up,
but by the Holy
Spirit embodied all that Christ meant by that, but did not
explain. Christianity
became the fulness of the meaning of Christ as the Way. These
two aspects,
then, Christ's own simple statement as to Himself, and
Christianity becoming
the full expression of what He meant, just resolves itself
into several quite
simple, but quite important things: firstly, what the Way is;
secondly, what
Christ meant as to Himself, and thirdly, what Christianity was
at the
beginning, and was always intended to be. Those things will be
the ground of
our consideration and enlargement at this time.
What the
Way Is
Firstly,
what a way is. A way is that
which links together a desire and its realization, a goal and
its attainment, a
beginning and an end. That is perfectly simple, almost too
simple, and yet
there is a profound fulness in that simple definition when it
comes to the Lord
Jesus. The goal, according to His statement, was and is, the
Father. The object
is coming to the Father. "No one comes to the Father but
through Me."
That
implies two or three things. Firstly,
that implies a closed way. It says to all men - "no man". "No
man comes." So
that all cannot come. The way is not open that anybody and
everybody can just
come or go to the Father willy-nilly, anyhow; that they will
all get there
sooner or later. "No man" means that there is a closed door;
it is a governed
door or way.
Then, it
implies an exclusive way - "but
through Me". That is exclusive, that is the only way. It is
selective, it is
discriminating: "But through Me".
But then it
also has its positive side
which shows that there is an open way. "I am the way." So
much, then, for what
a way is.
What
Christ Meant as to Himself
Now as to
what Christ meant as to
Himself. Here we will just state the thing in broad outline
and spend more time
on it later. What did Christ mean when He said, "I am the
way"?
a)
The Representative of people whom the Father will receive
Firstly, He meant that there is a
kind of person who alone could
be received by the Father. There is a particular and special
kind of person who
will get to the Father and no one else, and Christ meant that
He was that kind
of person. He set forth in Himself what kind of people will be
found with the
Father, who the Father will receive and have with Him. It is a
particular kind
of people, and Christ is the representative of that people,
because He is
speaking about people coming to the Father. He is not saying
that no one ever
will get to the Father. But what He is really saying is that
those who get to
the Father will be of a special and particular kind, and He is
that kind, "It
will be when people take on My character and My nature and My
likeness that they
will be with the Father." That is simple and we will spend much
more time on
that presently.
b)
Christ removes the reason for the closed way
Then He meant that the reason for
the way being closed was dealt
with and removed by Him. "No man" - that is a closed door.
That door closed at
a certain time. There was a particular point in the history of
man when God
closed the door and man could no longer pass through to God.
We know the whole
story. But the Lord Jesus has dealt with all that, and because
He has done
that, the way is open, but it is open only in Him and through
Him. The first
thing that we said as to the kind of person that gets to God,
has to do with the
Person of the Lord Jesus. The second thing as to the ground of
the closed door
being taken away has to do with His work.
c)
The way is a Person
The third thing that He meant -
and I am quite sure that those
of you who know your Bibles at all will be able to see that I
am not speaking
out of myself, I am speaking closely according to the content
of the Word of
God - and the third thing that He meant was that the way is not
a thing, the way
is not a system, the way is a Person. The
Person is representative of God's mind and inclusive of all
those who, through
faith, are in Christ. He is a great representative Person and
He becomes a
great inclusive Person. That again further awaits our fuller
consideration.
d)
Sonship the basis of coming to the Father
And fourthly, what the Lord Jesus
meant when He said, "I am the
way... no one comes to the Father but through Me" clearly
indicates the basis of
this coming to the Father. The very word that He uses, and uses
carefully, He
uses every time knowing what He is doing; not casually, for
later in the Gospel
by John He made the statement, "I have manifested Your name"
(John 17:6). The
basis of coming to the Father is sonship. The condition is
being begotten,
because it is coming, though it is not said here, to God. Here
it is not a
matter of getting to heaven or getting into the church; it is
a matter of
getting "to the Father" and that determines the basis of
any kind of
standing in the presence of the Father: begotten of God,
children of God,
sonship.
Well now,
that is broadly what the Lord
Jesus meant when He said, "I am the way."
What
Christianity Essentially Is
Then we
come to what Christianity
essentially is. Christianity is not a system; Christianity is
not a religion;
Christianity is not a form of teaching or practice or
procedure. Christianity
is first and last a Person. Christianity is a Person Whose
constitution and
nature and essential being becomes the Way. Christianity takes
on the values of
the Person. It is not Christianity's business to preach
doctrines, to set up
systems of practice; Christianity's whole business is to set
forth Christ, to
bring Christ livingly into view, to register Christ as a
living Person upon the
world. It is that that makes Christianity the Way. You can
have all the other
and people never find God and people never come to new birth
to become children
of God, and therefore, after all, Christianity may be failing
in its ultimate
responsibility of bringing about a vital union between man and
God as the
Father.
You may have all the other and fail. Christianity is a
Person in expression,
a Person in revelation, a Person in impact. It is Christ
Himself in His church,
His Body, making Himself and His presence known. If
Christianity is the making
real of Christ as the Way and so embodying all that Christ is
and has done to
bring to the Father, then Christianity must take up into
itself those things
which were true of Christ, making Him the Way.
Christ Provides God with Perfect
Satisfaction
The door is
closed when God is not
satisfied. There is no way through. Somehow God has got to be
satisfied. This
One, the Lord Jesus, has provided God with perfect
satisfaction; God is
satisfied. Christianity (or the church, it is the same thing
in the mind of
God, for our purposes we are using the term Christianity) must
be characterized
by God's satisfaction. That is, Christians must be living
wholly in the good of
God having been satisfied. They must be a satisfied people.
There is no
testimony, no registration, no value, no influence unless
there comes through
Christians the impression that they are a satisfied people,
that their
satisfaction rests upon God's satisfaction. Into their hearts
there has been
born the fact that God is satisfied.
It is a
fundamental thing which Satan and
all the evil powers are evermore seeking to upset. It is one
of those focal
points of the enemy's assault and pressure to rob us of that
inborn witness
that God is satisfied. You see, it is here that we are to take
our character
from Christ, what He was and is. He said, "I will give you
rest"; "you will
find rest for your souls" (Matt. 11:28-29). What did He mean?
Well, just this
quite simply. Here were a people in anything but rest,
labouring and
heavy-laden, and that does not mean that they were toiling in
the work of this
world of everyday vocation. They were labouring under the
heavy load of the
exacting demands of the Law as it had been developed into
thousands of
meticulous points by tradition and by the rabbis, so that it
was an intolerable
strain to try to live up to that standard, demanding an
instant watchfulness
lest you should slip up and make a mistake.
Life became a
burden and a toil
under that legal order. The meaning was, 'God is far from
satisfied; He is a
most dissatisfied, discontented God, and anything and
everything that we can do
will not please Him, will not satisfy Him. He keeps us all the
time, every
moment of our lives, on this ground of readiness to condemn,
readiness to
judge. What a discontented God He is, what a dissatisfied God
He is, and
therefore how hard it is to love this God, to serve this God.
How difficult
this kind of God makes our lives! There is no rest in this
life.' The Lord
Jesus said, "I will give you rest." How? Because in Him God
had found His
satisfaction representatively. He is the representative of
those who will come
by faith in Him to the Father, and then just take what is true
of Him into
their own hearts; what is true of the Lord Jesus, that God is
satisfied, that
God can look at His Son and say, "My beloved Son, in whom I am
well-pleased"
(Matt. 3:17). Then these through faith in Him can be accepted
in the beloved
One. God is satisfied with them in Christ, and so they come to
rest, the whole
burden has gone, the whole strain has gone, the whole
intolerable labour,
laboriousness, has gone. "Rest for your soul". So Christ is
the way to the
Father because He is the satisfaction of the Father.
Now
Christians can only minister Christ,
be here as expressing Him as the Way, and in effect being the Way
(that is that
vessel, instrument, channel and vehicle, of Christ to others)
insofar as
Christians themselves are living in, and enjoying, God's
satisfaction. To put
that the other way, our helpfulness, our usefulness, our
serviceableness for
the Lord to men will depend entirely upon the measure of God's
satisfaction and
rest in our own hearts. Hence the enemy will seek to destroy
our usefulness,
destroy our testimony, destroy our serviceableness, be
constantly attempting to
upset that rest and bring us again in some way to feel that
God is a very
dissatisfied God where we are concerned. That is maligning
God, undercutting
the work of the Lord Jesus, and setting at naught the very
meaning of His
Person. It is again closing the way to men.
It is very
practical, this matter of the
Way. There is no theory about this. You see, the Lord Jesus
brought men to God
not officially, but spiritually. The thing that drew people to
God through Jesus
Christ was that this Man has rest, this Man knows what rest
is, this Man
somehow or other speaks altogether of satisfaction, God's
satisfaction. There
is no strain in this Man's life. Rest is the secret of labour.
Labour without
rest, and your labour is for naught. Have rest, and your
labour is fulfilled.
The Lord's servants must know what it is to be in the
enjoyment of the Father's
satisfaction with the Son and with them in Him.
Christ's Sense of Sufficiency
The Lord
Jesus was wonderfully
independent in the right sense, wonderfully independent of
this world. There is
about Him, as you study and watch and follow, a sense of
sufficiency, being
cared for, being looked after. He had nothing in this world,
and probably
deliberately so, in order that having nothing in this world,
He might prove
that God can look after people who have nothing in this world,
and that they
need not suffer any lack. Interpret that spiritually, and you
see that
wonderful confidence and assurance in Christ's life. He was
never fretted about
things. He said "But if God so clothes the grass of the field,
which is alive
today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not
much more clothe
you? You of little faith!" (Matt. 6:30). "So don't worry about
tomorrow" (Matt.
6:34). A carefree life in all those realms; that was the Lord
Jesus, and He
spoke to people who were so burdened with care about
everything, whose lives
were such a strain.
Now that, of course, has an application in
temporal things,
but for the moment I want to keep on the spiritual side. That
name "Father" was
used by the Lord Jesus with the object of indicating that
people who came to
Him through Jesus Christ would be well looked after. "Your
heavenly Father
knows that you need all these things" (Matt. 6:32);
"Your
Father"; "How much more will your heavenly Father...?" (Luke
11:13). It was
because the Lord Jesus knew God, (if I may put it this way,
not forgetting the
facts of Deity and Trinity, but as Man here), in such a real
way as Father that
He had a life of such sufficiency, such assurance, and freedom
from fret and
anxiety, that people were drawn to the Father. If they came to
the Father at
all in His day and afterwards, they came because they saw that
this was the way
of deliverance from all their worries and burden of care. Here
again
Christianity must take its character from Christ if it is
going to bring people
to God, if it is going to serve in the capacity of the Way, if
it really is
going to live up to that original definition and designation -
the Way.
Christians must enter into that which was true of the Lord
Jesus, that His
Fatherhood means - and it cannot mean anything else - it means
that they will
be looked after. They may be tested, they may be tried, but
they will be looked
after. That is very simple, but "Father" means sufficiency -
it must mean that.
Life in
Christ
And then
how much was one word upon the
lips of our Lord, that word 'life'. "I came that they may have
life" (John
10:10). When the Lord Jesus uses that word it means something
more than
existence, something more than just managing to get along.
Life with Him is a
quality of life; it is a great life, it is a wonderful life;
it is a life no
one knows anything about but those who have it. It is so
different. You may
have everything that this world contains and can give. When
you come to have
this Life that is in Christ, you discover you have something
more than ever the
world could possibly give you, and it is not just something
more, it is something
different. The difference is found in its contrast.
Those who
have this Life do
not have their circumstances made easier. Indeed, it very
often seems - and I
think it is quite true - that the Christian life, so far as
circumstances are
concerned, is a much more difficult life than anyone else's.
We seem to be let
in for something, a lot of trouble, when we come into the Lord
Jesus, trouble
that would never come our way otherwise. We meet a new world
of opposition, and
yet is it not true that, with all the suffering and difficulty
of the Christian
life, the true Christian would not give up that life for all
that the world
possesses? That is the Christian's testimony and that
testimony is wrought out
on the anvil of suffering. It is moulded in the fire, it is
hammered out in
affliction. The strange thing about Christians is this, that
whereas they
suffer so much, they cannot contemplate giving up Christ.
It has
always been that, that has drawn
people to God in true Christianity. Christianity becomes the
Way, in effect, as
Christ was the way, when it embodies that blessed spiritual
reality of Christ -
a life that is different, transcendent, more blessed and
precious than any
other life.
Well, all
that is but introductory,
indicating something of the meaning firstly, of Christ as the Way
and then of
Christianity being called the Way.
Five Main Features of Christ as
the Way
From that
point we have to go yet more
fully. There are five main features of Christ as the Way. I
have indicated some
characteristics of Christ, but there are these major features
of Christ as the
Way. I mention them now, and leave their consideration for
later on. These five
features of Christ as the Way are the meaning of His birth,
the meaning of His
baptism, the meaning of His anointing with the Holy Spirit,
the meaning of His
walk here on the earth, and the meaning of His sufferings. We
will consider
them one by one in greater fulness.
The Meaning of His birth
But we may
begin with the first - the
meaning of His birth, and by that I mean His humanity, His
manhood. God's
normal way to man is by man. God's normal way for man to
Himself is by man.
Even in those extraordinary visitations in the Old Testament
when God Himself
came in what are called theophanies, men saw men, and
afterwards said it was
the Lord. It would be perhaps speculating, and certainly not
very convincing or
conclusive or profitable to say that that is probably how God
walked with Adam
in the garden - in a theophany, in the form of a man, just as
He came to
Abraham, and Abraham afterwards realized that it was the
Lord. And so with
others.
There have been, of course, independent speakings of
God to men without
any personal form being taken, but God's normal way to man is
by man, and for
man to Himself through man. Manhood is God's means and method
of communication.
Bear that in mind. God has so often refused to act
independently of man. He has
made Himself so largely dependent upon man. He has so largely
committed Himself
to man. In a very real sense God has put Himself into the
hands of men. That is
a very solemn truth. But remember that it is man in union with
God who is God's
instrument and means of bringing others to Himself, being His
Way. That is, it
is a certain kind of man: man according to God.
So we are
brought to the fact of manhood.
God never has and never does really commit Himself to a
system. You may say
that the Old Testament contradicts that. No, it does not. God
never really
committed Himself to the Old Testament system. The Old
Testament system which
God used was not the truth, it was not the reality, it was
only a figure. If
God had really committed Himself to that system and been
really a part of it,
He could never have allowed it to perish, He would have gone
down with it. But
when that system in any way failed God, God could wash His
hands of it, He
could desert the tabernacle in Shiloh, leaving it an empty
shell. He never
really committed Himself to a system, and He never does; He
may use things, but
that is as far as He will go. A system is not the truth.
When
the Lord Jesus,
pointing to the temple in Jerusalem, and then pointing to its
counterpart in
Samaria, Mount Gerizim, said, "But an hour is coming, and now
is, when the true
worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth" (John
4:23), He was
drawing a broad line of distinction between these objective,
outward, temporal
means, and the reality; saying, 'This is not the real thing,
this is not the
truth. I am the Truth, and I am the Way because I am the
Truth.'
The fact of
manhood is that God's way to
Himself and God's way to man is by personal representation.
Get hold of that:
personal representation. "Let Us make man in Our image,
according to Our
likeness" (Gen. 1:26). That is God in representation. Man
was made to be
representative of God. I am keeping the clear distinction
between humanity and
Deity. I am talking about manhood. Man was conceived and made
on the principle
of representation. "Our image, Our likeness". That man failed,
but another Man
came and said, "He who has seen Me has seen the Father" (John
14:9). That is
the whole principle of manhood where God is concerned - God
brought near, God
brought into view, God brought present in man-form. "Immanuel... God
with us"
(Matt. 1:23). God's likeness seen - representation, mediation,
a two-way union,
one hand on God, the other hand on man, and the Man of the
hands bringing the
two together, standing to mediate God to man and bring man to
God. "For there
is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man
Christ Jesus" (1
Tim. 2:5). Why did the Holy Spirit see to it that the apostle
put that in? "The
man". And again, "For since by a man came death, by a man also
came the
resurrection of the dead" (1 Cor. 15:21). As through man sin,
and through sin
death, so through man righteousness and through righteousness Life
- that is
the argument of the letter to the Romans, but the emphasis is
always upon this
word 'man'. God's way.
So the
birth of Christ or the incarnation
is a master concept. God has solved this whole problem in
manhood, manhood
after His own mind, His own heart, and that manhood is
exclusively realised and
revealed in Jesus Christ. Christianity does not become in that
identity Christ,
but Christianity is supposed to be the expression of the truth
that there is a
new creation, there is one new man; that in union with Christ
we are members of
His Body, of His flesh and of His bone. There is a spiritual
manhood brought
into being with the church and so the church fulfils the
function of Christ to
bring God present where two or three are gathered into His
Name, to reveal what
God is like. Oh, how we fail! But this is the original concept
of Christianity.
This is exactly what it means that Christianity was called the
Way. What is
God's way? God's way is man according to His own mind,
expressing Himself,
embodying Himself; that is God's way. That is God's way for
man to Himself, and
that is God's way for Himself to man - by man.
What is the
point? The majority of us
take the name "Christian". We are in this thing called
Christianity. But you see,
Christianity originally, initially, was called the Way, which
meant that it
took its character from Him Who declared Himself to be the
Way, and therefore
Christianity is supposed to be that which by Christ, because
of Christ, brings
God into view. God cannot be seen in a world like this except
through men and
women. It is the world that we are thinking about. What God is
like in His own
realm of heaven we do not know, how He is seen there and heard
there we do not
know. That is another order. There will have to be a whole new
set of faculties
for seeing and hearing God nakedly, so to speak, in His own
realm. When in a
world like this, because this world is constituted on the
human basis, the only
way in which God can really be seen and known and understood
is through man.
Christianity is supposed to be that collective man in Christ,
Christ in it. It
is a challenge. The next chapter will bring us very closely up
against that
challenge. But here is the statement of fact. What are we as
Christians? What
is the very idea of Christianity? What is its concept? What is
its nature? What
is its purpose? Oh, Christianity has become so many things!
Christianity has
taken on so many features. But let us get right back to the
beginning. What was
it? And how simple is the way in which it is put forth - the
Way - and that
meant a kind of person that comes to God, and a kind of person
that is able to
bring others to God. It is men, it is manhood, it is humanity,
and Christianity
can be gathered up into that wholly and solely, that it is a
human expression
of the Lord, an expression of the Lord in a world of human
beings by a kind of
people that are different from all other people. The
difference is that they
show forth the excellencies of Him Who called them out of
darkness into His
marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9).
You will
see that the Lord's purpose is
really to get down to the nature of Christianity and to get
back to its true
essence - the Way. The Lord help us to see it, and the Lord do
something in us
that others will be able to come to Him and will come to Him
because they see
the Way in us.