Reading: Galatians 3.
“…I am again in travail until
Christ be formed in you” Galatians 4:19.
The Resistance to Divine Purpose
As we
continue our meditation in relation to spiritual growth,
spiritual full growth, recognising, as we have sought to
do, the very great and serious place which the matter
occupies in the Word of God, and how important the Lord
evidently regards it, there is the other side to that
fact which must impress us, namely, the way in which this
matter of spiritual growth is fraught with opposition.
Whenever you touch upon it you find yourself in the
presence of something set against it. It is never
presented in passive conditions. It is always encompassed
by active opposing elements and forces. You find that the
exhortation, the encouragement, the admonition is all of
the most positive character as over against something.
Whenever God has moved in the past towards spiritual
increase, there is always present some counter-move, some
antagonistic element. You can see it through the Word of
God again and again.
When
the Lord would bring Israel from the bondage and
limitation of Egypt, at once there was bitter conflict.
When Israel was at last brought into the land, almost
immediately there was an Achan to arrest the whole
movement and bring to a standstill that development unto
the fullness of which the land spoke, and for the moment
it was effectively done. So you may see it in a great
number of instances in the Old Testament.
When
God brought His Son into the world, which was a great
movement towards spiritual fullness, there was to begin
with a Herod, and then the Jews in their prejudice. Let
us take note of the fact that prejudice is always set
against spiritual progress. Prejudice never does give God
a chance. It is a closed door. If one thing more than
another marked the Jews, in the days when He who was
God’s fullness came amongst men, it was prejudice,
and it was that which limited them, and robbed them of
God’s full purpose.
When
the Day of Pentecost was fully come, and a mighty move
towards fullness was made — that which the apostle
later refers to as “the fullness of him that filleth
all in all” — hardly has the church started
upon its course before you find a suitable instrument to
the enemy’s arresting work in Ananias and Sapphira.
Then you move on to the great apostle Paul, and always
dogging his steps everywhere are the Judaisers.
So it
is, that every movement of God is met by a
counter-movement. Every step towards spiritual
enlargement finds something present from the other side
to check it, to arrest it, to frustrate it.
The
Letters of Paul
Thus
these letters of Paul bring up into view a large number
of things which Satan has produced, very largely through
the flesh, as counter-movements to God’s end —
full growth. As we have seen, in Corinth it was
carnality, and also in Corinth, as is made perfectly
clear in the early chapters of the second letter to the
Corinthians, and among the Galatians, it was the
Judaisers. Theirs was a very unworthy way of going to
work. One of their great strokes against what God was
seeking to do, was doing through His servant Paul, was
their attack upon him in person; that is, their attack
upon him as the vessel being used by God, an attack in
ways unworthy of those who professed to be seeking the
interests of God.
It is
always so. When God moves and takes up a vessel for the
increase of Christ in His people, for spiritual
enlargement, Satan raises up an attack upon that vessel,
and seeks to frustrate the purpose by prejudicing that
purpose through the vessel in some way. He will
misrepresent, lie — oh, he will use every kind of
movement to discount the instrument, so that the divine
object may fall into disrepute or be brought under
arrest.
Now
here is a letter (the letter to the Galatians) which is
full of terrific conflict. Martin Luther was a fighter if
he was anything, and he said he had betrothed this letter
to himself. But what did Luther say further in relation
to that? “Beforehand I was in quietness and comfort,
in rest and acceptance, but since I have surrounded
myself with a solid block of enemies”! That is
significant because of what this letter stands for. Would
to God that Martin Luther had seen all that it stands
for, instead of only its beginnings. However, here
we are in the presence of conflict, and the point is for
us to recognise that if God is moving towards the
enlargement of the measure of Christ in the saints, that
movement encounters all hell’s antagonism, and the
vessel used by the Lord to that end will come under the
massed assaults of the enemy, both vehement and
malicious. He will stop short at nothing in seeking to
render that vessel inoperative, to paralyse it, so that
it cannot fulfil its divine mission. I always take the
apostle Paul as a personal representative of the truth
which was committed to him, as a vessel, one in whom all
that related to that truth was wrought out in his own
history; and in this point, as in so many others, it is
quite manifest that Paul was raised up as a special
vessel in relation to the full, eternal purpose of God
concerning the church, and there was not another man in
the dispensation who so met the force of hell, in its
endeavour to paralyse and destroy, as that man. He stands
to show us in his own history, and in his own person,
what we may expect if we are linked with God’s full
purpose.
This
should be enlightening and encouraging, looked at from
one standpoint. It should explain things, and it should
set us on our feet. The danger so often with us, when
there is a mighty uprising of spiritual antagonism and we
are made to suffer, and are suffering intensely, is that
we should regard that suffering as something in itself,
seek to attribute it to natural causes, to feel that it
is something in the course of life which has come our
way. We think we are just sufferers, and fail to see
that, however the thing may appear to be like that, it is
related definitely and directly to the purpose with which
we are occupied.
It may
be that you are not able to enter into this, because you
are not in the experience of it, but others will
understand. Believe me, that if you have betrothed
God’s full purpose to you, if you are married to
God’s full thought for His people — for
yourself and for others, especially for the church —
you are going to meet the Devil’s attempted
frustration of it in every conceivable way; the
frustration of yourself, the frustration of your
ministry. You are going to meet it physically, you are
going to meet it in your soul, and you are going to meet
it spiritually. You are going to meet it inside yourself,
and you are going to meet it outside yourself. You are
going to find yourself in a battle. And what is true of
the individual will be true of any company that is
standing in relation to God for that purpose.
The Form of the Attack
Among the Galatians
So we
find ourselves in that very atmosphere immediately we
open this letter to the Galatians. Paul wastes no time
here. He uses very few words by way of nicety. He
introduces himself, and his introduction is an attack. He
opens the battle in his first sentence. “Paul, an
apostle (not from men, neither through man…)”
That is an attack. The battle is joined. Judaisers have
been at work, and they have persuaded these Galatians
that Paul was not an authentic apostle, but had set
himself up as something; he was not one of the twelve,
but was self-appointed. “Paul, an apostle (not from
men, neither through man, but through Jesus Christ, and
God the Father, who raised him from the dead).” You
see, that is accepting the challenge. How it goes to the
heart of things! It takes hold of the sword of the enemy
and turns it right round and pierces himself. The
Judaisers say I am not an apostle by recognition of
Jerusalem; I have not been ordained at headquarters; I am
not one of the authentic twelve; I have not received my
credentials from the ecclesiastics, those who are called
pillars. I agree! But I take my apostleship higher; I
received it “through Jesus Christ, and God the
Father…” What can you say to that? How are you
going to handle that?
Now
that is only just to point out that you are in the
presence of conflict, and to establish the fact that
where God is seeking to move towards the bringing of His
Son to full formation in the church, Satan is always most
active to defeat that end by any means possible. Bear
that in mind at all times. The Lord help us to do it. If
we remember that, it will be to our salvation.
What
the Judaisers sought to do is perhaps something which we
need not consider in detail. Had they had their way, this
is what the effect and the outcome would have been,
namely, that the Galatians would have returned to, and
have become settled and fixed in religious formality, in
ceremonial and ritual, in tradition and external
religious works at the cost, firstly, of life, and
ultimately of God’s eternal purpose. The apostle
takes up the battle for life in this letter, and makes it
an issue of life.
We can
clearly see that the method of the enemy was not
restricted to the Galatians, for it had gone on before
their day, and it goes on still: formalism, religious
formality, ceremonial, ritual, religious traditions, many
outward works in the name of God, all that in the place
of, firstly, spiritual life, and then, finally, in the
place of God’s full intention for His people. That
is very true. Of course, the enemy always knows where he
has a salient point, where he has a vantage ground. These
Galatians were mainly Gentiles, and they had come out of
paganism, and in their pagan religious system there were
many rites and ceremonials, many religious ordinances.
There were all those performances and outward activities
which constituted the form of worship of their gods, and
to the natural man, the man of the soul, such things are
indispensable. He must have what is tangible, he must
have helps in religion; he must hear something, see
something, do something, handle something. All these
accompaniments of religion are essential to religion, and
his religion would be a poor, starved thing if you took
those away. Take the artistic away, take the aesthetic
away, take away all the externals that come to our
senses, and those means by which we express our sentient
life, and what is religion? This pure, spiritual life of
faith without anything of that is an uninteresting thing
to the soul, and is very vague. Yes, what an unreal thing
it is! These Galatians had come out of all that other
thing, and had turned to the Lord. Then the Judaisers had
come along with the Jewish order, and said, “Except
you are circumcised you cannot be saved, and what you
need is to come back to the Jewish ordinances”. If
you are at low ebb spiritually you are not able to stand
up to that sort of thing very well, when there are
plausible arguments and strong constraints, and when
there is a turning upon the instrument which has been
used for you and the pointing out of all the flaws and
weaknesses in that one, and the showing of how that one
has set himself up to be something which is contrary to
the accepted position at Jerusalem. These leaders in
Jerusalem had known Jesus Christ personally, in the
flesh; they had been with Him, and they did not agree
with this sort of thing, they still believed in these
Jewish ordinances. “So you see Paul is all wrong; he
is just one by himself, no one agrees with him”, was
what they urged.
It was
all so subtle, and thus Satan had his point with them in
relation to their old form of life, working on that
uncrucified soul-life, and they came under the spell.
“O, foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?”
As we have pointed out, the literal words there are,
“Who did cast over you the witch’s spell?"
A spell is a nice sensation, till you wake up. A spell is
usually cast over a person in order to rob him of
something, and that in fact is what happened in the case
before us.
Spiritual
Apprehension of Christ
Let
us, then, recognise the point, namely, that in Christ we
are called out of that whole thing. That is earthly, that
is of man, tradition, religious system of rites and
ordinances, of days, times and seasons. We have been
called out of that into a heavenly life in Jesus Christ
by faith. When you really do get through you never have
any inclination towards that other thing again, you are
spoiled for it. But that is just the point of Galatians
4:19: “My little children for whom I am again in
travail until Christ be formed in you.” Paul was not
saying at this point that he was in travail in relation
to that end when Christ should be fully formed in them in
the purpose of God. Of course, it had its bearing upon
that, it was related to that ultimately, but that is not
what he means here; not that full conformity to the image
of Christ, not that full development of Christ in them.
What he is saying here is this: “I am in travail
until Christ takes definite shape in you.” It is the
difference between the embryo and the fully formed child.
He said he was in agony about that. The trouble with them
was that they had not clearly seen Christ, not clearly
apprehended Christ; Christ was not distinctly defined in
them, the meaning of Christ had not become definite in
them. Something had happened. They had been begotten from
above, they had received the Spirit, by faith they had
turned to the Lord Jesus, but it has become evident that
they have not grasped the significance of Christ. Paul
said, “I fear lest I have bestowed upon you labour
in vain.” What is labour in vain? Oh beloved, in
relation to God’s purpose, in relation to God’s
full thought, it is far from being enough that we should
just believe on the Lord Jesus; it is essential that we
should see who and what Jesus is, and what He means.
If you
want proof that this is the point here between Paul and
the Galatians, recognise this, that the personal name of
the Lord Jesus Christ occurs forty-three times in this
very brief letter. It is not the descriptive title, as so
often elsewhere. It is the personal name, the Man Christ
Jesus thirty-nine times out of the forty-three in this
letter. Why? Why should he bring such a tremendous number
of references to Him into this letter? Well, it is
self-evident. Hear his exclamation, to this effect:
“Before whose eyes Jesus Christ was openly set
forth, crucified”, placarded openly, and you have
not seen! Four times in this letter the Cross of Christ
is referred to in relation to the biggest things with
which we have to do. We are not going to stop now with
them, but those four statements about the Cross of the
Lord Jesus in this letter are the greatest things that
could be said about the Cross, and they all have
reference to the end of the personal ego: “I have
been crucified…” — the all embracing fact;
then, by the same means, severance from the law —
“I… died unto the law”; severance from the
flesh — “They that are of Christ Jesus have
crucified the flesh with the passions and the lusts
thereof”; severance from the world — “Far
be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord
Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been crucified
unto me, and I unto the world.” “Before whose
eyes Jesus Christ was openly set forth crucified”,
and you have not seen the implications.
If you
had but believed (Galatians and all others) you would
have once for all been delivered from earthly religious
systems, earthly orders, rites, ceremonies, traditions,
and all that sort of thing, and you would be in a
heavenly place; for Christ crucified means that. To
apprehend Christ means absolute emancipation out of
everything here, even in a religious way, after a
religious kind. It is that which represents the whole
question of maturity and immaturity. You ask, What was it
that constituted immaturity amongst the Galatians? It was
that, under persuasion, influence and argument, they were
ready to drop back so easily and so quickly into an
earthly religious order with which the Cross of Christ
had finished, which the Cross of Christ had brought to an
end. Oh yes, the law of Moses, and all his order, and his
ritual ended in the Cross of the Lord Jesus. It served a
purpose, but reached its fulfilment in Christ, and Christ
crucified marked an end. In Christ risen, all that it
pointed to is taken up in a spiritual way to heaven, and
now we are united with Christ in heaven. He fulfils all
the values of that for us. He is our High Priest, our
sacrifice, our precious Blood, our meeting place, our
righteousness, our approach, our access to God, our
acceptance. Everything shadowed in the types and figures
is carried up into Him risen and exalted, and we have it
all in spiritual value. Yes, you say, but it is all so
far away, and unreal, and we want something that we can
handle and see and hear. Ah, that is immaturity, that is
spiritual infancy. Children always want something (and
rightly so) that they can see and hear. But the apostle
in this letter plunges the Galatians right into the place
where all those infant things are finished with. He says,
“You must begin sonship from the beginning”. It
is remarkable how far advanced he is in his point of view
in this letter.
While
the placing of sons lies in the future, while the
inheritance lies there, the apostle says, we are all sons
of God by faith in Jesus Christ, and we are expected now
to begin to live upon the sonship principle. We do not
want toys to play with on the earth, picture books to
look at, object lessons, but we have come in spirit
immediately to an apprehension of Jesus Christ, and a
living fellowship with Him, so that all that kind of
thing is passed. The Cross of the Lord Jesus in this
letter is not set forth merely in relation to what we
would call gross sin, but is set over against all
religion in the flesh, and when Paul says, “I have
been crucified with Christ; yet I live; and yet no longer
I, but Christ liveth in me”, he further adds:
“and that life which I now live in the flesh, I live
in faith, the faith which is in the Son of
God…” You notice the context. It is the
difference between life in the law and life in the risen
Christ; not the difference between the religious life of
the Jew as such and the religious man as such. All that
is one thing, and the Cross cuts that off, and the
“I” that is in that is brought to an end. Now I
live, he says, “yet no longer I, but Christ…
and that life which I now live I live in faith, the faith
which is in the Son of God…” It is a kind of
life. The Cross brings out to that kind of life which is
the life of the Son of God lived by us through faith.
That must be reserved for further consideration. We will
stay with the more obvious points in the letter.
Christ
Formed Within, A Question of Supreme Importance
I
think we can be content to dwell for a little while
longer upon those words in chapter 4:19: “My little
children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ be
formed in you.”
It is
the anguished cry that believers should come to a place
where they are fixed — “Christ be formed”.
It is the place where there is some definiteness in them
as to the Lord Jesus. It is a settled thing. They have SEEN
the Lord Jesus and they are settled. You cannot move
them; that is, they have the root of the matter in
themselves. Christ has taken shape in them.
Now,
if Paul agonizes, groans, travails in that connection,
how important it is, and what serious consequences must
be related to a Galatian condition. The crying need
amongst the Lord’s people is that they should come
to a fixed and settled place and position in consequence
of the meaning of Christ having come home to them in
clearness and in definiteness; that they should be
settled and grounded, not easily moved away, not easily
falling under the witch’s spell. They know the Lord,
and you cannot move them. You do not have to nurse people
like that. You do not have to keep picking them up and
putting them on their feet. You have to supply no
crutches. You can count on them. You know that they have
that basic knowledge of the Lord, that they will not be
moved away easily, that they will go right on. They see
what this means; they have grasped the significance of
Jesus Christ, and you can count on them to go on. You
will agree that this is a very necessary state to
God’s end, which is full growth; to have an initial
and fundamental grasp of the significance of Christ, and
to have become fixed in relation to Him. It is because
that is lacking that there is such spiritual poverty and
limitation, weakness, defectiveness and defeat
everywhere. It is a matter of seeing the Lord Jesus.
That
is why the apostle uses, with all his might, his own
personal case as a case in point. He opens this letter,
and takes up the battle. He declares his apostleship as
from heaven, and not from men. Then he goes on with his
own case, and before long he will say, “It pleased
God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and
called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me.”
When that happened, he says, in effect, “I went not
up to confer with flesh and blood at Jerusalem; I had the
root of the matter in myself by direct act of the Holy
Spirit.”
All
is by the Spirit
Go
through this letter again and count the number of times
that the Spirit is mentioned. You will find everywhere it
is the Spirit, and it is this inward work of the Holy
Spirit in the heart that makes him see the Lord Jesus. I
am not talking about seeing a figure, not about seeing a
person as such; I am talking about seeing the meaning of
God’s Son, the meaning of the Man Christ Jesus, how
He gathers up everything that has ever been, or ever will
be, in His own person, and becomes the embodiment of all
God’s thought, intention, and the fountain-head of
every resource in relation to that purpose of God: and He
becomes that to him. Paul needs no Jewish altars, no
Jewish priests, no Jewish blood-shedding and sacrifices,
no Jewish temple or tabernacle. Jesus Christ is all that
and infinitely more to him. Paul does not live by those
things, Jesus Christ is his life. He does not need
guidance from those things, Jesus Christ is his guidance.
It is what the Lord Jesus is to him that is the sum total
of it all.
When
you have that, you are out, you are free. Oh, no one need
say to you, You must do this, and you must not do that.
That is the law. You are out, you are free, you have no
life in that; you have rest, and liberty, and power, and
peace in Christ, in communion with Him, in fellowship
with God in Him. Think of the terrific fall this was on
the part of the Galatians. Paul appeals to them: “Oh
you, who began in the Spirit, do you think now you can be
perfected in the flesh? You who came into the way of all
that by the Holy Spirit, do you think you are going to
reach God’s full end, be made perfect by coming down
to fleshly religious activities? It is unthinkable. No
wonder you find Paul amazed, perplexed, bewildered and
vehemently angry that anybody would so undo the Cross of
Christ, so set aside the life in the Spirit. Spiritual
maturity is that the Holy Spirit has revealed and is
revealing all the meaning of CHRIST IN US, and we
are living on Him. Spiritual immaturity is that we must
have all these external religious things to help us to be
good, and with a very unsatisfactory result. Do you see
the point? Read the letter again in the light of this
word: “Because ye are sons, God sent forth the
Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying,
Abba…” In the original languages of the Bible,
the Hebrew and the Greek, when you read that particular
clause you are using exactly the word that the Lord Jesus
used when He prayed to the Father. When He prayed He did
not say in English, Father! He said, Abba! I do not see
any particular value in it coming down to us like that,
but it is strange that the Holy Spirit has preserved
that, and given us the original word and then the
translation, as though He would bring us right into the
closest touch with this thing, bring us there in spirit
to the very heart of the Lord Jesus.
Just
as Jesus Christ said to the Father, Abba! so the same
Spirit as in Christ is in us causing us to know the same
relationship with the Father as He had: “Because ye
are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our
hearts, crying, Abba…” That is where life in
the Spirit begins — Father! It is by the Spirit of
His Son.
You
see God’s purpose, God’s end, that we should be
conformed to the image of His Son. The Spirit of His Son
in us crying “Father”, revealing Christ in us.
“It pleased God… to reveal his Son in me.”
That puts everything on the inside from start to finish,
the beginning and the end; the first step and the
fullness is bound up with that. “Reveal his Son in
me”! That stands over against all externalities of
religion. The difference is between life and death, earth
and heaven, time and eternity. And so Paul calls this
liberty, “the liberty of the sons of God.”
“Stand fast therefore in the liberty…”
May
the Lord make this all clear, and bring it home to our
hearts, that we may know Christ.