“Thou
in thy lovingkindness hast led the people that thou hast
redeemed: thou hast guided them in thy strength to thy
holy habitation... Thou wilt bring them in, and plant
them in the mountain of thine inheritance, the place, O
Lord, which thou hast made for thee to dwell in, the
sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established”
(Ex. 15:13,17).
“Who
shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? And who shall
stand in his holy place?” (Ps. 24:3).
“And
I saw, and behold, the Lamb standing on the mount Zion,
and with him a hundred and forty and four thousand,
having his name, and the name of his Father, written on
their foreheads” (Rev. 14:1).
“For the Lord hath built up Zion;
he hath appeared in his glory... that men may declare the
name of the Lord in Zion” (Ps. 102:16,21).
A Present Foretaste of Glory
The
above passage in the book of Exodus is very remarkable in
this respect, that the reaching of Zion, the holy
habitation, the hill of the Lord — for so it proved
to be eventually — is spoken of as though it were
already an accomplished fact at the beginning of the
history of Israel as a nation; for Exodus 15 occurs when
Israel is only just out of Egypt and just over the Red
Sea. The inspired song sees the end at once and brings it
right forward, and the people are, in spirit, in the good
of the end right at the outset. It is the language of
accomplished fact. “Thou hast led... thou hast
guided... to thy holy habitation...” There you
have New Testament history crammed into a very small
compass of words; because right at the beginning of the
church’s history, when the book of the Acts opens,
you are only just past Calvary, you are just out of the
authority of darkness, but the whole spirit and
atmosphere is of present attainment of the end. The
Lord’s people there are undoubtedly, in spirit and
enjoyment — at the end of the journey. They have
arrived. They have come to Zion. They have ascended into
the hill of the Lord, and it is with glory men may
declare the name of the Lord in Zion. Thus it was right
at the beginning. Whenever the Lord brings in part of His
purpose of the ages, He always brings it in with glory.
The bringing in is always accompanied by a sense of
fullness, attainment and realization. It has always been
like that, and those who were there at the time felt,
“We have reached the end, we are there!” That
was the spirit of it.
You
know that is how you feel when you get truly and soundly
born again. At the time you feel there is nothing more to
be done; you are ready for glory, heaven has arrived! No
one can tell you anything, teach you anything! It is that
spirit of youth which says: I have more understanding
than all my teachers! It is all glory. God has broken in
so far as you are concerned. It is the coming of the
great purpose of the ages, and you have arrived. So it is
whenever the Lord comes in like that. He gives at the
beginning an experience, a vision, a consciousness, a
realization, of the greatness and the glory of His
purpose; we are just full of it. That is how they were in
those first days of the church’s history.
A Process Begun
But
then the tense changes — “Thou wilt bring
them in...” — and it is not long before you
discover that it is not only that you have a present
foretaste, but also you are in a process begun — you
have arrived, but you have to go yet some way before you
do arrive. There is a glorious paradox about it all. The
Holy Spirit has touched the end at the beginning, and
then He has taken up that end to make it more than just a
sensation, just an ecstasy — to make it an inward
reality. Although on that day, when they were just over
the Red Sea, Israel did sing so lustily about having
arrived, they had to learn that in spiritual geography
there was a long way to go for that to become something
more than just a sense of things, however great that
sense might be.
What
is the Lord doing when He combines these tenses, bringing
these two things together — the realization that we
are come to Mount Zion and yet that we have a long way to
go, and something has yet to be done? The Lord knows us
very well. He knows realities. He does not build upon
nebulous, abstract foundations. He is going to have real
people — very real people. As we said earlier, the
Lord’s spiritual people are the greatest realists on
earth. They know increasingly how real everything is that
is spiritual. Such things become almost desperately real.
This is not merely something in the mind, this is
something tremendously real. Those forces of evil are
very, very real. The ground which they have in the
broken-down humanity which is ours is very, very real
ground. Everything that has to do with the spiritual life
is very real indeed, and the Lord is the great Realist
where we are concerned. He is going to have nothing that
is merely an emotion. He gives the foretaste, the
earnest, and then He says, “Now I am going to set to
work to make that your real position”. When at
length the hundred and forty-four thousand are found with
the Lamb on Mount Zion, you notice by the context that
they are not a people who have come there merely on an
emotion or an ecstasy or a teaching. They have come
through things. They are not only in the truth, the truth
is in them.
That
brings us at once to this further spoke in the wheel of
which we were speaking earlier, the very hub of which is
Zion. It brings us to this, the Name of the Lord in Zion.
Looking at the actual spiritual counterpart of all this
Old Testament teaching about Zion — Pentecost, the
Lord Jesus — what is the thing that is so very much
in evidence from that moment; the thing that is more on
the lips of the apostles than anything else, and which
constitutes the dynamic of their ministry, their
testimony, their work? Is it not the name of Jesus? And
this is no mere designation, this is a mighty
registration. That Name carries with it all the impact
and force of heaven. Nothing can stand before that Name.
World powers will seek to withstand, but they will be
broken. Herod may seek to destroy the servants of the
Lord and the church, but he will be destroyed out of
hand. The Lord in every realm in the book of the Acts
gives evidence that the name of Jesus is no ordinary
name. “God highly exalted him, and gave unto him
the name which is above every name.” It is the
Name of exaltation, ascension.
Zion the Embodiment of the Name
Zion
is the embodiment of the Name. Take the history of Zion
again. It is the city of David, “the city of the
great King”. It is the greatest name in
Israel’s history. It embodies the greatest glory of
their national life. The greater than David has ascended
up on high, the angelic hosts have burst forth in their
festal song — “Lift up your heads, O ye
gates; and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors: and the
King of glory will come in” (Ps. 24:7). In the
New Testament we have a very similar title given to the
Lord Jesus — “they... crucified the Lord of
glory” (1 Cor. 2:8); and, again, we read, “Ye...
killed the Prince of life; whom God raised from the
dead” (Acts 3:14,15). “I have set my king upon
my holy hill of Zion”. Zion is the name of
supreme power, supreme glory; and in the name of Jesus
every knee shall bow, “of things in heaven and
things on earth and things under the earth” (Phil.
2:10). Zion then means the power and glory and
sovereignty of the name of the Lord Jesus as a mighty
working power, registering itself upon things spiritual
and sometimes upon things temporal, a name which carries
with it all authority in heaven and in earth. It is the
Name of authority.
The Need to Recover the Authority
of the Name
Now I
suggest to you — and I expect I have your immediate
agreement — that what is needed today is the
recovery of the authority of the name of Jesus in the
church. We use it so frequently, it comes into our
language and phraseology, but we know all too little of
its virtue. I am not suggesting to you now that we should
seek after demonstrations in physical and temporal realms
of the power and authority of the name of the Lord Jesus,
but rather that what we need is the presence of the power
of the Name, as something which weakens all other powers.
For me that means something very much more than just
demonstrations in the temporal realm. What we really do
need is a power, a force at work which goes right on,
persists and overcomes in a quiet, silent, steady way
— when all the adverse forces are at work to
frustrate, we go right on and become irresistible in a
spiritual way. The thing goes on, the work is done. You
marvel that it is so, when you take account of all that
is set against it. That which is of interest to the Lord
really does hold on its way, and not only maintains its
existence, but increases, and there is nothing to account
for this in any other realm than that there is somewhere
a mighty divine force at work; and do what they may and
will, neither the naked powers of evil nor their
instrumentalities can stop it.
I
believe that was the outworking of things at the
beginning. You have demonstrations in the book of the
Acts, but that book is a book of principles; that is, it
is a book in which the Lord in the foundation of the
church, in the beginning of the dispensation, is making
it very plain that certain spiritual things are very
real. He may remove the ways in which He does make that
plain, but the reality goes on, and when you think about
it, you would prefer it like that. No one wants to have a
continuous, everyday repetition of the incident of
Ananias and Sapphira. Do you want to see in any of the
companies of the Lord’s people men and women
literally stricken down and carried out because they
sinned against the Holy Ghost? No, but what we do want to
know is that people are made aware of the fact that they
cannot withstand the Holy Ghost with impunity, that it is
a very dangerous thing to spiritual life and it may be to
the physical also — to stand in the way of the
exalted Christ. What we want is to see that Christ is
Lord in His house — but not by just physical and
temporal demonstrations. It is the mighty working of a
spiritual power, where everything is very real and the
Lord is Lord.
That
is the principle of the Name. It is a great spiritual
authority at work and nothing can withstand the goings.
Oh, it is a great thing! I often think that Gamaliel was
more inspired than we have imagined or than he knew. He
did indeed utter a great truth when he said, “If
it is of God, ye will not be able to overthrow them lest
haply ye be found even to be fighting against God”
(Acts 5:39). It is a hopeless thing to get in
God’s way. “If it be of God...”. That
is the only assurance you and I want — that a thing
is of God. If it be not of God, then our prayer is, The
Lord save us from it! But if it be of God, let all forces
combine, let all tongues wag, let all devices be resorted
to — it will go on! Why? Because the Name of the
Lord is going to be declared in Zion. It is this mighty
meaning of the Name of the Lord. It is the Name of
transcendent power. That is the fact, and that is what we
are concerned with.
Then,
of course, there comes the challenge. They did not
actually stay on mount Zion very long, even in the book
of the Acts. Positionally, of course, the church is
always there, but actually not always so. We were saying
in our previous meditation that the church made the
earth-touch all too soon. So at Corinth you find
believers at strife, and saying, “I am of Paul,
and I of Apollos” (1 Cor. 1:12). This is making
something of other names, and even bringing the exalted
Name down in spirit to the level of an earthly party
— “I am of Christ”. Human
likes and dislikes, preferences, antipathies and
sympathies, and all the activities of human judgment, an
earth-touch with a fallen creation, have made something
of other names, and the glory of the Name is veiled.
Or you
go to Galatia, and you find they have come down from Zion
and have gone to Sinai. That is to say, they have brought
everything to the level of legalistic Old Testament
religion — Judaism again with its legal bondage
— and the glory and the power of the Name are once
more suspended. Wherever this is found to be the case,
the underlying cause is ever the same. You can only know
the mighty operation of that ascension power of the
exalted Lord, as represented by His name, if you stay up
with Him in Zion. Come down to earth in spirit, and you
lose it, you forfeit it.
The Need to Get On to Higher
Ground
Now,
that is capable of such wide and varied application that
we could never cover the ground. But we can say this in
an inclusive, comprehensive way: for all the laws of
spiritual power, effectiveness and glory, the need is
higher ground. I would say that of almost every situation
of which I know where the glory is veiled, the power has
gone, and anything but Zion conditions prevail.
Corinthians, you are all divided up against one another,
suspecting one another, preferring, choosing; and what is
your state? You are in a state of chaos and defeat. Your
need is higher ground. As believers, you have to get off
this ground of mankind. If you and I, as the Lord’s
people who bear His Name, come down on to human ground
with one another, we forsake the power and glory and
working of that Name. It is not that we are going to live
a make-believe life. We are very real people, and the
people we have to do with are very real people too. They
are very awkward, they have their weaknesses, their
flaws, their faults, and many things difficult to put up
with, even though they be the Lord’s people. And you
know quite well that, while you are taking account of
people as they are in nature it is keeping you down, and
keeping everything down, and the glory is being excluded
and the power is suspended. The Holy Spirit, being within
all the truly born-again children of God, constitutes and
provides another kind of ground upon which we have
definitely to place our feet. We have deliberately and
persistently to regard the matter in this way:
“So-and-so is of such a kind, and there is this and
that about him, and if I proceed on purely natural
grounds I shall not go on far with him; I shall eliminate
him, and not have any fellowship with him. He is a child
of God, the Holy Spirit is as much in him as in me by new
birth; and he might find just as many wrongs and faults
and weaknesses about me as I do about him. But we have a
common ground, which is not that natural ground at all.
It is the ground of Christ, and I have deliberately to
trust Christ in my brother. It may be some time before He
gets the upper hand there and gets what He is after, but
I trust the Lord concerning him and take my hands off,
and believe that the Lord can do a great thing
there”. Some of us would never have gone on very
long with some people but for a deliberate taking of that
attitude. Do you think that my brethren would have
continued with me during all these years if they had not
taken that attitude? They have had much to put up with,
but there is something that God has done which transcends
that. It is an inwrought love of God and it is an
inwrought determination not to allow the natural side of
things to be the ultimate criterion. There is a
recognition that, however little there is, there is
something of the Lord to reckon upon, and we are in His
hands, and we are just going on trusting Him. That is
very practical, and it is only in that way that the enemy
is defeated and the Lord is glorified. Do you think the
name of the Lord is glorified by divisions and strivings
and conflicts, which come about because of natural
conditions of temperament, disposition, and so on? No,
there has been more dishonour brought to the Name of the
Lord in that way than perhaps in any other. The Name of
the Lord has to be glorified in Zion; that means
spiritual ascendency, the taking of higher ground. That
is the personal application of it.
I will
carry you much more easily with me when I make the
corporate application. You will agree when I say that,
speaking generally, the glory and power of the Name of
the Lord Jesus are not to be found in the church today as
they should be, simply because the church has come down
to such an earthly level, and is so largely a thing of
this world. It has lost the heavenly vision and its
heavenly position. It has become a thing of orders and
rites. As a matter of fact, the church very largely
— of course, with notable and blessed exceptions
— has tried to reconstruct an Old Testament
situation in this age. You have a thing that is seen down
here on the earth, with all its accompaniments, its
system of vestments and what not, a reconstruction of the
whole Jewish system in the Christian age, and called
“Christian”. No wonder the Name has gone out,
and the power; it is no longer a heavenly thing. And so,
however you look at it, and wherever you touch it, the
Lord has shown right at the beginning that, if the church
is to be in the mighty power of the Name of the Lord
Jesus, it has to leave its low levels and be in the place
of the Name spiritually. The picture is quite simple, the
picture of this going up to Jerusalem three times in a
year of a representative company in the old dispensation.
God Governs by Spiritual Maturity
Well,
the day came when the going up was due, and what
happened? They left their own hamlets and villages and
towns and cities wherever they were, as insular, as
apart, as distant; they left it all and came away from
their insularity, their dividedness, their separateness,
and all came up on to one mount, where their oneness in a
heavenly place was the great reality. And how blessed a
thing it was for them! And the Lord established that as a
testimony three times in every year, saying to them
thereby, “Israel, you are not so many isolated,
separate units, scattered everywhere, living your own
little village life or even your own great city life. You
are one people belonging to another city which is above:
your names are enrolled in heaven, you are the church of
the firstborn ones.”
Oh,
the amount there is in the Word of God to bear this out!
Take Joshua 21, for example. There you have the
forty-eight Levitical cities. The Levites took the place
of the firstborn in all Israel, and so became in type the
church of the firstborn ones. They were given cities.
What are the cities? They are the local representations
of THE city, that is all. They have no meaning
except in their central relatedness to THE city.
They are, so to speak, just microcosms of the one city of
God. They are the city everywhere expressed; forty-eight
— four times twelve — governmental order.
Twelve is the number of government, and twelve is all the
time found associated with God’s people. Israel
— twelve tribes. Twelve runs right through to the
twenty-first chapter of the book of the Revelation. And
firstborn SONS, the church of the firstborn ones,
signify that. Sonship is the full thought of God. When
you touch sonship in God’s thought, you touch
maturity in fullness, completeness of spiritual
realization. “Ye are come unto mount Zion... to
the church of the firstborn” (Heb.12:22,23).
Well,
the Levites of Joshua 21 and their forty-eight Levitical
cities are just one of the many types of this great
truth, that God’s thought for His people is
spiritual maturity, spiritual fullness, by which He
governs the world. It is a spiritual government. Oh, do I
need to stop with it? You know as well as I do that the
people who have gone on most with the Lord, who are most
spiritually mature, are the people who really govern.
They may be thoroughly inadequate in this world, they may
have none of the advantages that others have here, but
they know the Lord, and they are the people who in
spiritual matters come to the fore. Here we have the
whole principle of leadership, which is not official at
all. Government is vested in spiritual measure, it is a
spiritual thing. Firstborn sons, the forty-eight cities
— it is all an expression of Zion, Zion gathers it
all up. It is spiritual fullness, spiritual maturity by
which God will govern.
The Power of the Name
It is
very impressive to remember that when a name is given in
the Bible, it always means something. You know the cities
of the Pharaohs, and how they gave their names to their
cities — Raamses for example. The city is the work
of a man, it is produced by that man, and the name given
means that the man is thoroughly well satisfied with his
work, and he can give his name to the city. We do not, as
a rule, let our names go on things of which we do not
approve.
Here
in Rev. 14 is Zion, and a company standing thereon, “having
his name and the name of his Father written on their
foreheads”. That means that God has no
hesitation whatever in putting His Name there; He is
thoroughly satisfied. The name of Jesus simply means that
God is completely and perfectly satisfied with the work
that the Lord Jesus has done and has given Him “the
name which is above every name”. In the hundred and
forty four thousand on mount Zion you have a company who
have entered so thoroughly into the work of God in Christ
that God does not hesitate to put His Name upon them.
They bear His Name. It is Zion, with the Name of the
Lord.
You
see what that means. We have to come to the place where
God is satisfied. And where is that? God is satisfied
with nothing on this earth. It is only there in His Son
in heaven, as not belonging at all to this world, that
God finds His satisfaction. The Name is there, and it is
out from that perfect satisfaction of God that the Holy
Spirit comes with all the power of the Name. And how
mighty that Name has proved to be!
But
something has happened. What is it? Look at the people
concerned in Acts 2. First look back a few days. “They
all left him, and fled” (Mark 14:50). They did
not like to have themselves associated with His Name.
“Are you one of His disciples? No, I am not, I have
no connection with Him!” Ashamed of His Name. Then
those two as they went on the way to Emmaus, how
miserable they were, utterly in despair. Why? The answer
is in one word — earthliness. Their whole horizon
had been earthly. They had looked for the kingdom of God
in terms of earthly, temporal power, prosperity, and
position. Everything for them had been a matter of this
earth, this present life down here and how things would
affect them here and now, and that had proved their
undoing. The cross had put an end to all their hopes. But
then something happened. When Christ arose, by the space
of forty days He repeatedly appeared unto them. The thing
was happening; they were getting a new heavenly vision, a
spiritual conception of things, a transformation of
outlook: and then the Spirit came and put His great seal
upon it all. “My kingdom is not of this
world” (John 18:36) the Lord had said, and now
they knew how true that was. All was heavenly, and no
longer did that old idea of theirs hold them. When the
Spirit came, they were men emancipated from this world,
emancipated from the very strongest ties of which it is
possible for man to conceive — religious ties. Oh,
how powerful were their Judaistic bonds! But they were
emancipated now. The vision of Christ in glory did what
no combined forces on this earth could have done with
Saul of Tarsus. It emancipated him from his Judaism. I
consider that one of the greatest miracles of the New
Testament — the translation in spirit of a man from
earth to heaven in an instant by revelation; complete
emancipation. That is the realm of the power of the Name.
That is the nature of things where the glory of the Name
is manifested. We need a new apprehension of what it
means to be seated together with Christ in the
heavenlies, a real spiritual experience of emancipation
from things here in all our concerns and anxieties: so
free from things here that we are in possession of
everything! Paul said, “All (things) are
yours”. Life is yours, death is yours, the world
is yours, all things are yours (1 Cor. 3:21-23). To
understand what that means is tremendous spiritual
uplift. It means, in a word, that you have come into the
place where the heavens do rule, and whatever the Lord
wants you to have, you will have it: no matter what men
or devils say about it, it is yours. Priorities? You will
not get any priorities here, but you can have priorities
every time if the Lord wants you to. No one knows how it
is done. You may be at the bottom of the waiting list,
but if the Lord requires it you go to the top. Transport
or anything is yours if the Lord wants it. That is a
glorious position to be in. We are quite content not to
have a thing if the Lord does not want it, but if we have
it in our hearts that the Lord wants it, we have a right
to go to heaven and take it; it is ours. You find it
works out like that. Somehow or other it comes about when
everybody says that it is impossible — it just comes
about, it happens. The heavens do rule for those who
belong to heaven, and live in heaven. We need to know
there is a mighty authority in the Name; but in all its
forms of manifestation it demands that you are in the
heavenly position. The Name is impotent when you are
touching this earth in voluntary association. But be in
the place of the Name, then ask whatsoever ye will, and
it shall be done. If we only know the place of the Name
with regard to everything, we have the key to the whole
situation. The Lord make us understand more what the Name
of the Lord is in Zion.