Reading: Matt. 4:4; John
6:63,68; 8:47; 14:10; 1 Peter 1:23,25; Heb. 4:12-13; 1 John 4:17.
You will notice that what is
said in the first four of these passages arises out of the fact
that the Lord Jesus was the Heavenly Man. In the temptation in
the wilderness, as recorded in the passage in Matthew, we see
that it was following the opening of the heavens and the
attestation from the Father, "This is my beloved Son..."
that the enemy made his challenge to all that this designation of
Christ as the Heavenly Man implied. "If thou art the Son..."
The temptations had their foundation in the fact of the
heavenliness of the Lord Jesus. In the passages in John's Gospel
the same feature is seen. As we have already noted, John keeps in
view the heavenliness of the Lord Jesus all the way through, from
the first words of his Gospel to the end. The challenge of the
Lord Jesus carries that same meaning: Believest thou not that I
am in the Father... The Heavenly Man is brought before us at this
point in relation to the Word of God.
We closed our previous
meditation by dealing with the vital principle of redemption, and
we were saying that that principle, which is eternal life, makes
the redemption that is perfect in Christ, progressive in us.
Redemption is introduced into us with the receiving of eternal
life, and as the life operates, works, and increases, we come
increasingly into the good of redemption. The real values of
redemption become ours in experience by the operation of the life
of the Redeemer in us, the Redeemer operating in us by His own
life.
Christ the
Beginning of the Creation of God
In John 20:22 we have an
incident recorded which has given rise to a certain measure of
perplexity: "...he breathed on them, and saith unto them,
Receive ye the Holy Ghost..." We perhaps want an explanation
of that act, and of those words, and I think the explanation is
that what He did and said was in pattern, and not immediately in
actuality; that is, it was a representative act on the part of
the last Adam. John 20 sees us on resurrection ground with the
Lord Jesus. We remember that it is written, "The first man
Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a lifegiving
spirit" (1 Cor. 15:45). That must, in spiritual reality,
relate to His resurrection. Not in the full sense was He a
life-giving spirit before the Cross, neither was He the last Adam
before the Cross. All that was represented by, and summed up in
Him, but in the sense of generation, this only begins on
resurrection ground. There in the fullest sense He becomes the
last Adam, a lifegiving spirit. So on resurrection ground He
performs this representative or pattern act, and utters these
representative words as the last Adam, fulfilling in the
spiritual sense the words of Revelation 3:14, "...the
beginning of the creation of God." In the literal sense He
was that at the beginning of this world. He was the beginning of
the creation of God. That does not mean that He was the first one
created by God; it means that He began the creation of God
literally then, as to this world.
In the new creation He is
taking that place in the spiritual sense: "...the beginning
of the creation of God." In the beginning of the literal
creation there was a breathing into man of the breath of lives.
Now, as the last Adam, as a life-giving spirit, He breathes upon
them. It is a typical act. It is the last Adam acting in a
pattern-way in relation to the first members of the new creation,
the beginning of the creation of God. He is typically infusing
eternal life into the new creation. It is only a typical act,
because the Spirit was not yet given. The full expression of it
came later at Pentecost.
The Heavenly
Man in Relation to the Word of God
Here is life in relation to the
Heavenly Man in the full sense. We now come to bring all this
life principle in the Heavenly Man into relation to the Word of
God. The Word of God is very closely related to this life, and
this life is very closely related to the Word of God, both of
them as in the Heavenly Man, the life and the Word. So much is
this so that they are not things in Him, but He is them. He is
the Word, and He is the life; the life and the Word are in Him as
His very being. Yet the Word is utterance as well as person. If
you have taken the trouble to study the technique of the point
that is raised in the use of the words "Logos" and
"rema", you know how difficult it is always to
differentiate between the two. You know how they run into one
another, and how very often they meet and are one. So it is that
the person has the word and the word is the word of the person.
There is a difference, and yet they are both bound up with the
person. We shall see as we go on what it means.
(a) Begotten
by the Word
In the first place, as we have
been saying, the Lord Jesus as the Heavenly Man was begotten
through the Word. The angel visited Mary and presented her with
the word of God, and waited for her to respond to it before there
was any living result, and when, after consideration and fighting
her battle through the problem and the difficulty, and the cost
of it, she responded, "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; be
it unto me according to thy word", then the living Christ
was implanted.
(b) Tested by
the Word
In the temptation in the
wilderness, it is clearly indicated to us that, in the background
of things, it was the Word of God that was governing the Lord.
Every temptation was met with the Word of God: "It is
written..." Life was contingent upon the Word of God:
"Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that
proceedeth out of the mouth of God" (Matt. 4:4). In the
Heavenly Man the life question is bound up with the Word of God.
If you take the opposite of that, you know that the earthly man
dies because he refuses the Word of God; his life depends upon
the Word of God and his attitude toward it. Here the last Adam is
taken up on the same basis, and inasmuch as He met the three
temptations with the Word of God, it is perfectly clear that His
life was bound up with the Word of God. It was the Word of God
that was governing this whole experience, and its issue. The
Heavenly Man was being assailed with a view to tearing Him out of
His heavenly life, as it were, by getting Him in some way to
refuse, or violate, or ignore the Word of God. He maintained His
position as the Heavenly Man in life on the ground of the Word of
God.
(c) Governed
by the Word
Not only was He begotten
through the Word, and tested by the Word, but in the third place,
Christ was governed throughout the whole of His life by the Word
of God. All the Law and the Prophets apply to Him. Said He to
Jewish leaders, "Ye search the scriptures, because ye think
that in them ye have eternal life; and these are they which bear
witness of me" (John 5:39). The suggestion there does not
immediately affect our consideration, but is worth noting. In
effect He was saying: In your searching of the scriptures for
eternal life, it is the Person in the scriptures that you need to
know; it is in Him in whom the scriptures are gathered up that
eternal life is found. That is the force of the statement:
"...these are they which bear witness of me." Again,
when with the two on the way to Emmaus after His resurrection, it
is said of Him that "beginning from Moses and from all the
prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things
concerning himself."
We mark the fact, then, that
all the scriptures applied to Him. He embodied and fulfilled all
the scriptures. How often will He say, while here on the earth,
concerning a certain movement, a certain act, a certain
experience, a certain statement, 'I... that the scriptures might
be fulfilled..." If you have never taken out every instance
in which that occurs, you should do so. It is worth gathering up.
The Relation
of the Holy Spirit to the Word of God and the Heavenly Man
Now I want you to
note this. The Lord Jesus, in the whole of His life, was being
governed by the Word of God. How necessary it was, then, for Him
to walk in the Spirit, so that the Word of God should be
fulfilled. Now what does that mean? Take, for example, the Old
Testament. Do you suppose for one moment that every statement in
the Old Testament was always present in the mental consciousness
of the Lord Jesus, and that when He went to do something He
referred to His manual, and said: 'Now, shall I do this, or shall
I do that? What does the scripture say I ought to do?' Yet every
part of the scripture was controlling His life, and there was a
sense in which He was responsible for everything there. It all
applied to Him. But He was not carrying all the scriptures in His
head, nor even in a book, and referring to his memory or His
manual for His conduct, His utterances, His acts, His
experiences, for what He allowed and what He did not
allow, for what He did and what He did not. Although the Word of
God was with Him richly, although He would have had a great
knowledge of the scriptures - and that becomes perfectly clear as
we read His utterances - that is not the way in which the Word of
God governed Him; as though He had to call scriptures to
remembrance on every occasion and to act accordingly. He was
moving in the Spirit of life, and as He did so He moved according
to the Word of God. When necessary the Spirit of life brought the
Word of God to His remembrance, and He was able to use it. How He
did use it! But apart from any quoting of scripture, and apart
from any present memory of the particular passage which governed
any given incident, the Spirit was moving with life, in relation
to the Word of God. He was governed by the Word of God, so that
even when, as Man, He was helpless upon the Cross, unable to do
anything, it says of those very conditions, "...that the
scripture might be fulfilled..." Again, it is recorded that
when He was dead on the Cross, and they came to break the legs of
those crucified, finding Him already dead, they break not His
legs, "...that the scripture might be fulfilled, A bone of
him shall not be broken" (John 19:36). That Man is under the
government of the Word of God in everything because of the Spirit
possessing, because of the Spirit directing, and the Spirit
taking responsibility.
I can see a danger there, and
I am going to safeguard what we are saying, but let us first of all
stress this law. If we are walking in the Spirit, and are moving
according to the life of the Heavenly Man, our lives will be
ordered according to the Word of God. Sometimes we shall not know
the scripture that applies to a given moment, but we shall know
of something happening; we shall know that at that point we were
checked; it was as though within us something said: That is not
right, you will have to correct that statement; there is a flaw
in that, and you will have to make that good. How often we have
known that. Afterwards we have discovered where we were mistaken.
The Spirit of life does not let anything that is contrary to the
Word of God pass, if we are walking in the Spirit. Surely that
should be a great comfort to us, and a great help.
The Word of
God Never to be Set Aside
But there is a danger of which
we need to beware. What we have said does not mean that we can
take up a course of trying to walk in the Spirit, and neglect the
Word of God. We cannot say: Well, to walk in the Spirit is all we
need and we shall be according to the Word of God; we need not
bother about that. There are a lot of people who live in what
they call their "spirit". They "get it from the
Lord". They get something, and act upon it, and afterwards
it is discovered that it is a direct violation of the Word of
God. How often we have met that. People get things "from the
Lord", and do something which they think they got from the
Lord, and it is as clear as possible that the Word of God is
positively against what they have done.
Thus the matter needs
safeguarding. "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in
all wisdom..." (Col. 3:16) as a basis for the Holy Spirit.
If, however, you are doing that you will not always have the
exact passage to hand to govern the thing of the moment, but the
Holy Spirit will be making good in you what He knows to be the
Word of God, and holding you up. How true that is. Some of us
have found that our natural memories have in great measure broken
down. Very often a misquotation of scripture does not touch
doctrine at all, but the point is this, that there is a governing
Intelligence which makes us know the Word of God, though we may
not be able for the moment to give a particular passage in its
exact phrasing or call it to mind. We are governed by it if we
belong to the Heavenly Man. "As he is so are we in this
world" (1 John 4:17). Here is the Heavenly Man governed by
the Word of God, inasmuch as there was life in Him.
What is true of the Head, is to
be true of the members. If we are joined to the Heavenly Man, we
become parts of that corporate Heavenly Man, and that same life
is in us, and we shall walk by the Word. We shall be governed by
the Word through the Spirit of life that is in the Word, and that
Spirit of life is all-knowing, all intelligent. I wish that all
the Lord's people lived on that basis. It would save us from all
that deadly heresy-hunting kind of thing; from always being
suspicious, little, doctrinal watchdogs, keeping a lookout for
anything that is erroneous, and producing a blight of death over
everything. If we were but living in the Spirit, we should know
in our hearts whether a thing were right or not, without
projecting our analytical minds into things; the Spirit would
bear witness in our hearts. That would be life and salvation. The
other is a miserable existence for everybody.
Now you see the Heavenly Man,
eternal life, and the Word governing throughout. What a
difference there is between being governed by the letter and
being governed by the Spirit. We may have the book; may possess
all the letter; and may be constantly exclaiming, "To the
law and to the testimony!" We may thus become very legal,
checking up on the letter all the time. The Lord Jesus did not
thus act, nor did the Apostle Paul. Zealous as they were for the
scriptures, for the Word of God, utterly governed by the Word of
God, the thing which mattered with them was the living Word. Said
our Lord Jesus: "...the words that I have spoken unto you
are spirit, and are life"; "...the flesh profiteth
nothing" (John 6:63). We can kill with the letter. We can
kill with the Word, as the Word. Surely we want to be delivered
from dealing with the scriptures as words, as letters, and to be
brought into the place where it is the Spirit in the Word giving
life. What a difference there is between those two realms. One
leads to nothing but death, paralysis, to the chilling and
blighting of everything; the other leads to a positive
condemnation, to judgment which is necessary to slay the thing
that is evil. It does not leave things in that blighted state
without any meaning, which is all too often the case when it is
merely a thing of the letter.
So you get the twofold aspect
of the Word unto growth in Christ. Firstly, the Word is a
Spirit-breathed utterance. That is what the Word of God must be,
and not just something that has been written. Secondly, the
Spirit of life associated with the Word. This raises a very big
question, a question that perhaps it is almost dangerous to open
in public in these days, and to answer which maybe would require
a good deal of explanation. The question is this: How far is the
written Word, as it stands, the Word of God? This Book can be
taken hold of and the same fragment used in fifty different ways
at the same time. The same passage of scripture can be the basis
of a dozen different things, all of which are mutually exclusive
and contradictory. Which of these dozen or fifty is the Word of
God? You can take scripture as the letter like that, out from
this Book, and you can say: This is the Word of God! How are you
going to prove it? All these different people take the Word of
God, and get a different meaning with a different result, act in
a different way, and justify a different course, and the same
Word has brought about terrific conflict and opposition between
different sections of people. How far is it the Word of God as it
stands? My point is this, that I believe that something extra is
necessary to make that the Word of God in truth, in fulness, and
that is the Spirit of life in it. That Spirit of life (we are
thinking of the Holy Spirit now, not an unintelligent
abstraction) must Himself use, and apply, that Word, to make it
the Word of God. I do not believe that you can get any Divine
result by simply quoting scripture as scripture. The Holy Spirit
has to come into that Word, express Himself as in it, and make it
live before you get the Divine result, because of the object in
view. A living Heavenly Man is not made by mere words, even
though they be words of scripture. That is what people have tried
to do. They have tried to make the Church by words of scripture,
constitute the Church by what is here as written, and so you have
half a dozen different kinds of Churches, all standing on what
they call the Word of God, and the thing does not live. It is a
living, Heavenly Man that God has in view, and to produce that,
the Spirit must operate through the Word.
"The words that I have
spoken unto you are spirit, and are life," said the Lord to
His disciples. "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the
words of eternal life." On the part of Peter, the spokesman
of these latter words, this was a word of discrimination. The
Scribes and Pharisees had the scriptures. They claimed that
everything they had and held was in the Word of God. Ah yes, but
they knew them not as the words of eternal life. There is a
difference. This life is in His Son. It has to be in a living
relationship to the Lord Jesus that the scriptures are made
effective.
The
Sovereignty of God in the Creative Word
That works, in the first place,
sovereignly in the direction of the unsaved. You may take the
Word of God as it is written and preach it, but you have to leave
the whole matter to the sovereignty of the Spirit. Preach it to a
crowd of fifty, a hundred, a thousand, and to nine hundred and
ninety-nine of the thousand the thing is as dead as anything can
be. They see nothing, they feel nothing, but one in the thousand
is sovereignly touched. That word is something more than an
utterance, than letters, that word is Spirit and life. That is no
accident, no chance, but a sovereign act. The Spirit of God has
come into the Word in relation to that one. That is the
foolishness of preaching, in a sense, that you have to preach,
and have no guarantee that the many will be touched by the Word
of God. You have to commit yourself to the waters, and believe
that God will somewhere come into the Word and touch some life,
though the majority should be left untouched. That is the extra
element, the Spirit of life in the Word of God, sovereignly
acting in relation to the unsaved.
That, of course, is the
creative Word, and brings us to see that in the Heavenly Man the
Word of God is God's act, and not just God's statement. In the
Heavenly Man the Word of God is never a statement alone, it is an
act. We say many things, and then we look round for the result,
with the thought in our minds, 'What is the value of all this?'
You have never, never to look for the result of God's Word in the
Heavenly Man; it is there. You may not see it, but it is there.
The Word in relation to the Spirit of life in Christ is an act;
something is done; and when that Word has come by the Spirit of
life, those to whom it has been directed by the intelligent
Spirit can never again be the same, though they may seem to go on
in the old way: "...the word that I spake, the same shall
judge him in the last day" (John 12:48). Something has been
said; the Word has come, and the thing is done, never to be
undone. Sooner or later those concerned are going to come right
up against that, and it is all going to be dated back to that
hour when the Spirit gave expression to the Word. That is a
tremendous fact. That is the value of giving the Word in the
Spirit, because it is an act. It is creative. It is something
done, not something said. Oh, to recognise that the Word in the
Holy Ghost is something done, not merely something said. God's
Word is always God's act: "...the worlds have been framed by
the word of God..." (Heb. 11:3). The Word of the Lord is a
blessing. It is not just saying, The Lord bless you. It is a
blessing in itself; it brings the blessing. It is an act.
The Life
Principle Established in the Case of the Saved
In the saved there is another
side. The first side is creative, sovereign. Now in the case of
the saved, where those concerned are the Lord's people, the
operation of the Spirit in relation to the Word of God is no
longer purely sovereign. In the case of believers the Word is not
given with a view to bringing about creation, for that is done.
We stand because of the Word of the Lord spoken sovereignly by
the Spirit into our hearts, having thus been made His children,
begotten by the Word of God. That is a sovereign act, but from
that time onward, that which is sovereign ceases and growth is by
the Spirit of life in the Word; but upon a basis that there is
life in us to correspond to the life in the Word. The life in the
one, or in the company concerned is the basis of growth according
to the Word of the Lord, which has life in itself. Take a simple
illustration from our use of natural food. No matter how you may
feed a corpse, you will get no development, no kind of growth. It
is of no use feeding a dead man. There must be some life in a man
that corresponds to the life in the food, takes hold of it, works
with it, co-operates with it, before there can be growth. That is
what we mean by the activity which bears the mark of sovereignty
in the main ceasing. The sovereign act is something apart from
ourselves; it is the grace of God to sinners who can give nothing
back. Now that the life is in us our growth is on the basis of
the life within us cooperating with the life in His Word. You can
preach to people who have not much light, and preach in the Holy
Ghost, and may not get very much result because of the limited
measure of life that is in them. But you get tremendous response
to a living word when people are all alive unto the Lord, when
there is life in them. Growth comes that way, the life in us
corresponding to the life in the Word, forming the Heavenly Man.
The Spirit-accompanied Word
imparts life, quickens into life where there is a dead state, and
does it sovereignly; but the Spirit-accompanied Word requires a
response in the spirit in the case of those who have already been
sovereignly brought into relation to Christ through the Word. The
same life in the Word governs our lives as governed our new
birth. The Lord Jesus was begotten truly of the Holy Ghost, the
Spirit of life, but by the Word, or through the Word. Now, for
the governing of His life, the same life through the Word
operated as in the birth; that is, the same life that brought
into being must be in the Word which governs the life, to bring
that being to full growth. It is the life principle which is so
important. It is this newness, this freshness that is of such
account - if you like, this originality. Do not misunderstand; we
are not using that word in the natural sense. We mean that in the
birth by the Spirit of life there is something that never was
before; it is original, new. We are a new creation in Christ
Jesus. We call it the "new birth". It is not just
something fresh, recent, but something that was not before.
In relation to the Word it has
to be like that. The Word must come with all the force of
something that never was before. There has to be a sense of
Divine originality and freshness about it that is bringing to
wonder, amazement. Again, you can test that. When the Word is in
the hands of the Holy Spirit, though you may have read a passage
a thousand times, and have had something from that word, you can
come back to it again and say: Well, I never saw that before!
Why, this is alive with meaning and value beyond anything before!
There is all the difference between that, and the stale stuff
that we put into books as the result of our Bible study. The Lord
would have His ministers in the realm where their handling of the
Word of God is in life. It is the Heavenly Man being governed by
the heavenly life in the Word, so that everything is constantly
new, constantly fresh, constantly original.
How true that is to experience.
There have been times when we thought we knew all about a
certain thing in the Bible; we have talked about it
tremendously, and it has been our theme for a long time. Then a
period of time has elapsed when we have left it, and the Spirit
of the Lord has led us to that again, and it is as though we have
never seen that truth before. We find that we can come back to
the old themes, as they are called, with such a newness. Other
people may not realise what is going on in us. They may hear what
amounts to the old things again, but they say: 'There is such a
new meaning, a new grip, that it is quite clear the Holy Spirit
has not finished with that matter, and has more to say to us
about it.' We have to be careful how we react mentally to things
like that. We are so often tempted to take this attitude: Oh,
well, I have spoken of that so often that people must be tired of
it! The Holy Spirit is saying: You say it again; do not take any
notice of what they think; if they have heard it a thousand
times, you say it! And when you do so, there is something done
which, with all the earlier utterances of the same thing, has
never been done before. Be careful of pigeon-holing anything in
the Word of God, and saying that we have exhausted that. If you
are dealing with the themes of the Bible, as such, you may as
well pigeon-hole the whole thing right away. If you are moving in
the Spirit with the Word of God, there will never be a time when
any part of the Word of God becomes obsolete. It is the same new
life that never was before, which came into us to constitute us a
part of the Heavenly Man, which is so governed by the Word all
the way along, unto constant increase, constant growth.
Remember, then, that it is a
matter of life. Remember that doctrine comes out of life, and not
life out of doctrine. The Church comes out of life, and not life
out of the Church. It is not attachment to doctrine, nor
attachment to the Church, but attachment to the Heavenly Man in
a living way that is the vital necessity; and then you will get
the doctrine and the Church. In the Word as we have it, the
doctrine came after the life. The Church existed before the
doctrine of the Church was given. Attachment to the Heavenly Man
produced the doctrine of the Church. The Church came about by a
living relationship, not by taking up a revelation of what the
Church was, and seeking to put it into operation. Life comes
first of all, and where life is found the rest will follow. It is
of no use trying to impose the doctrine of the Church, or any
other doctrine, upon people, if they are not alive unto the Lord.
The Lord knows what He is doing. You cannot go about the world
anywhere, not even amongst Christian people, with your full
doctrine, your full revelation, and have the assurance that, as
you give it out, they are going to leap to it. You have to go
where the Spirit leads you, for the Spirit knows exactly where
there is a sufficiency of life to have prepared the ground, and
what can respond to that which you have to give. How we would
like to go out into the world and talk to all the Lord's people
of what He has shown us, and give them the revelation of the Body
of Christ! We should go and organise great gatherings and get
people together, only to find that they look at us blankly and
exclaim: This is strange doctrine! You cannot do it like that.
Increase has to be on a basis of life; because doctrine does not
come first, but life. You cannot get the Church by trying to get
it! There has to be life, and life by its working forms the
Church, becomes the realisation of the Church. The reversal of
that order only leads to Babylon.
What is Babylon? Babylon
represents the loss of the authority of the Word of God as a
living thing. It was in the reign of Jehoiakim, the king who took
his pen-knife and cut up the Word of God, that Judah began to be
carried away into Babylon. When he repudiated the living
authority of the Word of God, all the vessels of gold and silver
were carried off to Babylon. It is a parable. It means that the
Lord's people come into bondage, into captivity, into death, are
out of the place of the Lord's appointment, and the Lord's
ministry is not going on in life, because the vessels have
departed, have all been taken away. Right up to that time they
were going on with their sacrifices, going on with their
Levitical order. But that is not the point. You can have the form
of things, the system, and yet go to Babylon. It is the Word of
the Lord as a spiritual and living thing, which keeps you free,
clear, strong, out of Babylon.