We saw
at the beginning that the Christian life is not something
which just springs up in this particular era - the
Christian era, as it is called - but that it dates right
back to eternity past. We saw that it was designed by God
in His eternal counsels - the New Testament has much to
say about this - and that that eternal Purpose and design
is pressing into this present dispensation in a very
definite and particular way.
Now we
are to see that the future eternity is also pressing into
this dispensation. The future eternity is governing the
present, is shaping and explaining the present. God is
not only working onward. Really, the onward aspect of
Divine activities is our side of things. God is, so to
speak, working 'backward'. From His side of things He is
always working back to His full thought in eternity past.
He is bringing us on, but from this other standpoint He
is really bringing us back.
THE PROSPECTIVE ELEMENT IN THE NEW
TESTAMENT
So we
come to this matter of the eternal prospect of the
Christian. We have to realise - not that it is difficult
to do so - that there is a very large prospective element
in the New Testament: that is, the New Testament is
always looking on. In the New Testament everything is
dominated by the ages to come. God's conception was an
eternal one, not just one of time; it is something far,
far too big to be realised in fullness in any mere period
of time. It certainly, therefore, cannot be realised in
the lifetime of any person. It outbounds time. This is
"from eternity to eternity", and it requires
timelessness for its full realisation.
This, of
course, explains a great deal. It explains the very
nature of the Christian life and of Christian service. A
very big factor in the ways of God with His people, with
Christians, is that of experience. God puts a great deal
of value upon experience. Yet it often seems that, just
when we are beginning to profit by experience, the end
comes, and we are called away from this life, and all the
long and full and deep experience has really had no
adequate expression. There is something about this that
would be a problem. If God puts so much value upon
experience, and then when we have got it we cannot use
it, it seems like a contradiction. It requires an
extension somewhere, somehow, in order to turn to account
all that deep experience which God has taken so much
pains to produce. And so this eternal prospect explains
God's ways with us in the path of deep and deepening
experience.
Then as
to the work of God. Well, the work is difficult, it is
hard; the progress is all too slow; and though you may do
much, and fill your life, when you have had all the days
that can be allotted you and have spent yourself to the
last drop, what have you done? What does it amount to, at
most? We have to say - little, comparatively little.
There is so much more to be done, and every successive
generation of Christian workers has the same story to
tell. On we go, on we go, and we never overtake, we never
reach anything like fullness in this life. Something more
is required to make perfect both our imperfect lives and
our imperfect work.
And then
another factor, which is not a small one, is that God
seems to be so much more concerned with the worker even
than with the work. This of course creates the
perplexities of Christian life and service. If God were
really concerned with our Christian work, surely He ought
never to allow us to be laid aside from it, especially
repeatedly or for long periods, and He certainly ought
not to allow us to die 'prematurely', as we would say. If
the work is everything, then He ought to keep us on full
stretch all our days, and extend our days to a full
period; but He does not. So many of His choicest are not
able to be in action, to serve, in the way in which
Christian service is ordinarily thought of; and even
those who are fully in action are conscious that the real
need in the work of God is for their own deeper knowledge
of God Himself - that God is concerned with THEM, even
more than He is with their work.
What
does this say? All that discipline, chastening, trial,
testing, that we go through under the hand of God: is all
that just for now? Surely He is preparing for something
more. He is concerned with men and with women - with people
- quite as much as, if not more than, with what they do
for Him. This, of course, will never be taken as an
excuse for our not working to full capacity, but it does
all point to something more. There is nothing perfect
or complete so long as death remains. You will remember
the argument which the apostle develops in the letter to
the Hebrews concerning the priesthood of the Old
Testament. A priest of the old dispensation could bring
nothing to finality because he died and had to hand on to
another; and in like manner he himself never attained to
finality; and so it went on. The argument is that,
because of death, nothing was made perfect. But He -
Jesus, our High Priest - has made and does make things
perfect, because He "ever liveth". It requires
an endless life - "the power of an indissoluble
life" - to reach fullness. That is clearly shown in
the Scripture.
You see,
the picture of immortality which the Bible gives us is a
very wonderful one, and one, of course, which in our
present order of things we cannot understand. The picture
of immortality which the Bible gives us is that of new
productions coming about without the dying of the old.
Our present order is that everything new comes out of a
preceding death. Seed, flower, everything has to die, in
order to produce or make way for something new. That has
been the natural order of things since Adam fell. And the
heart of this present dispensation is the great truth of
Jesus Christ, the "corn of wheat", falling into
the ground and dying, that there should be a production
on a larger scale. That is the order of this
dispensation. But that is not the order of the coming
eternity. The picture of immortality there, as given in
the Word, is of trees producing new branches, new leaves,
new fruit, and yet the old never dying. Fruit is brought
to perfection without any death at all. That is rather
wonderful, is it not?
And how
much there is in the Word in the nature of an urge and an
imperative to wholeheartedness, to utterness. All the
time the apostles are urging us, bringing upon us the
weight of this great imperative to go on - go on - go on!
By exhortation, by warning, they are constantly saying to
us, 'Go on and ever on! Have no margin of life that is
not burnt up for God!' And the point of that argument, of
that urge and imperative, is the coming eternity. All
this is in the light of the afterward. We must, they say,
be utter for God because of what is going to follow,
because this is not the end. There is that which, coming
afterward, will show the justification for having been
utter for God.
THE COMPARATIVE ELEMENT IN
ETERNITY
Now,
that leads us to the next thing in this connection - the
comparative element in eternity. There is, I think we
agree, a prospective element in the Christian life which
occupies a great deal of the New Testament. Cut out that
prospective element from the New Testament and see how
much you have got left, whether it be Gospels or
Epistles. You are not going to have very much left if you
take that out. It is there and it is mightily there. But
in addition to it, there is in the New Testament what I
am calling the comparative element in relation to the
coming eternity. I mean by this that things are not all
going to be on one 'mass production' level hereafter.
There are going to be differences where the children of
God are concerned, and very great differences.
It was
to this, of course, that the Apostle was pointing when
writing to the Corinthians. Speaking about foundations
and superstructure, he said: 'The foundation is laid. Now
let every man take heed how he build thereon. If any man
build thereon wood, hay, stubble, gold, silver, precious
stones, every man's work shall be tried by fire' (1 Cor.
3:10-13). And, he implies, if it is wood, hay or stubble,
it will all go up in smoke. And then he brings in this
tremendously forceful word (vs. 15): "If any man's
work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he
himself shall be saved; yet so as through fire."
That is, the man may just scrape through, as a kind of
'emergency' - just managing to get in, as we say, 'by the
skin of his teeth'. But everything else has gone. The
argument surely is that that is not what God intended.
Over against that we have a phrase like this: "For
thus shall be richly supplied unto you the entrance into
the eternal kingdom" (2 Pet. 1:11). On the one hand,
we see the possibility of just getting in, with our life
and nothing more; on the other hand, an abundant entrance
into the everlasting kingdom. You see, there are
differences, there are comparative features about the
afterward.
What
about those messages to the seven churches in Asia, which
we have at the beginning of the book of the Revelation? I
believe that the people in those churches are true
Christians and not merely professors. If you grant that,
then you have got to face this, that between Christian
and Christian there is a difference, and there are some
very distinct promises given to certain Christians there.
"To him that overcometh..." "to him that
overcometh..." "to him that overcometh will I
grant..." Surely logic implies: 'If you don't, then
you won't. If you don't overcome, then you won't get what
the Lord offers.' There are differences. I do not believe
this is a matter of loss of salvation, but it is
something more than just being saved, just getting in.
RELATIONSHIP WITH THE LORD FOR
ETERNAL VOCATION
What is
the nature of the difference or the differences? Some
people will say, 'Well, of course, it is reward.' But
what does the New Testament show to be the nature of the
reward? The answer is quite clearly this. The reward
relates to CALLING. It is vocational - it is
always vocational. "And his servants shall serve
him; and they shall see his face" (Rev. 22:3,4). It
is service, but service without all the burdensome
elements that are so often associated with service now:
service to Him without limit, without restraint, without
opposition, without suffering. To be able to serve Him!
Surely there can be no greater joy than just to be able,
without all the straitness and limitations and
difficulties of the work now, to serve the Lord in
fullness.
Now that
is where the New Testament puts its finger. It is
calling, vocation; and this, it goes on to show, is a
matter of positions in relation to the Lord, different
positions for service. Take an illustration of this from
one of the messages to the churches. "He that
overcometh, I will give to him to sit down with me in my
throne" (Rev. 3:21). There you have two ideas. One
is a very close relationship with the Lord, a very
intimate nearness to Him; the other, royal service - the
service of the throne. What is your conception of sitting
with Him in the throne? Let us not have pictures of
sitting on golden or ivory thrones, and so on. This
simply means union with the Lord in the administration of
His eternal kingdom. That is service. But that is said to
be a special gift to certain people - it is their reward,
if you like. The point is that it is vocational, and it
is a matter of relationship to the Lord.
The
final picture that we have in the New Testament, while so
full of symbolism, is an embodiment of these spiritual
principles. It is the picture of the City. Now again get
your mind clear, and do not think of a literal city. It
is only an illustration, a figure, a symbol. This city is
undoubtedly the Church. Need I argue that? "The
Jerusalem that is above... which is our mother"
(Gal. 4:26). "Ye are come unto... the heavenly
Jerusalem" (Heb. 12:22). "Ye are come..."
We are not coming later on, afterwards. "Ye ARE
come... unto the heavenly Jerusalem... and to the...
church of the firstborn". So that that city which is
said to be the "new Jerusalem, coming down out of
heaven from God" (Rev. 21:2), is the Church. Now,
like a capital city, it is put into a particular and
peculiar position, and the idea of such a city is that it
is an administrative centre. We are told that 'the
nations walk in the light thereof ' (vs. 24). You see,
there is something at the centre for government, and
there is much more that is not at the centre. Here is
proximity to the Lord, relationship with the Lord for
eternal vocation in administration in His kingdom.
THE URGE AND THE IMPERATIVE
That,
surely, is enough to bear out the statement that there is
a comparative element in the eternity to come. And that
is the point of the urge and the imperative, that is the
force of the constraint: "Let us press on unto full
growth" (Heb. 6:1, R.V. mg.) - not looking back, but
pressing on; it is the force of all the warnings - not
that you may lose your salvation, but that there
are positions and there is a vocation to which you are
called in eternity, and you may miss that. I think Paul
saw that in what he called 'the ' (Phil.
3:14). He saw something of this reigning life in the ages
to come.
Now,
with God, nothing is merely official. God never appoints
officers in His Kingdom. There are not politicians -
political officials - in His Kingdom, neither are there
ecclesiastics - ecclesiastical officials. With God, I
repeat, there is nothing that is merely official. You
know, God does not appoint officers in His Church. God's
principle of appointment is always according to spiritual
measure. Even now in the Church - where it is a spiritual
thing, where it is according to His mind - God indicates
those who are to have oversight as being men of spiritual
measure; not selected, chosen and voted in by popular
vote. That is the principle of the New Testament, and in
the Kingdom it is like that. No one is going to have any
position just because he is appointed officially to it.
Not at all! Every position will be according to our
spiritual measure.
Hence we
are urged repeatedly - 'let us go on to full growth'
('perfection' in the A.V. is an unfortunate translation).
It is always according to the "measure of the
stature of the fullness of Christ" (Eph. 4:13). It
is just how much of Christ there is, how big we are
according to the standard of Christ. That is God's basis
of appointment, and it will always be so. It is so now
and it will be in the ages to come. It will always be
that vocation depends upon how much of Christ there is in
those concerned. God's whole thought, as we saw at the
beginning of these meditations, is that Christ shall fill
all things.
Now that
explains our discipline, for our discipline is our
training for then; and the nature of our discipline now
is just to increase the measure of Christ and to decrease
the measure of 'I', of ourselves, in every way; to set
aside the one man, that occupies the place of Christ, and
to put Christ in his place. The one all-inclusive object
of the Holy Spirit in this dispensation is to make Christ
everything, and to get as much room for Christ as He
possibly can - and that means, where we are concerned, as
much as we will let Him have. That throws us back, of
course, upon the question: Are we really going to be
'utter'? The measure of our 'utterness' will be the
measure of our usefulness in the ages to come. This will
be governed by spiritual measure and by no other
principle.
REWARD AND GRACE
Some
people find difficulty - a purely mental one - in
reconciling reward and grace. Some may want to say, 'Oh,
but it is all of grace, and you are making it a work.
After all, it is all of grace.' How can you reconcile
reward and grace? Well, you have got to find somehow the
place of rewards, haven't you? But it is not so difficult
as all that. It is all the grace of God that we have a
chance to be 'utter' at all. It is all of grace that I
can be a Christian and that I can go on with the Lord,
that I can serve the Lord even a little bit. It is all of
grace. And if suffering is going to lead to glory, and
the measure of the glory is going to be according to the
suffering, then it will require all the grace of God for
that. You can never get outside of grace. If ever there
should come a reward - if you like to visualise such a
thing as a reward being literally offered now, I
tell you, dear friend, when we get to that point of full
understanding and knowledge of all the forbearance and
longsuffering and patience of the Lord, we shall fall on
our faces and say, 'Lord, I cannot take any reward - it
is all of your grace.'
But then
remember that grace is spoken of in more than one way in
the New Testament. There is grace which gives us access
and acceptance. "This grace wherein we stand"
(Rom. 5:2). It is all the favour of God, without merit,
that we are saved at all, that we belong to the Lord.
Yes, that is grace. But then grace is also spoken of as
strength - strength beyond initial salvation. It is what
the Lord meant when He said to Paul in the presence of
his affliction and suffering: "My grace is
sufficient for thee: for my power is made perfect in
weakness" (2 Cor. 12:9). Grace is acceptance without
merit, but grace is also strength to labour, serve and
suffer. However you look at it, it is all of grace.
UTTERNESS FOR GOD
So now
we have to focus down upon this, that there is in the New
Testament a large place for our meaning business with
God. It is not all willy-nilly - that you believe, you
accept Christ, and that is the beginning and end of it;
you get everything now. Surely all these entreaties,
exhortations, beseechings, bear down upon this. Their
burden is: Do not leave anything to chance. Do not say,
'Oh, well, this does not matter very much, this will not
hurt, there is not much wrong in this; I have got
salvation, and the grace of God will cover all these
imperfections; I can do this and that, and it will not
make much difference; God is a God of love.' The New
Testament says, in effect, 'Do not take any risks.' If it
does not mean as to your salvation ultimately, it does
mean as to something. The whole force of the Word is:
'Look here, you be utter; God does not make provision for
anything else. You go all the way with the Lord, for it
is that to which you are called.' The Lord has never
said, 'Well, you only need to go so far, and I will
excuse you the rest.' No, it is always fullness that God
keeps in view, and He is challenging us all the time as
to whether we will mean business with Him. But there will
be no place, in the end, for our boasting in our
endurance, our success, our utterness. Even though we
pour ourselves out to the last drop, at the last it will
be ourselves, above all, who will be the worshippers - we
shall be the ones who are down before Him most. The most
utter people are always those who are most conscious of
their indebtedness to the Lord.
THE GREAT CRISIS WHICH DETERMINES
EVERYTHING
And now,
as we draw to a close, we come to the great crisis which
determines everything. It is always there in the
Scripture, always kept in view: a great crisis - the
coming of the Lord. It is there, it is then, that
everything will be determined. Though we may have passed
on before He comes, the Word makes it perfectly clear
that that makes no difference - we shall be there when He
comes, and those who are alive when He comes will not get
ahead of us. We shall be there together, and so we shall
all be on the common footing; and then it will be
determined what the future is going to be - just exactly
what will be our place, what will be our function. That
is a big factor in the prospective aspect of things. The
Scripture always keeps in view the prospect of the Lord's
coming. When we are saved, we receive a new hope, but as
we go on as believers we find that that hope becomes
something very definite and concrete. It is called in the
New Testament 'THE hope', and the hope is related
to the coming of the Lord.
So that
all the appeals and all the warnings and all the
entreaties focus down to this. The Lord is coming, and at
His coming everything will be decided, everything will be
settled. It is then that our future eternity will be
decided upon. You recall all those appeals, in the light
of His coming, for watchfulness, for being fully
occupied, being on full stretch, till He comes, and the
earnest warnings that, if we are not, something serious
is going to happen - something is going to go wrong. I am
not putting this into any system of doctrine,
crystallizing it into any form of teaching; but these are
the facts, pure, simple facts. At the coming of the Lord,
great decisions will take place, and if we are not
watching, if we are not occupying, if we are not on full
stretch, something is going wrong. The Word makes that
perfectly clear in various ways. Something is going wrong
- I put it like that. I mean that something is going to
be other than the Lord would have had, and what might
have been with us.
So we
bring the eternity that is ahead right into the present,
and say that this is a tremendous motive. It gives a
tremendous motive to the Christian life. Oh, the life
hereafter - going to Heaven, or however we may speak
about it - is not something that is just out there, in a
kind of objective, detached way, and we are looking
forward to that day, waiting for that day to come. Dear
friend, that day is pressed right into the present. That
day is here now in all its implications. There is little
hope of our going to Heaven, if Heaven has not already
come to us. Our place and our vocation in that day
(though not our salvation) will depend very largely upon
the measure that Christ has had in us in this life.
That,
again, explains many things, does it not? It explains,
for instance, why the Lord very often presses into a
short time a great deal of suffering, much affliction,
much trial, that produces a wonderful measure of Christ.
You can see the growth in grace. You discern the
patience, the forbearance, the kindness, the love of
Christ coming out in this suffering child of God. This is
preparation for glory, preparation for service. It
explains very much. We can go round it, and look at it
from many different standpoints, but after all what it
amounts to is this. The New Testament keeps the future in
view as the great governing thing for the present. The
New Testament says that it is going to make a difference
in the eternity to come just how far we have gone on with
the Lord, and how much room the Lord has gained in our
lives now.
And it
is going to be definite. The New Testament says the Lord
is coming. The Lord will come in His own time, and then
all will be decided. You see, so many people are
interested in the second coming of Christ purely from a
prophetical standpoint, as to events and happenings in
the world, and so on, and so few Christians are alive,
fully alive, to the fact that in the New Testament the
coming of the Lord is always brought to bear upon our
spiritual state. "He that hath this hope" -
not, 'he that hath this prophetic interpretation of the
second coming' - but "he that hath this hope set on
him purifieth himself" (1 John 3:3): he gets ready,
he seeks that his state shall be all right as well as his
standing. It matters, and it will matter, a very great
deal. So we must open the door wide in our Christian
lives to that far greater life that is before us. At most
this is a brief one, a small one; it is only the
beginning; but in that day all its meanings are going to
come out in fullness.
Will you
hear the appeal? The Christian life, as we have said, is
a tremendous thing, an immense thing. We are called with
an eternal calling, unto an eternal vocation. Here we are
just brought into relationship with the Lord, and then
are dealt with by the Lord. We are allowed to serve the
Lord; but even in our service we are in school, we are
learning, rather than anything else. Do you not think
that that is how it ought to be? Not just that we should
be doing a thousand and one things, but that we should be
learning deeply in the school of experience. And it is
all related to the calling on-high, and the great
vocation afterward.
The Lord
move our hearts to be utter for Him, to take no risks, to
leave nothing to chance whatever, but, like His servant
Paul, to go for the highest prize, the fullest thing that
the Lord ever intended.