We have been led to
think in these meditations about being in the School of
Christ, where all the learning, all the instruction, all
the discipline, is toward knowing Christ, learning
Christ; not learning about Christ, but learning Christ.
That is the point of greatest difficulty in trying to
make things plain and clear. We could take up everything
there is about Christ as doctrine, as teaching, but that
is not what we are after. That is not what the Lord is
after at all. It is Christ Himself. He Himself is the
living, personal embodiment, the personification of all
truth, of all life, and the Lord's purpose and will for
us is not to come to know truth in its manifold aspects,
but to know the Person, the living Person in a living
way, and that the Person being imparted to us, and we
being incorporated into the Person, all the truth becomes
living truth rather than merely theoretical or technical
truth.
Just a word of
repetition here: and I cannot tell you with what force
this has come to my own heart and how heavily it rests
upon me in its meaning. Whenever things are in danger of
departing from His full, His complete, thought, God will
always seek to bring back a fresh revelation of His Son.
He will not lead to the recapture of truths as such. He
will bring back all that is necessary by a fresh
revelation of His Son, an unveiling or presentation of
His Son in fullness. In that connection we have more than
once said in these meditations that the Gospel written by
John and his Letters and the Apocalypse, are the final
things of the New Testament dispensation. They were
written and brought in when the New Testament Church was
departing from its primal and pristine glory, and purity,
and truth, and holiness, and spirituality, and becoming
an earthly Christian system. The Lord's way of meeting
that situation was through these writings which are a new
presentation of His Son in heavenly, Divine, spiritual
fullness. It is a coming back to Christ, and the Holy
Spirit would do that all the time. He would bring us back
to the Person, to show us what that Person represents in
a spiritual and heavenly way. We must be very careful
that in our passing on from the Gospels to the Epistles,
we do not get even unconsciously into the position that
we have left elementary things and gone on to something
that is not so elementary; that is, that the Epistles are
something very much in advance of the Gospels.
Emphatically they are not. They are only the opening up
of the Gospels. All that is in the Epistles is there in
the Gospels, but the Epistles are simply the
interpretation of Christ, and the Lord would never have
us occupied with the interpretation to the loss of the
Person.
ALL
THINGS IN CHRIST
Now, if I were talking
to people who were responsible in the matter of Church
building, that would be a very profitable matter with
which to stay for a little while; but it just amounts to
this for us. We take the Acts and the Epistles as setting
forth the technique of the Church and churches and adopt
it as a crystallized system of practice, order, form,
teaching, and the weakness in the whole position is just
this, that that is something as in itself, and the Lord
Jesus has been missed and lost. I wonder if you detect
what I mean by that? You see, the Holy Spirit's way is to
take Christ and open up Christ to the heart, and show
that Christ is a heavenly order; not that the Epistles
set forth as a manual a heavenly order, but that Christ
is that order, and everything in the matter of order has
to be kept immediately in relation to the living Person.
If it becomes some thing, then it becomes an
earthly system; and you can make out of the Epistles a
hundred different earthly systems all built upon the
Epistles. They will be made to support any number of
different systems, different interpretations, represented
by Christian orders here, and the reason is that they
have been divorced from the Person.
You see there are
numerous things, numerous subjects, themes, teachings.
There is the "kingdom of God", there is
"sanctification", there is "eternal
life", there is 'the victorious life', 'the
overcomer' or 'the overcoming life', there is 'the second
coming of Christ'. These are but a few subjects, themes,
truths, as they are called, which have been taken up and
developed out of the Scriptures and become things with
which people have become very much occupied, and in which
they are very interested as things. So certain people
hive off around a sanctification teaching, and they are
the 'sanctificationists', and it becomes an 'ism'. Others
hive off; and they are bounded by the hedge of Second
Adventism, the Lord's coming, prophecy, and all that. So
you get groups like that. I want to say that would be
utterly impossible if the Person of the Lord Jesus was
dominant. What is the kingdom of God? It is Christ. If
you get right inside of the Gospels you will find that
the kingdom of God is Jesus Christ. If you are livingly
in Christ, you are in the kingdom, and you know, as the
Holy Spirit teaches you Christ, what the kingdom is in
every detail. The kingdom is not some thing, in the first
place. The kingdom, when it becomes something universal,
will simply be the expression and manifestation of
Christ. That is all. You come to the kingdom in and
through Christ; and the same is true of everything else.
What is sanctification?
It is not a doctrine. It is not an 'it' at all. It is
Christ. He is made unto us sanctification (1 Cor 1:30).
If you are in Christ and if the Holy Spirit is teaching
you Christ, then you are knowing all about
sanctification; and if He is not, you may have a theory
and doctrine of sanctification, but it will separate you
from other Christians, and it will be bringing any number
of Christians into difficulties. Probably the teaching of
sanctification as a thing has brought more Christians
into difficulty than any other particular doctrine,
through making it a thing, instead of keeping Christ as
our sanctification.
I am only saying this to
try to explain what I mean that it is in the School of
Christ that we are to be found, where the Holy Spirit is
not teaching us things; not Church doctrine, not
sanctification, not adventism, not any thing, or
any number of things, but teaching us Christ. What is
adventism? What is the coming of the Lord? Well, it is
the coming of the Lord. And what is the coming
of the Lord? Well, such a word as this will give us the
key: "He shall come to be glorified in His saints,
and to be marvelled at in all them that believed" (2
Thess 1:10). You see, it is the consummation of something
that has been going on in an inward way. How then do I
best know that the coming of the Lord draws nigh? Not
best of all by prophetical signs, but by what is going on
within the hearts of the Lord's people. That is the best
sign of the times, namely, what the Spirit of God is
doing in the people of God. But maybe you are not
interested in that. You would far sooner know what is
going to happen between Germany and Russia, whether these
two eventually are going to become a great confederacy!
How far does it get us? Where has all the talking about
the revived Roman Empire got us? That is adventism as a
thing. If only we keep close to Him who is the sum of all
truth, and move with Him and learn Him, we shall know the
course of things. We shall know what is imminent. We
shall have in our heart whisperings of preparation. The
best Advent preparation is to know the Lord. I am not
saying that there is nothing in prophecy: don't
misunderstand me. But I do know that there are multitudes
of people who are simply engrossed in prophecy as a thing
whose spiritual life counts for nothing, who really have
no deep inward walk with the Lord. We have seen it so
often.
I shall never forget on
a visit to a certain country going into one of the big
cities where I was to speak for a week. Everything was so
arranged that my first message was timed to follow the
last message of a man who had had a week before me, and
he had been on prophecy for the whole week. I went into
the last meeting where he gave his final message on the
signs of the time. Notebooks were out, and they were
taking it all down, fascinated. It was all external, all
objective; such things as the Roman Empire revived and
Palestine recovered. You know the sort of thing. Then he
finished and they were waiting for some more, and the
notebooks were ready. The Lord put it right into my heart
that the first word was to be, "And every one that
hath this hope set on him purifieth himself, even as he
is pure" (1 John 3:3); to speak on the spiritual
effect of that spiritual hope. They were not interested
in that. The notebooks were closed, pencils put away,
there was no interest as I sought in the Lord to be very
faithful as to what all this should mean in an inward
way, in adjustment to the Lord, and so on. They were only
longing for the meeting to close. When I
finished—they hardly waited for me to
finish—they were up and out.
Oh no, it is the Lord,
and the Holy Spirit would bring us back to the Lord, and
it is not, after all, coming back to nonessentials, to
elementary things, to come back to Christ. It is coming
on to the only basis upon which the Holy Spirit can
really accomplish all God's will and purpose, to be in
the School of Christ where the Holy Spirit is teaching us
Christ; and the Holy Spirit's way of teaching Christ is
experimental.
THE
NEED OF A NEW SET OF FACULTIES
Now, here is where we
become so seemingly elementary. You see, the very nature
of this school requires the most drastic change in
ourselves. It is impossible to get into the School of
Christ, where the Holy Spirit is the great tutor, until
the greatest change has taken place in us. We have to be
made all over again or that school will mean nothing. We
cannot come in here with any hope of learning Christ in
the smallest way until a whole new set of faculties has
been given to us. We have to have faculties given to us
which we do not possess naturally. "Except one be
born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God"
(John 3:3); and that is the Lord's way of stating a
tremendous fact.
That kingdom is one in
which certain things obtain with which I have no
correspondence at all, with which naturally I have no
power of communication. Take a walk round the garden.
Walk down by the potatoes and vegetables and talk about,
well, anything you like. What would the potatoes think
about you? What would the cabbages say about you? They
neither hear nor understand what you are talking about,
whatever it is. Their kind of life is not your kind of
life. They are not constituted in your kingdom. There is
no correspondence between them and you at all. They have
not the capacity, the gift, the qualification, for the
most elementary things that you may be talking about. You
may be talking about such foolish things as dress,
ordinary everyday things: they do not know. It is like
that. There is just as great a divide between us and the
kingdom of God. "The natural man receiveth not the
things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness
unto him; and he cannot know them . . ." (1 Cor
2:14). The divide is so utter that if you and I were
brought in our natural state right into the place where
the Spirit of God was speaking, unless that Spirit of God
wrought a miracle in us, the whole thing would be of
another world. And is it not so? You believers, go out
into this world and talk about the things of the Lord and
see men gape at you! It is all foreign to them. It is
like that. "Except one be born from above, he cannot
see the kingdom of God." To get into this school,
something has to happen to us, and that means that we
have to be constituted anew, with altogether other
qualifications and abilities for the things of God. That
is the nature of this school. It is the School of the
Spirit of God.
I know that is very
elementary, but, after all, is not that the thing that is
being pressed on us all the time? It is being brought
home to us how that we may hear words, and yet that they
may not mean anything to us. We need our capacity for
spiritual understanding enlarged more and more. We are
naturally handicapped in this whole matter.
THE
BREAKING OF THE SELF-LIFE
There is one passage
that I cannot get away from. It has been with me for a
long time. It has been here as the basis of our
meditation. It is John 1:51, and it seems to me that
those are words which introduce us to the School of
Christ, namely, those words of the Lord Jesus to
Nathanael. I think it would be helpful to read the whole
section from verse 47:
"Jesus saw
Nathanael coming to him, and saith of him, Behold, an
Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile! Nathanael saith
unto him, Whence knowest thou me? Jesus answered and said
unto him, Before Philip called thee, when thou wast under
the fig tree, I saw thee. Nathanael answered him,
TEACHER, thou art the Son of God, thou art King of
Israel. Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said
unto thee, I saw thee underneath the fig tree, believest
thou? thou shalt see greater things than these. And he
saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye shall
see the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending
and descending upon the Son of man."
Here we are approaching
the School of Christ, and there is one thing which is
essential before we can even come to the threshold of
that school, and that is what is marked by those words,
"Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no
guile!" That put alongside the final
words—"the angels of God ascending and
descending upon the Son of man"—gives us a
complete picture of what spiritually lies behind.
At the time when Jacob
in guile—you remember the story of his
guile—stole the birthright and had to escape for his
life, he saw a very great truth, though but dimly as in
type or figure, and a truth moreover into which he was
not then able to enter. Jacob at that time could never
have entered into the meaning of what he saw, namely, the
House of God, Bethel; that place where heaven and earth
meet, God and man meet, where the glory—uniting
heaven and earth, God and man—is the great link,
where God speaks and makes Himself known, where God's
purposes are revealed. Why was this the case with Jacob?
He was in guile. Let him leave it there then, as he must,
and go on, and for twenty years come under discipline,
and at the end of twenty years' discipline meet the
impact of heaven upon his earthly life, his earthly
nature, the impact of the Spirit upon his flesh, the
impact of God upon himself at Jabbok, and let that
fleshly, natural life be smitten and broken and withered,
to bear the mark for the rest of his days of its having
come under the ban of God; and then with the Jacob
judged, the Jacob smitten, wounded, withered, he can go
back and pour out his drink-offering at Bethel, and
abide. The guile is dealt with. He is now not Jacob but
Israel, in whom, speaking in type and figure, there is no
guile. The work was not finished, but a crisis was met.
The Lord Jesus is saying
here, to put it in a word, just this; to come into the
place of the open heaven, where for you God is coming
down in communication, and the glory of God abides, and
where you enjoy what Bethel means, is nothing else than
to come into Me; and to come into Me and abide in Me as
the Bethel, the House of God, and have all the good of
heaven and of God communicated, means you have come to
the place where the natural life has been laid low,
broken, withered. You cannot come into His school until
that has happened, and it is necessary for the Lord to
say to us in Christ as we come to the very threshold of
that door, Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is
no Jacob; you shall see the heaven opened! To speak of
the Jacob-life, is, after all, only another way of saying
the self-life; for self is the very essence of the
natural life; not just the self-life in its most positive
evil forms, but the self-life in its totality. Jacob was
in the elect line. He had a knowledge of God
historically, but the transition from the natural to the
spiritual was through discipline and crisis.
Let me stay with that.
Here is the Lord Jesus. No one will dare to say that the
self-life in Christ was like our self-life, polluted,
corrupted, sinful. Not at all! And yet He had a
self-life, a sinless self-life. For Him the self-life
simply meant that He could act and speak and think and
judge and move out from Himself. That is all. Not with
evil intent, not as motivated or influenced by anything
sinful or corrupt, but simply independently. He could
have done and said a lot of good things independently.
But He took the attitude, the position, that, although
there was no sin in Him, He could not and would not at
any time act or speak apart from His Father. That would
be independence, and give the enemy just the opening that
he was working for. But we can leave that.
My point is this, that
you and I must not think of the self life only as
something manifestly corrupt. There is a great deal done
for God with the purest motive that is done out from
ourselves. There are many thoughts, ideas, judgments,
which are sublime, beautiful, but they are ours, and if
we did but know the truth, they are altogether different
from God's.
And so, right at the
very door of His school the Lord puts something utter. It
is Jabbok. Jabbok was a tributary of the Jordan, and the
implications of Jordan are right there at the very
threshold of the School of Christ. He accepted Jordan in
order to enter into that school of the Spirit for three
and a half years. You and I will not get into that school
of the Anointing in any other way. It has to be like
that. If you and I are going to learn Christ, it will
only be as the Jacob-nature is smitten. I am not talking
to you mere doctrine and technique. Believe me, I know
exactly what I am talking about.
I know this thing as the
greatest reality in my history. I know what it is to have
been labouring with all my might for God and preaching
the Gospel out from myself for years. Oh, I know; I know
what hard labour it is with the dome over your head. How
many times have I stood in the pulpit and in my heart
have said, If only somehow or other I could get a
cleavage through this dome over my head, and instead of
preaching what I have gathered from books and put into my
notebooks, and having to study it up, I could scrap the
whole thing and, with an opened heaven, speak out what
God is saying in my heart! That was a longing for years.
I sensed there was something like this, but I had not got
it until the great crisis of Romans 6 came, and with it
the open heaven. It has been different ever since then,
altogether different. "Ye shall see the heaven
opened"; and all that strain has gone, all that
bondage has gone, that limitation; there is no dome
there. That is my glory today. Forgive that personal
reference. I must say it, because we are not here to give
addresses; we are right down on the reality of this
matter of the Holy Ghost directly and immediately
revealing Christ to us, and that ever-growingly; and this
cannot be until we have come to our Jabbok, until the
Jacob-life has been dealt with through that crisis, and
the Lord is able to say, An Israelite indeed, in whom is
no Jacob; thou shalt see heaven opened! There is that
dome, that closed heaven over us by nature, but, blessed
be God! the Cross rends the heavens, the veil is rent
from top to bottom, and Christ is revealed through the
rent veil of His flesh. He is no longer seen as the Man
Jesus; He is seen in our hearts in all the fullness of
God's consummate thought for man. It is a tremendous
thing to see the Lord Jesus, and it is a tremendous thing
to go on seeing Him more and more. That is where it
begins—Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no
guile, no Jacob! Thou shalt see heaven opened!
A
NEW PROSPECT FOR A NEW MAN
That word, "thou
shalt see heaven opened" is the new prospect for a
new man. A new man, a new prospect! In the Authorized
Version, a word is added which has been left out in the
Revised Version. I take it for the simple reason that it
is implicit in the original, without the word necessarily
being introduced. In the Authorized it says,
"Hereafter ye shall see heaven open". In the
Revised Version, that first word is left out, and it
simply reads, "Ye shall see . . .". But
"ye shall" is something prospective, it is a
tense pointing on to a future day. Not 'ye are seeing',
but "ye shall see". It is a new prospect for a
new man; and therein lies a new era. It is the era of the
Holy Spirit, for by the coming of the Holy Spirit, the
open heaven is made a reality. The Cross effects the
opening of the heavens for us, but it is the Holy Spirit
who makes it good in us, just as was the case in that
typical or symbolic death and burial and resurrection of
the Lord Jesus in Jordan, when the heavens were opened to
Him. Coming up on new, resurrection ground, He had the
open heaven. The Spirit then alighted and abode upon Him,
and the Spirit became, shall we say, the channel of
communication, making the open heaven all that it should
be as a matter of communication, intercourse, communion.
It is the era of the Spirit, making all the values of
Christ real in us. "Ye shall"; and, blessed be
God, what was prospective for Nathanael is present for
us.
That era has come. We
are in the era of the Holy Spirit, of the open heaven.
THE
MARK OF A LIFE ANOINTED BY THE HOLY SPIRIT
Now, what is, then, the
mark of a life anointed by the Holy Spirit? You remember
when Paul went to Ephesus, he found certain disciples
and, without giving us any explanation of the reason for
his question, he immediately said, "Did ye receive
the Holy Spirit when ye believed?" Their reply was,
"We did not so much as hear whether the Holy Spirit
was". Then Paul's next question is full of
significance, taking us back to Jordan. "Into what
then were ye baptized?" 'Baptism is bound up with
this vital reality. If you do not know the Holy Spirit,
what can your baptism have meant?' Oh, we were baptized
with John's baptism; Oh, I see: well, "John baptized
with the baptism of repentance, saying unto the people,
that they should believe on him that should come after
him, that is, on Jesus." Then when they heard that,
they were baptized into the Name of the Lord Jesus, they
were baptized into Christ, and the Holy Spirit came upon
them. Thus they came into the School of Christ; and the
mark of a life anointed by the Spirit is that you know
Christ in this living and ever-growing way.
Oh, listen to this, this
is not so elementary and unnecessary as it may seem. Some
of us, of course, are very poor scholars, and we take
such a long time to learn. It took decades in my case to
come to a true realization of this. We know so much, and
we discover that our real personal knowledge of Christ is
a poor thing. We are constantly brought up against that.
At last, sooner or later, you and I are going to come to
the place where we exclaim, 'Oh, it is not doctrines and
truths and themes and subjects and Scripture as mere
matter that I need to know!' It is all very wonderful
when you are taken up with it; but let a man come into
the fires, into deep trial, into trouble and perplexity
and then what about all your doctrines and all your
themes, and all your Bible study? What is the value of
it? It does not really solve your problem, it does not
get you through. This is a tragedy. It is true of many of
us who have got certain doctrines, who have gone through
the doctrines of the Bible and worked them out, and who
know what is in the Bible on these things; regeneration,
redemption, atonement, righteousness by faith,
sanctification, and so on; it is true that after we have
gone through them all, and have got them all well worked
out, and we come into a terrible spiritual experience,
the whole thing counts for nothing, and we come to the
place where, but for the Lord, we could easily throw the
whole thing over and say, This Christianity does not
work! Yes, for those who have known the Lord for years,
so far as the accumulation of truth is concerned, that is
about the value of it in an hour of the deepest spiritual
distress. The only thing then that can help you is not
your beautiful notebooks full of doctrines, but, What do
I know of the Lord personally and livingly in my own
heart? What has the Holy Spirit revealed in me and to me,
and made a part of me, of Christ? Sooner or later, that
is where we are coming to. We are going to be brought
back to the living, spiritual knowledge of the Lord; for
He alone personally, as revealed in our very being by the
Holy Ghost, can save us in the deepest hour. The day will
come when we will be stripped of everything but what is
spiritually, inwardly known of Christ; stripped of all
our mental and intellectual knowledge. Many of those who
have been giants in teaching and in doctrine have had a
very, very dark hour at the end of their lives, a very
dark hour indeed. How they have got through has depended
upon the inward knowledge of the Lord as over against
mere intellectual knowledge. How can I explain what I
mean by that?
Well, for example, you
discover something in the realm of food that really does
help you. You have gone all round trying everything, all
that the food people can provide to help you in a
specific malady or weakness, and nothing has helped you.
Then suddenly you discover something that really does
help you, and the next time you are put to the test you
take some of that and find you can go through on that. It
is in you, something that gets you through your ordeal.
That is what I mean, with reference to this question of
how and what Christ is to be to us. He is to be in us,
that upon which we can rest back in confidence and
assurance, and, doing so, He gets us through. We are to
know Him in that way. That is the only way in which to
learn Christ, and that is experimental. "Ye shall
see the heaven opened." The Holy Spirit has come to
make for us an altogether new order of things, so that
Christ is being revealed in us as our very life. Ye shall
see when the Spirit comes: that is the mark of an
anointed life. Ye shall see! And those are great moments
when we do see. Some of us have had those great moments
in specific connections, and some of us have seen others
have their great moments in specific connections. Yet we
have known that they knew all about the thing, and have
been taught it, and have had it drummed into them for
years; and then after years suddenly it has broken upon
them, and they have said, Look here, I am now beginning
to see what has been said all this time!
I remember a man brought
up in a most saintly family, whose father I always used
to liken to Charles G. Finney. He was like Charles G.
Finney in spirit, soul and body; and one of his sons
brought up in that most godly home was a great friend of
mine for years. We had real fellowship together, always
talking about the things of the Lord. One day —I can
see it now right at the corner of Newington Green—I
was going to meet him, and as I came toward Newington
Green I saw him in the distance. I saw him smile, and we
met and shook hands. He was one big smile. Do you know, I
have made a discovery, he said. I said, What is your
discovery? I have discovered that Christ is in me!
"Christ in you, the hope of glory", has become
a reality to me. Well, I said, I could have told you that
years ago. Ah, that is the difference, he said: I see it
now, I know it now.
You see what I mean. It
is just that. Oh, that the world were full of Christians
like that! Is this not the need? But inasmuch as this was
said to Nathanael, it must be for us all. It was not said
to Peter, James and John up on the Mount of
Transfiguration: it was said to Nathanael, one of the
general circle. It is for all; and if that wants
strengthening, proving, notice what the Lord Jesus
said—"Ye shall see the heaven opened, and the
angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man."
What has happened? A tremendous transition has taken
place in the course of a few sentences. Behold, an
Israelite indeed! That is for Israel; for Jacob, yes, the
father of Israel; for sons of Jacob, the earthly Israel.
Ah, yes, but that is purely within the limitation of
earth, purely within the limitation of a people here
amongst the nations, and within the limitation of types.
Yes, but now for the tremendous transition. The Lord has
cancelled out something Nathanael said. "Thou art
King of Israel", said he. King of Israel? That is
nothing. Thou shalt see greater things than these.
Thou shalt see the heaven opened, and the angels of God
ascending and descending upon the Son of man! That
is something vastly greater than Israel. Son of Man! That
is racial, that is universal; that is for all men who
will come in, not just for Israel. Thou shalt see greater
things! Heaven opened—and for whom? Not just for
Israel, but for all men in Christ. The Son of Man!
That title, Son of Man,
simply represents God's thought concerning man. Oh, the
great, great thought and intention of God concerning man.
The open heaven is for man when he comes into God's
thought in Christ. The open heaven is for man: God
revealing Himself to man in the Man. It is for all of us.
Let no one think that this open heaven, this anointing,
is for a certain few. Oh no, it is for everyone. God's
desire, God's thought, is that you and I, the most
simple, foolish, weak amongst men, the most limited
naturally, with the least capacity naturally, should find
that our very birthright is an open heaven. In other
words, you and I may, in Christ, know this wonderful work
of the Holy Spirit in an inward revelation of Christ in
ever-growing fullness. That is for us, every one of us.
May the most advanced Christian have a new movement
toward the Lord in this matter, and all of us really come
to this first crisis where the dome over us is cleft, and
we know an open heaven, the Spirit revealing Christ in
our hearts, for His glory.