It is a matter of very
simple evidence and observation that the first three
chapters of the Bible have not been passed before all the
elements of conflict and controversy are met with. And
from then onward, right through the Bible, those elements
of conflict and controversy are rarely absent. The Book
is just full of them, until we reach the last two
chapters; and the conflict ceases, the controversy is
settled, and that, forever. But, as we pointed out in our
first chapter, the center of the consummation, the final
issue, the end which has been the occasion of this
tremendous conflict from the beginning, is this: "The
tabernacle of God is with men, and He shall dwell with
them, and they shall be His peoples, and God Himself
shall be... their God" (Rev 21:3).
When we look closer into
this matter, it is most impressive to find that it is
invariably related to and focused upon one thing: namely,
God's place in this world, and particularly upon a people
for His habitation. It is that which is, as we
say, the bone of contention, the focal point of all the
trouble. That is the issue there in the garden at the
beginning, with the first pair. It is far too beautiful
and happy a scene - for one exalted being - to behold God
walking and talking with men, having blessed fellowship
with men, in a scene of peace and rest and order - that
is far too beautiful a thing to allow to go unassailed.
Somehow, a situation must be set up, which will
break in upon that fellowship, if possible end it, or at
least suspend it, and drive God out. That was the issue
then - God present here in conditions of fellowship with
men. Many things may circle round that, but that is
the point of the trouble in the first family. A family in
holy and sacred fellowship with God is something that
will not go unassailed. And so we find the family thrown
into this state of conflict, and one brother murders the
other.
It is the whole point in
the history of the chosen nation, in all its varied
phases and stages. It was the point when that chosen
nation was in Egypt. What was it that God intended?
It is found in His challenge to Pharaoh, king of Egypt: "Let
My people go, that they may serve Me" (Ex 7:16
etc). We know from later history what that meant - God in
the midst of a people. And the great controversy and
conflict in Egypt was born of the realization, on the
part of sinister powers, that, if that happens, God will
have what He has ever set His heart upon having, and that
must be frustrated at all costs. God gets the children of
Israel out into the wilderness, to be His people, for His
dwelling-place; but, as they are in the wilderness,
congregated at the foot of the mountain, and Moses goes
up into the mountain, what happens? Note, Moses is
going to receive the pattern of the Tabernacle, in which
God will take up residence in the midst of His people,
and for that Tabernacle there will be the need of some
gold in the great symbolism of the Divine nature; and
that gold has been brought out of Egypt. While
Moses tarries in the mount, what happens? Once again,
there enters in this challenge to the Divine purpose, and
the gold is stolen from God and made into a calf, to be
worshipped in the very place of God!
It is all a part of the
one long story. And it goes on in their history,
when they are through the wilderness and in the land.
Solomon builds the Temple, and God takes up His
residence. But just before that temple was going to be
brought in and built, another terrible thing happened. It
is said, "And Satan stood up against Israel, and
moved David to number Israel" (1 Chron 21:1).
We know the story. The numbering, of course, was just a
bit of vanity - the vanity of the human heart; 'counting
heads'; being able to say, 'What a great people I have,
and what a great king I am!' Even a man of the
world who had very little, if any, spiritual perception -
Joab - saw through it and urged the king not to do it.
But he insisted, and then He had to reckon with God. The
result - the devastation of the nation; till at last, as
the plague swept over the people, mowing them down, the
Angel of the Lord met David at the threshing floor of
Ornan the Jebusite - and that became the site of the
Temple.
What a contesting, what
a controversy all the time over this 'habitation of
God'! The Temple is built and then, when the nation
has come to the very summit, in the realization of a
habitation for God, the builder of the Temple himself
defaults, and makes an alliance with that which is
another god, outside of Israel. And so it is not long
before the nation is split in two. The downward
movement rapidly gathers momentum, and the Lord leaves
the Temple. The end of that movement is away into
Babylon: the Temple, Jerusalem, forsaken of God; a people
in captivity. After seventy years a remnant returns and
commences to rebuild a temple. The story is told in
the twin books of Ezra and Nehemiah - and what books of
conflict they are. Here it is again; it is as though
something or someone has said: "No, never, if we can
stop it!" And indeed they were partly successful,
for at one point we read "Then ceased the work
of the house of God..." (Ezra 4:24).
In this atmosphere of
conflict and controversy the Old Testament closes.
As the New Testament opens, as we saw in our first
chapter, God comes to His consummate realization along
two lines. Firstly, He becomes incarnate in His Son
as 'Immanuel' - 'God with us'. But His very
presence raises the bitterest controversy, on this very
point of the Temple. It all centers in and circles round
this Temple. You remember the charge which
brought Him to His death; it was: 'He spoke about the
destruction of the temple!' He said: "Destroy
this temple, and in three days I will raise it
again" (John 2:19). In their blindness to His
true spiritual meaning, they interpreted it as meaning
that the great Temple in Jerusalem was to be destroyed.
Of course it was! But those words of His brought Him to
His death. A few years later Stephen took up this matter,
and, in words that are almost an echo of Solomon's
declared: "The Most High dwelleth not in
temples made with hands" (Acts 7:48) and those
words unloosed upon him a storm of rage and fury. That
was the focal point of it all, and it is most
significant. And finally, when the personal Christ,
having been sown like a grain of wheat in the ground, and
having died, has risen in the corporate form of the
nucleus of His Church, to form the 'habitation of God' in
reality, what a storm breaks upon it! It is the signal
for new outbreaks of this same terrible antagonism.
The
Tragic History of Divisions
That is at the root of
all the sad, tragic history through the centuries, of
divisions and schisms, conflicts, contentions and
controversies, amongst Christians. The one determination
is - God is not going to have this dwelling, if it can be
prevented by any means whatsoever; this must be stopped!
For there is no greater menace to the kingdom of darkness
than a people after this kind: a people to which God
commits Himself, because they provide Him with a
ground for being there - just being there in blessed
fellowship. We believe that we are living in the 'end
times'; and, as the end draws near, in spite of all the
talk and efforts for unions and affiliations, and so on,
the spirit of suspicion and fear and misunderstanding
only intensifies. The atmosphere of Christianity is
impregnated with it, until it seems that the last little
thing will suffer division if possible. The differences
are multiplying all the time.
Why are there so many
differences and controversies in the realm of
interpretations and of Christian relationships? It is
this one thing. You may say it is because of this or that
or the other thing; you may put it down to one of the
many hundreds of things that make for division, but let
us get right to the heart and root of the matter.
Every one of these things which may be the pretext is
related to this one true reason, which is all-inclusive
and all-governing: namely a spiritual-relatedness of the
people of God, to provide Him with that which has been in
His heart from all eternity - a habitation, a presencing
of Himself with men. That is the heart of it. All this
sad and terrible history and story is related to this
corporate idea - in the beginning, the man and his wife;
then two brothers; next the race, twelve brothers who
became twelve tribes; the pattern of the Tabernacle, and
so on. There has always been an inexorable determination,
either to prevent it, or wreck it, if it has any
semblance of being present. Ever and always the point of
attack has been the people of God in heavenly fellowship,
with God in their midst.
It is thus perfectly
evident that there exists in this universe a force and
system that is bitterly antagonistic to the realization
of this Divine purpose. This phenomenon is not a
'natural' thing. True, there often seem to be good human
and natural reasons for it. But get behind all
that, and you find that it is all issuing from this
realm, or hierarchy, which is antagonistic to this one
thing.
And it is this one
thing. We speak about the 'Church militant': what do we
mean by the Church militant? Well, our ideas are
usually objective when we speak like that. We think of
the Church making assault upon heathenism, upon paganism,
upon worldliness, upon vice, upon bad social conditions,
upon suffering and its causes. This is perhaps what
we mean by the Church 'militant', but however true and
right that may be, the fact is that the Church 'militant'
finds its campaign sabotaged from the inside - it is
defeated before it even starts to fight. It cannot fight
as a corporate whole, because it is already crippled from
within by the lack of expression of this one,
related, corporate life. Yes, the enemy has subtly
got inside things, and has weakened and paralyzed the
Church 'militant'.
You are perhaps familiar
with the story in the life of Spurgeon. The students of
his college were preaching their 'trial' sermon before
him and one young man chose Ephesians 6 for his
subject. In a great attempt at eloquence and
impressiveness, he pictured the warrior, and the armour,
and himself as taking it up; and at last, fully clad, in
great boldness he stepped forward and cried: "Now,
where is the enemy?" Mr. Spurgeon, sitting in the
audience, cupped his hands and called out: "Inside
the armour!"
That story is very much
to the point. The Church is not moving 'like a mighty
army' - it is not true that -
'Like a mighty army
moves the church of God!'
It is not true that it
is "terrible as an army with banners"
(Song of Solomon 6:4,10). Satan has seen to
that; he has given the lie to that. What is the
point? We have got to take account of something more than
the human factors and the natural elements. I am not
wanting to open the door to any morbid occupation with
demonism, but perhaps in our fears we have swung
too much the other way. We must either accept the Bible
or reject it; and if we accept the Bible as it stands, we
have got to accept the fact of a great, evil, spiritual
system that is unresting, ceaseless in vigilance and
activity, watching for any and every opportunity and
ground that it can use against this one thing - the
absolute oneness of God's people, to provide Him with a
habitation suitable to Himself. We have got to
recognize that great system, and definitely take it into
account.
Numbness
to the Real Cause
There seems to be some
strange dullness, numbness, over the Church in this
matter - a fact which in itself may be significant. What
Christian, for instance, does not know Ephesians chapter
6? Probably most of us could quote it: "For our
wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the
principalities, against the powers, against the
world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual
hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Eph
6:12). Who does not know that, as to the words, the
language? But, who has really been stung into
the realization of what that means for the Church - into
the recognition of the fact that that word is the summing
up of the greatest revelation of that Church which has
ever been given to mankind? It is up to that
that the apostle moves, with his great unveiling of the
Church, in its past, eternal election, in its heavenly
vocation, in its walk here with God and in its coming
eternity of purpose. Through all that, he moves up to
this, and says: Yes - but, while that is true,
while that is God's masterpiece, the greatest thing ever
conceived, it is at the same time the one object of the
inimical, antagonistic interest and attention of
countless hosts of evil spirits. The
'principalities and powers', the 'world rulers of this
darkness', the 'hosts of wicked spirits', all have one
thing that they are after, namely, the destruction of
that Church, the dividing of that Church. We, I say, are
strangely numb in the face of such a revelation: we are
not stung alive to the recognition of what it means.
If all of this is true -
and you will have very great difficulty in arguing your
way out of this, if you are so disposed, for, as I say,
the Bible, from the first chapters to the last, is full
of this controversy and conflict, over the matter of God
having a habitation for Himself, in a people - if this is
true, we need to adjust ourselves, take a new attitude,
and face the fact that these evil forces are merely
concerned with the grand sum-total of the Church, to
split it into so many sections, but that they will not
stop at the last two individual Christians! They began
with the first two, and they will pursue their evil
purpose to get in between and separate the last two
believers.
That being so, we have
got to adjust ourselves to the further fact that any
division, any breaking up of fellowship, is not to be put
down finally to some human or natural factors. They may
be the immediate pretext or the occasion, but behind,
there is something very much more. We are involved in a
terrible warfare over this matter of relatedness - far,
far, beyond our power of overcoming or coping with it.
And there is where the words in this great letter come to
our rescue, as the apostle prays that the Father would
"grant you... that ye may be strengthened with
power through His Spirit in the inward man".
"Now unto Him Who is able to do exceeding abundantly
above all that we ask or think, according to the power
that worketh in us, unto Him be the glory in the Church
and in Christ Jesus, unto all ages, forever and
ever" (Eph 3:16,20,21). Yes, we must take
account of these forces, and adjust ourselves to the
matter in a new way. We need to realize what it is
that is happening, not putting everything down to
secondary causes, but getting behind them to the primary
course in that other, evil, realm.
God is holy: the place
of His dwelling must be holy. If this dividing is
the work of Satan, then it is unholy The
touch of evil means that God cannot commit Himself to
that which divides Him. Cried the apostle to the
Corinthians: "Is Christ divided?" (1
Cor 1:13) And I think there was a tone of shock in his
interrogation - it is unthinkable! Christ is not divided!
Therefore He cannot commit Himself to division. The Holy
Spirit is one Spirit: "There is," says
the apostle, "one Spirit" (Eph 4:4). There
are not as many Christs, as many Holy Spirits, as there
are believers. We do not have a personal or private
Jesus, or Holy Spirit. We only have Him and Them in
common, and there is no other way of having the Lord.
The
Key to Oneness
Now we have got to find
the key to this oneness, this unity. And in this very
passage, the apostle speaks of it as "the unity
of the Spirit" (Eph 4:3). The unity of the Spirit
- therein lies the key. Our oneness, our unity, is not
first an intellectual thing. It is not that, after
threshing out truth and matters of procedure and after
the great deal of discussion and argument we have arrived
at some measure of procedure, and a great deal of
discussion and argument, we have arrived at some measure
of agreement, and know we are one! It does not begin
there; that is not the basis of our oneness at all. Even
in evangelical truth, we do not arrive at oneness by
argument, intellectually. We do not arrive at it by
sharing in some enterprise, a common undertaking or piece
of work - seeing something that needs to be done, and
resolving to unite to do it. The history of Christian
work is surely the history of how that kind of thing
breaks down, does not go through, when it meets the
forces of evil. No, we are not one in that way. We are
not one by sentiment - by, (may I use the word)
smarminess, nice talk, closing our eyes to wrong that is
wrong; that is not a basis of oneness. It is not a
oneness of ideals, and certainly not a oneness of
pretense. What is it? It is, as the Word here says, the
unity of the Spirit; that is, of the Holy Spirit. As I
have just said, there are not as many Holy Spirits as
there are believers. "In one Spirit we were
all baptized into one Body" (1 Cor
12:13), says the Apostle.
This oneness is first of
all basic, and then it is progressive. It is basic by our
sharing of a common life. Oh, that we made more of that
fundamental reality. We know it is true. Were we to be
scattered over the world, meeting perhaps one Christian
in a hundred thousand, we should find the thing becoming
very, very real. What a grand thing it is -
generally - to meet a Christian! You do not immediately
raise ecclesiastical questions, doctrinal questions, and
so on; you just find you have something in common. And if
we only keep on that ground, what a long way we can go.
We know a believer, a true believer, anywhere in the
world, without introduction. The introduction is
inside! It is something fundamental: we share one
life; we have one Holy Spirit dwelling in all. That
is the basic reality of oneness, if only we would make
more of it.
And then the oneness is
progressive: that is, it grows, it develops, it proceeds
and progresses: by our living in the Spirit.
It is ministered to by life in the Spirit, by a life
governed by the Holy Spirit within us. Though this has
been said many times, it is a point for very great
emphasis: if only you and I, personally, really lived
lives that were under the government of the Holy Spirit
inside, what a big difference it would make! For He is
the Spirit of truth; and if we as born-again
children of God, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, knew Him
governing our spirit and our inner-consciousness,
supposing we had a false notion about some other child of
God, it would not be long before we knew, in our own
hearts, that the Holy Spirit did not agree with that
notion. We hear something about somebody - a false
report, a false rumour - and take it on. But
reports that are apparently true, and that come from the
most 'authentic' and most 'trustworthy' source, may yet
be false; and we can know it in our own hearts by the
Holy Spirit. And the governing of the Spirit will be a
safe-guard against some division, some strain, some
broken fellowship, which ought never to be, because it is
founded upon a lie - it may be even a beautiful lie! We
could spend much time with that.
Oneness -
fellowship - is then progressive on the basis of a life
in the Spirit. And you and I, as God's people, are
called to live in the Spirit, to walk by the Spirit, to
know the voice of the Spirit, the inner instruction and
teaching of the Spirit. It takes us a long time to learn
it in any great measure, but it is a great reality which
ought to begin with our new birth - the consciousness of
a new standard of values, of things that differ, of right
and wrong, of what we ought to do and what we ought
not to do, of how we ought to speak and how we ought not
to speak - all this ought to be born with us at our new
birth. And it ought to grow, and grow, and grow.
Only so will this other evil kingdom be destroyed; only
so will its works be countered; only so will the Church
be "terrible as an army with banners".
Only so will God find the place that He is seeking, where
He can commit Himself and abide, and make Himself known.
There is a great battle
on, and that battle is not just the battle of different
conceptions and interpretations and presentations of
Christianity. Behind all is the battle between a great
intention of God, and the counter-intention of a great
foe. May God help us to have our eyes opened to this, and
to be very clear-cut as to where we stand in this fight.