We are considering the
deeper and fuller meaning of what came in on the day of
Pentecost - the nature and order of an entirely new day
in this world's history, that nature and order being
essentially spiritual: a new order and character
introduced by the advent of the Holy Spirit to constitute
everything immediately spiritual; not indirectly and
ultimately, but immediately spiritual.
The
Voice of the Spirit the Governing Factor
One of the primal
features of this new day is this - take careful note of
it because it is the key and the basis of everything -
that the voice of the Spirit is to be taken account of
rather than what is going on in the religious world
around. It is that which cleaves things asunder, puts
things into two different realms in this book. With this
new age we see on the one hand in the religious world
that which claims authority with power, position and
influence, which has established itself and taken
possession, but which is shown to be something
which is not according to the Spirit of God. On the other
hand, over against that, we see what is brought out into
such clear, manifest relief, that to bear and to take
account of the voice of the Spirit of God may be, and
very often is, another thing altogether. You recall
Stephen's defence. You know that he comprehends the whole
of this history. He starts with Abraham. "The God of
glory appeared unto our father Abraham" (Acts 7:2).
That is the beginning of this religious history, and he
traces right through stage by stage until he arrives at
the murder of the Lord Jesus, and he sums it up in one
great declaration, sweeping away the whole ground of that
established thing on the earth, and saying, as
comprehending it all, "Ye stiffnecked and
uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the
Holy Spirit" (Acts 7:51). Something spiritual, a
taking note of the voice of the Spirit of God, is
something very different indeed from an established
religious order on this earth, and very often runs
directly counter to it. That is a strong statement but it
is said in order that we may immediately get to the very
heart of what it is the Lord is seeking in this present
age - a people of a spiritual life who are governed by
the Spirit of God, who take account of what the
Spirit says, and are obedient and conform thereunto.
It is a spiritual people God is after in this age, not
religious people. Paul has built a very great spiritual
structure upon this very principle. A large part of his
letter to the Romans and the whole of his letter to the
Galatians and of the letter to the Hebrews - whoever
wrote that letter, I think there is little doubt that the
influence of Paul is found in it and it comes altogether
into line with the other two on this very matter - is
occupied with the sole object of pointing out that
traditional religion is one thing and life in the
Spirit is another; that religion as here on this earth in
all its forms may be one thing, while what is of the
Spirit of God may be altogether another thing. That is
what Paul set out to make clear, and he built this
tremendous edifice upon this fact. If you read Galatians
carefully in the light of that, you will see that that is
what he is after - to divide between this religious thing
and this other which is of the Spirit.
You notice that Abraham
has quite a place in this book of the Acts. Note, for
example, the following fragment:
"For to you is
the promise, and to your children, and to all that are
afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call
unto him" (Acts 2:39).
If you want to know
what that promise is, you have to turn to Galatians, and
you find at once it is linked with Abraham.
"...that upon
the Gentiles might come the blessing of Abraham in Christ
Jesus; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit
through faith" (Gal. 3:14).
"For to you is the
promise." That is the word on the day of Pentecost,
and it refers to the coming of the Spirit.
"...who are
Israelites; whose is the adoption, and the glory, and the
covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of
God, and the promises" (Rom. 9:4).
Abraham has quite a
place here in this book in relation to the Holy Spirit,
the promise.
The
Seed of Abraham
The first thing we see
here is that the challenge of the new age, the new day
and its meaning, was first presented to the seed of
Abraham, and the nature of the challenge was that they
should become a spiritual seed of Abraham as something
more than a natural seed. The significance of the day of
Pentecost is just that. Now by the coming of the Spirit a
transition is to be made, a change is to take place. The
natural seed of Abraham should become a spiritual seed of
Abraham. There is a difference between the seed of
Abraham and the children of Israel. The seed of Abraham
is racial; the children of Israel is national. We shall
speak about that when we come to the elect nation. Here
the racial side of things, the seed of Abraham, is in
view; but Paul makes it perfectly clear in his letter to
the Romans and to the Galatians that those that are of
the Spirit are children of Abraham, not those which are
of the flesh. We have said before that Paul's letters
were all written and circulated before ever the book of
the Acts was written, so that the spiritual things were
already there established in the teaching of the Lord's
people, and the people were able to interpret this survey
of the history in the light of spiritual things; and that
is exactly what we are doing now. We have the spiritual
interpretation of Acts right in our hands. We have the
letter to the Galatians in our hands before ever we
approach this book of the Acts, and what does it say?
Well, the challenge to the seed of Abraham is that they
are not established before God on natural grounds: they
can only be established before God on spiritual grounds.
What they are naturally is not what God is seeking, but
what they are spiritually. "First that which is
natural; then that which is spiritual," and it is
that which matters. That is the object of the Lord - a
spiritual seed of Abraham.
A
People Not Numbered Among the Nations
We have much by way of
illustration as to what God's thought was for this
spiritual seed. He chose sovereignly in grace. You know
how Paul argues that the law did not exist when God chose
Abraham and his seed; that choice was not on the ground
of law at all, not of works, not of anything that was in
them or that they did or tried to do. It was just in His
sovereign grace that He chose and marked them out; and
the remarkable thing is that that nation has borne its
own natural characteristics right through history which
have never been lost. I remember the late Samuel Schor
saying that in any part of this world he could always,
without a word, detect a Jew, no matter how much the Jew
had been absorbed into the nation. That is saying a lot.
I think he used the phrase "a son of Abraham";
that was his way of speaking. The mark is there,
something which distinguishes, embodying a spiritual
principle which is brought out in this new spiritual race
belonging to this age - but not now of Christians marked
off by their physiognomy nor by their language, nor by
their particular country. There is no doubt that the hand
of God was upon Balaam, although he was not a very
willing and joyous prophet under the hand of God; but the
Spirit of God made Balaam say about Israel as he looked
from the top of the mountain: "It is a people that
dwelleth alone, and shall not be reckoned among the
nations" (Num. 23:9). There is surely a spiritual
principle there that this spiritual seed of Abraham which
has been brought in with the Day of Pentecost is a people
distinguished from all other people, whether by
physiognomy or not. I believe that if we are living in
the radiance of Divine life, there will be something of
it betrayed by our faces. At any rate, the world will
know something if we are really living in touch with the
Lord, and there will be a language which only the
spiritual can enjoy and understand.
There will be those
spiritual counterparts of the seed of Abraham, a people
different from all the rest.
Now, the tragedy of
what is called 'the Church' has so often been, and
perhaps is more today than ever, that that
distinctiveness is being lost. It seems today as if a set
is being made in some way to remove all the offence and
all the difference, and to get us near to people without
anything that clashes, in the hope of winning them. Yes,
that is what is going on in the religious world around;
it is a conforming to this age. But what came in at
Pentecost is fundamentally this, that this people of the
Spirit are so utterly different in the very centre of
their being, different altogether from all other peoples:
and their power and influence lie in that fact. You
cannot fit them in with other things, and it is not
because they are awkward and difficult and deliberately
irritate people, but there is that which, by reason of
their spiritual constitution marks them off; and if they
did but know it, this is the secret of their influence in
the world. The progress and increase of spiritual life
mean this, that the gap widens all the time between the
children of God and those in the world who are not such.
That is not to be taken literally in this sense, that we
begin a mistaken system of hiving off, shutting ourselves
up, getting out of touch. That is a wrong application of
the principle. The Lord Jesus is pre-eminently our
example in that He could move in any circle, and He did
so deliberately - publicans and sinners, all classes - He
moved amongst them, but His power over them, was in His
basic difference from them. Let us be careful how we are
caught in this great movement of conforming to this age.
To conform is to lose spiritual power. Well,
spiritual seed is what God is after, a spiritual seed of
Abraham.
A
Seed of Promise
What was that seed? It
is said to be according to promise. The Apostle marks it
out by that word "promise." He distinguishes
thereby between Ishmael and Isaac. God never promised
Ishmael; he was not the son of promise, therefore he
never stood before God in the fulfilment of His thought
and intention. He came into conflict with the whole
thought of God. But Isaac was the son of promise. What
does that mean? It does not mean that God just said, I
will give you a son. The promise means more than that. It
means that God had taken His place with Isaac, God had
committed Himself to Isaac. He never committed Himself to
Ishmael. A promise is something more than a verbal
understanding or undertaking. It is a committal. I have
given my promise, and my name, my honour and all my
resources are involved. If I am a man of honour, then I
am committed, with all that I have, to see that the
realisation of the purpose in that direction is brought
about. I am committed up to the hilt when I have given my
promise. God was committed to Isaac, and that is why it
was not possible for Isaac to be eventually swallowed up
of death; he must be a child of resurrection. If he dies,
God's honour is involved and goes down with Isaac. Isaac
was the son of promise in that sense, that God was
covenanted to him. "In Isaac shall thy seed be
called" (Gen. 21:12).
Now you know how Paul
works that out in his Galatian letter, and it comes back
into Acts. He works Acts out in his Galatian letter.
Again, the seed of Abraham is not that which is natural,
but that which is spiritual. "They that are of
faith, the same are sons of Abraham" (Gal.3:7). They
that are of faith are Abraham's seed. "He saith not,
And to seeds, as of many: but as of one, And to thy seed,
which is Christ" (Gal. 3:16).
God is committed to
that spiritual seed, that counterpart of Isaac. He is
that Son of resurrection. "...whom God raised up,
having loosed the pangs of death: because it was not
possible that he should beholden of it" (Acts 2:24).
Why? Because God is bound up with Him, God is in Him,
God is one with Him. And we are all children of Abraham
in that sense by faith, and all sons of God through
faith, in Christ Jesus (Gal.3:26). That is how it is
worked out - the spiritual seed of promise to which God
is committed, and which cannot therefore be engulfed of
death, but must know all the Divine resource in the power
of resurrection.
A
Resurrection Seed
That brings in one of
the major basic principles and truths of this spiritual
seed, that it is a resurrection seed, and that its
history is to be characterised by the resurrection of
Jesus Christ from the dead. I cannot lay enough emphasis
upon that. It is not just a truth enunciated, it is the
most searching and testing thing that you and I can have
to do with - that, if we are the spiritual seed of
Abraham in Christ by faith, we are called to have our
whole history based upon this fundamental law - the power
of His resurrection. It is something stated as a truth,
but it is something to be taken hold of by faith. Again
and again in the course of our history we shall be at the
place where there is no hope but in "God who raiseth
the dead" (2 Cor. 1:9) if there is to be any future
at all. We shall come there, in our own spiritual
history, we shall come there in our own soul life - that
we are at an end of our resources, mind, heart and will.
We may come ofttimes in our very physical life to the
place where, if God does not do something, it is an end.
We shall come there in the work of God - where everything
seems to declare that this is the finish of the work,
there is nothing more possible; but now is the occasion
for the God Who raiseth the dead, the God of promise, the
God of Isaac, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ. This is not just a Bible teaching. This is
searching truth. We have to have our life based upon it
and to believe it, and when it begins to work we must
remember what is happening. I have no doubt that we have
all accepted it as a truth, we believe it as something
set forth; but when it begins to work in us, somehow we
lose the whole thing. When we really do get to an end and
say, This is the finish! we begin to accept it as the
finish, we agree that all is finished. Instead of that,
we should not trust in ourselves but in God. "Should
not trust in ourselves" - that is negative. The
positive is - "We ourselves have had the sentence of
death within ourselves, that we should... trust... in
God who raiseth the dead." That is very
practical. It will find us out many times, if we are men
and women of the Spirit.
Now, you say: That is
extraordinary - I always thought if only I was filled
with the Spirit, if I really knew the meaning of
Pentecost, I should always be on top in the full flood of
life; surely there is a contradiction? Not at all! This
resurrection life works primarily and firstly in our
spirit, and it is from there that we have got to come up
in mind and in body. The real working of the Spirit is
like that. You are waiting and crying for the Lord to
come and touch you on the outside, to lift you, to
quicken you. You are waiting for something to happen that
you can sense somewhere in the circumference of life.
Death is there in the realm of your soul, your mind, your
sensibilities, your body, your surroundings; you are
waiting for the Lord to do something there. No, that is
natural, that day has passed in the order of God. You
have to know a touch of life in your spirit. It may come
by a word from the Lord. If you are called to the
ministry of the Word you may be completely dry and dark
and dead for the next bit of ministry which looms ahead,
but when God's moment comes, the word of the Lord comes
to you and from that moment the ministry begins to open
out and you fulfil it; that is spiritual ministry. Or in
any other connection the principle holds good - the power
of resurrection begins in our spirit. We have to know it
there, and then in faith move on that, and we find that
mind and body come into line for all that the Lord wants.
"First that which is natural; then that which is
spiritual." That is the law of the Lord now; this is
the "afterward" day. The day of the natural
passed with the day of Pentecost; things were all outward
until then.
You know how true that
was in Israel's case. They had only to do something
outward and God responded. But not now; you cannot get
anything by law now. You can observe all the ritual, but
you never get anything from God that way. This is the
"afterward," it is spiritual; it is now a life
in and by the Spirit.
To reinforce what we
have been saying, let us remind ourselves of the fact
that God never committed Himself in this matter of the
promise of Isaac until the thing was utterly
impossible naturally. The promise was never given until
the whole situation was a natural impossibility. Ishmael
- "first that which is natural"; but God is
looking on, He has in principle something more in view,
He is after the spiritual, and so He gave His promise to
Abraham, and with it committed Himself, only when things
were absolutely impossible naturally for the realisation
of His promise. Are you prepared to accept that as a
working principle in life all the way along? You cannot
have anything more testing than that. It is very real, it
is desperately real, so real that when you are in it you
can do any desperate thing. It is so real that if you are
not alive to this other side, if you do not believe in
God Who raiseth the dead, anything can happen. But the
God of resurrection comes in only when resurrection is
the only thing possible; and resurrection is God's
prerogative alone. This is a matter for Almighty God
alone, that is all there is to it. Unless Almighty God
comes in, then there is no prospect, no hope, whatsoever.
That is a law of life for the spiritual; that is the
nature of things in this new age.
The
Sign of Circumcision
Now, God followed this
up with a sign, an outward mark of a spiritual
significance. He gave to Abraham the sign of
circumcision. It became the mark of all the seed of
Abraham, distinguishing them from all other peoples, and
establishing a law. Let us be sensible about this, even
if it is a delicate subject. It established a law that
all the fruit of life from that time onward was to be
wholly for God. That is the meaning of circumcision - to
be wholly separated unto God. God was very meticulous
about that. You remember that extraordinary incident in
the life of Moses. Moses had met God in the bush, God
had spoken to him about His intentions, and then God had
commissioned him as the deliverer of His people, and
Moses was on his way to fulfil his Divinely-given
commission; and then you have this statement -
"...the Lord met him and sought to kill him" (Ex.
4:24). An extraordinary thing that the man Divinely
called, chosen and commissioned should be met by God with
intent to slay him! God was saying, in effect: Yes, but,
after all, nothing of it is possible; with all that
vision, with all that purpose, with all that intention,
it is all suspended until something has happened. And you
notice what happened. It was made quite clear what the
difficulty was - Moses had not circumcised his son; and
when that was done, he went on and fulfilled his task.
All the fruit of his life was to be held for God,
everything was to be upon this basis, that the flesh is
out of the way, and all is of the Spirit, the fruit of
the Spirit, not the fruit of the flesh, for God. Oh, what
a history is bound up with that! Paul takes that up again
in the letter to the Galatians and says in substance: It
is not circumcision of the flesh at all in this new day;
that all belongs to the natural, that belongs to
yesterday; we have come into a new day, and now
circumcision is circumcision of the heart where
everything is unto God, and the flesh put away. Writing
to the Colossians, he explains that when he says we were
"buried with him in baptism" (Col. 2:12), and
in that connection he says "...ye were circumcised
with a circumcision not made with hands, in the putting
off of the body of the flesh, in the circumcision of
Christ" (Col. 2:11). It is the Cross dealing with
that self-life which will come even into the service of
God, into a Divine, commission - that uncircumcised
Philistine hand that will always be meddling with Divine
things, even with the Ark itself. Yes, we are all capable
of that. It is the peril that is always nearest to us of
bringing our natural life in some kind of impingement
upon Divine things, getting into the Lord's work
ourselves, doing it ourselves, being interested in the
Lord's things ourselves. It takes the Spirit of God in
His perfect knowledge and understanding and insight to
take the full measure of this self-life; we cannot do it.
But here is the point -
this is the day of the Spirit, and those who are the
spiritual seed of Abraham, who are now under the power of
the Spirit, governed by the Spirit, will be made alive by
the Spirit continually to that which is of the Spirit and
that which is not. The more we go on with the Lord, the
fuller and clearer will become our perception as to what
is spiritual and what is natural, even in our Christian
life. It is a whole life of education. Things that we
thought at one time were quite all right, quite
permissible, quite in line with the Lord's will, as we go
on we come to find that even those things have come into
a realm of question, the Spirit is not agreeing with them
now. We have come to discover that He never did agree
with them, but we were not enough alive to Him to know
His mind about them. He deals with us as with children as
long as we are children, but when it is time that we
should leave childhood the Spirit begins to deal with us
very drastically if we are going on with the Lord. It is
this kind of people that the Lord is after in this age.
Oh, what a difference it would make if all the Lord's
people were really governed by this law of the Spirit of
life in Christ, whose hearts were truly circumcised,
that all the fruit of life should be wholly unto God;
because this law of the Spirit is not outward, but
inward.
I wonder if you are
feeling the Lord touch your hearts in this matter? I am
so anxious not just to heap words upon words and truths
upon truths. I do feel the Lord wants to do something,
not just to say things, and it does matter above
everything else whether we are able to take account of
the voice of the Spirit rather than to be actuated and
governed by even the Christian and evangelical world
around us. Yes, even in the evangelical world
Christianity has become a very set thing; it has become
fixed as an order, a system of things; you have to
conform to it, and if you do not, well, you are not sound
or you are in some way heretical. No, we shall not go
wrong in being governed by the Spirit; but even there
many good Christians may not be able to understand. Are
you prepared for that? It is not conformity to a system
of teaching or truths that is needed, but to be able to
take account of the movement of the Spirit of God. That
will not make us independent, a law to ourselves: the
Lord will attend to that. But oh, it is more important
than anything else in these days the Lord should have a
people who know the Spirit, who hear His voice and follow
Him; and all who do that will move in the same direction,
will flow together. We said earlier that the reason for
so much division and conflict is the fact that the Spirit
is not Lord. Other things are Lord - Christian interests
are Lord, interpretations are Lord, mental appraisements
are Lord, all sorts of things have taken Lordship. Where
the Spirit is Lord, we shall speak and think the same
thing, there will be no mere individualism. I think I
must stop there. Let us listen to what the Spirit says.
Let us ask the Lord to make very sure in us that we are
not being moved in our lives, in the course that we are
taking, by what is religiously natural, but that we are
really children of the Spirit and know the Spirit and are
in conformity to God's thought for this present
dispensation, true children of Abraham according to the
Spirit.