Reading: Ps. 24:3; Rev. 14:1-5
We
will say right away what it is that is really in view, so
that you see what we are working unto. In a word it is
this — that God has always had in His mind and eye a
people in absolute ascendency. You can change the word
ascendency for other words if you like, such as dominion,
exaltation, and so on. But ascendency is a very good
word, and I think it will suit our purpose; a people in
absolute ascendency.
That
thought immediately resolves itself into a key to all the
Scriptures. It explains everything that is there. The
Bible is not just the record of numerous happenings, the
story of many lives, or something about many nations. No;
these all centre in one thing, and that is this — a
people corresponding to God’s mind in the matter of
absolute ascendency, and what that means spiritually.
That is a large enough matter.
In
this closing book, at the point at which we have read
(Rev. 14), we have a culmination of divine purpose. We
have the question of ascendency answered in one called
“the Lamb,” and with Him a hundred and
forty-four thousand. The question has dated from a point
long before David raised it in this form — “Who
shall ascend... who shall stand...?” That question
has rung down the ages from the day that Adam let the
whole matter of ascendency with regard to this world go
into the hands of the devil. Who SHALL ascend, who
SHALL have the dominion, who SHALL be above
and who SHALL stand when all has crashed in the
fall? That question at last is answered here, as the
voice is heard as of many waters, as of a great thunder,
as of harpers harping with their harps, and the Lamb and
those that are with Him are seen on mount Zion. That is,
as we pointed out in our previous meditation, the place
of final impregnability so far as the forces of evil are
concerned. The answer is there.
The
answer, again, is found in a representative company. In
saying that, we immediately introduce a new factor into
the whole situation. Why do we, as the Lord’s
people, gather together? Is it that we are just a number
of Christians who love the Lord and delight to come
together from time to time to have some meetings and some
teaching, and generally to help one another to be better
Christians? I am quite sure that most of you answer No to
such a question. You have seen that there is something
very much more bound up with our belonging to the Lord
than just being Christians, and good Christians at that.
You have seen that God has a purpose concerning His Son
into which believers are called, and which has only its
beginning in our being born again. That purpose of God
has been the occasion of intense and unrelenting
hostility right down the ages from the whole kingdom of
evil. It is the object which lies at the end of the
Christian life upon which those powers of evil have their
attention focused. If they are against the beginnings of
Christian life in new birth, if they are against any and
every stage of the Christian life, and if increasing
intensity of opposition faces any believer who determines
to go further and still further with the Lord, it is all
because of what these things mean as to their outcome.
The matter becomes individual and personal only because
we are a part of a whole; but the whole is not to be
found in any individual or any number of individuals as
such, but in one united people.
Israel as an Illustration of
Spiritual Ascendency
Whatever
we find recorded historically in the Bible, whatever we
find there relating to what is actually here on this
earth, seen and tangible and known after the flesh, there
is a spiritual counterpart to it. It is a representation
of something not seen. And amongst the many things which
fulfil that function, one of the greatest is the nation
of Israel; something known in history, seen on the earth,
but in the mind of God hiding a great spiritual intent.
That ultimate intent in fullness is contained in a little
statement in Deuteronomy 28:1 and 13: “If thou
shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy
God, to observe to do all His commandments which I
command thee this day... the Lord thy God will set thee
on high ABOVE ALL THE NATIONS of the earth... And the
Lord will make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou
shalt be ABOVE only, and thou shalt not be beneath.”
There is the secret of God lying within that vessel
which illustrates God’s thought. The thought is
passed on in spiritual reality to the church, which is
the spiritual Israel, and the very explanation of the
existence of the church according to God’s mind is
just that — a nation above all the nations, a people
in absolute spiritual ascendency. “Who shall
ascend?” The answer is found there, in the thought
and mind of God.
That
thought will most certainly be realized, but in the first
place it may only be realized in a representative
company, of which these hundred and forty-four thousand
are the expression. Oh, what a vast amount of the Word of
God is opened up immediately you get that key! It brings
in the whole history of Israel. It starts with Jacob, the
man through whom the twelve tribes came. The whole
history of Israel is wrought into that one man’s
spiritual experience. What is Jacob to begin with, before
he actually comes under the disciplining hand of God?
Well, he is just what the nation was in itself; a poor,
miserable, wretched, contemptible thing. “The
Lord did not... choose you because ye were more in
number than any people” (Deut. 7:7); “He
did not choose you because you were better than other
people:” No, it was sovereign choice, and that is
all you can say about Jacob. If you want anything to
commend the man, you will look in vain; and you will find
plenty to the contrary. But that worm Jacob came into the
sovereign hands of God, and from Jacob the supplanter,
the mean, contemptible worm — God made a prince. He
changed his name to Israel — a prince with God
— and gave him twelve sons and what a mixture they
were! We dare not stay at the moment with the details.
But here we have twelve sons, twelve tribes.
Israel’s Twelve Tribes —
A Governing People
What
does twelve signify? Twelve in the Bible represents
government. The twelve stones taken out of the Jordan,
and the twelve stones set up in the Jordan (Josh. 4:8,9)
speak of ascendency over death, death’s subjection
to the power of resurrection. (That is an absolute thing
in the very existence of the people we are thinking
about). Elijah on Carmel built an altar of twelve stones,
definitely said to represent all the tribes of Israel,
and that altar bore witness concerning the absolute
ascendency of Jehovah and His people.
Many
things happened to the twelve tribes. Dan lets in
idolatry and passes out of history (see Rev. 7), but
someone else takes the place of Dan and twelve is
preserved to Revelation 21. “The holy city...
having twelve gates... and names written thereon,
which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children
of Israel.” The number is preserved right
through to the end. You need not think historically now;
think spiritually. Twelve is government in
representation. One hundred and forty-four thousand
(twelve times twelve) are seen on the mount. This speaks
of government, complete, absolute, ascendent,
transcendent — you come into the realm of
superlatives now — through the Lamb.
So you
could go on gathering it up, and seeing how this divine
thought is wrought into the very fabric of the
Scriptures. From start to finish, it is all centred in
the challenging enquiry, “Who shall ascend...? Who
shall stand...?” Who shall have the government of
God’s universe at last? Who shall be His
governmental instrument and vessel in reigning over this
universe? Who? “Thou madest him to have
dominion” (Ps. 8:6). “We behold... Jesus
crowned with glory and honour” (Heb. 2:9)
“Thou didst put all things in subjection under his
feet” (Heb. 2:8). “He put all things in
subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over
all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness
of him that filleth all in all” (Eph. 1:22,23).
From the head the government passes out to the universe
through the church, which is His body. It is all of a
piece.
Israel Lost What God Intended
What a
lot this explains in spiritual experience! I am going to
pause there before I go on. This represents the big
difference amongst Christians, the difference of
conception as to the Christian life, as to what we are
here for. Israel met many temptations and things adverse
to this great destiny. Eventually Israel forfeited the
destiny, and they are scattered among the nations, and
have lost what God intended, so far as this dispensation
is concerned. That did not just happen. There were many
reasons for it and those are exactly the same things that
you and I have to encounter and beware of in our calling
unto this great destiny. For although God will achieve
His purpose in the end, it will be achieved in a
representative company, and all Christians will not reach
this end. If it were otherwise, why the conflict, why all
the exhortations, the entreaties, the urgings, the
warnings of the Word of God to CHRISTIANS? Why do
we not just — automatically come to it? What is all
the trouble about, if after all it does not matter,
since we shall reach the goal in any case? You see how
absurd it is to take it for granted that willy-nilly,
once you are a Christian, you are going to arrive at
God’s full purpose. You are not! Israel, even though
they were called and had God on their side, and every
divine resource at their command for the realization of
the end, encountered things that proved too powerful for
them and were worsted in the fight. They are used again
and again as a warning to the church. The things which
caused that downfall are the things of which we have to
be fully aware, and although they are not pleasant things
to say, they have to be said — in all faithfulness.
Israel’s Folly —
Clinging to the Letter, Not Open to the Spirit
One of
the inclusive enemies to the great purpose of God in
Israel’s life and which virtually brought about
their downfall was this: that they gathered all the
truths of God together into a well-defined, compact
system of sayings and practices, and said, “That is
everything and the end.” They boxed the compass of
divine revelation and said, “We have it all, and now
it is just a matter of observing these sayings and these
forms.” They resolved the whole revelation of God
into a formal teaching and practice. They failed to see
that the essence of all divine things is divine life;
that there is a vast difference between the letter and
the spirit; that you can have all the letter and all the
forms and yet be quite dead, and all of it profit you
nothing. Their attitude amounted to this, that if anybody
claims to see something more of the meaning of the Lord
— not claiming to have had fresh revelation from
heaven, but to have seen something more of God’s
meaning in what has already been given in His Word,
demanding adjustment, demanding fresh progress, perhaps
demanding revolutionary things — then that is
unsafe, it is suspect, it is something outside of what WE
hold, what WE have been taught, what WE believe.
They shut it all down like that and barred the way to all
spiritual progress. That is what Israel did, and it was
this that the Son of God came up against. It was this
very thing that put out of court all the purpose of His
coming and rendered it nil, so far as they were
concerned.
Think
of the story of our Lord’s trial before Pilate.
Where are our sympathies, and where are our indignations?
Our sympathies are with Pilate, the man who said, as he
took water and washed his hands, “I am innocent of
the blood of this righteous man” (Matt. 27:24). He
was a man in a predicament. You may despise him for
apparent weakness, but in comparison with those who said,
“Give us Barabbas, and let Jesus be crucified; His
blood be on us, and on our children”, it is Pilate
who commands our sympathy, not these others. We feel more
with the world than with the church. That is strong
language. I mean, our sympathy is more there with the
world than it is with those who claim to know everything,
to be in possession of everything, of divine truth. In
its hostility to Christ the world is nothing in
comparison with a dead, fixed, systematized
Christianity... That is where the danger lies; of having
all the truth, and all the articles and all the
practices, and losing the throne. Beware “that no
one take thy crown” along that line.
That
compasses a very great deal. It is for us to look
carefully again at the things which brought about
Israel’s downfall and robbed Israel of that great
and glorious issue which God had set before them. “The
Lord thy God will set thee on high above all the nations
of the earth” (Deut 28:1). Satan’s answer
to that is, “If I can help it, never!”; and he
resorts to every means and method to see that no seed
comes to final spiritual ascendency. No church will
arrive at ultimate dominion if he can prevent it.
Ascendency To Be Gained Through
Challenging Experiences
It is
that throne which is the centre of the universe, it is
that glorious throne on high which rules, which governs.
It is governing the experience of every believer. That is
to say, it is determining our temptations, the assaults
which we meet. As members of Christ’s Body, our
trials and sufferings are not things in themselves. It is
a part of the mischief which the enemy has done in us, in
numbing our spiritual faculties and blinding our eyes,
that we regard the things that happen to us as personal
things. It is one of the most devastating things to take
our sufferings as merely personal things. By so doing we
rob them of their point and meaning. So soon as we begin
to turn in on ourselves and regard our sufferings as
directed against ourselves, making the whole thing into a
personal problem, we have lost the way to the throne. If
you see a person who is continually occupied with his own
troubles, all the time in the circle of his own
sufferings, one who has made altogether a personal matter
of this whole question of discipline and training, of the
trying, testing and proving of faith, you can see at once
that such a one has cut the very vitals of divine
intention in his trial and suffering; he is a defeated
person. If only we could take up the trials, the
adversities, the sufferings, the problems, that come to
us, and look at them in the light of the great end, as
the rungs of a ladder for our feet to rise to the throne!
It is the ladder of suffering to bring us to the throne.
It is the LAMB Who is in the throne, it is
suffering and sacrifice that bring to mount Zion. Yet we
resolve such trial into a personal thing all the time and
defeat the end by so doing.
Do not
be consumed with self-pity. See what it is doing. It is
giving the enemy the ground he wants for holding you in
defeat. You are no good for anything whatever; your
phraseology about victory counts for nothing. Until we
take hold of our affliction and suffering and say,
“This thing has got to bring me higher, I have to
get it under my feet: God has given me a good opportunity
to learn ascendency by means of this”; until we take
an attitude like that our affliction and suffering is
working just in the opposite direction to what God
intends.
“These
are they that come out of the great tribulation, and they
washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of
the Lamb” (Rev. 7:14). That is said of another
company in this book, and though the company may be
different the principle is the same. When God gets a
representative company there in the throne it will be in
virtue, not of sovereign acts of picking them up and
putting them there, but of a mighty travail; but not a
travail in which they have wallowed in self-pity but in
which they have risen by the grace of God and gained
ascendency.
Do not
literalize these things and, by so doing, vitiate them.
Get rid of the literal conception of a mountain and a
throne and a hundred and forty-four thousand, and crowns
and elders and what not. See that it is symbolic language
which enshrouds spiritual principles. It is all spiritual
in nature and essence; and spiritual ascendency, or
coming to the throne, is something that is to be effected
inside of us, not at some future date but now. Any day in
the life of a child of God will provide plenty of
material for determining whether he, or she, is coming to
the throne or not. Do not wait for the great day when
Satan shall be cast down from heaven and there shall no
place be found for him any more. Let us ask the Lord to
see that in the measure that is done today. The heavens
may be geographical, but they are spiritual also. That is
what is before us, that is what the Lord is after: not
merely to have a number of Christians, and as good
Christians as He can get, but to have a people who will
come to that place where the answer will be given fully
and finally, both to the question and to the challenge
— “Who shall ascend...?”
Need and Challenge Both Met
Through A Disciplined People
We
referred in our earlier meditation to Job, and we will
for the present close with a reference to him. Job’s
was a tremendous climb up out of a miry condition, up and
out into that place of vindication where the Lord could
point to him in a new way and say to others, “This
man is the key to the answer to your prayers and you will
not get any answer to prayer unless he stands in the
breach: your spiritual interests and destiny hang upon
him.” That is tremendous: that a man should have
reached some specific point where the destiny of many
others hangs upon him, and God has determined it and said
it in so many words — “Your spiritual good is
bound up with this man; I have had to bring him to this
position for your sake.” It was a climb up: and what
a climb up and out it was for Job!
What
was God doing in all this? He was answering a challenge
from hell. In effect, if not in word, the challenge of
Satan was, “Who shall ascend? Who shall stand? Let
me touch Job and You will see whether he will stand or
not, You will see whether he will come up or not.”
And God said, “I will answer that challenge by means
of this man.” The challenge was answered. May it not
be that this is exactly what the Lord is doing by means
of the church? Why has Satan been allowed to continue for
these centuries? Why was he not wiped out of existence
when Christ destroyed his power at Calvary? Why has the
church suffered through the ages as she has? Why today
are the people of God so oppressed and afflicted? God is
answering the enemy, and in that company on mount Zion
with the Lamb the answer will be fully found. These have
ascended and these shall stand. It yet remains, of
course, to see what is basic to that standing and that
ascendency. That is spiritual history, but we have the
fact of what God is after, what it is that alone will
satisfy His intentions from the beginning. “Who
shall ascend? Who shall stand?” Mount Zion and what
that means spiritually will be the answer. And the
apostle says, “Ye are come unto mount Zion... the
church of the firstborn” (Heb. 12:22,23). It is
the same thing.