We have been occupied thus far
with a re-statement of that testimony for which we believe the
Lord raised up this instrumentality and this ministry at the
beginning, now many years ago. To us, the purpose of the Lord in
the ministry and in the corporate instrument which He brought
into being came to be gathered up in this symbolic representation
of a candlestick all of gold, and it has been the figure and
symbol all through the years. But many have come and many have
gone, and it has not always been clear to all fresh comers what
exactly it is that is stood for amongst us; and, although the
ministry in certain quite distinctive terms has gone on, it has
not been often that we have sought to gather up the whole ground
in a short space, to re-present it. The Lord seems to have been
laying upon us recently the need for this.
We said earlier that there are
in the main three aspects of the testimony, represented by three
lines of consideration of the candlestick. The first of these was
the fulness of Christ; the second, the Church as the Lord's
vessel of testimony. These we have already considered. We now
pass to the third - which is, the need for the Cross as basic to
all else.
"A candlestick all of
gold." Before proceeding further, I think I might say here
that the marginal word is better than that which is in the text.
We have 'candlestick' here, and also elsewhere where the
symbolism is used, but the margin says 'lampstand.' 'Lampstand'
really is better, because a candlestick burns with self-consuming
fire and light, whereas the full representation of the lampstand,
as we have it in Zechariah, is a drawing from the living and
inexhaustible source of olive trees, something very much better
than a candlestick which burns itself out. We are not supplying
from ourselves the fuel for the testimony - nor are we called
upon to do so. God the Holy Spirit is the fuel of the testimony;
and when it comes to endurance, to staying power, to real
effectiveness, there is all the difference between what we can
supply as candles, and what He can supply. Someone quoted to a
certain indefatigable worker that he could not burn the candle at
both ends. The response was, 'Of course, I can; it only depends
on how long the candle is!' Given the longest candle, it burns
itself out sooner or later; but, given the living fountainhead,
the Spirit of God, it is inexhaustible. That by the way.
The
Lampstand Constituted on the Basis of the Cross
This whole lampstand or
candlestick was constituted on the principle of the death and
resurrection of Christ. It is a very impressive fact. How much
the candlestick brings that into evidence! If you were to
approach the actual thing as it was made according to the Divine
instructions, and closed your eyes and put your hand at the base
of the central shaft out of which the branches went on either
side, and then moved your hand from the base up that central
shaft, at a certain point you would come upon something - what is
called here a 'knop' or a knob, and you could not get past that,
you would find that checked you; the smooth upward going would be
arrested. We have met something, something calculated to arrest
our progress, which stands in our way and challenges us,
something that makes us take account of our movement. But, having
taken account of it, you move up over the knob, and you feel
something else. What is this? You feel round. Oh, this is the
form of a flower with its leaves wide open. And, having taken
note of that, you then discover that this flower is actually a
cup, a receptacle, a vessel, a reservoir. After that, you move on
again. You go a little further without meeting anything. But here
the thing is repeated, the same thing over again - a knop, a
flower, a cup. And up that stem, you meet that threefold thing no
fewer than four times. Four times it breaks in upon your
progress. Then you come and you feel the branches; there are
three on either side. You take the lowest branch, you feel up,
you come before long to a similar threefold obstruction; and then
a little further a repetition of it, and then again a repetition
of it; and on every one of the six branches you will find this
repeated three times. Four times on the stem and three times on
every branch. The very number of occurrences, the presence in
such fulness of this thing, is something that you have to take
note of. Would it not be enough to have one of these things at
the very base, at the very beginning, and then everything smooth
going after that? No. It is repeated all the way through. The
whole course of this instrument, this vessel of testimony, is
marked by these three things.
The
Cross - Death, Resurrection, Fulness of Life
What would the knob represent,
the arrest, the check? You are not just going on; you are brought
under arrest. Does it not say, 'Here you must stay to give heed
to something of importance. Here is the death of the Lord Jesus,
here is the Cross on its death side - that which brings you up
short, that past which you cannot get without laying to heart its
solemn meaning.' You cannot get over the Cross without taking
account of it, you cannot pass it by and ignore it. When the Lord
brings the Cross into your path, you are brought up short, you
really have to take that to heart - the meaning of the death of
the Lord Jesus.
But then - and thank God - on
top of it is the blossom, and it is an almond blossom. You know
that the almond is the type of resurrection. The almond blossom -
new life, new hope, new prospect, resurrection; the almond
blossom - a new season opens, for it is the earliest of the
blossoms of spring. It goes before as the forerunner of all other
blossoms, of everything else, and it is prophetic. It says that
resurrection has come, a new year, a new Spring, a new fulness.
Here are death and resurrection.
And then a cup. Here is a
container, a vessel. What is this? Well, surely it speaks of that
which contains the fruit of the death and the resurrection - the
new life, the Spirit, the Spirit of life. "There is
therefore now (because of the death and the resurrection) no
condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the
Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin
and of death" (Rom. 8:1-2). Death, resurrection, and a new
Spirit of life in the vessel everywhere.
And then, superimposed upon the
whole, is the lamp of testimony throwing light upon the death and
the resurrection and the life of the Spirit, keeping them always
in view, so that in the light which is from above you see that
the testimony of Jesus relates to His death which says 'No' to
one whole realm; and to His resurrection which says 'Yes' to
another whole realm; and to the power of a new life to live in
that realm that God accepts; the light from above thrown upon
that.
Four times we meet it in the
stem - and four is the number of creation. If any man is in
Christ, there is a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17) - through death and
resurrection. In Christ are the branches, the whole constituting
a new creation. Three times in every branch we meet it. Three is
the number of Divine fulness. It is also the number of death and
resurrection. "As Jonah was three days and three nights in
the belly of the whale; so shall the Son of man be three days and
three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matt. 12:40).
"Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it
up" (John 2:19). "It is now the third day since these
things came to pass" (Luke 24:21). Three - death, burial,
resurrection - borne on all the branches of that testimony. Does
that sound fanciful? You have to take account of Biblical
symbolism. These things are not meaningless. God has written
Divine thoughts in all His creation. So we say that the vessel of
testimony is constituted on the principle of the death and
resurrection of Christ.
The
Cross - An Inwrought Experience
Turn to the book of the
Revelation, and at the beginning of it we are presented with
"one like unto a son of man" Who says "I am... the
Living one; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive for
evermore" (Rev. 1:18). And we see the seven golden
lampstands and that Living one in the midst - the testimony of
Jesus in the lampstands. And the testimony is the death and
resurrection of the Lord Jesus in each lampstand,
wrought into the very substance of this vessel, into the very
gold. Those deft workmen who were called to make this candlestick
- you can see them with their tools, their sharp and hard tools,
hammering, cutting, working painfully upon the gold, making these
oft-repeated symbols. It is not too strong a thing to say that if
you and I and the Lord's people are anywhere to provide for Him a
vessel of such a testimony, the testimony of Jesus, it is going
to be cut into us, to be hewn into us, to be hammered and wrought
into us. It is the result of deep and painstaking work - the
death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.
The
Testimony - The Presence of the Risen Christ
I wonder if that was not just
the meaning of the challenge to the churches in Asia. When all is
said about these churches - what was wrong and what was right
with them - was not the Lord, after all, only bringing them back
to the original testimony? When the Church began, as recorded in
the first chapters of the book of the Acts, the apostolic message
and preaching was not much more than of Jesus dead and risen;
that He Who was dead was raised; that Him Who was crucified, God
had raised up.
That is the thing they were
saying everywhere. Everything was built upon that, everything was
drawn from that, that was the basic thing - Christ crucified and
raised. It was the thing that caused all the trouble. Nothing
like that had ever been known before, it was an unheard of thing.
A man crucified - no doubt about His being dead - and, without
any touch of man's hand or intervention of any psychic force,
that one risen from the dead and alive! The claim was that God
had done it, and in doing it had declared that everything in the
risen One was according to His own mind. God was not identifying
Himself with something that was only partly of Himself. He had
put forth His power in resurrection because the situation was
utterly according to His mind. Jesus Christ is utterly according
to God's mind - all of God. That was the testimony that caused
all the trouble; yes, in earth because in hell.
Now, so to speak, at the end of
the dispensation the risen Lord is coming to the Church and
taking it up as on the first basis. He would say in effect, 'You
have a lot of works, there are a lot of good things about you,
there are some bad things too; but whether they be good or bad,
the one question is - Is there with you and in you the mighty
impact of My death and resurrection? "I am... the Living
one; and I was dead, and, behold, I am alive unto the ages of the
ages." Is that the thing that is being borne witness to -
not in word but in very power - by your presence here in the
nations?' I think that is how the challenge to the churches can
be truly and rightly summed up, from the beginning to the end;
how does the end correspond with the beginning? It is basic to
everything and you cannot get away from it.
The
Church Repeatedly Brought Back to the Cross
I do not think I am straining
the application when I say that, inasmuch as this candlestick or
lampstand has in its construction the constant repetition of this
testimony, the Church (and the individual child of God also) is
repeatedly brought back to its foundation and reminded that it
cannot get away from that. You do not go on in the Christian life
so far that you get away from your foundation, which is the
Cross. The Cross on both its sides - death and resurrection - is
ever present in the history of the Church. You cannot run on as
though you had run past it; as if you could say that now you have
left the Cross behind, and you have come to something beyond
that. No, never! True spiritual history is that you come up
against the Cross again and again. There has to be a fresh
application of it. The knob is met and you cannot get further
into the resurrection life and into the fulness of the cup until
you have again allowed the meaning of the Cross to touch whatever
it must touch of the old creation; and yet again it will happen,
and yet again. It is like that in spiritual history, and it must
be so.
The
Cross the Way to Fulness
But as you go on - and you
notice you are moving upward all the time, and being an upward
movement it is a heavenly movement - you are coming nearer to
heavenly fulness, the fulness of His glory, the sevenfold
blessing; nearer to that which is on top - spiritual fulness of
light, of testimony, of glory. Let us always remember that the
application of the Cross of the Lord Jesus, whether made
initially in one basic crisis or subsequently at different times
for different purposes, is never meant to be other than the way
to a greater fulness. Oh, do not be in a wrong way obsessed with
the death aspect of the Cross. A lot of people are so occupied
with their death and the need of their dying that it quenches
their spiritual life; you do not meet spiritual life in them
because they are so occupied with their death with Christ. While
the death aspect is necessarily there, it is only a way to the
almond blossom and to the cup of greater fulness, and it is an
upward movement, a resurrection movement, right up to spiritual
fulness.
The
Cross the Way of Divine Glory in the Church
In what we have been thus
briefly saying there is contained the whole of the spiritual work
of God to secure for Himself a people in whom there is not merely
a verbal testimony to the facts and the doctrine of the death and
the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, but by the Spirit there is
the living flame, the living power of the testimony, of what that
death and resurrection really mean. When all is said (and I am
not going to add words and try to bring out all the full content
of this) what does it mean, what does it amount to? Just this -
God is out to show that He is the God of the impossible, the God
of the miraculous, the God Who transcends nature. How can He do
it best? He can do it best by bringing us, on the one hand, to
know the death of the Lord Jesus to our own life, to our own
strength, to our own resources, our own abilities, our own
self-sufficiency, and all that - an end which is an end in death
so that we are compelled to say, 'I cannot go on any further, I
can do no more, I am at an end' - and then to discover Him as the
God of a new beginning, a miraculous new beginning, the God of
resurrection. The testimony is - 'But for God, where should we
be? This cannot be explained on any other ground than that it is
the Lord's doing, this is God's miracle of resurrection. It is
God, and only God.' That is the testimony of Jesus. We can say
these things, and probably embrace them as truth; but are we
prepared for the Cross to cut from under our feet all ground but
God Himself, to bring us repeatedly to Wit's End Corner, the end
of all resources, the end of all hope, where, as Paul said,
"we despaired... of life... that we should not trust in
ourselves, but in God who raiseth the dead" (2 Cor. 1:8-9)?
Are you prepared to accept that as the basis of your life? That
is the basis of glory. That is the testimony. You cannot bring
that about merely by the teaching you receive. That is the peril
- that there should be a people accepting the teaching but not
standing in the life and the power of it.
As we close these meditations,
I think it necessary and right we should quietly bow in the
Lord's presence and have an understanding, a transaction, with
Him that we shall not hold a testimony merely in word, in
doctrine, in teaching, in information, but that we shall in very
truth embody the testimony of Jesus in the power of the Holy
Ghost through the inworking of His death and His resurrection.