"Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, Forever"
by
T. Austin-Sparks
Chapter 2 - The Kingdom Of Light In Conflict With The Kingdom Of Darkness
"In the beginning God created the heaven and
the earth. And the earth was waste and void; and darkness
was upon the face of the deep: and the spirit of God
moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let
there be light: and there was light" (Genesis
1:1-3).
"But and if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled in
them that are perishing: in whom the god of this world
hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that the light
of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of
God, should not dawn upon them... Seeing it is God, that
said, Let there be light, who shined in our hearts, to
give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in
the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:3-4,
6).
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God... In him was life; and
the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in
the darkness; and the darkness overcame it not"
(John 1:1, 4-5).
We proceed to consider a little further what the Kingdom
of God is. We have seen that from the beginning there has
been a great conflict in this universe as to WHO
shall have the dominion. The New Testament speaks of two
kingdoms, the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan,
the Kingdom of the Son of God's love and the kingdom of
that one who wants to usurp the place of God's Son, and
all through the history of this world those two kingdoms
have been in deadly conflict. As to the Kingdom of God,
we have said that it is the sovereign rule of God. We
speak of 'entering the Kingdom of God', and in that way
we think of the Kingdom of God as being a sphere of God's
rule, but there is something about which we must be very
clear, although it is not easy to explain.
GOD RULES BY HIS OWN NATURE
We could think of a kingdom being just a place, and a
number of people in that place, and then we could think
of some person, a dictator, an autocrat, having dominion
in that place over those people. We could say that Egypt
is the kingdom of Mr..., and that China is the kingdom of
someone else, but that is not the idea of the Kingdom of
God. You see, God does not rule just as an autocrat or as
a dictator. God's Kingdom is composed of those who are
like Himself. That is what it is going to be at the end.
The Kingdom is coming now, and when it has fully come it
will just be, and only be, people who are like God
Himself. I wonder if you understand what I mean when I
say that God rules by His own nature? God's government is
on the basis of what God is. That is how He is ruling
now. When we say: "Thy will be done", we have
to go on immediately and say: "As in heaven, so on
earth." The Kingdom of God is according to that
which satisfies the nature of God.
We have, then, two things to consider. The first is this:
that to belong to the Kingdom of God we have to be
reconstituted according to God. You know, the door is
closed to every man and woman who has not been
reconstituted according to God. Let us think of it like
this: Someone wants to be in the Kingdom of God and they
come to the door, and on that door they see the word:
"Cannot." 'You cannot come in here.
Something has to happen in you before you can come in
here. This realm belongs to people who are altogether
different from what you are by nature.'
You remember that the Lord Jesus told a parable of
someone who made a great feast, and in order to attend
and participate in that feast the guests had to wear a
certain garment. Well, the people came with the garments
on, but when the master of the feast came to look over
the people he found one man without that garment. He said
to that man: 'Friend, how did you get in here without the
garment on?' In effect he said: 'You have no right here.'
The master of the feast said to his servants: 'Bind him
hand and foot and cast him out!' It was in that parable
that the Lord was expounding this very principle: if you
are going to be in the Kingdom of God something has got
to happen that makes you suitable for that Kingdom.
Now, of course, you know that I am talking about the
third chapter of the Gospel by John. I am quite sure that
this man, Nicodemus, would have had an awful shock if he
had been told that he was the man without the wedding
garment, but this chapter makes it perfectly clear that
it was Nicodemus. The only difference between Nicodemus
and the man in the feast was that the latter got in and
was thrown out, but the unborn-again Nicodemus never got
in at all. Now, you note that it was about the Kingdom
that Nicodemus was concerned. He was a very religious
man, and highly educated, a man held in high esteem
amongst the men of this world. Perhaps you would have
found no fault with him, but Jesus said to him, without
any hesitation: "Except a man be born from above, he
cannot SEE the kingdom of God" (John 3:3),
and: "Except a man be born of water and the Spirit,
he cannot ENTER into the kingdom of God"
(John 3:5). Far from being able to ENTER, he
cannot even SEE!
There is something about this Kingdom of God that
necessitates having an altogether new constitution. We
are hearing a great deal in our times about outer space,
and we send men into it. Have you seen pictures of those
men? You can hardly recognize that they are men! They are
so laden with artificial apparatus that you can hardly
see them. They have no natural qualification for living
in outer space, and have to have artificial lungs. In a
sense, they have to be reconstituted upon another
principle. That is just an illustration of John chapter
3. Jesus might have said to Nicodemus: 'Nicodemus, if you
got into the Kingdom of God you would die. You have not
the equipment to live in that rare atmosphere.' That is
very simple. If you had to bring a man or a woman whose
life is in this world, to whom this world is everything,
into a meeting like this, where we are singing these
wonderful hymns and talking about these heavenly things,
you know, the eyes of that man or that woman would be on
the door all the time. They would be wriggling in their
seats and saying: 'I will be glad when this is all over
and I can get out. Let me get out of this as soon as I
can!' You see what I mean? They are not constituted
according to the realm of God.
So the Kingdom of God is what God is in His own nature.
It is not just a sphere in which God rules as an
autocrat. It is the realm in which God's nature is
expressed. Peter spoke about His "precious and
exceeding great promises through which ye may become
partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4), and
that is only another way of speaking about the Kingdom of
God, or the Kingdom of Heaven.
Now we come to the real message for now.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD THE RULE OF
DIVINE LIGHT
What is God like? If the Kingdom of God is the realm
where God's nature rules, this opens a door to very many
things. I only want to speak of one of those things now,
but it is a matter of fundamental importance. It is the
matter which just went to the heart of Nicodemus' case.
The Scripture says: "God is light, and in him is no
darkness at all" (1 John 1:5), so the Kingdom of God
is the rule of Divine light, but Divine light has always
been a focal point of intense conflict.
The Bible opens with a conflict. There is a state of
things in nature which God attacks - He begins to make a
tremendous assault upon a condition of things, and the
first attack of God was upon darkness. "Darkness was
upon the face of the deep", and I do not think that
God just looked at that darkness and in a very soft voice
said: 'Let us have some light.' I believe that there was
an angry look on His face and He said: 'Let light be!
This is a situation that I never intended to exist and
which I will not tolerate. It is a contradiction to My
very nature.' So the Divine fiat was uttered in a strong
voice: "Let there be light!" Do you
think I am reading something into the story? No, I have
the whole Bible behind me to support what I am saying.
That is why I gave you 2 Corinthians 4:3-6, and if you
can listen to the tone in the voice of the Apostle Paul
when he is saying those words, you would not find
anything very meek and mild - "The god of this world
hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving LEST the
light of the gospel of the glory of Christ should dawn
upon them." This darkness is the work of the devil,
and God is against it.
I repeat that the first attack of God was made upon
darkness, and the natural is a parable of the spiritual.
You know that throughout the whole Bible redemption is
centred in light, as the redemption of the natural earth
was by light. The first phase of the redemption of the
earth was by reason of warfare against darkness, or light
overcoming darkness.
You can take up that principle right through your Bible.
I can only touch on a few points now. We were hearing
about Abraham this morning, and Abraham was another
movement of God's rule concerning His Kingdom, and that
new movement in redemption was on the basis of light. Our
brother called it vision, but it is the same thing. Light
is vision, and vision is light. It was left to the great
martyr Stephen to tell us how this happened: "The
God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he
was in Mesopotamia" - if you like, "when he was
in darkness" - (Acts 7:2). The God of glory APPEARED,
showed Himself. Abraham had his eyes opened to see the
God of glory, and all the great redemptive work of God
went forward through Abraham on that basis. It was a
marvellous illumination! Jesus said to the Jews:
"Your father Abraham rejoiced to see MY
day" (John 8:56). What a light Abraham came into! He
was a great key to the whole plan of redemption.
You leap over a few centuries and you see the seed of
Abraham, the children of Israel, in the darkness of
Egypt. If you want to see what God thinks and feels about
darkness, look at the ten judgments upon Egypt! God
entered into a tremendous warfare with the darkness of
Egypt, and that phase of the warfare headed right up to
this: on that fatal night for Egypt, in all the deadly
darkness, the children of Israel had light in their
dwellings. The first-born sons of Egypt died in the
darkness, but the first-born sons of God went out in the
light. And that was not the end. All the way through the
wilderness journey, in the darkness of the night there
was a pillar of fire, and that light above them was in
warfare against the darkness around them. They were
redeemed from being lost in the wilderness by the pillar
of fire, the light in the darkness.
Now, how much of the Old Testament am I to employ to show
you how true this was? The Prophets were centres of light
in the darkness of the people of God to redeem them from
their darkness. If you take Isaiah alone, what an example
he is of this very thing! His great ministry took its
rise from: "I saw the Lord... high and lifted
up" (Isaiah 6:2). Again and again he spoke about the
darkness and the light, and at last, with a vision
beyond, he cried: "Arise, shine; for thy light is
come" (60:1).
I want to get this right home. All that is truth which
may be objective, but let us come back to this: There is
a tremendous conflict between these two kingdoms of light
and darkness. In 2 Corinthians 4:4 we are brought right
to the very work of the devil: "The god of this
world hath blinded." What, then, is THE
supreme work of the devil? It is not that he makes good
men bad men, nor that he drags good men down into the
mire of sin, nor that he brings strong young men and
beautiful young women down into moral corruption, nor
makes atheists and infidels. Those are only by-products.
They are the results of something else, and that is:
"The god of this world hath BLINDED."
Remove their blindness, open their eyes, and these things
will be dealt with quite simply. The work of the devil is
to keep people in the dark. Light is the most fatal thing
to the kingdom of Satan; he fears light more than he
fears anything else. He is the "prince of
darkness". He has blinded the minds of the
unbelieving, and why has he done so? It is a precaution
against something, and one little word explains it:
"LEST the light of the gospel of the glory of
Christ should shine." 'If those people get the light
of the gospel of the glory of Christ, MY kingdom
is gone. The battle is over for me. I am lost.' So that
Satan will do anything to keep us from having light.
There is a real touch of genius in Bunyan's "Holy
War". Satan and his kingdom are making their assault
upon Mansoul in order to capture it - the city of Mansoul
is besieged by the powers of darkness. Satan says to his
captains: 'There is one man that you must capture. If we
capture that one man the city is ours. Focus all your
attention upon the Lord Mayor!' What is the name of the
Lord Mayor? His name is Mr. Understanding. 'When you have
captured Mr. Understanding put him down in a dark dungeon
so that he does not know what is happening. The rest of
the battle will be easy.' That is the genius of John
Bunyan, but where did he get it? He got it from Paul. Do
you remember this little phrase of Paul's: "Being
darkened in their understanding" (Ephesians 4:18)?
Paul is speaking there about all the moral evils of the
Gentile world, and he says they are due to one thing:
their understanding is darkened.
Now, dear friends, you perhaps wonder why I am speaking
to you like this. You may say: 'Well, we are not in the
dark. We are saved people.' I will ask you to explain one
thing to me: Why is it that invariably when we are going
to have a conference where the Lord is going to give more
light, we have to come to it through so much conflict?
That is quite true of this very conference. All kinds of
things arose to get in the way. But that is only a simple
example of a great truth.
We have spoken of the prophets, and they were points of
light in the darkness of Israel. Will you tell me that
they were not in a conflict? Because they were points of
light they were points of the most vicious assault of the
evil powers. Jesus said: "I am the light of the
world" (John 8:12), and every day and everywhere
Jesus was in conflict because He was a light. It was true
of the apostles. Wherever they went, even without
beginning to preach, they found themselves in conflict.
It is as though the devil and his powers said: 'We will
not have this in our kingdom!', and they will stop at
nothing to quench the light. And the Lord says: "Ye
are the light of the world" (Matthew 5:14). Here is
the challenge. Divine light is POSITIVE. You
cannot have Divine light and be neutral. If God has
shined into your heart to give the light of the knowledge
of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, your
life is a challenge to the kingdom of Satan, and his
attitude to you will be: 'We will get you out as soon as
we can!' You will find that Satan will stop at nothing to
quench that light. You see, Divine light is not just
teaching and theory; it is a menace to the kingdom of
Satan. Are we in the Kingdom of God? That is what it
means. Individual Christians are to be like that - their
very existence disturbs the kingdom of Satan.
And what is true of the individual is true of the little
companies of the Lord's people. Satan does not mind you
organizing communities of people called Christians. I
don't think he troubles about them very much, for the
simple reason that they don't trouble him, but if any
little company of the Lord's people anywhere are really
in the light and are focal points of the significance of
Jesus Christ, Satan will do everything to destroy that
little company.
I must add this as I close. Remember that this is not
only an initial matter in the Christian life. Every fresh
step of advance in the spiritual life is the result of
some new light. We only make progress in the spiritual
life by more and more Divine light, and the evil one does
not want us to advance to the fullness of light. As soon
as we think we have got all the light, then death will
set in.
Well, I must leave it there for the present.
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