Reading: Acts 10:1-11:18.
The New
Creation Man in Process of Formation
Acts 10 follows on what we were
considering in our last message. It concerns this
particular dispensation or age of the Holy Spirit, and
the specific object which the Holy Spirit has in view
during this age. We can put it in one phrase — the
formation of the new-creation man. This chapter is a
phase in that formation, and therefore a phase in the
dispensation of the Holy Spirit.
It is a remarkable chapter. Much
that is in it can only be explained in the light of
something very much bigger than the conversion of an
individual. Not that the conversion of an individual is a
small thing, by any means, but it would have been very
easy and very much more simple just to have sent a
preacher to Caesarea to proclaim the Gospel there, so
that this one man heard it and got converted. Things like
that were happening; that in general was what was taking
place.
But there is a tremendous amount of
— if I may use the word — “paraphernalia”
about this that actually happened. It is something quite
“extra” and extraordinary, even for the general
movement of the preaching of the Gospel in those days.
That an angel from Heaven should visit the man, that the
Holy Spirit should speak to Peter, that there should be
these strange accompaniments of the sheet let down and
the voice speaking, and many other strange features and
factors, all indicates that this incident must be set in
a realm that is more than the conversion of an
individual, however important that may be. It is a part
of a great dispensational movement: all the forces at God’s
disposal in Heaven and on earth are brought into a “combined
operation” in relation to this matter, for the man
in the case is not just a man — he is a
representative.
If you think that that needs
proving, you have only to look further into this book.
You can see that this is a phase, and the outstanding
phase, of all that is happening. You have only to step
back two chapters — and remember there are no
chapters in the original record, it is one continuous
narrative — step back into chapter 8 of our
arrangement, and you have that extraordinary matter
concerning the Ethiopian. Here was this man, holding a
position of great power in the palace of the queen of the
Ethiopians, who had been up to worship, and was now going
back — a dissatisfied man. On his way back to
Ethiopia, back to his seat of influence and activity, he
has to pass by way of the desert; and the Spirit —
the Holy Spirit, the same Holy Spirit — speaks to a
servant of God, named Philip, in Samaria. Great things
are happening in Samaria, very important things are
taking place there, much is going on under the power of
the Spirit, but the Spirit touches Philip and says,
“Now, go down toward Gaza, the way of the desert.”
And Philip obeys. He is at the disposal of the Holy
Spirit; he has no arguments and no personal objectives.
There is nothing contrary about him — he is yielded
to the Spirit. He obeys, and is brought into touch with
this outstanding man, this representative man, this man
who is right at the heart of everything in Ethiopia.
In chapter 9 we meet with another
man, even more outstanding than the last. Saul of Tarsus
was undoubtedly an outstanding man in every way. Whatever
we may think about his persecutions, we must remember
that he did it in all good faith. For him it was
conscience; he was being utterly conscientious. Yes, he
was an outstanding man, and again, a representative man
— a representative of a nation and a great nation, a
man who had a place right at the very heart of things in
that nation. And the same mighty movement of Heaven comes
to him and lays hold of him. There are big things
happening in relation to individual men.
And so we come, with the straight
course of the narrative, to what we have in chapter 10.
Here is another man. He is away up in Caesarea, the
capital of the country, the very stronghold of Roman
influence. All that Rome stood for was centred there.
This man holds a place of power, position and importance
right there, and so an angel and the Holy Spirit, as we
pointed out previously, co-operated in relation to the
winning of this representative man.
So we have an Ethiopian, a Jew, and
a Roman: men representing nations of no small
significance and influence. This is no ordinary thing.
What is it all about? Well, as I have said at the
beginning, there is a “new-creation man” in
process of formation. Out of this dust of the earth God
is forming His new corporate Adam after the image of the
One that He has in His own presence, in the likeness of
His own Son. A new creation is in process of formation,
and it centres in man — in a Man — and that Man
is in the glory. But that new creation man that is being
formed after the likeness of the Man in Heaven is
corporate — the collective man after the likeness of
THE Man, the last Adam.
Well, the new creation man is
firstly Christ, and you notice how everything circles
round Peter’s words — “Jesus of Nazareth,
a man approved of God” (Acts 2:22). And then in
chapter 10, verse 42 — “He charged us to preach
unto the people, and to testify that this is he who is
ordained of God to be the Judge of living and dead”.
That word “ordained” is the word with which we
commenced our first meditation in this series. It is the
Greek word from which we get the English word “horizon”.
We may perhaps think of Christ as marking the horizon of
everything with God.
So everything here is within that
horizon. The Holy Spirit is working within the horizon of
Christ, the new creation Man, the last Adam. He is the
new creation personally in God’s very presence, but
then He becomes the new creation Man dominantly. He is
governing everything here — not officially, but by
His likeness. It is the likeness of this Man that is
governing everything. God is working by the Holy Spirit
to bring about something after the likeness of this Man,
a collective man in the image and likeness of this
individual perfected Man before God. And this Man is
dominant, in the sense that His character dominates all
the activities of the Holy Spirit: that is, the Holy
Spirit is in action to bring about a collective
reproduction of this individual new creation Man.
Dominating the activities of the Holy Spirit is what
Christ is as man, according to God’s mind. Then
follows, of course, the collective side of this, and that
brings us here to these representative people.
The Natural
Man Dismissed
Of what will this new-creation
collective man be made? Will he be made of Peter and
Cornelius and the Ethiopian? Not at all. You see, Peter
is here very much in view as an instrument, and Peter
naturally, according to his earthly life, is of Jewish
constitution, Jewish mentality and Jewish horizon —
very much of Jewish horizon by reason of his very blood
and his birth and his upbringing. He is horizoned by
Judaism, by Israel. That is how he is constituted.
Cornelius — well, he is very Gentile-constituted. He
is Roman, and he is very Roman, or he would not be a
centurion. He certainly would not be in that place
without being a Roman of the Romans. You know how these
centurions were selected, on what grounds they were
appointed. They were magnificent men, humanly speaking,
splendid specimens, the best specimens of Roman life and
training and discipline, and very thoroughly devoted to
Roman interests. This man, being in Caesarea, is not a
centurion of an outpost. He is at the heart of Roman
influence in that part of the world, so that he is
naturally Romanly constituted.
What we find, therefore, is not that
these two men are brought into Christ just as Peter and
Cornelius, but that they are disintegrated, broken up,
broken down, put out, as to what they are naturally. They
are born from another country, from above, brought into
the kingdom of Heaven, brought into the “new
creation man”, the church, where there is “neither
Jew nor Greek” nor Roman nor Gentile, but “all...
one man in Christ” (Gal. 3:28), and “Christ is
all” (Col. 3:11). You notice that even Peter has to
be broken down, disintegrated, when he allows what is
natural in his constitution to begin to influence his
judgments and cause him to argue with the Lord. A
transition has to take place in him, from the point at
which he was commanded by the Lord to rise, kill and eat,
and he said, “Not so, Lord” (verse 14) — a
transition had to take place, under this mighty breaking
down of the Holy Spirit, to the point where he said,
“He is Lord of all” (verse 36). Notice, not
only of the Jews — “Lord of ALL”.
That meant something very drastic in Peter’s case,
but it had to be done.
And so far as Cornelius is concerned
— I shall say a little more about him presently
— it is quite clear that in the issue of this he
became a man governed not by Rome but by the Holy Spirit;
under the influence not of what was natural but of what
was spiritual; not earthly but heavenly. For you notice
that the Heavens were opened — the Spirit of God
from Heaven fell on them, and in so doing made them
different. But they both had to be broken down in what
they were naturally, and formed again, another vessel,
not according to nature but according to Christ.
The Spiritual
Education of the Born-again
Now just one further glance at Peter
in this connection. Peter had already been born from
above, he was already in the kingdom of Heaven, he was
already under the government of the Holy Spirit, but even
with such people as Peter — and none of us would
claim to compare with him — the Lord will not allow
any of the old natural influences to arise and control
judgments and movements. Those influences have to be put
back, there has to be still fuller, deeper conformity to
the image of the Man who is not this or that, but is
different altogether from all the rest. You and I must
remember that, though we are born again, we are not
permitted to allow our natural judgments, standards,
conceptions or mentality about people to influence us. We
have to get Heaven’s estimate.
And what a revolutionary thing that
is! Consider for a moment the contents of this sheet that
was let down to Peter: four-footed creatures, reptiles,
birds — and the inference is that they are “unclean”
birds naturally — just the very things that were
forbidden in Leviticus 11 to be eaten by the Jews. And
Peter is informed that Heaven’s point of view is
altogether different from his. Although he may have the
most utter conviction about this matter and his mentality
may judge this people to be altogether outside the pale
of the kingdom of Heaven, Heaven’s view is quite
different, completely different. Peter has got to learn
not only what it means to be born from above, but what it
means to be conformed to the likeness of the Man above.
There is a great deal to be done in
all of us about this matter. We are so influenced by our
own constitution, by our own make-up, by our own natural
outlook, mentality or training, and we think God has got
to come into line with that, conform to that and accept
that. But the Lord is teaching us the very hard lesson
that He does not accept our mentality at all, He does not
accept our standards, He repudiates much that is a strong
conviction with us, even religiously, and demands of us
things that “religiously” we would never do.
That perhaps needs a little safeguarding, but I say it
within the right realm and the right limits. What it
amounts to is that when the Holy Spirit comes in we have
to go out of court. He must be allowed to have His mind
about things and people and ways and means, for He is not
going to accept ours. Peter, as Peter naturally, will
have to be set aside. It is a large part of our
education.
And if that was true of Peter, it
was of course much more true of Cornelius, because he was
not yet born from above. He has got to be born from above
— to cease to be Cornelius, the Roman centurion, and
simply become a man in Christ. Thank God, there were all
the possibilities of that with Cornelius. God had an open
way with him.
Well, the Holy Spirit obliterated
Peter and Cornelius and put Jesus in their place. That is
what it amounts to, that is what He was working toward.
But you see, the whole dominating objective is this
divine conception of a man as gathered up in the Person
of Jesus Christ, a new creation man in Himself. His
purpose is to gather into Himself, not OF all
nations, but OUT of all nations — there is a
profound difference — to gather out of all nations
that which will compose and comprise the collective new
creation man. Let us therefore at once be ready to be
stripped of all our national prejudices, to let go all
those things which govern our attitudes and judgments.
Let us be free for them to go, to leave us. Let us seek
very much, earnestly and continually, to “know no
man after the flesh”, but to know only Christ, to
cleave to Christ, to make everything of Christ in one
another.
Oh, may God give me, and give you,
grace to make more of Christ — even when we may feel
there is only a very little of Him — in other
people. Fasten on to that measure, small though it may
be, and make that the all-important, paramount thing. It
is an absolute essential in our apprehension of the Body
of Christ, and that is the very work of the Holy Spirit
in this dispensation. If the Holy Spirit is in us and we
know anything about registering the movement, the voice,
the influence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, when we
pass a wrong judgment upon someone else or take more
account of that which they are naturally than of Christ
in them, we shall meet a rebuke, we shall sense a
displeasure of the Holy Spirit. Ask the Lord to make you
sensitive to the Holy Spirit in this matter, that Christ
may grow and grow. We do make it difficult for Christ to
grow in other people. We do get in the way of the Lord
Jesus. We do tie Him up, because we do not seek to
release Him and make the most of Him in one another. We
are so ready to fasten upon the things that run counter
to our prejudices and contrary to our ideas of what ought
to be. Let us make more of the Lord Jesus. That is the
setting of this tenth chapter of Acts, in its
dispensational meaning and its supreme concern.
The Need of
the Naturally Morally Good for Salvation
In conclusion, I want to indicate
briefly the bearing of this word upon the preaching of
the Gospel. There are many aspects of the Gospel
application of all that is going on in the book of the
Acts. Take this man Cornelius. There are some grand
things said about Cornelius. He is a very devout man, he
honours God, he is a man who prays to God; he is a man of
practical charity, he gives alms — that means he has
the interests of other people at heart, he is not living
to himself. As you look at him naturally, he is a fine
man, characterized by an honest and pure spirit —
there is no doubt about it. We wish everybody were as
ready as Cornelius was to respond, to answer without
argument, without prejudice. He was a fine specimen of a
man: I expect physically he was that; certainly he was
that morally, mentally and religiously.
And yet — and yet — Heaven
and earth are combining in a mighty movement to get that
man SAVED. Everybody would say, “That is
surely enough; that man honours God, he is a God-fearing
man, he prays, he puts his religion into practical
expression. That man is unselfish, he is generous, he is
kind in his actions, he cares for other people, he is
full of charitable works: what more do you want? That man
is going to Heaven, if any man is!” And yet, I say
again, Heaven moves, and Heaven moves earth: the Holy
Ghost, the Spirit of the great dispensation, on the one
side; on the other side, angels at work, co-operating.
For what purpose? — to get such a man saved. He is
not yet born again, he has not yet received the Holy
Spirit. With all, he does not know the Lord Jesus in a
personal way. He knows about Him. Peter says so. “You
know all about what happened, you know the story of Jesus
of Nazareth; but you do not know Him personally.”
Well, what are you going to make of
that? That is not my interpretation, that is not my
Gospel, that is not my prejudice: that is the clear
statement. If anything could be more vivid, tell me what
it is! Here is the point. Why, as I put it earlier, all
this excitement, all this “paraphernalia”, all
these extraordinary things? Why does Peter go up to the
housetop and pray at 12 o’clock, and then want his
dinner terribly, so badly that he sends downstairs and
asks them to get something ready, and Heaven comes in and
takes hold of his very hunger to make him to understand,
appreciate, heavenly things, taking occasion by this to
give this vision? What is all this about? Why should an
angel go up there to Caesarea and visit Cornelius and
speak to him, and why should it be necessary for him to
send men and a soldier all the way from Caesarea down to
Joppa — 35 miles — and then for Peter to have
to take the long journey back? Why all this, if this man
is such a good man and is going to get through all right?
No, the new creation is something
much more than religion, than praying, than giving alms,
than being charitable. Christ is much more than that; the
Holy Spirit is after more than that. You may say, “I
do not agree — I believe if you do your duty and you
are kind and you recognise God and you go to church you
will get through all right”. You take this account
and read it again. This is a positive denial of any such
thing, and to settle down in such a position is to assume
something which is not true. There are many in the
position of assumed salvation, and there will be for them
a very great undeceiving unless something happens. This
is not enough. The Spirit of God takes great pains to get
even a Cornelius — as he did also with another
devout man, the Ethiopian, who had been up to Jerusalem
to worship God. Likewise Saul of Tarsus, a man who was
utterly devoted to what he believed to be God’s
will, God’s way. The Holy Spirit — Heaven
— comes in in mighty power to get these people
saved. Salvation is a very big thing, far transcending
religion and a good moral character and many kindly
activities. Salvation is far more than that.
But, thank God, Cornelius was
prepared. Here is something very precious about it all.
You may be like that — you may not be one of those
who could be classed as an outrageous sinner and criminal
and offender, marked by all those things which society
calls bad. You may be God-fearing, you may pray, you may
be doing many kind things; and yet, like Cornelius, you
may still have, somewhere deep down, the feeling that
there is something more. “I am after something, I am
reaching out for something; I do not know what it is, but
I feel I need something more; all my praying and all my
doing is only an expression of a longing for something
— I want to get somewhere that I have not yet got!”
That was Cornelius, and God took account of it and worked
to see that he got what he needed and what his heart
longed for. When Cornelius heard it, he instantly
responded, and in effect said, “This is just what I
have been after! I did not know what it was, but this is
it! This answers my longing, this answers my praying,
this meets my deeply-felt need!” The very story at
its end seems to say that. Oh, how full of joy and
thankfulness they were! God had been doing something in
preparation.
It may be that you who read these lines are prepared
for something God has for you — you do not know what
it is. Do not be deceived by the fact that you pray and
go to church, even that you attend Christian conferences
or do kind things. Do not be deceived. Be sure that you
are positively born again — that you have received
the Holy Spirit into your life, as a living Person, and
know that He is there. Do not rest until that is true
— otherwise there will be a grievous awakening and
disillusionment. Do not assume anything. Demand that you KNOW.
The basis of your knowledge is the present, instant
indwelling of the Holy Spirit. It may be that some
longing of yours, some hunger, some unexplained and
inexplicable feeling of need in you is just God’s
way of preparing you for what He offers, what He
presents, and what He may be saying to you at this very
moment. There is something more, and you will find that
“something” when you receive the Holy Spirit,
who is the Spirit of the Man in the glory. That Man is
God’s satisfaction, and therefore He will be our
satisfaction too.