“...the exceeding
greatness of His power to us-ward who believe, according to that
working of the strength of His might which He wrought in Christ,
when He raised Him from the dead, and made Him to sit at His
right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule, and
authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is named,
not only in this world, but also in that which is to come” (Ephesians
1:19–21; ASV).
Christ Exalted
the Perfect Representative Man
Our object now, for the
attaining of which we are so completely dependent upon the Lord,
is to get inside those words and see and feel something of what
they mean. If you read the whole passage thoughtfully, it
will be recognized that this setting of Christ at God’s
right hand was with the object of installing Him as the inclusive
representative of all of us who believe—“to us-ward who
believe.” It is a related thing. He “made
Him to sit at His right hand,” which was the final step in
the exercise of that exceeding great power in raising Him from
the dead: and it is said at the end of the statement that He
“gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is
His body.” He was not set there as one by Himself—as
the exalted but isolated Christ, the honoured Lord—but, in
the thought and intention of God, in a related way to us-ward who
believe, to the Church which is His Body. The all-governing
presentation of Christ in the Word of God is of Him in the
position and capacity of representative Man. That is the
thing which governs supremely in the full revelation of Jesus
Christ. He is the incarnation of the Divine idea of
humanity, but, strangely enough, that representation is
ultimately projected into a region altogether beyond human
experience. He is placed where no other man has ever
been. Christ is set forth fully and finally as
representative in an experience and position through and beyond
death. I say that no other man has ever been there in all
the history of men. At the first view, that very fact would
seem to shatter the conception of Him as representative. If
He is representative in a realm and on a ground that no other man
has ever known, how can He be representative of all men?
And yet, when you come to think about it more carefully, it is
just the opposite. That is why and how He can be the
representative, because perfect representation in any realm or
connection demands the perfect realization of all the intentions
and possibilities of that realm. If you take a flower and
say: ‘That is the perfect specimen of its own kind!’,
then it is requisite that that flower should embody all that ever
that species was intended to be and all the possibilities that
were within it in its creation. It cannot be a perfect
specimen until it has gone right through unto the full end of its
own inherent and Divinely-appointed destiny. And Christ
risen is—may I use the word?—the perfect specimen of
all the Divine thought in man’s creation, so He must have
gone through into that realm which is beyond anything that any
other man has known. He must be in a position and in a
fulness which fully answers to the original thought of God for
man.
Christ Risen
Dispels All Limitations
But we must get down to
that! In the Bible we have other people who were raised
from the dead, both in the Old Testament and in the New.
Lazarus is an outstanding example. But we know, without
much discussion, that there is a very great difference between
Lazarus after his resurrection and Christ after His.
Lazarus, although raised from the dead, was still the same man.
There is nothing to indicate that he was changed in any way, and
he came back just as he was before. His was not, in this
Divine sense, a resurrection, but a resuscitation, and there is a
vast difference between resuscitation and resurrection. In
the Lord Jesus we find that which is unique in this matter.
The uniqueness of Christ is found in His nature, in what He was
after His resurrection. There are so many differences, and
they are so real that you find that even those who had had the
closest association with Him and companied with Him in the most
intimate way were not able to recognize Him except by a special,
Divinely-given enablement. He was not accepting them on the
old basis. He would allow none of the old affectionate
human caresses and touches—“Touch Me not” (John
20:17)—for those were the gestures of the old level of
natural life. On the other hand, He did allow Himself to be
touched, but it was to be the touch of faith. He invited
one who was doubting to touch Him—“Reach hither thy
hand, and put it into My side” (John 20:27; ASV)—but
this was the invitation to faith to overcome doubt and
unbelief. It is a different kind of relationship, for He
has gone out of one realm and into another. Now the old
limitations and ties obtain no more. Space has gone, and
time has gone; He does not depart—He disappears; He does not
come—He is there. There are new powers, new capacities
and new abilities now. Everything is in a different realm,
and yet so real. He is enforcing the reality of it, and
necessarily so, because they are between two worlds—the
world of what has been and the world which now is—and they
have to learn the difference. It is the revelation of a new
kind of life and a new order of things altogether. There is
no pandering on His part to curiosity about the other world and
the unseen, but just the mighty impress of spiritual
reality, and that is what He is seeking to bring home. And if we
can see Christ risen and perceive the nature of this Man on the
resurrection side, we see in Him the end for which man was made,
the representative of God’s full thought for man—altogether
outside and beyond the mere limitations of life as we know it,
outside of the control of space and time, with powers of which we
know very little and capacities for which we all long but discern
very dimly.
What has Christ done? He
has got rid of all that which led to death and which death
involved. Death is that which puts a limit upon everything,
which comes in between heaven and earth, which brings man into
bondage, which places a mighty ‘No!’ over man’s
development, and spells vanity—vanity to all his struggles
and efforts. Christ has dealt with that and put it out of
the way, making possible that mighty fulfilment of all that God
ever intended for man. He has reversed the course of death
and removed it as a barrier in the way of man’s fulness, and
in His resurrection He has brought life and incorruption—incorruptibility—to
light.
Hence, one of the first things
that He did after His resurrection was to take up the Scriptures
and indicate Himself in them all, from Moses, the beginning of
the Scriptures, right to the end of them as they existed at that
time. All the Scriptures—what is that? That is
history. The Scriptures are human history with God ever in
view, and human history is the history of failure where God’s
thought is concerned; but now in resurrection Christ can take up
the whole history of failure and impossibility and show how right
through it there has been present that which was saying: ‘This
failure, this impossibility, is not for ever, is not inevitable,
and is not the final factor. I am here!’ We know
from the record of the raising of Lazarus just how the Lord used
that particular truth. “Thy brother shall rise again.”
“Yes,” said Martha, “I know that he shall rise
again in the resurrection at the last day.” He broke
in: ‘The last day! When I am present the last day is
here. Time is gone and there is no yesterday, today and
tomorrow’—“I am the resurrection and the life.”
‘All time is encompassed and embraced and dismissed when I
am here.’ “I am”—we have heard that
before! The Eternal One is the resurrection and the life
because time goes out when eternity comes in. And all the
Scriptures, having Him in view, have that which says: ‘Yes,
history on the earth may be what it is, but I am here, and in the
end it will all change.’ That is, in effect, what He
said on the day of His resurrection: ‘I am alive, I have
fulfilled all the Scriptures. I have gathered up all the
Scriptures, all the history of man in his relationship with God,
and have fulfilled it. Here I am, the realization of all
that God intended, and all that history has seemed to say is
impossible.’
The Church the
Expression of Christ Risen and Exalted
Now the New Testament shows us
two things in relation to Christ risen and seated at the right
hand of God. It shows us—and this is what is here
particularly in this passage in Ephesians, as we have indicated—that
the Church, which is His Body in the Spirit now corresponds to
Christ risen. “...gave Him to be head over all things
to the church, which is His body.” This is not a Body
without a Head, and this is not a Head without a Body; it is
one. In the same letter it is said that we, in the thought
of God, are seated together with Him in the heavenlies. The
Church, when on spiritual ground, corresponds to Christ
risen. That is the first great thing that the New Testament
teaches us, and that came particularly through Paul by revelation
of the Spirit; and, even if the Church is only represented by a
small company in one place on the earth, and that company is
truly on the ground of Christ, time and space and all limitations
are dismissed, and the uttermost bounds of the earth are touched
in one moment. If there is a little company here on the
ground of Christ risen, by regeneration, by the mighty operation
of that same Spirit Which raised Him from the dead, in their
innermost being most truly risen together with Christ on new
creation ground and being governed by the Spirit, as that company
functions in the Holy Spirit, space is dismissed, all geography
goes out, the ends of the earth are touched from that point, and
in a moment anything, anywhere, can happen. It is not a
matter of having to wait for weeks or months or years. If
the Lord wills it, the Church can effect it in a moment, for time
does not govern at all. You are outside that realm when you
are in the Spirit. Praying in the Holy Spirit is simply
bringing into operation what Christ is at the right hand of God;
it is the risen Christ functioning. So He says: “Lo, I
am with you always, even unto the end of the age.”
“All authority hath been given unto Me in heaven and on
earth. Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the
nations” (Matthew 28:18–20).
But who is to go? It is
the Church, and His irreducible nucleus of the Church is
two. It is a corporate thing, the bringing of the
significance of the Body into view. When there is a functioning
in the Spirit, it is nothing less than Christ risen, ascended and
exalted, going on with His work through His Body, with all those
limitations dismissed. That is tremendous! Of course,
it does not sound so extraordinary to us because we have heard it
before and know something about it in terms of teaching, but take
that sort of thing out into a world that has never heard it, and
it sounds ridiculous, fantastic, presumptuous. But that is
where we have a Christianity that makes such tremendous demands
upon faith. It is either true, or it is not true. If
it is true, it is an immense thing. If it is not, well,
what fools we are! But here it is, and, oh! that the Church
might learn more of what it means to be in living union with a
risen Christ! That there should be a company, two or three
or more, though limited physically here on this earth by time and
space, yet really functioning in the Holy Spirit, so that the universal
Christ—all that it means that He is there at God’s
right hand—is having some expression! I would to
God that this could come home to you by the Spirit and that you
could grasp it, for what differences it would make! We
have a long way to go yet before this is appreciated
adequately. But it is true!
We have said that Christ in
resurrection at God’s right hand is the representation of
man collectively, according to God’s mind. What does
His presence there imply? What do the forty days after His
resurrection say? They say that He is in another realm and
on other ground altogether. The old human, natural things
have passed out, and He does not allow them. Everything is
new—new powers, relationships, capacity, understanding.
There is a whole new state of things which transcends the old and
goes far beyond it; and what is possible now is beyond our
ability to comprehend. This is the meaning of 2 Corinthians
5:17: “...in Christ, there is a new creation: the old things
are passed away; behold, they are become new” (ASV).
When you touch these things,
human language is a vain instrument for expression. “The
exceeding greatness of His power”—the superlatives in
this realm! Oh, for this enlargement by a new apprehension
of the greatness of Christ in His Person, in His death, in His
resurrection!
Well, then, the supreme thing
the New Testament shows is that the Church on its true, spiritual
basis corresponds to Christ risen. Not ‘the Church’
that we know here on earth, for it does not. But God’s
thought about the Church is not an impossible and merely
idealistic one. It is a practical thing. Two saints,
simple, humble and unimportant in this world, but really meeting
together in the Spirit, can be a functioning instrument of Him to
whom has been committed all authority in heaven and on
earth. With them all these old limitations can be dismissed
and they can at one moment touch all the ends of the earth.
Do you believe that? That is really the meaning of our glorying
in Christ risen. It has to be something more than emotion,
and more than glorious doctrine; yes, more than a truth to which
we give some assent. It has to be very practical. Christ
risen is the most practical proposition for the Church.
When He was risen He said: “All authority”—and the
literal is—“has just been given unto Me in
heaven and on earth. Go ye therefore...”—spoken
to the Church—“and lo, I am with you”—with
all authority in heaven and on earth—“even unto the
consummation of the age.” We have not grasped the real
meaning and value of that! We have simply selected
fragments of it and made it a basis of worldwide evangelization
or missionary enterprise. We have not gathered into it the
mighty implications of Christ risen.
The Literal,
the Consummation of the Spiritual
Another thing—which I will
only mention—that is shown to us in the New Testament in
this connection is that the consummation of the spiritual will be
the literal. This correspondence to Christ now is a spiritual
matter. It is a thing of the spiritual life, the Spirit in us,
and of our being in the Spirit; but there is the counterpart of
that in the literal, in the consummation of the spiritual. The
consummation of the spiritual is that this body of humiliation,
of corruption, shall be changed to be made like unto His glorious
body, both individually and collectively. It will be an
individual thing, for that is what 1 Corinthians 15 means.
It will also be a collective thing, for the whole Body will be
changed; the Church will be a glorious Church, a Church of glory,
not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing (Ephesians 5:27), no
touch of corruption, and no possibility of being corrupted; like
unto His body of glory. That is the consummation of the
spiritual, and the Apostle says that we have the earnest of that
already in the Holy Spirit.
May the Lord give us some fresh
glimpse of what His resurrection is intended to mean as a
practical thing, and, if the practical meaning is to be pressed
to some action, then let us apprehend it first by faith and then
begin to act upon it. When we come together, let it not be
just to say prayers and make all sorts of petitions, but to give
the living Lord by His Spirit an opportunity to function beyond
the range of locations and space and time, and Himself from the
Throne through the Church be able to touch all realms on earth
and in heaven and do the thing He has indicated to be His
will. Why not now, seeing He is outside of time? Why
accept delays if the Lord wills a thing? We want to be very
much more practical. If it is true that we are one with a
risen, enthroned Lord, it ought to have tremendous repercussions.
May it be so!