Reading: Eph. 1:5; Gal. 4:19; Rom. 8:28-29.
Coming to this letter to the Hebrews, let us find our link
between the calling, the purpose of God in Christ, and the
preparation of an instrument for its expression.
We have seen in the first chapter that the eternal purpose
relates to His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through
whom He made the ages. And then, passing into the second chapter
there is the extension of that thought from the Son to sons,
“bringing many sons to glory”, and both of these
things, the Son and the sons, are gathered into a comprehensive
quotation from the Psalm: “What is man, that thou makest
mention of him; or the son of man, that thou puttest him in
charge.” That quotation undoubtedly embodies both Christ and
those who are Christ’s, because the apostle goes on
concerning man, “Thou madest him to have dominion; thou hast
put all things in subjection under his feet”, and so on:
“But we see not all things put under his feet; but we see...
Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels,
crowned with glory and honour.” So that this purpose of God
concerning His Son embraces the sons, and takes us back to this
passage in Romans 8: “...conformed to the image of his Son,
that he might be the firstborn among many brethren...”;
“...bringing many sons to glory...”.
Then you pass in the letter to the Hebrews to what is the
first verse of chapter 3: “Holy brethren (these are the
sons), partners in a heavenly calling...” and you pass from
there right through the great unveiling of that priestly work of
the Lord Jesus by which the sons are secured and come at length
to chapter 12, where you have the sons in training. I am not
going to quote the whole passage, but I want to underline some
fragments which are relevant. Here is a connecting exhortation:
“Looking off unto Jesus, the author (or captain) and
perfecter of faith...”; “Consider him that endured such
gainsaying of sinners... lest ye be weary...”; “...the
exhortation which reasoneth with you as with sons...”. The
Captain has been made perfect through sufferings; the Son has
gone this way. That is what is being said, leaving, of course, in
its own untouched place, that peculiar value of the sufferings of
Christ in relation to sin and atonement with which we have no
connection at all. There is that other side of the sufferings of
Christ with which we are linked, and the beginning of this
twelfth chapter clearly links us with Him in the way that He has
taken as the Son; and then, “The exhortation which reasoneth
with you as with sons, My son regard not lightly (do not think of
it as something unimportant) the chastening of the Lord”;
that is, the child-training of the Lord. Do not think of it as
something unimportant. And as a guard against fainting when
reproved of Him remember the range of relatedness and value in
this child-training. That is what is implied here, what is said
in other words. This child-training is in relation to the eternal
purpose. It is connected with the Son for the inheritance and the
receiving of a Kingdom which cannot be shaken. Child-training has
to do with that, and when we see it in that light then we do not
regard it as something unimportant, and we are strengthened by
that knowledge when we are chastened, so that we faint not:
“For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every
son whom he receiveth.” “Furthermore, we had the
fathers of our flesh to chasten us, and we gave them reverence:
shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of our
spirits and live?” “The father of our spirits”!
That immediately shows where the chastening is, where the
child-training is, where the sonship is, or where the sonship is
to be developed — in our spirits. That is the point that we
may reach presently as we work towards it.
The training of sons in relation to the eternal purpose, and
for our present purpose here, a sonship vessel or instrument to
fulfil the ministry of keeping God’s full thoughts before
His people. For such a ministry the instrument to be employed
will be dealt with in a very definite and direct way on the lines
of sonship, will know the strict child-training of the Lord. The
end fixed for all the Lord’s children is sonship. We will
not — we must not — put Romans 8:28-29 into any lesser
category than God’s purpose for all in Christ; that is, we
must not say that this is for a certain number in the thought of
God. It is for all in Christ, and this is God’s will for all
His people, but as has always been the case the majority of the
Lord’s people do not follow on spontaneously, and the Lord
has continually to have in the midst of them, amongst them,
before them, a company embodying and representing and expressing
His full thought, to be a ministry of revelation and a ministry
of strengthening and exhortation to His people. It is a
ministering vessel in the midst of His people, and that vessel
not just having special information to give, but that vessel
being the embodiment of that which the Lord would have all His
people know and be. Paul put himself into that category in a
personal way, and spoke of himself as a first one —
“… that in me as a first one …” — and
then he used a phrase like this: “that he might fulfil the
Word of God”, and the sense there is not just what we in our
modern English mean by fulfil, that is, carry out something; it
means make full the Word of God. He put himself, therefore, in
the position of one who was the full embodiment of God’s
thought for the church, and so Paul became in very truth a
dispensational man; that is, the individual in whom the whole
supreme meaning of the dispensation was gathered up
experimentally; and the church, the Body of Christ, being the
supreme feature of this dispensation, had its embodiment and
expression in a living way in that one man.
Now what was true in him as an individual early in the
dispensation has had to be true and be repeated again and again
through the dispensation in instruments which God has raised up;
that is, that there shall be a living voice — not a voice of
teaching, a voice just of truth in the technical or academic
sense, not just the proclamation of something, but a living
embodiment and expression of God’s thought amongst His
people. The Word of the Lord to such a vessel at all times will
be: “whether they will hear or whether they will
forbear”. It is so easy from time to time to let go, to sag
because your message is not wanted and because you see no place
for it, no room for it, or because you see almost universal
opposition to it; to conclude, or to take the attitude as though
you had concluded, that this is not the message for the time, the
people are not ready for it, they are not open for it, they will
not have it. Whether they will hear or whether they will forbear,
is the Lord’s word to an instrument which He raises up for
any purpose. That is, although you may be speaking in the
wilderness, you have got to get on with it; although no one will
listen to you, you have got to go on; although you may see no
response, but just universal antagonism, you have to go on with
your work, “whether they will hear or whether they will
forbear”.
For the fulness of God’s thoughts a vessel has to be
constituted accordingly, and if the fulness of God’s
thoughts is sonship as the means of the universal dominion of
which this letter speaks, the universal dominion of Christ, then
our training is along the lines of sonship, for we are called to
that ministry.
I am tempted to stay with another parenthesis, to remind you
of the very greatness of our calling, not something in time but
something which came in eternity; not something that just belongs
to this earth, but which is over this earth. It is not the
dominion merely in the inhabited earth to come; it is that but it
exceeds that. The church is not just going to reside here on the
earth in the age to come, even to have dominion on the earth. The
church is going to have dominion over the earth, and its dominion
is going to reach beyond the earth into the realm of
principalities and powers. It is in the light of that calling to
that capacity that the Lord’s dealings with us go on.
What is the basis of the training of sons? It is the cross.
What is the pattern of the training of sons? It is the Son. What
is the sphere of the training of sons? It is in the spirit. Those
are the three things for our present consideration.
The Basis of Training is the Cross
In the thought of God, in the mind of God, the cross of the
Lord Jesus was the end of one race and type of humanity. From
God’s standpoint the death of the Lord Jesus on the cross
wound up, concluded and set aside one type of being called man.
Calvary does not just represent the dealing with sin in man as
though God by the cross plucked sin out of man and dealt with it
in judgement and destruction and left the man. God took the man
with it, and the man was put away, so far as God was concerned,
with sin; he is sin. “I have been crucified with
Christ”; “We were crucified with Christ”. In the
resurrection of the Lord Jesus a new type of man is represented.
He in resurrection is called the firstborn among many brethren.
Sonship according to God’s mind is represented in the
resurrection of the Lord Jesus: “declared the Son of God
with power, according to the spirit of holiness by the
resurrection of the dead”. “God raised him from the
dead, as it is written in the second Psalm, Thou art my Son, this
day have I begotten thee.” You see, it is a new kind of man:
in God’s thought the man of sonship is represented in the
resurrection of the Lord Jesus. That has nothing to do, of
course, with His eternal person as the Son of God, but here in
representation. You may put it, if you like in the full form, and
say, here is a comprehensive, corporate man, race, after a
certain order, of a certain kind, and that man, that corporate,
inclusive, collective man is crucified, is put to death and is
buried, and that is an end. And then, after a period, God acts
and brings out from that tomb a man of a different order, the
same yet another, a different type altogether, another kind of
man, and He who could never say of that one that has died, Son!
But He says of this one, “Thou art my Son.” How all
that is represented, gathered up and included in the
representative person of the Lord Jesus, so that a sonship is
brought into being on the ground of resurrection, and God in the
resurrection of Christ has a new order of man in view, a new type
before Him, and that type is designated, Son! That in Christ is
what sonship is, but in Christ, the representative one, you have
sonship reached, completed, consummated. In Christ we have but
received the Spirit of God’s Son, and are told to become
sons as conformed to the image of His Son, and as His Son is
fully formed in us. Then, on the ground of His resurrection, and
by the power of His resurrection, and in virtue of His risen
life, there is being worked into us sonship under the hand of
God: that is, so far as the process is concerned, the process
which was concluded in an act in the representative one, the
Firstborn, now to be wrought out progressively in us.
So far as that process is concerned it has these two sides,
the two sides of the cross, the death and the resurrection. The
process of the cross has to follow the act of the cross.
Now I do not want to confuse you, but I am going to try to
explain what I mean by that. There has got to be a crisis of the
cross, and on the basis of the crisis of the cross there has got
to be a process of the cross. That crisis takes place in the hour
in which we see with the eyes of our heart opened that when
Christ died we died, and that “we” or that
“I” is not some part of us, something in us, something
about us, but it was ourselves. When we see that, that is a
crisis. If we are able to comprehend and take in what that means
it is a tremendous crisis.
What am I? I am a thinking creature, I am a reasoning
creature, I am a feeling creature, I am a willing creature, I am
a choosing, a deciding creature, I am a judging creature, I am a
talking creature. I am all that, and much more, and I have died,
and when I am dead my thinking stops, my reasoning stops, my
arguing stops, and my judging stops, and my feeling stops. It all
stopped when I died. In the sum total of our natural functioning
and activity in the death of Christ God sees the end of us. In
the resurrection of the Lord Jesus God sees only Christ thinking,
Christ reasoning, Christ judging, Christ feeling, Christ
choosing, Christ talking, and it is no longer I but Christ since
I have been crucified with Christ. I can no longer talk:
if I do, so far as God’s eternal purpose is concerned
it does not count for anything. It is only what the Spirit of
God’s Son in me says through me that touches God’s
eternal purpose. I may be a preacher of renown, and it counts for
nil in relation to God’s eternal purpose unless the Holy
Ghost is doing the preaching. And that applies so far as my
thinking is concerned. I may reason, and argue, and work things
out, and apply my mind, my brains to things of God. It does not
effect one fragment unless it is Holy Spirit inspired thinking,
unless it is revelation by the Holy Spirit beyond my powers of
grasping divine things.
This matter of the application to the cross is a comprehensive
thing, setting aside fully, progressively, what is of ourselves
in mind and heart, and will, in spirit, soul and body, and
bringing up the Son of God in everything; so that it is Christ.
That is where the eternal purpose of God lies, and only in the
measure in which it is that, can there be ministry related to
God’s eternal purpose; therefore those who are going to
serve God in relation to His fullest thought have got to be the
most crucified people in God’s universe. All natural
ambitions to do anything, to be anything, to say anything will
have been smitten, and it will simply be by the Spirit, and by
the Spirit alone that anything can be said or done that counts.
When this work is done to any degree of depth, those concerned
have a longing not to do anything and not to speak anything
unless the Lord is going Himself to do it and say it. It is only
in the Spirit that you know anything is worthwhile. The cross,
according to what was conclusive with God at Calvary, is to be
applied. And if God in His forbearance and longsuffering, still
permits things which are not crucified and not put out of the
way, that is, if they are allowed to remain for the time being
and they come into the Lord’s work — and we do see a
good deal in the Lord’s work that is not of the Spirit, not
Christ — let us never conclude for a moment that God has set
Calvary aside and has accepted that. Sooner or later if that one
is going on with God they are going to be smitten hip and thigh
on the matter of the flesh. If they are going on in the Spirit
that will be. God has never since the day that it took place
moved one hair’s breadth from Calvary, which was finality as
to that kind of man represented when He was made sin in our
stead. So the cross is the basis of the training of sons, of the
training in sonship.
The Pattern is the Son
The pattern of the training of sons is the Son. Conformed to
the image of His Son! Christ fully formed in you! Foreordained
unto adoption as sons! And adoption is at the end not at the
beginning; adoption still waits; the day of our adoption has not
arrived. You know the New Testament teaching on this matter is
altogether different from modern English practice; and so,
although Paul does not use that actual word in that connection,
he puts the same truth into other words when he says, “Waiting
for the manifestation of the sons of God”. The
manifestation of the sons is only another way of saying the day
of adoption: that is, when the sons are brought forth and
presented as sons, no longer children but mature, now to take
responsibility.
What is God doing with us? His work with us is to reproduce in
us the constituents of sonship as represented by the Lord Jesus.
The battle that rages and rises between our thought and the
Lord’s thought, between our will and the Lord’s will,
between our way and the Lord’s way, between our desiring and
the Lord’s desire, has this one issue at stake, whether
something more of His Son is to become a part of our very
constitution, or whether we are going to put that back and remain
just the same old creation. There is a big thing hanging upon
that battle. In our last meditation we were speaking about
adjustability. What is it that we are to be adjusted to? It is
simply putting Christ in the place which we ourselves in some way
have occupied, giving place to the Lord. That is Christ being
fully formed. He is in us, but He is to be fully formed in us.
I am sorry the translators left out the value of the Greek in
that passage. The Greek word is perfectly clear: “Till
Christ be fully formed in you”. He is there, but there is
formation, and this formation is through conflict, and Paul says
that he is undergoing the suffering: “For whom I am in
travail till Christ be fully formed in you”. There is
something going on that is costly. It is marked by a painful
process.
The Sphere is our Spirit
I want to come to the sphere of the training of sons, the
spirit; of course, now not the Holy Spirit but our spirit:
“the Father of our spirits”. You notice the word
“father” in this twelfth chapter is implied, suggested
by son; “fathers of our flesh” — “Father of
our spirits”. So that it is in the realm of our spirit that
all this is going on. God is concentrating upon our spirit, and I
want to define that. The teaching of the Word of God about the
spirit is not just what we mean when we say, He has a nice
spirit! That means that what you meet is something very pleasant,
it is a kind of outgoing influence to you. Or we may say, He has
a nasty spirit! You mean he is a cantankerous person. That is not
the meaning of the Father of our spirits. Our spirits are
represented in the Word of God as the essential man: that is, the
innermost part of our being, and if you like to sit down with a
concordance and go through this matter of spirit you will be
surprised.
I am impressed with some of the things that are said about
spirit. I will give you two or three references.
Take 1 Corinthians 2:11, “For who among men knoweth the
things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?
Even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of
God.” That is not just breath, that is an intelligent organ,
and that is clearly something deeper than reason. It is not that
I meet a certain man, and I look him up and down; I look at the
size of his nose, and the shape of his chin, and just how his
head is formed, and various other things, and I come to the
conclusion that he is a certain type of man; that kind of man
will behave in a certain way. I know what I may expect by having
taken the measure of that man, and so I know that man. No, it is
not that. This passage is deeper than the reasoned thing, the
thought-out thing, the sized-up thing, it is intuitive knowledge,
and that is spiritual knowledge. Spiritual knowledge is intuitive
knowledge, and the spirit is the intuitive organ. That is exactly
how angels move; they are spirits. God and angels never have to
reason out anything. They never have to calculate. Angels do not
move at the behest of the Lord by being told in words and given
an explanation. They move intuitively. It is intuitive knowledge
of the Lord. If another brother and I are one in spirit we
intuitively know what we will do, and what we would like each
other to do. We do not have to be told, we do not have to be
argued with, we know intuitively and we can anticipate one
another’s wishes intuitively. It is an organ of knowledge.
Or take another passage in the same letter, 1 Corinthians 5:3:
“For I verily, being absent in Body but present in spirit,
have already, as though I were present, judged him that hath so
wrought this thing”; “...absent in Body... present in
spirit, have... judged”. In spirit judged. I have
weighed this thing up in spirit, my spirit has come to the
conclusion that such-and-such is the case; my spirit has
decided this thing. It is an intelligent organ.
Or pass to 1 Corinthians 14:14-15: “For if I pray in a
tongue, my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is unfruitful.
What is it then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray
with the understanding also: I will sing with the spirit, and I
will sing with the understanding also.” There you have
spirit and soul. The understanding heart is the intelligent, the
rational soul, but that is not the point. The apostle is saying
that it is possible for the spirit to pray. It is an organ that
can pray and that can sing. You can sing in spirit, and you can
pray in spirit. If it comes to the matter of an unknown tongue
that is another thing, and it is not our point. We are detaching
it from the matter of tongues at the moment. Here is an organ
that it is said can pray and sing. I suppose you know something
about the singing inside; your understanding is not at work, but
it goes on. I know what it means. I remember an experience I had
myself, and just recount it to convey to you what I mean by this.
When undergoing a somewhat serious operation I experienced that
in coming back to consciousness. Not knowing anything or anyone,
being altogether dead so far as soul activity was concerned
— that is, reason, and feeling, and all the rest —
there was going on in me a hymn all the way through. I might have
been in another world; it was going on all the time:
“Like a river glorious is God’s
perfect peace.”
The tune was going on, and the words were going on. It was in
the spirit, and one of many examples in the experience of others
whom we know, of how the spirit functions altogether apart from
the intellect.
Now I know what psychology says about the subconscious mind
and all that, but that is mere materialistic psychology, and I am
dealing with the Word of God which is a direct contradiction of
the psychology which is generally accepted now, and which is
pagan in its origin. Here Paul says that there is an organ that
functions, and it is called the spirit.
You take Romans 1:9: “For God is my witness whom I serve
in my spirit in the gospel of His Son...”. Paul says, “...I
serve in my spirit...”. And we could add to these
many other passages and find an abundance of proof that the
spirit is something more than air, wind, breath, or what we mean
by life when we say we give up our life. It is an intelligent
organ, a functioning organ.
Now that spirit is where our new creation begins. It is there
that new birth has its place and its meaning: “That which is
born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit
is spirit.” You cannot have anything more definite than
that. Now birth is there, and it is that. The spirit of man is
born from above, renewed with divine life, and indwelt by the
Spirit of God’s Son; and from that moment all God’s
interests are centred there. Oh yes, they are going to affect our
souls very definitely, they are going to affect our bodies, but
they begin in our spirits and it is through our spirit that
everything else that God does is accomplished.
The first thing that God is concerned with is to see that our
spirit has its right place, and its right place is dominion.
Dominion begins in the spirit, and dominion ends in the spirit,
and the spirit is indwelt by the Spirit of God’s Son. It is
sonship, therefore, in the spirit where dominion begins, and all
the training for dominion goes on, and dominion is consummated.
I am more and more impressed and convinced with the importance
of this matter. It is my life’s work, very largely, to help
others, to look to their spiritual well-being, growth and
maturity, and, of course, we meet with a large number of people.
It is more than ever patent to me that the clue to everything
lies in this discrimination between soul and spirit. If the
Lord’s people could really get hold in a living way of this
distinction and understand it, they would be saved from so much.
They would make so much faster progress, and the church of God
would be delivered from all kinds of entanglements and confusions
and contradictions. It lies here, in seeing with spiritual eyes
the difference between spirit and soul. The soul not under the
government of the renewed spirit, indwelt by the Spirit of God,
sets up a counterfeit kingdom of God, it is a psychical kingdom
of God. It counterfeits conversions, purely psychological or
psychic. You can have everything that is in the New Testament
counterfeited in the realm of the soul, the psychical. The people
who dwell in the realm of their souls become a complete
contradiction to what true life in the spirit is, and, oh, what
havoc the Devil has made; what confusion, what chaos and what
dishonour to the Lord along that line! God’s first concern
is to see that the soul is brought under the spirit: that the
spirit indwelt by the Spirit of His Son is dominant over the
soul.
The soul is the sum total of human emotions. You can get
anywhere in the realm of human emotions, but this is all false so
far as spiritual things are concerned. You can get everything in
the realm of the reason. Some people’s battlefield is the
realm of their own emotions and feelings, they live there; they
have different emotions, some of elation, carrying them away in
that way; other emotions of depression, morbid; swinging between
these two frequently, so that you never know exactly how you are
going to find them. You say something to them that is not very
cheerful and bright and down they go into the depths; they cannot
stand up to any kind of faithful speaking, and you are afraid to
speak to some people faithfully: they go to pieces if you do.
That is not living in the spirit; that is in the soul. In other
cases the battlefield is the realm of the reason, the head, the
intellect always getting in the way, and everything must be
analysed there, everything must be dissected there, everything
must be properly articulated and constructed there; and there
they live. Their spiritual value is practically nil. They are
living in their soul, on the intellectual side. With other people
it is all action, all doing; they must be on the go, and their
whole world is taken from them if they have to sit still for an
hour; if God should put them aside so they cannot do anything
they have lost everything.
That is why, in order to develop sonship, to train in sonship,
God has to bring us up against the hopelessness of everything in
these realms, break down, break down this habitual mental
analysis, investigation, probing and all that goes on in our
emotions; bring us to a breakdown perhaps, lay us aside so that
we cannot do anything. God is after our spirit, and to bring the
spirit into control, so that He may speak to us through our
spirit and we may have spiritual understanding.
You say, where does the soul come in? As the instrument of the
spirit. I trust that that is holding good at this time. How do we
know these things? Not by study but by revelation in our spirit.
How do I pass them on to you so that at least in some little
measure you are able to intelligently grasp them? I mean, how do
I make them even in a little measure intelligible to you? Through
the working of my soul, my reason, but I do not get it that way.
I never got it by sitting down with books to study it. It came
through the spirit. Oh yes, the soul has its place, but it has to
be the instrument; and my soul has not to become the dominant
thing in any of these departments. I must know not just in my
soul but in my spirit; I must feel first of all, not in my soul
but in my spirit. Paul said that he went bound in spirit. The
Lord would govern our lives in every way, knowing, feeling and
doing through the spirit, and that by the spirit of His Son, so
that what is expressed is Christ, not ourselves.
I think we have said enough to indicate that this training for
dominion begins there. That is the realm of our schooling, and
the smiting of that will be a humanity of a spiritual order, not
disembodied spirits floating about in space, but humanity
spirit-governed and of a spiritual order. Do you see Christ in
resurrection? There you have Humanity. “Handle me and see,
for a spirit hath not flesh and bones...”. What they meant
by a spirit was something vapoury, and yet that Humanity was not
fettered at all by the ordinary limitations and barriers of this
life. He can be there in an instant, and can be miles hence the
same instant. Time does not obtain there. The material has no
power there; He can come through closed doors. That is Christ in
resurrection. That will be the church when this corruption has
put on incorruption, when this Body is made like unto His
glorious Body. It will be a humanity, but a spiritual humanity;
but that is the consummation. It begins now in our spirit, and we
are learning the nature, the constitution, the order of a new
Kingdom, a Kingdom that is not of this world nor of this
creation, another Kingdom altogether different from this Kingdom,
and yet we are learning a little here what the laws of that
Kingdom are, what the faculties of that Kingdom are, and so we
are receiving the Kingdom which cannot be shaken, because that
which is shaken, says the apostle, is of things which are made,
but this is not something made, this is generated by the Spirit
of God.