“The bread of God is
that which cometh down out of heaven, and giveth life unto the
world... I am the bread of life... I am come down from heaven...
I am the living bread which came down out of heaven: if any man
eat of this bread, he shall live for ever; yea and the bread
which I will give is My flesh, for the life of the world...
Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, ye
have not life in yourselves... My flesh is true meat, and My
blood is true drink... This is the bread which came down out of
heaven” (John 6:33,35,38,51,53,55,58).
“That Christ may dwell
in your hearts through faith; to the end that ye, being rooted
and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the
saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and
to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may
be filled unto all the fulness of God” (Ephesians
3:17–19).
As the Lord enables, we shall
now seek to recognize the link and the transition from Christ
through the Cross to ourselves—that is, to the Lord’s
people. As we have been thinking of the greatness of Christ
there have been some things which have come out as to His Person.
Firstly, in connection with sonship, we thought about His
eternity—the eternal Sonship; then, at the other end, we
thought of Him as the Son of Man. Son of God eternal, Son
of Man in time; Son of God in heaven, Son of Man on earth; and we
have been trying to understand the greatness contained in those
capacities. We have thought about the greatness of the
Cross. One thing we have said about Christ is that He does
not stand in solitary isolation outside our universe, but the
revelation of Him—even in His eternal Sonship, as well as in
every other capacity—is intended to show that He stands
closely associated with us, with man. You will remember
that we have said that the eternal Sonship of Christ is no matter
of concern to us if it is something in itself; we are not very
interested if it is not going to affect us in any way.
Therefore the fact that it is the very substance of revelation to
man shows that God is interested that man should know, and that
with a great purpose. God does not show us these things
just for the sake of letting us have a look at something very
wonderful. He reveals with an object in view, a big, but
very practical object, and He says, in effect: ‘Now, this
concerns you. You are bound up with this and related to
it.’ So that the greatness of Christ as Son, both of
God and of man, is brought by the New Testament down to a
practical living relationship with us. He, the Son, is going to
bring many sons to glory. He, the Son of Man, is the
firstborn of a new creation, and in His manhood, after His
likeness, a new creation is coming back to God, to be presented
to God in Him. Well, that is all common ground, but we must
get to the inner, practical meaning of it all.
God’s
Eternal Thought of Sonship Secured in Christ
We have spoken about the
eternity of the Son and of our participation in the eternal life
which is His. What does that mean really? Does it
just convey to your minds the idea of endless duration, something
without beginning and without end? That is vague, and
hardly helpful. What is the real, practical meaning and
value of that as a revelation, as something brought to us?
Well, what it means is that sonship is a thought, a conception,
in the mind of God before we were made, that which was to be
transferred to a creation. That is, it goes before time,
and for us, time simply means this present material world
order. Time for us begins when God made a material creation
and put the heavenly bodies in their place to govern years and
months and days and the seasons of the year, and so on.
That is time for us, and it belongs, therefore, to the material
creation; but get back behind time and you come to God's thought,
which is outside of time. Call it timeless, if you like, or
eternal. It is outside of time, before time was, and it was
to give character to time, give nature to creation. That
which He would make would, in His intention, take its character
from this and would, therefore, in its conception, in its idea,
as well as in its nature, be something related to the timeless
thought of God. Now, Christ is that.
But what, again, is the
practical meaning of that to us now? It is that Christ has
perfected that eternal pre-time thought of God; Christ stands to
govern everything created, and to see that time has no power to
destroy it. Nothing which can come into time can eventually
dismiss that, because that is eternal and stands there governing
all time. Eventually things are bound, with the
timelessness of God, to come back to that original idea.
The creation in time may go leagues and leagues further from
God’s idea and may move completely out of its orbit, but
time shall be no more; time has no power finally to dismiss
that. In Christ it is secured before ever time was, and
eventually it is bound to be realized. The creation will
come back to the timeless thought of God, and it will be shown
that nothing that has ever entered into time has had power
finally to change that. That is tremendous—and that is
the practical value of sonship. Sonship is an eternal idea, and
eventually the creation will come to sonship. There will be
that eventually which will be sonship embodied in creation, in a
people, and that will be what God ever thought and determined.
God’s
Eternal Thought Secured in the Cross
But how can that be? There
is the eternal fact—and here is time; here are conditions of
time; and here are we as found in this creation. We are far
from that eternal thought, so how can that be realized?
Between the eternal thought as perfected in that Son and the
ultimate realization of that thought stands the Cross. The
Cross with one arm reaches back to eternity, to that thought, to
that purpose of God; with the other arm it reaches on to eternity
yet to be, the consummation of that thought. The Cross is
the bridge through all time between the eternities, to take up
the purpose on the one hand, and to secure it as a realization on
the other hand. It is in the Cross that the eternal thought
of God concerning the Son and the sons is made possible and is
secured, and here is the greatness of the Cross in the sense of
the eternity of the Cross. That is the meaning of such a
phrase as “the Lamb... slain from the foundation of the
world” (Revelation 13:8). Time is anticipated, and all
that could and would come in with time which is so contrary to
that eternal thought, is anticipated in the Lamb slain in the
thought of God from the foundation of the world. The Cross
bridges it all. So, when we come into a faith union with
Christ as crucified to all that has come in with time—the
change of man’s nature and character, the change of the
world, and the change of the character of creation; when we stand
on the one side of that Cross in a faith identification with Him
in death to that change, to all that disruption and denial and
contradiction of the Divine conception, and we stand on the other
side in a faith identification with Him as risen triumphant over
all that has come in with time, we receive the gift of timeless
life, eternal life, in Jesus Christ our Lord. Or, to put it
this way, we are then found in Christ, that Christ, from
eternity. We have been lifted out of time and what time
means now—for time now means disruption, disorder,
corruption, and is only another word for the reign of death which
puts a limit to life and begins at once to say: ‘So far, and
no farther.’ That is death, and that is time. In
His death He has destroyed all the conditions which time
represents, He has taken it all away, and we are linked with Him
in His eternity. Sonship—received potentially through
the Holy Spirit in new birth, and realized through the Holy
Spirit’s continual operation in our maturing—is
something which is the fulfilment of an eternal thought of God,
the realization of all that God ever thought about us; and the
Cross is the point at which all that is made possible—nay,
is already secured in Christ. How great is the Cross!
God’s
Heavenly Man
Following that (and it is only
saying the same thing again, putting the emphasis on another
word), we have here in this Gospel by John: “I am the living
bread which came down out of heaven”: “I am come
down from heaven.” Here is a phrase reiterated
almost monotonously. Eternal, yes—that is the reach
backward. Now “from heaven”— that is the
reach upward. But what does: “I am come down from
heaven” mean? Christ said things which are completely
mysterious until the Holy Spirit interprets them to the
heart! He speaks about the Son of Man Who is in
heaven (John 3:13). While He is saying the very words He is
on the earth, yet He says: “The Son of man, Who is in
heaven.” What does He mean? He simply means, as
the later New Testament shows us, that He is not of this
creation, He is not produced by the ordinary racial means on this
earth and does not come into being along the ordinary line of
generation in Adam. “I am come down from
heaven.” The essential and deepest reality about
Christ is that He is of a different order. Yes, He is born of
Mary, but He is born of the Holy Spirit, in a unique way.
Something has operated so that it can be said of Him before His
birth: “The holy Thing Which is begotton of Thee...”
(Luke 1:35)—a completeness of holiness which is the product
of the intervention of God the Holy Spirit, cutting off from the
inheritance of this fallen creation. So it is true that, by
the Holy Spirit come down from heaven, He has come down from
heaven. In a word, He is of another order of human beings; there
is that about Him which is unique and different from all other
men; there is not another like Him. “I am come down
from heaven.”
That, again, is God’s
thought—a certain kind of humanity which is not found in
time and on this earth as we know it, a mankind which is not the
one familiar to us; a different order, something outside of this
realm and this race of mankind altogether. We are
“foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son”
(Romans 8:29). You and I are to be of a different order
altogether from the one to which we belong by nature. This
order to which we belong now in this creation is not God’s
thought at all. It has gone wrong, and has fallen right out
of the Divine recognition and acceptance. It is something
other, it is confused, contaminated, tangled and poisoned.
THIS ONE from heaven is the
representation, the embodiment and the inclusiveness of what God
intended man to be. There is this creation at one end, and
at the other end—“conformed to the image of His
Son,” made like Him in resurrection, made different,
spiritually, within. Yes, but only in embryo now. You
know what an embryo is: something that has life, but undeveloped
and not fully conscious life. Development will take place
and consciousness will grow, but it is not there to begin with.
That is what we are when we are born again. We have life,
but how much consciousness and understanding of the meaning of
that life is there? Very little! How many of the
Lord’s people, of all the millions on this earth, are
conscious of what they are saved unto, of what the great object
is that God has in view in saving them? They have life
because they are born again, but the life is only embryonic life
in the sense that the consciousness of the meaning of it is very
limited. But as that life develops, so there grows the
consciousness of the object for which we have been born
again. There may be a good deal of enthusiasm, activity and
energy about young Christians, but if they stay in that place of
having only energy and not understanding, they are not
growing. Any little babe will wear you out in the course of
a few hours! Try and do what a child does and see how long
you can keep it up! There is plenty of life and energy, but
not much intelligence. The real mark of growth is not
energy alone, but intelligence. So the true course of the
development of spiritual life is in seeing and knowing more and
more what we are called unto, what we are saved for, and what is
the Divine meaning in that which has taken place in us.
There are comparatively few who are growing up like that!
Well, in the end there will be
the full-grown man, the fulness of the stature of Christ, and
sonship fully attained, for it is secure in Christ, and was
secured in Him away back in the Cross.
But between what God has
eternally secured and projected in His Son, and that ultimate
realization, there is what we are by nature. We are not
that which is God’s thought, and, what is more, it is not in
us to be that, whatever the humanists may say, and whatever may
be the widespread false doctrine of the universal Fatherhood of
God and the brotherhood of man, and the power of man to be his
own saviour if only he is cultivated and educated, and all the
rest. In spite of all that, it is not in us to become what
God eternally intended us to be. How blind men are, in the
light of recent history, to hold to the belief that, after
thousands of years, we are nearer to God! We are no nearer
to God than we were in the beginning. God is surely spoiling all
that sort of thing, but men are blind and still cling to it; they
are die-hards in this realm of total depravity. However,
where is the hope? There, between the two, stands
the Cross, and the Cross takes up not only the eternal, but the
heavenly, the altogether ‘other.’ With one hand
it possesses what we are, and with the other hand it secures the
realization of the Divine intention and brings them both together
in that Man crucified—a Man Who in resurrection becomes the
first of the kind of man that is to be. There He is in the
Cross. The Cross of the Lord Jesus, Christ crucified,
secures another kind of man, and (as we were saying) when we are
born again we receive the embryonic life of that new order.
If only we will be obedient to the law of the Spirit of life in
Christ Jesus we shall be changed into the same image, we shall be
transformed, we shall grow up into Him in all things, we shall
become progressively like Him, and then, in the great day of His
final intervention for us, “we shall be like Him; for we
shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2). We shall all be
changed, and this corruptible shall put on incorruption, and
death shall be swallowed up in victory (1 Corinthians 15:53,54).
The Cross accomplishes that. How great it is!
Christ the
Broken Bread
You see, that is why the Lord
Jesus speaks in this symbolic way about Himself: “I am the
bread of life... I came down from heaven.” “He
that eateth Me...”; “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son
of man and drink His blood, ye have not life in
yourselves.” Clearly that means that the bread must be
broken. He speaks those words, not just to individuals, but
to the whole company of believers: “He that believeth on
Me.” The bread has to be distributed. You notice
that, leading up to this, was the feeding of the multitude, and
it was out of the breaking of the bread for the feeding of the
multitude that this wonderful revelation of Himself as the bread
of life took its rise. Where was the broken bread to be
distributed? It was at the Cross. The Cross is the
breaking of the loaf, so that we might receive Christ. Paul
explains it all, getting right into the mystery of it, in this
matchless passage in Ephesians 3:17 and 18: “That Christ may
dwell in your hearts through faith.” How does Christ
dwell in our hearts? He has been broken and given to faith;
faith has reached out, and the broken, distributed Christ, Who
still remains whole while yet broken, is come to dwell in our
hearts. “...that Christ may dwell in your hearts
through faith; to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in
love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints...”;
“we, who are many, are one loaf, one body” (1
Corinthians 10:17), made so by Christ dwelling in all our hearts
through faith. “...may be strong to apprehend with all
the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,
and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye
may be filled unto all the fulness of God.” That is
simply gathering up what we have been saying in one comprehensive
statement.
The Greatness
of the Love of God
We close with a fresh emphasis
upon the fourfold dimensions of the love of Christ. Love,
in Ephesians, goes hand in hand with the great word
‘grace.’ Grace and love in Ephesians are
twins—or shall I put it this way: grace is love in
action. When we come to grace in Ephesians, it is not just
the grace of God towards us to save us from hell and to give us
some assurance of heaven. It is the grace of God to save us
unto that high and full and perfect thought of His. It is
all this that is in view—this vast, eternal thing, all
brought into relation to the Church. That is the grace of
God in this Letter. Then grace is shown to be because of
the love of God: “Christ... loved the church, and gave
Himself up for it” (Ephesians 5:25)—the broken
bread. That love springs out of the Cross. The Cross
is first brought into view here. “In Whom we have
redemption” (Ephesians 1:7). “You did He make
alive, when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins,
wherein ye once walked according to the course of this world,
according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit
that now worketh in the sons of disobedience; among whom we also
all once lived in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of
the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath,
even as the rest: but God, being rich in mercy, for His
great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead
through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ”
(Ephesians 2:1–5; ASV). There is the great love of
God, as shown in the Cross, raising us from that awful death
through the Cross.
And then that love is seen in
its four dimensions—breadth, length, height and depth.
What is that? It is the Cross reaching out in its
expansiveness. The breadth of the Cross—and, oh! how
broad the Cross is! How broad the love of God is! You
can afford to be a wholehearted ‘Broad Churchman’ in
the love of God! Oh, the love of God is much bigger, much
broader than our conception of it, and, oh! for more of this love
that will broaden us! We are so small, so contemptible, so
petty. Do not let us be afraid of thinking of the love of
God in broad terms. The Lord will surprise some of us with
what His love has done, and whom His love has saved. Oh,
the breadth of His love! It brings us back to the
exhortation of Paul to the Corinthians: “Be ye also
enlarged.”
That is the breadth, the outward
reach; and now the length of His love—the backward and
forward reach, going back beyond time, beyond the Fall, beyond
all that has happened. The love of the Cross reaches beyond
that and outstrips it. Thank God, it outstrips all that has
come in with this creation through Satan and through Adam, and it
goes on when time shall be no more. The Cross, the love of
God, extends backward and forward over the eternities.
“...What is the breadth and
length and height”—Oh, the height of the love of God,
of the Cross of our Lord Jesus! To what heights it can
bring us! “...and made us to sit with Him in the
heavenly places” (Ephesians 2:6). The heights of the
power of the Cross! The reach of the Cross to lift
us! We have no conception of what we are going to be.
John says: “Beloved, now are we the children of God, and it
is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if
He shall be manifested, we shall be like Him” (1 John
3:2). Look at Him on the Mount of Transfiguration!
Look at Him in the brightness above that of the noon day sun over
the road to Damascus! Look at Him as John saw Him, as
recorded at the beginning of the Book of the Revelation:
“And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as one dead”
(Revelation 1:17; ASV). We shall be like Him!
We cannot describe it, but that is the height of the Cross, the
height of the love of God. Oh, what an uplift there is in
the Cross! What an uplift in the love of God! This is
practical, and not just doctrine. When the love of God
really does get hold of a life, it lifts. There is lift in
the love of God. Oh, if only God Almighty were to come
alongside you now in a personal form, and you knew Him to be God
Almighty, the Eternal, and He said to you: ‘I do love
you!’, you would be lifted clean off the earth at
once. The Cross is the great revelation that God loves
us. “God so loved... that He gave His only begotten
Son” (John 3:16). Oh, for that love to be in us so
that the effect of our being here would be to lift others!
I am afraid it is the other way so often—we cast down, we
oppress, and our effect is not lifting. Oh, God save us
into more of His love that lifts!
And the depth of the love of
God, of the Cross! We sing:
“Oh, teach me what it
meaneth:
Thy love beyond compare,
The love that reacheth deeper
Than depths of self-despair!”
That is one depth some of us
know—the depth of self-despair. He took all the
despair of all men, that abyss of hopelessness, of shame, of sin,
right down to the bottom; and the Cross, the love of God, reaches
down there to lift up. What is the depth? Well might
the Apostle go back upon himself when he comes into touch with
that love and talk nonsense: “...to know the love of Christ
which passeth knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19). You are
outside of human language! Ephesians is the Letter of
superlatives. Paul just cannot cope with language in that
Letter, because he has got altogether outside of this life, this
world, this creation. He has got into touch with eternity,
heaven, God, with the magnitudes, and human language falls over
itself in trying to describe that! “The exceeding
greatness of His power” (Ephesians 1:19).
“...able to do exceeding abundantly above all...”
(Ephesians 3:20). Language cannot describe it. Here
is love in its four dimensions, but it passes knowledge.
That may sound like mere words. It is; but, oh, what I
trust is that through the words there will be a registration in
our hearts of the Spirit of God to tell us that “the love
of God is broader than the measures of man’s
mind.” IT is deeper than the depths of the
world’s despair and shame and sin. IT is higher than
the highest thoughts of which we are capable as to what it can
do, and IT anchors us outside of time and in eternity.