"Jesus
saith to her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended
unto the Father: but go unto my brethren, and say to
them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and my God
and your God" (John 20:17).
"For
the death that he died, he died unto sin once: but the
life that he liveth, he liveth unto God... Present
yourselves unto God, as alive from the dead, and your
members as instruments of righteousness unto God" (Romans
6:10,13).
Everything
waited on the resurrection of Christ. When He died,
everything stood still. There was silence in heaven,
darkness over the face of the earth. There was a
universal pause, and heaven was holding its breath. The
resurrection of Christ was the greatest and most
momentous event in history. Everything that had preceded
it, His birth, His life, His teaching, His works, His
death and all that death meant, His atoning work: all
waited for His resurrection to make them effective. If He
had died and not lived again, it would all have been of
no profit. "If Christ be not risen, our faith is
vain, we are yet in our sins" (1 Cor. 15:17),
although He died an atoning death.
A PRE-ASCENSION ASCENSION
The
passage we read in John 20 - the words to Mary - is a
remarkable one. "Touch me not" - that is, lay
not hold of Me - "for I am not yet ascended unto the
Father." There has been much speculation as to this
pre-ascension ascension. The fact that this very woman
was allowed to take hold of Him later (Matt. 28:9) gives
much point and strength, with other things, to there
having taken place an ascension.
CHRIST THE FIRSTFRUITS
Of
course, one thing was the fulfilment of an Old Testament
type, and was the spiritual, the Divine heavenly
counterpart of something that was probably taking place
on that very day. On the day after the Sabbath the High
Priest would be waving the sheaf of firstfruits before
the Lord, according to Leviticus 23, and it was on that
very day after the Sabbath that Jesus presented Himself
alive to the Father from the dead. As Paul says:
"But now hath Christ been raised from the dead, the
firstfruits of them that are asleep" (1 Cor.
15:20).
That, of
course, is one of the meanings of this - "I am not
yet ascended"; but there is much more in it than
that, and we will seek to see something more of this
ascension of Christ to the Father on the morrow after the
Sabbath.
FIRSTBORN AMONG MANY BRETHREN
We begin
by noting that it was the presenting of Himself as alive
from the dead, for God's satisfaction, in a
representation. He had been true to the figure of the
firstfruits. The sheaf of the firstfruits was
representative of all that was to come. It was the
prophecy of that which was to be, it was the earnest of
the whole, it was the certainty that the harvest was on
its way; and it was accepted as that. God was satisfied
that all the travail, all the labour, all the falling
into the ground and dying, all the giving over of life
unto death, was eventually not for nought. God was
satisfied that in the Firstfruits He had all the fruits
of that death; a representation - "the firstfruits
of them that are asleep"; or, in other words of the
Apostle, "the firstborn among many brethren"
(Romans 8:29). That is surely inherent in these two words
in John 20:17: "Go unto my brethren" - not, 'Go
to My disciples', or 'to My Apostles', or 'to My friends;
to those men whom I chose, who have been with Me' -
"Go unto my brethren, and say to them... my Father
and your Father." He is representative of the
family, of the whole. God is satisfied in the
representation, and the representation is the firstfruits
sheaf.
With one
further word on that, we pass on. The Lord Jesus Christ,
because of who He was and therefore because of what He
alone could accomplish, has secured everything unto God:
He has established the security of all that God is to
have. He is our security unto God. Put that in another
way. When the Father received that presentation of His
Son at that time, He received us - all who would believe.
We are not secured in the day in which we believe. We
only enter into our security then by faith. We were
secured at that moment when He, the sheaf of the
firstfruits, presented Himself unto the Father's full
satisfaction. We were secured there and then. Our
security does not depend upon anything in ourselves.
Through faith our security is established in Him and what
He is to the Father's satisfaction. That, of course, is
the very beginning, the most elementary thing in the
Christian life.
INSTALLED AND ACCREDITED AS THE
PROTOTYPE OF THE NEW CREATION
This
ascending to the Father was also the installing and the
accrediting of Him as the Prototype and Beginning of the
new creation. Remember that His resurrection and
ascension always go together - they are not two separate
things. Paul puts them together in his letter to the
Ephesians: "he raised him from the dead, and made
him to sit at his right hand in the heavenlies"
(Eph. 1:20). There is no space between: He is raised and
exalted in one act. That is how it is here in John 20: He
will return for forty days, and then the ascension, as it
is called by us, will take place - the great ascension.
This resurrection-ascension was His accrediting -
"declared to be the Son of God with power... by the
resurrection from the dead" - and His installing as
the Prototype and Beginning of the new creation. In His
resurrection-ascension, He not only presents Himself to
the Father's pleasure and is accepted to the satisfaction
of God; He not only includes all who believe in Him
afterward in that presentation; but He there and then
becomes the Image, the Model, the Pattern, of the whole
of that creation - that new creation which is coming in
through faith in Him.
Jesus
Christ is Man still. The New Testament Church believed
that He did not let go His humanity when He went to
heaven. Stephen saw the heavens opened and the Son of Man
standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:56). The
Apostle writes: "There is one God, one mediator also
between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus" (1
Tim. 2:5), and He is still mediating as Man. The whole
system of Christianity hangs upon this very thing, that
there is now a Man glorified to answer to God's original
thought and intention. So He is now installed as God's
model and pattern for the whole creation.
INVESTED WITH ALL AUTHORITY
Further,
at that moment when He ascended to His Father, on that
occasion, there was conferred upon Him all authority in
heaven and earth for the great world commission. We do
not get the full force of the original words in Matthew
28:18. Literally, it is: "All authority has just
been given to me in heaven and on earth." When He
appeared before the Father, satisfying the Father and
being installed as the model for the race, the new
creation, all authority was then given to Him because of
that satisfaction, and in His capacity as that model.
"All authority... in heaven and on earth" - SPIRITUAL
authority. I think sometimes we may have a little
difficulty, mentally, in reconciling the fact that all
authority has been given to Him and that He has been made
to sit at the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens
and that all things are put in subjection under Him, and
all the other things that are said of His Lordship and
His supremacy and His authority - in reconciling this
with the setbacks, the difficulties, the enemy's
triumphs, as they appear to be, and all the extreme
difficulty connected with the slightest degree of
progress in the things of Christ. It does not seem to
balance. But that is just our earthly way of judging. The
authority of Christ is spiritual and it remains.
To
condense very much into a phrase, a tremendous history
into a short sentence or two, this is how it works: that
if Christ ever really and truly, spiritually, comes into
any place on this earth, that place can never be the same
again. An issue has arisen, an eternal issue, and for all
eternity the consequences of that issue, in one way or
another, will be found to exist. So often it seems that,
when Christ has come, when something of Christ has been
brought, there is nothing to see as the result, or it
seems to be just covered over and the enemy seems again
to take possession; and you say, 'What was it all for?
Why were those lives laid down? Why all that suffering
and cost. There is nothing!' Oh, make no mistake! The
authority of Christ has come there, and how often it has
happened that years after, perhaps when that generation
has passed away entirely, something has sprung up in that
very place. That is the story of the Gospel in Japan.
Something of Christ came in, in a simple way, and then it
was all swamped and seemed to be drowned. But years after
something was found growing, and growing, and growing,
till a great thing of Christ existed. There is something
that is not official authority, but a spiritual power
which cannot be quenched. It will come back somehow, in
some way. Paul expressed it that he was a sweet savour
unto God, and that it was a matter of a savour of life
unto life or of death unto death (2 Cor. 2:15-16). It was
never neutral. The authority of Christ means that where
He comes, in any form or in any way, neutrality is
impossible. There will be an effect one way or the other.
But that, as I said, is a very insufficient explanation
of this authority, which works in many other ways.
A GREAT DIVIDE BETWEEN TWO ORDERS
The
first issue of this resurrection-ascension is that there
is created a great divide between two human orders. There
is the order that was and the order that is - a new
order, the new human order. One order, to which all the
children of Adam belong, in the resurrection of Christ is
left behind in death; then there is the new human order
in His resurrection in life; and there is the great
divide between two humanities. That divide is planted
right into the very centre of the being of every child of
God, so that now there are TWO beings in the
believer. On the one hand we are a new creation, we are
of the new order, of the Christ order, there is the new
kind in us. On the other hand we still carry the old
order about with us - but it is a dead body. And right
through all this race, that divide is established. Two
orders of humanity, one in death, one in life.
To the
latter, the order in Christ, the heaven is opened. That
is the meaning of this resurrection-ascension. Yes, He
can ascend to His Father, He can ascend right away, there
is no need to wait. Immediately on resurrection He can go
right through. The heaven is opened, the face of the
Father is in His direction waiting to receive Him. Heaven
is opened to this new order. It is closed to the old.
These are facts, but they are the facts which lie at the
very basis of the Christian's life.
THE WORK OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
Immediately
we pass from the one order to the other, from the old
order to the order of Christ as God's model, from death
unto life; immediately we in Christ 'present ourselves a
living sacrifice', or, in other words, 'present ourselves
as alive from the dead' - immediately we do that, we must
understand that we enter into the school of the Holy
Spirit. The great Schoolmaster takes charge. He is not a
despot, but He takes charge; and there is one work to
which He is committed, and that work - if we will let Him
- is to teach us, to make us know the difference between
these two orders: the order that lies behind and the
order that now is; the order that is in death and the
order that is in life; the order that has the closed
heaven, and the order that has the opened heaven. And
almost any hour or moment in our lives, if we are under
the tuition of this great Divine Schoolmaster, the Holy
Spirit, we can be having the registration in us of what
is alive and what is dead unto God. It is the very nature
of the Christian life. It is the very purpose for which
the Lord leaves us here and deals with us as He does - to
make our spirits, as alive from the dead, capable of
discerning what is dead to God and what is alive to God.
SPIRITUAL GROWTH BY THE KNOWLEDGE
OF LIFE AND DEATH
That is
the basis of guidance, the basis of knowing the mind of
the Lord, the basis of our complete transformation - the
renewing, the making over again, of our minds. It is the
basis of our new intelligence. It is all governed by the
laws of life and death, and our spiritual growth will be
according to our ability to know, on the one hand, what
is dead when we touch it, when we come into contact with
it, to recognize what lies behind the withdrawn face of
God - the Lord is not in that, the Lord is not for that,
the Lord does not accept that - and on the other hand,
when we meet life, to be able to say, 'Yes, I am touching
life here, the Lord is in this'. It is not something
reasoned out; it is not the result of logical
comparisons: it is something in the Spirit; it is life
and death. Oh that every Christian, every young
Christian, lived on this basis - not on the basis of
meetings, not even on the basis of being told by others,
but steadily, surely, on the basis of their own spiritual
discernment and perception of what is alive and what is
dead so far as God is concerned; what is left behind in
His judgment, and so has to be left behind and repudiated
by us; what is brought in with Christ and has to be
apprehended. The difference is life and death. I think
you know something of it. This is the mark of growth, but
we do not grow out of it: it is always ahead of us, and
it will be ahead of us to the last breath that we draw in
this body.
Let me
put that another way. The longer we live and go on with
the Lord and know a life of fellowship with Him, walking
in the Spirit, the more acute will be our sense of life
and death. We shall not be overtaking this; it will
always be ahead of us. The most advanced people
spiritually are those who have the keenest sense of what
they may and what they may not touch, and they sense it
in this - life and death, death and life. You touch
something at one time, even in your Christian life, and
you touch it without any reaction. But touch that now and
it precipitates a new crisis. You have gone on. You used
to do that and have no trouble, but somehow or other you
cannot touch it now. And it will always be like that.
Let us
remember that death is an immense thing, a terrible thing
- not merely as we know it, but as it is in this
universe. Death is the greatest enemy of all that is of
God. "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is
death" (1 Cor. 15:26); everything in the end
of the Bible is the swallowing up of death and the curse.
Death is no friend; we do not go with the poets in that.
Death is a terrible enemy - it is the end of everything.
Spiritual death is a very, very grim enemy indeed. And as
we go on we become more acutely aware of how great death
is and how far-reaching, and therefore of how much more
there is which, being death, we may not touch - even
though others may because they have not reached that
point of spiritual sensitiveness. It is all right to be a
child while you are a child; there is nothing wrong with
that; but it is wrong to be a child when you ought to be
a man. God blesses the children. Do not say, These people
do these things and the Lord blesses them. Of course He
does; He blessed the little children. But if they go on
with the Lord and grow up, they also will come to the
place where they know they cannot go on with certain
things any longer. If they do, they forfeit their
consciousness of Divine life; something has gone. I do
not say they forfeit Divine life, but they forfeit the LIFE
in their life, their enjoyment of it, their consciousness
of it.
Do
believe me, that this is true - Christ has become a
standard and a different standard, a model altogether
different, and the Holy Spirit has taken in hand the work
of conforming us to the image of Christ. And how does He
do it? Just in this way - in our own growing spiritual
consciousness; and that consciousness is a matter of
death or of life. How much can you corroborate? I am sure
you can, up to some point; but do give heed to this word,
because a very, very great deal is bound up with this.
"I ascend unto my Father!" "I
ascend!" If He had explained why, He would have
said, 'I ascend to be installed, accredited; placed, in
the great Son-placing, as God's model and basis for you';
meaning, 'You cannot have Me on the old earthly terms;
you have to apprehend Me now in a different way.'
So may
we really be people who are growing. It is painful. This
capacity for knowing when you touch death is a painful
thing, but it is also a very blessed thing to have the
capacity for knowing when you touch life. Very often you
have to go round the whole dial on the Divine radio,
feeling your way till you get attuned to that particular
frequency and wave-length - and you touch life. As you go
round that radio dial - I cannot have this, I cannot have
that, you go a little further - Ah, now, this is it! The
selectiveness of the Spirit in us as to Divine things
bears witness in our spirits: 'This is of God!' - and
there is life and there is satisfaction.