Leaves From The
Book
LECTURE II.
HIS
DISCIPLINE.
KINGS XVII. 2-9.
NOW we have, from the
second verse of the chapter, the Lord's discipline of His servant. We have his
character in the first verse,- what he was, how he stood before the living God,
the God of Israel. We see him in the presence of God's enemies with His word;
one of those who had learned His mind, and therefore who could be used as
Jehovah's mouth. He is now called away into the wilderness, himself to be
disciplined; to learn some needed lessons under God's hand.
Discipline is
needed by us from the first moment of our lives until the last. The discipline
of the Father is ours because we are children. And the discipline of the Lord
is ours too in the character of servants; for He has as much to do in shaping
the instruments He uses as He has by them when they are shaped.
That
discipline of the Lord never ceases; but still there are special seasons of it,
and a special season we have here in Elijah's life. He has scarcely stood forth
publicly before the world before the Lord takes him away again, apart by
himself. No doubt it was not a new thing for Elijah to be alone with God ; but
there are yet some new features in his present isolation. He is bidden to turn
eastward and hide himself by the brook Cherith, that is before Jordan. You know
what "Jordan" means,- the great typical river of death. And "Cherith" means
"cutting off." The Lord brings him to that significant place, and there makes
him drink of the brook, sustained by the ravens, which feed him there.
We
have to take these illustrative names to help our understanding of the Lord's
dealings here. They show us Cherith as the prophet's Mara, where he had to
drink in, as it were, the death from which as judgment he escapes. Miraculously
sustained himself, he learns for himself "the terrors of the Lord," and how sin
has wrecked the first creation. And it is a lesson we have to learn. We have to
pass through the world, knowing, as far as outward circumstances go, no
exemption from the common lot of men. God would not sever us from it. His own
Son has come down into the world, as we know, in order to go through it
Himself; the One who was ever pleasing to the Father, and had no need of
discipline, and could not possibly have to say to judgment except as bearing it
vicariously on the cross. Yet, in His grace, He came in the likeness of sinful
flesh, and passed through all the trials and troubles proper to man. Free from
the callousness which sin engenders in us, He entered into them in a way we can
little realize. "Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses." His
mere presence in the world was enough to make Him a "Man of sorrows and
acquainted with grief." It did not need that He should personally be subject to
it: it was enough for Him to be in the world to realize what the world was. He
had come from God and went to God, and He was with God all the way through.
That was sufficient to make Him pre-eminently a Man of sorrows, just because He
was not a man like us. How little of the misery around have our hearts room
for! How even familiarity with it deadens our sense of it! And how our own
personal sorrows absorb and abstract us from those around! Think of One all
eye, all ear, all heart, for all of this. The Lord knew it divinely, and felt
every thing.
Personally, however, He gave Himself up to that which sin has
made our condition. His probation was not in Eden, but a wilderness nor did He
use His miraculous power to relieve His hunger there. He had come into the
world only to do God's will in it, and His hunger was no motive to act, when
that will was not expressed. In His answer to Satan, He just takes the ground
of man, but perfect man:-" Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word
that proceedeth out of the mouth of God."
And the word of God, whatever
trial were involved, whatever suffering it called for, that word was to Him
meat and drink. He lived by it. It ought to be that to us. The bare fact of
having the word of God to fulfill, whatever it call for ought to be enough,
surely, to sustain us. The bare fact of being in His path ought to be enough,
as we realise it, to furnish us with the endurance and faith needed for it.
Thus, then, the Lord passes Elijah through the suffering and sorrows coming on
the land. He brings him to Cherith, and Cherith yields him water for his
thirst. Just as, in the beautiful language of the eighty-fourth psalm, it is
said, as to the blessing of those "in whose heart are the ways "- the ways that
lead to the presence of God, "Who passing through the valley of Baca," (of
tears) "make it a well." Cherith becomes this to the prophet. Thus God makes
things most contrary to work together for good to them that love Him. It is not
loss to learn what that world is through which Christ has passed before; nor to
be proved by it as He was proved; nor to have had in it the discipline He could
not need ; nor the opportunity of doing in it, as He did, the Father's will, in
the face of suffering and of sorrow.
By and by, it will certainly be no
sorrow to have known, in whatever measure, the circumstances of his path down
here, in which God was glorified as nowhere else. How could we be so prepared
to see, as now we may see, but soon shall fully, what His perfection was, or
what the grace that brought Him into the world for us? And then to have shared,
in whatever smaller measure, with Him the trial, and with Him the victory!
Manna is no mere wilderness food, though it is that. In our Canaan home at
last, and forever, it is written that he that overcometh shall eat of the
hidden manna.
This is another thing from discipline, of course; but we do
need discipline at God's hand continually too; and that discipline is really
what God uses to strengthen and bless. You have it in a beautiful way in
Balaam's unwilling blessing of the people. "Who can count the dust of Jacob?"
Jacob is looked at in the figure of dust. What does that mean? It means that
they had been as dust trodden under the foot of the Egyptians. And yet Egypt
was the place in which suddenly Jacob had grown into a nation. "The more they
afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew." It is the rule in all
dispensations that have been, for all God's people. Thus Balaam says, "Who can
count the dust of Jacob'" "Jacob" is designedly said. It was his natural, not
spiritual, name,- Jacob, the "supplanter." And Jacob needed humiliation, but
grew by it.
That is what we find in the first place as to the prophet in
this chapter. In the second place, God takes him away from the brook, when it
fails and dries up, to Zarephath, outside of Israel altogether. Israel had
rejected the Lord, and were feeling His hand in consequence. He takes him
outside of Israel to be witness that the grace of the Lord will not be dammed
back by human barriers, or restricted to the narrow limits to which man would
confine it. That is the way the Lord uses that story of the widow of Zarephath.
And the gospel in Luke commences with His testimony at Nazareth, that if in
Israel the outflow of His goodness is restrained, God will have His witnesses
in spite of that. Grace will only show itself the, more gracious. Outside of
the whole field of privilege, He takes Himself a witness among the
Gentiles.
For the Lord's words recorded in the fourth chapter of Luke are
not a mere arbitrary expression of God's sovereignty; - they have been so
taken, but they are not. "Of a truth," He says, "many widows were in Israel in
the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when
great famine was throughout all the land; but unto none of them was Elias sent,
save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow." (vv. 25,
26.) Now you must remember that what they had been just saying, after they had
borne witness too of His gracious words, and wondered at them, was, "Is not
this Joseph's son?" Before this, He had been declaring to them the acceptable
year of the Lord, and the power of the Spirit there in Him for their healing.
It is when they were saying, "Is not this Joseph's son?" in spite of the
gracious words they were conscious and witness of,- it is then that He warns
them that God cannot be shut up by their unbelief: if they reject Him, He will
go outside to the Gentiles.
That is what Elijah has to learn in the case of
the widow of Sarepta. He has to learn to go out with God outside the limits to
which natural ties, and even religious associations, would confine him, and
recognize in a woman of Sidon the work of God's sovereign grace,- there in its
fullest and most wonderful display. I do not believe we have bottomed the need
of man (or, therefore, our own,) until we have learnt the absolute sovereignly
of divine grace,- shown, however, let us remember, in a scene where man's
rejection of it compels Him to be sovereign, if He show grace at all. Man's
will, alas! is in opposition to that will of God to which, if all yielded, all
could and would be saved. But if some,- if we have yielded, is it because of
betterness in us?- were our hearts naturally more docile or obedient? Scripture
shall answer for us: "As in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man
to man." Therefore, beloved brethren, was it needful that we should be born
again, "not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God"
alone. The very figure speaks of this; for in our natural birth, was there
aught of our own will ?- were we consulted? Or in creation, has the thing
called into being its choice? And we are not only born of God, but His
creation, "His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works."
But
then this sovereign grace is grace in its fullest display. It is divine love
overtopping barriers that might well be thought, even by it, unsurmountable. It
is the heart of God manifested,- His will shown indeed to be but the energy of
His nature who is love.
I know what rises in the mind of some: "Why not,
then, save all? Could He not as well save all ?" But I can only answer, The
necessary limit even to divine goodness is its own perfection. God has solemnly
assured us He would not have men perish. What infinite wisdom can do, I must be
infinitely wise thyself to know.
Elijah's second lesson is one that it
indeed imports the man of God to have learnt well. All the way through, Elijah
has to learn the lesson of dependence. Dependence, of course, is nothing else
than faith; and the Lord puts His servant where faith shall be a continual
necessity. Thus, what He seeks from us, He gives us practical help toward
producing for Him. Faith grows by exercise. God ordains for it, in Elijah's
case, continual exercise. He has no stock of his own, we may say, ever to
subsist upon. The ravens bring him bread and flesh in the morning and bread and
flesh in the evening; and the next day, and still the next, it is the same
thing again. And then when he comes to Zarephath, there you find, in the same
way, the widow is called upon to sustain him, and there is a little oil in a
cruse and a handful of meal in a barrel. The meal does not fail in the barrel,
and the oil does not fail in the cruse. It does not increase, however,- it
continues a handful of meal and a little oil ; and he is kept, in that way, in
constant dependence upon God.
And that is the way the Lord would have us
spiritually. He never gives a stock of any thing - of grace or of gift - so
that we can say, "I have got enough to last me so long, at least." That would
be taking us out of the place of faith, and depriving us of the blessing God
has for us. He covets to show us what He is,- His power, His love, His
unforgetfulness of us. As it is said of the people whom in His love and His
pity He redeemed, "He bare them and carried them all the days of old." It is a
great thing to get this in a real and practical way for ourselves with God. If
He keeps us low down here,- and you know it is His way, in more senses than
one, to call and choose the poor,- it is not because His hand is niggard, (God
forbid !) but that we may not miss realizing this great blessing of His care.
Often all we think of is, having our need met; but how little a thing is that
with God ! It would cost Him nothing, we may say, to meet the need of a
lifetime in a moment ; and a lesser love than His would supply it at once, and
get rid of a constant burden. But that is not His way. To supply the need is a
small thing; but to supply it in such a way as to make us feel in each
seasonable supply the Father's eye never withdrawn from us, the Father's heart
ever employed about us,- that is what He means. "Give us day by day our daily
bread" is the prayer the Lord taught His disciples; and thus we ask Him
continually to be waiting on us. Is it not much more than to ask, Give us now,
that we may not have to come again?
What a place the wilderness was to
Israel, where the constant manna was a daily miracle, and the cloud of
Jehovah's presence led them in the way! It was the place, alas! of constant
murmurings; but in God's design, and to faith wherever in exercise, how
wonderful a manifestation of the living God ! Yet that wilderness journey is
but for us a type,- only a shadow, therefore short of the reality of what faith
in us should realize to be ours. What a spectacle to the heavenly beings, to
whom is "known, by the Church, the manifold wisdom of God "! what daily
miracles of grace for eyes that are open to it! And of course these were types
(as the manna and the water from the rock,) of spiritual blessings ministered
to us. And here, the same rule applies. No stock given into our hand; all funds
in God's treasure-house, but therefore unfailing; and a daily, hourly, ministry
of strength according to the need, which not only meets it, but tells of the
tenderness of a Father's care, and of the faithfulness of our High Priest gone
in to God.
Precious lessons for more than Elijah the Tishbite!- fresh for
our hearts to-day.
LECTURE III.
HIS DISCIPLINE - I KINGS XVII. 17-24.
IN this
last scene in the verses I have read to you we find the third thing in the
discipline of the man of God,- and a thing that is above all needed to be known
in order that he should really fulfill this character. As I have said, it is
what we all are by, position, it is therefore what we all must be practically,
or else our very profession of Christianity condemns us. Being a man of God is
not being something very exalted, and which God would leave, so to speak, to
our choice, whether we would be so or not. As we have seen already, all
Scripture is given to furnish the man of God thoroughly unto all good works.
Mark well, it does not speak of furnishing any body else, and we are
necessarily God's by the fact that we are purchased by the blood of Christ.
Beloved friends, to be according to his mind, therefore, is what we are called
to, and throughout history,- especially, I may say, that of the Church of God,-
the very failure of His professing people has only forced those true to Him the
more to take that character. You have here, in the very last verse, something
which especially makes known the man of God. The woman says to Elijah, "Now by
this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in thy
mouth is truth." What is it that makes the man of God specially known to her,
and gives specially to his testimony the character of truth? It is this: not
merely that he knows the living God, but that he knows and has had to do with
the God of resurrection. Death visits the house of the widow of Zarephath. God
has taken away her son. Not the widow alone, but Elijah himself is brought face
to face with this fact of death; a death which the woman's conscience realises,
as ours do if in activity at all, to be the fruit of sin.
Death is the
stamp upon a fallen creation - the solemn witness upon God's part of the ruin
which has come in. Everywhere, in every language, whatever the darkness of
man's mind, whatever the religious corruption of those not wishing to retain
God in their knowledge, it has testified plainly to men's souls of wrath
against the creature He has made. Why else undo what he has done? \Vhy take
again the life that He has given? He is not a child, to break and cast away His
plaything of an hour.
Death is what we all have to do with,- the liability
to which God has not delivered any one of us from here. If the Lord Jesus
comes, of course we shall not die; but in the meanwhile, each of us is
personally liable and exposed to it. And what we need is, surely, to know the
God of resurrection. We need a God of that character in two ways: for
ourselves, of course, as a matter of simple power for our own life. We need to
know this also as a power for testimony, as Paul the apostle,-"We also believe,
and therefore speak: knowing that He who raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise
up us also by Jesus;" or, as you see it here in the widow of Sarepta, "Now by
this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in thy
mouth is truth."
Resurrection, God's power over death,- power available and
displayed in our behalf, is thus God's testimony to Himself among men. But I
may say, in these times it is particularly the testimony He is giving. You
know, if you take the Lord Jesus through His life even down here, as you have
Him in the first chapter of the epistle to the Romans, "He was marked out the
Son of God." How? He was, on the one hand, Son of David after the flesh; but He
was "marked out the Son of God, according to the spirit of holiness, by
resurrection of the dead." By the fact that He could meet death, and manifest
divine power over it,- by that fact He showed Himself as evidently the Son of
God; for He met it, not as Elijah meets it here,- by prayer and supplication,
looking up to another for help about it, but in His own power and name alone.
By His simple word He met it and dispelled it; a condition hopeless for man to
deal with. Man says, "While there is life there is hope." When death comes
there is no hope: he can only bury his dead out of his sight. That gives God
the opportunity to come in. It is just there He testifies to Himself as One who
has available for man the power of resurrection. The Lord thus manifested His
power on earth before His own death and in His own name. He showed that He was
the Son of God there with practical help for man,- a power that could deal with
sin itself, or it could not deal so with its fruit and penalty.
When the
Lord met death, He met it fully;-Jordan filled all its banks for Him. He knew
it in its full character as penalty, bearing in His own body what had brought
it in. Three days and three nights He lay under it, and when He arose from the
dead, there took place what had had its type long before, when for Israel the
ark stood in the bed of Jordan; when those who bore it stood on the brink of
the waters, and they rolled away right and left till there was a road no
woman's heart need fear to travel from shore to shore. Then His own words
received their full interpretation which He had spoken to the sorrowing heart
of Martha before that - "I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth
in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever live.lh and
believeth in Me shall never die."(vv. 25, 26.) In the past, there had been
death; in the past, people had to go through it. No doubt He was with them: and
so the Psalmist says, "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me." (Ps. xxiii.) Still it had to be
gone through, - though resurrection eventually for them also should banish it,
whereas now the Lord having been in it, and come through, there is no real
death impending for us, but a clear path made right through it. "I am the
resurrection and the life; and he that liveth and believeth in Me "- has no
death to go through at all,-"shall never die." Now are we not called as
Christians to realize the truth of that? It is truth, of course, for faith ; it
is not truth evident to sense and sight. Yet by and by, when the Lord Jesus
comes, it will be manifested as to those that are in the body at that time ;-
it will be manifested as to us then, if we should be, as we easily may be,
here, that death has no title over us at all. He will take His own to Himself
without dying. Until that time, it is a fact that faith has to realise. For
faith it is simple, that Christ having passed through death and come up out of
it, His resurrection no less than His death is ours. Divine power has shown its
exceeding greatness toward us, "according to its working when God raised Him
from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places." (Eph.
i. 19, 20.) In Him, quickened and raised up with Him, we too "are seated in the
heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Therefore in God's mind we have no death to
pass through, for we have passed through it in Him who is as much our
representative in the heavens as He was upon the cross. We are rightly
expected, therefore, to know resurrection in a way in which even Elijah could
not know it - in a way in which no saints of the Old Testament could possibly
know it. We are called to know it as those who in themselves, in their own
persons, are living examples of it.
True, we did not know what death was in
passing through it: there was no water in Jordan for us. The waves and billows,
so terrible as God's waves and billows, spent their force on Him alone. We have
come through the dry bed only. But we have come through. This is the simple
fact in God's account; and God's is ever the truest - the only true one. Being
dead with Christ, we are also quickened with Him out of death, and raised up
and seated together in Christ in the heavenly places. - It is one thing to have
this, of course, in Scripture,- nay, to recognize this truth in Scripture; but
another thing for ourselves to have known what it is practically - to have got
hold of it experimentally, to have apprehended in this respect that for which
we are apprehended of Christ Jesus. It is this latter alone that makes us men
of God, and gives us to be real witnesscs for God, accredited witnesses of
heavenly things. This makes us lights indeed in the world: for earth's ordained
lights are heavenly; sun and moon and stars light her up, otherwise dark. So,
if the Church is the responsible witness for God on earth - the candlestick,-
the true light, the "angel" is the heavenly "star." (Rev. i. 20.) Nature is one
with God's Word in affirming thus the character of all true witnessing ;
because it comes from God, it must be of necessity heavenly, for He is.
Resurrection puts us there. Resurrection carries us outside of. the world
through death, its boundary-line. Left in it for a while, no doubt, in another
sense, but even so pilgrims and strangers, merely passing through it. We belong
to it no more than Christ belonged to it.
And is there not such a thing as
getting hold of this in reality? It is a different thing to say, "I know it is
there in Scripture," from saying, "I know it for a truth in my very soul." Such
recognition will make us of necessity something of - in one sense much more
than what Elijah was. It will carry us into a new sphere of relationship, of
thought, of interests; and where all is deathless and eternal. We shall
appreciate the Lord's words to the lingering disciple, to "let the dead bury
their dead." That will be no unintelligible mysticism, as to many a believer we
fear still it is. The simple recognition of the fact requires faith. All
spiritual realisation is by faith,- a faith to which the sureest evidence and
the highest reason are that God has spoken. And although the Spirit of truth
must make it good to us, and to grieve the Spirit is necessarily to deaden
spiritual sense and dim perception, yet it is as the Spirit of truth He acts -
by truth, and our faith in it. Thus alone can we pass through death and beyond,
to where Christ is before God, and there for us.
If you look at the
eleventh chapter of John's gospel, you will find there the great chapter which
speaks of. resurrection as God's witness. All the way through, you find how
even Christ's disciples are under the power of death. The sisters of Bethany
send to Him to say that His friend Lazarus is sick. The thought is (one so
natural), if Christ were there, he could not die. They want His presence in
order to put off death, which yet could be merely a reprieve, staving it off
for a little while. That is all they think of. He has other thoughts. He stays
away, in his love to them (for it comes in here so beautifully, "Now Jesus
loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus), and lets him die.
When the Lord
proposes to go to Judea again the disciples say, "Master, the Jews of late
sought to stone Thee, and goest Thou thither again ?" Thomas says, "Let us go
also, that we may die with Him." Death is upon all their souls,- nothing but
death. When He comes, He finds them overwhelmed at the thought that death had
come and touched one of the Lord's own. Instead of Lazarus being this making it
better, it made it worse in one sense. Was He indifferent? or was death master
even over His? What does He do? He has said from the beginning "This sickness
is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be
glorified thereby." Facts might seem to be against Him, for Lazarus does die.
But even so is it seen, as else it could not, that He, not death, is Master.
Lazarus is raised. And what is the consequence? Such a testimony to Himself
they never had before: crowds come out from Jerusalem to learn about this
wonderful thing; and the very presence of Lazarus there, the man who had
actually come through death, is the thing that draws them. They come, "not
merely that they may see Jesus, but to see Lazarus also, whom He has raised
from the dead." Think of a man who had actually come through death and come out
of it! If we apprehended that we are just such a people,- if we did apprehend,
in any proper sense, that we really belonged to another sphere, what a
testimony for Christ it would be! It would indeed bring persecution. It brought
it in that case. It was then that the Pharisees consulted about putting Christ,
and Lazarus also, to death, because by reason of him all men, as they thought,
would believe on Him. They would like to put out the lamp which God had
lighted; but it just shows what the power of such a testimony is. And let me
say again, there is no real and sufficient .testimony - there is no proper
Christian testimony now - but that.
Some may call it high truth; and some,
again, to whom it is outwardly familiar, may think it truth that needs very
little insisting upon. I wish it did. What is the fact, when practice comes to
test the actuality and power of the belief we have? What, for men who really
knew the power of resurrection, would be the serious business of their lives?
Would it be their aim to make money, beloved brethren? Trying to get things
comfortable around them? To keep up their station in the world, and live as
well as their neighbours? Of course we have got to get through it, and have to
do with it in the way of business. He who was "the carpenter" has sanctified
honest labour, and there is nothing at all derogatory or unspiritual in it. But
I need scarcely remind you what He was down here, all the way constantly and
absolutely a heavenly man. Let me ask you, beloved friends, do you think that
Christ could have set his heart on making money? Do you think He could have
come into the world in order to seek a comfortable place in it, or anything of
that sort? You know it was the very opposite of that. And what are we? We are
distinctly His representatives in the world, as He was Himself His Father's
representative. "As My Father hath sent Me into the world," He says to us, "so
have I sent you into the world." What is the consequence? Why, we must not talk
about this being "high truth," and we must not think that after all the humble
part is not to pretend to so much. We are Christ's representatives down here in
the world. True or false, no doubt: that is what it comes to; true or false
witnesses for Christ down here. The responsibility of the place is ours, and if
we are Christians, we must frankly accept it.
It will not do to value
ourselves upon our morality, honesty, benevolence, and that sort of thing. The
world knows perfectly well there is no testimony merely in that, because it
will find you honest men, benevolent men, and moral men, without the least
pretense to religion. The world is keen-eyed, and knows that that is no
sufficient testimony. "If that is all you have to show," they will tell you,
"we can do without your Christianity. We have just such people who have none."
But if we appear as people of another sphere, people who have their backs upon
the world, as having beyond it a sufficient and satisfying portion, such as in
it they have not,- that is another matter. "There be many that say, Who will
show us any good? Lord, lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us, Thou
hast put gladness in my heart, more than in the time that their corn and their
wine increased." Elijah of course could not know, as we now may, the power of
resurrection. We have in this case the exhibition of it in a very different
way, because we have Old.. Testament truth, and not New Testament. Still it was
resurrection that made Elijah known as a man of God, anti the word of God in
his mouth as the truth. So nothing else will make the word of God in our mouth
known as truth in any sufficient sense, or approve us as men of God.
You
will find, if you turn to the fourth chapter of the second of Corinthians, the
apostle speaking very plainly about this. What opened his lips to speak? He was
continually exposed to death, given up to it, not merely of his own accord, but
by God's will too, God everywhere exposing him to that which he had given
himself up to. " We are always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the
life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh." (v. ii.) He was
"always hearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus," (v. i2.) and
God gave him up to death, to meet it practically,- "in deaths oft." That was
the very thing which made life work in those around about. This death which was
working in him (v. 12) was the power of his testimony to them. Death, so to
speak, had a fair opportunity to show its power over him ; but it only showed
that it had none at all; all it could do was to make life shine out brighter.
"Death worketh in us, but life in you."
'I'he power of resurrection opened
his mouth : "I believed, and therefore have I spoken," (v. 13), "knowing that
He who raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus, and shall
present us with you. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment,
worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we look
not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen." (v.
17, 18.)
'That is where his eyes were; that is what his heart was occupied
with; and you find at the opening of the next chapter how fully for him Christ
had met death and judgment. To die was to "depart and be with Christ." The
thought of the judgment-seat moved him for others: "Knowing therefore the
terror of the Lord, we persuade men."
Listen to him again: "We have this
treasure (the treasure of divine grace,) in earthen vessels, that the
excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us." (v. 7.) What is the
practical value of the "earthen vessel"? The bird of heaven, the leper's
offering in Lev. xiv., needed an earthen vessel too - to die in It was one
thing impossible for God - to die. He who had that in His heart of love for us,
if He remained that simply, could not die. He took an earthen vessel - a human
body - to die in. We. have this treasure in earthen vessels, and death works in
us. God has taken us up as earthen vessels, in which He can accomplish
something for Himself. He takes up what is just proper material to be broken
into potsherds,- poor, weak creatures, who can stand nothing, we may say ; and
then, like Gideon's men, having hid his lamps there, He breaks the vessel to
make the light shine out. Death may have power over Paul's body, but the very
fact manifests that there was o that in Paul over which it had not power. His
true life is beyond it, uitouched by it. The life of Jesus - the risen heavenly
life of Jesus-shines manifestly out in him. "Death worketh in us, but life in
you."
The life of Jesus belongs not to the world. It is eter-nal life, with
the Father before the world was, and manifested to us in Him in whom the world
found nothing kindred to itself, therefore no beauty. His home was elsewhere.
His delights with the sons of men did not alter that. In us, too, it will
manifest itself as that which has its source and attachment elsewhere, and
there where alone no want, no unrest, no instability, is found. We manifest it
when Christ is our realized sufficiency and strength, and our circumstances
alter nothing, as with regard to this they can alter nothing. When we pass
through the world debtors to it for nothing it can give. This is not
misanthropy, not asceticism, not giving up this world in order to get another,-
that is only living to ourselves in another form, and from that we are
delivered. It is the very opposite,- giving up the world because we have what
is beyond. God is our portion, and to the fullness which is ours in Christ the
world can add abso-lutely nothing; nor, blessed be His name I can it take any
thing away. This is real testimony to Christ. It is when we can say, "He is
enough for us; and know how to be abased, and how to abound, for He strengthens
us. Why, often-times God has to put us on a sick-bed, in order to show us
practically what He can do. Blessed it is, surely, to see o how He works
thus,-to see how He proves His sufficiency to those whom He lays low. But the
blessing of a sick-bed is often just that God takes away all other things to
show us that - in reality we have lost nothing, whereas before we did not quite
believe this. And what Christ shows us there, He is ready to show us without
the need of a sick-bed at all. I do not say that all there need it in this way.
I am not reflecting upon these at all: God has His own mysterious working, and
there are many and diverse purposes worthy of Himself He can accomplish thus.
Still this is often what we learn and have to learn there, to be weaned from
nature's breasts, and find what is our sufficiency elsewhere.
The power of
resurrection is divine power, and He who is in us, come down from His own abode
to link our souls with the place to which they belong, is not limited in His
power to do this for us. No doubt we, by our unbelief, may practically limit
Him, and as with Elijah on the mount, the storm and earthquake and fire maybe
needed to prepare the way for what after all must do His work with us - the
"still, small voice."
Let us remember, too, one thing as to resurrection
which connects itself with our first gospel-lessons. I have already spoken of
it, but not as fully as it needs." Until Christ died,- until the work was done
by which righteously He could do it,- God could not show Himself upon our side,
or His heart out as He would. There was a time when the blessed Sufferer had to
say, "I cry in the daytime, and Thou hearest not." He had to be delivered out
of death, not from it, out of it as the One gone into it for others.
As
soon as His work was accomplished, then God stepped forth and showed Himself at
once on the same side as the One who took that place for us,- by raising up His
Son from the dead. It was the acceptance of Christ's work. He showed Himself
there upon our side. Therefore the apostle says, at the end of the fourth of
Romans, "If we believe on Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead, who
was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification,"
(vv. 24, 25.)
That is, believe on the God who is for us righteously by the
death of Christ. Who is for us, and showed Himself for us the very moment He
could ; and He could be for us now, with all His attributes displayed and
glorified. He was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father;
righteousness required it, while love shone out in it.
That is what
resurrection makes us know. It is the full and bright display of divine glory
now shining in the face of a man in the nearest place that can be to God in
heaven ; yea, and that man is God,- His image. To attempt to know Christ after
the flesh, as the apostle says for himself he did not, is to lose all the
blessedness of this. Nor is there any Christ to be known but up there in
heaven. If our souls are occupied with Him up there, in the light over which
never more comes a cloud,- there where all the glory of God is displayed,
shining with perpetual sunshine down into our souls,- what will the world be to
us?
With our eyes and hearts up there, where Christ in the glory is the
revelation of a divine object for a heart brought back to God, they will
necçssarily be off the whole scene from which temptation comes to us. He
is for us there in the glory. We are before God in Him, those upon whom God's
eye rests with fullness of satisfaction, His own beloved. And so, practically,
outside all that now tempts and defiles and weighs down here ; that is what God
has provided for us, and our first duty as Christians - taking the epistle to
the Philippians - is to "rejoice in the Lord." To be happy where happiness is
full and uninterrupted. The only possible power we can find for going through
the world aright is the power of the enjoyment of Christ. If Christ is known in
this way,- if Christ satisfies, in that is strength to do all things - to be
abased and to abound - as the apostle; to go down into the scene of death, and,
while it works upon us, to give forth the testimony which God seeks from us.
The Lord give us grace to realize what I have so feebly shown you here. Thus
only can we be practically men of God.
The Lord enable us to realise what
we are, as those who have learned the power of resurrection - the power which
has raised up Christ from the dead, and which works toward His people in the
same energy, raising Us up with Him and putting us in Him in the heavenly
places before God.
AN ADDRESS TO MY BRETHREN AND
FELLOW-MEMBERS OFF THE CHURCH
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