Reading: Rom. 8:29; 2 Cor. 5:16-17; Eph. 4:24; 4:13; Col. 3:9-11.
Now what we have before us in the continuation of this great
matter is the universality of that which is born of the Spirit, or
the New Creation. In the previous message we were occupied with
the essential heavenliness of this new creation, and one of the
primary features of heavenliness is universality. If you look into
the Word in its symbolic sense you will always find that heavens
are intended to be, and are, used as symbols of universality. Just
as the sea also represents universality and fulness, so the
heavens are symbolic of that. And that fulness of which we were
speaking has as one of its primary features, universality. And it
is upon that universality that we shall dwell for a little.
But first of all let us take special note of this thing: the
absolute necessity for an adequate background to everything that
relates to the Lord's dealings with us in redemption, in
regeneration, in sanctification, and in all those sovereign and
providential activities of the Lord in our lives. In order for us
to have a sufficient motive for endurance, consecration, and allowing
the Lord to chasten and discipline, we must get the setting of
things.
The Lord has been speaking some very strong and straight things
to us. He has been bringing with very great force His word of the
Cross to apply to the old man, the natural man, the flesh, and we
have felt the tremendous impact of that word. It is calculated to
slay us outright and to leave nothing unless we get the setting of
it. And we must be reminded that the Lord's object is not to
annihilate, to wipe us out, to limit us or to take away in order
that there might be less and less until there is nothing. The
Lord's whole object and motive in all the operations by His Cross
is enlargement and emancipation. When the Lord desires and decides
to come into the life of His people it is never with the object of
curtailing their life, reducing it, bringing it within severe
limitations; it is always to eliminate the limiting features and
to destroy those things which keep them earthbound and confined in
order that they may be emancipated into that very universality of
His own Person and life and purpose. Unless we recognise that, we
shall receive His word of slaying in such a way as to make the
whole thing appear so hard, terrible and cruel and we shall regard
the Lord's dealings with us in a wrong light as coming from a Hand
that is against our interests, that is working to our
impoverishment, that really wants us to be reduced to something
less than we had hoped for or expected. It is so easy to receive
that insinuation from the enemy that this Cross is intended to
make your life less than it could be and to cut off and
continually cut off until everything is reduced to a minimum and
you are a poor little thing boxed up and you dare not breathe or
extend or expand yourself at all; you dare not look for things
large or great, living always in a coffin. That is not the Lord's
thought.
The Lord does not want you to live with your head in a coffin. I
went into a monastery on one occasion and the brother first of all
took me down into the under part of the monastery and showed me a
series of empty coffins. He said that when a brother comes into
this monastery, he is first given his coffin and he is told that
he is bound to this thing for life and that beyond this he has no
life whatever; and his coffin is given him to show him he is here
to the end. We are not going to live with coffins, but a good many
folk think that the mystery of the Cross is intended to bring
about that atmosphere of the coffin and to make them feel they are
already embalmed! The Lord deliver us. The enemy would just like
to interpret the mystery of the Cross in that way... it is always
dying and nothing but dying, when all the time the Lord is out for
emancipation. He is out for enlargement and all His activities
with us, though sometimes severe and painful, and do look like
cutting off, all those activities have in view universality if we
have been planted with Him in the likeness of His resurrection; it
says that just as emphatically as we have been planted in His
death.
What is resurrection, but emancipation? The resurrection of the
Lord Jesus was a complete and utter, absolute loosing from every
kind of bondage and limitation; from the moment the Spirit raised
Him from the dead, set Him free from the bands of death, there was
no more hold over Him in the universe. Death had no more power
over Him. Human sin had no more place in His sphere of things as
something which was upon Him, voluntarily accepted, of course.
Judgment was forever destroyed.
Sonship
World limitations went and He became the absolutely universal
Christ without limit or dimensions, and that is the meaning of the
resurrection. That is the meaning of sonship because it is in
resurrection that sonship is manifested, on the ground of
resurrection that sonship becomes a manifest reality - "Declared
to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection of the dead".
It is in the power of resurrection that sonship is manifested:
sonship, that which is born of the Spirit, that new creation in
Christ as inherent universality. Conformed to the image of His
Son... the new man created now after the image of Him that created
him.
You see that this thing in the thought and purpose of God is an
enlarging thing. Sonship is timeless. Notice how immediately you
are brought by the Spirit through the revelation given to the
apostle Paul, into relation to God's supreme thought about this
world and about the church. You come into contact with that which
is called "the eternal purpose", "that which was purposed
concerning His Son before times eternal", and then you have these
simple statements, "Whom He foreknew... them He foreordained". We
were chosen in Him before the world was; here you have got into
the timelessness of the new creation, of that which is born of the
Spirit, of the sons in the Son. They are no longer children of
time, and if we understood the dealings of God with us along this
line which called for the development of infinite patience, we
should see that the one thing that patience relates to is
timelessness. I expect you have recognised that before now. God is
not circumscribed by time limits, and that patience of Christ has
to do with all the ages which God has at His disposal. The Lord
would let us know that He has eternity at His disposal, and we
need not be in a hurry. Our trouble is that we feel we have one
life and we must be in a hurry. A few years taken out of the vast
eternities are to have eternity in them.
God is working with eternity in view, not with spans of years,
and beloved, God can crowd eternity into a few days. In the
intense agony of suffering, in a few days, weeks or months, there
has been crowded eternity, "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; for the things which are seen are
temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." The
things which are of time, a passing moment, have an eternal weight
in it; that passing moment, of course, is a moment of agony
sometimes, but there is eternity in it. We cry out, "What is it
God means by this destroying or taking from us, this cutting off?"
God has eternity in view. It is the universality of things in
relation to the sons of God, and sonship is an eternal thing, a
timeless thing. It dates back to eternity past, before ever this
world was, and moves on to the eternity to be, when time shall be
no more. That is sonship: that which is born of the Spirit.
Timeless... and what is true in the matter of time is true in the
matter of space. It may be difficult to grasp, but it is true:
sonship is a spaceless thing, it is universal in its range.
If the Lord Jesus in His resurrection represents one thing more
than another, it seems to me that He represents the nature of that
which is spirit as differing from that which is flesh in the old
sense. Spaceless... distances count for nothing. Human dimensions
have no standing; He ranges heaven and earth in a moment, He
touches bounds in an instant. The length and breadth and height
and depth are all compassed in a Person in an instantaneous
moment. And the Lord is seeking to get us out of our limitations
into that realm where we function spiritually to touch the ends of
the earth; where spiritually we come into the inheritance of the
universality of our Lord Jesus as Sovereign Head of the church,
and where everything from that moment is universal and not merely
local. This is a tremendously important thing.
What is the Lord after in a little company of His people which
may be comprised of many nationalities? That has been my enquiry
all the time. What does this mean? Surely there is but one
explanation: the Lord is seeking to bring about that oneness of
vision and vocation where everything which is of earthly
distinction is entirely lost and where there is a universal
ministry constituted in all the nations without nationality; where
every kind of earth bond is entirely eliminated. That is the
nature of His instrument. It is the nature of the church.
You have put on the new man where there is neither Swiss, French,
Armenian, German, American nor anything else, but where Christ is
all and in all. The universality of Jesus Christ. There can be
neither Jew nor Greek. Not "there is not", but, "there cannot be"
circumcision nor uncircumcision on the earth, but where it is all
of the heavens and therefore universal. Oh, the need for this
emancipation in spirit!
The only way in which there can be any true realisation of the
universality of the Lord Jesus is by a spiritual operation of God
in our hearts. We could be at conferences as those various
nationalities and various denominations and we could say while we
are at a conference that we are not going to be different nations,
we are going to sink all that for the time being and have common
interests. When we leave this conference we could go back to our
French, English, American and all the rest of it. We could do that
and it would be a caricature, it would be an entirely false
conception of the truth of the body of Christ. You need to have
the thing done inside by the Holy Spirit, to be absolutely
emancipated from all that is of this earth, to be brought into the
heavenly universality of the Lord Jesus Christ where everything
else ceases. Not to divide you merely from other people, but where
it ceases to have a place in your own heart, where you do not
regard yourself as belonging to that any longer, but where you
realise you are out of every kind of earth system and earth order,
and you are now with the Lord in the heavens and that the universe
is the sphere of your spiritual operation, and that everything
with which you have to do although it may be local, has a
universal relationship.
That is how it was with local assemblies in the New Testament.
They recognised that their ministry was not just within that
parish, but wherever there was ministry in the Name of the Lord,
that was their ministry; so that the apostle wherever he went had
them with him co-operating definitely in spirit, recognising that
the ministry was one and that there was a universal ministry
though located in one spot.
The Thessalonians were instrumental in going right through all
Asia. The Ephesians: a similar ministry, through them the Word
went into Macedonia. It is wonderful to see how this universal
principle operated in local assemblies which did not regard
themselves as local companies, but as universal factors - in that
they had interest in other nations. It was a spiritual thing, a
thing into which they came from above. Nations ceased to be
nations for them; the whole world was one, and Christ was a
universal Christ, and wherever a child of God was, or a company of
the Lord's children, there Christ as universal Lord was
represented and implied.
Wherever there is a child of God, or two or three or more
children of God, there Christ, not as local but as universal, is
represented and implied. The universal Christ is there
represented; it is not the local Christ, it is the universal
Christ, the Lord Jesus who now is Lord of all - Lord of all and
the head of every man. So that which is born of the Spirit, this
new creation in Christ where old things are passed away, where
there is no longer to be Greek, Barbarian, bondman, freeman, where
all that has gone and this new man is brought in. That is sonship.
And entering into that sonship is freedom from the whole system of
satanic authority which governs the earth system and freedom from
the law in the sense that now the nature of the Holy Spirit is in
our hearts and we do not have to face up to something outward,
some presentation of obligations and legal demands; the whole
thing has become an inward power and you are emancipated from the
imposition of a legality now, because you have the law written in
your heart. It is Christ in you.
We have said before now that it is just as possible to be in
legality in Christianity as it was possible to be in it in
Judaism. Legality as Christianity is put upon you as a system and
the natural Christian says you may do this and not do that etc.,
and your life becomes legalised and you are afraid to move for
fear of what the brethren might say or think if you do this or
that. We ought to be out of that. We should be free in the Lord.
Sonship has freedom as its birthright. If the Son shall make you
free you shall be free: free from Mosaic law, freedom from death,
for now death is no longer in the hands of the devil; death is now
in the hands of the Lord Jesus. He has taken charge of death; He
lives and has the keys of death and of Hades, and keys are symbols
of authority. He has the authority of death and of Hades and so
while death still persists and is still operative here, the
sovereign authority of the Lord Jesus over death is to make death
work unto life for us. Flesh works death, but for the believer it
works in this blessed way: when the believer touches flesh the
Lord uses death to make that believer let it go. The believer
knows when he has touched flesh and his first thought is to get
out of this. The Lord drives them from death by using death. It is
in His hands.
Now it is life triumphant over death, that is, making death serve
the purpose of God. Death is working in this mortal body, but
there is another power also working in this mortal body and that
is the life whereby Jesus conquered death. Look at Paul: carrying
a body full of weakness and infirmity, a real burden, but a man
who was doing a colossal work, things that the energy of man could
not do without a nervous breakdown. What is the explanation of
this? Life triumphant over death, but death working is making the
life more manifest and glorious. Death is the servant of the Lord
Jesus Christ to make life manifest now. That is why the Lord has
not brought the redemption of the body up to date with the
redemption of the soul. Our souls have been redeemed, but we have
not got the full inheritance of our redemption in the body. "Waiting
for the redemption of the body" and in the meantime we have the
life whereby death has been overcome, working in these mortal
bodies and the Lord is giving His testimony now along that line.
Of course, that is the wisdom of God. If you saw a lot of
redeemed, resurrection and glorified bodies you would want to join
that company! If you want to join those, this is the way: suffer.
And by suffering you will know the glory. People do not want to
take that on. So He uses this very method to keep out those who
are not going on with the Lord. The believer is a mystery to the
world and in that sense, there is something that cannot be
accounted for on any human basis whatever; it is Divine, of God,
transcendent. Sonship is freedom from death, freedom from the law,
freedom from the authority of darkness. The Son making free.
I want you not to forget that it is a process. This new man is
being renewed after the image of Him that created him.
Foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son; being
renewed after the image of Him that created him. That is what is
going on now. We are being renewed after the image.
Then it is a progressive emancipation. We are more and more
shedding the things of this natural life, which govern and control
and confine and strain and limit, and becoming more and more (or
ought to be) emancipated people from all that is of the earth.
This is just one of those things to which we have referred, which
is almost impossible to explain to anyone, which it is difficult
to get into, but if you get it, you know. It is a reality.
There is a very common idea about that along some line of
disaffection, disagreement, or desire to be different from
everyone else, we have come out of denominations and left churches
as here on earth according to the present order and system of
things. That is how the natural man regards such things. That is
not true. Exactly what happened was this: before there was any
thought whatever of leaving denominations and the organised system
of Christianity, there was a revelation of the true nature of the
church which is His Body. The Lord revealed through His Word that
this is not the church according to His mind; that church is not
the traditional church. The church is one body in the heavenlies
under one Sovereign Head, the Lord Jesus - governed absolutely by
the Holy Spirit and not by committees or anything else. This is a
thing which is essentially spiritual in all its government,
conception, and vocation and is not run by man. It does not belong
to man; it belongs to the Lord Jesus and it is not for man to
order, arrange or organize it. The Holy Spirit may do all that and
men are to receive their orders from the Head by the Holy Spirit
as servants of Jesus Christ, to do what He says.
Well, that is putting very imperfectly that which came with
tremendous force; the result was that everything else fell away.
You did not have to resign; it went, you found yourself no longer
a part of it. Not that you were leaving, but you had already left.
You were not in it. The danger for people today is that they get
the idea mentally and they go and preach against churches and
denominations and tell people to come out. Don't you do that, but
ask the Lord to give you a revelation of the church which is His
body and the heavenly nature of things, and when once that breaks
in upon you, you will find yourself in a universal realm where
everything is different. You are out. You see what I mean.
It is one thing to do this down on an earth level and another
thing to come into it from above; but this is the great factor of
the universality of the church which is His body because it is an
expression of the universality of the Head, Jesus Christ. If you
sit down and meditate upon and look thoughtfully and prayerfully
into the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ as representing God's
thought for His church and for every individual member of His
church which is His Body, you will find that universality is in
every fragment of that Person.
It would be a long study for us but it would be well worthwhile
to study the universality in the life of the Lord Jesus. His birth
was not a merely earthly, local thing. Look at the action of the
Holy Spirit; born, not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will
of man, or of bloods, but of the Holy Spirit. That is universality:
lifting the thing right out of the earthly level of birth. The
heavens came in, the angels clave their way through the heavens,
and heaven comes into that birth. The nations are there. Men come
from a far land - shepherds, creation, every form of creation round
Him - sheep, oxen, shepherds, wise men, poor and rich, learned and
illiterate, heaven and earth. There is universality in that birth.
So is everyone that is born of the Spirit. That which is born of
the Spirit is universal. As it is from heaven it touches the whole
creation, embraces all space, time, ages and eternities; that is
not us by natural birth, but that is us by spiritual birth. It is
universal. The Holy Spirit is in that to begin with and heaven is
in that to go on with, and then to the whole creation that has its
mission. Its vocation is to the whole creation. It is spiritual.
His baptism was universal. As a representative act it gathered up
the whole creation and carried it into death as a foreshadowing of
Calvary gathered round great companies of people. Prophets were
all summed up in John the Baptist; the whole of the Old Testament
was summed up in him. It commenced a new state of things
altogether. Heaven opened and again came in. Hell from beneath was
touched, if that going down into death touches, by symbol, that
under realm. This is no mere right which is performed, to be got
through as an observance, it touches heaven, earth, hell because
right at the back of it is universality. Get the universality of
baptism and you have your motive for your testimony. If only we
get the dimensions of this thing. People say, "We want to be
baptised because it is a command", or "We want to follow His
example..." or "It is the right thing to do because of His
command". This is not adequate. See hell in this thing, hell hates
a testimony of that kind and heaven is in it, and the Holy Spirit
is in it, all ages are in it, and sonship is in that testimony to
your resurrection union with the Lord Jesus in death and burial.
It is a vast thing.
His anointing was universal. See the universality of the
temptation of the Lord Jesus. See how it touches two creations. It
touches the old order of things in Adam; where the fall takes
place because Adam used his own will rather than preferring the
will of God. Now, if the last Adam could be caught on that ground,
a second creation would be ruined by the devil. So two creations
were involved in that temptation. "All the kingdoms of the world
will I give thee for a moment's recognition of my sovereignty". It
is universal. The Lord Jesus had come for all the nations of the
world, but He was not going to get them through the hands of the
devil, by obedience to him, but take them on the ground of His own
authority. He has them. The temptation was related to universal
possession of the nations.
We have seen that Man being
renewed after the image of Him that created Him, the image of His
Son as to His humanity - can you fix the Lord Jesus in any one
isolated department of humanity? He had the blend in His humanity
of everything. Has it not been proved during nearly 2000 years?
Take the Lord Jesus to India, Africa, China, anywhere you like in
this world, and you will find that there is something in Him that
finds a universal contact. He is not a stranger anywhere on this
earth when spiritually brought in. He is not fixed in any one
mould that makes Him the Saviour of the British or in any one
nationality, but there is that in Him which makes Him universal in
His incarnation. He blends everything in His Person.
Take temperaments, the artistic temperaments; you know exactly
how he will behave in given circumstances. Another is of the
phlegmatic temperament and you know exactly what to expect from
that man. Give him something to do and you know the phlegmatic man
will not jump at it, he will take it up slowly, but once you get
him started he will go on and that man, if he takes eternity to do
it, will go quietly on with it. Another will come along and you ask
him to do something and he is into that as quick as you like,
leaving it half done. You know what that temperament is. You have
six or seven temperaments to deal with and everyone is governed by
their own temperament. You cannot put the Lord Jesus into any one
of these. He has the best of them all. Artistic, at its best. See
Him touching the flowers and nature. Phlegmatic, you never hear of
Him running, He goes quietly, sets His face like a flint, and yet
He is never slow in the uptake, never slow to appreciate a
situation. He is responsive, not dull, not superficial, but sees
underneath; that is the best of another temperament. As to sex, He
is a man, but you cannot put Him altogether there, there is that
about Him which has a mother heart: "Oh Jerusalem, how often would
I have gathered thee..." etc.. There is the tenderness of a woman.
You get the merciless side coming out. Everything is at its good
side in the Lord Jesus. What the Holy Spirit is trying to do with
us is to bring about a conformity to the image of His Son where
the best is brought out; the features of the Lord Jesus as very
Man according to the mind of God. Those features are to be
developed in us. Those which are contrary to that are being
crucified, cut off.
It is not necessary for us to move in our temperamental circle,
but to move in every circle and be helpful where we might
gravitate deep, where we enter into fellowship with those who are
simple... we do not wash our hands of them. There is a
universality of ministry to all by the one Holy Spirit. Renewed
after the image of Him that created him.
Of course there is a very great deal more to be said -
transfiguration, resurrection, ascension, the coming of the Spirit
at Pentecost and His Name - it is all universal. The Name which is
above every name, at which every knee shall bow. That is
universality; it is in the Lord Jesus. That Name is called upon
us, we are brought into the Name of Jesus through the universality
and the authority of that Name as raised in Him. That baptism of
the Spirit, that advent of the Spirit at Pentecost is for us; a
universal Spirit in the sense that the Holy Spirit is a cosmic
Spirit. He relates to all realms, the whole creation; not only
working in the believer, but operating upon the unbeliever and
back of the things of this world since the Lord Jesus has taken
the authority into His Hands. The sovereignty of the Spirit is
there. See the great background of things.
If the Lord is Head and He is Head here, what about this flesh?
The Cross is the necessity for this old man, the natural man,
carnal man to be cut off, ruled out. Why does the Lord do this?
Why is it necessary for the old man to go out? In order to achieve
this. It is an emancipating process. It is enlargement the Lord is
after; to get us out of the local into the universal; out of the
present into that vastness of the Lord Jesus; it is to get rid of
limitations and not create limitation, that He applies the Cross.
Our flesh has to be slayed in order that our spirit might be
released. That is all. Yet one feels that it is so necessary when
bringing home this great practical and experimental truth about
the Cross and the old creation and the flesh, and self-life, and
the great truth of the church which is the body of Christ. These
things should not be looked at as merely things heard that are to
be mechanically accepted and taken on as some terrible obligation,
but we are to see there is a vast eternal background as a reason
and motive for it all; that in God's view there is something more
than you and I being crucified. It is not just to crucify us that
the Lord is doing it. He has that eternal purpose in view all the
time. He is working to a vast thing and to come into that we must
be delivered from that which is less.
May the Lord by His Spirit bring us that which is in His own view
in dealing with us as He does and every bit of cutting off here on
the earth which looks like limitation is really the Lord's way of
getting us out into that which is timeless and spaceless - that we
may fulfil the heavenly vocation of the sons of God.