LOVE NOT THE WORLD
WATCHMAN NEE
[Book cover] In this hard-hitting and controversial book, the great
Chinese writer and preacher Watchman Nee states that there is a Satanic power
behind every worldly thing and that the natural tendency of every worldly
system such as Politics, education, literature, science, art, law, commerce,
music - such are the things that constitute the kosmos, and these are the
things that we meet daily. Subtract them and the world is a coherent
system ceases to be. In studying the
history of mankind, we have to acknowledge marked
progress in each of these departments.
The question, however, is: In what direction is this progress going? What is the ultimate goal of all this development? At the end, John tells us, antichrist will
arise and will set up his own kingdom in the world. That is the direction of this worlds
advance. Satan is
utilizing the material world, the men of the world, the things that are in the
kingdom of antichrist. At that
hour the world system will have reached its zenith, and at that hour every unit
of it will be revealed to be anti-Christian.
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[Page V]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1.
The Mind Behind the System Page 9
CHAPTER 2.
The Trend Away from God Page 18
CHAPTER 3.
A World Under Water Page 27
CHAPTER 4.
Crucified Unto Me Page 37
CHAPTER 5.
Distinctiveness Page 44
CHAPTER 6.
Lights in the World Page 51
CHAPTER 7.
Detachment Page 57
CHAPTER 8.
Mutual Refreshing Page 64
CHAPTER 9.
My Laws in Their Hearts Page 72
CHAPTER 10.
The Powers of the Age to Come Page 80
CHAPTER 11.
Robbing the Usurper Page 88
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[Also
additional writing from]
CHAPTER 3
What Shall This Man
Do?
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[Page vii]
PREFACE
The greater part of this book derives from a series of
addresses on the subject of the world given by Mr. Watchman Nee (Nee To-sheng) of Foochow to Christian believers in
The author sees the kosmos as a spiritual entity behind the things seen, a force always
to be reckoned with. He deals with its
impact upon the Christian and his impact upon it, with the conflicting claims
upon him of separation and involvement, and with the destiny of the man in
Christ to have
dominion. As always, Mr. Nees
studies display original thinking and he is not afraid to be provocative,
stirring both heart and mind to a response.
It is my prayer that, despite the inevitably piecemeal construction of
the book, its theme will prove to have coherence as a picture of the man of God
in the world, and further, that it may challenge us all who name the name of
Christ to move more courageously and positively through this earthly scene,
with a thought always for our role here in Gods eternal purpose concerning His
beloved Son.
-
ANGUS
1968
[Page VIII]
Scripture quotations are from the
Revised Version
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[Page 9]
CHAPTER ONE
THE MIND BEHIND THE SYSTEM
Now is the judgment of this world now shall the prince of
this world
be cast out.
And I,
if I be lifted
up from the earth, will draw
all men unto
myself. John 12: 31, 32.
Our Lord Jesus utters these words at a key point in
His ministry. He has entered
Yet if His utterance destroyed one set of illusions, it
offered in place of them a wonderful hope, solid and secure. For it announced a far more radical exchange
of dominion than even Jewish patriots looked for. And I ...- the expression contrasts sharply with what precedes
it, even as the One it identifies stands in contrast with His antagonist, the
prince of this world. Through the Cross, through the
obedience to death of Him who is Gods seed of wheat, this worlds rule of
compulsion and fear is to end with the fall of its proud ruler. And with His springing up once more to life
there will come into being in its place a new reign of righteousness and one
that is marked by a free allegiance of men to Him. With cords of love their hearts will be drawn away [Page 10] from a world under judgment to
Jesus the Son of man, who though lifted up to die, is by that very act lifted up to reign.
The earth is the scene of this crisis and its
tremendous outcome, and this world is, we may say, its point of collision. That point we shall make the theme of our
study, and we will begin by looking at the New Testament ideas associated with
the important Greek word kosmos.
In the English versions this word is, with
a single exception shortly to be noticed, invariably translated the world.
(The other Greek word, aion, also so translated, embodies the idea of time and
should more aptly be rendered the age.)
It is worth sparing time for a look at a New Testament Greek
Lexicon such as Grimms. This will show
how wide is the range of meanings that kosmos has in Scripture. But first of all
we glance back to its origins in Classical Greek where we find it originally
implied two things: first a harmonious order or arrangement, and
secondly embellishment or
adornment.
This latter idea appears in the New
Testament verb kosmeo, used with the meaning to adorn, as of the temple with goodly stones or of a bride for her husband (Luke 21:
5; Rev. 21: 2).
In 1
Peter 3: 3, the exception just alluded to, kosmos is itself
translated adorning in keeping with this same verb kosmeo in verse 5.
(1) When we turn
from the Classics to the New Testament writers we find that their uses of kosmos fall into three
main groups. It is used first with the
sense of the material universe, the
round world, this
earth.
So: Acts 17: 14, the God that made the world and all things therein; Matt. 13: 35 (and elsewhere) the foundation of the world; John 1: 10, he was in the world, and the
world was made by him; Mark 16: 15, Go ye into all the
world.
(2) The second
usage of kosmos is
two-fold. It is used (a) for the inhabitants of the world in such phrases
as John 1: 10,
the world knew him not; 3: 16, God so loved the world; 12:
19, the world is
gone after Him; 17: 21, that the world may
believe. (b)
An [Page 11] extension of this usage leads to the idea
of the whole race of men
alienated from God and thus hostile to the cause of Christ. So: Heb. 11: 38, Of whom the world was not worthy; John 14: 17, whom the world cannot receive; 14: 27, not as the world giveth, give
I unto you; 15: 18, If the world hateth
you
(3) In the third place we find kosmos is used in Scripture for worldly affairs: the whole circle of
worldly goods, endowments, riches, advantages, pleasures, which though hollow
and fleeting, stir our desire and seduce us from God, so that they are
obstacles to the cause of Christ. Examples are: 1 John 2: 15, the
things that are in the world; 3: 17, the worlds goods;
Matt. 16:
26, if he shall
gain the whole world, and forfeit his life [or soul]; 1 Cor. 7: 31, those that use the
world, as not abusing it.
This usage of kosmos
applies not only to material but also to abstract things which have spiritual
and moral (or immoral) values. So: 1 Cor. 2:
12, the spirit of
the world; 3: 19, the wisdom of this
world; 7: 31,
the fashion of this world; Titus 2: 12, worldly (adj. kosmikos) lusts; 2 Pet. 1: 4, the corruption that is in the world; 2: 20, the defilements of the world; 1 John 2: 16, 17, all that is in the
world, the lust ... the vainglory ... passeth away. The Christian is to keep
himself unspotted from the world, James 1:
27.
The Bible student will soon discover that, as the above
paragraph suggests, kosmos is a favourite
word of the apostle John, and it is he, in the main, who helps us forward now
to a further conclusion.
While it is true that these three definitions of the world, as (1) the material earth or universe, (2), the people on the earth, and (3) the things of the earth, each contribute something to the whole picture,
it will already be apparent that behind them all is something more. The Classical idea of orderly arrangement or organization helps us to grasp what this is. Behind all that is tangible we meet something
intangible; we meet a planned system; and in this system there is a harmonious
functioning, a perfect order.
[Page 12]
Concerning this system there are two things to be
emphasized. First, since the day when
Adam opened the door for evil to enter Gods creation, the world order has shown itself to be
hostile to God. The world new not God (1 Cor. 1: 21), hated Christ (John 15: 18) and cannot receive the Spirit of truth (14:
17). Its works are evil (John
7: 7) and the friendship
of the world is enmity with God (James
4: 4). Hence Jesus
says, My kingdom is not of
this world (John 18: 36). He has overcome the world (16:
33) and the victory that hath
overcome the world is our faith in Him (1 John 5: 4).
For, as the verse of John 12
that heads this study affirms, the world is under judgment. Gods attitude to it is uncompromising.
This is because, secondly, as the same verse makes clear, there is a mind behind the system. John writes repeatedly of the prince of this world (12: 31; 14: 30; 16: 11).
In his Epistle he describes him as he that is in the world (1 John 4: 4) and matches against him the Spirit of truth who indwells [obedient (Acts
5: 32, R.V.)] believers. The whole world, John says, lieth in the evil one (5: 19).
He is the rebellious kosmokrator, world-ruler - a word which, however,
appears only once, used in the plural of his lieutenants, the world-rulers of this
darkness (Eph. 6: 12).
There is, then, an ordered system, the world, which is governed from behind the scenes by a ruler, Satan. When in John 12: 31 Jesus states that the sentence of
judgment has been passed upon this world He does not mean that the material
world or its inhabitants are judged. For
them judgment is yet to come. What is
there judged is that institution, that harmonious world-order of which Satan
himself is the originator and head. And
ultimately, as Jesus words make clear, it is he, the prince of the world, who has been judged (16:
11) and who is to be dethroned and cast out for ever.
Scripture thus gives depth to our understanding of the [sin-cursed] world around us. Indeed, unless we look at the unseen powers
behind the material things we may readily be deceived.
[Page 13]
This consideration may help
us to understand better the passage in 1 Peter 3
alluded to above. There the apostle sets the outward
adorning (kosmos) of plaiting the hair, and of wearing jewels of gold, or of putting on apparel in deliberate contrast with the incorruptible apparel of a
meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of
God of great price. By inference, therefore, the
former are corrupt and worthless to God.
We may or may not be ready at once to accept Peters valuation,
depending upon whether we see the true import of his words. Here is what he is implying. In the background behind these matters of
wearing-apparel and jewellery and make-up, there
is a power at work for its own ends. Do not let that power grip you.
What, we have to ask ourselves, is the motive that activates
us in relation to these things? It
may be nothing sensuous but altogether innocent, aiming by the use of tone and
harmony and perfect matching merely to gain an effect that is aesthetically
pleasing. There may be nothing
intrinsically wrong in doing this; but do you and I see what we are touching
here? We are touching that harmonious system behind the things seen, a system
that is controlled by Gods enemy. So
let us be wary.
The Bible opens with Gods creation of
the heavens and the earth. It does not
say that He created the world in the sense that we are discussing it now. Through the Bible the meaning of the world undergoes a development, and it is
only in the New Testament (though perhaps to a lesser extent already in the Psalms and
some of the Prophets) that the world comes to have its full spiritual
significance. We can readily see the
reason for this development. Before the
Fall of man, the world existed only in the sense of the earth, the people on
the earth, and the things on the earth.
As yet there was no kosmos, no world, in the sense of a constituted
order. With the Fall, however, Satan
brought on to this earth the order which he himself had conceived, and with
that began the world-system of which we are speaking. Originally our physical earth had no
connection with the world in this [Page 14] sense of a Satanic system, nor indeed had man; but Satan took advantage of
mans sin, and of the door this threw open to him, to introduce into the earth
the organization which he had set himself to establish. From that point of time this earth was in the world, and man was in the world.
So we may say that before the Fall there was an earth; after the Fall
there was a world; at the Lords return there will be a kingdom.
Just as the world belongs to
Satan, so the Kingdom belongs to our Lord Jesus. Moreover it is this [Messianic] Kingdom that displaces and that will displace the [present sin-cursed] world.
When the Stone not
made with hands
shatters mans proud image, then the kingdom of this world will become the kingdom
of our Lord and of his Christ (Dan. 2: 44, 45; Rev. 11: 15).
Politics, education, literature, science, art, law, commerce, music
- such are the things that constitute the kosmos, and these are things that we meet daily.
Subtract them and the world as a coherent system ceases to be. In studying the history of mankind we have to
acknowledge marked progress in each of these departments. The question however
is: in what direction is this progress tending?
What is the ultimate goal of all this development? At the end, John tells us, antichrist will arise and will set up his
own kingdom in this world (1 John 2:
18, 22; 4: 3; 2 John 7; Rev. 13). That
is the direction of this worlds advance.
Satan is utilizing the material world, the men of the
world, the things that are in the world, to head everything up eventually in
the kingdom of antichrist. At that hour the world-system will have reached its zenith; and at that
hour every unit of it will be revealed to be anti-Christian.
In the book of Genesis we find in
The same thing applies to music and the arts. For the pipe and the harp seem also to have
originated with the family of Cain, and today in unconsecrated hands their
God-defying nature becomes increasingly clear.
In many parts of the world it has long been easy to trace an intimate
relationship between idolatry and the arts of painting, sculpture and
music. No doubt the day is coining when
the nature of antichrist will be disclosed more openly than ever through song
and dance and the visual and dramatic arts.
As for commerce, its connections are perhaps even more
suspect. Satan was the first merchant,
trading ideas with Eve for his own advantage, and in the figurative language of
Ezekiel 28, which seems to reveal something of
his original character, we read: By thy traffic thou has increased thy
riches, and thine heart is lifted up (verse 5). Perhaps this does not
have to be argued, for most of us will readily admit from experience the
Satanic origin and nature of commerce.
We shall say more of this later.
But what of education?
Surely, we protest, that must be harmless. Anyway, our children have to be taught. But education, no less than commerce or
technology, is one of the things of the world.
It has its roots in the tree of knowledge. How earnestly, as Christians, we seek to protect
our children from the worlds more obvious snares. And yet it is quite true that we have to provide
education for them. How are we going to
solve the problem of letting them touch what is essentially a thing of the
world, and at the same time guarding them from the great world system and its
perils?
And what of science?
It, too, is one of the units that constitute the kosmos.
It, too, is knowledge. When we
venture into the further reaches of science, and begin to speculate on the
nature of the physical world - and of man - the question immediately [Page 16] arises: Up to what point is the
pursuit of scientific research and discovery legitimate? Where is the line of
demarcation between what is helpful and what is hurtful in the realm of
knowledge? How can we pursue after
knowledge and yet avoid being caught in Satans meshes?
These, then, are the matters at which we must look. Oh, I know I shall appear to some to be
over-stating things, but this is necessary in order to drive home my
point. For if any man love the
world, the love of the
Father is not in him (1 John 2:
15). Ultimately, when we
touch the things of the world, the question we must ask ourselves always is: How is this
thing affecting my relationship with the Father?
The time has passed when we need to go out into the world in
order to make contact with it. Today the world comes and searches us out. There is a force abroad now which is
captivating men. Have you ever felt the power of the world as much as
to-day? Have you ever heard so much talk about money? Have you ever thought so much about food and
clothing? Wherever you go, even among Christians, the things of the
world are the topics of conversation.
The world has advanced to the
very door of the Church and is seeking to draw even the saints of God into its
grasp. Never in this sphere of things have we needed to know the power of the
Cross of Christ to deliver us as we do at the present time.
Formerly we spoke much of sin and of the natural life. We could readily see the spiritual issues
there, but we little realized then what equally great spiritual issues are at
stake when we touch the world. There is
a spiritual force behind this world-scene which, by means of the things
that are in the world, is seeking to enmesh men in its system.
It is not merely against sin therefore that the saints of
God need to be on their guard, but against the ruler of this world. God is building up [obedient, repentant, redeemed and
restored members of] His Church to its consummation in
the universal reign of Christ.
Simultaneously His rival is budding up this world-system to its vain
climax in the reign [Page 17] of antichrist.
How watchful* we [regenerate Christians] need to be lest at
any time we be found helping Satan in the construction of that ill-fated
kingdom. When we are faced with alternatives and a
choice of ways confronts us, the question is not: Is this good or evil? Is this helpful or hurtful? No, the question we must ask ourselves is: Is it of this world, or of God?
For since there is only this one conflict in the universe, then whenever
two conflicting courses lie open to us, the choice at issue is never a lesser
one than: God ... or Satan?
[*
take heed to
yourselves lest your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness,
and the cares of
this life, and that day come on you suddenly as a snare: for so it shall
come upon all them that dwell on the face of all the earth. But WATCH ye at every season, making supplication, that ye may prevail to escape all these things that shall
come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man: (Luke 21: 34-36, R.V.).]
* * *
[Page 18]
CHAPTER TWO
THE TREND AWAY FROM GOD
HAVING every one of us been in bondage to sin, we readily
believe that sinful things are Satanic; but do we believe equally that the
things of the world are Satanic? Many of
us, I think, are still in two minds about this. Yet how clearly Scripture
affirms that the whole world
lieth in the evil one (1 John 5:
19). Satan well knows that,
generally speaking, to try to ensnare real Christians through things that are
positively sinful is vain and futile.
They will usually sense the danger and elude him. So he had contrived instead an enticing
network, the mesh of which is so skilfully woven as to entrap the most innocent
of men. We flee sinful lusts, and with
good reason, but when it comes to such seemingly innocuous things as science
and art and education, how readily do we lose our sense of values and fall a
prey to his enticements!
Yet our Lords sentence of judgment clearly implies that
everything that constitutes the world is out of line with Gods purpose. His words, Now is the judgment of this world, dearly imply the condemnation of all
that goes to make up the kosmos, and
would never have been uttered if there were not something radically amiss with
it. Further, when Jesus goes on: Now shall the prince of this world be cast out, He is stressing not merely the
intimate relation between Satan and the world order but the fact that its
condemnation is linked with his. Do we
acknowledge that Satan is today the prince of education and science and culture
and the arts, and that they, with him, are doomed? Do we acknowledge that he is the effective
master of all those things that together make up the world system?
[Page 19]
When mention is made of a dance hall or a night-club, our reaction as Christians is one of
instinctive disapproval. To us that is the world par excellence. When, however, to go to the other extreme, medical science or
social service are discussed, there may be no such reaction at all. These things command our tacit approval, and
maybe too our enthusiastic support. And
between these extremes there lie a host of other things varying widely in their
influence for good or bad, between which we should probably none of us agree on
where to draw an exact line. Yet let us
face the fact that judgment has been pronounced by God, not upon certain
selected things that belong to this world, but impartially upon them all.
Test yourself, if you venture into one of these approved
fields, and then someone exclaims to you: You have
touched the world there, will you be moved? Probably not at all. It takes someone whom you really respect to
say to you very straightly and earnestly: Brother,
you have become involved with Satan there! before you will so much as
hesitate. Is that not so? How would you feel if anyone said to you: You have touched education there, or You have touched medical science, or You have touched commerce? Would you react with the same degree of
caution as you would if he had said, You have touched
the Devil there? If we truly
believed that whenever we touch any of these things that constitute the world
we touch the prince of this world, then the awful seriousness of being in any
wise involved in worldly things could not fail to strike home to us. The whole world lieth in the evil one - not a part of it, but the whole. Do not let us
think for a moment that Satan opposes God only by means of sin and carnality in
mens hearts; he opposes God by means of
every worldly thing. Oh, I agree
with you that the things of the world are all in one sense material, lifeless,
intrinsically without power to harm us; yet even that should itself suggest
that they are resistant to the purpose of God, as indeed is everything in which
there is no touch of divine life.
[Page 20]
The recurring phrase after its kind in Genesis 1 represents a law of reproduction that governs the
whole realm of biological nature. It
does not, however, govern the realm of the Spirit. For generation after generation, human
parents can beget children after their kind; but one thing is certain:
Christians cannot beget Christians! Not
even where both parents are Christians will the children born to them
automatically be Christians, no, not even in the first generation. It will take a fresh act of God every time.
And this principle applies no less truly in the affairs of
mankind more widely. All that belongs to
human nature continues spontaneously; all that belongs to God continues only
for as long as Gods working continues.
And the world is all-inclusively that which can continue apart from
divine activity, that is, which can go on by itself without the need of
specific acts of God to maintain it in freshness. The world, and all that belongs to the world,
does this naturally- it is its nature - and in doing so it moves in a direction contrary to the
will of God. This statement we shall now seek to illustrate both
from the Scripture and from Christian experience.
Let us take first the field of political science.
The Old Testament history of
Now even when this was clearly Gods doing, the natural trend
of the kingdom proved to be, like the nations, away from Him. For a kingdom is a worldly thing, and in
keeping with all worldly things it tends to come into collision with the divine
purpose. Wherever in the world a nations government is left to itself, it
follows its natural course which is further and further away from God. And what is true in secular national politics [Page 21] worked itself out equally surely even in divinely-chosen
It will scarcely surprise us that the same thing proves to be
true in the field of commerce. I can think of no sphere where the temptation
to dishonest and corrupt dealing is so great as here. We all know something of this. We all know how hard it is to remain straight
and to conduct affairs honestly in the competitive world of trade. Many would say that it is impossible, and
certainly to do so calls for a life that is cast upon God in an unusual way.
We recall that our Lord Jesus tells us of two contrasting men,
one who gained the whole world and forfeited his life, and another, a merchant,
who went and sold all that he had to buy one priceless pearl. To the latter of these Jesus likened the
kingdom of heaven (Matt. 16: 26; 13: 45, 46). The
Spirit of God has not infrequently moved men in business to action of a like
character. There have been not a few
well-known business firms whose profits have been turned over to divine ends in
the spread of the Gospel and in other ways.
I think of one such enterprise that, at the outset of its
history, was the creation of a God-fearing business man. Now godly fear is a quality that can only
exist as it is sustained from heaven, but business acumen and the efficient
organization which it creates can be self-perpetuating. In the first generation of this firms
history we find divine life being mediated through its founder sufficient to
hold what was even then a worldly concern securely under the authority of
God. But by the second generation that
restraint was gone and, as one would expect, the business gravitated
automatically into the world-system.
Godly fear had drained away, but the firm itself is still flourishing.
[Page 22]
Suppose we take now so apparently innocent a matter as agriculture. Here Genesis, written in a primitive world of flocks and husbandry, has something
to tell us. After Adams fall God was
compelled to say to him, Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee;
and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return
unto the ground. No one would suggest that in
How different is the Church, Gods husbandry!
Through the grace of God and the indwelling Spirit she possesses an
inherent life-power capable, if she
responds to it, of keeping her constantly moving Godward, or of recalling her
Godward if she strays.
When we turn to
education, both the Bible and experience have something to say to us. Speaking allegorically we might say that in
rejecting Saul and choosing David God was passing over a man distinguished by
his head (for he was that much taller than his peers) in favour of the man
after His heart! But more seriously, the
men such as Joseph and Moses and Daniel of whose wisdom God made public use each received in a direct way from [Page 23] God Himself the understanding they needed.
They took little account of their
secular education. And the apostle
Paul clearly placed scholarship among the all things that he counted to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ
Jesus his Lord (Phil. 3: 8). He
draws a clear distinction between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom
that comes from God (1 Cor.
1: 21, 30).
But it is experience that demonstrates the essential
worldliness of scholarship as such. Most
of the historic University colleges of the West were founded by Christian men
with a desire to provide their fellows with a good education under Christian
influence. During their founders
lifetimes the tone of those foundations was high, because these men put real
spiritual content into them. When,
however, the men themselves passed away the spiritual control passed away too,
and education followed its inevitable course towards the world of materialism
and away from God. In some cases it may
have taken a long time, for religious tradition dies hard; but the tendency has
always been obvious, and in most cases the destination has by now been
reached. When material things are under
spiritual control they fulfil their proper subordinate role. Released from that restraint they manifest
very quickly the power that lies behind them.
The law of their nature asserts itself, and their worldly character is
proved by the course they take.
The spread of missionary
enterprise in our present era gives us an opportunity to test this
principle in the religious institutions of our day and of our land. Over a century ago the Church set out to
establish in
In the early chapters of the Acts we read how a contingency arose which led the Church to
institute relief for the poorer saints.
That urgent institution of social service was clearly blessed of God,
but it was of a temporary nature. Do you
exclaim, How good if it had continued!? Only one who does not know God would say
that. Had those relief measures been
prolonged indefinitely they would certainly have veered in the direction of the
world, once the spiritual influence at work in their inception was
removed. It is inevitable.
For there is a
distinction between the Church of Gods building, on the one hand, and on
the other, those valuable social and
charitable by-products that are thrown off by it from time to time through the
faith and vision of its members. The latter, for all their origin in
spiritual vision, possess in themselves a power of independent survival which
the
The
But suppose alongside that church there is a school or
hospital or publishing house, or other religiously founded institution,
originating in the faith of the same church-members. Assuming that the need for its service
continues still to exist ten years hence and has not been met by some
alternative private or State enterprise, then the probability is that that work
will still be operating then at a no less efficient and commendable standard of
service. For given ordinary
administrative know-how, a college or a hospital can continue efficiently on a
purely institutional level without any fresh influx of divine life. The
vision may have gone, but the establishment carries on indefinitely. It has become no less worldly than everything
else that can be maintained apart from the life of God. And every such thing is embraced in the
Lords sentence: Now is the judgment of this world.
Suppose I put to you the question,
What work are you engaged in? You
answer, Medical work. You say that
without any special consciousness other
than pride in the compassionate nature of your calling, and without any sense
of the possible danger of your situation.
But if I tell you that medical science is one more unit of a system that
is Satan-controlled, what then? Assuming
that as a Christian you take me seriously, then you are at once alarmed, and
your reaction may even be to wonder if you had not better quit your profession.
No, do not cease being a doctor! But walk softly, for you are upon territory that is [Page 26] governed by Gods enemy, and
unless you are on the watch you are as liable as anyone else to fall a prey to
his devices.
Or suppose you are engineering, or farming, or
publishing. Take heed, for these too are
things of the world, just as much as a place of entertainment or a haunt of
vice. Unless you tread softly you will be caught up somewhere in Satans
snares and will lose the liberty that is yours as a child of God.
How then, you ask, are we to be delivered from his
entanglements? Many think that to escape
the world is a matter of consecration, of dedicating themselves anew and more
whole-heartedly to the things of God. No, it is a matter of salvation. By nature we are all entrapped in that
Satanic system, and we have no escape apart from the mercy of the Lord. All our consecration is powerless to deliver
us; we are dependent upon His compassion
and upon His redemptive work alone to save us out of it. He is well able to do so, and the means
whereby He does it will be the theme of our next chapter. God can set us upon a rock and keep our feet
from slipping. Helped by Him we may turn our trade or profession to the service of His
will for as long as He desires it.
But let me repeat again that the natural trend of all the things that
are in the world
is towards Satan and away from God. Some
of them may have been set going by men of the Spirit with a goal that is
Godward, but as soon as the restraint of
the divine life is removed from them, they automatically swerve around and take
that other direction. No wonder then
that Satans eyes are ever on the worlds end, and on the prospect that at that
time all the things of the world will revert to him. Even
now, and all the time, they are moving in his direction, and at the end time
they may be expected to have reached their goal. As we touch any one of the units of his
system, this thought should give us pause, lest we be found inadvertently
helping to construct his kingdom.
* * *
[Page 27]
CHAPTER THREE
A WORLD UNDER WATER
Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He that
believeth and
is baptized shall be saved; but he
that disbelieveth
shall be
condemned. (Mark 16: 15, 16.)
To many
of us the form of that second sentence comes as a surprise. Jesus did not say that he who believes and is
saved shall be baptized. No, He put it
the other way round. He who believes and
is baptized, He said, shall be saved. It is only at our peril that we change
something that the Lord has said into something that He did not say. Everything He says matters, and He means
every word of it. But if this is so,
then it must be a fact that only by having faith in Him and being baptized are
we saved. Some will be puzzled at
this. What do you mean? they will
protest. But do not puzzle; and do not
blame me! I did not say that; my Lord
said it. He it was who laid down the order: faith, then baptism, then salvation. We must not reverse it to faith, salvation,
baptism, however much we might prefer it that way. What the Lord said must stand, and it is for
us only to pay heed to it.
(I make no apology for taking these words of Mark 16: 16 as authentic words of Jesus, though I
am aware that there are critics who question them. Once in a country village I came across a
tailor named Chen. He had picked up a
Gospel of Mark, and when he reached this passage
which the critics all affirm does not belong to that Gospel at all, he believed
and trusted in the Lord. There were no
other Christians in the place and so no one to baptize him. What should he do? Then he read verse 20. God [Page 28] Himself would confirm to him His
word: that was sufficient. So in his
simplicity he decided to test out one of the promises in verse 18. Accordingly he visited several neighbours who were
sick. After prayer, he laid hands on
them in Jesus name and then returned home.
In due course and without exception, he told me they recovered. That satisfied him. With his faith confirmed he carried quietly
on with his tailoring, where, when I came across him, he was faithfully witnessing
to his Lord. If he could take Gods word
seriously, must not I?)
So I repeat, He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved.
Do you mean to tell me, you will now exclaim, that you believe in
baptismal regeneration? No indeed I do
not! The Lord did not say, Believe and be baptized and thou shalt be born again;
and since He did not say that, I have no need to believe in that. His words are: He that believeth and is
baptized shall be saved. What
therefore I do believe in is baptismal salvation.
[* NOTE: The word salvation must always be interpreted by the context
in which it is found! A good example is seen in 1
Peter 1: 5. 9,
R.V.]]
So the question naturally arises: What does this statement mean? And
what does it mean when Luke
tells us that, in response to Peters exhortation to save yourselves from this crooked generation, then they that receive his word were baptized?
To answer this we must ask ourselves first what we mean by the
word saved. I am afraid we have a very wrong
idea of salvation. All that most of us
know about salvation is that we shall be saved from hell and into heaven; or
alternatively, that we are saved from our sins to live henceforth a holy
life. But we are wrong. In
Scripture we find that salvation goes further than that. For it is concerned not so much with sin and
hell, or holiness and heaven, but with something else.
We know that every good gift that God offers to us is given to
meet and counter a contrasting evil. He
gives us justification because there is condemnation. He gives us eternal life because there is
death. He offers us forgiveness because
there are sins. He brings us salvation -
because of what? Justification is in
terms of condemnation, heaven is in terms of hell, forgiveness is [Page 29] in relation to sins. Then to what is salvation related? Salvation, we shall see is related to the kosmos, the world.
Satan is the personal enemy of Christ. He works through the flesh of man to produce
this pattern of things on the earth in which we have all become involved; not
one of us is exempt. And this whole
cosmic pattern is peculiarly at odds with God the Father. I think we all know how the three dark
forces, the world, the flesh and the devil, stand in opposition to the three
divine persons. The flesh is ranged
against the Holy Spirit as Paraclete, Satan himself against Christ Jesus as
Lord, and the world against the Father as Creator.
What we are speaking of as the kosmos always stands opposed to God as Father, and Originator. His was the eternal plan in creation hinted at in the words It was very good, a plan towards which He has not
ceased to work. From before the foundation of the world He
had purposed in His heart to have on earth an order of which mankind would be
the pinnacle and which should freely display the character of His Son.
But Satan intervened. Using this
earth as his springboard and man as his tool, he usurped Gods creation to make
of it instead something centred in himself and reflecting his own image. Thus this alien system of things was a direct
challenge to the divine plan.
So today we are confronted by two worlds, two spheres of
authority, having two totally different and opposed characters. For me now it is no mere matter of a future
heaven and hell; it is a question of
these two worlds today, and of whether I belong to an order of things of which
Christ is sovereign Lord, or to an opposed order of things having Satan as its
effective head.*
[* A-millennialists
should pay careful attention to this disbelieved and rejected; but divinely
repeated scriptural truth in both Testaments!]
Thus [this particular future] salvation is not so much a personal
question of sins forgiven or of hell
avoided. It is to be seen rather in
terms of a system from which we come out.
When I am saved, I make my exodus out of one whole world and my entry
into another. I am saved now out of that whole organized realm
which Satan has constructed in defiance of the purpose of God.
[Page 30]
That realm, that all-embracing kosmos, has many strange facets. Sin of
course has its prior place there, and worldly lusts; but no less part of it are
our more estimable human standards and ways of doing things. The human mind, its culture and its
philosophies, all are included, together with all the very best of humanitys
social and political ideologies.
Alongside these too we should doubtless place the worlds religions, and
among them those speckled birds, worldly Christianity and its world Church.
Wherever the power of natural man dominates, there you have an element
in that system which is under the direct inspiration of Satan.
If that is the world, what then is salvation? Salvation means that I escape from that. I go out, I make an exit from that
all-embracing kosmos. I belong no more to Satans pattern of
things. I set my heart on that upon
which Gods heart is set. I take as my
goal His [millennial and] eternal purpose in Christ, and I step
into that and am delivered from this.
He that believeth and
is baptized shall be saved. What
Jesus said He plainly means. I take that
step of faith: I believe and am baptized,
and I come out a saved man. That is salvation. So never
let us regard [Christian] baptism as of small
concern. Tremendous
things hang upon it. It is no less a
question than of two violently opposing worlds and of our translation from the
one into the other.
There is in Scripture another passage which brings baptism and
salvation together to illustrate this theme.
I allude to Chapter 3 of 1
Peter. There the apostle tells us how the
longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few,
that is, eight souls,
were saved
through water (verse 20).
The water, he says, is a figure or likeness, or (as the R.V. margin
reads) an antitype, of something else. Which also in the antitype doth now save you, even baptism.
So baptism, he reasons, saves us now. Clearly Peter believed in our
salvation through baptism as firmly as he believed in Noahs salvation [Page 31] through water. Please remember, I am not
saying regeneration, and I am not saying deliverance from hell or from
sin. Understand clearly that we are
talking here about salvation. It is not just
a question of terms; it concerns our being fundamentally severed from todays
world-system.
To understand better what Peter means we should turn back to
his source in Chapters 6 to 8 of Genesis. The picture is
instructive. There, in Noahs day we find
a wholly corrupt world. Created first by
God, the earth had become corrupted by mans act on that day when he placed
himself under Satan. Sin, once
introduced, had developed and run riot, until even Gods Holy Spirit cried
Enough! Things had reached a state where
they could never be remedied; they could only be judged and removed.
So God commanded Noah to build an
Praise God, they came out!
How? Through the waters. So today when
believers are [scripturally] baptized they go symbolically through water,
just as Noah passed in the ark through the waters of the flood. And this passage through water signifies
their escape from the world, their exodus from the system of things that, with
its prince, is under the divine sentence.
May I say this especially to [Page 32] those who are being baptized today.* Please remember, you are not the only one who is in the
water. As you step down into the water,
a whole world goes down with you. When
you come up, you come up in Christ, in the ark that rides the waves, but your
world stays behind. For you, that world
is submerged, drowned like Noahs, put to death in the death of Christ and
never to be revived. It is by baptism
that you declare this. Lord, I leave my world
behind. Thy
Cross separates me from it for ever!
* The occasion of this address was a baptismal service in
Speaking figuratively, therefore, when you go through the waters
of baptism everything belonging to the former system of things is cut off by
those waters never to return. You alone
emerge. For you it is a passage into
another world, a world where you will find a dove and the fresh leaves of olive
trees. You go out of the world that is
under judgment, into a world that is marked by newness of divine life.
I want to emphasize again that you were not the only one that
went down into the water; your world went down with you. And then it stayed. From the standpoint of your new situation you
will find that the water always covers the world to which you belonged
before. The same flood which saved Noah
and his family drowned the world in which they had once lived their lives - the
very same flood. So the same water on
the one hand puts you and me on salvation ground in Christ, and on the other
hand buries Satans whole system of things.
Not only does your own history as a child of Adam end in your baptism;
your world also ends there. In both
cases it is [typical of] a death and a burial with nothing resurrected. It is an end of everything.
This means that you cannot carry over anything from that
former world into the new one. What
belonged to that former realm of things in Adam stays there and may never be recalled. Formerly perhaps you were an employee in a
shop, or a servant in a house. Or
perhaps you were the master, or the manager or [Page 33] director of a business.
Still today you may be a master, or still a servant, but you will find
that when coming to divine things, when coming to the
You ask me now whether it matters if we are not baptized. My only answer is that the Lord Himself commanded it (Matt. 28: 19). And it was a step from which He
Himself refused to be dissuaded (Matt. 3. 13-15). Peter describes baptism as the appeal, or
testimony, of a good conscience towards
God (verse
21). A testimony is a declaration. So through
this act you say something, you declare where you stand, perhaps without using
words but certainly by what you do.
Passing through the water you
proclaim to the whole universe that you have left your world behind and have
entered into something utterly new.
That is salvation. You take a public stand where God has placed
you in Christ.
This helps to explain why in Scripture we find passages [Page 34] concerning salvation which are hard
to interpret if we relate salvation only to hell or to sin. It illumines, for instance, the apparently
difficult words of Paul and Silas to the jailor at
That is what it means to be saved. You declare that you belong to another system
of things. People point to you and say,
Oh yes, that is a Christian family; they belong to
the Lord! That is the salvation
which the Lord desires for you, that by your public testimony you declare
before God, My world has gone; I am entering into
another. May the Lord give us
that kind of salvation, to find ourselves uprooted entire out of the old,
doomed order of things and firmly planted in the new, divine one.
For, praise God, there is a glorious positive side to all this. We are saved through the resurrection of
Jesus Christ, who, Peter goes on to say, is on the
right hand of God, having gone into heaven,
angels and authorities and powers being made subject
unto him (verse 22).
God has set His Son supreme above everything, and made all authorities
His subjects. A God who can do [Page 35] this is well able to bring me, body
and soul, into that other realm.
So, to recapitulate, we have here two worlds. On the one hand there is the world in Adam, held
fast in bondage to Satan; on the other hand there is the new creation in
Christ, the sphere of activity of Gods Holy Spirit. How do you and I get out of the one sphere,
Adam, into the other sphere, Christ? If
you are uncertain how to answer that question, may I ask you another? How did you get into Adam in the first
place? For the way of entry indicates
the way out. You entered the sphere of
Adam by being born into Adams race. How
then do you get out? Obviously by
death. And how, in turn, do you enter
the sphere of Christ? The answer is the
same: by birth. The way of entry into
the family of God is by new birth to a
living hope, through the
resurrection of Jesus Christ [out] from the dead (1 Pet. 1: 3). Having become united
with Him by the likeness of His death, you are united with Him also by the likeness of His resurrection (
Finally, what occupies the gap? What is the stepping-stone between those two
worlds? Is it not burial? We were buried therefore with him through baptism into death (Rom. 6: 4). From one point of view there is a
grim finality about those words buried into death.
My history in Adam has already been concluded in the death of Christ, so
that when I walk away from that burial I can say I am a finished man.
But I can say more, for, praise God, it is no less true that there is
the other side. Since Christ was raised [out] from the dead, when I come
out of the water and walk away. I may
walk in newness of life (6:
4).
This double outcome of the Cross is implied too in the
preceding words of Romans 6: 3.
Are ye ignorant that all we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
Here in a single sentence the two aspects of baptism are again hinted
at. It is baptism into two things. First, we who believe [Page 36] were baptized into his death. This is a
tremendous fact, but is it all? Not by
any means, for in the second place the same verse says that we were baptized into
Christ Jesus. A baptism into the death of Christ ends my relation with this world,
but a baptism into Christ Jesus as a living Person, Head of a new race, opens
up for me a new world of things altogether.
Going into the water I simply act the whole thing out, affirming
publicly that the judgment of this world became real to me from the day when the lifted up Son of man drew me to Himself.
What a Gospel to preach to the whole creation!
* *
*
[Page 37]
CHAPTER FOUR
CRUCIFIED UNTO ME
SEPARATION to God, separation from the world, is
the first principle of Christian living.
John, in his revelation of Jesus Christ, was shown two irreconcilable extremes,
two worlds that morally were poles apart.
He was first carried away in the Spirit into a wilderness to see
Whether we be a Moses or a Balaam, in order to have Gods view
of things we must be taken like John to a mountain-top. Many cannot see Gods eternal plan, or if
they see it they understand it only as dry-as-dust doctrine, because they are
content to stay on the plains. For
understanding never moves us; only revelation does that. From the wilderness we may see something of
The harlot
Thus it comes about that the wall is the first feature John
mentions in his description of the city itself.
There are gates, making provision for the goings of God, but the wall
takes precedence. For, I repeat,
separation is the first principle of Christian living. If God wants His city with its measurements
and its glory in that day, then we must build that wall in human hearts
now. This means in practice that we must
guard as precious all that is of God and refuse and reject all that is of
Nehemiah in his day succeeded in rebuilding the wall of
For build we certainly must.
Most of us would agree that to the apostle Paul was given a
special revelation of the
In his first epistle John writes: All that is
in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and
the vainglory of life, is not of the Father,
but is of the world (2:
16). In these words that so
clearly reflect the temptation of Eve (Gen. 3: 6) John
defines the things of the world. All
that can be included under lust or primitive desire, all that excites greedy
ambition, and all that arouses in us the pride or glamour of life, all such
things are part of the Satanic system.
Perhaps we scarcely need stay here to consider further the first two of
these, but let us look for a moment at the third. Everything
that stirs pride in us is of the world.
Prominence, wealth, achievement, these the world acclaim. Men are justly proud of success. Yet John labels all that brings this sense of
success as of the world.
Every success therefore that we experience (and I am not
suggesting that we should be failures!) calls in us for an instant, humble
confession of its inherent sinfulness, for whenever we meet success we have in
some degree touched the world-system.
Whenever we sense complacency over some achievement we may know at once
that we have touched the world. We may know, too, that we have brought
ourselves under the judgment of God, for
have we not already agreed that the whole world is under judgment? Now (and let us try to grasp this fact) those
who realize this and confess their need are thereby safeguarded.
But the trouble is, how many of us are aware of it? Even those of us who live our lives in the
seclusion of our own private homes are just as prone to fall a prey to the
pride of life as those who have great public successes. A woman in a humble kitchen [Page 40] can touch the world and its
complacency even while cooking the daily meal or entertaining guests. Every glory that is not glory to God is
vainglory, and it is amazing what paltry successes can produce vainglory. Wherever we meet pride we meet the world, and
there is an immediate leakage in our fellowship with God. Oh that God would open our eyes to see
clearly what the world is! Not only evil
things, but all those things that draw us ever so gently away from God, are
units of that system that is antagonistic to Him. Satisfaction in the achievement of some
legitimate piece of work has the power to come instantly between us and God
Himself. For if it is the pride of life
and not the praise of God that it awakens in us, we can know for certain that
we have touched the world. There is thus
a constant need for us to watch and pray if we are to maintain our communion
with God unsullied.
What then is the way of escape from this snare which the Devil
has set to catch Gods people? First let
me say emphatically that it is not to be found by our running away. Many think we can escape the world by seeking
to abstain from the things of the world.
That is folly. How could we ever
escape the world-system by using what, after all, are little more than worldly
methods? Let me remind you of Jesus
words in Matt. 11:
18, 19. John came neither eating nor drinking,
and they say, He hath a
devil. The
Son of man came eating and drinking, and they
say, Behold, a gluttonous
man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!
Some think that John the Baptist here offers us a recipe for escape from
the world, but neither eating nor drinking is not Christianity. Christ came both eating and drinking, and that
is Christianity! The apostle Paul speaks
of the elements of the world, and he defines these as, handle not,
nor taste, nor touch
(Col. 2: 20, 21).
So abstinence is merely worldly and no more, and what hope is there, by
using worldly elements, of escaping the world system? Yet how many earnest Christians are forsaking
all sorts of worldly pleasures in the hope thereby of [Page 41] being delivered out of the world! You can build yourself a hermits hut in some
remote spot and think to escape the world by retiring there, but the world will
follow you even as far as that. It will
dog your footsteps and find you out no matter where you hide.
Our deliverance from the world begins, not with our giving up
this or that but with our seeing, as with Gods eyes, that it is a world under
sentence of death. In the figure with
which we opened this chapter, Fallen, fallen is
Let us suppose that the municipal authorities of
And we may justly say of the world that it is under a decree
of closure.
A revelation of the Cross of Christ involves for us the
discovery of this fact, that through it everything belonging to the world is
under sentence of death. We still go on
living in the world and using the things of the world, but we can build no
future with them, for the Cross has shattered all our hope in them. The Cross of our Lord Jesus, we may truly
say, has ruined our prospects in the world; we have nothing to live for there.
There is no true way of salvation from the world that does not
start from such a revelation. We need
only try to escape the world by running away from it to discover how much we
love it, and how much it loves us. We
may flee where we will to avoid it, but it will assuredly track us down. But we inevitably lose all interest in the
world, and it loses its grip on us, as soon as it dawns upon us that the world
is doomed. To see that is to be
automatically severed from Satans entire economy.
At the end of his letter to the Galatians Paul states this
very clearly. Far
be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our
Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath
been crucified unto me, and I unto the world
(6: 14). Have you noticed something striking about
this verse? In relation to the world it
speaks of the two aspects of the work of the Cross already hinted at in our
last chapter. I have been crucified unto the world is a statement which we find fairly
easy to fit into our understanding of being crucified with Christ as defined in
such passages as Romans 6. But here it specifically says too that the world has been
crucified to me. When God comes to you and me with the
revelation of the finished work of
Christ, He not only shows us ourselves [Page 43] there on the Cross. He shows us our world there too. If you
and I cannot escape the judgment of the Cross, then neither can the world
escape the judgment of the Cross. Have I
really seen this? That is the
question. When I see it, then I do not
try to repudiate a world I love; I see that the Cross has repudiated it. I do not try to escape a world that clings to
me; I see that by the Cross I have escaped.
Like so much else in the Christian life, the way of deliverance
out of the world comes as a surprise to most of us, for it is so at odds with
all mans natural concepts. Man seeks to
solve the problem of the world by removing himself physically from what he
regards as the danger zone. But physical
separation does not bring about spiritual separation; and the reverse is also
true, that physical contact with the world does not necessitate spiritual
capture by the world. Spiritual bondage to the world is a fruit
of spiritual blindness, and deliverance is the outcome of having our eyes
opened. However close our touch with
the world may be outwardly, we are released from its power when we truly see
its nature. The essential character of the world is Satanic; it is at enmity with
God. To see this is to find deliverance.
Let me ask you: What is your occupation? A merchant?
A doctor? Do not run away from
these callings. Simply write down: Trade
is under the sentence of death. Write:
Medicine is under the sentence of death.
If you do that in truth, life will be changed for you hereafter. In the midst of a world under judgment for
its hostility to God you will know what it is to live as one who truly loves
and fears Him.
* *
*
[Page 44]
CHAPTER
FIVE
DISTINCTIVENESS
MAY I now invite your attention to words
Jesus addressed to the Jews in John 8: 23: Ye are from beneath;
I am from above:
ye are of this
world; I am not of this world.
I wish us to note especially here the use of the words from and of.
The Greek word in each case is ek, which means out of and implies origin. Ek tou kosttios is the expression used: from, or of, or out of, this world. So the sense of the passage is: Your place of origin is beneath; my place of origin is
above. Your place of origin is this
world; my place of origin is not this world. The question is not: Are you a good or a bad
person? but, What is your place of origin?
We do not ask, Is this thing right? or, Is that thing wrong? but, Where
did it originate? It is origin that
determines everything. That which is
born of the flesh is flesh: that which is born
of the Spirit is spirit (John 3: 6).
So when Jesus turns to His disciples He can say, using the
same Greek preposition, If ye were of the world (ek tou kositios), the world would love its
own: but because ye are not of the world,
but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you (John 15: 19).
Here we have the same expression, not of the world, but in addition we have another and
more forceful expression, I chose you out of the world.
In this latter instance there is a double emphasis. As before there is an ek., out of, but in addition to this the verb to
chose, eklego, itself contains another ek. Jesus is saying that His disciples have been chosen out,
out of the world.
There is this double ek in the life of
every believer. Out of that vast
organization called the kosmos, out of all the great mass of [Page 45] individuals belonging to it and involved in it, out, clean
out of all of that, God has called us.
Thence comes the tide Church, ekklesia, Gods called-out ones.
From the midst of the great kosmos God
calls one here and one there; and all whom He calls He calls out. There is no such thing as a call from God
that is not a call out of the world. The church
is ekklesia. In the divine intention there is no klesia which lacks that ek.
If you are a called one, then you are
a called-out one. If God has called you at
all then He has called you to live in spirit outside the world system. Originally we were in that Satanic system
with no way of escape; but we were called, and that calling brought us out. True, that statement is a negative one, but
there is a positive side also to our constitution; for as the people of God we
have two titles, each of them significant according to the way we view
ourselves. If we look back at our past
history we are ekklesia, the Church; but if we look to our present life in God
we are the Body of Christ, the expression on earth of Him who is in
heaven. From the standpoint of Gods
choice of us we are out of the world; but from the standpoint of our new life we are not
of the world at all, but from above. On
the one hand we are a chosen people, called and delivered out of the world
system. On the other we are a regenerate
people, utterly unrelated to that system because by the Spirit we are born from
above. So John sees the holy city coming down out of
heaven from God (Rev. 21: 10). As the people of God, heaven is not only our
destiny but our origin.
This is an amazing thing, that in you and me there is an
element that is essentially other-worldly.
So other-worldly is it indeed that, no matter how this world may
progress, it can never advance one step in likeness to that. The life we have as Gods gift came from
heaven and never was in the world at all.
It has no correspondence with the world but is in perfect correspondence
with heaven; and though we must mingle with the world daily, it will never let
us settle down and feel at home there.
[Page 46]
Let us consider for a moment this divine gift, this life of
Christ indwelling the heart of regenerate man.
The apostle Paul has a great deal to say about this. In an illuminating passage in 1 Corinthians he makes a striking two-fold
statement: (a) that God Himself has
placed us in Christ, and (b) that
Christ has been made unto us wisdom from God: righteousness
and sanctification and redemption (1:
30). Here are examples of the
whole range of human need that God has met in His Son. We have shown elsewhere, how God does not
distribute to us these qualities of righteousness, holiness and so on in
instalments to be taken as required. What He
does is to give us Christ as the inclusive answer to all our needs. He makes His Son to be my righteousness and
my holiness, and everything else I lack, on the ground that He has already
placed me in Christ crucified and risen.
Now I would draw your attention to the last word, redemption.
For redemption has a great deal to do with the world. The Israelites, you will recall, were redeemed out of Egypt, which at that time was
all the world they knew, and which is for us a figure of this world under
Satanic rule. I am Jehovah, God said to
In the light of this, let us now take
Pauls double statement. If (a)
God has placed us in
Christ, then since Christ is altogether out of
the world, we too are altogether out of the world. He is now our sphere, and being in Him, we
are by definition out of that other sphere.
The Father delivered us out of the power of darkness and translated us
into the kingdom of his dear Son; in whom we have our
redemption (Col. 1: 13, 14, A.V.). This transfer was the
subject of our last two chapters.
Furthermore, if also (b) Christ is made unto us
redemption - if [Page 47] that is to say, He is given to us [the freedom] to be that - then that means that within us God has set Christ Himself as the barrier
to resist the world. I have met many
young Christians trying to resist the world, trying in one way or another to
live an un-worldly life. They found it
very hard and, moreover, such effort is of course wholly unnecessary. For by His own essential otherness Christ is our barrier to the world, and we
need nothing more. It is not that we
must do anything in relation to our redemption, any more than the people of
What need therefore have I to try either to resist or to
escape the system of things? If I look
within myself for something with which to meet and overcome the world, I
instantly find everything within me crying out for that world, while if I struggle to detach myself from it I simply become
more and more involved. But let the day
once come when I recognize that within me Christ is my redemption, and that in
Him I am altogether out.
That day will see the end of struggling.
I shall simply tell Him that I can do nothing at all about this world business, but thank Him with all my
heart that He is my Redeemer.
At risk of monotony let me say again: the character of the
world is morally different from the Spirit-imparted life we have received from
God. Fundamentally it is because we
possess this new life of Gods gift that the world hates us, for it has no
hatred for its own kind. This radical
difference leaves us indeed with no way of making the world love us. If ye were of the world, the world would love its own: but
because ye are not of the world, but I chose you
out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.
[Page 48]
When the world meets in us a natural human honesty and decency,
it appreciates this, and is ready to pay us due respect and place in us its
confidence. But as soon as it meets that
in us which is not of ourselves, namely the divine nature of which we have been
made partakers, its hostility is at once aroused. Show the world the fruits of Christianity and
it will applaud; show it Christianity and it will oppose it vigorously. For let the world evolve as it will, it can
never produce one Christian. It can
imitate Christian honesty, Christian courtesy, Christian charity, yes, but to
produce one single Christian it can never aspire. A so-called Christian civilization gains the
recognition and respect of the world.
The world can tolerate that; it can even assimilate and utilize
that. But Christian life - the life of Christ in the Christian
believer: that it hates, and wherever it meets it it
will assuredly oppose it to the death.
Christian civilization is the outcome of an attempt to
reconcile the world and Christ. In Old
Testament figure we see that represented by Moab and Ammon, the fruit
indirectly of Lots involvement and compromise with Sodom; and neither Moab nor
Ammon proved any less hostile to Israel than were the heathen nations.
Christian civilization proves that it can mix with the world, and may even be
found taking the worlds side in a crisis.
There is one thing, however, that is eternally apart from the world and
can never mix with it, and that is the life of Christ. Their natures are mutually antagonistic and
cannot be reconciled. Between the finest
specimen of human nature the world can produce and the most insignificant
Christian there is no common ground, and thus no basis of comparison. For natural goodness is something we had by
natural birth and can by our own resources naturally develop; but spiritual
goodness is, in Johns words, begotten of God (1
John 5: 4).
God has established in the world a
universal Church; and in one place and another He has planted many local
churches. God, I say, has done
this. It would be unreasonable therefore
to expect [Page
49] that His way of
deliverance from the world would be by physical separation from it. But as a consequence many sincere Christians
are greatly perplexed by the problem of absorption. If God plants a local church here, will it, they
ask, one day be reabsorbed by the world?
That in fact presents no problem to the living God. Inasmuch as its origin is not of the world,
there is in the family of God no correspondence whatever with the world and thus
no possibility of the world absorbing it.
This is of course no credit to us, His children. It is not because we earnestly desire to be
heavenly that the Church is heavenly, but because we are born out of heaven.
And if by our heavenly origin, we are absolved from trying to work our
way thither, we are absolved also thereby from studying to keep ourselves
physically clear of this world.
How can the world possibly mix with what is
other-worldly? For all that is of the
world is empty dust, whereas all that is of God has the miraculous quality of
divine life. Some of our brothers in
The prayer of Jesus to His Father which John records in Chapter 17 contains a plea that is most
arresting. Having repeated the statement that the world hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the
world, Jesus
continues: I
pray not that thou shouldest take them from (ek) the world, but
that thou shouldest keep them from (ek)
the evil one (verses
14, 15).
Here we have an important principle which will occupy our next
chapter. Christians have a vital place
in the world. Though [Page 50] saved from the evil one and his
system they have not yet been
removed from his territory. They have a part to play there for which they are
indispensable. Religious people, as we
saw, attempt to overcome the world by getting out of it. As Christians, that is not our attitude at
all. Right here is the
place where we are called to overcome. Created distinct from the world, we accept
with joy the fact that God has placed us in it.
That distinctiveness, our gift from God in Christ, is all the safeguard
we need.
* *
*
[Page 51]
CHAPTER
SIX
LIGHTS IN THE WORLD
WITHOUT fear of challenge Jesus could say: I am the light of the world (John 8: 12).
His claim does not surprise us in the least. What is surprising, however, is that He
should then say to His disciples, and so by implication to us: Ye are the light of the world (Matt. 5: 14). For He does not exhort
us to be that light; He plainly says that we are the worlds light, whether we
bring our illumination out into places where men can see it, or hide it away
from them. The divine life planted in
us, which itself is so utterly foreign to the world all around it, is a
light-source designed to illumine to mankind the worlds true character by
emphasizing through contrast its inherent darkness. Accordingly Jesus goes on: Even so let your light shine before men, that they may see
your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.
From this it is clear that to separate ourselves from the world today,
and thus deprive it of its only light, in no way glorifies God. It merely thwarts His purpose in us and in
mankind.
It is true that, as we saw earlier,
the career of John the Baptist was rather different. He did in fact withdraw from the world to
live austerely in desert places apart, subsisting, we are told on locusts and
wild honey. Men went out there to seek
him, for even there he was a burning and a shining light. Yet we are reminded that he was not
that Light. He came only to bear witness to it. His testimony was the last and greatest of an
old prophetic order, but it was so because it pointed forward to Jesus. Jesus alone was the true
Light which lighteth every man, coming into the
world; and He
certainly was in the world, not outside [Page 52] of it. (John 1: 9, 10.)
Christianity derives from Him. God can
use a John crying in the wilderness, but He never intended His Church to be a
select company living by the principle of abstinence.
Earlier we saw how abstinence - handle not, nor taste, nor touch - was merely one more element in the
world system, and as such was itself suspect (Col. 2: 21). But we must go a stage further than
this, and once again the apostle Paul comes to our help. In Romans 14: 17 he shows how the Christian life is
something removed altogether from controversy about what we do and what we
dont do. The
Righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. It may be good for a moment to direct our
attention to the second of these. For
peace, we find, is a potent element in Gods answer to His Sons prayer that He
would keep us from the evil one (John 17: 15).
In God Himself there is a peace, a profound undistiurbedness
of spirit, which keeps Him untroubled and undistressed in the face of
unspeakable conflict and contradiction. In the world ye have tribulation, Jesus says, but in me ye may
have peace (John 16: 33). How easily we get
troubled as soon as something goes wrong!
But do we ever pause to consider what went wrong with the great purpose
upon which God had set his heart? God,
who is light, had an eternal plan.
Causing light to shine out of darkness He designed this world to be the
arena of that plan. Then Satan, as we
know, stepped in to thwart God, so that men came to love darkness rather than
light. Yet in spite of that setback, the
implications of which we appreciate all too little, God [Page 53] preserves in Himself a quite undisturbed peace. It is that peace of God which, Paul tells us, is to garrison our hearts and
thoughts in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 4: 7)
What does garrison really
mean? It means that my foe has to fight
through the armed guard at the gates before he can reach me. Before I can be touched, the garrison itself
has first to be overcome. So I dare to
be as peaceful as God, for the peace that is keeping God is keeping me. This is something that the world knows
nothing about. Peace I leave
with you; my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. (John 14: 27.)
How utterly men failed to understand Jesus! Whatever He did was wrong in their eyes, for
the light that was in them was darkness.
They even dared to identify the Spirit that was in Him with Beelzebub
the prince of devils. Yet when they
accused Him of gluttony and drunkenness, what was His response? Father, I thank thee! (Matt.
11: 19, 25). He was unmoved,
because in Spirit He abode in the peace of God.
Or recall that last night before His passion. Everything seemed to be going wrong: a friend
going out into the night to betray Him, another drawing a sword in anger,
people going into hiding, or running away naked in their eagerness to
escape. In the midst of it all Jesus
said to those who had come to take Him, I am He,
so peacefully and so quietly that instead of Him being nervous it was they who
trembled and fell backwards. This was an
experience that has been repeated in the martyrs of every age. They could be tortured or burned, but because
they possessed His peace, the onlookers could only wonder at their dignity and
composure. It is no surprise to us
therefore that Paul describes this peaces as beyond understanding.
How striking is the contrast Jesus draws between in the world where we are to have tribulation, and in me where we may have
peace. If God has placed us in the one, to be thronged by its pressures and
claims and needs, He has placed us also in the other, [Page 54] to be held by Him undisturbed amid it all.
Jesus Himself once asked, Who touched me?
The believing touch of one in that
Righteousness and peace and joy: with such things is the
Far from seeking to avoid the world we need to see how
privileged we are to have been placed there by God. As thou didst
send me into the world, even so send I them into
the world. What a statement! The Church is Jesus successor, a divine
settlement planted here right in the midst of Satans territory. It is something that Satan cannot abide, any
more than he could abide Jesus Himself, and yet it is something that he cannot
by any means rid himself of. It is a
colony of heaven, an alien intrusion on his territory, and one against which he
is utterly powerless. Children of
God, Paul calls
us, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom ye are seen as lights in the world (Phil. 2: 15). God has deliberately
placed us in the kosmos to
show it up for what it is. We are to
expose to the divine light, for all men to see them, its God-defying
rebelliousness on the one hand and its hollowness and emptiness on the other.
And our task does not stop there. We are to proclaim to men [Page 55] the good news that, if they will turn
to it, that light of God in the face of Jesus Christ will set them free from the worlds vain emptiness
into the fulness that is His. It is this
two-fold mission of the Church that accounts for Satans hatred. There is nothing that goads him so much as
the Churchs presence in the world.
Nothing would please him more than to see its tell-tale light
removed. The Church is a thorn in the
side of Gods adversary, a constant source of irritation and annoyance to
him. We make a heap of trouble for Satan
simply by being in the
world. So why leave it?
Go ye into all the world and preach
the gospel (Mark 16: 15). This is the
Christians privilege. It is also his
duty. Those who try to opt out of the world
only demonstrate that they are still in some degree in bondage to its ways of
thinking. We who are not of it have no reason at all to try to leave
it, for it is where we should be.
So there is no need for us to give up our secular
employments. Far from it, for they are
our mission-field. In this matter there
are no secular considerations, only spiritual ones. We do not live our lives in separate
compartments, as Christians in the Church and as secular beings the rest of the
time. There is not a thing in our
profession or in our employment that God intends should be dissociated from our
life as His children. Everything we do,
be it in field or highway, in shop, factory, kitchen, hospital or school, has spiritual
value in terms of the
[Page 56]
Of Jesus presence in the world it is written that the darkness
overcame it not (John 1: 5 mg.). Nowhere in Scripture
does it tell us of sin that we are to overcome it, but it distinctly says we are to
overcome the world. In relation to sin Gods word speaks only of deliverance;
it is in relation to the world that it speaks of victory.
We need deliverance from sin, because God never intended we
should have any touch with it; but we do not need, nor should we seek deliverance
from the world, for it is in the purpose of God that we touch it. We are not delivered out of world, but, being
born from above, we have victory over it.
And we have that victory in the same sense, and with the same unfailing
certainty, that light overcame darkness.
This is the victory that hath overcome the world, even our faith.
And who is he that overcometh the world, but he
that beleveth that Jesus is the Son of God? (1 John 5: 4, 5). The key to victory is
always our faith-relationship with the victorious Son. Be of good cheer, He said, I have overcome the world (John 16.
33). Only Jesus could make
such a claim; and He could do so because He could earlier affirm: The prince of the world ... hath nothing
in me (John 14: 30). It was the first time
that anyone on earth had said such a thing.
He said it, and He overcame. And
through His overcoming the prince of the world was cast out and Jesus began to
draw men to Himself.
And because He said it, we now dare say it too. Because of my new birth, because whatsoever is begotten of
God overcometh the world, I can [by His grace and in His strength] be [an overcomer] in the same world as my Lord was in, and in the same sense
as He was I can be utterly apart from it, a lamp set on a lampstand, giving
light to all who enter the house. As he is,
so are we in this world (1 John 4: 17).
The Church glorifies God, not by getting out of the world but by
radiating His light in it. Heaven is not
the place to glorify God; it will be the place to praise Him. The place to glorify Him is here.
* *
*
[Page 57]
CHAPTER SEVEN
DETACHMENT
WE have seen the Church as a thorn in Satans
side, causing him acute discomfort and reducing his freedom of movement. Though in the world, the Church not only
refuses to aid in the worlds construction but persists in pronouncing judgment
upon it. But if this is true, if the
Church is always a source of irritation to the world, then equally the world is
a source of constant grief to the Church.
And because the world is always developing, its power to distress Gods
people is ever expanding; in fact the Church has to meet a force in the world
today with which in the early days she was not confronted at all. Then the children of God met open persecution
in the shape of outward physical assault upon their persons. (Acts 12; 2
Corinthians 11.) They were always coming into collision with
material, tangible things. Now the chief
trouble they meet in the world is more subtle, an intangible force behind its
material things, that is not holy but spiritually evil. The impact of that spiritual force today is far
greater than it was then. And not only
is it greater; there is an element present now that was not there formerly.
In Revelation 9 we read of a development which, to the author of that book,
lay far in the future. The fifth
angel sounded, and I saw a star from heaven
fallen unto the earth: and there was given to
him the key of the pit of the abyss.
And he opened the pit of the abyss; and there went up a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace. ... And out of the smoke came forth locusts upon the earth;
and power was given them, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And it was said unto
them that they [Page 58] should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any
green thing, neither any tree, but only such men as have not the seal of God on their
foreheads (verses 1-4). This is figurative
language, but the star falling from heaven obviously refers to Satan, and we
know that the bottomless pit is his domain - his storehouse, we might say. Thus it appears that the end-time is to be
marked by a special release of his forces, and men will find themselves up
against a spiritual power with which they had not before to contend.
Surely this accords with conditions in our day. While it is true that sin and violence will
be greater than ever at the close of this age, it is apparent from Gods Word
that it is not specifically these with which the Church will have to grapple
then, but with the spiritual appeal of far more every-day things. As it came to pass in the days of
Noah, even so shall it be also in the days of
the Son of man. They ate, they drank, they married, they were given
in marriage, until the day that Noah entered
into the ark, and the flood came and destroyed
them all. Likewise even as it came to pass in
the days of Lot; they ate, they drank, they bought,
they sold, they planted,
they builded; but in the day that Lot went out
from
[Page 59]
And yet Scripture warns us that the
Now here is the point that needs special emphasis. This condition of things is abnormal. The undue attention to eating and drinking,
whether at the extremes of subsistence or luxury, that characterizes so many
Christians these days is far from normal; it is supernatural. For it is not just a question of food and
drink that we are meeting here; we are meeting demons. Satan conceived and now controls the world
order, and is prepared to use demonic power through the things of the world to
lure us into it. The present state of
affairs cannot be accounted for apart from this. Oh that the children of God might awaken to
this fact! In past days Gods saints met
all sorts of difficulties; yet, in the midst of pressure, they could look up
and trust God. In the pressures of
today, however, they are so confused and bewildered that they seem unable to
trust Him. Oh, let us realize the
Satanic origin of all this pressure and confusion!
The same is true in matrimonial
affairs. Never have we met so many
problems in this field as today. There
is confusion abroad as young people break with old traditions but lack the
guidance of any new ones to replace them.
This fact is not to be accounted for naturally, but supernaturally. Marrying and giving in marriage are wholesome
and normal in any age, but today there is an element breaking into these
things-‑ that is unnatural.
So it is with planting and building, and so too with buying
and selling. All these things can be
perfectly legitimate and beneficial, but today the power behind them presses
upon men until [Page 60] they are bewildered and lose their balance. The evil force that energizes the world
system has precipitated a condition today where we see two extremes; the one
extreme of utter inability to make ends meet, and the other extreme of unusual
opportunity to amass wealth. On the one
hand many Christians find themselves in unprecedented economic difficulties: on
the other hand many are faced with no less unprecedented opportunities of
enriching themselves. Both of these
conditions are abnormal.
Enter any home these days and listen in on the
conversation. You will hear remarks such
as these: Last week I bought such-and-such goods at
such-and-such a figure, and I have thereby saved so much. Happily I purchased
that a year ago, otherwise I would have lost badly. If you want to
sell, sell now while the market is good. Have you not noticed the way people are
rushing hither and thither, feverishly making business deals? Doctors are stocking up with flour,
cloth-manufacturers are selling paper, men and women who have never touched such
things before are being swept off their feet by the current of
speculation. They are caught up in a
marketing maelstrom that is whirling them madly around. Do you not realize that this state of affairs
is not natural? Do you not see that
there is a power here which is captivating men?
People are not acting sanely; they are beside themselves. Todays buying and selling spree is not just
a question of making a little money - or losing it. It is a question of touching a Satanic
system. We are living in the end-time, a
time when a special power has been let loose which is driving men on, whether
they will or no.
So the question today is not so much
one of sinfulness as of worldliness. Who
would dare to say you do wrong to eat and drink? Who would dare to disapprove of marrying and
giving in marriage? Who would question
your right to buy and sell? These things
are not in themselves wrong; the wrong lies in the spiritual force behind them,
which, through their medium, presses relentlessly upon us. Oh that we might awake to the [Page 61] fact that, whereas these things are
so common and so simple, they are
yet being used by Satan to ensnare Gods children into the great net of his
world order.
Take heed to
yourselves, lest haply your hearts be
overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness,
and cares of this life, and
that day come on you suddenly as a snare (Luke
21: 34).
Note the term life in Jesus
words. In the Greek New Testament three
words are commonly used for life: zoe, spiritual life;
psuche, psychological
life; and bios, biological life.
The last is the word used here, appearing in its adjectival form, biotikos, of this life.
The Lord is warning us to beware lest we be unduly pressed with this
lifes cares, that is to day, with anxieties regarding quite ordinary matters
such as food and dress which belong to our present existence on the earth. It was over just such a simple thing that
Adam and Eve fell, and it will be due to just such simple matters that some
Christians may overlook the heavenward call of God. For it is always a matter of where the heart
is. We are exhorted not to let our
hearts be overcharged or laden with these things to our loss. That
is to say, we are not to carry a burden regarding them that would weigh us
down. We are to be in a true sense
detached in spirit from our goods in the house or in the field (Luke 17: 31).
For let us realize who we are!
We are the Church, the light of the world shining amid the
darkness. As such let us live our lives
down here.
There was a time when the Church
rejected the worlds ways. Now she not
only uses them; she abuses them. Of
course we must use the world, because we need it; but let us not want it, let
us not desire it. So Jesus continues, Watch ye at every season, making
supplication, that ye may prevail to escape all
these things that shall come to pass and to stand (literally be set) before the Son of man
(Luke 21: 36). Would God urge us to watch and pray were
there not a spiritual force to guard against?
We dare not take our destiny as a matter of course, but must be
constantly [Page 62] on the alert that we be truly
disentangled in spirit from the elements of this world. There are things of the world that are
essential to our very existence. To be
concerned with them is legitimate, but to be weighed down by them is
illegitimate and may cause us to forfeit Gods best.
The book of Revelation suggests that Satan will set up his kingdom of antichrist in the political
world (Ch. 13), in the religious world (
Are we sensitive to
For we are in a perilous realm when we touch commerce. If by reason of our calling we engage in pure
trade, and if we do so [Page 63] in fear and trembling, we may with Gods help escape the snare of the
Devil. But if`we
are over-confident, then there is no hope of escape from the unscrupulous
self-seeking that such business engenders.
So the problem that confronts us these days is not how to refrain from
buying and selling, from eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage;
the problem now is to avoid the power behind these things, for we dare not let
that power triumph over us.
What, then, is the secret of holding our material things in
the will of God? Surely it is to hold
them for God, that is to say, to know we are not
hoarding useless valuables, or a massing vast bank deposits, but laying up
treasures to His account. You and I must
be perfectly willing to part with anything at any moment. It matters not whether I leave two thousand
dollars or merely two. What matters is
whether I can leave whatever I have without a twinge of regret.
I am not suggesting by this that we must try to dispose of
everything; that is not the point. The
point is that as Gods children you and I may not accumulate things for
ourselves. If I keep something it is
because God has spoke to my heart; if I part with it, it is for the same
reason. I hold myself in the will of
God and am not afraid to give if God asks me to give. I keep nothing because I love it, but let it go
without regret when the call comes to leave it behind. That is what it means to be detached, free,
separated to God.
* *
*
[Page 64]
CHAPTER EIGHT
MUTUAL REFRESHING
IN Johns Gospel there is recorded an
event which only he has preserved for us.
It is an event full of divine meaning and one which greatly helps to
illumine for us this problem of living in the world. I refer to the incident in Chapter 13 in which our Lord Jesus girds Himself
with a towel, and taking a basin, washes His disciples feet. This action of Jesus has lessons to teach us
which I do not propose to go into fully here.
Instead I want us to look in particular at His command which follows
it. Ye also ought to wash one anothers
feet. For
I have given you an example, that ye should also
do as I have done to you. ... If ye know these
things, blessed are ye if ye do them (verses 14-17). What is this mutual
feet-washing? What does it mean that I
should wash my brothers feet and that my feet should be washed by my brother?
The aspect of truth specially emphasized here is
refreshment. As we shall shortly see, it
is something very dear to the Lord that we as His children should learn to minister
refreshment to our brethren, and that they in turn should be a means of
refreshment to our spirits.
Let me say at once that this passage does not concern
sins. Whether I go barefoot or wearing
sandals, or even shoes, the dust that gathers on my feet is something
inevitable. I cannot avoid it. But for me to have a fall, and having fallen
to roll in the dust so that it collects on my body and on my clothes - that is
not inevitable; it is altogether wrong!
I have to walk from one place to another, but it is quite unnecessary
for me to roll along [Page 65] the street in order to get there. I can do so without floundering in the mud!
Equally in the Christian life, to stumble and fall and then to
flounder in the dust is sin, certainly.
It calls for repentance and it needs Gods forgiveness. For it is not necessary for me to walk with
the Lord like that, hiding behind the excuse that I
must fall once in a while; it is inevitable! That, we all agree, is wrong.
But the point about the dust on our feet is this, that in
walking through the world, no matter who we are or how careful we may be, it is
inevitable that our feet will collect something. Of course if we do not touch the earth at
all, we certainly pick up nothing, but to achieve this we should have to be
carried around. If we do touch the
ground - and who seriously expects not to? - we are certain to pick up what is
there. Even our Lord Jesus rebuked His
host with the words: Thou gavest me no water for my feet (Luke 7:
44). So please remember
that the mutual washing in John 13
is not concerned with sins committed, for which there is always forgiveness
through the Blood, but from which anyway God intends that we should be
delivered. No, it is concerned rather
with our daily walk through the world, during which it is unavoidable that we
shall contract something. Ye are clean, Jesus says. The precious Blood sees to that. He that is bathed needeth not ... and as far as sin is concerned
the sentence might end there. But move
about in Satans kingdom and something certainly clings to us. Like a film upon us it comes between us and
our Lord. This is inescapable, simply
because we are touching the worlds things all the time, its business and its
pleasures, its corrupt scale of values and its whole ungodly outlook. Hence the words with which Jesus concludes:
save to
wash his feet.
So let us come now to the practical
outworking of this. Some of you brothers
and sisters in Christ have to go our to work in offices or shops for, say,
seven or eight hours a day. It is not
wrong that you do so. It is not sin to
work in a shop or a factory. [Page 66] But when you come home from your place of employment, do you not find
yourself tired and dispirited and out of tune with things? You meet a brother, but you cannot. slip
easily and directly into speaking with him of divine things. It is as though
there were a coating of something contaminating you. I repeat: that is not necessarily sin at all;
it is just that your contact with the world has deposited upon you that film of
tarnish. You cannot help feeling it, for
there seems to be an inability to rise up to the Lord at once. The luminous touch which you had with Him in
the morning seems to have been darkened; its freshness has gone from you. We all know that experience.
Or again, some of our sisters have to
attend to domestic duties. Let us
suppose a young mother is preparing dinner and has something cooking on the
stove. All at once the baby cries, the
door bell rings, the milk boils over -
everything comes upon her together in a rush.
She runs to one and misses the other!
After everything is eventually settled she sits down, and it seems as if
she needs a power to lift her up to God again.
She is conscious of something there - not sin, but as it were a deposit
of dust over everything. It clings like
a film, coming between her and her Lord, and she feels tarnished, soiled. There is not that clear way which takes her
through to God at once. This I think illustrates
for us the need of feet-washing.
Many a time we are tired and jaded by our secular duties. When we get down to pray, we find we have to
wait for a while. It seems to take us
ten or twenty minutes to come back to that place where we can really get
through to God. Or if we sit down to
read the Word, we find it requires a determined effort to restore again that
openness to His speaking. But how good
it is if on the road home we meet a brother with an over-flowing heart, fresh
from communion with God! Without meaning
to do anything he just spontaneously shakes our hand and says, Brother, praise the Lord! He may not know it, but somehow it is as if
he has come with a duster and wiped everything [Page 67] clean. Immediately we feel that our touch with God
has been restored.
Sometimes you may come into a prayer meeting with a heavy
spirit, through the effect of your work during the day. Someone may pray, and you still feel the
same; and another prays, and there is no difference. But then another brother or sister prays, and
somehow you immediately feel the lifting power.
You are refreshed; your feet have been washed. What, then, does washing mean? It means to restore to the original
freshness. It means to bring things back
to a point of such clearness that it is once again as though they came out of
Gods, immediate presence, new from His hand.
I do not know how many times I
personally have felt low like that, when it was not exactly sin that was troubling,
but that feeling of a coating of the worlds dust; and then I have met a
brother or a sister, one who may have known nothing at all of my condition, but
who has just passed on a remark that has brightened everything. When this happens you simply feel all the
darkness gone, the film swept away.
Praise God, you are refreshed and put back at once into the condition
where you can directly enjoy touch with Him again. That is feet-washing - to refresh my brethren
in Christ; to bring a brother again to the place where it is as though he had
just come out from the very presence of God.
It is this ministry to one another that the Lord desires to see among
His children.
If we are walking with God there is
not a day when we may not, if we wish, be a refreshment to our brethren. This
is one of the greatest ministries. It
may be no more than a handshake. It may
be a word of encouragement almost casually spoken. It may be just the light of heaven on our
faces. But if the Lord has got His way
with us and we are in the state of having no cloud between ourselves and Him,
we shall find that we are quietly being used.
We may not know it, for it is better not to seek to know it - indeed it
may be better never to know it. But whether [Page 68] we know it or not; we are constantly being used to refresh our
brother. When he is low and in darkness,
when he has a burden on his heart or a film before his eyes, when he has been
tarnished and stained, then to us he will come.
He may not stay long, perhaps only for a few minutes. Seek for that ministry. Find grace from God
to help him. Often we think it would be
good if we could give long sermons that command a wide hearing, but few have
that gift, and many are not reached by those few who have. To refresh the hearts of the saints is the
kind of ministry which everyone can fulfil and which can reach everywhere. In the valuation of God it is without price.
But to serve others in this way we must fulfil the
conditions. If we are really [interested in His plans, and willing
and wanting to be] going on with the Lord there is of
course no question that we shall be used, for there are no limitations with
Him. If we ourselves are untarnished,
with hearts brimming with His joy and peace, there is bound to be an overflow. So the simple question I put to you is this:
Is there any point of controversy between you and God? I refer of course to real, known issues. If there is nothing special, then there is no
need for you to search around to find something; the Lord Himself will always
discover it. When He wants to bring to light something you
are overlooking, He will always point His finger there, and you will know
it. There is no need for you to turn
your eyes within and by checking up and analysing every feeling to try to dig
it out. Just praise Him! It is the Lords business, not yours, to
shine into your heart and show you when you are astray from Him.
But one thing is certain.
If you do have a controversy with God, you can only tarnish others. You can never wash their feet. When they are low, you will bring them
lower. When they feel heavy, you will
come to them and make them heavier still.
Instead of refreshing them and restoring to them the newness that comes
out from God, you can only plunge them into deeper gloom. To be at odds with God is the sure way to be
a drain [Page
69] upon the life of
His Church, whereas the greatest manifestation of power is, I believe, to be
able constantly to refresh others. It is
a priceless thing, that touch of heaven that lifts, cleanses, renews.
Ye also ought to wash one anothers
feet. Of all His commandments to His disciples this
is - and I use the expression in its purest sense - the most dramatic. To impress on them its importance He Himself acted
it out before them. It was an expression
of His love for his own which were in the world (verse 1). He set Himself to show
His disciples what He meant by ministry.
It is not platform work. It is
serving one another with a basin and a towel.
There will always be a need of restoring people who have fallen, of
bringing back to repentance the weak ones who have sinned; but the greatest
need of the saints today is of refreshment, by which I mean recalling them
afresh to what is original and of God. That is power.
Jesus Himself came forth from God (verse
3) to do
this. I do not know how it strikes you,
but I think there is no greater power for God than to be fresh from Him before
the world. Do you not find it to be the
greatest manifestation of the power of divine life? In a world-system darkened with the smoke of
the pit, how we rejoice to meet saints who are fresh with the clean air of
heaven. Such freshness brings anew to
you and me the divine breath of life.
I thank the Lord that in my younger
days I had the great privilege of knowing one of the rarest of saints. I knew her for many years, and found her to
have many spiritual qualities; but I think the thing that impressed me above
them all was the sense of God. You could
not for long sit in her presence, or even walk into her room and have a
hand-shake, without feeling a sense of God coming over you. You did not know why, but you felt it. I was not the only one who felt this. Everyone who had touch with her gave the same
testimony. I have to confess that in
those days many a time I was feeling downhearted, and it seemed as though
everything had gone wrong. I walked into
her room, [Page
70] and immediately I felt rebuked.
Immediately I felt I was face to face with God, I was refreshed.
Why should this thing happen, this immediate restoration? Surely not because it is just the ministry of
a privileged few. The Lord would like
every single one of us to be like that, to impart that power to brighten our
brothers and sisters when they have become tarnished. Please remember - dare I say this? - that
sometimes being tarnished does more to hurt the impact of the Christians life
upon the world than do his actual, conscious sins. Once in a while we may sin, any of us, but
because we are sensitive to that, we know at once that we have done so and will
seek and find forgiveness. But many a
time we have been tarnished for hours with the worlds tarnish, and because it
is not actual sin we remain unconcerned.
Then it is that our impact for God upon the world becomes blunted. How good it is at such a time to have around
a brother or sister through whom we are lifted once more to a renewed communion
with God!
What, then, are the rules?
They are two. First, as we have
seen, there must be no known discord between me and my Lord that is not at once
cleared up; for if there is, that effectively puts me out of this ministry altogether. Whatever the matter be, it is to be settled at once or I am useless. Far from being an asset to the
Secondly - and to avoid misunderstanding this needs stating
plainly: please remember that this refreshing is mutual. Wash one anothers feet, Jesus said. The refresher must expect also to be
refreshed by others. Many a time the Lord may use you, but equally, many a time
He may use someone else to refresh you.
There exist no chosen few set apart for a spiritual task as [Page 71] refreshers,
just as none of us are absolved from walking through this world and needing
therefore to be refreshed. As with
Peter, no single one of us is entitled to say of himself: I have gone beyond that stage. I am now in such touch with
God that I am above tarnish, and can pray or preach without the need of such a
ministry. Thou shalt never wash my feet!'
No superior class of brothers exists in the Church that has no
need to be refreshed. It is something
every servant of God depends on. Employed
in a workshop or a kitchen all day, you may well need brightening up; but some
of us have been working all day in churches, and we too need to be
brightened! Our need of restoration is
often just as great, though we may well be lulled into overlooking that
fact. Whether we work in any obviously
secular sphere or are engaged in so-called spiritual things, the world is all
around us, closing in. Ever and anon
therefore we need the help of some brother or sister to lift us again to that
fresh touch of God, that renewal of divine power.
Thus the principle of the Body is, quite simply, refreshing
and being refreshed. The more we go on
with the Lord the more we need the brethren.
For in this ministry not one of us is insignificant, and not one of us
ever reaches the point where he has no need to be ministered to by
another. My prayer for myself is that
God may once in a while use me to refresh someone elses spirit when it is
jaded, and that likewise. He may once in
a while use someone else to touch my flagging spirit and refresh me. If by that brother the tarnish of the world
is wiped off me, so that coming weary I go away renewed, then his has been a
ministry of Christ to me.
What I have thus sought to describe in simple terms amounts to
a united front against the world. This
is no small thing. If we will believe it
enough to practise it, it possesses, I am convinced, the power to make Satans
mightiest strongholds tremble. In Jesus
words: If ye know these things, blessed
are ye if ye do them.
* *
*
[Page 72]
CHAPTER NINE
MY LAWS IN THEIR HEARTS
IN
earlier chapters we have been building up a picture of this world, not just as
a location, nor as a race of people, nor indeed as anything merely material,
but rather as a spiritual system at the head of which is Gods enemy. The world is Satans masterpiece, and we have
thought of him as directing all his strength and ingenuity into causing it to
flourish. To what end? Surely to capture mens allegiance and draw them
to himself. He has one object: to
establish his own dominion in human hearts worldwide. Even though he must be aware that that
dominion may last only briefly, that, without question, is his goal. And as the end of the age approaches and his
efforts increase, so does the distress of Gods people intensify. For as aliens and sojourners their position,
in the world and yet not of it, is an uncomfortable one. They would fain seek relief from the
spiritual tension in physical distance.
How good it would be to escape from this world completely and be for
ever with the Lord!
But clearly that is not His will. As we saw, He prayed the Father not to take
His own out of the world but to preserve them there from the evil one. And Paul takes a similar line. Having in a particular instance exhorted the
Corinthian believers not to have fellowship with a certain class of sinner, he
immediately takes steps to guard against possible misunderstanding. They are not to isolate themselves. They are not to sever connections with all
sinners in the world, nor even with those in the category described, for to do
so would involve their leaving the world altogether. I wrote unto you in my epistle to have no company [Page 73] with fornicators; not
altogether (i.e. not at all meaning) with the fornicators of this
world, or with the
covetous and extortioners, or with idolators; for then must ye needs go out of the world
(1 Cor. 5: 9, 10).
It is clear from Pauls words therefore that we may, and indeed
must, associated with the world to a certain extent, for it is not the world
that God so loved? But here is the
question: To what extent? How far may we
go? All of us agree that we are obliged
at some points to touch the things of the world. But presumably there is a limit
somewhere. Keep within that limit and we
are safe; exceed it and we risk becoming implicated by Satan.
I do not think we can exaggerate this problem, for it is an
acute one and the dangers are real. If
the time should come when you are acutely ill and in great pain, and the doctor
should prescribe for you heroin or morphine, you would instantly be alive to
the danger of developing a craving for the drug. You would obey him and take the treatment,
but you would take it fearfully and prayerfully, for you know there is a power
in it, and you know you are liable to come under that power. This would be especially so if the treatment
had to be prolonged.
Every time you and I touch the world
through the things of the world - and we must do so repeatedly - we should feel
much as we would feel about taking morphine, for there are demons at the back
of everything that belongs to the world.
Just as I may, if seriously ill, be prescribed opium as a treatment, so
also, because I am still in the world, I have to do business with the world,
follow some trade or employment, earn my livelihood. But how much treatment with dangerous drugs I
can safely take without falling a prey to the opium-craving I do not know; and
how many things I can buy, or how much money I can make, or how close can be my
business or professional associations, without my becoming hooked, I likewise
do not know. All I know is that there is
a Satanic power behind every worldly thing.
How vital therefore for every Christian to have a clear [Page 74] revelation of the spirit of the world
in order to appreciate how real is the danger to which he is continually
exposed!
Perhaps you think I am going too far. Perhaps you say: Oh yes, that may be a good
sermon-illustration, but I find it hard not to feel you are overstating the
case. But when you see, then you will say of the world, as you
say of opium, that there is a sinister power behind it, a power designed to
seduce and to captivate men. Those whose
eyes have been really opened to this worlds true character find they must
touch everything in it with fear and trembling, looking continually to the
Lord. They know that at any moment they
are liable to be caught in Satans entanglements. Just as the drug which, in the first
instance, is welcomed to relieve sickness may ultimately become itself a cause
of sickness, so equally the things of the world which we can legitimately use
under the Lords authority may, if we are heedless, become a cause of our
downfall. Only fools can be careless in
circumstances like these.
No wonder we look with envy upon John the Baptist! How easy, we feel, if like him we could
simply withdraw into a safe place apart!
But we are not like him. Our Lord
had sent us into the world in His own footsteps, both eating and drinking.
Since God so loved, His command to us is to go into all the
world and
proclaim His good news; and surely that all includes the folk with whom we
must rub shoulders daily!
So a serious problem faces us here. As we have said, presumably there must be a
limit. Presumably God has drawn
somewhere a line of demarcation. Stay
within the bounds of that line and we will be safe; cross it and grave danger
threatens. But where does it lie? We have to eat and drink, to marry and bring
up children, to trade and to toil. How
do we do so and yet remain uncontaminated?
How do we mingle freely with the men and women whom God so loved as to
give His Son for them, and still keep ourselves unspotted from the world?
If our Lord had limited our buying and selling to so much a [Page 75] month, how simple that would be! The rules would be plain for any to
follow. All who spent more than a
certain amount per month would be worldly Christians, and all who spent less
than that amount would be unworldly.
But since our Lord has stipulated no figure, we are cast on
Him unceasingly. For what? I think the answer is very wonderful. Not to be tied by the rules, but that we may
remain all the time within bounds of another kind: the bounds of His life. If our Lord had given us a set of rules and
regulations to observe, then we could take great care to abide by these. In fact however our task is something far
more simple and straightforward, namely, to abide in the Lord Himself. Then we could keep the law. Now we need only keep in fellowship with
Him. And the joy of it is that, provided
we live in close touch with God, His Holy Spirit within our hearts will always
tell us when we reach the limit!
We spoke earlier of the kingdom of antichrist, soon to he
revealed. John, in his epistle, writing
to his little children about the world and the things of the world (1 John 2:
15) goes on to warn them: As ye heard that antichrist cometh,
even now have there arisen many antichrists (verse 18). Faced with these, and
with that even more insidious spirit of the antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it cometh; and now it is in the world already (4: 3), what are they to do? How are they in their simplicity to know what
is true and what is false? How are they
possibly to tell which ground is treacherous to walk upon and which is safe?
The answer John gives them is so
simple that today we are afraid to believe it.
Ye have an anointing from the Holy One, and ye know all things. ... The
anointing which ye received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that anyone teach you: but as his anointing teacheth you concerning all things,
and is true, and is no
lie, and even as it taught you, ye abide in him (2:
20, 27). This is certainly an allusion to the Spirit of
truth, who Jesus promised His [obedient] disciples, would both convict the world and guide them into all the truth.
(John 16: 8,
13)
[Page 76]
In any given instance there must be safe
limits known to God beyond which we should not go. They are not marked out on the ground for us
to see, but one thing is certain: He who is the Comforter will surely know
them, even if perhaps Satan knows them too.
Can we not trust Him? If at some point
we are about to overstep them, can we not depend on Him at once to make us
inwardly aware of the fact?
In 1 Corinthians 7 the apostle Paul offers us some further guidance on the same
theme. This I say, brethren, the time is shortened, that
henceforth both those that have wives may be as though they had none; and those that weep, as though
they wept not; and those that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and
those that buy, as though they possessed not;
and those that use the world, as not abusing it; for the
fashion of this world passeth away.
I would have you to be free from cares (verses 29-32).
Here several matters are in turn touched upon, but the governing factor
in them all is clearly this, that the time is shortened, or, as some translators render it, straitened.
We are living, the apostle says, in days of peculiar pressure, and the
principle that must guide us for such days is this, that they who have ... be as not
having.
Does Paul, we wonder, contradict himself? In Ephesians s he enjoins husbands to love
their wives with as perfect a love as that with which Christ loved the Church -
no less. Yet here he tells them, to live
as though not having wives at all! Does
he honestly, we exclaim in dismay, expect us at one and the same time to
reconcile such complete opposites?
Here at once it must be said that such a paradoxical life is a
life that none but Christians can live.
Perhaps the expression as not having affords us a clue. It reveals that the matter is an inner
matter, a question of the hearts loyalty.
In Christ there is an inner liberation to God, not merely an outward
change of conduct. They have, and
having, they rejoice in Ephesians 5; but they are not bound by what they possess, so that having not, [Page 77] they equally rejoice in 1 Corinthians 7. Notwithstanding all
they have they are so truly delivered in spirit from the worlds possessiveness that
they can live as not having.
The natural man lives at one extreme
or the other - either having, and being wholly taken up with what he has, or if
he is religious, putting away what he has so that he no longer has it, and so
being no longer concerned with it at all.
But the Christian way is utterly different from the natural way. The Christian way to solve the problem is not
by removing the thing, but by delivering the heart from the grip of that
thing. The wife is not removed, nor the
affection for the wife, but both wife and husband are freed from the
overweening dominance of that affection.
So, too, the trouble that caused weeping is not removed, but the life is
no longer controlled by that trouble.
The cause of joy still remains, but there is an inner check against vain
abandon to the thing that caused it.
Buying and selling go on as before, but an inward deliverance has
loosened the personal grip upon them. We
have them all, but we have them as not having.
We talk sometimes about our desire to
maintain, like John, the testimony of Jesus in the earth. Let us remember that that testimony is based,
not on what we can say about this or that, but on what Satan can say about us.
God has put us in the world, and often he locates us in some specially
difficult places, where we are tempted to feel that worldlings have a much
easier time than do Christians. That is
because Christians are indeed aliens, living here in an element that is not
naturally theirs. A swimmer may dive
deep into the sea, but without special clothing and an air-line to the
atmosphere that is his own, he cannot stay there. The pressure is too great and he must breathe
the air of the world to which he belongs.
He stays deep as long as there is a task to do and as long as he is
supplied with the power to overcome the element around him, but he does not
belong to the element and it has no part in him.
[Page 78]
Thus it is that the problem of our touch with the world is not
solved by any change of outward action.
Some think that, at a time like this in which we are living, it is a sign
of spirituality to make no provision for the coming days. That is not spirituality, it is folly. What we may do with the provision we make is
a question we shall consider in our final chapter, but Gods word makes it
plain that we are to use the world. We
are to eat and drink, to trade merchandise and grow crops, to rejoice, yes and
if need be to weep, and yet not to use any of these things to the full. We have learned what is at stake in all our
relationships with the world. It is no
wonder therefore that we have learned also to tread softly, heedful all the
while of the Comforters gentle constraining.
Jesus came from above.
He could claim without fear of challenge: The prince of this world
cometh and hath nothing in me. The line of demarcation
was drawn, not on the ground at His feet but in His own heart. But just as
truly, everything in this world that is from above is as safe as He is. God is at the head of the air-line working
the pumps, as it were. A life that
belongs above is being sustained and provided for down here by Him.
Thus it comes about that if a thing is spiritual and is of God, we need not worry about it nor
contend for its preservation. My kingdom is
not of this world, else would my servants fight. They have no need to.
God does not worry about us, simply because He has no anxiety
about His Holy Spirit. There is a sense
in which poor-quality spiritual life is impossible, because spiritual life is
Gods life; and just as truly, spiritual life can only be overwhelmed if God
Himself can be overwhelmed. God does not
argue about this fact. He is content to
leave it to the Comforter to make it real in us. Ye are of God, my little children, and have overcome them; because greater is he that is in you than he that is in the
world (1 John 4: 4).
Again, the same verse which tells us that the whole world lies
[Page 79] in the lap of the evil one - yes, the
very same verse! - assures us once more that we are of
God (1 John 5: 19). We are of God! Could we possibly discover a more blessed
fact to balance against that other ugly fact and to outweigh it? We who believe on Jesus name were born,
not of blood, nor of the
will of the flesh, nor of the will of man,
but of God (John 1:
13). And praise Him,
because we are begotten of God, the evil one cannot touch us. (1 John 5: 18.)
Put very simply, Satans power in the world is
everywhere. Yet wherever men and women
walk in the Spirit, sensitive to the anointing they have from God, that power
of his just evaporates. There is a line
drawn by God, a boundary where by virtue of His own very presence Satans writ
does not run. Let God but occupy all the
space Himself, and what room is left for the evil one?
Are we thus utterly for God?
Can Satan testify of you and me: I cannot
entrap that man!?
* *
*
[Page 80]
CHAPTER TEN
THE POWERS OF THE AGE TO COME
WHAT
does the writer to the Hebrews
mean when he says of Christians that they have tasted ... the powers of the age to come (Heb. 6: 5)? We would all readily agree that there is a splendid future age to which we
look forward. In it the kingdom that
is now in the midst of us in terms of the mighty acts of the Spirit of God (Matt. 12: 28) will then
become universally visible and unchallenged. The
kingdom of the world will [then] have become the kingdom
of our God and of His Christ (Rev. 11: 15). But what, we may wonder, are these powers that now we only taste but cannot as
yet feast upon? Clearly they are to be
received and enjoyed, for the word taste implies not merely a doctrine to be
thought about and analysed, but something subjectively experienced and made our
own. These powers are the preliminaries
of a feast of which there is much more to follow but of which we already eat
just a little.
We could list a number of such things to which Scripture looks
forward. There is a [future] salvation [of souls] to be revealed in the last time (1 Pet. 1: 5). There is a fresh aspect of eternal life in the age to come (Luke 18: 30).
There is a rest remaining to the people of God (Heb.
4. 9). There will be the raising and renewal of our
mortal bodies [and disembodied
souls] (Rom. 8: 23; 1 Cor. 15: 14; [Acts 2: 27;
Rev. 6: 9, 11]). There will be a day when
everything that stumbles men will be removed (Jer. 31:
9; Isa. 57:
14; 62: 10). There
will be a time when all shall know the Lord from the least to the greatest (Jer. 31: 34; Heb. 8: 11) and indeed when the earth shall be filled with
the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Isa. 11: 9; Hab. 2: 14). Of [Page 81] all these things we have now a real foretaste in Christ, but
we do not yet see them in completeness.
More directly related to our present
study are the following considerations.
The Epistle to the Hebrews
applies to our Lord Jesus the words
from Psalm
8: Thou didst put all things in subjection under
his feet, and
then goes on quite frankly to express what experience generally must compel us
to admit, namely, that we see not yet all
things subjected to him (Heb. 2: 8).
But alongside these two contrasting statements we must place also that
of Jesus in Luke 10: 19, where He already gives to His disciples authority ... over all the power of the enemy. Surely this promises to us a present foretaste of that future [millennial] day that we do not yet see.
Again, in the same Gospel passage, Jesus is recorded as
saying, I beheld Satan fallen as lightning from heaven (10: 18).
This event John, in Revelation 12: 9, seems to place far in the future. Yet clearly Jesus implies that from the
standpoint of the witnessing Church it is already in some sense a present
fact. Furthermore, in a later chapter of
Revelation John is shown a day when Satan is to
be bound with a chain for a thousand years (20: 1-4).
Yet Jesus speaks of the strong man as already bound, so that we may even
now break into his house and despoil it (Matt. 12: 29).
These are significant statements; for surely if we possess
salvation and eternal life in the present, as we most certainly do, then we
should also be knowing some foretastes today of the rest of these future powers.
For though not yet manifest universally, they are quite evidently fruits
of the Cross and resurrection of Christ that must be, at least in principle,
the Churchs present possession.
Gods eternal purpose is bound up with man. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, He said, and let them have dominion.
God intended man to wield power, to reign and rule, to control other
created things. We cannot say that
redemption was Gods design - or even a part of it - for man was never [Page 82] intended to fall, still less to
perish. Genesis 3 represents mans history, not Gods [future desire and] purpose for him. A workman may fall
from the fifth story of a building under construction, but that was never in
the architects plan!
No, Gods plan is concerned with mans dominion, and it is
well to note the special sphere of this, namely, all the earth (Gen.
1: 26).
Heaven has no problem; the problem is on earth. Man is told to subdue it (verse 28) and we ask ourselves why.
If there were no forces to be subdued, why this need? Furthermore we are told that the Lord God
took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it
(2: 15). This is more than the usual Hebrew
word for to keep. Adam is to guard
Gods
It is interesting to note the wording of Genesis 1: 26.
Man is to have dominion over all the earth, and the clause is expanded to cover,
among other things, every creeping thing that creepeth
upon the earth. But in the event the first thing that man
faded to control was a creeping thing, a worm.
And by mans failure Satan obtained, in a new way in man himself, legal
rights on the earth. True, the dust of
the earth was the lowly sphere appointed to him. Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat (3:
14). But what is dust? It is the substance of which Adam was
made! Thus man in the flesh is now
morally subject to Satan. Gods foe has
secured a clear title to all that by natural birth man is and has. Natural human life is the foothold here on
earth of Satans activity. Satans world
springs from and finds its strength in his rights in man, and even God does not
dispute these rights. He has acquired by
Adams default a full title to all that is of the old creation.
If Satan is to cease to act in us, then his ground in us must
be taken from him. So God meets the situation
in redemption, not by dealing with Satan directly but, as we have seen, by
taking the whole of the old creation - the man himself, his world, [Page 83] everything - clean out of the way,
and thus removing from Satan his legal stand.
Satans overthrow is compassed not by a direct blow aimed at him, but
indirectly by the removal from him in the death of Christ of all that gives him
the moral right of control. Our old man
was crucified with him, that the body of sin
might he done away, that so we should no longer
be in bondage to sin (Rom. 6: 6).
Praise God, Satan has therefore no longer any rights in
us. But that is a merely negative
fact. There is a positive one also. God has not only removed all that was in the
way of His eternal purpose by removing the old creation; He has also secured
all that is necessary to realize that purpose by bringing in a new creation -
His new Man. Christ being
raised from the dead dieth no more; death no
more hath dominion over him (verse 9).
The purpose revealed in Genesis 1 and lost in Genesis 3 is not lost
for good. What God could not secure in the first man He
obtained in the second; and that second Man is on the throne. No wonder the New Testament writer dares to
reapply the psalmists words: What is man, that
thou art mindful of him? Or the son of man that thou visitest him? Thou crownest him
with glory and honour. Thus he quotes the psalm, and then
he exclaims - We behold him ... even Jesus
... crowned! (Psalm
8: 4-6; Heb.
2: 6-9). If the creation of
mankind was intended to meet the need of God, that need has now at last been
met. God has got His Man.
Genesis 1, Psalm 8 and Hebrews
2 are thus uniquely linked. Psalm 8 is
of course poetry and sings of Gods plan for
mankind, but the significant thing is that in spite of the Fall the singer
does not deviate. He only re-affirms the
original plan of Genesis 1: Thou madest him to have dominion.
It has not changed. Moreover, he
not only begins but ends his chant with the exclamation of praise: How excellent
is thy name in all the earth!
The enemy has done his worst; man has
been trapped into blaspheming God, and if you or I had composed this Psalm we [Page 84] would surely have followed the eighth verse with a cry of distress: But alas, man has fallen; all is lost! Not so the psalmist. It is as though he had forgotten the Fall
completely, for he does not even allude to it.
He leaps in thought across the whole history of redemption, and cries
again, How excellent! Adam and Eve could fall, but they could not
alter Gods purpose that man should eventually overthrow Satans power. His
purpose stands unaltered and this excellence is to be known - where? In all the earth.
Nor is it in the Son of man merely that this purpose is
realized, but in the sons of men - those many sons whom God is bringing to glory. The psalmist is at pains to underline this
fact. Though the enemy do his worst, the
rights he has gained through the Fall have not proved inalienable. Still among men there are those he cannot
touch. Out of the mouths of babes and
sucklings hast thou established strength, because
of thine adversaries, that thou mightest still
the enemy and the avenger (verse 2). God does not depend on great military
leaders. Little children, yea, very
babes, are sufficient to quell the hosts of His foes.
As we saw, Hebrews 2 draws its inspiration from this Psalm.
Yet it goes a step further. While
reaffirming Gods purpose in creation and the goal to which it points, it does
more than this. Looking back
realistically over the course of fallen mans dark history it establishes now
that Gods purpose in redemption and recovery is directed to the identical end. In all the new circumstances that redemption
has called into being, the plan is still unchanged. God has not abandoned His goal. Moreover, from the writers viewpoint beyond
the triumph of the Cross he can confidently reaffirm the psalmists affirmation
of faith. So, far from all being lost,
it is true to say that in Christ the end has been secured.
Oh yes, it is still the same plan: He left
nothing that is not subject to him (verse 8).
Appearances would tend to deny this, so that we see not
yet all things subjected to him. Yet true as this [Page 85] is, the writer disregards it and at
once proceeds triumphantly: But we behold him who hath been made a little
lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour, that by the grace of God he should taste death for every man (verse 9). And then, almost
defiantly he adds: that he might bring to nought ... the devil (verse 14).
What man was to do on earth for God, and failed to do, our
Lord Jesus has accomplished. He tasted death
for everything (as the original Greek implies - not
just for every man). That is to say, it
was not for mans redemption alone that He died but for that of the whole creation, and, going back further, for the recovery of the Fathers purpose in the complete oversetting of the
Satanic world order.
Thus it comes about that today
the Church has a definite responsibility before God to register the victory of
Christ in the devils territory. If
there is to be a testimony to the principalities and powers, if the impact of
Christs sovereignty through His Cross is to be registered in the spiritual
realm, it can only be as the judicial foothold in our hearts of the pretender in the race is met and, by the same Cross,
removed and repudiated. For Gods object
is still that man should have dominion.
Our work for Him does not stop with proclaiming a Gospel that was
designed merely to undo the effect of Genesis 3, marvellous as was that undoing. God wants also to take us back further to Genesis 1 itself. He
wants us in Christ to regain the moral dominion. over His foe that was there in
view, and thus effectively to restore the earth to Him. This is surely why, as Paul tells us, the earnest
expectation of the creation waiteth
for the revealing of the sons of God (Romans
8: 19).
The Gospel of salvation is necessary and vital in order to
meet mans need. But if as Gods
servants we are only labouring for others we are missing Gods first aim in
creation, which was to supply not merely mans need but His own. For as we have said already, the creation of
man was to meet the need of God. Thus [Page 86] if today we are going to meet Gods
need we must go a step further and deal with Satan himself. We must
steal back from him his power, evict him from his territory, spoil him of his
goods and set free his captives - for God.
The question is not merely, Of what account are we in the winning of souls?
Rather is it, Of what account are we in the realm of principalities and powers? And
for that there is a price to pay.
It is often possible to move men when it is quite impossible
to move Satan. The plain fact is that it
costs much more to deal with Satan than to win souls. It demands an utterness of spirit Godward that in itself effectually deprives Satan
of any moral ground in us he may claim to possess. This is the costly thing. God in His merciful love for the lost can
often bypass and overlook in His servants what one might justly feel to be
appalling weakness and even failure. But
while He may do this for the soul-winner, when it comes to our dealing with the
devil it is another matter.
Evil spirits can see right through the witness of man. They can tell when it is compromised by being
half-hearted or insincere. They are
aware when we are holding back a part of the price. Looking at us they are under no illusions as
to whom they can safely defy or ignore; and conversely, they know perfectly
well against whom they are powerless. Jesus I know, and Paid I know;
but who are ye? (Acts
19: 15).
Because they believe, they know when to tremble. And let me say this: since our most important
task is their overthrow, it is better always that we should have the witness of
evil powers than the praise of men.
But the price of this witness to the principalities and power
is, I repeat, an utterness of allegiance to God that is unqualified. To entertain our own opinions or desires, or
to prefer our own variant and contrary choices, is simply to present the enemy
with his advantage. It is, in short, to
throw the game away. In any other sphere
there may perhaps - I do not know - be room among our motives for something of
self-interest, without [Page 87] appreciable loss. But never, and I repeat never, in this. Without such utterness for God nothing can be
achieved, for without it we make even God powerless against His enemy.
So I say it once again: the demand is very high. Are you and I here on earth, utterly
committed, utterly given to God Himself? And because this is so, are we tasting even
now the powers of that future glorious age?
Are we reclaiming territory from the prince of this world for the One
whose alone it rightly is?
* *
*
[Page 88]
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ROBBING THE USURPER
CHRIST JESUS came into the world to save sinners.
Since in the eternal purpose of God it is man (and not some other being)
who is to have dominion, it is natural and right that our compassion should be
drawn out to those sinners.
Notwithstanding anything said hitherto, we might well feel that in this
brief day of grace the whining of souls to the Saviour of the world is perhaps
the supreme means available to us of robbing Satan of his spoils. Certainly were man
himself our theme, we should give a big place at this point to the subject of
soul-winning.
But we have dealt with evangelism already elsewhere.**
Instead, therefore, I propose in closing these studies of the world to take another and more materialistic
area of Satans dominion by way of practical illustrations of the art of despoiling
the strong man. I refer to the field of finance.
*What Shall This Man Do?
Money is opposed to God.
The Word of God speaks of it as the mammon of unrighteousness (Luke 16:
9). Since Jesus says,
Make
to yourselves friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness, He clearly cannot mean to describe
it as the mammon that you have obtained through unrighteous dealings. He is therefore saying that the mammon itself
is unrighteous. What is being brought
before us here is not the unrighteous means by which money is procured, nor the
unrighteous use to which money is put, but the unrighteous character of money. Money in its essential character is evil. We talk of clean
money and dirty money, but in Gods
sight there is only dirty money. The [Page 89] man who knows God knows the character
of money. He knows that money in itself
is evil.
If you would test the character of anything, you only need to
enquire whether that thing leads you to God or away from God. Money invariably leads away from God. Jesus lays down clearly in verse 13 the principle that it is impossible to
serve God and mammon, though I think that even without His statement, most of
us would be convinced that this is so.
For experience tells us that God and mammon are never on the same side;
mammon is always set over against God.
Of course it would be possible to interpret Jesus words more
widely, and to see mammon as representing everything in general that opposes
itself to God. But the apostle Paul
helps us to pin-point money as the means the world uses most successfully to
draw us away from God. They that
desire to be rich, he says, fall into temptation and a snare and
many foolish and hurtful lusts, such as drown
men in destruction and perdition.
For the love of money is the root of all kinds
of evil: which some reaching after have been led
astray from the faith, and have pierced
themselves through with many sorrows (1 Tim.
6: 9, 10). In
other words, if anything can lead us astray from God, money will.
The essence of the world is money.
Whenever you touch money you touch the world.
The question arises, How can we take a thing which we know assuredly to
be of the world, and yet not become involved with the world system? How can we handle and do business with money,
that most worldly of worldly things, and not, in doing so, become implicated
with Satan? Still more to the point,
since nothing can be done today without paying for it, how is it possible for
us to take money, that thing which is a supreme factor in building up the kingdom
of antichrist, and use it to build up the
The widow who dropped her mite into
the temple treasury did something so acceptable to the Lord that she received
from [Page 90] Him special commendation. What in fact she did was just this: she took something out of the
On every Roman denarius there was an image of Caesar. In Jesus words all such coins are Caesars.
How could the connection between Caesar and that coin be severed? Money is a thing of the world. It is an essential part of the world system. How then can it be taken out of the world
that claims it and devoted to God for His use?
In Old Testament times a rigid principle was laid down. No devoted thing, that a
man shall devote unto the Lord of all that he hath, whether of man or beast, or of
the field of his possession, shall be sold or redeemed: every devoted thing
is most holy unto the Lord (Lev.
27: 28). In other words, there is no true devotion
without destruction. If in those days a
sheep was devoted to God, it was not placed before Him to remain there a living
sheep and to bring forth lambs; it was placed before Him to be sacrificed. It shall
certainly be put to death (verse 29).
Its destruction was the sign of
its acceptance.
All money that is truly devoted to God must come under the
principle of destruction; that is to say, it
must cease to exist as far as the world is concerned, and it must cease to exist also as far as I am
concerned. When our Lord commended
the widow for putting her two coins into the treasury, He observed that she had
put in her bios, that is, her life.
She of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living (Mark
12: 44).
Many people just put money into the treasury of the Lord; she put her
life in with her money. In other words,
when that money went out of her possession, her life went out with it. In
giving her two coins she gave her all.
If your money is to come
out of the world, then your life will have to come out of the world.
You cannot keep your self back and contribute anything significant to
God. You cannot send your money out of the world at all:
you can only bring it out of the world!
Thus it is no easy matter to transfer money from the realm of
Satan to the realm of God; it involves travail.
To convert souls from Satan to God is in fact easier than to convert
money from Satan to God. By the grace of
God men and women may be won to Him whether or not we ourselves are devoted in
any utter sense; but this is not so with money.
It takes great spiritual power to convert our shekels, which in their
character are evil, into shekels of the sanctuary. Money needs converting as truly as men need
converting; and money can, I believe, be made anew (if in a rather different
sense) as truly as souls can be made anew.
But your bringing of an offering of money to the treasury will not in
itself change the character of the money you offer. Unless your life goes out with your money, it
cannot be released from the kingdom of Satan and transferred to the kingdom of
God. The spiritual value of your work
for God will largely depend on whether
or not the money you handle has been delivered from the world system. I ask you, Has it? Can you claim that
there is no money in your hand that belongs to the world? Are you able to say now that your money is no
longer a part of the kosmos, for
it has all been converted? Are you
willing to tell God: I will convert all the money I
earn by labour, and all the money I receive by gifts, that it all may he Thine?
To Paul the principle was very plain: We want you, not
yours. Of the Macedonian saints, who out
of their poverty contributed so liberally, he said that first they gave their own
selves to the Lord, then they gave their money (2 Cor. 8: 5). Paul had his training in the Old Testament,
where the consecration of material [Page 92] gifts was always connected with the
consecration of those who brought the gifts.
His reasoning may have had its roots there.
For it may sound startling, but it is true, that God has a
limited supply of money, whereas Satans supply is unlimited. You wonder perhaps how this statement can be
reconciled with that other one, that all the silver and the gold are His. Yet our Lord Jesus Himself says that there is
that which belongs to God and that which belongs to Caesar. Ultimately no doubt all material things
belong to God as Creator, but the amount of money in Gods treasury [for His use] today is limited by the number of people who are devoted to Him.
If I had lived in Old Testament times I could have calculated
immediately the amount of money in the sanctuary. I should have enquired the total number of
the children of Israel and reckoned half a shekel of silver for the redemption
of each of them (Exod.
30: 11-16). To that I should have added five shekels per
head for the redemption of each of the firstborn of
Here, then, is a vital question for each one of us to answer:
Does the money I am touching today represent shekels of the sanctuary or the
mammon of unrighteousness? Whenever I
receive a dollar, or whenever I earn a dollar, let me make sure that that dollar
is instantly converted from world currency into the currency of the
sanctuary. Money can be our destruction,
but money can also be our protection. Do
not despise money; its value is too real for that. It can be of great account to the Lord. If you yourself come heart and soul out of
the world, then you can, if God so wills it, bring many precious things out of
the [Page 93] world with you. When the Israelites came out of
If you can find that reality in Old Testament times, how much
higher still must be the standard set in the New! The New Testament key to all
finance is that we hold nothing to ourselves.
Give, and it shall be given
unto you, those
were our Lords words (Luke 6: 38) and not, Save and ye
shall grow rich! That is to say, the
principle of divine increase is giving, not storage. God requires of every one of us proportionate
and not just random giving. He desires,
that is to say, giving that is not subject merely to the whim of the moment but
that is the fruit of a definite covenant reached with Him about the matter -
and stuck to.
This is because the real secret of spoiling Satan is, as we
saw, personal dedication [to the Lords
work]. For us to be redeemed
from the world and not as a consequence offer ourselves to God is an utterly
impossible thing. Ye are not your own; for ye
were bought with a price (1 Cor. 6: 19, 20).
It matters not whether we follow a profession or trade that brings us an
income from the world, or occupy ourselves solely in preaching the Word and
depend for our sustenance upon the gifts of Gods people, there is only one
road before us, not two. We are all
equally dedicated to God and we are all His witnesses. It is simply not true that preaching the
Gospel in itself is clean and business unclean, so that those who engage in the
latter must become so tainted as to be of less account to God. What matters is simply that God, and not our
business, must be the centre of our lives.
Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. [Page 94] You have an anointing from the Holy One: live by it! Give yourself to God; live for Him wholly and
utterly; see to it that, where you personally are concerned, the things of this
world are scored off Satans books and transferred to Gods account. For the world [kosmos] passeth away, and the lust
thereof: but he that doeth the will of God
abideth for ever.
*
* * *
* * *
* * *
* *
[Page 33]
What Shall This Man Do?
[From Chapter 3 (pp. 33-49) of the authors book.]
CHAPTER THREE
CATCHING MEN
How do men
press into the Kingdom? We have
considered at some length how a preacher of the Gospel needs to be personally
prepared in spirit for his task. But
what of the hearers? What is the minimum
requirement in the sinner if he is to find the Lord and be saved? This question now claims our attention, for
it is as important for the preacher to know what he is attempting to do as it
is for him to be prepared in spirit to do it.
In the discussion which follows we can
only deal with a single point in the preaching of the Gospel. I take it for granted that the servant of the
Lord knows the facts of redemption through the atoning death of Christ, and
that he himself is born of the Spirit. I
assume also that he knows how to present those facts clearly and with power. I am concerned here not with the substance of
his preaching, but rather with the principles that should guide in the actual
task of leading the individual soul to Christ.
What is necessary for a man to be saved? How can he be prevailed upon to come to the
door of the Kingdom and enter? How do we
bring men who have only the absolute minimum of knowledge or desire for God
into a living touch with Him? These are
our questions, and I am going to lay down four guiding principles that will, I
hope, be found to go a long way towards answering them.
God has made, from His side, a threefold provision for every
man in his hour of crisis. Firstly,
Jesus has come as the Friend of sinners; secondly, it is He personally (and no
intermediary) whom men are called to meet; and thirdly, the Holy Spirit has
been poured out upon all flesh, to bring to pass in man the initial work of
conviction of sin, repentance and [Page 34] faith, and, of course, all that follows.
Then, finally, from the side of the sinner, one condition and one only
is demanded. He is not required - in the first place - to believe, or to repent, or to be
conscious of sin, or even to know that Christ died. He is required only to approach the Lord with
an honest heart.
This last statement may at first startle you, but as we go on,
I think you will see how helpful it is.
We will, however, take these points in order, beginning from the side of
Gods provision.
THE SINNERS FRIEND
In the Gospels the Lord Jesus is presented as the Friend of
sinners, for historically He was found, first of all, moving among men as their
Friend before He became their Saviour.
But do you realize that to-day He is still in the first place our
Friend, in order that He may become our Saviour? Before we have reached the point where we are
willing - or indeed able - to receive Him as Saviour, He comes to us as a
Friend, so that personal encounter is not debarred to us and the door is held
open for us to receive Him as Saviour.
This is a precious discovery.
Since I saw the Saviour as the Friend of sinners I have seen
many unusual and difficult people brought to the Lord. I remember how in one place a young woman
came and attacked me, saying that she did not want to be saved. She said that she was
young and intended to have a good time, and did not want to have to leave her
ways and become sedate and sober, for then there would be no joy in life. She said she had no intention of forsaking
her sins and had not the least desire for salvation! It transpired that she knew quite a lot about
the Gospel, for she had been brought up in a
It is clear from the New Testament that the Lord Jesus came as
a Friend, in order to help sinners
to come to Him.
Our coming to
Him was made possible by His first coming to us. He came to bring heaven down within our
reach. I remember that I was once
sitting talking to a brother in his home.
His wife and mother were upstairs, but his small son was in the
sitting-room with us. Presently the
little fellow wanted something, and called out to his mother for it. It is up here, she replied; come up and get it. But he cried out to her, I cant, Mummy,
its such a long way. Please bring it down to me. And indeed he was very small; so she brought
it down. And [initial and eternal] salvation [by Gods grace through faith in Jesus Christ] is just like that. Only by His coming right down to us could our
need be met. Had He not come, sinners
could not have approached Him; but He came down in order to lift them up.
At the hour of crisis there are many practical difficulties
that face the sinner. For example, in
the Scriptures we are often told to believe.
The Word lays much stress on the necessity of faith. But you say, I have not got faith. A girl once said to me, I cant believe. I would like to believe but I cant! My parents keep on saying to me You must believe, but it is no good; I havent got it in
me. The desire is there, but I find faith lacking. It is impossible
to believe. That is all right,
I said. You
cant believe. But you can ask the Lord
to give you faith. He is prepared to help
you to that extent. You pray: Lord, help Thou my unbelief!
Or again, the Word tells us that we are to repent. What if we have no desire whatever to
repent? I met a student once who said it
was too early for him to come to the Lord.
He wanted more time in which to taste the pleasures of sin and to enjoy
himself. He said to me, The thief on the
cross was saved, but he had had his fling, and it was high time that he
repented. But I - I am young. Well, what do you want to do? I asked him. He replied, I want to wait for another forty
years and have a good time, and then I will repent. So I said, Let us pray. Oh, I cant pray, he answered. Yes, you can, [Page 36] I said. You can tell the Lord all you have told me. He is the Friend
of unrepentant sinners like you.
Oh, I
couldnt say that to Him. Why not?
Oh, but I
could not. Well, be quite
honest. Whatever is in your heart, you
tell it to Him. He will help you. Finally he prayed, and told the Lord that he
did not want to repent and be saved, but that
he knew he needed a
Saviour; and he just cried to Him for help.
The Lord worked repentance in him and he got up a saved man.
In
I repeat these incidents just to emphasize that what the sinner cannot do the Saviour is at hand to do for him. It is for this reason that we can tell people
that they need not wait for anything, but can come to Him immediately. Whatever their state, whatever their problem,
let them bring it and tell it to the Friend of sinners.
FIRST CONTACT WITH THE LORD
What is salvation? Many
think that to be saved we must first believe that the Lord Jesus died for us,
but it is a strange fact that nowhere in the New Testament does it say
precisely that. Of course the whole
message of the New Testament is [Page 37] that Jesus died and rose again that we might be saved. But read through your New Testament carefully
and tell me where you can find one verse that says that the condition for being
saved is to believe that Christ died
for our sins? You cannot find it
anywhere. We are told to believe in Jesus, or to believe on Him; not to believe that
He died for us. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt
be saved were
Pauls words. We are to believe first of
all in Him; not specifically in what He has
done.
In John 3: 16 we are told that whosoever believeth on him shall have everlasting life.
Earlier in his Gospel John says that He came unto his own, and they that were his own received him not. At the end of the same
Gospel John states that he wrote it that ye may
believe that Jesus is the Christ [or Messiah], the Son of
God; and that believing ye may have life in his
name. Men rejected Him,
not on the ground of what He did but of who He was, and they are invited to
believe in what He is and who He is, and not, first of all, in what He has
done. John 3: 16 does not say: Whosoever believeth that Christ died for him and bore his
sins on the Cross hath everlasting life. Its message is that God gave His Son, and it
is He Himself in person upon whom we are to believe.
He that hath the Son hath the life.
Of course I do not want you to think me a modernist, who would
dare to belittle the Cross or give a lower place to the substitutionary work of
Christ. I do believe in the necessity of His atonement, and so I am sure do you. I trust you will not misunderstand me
therefore when I say that the appreciation of that work may not be the first
step in the sinners initial contact with the Lord. That appreciation must follow, but the main question is whether or not we have
the Son, and not, first of all, whether or not we understand the whole plan of
salvation. The first condition [or way], of salvation* is not
knowledge, but meeting Christ.
[* NOTE: A believers initial and eternal
salvation is not conditional upon anything he/she needs to do: it is the the free gift of
God
eternal
life in Christ Jesus (Rom. 6: 23, R.V.).]
There are many people of whom you may feel that they were
saved by the wrong scriptures! They
were spoken to through verses that do not seem to point the way of salvation,
and you almost feel they cannot be saved on that basis! You feel that there must be a weakness
somewhere, and yet you [Page 38] have to recognize that God is often pleased to work in that way. I used to wish that those whom I led to the
Lord would be saved on the basis of John 3: 16 or 5: 24 or 6: 40.
But I have come to see that all that is needed for the initial [or first] step is that there should be a
personal touch with God, and when that is so the rest will surely follow. It does not matter, therefore, which verses
God elects to use for that first step. After
all, we do not need to study the theory of electricity and to understand it
thoroughly before we can turn on the electric light. The light does not say, I am not going to shine for you, for you know nothing of the
principle on which I work. And God
does not set understanding as the condition of our approach to Him. This is life eternal, that they
should know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.
Let us take three examples from the Gospels. Which was the first outstanding conversion
recorded in the New Testament? Surely
that of the thief on the cross. Up till
then everything had been pointing forward to the Cross of Christ. Now it was being enacted before mens eyes,
and the thief was a witness. This man
was a model sinner and was receiving a model punishment, and his was, we may
say, a model conversion. Yet did he
recognize the Lord as Saviour? What were
his words? Remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom (Luke 23:
42). What did the Lord
reply? He did not remind him of his evil
life, or tell him that he was suffering justly and ought to die, and that instead He, Jesus, was suffering on
the cross for him and dying for his sins. It seems to us that it would have
been an excellent opportunity to announce the plan of redemption - but no, the
Lord only answered: To-day shalt thou be with me
in paradise.* For the
thief recognized who Jesus
was - that though
suffering unjustly He was going to reign and would
have a [thousand-year] Kingdom - and he believed in the Lord, and that was enough.
[* NOTE what our Lord Jesus did not
say! He did not say, - To-day shalt thou be with me in Purgatory! or, To-day
shalt thou be with me in Heaven!!
For neither Heaven nor Purgatory was where they went on that crucifixion-day! (Acts 2: 31. cf. Gen.
37: 35ff.;
1 Sam. 38:
11, 14, 15, 19; Psa. 16: 10; 139: 8b; Rev. 6: 9ff, R.V. etc.).
Both went into the heart of the earth
(Matt. 12:
40. cf. 16:
18, R.V.); into Sheol
= Gk. Hades - where all disembodied
souls must wait for the time of
their respective Resurrections! Isa.
40: 31; Ezek. 37: 24ff. Hosea. 3: 5; Acts. 7: 5ff. cf. Luke
16: 23; Acts 2: 34; John 3: 13; 14: 3; 20: 17; 1 Cor. 15: 23ff.; 1 Thess. 4: 16ff.; 2 Tim. 2: 18ff. Rev. 6: 11; Heb. 11: 35b; Luke 20: 35; Phil. 3: 11; Rev. 20: 4-6, R.V. with Rev.
20: 7-13, R.V.]
Consider next the woman with an issue. In Mark 5: 24 we are told that the multitude thronged Jesus. There were many among the crowd who were touching
and even pressing upon Him, but only one among them was healed. She was healed because with a special
intention she touched Him. And it [Page 39] only
required a touch; for in her it represented a reaching out in spirit to God for
help in her deep need.
Or recall the incident of the Pharisee and the publican at
prayer in the temple. The Pharisee
understood all about offerings and sacrifices and tithes, but there was from
him no cry of the heart to God. But the
publican cried, Lord have mercy upon me!
Something went out from him to God which met with an immediate response,
and the Lord Jesus singles him out as the one whom God reckoned righteous. For what is it to be reckoned righteous? It is to touch God.
The Epistle to the Romans tells us in much detail about sin and about the way of
salvation, and from a study of it we can learn a great deal about the doctrine
of redemption; and yet it was written
for the saved. Johns Gospel, on the
other hand, gives no doctrine in any systematic form; in fact there seems to be
little or no plan to the book at all; and yet it was written for the world (John 20. 31). We would have arranged things the
other way round, I am sure; and we should have been wrong! For consider: if your house is on fire and
there is no way of escape for those on the top storey, and if the firemen come
and set up a ladder to save you, what will you do? Will you say, Not
so fast! Tell me first why your ladder
sticks up without any support. Ordinary
ladders have to lean against something.
And what material are your clothes made of? Why do they not catch fire? - and so
on? No, you will allow yourself to be
saved, and afterwards you may inquire all about the fire escape and the
firemens uniforms and everything else that interests you.
After I was saved I used to feel very dissatisfied with
Peters sermon on the day of Pentecost.
Indeed I thought it was in some respects, a very poor one, for it seemed
so inadequate for its purpose. It did
not, I thought, make things clear at all, for there is nothing in it about the
plan of redemption. What does Peter
say? Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God unto onto you by mighty works and
wonders and signs, which God did by him in the
midst of you, even as ye yourselves know;
him, being delivered up
by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye by the hand of lawless men did crucify and [Page 40] slay: whom God raised up ... Surely, I felt,
here was the golden opportunity Peter needed to press the point home. Surely here was the time to introduce some
reference to Isaiah 53, or
otherwise to explain the doctrine of the atonement. But no, he let the opportunity pass, and went
on: Let all the house of
Later on Peter went to Gentiles who had a different religious
background altogether. There surely, you
feel, the Gospel would be plainly preached.
Yet to Cornelius Peter only spoke about who Christ was, and though he
certainly mentioned the remission of sins he gave no explanation of the meaning
of His death - yet even so, the Holy Spirit fell upon them all.
Surely it becomes clear from this that
[eternal] salvation is not initially a question
of knowledge but of touch. All who touch the Lord receive [eternal] life.
We might say [or imagine] that, judged by his sermons in the Acts, even Paul was not clear in his Gospel. Those many years ago the Gospel was not
preached as it is now! There was not the
same clear presentation of truth! But is
it the truth which is the most important?
The great weakness of the present preaching of the Gospel [i.e.,
the word of the kingdom (Matt. 13: 19, R.V.)] is that we try to make people understand
the plan of salvation, or we try to drive people to the Lord through the fear
of sin and its consequences. Wherein
have we failed? I am sure it is in this,
that our hearers do not see Him, for
we do not [now] adequately present the Person. They only see sin or salvation, whereas their need is to see the
Lord Jesus Himself [coming in His Kingdom], and [want] to meet Him and touch Him.*
[* See also Signs in Johns
Gospel by Arlen L.
Chitwood.]
Too often those who have been saved [by grace] merely through knowledge develop
big heads. They progress without seeming to feel much
need of God. They know it all and they even feel qualified to
criticize the preachers presentation of facts.
But when it comes to a crisis in which they lose their known bearings
and have to trust the Lord over something, they cannot do so. They are not in living touch
with Him. Yet there [Page 41] are others, who [are humble but] may know very little but have come out of themselves, and have touched the
living God, who develop and grow in faith even through the severest trial. That is why our first object must be to lead
people to meet Him.
None of us can fathom the mysterious ways of God. None of us dare prescribe for Him how He
should work. There was a Chinese boy
who, when he was twelve years old, was taken by his mother up to a temple in
the hills. As he was worshipping before
the shrine with his mother, he looked at the idol and thought, You are too ugly and too dirty to be worshipped. I dont believe you can save me. What is the sense of worshipping you? But out of respect for his mother he joined
in the ceremony, and after it was over his mother got into her chair to go down
the mountain. But he slipped away to the
back of the temple and found an open space where he stood and looked up to
heaven and said, O God, whoever You are, I do not
believe that You can dwell in that shrine.
You are too big, and it is too small and dirty for You. You surely must dwell right up there in the heavens.
I do not know how to find You, but I put
myself in Your hands; for sin is very strong, and the world pulls. I commit myself to You, wherever You may be. Thirty years later I met him and told him the
Gospel. He said, I have met the Lord Jesus for the first
time to-day, but this is the second time that I have touched God. Something happened to me that day thirty
years ago on the mountain top.
It is the living Lord who becomes our Saviour. Jesus is no longer the crucified but the
reigning One, and to-day therefore we go
for salvation not to the foot of the Cross but to the Throne, to believe in
Him as [both King and] Lord.
Perhaps we need to see more clearly the difference between redemption
and salvation. Redemption was secured by
the Lord Jesus on the Cross two thousand years ago. Our salvation rests to-day upon that
redemption, accomplished once for all in time.
Nevertheless it is equally true that you may have been saved ten, twenty or thirty years ago and I
quite recently, because for each of us salvation is a personal matter - a
personal partaking, as it were, of Christ.
There is surely a parallel here with the Israelites of old [Page 42] in
It comes to this, that salvation, which is a personal and a subjective
experience, may be said to rest rather
upon the Lords resurrection than
upon His death. The death of Christ
was necessary for atonement objectively before God. But for salvation the New Testament lays
emphasis upon our faith in His
resurrection, for that [select] resurrection is the proof that His
death has been accepted. We believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, personally
risen and ascended to glory, and we seek to bring sinners now into immediate
contact with Him.
AN HONEST HEART TOWARDS GOD
Before we come to the third provision that God has made for
the crisis of salvation in a mans life, I am going to digress, and to deal
first with what seems to me to be the single requirement demanded from man
himself.
When you have preached the Gospel of repentance and of faith
through Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, you encounter various
difficulties in your hearers which may bring you up short, One man, having
heard you tell all about sin and its punishment, says quite frankly. Yes, I know it all, but I like sinning.
What will you do? As we have
suggested, the Friend of sinners is the One to help him here. Another man listens to you and assents to everything,
and yet does not seem to be able to take it in.
You meet him next day, and he says, I have
forgotten the third point. What was it?
Salvation is not a question of points! Salvation is not even a question of
understanding or of will. It is, as we
have seen, a question of meeting God - of men coming into first-hand contact
with Christ the Saviour. So what, you
ask me, is the minimum requirement in a man to make that contact possible?
For my reply I would turn you to the parable of the
sower. It seems to me that here we are
plainly told the one thing that God does demand. That in the good ground, these are such as [Page 43] in an
honest and good heart, having heard the word, hold it
fast, and bring
forth fruit with patience (Luke 8:
15). What God demands of
man is an honest and good heart - good, because honest. It does not matter if a man wants or does not
want to be saved, it does not matter if he understands or does not understand;
provided that he is prepared to be honest with God about it, God is prepared to
meet him.
The question has been raised: How do you reconcile Gods
requirements of an honest and good heart with the statement that the heart is
deceitful above all things (Jer.
17: 9)?
But the point in the parable of the sower is not that the man who
receives the Word [of the kingdom] is a
perfectly honest man in Gods eyes, but that he is honest towards God. Whatever is in his heart, he is prepared to
come to God frankly and openly with it.
Of course, it is a fact, and it remains a fact, that the heart of man is
deceitful
above all things,
but it is still possible for a man with a deceitful nature to turn honestly to
God. A dishonest man can come to God and
say honestly to Him; I am a sinner; have mercy on me! In the realm of desire towards God he can be
true. This is what God seeks in men, and something of this meaning is contained
in the word which says: The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole
earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of
them whose heart is perfect toward him (2
Chron. 16: 9).
The basic condition of a sinners salvation is not belief or
repentance, but just this honesty of heart towards God. God requires nothing of him but that he come
in that attitude. Into that spot of
straightforwardness that lies in the midst of much deceitfulness, the good seed
falls and brings forth fruit. Of the two
thoroughly dishonest thieves crucified with the Lord, there was in the one a
little bit of honest desire. The
publican who prayed in the temple was a crooked man, but in him to there was
that honesty to acknowledge his sinfulness and cry to God for mercy. And what of Saul of
As several of the incidents recounted earlier have indicated,
we should encourage every sinner to kneel down with an honest heart and pray,
telling the Lord frankly where he stands.
As Christians we are told that we must pray in the name of the Lord
Jesus (John 14: 14;
15: 16; 16: 23, 24), by which, of course, we understand not a mere
formula of words but an act of faith in Him.
But with sinners it is different, for there are prayers which God will
hear that are not uttered in the name of Jesus.
In Acts
10: 4 the angel says to Cornelius: Thy prayers and thine alms are gone
up for a memorial before God. If there is a sincere
cry from the heart, God hears. A
sinners heart can touch God.
A striking example of one who came to God without even wanting
to be saved is afforded by the experience of an English lady of the last
century. One of a wealthy family of good
social position, she was well educated, a good musician and an accomplished
dancer, and she was both young and beautiful.
One night there was a ball to which she was invited. She had a wonderful ball dress specially made
for the occasion, and that night she was the one who compelled most attention
and was most sought after by all. It
was, one might say, a great triumph for her.
After the ball was over she went home, took off her ball dress
and cast it aside. She flung herself
down and said, O God, I have everything I want,
wealth, popularity, beauty, youth - and yet I am absolutely miserable and
unsatisfied. Christians would tell me
that this is a proof that the world is empty and hollow, and that Jesus could
save me and give me peace and joy and satisfaction. But I dont want the satisfaction that He
could give. I dont want to be
saved. I hate You and I hate Your peace
and joy. But, O God, give me what I
dont want, and if You can, make me happy! It is recorded that she got up from her knees
a saved woman, and became one who knew the Lord in a deep way.
[Page 45]
I affirm once again: all that is needed is an honest
heart. If you want God there is no
difficulty. But praise God, even if you
do not want Him. He will still hear you if you will come to Him
and be honest about it.
THE HELPER NEAR AT HAND
We have said that a cry to God from the heart is
sufficient. In the words of Joel, quoted
by Peter: Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
How is this possible? Because God has fulfilled the other promise
(quoted by Peter from the same prophecy) that: I will pour forth of my Spirit
upon all flesh (Acts 2: 17, 21).
Because the Holy Spirit has been poured out upon all mankind, a cry is
enough.
No preacher of the Gospel is of much use unless he believes
this. The presence of the Holy Spirit,
and His proximity to the sinner, is vital to our preaching. God in the heavens is too far away; He is, as
it were, out of reach of man. But to the
Romans Paul writes: Say not in thy heart, who
shall ascend heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down:) ... The
word is nigh thee. ...
For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord
shall be saved. (
I always believe that the Holy Spirit is upon a man when I preach
to him. I do not mean to say that the
Spirit is within the hearts of
unbelievers, but that He is outside.
What is He doing? He is waiting,
waiting to bring Christ into their hearts.
The Holy Spirit is waiting to enter the heart of the hearer of the
Gospel. He is like the light. Open the window-shutters even a little, and
it will flood in and illumine the interior.
Let there be but a cry from the heart to God, and at that moment the Spirit will
enter and begin His transforming work of conviction and repentance and faith -
the miracle of new birth.
Not only had Peter observed the
miraculous intervention of the Holy Spirit upon his hearers as he preached to
them in the home of Cornelius; he had also, of course, his personal experience
of the Spirits work in his own heart.
As I began to speak, he reports, the Holy Ghost fell on them, even as on us at the beginning (Acts 11:
15). Perhaps the biggest
condition of [Page 46] success in bringing men to Christ is to remember that the same Holy Spirit,
who came to our help in the hour of darkness, is at hand waiting to enter and
illumine their hearts also, and to make good the work of salvation to which, in
crying to God, they have opened the door.
I had a friend who was preaching in a certain city. A woman sought him out and he talked to her
and preached Christ to her. He spoke of
her sin, and of the punishment for sin, and of the Lord who came to save. But the woman said to him, I dont think you
know how nice sin is; you have never tasted its delights. I like to
sin. Life would be empty otherwise. After a while my friend suggested that they
pray. The woman said, What could one so
sinful as I say to your God? I cannot
find repentance in my heart. I have nothing
I could say that would be acceptable to Him. But my friend replied: My God understands. He is near
to you and He can hear any prayer;
so you say to Him just what you have said to me. She was amazed, for till now she had only
heard the kind of formal prayer where you have to say what you do not believe,
for politeness sake! Then he showed her
the verse in Acts 2 where it says
of the Gentiles on whom the Holy Ghost fell that God granted them repentance unto life. So she prayed, and told it all to the God who
understands sinners. Though I do not
want to repent, she Pleaded, O God, help me and grant me repentance. And He did!
She had opened to His Spirits illumination the windows of her heart,
and she arose from her knees a saved woman.
Here then is a principle, that because Jesus is the Friend of
sinners, and because the Holy Spirit undertakes to do what men themselves
cannot do, therefore sinners can come to God just as they are. They do not need to change at all, and it is not
necessary for them to find in themselves the ability to do anything. If a man asks you to tell him the Gospel of
salvation and afterwards he says to you, Sir, I want to be saved, and on your telling him
to believe, he replies, I cant believe, what will you do? Will you say, I am afraid you are no good. You go away, and come back when you can
believe? Are you not thereby asking him to do
something towards his salvation? [Page 47] Another man says to you, I dont want to be saved. What will you do then? Will you send him off to wait until some
difficulty or sorrow drives him to God?
May you not thereby be closing the door to him? Why need we lay down so many conditions for
sinners before they can be saved? Surely if Jesus is the Friend of sinners all
men can come as they are, and because His Spirit is at hand to work, we can
count on Him to do in them what they themselves can never do.
During the twenty years that I have preached the Gospel in
China, many of course have initially understood the way of salvation, many have first of all
been convicted of sin, have repented, have believed - and they have come to Christ on that basis
and been saved. But, praise God, there
have also been many others who, though they did not in the first place repent
or believe, or even consciously desire to be saved, yet were persuaded to come
honestly to the Lord and make personal contact with Him; and in many of these,
too, understanding, conviction, repentance and faith have followed, and they have,
as a result, been gloriously saved. This
gives me the confidence to state unequivocally that there is not one other condition necessary to being saved
except that of being a sinner and being honest enough to say so to the Lord. That condition is enough to allow the Holy Spirit to
begin His convicting and transforming work.
We have spoken of those who wont
repent, and of those who cannot believe; we have spoken of those who have no desire
for salvation, and of those who think they are too bad to be saved; we have
spoken of those who are confused and cannot understand the Gospel, and of those
who understand but will not acknowledge the claim of God upon them. May I tell you that it is yet possible for
any of these to be saved? I have met all
of these six types of people and many of them have been saved on the spot; and in addition I
have met a seventh type - those who do not believe there is a God at all - and
I have dared to say even to them that they do not need first to substitute
theism for atheism. They can be saved as they are, even without any belief in God at
all, if they will be honest about it.
[Page 48]
Some will at once rejoin: But what about Hebrews 11: 6? Surely that verse demands faith in Gods
existence at least. Well,
there was a time when I should certainly have said so; but one day I learned
afresh how infinitely far God is prepared to go to meet the son returning from
the far country. It happened in the following
way.
I was once holding
evangelistic meetings in a college in
The next day, at the end of the first meeting of my campaign,
I asked any who had been saved to stand up, and the first one to do so was this
professor. I went up to him afterwards [Page 49] and asked him, Has anything happened? He replied, Much. I am saved.
How did
it happen? I asked. He
replied, After
you went I picked up the Bible and opened it at Johns Gospel. My eye caught the words: The day after, the next day, the day after, and I thought
to myself, this man knows what he is talking about. He saw it all. It is like a
diary. After that, I thought about what
you had said to me, and I tried to see if there was any catch in it - if you
were getting at me in any way. I went
over it point by point and could see no flaw in it. It all seemed perfectly sound. Why should I not pray as you suggested? But suddenly the thought came to me: What if
there is in fact a God? Where do I stand
then? Having told my students that there is nothing in religion at all, and that
psychology accounts for everything, am I willing to admit to them that I have
been wrong all the time? I weighed this
up carefully, but nevertheless I felt I had to be honest about it. For if, after all, there really was a God, I
would be a fool not to believe in Him!
So I knelt down and prayed; and as I prayed I just knew there was a God. How I
knew, I cannot explain, but I just knew it!
Then I remembered the Gospel of John that I had read, and how it seemed
to be written by an eye-witness, and I knew that if that was so, then Jesus was
the Son of God - and I was saved!
Oh, it is wonderful what our God can do! When you go put preaching the Gospel, never
lose sight of the fact that He is a living God,
ready to act in mercy. Even if men could
be a little better than they are it would not help matters, and if they were
much worse it would not hinder. All He
looks for is an honest and good heart.
And never forget that the Holy Spirit is present in power to move mens
hearts to God. Have faith in Him in respect of every soul with whom you
have to deal. Alone you may not be much
of a fisherman, but co-operating with the Spirit of God, you may have
confidence enough to land the biggest fish.
THE END