The Normal Christian Life (20 page)
“Very good, brother,” I said. “You always listen to Resident Boss!”
Many of us know that Christ is our life. We believe that the Spirit of God is resident in us, but this fact has little effect upon our behavior. The question is, Do we know Him as a living Person, and do we know Him as “Boss?”
B
EFORE WE PASS on to our last important subject, we will review some of the ground we have covered and summarize the steps taken. We have sought to make things simple, and to explain clearly some of the experiences which Christians commonly pass through. But it is clear that the new discoveries that we make as we walk with the Lord are many, and we must be careful to avoid the temptation to over-simplify the work of God. To do so may lead us into serious confusion.
There are children of God who believe that all our salvation, in which they would include the matter of leading a holy life, lies in an appreciation of the value of the precious blood. They rightly emphasize the importance of keeping short accounts with God over known specific sins, and the continual efficacy of the blood to deal with sins committed, but they think of the blood as doing everything. They believe in a holiness which in fact means only separation of the man from his past; that, through the up-to-date blotting
out of what he has done on the ground of the shed blood, God separates a man out of the world to be His, and that is holiness; and they stop there. Thus, they stop short of God’s basic demands, and so of the full provision He has made. I think we have by now seen clearly the inadequacy of this.
Then there are those who go further and see that God has included them in the death of His Son on the cross, in order to deliver them from sin and the Law by dealing with the old man. These are they who really exercise faith in the Lord, for they glory in Christ Jesus and have ceased to put confidence in the flesh (Phil. 3:3). In them God has a clear foundation on which to build. And from this as starting point, many have gone further still and recognized that consecration (using that word in the truest sense) means giving themselves without reserve into His hands and following Him in all things. All these are first steps. Starting from them, we have already touched upon yet other phases of experience set before us by God and enjoyed by many. It is always essential for us to remember that, while each of them is a precious fragment of truth, no single one of them is by itself the whole of truth. All come to us as the fruit of the work of Christ on the cross, and we cannot afford to ignore any.
Recognizing a number of such phases in the life and experience of a believer, we note now a further fact, namely, that though these phases do not necessarily occur always in a fixed and precise order, they seem to be marked by certain recurring steps or features.
What are these steps? First there is revelation. As we have seen, this always precedes faith and experience. Through His
Word God opens our eyes to the truth of some fact concerning His Son, and then only, as in faith we accept that fact for ourselves, does it become actual as experience in our lives. Thus we have:
1. Revelation (Objective)
2. Experience (Subjective)
Then further, we note that such experience usually takes the two-fold form of a crisis leading to a continuous process. It is most helpful to think of this in terms of John Bunyan’s “wicket gate” through which Christian entered upon a “narrow path.” Our Lord Jesus spoke of such a gate and a path leading unto life (Matt. 7:14), and experience accords with this. So now we have:
1. Revelation
2. Experience: (a) A wicket gate (Crisis)
(b) A narrow path (Process)
Now let us take some of the subjects we have been dealing with and see how this helps us to understand them. We will take first our justification and new birth. This begins with a revelation of the Lord Jesus in His atoning work for our sins on the cross; there follows the crisis of repentance and faith (the wicket gate), whereby we are initially “made nigh” to God (Eph. 2:13); and this leads us into a walk of maintained fellowship with Him (the narrow path), for which the ground of our day to day access is still the precious blood (Heb. 10:19, 22).
When we come to deliverance from sin, we again have three steps: the Holy Spirit’s work of revelation, or “knowing” (Rom. 6:6); the crisis of faith, or “reckoning” (Rom. 6:11); and the continuing process of consecration, or “presenting
ourselves” to God (Rom. 6:13) on the basis of a walk in newness of life.
Consider next the gift of the Holy Spirit. This too begins with a new “seeing” of the Lord Jesus as exalted to the throne, which issues in the dual experience of the Spirit outpoured and the Spirit indwelling.
Going a stage further, to the matter of pleasing God, we find again the need for spiritual illumination that we may see the values of the cross in regard to “the flesh,” the entire self-life of man. Our acceptance of this by faith leads at once to a “wicket gate” experience (Rom. 7:25), in which we initially cease from “doing” and accept by faith the mighty working of the life of Christ to satisfy God’s practical demands in us. This in turn leads us into the “narrow path” of a walk in obedience to the Spirit (Rom. 8:4).
The picture is not identical in each case, and we must beware of forcing any rigid pattern upon the Holy Spirit’s working; but perhaps any new experience will come to us more or less on these lines. There will certainly always be first an opening of our eyes to some new aspect of Christ and His finished work, and then faith will open a gate into a pathway. Remember too that our division of Christian experience into various subjects—justification, new birth, the gift of the Spirit, deliverance, sanctification, etc.—is for our clearer understanding only. It does not mean that these stages must, or will, always follow one another in a certain prescribed order. In fact, if a full presentation of Christ and His cross is made to us at the very outset, we may well step into a great deal of experience from the first day of our Christian life, even though the full explanation of much of it may only follow later. Would that all gospel preaching were of such a kind!
One thing is certain: Revelation will always precede faith. Seeing and believing are two principles which govern Christian living. When we see something that God has done in Christ, our natural response is “Thank you, Lord!” and faith follows spontaneously. Revelation is always the work of the Holy Spirit, who is given in order that, by coming alongside and opening to us the Scriptures, He may guide us into all the truth (John 16:13). Count upon Him, for He is here for that very thing. And when such difficulties as lack of understanding or lack of faith confront you, address those difficulties directly to the Lord: “Lord, open my eyes. Lord, make this new thing clear to me. Lord, help thou my unbelief!” He will not let such prayers go unheeded.
We are now in a position to go a step further still and to consider how great a range is compassed by the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. In the light of Christian experience and for the purpose of analysis, it may help us if we recognize four aspects of God’s redemptive work. But in doing so it is essential to keep in mind that the cross of Christ is one divine work, and not many. Once in Judaea two thousand years ago, the Lord Jesus died and rose again, and He is now “by the right hand of God exalted” (Acts 2:33). The work is finished and need never be repeated, nor can it be added to.
Of the four aspects of the cross which we shall now mention, we have already dealt with three in some detail. The last will be considered in the two succeeding chapters of our study. They may be briefly summarized as follows:
1. The blood of Christ to deal with sins and guilt.
2. The cross of Christ to deal with sin, the flesh and the natural man.
3. The life of Christ made available to indwell, recreate and empower man.
4. The working of death in the natural man that that indwelling Life may be progressively manifest.
The first two of these aspects are remedial. They relate to the undoing of the work of the devil and the undoing of the sin of man. The last two are not remedial but positive, and relate more directly to the securing of the purpose of God. The first two are concerned with recovering what Adam lost by the Fall; the last two are concerned with bringing us into, and bringing into us, something that Adam never had. Thus we see that the achievement of the Lord Jesus in His death and resurrection comprises both a work which provided for the redemption of man and a work which made possible the realization of the purpose of God.
We have dealt at some length in earlier chapters with the two aspects of His death represented by the blood for sins and guilt, and the cross for sin and the flesh. In our discussion of the eternal purpose, we have also looked briefly at the third aspect—that represented by Christ as the grain of wheat—and we have just seen something of its practical outworking in our last chapter, when considering Christ as our life. Before, however, we pass on to the fourth aspect, which I shall call “bearing the cross,” we must say a little more about this third side, namely, the release of the risen life in Christ to indwell man and empower him for service.
We have spoken already of the purpose of God in creation
and have said that it embraced far more than Adam ever came to enjoy. What was that purpose? God wanted to have a race of men whose members were gifted with a spirit whereby communion would be possible with Himself, who is Spirit. That race, possessing God’s own life, was to cooperate in securing His purposed end by defeating every possible uprising of the Enemy and undoing his evil works. That was the great plan.
How will it now be effected? The answer is again to be found in the death of the Lord Jesus. It is a mighty death. It is something positive and purposive, going far beyond the recovery of a lost position; for by it, not only are sin and the old man dealt with and their effects annulled, but something more, something infinitely greater and more far-reaching, is introduced.
We must have before us now two passages of the Word, one from Genesis 2 and one from Ephesians 5, which, considered together, are of great importance at this point.
And Jehovah God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof: and the rib, which Jehovah God had taken from the man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And the man said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. (Gen. 2:21–23)
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up for it; that he might sanctify it, having cleansed it by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself a
glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. (Eph. 5:25–27)
In Ephesians 5 we have the only chapter in the Bible which explains the passage in Genesis 2. What we have presented to us in Ephesians is indeed very remarkable, if we reflect upon it. I refer to what is contained in those words: “Christ . . . loved the church.” There is something most precious here.
We have been taught to think of ourselves as sinners needing redemption. For generations that has been instilled into us, and we praise the Lord for that as our beginning. But it is not what God has in view as His end. God speaks here rather of “a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but . . . holy and without blemish.” All too often we have thought of the church as being merely so many “saved sinners.” It is that; but we have made the terms almost equal to one another, as though it were only that, which is not the case.
Saved sinners—with that thought you have the whole background of sin and the Fall; but in God’s sight the church is a divine creation in His Son. The one is largely individual, the other corporate. With the one the view is negative, belonging to the past; with the other it is positive, looking forward. The “eternal purpose” is something in the mind of God from eternity concerning His Son, and it has as its objective that the Son should have a Body to express His life. Viewed from that standpoint—from the standpoint of the heart of God—the church is something which is beyond sin and has never been touched by sin.
So we have an aspect of the death of the Lord Jesus in
Ephesians which we do not have so clearly in other places. In Romans things are viewed from the standpoint of fallen man, and beginning with “Christ died for sinners, enemies, the ungodly” (Rom. 5) we are led progressively to “the love of Christ” (Rom. 8:35). In Ephesians, on the other hand, the standpoint is that of God “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4), and the heart of the gospel is “Christ . . . loved the church, and gave himself up for it” (Eph. 5:25). Thus, in Romans it is “we sinned,” and the message is of God’s love for sinners (Rom. 5:8); whereas in Ephesians it is “Christ loved,” and the love here is the love of husband for wife. That kind of love has fundamentally nothing to do with sin as such. What is in view in this passage is not atonement for sin, but the creation of the church, for which end it is said that He “gave himself.”
There is thus an aspect of the death of the Lord Jesus which is altogether positive and a matter particularly of love to His church, where the question of sin and sinners does not directly appear. To bring this fact home, Paul takes that incident in Genesis 2 as illustration. Now this is one of the marvelous things in the Word, and if our eyes have been opened to see it, it will certainly call forth from us worship.
From Genesis 3 onwards, from the “coats of skins” to Abel’s sacrifice, and on from there through the whole Old Testament, there are numerous types which set forth the death of the Lord Jesus as an atonement for sin. Yet the apostle does not appeal here to any of those types of His death, but to this one in Genesis 2. Note that; and then recall that it was not until Genesis 3 that sin came in. There is one type of the death of Christ in the Old Testament which has
nothing to do with sin, for it is not subsequent to the Fall, but prior to it; and that type is here in Genesis 2. Let us look at it for a moment.