We return to our key fragment of Scripture in the twelfth chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews, verse 22. For a little while longer, we continue with the simple and imperfect fragment of the whole statement: “Ye are come.” Whether we shall get beyond that remains to be seen.
We have seen that this is a very comprehensive segment, gathering up everything that God has ever intended by way of making provision for the realization of man’s glorious destiny.
We began by pointing out that this wonderful document, the Letter to the Hebrews, takes up the Old Testament in its three great phases:
All those phases—the movements of God—are collected and transferred to Christ and His Church in a spiritual way in this letter.
So far, we have been occupied with the first phase, noting that as Genesis begins, “In the beginning God,” so the Letter to the Hebrews begins with God having spoken. Everything begins with and proceeds from God—God alone acting, designing, projecting, and working until He has everything completed to His own satisfaction.
Then, in the second chapter of Genesis and the second chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews, man is brought onto that scene. You will remember that in Genesis 2, and also in Hebrews 2, the matter of man’s position—the design of God for him—is introduced:
What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands.
We spent considerable time upon that most glorious of all facts: God has everything completed for man before He brings man in. That is, man comes into something which God has perfectly completed.
We have not to make anything for our salvation, our perfecting, or our glorification. God has done it all, and then brings us into what He has done. It is the heritage of faith in the great divine Benefactor.
We went on to see man placed in his heritage, and what the garden represented and typified spiritually. I am not going over the detail again. I merely remind you, because there are one or two additional points to be considered.
In the first place, the garden defined man’s existence. It brought the whole creation down to something very practical and immediate so far as man was concerned. The garden was the microcosm of God’s whole, satisfying creation, and it was given to man.
In effect, God said with the garden, “This is yours, man. This belongs to you. This has a very practical relationship to you, and you to it. You are not just turned loose on the earth. The whole thing is focused here to become something that you have got to apprehend, something that you have to lay hold of by faith and make good.”
So the garden meant that in the beginning. It is perfectly clear that, when we come to the New Testament—and to this Letter to the Hebrews in particular—the whole of God’s wonderful new creation through redemption in Christ is presented to faith as a practical proposition.
It becomes something more than general teaching, doctrine, and belief. It is something that you and I have really to apprehend, take hold of, and believe. God says, “This is all for you. This is all yours. What are you going to do about it?”
That was the upshot of the garden for Adam: “This is yours. What are you going to do with it?” The great work which God has perfected in Christ and through Christ is presented as a finished, completed, and altogether God-satisfying work. It is presented to us to accept and to make our own.
It is very practical.
Then we went on to see that the garden was intended to be man’s home. That means that it was his place of rest, pleasure, interest, and abiding. These are the things into which we are brought in Christ, where God’s new creation is.
The right apprehension of Christ by faith does mean—and is intended to mean—that you and I come into rest of heart.
Rest is not inactivity, doing nothing. Rest is not simply sitting in an armchair. That is our idea of home. Well, sometimes it might be included; but the armchair does not comprehend the whole idea of home, does it?
I think I rest more in satisfying work than in doing nothing. I am very restless in doing nothing. What brings real satisfaction is to have something creative on hand, something worthwhile. In Christ we have that kind of rest.
It is interesting and significant that when the Lord Jesus said that, in coming to Him, rest would be found, He combined with it:
Take My yoke upon you.
The yoke is the symbol of service. If we are going to find rest in service, it must be very heart-satisfying service. That is home; it is the place of rest and the place of abiding. These, with many other features of home life, are what we are supposed to find in Christ.
We are supposed to be—being very careful now because of my American friends—very homey people. Some of you do not know the significance of that.
Now, man’s vocation was represented and signified by the garden. It became his life-work, or was intended to become his life-work: the care, fashioning, and cultivation of the things committed to him. They were to be his active interests and the means of the development of his own life.
These things are true in Christ. Christ becomes the very life-work of the believer. We are introduced by Christ and in Christ into a great vocation—a great vocation in which all that is deepest in our being, through the grace of God, finds its expression.
Love for God, the answer of our own hearts to God’s goodness, goes out in expression and pours itself out in vocation and service. But let us be very careful what we mean when we use the word service. It is better to speak of our ministering to the Lord.
That covers every form of service. If what we do is not ministering to the Lord, then it is not service to the Lord. In Christ, as Adam exercised himself in the garden, our own lives are developed. There is increase. We grow up in Him into all things.
Finally, so far as the afternoon was concerned, we saw the garden as the place of man’s probation, where he was on test to be approved or disapproved. The element of responsibility comes in, in relation to all that God has done for us and offered to us in Christ.
But responsibility is summed up in one word: faith.
Without faith it is impossible to please Him.
Faith is our answer, and it covers everything. We leave that and go on to one or two other things in relation to this first phase of interpretation.
We said that man had to possess, exploit, and realize all that God had given to him. This Letter to the Hebrews bears down very strongly upon that. It tells us what has been done for us by Him, in Him, and through Him; then it calls upon us to answer.
In the first place, there is the apprehending of the possession: making ours what God has offered. There can be a gap between God’s presentation and provision and our deliberate, positive apprehension of it.
Many of the warnings and exhortations in this letter have to do with that. I am not going to turn aside to remind you of the occasion upon which the letter was written, but you will see that again and again the writer comes back on this kind of exhortation.
Here is the fact presented. Here is everything offered. Here is that to which you have come. The wonderful phrase is constantly reiterated: “Let us.”
Let us fear lest, a promise being left us, any one of you should seem to have come short of it.
There is much in that strain: the distance between God’s great provision—all that is our heritage in Christ—and our laying hold of it, definitely and positively possessing all that is ours in possessing Christ.
The New Testament has much that bears upon that matter of really possessing Christ, really taking hold of Christ. There is an exercise here. For the man in the garden, he has got to make hold of this.
It is very nice that the Lord should say, “Now look at all this. This is very lovely, very good, very wonderful. There are great possibilities in this.” But you cannot just sit down, look at it, think about it, and be pleased with it.
No, the Lord says, “Do something. Get hold of this whole situation. Get it into your hands. Turn it to real account.”
Friends, there is, I fear, a weakness here in many Christians. They know the truth, the promises, the gifts, and all the wonderful things God has done and said in Christ; but they do not get down to this thing and, by faith, lay hold of it, appropriate it, and say, “That is for me, and I make it mine.”
Because there is not this kind of reaction to God, there is loss. We drift away. We come short. That is what the letter is about: to be possessed in the first place, and then to be exploited.
That is, it has to be taken up and made to yield its inherent and intrinsic riches.
That is general language, but here is life, for instance. Right at the heart of this garden is life, and everything in the garden is living.
For us, in this Letter to the Hebrews, the Lord Jesus has tasted death and has overcome him that had the power of death—that is, the devil. This letter comes to us with life in many connections. The whole matter of life arises again and again.
Of course, you and I all believe that Jesus is the life, that life and incorruption were brought to light through the gospel, and that our heritage is eternal life, the gift of God. We believe all these things; but, as you know, very often that is only doctrine, only objective truth.
It has got to become a very practical matter. We are, after all, in a realm of death. Death is all about us. It becomes a necessity for us to lay hold on life.
Any day, we may become conscious of this blanketing of death. What do we do about it? It may come into a prayer gathering. People gather together for prayer, and sometimes a woolly blanket seems to spread over the whole thing. We may struggle through and come out at the other end and go home saying, “It is dead. It is all dead.”
What have we done about it? There ought to be a collective and corporate reaction: “We are not going to have this. This is not our heritage. Life is God’s gift. We will not tolerate this.”
We can do that individually, physically, mentally, spiritually, and collectively. If we do not resist the encroachment of spiritual death upon our bodies, we shall live a living death. It is a contradiction, I know, but it can be just like that.
In so many ways, individually, physically, mentally, spiritually, and collectively, this is the battle: the asserting of life. We have got to lay hold of eternal life.
Lay hold on the life eternal.
Then exploit what He has given you. Oh, that God would get this into us! It changes our gatherings. We become sensitive enough to register the encroachment of death and know that that is the time for us to do something—not to accept it, but to do something. Exploit life.
What is true of life is true of everything else that constitutes this inheritance in Christ. It is given, but it does not become effective or fruitful until we do something about it.
It is a remarkable thing that God has given us all this in its perfection as a gift, and yet it does not become fruitful in our experience until we exploit it. The purpose that is inherently and intrinsically there has got to be realized.
Strangely enough, it is realized as we come into faith-action about it. It is a great heritage, but somehow or other we do not realize all that it means without doing something in relation to it.
Works are things. Works do not justify, but the justified person works, putting faith into action and proving that he has faith by doing something about it. But that does not need enlarging.
The person and work of Christ in their entirety are presented to faith for inclusive apprehension. It is a remarkable thing:
Receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls.
Faith leaps over time and takes hold of the end—the ultimate issue—and takes the line there and now. Receiving the end of your faith means inclusively apprehending by faith what God has secured.
Oh, that we could make that clear. I am sure you are grasping it. It is necessary for you and me, again and again, in the pressure of time and in our difficulties, to stand up and say, “Yes, this is a bad patch. This is a difficult thing. Today everything is black, dark, and apparently hopeless.”
“But it will be all right at the end. This is not what it will be at the end. At the end I shall be out, and up, and through, on top, in victory.” Receive the end, lay hold of that end today, and do not give away everything because of the present.
Lay hold of God’s end. That is very practical faith. That is exploiting your inclusive inheritance—not merely a bit of it, but the whole.
There is progressive development of what is given to us in Christ. That does not mean making it more, because you cannot make it more. It means drawing out what is there—the possibility, potentiality, and value in Christ which we have never yet seen.
We shall discover that He is an inexhaustible fullness only as, by faith, we get to work upon Him and upon what is given to us in Him. Development in that sense is like a man developing a piece of property that he has inherited. We do not mean that he is enlarging it; we mean that he is getting out of it all that is in it.
That is what I mean when I speak of developing Christ: getting out what is in Him.
Now we can pass on to the next thing: the correspondence between this letter and the beginning of Genesis.
In the garden, man was given a trust and a commandment combined with that trust. The trust was life, and the commandment was, “Be fruitful, and multiply.”
The garden was intended by God to be the place and scene of the constituting of a family—a growing family corresponding to the garden, suitable to the garden. That is a very important point.
When man was no longer suitable to the garden, he was put out. God was not going to have, in that garden, a family that was not suited to it or did not correspond to it. That would have been an inherent contradiction.
It can easily be illustrated by putting different kinds of people into different kinds of environments. They are not suited to it. It does not suit them, and they do not suit it. They are unhappy, and the whole thing is a contradiction.
People must have things which are like themselves. That is the whole secret of life, is it not? Take people out of certain environments and put them into a lovely place, and they may be miserable and unhappy. They will very soon turn it into something that suits them.
The same is true the other way around. Put someone into something altogether inferior, and they are not happy in it. They will make a difference; they will put their stamp upon it. It is the answer to what they are.
That is the principle with God. Every person who was to be in that garden was to be perfectly in sympathy and harmony with the garden itself.
That is better understood when you transfer it to Christ. Let Christ represent that garden—our paradise. You know quite well how unsaved people are miserable amongst Christians, and so they ought to be. There is something wrong with Christianity if they are not.
You know how miserable Christians are in the world. There is a difference, is there not?
Here could be a family wholly corresponding to the garden. Transfer that to Christ. This Letter to the Hebrews brings this matter out so strongly. Perhaps you have not looked at it in this way.
What is the meaning of such phrases as:
Holy brethren.
He is not ashamed to call them brethren.
Behold, I and the children whom God hath given Me.
Bringing many sons unto glory.
The general assembly and church of the firstborn.
Do you see the language? It is the language of family. It is distributed throughout this letter from beginning to end.
What does it mean? This family is an object of God. The family consists of those conformed to the image of His Son, those who take their character from Christ, and those who correspond to the great heritage God has given them in Christ.
If He has given the great inheritance of rest, then He desires a family enjoying that rest. Whatever it may be, He desires a family having the features of Christ and of the work which God has perfectly accomplished in Christ.
Man was put in the garden, first of all, with the responsibility of life. You and I, in and through Christ and His work, have been given that divine life. It is another order of life, an altogether different kind of life.
This life which we have in Christ and through Christ is another life, but it carries tremendous responsibility. We cannot have it and stop it with ourselves. Alongside it goes the command: “Be fruitful, and multiply; replenish the earth.”
The justification of life is in the measure of Christ in others through us. The justification of our being called Christians, the justification of our standing upon the finished work of Christ, and the justification of our daily existence as new-creation people is not merely in our having life and knowing things.
It is in a measure of Christ being found in others through us. That is the justification of our existence and the vindication of God in giving life. Oh, it is a challenge, is it not? The test is very searching.
Family is in view here. Paul spoke of having begotten the Corinthians through the gospel. Concerning Onesimus, he said:
Whom I have begotten in my bonds.
Do you see the point? Spiritual birth is brought about by the transmission of life from one member to another.
It requires a living church to bring about an adequate salvation. It requires a living member of the church to bring another into life. That is always the way.
It is illustrated by the prophet when the child was dead. He stretched himself upon that child—hands to hands, lips to lips—and transmitted life to that child, and the child was brought to life.
That is the responsibility of life. How searching and serious the Scriptures are upon this matter: no person is supposed to be a dead end.
Any kind of dead-end condition—vital barrenness or fruitlessness—receives the most serious view from the Lord. In the natural, it brings its nemesis. By our likes, dislikes, offences, preferences, or sheer willfulness, we may stop life with ourselves.
I am speaking now in the realm of volition. We have a will about this. If we do so, we shall meet a nemesis sooner or later in the natural; and so we shall in the spiritual.
Where there is no life that can be spared, life that can be given, life that is more than we need for ourselves, where there is no such life that can be transmitted, that individual is becoming an end in himself.
Such a person is not standing up to obligation and responsibility, and will bring the Lord’s displeasure upon himself. “Be fruitful, and multiply” postulates the fact that you have something—a deposit—that makes that possible.
The family is very much in view in this letter. It is a proof that God has done all this and given all this in Christ, and a proof that we have really entered in and apprehended all that God has done.
The proof is found in how many other people are getting life through us. Oh, dear friends, above all things, do not become an end in yourselves. Let there be those who, in the day of God, can attribute their spiritual life to you as a channel.
Make it your business in life to see that there are men and women who have received life through you. That is the justification of our existence. That is the vindication of God in giving us life at all. Indeed, it is the vindication of the cross of Christ.
He shall see of the travail of His soul.
He shall see His seed.
The pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand.
Ye are come to all the provision for a life like this, for a vocation like this, and for a multiplication like that. It is all there. It can be, because God has made the full provision for it.
It is so largely a matter of our exercise.
If you have that, I would like to go on for a little while with the next word. It is not my purpose in this conference, unless the Lord should lead otherwise, to go beyond the next word in this great statement in Hebrews. But this is very much on my heart:
Ye are come unto Mount Zion.
The turn of the argument is upon that little word, but. You have not come to Sinai—to earthquakes, lightning, fire, terror, and the voice that terrified those who heard it. But ye are come unto Mount Zion.
What I want you to see is that while it is quite true that Zion is the antithesis of Sinai and is mentioned here in contrast with it, that is not all.
What is meant here is in keeping with the whole matter: you have come to the end of the road which was in view at the beginning of the road.
Not only do you not now come to Sinai, but you have left that long behind. It lies far back in the course of things. It has its own significance and implications, but it lies back there.
You have journeyed a long way from Sinai, and you are now come—not to an advanced point on the journey, but to the end of the journey.
Remember, we have moved from Genesis now into Israel. When they were on the salvation and life side of the Red Sea, they sang that song:
Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of Thine inheritance,
The place, O Lord, which Thou hast made for Thee to dwell in,
The sanctuary, O Lord, which Thy hands have established.
Right at the beginning of the journey, the end was in view. The end was said to be the mountain of their inheritance. If you look through the Old Testament, you know what that mountain is: it is always Zion.
From the beginning of the journey, the end is Zion. It is not only a contrast to Sinai; it is the end of the road which was in view at the beginning.
This whole letter is a letter of things left behind, is it not? How many things are left behind. They belong to that order back there. We have something now which is right on here.
Back there it was all partial and imperfect. Now we have come to the complete and final. Zion is an inclusive and comprehensive term.
If Zion came into view at the beginning of the journey on the shores of the Red Sea, then, as the end of the journey, it means that all which the journey represented is comprehended in Zion. The whole thing is included in Zion. There is nothing more after that.
Zion is so inclusive and comprehensive a term. It is the sum. Symbolically, it is the sum of all God’s work in Christ.
You have only to look at the whole section of Scripture from Sinai to Christ and see everything speaking of Christ, pointing to Christ, moving on toward Christ, and finding its fulfillment in Christ. Zion gathers it all up in Christ.
Zion becomes the sum total of all God’s work in Christ. Ye are come unto Zion. You are come to the consummate, comprehensive, all-inclusive work of God in Christ.
That is another emphasis upon the same thing. Zion means, inclusively and comprehensively, all that God has accomplished in His Son.
In the light of the Old Testament, all that it has to say about Zion shows that Zion comes to mean a people—a people.
Zion passes from being a thing or an object to becoming a people:
Let the children of Zion be joyful in their King.
The virgin daughter of Zion.
Zion, therefore, is not only all that God has accomplished in Christ and all that Christ means in Himself of God. Zion comes next to mean a people in the good of it.
Ye are come to Zion. That means that we have come to be in the good of all that God has provided and accomplished in His Son. It is the sum of God’s salvation enjoyed by His people.
When you read about Zion, the predominant note in that connection is always one of glorying, rejoicing, and praise.
Walk about Zion, and go round about her.
Mark ye well her bulwarks.
Zion, the joy of the whole earth.
You get into the prophets, and it is another story—not the glory but the sorrow, not the song but the sigh. It is the story of a people who have not entered into their inheritance and heritage.
Let us keep to the bright side for a little while. Zion means a people really in their joy and in their glory in Christ.
Really, really having a good time—that is what it amounts to in Zion: having a good time because of all that the Lord has done.
If we were more truly living on that ground and corresponding to that picture of Zion, it would be more true of us. Yes, we have good times; but are we always in the enjoyment of the good, having a really good time because of what Christ has done and what Christ is to us?
I do not mean because things are always going well, but simply because of what the Lord has and is. There ought to be a good deal more of the good time about us, do you not think, in that sense?
In Zion, people are having a good time, and it is all connected with life. It is because of what the Lord has done and what the Lord is. Very simple, but that is the meaning of “Ye are come.”
God has made all the provision for us. Zion is a symbol of His inclusive, transcendent victory.
You remember the beginning of Zion: it was a stronghold in the hands of the Jebusites, thought to be impregnable. When David came, they fortified it with the blind and the lame—an impossible thing, they believed, for anybody to overcome.
David did overcome it and made it his city. The point is this: Zion symbolizes transcendent victory—victory over all the enemies of God, over all the enemies of Christ, and over all the enemies of God’s people.
It is the sound of victory that is the sound of Zion.
Come to your Letter to the Hebrews. What do you find? You find an enemy: Satan. You find death—he that had the power of death, that is, the devil. Are Satan and death like impregnable strongholds?
Then there is man—not man deliberately and consciously opposed to God, but man in his own state. He is here in this Letter to the Hebrews, and everything that God has done in Christ has to do with those enemies.
What is all this about the blood? What is all this about man far from God? What is this about the Mediator between God and man, this great Mediator, this High Priest? What is all this about death, and the Aaronic priesthood which could not continue because the priests died?
What is all this about death? Who is behind all these things? Sin, death, and the devil.
The whole context is that what God has done in Christ has been to destroy all that, to put it out of court. The sin which keeps us away from God has been dealt with.
Let us draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace.
The devil, using death, would bring an end to everything; but Christ has overcome. What a mighty victory God has wrought in Christ.
That is all gathered up at the end of the letter in Zion: “Ye are come unto Mount Zion.” What is happening? What seemed to be the impregnable fortress of Satan, sin, man’s fallen condition, and death has been overcome and taken by Christ through His cross.
That victory is given to you. Zion is a symbol of comprehensive victory in every realm. What a heritage is ours.
This is not fiction. This is not theory. This is something, as I have said, to be put to the test. Ye are come unto Zion.
I think I had better finish somewhere. Perhaps that is a good note on which to finish. There are other things of tremendous value related to Zion, and they can receive later consideration.
We finish on this note of the perfect tense. It is written here in the perfect tense: “Ye are come.”
It does not say, “Ye are coming.” It does not say, “Ye are going to come,” or, “You will come one day.” It says, “Ye are come.”
How can that be possible? Well, it is again simply this: God has done it all and handed it out to us. There you are. That is for you.
If you will believe it, if you will accept it in faith, all that is yours. Take it. Get to work. Go on in the good of it. Go on to the full inheritance.