The passage for our meditation at this time is in the twelfth chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews, at verse 22.
But ye are come unto Mount Zion,
And unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,
And to innumerable hosts of angels,
To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, who are enrolled in heaven,
And to God the Judge of all,
And to the spirits of just men made perfect,
And to Jesus the Mediator of a new covenant,
And to the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better than that of Abel.—Hebrews 12:22-24
It is only the first clause of that sentence which we shall take as covering what we have to say, although perhaps later we shall proceed to other parts of the whole statement: “Ye are come.”
For some of the time that we are together, I believe it is the Lord’s will that we shall be occupied with the heritage of faith.
It is understood by all who have made and considered this document—the Letter to the Hebrews—that it is a most momentous document in the history of God’s counsels. It takes up all that is in the Old Testament, especially as to its trial, and finds its home and final meaning in the Lord Jesus Christ and in His Church.
This letter, or document, covers a great deal of ground. It covers the three great sections of the Old Testament: from Genesis to Exodus; from Exodus to the end of the Book of Judges; and from the Book of Judges to the end of the Old Testament in Malachi.
All those sections are taken up and covered by this comparatively short document. All that is found in each one of them, and in all of them together, is shown to be gathered into, and to find its consummation in, the Person and work of Christ, and transmitted to His Church.
So that, in Christ and by Christ, we have this immense heritage. We inherit all. There could hardly be a fuller and greater content in so small a fragment of only three words: “Ye are come.”
This letter—I prefer to call it a document, because in fact it is a very true document for the Church’s inheritance and concerning the heritage delivered in this dispensation—sets us on the divine road with God.
God is moving from eternity to eternity, moving forward in His purpose. Then the letter gives us a caravan of travellers on that road: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, Samuel, David—the priest, the king, the prophet. They are all here in the caravan on the road of God.
It touches upon some of the things that we find on the journey, such as the tabernacle and its ordinances. It says that all these who were of this great divine caravan, on the road of God from eternity to eternity, were in a quest, in pursuit of an inheritance.
They looked; they not only looked, but they sought. They left everything behind and went on the road in quest of an inheritance. The aspect of those ages is that of homeless seekers, pursuers on the track with God.
Then this letter tells us that we are come to that which was the object of their quest through all those ages. We have the heritage of which they sought. They received us, because God had some better thing for us, that they, apart from us, should not be made perfect.
What this letter says overall is that all that is no longer future; it is present. So far as entering into it is concerned, it is present. It is present to our apprehension. “Ye are come.” They were seeking, pursuing, and coming; we are come.
God started on His road; these men joined with Him. God has reached the end of His road, and we are with Him at the end of the road. The immense thing that is here is, “Ye are come.” We have arrived. The caravan has arrived.
The whole of that heritage for which these faithful men and women sought is now present for our apprehension. “Ye are come.”
Now that needs breaking up. Take the first thing. In the first place, this document corresponds to the first two chapters of Genesis. That is a high statement.
How does Genesis begin? “In the beginning, God.” How does Hebrews begin? “God, having of old time spoken…” In that particular, it corresponds to Genesis.
In Genesis, God is revealed as the great Designer, the great Projector, the great Worker upon His design which He has projected, and the great Perfector of His work. God saw everything that He had made, and God said, “It is good.”
The Letter to the Hebrews corresponds to that in every particular. It begins with God. It shows God as the great Designer, the great Projector, the great Worker, and the great Perfector. We shall see that as we proceed.
A great point is this: God completed the creation. God created the creation. Then, having completed the creation, He planted a garden. That was subsequent to the whole creation.
Having planted a garden, He put man into it. Now, it does not say that God created man in the garden. It does say that God put man into the garden.
Man was part of the creation as a whole. The garden was subsequent to the whole creation and to man. Man in the garden is something within the whole. You may not see any value in that for the moment, but you will see that it is not just an observation.
Man was put into, firstly, a completed work—a completed work. When everything was done, everything was prepared, then, as a completed thing, it was provided for man as his heritage, his inheritance.
Man was put into a completed work to possess it, to exploit it, and then to build up a family corresponding to, and suited to, the kind of world into which he had been put.
It was a heritage provided by God, to be held and to be enjoyed through faith in God—through faith in the Designer, the Creator. Man did not possess it in his own right. God, by the benefaction of God, centered everything in Him.
Man was placed on a basis of potential sonship, and man was destined for glory. If you could take all that, have it all before you in mind, and take it into the Letter to the Hebrews, how you would find that what was material, temporal, and palpable in Genesis is, in every particular, present in a spiritual way in this document.
We could not have a more glorious message. The message comes out of the content of this spiritual correspondence to God’s activities in creation.
Let us look at it again. Everything concerning man’s glorious destiny has been wrought out by God Himself—yes, wrought out by God in Christ. It is an accomplished thing, a perfected work.
We use the phrase so lightly: the finished work of Christ. The finished work and the perfected Man. Oh, it is there before man gets a look in.
Man had no place at all in what God was doing up to the point of God saying, “It is very good.” Man had no place and no part in it, and he never has had, and never will have.
God independently took this whole matter into His own hands and did it Himself. When the thing was an accomplished act, the creation was there in its beauty, glory, and perfection. He gave it as an inheritance to man. He put man into that.
That is the great message of this letter. Indeed, it is the great message of the New Testament, but it is set out here so patently and gloriously. In Christ, God has wholly and fully consummated the redemption, the new creation.
You and I have no part whatever in making that, but you and I are brought into it. We are come. The whole heritage is presented to faith.
God grant that we, the Lord’s people, may apprehend this: there is nothing to add to it, nothing to make up. God has done it.
Everything concerning man’s glorious destiny—a destiny which was determined before man came on the scene—has been wrought out by God in Christ. God says, “Come, take this heritage.” Oh, man’s glorious, perfect potential, containing unspeakably wonderful and great eternal possibilities.
It is a heritage of light, of life, of rest, of peace, of power, and of victory. All those things are implicit in the first creation, and then they are taken up in this spiritual way and offered to us for our enjoyment—not as something still to be done, but as something done.
God did speak light, and God has given light. We could carry that through in every other respect, but I do not want to get away from the main point.
If I were to introduce a parenthesis here, as a way of giving emphasis to the importance of this matter, I should say again that, as we approach the end of the dispensation—which we are doing most surely and most rapidly—God will seek to come back to His full thought concerning a people and to bring a people back to His full thought.
He will give expression to the dispensation consummately. If that is true, then a word like this is very much to the point.
You and I, first of all, and the Lord’s people wherever they are, whosoever will, shall enter into some wonderful rest, peace, assurance, power, victory, light, liberty, and glory, on the basis of the simple, inclusive fact that God has, in Christ, compassed all that is bound up with man’s glorious destiny and has offered it to faith.
Oh, this straining on the part of Christians to try to add something to what God has done; to try to make effective what God has made effective; to try in some way to do this thing! We have to get adjusted over this matter.
The matter of our responsibility comes out presently, but it does not, and must not for one moment, take away from this: that what was true in the creation of this world was that God did it all by His own hand, independently and self-sufficiently.
Then He gave it as a heritage to man simply on the basis of faith in Him as the great Benefactor. That is true. In this Word it is shown to be exactly true in a far higher realm than the material and temporal—in the spiritual realm.
God has done that. That is all gathered into this—we dare not call it a little phrase—“Ye are come.”
You look at everything before that point. Before that, everything was a quest, a search, a longing, an expectation, an effort. From the point at which this letter says, “Ye are come,” it is here. All that is here, present in the Person and work of the Lord Jesus, offered to you as a completed thing.
The whole thing is wrapped up and offered to you like an object, with all its immense meaning and potentiality. It is offered to us.
What was true with man then is spiritually true of the believer now. The believer, as a new-creation man in Christ, is placed in the heritage.
Ye did not choose me, but I chose you.
—John 15:16
I am not going now to launch out upon all that there is in the Word to show that it was not of our choosing, or of our running, or of our deciding. Any decision that ever we made regarding Christ and His work did not take its rise in ourselves. It came from God. It is the gift of God.
If we are the Lord’s, it is not because, at some time, the whole thing had its commencement in what we called deciding for Christ. That was not the beginning. There was something behind the deciding, and we well know it.
We are placed in the heritage. We had no part in it. There is a history of our coming, and there are a number of people who have come, but behind all was the action of sovereign grace.
We have to say today that we are not where we are because we determined to be, because we chose. No, there was a moving of God. The initiative was with Him. He pursued us. He apprehended us. He has placed us in His Son.
What a wonderful thing to know—that God has put us into Christ. “Created in Christ Jesus”: that is the phrase. Created in Christ Jesus; placed in the heritage.
Then the garden becomes significant in several ways. The garden signifies, firstly, the defining of man’s existence. What I mean is this—and this is a throwback upon what I said a little while ago about the garden being subsequent to the whole creation.
The garden represents, or signifies, the narrowing down of everything to man’s personal life and responsibility. That is, man was not just a kind of general person roaming about the world. It was not just a general idea—man, a kind of freelance in the creation.
No, God definitely defined something. It is called a garden. In the midst of the whole creation, He marked this out. He hedged it about, and He put man inside that hedge, inside those limits.
And so He defined man. He narrowed the whole matter of man’s life down to something quite concrete, quite personal, quite definite, taking it away from generalities and putting it there right at the centre.
Everything became immediate and personal where man was concerned. You see, all this that God had done—all this wonderful work that had been completed by God, and had God’s blessing and approval upon it—had to be made something very concrete where man was concerned.
God was not going to put man into that wonderful world and let him just wander about and live out his life in some indefinite way, in a kind of vague line of things. No, all this must be focused, and man must come into a personal, immediate responsibility to what God had done.
The garden represents that something very immediate and concrete in the relationship between the heritage and the man. Perhaps, if we follow that, the spiritual application becomes more clear.
You see, what God really said when He put man in the garden, right at the centre and heart of the creation, was, “This is your personal matter. This is your personal heritage. This all has to do with you, and you have to do personally with this whole fact.”
So it is with Christ and His work. In Christ, personally and by Christ vocationally and officially, God has perfected the new creation. God has completed everything and entered into His rest.
We know concerning His Son that He has pronounced His verdict:
This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
—Matthew 3:17
God has finished His design, and His work is all finished. Now God says, “Look here, this is not something of general doctrine and teaching. This is something that relates to you personally and individually in an immediate way. It is something that you have to take hold of as your personal heritage.”
The whole question of responsibility comes in there, you see. It comes down upon the matter: all this God has done—what have I done with it? What attitude have I taken toward it?
Dear friend, this is more meaningful and important than perhaps you are grasping. For the moment, put the point this way: you believe in the finished work of Christ. That phrase lies at the very foundation of your Christian faith—the finished work of Christ.
You agree with all that I have said about God independently doing this thing, right out from Himself. You agree that the new creation in Christ personally has the approval of God upon it, the expression of His perfect satisfaction.
Then why look so miserable? Why go about all the time with a hang-dog expression concerning your salvation, wondering whether you will ever arrive and get through and come to glory?
I mean this: when Adam was put into that garden, he looked around. “Is all this for me? Does all this belong to me? Is it mine?” There was a man full of amazement, full of wonder, full of pleasure, full of worship.
Probably the one expression every day was, “Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it wonderful? Just look! Look!”
Do you think it is less so in Christ? Is it necessarily less so in the new creation? Is it less so in the spiritual than in the temporal?
There is something defective about our apprehension, about our faith. You see, this document is a document of faith. Something is defective about our faith-apprehension of all this.
Yes, we very often sing, “More of Thee.” We ought to be people who are more full of worship. So God did not leave this thing in kind of general terms. He reduced the whole new creation to a very practical proposition when He planted a garden and put man into it, saying, “Now, here, this all has to do with you. It all has to do with you, and you have to do with all this.”
So it is with Christ and His work. That was the first significance of the garden. After the creation, God proceeded to plant a garden and then to put man—not in the whole thing in general, but to reduce it to concrete, practical terms—and say, “Look here: this is not some abstract, wide-world, remote sort of thing. This is something that comes very near to you.”
The second significance of the garden was that it was to be man’s home. It was a home. If man had made it his home, he would not have been turned out; he lost his home.
Well, home, to justify its name and to be true to its real meaning, is, to begin with, the place of rest. Christ is our paradise. Christ is God’s way of making this great universe, redeemed, concrete, practical, and present to us. Christ is our home.
We are keeping through to the purpose of the letter. The whole matter of entering into rest, upon which the writer dwells very fully, is here. God entered into His rest, and He put man right into the heart of that which was His own rest. He made man’s home at the heart of that rest.
Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me;
For I am meek and lowly in heart:
And ye shall find rest unto your souls.—Matthew 11:28-29
That is only saying, in other words, “Come home.” Our wanderings are over. Man might have been a wanderer in the great world, but he was given a home. Instead of being a wanderer, he was given a home.
God has done a great thing, but He has not just left us to wander about in His great things. He has brought us to His Son, that His Son should be our home in terms of rest. He is our rest because He is God’s rest.
Home, if it is what it is meant to be, is the place of man’s pleasure. He has pleasure there. All his pleasant portions are bound up with his home. It is joy.
These things need not take much time in their spiritual application. Has Christ really become our home in terms of pleasure? Has He not become the very centre and sphere of our delight and our pleasure?
You know how true that is in the natural when a new home is being set up. Everything else is put up with, and you get through as quickly as possible in order to get to that home, to make that home. The dominating heart-pleasure is at home.
Such should be our attitude toward Christ in Person. Christ should be our pleasure, our delight. A home is not a lodging; a home is an abiding place.
Jesus, in the days of His flesh, spoke in spiritual terms when He said, “In My Father’s house are many abiding places”—“mansions,” the old version says. Literally, “abiding places.”
It comes to the place where we can abide forever, and go no more out, and find eternal satisfaction. Where, in all God’s universe, will that be if it is not in Christ? He is our abiding place.
Therefore the writer introduces into this letter, over against the instability of these Jewish believers and over against their variableness:
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to-day, yea and for ever.
—Hebrews 13:8
It is a contrasting statement, you see. They were not the same. They had professed and moved away from their profession. They had taken a position and let it go. They had been drawn away, persuaded away, argued away. They were not settled.
But Jesus Christ is the same. Is that not something in which to rejoice—that He is not moving, changing His position, or variable? He has the attributes of God, with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow cast by turning.
What a tremendous thing that is! How many shadows come into life through unreliableness, through never being sure. But there is neither shadow cast by turning in the abiding place.
That comes out later as we go on. Christ should be all this to us because He is all this to God. God has come to rest. God has come to settlement and certainty in the Person and work of His Son.
God finds all His pleasure in Him and all His interest in Him. God has given Him to us in all these terms of spiritual reality. The challenge is this: Is Christ to us our delight and pleasure, our abiding place, our one absorbing interest?
That was what the garden was to Adam, to begin with: all that, and a foreshadowing of Christ. He is our paradise.
The garden next signified man’s vocation—man’s vocation. God gave it to man as a heritage and told him to look after it, to develop its potentiality, and to realize all its possibilities.
It was his life-work. The first vocation in this world was that. It was man’s life-work, and it was the sphere of his self-expression.
That phrase could be used perfectly safely in those conditions at that time—in unfallen man’s experience—because God was his one interest. It is perfectly safe to express yourself if the Lord is everything.
The garden was the way of his self-expression, the way of his own development. While things were perfect as to nature, they were not complete as to possibility, either in man or in the creation.
Perfect, yet to be perfected in the sense of being brought to full stature. The garden was the sphere and means of man’s coming to full development himself, and bringing out all that was there potentially in the work of God.
What a field that opens where we and Christ are concerned! Christ is our vocation. Christ is the occasion of our expression of all that is in us. Christ is the means of our enlargement, our growth, and our exercise.
You see, the principle is all there. That is what is being said here in this letter, in other language, in other ways and forms; but it is all here in substance, meaning, and principle.
This is the meaning of our being in Christ. He is our vocation—our vocation, our life-work, our supreme interest, and the means of our own spiritual development.
For the present, I close with this one other word: the garden was man’s probation—the scene, sphere, and occasion of his testing and his proving.
Here responsibility is introduced. Note the focal point of responsibility. This responsibility had nothing to do with providing anything for his own foundation, or making up his glorious heritage. It was all complete.
He was put into it as a completed, perfected thing, and then he was made responsible. But what was the focal point of responsibility? Into what did the whole matter of responsibility become gathered? Just one thing.
Everything stood or fell as to his attitude toward the great Giver—whether he trusted God, and trusted Him so utterly that no other voice could turn him aside from the One who had given him this heritage.
Responsibility in this context—is that not the argument of the Letter to the Hebrews from beginning to end? The great word of this letter is faith, is it not? Faith is finally the summing up of everything. It is faith all the way through from the beginning.
It is a great letter of faith. Tremendous things are said in this letter about responsibility. But when you focus this whole matter of responsibility down and ask, “What does it amount to?” the answer is: believing God; having faith in God.
Faith of that kind shuts you up unto God. It is a very energetic thing, the faith that is in this letter. It is a faith that precipitates, a faith that compels.
Look at what it says about the faith of those men on this road. There is Abraham, for example. His faith caused him to forsake because God’s purpose was not there, and faith drew him in the direction of God’s purpose.
It is a tremendous thing, this faith, but everything hangs upon that. Responsibility, dear friend, is not that we have in some way to make our salvation, to save ourselves, or to perfect ourselves—not at all.
God is the Author and Perfector of faith, it says here. But how is it going to be done? Believe God.
It comes back, after all, to this: Is it really true? Is this true—that this whole thing right on to glorification is an accomplished act of God’s own?
Whom he justified, them he also glorified.
—Romans 8:30
The perfect tense: “Whom He justified, them He also glorified.” Is it true that the whole thing, so far as God is concerned, is finished and offered to me as a finished thing?
Oh, if only I can trust my heart really to that! What comfort. What release from strain and tension. What rest. What joy. What strength to go on.
That is what follows. You will never be able to do it—or any of the other things that we are bidden to do in this letter—unless you have come to that settled assurance: it is all right. There is no question, no hazard, no risk at all in this. It is settled.
All that remains is for me, by faith, to take it, to grasp it, to hold on to it, and to go on with it. Let us go on.