We continue this afternoon to explore some of the depths and fullness of that little fragment in the Letter to the Hebrews, Hebrews 12:22:
Ye are come unto mount Zion.
It is common knowledge that the Letter to the Hebrews represents, perhaps more than any other document, the transition from one dispensation to another—from one order, system, and economy to an entirely different one; from all that was temporal and material in God’s ways and means with Israel to the spiritual counterpart of those things as they relate to the Church.
This matter of Zion is inclusive of all that was involved in that transition. It came to sum up everything from Israel’s going forth from Egypt, and then their being brought fully into view as planted in the mountain of His inheritance.
All that was subsequent to their deliverance, and its fulfilment and consummation in that place called Zion, is taken up in a spiritual way and made the heritage of the Church—our heritage, the heritage of faith. “Ye are come unto Zion.”
We have been seeking to explore and exploit the fullness of that heritage. We will take one more facet of it this afternoon. For our basic word, we turn to Psalm 132.
For the Lord hath chosen Zion;
He hath desired it for His habitation.
This is My resting-place for ever:
Here will I dwell; for I have desired it.
The fragment for our present consideration is this: “The Lord hath chosen Zion.”
In the very blood of the true Israelite is the element of selection and election. There is a difference and a destiny. Even a true Israelite has that in his make-up. It is part of his very constitution. There is something in him, in his consciousness, in his very being, that tells him he is something different and that he has a particular destiny.
It has become customary to refer to Israel as the chosen people, or God’s chosen people. That is the consciousness of the true Israelite. God distinguished him in the appointment of God unto some particular purpose. There is in his blood a sense of destiny.
These two things go together: difference and destiny. They are part of his constitution. They cannot help themselves; it just comes out. Sometimes it shows itself in arrogance, independence, superiority, and many other ways. But there it is: they cannot help themselves. That is how they are made. They are different, and they know it.
Something is bound up with that difference in the nature of a purpose and destiny which is their heritage. This sense of destiny has always been a tremendous factor in their history, in their endurance, and in something that has enabled them to endure untold suffering in work, vocation, and hardship.
It has been a potent factor in their survival. When that consciousness was alive, they were in strength. When that consciousness faded, when it came under a cloud of a thousand questions and lost its keenness, they were in weakness.
Their strength or weakness was related to the strength or weakness of this consciousness—this sense of calling, this sense of vocation, this sense of destiny. When they were in right relationship with God, that consciousness was great. It was the dominant factor in their life, a powerful motive and principle.
When their relationship with God was not right, that consciousness faded and ceased to be a governing factor. They hung their harps upon the willows and ceased to sing the songs of Zion.
Zion, you see, contains this very element, principle, and dynamic of destiny—our purpose, our calling.
This glory of calling, purpose, choosing, election, and destiny is regnant in Zion. People lose a tremendous buoyancy when Zion is not present and active, when it is latent or even absent.
It became the chief vocation and purpose of the prophets to recover that factor. The voice of the prophet is always tuned to that one note:
Behold, My servant, whom I uphold;
My chosen, in whom My soul delighteth.
That is the note of the prophets. Look again at Isaiah 43, and you find that this is the supreme note there: redemption goes hand in hand with this reassurance, “I have chosen thee.”
All that lay in that half of the Bible concerning the earthly people and the earthly Zion comes back to us through this New Testament writer:
Ye are come unto mount Zion.
Not to that earthly Zion, but to another—a superior, transcendent, heavenly, spiritual Zion. Coming to Zion, among all the other things that it means, is coming to that reality: coming to the eternal counterpart of the temporal.
It is coming to divine choosing, divine electing, divine calling, and a divine, heavenly destiny.
We find this made clear in the New Testament in two ways. First, if it was true in the very blood and constitution of the Israelite that the sense of vocation and destiny was so strong and powerful, it is also true in the new birth of the child of God.
It is there as a great factor, present in the new birth as a general principle. We may not define it in this way or give it this particular definition in words; but when it is put to us in this way, we say, “Yes, that is just what we know.”
When we were born again, we immediately became conscious that there was, after all, some purpose in our being on the earth. Life began to have real meaning. Whatever we had thought or felt about life up to that time, now we became conscious that there was some meaning about life of which we had never been conscious before.
We just feel, “Now I have begun to live, and now life has meaning.” I say that this is there as a general principle in the very constitution of the new birth. It is a test as to the reality of the new birth.
It is a testimony to a very great fact. Somewhere behind our birth, all unknown and beyond our understanding and comprehension, there is a design. There is a purpose. We are no accident. There is a meaning.
I think, if I may use the expression spiritually, it is in our blood by the new birth. Of course, that is open to your attesting. You know it is true.
It is at least as potent a reality and fact in the birth of a child of God as ever it was in a Jew. If your new birth has not brought you something of this—not necessarily in the form in which I have put it, but something that you know to be true—that life has only just begun and purpose has only just come in, then listen. Listen.
It is, I say, a blood constituent of the new creation. It is there as a general principle in your new birth, and that is the meaning of being born anew.
But then the New Testament goes on to show us that a life in the Spirit—which, after all, is the enlargement and fullness of the meaning of your birth—becomes intelligent concerning this matter of purpose, destiny, and difference. It becomes intelligent and specific.
By intelligent, I mean that we come to know what Paul spoke of: that we have been chosen in Him before the foundation of the world. We come to understand what Peter meant when he described the Church as an elect people—an English word from the same original root as “chosen.”
We come intelligently to understand that we are, somehow, chosen by God. Before there had been any introduction to us through the new birth, we could not have been aware of it; but we begin to understand something of what that means.
We can understand what the Lord Jesus meant when He said:
Ye did not choose Me, but I chose you.
This is something that God has done, and there is no explanation of it on any other ground than that God did it. God has purposed it. We begin to understand that it is so, and intelligently we are able to grasp more and more of the teaching, especially through Paul, concerning this matter of election.
Choosing and calling—calling! What a favourite word that was with Paul: “called according to His purpose.” Purpose according to His purpose. These are great words, all gathered into the one word: destiny.
A life in the Spirit means a growing intelligence about that, a growing understanding of it. It is not only the basic consciousness of destiny, but the growing understanding of what that means.
As we grow in understanding of what it means to have been chosen and called according to His purpose, life takes on a great deal more fullness of meaning, value, and power. It becomes something of tremendous power and potency in our lives.
It is a mighty motive. It is the thing that also girds us for the race, the journey, and the conflict.
You see, this is very closely in keeping with the Letter to the Hebrews, because it is this very sense of destiny that is spoken of in relation to men such as Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and the rest.
These men had in them this sense of the hand of God having come upon them with an object, for a purpose. It was that sense of destiny which enabled them, on the one hand, to leave the world behind with its interests and possessions, and, on the other hand, to go patiently on through the years.
They were men who had seen something. They had seen something. Abraham had seen something that this world could never answer to: a city and a heavenly country. No matter how much they possessed of this earth, it never answered to what they had seen.
Moses saw something. Yes, he saw the God of Israel, and he saw the pattern of the things in the heavens; but he saw more than that. What a tremendous suggestion is found in this statement:
Accounting the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt.
Christ! He had seen something that could never find its answer in types, symbols, and the whole earthly representation. He had seen something heavenly.
So all these men had seen something, and that seeing was bound up with this sense of being called and of destiny. It kept them going.
Of Moses it is said that he endured as seeing Him who is invisible. He had seen something, and he endured. They endured. The power that girded them to endure, to suffer, and to die in faith, not having received the promise, was something in them—not something they had merely taken on, but something inborn: a sense of God-appointed destiny.
The Letter to the Hebrews gathers all that up and says:
Therefore let us also, seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.
Lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily besets. That doubt, that unbelief, must be laid aside. Run with patience, girded by the same inward seeing, sensing, and knowing: we are called, we are chosen, and we are related to some tremendous destiny.
But this becomes specific. It is not just general. Zion is something that becomes very concrete in Israel. It is, so to speak, the gathering up of all that the nation meant, all that the land meant, and all that the city meant, concentrated at one point.
This sense of destiny, instead of being merely general and spread abroad, becomes concentrated and focused. “Ye are come unto Zion.”
This is something that has been said more than once in the conference: it is presented to faith, and it is something that you and I have to take back into our minds as being a matter which concerns us.
The apostle will present the truth and tell us the facts about being chosen in Christ, elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, and so on. But then he says, “Walk worthily of the calling wherewith ye were called.”
Make this something that comes into your everyday life. It will redeem your everyday life from the ordinary, the monotonous, and the trivial. It will lift you right up onto another level. You know that, as a child of God, you are related to some tremendous purpose, and you have to live in the light of a great purpose.
Zion, as we have said, is a collective conception. It is that which joins the Lord’s people together. They found their corporate point in Zion as a nation. Zion was the cohesive strength that brought them together.
Most naturally and literally, that was true. At the appointed times they all went up to Zion, and there their national unity was celebrated and enjoyed. Though they lived apart in many places and might become isolated during the intervening months, really they were not isolated. Zion was the testimony to, and experience of, their oneness.
That is a great feature of this whole matter of Zion with which we are concerned spiritually. It is collective—or, to use the more familiar word, corporate.
Though every individual Israelite had a sense of election and destiny, every Jew held that relatively. No individual Jew thought that he was the elect and that the whole purpose of God related to him alone.
He knew that his calling, election, and destiny were related matters, and he found the strength of them in that relatedness. It was the people—not individuals as such. Individuals shared in these things in their relationship with the whole people.
God is after a people for His purpose. You and I will have our meaning, strength, destiny, and purpose in a related way.
There is always a great deal of limitation and danger in individuals thinking that they are the elect and that their job is the job of all jobs which God has given. Anything like that is a divisive principle, and it will certainly lead to a dead end.
We have this relatively. God’s purpose is bound up with a people—His Church. And when we say His Church, we mean the true Church character, the heavenly Body character. Wherever that is found representatively and collectively, there these things are found. It is in that relatedness that we shall come into our purpose in God.
We shall come into this mighty sense that God is after something, and that we are related to it. Relatedness, you see, is essential to this motive and this purpose.
If we get out of right relatedness—right spiritual relatedness, whole spiritual relatedness—with that which really is chosen of God and in fellowship with Him concerning the eternal purpose, then life becomes limited.
You may get off the track altogether. It will not be long before you begin to ask questions as to whether, after all, this wonderful truth about being called and chosen really relates to you.
That is exactly what happened when Israel got away from Zion. While they were in Zion, there were no questions. There was life, there was fullness, and things were happening. But through spiritual decline they were moved away from Zion. They were out of immediate touch with Zion and became a scattered people.
Then the great questions were asked: Were they really the elect people? Were they really God’s people? Was this all some wonderful illusion? Were they called to a special purpose? Everything came into question.
They lost their vision, and where there is no vision the people go to pieces. That is another way of putting it: Zion means relationship. Get away from true spiritual relatedness, and you expose yourself to terrible losses and degradations. Sooner or later, you may begin to ask the major question as to whether it is all true.
This teaching does hold good. It does work gloriously, but it does so when you are in the right relationship and in the right position. It works for you, and it works against that which is against it.
I know that many people have this difficulty. You speak about being called and chosen for a great purpose, and they ask, “What is the purpose of my life? Where do I fit into this? What is my function?”
You are always making an individual and personal matter of this in the wrong way. If an Israelite had asked, “What is my place? What is my function? What is my vocation? For what am I called?” the answer would have been, “Zion.” On every point, the answer is Zion.
You see what I mean? It does not relate to you out there as one of many detached individuals. It relates to a collective thing that God is doing. You will find your place and your function in a related position. You must not take the whole purpose of God and pull it out to yourself in some detached position. You have got to come right into it.
This has tremendous implications in terms of strength. The enemy knows that fellowship is essential to purpose. He knows that weakness and disintegration come immediately when he gets us out of fellowship. That is why he is so concerned to do it.
But listen to your own heart. Listen to your own new nature.
What was it that was in every Israelite in those days when things were right? They were distributed over the land, from Dan to Beersheba, from the utmost frontiers; but this was true of them all: there was an inward gravitation toward Zion.
They longed for Zion. Their thoughts were turned toward Zion. “If only we could get back! It is difficult to wait for the day to go up to Zion.” Their inner being was all the time moving in that direction.
Listen, dear friends, to your new nature and disposition. Is it not a very part of you to long for the fellowship of God’s people? Is there not something in us that says, “We must have it. Our very life depends upon it”?
The great difficulty is when we cannot have it. It is much more difficult to live an unrelated life. Yes, in our very being there is this gravitation to God’s fellowship and relatedness. It is part of the Spirit’s work.
Therefore, it is a violation of our new nature, a violation of the work of the Spirit of God in us, to be out of fellowship—to be unrelated, independent, isolated, or freelance.
The word “freelance” comes, I suppose, from the world of journalism. A freelance is one who runs about all over the place, picking up little bits here and there without any specific relationship. He is not related to any one journal. His whole life is distributed and scattered; there is nothing central or cohesive about it.
He may make a living and maintain an existence. He may make something good out of it, in a way. But you cannot have that sort of thing spiritually.
Zion means that we are bound together with the people of God, wherever they are and whoever they are. Yes, the people of God, because they are the people of God—not because they belong to our society or move along our particular line of things, but because they are the people of God. If they belong to Christ, we belong with them on that ground.
If that is true, God is able to do things for us and through us.
This whole matter depended so much upon the fullness of Israel’s spiritual life, upon allowing that inner life to govern and responding to it. If any Israelite resisted the gravitation of his life, he found himself in a very difficult position. Sometimes tragedy and disaster followed.
In the case of the Lord’s disciples after His resurrection, there was one man, at least, who tried it and had a very miserable time. He stayed outside while they were having a blessed time inside. He kept himself apart.
I can imagine there was no more miserable man on earth than Thomas during those days while he remained apart. When he came in, he found everything: the answer to all his questions and a new glow of life.
My Lord and my God.
So much for the value of Zion in terms of relatedness and fellowship.
Remember, this will only be on a twofold basis. On the one side, the cross must do a very thoroughgoing work in us in order to get us ourselves out of the way. We are really very difficult people.
It is very necessary to get ourselves, our interests, our ambitions, our pretensions, our preferences—all that is merely personal—out of the way, thoroughly crucified and dealt with.
On the other side, positively, we must be entirely under the lordship of the Holy Spirit, where the Holy Spirit dictates everything and we answer to His direction.
I will pass to another point. Zion was, and is, the basis of revival.
What is popularly called revival is usually related to one thing as its object: souls being saved or converted. I think that almost entirely sums up the general conception of the meaning of the word revival. People are being saved on a large scale.
Well, we have nothing to say against that. The Lord grant it. But this whole matter of revival is so largely unrelated, in popular thought, to spiritual conditions in the Church.
It is objective. It is something found in outward activity, with certain outward results, unrelated or out of relationship with inward spiritual conditions. In that sense, this idea of revival is often a blind to the real need.
A visitation of sovereign grace, by which many souls are saved, is a sovereign act. It is an act of sovereign grace. But acts of divine sovereignty and sovereign grace are one thing; the thing with which we are now occupied is another.
A sovereign act or visitation of God for the salvation of souls is right and good. May it be so again. But that is not mainly what the Bible means when it speaks in terms of revival.
God and the Bible think of revival in terms of the recovery of something. It is re-vitalisation. It is the recovery of something that has been lost.
The whole prophetic section of the Bible was occupied with this matter: the recovery of Zion. Look through the prophets and see whether that is not the burden—the burden of their message, their cry, their pathos: that Zion may be recovered and restored, that it may come again.
The recovery of the glories of Zion, Zion coming into the place that it once held, runs right through the prophets. Thus prophetic ministry has to do not merely with sovereign acts of God’s grace externally and objectively, but with the recovery of something in the people of God themselves.
That really is God’s way of touching the nations. It was not until that was true in Zion that the nations were touched. God made that state of things internally basic and essential to the touching of the nations.
The outward result will follow. Yes, it will follow as day follows night—spontaneously—when God has in His people what He wants.
You will not need to have particular appeals to get souls saved. They will be after these things all the time. There will be something going out, touching lives in an ever-widening circle, when God gets what He wants among His people. It must be. It is spontaneous. It is inevitable.
The prophets did not merely pray that the nations should be saved. They prayed that Israel should be restored, and then they saw that the nations would be touched. Revival, from the Bible standpoint, is inward before it is external. It is recovery.
For that, a prophetic ministry—a ministry concerning Zion—is needed. See what Zion really means, what it stands for in its heavenly aspect. Have that burden, that vision, and that ministry.
That does not mean only a preaching ministry. It means a matter of praying. It means a burden on your heart. That is a ministry sometimes. It does not get onto a platform; it is a burden on your heart that finds expression: “Oh, that the Lord’s people might be where the Lord would have them be, in the full meaning of Zion, recovered.”
My last word follows on that. Zion is a means to God’s larger and greater ends.
That which represents a full testimony to the Lord Jesus—in His Person, His work, and His appointed place in relation to the hearts of God’s people—has to be planted in the nation. It has to be there.
The strategy of God is that He plants the testimony: a testimony so according to His mind, so answering to His thought, that He finds it perfectly safe to add to it.
That is what we have in the New Testament. He founded a testimony in a nucleus here and a group there. They lived in the good of Christ—His work, His grace, and His life. What happened? God added.
God is not going to add to our institutions. God is not merely going to add to our particular private interests in Christianity. God is going to add to His Son, and to His Son as represented in His people. He will add according to the measure of His Son.
Believe me, this is the key. This is the key to the growth of the Church.
It is a remarkable thing in true history that wherever there is something answering to God’s heart in greater fullness, and Christ is there as the basis and in expression, God answers to it.
The solution to empty churches and all that lies along those lines is not going to be found in outward methods. The only true way is this: God acts where there is that to which He can confidently act.
Therefore, He must have Zion, that He may build Zion. He may go on to build other things, but He builds Zion. Zion is a living testimony, a corporate expression of His Son.
God plants in order to add. He plants in order that He may have a ground of argument with everything else.
This opens another field which we have no time to explore. But Zion was God’s instrument of argument with everybody else. He argued with the nations concerning His life. He argued with all the enemies on that ground. He had there an instrument of argument.
If the question arose, “Where is the evidence? Is this whole thing true?” the answer was, “Here it is.” If the question was, “Does God indeed dwell with men in these days?” here was the answer.
No matter what the question or the attitude, God argued by having something concrete in hand. “Does it work? Does this teaching work?” Well, here is the answer.
It is pathetically tragic that God has so little with which He can argue against other things, and so little that gives an immediate or adequate answer. But Zion was God’s ground of argument.
We saw this morning that nations came into God’s controversy over Zion. Yes, controversy. God had a controversy with the nations, and it was over Zion.
Finally, Zion is that which will be the occasion of the overthrow of the whole kingdom of Satan. Zion was the occasion of the overthrow of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and Rome. Rome lifted up its head against Zion—speaking now in spiritual language—and what happened to Rome?
Where is that mighty iron empire? Broken in fragments and dust.
God argues on that ground with the nations and with the empires. Behind them all lies the mighty kingdom of Satan, and Zion will be the occasion of the entire overthrow of Satan’s kingdom.
How important it is that God should have that which corresponds to life. Does not this throw much light upon the enemy’s ceaseless, unfeigned activity to destroy a full testimony—to prevent it or destroy it?
Wherever there is a vessel that represents any greater fullness of Christ, the enemy seeks to break it up, scatter it, bring reproach upon it, introduce that which causes scandal, and spoil that instrument which God would use to answer Satan.
God can answer Satan only where His Son is represented. That is the whole story of the Book of Job. Satan challenged God, and God answered him in a man.
There came a point in that story where Satan disappeared from the scene and was heard of no more. He was out of court. God had answered him in that man.
God must have a ground of argument. Zion.
I trust that you are not thinking in objective terms of Zion, saying, “Well, I was born there. My name is in the roll of the citizens of Zion, and all this refers to me.” We must take these things spiritually.