We are now returning to the point from which we began on Saturday afternoon, when we said that all that we were going to consider would be gathered into the cross and the name of the Lord.
We then did very briefly indicate that these two things are found together right through the Word of God. We instanced several occasions where they are found together. It only needs to be said again here that this is so, and it is open to proof if you will look at it.
In the Old Testament, of course, the cross is represented by the altar. There it is a matter of the union of the altar and the name of the Lord—the name of the Lord connected with the altar.
In the New Testament, as we should expect to find it, the altar is changed for the cross, but the name is still kept with it.
I will just return you to a couple of passages which indicate this very definitely and clearly, though we have already considered them. We are going to greatly abbreviate, or shorten, it for our purpose at this time.
Turn to the letter to the Philippians, Chapter 2. At the end of that, we have the words, “the cross”; and then the name goes on: “Wherefore God also highly exalted Him, and gave unto Him the name which is above every name.” The cross—the name. All that is there is gathered into that.
Turn back to the letter to the Ephesians. You have the same thing indicated: He raised Him from the dead and made Him to sit above every name that is named. He raised Him above every name that is named.
Of course, if you will take time with the context of both of those passages, you will find that it is all about what God has done through the cross of the Lord Jesus as the basis of glorifying His own name, or bringing His own glory into full manifestation.
With that there is our basic position: union between the cross and the name—the name and the cross. Let us go on.
The Book of Acts, which is a very large and full book, as you know, stands entirely on the ground of the cross. That book is just the issue of the cross, the spontaneous issue of the cross. It would never have been written; all that was there would never have happened but for the cross. It rests upon the cross.
And in that Book of Acts, the term or phrase, “the name,” is mentioned more than something like thirty times, which carries its own significance. The name is pre-eminent and predominant throughout that whole wonderful book called the Book of Acts—on the ground of the cross.
Then the New Testament as a whole: everything is in the name, the name of the Lord Jesus. People are exhorted to believe into the name.
In answer to the inquiry as to what they should do, they are bidden to be baptized in the name. Their gathering together as the Lord’s people was a gathering in the name. All their prayer was in the name. They were freed in the name. They were preaching and teaching in the name.
And the work that they were doing—healing the sick and all—was all in the name. It was that which caused the trouble. The rulers came upon them, forbidding them to speak or teach any more in this name.
All that is a most inspiring, helpful, and instructive study: just to look at that in the New Testament. It all rests upon the cross and is inseparably connected therewith.
The name of the Lord Jesus came before Christianity. Christianity took its character in the first place from the name. It was the name that gave Christianity its nature.
I think it may have been reversed since, though perhaps not deliberately, intentionally, or punctiliously. But it does seem that Christianity has come before the name, gets in the way of the name, and very largely is a contradiction of the name.
So that we have to understand, and what has to be recovered—if there is going to be anything like the power, effectiveness, and truthfulness that there was at the beginning—is what the name signifies and implies.
Because it is not just a title, a designation, some phrase, some tag put on: “In the name of Jesus.” It becomes so commonplace to use the phrase “in the name of Jesus,” but nothing seems to happen with all that. So little results; so little is present, even when that terminology is used as the commonplace thing.
No, it is not just a title. It is not just a designation, just the name of someone, although that Someone may be the Lord Jesus Himself. It is something very much more.
It is impossible to consider this matter of the Lord’s name in the Old Testament without recognizing that it is not just a difference of titles from other gods and other lords. It is an entirely different kind of being.
And there is more than that. What is true in the Old Testament is true, yes, infinitely and transcendently more, in the New Testament. May I repeat: what we have to understand, and what has to be recovered, is the significance and implications of the name as the apostles understood it and the Holy Spirit caused it to mean.
Therefore, when they said, “In the name of Jesus Christ,” something happened. When they prayed in the name of Jesus Christ, something happened. When they preached in the name, something happened.
That is something which is there that we have to know and recover. The name and its glory have got to come back into their right place.
Well, we have said, and we repeat, that the name rests upon and issues from the cross. Therefore, all the meaning of the cross is embodied in the name. That is simple; that is very important.
All the meaning of the cross is embodied in the name, and to separate these two is to put asunder what God has put together. When you do that, you destroy a real testimony.
The name can never be effective without the meaning of the cross behind it, or present with it. For the name to manifest all its divine power and fullness, it must be kept vitally bound up with the cross. It must rest all the time upon that which has given it those values. You cannot divide those two; they remain together.
So that it becomes necessary for us, dear friends, to reconsider some of the great meanings of the cross which are gathered into the name of the Lord Jesus, and give that name its real meaning and value.
I am going to assume that we here today, or this morning, are the Lord’s children. So it becomes unnecessary for me to spend time speaking about those values of the cross which have made us the Lord’s people: the atonement, justification by faith, and initial union with Christ by new birth.
These are values of the cross, meanings of the cross, which are gathered into the name. Of course, nothing more can be until that is true. But I am assuming that you here do know and understand what the name of the Lord Jesus means for you: your sins forgiven, your union with Christ, your justification before God.
So that I can leave that in this company and proceed beyond it to these further values and meanings of the cross which are gathered into the name.
Certainly then, the cross was the place, the means, and the occasion of the overthrow of the kingdom and its prince.
We have got to be very sure about that. Of course, we all believe in the common phrase, “the victory of Calvary,” and we think we know a lot about that. But we have got to be very sure about this, because it does not always seem to be working out.
It was definitely and positively, if the New Testament means anything at all, the occasion of the overthrow of that kingdom and its prince.
That kingdom is a nature and a system in this world, ruled by Satan. Every nature produces its own system, and every system is the product of a particular nature. When I use the word system, I am only using another word for kingdom.
In every different kingdom, a certain nature predominates. That need not be followed up; it is obvious. In the kingdom of this world there is a nature, and that kingdom takes its strength and its form from that nature. It is through that system that Satan rules.
And the principle of that rule of Satan is the alienation of man from God. That sums up everything.
All the wiles and devices of Satan have one object. His ways and his works are perhaps countless, so varied that they are often difficult to track down. But however many they may be, and however great their variety, they are all gathered into one single object: to alienate man from God.
That may be done by making a great deal of man—making him his own god, his own law; the very deification of humanity, the enthronement of man in his own glory. Or it may be, on the other hand, by depression, misery, suffering, and degradation.
Everything between those two extremes is just to make man, on the one hand, independent of God and, on the other hand, bitter against God. The object is one: alienation from God.
Leading man to part with God, to be independent of God, to take a course of self-will, to blind man, to make him ignorant—everything to get in between man and God. That is the nature which is in the kingdom of this world, is it not?
For the most part, you can divide the whole world into those two sections. On the one hand, man is made to feel that he does not need God, that he can get on quite well without God—independent of God, Godless. Then, very largely, there are many preoccupations and what he calls pleasures, filling his life so that there is no place for God.
Or, on the other hand, there is that more positive attitude of bitterness, rebellion, and enmity. In greater or lesser degree, the whole world is summed up in those two things, and it is in every natural heart.
That is the kingdom of Satan. That is the kingdom of this world, of which he is prince. Keep on the focus point: that which comes in between God and man, man and God, is Satan’s supreme objective and activity.
The cross of our Lord Jesus Christ meant the destruction of it. It was the occasion when the prince of this world was cast out. Then that kingdom received its death-blow. When that work of Satan was mastered and overcome, the Lord Jesus, through His cross, held that victory in His hand.
It has not yet become an accomplished fact in the world actually—we are coming to this in a moment—but the fact is there that the Lord Jesus has done that, and those who are delivered into the name of the Lord Jesus know it and are in the good of it.
So that the name embodies this: that kingdom and that ruler have been cast out. The cross meant its destruction. The name is the name of the One who specifically did that.
How did He do it? Firstly, there was none of that kingdom, that nature, in Him.
How did Satan work? Along every line, by every means, to get in between the Son and the Father—between Christ and God. We have not really the record of all the secret battles of His life, but we have enough to know that there was a battle going on throughout His life.
In some way Satan sought to get in between Him and the Father. “If Thou be the Son; if Thou be the Son”—trying to stimulate a question, a doubt, to open the way for a breach.
I am not going to take you through His life, showing how here and there, in this place and in that, the enemy was at work by pressure and oppression, by friends and foes, working all the time to find a gap into which he could insinuate himself. Then he would drive it home and do with the last Adam what he did with the first.
But:
The prince of the world cometh: and he hath nothing in Me.
— John 14:30
Notice the phrase: not, “The devil comes,” nor, “The great adversary,” but, “The prince of this world.” And he had nothing in Him. He could not get in between Him and the Father. He could not bring about this alienation, this division, this separation. He just could not do it.
But for our Lord it was a matter of constant victory and constant conflict. It was not automatic. The mystery of His humanity—the humanity of God, God incarnate—is that He had to fight our battle.
There is a theological problem, I know, as to how a perfect Being can be tempted. The fact is, beloved, in the words of Scripture, that it was real. It was real. It was battle unto blood to maintain this to the last.
It is no small thing, then, that immediately after He was raised from the dead, He said:
I ascend unto My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.
— John 20:17
That is a tremendous victory over the dividing work and power of the enemy. Still in union, instead of division. Ah, what that meant in the moment of His being forsaken by the Father.
No, that cry of forsakenness was not the last cry. The last cry was:
Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.
— Luke 23:46
Relationship through all was unbroken. He has triumphed in Himself. That is how He did it.
All hell ranged itself against Him on that ground alone. Everything was focused in that. Satan’s kingdom was in this one thing: all his forces, all his angels, all his business, were marshalled against this one Man.
The pivot of all was this relationship with God. Hell ranged itself against Him on this ground alone, this one ground: fellowship with God.
It cost everything. Here in this world it cost everything. Satan saw to it that He did not have anything here. “If You are not coming into my kingdom and yielding to my law, and falling down and worshipping me, putting me in the place of God, You shall have nothing.”
Think of that. And He had nothing—not so much as a place to lay His head. He did much more than that, right through to the end.
Then, from Satan’s side and through the instruments of Satan, He was murdered. God, we know, had another side to that; but from that side, He was literally slain by Satan and Satan’s agents. He was killed for that reason only: the battle that He had come to fight out to a victorious issue in the matter of this relationship with God.
But there is God’s miracle. The thing that was intended and calculated by that evil kingdom to be His destruction was its own destruction. The devil planned all that, thinking that it would be his supreme triumph, and found it to be his supreme defeat in a way that was not meant—the undoing of that kingdom and its prince.
That, dear friends, is the cross.
Now you see, the Book of Acts, which brings in the church, and all that is there, stood on that ground. The church stood on that ground. It took up that value of the cross by the Holy Spirit.
It was caused to stand upon that tremendous victory which Christ had brought. By the very Holy Spirit, the church at the beginning was brought into a marvellous union and fellowship with God. Oh, how strong it was!
Hell raged against the church as it raged against Him, and carried them to death and martyrdom. But it could not get in between them and their Lord. They had come into the good of His tremendous victory over that kingdom and its prince. The church stood on that ground.
And seeing that that was the content of the name, we can understand the potency of the name in, through, and upon the church in those days. Standing on that ground, when they employed the name, they employed the mighty victory that was gathered into that name—what Christ had done in His cross—and things happened.
Satan has not given up. There is still the need for the church to stand on its rightful ground: the cross and the name, the name of the cross.
The church must be as vigilant as ever, and be all the time watchful, because the world—as a spirit, as a nature, as a spiritual system—is all the time seeking some point at which it can insinuate itself to get between the church and the Lord.
It seeks to make it necessary for the Lord to stand back, unable to go on with His people because that other thing has got in place in some way. This is the work that is going on. Yes, how subtle it all is.
Go back with this thought over your Old Testament again. You see, not always was it by open assault that the enemy brought in the peoples of the world against the people of God, to overpower them and subject them to their deities. Not always was it along the line of open suffering and affliction.
Oh, how often in the Old Testament you find a very subtle, quiet insinuation of something, just working like that almost secretly. People were hardly alive to what was happening; then they woke up one day to find that the Lord was no longer with them.
Look at the times when they lost their law, lost their power, and lost their position. Then the prophets, who saw—the men who knew the reason, seeing what the people did not see—came to interpret their condition and situation. They put their finger always and ever upon some secret thing of that other kingdom which had got in.
This is a tremendous matter, dear friends, for the people of God. It is like that. Why the loss of power? Why the loss of the Lord’s presence? Why the loss of the situation such as obtained at the beginning, in the days of the Book of Acts? Why are things so different?
Why all the witness and the faith and the poverty and hunger among the Lord’s people? Why? Because that with which the Lord will not ally Himself has got in between Him and His people. You may call it the world, if you like.
We think about the world and the church, and the world as a person. Well, what do you mean by that? It is not always the gross thing. Sadly enough, in many Christians and multitudes of Christian gatherings—what are called churches—there is blatant, gross worldliness. But that is not all.
So many methods employed, ways of going about things, so much of the energy and heat brought in, are just that other kingdom. It is not the Holy Spirit. Where did it come from?
I sometimes think—and I say it rather seriously—I sometimes think Satan can energize to do what looks like the work of God. Satan is always passing himself off, and he can get a false movement in the name of the Lord: a false movement which is ostensibly a Christian movement, but which is false and goes upon other resources than the Holy Spirit of God.
He sees very clearly that a time will come when it will be far more difficult to touch things in that direction than it was before. The thing will have become hardened—so hard as to be almost impregnable.
You may speak about the Lord there, and they will say, “Oh no, we have had that. We have seen how that works out. That does not last. We are not going to have any more of that.” That is a settled attitude.
Well, if you do not understand me or agree with that, leave it. But there it is. There is a subtle work that gets Satan’s kingdom in the place of the kingdom of God, and he will do it by any means.
The cross does represent the undoing of that kingdom, and therefore the church must be a cross-governed church. The cross must be its foundation and its basis, not in doctrine only.
You may have all the doctrine; it may be accurate and sound as to the atonement, the cross, the life, and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Yet it may count for nothing spiritually. We can be outright fundamentalists, and real spiritual life and power may be utterly absent.
It is not that; it is not that. It is that the cross is there as an actuality, a reality, undercutting all the kingdom and nature of Satan’s kingdom.
You will know nothing of that first power unless it is so—or, shall I say, you will only know it in so far as it is so.
That is the meaning of the name. When we use the name, we ought to be meaning in our own hearts the bringing in of all the potency of the cross of the Lord Jesus over against the kingdom of Satan, its nature, and its objective.
You know quite well that, without understanding all this, without having had it explained and interpreted to you, when you really have come, as we put it, to the cross—that is, bringing your hand and receiving by faith the values of Christ’s death and resurrection—you know that the very first thing that brings into your consciousness is this: “Somehow, I cannot explain it, but I feel nearer to God, and God feels nearer to me.”
That is the most elementary way of putting it, is it not? That is the language of a little child: “I feel that God is nearer to me, and I am nearer to God. Somehow or other, God and I have been brought together.”
There is fellowship with God, no longer enmity. There is a consciousness of union, no longer separation. Ah, there is a consciousness no longer of bitterness, hatred, or independence. It comes to this: “This is my life, and if I lose this, I lose everything.” God has become, in Christ, everything.
That is the consciousness, is it not? Well, there you are: that is the work of the cross. That is the proof, the simple elementary proof, that the Lord Jesus in His cross went right for the heart of this whole thing—this separation between God and man. He went right there and fought that out.
And so, in Him risen, we are brought to and joined with God. If that sounds too simple, too elementary for you wonderful, advanced Christians, do not press it aside. It is the most beautiful thing, but the most costly thing. Oh, what it cost! What it cost our Lord just to fight that out.
Well, if that is so, that is tremendous for Satan to get in between God and man. He fought it out better.
Do you see? That is the meaning of the name. That is the outworking of the name. If that is true, if we are in the value of that, oh, how wonderful the name! How powerful the name! It is a great victory.
Do you not see that the object of the enemy all the way—still his object, still his object—is to recover that ground? He persists in trying, not now to keep us away from God, but to get in between us and the Lord again, by any means whatsoever.
It is a terrible thing for one who has really known that fellowship with God to lose the consciousness of it. It is the terror of the cross again, is it not? The terror of that moment of forsakenness casts its shadow over us. It is almost as though it will be said, “He did not win that victory.” It is as though all that He did is being nullified, if fellowship is gone.
Therefore our whole New Testament is constructed for believers upon this one thing: the way of maintaining union with God. It is only another way of putting the way of life in the Spirit. It is a battle; it calls for vigilance.
Remember, dear friends, that still the prince of this world is in his own kingdom, to which, thank God, we do not belong, because we have been translated out of the authority of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of His love. He assails us from without, trying to get in between us and the Lord.
If that happens, you know where it comes from. You know where it comes from. It does not come from the Lord. Whatever interpretation you put upon the shadows between you and the Lord, you know where they come from, and you know the remedy.
It is Christ and what He has done in His cross. But do you see the issue of this? Ah, the dishonour of His name. We come back to that every time, do we not?
What is the motive for our vigilance? What is the only adequate motive for dealing with everything that comes between us and the Lord? It must be the honour of His name.
In the fighting out of that battle in life and death, it was the name of the Father. It is the name of the Father. Oh, how much we have got to realize of what we know.
That prayer which is called His high-priestly prayer, when He was just going, so to speak, to the altar—He was going to the cross—is occupied with the name, the name, the name. It is the name involved in this company.
He is pouring Himself out in His concern for those whom the Father had given Him:
I have given them Thy name.
Keep them in Thy name.
— John 17:6, 11
The honour of the Father’s name is the passion of His soul. He fought the battle of that honour right through the cross. You and I must be baptized into that same concern for the honour of His name in His people—not something objective and abstract, but true in His people: the honour of His name.
We go on later. Perhaps this afternoon we shall see that in some very practical ways. I feel that is enough to challenge us and occupy us this morning.
Oh, that we should see one thing: when we say, “In the name of the Lord Jesus,” we are not just repeating some formal attitude, some habitual way of speaking as Christians.
We really ought to be meaning, “By the cross of the Lord Jesus.” You can put it that way if you like: this and that and the other, by the cross of the Lord Jesus—the ground on which God intends.
That cross, in all its meaning, is embodied in the name, and the name just means that. It means nothing without it.
Lord, give us to see and understand the meaning of the name, and set us upon the recovery of its best. We pray.