We are now much too advanced in the matter before us in this conference to be able to go back in review, as it might be helpful to those who are with us for the first time.
They will understand that the part we shall yet say has a large context. It is part of, and set in, a much larger realm than that which is immediately under consideration.
On the other hand, without reading again the various passages of Scripture which have been our platform, friends who have been here will, I trust, be able to recognize that what we are now going to say is in that setting.
So I turn you this afternoon to Mark, chapter 3, verses 13 and 14.
And He goeth up into the mountain, and calleth unto Him whom He Himself would;
and they went unto Him.
And He appointed twelve, that they might be with Him,
and that He might send them forth to preach.
The particular aspect of our whole consideration which I want to bring to you this afternoon is what I am going to call apprenticeship unto the kingdom of God. That is, of course, all contained in the word disciple or discipleship.
You will have noted the very tight terms in which this statement was made. It was a very deliberate, calculated, considered, far-reaching, and very significant act—this choosing of the twelve.
Another time He said, “I know whom I have chosen”; and again, “Have not I chosen you twelve?” You will observe that His choice followed time alone with His Father in much prayer.
I repeat: it was a very deliberate act, thought over and considered. It was far from casual, with a very large background in His own mind.
These are not mere comments upon the statements; they are supported by all the teaching of the Scriptures. You will see that in some little way as we go on.
And He chose twelve. What a dangerous thing for Him to do! What a significant thing for Him to do!
That number was a well-understood number in Israel—one of the great dominant numbers of the Bible, and particularly of Israel. Were there not twelve patriarchs? Were there not twelve tribes?
In many other ways, that number comes into view, in itself and in its multiples. Now that is deliberately taken up by Him and brought over as the very beginning of the movement into the new dispensation.
So we have twelve apostles. In the New Jerusalem, we have twelve foundations to the wall. The city itself is twelve thousand furlongs in each direction. It has twelve gates; at the gates are twelve angels.
So we could go on. In Revelation 7, the number of the sealed is the multiple of twelve: one hundred and forty-four thousand—twelve times twelve thousand.
You are beginning to see something of this deliberate act of the Lord Jesus. I say it was not casual. He knew what He was doing.
In one sense, He was doing the most dangerous thing that He could do when He did this. Of course, all the Jews, all Israel, and especially the rulers, would jump to their own conclusions from what He was doing.
In their minds at once there would arise: “Oh, He is setting up another Israel, is He?” And so He was. That is the point. With Him, the one that had been had its time and had been repudiated, as we have been seeing. With Him, another is brought in.
To the twelve He said, “Ye shall sit upon twelve thrones.” You know quite well—or many of you do—what is the number twelve in Bible symbolism. It is the number of government, or administration.
So again, the implication of choosing twelve is that He is setting up a new government, a new administration. And so He was—a very different one, as we shall see.
Twelve is the multiple of three and four. Three is always the number of divine fullness, of heavenly government. It is the very Godhead over all.
Four is quite obviously the number of earthly government; that is, everything belonging down here: north, south, east, and west; spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Heavenly and earthly government are embodied in this number twelve, and that again is very significant as to His act.
How much we must push aside of detail and valuable material in all this! Note that to Abraham the covenant was made: as the sand of the seashore and as the stars of heaven, so should his seed be.
But Paul tells us, “Not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.” Heavenly and earthly government are found in Christ.
I think that is enough to be indicative. The choice of twelve first of all brings into view the new Israel, and then the new government by that Israel—of heaven and of earth. And that is the church, as represented by the twelve.
But this new Israel, we repeat once more, is very different. It is a travail-born thing—the fruit of His travail, the seed which He shall see because of that travail, according to Isaiah.
It is a people inheriting and taking over the real spiritual meaning of that nation called Israel: a prince with God. There is inherent in the very name the governmental element.
Many things were said about their pre-eminence: being head of the nations, the head and not the tail, and so on. That has failed where they are concerned. But you see, God’s principles do not fail when God’s instruments fail.
When anything which God chooses to express His principles fails to do so, He does not abandon the principle. He may have to abandon the vessel or the instrument, but He goes on with His principles.
And so the principle is taken over, and the new Israel becomes the fulfillment of this conception: a prince with God, the head and not the tail, the head of the nations.
Now that is the setting. There are two major aspects: firstly, the essential nature of this Israel; and then, the essential apprenticeship unto the kingdom.
Firstly, then, the essential nature. We have this: Christ’s spiritual constitution. We spent a lot of time on that this morning in John 3. Let us just catch it again.
You see, in the Israel after the flesh, you have an actual people on this earth. You can recognize them. You can say that they were physically, and in every other way, a nation—however it may manifest itself.
But that is not the constitution of the new Israel. It is not now a physical constitution, a constitution of physical features. It is essentially a spiritual constitution.
That is, it has to do not with anything outward at all in the first place. It has to do with character. It is an Israel constituted on the basis of another character, and that character is Christ.
Its very constitution is Christ. It is constituted with a faculty of knowing—with knowledge—which is altogether outside the reach and range of any other kind of person.
There again we come back to John 3. Except a man be born anew, he cannot see; he cannot enter the kingdom. It is beyond him in sight, in knowledge, in understanding—say nothing of inheritance.
This Israel is an Israel which has a seeing capacity which the old has not, and no other has. Constituted that way, this is not only a statement of truth; it is a very searching thing to us as to our being children of God, being spiritual children of the true Israel, Christ.
This is not something extra to the Christian life, to be attained if you advance to certain heightened degrees. Right at new birth, you and I—every one of us—ought to have a faculty of spiritual understanding and perception and knowledge that no other person has who does not belong to this kingdom.
Another time we could spend in finding out the tragedy that has come into Christianity because of failure to recognize that, or to live up to it.
I would go so far as to say that the largest proportion of all the troubles between Christians is due either to a lack of, or a failure to live on the basis of, spiritual understanding—spiritual discernment, spiritual perception, spiritual knowledge.
There is any amount of natural knowledge in the Christian world—Bible knowledge, prophetic knowledge, and whatnot. But spiritual knowledge is a rare commodity, and yet it is supposed to be a constituent of our new birth, a faculty that we ought to have.
Now, if some of you are saying, “Then woe is me. I do not know much about that,” the Lord is simply saying to you, “This is yours by right.”
This is not some extra thing to which you attain by struggle and labour, by years of laborious Christian living, or by some specific act—some terrific upheaval in your spiritual life. It is a birthright. You have a right to this, only you come the Lord’s way.
You know—well, perhaps after all you do know, although you do not know that you know. You know you have got a new sense, a new faculty, a new something in you that makes you know, in some little measure at least, what is of the Lord and what is not; what is spiritual and what is not.
But oh, for the increase of that! It is the development of that, the increase of that, which is the apprenticeship in the school of Christ.
We learn by mistakes; we learn by blunders. But the thing that we are learning is not that objective. We are learning inwardly that such-and-such is not the way of life, and we should do well to avoid it; and such-and-such is the way of life, and that is the way for us to go. We learn it inwardly.
Knowledge—a new kind of knowledge—and a new kind of power. This particular divine progeny has a power, an ability, a strength, which is quite different, quite different.
And in this apprenticeship, in this school, one of the things that we do learn, if we are pupils, if we are really abandoned to know the Lord, is that the Lord, on the one side, undercuts and undermines our natural strength.
He brings us to positions where the very best natural strength of any kind cannot cope with the situation. We have got to have a strength to go through that is not ours by nature at all, even though we might be the very best specimen.
Here, then, back to Nicodemus. “You just cannot,” says the Lord to Nicodemus. “You just cannot.” You may be as willing as anybody can be; you may be as anxious and as interested; but what stands over you is, “Cannot.”
That is the great cry arising again and again in Nicodemus’ lips: “How? How? How?” You cannot. But this new thing has a strength which is different, quite different from all that—an ability which is of another order. Paul spoke of it as the ability which God giveth.
And so we could go on with the constitution. It will all amount to this: that it is another generation—another generation. It is of a generational type.
There are here capacities, possibilities, and resources which are from heaven, which cannot be accounted for on earth at all.
You see, old Israel was in a symbolic or typical way put onto that basis. We said this morning they were put onto the basis of Christ. We saw how they were put onto the basis of Christ—just rooted up from the land when everything went wrong with them spiritually and morally, and they were unworthy of the name of Israel.
Those twelve sons of Jacob, and children behaving as they were—putting Joseph in the pit, deceiving their father, counselling murder—and then the exposure of them before him when they did not recognize him in Egypt. What a sorry tale of Israel! What a breakdown! What a fall!
So they must be put onto the ground of Christ through death and resurrection, coming to the meaning of Israel through travail and born out of it.
Then they are afterward constituted on the basis of Christ, so that there is no accounting for their bread, their water, or anything else for forty years in the wilderness on any other ground than heaven.
Moses gave not the bread—no, my pardon—it was heavenly. You see the point: constituted according to Christ with something which is not explicable on any other ground than that it is from heaven.
Thank God for that. It is the most wonderful thing—the most wonderful thing—to live on Christ on heavenly ground. You think this spiritual life must be a very difficult one. Well, for the flesh, of course it is; for the natural man, of course it is; for the old life, it is. But it is a romance in the spiritual life.
What the Lord does! Oh, His ways! How my heart went with my brother yesterday afternoon about ministry on this matter. Would not the flesh like always to have it all well in advance, worked out, planned, and all there, so that there is really no trouble at all?
And the Lord shuts up and holds up, often to the last minute, and gets us into a perfect travail over a message until it comes. That is the story of thirty years here, dear friends.
But this is no mere theoretical sort of thing. This is marvelously real, and really marvelous. That is the nature of this new Israel.
This seed is mysterious. That is, it cannot be understood by natural means at all. Everything to do with it is mysterious.
Do not take that in the wrong way and interpret it to mean that you have got to be very mysterious people. Other people try to be mysterious and think that is spirituality.
No, the mystery is the mystery of a life. Of course, life in the natural is always a mystery. You cannot explain life. You do not know what life is. The greatest reality, and yet the thing most impossible of explanation, is life.
Within the realm of the spiritual there is another life, and it is a mystery—this life. It lives in spite of everything that can be set against it.
There is a mystery about the church. There is a mystery about the people of God, a mystery about this life—how it survives. It survives; it goes on; it increases.
Nothing in all this universe is more set against this life of the people of God. All the dark forces of the kingdom have but one ultimate object: that somehow they may finish this life.
All the experiences through which the Lord allows His people to go, and sometimes fixes them, which naturally could be said to be death—death—are only allowed to bring out this wonderful reality: that there is a life which, when put to the test and subjected to every kind of test, survives.
Oh, it can! It is a mystery. It is just a mystery—its power, its persistence, and its progress. The more they oppressed, the more they grew.
Carry that over into the spiritual Israel. Look today at the awful things evil forces, hell, and men are doing—reducing, putting to death, driving out—yet triumphant faith is found among the Lord’s people.
But that is not the end of the story. These people are foolish. They cannot read history. They cannot read history. If only they thought what they were doing, they would see that they are doing the very thing which is going to accomplish what they are trying to frustrate.
Oh no, do not you make any mistake about it. Long centuries of terrible ordeal have proved this: there is something you cannot explain or account for naturally. There is a persistence and a growth here that is a mystery.
Now that should be true of every child of God. So take hope; take heart, child of God. You are feeling it is more death than life. The ordeal is tending to be one of reduction. That is not the end of the story—not the end of the story.
Now, more than half my time this afternoon is gone, and I have not touched half of what I must say. I come to this matter of the essential apprenticeship unto the kingdom of God, as I am calling it.
That is, He chose twelve—you have seen the significance of His act—and then, “that they might be with Him, and that He might send them forth.” Two halves of one thing: essential harmony.
“Be with Him.” Why? That He might teach, that He might instruct, that He might equip, in order that He might send them forth.
All going forth must issue from the closest association with Christ in His school. And all association with Christ in His school must issue in going forth.
That is not monasteries and cloisters, and people shut up like that, always studying and learning, accumulating knowledge of things, even though they might be heavenly things.
Every bit of God-imparted knowledge is to be for practical purposes. And all practical activity which does not come out of God-imparted knowledge will not affect the kingdom of God.
So these are the two things. Now then, Christ teaching and training the twelve—look: it all came out of His own spiritual life.
It did not come out of books. It did not come out of the schools. The scholars of His day said, “How knoweth this man these things, having never learned?” He was not a man of the schools. He was not a man of the library or of the study.
It all came out of His own divine life. He had a divine knowledge which was unique. It differed entirely from every other kind of knowledge.
The one thing—and this was the basis of everything—His knowledge of the Father was unique. Look at this in Luke 10. You know it so well, but here it is: Luke 10:22.
All things have been delivered unto Me of My Father:
and no one knoweth who the Son is, save the Father;
and who the Father is, save the Son,
and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him.
No one knoweth the Father—who the Father is—save the Son. What a sweeping statement! What a tremendous thing that is.
His knowledge of the Father, I have said, was unique. And that knowledge sprang out of spiritual oneness with the Father—not study, not contemplation, but spiritual oneness with the Father.
Now, I leave you to whom it may be of importance to help know this: the Fatherhood of God was not a doctrine preached by Jesus to the general public.
You can test that, if you like, by going to the Word. It was a mystery disclosed in private to His disciples.
The Fatherhood of God was not a doctrine with Jesus; it was not a theory. It was a reality in His own spiritual life and in His own spiritual being.
To the twelve He did not merely give the teaching, the theory, of the Fatherhood of God. He made it real. He made it real—not by argument, not by much speaking, but because the Father was to Him the supreme reality in His life.
His teaching came out of that. His sending forth of the twelve came out of that. And you notice how much there is with them, in His teaching of them and in His training of them, which centred in the Father.
How much He said about the Father: “The Father, the Father, the Father. My Father. Your Father. Father. Father.” If you are not impressed, look it up again.
This is at the heart of everything in His training of them. When it comes to prayer, it is all based upon that, saying, “After this manner pray ye: Our Father.”
I say, something on the inside of the school is not for the general public. It is a mystery disclosed alone to those inside, but it is made real.
This new Israel has got to be constituted on that basis. Just as He trained the twelve on the basis of His union with the Father, so all our training will be by our union with Christ, in the same vital way as His union with the Father.
So that we, in union with the Son, ourselves come into the mystery and wonder of the Fatherhood. It is a secret with Him—the thing within the Israel of God, a secret, the wonderful secret: our Fatherhood.
Not a title, but a great reality. Oh, how much we would be saved from if only that became real in our being as it was in His.
Note Him in this matter from beginning to end. It is just that: His references to the Father, His deference to the Father, His appeal always to the Father. The controlling reality in all His movements is the Father. Everything for Him is coming from the Father.
The last words of the Lord refer to the Father:
Father, into Thy hands I commit My spirit.
It was that, dear friends, that kept Him strong. It was that that kept Him right. It was the great motive force in His refusing everything that the devil offered Him—the motive power of enduring suffering. It was everything to Him, in every way, a deep inward reality.
And I suggest to you that we lack something in constitution if we lack an adequate sense of that spiritual union with Him as our Father in Christ Jesus.
Get us near to that; get Him as near to that. You begin to see something, because He sought to inculcate into them, the new Israel, the meaning of this relationship between Himself as Son and the Father.
It was to have practical account in their relationship with one another. He was not constituting a kind of clique and following, a new movement of people of common interest. He was constituting a family.
Paul, in the letter to the Hebrews, makes that so explicit, does he not?
He is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying,
I will declare Thy name unto My brethren.
I and the children whom God hath given Me.
Now, what an embedded statement he is saying! Look here: you are all brethren because you are all one family, children of one Father in this deepest reality, in your constitution.
That is the basis on which you should regard one another, behave toward one another, cherish and care for one another, even as, “I have loved you.”
Having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the uttermost—unto the end. That is only making practical in their corporate life the relationship between Himself and His Father, His Father and Himself.
It was a training. It was a discipline—real discipline. If ever there were twelve diverse kinds of people on this earth, these twelve were they.
You have got here something of every kind: temperamentally, constitutionally, dispositionally, naturally. They would fly to fragments at any moment. There was nothing here naturally of cohesion or integration.
But under His hand, in His school, something was happening—something was going to happen. At any rate, if the symbolism of the book of Revelation in its last chapters means anything at all, there is a very solid thing here: twelve foundations for the apostles of the Lamb, making one solid basis for the everlasting kingdom.
Something happened. Something happens. Now, that is what the Lord is trying to do with us.
If you feel that you cannot get on with another child of God, and want to get into the realm where the Lord does not answer your prayer, ask Him to remove them away—or move you away.
That is a prayer that He does not answer until something has happened—until something has happened.
We have to go through all the sandpapering difficulty of these contradictory constitutions, dispositions, and temperaments among the Lord’s children. It seems the Lord does nothing about it on the outside.
Oh, would it not be good if only He would take that very difficult person away? No. He is going to do something on the inside. He may take them away, but not until that something on the inside is happening, being done.
That is the apprenticeship unto the kingdom. How can we rule and reign together in the kingdom, and govern, if we are going to be in contradictory positions and conflict? No, He is not going to have a kingdom like that—not a government like that.
So their being with Him was a deep practical instruction and teaching in all this meaning of the Fatherhood of God—this deep secret and mystery—to find its expression in a corporate life.
Now, you see, I have embarked upon something in this matter of training which covers a vast amount of ground—many other aspects than the one that I have named. I will conclude by saying that it is of tremendous importance that we recognize this.
Whatever it may have been in this apprenticeship, this training for the kingdom in relation to the kingdom, every one of its aspects has to be seen in the light of this: the kingdom came on the day of Pentecost. The New Testament teaches that the kingdom is in principle.
It has come, it is coming, and it is yet coming. And it is unto that coming, now and yet to come, that you and I are being trained. We are now in school for the present coming of the kingdom.
It will come only through the difficulties of those who are called into fellowship with Christ. And the final manifestation, the appearing of the kingdom, is something for which great preparation is going on—preparation in us all. We are schooled unto the kingdom.
Now, whatever may be the aspect of the training, notice how Jesus held everything unto the cross.
He had them apart with Himself. He left the multitudes; He left the world; He got them to Himself. He was saying, “We are building.”
And then He heads it all up with, “We are going up to Jerusalem, to be delivered into the hands of the rulers and to be crucified.” That was the thing they could not accept. They could not understand. That was the thing that stumbled them.
But He held everything to that, as though He was saying: “All this that I have been saying to you, all this that I have been holding up to view, all this for which I have chosen you, all this for which you have been in school with Me, is based upon the cross.”
It is based upon the cross. Not one thing can be realized apart from the cross. You can come into no fragment of it except by way of the cross. The cross is essential to your being this Israel.
You will be born out of that travail. For that, you will be scattered, every man to his own. How true it was! But born as an organic entity out of His travail, out of His resurrection, they stood up together on the day of Pentecost.
I do not think they had ever been together quite like that. Some new togetherness! They were born on the day of Pentecost. The new Israel is here.
It had been spoken about, prepared for, with much instruction, much teaching, much handling; but it wanted the cross to produce it.
So, all the Israel of God—the cross is essential. The cross is essential to the kingdom, to the reign. The cross is essential to the service, the administration.
I am tremendously impressed, as I turn back to that part of the prophecy from which we have taken our basic passage, to note that the real beginning of Isaiah 53 is not with what is marked out in our arrangement as verse 1 of chapter 53.
The real beginning of Isaiah 53, as we call it, is about verse 13 of chapter 52: the whole matter of the Servant—the suffering Servant.
Behold, My Servant shall deal wisely,
He shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high.
His visage was so marred more than any man,
and His form more than the sons of men.
He was despised, and rejected of men;
a Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief:
and as one from whom men hide their face He was despised;
and we esteemed Him not.
Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows;
yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
But He was wounded for our transgressions.
And then on:
When Thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin,
He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days,
and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand.
He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied.
Who is it? The Servant of the Lord. The whole matter is service. They were to be with Him in the service of the kingdom—His fellows. They were to be the servants.
You notice the margin in Luke 10:22 says that some authorities add, “And He called them apostles.” Well, here we are: here is the whole service of the kingdom fully in view.
Isaiah 53, mainly verses 10 and 11: by the travail, by the travail. It all comes out of the travail, dear friends. No other way.
Something has got to be undone in the cross—disintegrated, broken up, and scattered. It is a position that cannot stand and will not go through, proved to be unsubstantial.
Another thing must be brought in which is spiritual, which can go through. The cross is the instrument of God to bring out the new Israel, the new kingdom, and the new servants.
I trust you will be able to gather something from all this. My problem has been that I have got too much—that is all. But may the Lord say something to every one of our hearts out of this message, show us what kind of people He is after, and why He is taking the way with us that He is.
He had in view a service here, mortal and hereafter, which requires some people after this kind.