The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me;
because the Lord hath anointed Me to preach good tidings unto the meek;
He hath sent Me to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all that mourn;
to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion,
to give unto them a garland for ashes,
the oil of joy for mourning,
the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;
that they may be called trees of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.
And they shall build the old wastes,
they shall raise up the former desolations,
and they shall repair the waste cities,
the desolations of many generations.
And strangers shall stand and feed your flocks,
and foreigners shall be your plowmen and your vinedressers.
But ye shall be named the priests of the Lord:
men shall call you the ministers of our God.
Ye shall eat the wealth of the nations,
and in their glory shall ye boast yourselves.
Instead of your shame ye shall have double;
and instead of dishonour they shall rejoice in their portion:
therefore in their land they shall possess double;
everlasting joy shall be unto them.
For I, the Lord, love justice,
I hate robbery with iniquity;
and I will give them their recompense in truth,
and I will make an everlasting covenant with them.
And their seed shall be known among the nations,
and their offspring among the peoples:
all that see them shall acknowledge them,
that they are the seed which the Lord hath blessed.
I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,
my soul shall be joyful in my God;
for He hath clothed me with the garments of salvation,
He hath covered me with the robe of righteousness,
as a bridegroom decketh himself with a garland,
and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels.
For as the earth bringeth forth its bud,
and as the garden causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth;
so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations.
For Zion’s sake will I not hold My peace.
We have been, in these days, following through from Isaiah 53. In that chapter we saw that the foundation of everything for a new prospect, for a new day, lies in the cross and by the cross of the Lord Jesus—the great, comprehensive, all-inclusive presentation of the suffering Servant of the Lord.
Now, it is too late, and we are too far advanced, to go back over the ground that we have covered. We have just moved to see the prospect of the cross brought into view. There is something of the wonderful features of resurrection, as in Isaiah 54. We have gone on to the recovery of testimony in the people of God, in virtue of the work of the cross.
Now, here this afternoon, we come to still a further phase, or aspect, of this tremendously many-sided fruit of the cross of the Lord Jesus.
It is not necessary for me to tell you that this sixty-first chapter of Isaiah, in the first three verses, was taken up by our Lord Jesus Himself. After His baptism, the heavens were opened and the Spirit descended and came upon Him—the great moment of His anointing as the Servant Who had just symbolically passed by the way of the cross, as represented by His baptism.
Now anointed, He meets the enemy in the wilderness and worsts him completely on all points. Then, returning from the wilderness in the power of the Spirit, He came to Nazareth, where He was brought up. On the Sabbath day, He entered into the synagogue.
The Scripture was handed to Him, and He opened it at this point in Isaiah’s prophecy and read these verses. When He had read them, He handed the Scripture back to the ruler of the synagogue and sat down—a sign that He had something to say.
The reverse of what we do: when we have something to say, we usually stand up. But in the synagogue, if they had something to say, they sat down. The eyes of all that were assembled were fastened upon Him because He sat down and had something to say.
And He began to say, “Today is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears,” thus appropriating this part of Isaiah to Himself.
What we have been seeing all along is that there is a relationship of these prophecies to the Lord Jesus and to this dispensation, as well as a connection with the history of Israel. This is what we come to this afternoon.
I want you to notice, as we begin, that this anointing, while first resting upon the Lord’s Servant—that is the title of Christ in Isaiah, “Behold My Servant”—rests upon Him comprehensively, fully, and supremely. It relates to Him and is upon Him as the Head.
The movement immediately goes on into “they.” You notice that, do you not? Immediately after this is declared about the Servant of the Lord, it goes on: “They shall build the old wastes, and they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations.”
“They.” People come into the good of this anointing. The people of God derive the values of this anointing. It is as though the anointing upon Him as Head just flowed down and embraced the whole of His membership, the members of Christ.
The values are found in Zion. You notice why I read that first fragment of the next chapter: “For Zion’s sake will I not hold My peace.” We said this morning that there is so much in these later chapters about Zion that the good of the anointing is found in Zion. Zion inherits all these things.
Zion, as most of you will know, is the Old Testament figure of the church, the New Testament church. This morning we were speaking about Zion’s light: “Arise, shine; for thy light is come.” The testimony will be recovered. Here, we move into Zion’s life and Zion’s liberty.
Notice that this is, first of all, a message to Zion, a message to the church. All this has to have its fulfilment, its realization, in the Lord’s people.
Israel at this time were in a state of bondage and death. These prophecies have to do with their deliverance, their liberation from bondage, the bringing of this people out into life and into liberty.
Jesus took these Scriptures to Himself—this concerning the anointing of the Lord being upon Him. Do you remember that the earthly Zion, Jerusalem—in other words, the Jewish people—never did come into the good of this? They missed all these values. Zion did not inherit all the values of His anointing.
But the church has inherited it all. This has become the inheritance of the spiritual Israel, the spiritual people of God. Judaism, Israel after the flesh, was the supreme antagonist of the Anointed One. By their weapon of legalism, they slew Him.
It must be a people who answer to all this that is said about the anointing, who come into all these further values of the second part of this chapter. That is, it must be a people who can appreciate the good tidings because they are meek. That was not true of Israel after the flesh.
It must be a people of the broken heart, and that was not true of Israel after the flesh. It must be a people who are conscious that they are really captive.
That was not true of the Jews. They thought and believed that, of all people on the earth, they were the freest people, who knew least about bondage. That was one of the points of controversy with them and the Lord Jesus.
It must be a people who feel that their state is one of imprisonment, in order to enjoy “the opening of the prison to them that are bound,” and so on. The values of the anointing can only come to people who realize, in all these ways, spiritually, their need of this Servant of the Lord working under the anointing for their good and for their advantage.
We follow the same course as we have followed in every connection. We are carried, of course, by this part of the prophecy, Isaiah 61 in particular, over to the New Testament counterpart.
We have seen that there are parts of the New Testament which answer so distinctly and so clearly to these different phases and movements in the prophecies of Isaiah. The New Testament counterpart of this sixty-first chapter is undoubtedly the Letter to the Galatians. It will be necessary for us to read a few fragments from that letter.
Galatians 3, verse 2:
This only would I learn from you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?
You see, we bring Isaiah 61 here: the anointing. “Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are ye so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are ye now perfected in the flesh? He therefore that supplieth to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you, doeth He it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?”
Galatians 3, verse 14:
That upon the Gentiles might come the blessing of Abraham in Christ Jesus; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.
Galatians 4, verse 6:
And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.
Galatians 5, verse 5:
For we through the Spirit by faith wait for the hope of righteousness.
Galatians 5, verses 16-18:
But I say, Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.
For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh;
for these are contrary the one to the other;
that ye may not do the things that ye would.
But if ye are led by the Spirit, ye are not under the law.
Galatians 5, verse 25:
If we live by the Spirit, by the Spirit let us also walk.
Galatians 6, verse 8:
For he that soweth unto his own flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth unto the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap eternal life.
All that has to do with the Spirit, which is, of course, another way of speaking of the anointing.
Galatians 2 begins this line of the cross. Galatians 2, verse 20:
I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me.
Galatians 3, verse 1:
O foolish Galatians, who did bewitch you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was openly set forth crucified?
Galatians 5, verse 24:
And they that are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with the passions and the lusts thereof.
Galatians 6, verse 14:
But far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been crucified unto me, and I unto the world.
I am sorry to have troubled you with all those Scriptures, but we must have a good, solid, sound foundation in the Word of God for what we say. You will see that it is perfectly clear in this brief letter to the Galatians: the two main lines are the cross and the Holy Spirit.
It is that bridge, you see, between Isaiah 53 and Isaiah 61.
We all know that this letter to the Galatians contains Paul’s tremendous battle. Yes, he was always out for a fight when he set himself to write in this manner. There is no more vehement product of the pen of Paul than we have in this letter.
But what is the battle for? What is it all about?
Of course, there are theological and doctrinal answers to that question. But I want to say, with a good deal to support it from this letter and from other parts of the New Testament, that this battle of Paul was all related to the true, essential spiritual character of Christianity.
Christianity—that is, true Christianity—is an essentially spiritual thing. That is what the battle is about: the spiritual nature of Christianity.
It shows so clearly in every connection that the cross leads to a spiritual position, to a spiritual condition. The enemy, the great enemy, who had very useful instruments in the Judaizers, was fighting to bring Christianity onto another than a spiritual basis—to make of it something other than a spiritual thing.
He sought to resolve Christianity into rites and ceremonies and so forth: ritual, formalism, earthly and temporal symbols, representations, figures, mysticism—which is not spirituality. Mysticism is not spirituality.
Satan was fighting to make Christianity into something like that. Paul saw that the issue was no less than the real meaning of what Christianity is—the real nature of Christianity, what it is.
Paul was not giving it away, because he had had a tremendous experience on this very matter. So he set himself to fight the thing with all the strength that he had, to make it perfectly clear that Christianity is not an earthly system in any respect. It is a heavenly life.
Christianity is essentially a life in the Spirit. The cross is intended to produce that. If it does not produce that, there is some reason for it in those concerned, which means that the whole nature of Christianity has been changed and the meaning of the cross has been subverted.
So Paul lunges at this thing with all the force of the cross, and he brings in every weapon to which he can lay his hand.
What are some of those weapons? First of all—and it is a very powerful weapon that Paul uses, as you will notice in this letter to the Galatians—the weapon of his own history and his own experience.
There are few cases in all his writings where he refers to himself more than he does in this letter. He brings his own history and his own experience right home as one of his master strokes. He was the man to do it.
Look at all the process. Look at his history. He tells us about himself. Was there ever a man who had put this whole Jewish system more thoroughly to the test than he had?
Why, up to the hilt—right up to the hilt—he had committed himself to the observance and performance of every part of the Jewish ritual. He tells us that in this matter he was more zealous than many of his own age, being more exceedingly zealous.
This man had gone all the way with his whole system: rites and ceremonies, types and figures, symbols and forms. He had gone all the way. Where did it land him? What did it do for him?
We have his own exclamation after having exhausted it most conscientiously, most earnestly, most thoroughly. What we have to say even about Paul is that he was a man who did not believe in half-measures. He was a man who meant business.
We can go further and say that he was sincere in what he did, because he tells us, “I verily thought that I ought to do many things contrary to the Name.” It was a conscientious man, this brilliant young Pharisee who climbed so high on the ladder of Judaism.
Well, where did it land him? He says, “This is where it landed me: ‘O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’”
You could not get very much lower than that, could you? That is the last word in anything. He says, in effect, “That is where it landed me. That is all it did for me. It is not going to do any better for anybody else, however given they may be to it.”
It had all failed in his own experience and in his own history. But then he came to that ignominious end: “O wretched man that I am,” crying for deliverance—“Who shall deliver me?” Nothing and nobody of all that long history had proved a deliverer for him.
Then he found the Lord Jesus, and the Lord Jesus did for him what this tremendous sum of things had entirely failed to do. He found the cross.
I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me.
You notice the change from the word death to the word life: “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” “I live; yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me.” Here is a dead man made alive, come to life.
There is a man who has got an altogether new beginning, a new history, a new experience, which has sprung out of the Lord Jesus. He found the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit did for him what this vast system of Judaism, to which he had given himself so heartily, had failed entirely to do. That is why, in this letter, he gives such a large place to the Holy Spirit. You notice that, do you not?
That is why the cross and the Holy Spirit are brought together as the ruling lines of this whole testimony. The Holy Spirit, on the ground of the cross, has reversed the whole experience and changed the whole situation.
There is another ruling line in this letter: the real meaning of Christ. I could not take you through the letter on that line because the name Christ occurs forty-three times in this little letter. You would not want me to take you through all that at this time.
Forty-three times in a little letter which you can read in ten minutes, Paul uses the name Christ. That itself is significant, is it not? It tells us really what it is all about and how Paul is seeking to show here the true meaning of Christ.
What is the true meaning of Christ? In Christ, all that system has been completely fulfilled. The vast system of the law and all its ordinances has been fulfilled in Christ, in the cross.
All righteousness has been fulfilled. As Jesus said:
Suffer it now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.
That is the question at issue. It was all fulfilled in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ crucified has fulfilled it all.
The Old Testament is fulfilled in Christ. That is what we are saying about Isaiah. What is true of Isaiah is true of all the Old Testament. You would not have me embark upon an attempt to show how the Old Testament is fulfilled in Christ, but that is what Paul is saying here.
“I have been crucified with Christ,” and so, because of that, I am united with Him in that fulfilment of all the requirements of God. By the Spirit, I come into the good of what Jesus is.
Then there is another thing in this letter which would again require our going through it: the meaning of grace. Grace—that is a great thing in the Letter to the Galatians. Indeed, you may say that it is almost the governing thing.
Grace puts us on to an entirely new basis. All the ritual, all the demands of the law, only serve to accentuate the evil conscience.
That is what Paul makes so clear. This Letter to the Galatians was written before the Letter to the Romans. I think probably Paul, when he had written the Letter to the Galatians, said, “I must write something more about this,” and set himself to write the Letter to the Romans, which is a very great enlargement upon what is here.
The point is that the whole thing related to the conscience. “I had not known sin, but the law had said, Thou shalt not.” That very saying only gave me a bad conscience; it upset my conscience. This whole system was only keeping my conscience alive. It was not saving me from an evil conscience.
But grace has done that. Grace has put me on to an altogether different and new basis. Grace does deal with the conscience, does it not? What a wonderful word, over against the bad conscience, is the grace of God.
Then we come again to this fourth thing: the meaning of the Holy Spirit. What does Paul say pre-eminently about the Holy Spirit here?
And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.
The Spirit of sonship. Paul sets that over against servanthood. There, you see, he gets right to the heart of this whole matter.
If we recognize—it is easy to do—the difference between a servant and a son, we have got the secret of everything. A servant is one who simply does what he is told. He has to do what he is told.
He hears that he must or he must not, and it is for him as a servant to obey. That is all. Whether he likes it or not, whether he agrees with it or not, whatever it may be, whatever may be his own reactions, he just cannot help himself. He is a servant; he has got to obey.
He may be inwardly in positive revolt against the whole thing, but what can he do? A servant in those days—of course, a servant today could give up his job and resign. That is how it is in our time. If you do not like anything, well, that is what you do. But you could not do that in Paul’s day.
A bondslave had no power of choice whatever. He could not say, “Oh, I am resigning. I am going to find another master.” He just could not do it. He was bought—body, soul, and spirit. However revolted he might be with all his being, he could do nothing about it. He was the bondslave of this law.
Well, that is a servant. What is a son?
If he is a son, in the true meaning of a son, he delights to do it. There is the dynamic in him: the dynamic of love. He delights to do those things which are well-pleasing unto his Father.
That very dynamic of love is the power in him to do it. He has another spirit. It is the Spirit of sonship working in him, making it possible for him to respond to every requirement.
That is the meaning of the Holy Spirit, you see: an inward power, and that of love, which makes everything possible. You know as well as I do that if you have got a mighty love for something, there is nothing impossible.
Oh, that we had more of this love—that does not irk, does not wait to have things pointed out or have our attention drawn to them, but is all the time alert and anxious and keen, watching to see what can be done. We need that spirit, do we not?
That is one of the things that has impressed us so much on these two visits to the Far East. It is just so impressive. We refer to it here by way of illustration and example, not by way of condemnation or criticism. But if it affects you that way, all right—it would be quite good.
There you are. You go there as we have been. For instance, you take that great meeting hall in Taipei, with an internal capacity of sixteen hundred, and provision made all around for so many more, up to over three thousand.
It is a great thing, with two thousand panes of glass. You can guess that it wants a lot of looking after—cleaning and care; all the electricity, all the amplifiers, and so much connected with even one centre like that.
After every meeting, you see an army of men and women prepared and getting down to it: sweeping and cleaning, mopping up, seeing to everything, adjusting so that everything is in its place and clean and wholesome for the next meeting.
You look at these people doing that job, and as I have done, you say about some fellow who looks a bit scrubby as he is doing the job, “Who is that brother?” “He is Major-General so-and-so.”
Another little man is getting down to it, really with his working clothes on, getting down to a dirty job. “Who is that young brother?” “He is the managing director of the biggest textile factory on this island.”
And so you go: general, colonel, captain—they all get into it. One of these high officers has made it his business to clean those two thousand panes of glass once every week.
And what do they do? Before they start on their work, they meet together and pray and sing. They pray all together, all these army workers, and then they have a good time together. Then they get to work, and it is all done in the spirit of joy.
I say, that is not bondslavery; that is sonship—the true spirit of sonship. Oh, we need more of that. We need more of that.
That is the meaning of the Holy Spirit. You are not surprised that these people are radiant, and you are not surprised that the question is answered in their case: “To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” Indeed, it is revealed there.
Suffer that way of illustrating it. It is very hard to have seen these things really working. They can work. They can work.
This, then, is the meaning of this Spirit. That is what Paul is saying here: the meaning of Christ, the meaning of the Spirit, the real spirit of sonship.
Satan is against that. Oh, Satan hates that. He will try to break that up. He will try to spoil that. There is no doubt about it: he is against that.
That was the battle that Paul was in—not merely with Judaizers, but with this antagonist, the great enemy, against a testimony of that kind: the real fruit of the cross.
If Satan is thwarted along one line, he does not give up; he tries another. He tries another. Satan is a great master of strategy, and one of his favourite things is to push things to extremes.
He seeks to push this legalistic thing to an extreme. That is what he has done. Paul wins the battle; there is no doubt about it. What is the next line of attack on the part of the enemy?
Very well, then: “You will not have the law? Then do not have any law. Discard all law. You are no longer under law; you are under grace. You can do as you like. Just behave as you like. Just carry on as you like.”
“You must know no limitations, no restrictions of any kind. Any kind of restriction is law; repudiate it. Go to the other extreme: licence instead of law.”
I believe that if Paul were alive today, he would be just as vehement against this as he was against the other. Oh, here is a work of Satan indeed.
If Satan cannot bind by the law and change the whole nature of things in that way, he will seek to dismiss all law and make us wholly lawless.
But remember that this letter is the letter of the liberty of the Spirit; it is the letter of the government of the Spirit. We are only free when we are bound.
We sing a hymn about that sometimes, do we not?
Make me a captive, Lord,
And then I shall be free.
A paradox, but how true—how true. You are not free when you are giving way to licence, taking liberty that far.
Oh no. The Letter to the Galatians, the Letter to the Romans, and the Letter to the Hebrews are not documents of lawlessness, even if they do set aside the whole of the Jewish system.
They do not introduce a regime of lawlessness, but they most clearly bring in the life and government of the Holy Spirit.
Remember: no man, no woman, who is really governed by the Holy Spirit, who is living and walking in the Spirit, will infringe any divine principle.
Indeed, a life governed by the Holy Spirit would be more meticulously careful about spiritual principles. Yes, that is quite true.
You see, the change is not in the law. That is where a great mistake has been made. The change is not in the law at all. Christ crucified does not alter the law. Christ Himself does not alter the law. The Holy Spirit does not alter the law.
The change is not in the law; the change is in the man. Grace does not say that you may now, because you are not under law, murder and get away with it. You can steal now; it does not matter, you are not under law. You can commit adultery now; you are not under law. You can be covetous now; you are not under law.
Grace does not say that. You are horrified at the suggestion. But carry that right through to everything and anything of divine principle. Remember that the law is only the embodiment of divine principles.
The Lord Jesus took that up. He said:
Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt not kill;
but I say unto you, that every one who is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment.
If you hate your brother, you have already murdered him. You are a murderer. Without taking any step to kill him, you are already a murderer in your heart. It is the principle of the thing, you see.
Moses said, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” The Lord Jesus said that if you look with lust, you have committed adultery already in your heart. This is terribly searching.
No, no, no. Christ and the Holy Spirit do not change the nature of the law, the principle of the law. They change the man. They change the man.
That is how the law is lifted from us: because we become changed people. The Spirit Who keeps the law has now entered into us, and by the Spirit, if we walk in the Spirit, we do not fulfil the lusts of the flesh. You see, it is the changed person, is it not?
Grace does not say, “You are not under the law; therefore, you do not keep the Sabbath. You need not observe the Sabbath.” We have got to recognize, dear friends, that the Sabbath is the embodiment of a principle. It is not a date. It is not a day. It is a principle.
It is the principle upon which God has constituted the creation: there must be a period of rest in every realm for something new. In all nature there has to be a period of rest in order that there should be something new.
In our bodies, there has to be a period of rest that there may be something new. In spiritual matters too, in spiritual service, there has to be rest—a period of rest in which the Lord can speak and give us something new. It is the principle of a Sabbath; it is not a day.
But even there, you see, the Lord has very graciously made it possible for many to have a day—even a day in the week still—in which to let other things go and to keep it sacred for the Lord, for spiritual renewal.
Well, you see what I mean. It is the principle that matters, not the outward form. Nothing changes the principle.
The principles of all divine laws are abiding. They are never abrogated, never set aside, never nullified. These principles still hold good.
Jesus went behind the code and put His finger on the principle of every part of the code. He said, in effect, “You may not now be governed by an outward system of ‘Thou shalt’ and ‘Thou shalt not,’ but you are ruled by the Holy Spirit, Who observes those things.”
It is the same Spirit. I say again that the Spirit is the Spirit of holiness. No one who lives in the Spirit, therefore, will do unholy things persistently and habitually, or be unholy.
The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of love. No one who lives in the Spirit will have any other than a spirit of love, will observe the laws of love, and will not violate love.
The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth. No one who lives in and by the Spirit will be untruthful in any sense. Untruthfulness covers a vast ground, does it not? It is not only saying things that are not true, but how much there is that is not absolutely true, real, genuine, honest, and transparent.
The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth. The man or woman who lives in the Spirit will be a man or woman of truth—a true person, one who is real.
The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of wisdom. Those who live in the Spirit will have a divine wisdom governing their lives.
You see, it is life in the Spirit through the cross that is here in view: crucified man, crucified woman, who walks and lives in the Spirit.
That is the man or woman, or the assembly or the church, to whom the arm of the Lord is revealed. We want to know the power of God—God with us, God for us. Let it just be like this: the cross our ground, the Spirit our life, walking and living as sons of God.