There is one other announcement which I have been reminded of.
Now we come to the close of this time in which we have been circling around the question in the first verse of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah’s prophecies: “To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?”
We have been seeking and exploring the ground upon which the Lord will commit Himself, upon which He will really show His power, His presence, and His support.
This evening, I am going to strip the whole thing of a very great deal that gathers around it, not even taking you back very much through Isaiah’s prophecies—just by way of review, with a little extra word, trying to sum up this whole matter.
I think that the most helpful way would be for you to draw a mental picture. That is, first of all, lay down the Letter to the Romans as a background, and superimpose upon it a figure of the cross.
We have seen that the Letter to the Romans sets forth the cross as God’s instrument for clearing the ground for His building; that is, providing a place for the foundation of the great building which has ever been in His thought and intentions: the church.
The Letter to the Romans begins with the ground—covers very much the ground—upon which God will not build, upon which He cannot build: the condition of things so tangled, so evil, so false, and so wrong. He surveys it with a view to laying the foundation for His church, His glorious church. He says, “I cannot build on that. We must clear all that out of the way. We must set fire to that and consume it, make a great clearing for this foundation.”
And so, in the Letter to the Romans, the cross is superimposed there: that which, on the one side, disposes of that whole state of things. And what a state it is! Those of you who are familiar with the letter and its early chapters know what a terrible condition is presented. And the cross is placed there to deal with it all, to get rid of it all, to consume it all.
It is like the great brazen altar, with its consuming fire bringing everything to judgment and clearing the ground of it all, leaving nothing but a clearing, an emptiness, a barrenness.
Then, on the other side, God having His foundation laid, the new prospect comes into view. With the remaining chapters of that letter, everything now is possible for God. And we find the apostle saying so much about God’s eternal thoughts, counsels, and conceptions—His wonderful ideas—in election, in foreknowledge, in predestination, in conformity to the image of His Son; the creation redeemed from corruption; the children of God delivered from bondage.
Everything now seems to come in for realization, since the cross has cleared the way. So that is where we begin: the cross as securing the foundation for everything.
That is your first figure. Then you draw lines radiating from that. The first line reaches to the First Letter to the Corinthians, where the cross is applied to conditions—not in the world now, not outside of Christ—but conditions among believers which do not tally with the cross.
The natural man, the carnal man, with all his works and the result of his presence among the Lord’s people: division, and all that horrible situation in the first letter. We have just come into the church, among the Lord’s people, and the apostle brings the meaning of the cross to bear upon that.
As he said:
“For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.”
— 1 Corinthians 2:2
You see, the first radiation from Romans is through all conditions inside the church that are not in agreement with the meaning of the cross. God cannot build, cannot get on with the building, until those things are dealt with.
So in that first letter the apostle tells us, “The foundation is laid. I laid the foundation as a wise master builder, but others build thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereon.”
And these things, as we have pointed out, that we find in that letter are the things to which God says, “No, you must not put those on My foundation. My foundation is worthy of something better than that. We cannot have those things in our clearing. That will only clutter up things again and make it necessary for us to do the whole business over again.”
Every man’s work that is not according to the cross is going up in flames and smoke, with nothing left. That is what the apostle says there. And that is the first outreach of the cross as from Romans: to touch conditions among the Lord’s people that are not in accordance with what God means by the cross.
God says, “No, all that. I am not going to use that on My foundation. I am not going to build with that. You get rid of that, and then we will get on with the building.”
First things being dealt with, as we saw this morning, by the Corinthians themselves. Oh, yes, the fire did burn amongst them: fire of repentance, fire of self-judgment, fire of clearing. Ah, brokenness of heart! Something happened. They dealt with those things.
And then you get the second radiating line coming in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, where the testimony that had been marred and spoiled by those things can now be recovered.
You have the great restoration of testimony in the church, in the locality, in the city, and in the world. God can get on with things now in relation to testimony in the world. That is, He can now build when He has that state of heart, that state of spirit—broken, humble, contrite, trembling at His word, very low before Him.
When He has that, then things begin to happen outwardly. They happen outwardly; it does not require a great effort. They just do happen, because here is the expression of a mighty dynamic power of God in the midst.
You know how the apostle puts that in that letter:
“Seeing it is God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
— 2 Corinthians 4:6
And then the apostle says:
“But we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory.”
— 2 Corinthians 3:18
That is the testimony; that is the outshining. When things inwardly have been dealt with, it is quite spontaneous. It is just the result of a deep but very quiet work of God.
I do not think, when God first said in the chaos, “Let there be light,” that there was a very great noise about it. You know, there never needs to be a great deal of noise when God puts forth His power. There is the hiding of His power. You remember that phrase, do you not? The hiding of His power, but not the minimizing of His power.
Oh, God can only speak—only needs to speak—and immense things can happen. He only said, “Let there be light.” Look at the force and power of light in this creation. How terrific is the light! But just from a word, just from a word.
I think it is real, and it is symbolic. You see, here at Corinth the light shines out when God has right conditions. It would be like that. What I mean is that there need not be a great noise of publicity, of advertisement, of organization, of tremendous excitement and feverish activity. If the testimony is there, people will know it. People will feel it.
If it is there, if it is there, if the conditions are right there, something will happen. If there is nothing happening, we had better look through our conditions.
Well, that is the Second Letter to the Corinthians, the second radiating line from the cross.
Then the third line radiating from the cross, as we saw this afternoon, is what we have in the Letter to the Galatians: the resultant life in the Spirit.
The cross produces a life in the Spirit and brings about a true spiritual kind of Christianity, as distinct from a merely professional, formal, ritualistic kind of Christianity that is all on the outside. This mighty thing proves spiritual Christianity: a life in the Spirit. How real, how effective that is.
That is what we reach when we come to the Letter to the Galatians. It says the cross works out in a life in the Spirit like that. And that is true Christianity: a spiritual thing.
Now, the additional word for just a few minutes. We come to the twin letters, the twin letters so called: Ephesians and Colossians.
I need not say, I think, much technical detail about that. I say “so called” because evidently it was not directly to the Ephesians. Someone check that on later. There is something inside the letter that shows that it was not directly to the Ephesians, although probably it went in a circle to the Ephesians.
But I leave all that because, after all, it is only technical. But when we come to these twin letters—because they are twin letters—you cannot read them without recognizing that you are covering the same ground very largely, only with distinctive emphases in each.
When you come there, you come to some tremendous things. You must notice, of course, that here in these letters, as in all the others, the cross is the foundation.
In this so-called Letter to the Ephesians, you begin with the cross. That is, we who were dead through our trespasses and sins, He quickened and raised together with Him. The cross is there.
You come to the Letter to the Colossians, and you have the circumcision of Christ, the putting away of the body of the flesh in baptism. Here you have got the cross. You have got the cross. The cross is basic. That is the point. It is the carryover from Romans of the foundation.
Then, when you recognize that, you come upon the two greatest things that have ever been disclosed by God—wonderful things that, if you really did see them, not as in the Bible to be read, but if you saw them in your heart, I am perfectly sure something would happen to you.
I wonder if maybe you have had something in the Word of God that has just overwhelmed you and carried you away.
I have some rather humorous little incidents in ministry in the Far East. Recently, on more than one occasion, I have said something which I thought was not anything extraordinary, or anything that would occasion or cause anything. But it did occasion something.
When I said these things, my dear brother with me, who was interpreting for me in Chinese, suddenly went out into almost roars of laughter. At my side, he lost all control of himself. He just could not stop laughing. And the people caught him; a great mass of people all caught it and went off into this laughing.
But he could not get back. He tried and struggled; the more he struggled, the more he seemed to lose his control. I had to wait and wonder what it was all about. I thought, “Well, what on earth have I said? What on earth have I said? How is this?”
And even a little later on, evidently while we had got away from that, it came back to him and he suddenly went off again. That has happened more than once.
So I thought, “Well, I do not know about this. I will just find out afterward what it is all about.” So afterward, when I got him in the room, I said, “Look here, brother, what on earth did I say? What did I say to cause you to go up in mirth, and all the people too? Did I say something so outrageous, so terrible, so funny to you? What was it?”
He said, “No, brother, no. We have never seen that before. That is all. It was something we had never seen before. That is all.”
What I mean, dear friends, you see, the point is this: that it is possible to see something in the Word of God that just takes you right away—something so absolutely fresh. And that is how it ought to be, surely?
Oh, the Lord deliver us from that kind of familiarity with His Word that we know it all, and it never provokes anything, it never stirs anything in us. It ought to be like that, although I am not wanting you to do that.
By the way, you see, when you come to these letters, really, if you have your eyes open, you come to things that are calculated to take your breath away—really to carry you right out of yourself. Well, they are very wonderful things indeed.
Perhaps when I say them to you, they will be so familiar to you that they will not stir you at all. But I cannot, at any time, reflect upon them without being tremendously moved by them.
These two things—two things. The language is so well known to you, but oh, that the Lord would bring you again into something of the real impact and meaning of these words.
Let us look at what is really the key to, and the sum of, the whole Letter to the Ephesians. There is, in all the wonderful fullness that is in this letter—it is a very, very full letter, is it not? Almost every clause carries you out of your depth—but there is something in the letter, a small fragment, which gathers the whole of the letter into itself, which just tells you what it is all about, what it all means.
It is always very helpful to be able to get hold of something like that which contains everything. And if you see it, you see everything in it. And so we have it in Ephesians 1:10:
“Unto a dispensation of the fulness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth; in Him, I say.”
— Ephesians 1:10
In the fullness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ. That phrase, “sum up,” is not fully or truly explanatory of what the apostle really meant and was saying. It goes as far as it can, but it would be better to say, “to gather together all things in Christ.”
When sin came in through Adam, a great process of disintegration commenced.
First of all, it began in the man himself. The man himself was no longer a single entity; he was a divided personality. And every child, every son of Adam, is a divided personality.
There is civil war in his very nature, in his very constitution. There is conflict. He is a divided man, and a man who in himself is in conflict. Is not that true of all of us?
We all know enough about ourselves to know that there is nothing that speaks of complete harmony in our natures, in our makeup, in our constitution. There is war within us—war in our makeup, war in our temperament, war in our whole constitution. We are broken. We are divided. We are disintegrated.
That happened with the man himself, and then it happened between the first two—the only two, the man and his wife. You can discern and trace the elements of disintegration, the disruption between them.
The man blames the woman. That is the beginning of a domestic schism, you see. So on, they are divided. It was a wonderful unity and harmony. They were one flesh, it says—one flesh. But now something has come in, and they are no longer like that.
Division has come there between them, and a strain in life. No doubt, when they were driven out of the garden, they were blaming one another. I do not think there is any doubt about it. “This is all your fault.” But we know that sort of thing, do we not?
And then we find in the family which came through them, you have Cain and Abel: the first children, schism, disintegration, even to the point of murder.
And from the family the thing spread to the race, till you come to the great scattering of the race, the dividing of it up into its many, many parts, as we have it today. Diversity of languages, where the whole race is broken to pieces and is in this condition of disharmony.
You pursue that through, and before you are out of the Old Testament, you have got the whole race divided into two irreconcilable sections: Jew and Gentile, hating each other.
“You will have nothing to do with Gentiles.” Call the Gentiles dogs, and have nothing to do with them—unclean things. And the Gentile reacting to the Jews, as we know the Gentile nations have done all along and do today.
Here is all this state of things: brokenness, catastrophe, discord, quarrelling, strife, conflict, war, and hatred. That is the state of the creation, is it not? Am I exaggerating? Well, surely not.
It is like that today, everywhere, from centre to circumference of this creation. It is all broken to pieces, and all the pieces are against each other. There is no harmony, no unity, and no integration in this creation.
God had a secret. He knew all about that. He knew what would happen; He knew what would come. And He devised His own way of meeting it, and had a secret in His own heart as to how He would meet it and solve that problem, that terrible problem.
That is what Paul calls the mystery in this matter. How would He do it? How would He sum up? He would gather together all things in Christ.
He would make His Son the integrating centre and sphere of a new creation, a new order, in which all these diversities and conflicts would never again be found.
That is the sum of this Letter to the Ephesians: to gather together all things in Christ. I say that surely sends a thrill through us.
And so three things come into view in that connection. First of all, the cross of Christ.
Because, you notice here, it is in the cross, Paul says, that the enmity was destroyed. That is an idea about the cross. We have many conceptions and teachings on the cross, but here is one wonderful thing: that in the cross this enmity was taken hold of and destroyed.
You see, where there is a true work of the cross in any of us, that kind of national, international, social, or even Christian division ceases. It does.
The cross is the instrument for dealing with all that sort of thing, and it will deal with it. It will deal with it. If the cross really gets down into the depths of our being, the whole situation in ourselves and between ourselves and others will change.
Well, of course, here in this very gathering tonight, we have a demonstration of it, have we not? How many nationalities are there here in this place tonight? How many mother tongues are there?
Well, if you came on to the natural, you would find you were all in pieces. If all you dear brothers and sisters from Switzerland, Germany, France, and other places would begin to speak in your own language, what confusion there would be. And if you did it all audibly, all at the same time, oh, what bits and pieces we should be in!
And it might be like that if we met one another on our own natural ground. Here we are. Here we are. We are having a good time together: real love, real fellowship, real joy.
Can I say, we do not want to go away? We would like to perpetuate this. We have perfect sympathy with Peter: “Let us make three tabernacles.”
But it is true, is it not? We have got above and over our national and personal and social and every other kind of disintegrating element. We are above it. We are enjoying wonderful fellowship in love.
Well, it is good to see that the thing does work. Here is a literal demonstration of it. There are not many bigger examples of it in this world. Yes, it has happened. First of all, the cross has done something.
So that we do not meet one another on natural ground at all. We meet one another on heavenly ground, on spiritual ground, on the ground of Christ.
The cross is the instrument toward that. Christ Himself is the focal centre and sphere of that. We meet in Christ. That is the great work: to gather together all things in Christ.
In Christ. Notice how often that little phrase is used: “in Christ,” “in Christ.” It is all in Christ. He is the centre and sphere of this wonderful new integration.
“In one Spirit,” says the apostle, “were we all baptized into one body.” One Spirit, one Spirit.
And then the third thing: the church. The church is the vessel of this. That is what comes out in this letter. God’s secret was that His Son would be the focal centre, but that the church would be the vessel in which this unity should be displayed.
What a tragedy that it is not more so. And yet, and yet, as I have said, where you get a true expression of the church, this is what you find. This is what you have. These disintegrating things are outside, and this mighty integration of divine love is on the inside.
You get a real testimony to what the cross has done, a true testimony to the body of Christ. The church is the vessel in which it is to be.
Very simple. I say you are familiar with the phrases and terminology, but oh, what a wonderful thing: that in the fullness of the times—we have not yet reached the fullness of the times; I think we are getting very near the fullness of the times—but in the fullness of the times, to gather together.
Gather together, not geographically and physically, but into that one glorious unity of Spirit: all things in Christ. The wonderful day when that happens, when that is realized! But God has determined to do that.
Slaying the enmity by the cross—slaying the enmity. Oh, brothers and sisters, do listen to this: if there is any enmity between you and another brother or sister in Christ, that enmity is a denial of the cross. It is a denial of Christ. And it is a denial of the church.
That is very solemn. Any enmity. Have you got any enmity with another brother or another sister? Have you? Listen then: it says here that in the cross enmity was destroyed.
Where is the cross then? Where is the Christ then? Where is the Spirit then? Where is the church then, if there is still that? If the cross has operated, ah yes, and in reality did put it away, it has no place here.
In this letter Paul prays, as you see in the third chapter, his great prayer. He says:
“For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father.”
— Ephesians 3:14
Unto the Father. Now you have got the heart of things. Unto the Father, then we are family. We are family.
And what is the chief characteristic of a true fatherhood and a true family? It is what Paul says here: it is love.
Now listen, listen to what he says:
“That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.”
— Ephesians 3:17-19
Oh, there is a love in such dimensions that can do this thing, that can achieve this end of gathering together all the brokenness in Christ. It is only going to be done by that mighty, mighty love, with its breadth and its length and its height and its depth. It is great enough to do it. It is great enough to do it.
But you and I have got to be strong to apprehend with all saints that love—apprehend that love—and God gets His end.
What about the Letter to the Colossians, the other half of this one thing? Well, everybody knows what the great word or phrase in that letter is. It is this:
“For it was the good pleasure of the Father that in Him should all the fulness dwell.”
— Colossians 1:19
“And in Him ye are made full.”
— Colossians 2:10
Well, you can get the picture. First of all, God made, so to speak, a beautiful vessel. The great Potter, at the beginning of the creation, created, moulded, fashioned, shaped, produced a beautiful vessel.
And as He stood back and looked at it, He said, “It is very good.” And He filled that vessel with His fullness. He filled into the vessel of this creation the beauty and glory of God.
Oh, how full is this creation, even now in its present condition, of the beauty and glory of God! Yes, but He filled it in unsullied beauty and glory at the beginning.
And then a great enemy came in and struck a blow at that vessel and shattered it to pieces, disintegrated the whole thing, and all that divine spiritual fullness leaked away.
We find desolation and emptiness where there had been fullness. The great Potter comes back to make it again another vessel, as it pleases Him to make it.
Here is the vessel: the church. This is the vessel of the Lord, a beautiful vessel, a glorious church—not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing.
As He looks at it according to His own thought and His own ideal, and what He intends and what He will realize, He says, “A glorious church. A glorious church. It is very good.”
And then the Letter to the Colossians sees the vessel brought into being, as in Ephesians, now filled again with all the fullness. The vessel is mended, shall we say? Gathered together, all the fragments gathered together.
You cannot now trace the cracks from the joins. It is a beautiful whole, this church as we have it here. And then He fills it again with all His fullness.
“That ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God.”
— Ephesians 3:19
“Ye are made full in Him, in whom all the fulness dwelleth.”
— Colossians 2:10; Colossians 1:19
That is how it is to be. How tremendous!
That is all I am really going to say this evening. But what I do want to underline is this: while this is a process God is seeking to work out, an end toward which He is labouring, we must remember that the achievement of this great and glorious thing—this gathering together of all things in Christ, this filling with all His fullness of that gathered-together vessel—requires, must have, a continuous work of the cross.
That is the challenge of this conference. It is the challenge of the cross in everything, in relation to the great purpose of God.
Now, I could have shown you all that in Isaiah if it had been our time for doing it, but we can believe that here it is so patently in the New Testament. I have not exaggerated. I have not given you anything that is not in the Word. This is it. This is it.
The cross leads on—leads on to this. It leads on to reintegration. If it has its way, it will do it.
If there is anything contrary to integration, to oneness, it will always be traceable to something that has withstood, or is withstanding, the cross.
You take that into your own life. Take it back into your fellowships, into your assemblies, into your companies. If there is something that still represents disintegration, dividedness, schism—use what language you like—that means that things are broken, they are in pieces, they are not one entity, one whole.
If there is that condition, you can trace it—or it can be traced—to the failure of the cross to have done its work in some direction or other. There is only one explanation.
Believe me, dear friends, that if the cross really does its work, this integration will spontaneously result. It will. The way of unity is not the way of patching things up from the outside. The way of unity is the work of the cross in the heart.
When the church really gets the cross at work in its very constitution, you will find the problem of division solved. It is like that.
And if there is poverty, if there is scarcity, if there is spiritual tenuity, if there is limitation in our spiritual resources and we are not knowing this filling, this fullness—the same reason. The cross is frustrated.
You find that the measure increases, always does increase, quite spontaneously, as soon as you get things out of the way that are contrary to Christ.
Well, that is a simple message, but simplicity does not necessarily mean that it is not important. It is a very important word.
So we finish where we began: “To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” Have we any interest whatever, or concern, in this matter of knowing God with us and for us in power, in support, in protection, in deliverance, in succour? This is the way. This is the way.
Forgive me repeating it. You see, that question was raised right at the beginning of Isaiah 53: “To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” The answer is found in that chapter.
It is revealed to this One who goes to the cross. It is revealed to this One who suffers the cross, who lets all go in the cross, goes down into shame and dishonour in the cross, who loses all His own in the cross. To Him the arm of the Lord is revealed, and history is the great proof of it.
God’s arm has been bared for His Son through history, and it ever will be; and for others who are with His Son—crucified men and women, crucified churches, a crucified church.
There is a passage that we are very fond of, very fond of:
“For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show Himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward Him.”
— 2 Chronicles 16:9
The cross is the instrument of testing whether our hearts are perfect toward the Lord, or whether we have personal interests, worldly interests, or dividedness of interest in any way. Whether our heart is perfect—the word “perfect” means complete, whole—toward the Lord.
“To show Himself mighty in the behalf of him whose heart is complete toward the Lord.”
And is not the Lord Jesus on that cross the very embodiment of a heart that is wholly for God? May we find the arm of the Lord. Pray with me.