Lord, Thou hast said, “Separated from Me, ye can do nothing.” We know it; we acknowledge it. And it applies to this very moment and hour.
But, Lord, we pray: remove every form and degree of separateness from Thyself. May there be such a oneness with Thee that Thou art able to bear Thine own fruit through this ministry, and so shall the Father be glorified. For this we ask, in the Name of the Lord Jesus. Amen.
I must ask you now to look at quite a handful of fragments of Scripture, going back to the first book of Kings.
In 1 Kings 8:1, Solomon assembled the elders of Israel, the heads of the tribes, and the princes of the fathers’ houses of the children of Israel unto King Solomon at Jerusalem.
Then, in 1 Kings 8:22:
And Solomon stood before the altar of the Lord, in the presence of all the assembly of Israel, and spread forth his hands toward heaven.
And in 1 Kings 8:62-63:
And the king, and all Israel with him, offered sacrifice before the Lord.
And Solomon offered for the sacrifice of peace-offerings, which he offered unto the Lord, two and twenty thousand oxen, and an hundred and twenty thousand sheep.
So the king and all the children of Israel dedicated the house of the Lord.
Turn also to the letter to the Ephesians. In Ephesians 1:7-10:
According to the riches of His grace which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence,
making known unto us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Him
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 Ephesians 2:1-6:
And you did He quicken, when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins,
wherein ye once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the powers of the air, of the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience;
among whom we also all once lived in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest:
but God, being rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us,
even when we were dead through our trespasses, quickened us together with Christ (by grace have ye been saved),
and raised us up with Him, and made us to sit with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus.
And Ephesians 3:17-19:
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, that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God.
Finally, Ephesians 5:27:
That He might present the church to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.
So far as I am concerned, we have come to the heart of these particular messages. I have to confess to you that, from the point at which we are now, into this brief hour, not the sky but eternity is the limit.
I am very much cast upon the Lord to get in an immense amount, but He will decide what we can register in the spirit, and it is enough.
You have been occupied with the greatness of the antitypical Solomon. We have been allowing Solomon to be, for us, an illustration and a type of One Who is greater than Solomon. Solomon, you remember, is a foreshadowing of Christ; and a foreshadowing is always so much less than that which it foreshadows.
We have contemplated some of the greatness of Solomon: the greatness of his wisdom, the greatness of his riches, the greatness of his glory, the greatness of his food, and the greatness of his honour.
But this many-sided greatness is seen most prominently in the altar and the house.
What we have read concerning Solomon gathering all the people, princes, and heads of fathers’ houses—the whole congregation—to Jerusalem for the dedication of the house of God, is very closely related to the altar.
There are two supreme, predominant features: the altar and the house. They are focused in the person of Solomon as king.
Keep that in mind. It is the person himself, Solomon, sitting upon the throne of David, who gives significance to the altar and the house. They take their meaning and their character from him, from his exalted position and his glory.
That is a statement which you will need to hold as we go on.
Now consider the greatness of this altar. I have not read the description of the building of the altar, but do so and you will see that it was immense—an immense altar.
The very thickness of it is said to have been a handbreadth in thickness. Well, that is something. It was not some light thing at all. The fuller description makes you feel that this must have been an immense altar, a tremendous and weighty thing.
Then picture the offerings. A procession of oxen, reaching almost out of sight, making its way toward that altar—twenty-two thousand oxen. Following them, one hundred and twenty thousand sheep.
It is almost unthinkable, unimaginable. You see that dark line of sheep reaching away, and here they come. How many days would it take to sacrifice them all? Day after day, from morning until evening, the blood would be poured out.
Of course, I should not have liked to have been one of the priests or Levites who had that task. There must have been a good many courses of Levites employed.
But my point is the immensity of this sacrifice and the meaning of this altar—an altar that could contain all that. How great that altar must have been!
And a greater than Solomon is here. A greater altar, a transcendently greater sacrifice, is here in the greater Son of David, the Lord Jesus.
Solomon’s sacrifice was, after all, a historical thing. It belonged to a long-past day. It is a record and a story of something that happened then, in the days of Solomon, which are passed and gone.
But when you pass from Solomon and his altar and sacrifice to the greater than Solomon, you find the first point of the superiority and transcendence of the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.
It is super-historical. That is, it outbounds all time. It ranges from eternity to eternity.
The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world; and when all the ages pass in procession before our eyes through the Bible, Old and New Testament, and we come beyond time, when time is no more, there in eternity is a Lamb in the midst of the throne, the object dominating everything.
Super-historical—outranging all time.
And this is by reason of a virtue which was never in the twenty-two thousand oxen and the hundred and twenty thousand sheep offered by Solomon.
The letter to the Hebrews asks:
Is it possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins?
Not by twenty-two thousand oxen and thousands of sheep, but by one offering, the Lord Jesus did more than all those sacrifices ever could do. There was a virtue in His sacrifice.
It is an impressive thing that in the earlier Christian literature—the earlier narratives of the New Testament—the crucifixion is hardly mentioned. It is hardly mentioned as crucifixion. But His death is everywhere.
“He died. He died.”
It is the death that is prominent, not the crucifixion. The crucifixion is the historical fact; it is the thing that men did. But within and beneath that outward aspect of His death, there was a virtue—a mighty virtue.
That death was dealing with a power, an immense, unspeakably strong, deep force which accounts for this world’s misery and for eternal misery in men. Behind and deeper than the crucifixion, there was a mighty, virtuous death.
There are things which, if you touch them—or if they touch you—give you the sense of something awful, something terrible. If we are spiritually alive and sensitive, there are realms and things from which we recoil.
What Watchman Nee used to call “earth-touch” is very real. You become voluntarily involved in something of this world, and, if you are spiritually alive and sensitive, something stings you. You feel that you have been tainted, pulled out of position. You have to get away and have a spiritual bath—to wash yourself, get before the Lord, and take the mighty efficacy of the blood.
That brings you back into your proper realm as a child of God, does it not? This is a real thing, and it becomes increasingly so as we go on.
A mark of growth is this deepening sensitiveness to what is life and what is death. It is a governing and deciding factor in guidance.
The law of the Spirit of life is the law of guidance. The mind of the Spirit is life and peace. That is a guiding law.
But I must not become too detailed. Behind His sacrifice there was a virtue, a power, never found in all the sacrifices.
It is not the crucifix. You can wear a crucifix and make much of the crucifix, of the physical sufferings; but the New Testament places the emphasis upon the mighty, mighty power of His death.
It is a power that vetoes, a power that prohibits—a power which says to a whole system, order, realm, and universe, “No!”
To be united with Him in the likeness of His death is to become aware of what is and what is not acceptable to God. That is the effect of the cross of the Lord Jesus.
The Christian life is just that. It is super-historical. It reaches from eternity to eternity. It passes through all time and reaches on to eternity in the mighty effectiveness and virtue of the death of the Lord Jesus.
The crucifixion was less than forty years past when the epistles were written. If something like that had happened within the last forty years of our lifetime, we should be talking about the event itself, should we not? We should be occupied with the awfulness of what happened there.
But the apostles were not occupied with that. They were occupied with the inner meaning of it—what it means in the spiritual realm, for us and for all others.
This is something. The spiritual and inner meaning, the power of the cross, is the New Testament subject.
We have this immense offering only in figure and type in Solomon, to show us figuratively and symbolically how great, immense, and mighty is the sacrifice of Jesus, our Lord.
Now, you see, I can strive to find words to set this forth, but I know that I am defeated when I begin, because I know that it is going to take all the ages of the ages to tell us.
They will be singing the song of the Lamb forever.
We know so little. All that we can say in a time like this is that we seek for the Lord to make an impression upon us concerning this cross about which we talk so much. We think we know because we have the terms and the language: identification with Christ, union with Him in His death and resurrection, and all the rest of it.
But we need an impression of the immensity of what Jesus was and did in His cross.
Solomon is, after all, only a shadow. Yet think of those twenty-two thousand oxen and one hundred and twenty thousand sheep, offered day after day upon that altar, with priests serving relay after relay, exhausted in accomplishing this work.
How much greater is the reality—the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ!
It is extra-historical. It is extra-terrestrial. Language will defeat us.
By extra-terrestrial I mean that it is above this world. It reaches far beyond what is here. To use another phrase, it is supra-cosmic.
This cross, this death of the Lord Jesus, not only takes in all that is here on this earth, but reaches unto heaven. The heavens were defiled. Something happened in heaven before it happened on earth.
When the angels kept not their first estate, and the devil who led them lost his place, a great schism took place in heaven. The beginning of all schism was there.
This is such a much bigger thing than this world. Ephesians gives us a glimpse of it. Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, world-rulers of this darkness, and spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenlies.
We have not time even to attempt an explanation of all that. But our point is that the virtue of the death of the Lord Jesus reaches through all ranges and realms until it reaches the very throne of heaven itself.
And there, a Lamb is the eternal testimony and witness of what was done at that spot, at that moment in time here.
How vast is the death of the Lord Jesus! Solomon’s sacrifice, great as it was, did not reach beyond this earth. But the Lord Jesus is Lord of all.
We have redemption in His blood. What a lovely thing redemption is. We rejoice in redemption. But think about it: redemption is one of those great New Testament words with the prefix re-.
Reconciliation. Redemption. Restoration.
Something was, and it was lost. Something was sold into the slave market.
This cross, this death, is a recovery—not only of man’s condition and man’s loss, but more than that: a recovery of all that God lost in the matter of His purpose, His intention, and His destiny.
For the time being, it was lost to Him.
There is a much larger context to our gospel. The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost.
When you trace “the lost” back to God, it is almost indescribable. The Lord Jesus speaks of the lost, and of the Son of Man coming to seek and save that which was lost; and He includes the parable that we call the parable of the prodigal son.
This son is far away—lost to the father, lost to the home, lost to the family. Translate that into heavenly terms, and you see what the Lord is speaking about.
He makes that man come alive to his lost condition and its causes, and He puts these words into his mouth:
Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight.
The Lord Jesus is remarkably careful in the way He puts that. The sin is against heaven. Heaven is that which is lost, and sin robs heaven of its rights and the Father of His rights.
That is why there is joy in the presence of the angels over one sinner who repents: heaven has received back that which was stolen from it. Heaven has recovered what God lost.
How great redemption is! It is not only man; it is a universe. The universe is full of conflict, full of controversy. In the very atmosphere of this universe there are contending forces.
In spiritual sensitiveness we come into that atmosphere where two things are clashing—the things of heaven, which we know to be our real realm and life, and the antagonism which confronts them.
It is a terrible thing to feel the hostility that is in the atmosphere of this world.
Many who have laboured in heathen countries know what I am talking about. I remember my first visit to India. I went where there was idol worship, and it was not merely something objective. In those heathen temples you feel something evil—something evil. You want to get away.
I am going to say something now which may get me into trouble. I felt that on my first visit to St. Peter’s in Rome.
On a first visit to Rome you want to see these things. I went in innocently to see a sight. But when I got inside, I felt something there so strongly that I could not remain long. I looked around and got out as quickly as I could. There was a spiritual antagonism.
There is this conflict because of what began in heaven, moving through all realms, polluting all realms, and registering its evil upon this earth.
But Calvary has dealt with it. The death of the Lord Jesus has delivered us from that. What a glorious and wonderful thing it is to be delivered from that!
I am not speaking of geography. The heavenly places are not merely geographical. All that is in the heavenlies, good and bad, registers in your spirit. You are as near to the heavenlies in your spirit as you have ever been geographically.
A Christian knows what that means. There is something more than a geographical realm when we speak of heaven. We are speaking of supra-cosmic forces, of evil and antagonism, and of the blessed realm in which we are in Christ.
Thank God, this creation itself is redeemed. It is waiting now for the day when that redemption will be consummated and creation will be delivered from the bondage of corruption.
This earth as it is, and this world, will be burned up with all that is in them; and there will be a new heaven and a new earth—redeemed.
That was effected and secured in the death of Jesus Christ.
And then there is the wonderful resurrection of redeemed physical bodies. “How are the dead raised? and with what manner of body do they come?” What about cremation? What about dust scattered upon the waves? How?
Paul’s answer is, “Thou foolish one.” You are governed by your natural wisdom. You have a spirit. As believers, that spirit has been born from above.
In that spirit is a divine life, an incorruptible life. That is the germ. In physical disintegration, God preserves that which is of His own life, and He gives it a body as it pleases Him.
There is a germ, and where that germ lives, the body corresponding to it will follow. This is a mystery, of course.
Paul says that in this we groan, waiting for our adoption, the redemption of our body. Redemption means bringing back something that was lost.
I believe that Adam and Eve, when they became aware that they were naked, had lost something glorious. I take that as symbolic language. There was some covering, some glory, and they became aware that they had lost it.
The New Testament takes up that word “nakedness” and relates it to something far more than the merely physical.
To redeem the body means to bring it back to something that it lost. Have we anything upon which to establish that? I think we have.
I have seen people pass from this life—people very near to me. One was a child of God who had lived sacrificially and suffered for the Lord through many years. Another had consistently rejected the Lord through the years.
I have seen them both pass out under my own eyes. As the one who belonged to the Lord passed, there was glory upon that face—a renewal, a childlike renewal.
I am not exaggerating. I am giving you an instance.
You know that sometimes the real enjoyment of the Lord makes a difference to the face. It is in the face and in the eyes. You do not need to be introduced to some dear children of God; you can see it.
There is a glory which belongs to the body, which sin has marred and taken away. Sin does take the glory out of the face. But redemption will make us like unto His glorious body.
How great this redemption is!
The offering of the Lord Jesus is so much greater than Solomon’s. It is inclusive and final.
All the sacrifices from Abel onward—Abraham, Israel, Moses, and all the rest—could never do what this one offering has done. This one offering embraces all, and it is final.
By one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified. So far as His work as the offering is concerned, it is finished.
When they brought the paschal lamb to the priest, it was examined. It had to be without blemish—not one hair of another colour, no defect. The priest placed his hand upon it and pronounced it acceptable.
Of the Lord Jesus it is said: “He offered Himself.” He offered Himself without spot unto God.
This is final. This is the unspeakably marvellous sacrifice of Christ, the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus.
I have only touched the cross, you see. I told you I was going to be defeated. I have not even started on the house.
David said of Solomon: “Solomon my son is young and tender, and the house that is to be builded for the Lord must be exceeding magnifical, of fame and of glory throughout all countries.”
The house was very great and very wonderful.
Now we pass from the altar to the house. The temple of Solomon was great in itself. But when you think of the altar and of the sacrifice, you see that the house takes its spiritual dimensions from the altar.
If the altar is so immense and the sacrifice so incalculable, how great this house must be! The house cost all that.
The Lord Jesus said, “I will build My church.” And we are told:
Whose house are we.
This house which He is building is the embodiment of the value and meaning of that immense sacrifice. The sacrifice was in the dedication of the house.
The house takes its dimensions from the altar. If all that was required for the altar, if the house takes its character from all that was in the offering, what a house it must be!
Look at Philippians 2. He was in the form of God, counting not equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself. He laid aside heaven’s glories, heaven’s prerogatives, everything that belonged to Him through eternal ages.
Why? In order to have this house.
Dear friends, we need to come beyond the truth as doctrine. The preciousness of the Lord Jesus must become something more than an objective and wonderful idea, more than wonderful teaching.
If we truly realised that this house is the expression of Christ, and that every part of it is precious to Him, what a difference it would make to our behaviour.
If all that we know about the church does not make a difference in this practical way, then we do not know anything about the church.
The church embraces all for whom Christ died. I am not becoming exclusive; I am saying that you cannot be narrow, small, legalistic, or exclusive if you have seen the church.
Because in seeing the church, you have seen Christ. You cannot separate the two.
The preciousness of the Lord Jesus is the basis of the church. We are in Him.
We sing about a city with a golden street. There is only one street in that city. We have all got to live on the same street, beside one another, and live together.
You may be ready to give up Christianity at that point! But you know what I mean. The preciousness of the Lord Jesus is going to make it possible for us to live together happily. It will be Christ and not ourselves.
Some of the biggest problems that many Christians have are connected with the church. “What is this? What is this?” They bring it down to the local church, to a local focus.
They look at local companies of Christians, who are supposed to be members of the body of Christ, and ask, “How is this the church?”
But, dear friends, you and I in ourselves are not the church. We are not parts of the church in a merely external sense.
The church, universal or local, is not an aggregate of Christian bodies. The real church is the measure of Christ in everyone.
Christ is the church. It is the measure of Christ that is in us which makes up the church. You cannot join the church. There is no such thing as joining the church.
If you are not an organic part of Christ, produced by His divine life as something different from your own natural life, you are not in the church. But if you have become inwardly an organic part of Christ, then, when we meet—not merely in bodies, but in spirit—the church is there.
We can meet in bodies as congregations and call ourselves a church, while no church is present in the spiritual sense. It is when we meet in spirit, and the Christ Who is in us is spontaneously, naturally present, that the church is there.
It just is. You do not make it. You do not form it.
It may shock you when I say that the apostles never had the idea that they had to go out and form churches. They were not called upon by the Lord to go and form churches.
What they did was to go and preach Christ—not only to preach Christ, but to bring Christ in themselves.
When people received Christ into their lives, they were brought together in Him. There is no record of the apostles saying, “Now let us go and find these people, get some streets, collect them together, and form them into a church.”
Never. The church was a spontaneous birth. It was Christ being brought together in a corporate way.
The church is Christ corporately expressed. It is His increase. It is the increase of Christ Himself that makes it.
That does not mean, of course, that we can behave anyhow. But we must get the true idea.
Peter is very clear about this spiritual house. He writes to those scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, and yet speaks of one spiritual house.
You mean geography is not the first thing? Being together in one place is not the first thing?
No. Wherever Christ is, there is the church. Wherever Christ is, where two or three are in any place with Christ in them, the church is represented.
He is the church. It is His own body.
This house is greater than Solomon’s house. It is magnificent and wonderful. It is eternal, timeless, heavenly, and supra-mundane.
We were chosen in Him before the foundation of the world. Unto Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all generations for ever and ever.
This is an eternal thing. We were called in Christ Jesus before the ages began. This is not the beginning of things; we are only stepping into something which began long, long ago, before we had anything to do with it.
Thank God for that. When I look at history, I see the forces against it—even in the early days of the apostles. All that has happened since then, in many parts of the world, in nation after nation, has been directed against this one thing.
The gates of Hades have been set against it. But they have not prevailed.
No empire, nation, ideology, persecution, or martyrdom can put this thing out. The church of Jesus Christ will prevail. The gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.
It is endless. We may go on, and then we shall all be caught up in the end. There will be that day when He presents us before the presence of His glory without blemish, in exceeding joy.
Whatever belongs to time—death, martyrdom, persecution, or anything else—He goes on with His church.
That is big enough for you.
After all that I have hoped might be the result of this ministry this week, I have been exercised about one thing: that there may be an impression—something deep and strong—not merely that we remember something wonderful, but that we know inwardly that it is all true.
How great is Christ! How great and beautiful is His house!
May God make this governing, not only in our thought, but in our manner of life and in our influence upon other people. May they feel, as they meet us, that these people represent something—not something mean or contemptible, but something of another world.
We hand it back to Thee, Lord. Do what Thou canst with it. Work upon it. Keep it alive. Watch over it and protect it.
And we say, through it all, unto Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus unto all ages, for ever and ever.