It goes down to the deepest. It is the very range and compass of His person and His work that show how great He is—so much greater in greatness than all others.
It is the universality of the Lord Jesus that is His supremacy.
There is no language or tongue, no human speech, into which that story cannot be interpreted, which cannot grasp something of its meaning. That has been proved, and is being proved continually. It compasses all language and all languages.
Although it has taxed, and overtaxed, the greatest intellects of all the ages, it is enjoyed, appreciated, and loved by the simplest and the most unknown. It meets the problems and difficulties of mature age, and yet it is the delight of little children.
Of all the various temperaments into which the human race is classified, there is no temperament that does not find in Him something to meet its own peculiar problems and demands.
Jesus and His love are the profoundest mysteries and treasures. Here is a name of inexhaustible wealth. In a word, it is going to take all eternity to reveal His fullness.
That is what we are up against when we so easily say, “Tell me the old, old story.” It just cannot be told. But it may be that, in these hours of our fellowship together, a little more light of that story will break upon our hearts.
There is a phrase in the prophecy:
Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty:
They shall behold a land that reacheth afar.
—Isaiah 33:17
That twofold statement can quite truly, and I think rightly, be applied to Him. He is the King in His beauty, and He is also the land of far distances.
To come into relationship—a living relationship—with the Lord Jesus is to come, sooner or later, to the impasse of the incomprehensible, and just have to say, “Lord, You are beyond me. Lord, I cannot comprehend. You are too much for me.”
That, of course, on the one side means difficulties. It puts us into a difficult position, that we cannot trace Him, follow Him, and understand Him. Although, on the other side, we would not have it otherwise. We would not have a little Christ whom we could comprehend and altogether understand with our little mind.
No, He is beyond us altogether. And what you and I, as His people, are destined to come to, if we go on with Him, is just this: that He is ever reaching farther, farther beyond, and drawing us out beyond ourselves—beyond our resources of mind and will—yet drawing us on and making us know that we have got to go on. We just cannot stand still. We have to go on.
Now, dear friends, the Bible rests upon one tremendous affirmation, upon a truth which it affirms in a thousand different ways. And that truth is this: that everything related to the great destiny for which man was created is bound up inseparably with the knowledge of Christ.
I say, you have some tremendous things there: the greatness of the destiny for which man was created. The Bible has a very great deal to say about that. The realization of that great design, purpose, and destiny demands the knowledge of Jesus Christ. It is bound up with the knowledge of God’s Son.
Within that compass of divine purpose, we have man’s creation, man’s redemption and salvation, man’s transformation, man’s glorification, and then man’s eternal vocation. These are all features of the great purpose of man’s creation.
I repeat them:
All that rests upon the knowledge of Jesus Christ. None of it is possible without knowing Him.
We look at a little child from the day that it comes into this world, and the one thing the parents are continually watching and waiting for is a sign of intelligence.
The normal development of a human life is marked by growing intelligence; that is, the ability in the first place to identify objects. Very simple, but very real. When, first of all, a parent is able to recognize that the child knows him or her—identifies them—there is development.
And so this development, this very life, is marked by growing intelligence: this ability to identify objects; then to interpret and grasp their meaning. It comes so slowly, and yet it is there. It is there.
Then there is the ability to apply those recognized, identified objects to practical value—to turn them to account; to know that they mean this and are meant for this or that. It is the application of intelligence to practical needs or situations.
I say, these are the indications of normal development along the line of growing intelligence.
Yet, friends, if that is true in the natural, it is at least equally true in the spiritual world. The mark of spiritual growth, the growth of the spiritual life, is this power to recognize the meaning of Christ: to identify Him hidden in things; to interpret Him; the power to interpret Him, to explain Him, and then to apply Him to practical situations—our own and others.
That is knowing the Lord. And I say again, that is the way of spiritual growth, unto full manhood, unto the fulfillment of the ultimate vocation.
Let it be recognized at once that what is true in the natural is true in the spiritual in this sense: no creature is born into this world without an object; no human being, if any other, is brought into this world without an end in view. And the end is vocation.
Life has altogether missed its way and purpose if it fulfills no vocation, if it becomes an end in itself, if it does nothing in this world that makes some kind of contribution to the whole course of things. Vocation is the object, the end, of all life and all development.
That is true spiritual life: progress toward eternal vocation. That is what the Bible reveals, and essentially along the lines of spiritual intelligence, or the knowing of Christ.
Now God has placed supreme importance upon this very basis. Hear His Word:
Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches;
But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he hath understanding, and knoweth me.
—Jeremiah 9:23-24
Above all other things in which men do or make glory, God puts this with tremendous emphasis. The supreme thing with Him is to understand and to know Him.
This morning we have read how the Lord Jesus put this matter in relation to the most vital thing—even that of eternal life. There is no more vital thing than that. It is the key to the Bible, in one sense: eternal life.
And this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.
—John 17:3
Eternal life, with the Lord Jesus, is placed upon this basis: knowing Him.
That man Paul, the aged man with a long life of learning Christ, and perhaps an incomparable revelation of Jesus Christ, is now standing at the gate of eternity and crying, “That I may know Him.”
You might say that was the cry with which Paul entered into heaven: “That I may know Him.” And alongside of that, remember, he said:
I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.
—Philippians 3:8
Not to be learning, dear friends, is to stop growing. For growing is along that line. The knowledge of Christ is the beginning of salvation. The knowledge of Christ is the whole meaning of the Christian life. The knowledge of Christ is God’s motive in all discipline and training.
You and I find ourselves in the hands of the Father of our spirits, Who is putting us through a hard school and on a difficult way. The one question that should always be in our hearts—not “Why?” as to His dealings with us in a general sense, or any murmuring—but, “What do You want me to learn by this? What is there of Christ that I am to understand by this means?”
I repeat: all the dealings of God have but this one thing—our education as to Christ, the knowledge of Christ.
Dear friends, the very essence of glory will be the knowledge of Christ. Perhaps that sounds a strange word, but it is not so difficult to understand.
When at last we see in Him the answer to all our questions and our problems, and He becomes the answer to every cry of our need and heart; when we see Him as He is, and He fills all the vacuum of our longing, that will be glory. That will be glory.
It is now in the smallest ways, is it not? If, after a very difficult time, we have been brought to deep and terrible suffering, and we have our eyes opened to see something of Christ which meets our need, that is glory. That is glory. He becomes our glory.
Glory is not just something of an external shining radiance. It is a state of heart: full satisfaction, full gratification, possession of a full explanation and understanding. That will be wonderful.
So the knowledge of Christ will be the very essence of glory.
Mark you, dear friends, that this is not in the first place a knowledge in the reason. This is not the satisfying of the natural mind and intelligence—reason. This knowledge of Christ is essentially, in the first place, spiritual knowledge. It is what we might call life knowledge. Life knowledge.
It means life. It brings life. It is life. We know by life. We may not yet be able to interpret it in human language, even to our own satisfaction, to explain it; but we have come into a knowledge of the Lord which has brought life, which is life.
“This is life, that they might know.” This kind of knowing is life knowledge. It is altogether deeper than natural intelligence.
We do not say, in the first place, that now we know because the thing has been explained. We say, “We know because that makes my heart live, because something has happened in me.” Prove it? It has brought us into life. It is spiritual knowledge, and it is by way of experience.
The Lord’s school—instruction, training, teaching—is not to tell us things or to write them in a book for us to study and memorize and say, “We know now.” It is not a merely mental education at all. It is the education, the knowledge, which comes by experience.
And experience simply means that something has been done in us by a certain process. We know in that way. We know the Lord in our constitution.
How much better it is to know Him constitutionally—that is, in our being. He has become a part of our being, not just something explained to our mind. That is the way in which we learn Christ. It is very practical, deeply practical.
Now, that is all by way of leading up to our present particular consideration. You will realize, in the light of this little that has been said, that Christ is many-sided, varied-sided. He is far too great to be comprehended, though we spend all our days. We can only look at Him from time to time from a particular standpoint.
There is one thing that has been very much on my heart for some time, increasingly. I have put it aside, but it comes back and will not be put aside. I feel it to be the Lord’s Word for us concerning Him at this time.
Of all the ways in which Christ is to be known unto life and unto growth, there is one way in the Word of God which we might be tempted to say is supremely important. But we could say that of every way in which He is to be known.
To rightly understand Christ is to see that He relates to a heavenly and eternal order of things.
That word order lies right back of everything in the Bible, which means in history. Everything that the Bible has to say to us is related to an eternal order which God intended to obtain in this universe, and without which nothing of all His glorious purpose is possible.
His key to that heavenly and eternal order is Christ. The person of Christ is the very embodiment of all the principles of a universal order.
If we could comprehend Christ, if we could discern Christ, if we could understand Christ, if we could know Christ, we should see gathered up in that one universal Person all the laws of a great heavenly order.
We are told that in Him, through Him, by Him, and unto Him were all things created. His creative activity is marked by a marvelous order.
We shall say more about that as we go on. Creation, as it comes from His hand, as it is projected by Him, is a marvelous system of coordinated forces and objects—a wonderful relatedness and harmony. Everything in its own place, everything in its own time, and everything with its own function.
You go on, and you will come back to it: His redemptive work. Oh, the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus has this one thing in mind—the recovery of a lost order.
He stands in His person, in His creative work, and in His redemptive work, related to this whole matter of an eternal heavenly order.
The Holy Spirit, Who is the custodian of God’s purpose concerning His Son, is occupied with this thing pre-eminently: a heavenly order. The will of God done in heaven is to be done on this earth in like manner.
You want to know the meaning of the Holy Spirit? This will be perhaps a suggestion to you if you turn again to the Word. The answer is here: the Holy Spirit is meticulous about order. He will not overlook disorder.
Divine order, to be overlooked, violated, ignored, or frustrated, is to perpetuate the loss, the suffering, the disappointment, and the despair of the creation. For the hope of the creation lies in the direction of God having it according to His order. The Holy Spirit is supremely concerned with this matter.
Now this is a thing which divides up as it goes on, and so we come at once face to face with the fourfold opening-up of this whole matter: the heavenly and eternal order in Christ.
We may be tempted to stay with that alone, for here, dear friends, we are given the explanation of that very phrase, “in Christ.” Because in Christ, Who is the sphere of everything of God, we have this eternal order.
But first: God as a God of order. God is a God of order.
Secondly: Satan as the arch-enemy of that order in Christ, and the instigator of all disorder and confusion. As the hallmark of God is order, the hallmark of Satan is confusion.
Those are big things which cover a lot of ground. Christ, in person and work, is the recoverer of a lost heavenly order.
And fourthly: the church is the elect vessel in which, in the ages to come, that heavenly order is to be first expressed and then administered.
In which, in the ages to come, that heavenly order is to be first expressed and then administered. Have you got those four things?
We are likely to go over them again, just to mention them. We will open them up in a minute:
Those of you who have any knowledge of the Bible will see at once how the whole of the Scriptures opens up around those four lines.
The end of God is glory. And comprehensively, the Bible shows that glory is inseparable from order, and divine order is always the way to glory.
Just as, to the contrary, confusion always results in shame. Well, that is true enough. So the Bible is supremely, comprehensively concerned with this one great issue.
Perhaps you are wondering, or asking in your mind, “What does this mean where we simple believers are concerned? It is all very wonderful, very great, but here we are, a little company of Christian people. How is this a message for us?”
Will you be patient, dear friends? This is most vital to you and to me. We are a part of a great whole. We are not just fragments shut off into space with an independent and unrelated life. We are called, by the grace and sovereign will of God, into a great whole; and what is true of the whole is true of every part.
You and I are going to learn, if we learn anything about Christ, that we are a part of the disruption of a divine order; and that grace, grace in its deepest and grandest interpretation, is to bring order out of our chaos—to introduce heaven into us and us into heaven, according to that which obtains in heaven.
Oh yes, we are going to learn this in many, many different ways: that what God is doing with us, and what He has called us into, is just this—to conform us to the image of His Son. But that is not just conformity to a Person; that is conformity to a divine order. His Son is an order of God, the order of heaven.
I do not know how you read the four Gospels. Do you read them as the life of Jesus here on earth—what He did and what He said—merely as a historic record? I suggest to you that you go back to those Gospels with this one thought: here is the embodiment of another order of things, in constitution and in behavior, in ways of life, in laws and principles governing the life.
Here is heaven in evidence. Here is heaven in control. Here is another world embodied.
They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.
—John 17:16
Here is another world coming in this Person. Read the Gospels in the light of that, and you will begin to see that He does not do and speak as the people of this world would, even the wisest. He is getting everything from heaven. Every word He is getting from heaven. He is governed by heaven.
That is the meaning of this oft-repeated phrase: the kingdom of heaven—the rule of the heavens; the kingdom of God—the rule of God.
As we learn Christ, so we pass from this world in our inward life more and more, and find ourselves more and more in conflict with it, incapable of accommodating ourselves to it, or being at home and happy in it. It becomes more and more a foreign country, something to which we do not belong.
That is true in the consciousness of the child of God, but increasingly so. The true child of God, as he or she goes on in this inward spiritual change, in knowing Christ, will often ask the question, “What is happening to me? I used to be able to do this and that, but I cannot now. At one time I had no qualms, no difficulties, but today there are questions.”
It grows like that. I think if we stayed here long enough, we should find this world an utterly impossible place spiritually to live in. We can only live in it as heaven comes down to help us stay here at all.
Well, that is a way of putting things. We are just going home, that is all—all the time, all the time.
Now, to refer to the great interpreter again of these things: the man who had such a full and exact knowledge of the Scriptures in the first place, and then added to that was given that peculiar and so great revelation of heavenly things, especially of Christ—to that man, the great issue of all things was this very thing: the recovery of divine order in this universe.
He stated that. Here is one fragment of that great statement:
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.
—Ephesians 1:10
Now we are faced with a tremendous statement—the implications of it in the first place. There is a word here, almost an unspeakable word in our language. In the Greek, it requires no less than nineteen letters: a compound translated, “to sum up.”
And in its original meaning, it is specially to bring back and center in one all things—to bring back, to recover, and center in one all things; to gather up all that which has been lost and focus it and embody it in Christ.
Do you see the implications? First of all, the implication is that there was an order—there was an order obtaining in God’s universe, perfect order. Secondly, that order has been lost. A great disruption has taken place in the universe. And thirdly, the regathering, the recovery, the restoring of that lost order in Christ.
That is what Paul saw to be the significance of Christ. What a range! What an interpretation of everything! What a word: to gather up all the fragments of this shattered vessel, all the parts of this little wrecked and confused universe; to repair the damage and to make of all one beautiful expression of heavenly order.
That is the work and the Person of Christ in redemption.
Paul uses the word so often: “to reconcile all things unto Himself.” Reconciliation implies that the situation is such that it does not find God in a state of conciliation with it, and it is not in conciliation with God. Everything has gone to pieces and is under a terrible strain where God is concerned, because things have broken down. The divine order has been shattered.
This One, Jesus Christ, came into this world in the first place in His own Person embodying that which He was going to recover objectively. He could not be deflected from that for a moment by any bribe or by any suffering. He is going through with what He calls the will of God.
And, dear friends, while we use that phrase sometimes glibly, sometimes seriously, we do not always recognize—if we ever recognize—that the will of God is the expression of this perfect order of God.
Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.
—Matthew 6:10
If only we knew how things are done in heaven, we should see a beautiful harmony, complete accord, the utter absence of jangling, confusion, contradiction, or inconsistency. Everything—that is God’s will.
He came for that, for that. It could only be, as we shall see later, by the Cross, that He had to take hold of this enormous force of destruction and confusion and break it forever, and produce, or reproduce, that order which we find commencing in the New Testament.
Please leave that for the moment. To rightly understand Christ, to rightly know Christ, is to see that He stands related to this of which we are speaking: this universal, beautiful order of God in the creation. Christ Himself is the seed of that order.
He is the seed. You take your seeds or your bulbs, and if you get the bulb of a hyacinth and place it in the earth, you do not expect a cabbage to appear. Within that small organism there is the order of hyacinth. That is the nature, that is the life, that is the species, that is the kind of thing that is there.
So it is in every organic creation. Every seed has its own life, producing after its own kind. That is Scripture, is it not? “After its own kind.”
Christ is the seed of a heavenly order. In Him, that order of God is present. Life is in Him. The order, or the form, is in Him. The nature of that order is in Him. The order requires a kind of nature.
Oh, for language, for words, for ability to explain a disposition—the kind of Person that He is. He is so different. We are always crying and praying to be like Christ.
Yes, in Him is a nature which, when it becomes universal, will be seen in a certain perfect harmony and order. He is the constitution of everything.
Paul finds himself groping for words in this very matter, and he is a master of language. He speaks about Christ filling all things, all things filled into Christ. You cannot grasp the language. It is just this: He is going to be the constitution of everything, and that everything is to be an expression of this mind of God—how things should be, what things should be, how they should behave.
You and I behave as we do because we have a certain constitution. We are made like that. Make the whole creation like Christ, and it will behave like Christ. Like that, He is the nature, the constitution, of the great divine system.
I am afraid I have to stop at this point before we come to this first matter: God as a God of order. I think I will leave that with you until the afternoon. You can be thinking, in the light of your Bible, “God as a God of order.”
For if there is one thing that the Bible reveals about God, it is that. On the other hand, the Bible is a tremendous testimony all the way through against disorder.
I want to see what it is all about, what it means, and find that it is this conflict between a divine order and a satanic disorder all the way through. That is the background.
And I say again, before we are through, it has got to come down to our own lives in a very intimate way. Take the great truth, capable of having a tremendous effect upon us—at least this, dear friends: that we must, we must make it our business, if this is the business of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, if this is the meaning of the Cross, to come under the rule of heaven, the rule of Christ, the rule of the Holy Spirit.
So that all the discords and conflicts go out of our individual life and out of our collective life, we are more and more an expression of Him, Whose life, character, work, and ways have no inconsistencies, no contradictions, no conflict in Himself.
He is the Son of this beautiful harmony.
No doubt there is, amongst other things, whatever else it means, when that great song is sung—which we read in the book of Revelation—by every language, every tongue, nation, kindred, and people, one thing about it will be that there is not one discordant note. It will be the most marvelous harmony.
Why? Because the center of it all is one Person Who pervades all. It is the Lamb. His work is done. He has redeemed by His blood out of every nation. He has brought together all the broken pieces, all the shattered plan of God, and here it is redeemed.
And the issue of His work is this: out of all the divided peoples of this earth—divided by language, divided by color, divided by temperament, divided in a score of different ways—He has made one harmonious whole, singing one song with no discord.
It is the mark of order. That is the mark of His redemption.