No one who was here this morning would expect, or be happy, if I were to seek to traverse the whole of the ground which we covered then. It had to be full and comprehensive, to lay a foundation.
We shall henceforth break it up into smaller fragments. But, to remind you, and to gather fresh comers, let me repeat what is before us.
Though the actual words do not occur in the New Testament, Jesus is declared and defined, by many comprehensive statements, as God’s horizon on all His purposes, interests, and activities.
The horizon means the farthest range of God’s vision and the inclusive sphere of God’s interests and activities. I have said that, while the original language does not actually occur in the New Testament, God has horizonized everything by His Son.
What does that really mean and amount to? Well, just this: that God’s Son, our Lord Jesus, is set by God the Father as the norm, the representative, of what will eventually be universal.
The universal will be an expression of the Son of God. Everything within that universal horizon will take its character from Him. To it He will give what is true of Himself.
He therefore must be very great if it is to be Christ universal, beyond Whom there is nothing because He is the horizon.
You know quite well that, although you may stand at a given point and see the whole horizon, as you advance toward it, no matter how far and how long—be it thousands of miles—the horizon is still ahead of you, and just as much ahead of you. You cannot get beyond the horizon.
So, when God has things ultimately as He intends to have them, the whole sphere will be found an expression of His Son, a manifestation of His Son. He is in all things to be preeminent; He is to fill all things; and all things are to be summed up in Him.
He is the Son of God’s intention. How great is this One Whom we call our Lord Jesus!
The object of this time is twofold: first, that we may receive new, fresh impressions of the greatness of our Christ; and second, that we may learn what He is like—the likeness to which God has destined us to be conformed.
I have said, here is the norm, the representative of what will eventually be universal. Therefore, this Man Jesus—and I use that word as the New Testament uses it.
When He is called Jesus in the New Testament, reference is always to His earthly life and to His humanity.
Jesus must have within Him, within His own Person and within His own work, all the features and factors of what will be human. Wherever you touch Him, you are not touching something limited, something confined. You are touching that which is going to expand to the full dimensions of eternal ages and eternal conditions.
Have you ever tried? A useless occupation—that I will pronounce a failure—and stare upon it right away: have you ever tried to put Jesus into any one of the human categories known to us?
We know the various human categories. The human race is divided up into these. We can say, “He belongs to a certain category”—perhaps a category of disposition, or temperament, or sex, or nationality and race, or language, and so on and on. The categories of humanity are many.
Have you ever tried to consign Jesus to any one of these? Have a try.
We would say, of a person who lived in a certain time in this world’s history, that he certainly would not be suitable for the life and conditions of our day. He was all right for his time, but he just would not fit into our time.
People of our time would not just fit comfortably into a situation so many centuries ago. There is the category of time. Can you put Jesus into any one of these?
I say your effort will be a total failure. The most remarkable thing about Him is that He makes an equal appeal to men and women. He has strength on the one side and tenderness on the other; courage on one side and sensitiveness on the other.
When you go on like that, He has outstripped every age and generation. He is bigger than any time in this world’s history. He is not only different from, but above, every kind of human being. This One is suitable to east and west, to north and south—equally suitable. He fits in as much in the East as He does in the West.
There is something about Him that is not true of any other person in creation. I said this morning, He is unique. He is above all categories, and yet He fits into and suits every category.
He is as much the friend of the illiterate, ignorant, and uncultured as He is of the educated.
It is this comprehensiveness of Christ in character—not only in Person as God, but in character—that makes Him God’s horizon for the whole creation eventually: the universal representative.
This morning, we returned to the Hebrew race, taken out from the nations of this world, begun in Abraham the Hebrew—the man from beyond. We found that God’s dealings with that nation were dealings in discipline.
With Abraham first, with Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, and all the other representatives of that nation, God’s dealings were dealings of deep and drastic discipline.
With one object in view: to make them, and that nation, His servant people in this whole order of creation; to be His servant instrument, to show what He is like, to bring Him into this world, to make His character known, and to establish that character as the governing thing amongst men.
Abraham, the man from beyond, was a stranger, a sojourner, all the days of his life—a pilgrim; someone who not only came from outside but remained outside all his days. While inside, yet outside always.
The race was Israel: stranger, pilgrim, sojourning people, not reckoned— to use Balaam’s words—not reckoned among the nations.
And that was God’s way of breaking down all self-importance and self-sufficiency, all arrogance and pride, everything of that kind: a despised and rejected people.
It was of Israel in the first place, even if it had prophetic content concerning the Lord Jesus:
Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?
Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.
By that, the undoing of something: to bring God alone in; the undoing of man; the undoing of all that self-fullness; that complete emptying.
The most perilous and disastrous times in the history of that people were when they became something in themselves—self-sufficiency, superiority, pride. That was the day of their disaster, whether it be their representative kings and leaders, or ultimately the nation itself.
Now, that is a repetition. You have heard it because it leads us to Christ.
Christ is the Son, the sum, of all the discipline and purpose of discipline in this one. He was of the seed of Abraham. He belonged, by birth and genealogy, to that race. There is no contradiction to what we have said—that He is above race. He came into it.
And, coming into it, He took up in Himself all that compass of God for seven hundred years along the line of discipline.
I wonder if you have seen the life of the Lord Jesus from beginning to end as a life of discipline—deep and terrible discipline.
He touched the deepest note in that aspect of human weakness, and He said:
The Son can do nothing of Himself.
What a contradiction and contrast to human nature as we know it! Human nature says, “I can. I can do it. I will do it. I am good for that.” That is the pride of man; that is the ambition of man—to be able to do it, to bring it about.
Then God joins, and there is this tremendous negative of all that: even the Son, even the Son, can do nothing of Himself.
I repeat, in order that you may really grasp this: Jesus is the sum of all that purpose of God through discipline that we see in history from beginning to end.
With that, let us break it up. It has many parts. Perhaps we shall only touch on one or two this afternoon.
See the object: what God is doing in this discipline in Israel, and then in its consummate form in His Son, in Jesus. What is it? To make the servant, to produce the servant, to constitute servanthood.
Look, then, at His beginnings—at His beginning in this world—and see the principle taken up and inwrought in His very birth: His mother.
We are on very delicate ground—very delicate ground indeed—when we speak about the mother of Jesus, for more than one reason.
A virgin, says the Scripture, shall conceive and bring forth a Son. The angel of the Lord appeared unto Mary.
In our time, when standards of morality are low, when sin and sensibilities are so degraded, it may not be easy for us really to understand what that meant to Mary.
Do you see that she was immediately confronted with a social stigma? A social stigma. Joseph tried to evade that; he would have put her away secretly. Social stigma.
You see her personal dilemma. If she was pure and unsullied in life, if she cherished in heart every true and noble ideal—that unsullied state of mind and heart—what a dilemma for her to be found in that state.
And then, what a religious predicament! From the standpoint of the law of Moses and the Jewish rulers, this was visited with stoning and death. This childbearing out of wedlock was culpable; it was criminal in Israel.
You remember, the Jewish rulers brought a woman to Jesus on one occasion, taken in adultery, and they said, “According to Moses, she ought to be stoned.” Here was a religious predicament.
And she had to face all that alone, in the secret of her heart, and come to a decision. What a cost that weighed!
I am no Romanist. There is no place for the worship of the Virgin Mary. Maybe we have lost something by our fear of that. May I suggest this to you: there was something in Mary by which Jesus was to come into this world which was a deep, tremendous, and almost terrible renunciation—self-emptying.
No grander thing came from human lips, in the light of all that, than:
Behold, the handmaid of the Lord;
be it unto me according to Thy word.
Is that the servant spirit? Is that the spirit of self-emptying, self-abasement, of utter surrender and submission? One hundred percent sure it is.
That was the vessel and the vehicle with that character through which Jesus came into this world. What was true there was a governing principle for the rest of His life.
This is called ecclesiastically the Annunciation. Maybe that is right, but I prefer to call it the renunciation, where she was concerned: letting go, giving up everything that might be cherished from this world’s standpoint, to accept something divine, something heavenly.
What a perception, what a vision, what a seeing through all this earthly human realm to the divine! Jesus takes that up in His very birth.
Look again at the circumstances of His birth. He is the Lord of glory—that is a scriptural title, the Lord of glory. Again, He is the Lord of light, the Prince of light. He is the eternal Son of God, Who could say:
Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.
Again, it can be written of Him that He subsisted in the image of God, equal with God.
Oh, that—and no place in the inn; no palace, no house, no home, no bed, no nurse, no attendants. How true are the words: “He emptied Himself.”
That is it: emptying. God, in this discipline, is emptying.
This One would never be able to say, “I was born of distinguished parents. I was born into and brought up in a palace, a noble home.” Nothing of that.
He emptied Himself and took upon Him the form of a bondservant. Here we are, right back at it: discipline to get the servant spirit.
Something of such priceless value to God, something that has got to fill the whole universe in the end—that His servants shall serve Him. Shall serve Him.
And for the present, the last thirty years—thirty years—it is the undisguised disappointment of Christendom that we have so little knowledge of those thirty years. How many people have tried to build up something to fill in that time and explain it!
Why those silent years? With only one very brief break at the age of twelve, disappearing again from twelve to thirty into hiddenness and silence.
Thirty years: the period in which every boy and every young man acquires his ability, his qualifications for life, for life’s ambition; a period of training that will give a place in this world when it is completed.
A time of equipment and qualification to take a worldly place among people of repute in this world. That is for thirty years. If you have not got something like that when you are thirty, then you are going to have to get very busy to try and get it. But, finally, that is the period.
That is the period out of which you will come with either your degrees, your diplomas, your training. For Him, silence. For Him, no such thing, as far as we know by His afterlife: silence and hiddenness.
What is happening? What is happening? Can we tell from the greater context? It is all in keeping with the abiding principle of God: the discipline, the discipline of the negative.
Is there any greater discipline in your life, dear friend, than nothing happening? Frustration and waiting; God seeming to be doing nothing. Know anything about that agony?
Going alongside of a consciousness: “God surely meant something better than this. God had a greater purpose in life than this.”
I say that discipline is it. Yes, the discipline of everything that is true about normal humanity. I do not call a person a normal human being who has no concern about their life, no concern to be worthwhile and to do something worthwhile. That is not a man; that is not a true human being.
For God to stay, for an unprolonged period, giving everything in suspense, waiting day in and day out—the awful monotony! If everything is suspense, waiting day in and day out, the awful monotony!
Man has many, many times rebelled about it. The Old Testament speaks about those who were at ease because they had no changes. How we must have some changes! Monotony is an awful affliction, is it not?
Well, have a year waiting like that. What is God doing? If this is not emptying yourself, I do not know what it is. If this is not to inculcate an absolute subjection, submission to God, understanding or not understanding, in the deepest perplexity and bewilderment, what is it?
Active in spirit—never passive, careless—active in spirit, and yet God not bringing out His purposes to clear light. That is suffering for the soul.
Submission. The servant spirit becoming the very nature and constitution.
Well, it was true of Him, and if we want confirmation that it is true in His case, we look into our own spiritual history: the infinite agony, a long-drawn-out suspense, and inaction, and waiting, and patience.
What a large place patience is given! Even at the end of the Bible, the patience of Jesus Christ is the mark of the steadfast soul.
We know this is true. But I have the explanation—the explanation. There is, on the one side, what you may call, if you like, the negative; but God knows it is a very positive kind of negative. It is an agonizing negative: the emptying, the weakening, the helplessness.
On the other side is the will of God, preeminent, absolutely come into, surrendered to. That is what heaven is going to be made of. That is what the ages to come are going to display, when God is all and in all.
That is not just something in the Bible. That is the disruption of the human soul to get there.
Jesus came out of His thirty years with nothing: no academic distinction, no status or references from men. He either came out with many handicaps.
Jesus of Nazareth—“Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?”—was a byword, a slogan, a handicap to any young man thirty years of age stepping into his life work. Yes, a handicap.
Well, has this helped you to see that Jesus did take over all the historic discipline of God in Israel to make Israel His servant, and that the greatest tragedy in history is that, at last, Israel broke away from that and sought to take the power into its own hands, repudiated the Son of God, and put itself outside of the horizon of God?
Out of darkness. I am not going to try to explain or argue what the Lord Jesus meant by that outer darkness, where there shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth—and this for the sons of the kingdom. But I can clearly see that, during the past two thousand years, that has been Israel’s lot: weeping, wailing, gnashing, outside of the horizon of God, in darkness—outer darkness.
What a challenge and an appeal to us, dear friends! What a challenge! I have some interpretation of God’s dealings with us. It all comes back to this.
God takes these pains—infinite pains—with us: breaking, emptying, humbling, weakening, taking away our own ability to do and accomplish and attain, in order to bring us to the place where His will is preeminent.
And in the doing of His will, He can show Himself to the world, to men. It is to people like this that He does so.
You never see the Lord Jesus in the arrogant, fantastic, self-assertive, self-sufficient kind of people who can do it, forcing themselves always into position and assuming something that God has never given to them—a position. That is not the Lord Jesus.
Well, He made Himself of no reputation.
There is God’s way. It is very practical. It is very real. Of course, a lot of Christians will not have it.
When you go to the seaside, you see three kinds of people. People who keep to the dry land, to the shore, and have a nice, happy little time building their sandcastles and whatnot—very happy.
Another class will take off their shoes and go into the shallows and paddle. If, peradventure, by accident, a wave should catch them above the ankles or to the knees, well, that is enough. Back onto dry land, and they are not having any of that.
They enjoy themselves in the shallows, and they will not accept anything else.
And the third class will strip and go right in and out. Soon they begin to realize that they are having to cope with forces that are more than human force. The further out they go, the more their resources of strength and endurance are drained, until they get far enough out that it becomes necessary for them to draw upon resources that are not in themselves.
A lot of Christians are going to keep to the dry land and have a happy time, and they are not going to have anything that interferes with their happy, present Christian life.
There are others who will just get into the shallows, have a little more; but as soon as things begin to get difficult, they retreat. They are back again. They are out of it.
There are Christians who will plunge into the depths with the Lord and make discoveries—resources beyond the earth, in Christ.
Maybe there are those classes here this afternoon, but I am speaking for the third class. You will have gone out as the Lord, committed yourself to the Lord, and said, “It is to be all for the Lord.”
You are in the deep. Your resources are taxed, perhaps beyond measure and endurance, but it is out there that you are going to make your discoveries—those discoveries that are going to be stock-in-trade for the business of heaven, going to be the resources that are in Christ for serving Him here and hereafter.
This is service. This is the way of self-emptying. This is horizonized by Christ Himself.
He is not only the scope, the sphere; He is the content of it, the nature of what is found within God’s whole horizon. May we have grace to yield to Him, to be conformed to Him.