In the book of Acts—Acts 3—at verse 15. This is only a part of Peter’s statement, but it contains the phrase that I want for this present time:
Ye denied the Holy and Righteous One,
and killed the Prince of life;
whereof we are witnesses.
That phrase and title: the Prince of Life.
This morning, we were occupied with the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit, as illustrated by our Lord in the wind:
The wind bloweth where it listeth,
and thou hearest the sound thereof,
but canst not tell whence it cometh,
or whither it goeth:
so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
The absolute sovereignty of the Spirit is the basis of a true Christian life—the born-again life of the believer.
This afternoon, we were occupied with the Spirit’s criterion. That is, the Holy Spirit has one object and test of everything: Christ Himself. He makes Christ the test of life, of work, of everything.
That is, how much of Christ is found in us, individually and collectively, and in all the activities of our life? The Holy Spirit’s criterion is this: just how much we meet Christ in one another.
A lot of other things are made Christianity’s criteria, but that is the Holy Spirit’s criterion. All reduced to that.
Now this evening, we are going to say a little about another very big matter: the whole mark of the Holy Spirit’s presence and activity—what really evidences the presence, sovereignty, and work of the Holy Spirit.
That is contained in this phrase, our title: the Prince of Life.
Well, as we come to that, let us just glance back a moment at this matter of the Holy Spirit’s objective. That is Christ.
At one point in our meditation, we showed how the Holy Spirit is against everything that makes Christ smaller than He really is. Put that around the other way: the Holy Spirit’s work, business, and purpose is to show how great Christ is—how immensely great Christ is.
And the difference will depend entirely upon our apprehension of the greatness of Christ: what kind of Christians we are; whether we are little ones, small ones, petty ones, trivial ones, unaccountable ones, insignificant ones; or whether we really do signify, count, mean, represent something by our being here in this world as Christians.
The thing that will determine our value, our accountability, our spiritual significance—no one thinks, after what I was saying this afternoon, that I am talking about natural importance or human greatness—I am speaking about spiritual stature, measure, and significance.
The measure of that, where we are concerned, will be very largely, if not entirely, dependent upon our real spiritual apprehension of the greatness of Christ. Not just our mental view, our studied conclusion, but how great Christ is to us in an inward way by revelation of the Holy Spirit.
And this is one thing that we believers, we Christians, ought to be occupied with continually, because it is the effect of this that will make us what we are going to be: occupied with knowing Christ in the full dimensions of the Holy Spirit’s revelation.
There are many ways in which we may come to that. I will try to mention one which is closely in touch with what we have here. This word of coming to an understanding of how great Christ is comes by a recognition of the titles by which the Holy Spirit speaks of Him.
I wonder if you have done anything about this—considered the titles given to us by the Holy Spirit of the Lord Jesus.
I have compiled a list from the New Testament of some fifty-three different titles of the Lord Jesus. Go back to the Old Testament, to the prophetic writings alone, and we will add quite a few more: Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. These are all titles—descriptive titles.
And, as you know, there are many others, both in Isaiah and in other parts of the Old Testament. I reckon that, when we have finished, we would have a total of over eighty different titles given to the Lord Jesus in the Word of God.
Now, it takes a very big person to carry as many names as that. You would not like to have all those names to carry about in life. If you get one or two—if you get three—that is just about all you could put up with.
But here you are: here is one Man, one Man, Who is so great that He can sustain this large sum of designations and titles.
And remember, they are not just names. They are definitions. Every one of them is a definition of His character, His work, and His significance in God’s universe.
I am not going to run through that list. You see the realm you are in: the greatness of Christ. Oh, if I said to you that I could occupy a whole week of meetings with you on each separate title—and more than that—you would want eighty-odd weeks just to cover the ground in a superficial way.
But there is no fathoming the depth of these titles, these definitions. How great He is!
And I repeat that if, by the Holy Spirit, you and I could be led to know Him in these terms—the terms of these wonderful designations—what a Christ we would have.
But it is all here for us. It is in the Bible; we have got it. It is in a Book for us, and we have got the Holy Spirit to take each one and bring us into the good of what that title means.
I trust that, though I have to concentrate into a very short time this evening, you will see something of what I mean.
Now, here is one of these more than fifty-three titles of Christ in the New Testament: the Prince of Life.
Perhaps I had better stop at once for a little technical adjustment. That word prince is likely to mislead us if we think of it, as we naturally should, as referring to some princeliness, some high estate, some honourable position, as we speak of other princes.
But that is not—while it is true, of course, of Him—that is not the word that is really here. The same word translated prince here is translated in other ways in the New Testament.
In the letter to the Hebrews, for instance: “to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.” That word author is the same word as prince here.
“The author and finisher of our faith”—author, again, is the same word.
But in the original language, the best translation of the word would be pioneer. You can see that author fits into that, just as in another place it is translated captain: “the captain of our salvation.” It is the same word again—captain, author, pioneer.
Pioneer of Life. What a meaning that gives, does it not, to this statement of Peter for these Jewish rulers, as he is hurling at them the great, devastating charge of their crime: “Ye killed the Pioneer of Life.”
You see what you do if you kill the pioneer. The pioneer, if there is only one pioneer—kill him; see what you do.
Oh, how rich that very word is: the Pioneer of Life.
Now then, let us broaden out a bit. Here is a word of immense dimension. This one word embraces, gathers into itself, all the meaning of Christianity.
It sums up everything that Christianity—New Testament Christianity, I mean, true Christianity—really means: this word, life.
This is the eternal issue. Make no mistake about it. This thing here called life is the eternal issue.
It is the issue in creation. It is as clear as anything can be. When God created the world, and then man upon it, He intended, through testing and probation, that the man whom He had created should become the recipient of and participator in something called life—something more than animal life, which he had; more than soul life, which He breathed into him.
Whether it is symbolism or not, it does not matter to me. At any rate, it does not matter. The principle is the thing. That tree of life, placed at the heart of the garden, represents this great thing: that there was something there for which God had created man, that he should have it on conditions of obedience and faith.
Have what? What that tree represented. It is called the tree of life. All the other trees were alive; they were all alive. All the animals were alive—the birds, all the creeping things, and all the fish were alive. Adam was alive, but not alive with that life.
There is no logic whatever, no reason, for putting that thing there apart from them, outside of them, as something distinctive and definite, if they had already got what it signifies. They had not.
And the very act of God, after their disobedience through unbelief, enforces this truth. He turned them out and put a cherubim guard around the tree of life, and said, “No, not now. Never now. Never now on this ground, for this kind of man—never.”
It was My intention, but never. “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
Sentence was passed, and man fell into spiritual death that day. All his children, from then to us and all others today, and all that may yet be, are dead to God in that sense—never having had that life by nature.
That is the issue of creation. That is the issue bound up with the incarnation of the Son of God. Why did He come? Why did the Son of God divest Himself of all His heavenly glory and come in man-form?
To take up this issue—this issue: “I am come that they might have life.” He said it.
But that they might have life implies, implicitly, that they have not got it. Without His coming, they would never have it. “I am come that they might have life.”
The issue of the very incarnation—and, of course, the issue of redemption—is this life, this particular life.
The issue of the advent of the Holy Spirit is this one issue. He is called the Spirit of Life: Romans 8:2, “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ.”
He is the Spirit of Life. Wherever you meet the Holy Spirit in all of our New Testament, you are coming upon the issue of life—right on the issue of life—in symbol, or type, or figure, or statement. It is this issue: life.
So the word carries with it, in itself, the very greatness of Christ. If this is the eternal issue in creation, in incarnation, in redemption, in the Holy Spirit and all His work, then the issue is life, and that life is in Christ, surely, and alone in Christ.
What significance is given to Christ! How great He is, reaching back to eternity, coming through all time, carrying this issue for men, and reaching right into eternity to be occupied with one thing: life.
The Pioneer of Life.
It is this difference, this particular thing, that makes Christ unique. Unique.
“In Him was life.” And again, the implication is: in no one else. Only in Him. “In Him was life.”
You know that John wrote twenty chapters of a Gospel and summed up the whole of those twenty chapters in one inclusive statement:
These are written,
that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God;
and that believing ye might have life in His name.
Thank you, John. Now we know what you have been after all the way through. All that you have written through that Gospel has been concentrated upon one thing: life. And that is borne out as you read, is it not? Chapter by chapter, the issue is life.
Then John wrote his letters, and you know that those letters of John just bear right down upon this: “He that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life.” It is all about life. The issue is life, centred in Christ.
And it is so clear by that, because you do not do that sort of thing—you do not write all that, say all these things—if everybody has got this life after all.
It evidently means that Jesus is unique in this. He is different from all other beings, created beings. He is different, as different as that tree of life was from all the other trees.
The difference, the uniqueness of Christ, is in this: that He has in Him a life that no other species of creation possesses. It is a difference in Him because it is a different kind of life from all others.
Now, this is the very heart of the meaning of His being the Son of God. Son of God.
In the spiritual and divine realm, it follows the line, the parallel, of natural sonship. Sonship—what is sonship, after all? It is not just a title, is it? It is not just an association.
Sonship, in its very essence, is this: the life of the father dwells in the son alike. How do I know that I am the son of my father?
And the remarkable thing is—I do not know how true it is with you; you may never have thought about it, it may not bear out in your case—but I know it does in mine. I suppose I am pretty well as old as anybody here. This is the remarkable thing to me: the older I get, the more I see my father in me.
I am coming up against my father more and more the longer I live, as I remember him, as I now can understand him. I could not as a child, or even as a youth. I took him for granted. He was objective. But now, my word, this father of mine is coming out all the time.
No one can raise any question as to whether I am the son of my father. I know. I know. Why? Because I am called by the same name? Not at all.
You are not a son of God because you call yourself a Christian or bear a certain name. No, none of that.
The thing that makes for sonship is this: that the life of the Father, God, is resident within the Son; has been passed into Him; has become the basic factor, reality, and power in His being. His Father’s life is in Him.
And that, dear friends, goes right to the heart of this matter of a new family: the new family which God is making, which is to occupy His realm for eternity when all others have been dismissed from His sphere.
All others have been dismissed, have gone. A family, and a family only, will remain. That family will be, in terms of sonship, in this sense: that they possess this unique life of Jesus Christ as His own transmission by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Life, to them.
Why different? Not in outward appearance, perhaps, altogether. For those who looked on, who were just spectators, did not note the difference amongst men.
“His visage was so marred more than any man,” and, “when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him,” and so on. Not in outward appearance, though I even think that Pilate registered something about Him.
However, it is in this secret possession that He is different from all others. And He was different. There was something there that was not true of any other person, of all the millions on the earth when He was here.
It is unique—quite different.
Now he says, “Here is the pioneer.” What is the pioneer? Well, pioneer carries with it no significance if there is no one else coming up. But the very meaning of the word pioneer means that He is ahead of others. He is the trail-maker and breaker for others.
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews, of course, puts it in this way: “bringing many sons to glory, to make the pioneer perfect through suffering.”
If this is true, you and I come to be possessors of that unique life, that life which is different in its very essence. Then you and I, dear friends, in the deepest reality of our being, are different—are different.
Now, that is a statement, a statement of fact. But what does it amount to? I do want to be helpful. Stating facts and doctrine—that is not really helpful. What does it amount to?
The most blessed thing of which you and I can conceive. Not only does it amount to our being in a family, a divine family, the eternal family, the answer to God’s everlasting desire for men; it means this: that there is something, by the Holy Spirit Himself as present, as the Spirit of Life, deposited in a born-from-above child of God.
It is deposited as a mighty power and energy to which you and I will owe everything.
Oh, yes. We were speaking this afternoon of the negative side—what the Holy Spirit does in order to get us to the place of His absolute sovereignty. That is, He breaks us. He empties us. He brings us to total exhaustion where our own natural resources are concerned.
He just smashes us to pieces and brings us to zero in order to bring us into the glorious sovereignty and fullness of Jesus Christ. That is the negative side.
But look here: when the Holy Spirit is doing that work, He is never, never doing it with a negative object. The positive thing that the Holy Spirit is doing is this: just to make us know the mighty, mighty, and persistent reality of resurrection.
The death-work is in us; it is true, by the Spirit’s operation. But life also—the reality of resurrection—is in us.
Oh, I do feel that this is something: if you forget everything else, just lay hold of the difference.
I do not know how many of you here—and perhaps some are not old, and others will follow in the way, if this is not too disconcerting for them—some of you know quite well what it is to be brought down very, very low indeed.
Low in your spiritual life, low in your physical life, low in your faith: a place where everything seems now gone, finished, and hopeless. Everything. Everything.
That more or less may have been tasted by some of you. And do not forget—I am sorry, I do not want to be depressing, really I do not want to be depressing—but I am on the positive side when I say it.
That is what the Holy Spirit will do if He gets sovereignty. He will upset you. He will break you. He will end you. He will upend you.
Oh yes, you know, maybe you are this way up or that. You just come there to complete the whole thing and despair of everything in yourself.
And then things—but the Holy Spirit really gets sovereignty for one reason, and it is a positive reason: to make you know the reality of the power of this life that He has deposited in you.
It is stronger than death. It is stronger than hell. It is stronger than all the power of Satan. It is mightier than all the strength of human nature and all the weakness of human nature.
It is something that comes up again, and it comes up again, and still again it comes up when you thought that it was gone forever, disappeared for eternity. Up it comes again, and on it goes again for the next cycle.
This is true. This is true. It is true to the New Testament, if you look—the Holy Spirit working on this line. It is true to spiritual experience when the Holy Spirit gets hold.
Is that something? Oh, thank God for it. It was deposited in us when we first received the Spirit of Life by faith in Jesus Christ and were born anew. It was deposited.
And a hundred times, a thousand times, for some of us since then, our survival—our very survival—has been on this basis: that there is something at work in us that is mightier than all these forces that are seeking our undoing and our destruction.
Something that survives, comes up, rises again, and takes us on further until we have the next bout. Then it happens again. It is there. It is real.
I dare not, perhaps, use illustrations, but you know you are familiar in this country, more than perhaps in any part of the world, with what you call injections—shots. What is it? Well, something put in, and it works, and it may work for years.
The presence of that within, while you are not conscious of it at all, is there working silently and secretly. The presence of that antidote is setting up a mighty resistance to something that otherwise would invade and mean a fatal issue.
It is there within, secretly at work. There are many diseases and maladies that are warded off in later life because of this something earlier put there.
Well, you see, we do not carry the consciousness of this thing all the way through life, but it is there. We owe a tremendous amount to it.
Now, that is in the physical realm, and it is a poor illustration, but it is an illustration of this: the Holy Spirit brings this life in, deposits this life—this divine life.
And secretly, oft-times so unconsciously, that life is there working as a mighty divine force for our redemption, for our deliverance, for our persistence, for our survival, for our spiritual progress, going on, stamina, and victory upon victory.
In the Christian life, when the battle rages and it is an issue of life and death again in some way or other, this stands in good stead: this divine life.
Because of what? There is One Who has pioneered this way of life.
You in this country know something of pioneer work over here in the West. You are living in the good of it, are you not? The pioneers who came away right across, ploughed the way, cut the way, met the difficulties and the obstacles, cut down the forest, gave you a way into this good and pleasant country.
But what they had to make, you know—pioneering. They met the cost of it. They took all the involvement in it. They shouldered all the responsibilities. They endured all the hardships and the sufferings. And what, I think it was, to give you this life.
Here is the Pioneer of something more than Californian benefits: the Pioneer of Life.
He came. He took on Him all that was involved in this matter of death and darkness and evil. God knows—as we were saying this afternoon, and God only knows—how deep that iniquity is in us, how terrible a thing has happened to humanity through Adam.
Oh, how terrible, how terrible is the thing that has taken place in us. But He took the whole thing, the sum of it, the whole of it, on Himself.
And through death, through blood, through agony, through darkness, through God-forsakenness—the final stage of sin—through it all, He pioneered through this issue of life and came victorious on the other side of the bloody ordeal of the cross.
And as the Pioneer, He said, “I am the first one. You can be the second, and the third, and the fourth, and on to a great multitude which no man can number—ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands—possessing this same life.”
That is our prospect. That is what He has brought to us.
But my point, that I want mostly to emphasise, is the reality of the indwelling Spirit of Life. Oh, lay hold on that. Lay hold on Him. Lay hold on life.
As Paul said to Timothy, “Lay hold.” Refuse—refuse death. Refuse the old argument of hopelessness and despair because of this or that, anything in this universe that would spell despair.
But for the fact that the Pioneer has got through to the other side for us, with life like a torch in His hand, offered to us.
You can see, in the light of what I have been saying, just as you glance aside, the terrible, terrible thing that resulted when they killed the Prince of Life.
Two thousand years of misery, hopelessness, despair; a wailing wall in Jerusalem, where they go continually day and night and bewail their awful lot.
Again and again, through these two thousand years, the awful consequences of their deed have been allowed to break up and show in the Holocaust, in the awful pogroms. “You killed the Prince of Life,” and it has been death for you.
It is true, is it not? History declares what an awful thing it is to reject the Prince, the Pioneer of Life. You never get through to do that.
But thank God, we have been given faith in the Lord Jesus, and that awful doom is not ours.
Today, we live with an open heaven—an open heaven right through to God—because the Pioneer went through for us.