We are occupied at this time with that great thing that God is doing in this dispensation.
He is constituting a new, heavenly Israel, and preparing it for the day when its King comes. It will reign with Him for ever.
The members of this spiritual Israel are called the companions of a heavenly calling—the companions of Christ.
The point at which we have arrived is this: in constituting the spiritual Israel, God is following the same line as He took with the earthly Israel. With the heavenly Israel, He is following spiritual lines, but they are one in principle.
We have seen something of this, and we are going to see a little more of it today.
I think it must be perfectly clear that this is what God is doing.
The Letter to the Hebrews is the great document of the transition from one Israel to another, and there are many evidences in that letter of this truth.
If anybody has any doubt at all, there is one fragment which, I think, should settle all such questions. Look at Hebrews 12 and read the section from verse 18:
For ye are not come unto a mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire,
and unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest,
and the sound of a trumpet, and the voice of words;
which voice they that heard entreated that no word more should be spoken unto them;
for they could not endure that which was enjoined,
If even a beast touch the mountain, it shall be stoned;
and so fearful was the appearance, that Moses said, I exceedingly fear and quake.
Well, that is the earthly Israel being constituted at the mount. The word is, “Ye are not come to that.” That is not God’s way of constituting His new Israel.
But ye are come unto Mount Zion,
and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,
and to innumerable hosts of angels,
to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven,
and to God the Judge of all,
and to the spirits of just men made perfect,
and to Jesus the Mediator of a new covenant,
and to the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better than that of Abel.
I think that settles all arguments. If we only had this paragraph in the New Testament, we would know what the difference is between the old dispensation and the new. We would know the difference between Judaism and Christianity, and between what they were in and what we are in.
But that is not all. That is only a part of the whole argument. I would have you note some of the titles in this letter which are evidences of this truth.
To begin with, we have God’s family. We all know that Israel was looked upon by God as His family. To Pharaoh, God said, “Let My son go.”
The evidence is too much for us even to follow through. Israel was, in a certain sense, looked upon by God as His family. They were His children, and in a certain sense He spoke of Himself as their Father.
Here in this letter, in the transition from the old Israel to the new, that idea is carried over into the spiritual Israel.
Hebrews 2 says:
For it became Him, for Whom are all things, and through Whom are all things,
in bringing many sons unto glory,
to make the Author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.
For both He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one:
for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren.
I will declare Thy name unto My brethren,
in the midst of the congregation will I sing Thy praise.
And again, I will put My trust in Him.
And again, Behold, I and the children which God hath given Me.
You will notice that that is a whole list of quotations from the Old Testament. Formerly, it related to the old Israel. Now that Israel has been set aside, but God is taking up in a new way this principle of family life in relation to Himself.
His Son is the firstborn among many brethren, and we are children of God through faith in Jesus Christ.
Probably you have noticed that the very first idea of God was a family. The idea of family was born in the heart of God.
This is not some official society. This is not some institution. The deepest thing in God’s heart about us is to have us as His children.
You who know the Bible will be able to quote to yourselves many passages, such as:
Like as a father pitieth his children,
so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.
We could build up a tremendous mountain of references to God as Father and His people as His children.
God could have made an organization of people into a kind of society. He could have taken some from this place and some from that, and then given them the title of some denomination. He could have said, “Now, you are members of this denomination. You are of this organization.”
But God never had any such idea. His idea is of family.
The Lord Jesus said that He came into this world especially to reveal God as Father:
I have made known unto them Thy name.
The name of God which was most upon the lips of the Lord Jesus was the name Father. God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, whereby we say the same thing as the Lord Jesus says: “Abba, Father.”
Now, that is, of course, very elementary, but there is a very great battle for this family conception.
If some organization gets broken up, we do not worry very much about it—not even if the United Nations breaks up. But we are always filled with grief and shame when a family breaks up.
We feel that there is something about a family which carries a very sacred idea. We know how bad a thing it is when a family becomes divided: when children are against one another, children against parents, when the husband is against the wife and the wife against the husband, and so on.
That is a mark of the devil’s work at the end of the dispensation. There is nothing more terrible in our time than the breakup of family life. That is true, is it not?
You may not know very much about that in Switzerland, but you go to the United Kingdom, you go to America, and to other countries, and you will see that there is a perfect landslide in this matter.
Think of the poor children who are left with either father or mother because of the breakup of that relationship. This is a blow at the deepest thing in the heart of God.
But it does not stay there. The most distressing aspect of this whole thing is in the family of God.
There is nothing more terrible in this universe than the breakup of God’s family. The Lord does not so much mind our denominations and our organizations, but He does object to this family business. It is God’s most cherished idea.
I think this is one of the most precious things about times together like these. Here we are, representing quite a number of different nationalities. Many of us have never met before on this earth.
We have not taken hands with one another yet, but we are all rejoicing here together as a family. The family spirit is the most precious thing, and it is the very hallmark of the heavenly Israel.
I have often said, in speaking about this heavenly Jerusalem as it is presented symbolically at the end of the Bible, that it only has one street.
People talk about the streets of gold. The Bible says there is only one street of gold. Dear friends, we have got to live on one street for all eternity. How are you going to get on with your neighbours?
Do not worry. It will be a very happy thing to live on one street. You see, it will just be a family. It is not a bad thing to live next door to each other.
Well, that is just a way of speaking of this. You know what I mean. This is a spiritual relationship: Father, brethren, and all united in the Holy Spirit.
Holy brethren, companions of a heavenly calling—what a glorious thing to have companionship. Well, I leave that there.
The second thing, you will see, is the house of God. Hebrews 3 says:
Moses indeed was faithful in all His house as a servant,
for a testimony of those things which were afterward to be spoken;
but Christ as a Son over His house;
Whose house are we, if we hold fast our boldness and the glorying of our hope firm unto the end.
Do you know what that says? Moses was faithful in all God’s house for a testimony of those things which were afterward to be spoken. When is the afterward? It is now. Whose house are we?
The house of God is something carried over in principle by God from the earthly Israel to the new. Peter says that we are a spiritual house.
But there is one thing that needs to be made quite clear here. We usually think of a house as a place in which people live, and that is not the meaning of the word here.
Do you know the difference between a house and a household? A household is quite a different thing from a house.
The household is two things:
It is a house with a certain kind of order. This is God’s house, composed of His people, who are under His order.
You know, God is a God of order. He is not only concerned to have things done; He is concerned to have them done in His way. It matters just as much to God how things are done as whether they are done at all.
God’s house is a house which is ordered by God. Everyone in this household has to be in subjection to the Spirit of God and come under the headship of Jesus Christ.
I could take the whole conference on the house of God, but we must not stay there. If you look into God’s ordering of the life of Israel in the old dispensation, you will see how particular God was as to what was done and how it was done.
On the day of Pentecost, God’s spiritual and heavenly house was brought in, and God had His own order. You will see how, in those first days of the life of the church, two things were happening.
God was demanding that His order should be observed. Even the apostles had not come fully to recognize God’s order. They were holding on to something of the old order.
When the Lord told Peter to go to the house of Cornelius, the Gentile, Peter said, “Not so, Lord.” This was not according to the old order. “I was not brought up this way. The old system says I must not do that.”
But the Lord is Lord of His own house, and He made it perfectly clear to Peter that He had brought in a new order. Things have changed. The Cross has made the great change.
Call not thou common what God hath cleansed.
The Cross has dealt with all uncleanness. We are moving on a new basis.
Well, Peter came to see it, although that was not the end of the difficulty even for Peter. But when we come to Peter’s letters, we come to a Peter who has fully accepted the new order: a spiritual house, spiritual sacrifices, and so on.
But I was saying that in Acts you have two things. There is the movement of the Spirit of God concerning the new order, but there is also the movement of the evil spirit against that new order.
You have that terrible episode of Ananias and Sapphira. They violated the new order of God’s house. They brought in their own personal interests.
Peter summed it up in this way:
Why hath Satan filled thy heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?
On that terrible day, the new order was upset. Satan struck a blow at this new Israel. To show how jealous God is for His heavenly order, see what happened to those two.
God has therefore laid down the principle very clearly, and He is very jealous for His heavenly order. Nothing but trouble can follow if we get out of God’s order.
But that is enough about the house of God for the time being. Whose house are we?
Then there is another conception: the heirs of God. That is introduced with the Lord Jesus Himself. In Hebrews 1:2, He is spoken of as the One “Whom He appointed heir of all things.”
In Hebrews 1:14, we are spoken of as heirs of salvation. In Hebrews 6:17, we are spoken of as heirs of the promise. In Romans 8:17, Paul says that we are heirs of God and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ.
Now, in the earthly sense, Israel was God’s heir. The promise was made to Abraham, and his seed should inherit the earth. God covenanted with Abraham that his seed should be the possessor.
Israel was to be God’s heir. They ought to have become joint-heirs with Jesus Christ, but they killed God’s Heir. They said, as in the parable of the Lord Jesus:
This is the heir; come, let us kill him.
They killed Him Who was appointed heir of all things, and in so doing they robbed themselves of the inheritance.
Now comes in the church: heirs of God and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ. The church is now heir of the promise made to Abraham.
The whole Letter to the Hebrews has to do with the inheritance—the great inheritance to which we are called as the companions of the heavenly calling.
The appeal of this whole letter to us is: See that you do not miss the inheritance. Israel lost it through unbelief. You can lose the inheritance.
The writer uses Israel by way of illustration. There is the terrible possibility of Christians losing the inheritance.
Do you notice this little word in Hebrews 3:14?
For we are become partakers of Christ,
if we hold fast the beginning of our confidence firm unto the end.
That little word if is a very big word. A lot hangs on that word.
We are not talking about the loss of eternal life. We are talking about the purpose of salvation. The purpose of salvation is a much more important thing even than being saved.
There will be a lot of people who get into heaven having lost everything. Their life work will go up in smoke. They themselves will be saved, so as through fire—everything but their salvation lost.
Do you want just to get into heaven, saved so as through fire? No. This matter says that there is something more than being saved. That is the great inheritance.
Read the letter again in the light of that. But our point is that this principle of being heirs of God is carried over into the heavenly Israel.
I will just mention one or two other things without very much comment. The next thing that is carried over from the earthly Israel to the new is the city of God.
If you look into this letter, you will find that on several occasions the city is referred to. In Hebrews 12, which we read, we have come to the heavenly Jerusalem, the holy city.
Now, Israel, of course, had their lives centred in the old earthly Jerusalem. They were all united because of that city. That is why their males had to go up to Jerusalem so many times every year.
They came from the north, the south, the east, and the west—wonderful caravans to Jerusalem. They were singing the Songs of Zion, glorying in their city, and finding the expression of their national unity in Jerusalem.
It was like the centre of their government. The whole national life came out from Jerusalem in government.
This Letter to the Hebrews is speaking about the approaching day when that will have gone for ever. To satisfy the people who believe that the Jews are yet to occupy Palestine and have another Jerusalem, that old Jerusalem has gone for a whole dispensation.
Jerusalem today is the very symbol of division. Jews have one part and Arabs have another, and they cannot live in peace together. It is the symbol of division.
With God, it does not stand. It has been given over. He has brought in His heavenly Jerusalem.
We have been made to sit with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. All our unity, as the new Israel, is centred in Him.
There will never be a true expression of unity amongst the Lord’s people except when they have a heavenly uniting life. Our unity is in heaven, not on earth. Our government is from heaven, not from earth.
Paul says that we are fellow citizens with the saints. Our life is hid with Christ in God. The city exists. God’s work concerning the city has been carried over to the spiritual Israel.
The next thing is the flock of God. These are all wonderful conceptions of the old Israel: the family of God, the house of God, the city of God.
Israel was thought of as God’s flock. “He led them like a shepherd,” it says. That idea lies behind the cry of the prophet Isaiah:
All we like sheep have gone astray.
He was Israel’s Shepherd. We shall go more fully into that later, for it is a very large matter in this new relationship to the Lord.
The Lord has carried it over. It is a very precious thought of God concerning the heavenly Israel: we are the sheep.
When we come to the end of this Letter to the Hebrews, we have this beautiful word:
Now the God of peace,
Who brought again from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep
with the blood of an eternal covenant, even our Lord Jesus.
That spreads itself back over the whole letter. The companions of Christ are His sheep.
My sheep hear My voice,
and I know them,
and they follow Me:
and I give unto them eternal life.
That is a grand idea. We will leave it there for the time being.
I remind you of the last thing, and close for this morning. There is the kingdom of God.
We all know that Israel was God’s kingdom—the kingdom over which God was King. Do you remember that when they chose Saul to be king, Samuel was very distressed about it? He went to the Lord and told Him about it.
The Lord said:
They have not rejected thee;
they have rejected Me from being King over them.
Israel was God’s kingdom. The Old Testament has a very great deal to say about this.
When we come into this new Israel, there are a number of references in this Letter to the Hebrews about the kingdom. I will not ask you, for the moment, to look at all the references.
But the last of them is this:
Wherefore, receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken,
let us have grace, whereby we may offer service well-pleasing to God with reverence and awe.
The Greek tense is, “being in process of receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken.” We are His kingdom, people under His kingship and government.
We have much more to say about that later. I think we have said enough this morning to show that this is a very real thing.
In a spiritual way, we have come into all that which was foreshadowed in the old Israel. To that Israel the Lord Jesus said:
The kingdom of God shall be taken away from you,
and shall be given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.
Peter said that we are a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession. We are the inheritors of all that God ever meant for His people.
In His true church in this dispensation, God is in process of realizing all that which He had foreshadowed through many, many centuries.
These are wonderful ideas. I hope they go further than our heads; I hope they go to our hearts. We are very privileged people.
The great need of our time is for Christians to know what God has called them unto. They do not know, dear friends.
You can go over this world and find Christians in the majority who have no idea of these things. They know that Jesus came into the world as the Son of God, lived His wonderful life, did His work, gave His teaching, died the atoning death, rose again, and is coming again.
But they do not know what it all means—what it is all unto, the great eternal purpose God has in it all. They are mostly quite ignorant of the things about which we have been speaking today.
That is why Christianity is in such a deplorable state today. They have not been given true instruction. They have not a true understanding of God’s great purpose in His church through Christ Jesus.
It is a very wonderful thing that we have come into in this dispensation. I say again: I hope it goes to your heart deeper than your head.
When I have said all this, you may be feeling that just now you cannot take much more. I have to tell you that I have only just begun.
There is much more of this that God has to reveal, and perhaps He will show us a little more this week.