Once again, we return to this great matter which the Lord is bringing before us in these days: the great thing which Christ is doing in this dispensation, namely, the present heavenly and spiritual Israel. That is the period between the ascension of the Lord Jesus and His coming again.
God is doing a secret thing in this dispensation. The real nature of the thing that God is doing is not seen on the surface. Men are always trying to make it seem, but what God is really doing is deeper down than can be seen.
It lies behind everything that is seen. God is constituting a new, heavenly, spiritual Israel.
The members of that new spiritual Israel are not known to this world, and many of them are not known to other Christians.
It is not until you come right into close touch with them that you discover that they are fellow citizens of the heavenly kingdom.
And very often you are quite surprised as to where you find them.
We may be in the Roman Catholic system, and we are sometimes very surprised to discover that there are fellow citizens of the kingdom of heaven inside the system. You can have a large measure of spiritual fellowship with them.
And so it is in other connections. You do not know where they are until you come into touch with them in a spiritual way.
This is a spiritual thing. It is not a great public, political movement.
That is the difference between the old Israel and the new.
Now, we have been saying a great deal in these meetings about the setting aside of the old Israel. There is something that we must recognize.
Although we are saying so much about the rejection of the former Israel, we have to remember that the twelve apostles and the apostle Paul were Jews.
And they represent what God meant all the Jews to be.
These men—the twelve apostles and the apostle Paul—were involved in the rejection of the Lord Jesus. Peter, the leader, was the one who denied Him.
And it says that they all forsook Him and fled. The fear of their nation came upon them. They broke down in that fear.
They fulfilled the word of the Lord Jesus:
All ye shall be offended because of Me this night.
They were all involved in that thing.
And as for the apostle Paul, there is no doubt about him. He was very much involved in persecuting all those that were of that way.
And yet, here they are: the first men of the new Israel. I think this is a very wonderful thing from more than one standpoint.
I do not think Peter ever forgot that denial of the Lord Jesus. No doubt, from time to time, it came up before him.
I have no doubt that the devil often played upon him and said to him, “It is all very well for you to preach, but remember your black past. Remember how you denied and forsook your Master.”
I take it that Peter often had to make a real battle over his past.
Well, we know that Paul did. He repeatedly said:
I am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church.
On one occasion he said to the Lord, “Lord, they know how I persecuted You, and how I gave my consent to the martyrdom of Your servant Stephen.”
Paul never forgot the tragedy of his past life.
And yet, these men were the foundations of the new Israel. Why have I said that? Because you are waiting for me to go on with the sixteen points in John.
But today the Lord told me that I was to say this: our past can always be a very great discouragement to us.
And it can be the ground upon which the enemy claims to take the heart out of us. He will tell us, “You see what kind of a person you are. You have proved yourself to be a worthless person. What do you expect, seeing what you have been like in the past?”
And so he would destroy all hope and take away all our assurance by saying, “You are a bad lot, and you know it, and you ought to expect nothing good for the future.”
Well, if ever there were men who could have talked like that, it was Peter and Paul, and the rest of those men on the night when Jesus was delivered up.
I put it over on the other side and say: if ever there were people who seemed to be hopeless, these were such people. But the hopeless people became the very beginning of the heavenly Jerusalem.
I say there is hope for anybody.
And if the apostle Paul were standing where I am standing tonight, he would say to us, “My friend, anybody can be saved if I could be saved. Anybody can be a part of this heavenly people if I could be.”
You see the material on which the Lord builds His new Jerusalem.
In the light of this, it is a great dishonour to the Lord for anybody to say, “I am hopeless. My past is such a bad one that there is no possibility for me.”
That dishonours the Lord. F. W. H. Myers has said, “God shall forgive thee all but thy despair.”
Elijah discovered that. “Elijah, you get up out of this and go yonder, and that is where I will meet you—not here under the juniper tree.”
God shall forgive all but despair, because despair limits the Almighty. It says, “God is not capable of handling my case.”
So, when we speak about the rejection of the old Israel, let us remember that it was material from the old Israel with which God began the new.
Well now, having said that, we can go on with John.
Because what we are seeing in the Gospel is the old Jewish background upon which the Lord is building. Behind this Gospel of John, in every part, there is something of the old Jewish order.
And the Lord is taking the principle of that and bringing it over to the new heavenly order.
Last night we began with the Lamb of God. We saw the large Jewish background to the Lamb of God.
Then we went on to Nathanael and saw the heaven which had been closed opened in Jesus Christ.
Then we came to the marriage in Cana of Galilee, behind which we saw the marriage relationship between the old Israel and the Lord, and the breakdown of that relationship because one party to the covenant had failed to keep it.
And the marriage is saved in Jesus Christ in a new Israel.
Further into John 2, we came to the temple. The Lord said:
Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.
The Jews thought that He spoke of the temple in Jerusalem, but this He said concerning the temple of His body.
So the old temple was set aside, and in Jesus Christ a new temple was brought in.
In John 3, we came to Nicodemus, this representative son of Abraham after the flesh, and saw how impossible it is for the sons of Abraham after the flesh to enter the heavenly kingdom.
The sons of Abraham must be born again to enter the kingdom of God.
Now tonight we come to number six. In John 3:
As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up;
that whosoever believeth may in Him have eternal life.
There is an Old Testament background. We have it in the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Numbers.
And the incident begins in this way: the children of Israel spoke against God and against Moses, and they said, “We loathe this light bread.” Those are the words they used about the manna.
They hated this light bread—the food from heaven. They spoke against God and against Moses and said, “We hate the thing that God has provided.”
Do remember, dear friends, that God, in all that He did, always had His Son in view.
When God gave them manna from heaven—and we shall come to the manna in John 6—He had His Son in view. The manna was a type of Christ, who said:
I am the living bread which came down from heaven.
And they said, “We hate this light bread.” You can hear the Jews in Christ’s day speaking like that. They would only say, “We will not have this man to reign over us.”
That was their spirit against God.
God saw the spirit of these people in the wilderness, how antagonistic it was to Him and to what He gave. Therefore, God sent serpents among them, which bit them, and a great multitude died.
Then came in the serpent:
As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.
Oh, there are these terrible things here. The serpent is, ever and always, from beginning to end of the Bible, the symbol of a curse. It is the symbol of the judgment of God.
This serpent lifted up in the wilderness is a symbol of the judgment of God.
The judgment and curse of God which rested upon the rebellious people was transferred to that serpent. That serpent was fixed to the pole, carrying the curse and the judgment of God upon itself for the people.
And whosoever looked to the serpent was saved.
In using that bit of the Old Testament, the Lord Jesus was only saying, “I am going to be made a curse for you.”
“When I am lifted up, I shall bear your judgment upon Myself.”
He bore our sins in His body on the tree.
There is deliverance in Christ crucified from the curse and from the judgment.
And whosoever will look—and here comes in the greatest Scripture that we know.
Oh, I like the conjunction. Conjunctions are always very significant things in the New Testament. When you get a “but” or a “therefore,” always look all around.
The serpent lifted up, and the Son of Man lifted up, bearing the curse and judgment of a rebellious people:
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son,
that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have eternal life.
We put John 3:16 without the context. What a tremendous thing this is. God is pouring upon His only begotten Son the judgment of us all, allowing His only begotten, well-beloved Son to be made a curse for us.
Why? Oh, God so loved the world that He gave His own very begotten Son.
You have to lift out John 3:16 and put it right into Numbers 21. Take Numbers 21 and put it right into John 3:16. Here is the background, and here is the foreground: the transition from the old to the new.
The new heavenly Israel is built upon this rock:
Whosoever believeth hath eternal life.
Oh, what a lot more we could say about that. We must pass on.
Here is one of the unfortunate things in the dividing of chapters. For spiritual purposes, it is a great pity that John 3 and John 4 are divided into chapters.
You know what is in John 4: the woman of Samaria, Sychar’s well, and the whole conversation between the Master and that woman.
The heart of the whole talk is this:
He that believeth on Me, I will put a well of water into him,
a well springing up unto eternal life.
The drinking of this water means that one shall never thirst again.
There ought to be no division of chapters there, because the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Numbers is not divided.
Immediately after the incident of the serpent lifted up, you have the incident of the springing well.
When the cross has done its work, when Christ has borne our judgment and the curse resting upon us, then the Holy Spirit is released and springs up as the well of eternal life.
That is the background of Numbers 21: the springing well following immediately upon the serpent lifted up.
In John 3 and John 4, you have these two things: the serpent lifted up, and Jesus lifted up.
He was made a curse for us, because it is written:
Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.
Made a curse for us, bearing the judgment of our rebellious hearts, He has made a way for the springing well—the well of eternal life.
Wonderful connections the Holy Spirit makes in the Bible, does He not? How He brings things together.
That was number seven, in case you are losing count.
Number eight: we have the incident of the nobleman and his dying son.
He had come all the way from Capernaum to find Jesus and to persuade Jesus to go home with him and heal his son.
Jesus tested his faith, and then, finding his faith, He said, “You can go home. Your son lives.”
The man believed Him and went home, and discovered that it was at the very moment when Jesus said, “Thy son liveth,” that his son began to get better.
Now, I expect that the people who were here last year think that they heard all about that last year. But you did not hear all about it last year, and you will see that in a moment.
You remember last year I took the eight signs of the Gospel by John. They developed into sixteen this year, so you did not hear all about it.
Now, here you have the heart of this incident: why did not Jesus go with that man to Capernaum?
At another time He did go to Capernaum, and He healed a lot of people. Why did He not say, “Well, I have to go to Capernaum at some time and do a lot of work there. I may as well go now”?
Jesus did not do that. He stayed where He was and sent the man home alone.
As we saw last year, it took from twelve o’clock noon until the close of the day, and then until the next day, for the man to get home.
Why was it that Jesus adopted this method on this particular occasion?
We have a Jewish background. And what is the Jewish background? It is the background of the law.
The letter killeth, but the words that I speak, they are spirit, and they are life.
It does not matter how far away the case may be. If He speaks, His word is life.
The Old Testament, speaking of the law, brought death. The letter killeth—that is, the letter of the law. The Spirit giveth life, and the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.
The law could never have done this. You may bring all the scribes and Pharisees down from Jerusalem, and they can recite all the law of Moses, but nothing will happen to the boy. He will die right enough.
Jesus only has to open His mouth and speak a word, and the boy, many miles away, begins to get better from that moment.
Jesus is showing that the law of His mouth is life. The transition is so clear, is it not? From death to life in the Word.
Number nine: we have to repeat largely what we have said before—the story of the impotent man at the pool.
Verse 5 is the heart of the thing:
A certain man was there, which had been thirty and eight years in his infirmity.
What is the Jewish background? There is very little doubt that the Jewish background was Israel’s long journey in the wilderness—the thirty-eight years of their wandering in the wilderness.
What cripples they were in the wilderness! They could have made the journey from Egypt to the land of Canaan in eleven days. It took them thirty-eight years.
And during the thirty-eight years, they were really making no progress at all. They were in bondage to their own self-life.
They were impotent, helpless cripples because the self-life was in the place of mastery.
You have no need of me to tell you how that self-life governed them in the wilderness. They never looked at anything as to how it hurt God, or as to how far it satisfied God’s interests.
They looked at everything as to how it affected them.
Oh, their murmuring and rebellion was because they were not getting what they wanted. It was never what God wanted. They were just a self-centred people.
And they were cripples lying on the bed of the self-life, never really able to get up and march straight forward to God’s purpose.
Well, that is the original background.
Jesus takes up an illustration of that. Right in the presence of the Jews, He takes this man and puts him on his feet.
The members of the new heavenly Israel are people who have been delivered from self-interest into God’s interest—people who have been put on their spiritual feet by Jesus Christ and are walking in strength in the way of the Lord.
Now, do you not think it is a very significant thing that the first miracle after the day of Pentecost was the raising of an impotent man at the gate of the temple in Jerusalem?
You see, these are not just pretty stories put together to make an interesting book. God knows what He is doing.
He puts the first miracle after Pentecost as the raising of an impotent cripple. He is saying that the people of this new Israel are people who have been delivered from this impotence and put on their feet spiritually.
There are a lot of Christian cripples about. They can neither get on their own feet, nor can other people put them on their feet.
They may take a step or two, and down they go again. There are a lot of people like that. You have to spend your life trying to get them up on their feet.
What is it that is eating the very life out of them? What is it that is making them such helpless cripples that they cannot walk?
It is self-centredness. There is no mistake about it. It is self in some form.
It is self that wants to be taken notice of. It is self in the form of pride. It is self that is in bondage.
This poor man was delivered because he knew his own helplessness, but he believed what Jesus said.
He believed unto Jesus Christ, which means that he believed out of himself.
Yes, that is the secret: that we shall turn from our miserable selves and cease to be occupied with them.
Once and for all, “I am done with you. I am done with you, wretched self. I throw myself onto Jesus Christ.”
And Jesus never lets such a person down.
Number ten, I think we can take for granted. We have already said something about it. We have John 6: the bread of life.
The Lord Jesus said, “It was not Moses that gave you the manna; it was My Father.” That is the Old Testament Jewish background.
Now, right in the presence of the Jews, He is saying:
I am the living bread
which came down from heaven
to give life to the world.
There is a very obvious transition from the old to the new. We have seen in the Book of Numbers that the manna did not fully and finally satisfy. Christ, who came down from heaven, is the full and final satisfaction of all spiritual hunger.
I do want to say a word about number eleven. That is why I have hurried over number ten.
This is in John 7. Perhaps I had better ask you: would you like me to stop now? I have seen some people looking at me as though they have had enough.
Very well then. John 7:
After these things Jesus walked in Galilee:
for He would not walk in Judaea,
because the Jews sought to kill Him.
Now the feast of the Jews, the Feast of Tabernacles, was at hand.
But when it was now the midst of the feast, Jesus went up into the temple and taught.
Verse 37:
Now on the last day, the great day of the feast,
Jesus stood and cried, saying,
If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink.
He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said,
out of him shall flow rivers of living water.
This spake He of the Spirit, which they that believed on Him were to receive.
Well now, we are in the presence of the Feast of Tabernacles. Numbers 29 shows us what led up to this great day of the feast.
All the different kinds of offerings had been presented to the Lord. I need not enumerate all the kinds of offerings; they are all mentioned there, and they had all been presented to the Lord.
Then came the last great day of the feast. It is called the Feast of Tabernacles.
On that great day, in the temple in Jerusalem, the priests brought out great vessels of water and poured out the water on the top of the steps of the temple, so that it flowed down the steps in great volume.
Jesus stepped forward at that time. All the offerings are presented to God in Him. He, in Person, is the embodiment of all the sacrifices and all the offerings.
He is the completeness of all God’s requirements, and He presents Himself to God on behalf of the people.
Then He comes to this day of the Feast of Tabernacles. It says in Numbers that the priests shall sound with the trumpets.
And Jesus took the trumpet, as it were, and cried with a loud voice. Here is the trumpet of the Feast of Tabernacles.
In Him all the offerings are perfected. God is fully satisfied. Therefore, He can pour out His Spirit.
He cries like the trumpet with a loud voice:
He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said,
out of him shall flow rivers of living water.
Now, this is the inheritance of all who are of the new Israel. It is your inheritance. The Word of God is true.
If what Christ has said is true, the Lord Jesus cannot come back from it. On this occasion, He lifted up His voice and cried with a loud voice. He put great emphasis upon this.
If you and I will accept Jesus Christ as God’s full satisfaction on our behalf—as the One who has brought every offering that God has stipulated to God Himself—then His great cry is true for us.
Jesus is God’s satisfaction on our behalf. He has answered to every sacrifice and every offering. If we really believe that, then out of us can flow rivers of living water.
That is, others shall be receiving His life through us as His channels. That is how it ought to be in the case of every true believer.
And Jesus has made it possible by satisfying God on our behalf.
So the people of the new Israel are all people with a river flowing out.
Take the trumpet to your lips and let people hear. You will be surprised when you begin to testify to the Lord Jesus: people will begin to receive life.
Something will happen in other people.
You keep your mouth closed, and you refuse to testify to the Lord Jesus in your home, or in your village, or in your work; then you are holding up the river of the Spirit.
You are just checking the flow of the river that ought to be flowing out of you.
Now, if you have never done it, you try it. I want to tell you that the first soul that comes to the Lord Jesus through your testimony will release something in you, so that you will never again want to keep your mouth closed.
There are a lot of miserable Christians because they keep their mouths closed. They live a hidden existence.
There are persons who talk too much, but there are quite as many persons who do not talk enough. So they are suppressing their own Christian life.
Take the trumpet of the Lord Jesus and cry with a loud voice, and the rivers will begin to flow.
Well, you told me to go on, but I am only ten minutes late after all. But we have not finished yet.