One of the difficulties of meetings of this kind, which are consecutive, is that the company changes all the way through, in some cases. Fresh friends come in from meeting to meeting, and it is just difficult to follow straight on.
I say that because we have started on a course which is consecutive, and we cannot go back over what has been said every time. But, for those who are with us anew, I will try to help them in. Perhaps the best thing to do is just to pick out one or two fragments of the Word by which we are being led, and then come to the special part which is for this morning.
In the first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 2—it is the whole chapter that needs to be in mind, but we cannot read that now—you will notice the line that the apostle is following. I just pick out these two fragments, verse 14:
Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God:
for they are foolishness unto him;
and he cannot know them,
because they are spiritually discerned.But he that is spiritual discerneth, or examineth, all things.
Those are the two designations: the natural man and he that is spiritual.
In 2 Corinthians 3:18:
But we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord,
are transformed into the same image.
And I add a fragment from Romans 8:29, well known and helpful in this connection:
For whom He foreknew, He also foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son.
Or, ordained to be conformed—made of the form—of His Son. We are being transformed into the same image: from the natural man to he that is spiritual.
Now, you are going to have some surprise when, on this day when we are thinking so much about the resurrection, I take you right away from the end of the life of the Lord Jesus here on this earth to its beginning.
In the Gospel by Luke, turn please to Luke 1:26 and onward.
Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,
to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David;
and the virgin’s name was Mary.And he came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee.
But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this might be.
And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found grace with God.
And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a Son, and shalt call His name Jesus.
He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High:
and the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of His father David:
and He shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever;
and of His kingdom there shall be no end.And Mary said unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?
And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee: wherefore also that which is to be born shall be called holy, the Son of God.
This falls right into line with our present consideration. We are saying that Christ is Christianity.
If we really do need, as we do, to understand and know what Christianity really is amidst all the confusion that has arisen within the compass of that word Christianity, then to understand the real nature of that into which we have come requires that we shall have a true, a genuine, spiritual understanding of Christ.
And that is not as simple as it sounds when it is stated like that. For the oldest believer, one who has gone longest and farthest with the Lord, still realizes how much he or she needs to know and understand the Lord Jesus.
If we want proof of a statement like that, let us remember that so great a servant of Jesus Christ, with so great a revelation of Jesus Christ, could say that he had at a certain time been caught up into the third heaven and shown unspeakable things, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. He could say, “I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord.”
Yet that man, with all his spiritual history and spiritual knowledge, in the closing days of his life, in his prison, was still crying, “That I may know Him.” That I may know Him—still the predominating ambition and quest of a man with all that.
Everything, therefore, is a matter of knowing, in a spiritual way, the Lord Jesus. So that Christ is really Christianity. It is not a system of truth, doctrine, teaching, practice, creed, and so on. It is a Person—a Person beyond all comprehending.
Well now, we come to this next phase of our present consideration. Paul said here to the Corinthians, “I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.” Jesus Christ—to know Jesus Christ among you.
That was excluding one whole realm of things and focusing and concentrating everything upon this Person, Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. Why?
Here again is the key to our New Testament, as well as to these letters. Jesus Christ has come into this world as the first and representative of a different type of humanity. A different type of man has broken into history in the Person of Jesus Christ.
It is this that gives the meaning and explanation to the incarnation, the miraculous birth of the Lord Jesus, the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus.
You know that the two things about which there has been more controversy than anything else where Jesus Christ is concerned—where all the schools of theological interpretation have been in conflict—are the birth and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Many other things, of course, in His life and so on, but the two main points of controversy have been the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection. It is very significant that it is so.
Leaving the resurrection for the moment—we may get there in these days; it remains to be seen, there is a long way to go—let us start here with this birth, of which we have just read: what is scripturally called the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus.
I said that this is the point of controversy and the point of division. It is a matter of real spiritual understanding. The battle began—the spiritual battle of these ages began—at that point, when there emerged into this world and into history this One after this kind, this particular kind of humanity.
So soon after His birth, all hell rose up to quench that, to blot out that life and its testimony. Herod, that devil-dominated and driven man, went so far as to massacre all infant boys with the object of getting this One—just this One.
And that was not Herod only. Jesus later Himself said of other men than Herod, “Ye are of your father the devil. He was a murderer from the beginning. The works of your father ye do.” The murderer behind Herod, and all of his kind, rose up immediately this type of humanity broke into this world.
Well, that is patent, is it not? And the answer—the explanation—is this: you have two alternative humanities in mankind.
You have the one that Satan made. When he got hold of Adam, he changed the humanity. The kind of being man was, he changed that man. By an evil spiritual fornication, he produced our race after his own mind.
Comprehensively, the Word declares, “The whole world lieth in the wicked one.” A race after Satan’s mind, of which he is, confessedly by the Lord Jesus, prince and god of this world—a kind of humanity.
On the other side, there is this kind, this type, brought into history, into this world, by God: another, an alternative humanity to that other. In the room of that other, all that other was going to be judged; and, if unrepentant and if not transformed, passed over from the one to the other, doomed to be blotted out of God’s universe.
Therefore, all the painstaking labour and effort of the evil one and all the evil powers in the whole Adam race is going to be upset by this new kind of humanity. All his work is going to be undone in this.
All that ever Satan set himself to do in spoiling God’s kind of man is just going to be undercut and blotted out in this One who has now broken into this world. You can understand why Satan said, as soon as possible, in His earliest days, “Knock Him out. Dismiss Him. Get rid of Him.”
That lies behind this kind of humanity that is God-produced and not man-produced, and not Satan-produced. This kind of man that is, in His very conception, a project of God.
You would understand why the rationalists, who do not know anything about new birth, take offence and objection to the virgin birth.
What is, after all, the best testimony to and confirmation of the miraculous, supernatural birth of the Lord Jesus? It is our new birth. You do not have to argue it as theology, as a mere Christian doctrine or creed. We know that Jesus Christ is a miracle because He is a miracle in us.
The rationalists do not know about new birth; therefore, they can be caught in this controversy over the birth of the Lord Jesus.
Well, the explanation of this antagonism, this animosity, and all this confusion—the enemy is the author of confusion—all this confusion about the Lord Jesus in His very conception and inception and nature and being, is because of this one thing which runs right through the New Testament: another kind of manhood, mankind, has been introduced into history.
And introduced not as an afterthought. Not as an afterthought, but foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son. Out from the eternal thought and intention of God, the image is introduced to which the believers, the church, have to be conformed, into whose likeness we are being transformed.
Now, you see, this is all worked out in your New Testament. You want to understand your New Testament—anywhere, anywhere—read it in this light: What is this all about? What does it mean? What is it after? What is the portent of this?
Every view of it is to bring Christ into view and show this transforming work in believers. Is it not all through the New Testament? First, you have the magnificent presentation of Him in Person in four portraits—the great wisdom and sovereignty of God. It all begins with a fourfold portrait of the Man.
Then, from then onward, by the Holy Spirit, the work begins and proceeds to transform and conform a people to that Man. So different, so different, that a mystery and a miracle lie right at the very heart and root of this thing.
Christian life begins, in truth, with a miracle, a supernatural act. You and I know that if we are born again. And it proceeds on the basis of that miracle and that mystery—of something other, something different, that God is doing. He is not just allowing us to go on our natural course.
Is not that compassed by a statement like this? Under the Holy Spirit’s government, we are not allowed to go on our natural course. We are continuously brought up against the demand for something supernatural, something above the natural, more than the natural.
We are continually brought up against the fact that naturally we cannot rise to the standard. We cannot meet this demand. We cannot go through this experience and trial. We need something more than we have in ourselves. We need something supernatural.
That is the whole history of the Christian life. It begins on that supernatural basis. No man can beget this type. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. We were born not of the flesh, nor of the will of man. It cannot be done. Natural means cannot produce this order whatsoever. It is only produced by God.
I am saying things that you all know and agree with, I am quite sure, but I have just said that the whole New Testament opens out along this very line.
We were in 1 Corinthians 15 for a few moments this morning. You see: in Adam all die; in Christ shall all be made alive. The first man, Adam; the last Adam. The contrasts are simply the contrasts of two orders of creation altogether, between the first and the last.
The second Man and the last Adam. Always be careful how you quote Scripture. Second Man, yes; but the last Adam. No more races after Christ. There is not going to be another race after Christ. Finality in humanity is in Him—the end.
“If any man be in Christ,” says the apostle, “there is a new creation.” In Christ, a new creation.
So we come back to our starting phrase: we are in process of being transformed into the same image.
All I am going to say again this morning, in this briefer time, is where I closed last night. It depends entirely upon which of these two orders in each one of us is predominant.
The Corinthians were Christians. They were born-again believers. They were addressed as such. But during the five years between Paul’s first visit to them and his letter, there had become such a degeneration and decline in their spiritual life that they had opened the door so widely to this world that, as Christians, predominantly the natural man was in charge.
So you have this terrible letter full of all these things belonging to the natural man. He has to say, “I could not speak unto you other than as unto babes.” Babes—whatever babes. They were babes.
It is all right to be a babe while it is time to be a baby. But after seven years—he was there with them two years, and then five years later he wrote his letter—after seven years, you ought at least to begin to emerge from babyhood, ought you not?
You think it strange if a child of seven years—and, by the way, seven years is the most original time of life. A child of seven is the most original person in creation, all original now. You parents know that quite well by the questions that are asked.
My eldest daughter, about that age, after coming to the service and hearing the chapter read about the end of the age—the end of the world, rather, as it is in the Authorized Version, that phrase “the end of the world”—when we got home, she said, “Daddy, if a man went up in a balloon, and while he was up the end of the world came, what would he come down on?”
Then seven-year-olds can put some posers to you. It is original. But that is just by the way. By the time you get to seven years of spiritual life, you ought to begin to emerge from that infant state of irresponsibility.
And here they were at that time in their spiritual life. He says, “Babes still. I have to feed you with milk. You are not able.” That is a terrible situation, a terrible situation.
It is a matter of which of the two sides of our makeup is really in the ascendant: the natural or the spiritual. Or, in other words, whether we are really in the process of being transformed and conformed.
Well, the answer will depend entirely, as I said before last night, upon our reaction to God’s dealings with us as children. Over in Hebrews: “God dealeth with you as with sons. Despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art reproved of Him: for whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.”
Your reaction to His dealings with you—if it is like Israel in the wilderness, murmuring, complaining, and shirking, and all the time rebelling and wanting to get out of it and saying, “Let us go back,” forgetting the tyranny of Egypt—then you are seeking to go back from under the hand of the One who, in difficulties and adversities, is seeking to make you discover things about Himself and what He can do.
Now, to bring that right up to date, dear friends, you and I are really in a school, and a very practical school, under the hand of God, where it is necessary for us to know Christ.
“That I may know Him”—and here is a focal point: “the power of His resurrection.” Can anyone here tell me they do not need to know that—the power of His resurrection?
We are here under His hand to learn that. You know, it is a wonderful, wonderful thing to know the power of His resurrection, maintaining us, enabling us, causing us to supersede those things which limit and make impossible our life and our service.
We are up against this all the time. We are in this battle with forces of death to quench us, to put us out. The Lord does not put us into situations and circumstances where it is all easy, straight sailing. He does not do that.
He does just the opposite for Christians. He puts us down in places where, my word, we cannot go through, we cannot live, unless the Lord Almighty sees us through. And that is what we are there for: to discover the Lord Almighty—the power of His resurrection.
If we say, “Well, I am going to resign. I am going to quit. I am going to find an easier way than this, a simpler way than this,” we take ourselves right out of the hands of God and out of the realm of making spiritual discoveries of Jesus Christ.
Take yourself right out of the hands of God and out of the realm of making spiritual discoveries of Jesus Christ.
We will leave it there. You see, this is very true, is it not? Very practical. Spirituality is very practical.
We are being transformed, passed from one order to another: from the Adam order to the Christ order, from the natural to the spiritual. And this is the way—a practical way.
But keep always in mind this: there is an image. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews puts it this way: “Looking unto Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith.” Remember, God has got His pattern, His order, in His Son. He is there.
And we behold. “Beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord,” we are changed, are transformed, into the same image, from glory to glory.
Again, while we look not at the things which are seen, so near and pressing upon our consciousness, trying to obsess us with themselves, but we look through to Him who, through these things which are very real, is seeking to produce something more of Christ.
Lord, help us so to view and interpret His ways.