We have got far enough to make it unnecessary for me to tell you what it is we are concerned with at this time, other than to remind you again of the first and second chapters of the first letter to the Corinthians.
For very necessary and very good reasons, because of the situation at Corinth, the apostle begins his letter with this great discrimination between two kinds of people that Christians can be. He calls them the natural man and the spiritual man.
And in his second letter, he states quite precisely that a transformation is supposed to be going on in Christians, passing from the one type called the natural to the other called the spiritual.
Now, this morning we were occupied with the birth of the Lord Jesus, because we had said that Christ is Christianity. Christianity is only truly known and understood by a spiritual knowledge of Christ.
And so we went to His birth in order to see one thing in particular: that it was not natural. It was not natural. That is where, of course, all the intellectuals have stumbled and all the rationalists have fallen down.
It was decidedly spiritual, for the archangel said to Mary:
The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee:
wherefore also the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God.
But thou shalt call His name Jesus.
There you have, severely and strictly, the earthly human name. Two things linked together: God and man in this Person. That is a spiritual man, or a spiritual woman, in inception—that is, in the very beginning—the linking of God with man and man with God.
So we saw that by this supernatural—I was just going to say unnatural—but this above and other-than-natural birth of Jesus, a new type, a new kind of humanity, came into this world.
And, as I have said, forgive repetition, because it is very necessary for these things to make an impression on us. We see something and recognize it.
So I repeat that the whole of the New Testament, following the birth of the Lord Jesus, has to do with the translation, transformation, and conformity from the one natural to the other, the spiritual.
We understand that our new birth is not a natural thing. Our relationship with Jesus Christ is by no means a natural thing, even at its beginning.
And every true Christian—I am sure it is true of all here this afternoon, this little company—ought to be able to say quite definitely, “I am not the same as I was. I am different.”
There is now something about me which has made me a different kind of person. Well, that is a simple way of putting it, is it not? But that is, you see, going right back to the beginning. Something has happened to me so that I am not the same kind of person.
And it is upon that beginning, that change, that difference, that distinction and discrimination, that all the Christian life is built—for its development, progress, and what the apostle calls being transformed into the same image.
Well, that is largely repetition. We are passing now, this afternoon, into the next thing that we can do with the Lord Jesus. It is the acknowledged regret of everybody that we know so little about the thirty years of His life in Nazareth.
We know practically nothing about those thirty years. There is one break at the age of twelve, very, very enlightening. It is an open window into the thirty years. But, for reasons which we will not stay to explore just now, the Holy Spirit has not found it in the scheme of things to give us a detailed account of His life during those thirty years.
Leave it with the Holy Spirit’s wisdom in doing that, and come to where He does definitely take up the story and the history: at the baptism of Jesus.
The baptism of Jesus. What we have to see is that it is just a part of this one inclusive thing: this new order of humanity which has come in with the Lord Jesus.
A great deal, of course, can be said about baptism. That is not my subject. But the baptism of the Lord Jesus is something that we must really understand.
I very often feel that we Christians, and people who are baptized, do lack an understanding of this matter of baptism which is necessary to make this great difference really a fundamental thing—the tremendous difference in the kind of people we are.
Baptism is so often taken as something that you have to do if you are going to obey the Scriptures and imitate the Lord Jesus. If you do not like that word, you prefer to say, “Follow the Lord Jesus,” but it is imitating the Lord Jesus, is it not?
Very often, He did it and He commanded it; therefore, do it. We do it in obedience to a command. We may have a little more light upon the matter as to what it means.
But as I have watched this in my own life and in the lives of so many, it has come to me more and more strongly that even yet there is light which we need upon this matter.
I was baptized when I knew very little indeed about the meaning of baptism. I was told that it was a command, that it was the way the Lord went, and that the Lord wanted us to follow Him in this way.
So we sang, “Follow, follow, I will follow Jesus,” and so on, as we went into the water. It was externally very largely like that, you see: an act of obedience, an act of devotion. We meant it, but we had little understanding.
Ever since, we have been learning the meaning of this.
Now, when we come to the baptism of the Lord Jesus, we have the standard thing. We have the meaning of it to the full in His own case. It had to be like this.
Not that I am going to try to give you the full meaning in Christ, but I do want to put my finger upon one or two aspects or details which constitute this whole matter of the absolute difference in the human type which baptism is intended to set forth.
His baptism is basic—the basic baptism for all baptisms.
First of all, then, let us remind ourselves of the universal nature of His death.
How can I put it most impressively? Do we who have gone this way, and do Christians who accept this matter of baptism, realize that we were all drowned—drowned in the depths of the flood?
People who have been drowned. Now, you think that is language, or that is impressive, or whatever your thought and feeling may be when I say it like that. But I am keeping to Scripture.
Do you know what Peter says in his letter about this? He is speaking about the flood, the flood that then was. You read the account of the flood. What happened?
Well, all but eight people were drowned—literally drowned. The flood overwhelmed them. They lost their lives. They went down into the depths, and they were drowned because of the flood. It was universal for that world, with the exception of these eight.
The world was a drowned world. Peter says that the like figure, speaking of the flood, is baptism.
Which also after a true likeness doth now save you, even baptism.
The universal engulfment of the world, of the race, is represented by the baptism of the Lord Jesus.
It is not necessary, I think, at this point for me to remind you that baptism is the figure of the cross: being united with Christ in His death and His burial. You know that. The whole of the following New Testament says so explicitly and positively.
You say then, “Why, if this represents the cross, was it necessary for Him to go to the cross afterwards, by a space of more than three and a half years between baptism and His crucifixion?”
The answer is quite simple, quite clear. At this point of His baptism, Jesus stepped out of what was a private life into a public life; out from an unofficial into an official life; out from a waiting, probationary period under the eye of God into the open, on His world mission.
At this point, He took up the mission for which He had come. It is official. It is public. It is before heaven, earth, and hell.
And therefore, because of all those features and factors, He must put the cross, in figure and type, right there as the basis of His mission, of His teaching, of His working, of His living, and of all that went to make up the fulfilment of His world mission.
He must put the cross there. All the elements of the cross are found in His baptism. These are statements which, of course, I cannot stay to analyse, but it is there.
The point is that He is putting all the meaning of the cross right at the very commencement of His official public life and mission, and basing it upon the cross. We understand?
Now, that being the case, the baptism does foreshadow the meaning of the cross, and it is universal.
John the Baptist, when Jesus came to be baptized, pointed and said:
Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world!
All rightly who bear the sin of the world bear the sin of the one universal humanity. He is, in this sense and aspect, related to the universality of humanity—God’s inclusiveness of all men in this death, in this drowning, because of sin.
The sin of the world—that is synonymous.
I am not sure how many people being baptized are aware of that: that they are supposed to have been drowned people, who, mark you, in the relationship which they held to the human race before that point, in that relationship had ceased to exist, ceased to have a being.
Before the flood, all those who succumbed to the flood had no more existence in relation to that race, that people, after the flood. That was something finished.
This is tremendously serious, is it not? No, that is what the New Testament teaches. We have got to grasp that the Lord Jesus, in His death, has carried us all the way under the flood of God’s judgment because of sin.
And when we take this position and this step, we are supposed, in the reality of our spiritual life, not to exist any longer in that old natural type.
The trouble at Corinth was that they had not grasped the significance of what really they had come into through baptism, or they had forgotten it or let it go, and had got back the other side of the flood.
There are some of the strongest things in the New Testament said in this connection. Read in this very letter about the people who came out of Egypt and perished in the wilderness.
Although they had been baptized, it says, “unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea,” they perished in the wilderness because they had not maintained the ground which that baptism signified.
You go into the letter to the Hebrews, and you know the almost terrifying things that are said there about going back upon these foundational things—going back upon them.
It is impossible to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh.
Well, that is an aside. We are not going to get upon it. But what I am emphasizing is this: that on the one side of the baptism of the Lord Jesus, there is this universal engulfment of all the children of Adam in an act of God which winds up that race so far as His acceptance is concerned.
The race goes on, but it is not accepted. It is out of court with God, this race. That is what the baptism and cross of the Lord Jesus mean.
Well, that is one thing, but notice: there is this discriminatory factor in baptism. It is a dividing thing.
Eight people went through the flood and survived. But they were not on dry land all the time. That is, they were in the flood. The flood was not in them, but they were in it. They passed through it.
We are told that they survived and came out on the other side because of faith—through faith, through faith, through faith.
And so there is this discrimination between the natural and the spiritual: that those who survive are believers. And believing in the New Testament is not a mental thing. It is not a mental assent, saying, “Well, yes, I accept that truth. I acknowledge that to be truth.”
That is not believing in the New Testament. Believing is something more drastic than that.
In the Glasgow Billy Graham campaign, I was sitting on the platform immediately behind Billy Graham. It was a big platform, and it had to take a good deal of responsibility.
Billy Graham just said this when he spoke about believing according to the meaning of the New Testament. “The word believing means this,” he said.
“I came along that passage, I went up these steps, and I walked onto this platform. And in so doing, I believed that this platform would bear me. I committed myself to it.”
“If it had collapsed, you know what would have happened. If I had stood back and said, ‘I am not so sure that they have constructed that platform sufficiently well to bear my weight,’ I would not have come onto it. But I believed.”
“I believed that this platform could carry me. And, seeing through all these meetings that there was strength enough in it, I simply committed myself to it.”
That is the meaning of the New Testament word “believing on the Lord Jesus.” Not mental merely; it is an act—commitment.
“I think—I think—but I shall not think. I believe I shall survive.” That is believing. That is very simple, is it not? But, you see, that is just it.
Those that went into the ark believed that the ark could see them through what was coming, carry them through the flood. Through faith, they survived.
It is discriminatory in this way, and it discriminates between a race that does not commit itself and those who do: a different order entirely, a different order of being.
But baptism declares that you and I, all who go this way, have recognized that we have been drowned in the great deluge of God’s judgment on sin—universal.
There is not one—not one, says the apostle—not one righteous. All have sinned.
So the spiritual people are those who survive the judgment, who come out on the other side by recognition of how utter this division is, how complete and how patent this division is.
I can make this much more impressive, if I like to do so—if you chose to do so. Well, if you have seen drowned people, you know what I am talking about: people who have been taken out of the water after being drowned, having been there long enough.
You know what I am talking about. There is not much hope there. No, they have ceased to exist as organic parts of a certain order of creation.
We are of a new order of men and women, of people, of mankind, of humanity—a new order in Christ.
Wherefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature:
the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new.
Put circles round that word: new. New, new, new. What is this newness? Think about that. It is discriminatory; it divides between two races.
The baptism of the Lord Jesus—that is why, in figure and in type, He went to the Jordan and demanded it, as representing the human race in the inclusive, universal terms of His title, Son of Man—the title of the race.
That is why, going there, He demanded this: because He knew how great, how tremendous, His cross was going to be in this one thing—a different type of humanity to be born.
And you can see how, from that moment of His baptism, coming up, He is so different from other men. It has occupied minds for these two thousand years trying to explain something about Him—something which was inscrutable.
That leads, as you see, into this new phase. But before we can go on, we have to come to the thing so immediately associated with His baptism.
No gap between coming up out of the water and immediately the heavens being opened and the Spirit lighting upon Him in the form of a dove. There is the anointing.
Concerning which, He began His ministry in Nazareth immediately with:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
Because he anointed me.
These are two parts of a whole: the resurrection and the anointing. And what does the anointing mean? As I have said, these are two parts of one thing.
I do not believe that the anointing should be delayed until sometime after either conversion or baptism. I do not think that is a thing which lies somewhere further on along the road.
In His case, it was immediate, and it is intended to be.
This new order, to which those belong who have recognized the meaning of His death and have stepped out onto it themselves in commitment, is characterized by the anointing of the Holy Spirit.
It is a Holy Spirit order. It is the new birth.
That which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
A spiritual man emerges from the baptism, if we rightly understand. I believe that is why the apostles always, immediately after they had baptized people, prayed for them that they might receive the Spirit. They put the two things together.
But this is a new order, and this new order is characterized by the Holy Spirit.
When we have said that, we have not said enough. It wants explaining. Well, if you move back again to 1 Corinthians 2, you will get some idea what the anointing means, at any rate basically, if not entirely.
In that chapter, the apostle is speaking about the spiritual man—the spiritual man which the Christian is supposed, intended, and meant to be, if rightly apprehending what has happened and the meaning of this baptism.
The spiritual man is characterized by certain quite elementary things.
The anointing just means that the spiritual man has capacities that no other human order has. It is searching, is it not? So it is testing.
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 judged.
What does that mean? What does that declare? The natural man is without certain essential capacities as to the things of God.
Things of God! Well, we have come into the things of God, have we not? The realm of the things of God—what a realm! Inexhaustible. Inexhaustible.
It will take all eternity to learn the things of God. Now, our whole Christian life should be just learning the things of God all the way along, learning the things of the Spirit of God.
The natural man has not the capacity for doing so. He cannot know; he cannot receive. His attitude is one of skepticism, cynicism.
“All these things you Christians think so much of—are they not nonsense?” They are just nonsense to the natural man, and he acts accordingly.
The Corinthians are the example. It is an awful, awful thing for Corinthian Christians.
But he that is spiritual—and you will notice in the different translations that the translators have really come up against a difficulty here. They found themselves struggling to translate into English the real meaning and sense of the original word.
He that is spiritual judgeth all things.
“Examines all things,” perhaps. These are words which translators have introduced either into the text or into the margin—Revised or Authorized Version—they are wrestling with a word.
What does it mean? What is the meaning? Well, if they are beaten, I am, of course. It is not that we say, “I can do better.”
But part of what the apostle is saying is that the natural man has not the capacity for grasping the meaning, the sense, the implication, of the things of the Spirit, whereas the spiritual man has capacity for this.
By his new birth and by the anointing, a capacity is produced which no other species of humanity possesses. He or she possesses capacity—perhaps in its infancy to begin with—and it has to grow and grow.
Until, well, we end this life, however long it may be, and then even then come to say, “Well, was I not a fool? Why did I not see that before?” I do not suppose they use language like that in heaven, but I am quite sure that, with all our studies and all our experience, we shall get there and say, “Did I not see that? Really, did I not see that?”
We shall probably spend all eternity with this remarkable, wonderful sense: “Oh, I was blind. This, this, this—if only I could have seen!”
However, there is a beginning here of this thing: capacity—all spiritual things, spiritual perception, spiritual understanding, spiritual apprehension. A capacity.
That is the work of the anointing. It is the work of the anointing. Oh, dear friends, what a lot it does mean.
I remember so well when I came up against this many years ago. I would say this might help out what I am wrestling with this afternoon.
I came to the realization of this fact: that what I was really after—really after—as for my own knowledge and understanding and value and ability, and for my ministry, what I was really after could never possibly be realized along the line of any natural capacity.
I read. Oh, how I read and studied.
I can see myself now, before I was married, in my own lodgings, alone with my books set up before me while I had my meal. I remember studying such things as Edward Caird’s History of Religion in Greek Philosophy, a volume like a family Bible.
And having to get up from my meal and take a walk round the block to get my head steady—dizzy with it all. That is the sort of thing I was doing, trying to find out God, trying to find something for my own spiritual good.
And at last I had to say, “I am not getting there. I am not finding what I am after. I am not getting there. It is eluding me.”
And then, of course, I turned to the Scripture, and I came to 1 Corinthians 2.
A natural man cannot, cannot, cannot. With all his efforts, he cannot. He does not get through; there is a barrier.
But, oh, what a tremendous thing it was to me when at that time I saw that the Holy Spirit is for us, is given, and the Holy Spirit has all the capacity for knowing His own things—everything about God, the things of God.
And if only I have the Holy Spirit, all that ever God wants me to know, I can know. I tell you, from that date, this has been a real, real boon in my life—for life, for ministry.
The Holy Spirit, the anointing, the capacity.
Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not,
And which entered not into the heart of man,
Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him.
The Holy Spirit is the capacity for all that ever God wants where we are concerned.
Jesus, being anointed, went out into His ministry. There are two sides to what the apostle says here about the spiritual man, who discerns, perceives, examines—whatever word you are going to choose—all things.
He himself is judged of no man. I do not like the word “judged” or “examined”; it does not help us very much.
What the apostle is saying is that this anointed kind of humanity is inscrutable to the world. The world just does not understand him or her.
And the temptation of a young Christian is to try to make the world understand him without being born again. It is so difficult, is it not, young Christians? So difficult.
You have to take this position: “They do not understand me, but I must accept it. They do not know, and I must just accept it.” Do not try by argument and discussion to make them know until they are born again.
My business is to bring them face to face with their necessity to be born again. That is Nicodemus, is it not? How the Lord tackled the situation.
Here is that very intellectual man. “I am not going to argue with you. I am not coming down onto your level to try and explain things to you. No, we are in two different worlds.”
“You are of one order and I am of another. In order to come where I am and know what I know, you have got to come the same way: be born from above.”
This is all perhaps too simple for you Christians, but what I am getting at is this: the anointing of Jesus was His capacity for His life mission.
His capacity for His life mission, and capacity in His case meant apprehending the mind of the Father.
You see, it was the Spirit of sonship as He came upon Him. Heaven, and the Father declared through the opened heaven:
This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
The attestation of sonship was sealed by the Holy Spirit in His Spirit of sonship.
And from that time onward, by the anointing, on the basis of sonship, He could understand His Father. He could hear His Father. He knew His Father.
It was a relationship of Father and Son, Son and Father, in communion. Everything that He said, everything that He did, and everything that He went through during the next three and a half years until He went away, was on this basis of the close relatedness of a new order—another heavenly order: the Father-Son, Son-Father relationship.
We have only the beginnings of that kind of knowledge, where we have it. If we are really born anew from above and anointed of the Holy Spirit, we do have the beginnings of that.
I am quite sure you know very well when the Holy Spirit in you agrees or disagrees with anything that you say, do, or have said, do you not? Do you not?
You have many ways of putting that. “I do not feel comfortable about that.” Some people use the language, “I have not any life about this.” Well, however you put it, you know what you mean. We know what we mean.
The Holy Spirit within does not corroborate, agree, or go with us. But we are going to learn a lot of lessons in that way.
Or He does, with life and peace, bear witness: “That is all right.” It is a wonderful education, the education of the anointing.
But it is the difference between two kinds of people: those who are living in the natural and trying to get through on everything by natural abilities, resources, and capacity, and finding deadlock—an impasse.
They go up a cul-de-sac and have to come back again because there is no way through, all the time. So there are natural Christians, and there are others walking in the Spirit—spiritual people.
Spiritual people have, at least, this capacity of knowing, or the beginnings of spiritual knowledge.
But I think the afternoon time has gone for that, and we will just leave it there. How helpful it is to you, I do not know.
But I am sure that there is something that we have yet to move into, at least not fully, in this matter of the different order of people to which we as Christians belong—who are the Christ people.
Taking their character and taking their capacities from Christ: that is true Christianity.
May it be true in ever-growing measure in the case of each one of us.