As we are getting nearer to the end of this time together, we naturally move to a culmination—a gathering up of the parts the Lord has been seeking to say to us. And so there has to be a certain amount of retrospect and repetition, but as little as we can make it, in order to link on with what the Lord has yet to say.
You know that the basic portion of the Word, out of which we have been led to many other things, is the second chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians, in which the apostle is seeking, very early in his writing to the church at Corinth, to re-emphasise, restress, and underline the real nature of the Christianity into which these Corinthians had come, and of which they seem to have lost very much—from which they had deviated and declined.
And so he is calling them back from their declension: the real foundation and restatement of the Christian life. You know, when he gets well on in this letter, to chapter 15, he definitely states that he is telling them what was the gospel that he preached to them:
I make known unto you, brethren, the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye received, wherein also ye stand;
By which also ye are saved, if ye hold fast the word which I preached unto you, except ye believed in vain.
These two letters are for one purpose: to remind them. And he does so very forcefully—what it was that they had come into. The necessity was the state of confusion which had come into their Christianity.
And his way of approach, as we have been seeing, to this whole matter is along the line of distinguishing between two kinds and types of manhood which can be characteristic of Christians. That is, in Christians there can be two things, and the whole question—the issue—is which of these two things is going to predominate.
The two things are set forth here in 1 Corinthians 2. And if you remember that, when he wrote, he did not mark out his letter with chapters, you can just wipe out those numbers. He is going straight on. He has made a start and is going straight on. He is not stopping at the end of chapter 1 and saying, “Well, that’s that. We leave it for the time being, and then next Sunday we’ll read chapter 2.” He is writing straight through, without any breach or interruption. It is one thing.
You must remember—this should be helpful to you—that the whole letter, the whole of these two letters, has to be read in the light of one main thing. There are not so many things here, although so many aspects are touched upon. You may say so many subjects are included, but all relate to one thing.
You must read every part in the light of that one thing. If you do so, it will be a very helpful way of reading the letter. As it moves on, it looks as though it changes from one thing to another, and then another, and another; but you have to say, “But how does this relate to the basic?” And you find that that is the way of interpreting the whole of these two letters. Every part is part of one whole.
And the one whole is the transition from one kind, or type, of Christian to another. The two types are called the natural man and the spiritual man. The natural man, in the original, is the man of soul; and then, he that is spiritual is the man of spirit.
The natural man is the man as he is in himself. The spiritual man is the man as he is in the Spirit. We know quite well that we can be in one of those two things. We can be in ourselves over anything, and that is terrible: it can be the dominating and governing thing. Or we can be governed by the Spirit. We can be in the Spirit, controlled by the Spirit in our life.
These two are here set over against one another by the apostle. The whole letter is to be read in the light of this one thing: the transition from one to the other.
As we have seen in 2 Corinthians 3, we are being changed, transformed into the same image. We are being made to pass from the one image to the other. We are in transition. That is the nature of the Christian life, and that is what Christianity is: complete change from one type of manhood to another, and the other is Christ.
Now, we have traced that in the case of Christ. We began by saying that that is the meaning and significance of the incarnation—the birth of Christ, the virgin birth of Christ. Another than the natural order of man has been brought in.
Christ did not come into this world along the ordinary natural lines. It was a work of the Spirit of God which produced His very being, His very body. As the angel said to Mary:
The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee.
That which shall be born…
A work of the Holy Spirit produced something that is not the old kind, the known type—something born of God, a different type of manhood. That is the meaning of the incarnation.
And then we moved on to His baptism. So that, as He placed His cross in figure right at the commencement of His public mission, He was saying that this mission I have come to fulfil requires death and burial of one kind, and resurrection and bringing into being, on the other side of the cross, of another kind.
That is what the New Testament teaches about baptism. The meaning of His baptism, then, was, in the light of the cross—which it was to fulfil—the putting out of the sight of God of a type. A type. He is figuratively on the cross in the Jordan.
He is taking the place of a whole race—of these who are being dismissed by God as never suitable for His presence. And, coming out on the other side, He is attested as Beloved, that which is suitable to God.
From there we moved to the anointing. After His baptism, the Holy Spirit came upon Him, and we saw that this new manhood, into which we are called, is a manhood wholly governed and led by the Holy Spirit.
I do not know whether it comforts you, or whether we can draw very much comfort from this: the first leading of the risen Christ, on the other side of the Jordan, was into battle.
Then was Jesus led of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.
Probably you will pause in the future when you are asking to be led by the Holy Spirit, if you remember that. But here it is quite clear: the very first action of the anointing was to bring Him into battle.
And, as we have seen, it was the battle between the prince of this world and the One Who was not of this world. It repudiated this world: the spiritual man over against the worldly man.
Well, we went into the details of that to show how the temptations were just an effort of the enemy to get this spiritual Man back onto natural ground, and so spoil Him, the last Adam, as he had spoiled the first Adam, and retain the kingdom for himself. That is it.
So much for the battle over the spiritual man, and over what really is, under heaven, attested as approved of God. What really is, in God’s approval, “My Beloved”—anything that can be of that order is a thing which is contested by the enemy, to despoil it and to get it away again onto the old natural ground.
These things—all who have been here now know that this is the way we have come. The anointing, the earthly life from that time onward, was the life and work of the spiritual Man.
And that spiritual Man amongst men is different. There is something different about Him which the world cannot understand. We are keeping to the text of 1 Corinthians 2:
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.
But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, and he himself is judged of no man.
How true that was of the Lord Jesus. If ever there was a Man Who was misunderstood by everyone—even His disciples—it was the Lord Jesus. He was of a different order, and they could not judge Him. They could not understand Him. He was, as we said, inscrutable.
And that is true of everything that is spiritual, and everyone who is spiritual. Here, strangers in a world, the deepest reality of their being is something that the world cannot understand. They are a mystery to the world—something about them that is different, that altogether defies the world’s understanding and comprehension.
No, that is how it ought to be. It makes, of course, the Christian life an exceedingly difficult one to live in this world, but then, you see, we are aliens here, are we not? We are pilgrims and strangers on the earth. We do not belong here. We speak another language.
We do not belong, and therefore we are not understood—or it should be so. One of the great mistakes many Christians, and young Christians especially, make is to try, try, to make the world understand them. It cannot be done. It cannot be done.
If you lower your standard in order that they might comprehend you and accept you as one of themselves, you are throwing away the very truth and reality of your Christian life.
Well, you do not try to be different; that is, you are not all the time trying to be awkward amongst people. The fact of your very being is that you are strange to them. You are of another order of creation. They can no more understand you than an animal can understand a human in many, many of the human ways.
Well, that was the earthly life of the Lord Jesus, and this is the meaning of the spiritual man. And for the little while this afternoon, at any rate to begin with, we are going on to the next thing that came in the case of the Lord Jesus: the supper in the upper room.
You see, there you have the actual history of the Lord Jesus. Is it not interesting to note how Paul, in these letters, takes us through that history in a spiritual way—not a historic way, but in a spiritual way? And how, in this very letter, he comes on to the Lord’s table.
You know that you very rarely, very rarely, come to the Lord’s table without reading from 1 Corinthians 11. It is regarded as the formula for the Lord’s table:
For I received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you,
That the Lord Jesus in the night in which He was betrayed took bread;
And when He had given thanks, He brake it, and said, This is My body, which is for you: this do in remembrance of Me.
In like manner also the cup, after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in My blood: this do, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of Me.
Well, it is read. There are few passages, probably, with which Christians are more acquainted than this. There are a number of things gathered into it, because it is so comprehensive. But what is the inclusive thing that is here? What is this life? What is this meaning?
He says, “This is My body.” My body.
He is contrasting, by the way, this table with the other tables—you notice—in the context: other tables, tables of demons, tables of this world. “This is My body,” and it is different from all others. It does not belong to any other category. It is distinct and separate—something unique.
There is not another body like this. Of all the bodies in humanity, there is not another body like this.
A body didst Thou prepare for Me.
An act of God. A unique act of God. This body—I repeat—there was no other body like this one. A special act of God.
His body, from His birth, was not an ordinary body. All looking at Him from the outside, perhaps He did not look any different; yet there was something about this Man, something about this Man, that you could not understand. Different.
And when, taking the loaf as the symbol of His body, breaking it and distributing it, and saying, “Eat, all ye, of it,” what is He saying?
In the light of this discrimination in the types and kinds of humanity, what is He saying? In taking My body, you are declaring that you are a part of this other and different kind—type—of humanity.
You are saying that you, you, have become a very part of this other order that Christ is, and that He has become a part of your being. You are different from other people.
That is what we mean every time we come to the Lord’s table, every time we read 1 Corinthians 11. Is that really what we mean when we declare by this act that we are not of this world? We are not, in the innermost reality of our beings, a part of this old creation. In Christ, we are a new creation, a new order of manhood.
And perhaps that is a reason why the Lord, in instituting this, indicated that there was something to be repeatedly repeated till He comes. We come back to the Lord’s table repeatedly, perhaps week by week. It is to both remind ourselves and declare that we are different people. We are different people.
That needs guarding, of course—not that we are superior in a certain sense, and exclusive—but that we are different. We are a Christ people.
We are Christ standing in this world, where every force of Satan and the world is set to draw us and drag us back under that other old level of life, down to the lower level of the self-life. We come back and say, “No. We will reaffirm today that we are on another level of life, in another realm of life, in another relationship of life: Christ in us, and we in Christ, by this loaf and cup.”
In like manner, the cup has the same significance: this body needs a life.
And you may repeat this so often that it becomes a dead form, a habit, an accustomed bit of Christian procedure which Christians do week by week, or so often. It is just that.
But He has combined the cup with the loaf, and the cup, the wine, is always a type of His life—His life released from Himself to be shared by His people—so that it is a living body.
The characteristic of this body, this people, is life. They live.
You go to many communion services where, to be very reverent in manner and solemn in voice and so on, you go away just the same. Whereas the Lord’s table ought to be a most living thing—not form, custom, repeated procedure—and living, from which we come away and say, “Yes, we have had a ministration of life.” A ministration of life.
Would that it were always like that. But here, you see, it comes to these Corinthians on the line of the difference between Christ and the natural man—the spiritual man and the natural man.
The spiritual man is like this: the man who has imbibed Christ and is changed, is changed, into Christ’s likeness by his, may I say, absorbing Christ into his being, making Christ a part of himself.
Oh, far from being foreign, far from being formal and custom—something to be got through because it is the thing that is done—it should be a testament to the fact that we, with Christ, are joined in another kind of God-approved humanity, accepted by God, under an open heaven.
God attesting, saying, “This is what I love. What I love.” Do you not think that our times around the Lord’s table also have that, perhaps, as their major meaning: the Father looking down and saying, “This is something I love—My Beloved”?
It should be like that. Lord, make it like that.
So we see here that, in the course of a continuous narrative or letter, the apostle comes at a certain point to this part where he introduces into his main theme the Lord’s table as a part of the whole. He says this Lord’s table is a testimony to the fact that we belong to another race, another order, another type—the Christ type. His body, His blood, His life: this is what we belong to.
Now note this other thing for the moment. You noticed that, right early in the beginning of this letter, at the beginning of the second chapter, the apostle says:
And I, brethren, when I came unto you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the mystery of God.
The revised text is “the testimony of God.” You notice the margin says “the testimony of God,” which is really the exact word: the testimony of God. I came preaching, proclaiming, the testimony of God.
The testimony of God, of course, is Jesus Christ. He is the testimony of God. But do you notice that in this matter of the Lord’s table, after you eat and drink, you do preach—proclaiming, that is the alternative word in the text—you do proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes. You do preach.
I came preaching, proclaiming the testimony of God. In this table, you preach. You preach the testimony of God in Jesus Christ. You do proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes. This is the preaching.
And for the comfort of some who may not think they do very well on a platform, or in an open-air meeting, preaching is not always by being on a platform, in a meeting, standing up and talking. Preaching is what you are. You do proclaim.
You see, dear friends, you cannot just pass the ministry over to the preacher, or the preachers—whatever name you use for them. You just cannot do that. Everyone who takes, or partakes of, the Lord’s table is a preacher—an ordained preacher.
What you are preaching is a declaration before heaven and earth and hell that, in this table, you have become a part of another order of creation. By the body and blood of Christ, you are proclaiming that you are of the Christ order. You are proclaiming it.
Would it not be a good thing if that were true of all people who took the communion service? But when you bring it into the letter to the Corinthians, it is quite startling and testing, is it not? These people were coming to the Lord’s table, but you see how they came.
Oh, they came with a lot of things. The apostle summed it all up in one word: eating and drinking unworthily—in an unworthy manner. My word, the context of that is shocking: how they came to the Lord’s table.
They brought to the Lord’s table the old man; there is no doubt about it. They brought to the Lord’s table themselves, all there. And it is a very terrible, terrible picture of the Lord’s table at Corinth. I should leave you to read it again—their behaviour, just being revealed.
But the point is that coming like that, with anything of that kind: “Let a man examine himself.” Look at himself. Let a man examine himself. Look at himself.
See now how he comes to the Lord’s table: whether as the old man, on the old man’s ground, on the ground of the natural man. Should he come to the Lord’s table with that? Or is he coming really to the Lord’s table on the ground of the spiritual man?
If so, all those things that are in this letter are ruled out by the Lord’s table. There are divisions among you. You cannot have that in one body, can you? That must go. That belongs to the natural man.
And there are a number of other things, to which I may refer later, which were characteristics of the Corinthians, which were a contradiction to the fundamental meaning of the Lord’s table.
The Lord’s table, therefore, becomes a great test of one thing: whether we are on Christ’s ground or on natural human ground.
Now, many of you may wonder why this should be said to you. You are not Corinthians—I hope you are not. There may be very little of these Corinthian conditions amongst you. I hope that is true. But I am not so sure.
But it comes really to the test whether we should not be found out in some of these things. Look at that again. It is a great test of whose ground we are on: the ground of the natural man, or the ground of the spiritual man; the ground of the first Adam, or the last Adam. The table is put there as a clean cleavage between the two.
This table is a very sacred thing. There is not always, at the Lord’s table, to be a note of warning as here. Yet it is a beautiful thing that the apostle says at the beginning of this letter. It is one of those things which needs to be taken note of very much.
Right at the beginning he says:
Unto them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all that call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in every place, their Lord and ours.
There is no exclusiveness there. When it comes to the matter of those who call upon the name of the Lord Jesus, Who is their Lord as He is ours, that is all right. That is interesting.
But then, when you move on to this matter of the table, the table cuts in and says, “Not for the natural man,” who is of this order—divisions and all these things. Oh, be careful. Examine yourself when you come to the table and see that you are not bringing the natural man and these characteristics to the Lord’s table. If you stand on other ground, stand on the ground of Christ.
Might I remind you that Paul is so strong about this matter of Christ’s ground that he opens this letter—what is in our arrangement the first chapter, with its thirty-one further divisions into verses; a small section in this introduction to the whole—with no fewer than nine mentions of the name of the Lord Jesus.
It is impressive, is it not? I do not know whether you mark your Bible as you are reading, but take something that shows and underline the name of the Lord Jesus in these first thirty-one verses, or this first section of the whole letter. Then there would always be a guide to the letter.
And then, in the second part—the second chapter is going on—he says, “I came to you proclaiming.” “I determined to know nothing among you, save Jesus Christ.”
How ultimate, complete, is this concentration upon Jesus Christ right through. Jesus Christ at every point. He says to every situation, “That is not Jesus Christ. That is not Jesus Christ.”
But I think all this is just a buildup of this one thing: there is a great divide in our humanity. In our humanity, the divide between what he calls the natural man—the man of soul—and the spiritual man.
And that is never to be more marked and clear than when we come to the Lord’s table, because there we do, by taking Christ, declare: “We are Christ people. Christ people, and not of this other type.”
Well, you see, if I were to go on and say a lot more, I could not say anything more vital. And we might spoil things by adding words. But different.
Look at this matter of the natural man in the Corinthian letter, leading right on to this advanced point in the letter: the Lord’s table. See all this that has led up to it, and what an appalling, appalling lot it is—what an exhibition of the natural man.
All that comes right up to the Lord’s table, and the Lord’s table says, “No, not that. That is not Christ. That is not right. Here is Christ, and He is different. And you are different from that, if you really have rightly apprehended Christ to replace…”