Oh, Father. Oh, God.
We ask Thee now, “Let light be,” to shine into our hearts at this time, to give the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
It is that face we together have said we are seeking now. We seek Thy face.
We thank Thee that the veil is taken away. We thank Thee that the heaven is open. We thank Thee that the Holy Spirit has come.
But we pray from our need, so deeply conscious we are of it—our own impotence and helplessness, inability to do anything, to say anything worthy of Thyself.
O Lord, we confess utter dependence upon Thee. But we say, Lord, we trust Thee.
Now make this, then, a time of entering into the good of that open heaven, that anointing Spirit, that revelation in the face of Jesus Christ. We ask it in His name. Amen.
I want to lay the foundation for our meditation in this morning session, the first session through this week, by asking you to turn to several passages of Scripture from the Old Testament and from the New, beginning in the book of Genesis, at Chapter 5.
Male and female created He them,
And blessed them, and called their name Adam.
Now, right away over to the New Testament, in the First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 15, verses 45 to 49.
So also it is written, The first man Adam became a living soul.
The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.
Howbeit that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is spiritual.
The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is of heaven.
As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly.
And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.
And then, please, in the Letter to the Colossians, Chapter 3, verses 9 to 11.
Lie not one to another; seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings,
And have put on the new man, which is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of Him that created him:
Where there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman: but Christ is all, and in all.
And finally, in the Letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 2, at verse 5.
For not unto angels did He subject the world to come, whereof we speak.
But one hath somewhere testified, saying,
What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?
Or the son of man, that Thou visitest him?
As I have said, this morning we are laying the foundation for these meditations in these morning hours. They will be, in some part, general and comprehensive, and later work inward to get to the real heart of things.
But it is necessary for us to have a comprehensive view and vision of what is before us.
I have no doubt that not a few of you who are here at this time have come with problems. And I find that Christians everywhere, the world over, are full of problems in our time.
If it is not problems about their own spiritual life and themselves, as it is in many cases, there are problems about other Christians, or problems about the church generally, and perhaps particularly locally.
And problems about the world. Problems are manifold, and they are apt to drain our spiritual life, get us very much locked up, and hold us up in our spiritual progress.
An old lady once lost some of her nice silver teaspoons. She could not find them in the house, so when the garbage man came, she said, “I have lost my teaspoons. Will you please look through the garbage, if they are there?”
Well, he had a horse-drawn truck for collecting the garbage, and his horse’s name was Dobbin. He turned to Dobbin and said, “Gee up, Dobbin. Our job is not to look for silver spoons in the garbage.”
That sounds, of course, not very kind, but it is like that, you know—like Bunyan’s man with the muck-rake. Remember him? Not seeing the golden crown over his head, but seeing about the rubbish, trying to find some treasures there.
And a lot of Christians are doing that today. They are missing the glory because their eyes are either turned inward or outward, at their problems.
You remember when the people of Israel were going over the Jordan into the promised land, the word was this:
Yet there shall be a space between you and it, about two thousand cubits by measure: come not near unto it, that ye may know the way by which ye must go; for ye have not passed this way heretofore.
There is a wealth of profound wisdom in that simple prescription: a space of two thousand cubits between you and the ark, because you have not passed this way heretofore. If you get too close to things, you will lose your perspective and you will lose your way.
Keep things in proportion, in perspective. Do not get too near.
Now, do you not agree that we have got too near to things, and we have made just this thing the everything? Yes, everything—even our Christian doctrine, so precious, so important, vital, essential. Yet we have isolated our doctrines and made this, and that, and that, the everything.
Even the cross, you know, we can make the everything, or the doctrine of the cross. And I can mention many other things which are like a circumscribed circle for many Christians today, and they cannot see beyond this. They cannot see anything more than that.
If you talk to them, there is no interest in anything but that. You come back to it every time, and they hold you to it. This lack of proportion, and perspective, and vision in its entirety is the cause of many of our problems and much of our arrested spiritual life.
Now, why am I saying that? Well, of course, for two reasons. You have to get a larger vision than your personal problem, so that you can see it in a related way.
I do not know very much about the science of relativity, but I come down very strongly on the principle of relatedness, or relativity. You see, everything is in its relatedness to everything else, and not just that thing as the end-all.
The other reason why I am saying that is that God is on my heart, and what is so much alive to me now is this comprehensiveness of the spiritual life—getting it in its greatness, its vastness, its immensity.
Now, immensity can, of course, be awe-inspiring to the point of making you stand still and hold your breath. But immensity can also be emancipating. You see the greatness of that into which we have been called in Christ: the greatness of Christ.
Oh, if we could, this week, get a new apprehension, a grasp, of the immensity of our Christian calling, we would go away an emancipated people. Within that setting, then, let us begin.
We read these passages. How I would have liked to read many more at the same time—soon enough as a starting point. Do you recognize what they were all about? From Genesis, beginning right on: one thing, man.
No, two men. Two men.
And what we are going to be occupied with is this: two humanities. These are the subject matter of the whole Bible.
Do you think your way along with me? You will see very much more than I will be able to say, if you have knowledge of the Bible.
The Bible is the story of God and man. Everything is gathered into that. There is nothing in the Bible that does not relate to that, because it begins with God: “In the beginning, God.”
You are not far on before you come upon man. And human history begins with God—God as a fact, God initiating everything, taking the initiative, God at work.
God’s mind working out in action in what He does. Remember that as a principle: to know the mind of God, you will come to know it by what God does, and not always by what He says to you.
More often, God’s mind is revealed by how He deals with you than by what He says in words in your ear. God is speaking in His actions, speaking very, very loudly in His works—God’s mind being revealed in His actions.
God is at work, at work preparing everything for man—everything prepared for man.
When He has made that preparation and brought man in, God says, “There is nothing more to do. At this stage, We can rest.” And God is at rest when He has man introduced into His prepared place and scene.
But man, the New Testament tells us, is a figure of Him that was to come, in Whom God will ultimately find His full rest.
Man constituted, man conditioned, man environed, man on probation—all God’s interests are centered in humanity, in humanity.
Not in things as such. No thing is an end with God. Man is God’s end. Humanity is God’s thought.
Seeing that all human beings are here this morning, this, I think, we are: we are right there, at the very center of the interest of God—humanity.
That man, as we know, disappointed God, failed Him, and was rejected by God. And at that point, God reacted with the intimation of another One—another Man, a representative Man—Whom God had foreordained before the foundation of the world, already forecast, foreshadowed.
And that reaction of God toward the one man, and toward this other Man, runs all the way through like a red line through the Old Testament: in figure, in type, in prophecy, in the spiritual history of an elect line, all moving on toward that other Man, that other humanity.
The difference between the two men.
So we reach the New Testament. Interesting: the crisis of humanity.
Have you thought of Christianity like that? Or have you thought of Christianity, well, in its parts, its fragments—atonement for man’s sin, man’s personal salvation, man’s securing eternal health and glory, all the parts of salvation?
Made so much of them. Well, you cannot make too much of the parts, of course, until you reach the point where the parts become less than the whole.
And, dear friends, we have got to readjust our conception and idea of Christianity at this point: to see that with the coming of the Lord Jesus, a crisis in the whole history of humanity is reached.
This is the crisis—the final word of rejection of a humanity, a kind of man, and the introduction of an entirely different kind of humanity with the Person, Jesus Christ.
You have lost that, you know; your whole Bible is going to come alive. It is a couple of lives. What have we come into? What is regeneration?
We call it conversion, being born again, or you call it regeneration. What is it? It is generation into another humanity—altogether different, a different race of creatures, a different species of humanity.
With the New Testament, this immense crisis in human history is introduced: the crisis of humanity.
Here is introduced with our New Testament the whole and final type of humanity that God is going to have.
Tremendous thing. Here is the One in Whom all that belongs to the perfection of man is found.
All that belongs to the perfection of man is found in this representative One that is introduced with our New Testament. Jesus stands in a unique relation to the human race.
And do you not see how rays of light focus upon this great fact?
What is it that God is doing with me, with you, in the midst of this humanity? What is He doing? What is He after? What is the explanation of our experience under the hand of God?
You know, when we get under the hand of God, we are going through it. We are going to work. What are you expecting this week?
When you go away from here, you meet friends and they will say, “Have you had a happy time?”
I think I told you once before here of a conference that I was at once. At the end, a large number of ministers were there. At the end, testimonies were asked for from these ministers as to what the conference had meant to them.
And one and another got up and said, “Oh, I have had a wonderful time. I have had a glorious time. This has been the best time in my life.”
And then one man got up, whose eyes were red, his face was gray. He said, “I do not understand this. I have had an awful time. This week has meant devastation to me. Everything that I have held as important has been laid low, with a necessity for a new Christ, a bigger Christ than ever I have known.”
What are you expecting? Well, I hope you have a good time. But your good time, to your friends, in the light of eternity, may be other than that. Understand that?
When it comes to seeing the real truth, it may come out of a devastation.
Well, that by the way: what is God doing? He is devastating one kind of humanity. You are going to see that as we go on. He is doing it.
Here we could, in parenthesis, look at humanity today. My word, what a sight! What a sight—and talk about progress, development, the rise of man.
In the world today, the utter desolation of the whole human race and this earth—wherever the world has been—because man is so clever. God is doing it on the one side. He is doing it.
He is aiding and abetting that man to the disclosing of what his cleverness can be—that cleverness that he made a bid for in the garden, to be clever, as clever as God.
But God is doing something on the other side.
I do not know what your experience is. I know what mine is. I know it is the experience of many of the most used and blessed servants of God, that they are going through a terrible time spiritually.
They have come to the place where, if the Lord does not really stand by, take over, and see through, it is an end even of their spiritual experience. All the past will not stand them in stead unless the Lord comes in in new ways. Is that not true with many? Yes.
Well, that is what He is doing, working on this very ground, you see, of the two humanities: that which we are by nature, and that which we are in Christ—in Christ.
So what we are to be occupied with this time is, first of all, to behold the Man—to behold Him.
And I would pray, and do pray, that when this week is finished, we shall be able truly to express our hearts in those wonderful words of a poet known to many of you. These are some lines from that wonderful poem, Christ:
I am Christ’s, and let that name suffice me,
And for me He greatly hath sufficed;
Yea, through life, through death, through sorrow, and through sinning,
He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed.Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning;
Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.
I say, those words express what we would all like to be the issue of this time: Christ. A new captivation of Christ, a new, wonderful appreciation of Christ, and seeing the significance of Christ in God’s universe.
Now, for these remaining few minutes of the introduction—you recognize that is all it is—I want to just pinpoint this one thing.
Have you recognized—perhaps you have, without putting it in these words or having it put in these words—have you recognized that the very heart and pivot of our Bible is an immense transition?
An immense transition. I say, the heart where the Old Testament ends and the New Testament begins: two halves of human history, of humanity.
Right there, at that point, we come upon this great, this immense transition.
The New Testament is wholly taken up with the meaning, the nature, the fact, of this transition—this movement from one thing to another in humanity.
You will recall so much in your New Testament, and I just mention this. First of all, it is a transition from one man to another—from Adam to Christ.
We read that in 1 Corinthians 15: the first man. He called them man. That is humanity in a nutshell: “called their name Adam.” That is very simple. First man, Adam—it is the same thing. Adam and man, as you noticed in the margin of Genesis: “called their name Adam.”
And the New Testament wholly bears upon this transition from one humanity to another: one racial head and inclusive person, first Adam and last Adam.
The whole course of Scripture is not second Adam, but last Adam. The whole humanity is going beyond. Transition, then, which is a racial one: from Adam to Christ, from the first man to the last Man.
Secondly, from one nation to another. I know room for a lot of controversy there.
Now, Israel—nevertheless, the New Testament, and Christ Himself, came down on this quite emphatically:
The kingdom of God shall be taken away from you, and shall be given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.
Heavenly fruits, not earthly. Transition from one nation to another.
And Peter—oh, Peter! Wonderful. I am amazed, sweetheart, are not you, that erstwhile Judaistic traditionalist, who had a battle with the Lord over Gentiles in Caesarea, going to the house of Cornelius, and even saying, in a contradiction of terms to the Lord, “Not so, Lord.”
You cannot put those words together: say, “Lord,” and “Not so.”
The other man, you remember, when he met Christ, said, “What wilt Thou have me to do?” But Peter had not got out of his tradition quite yet.
And even there, in that dissimulation, when James and the elders came down from Jerusalem, Peter withdrew himself from eating with the Gentiles. He still had a little bit of grave-clothes left on him.
But marvel of marvels, when you come to his letters, he is out:
Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the elect who are sojourners of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.
He is out of the one nation now into the other. The transition has been consummated in this man. But for the battle, you know—what was the battle over? This old association with the natural man. We want to see much more of that.
Well, it is transition. Then it is a transition from one economy to another. Your Letter to the Hebrews is one solid argument for this transition.
I am so impressed with the constant recurrence in the New Testament of one phrase—linking words, the phrases, “not,” “nor,” “but.”
John began there, did he not? Christ to the woman of Samaria:
Neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father.
But the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth.
Not, nor, but. And you find that occurring again and again here when you come to this great transition from one economy to another.
Taking in the great ministry of angels in the earlier economy—as a subject for a morning in itself, is it not? The ministry of angels in the earlier economy. The law was given through angels. Angels came again and again—Gideon, the archangels.
A marvelous ministry of angels. That Letter to the Hebrews opens up: “Not unto angels.” Not, not, but. And the following argument is that this new economy infinitely transcends the ministry of angels.
What we have come into.
You get on toward the end of that Letter to the Hebrews, and you have another of these transitory phrases:
Ye are not come unto a mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire.
How vast is this—from that old economy. And you have to bring in the one thing only in your New Testament: introduced by Christ in the Gospels.