We have in these verses what we had in Luke 9:28,3628And it came to pass about an eight days after these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray. (Luke 9:28)
36And when the voice was past, Jesus was found alone. And they kept it close, and told no man in those days any of those things which they had seen. (Luke 9:36); our calling and our inheritance, or rather God’s calling, and God’s inheritance in the saints. We cannot too earnestly apply it to the heart and conscience, bringing the soul directly before God; but for this we need the direct action of the Spirit of God. I desire to say a little as to the counsels and purposes of God as here given to us (Eph. 1:1-141Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to the saints which are at Ephesus, and to the faithful in Christ Jesus: 2Grace be to you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. 3Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ: 4According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: 5Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, 6To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved. 7In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace; 8Wherein he hath abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence; 9Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself: 10That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him: 11In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will: 12That we should be to the praise of his glory, who first trusted in Christ. 13In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, 14Which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory. (Ephesians 1:1‑14)); but I must be brief, because it is so very full.
In the first verses we have the calling (vv. 3-6), and then the inheritance (vv. 11, etc). There is a great difference between the counsels of God, and His dealing with our souls as sinners before Him. Here it is entirely the counsels of God. Redemption is given as the way in (v. 7), but there is nothing here about justification. When we are justified, He shows us His plans and thoughts for us. The passage begins at once with this; and it is exceedingly blessed to get this side of the truth—that sovereign grace has had its own thoughts, and has accomplished them. But before He gives these counsels as a whole, He brings the heart into tone-abounding toward us in wisdom and prudence, thus setting us in the consciousness of our own present place before God, according to His counsels for us, the objects of His entire delight (through righteousness doubtless); these are His thoughts of grace towards us. Then He goes on to unfold the whole plan concerning Christ. His thought as regards us is to give us everything in the best possible way. He will make known “The exceeding riches of his grace;” howl “in his kindness towards us.” In ages to come angels will learn it in us; but His mind is that we should learn it now. He sets us thus in perfect favor in the Son, to let angels know the full extent of it. We should have this kind of thought of God, that He is taking us up to show in us “the exceeding riches of his grace.”
It is not in contrasts only that our souls learn grace. That is not all. I feel uneasy about souls when I find them learning grace, only by contrasting their state now with what it was. Even in worship I dread to find them living entirely in contrasts. It proves that the mind is too near the old thing; if living habitually in God’s presence, the thought of Him would be enough to fill the heart without a thought about ourselves. If near enough to Him we shall drop the other. To enjoy the light of God’s favor and the shining of His love, I do not need a contrast. If I have been exposed to a storm it is true I shall be glad of the shelter of a house, and I may contrast the comfort of it with the storm out of which I have just come; but, is there nothing in the house? The storm is never to be forgotten; but I should desire to be occupied with what I am come into, at rest and contented.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” All blessings are drawn from Him as such. They are titles of the positions in which Christ is as Man, and as Son. You get the God of our Lord Jesus Christ in chap. 1, and the Father in chap. 3. We have the best kind of blessings of the best place, in the best way—in Christ, “chosen in him.” The thought and counsel of God about us was, that we should be “holy and without blame before him in love;” this is our calling in God. It is not a question of the election of persons, but what we are chosen to. If you take “holy,” “without blame,” and “love,” it is God’s own nature, of which Christ was the expression when here. He was the Holy One, and always before God His Father in love. We are set in Him, and are called to be what He was in the presence of God. It does not say whether on earth or in heaven, because it is our calling and is always true, though not yet fully developed. We are now before Him in love, we dwell in the love; are holy and without blame, having a nature capable of knowing and enjoying God, and are also before Him to enjoy. We need not think of ourselves, for we are this before Him.
First, we have a nature fit for God (v. 4); and secondly, we are the objects of His delight (v. 5). He would have sons, Christ was a Son, and so are we. His nature flows out and finds nothing to hinder His delight in me, and I find nothing to hinder my delight in Him; and then as His own sons in the Father’s house, with the nature and character of Christ before God, we are fully capable of enjoying Him. This is what we are called to; therefore He is not contemplating our weakness and failure, so that you do not find justification for the sinner here, but that we are accepted in the Beloved. Instead of thinking of the ‘sinner, it is to the praise of the glory of His grace.
“In the beloved,” the expression is remarkable, it shows the delight of God in Christ, because He desires to make me know the place Christ has in His heart. Thus I find my place before Him; not according to the necessity of my soul as a sinner, but according to all that is in. God’s heart. This is what they went into in the cloud, in Luke 9, having thus brought us fully into our place, He can now unfold to us the counsels of wisdom and prudence, His thoughts about. Christ for Christ’s glory. There He brings us into all His counsels. When He has set us entirely at ease in His presence, we can rest our thoughts on the glory of Christ,—the kingdom as it were, of Luke 9.
Thus we come to the second part, our inheritance. Here we are heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ. There are three titles of Christ in connection with the inheritance. As Son, necessarily heir; as Son of Man, the appointed heir, and as Creator of all things. We must add redemption, that He may not be alone in it when it comes, for He will have us. with Him as joint-heirs. Thus, there is the calling and the inheritance, the two parts of the glory-scene in Luke 9.
The cloud is the Father’s house into which we are first brought; then there is the earthly part, the kingdom of which we are made heirs,—God’s calling, and God’s inheritance in the saints. We have got the calling, but not an inch of the inheritance yet. Yet the perfect work of Christ having been wrought, we are cleansed, we are justified, and the Holy Ghost is given to us as an earnest of it all. We shall be like Him, and with Him, and meanwhile between His work and the actual accomplishment of all in the glory, the Holy Ghost dwells in us, shedding abroad in our hearts the spring of it all—the Father’s love and giving us the full consciousness of our part in the inheritance before it comes in power.
There are two characters of Christian walk as the result of all this. I am not in possession of the inheritance and am running towards it (Phil. 3:1111If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead. (Philippians 3:11)); living by the faith of the Son of God, looking at Christ in the glory, and counting everything else but dross and dung. He has laid hold of me that they lay hold of Him, may win Christ in glory.
Then, on the other side, I am set in Christ in heavenly places. That is not running to obtain the prize, it is what I have come to already, and this gives a different character to the walk. Sitting in God’s presence to go out into the world, and to manifest what I am sitting in,—to be imitators of God. This comes out in Eph. 5 as light and love. We are called upon to exhibit the character of God Himself as it has been manifested in Christ. We go out to manifest in the world what we are, and where we are, as set in Him. “Ye are”—not, ye ought to be,—the “epistle of Christ”; though, alas, the engraving of Christ is sadly filled up with rubbish, and the characters thus marred and blotted. Yet, like Christ in God’s presence now, we shall be actually like Him in glory, for “He that hath wrought us for the self-same thing is God.”
I would now go back a little to look into the way in which our responsibility comes in, and how God has met it—His ways for the accomplishment of His counsels. Here (Eph. 1) we are called, but we, are not yet in the glory.
Romans shows us how as poor sinners we can be brought in. in righteousness. God had these counsels before the foundation of the world. It is not the sovereignty of His grace choosing a people out of the world. His counsels have nothing to do with the world at all. God had these plans into which He was going to bring us before there were sinners, and before the world began for them to sin in.
They were thoughts for Christ as Man thoughts into which the world cannot enter, existing before it existed, and they will go on after it to find the perfection of their accomplishment in the new heavens and new earth. (See Prov. 8)
If we look through the crust of the world, what a scene it is! What darkness; if I begin to think about it! Open out the heart of a man of the world before God; oh, what a story it would unfold! Look at the world itself; oh, what confusion twice confounded! All the good that wisdom and power did, is smashed to pieces by the devil; while fragments of the wisdom and power and love seen here and there, are but proofs of the smash that Satan has made of everything. How unaccountable if we do not bring in sin! What perfect moral confusion! What a paradox man is! He cannot put the thought of God out of his head, though he tries hard. It comes back to him in times of dangers and in death: he cannot get rid of it. He must have a god, so he makes one suited to his own passions, nay, the passions themselves are made gods of and worshipped, to help him to carry out his passions! The heathen have their devil gods; one a good thief; another the upholder of the vilest corruptions. Lovely natural characters found among men, but spent on what passion has put in their heads. It is right and useful that the heart should be exercised about the state of things we now find around us.
But how comforting it is to go back to “Holy and without blame before him in love.” It is rest of heart to get away from’ even the needed exercises of our hearts, to the thoughts of God before ever evil or responsibility came in. These blessed holy counsels of God in and for His own Son—He whose delights were with the sons of men “hath saved us according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began.” (2 Tim. 1:99Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began, (2 Timothy 1:9).) You need not go into the world to learn God’s thoughts about you, they were “before the world began.”
When you come to the execution of these counsels, God does not begin at that end. The first man is brought into the world innocent—not holy or righteous—but ignorant of evil, with one thing he ought to do—to obey God. This is the character of that one test. There was no evil in him to be forbidden; no harm in itself in eating the fruit, obedience was everything. It was not like the law which forbade lust. Tell Adam not to steal, he had no one to steal from: tell him not to lust, he would not know what it meant. Then the moment the creature was put in responsibility he. fell. Wherever man is tested he has failed the first thing. Noah gets drunk the first thing after having offered his sacrifice. Before the law is brought into the camp, the calf is made. When priesthood is set up, the first day Nadab and Abihu offer strange fire, and Aaron never entered the holy place in his garments of glory and beauty. Whatever God has set up for good and blessing, the creature drags down into ruin. But it is not only what we have done that is in question, but what we are; that goes a good bit deeper.
Patience and grace go on working still, but testing is at an end. Look through man’s history: though no promise could be given to the first man, yet in the judgment pronounced on the serpent, the promise is given to the second man, the seed of the woman, which Adam was not. The instant sin came in, God gave something out of man’s self as an object for faith, something for him to rest on. Still there is this responsibility of man; but now it is of fallen man. No dispensation had been set up, and man was left to himself till the earth was filled with violence, and God has to make an end of him in the flood. The world had become so bad that God had to judge it, before the great white throne is set. After the flood God begins to deal specifically with man, and we must have grace, as we see it in the call of Abram. Idolatry had come in, and judgment follows, and God for the first time calls out a man in sovereign grace to be father of His family, as Adam was of the sinful family. But He must separate him from the world to live for and with Himself—the world which God had made but which had become corrupted. He calls out one to whom He gave promises in sovereign grace, without the smallest condition; “In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” God is going to bring in Christ—the seed, and blessing must come. All rests upon the promise of God. There cannot be an intelligent creature without responsibility, of which the law was the rule.
The law came in “by-the-bye,” 430 years after the promises, but could not disannul or add to them. It came in as the perfect measure of man’s responsibility. Tested by it, I ought to love God perfectly, ought to have a pure heart—a heart that loves my neighbor as myself. But where is it to be found conscience says it is all perfectly right, I ought not to have bad lusts, but I have them. I do not love God as I ought, nor my neighbor as myself. You do not find one whom the law does not convict of sin. Patience went on, grace worked in individuals; prophets sought to restore; but the history of the thing went on till there was no remedy. Then God said, I have yet one Son; one thing to wake up good in the human heart, if it be there. “It may be they will reverence my Son.” The answer was, “Come let us kill him!” Thus responsibility is at an end, and man is lost; it is the Willing point of man’s history. All has been gone through in the dealings of God. They had had the law, and broken it; the prophets, and rejected them; the Son, and killed Him; and I may add, the Holy Ghost, and resisted Him. For though the cross had brought all to an issue, grace lingered for a little moment in Israel, and till the testimony of Stephen, in answer to the prayer on the cross. Thus the question of responsibility has been thoroughly settled. “If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin; but now they have no cloke for their sin. If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin: but now have they both seen, and hated both me and my Father.” (John 15)
There is man! The individual gets the consciousness of that in his own soul. I find it all true about myself. I am a sinner with whom God has dealt in all these ways. It is my story that is told. “We indeed justly.” I am one that despised grace, that rejected the Son, and I am convinced of sin—I do not say the world is, though true; but I say it is I who have done it all!
Up to the cross all was thus thoroughly gone through, and man fully tested. Now God brings out grace, which proves that He no longer deals with man on the ground of responsibility. The law came in after the promise and before Christ, to bring out the offense, to make sin become exceeding sinful. Man did not merely what was wrong, but did it in spite of God forbidding him. Responsibility (not the Christian’s) ends in the first man being turned out of Paradise, and the Second Man turned out of the world by him, as unfit to live in it: on no terms will the first man have God. He may heal the sick, open the eyes of the blind, cast out devils, but they will not have Him, they would rather have the devil: and we are in a world that has done this.
Now, when man’s responsibility is at an end, and Christ is rejected and on the cross, God begins to work:—works simply, effectually;—does the whole at once and completely. The very point where the enmity of the human heart was proved against God, was the point where God proved His love to man. Man is thus convicted of sin up to enmity against Christ who was the perfect expression of God’s love to him; and God is above it all in grace! What hath God wrought! Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. Sin was there fully developed, and the history of it in man brought to an end. Then in that very place, and as to the sin, Christ perfectly glorified God. “In the end of the world.” He has done it so perfectly that, as man, God has set Him at His own right hand. So perfect was the work for man, and for glory to God, that the Man who did it has gone up into glory! We have here not a man turned out of Paradise on account of responsibility, but a Man gone into the heavenly Paradise in whom God is glorified! So glorified that He must glorify Him “straightway,” and not wait for the kingdom. The work is done for taking away the sins, and taking man to glory. The thing is complete and absolute, and He must have glory. What had we to say to the world our sins and hatred of God, that was all. It was a work done between Christ and God, in drinking the cup which no heart can fathom.
Now from this man entering into the glory of God, I get a new starting point altogether. Now He can bring out the counsels which were before responsibility began, because Christ was there as the center of them. The things that were in God’s mind that He could not before reveal, He can now. bring out, the blessed and glorious work being all accomplished which gives us our title to have part in them. Christ is our title. What is a Redeemer without His redeemed? He has brought us to God. Are we then unfit for God? Nay, fit for Him conscience can rest. We are accepted in the Beloved, and sealed with the Holy Ghost. My place before God is not in the flesh, but in Christ; not in the first Adam, but according to the worth of Christ’s work. He must see of the travail of His soul, and must have me with Him in glory.
A word as to how we are brought into it The Holy Ghost is given in Scripture consequent upon the faith of a person in the work that results in the remission of sins. It is a person who has received that who is sealed. (See Acts 2:3838Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. (Acts 2:38) and 10: 43, 44.) I am made as white as snow, and now the Holy Ghost says, I can come and dwell there. I am not speaking of being born of God, but of the way the heart is brought into it all.
In Rom. 1-3 we have all the world brought in guilty before God, in respect of sins,—not the state, but works as the ground of judgment. Now God sets forth Christ for a propitiation. This is the blood on the mercy-seat, and we get both sides of Lev. 16—the goat for the Lord’s lot, and the scapegoat for the people. All is grace now. It is no question of experience, for “there is none righteous, no, not one.” I do not want experience about this, for it is the positive testimony of God, though the deeper I feel about it the better. I find my responsibility perfectly met, and my sins all cleared away, ending in the perfect blessedness of Rom. 5:1111And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement. (Romans 5:11),—what God is to the sinner.
After this we come to experience, which is connected, not with what I have done, but with what I am—what I have got into through Adam’s sin. I am away from God, and have a sinful nature and lusts. I have to do with what I am, no matter whether I am a Jew or not. This brings in the law. I ought not to lust, but I do. Lust comes from vile flesh. What is flesh? It is that I like sin, and it is there. I shall resist it if I am a Christian, but still it is there. This goes deeper, and the remedy is deeper. You find another truth. It is not Christ bearing sins, but I must reckon myself dead,—crucified with Christ. Can I live on in sin? How did you obtain a part in the obedience of Christ? By death. How can you live on in that which is dead? If I tell a man that his debts are paid, it is not his experience of it, but resting on my word that makes him happy. Unbelief raises a question of experience here, and says, I am not dead; God says you are, and you are now alive to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thus, I have the way to appropriate all that these counsels give me. For I am not in Adam, but “in Christ,” and of course have all that is His.
Rom. 8 gives us the second aspect of our blessedness—what the saint is before God “in Christ Jesus.” Now I can understand what it is to be accepted in the Beloved. I have an entirely new place; “ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you.” The flesh is all past; we are not in the first Adam, but in the last! We are brought into His place; if He is heir of all things, so am I.
Thus it is not merely my responsibility which has been met, but I am transported out of the condition I was in in Adam, into Christ. I do not enter consciously into this new condition till I have learned that in me dwelleth no goad thing, and cry, “oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me?”—not take away my sins—not deliver me from what I have done, but from what I am! That brings me into the place where I have the fruit of those counsels; Christ’s place in the present grace where He is.
All responsibility is thus settled up to the cross, “guilt cleared away; and besides all that, I am in a new place, in new man before God. Then the responsibility of the Christian begins. I never can know what it is to have to do with being in Christ, until I know what it is to be delivered from the flesh. If we are in Christ, Christ is in us, and our responsibility is to show Christ in everything. Man’s responsibility has proved a total failure; the Christian’s responsibility is to manifest the life of Jesus in His mortal flesh, and nothing else. You are the epistle of Christ. That is where you are set in the world: “Manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, hut with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart.” Men are now to read Christ in you as plainly as they could read the ten commandments on the two tables of stone. It is the engraving of Christ by the Spirit of God upon our hearts that is to be read. Our responsibility as men is over; our responsibility as Christians has begun. We have now to overcome the flesh and to manifest Christ, and He says, “My grace is sufficient for thee.”
May the Lord give us earnest purpose of heart, that we may be ever near enough to Him to draw the grace we need to glorify Him!