The two main subjects which apparently occupy so large a place in Mr. Stuart’s mind and teaching; and which he considers of such importance, as to warrant his bringing them forward and republishing them in a second edition, and an elaborate reply to Mr. Stoney –are thus stated by himself.
We will now consider scripture teaching about the believer’s standing and about his condition as being in Christ (page 5).
Our standing then before the throne is seen in Romans to be complete before one word is said of our being in Christ (page 9).
He (who was unrighteous) is henceforth by God reckoned righteous, and so can stand before His throne (page 11).
The being in Christ forms no part of scripture teaching as to the believer’s perfect standing, or justification before the throne of God (page 12).
We stand before the throne of God, we repeat it, simply and solely by virtue of the abiding value of the sacrifice of Christ for us, and our standing there is viewed as settled, before one word is said about being in Christ (page 53).
The blood of the bullock and that of the goat were treated in the same way and sprinkled on the same places; so the standing of Aaron and his house, typical of Christians, and that of Israel, was the same (Letter to D. S.).
It will be seen from these statements that this standing is spoken of as equivalent to “justification” or being “reckoned righteous” and that it is common to all saints of all dispensations without exception. Compare pages 16, 17, Is it the Truth of the Gospel?
These two subjects Mr. Stuart so handles, as to do away with the proper position of saints in this dispensation, and the divine estimate of heavenly truth, so far as that position is concerned. By this means the liberty of the soul in its relation to God, and communion with Him founded upon it are also seriously affected. All this will be apparent as we proceed to examine these subjects.
In this system of thought, as presented to us by Mr. Stuart for our acceptance – of God, or the fruit of a mind astray from God and His word and the guidance of His Spirit, having lost its way through following and depending on its own reasoning powers. The mind of man is never an adequate measure of divine truth, and when it sets up to be can only fall into confusion, darkness, and error. Distrust of ourselves and deep dependence upon God can alone keep the soul in the discernment of His mind, which is really what is in question when we touch His truth. Oh for unshod feet to tread where all, though oft forgotten, is holy ground.
The first topic which occupies the foremost place in Mr. Stuart’s pamphlets is – a standing before the throne of God this, which he supposes all believers to have alike in all dispensations, he thus defines (Is it the Truth of the Gospel p.17)
By standing is meant, the title and ability through grace for a fallen and once guilty creature to be before the throne of God without judgment overtaking him.
This standing he takes as the measure or gauge of divine blessings bestowed upon us, not m erely as guilty creatures but as saints.
No higher position can the saint have than the standing before that throne; for there is no higher position except to be on the throne of God, a place or position which of course no mere creature can ever have. Many of course are the blessings that we possess through grace besides that of justification by faith. We are God’s children, His sons too, His heirs likewise, and joint heirs with Christ.
God’s purpose too is, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love. Yet none of these, nor all of them together, nor the being in Christ, who is the beginning of the new creation of God, the Head of a new race, can give us a higher position before God, than the standing before His throne which is ours now, in consequence of the death and resurrection of His Son (Christian Standing and Condition, pp. 8, 9 ).
These statements are very serious in their character. If Mr. Stuart is correct in making them, we have all been grievously mistaken in our belief, and in the teaching current, by those most approved of God in bringing out the truth among us, during the last fifty years; and the instructions gained, the lessons learned, the experience acquired, have all to be reversed or read backwards. If this standing before the throne, supposing it for a moment to be scriptural, which we are far from believing, equals the blessings which we have regarded as special and distinctive and among those marked by the Lord as having that character (above those enjoyed in millennial days under His government), the words addressed to Thomas – “Because thou hast seen me thou hast believed, blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed” – have lost their meaning; and those who have been recognized as pioneers or guides in truth among us, have, in common with those they taught, been living in a state of illusion.
The following extracts from Either in Adam or in Christ by J. N. D., will show the entire contrast between the truth commonly received among us, and that which is now pressed on us for our acceptance.
Our guilt as responsible men has been perfectly met for God, but we have done too, in Him [Christ] as to our life and standing before God, with all down here by the cross. We are baptized to His death . . . If we are Christians, our only true standing is in Him as having died and risen from the dead (pages 41, 42).
I can well understand a Christian knowing only that as a sinner, as guilty, Christ has died for him, and so seeing what he can rely on before God as a judge, and he is blessedly right (Mr. S.’s standing); but his true standing, his place with God, is in Christ risen. “If Christ be not risen, ye are yet in your sins”: and in this is, for the Christian as quickened, the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, which makes him free. The standing and life of the Christian as such, rests in this: that is, he is risen with Christ in his place before God. All beyond the cross is not thus meeting our responsibility, but bringing in God’s purpose (pages 42, 43).
The result is this; the whole standing, condition, estate in life of the believer is changed, not outwardly as to the body yet, as is evident, but in relation to God, and that really by a new life (page 51).
Thus our being in Christ is the highest possible place as to standing and perfect (page 58).
Where in scripture is the authority for such a statement, that there is no higher position for a saint of this dispensation than a standing before the throne? We have Mr. Stuart’s word for it, and that is all. No such position is ever assigned to us as saints, either in the Epistles or in the Revelation. In the Epistles we are seen in heavenly places and blessed there, or to be presented “perfect in Christ Jesus,” or “faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy,” or “holy and unblamable, and unreprovable in his sight”; indeed like Christ Himself, and in Christ, but never are we anywhere seen standing before the throne. Scripture, on the contrary as if to guard against the idea here expressed, specially speaks of us as “seated,” “hath made us sit together in heavenly places”; and this is carried on into the future (cp. Eph. 1:19, 20, and 2:6, 7), “that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness towards us through Christ Jesus.” In the Revelation, where the throne and government of God are in question, and our relation to it is specially marked, the heavenly saints are invariably seen crowned, and seated on thrones round the throne of God, with which these thrones are associated, in the full possession and enjoyment of their dignities in the presence of God, in the knowledge of His mind and ways before whom they bow in intelligent worship and adoring delight.Other saints indeed are found in this position before the throne, those who stand before the throne of God and the Lamb in Rev. 7, exactly occupy the place described by Mr. S., so do those who stand on the Sea of Glass before the throne (Rev. 4, 15), and the hundred and forty-four thousand who stand on Mount Zion and sing before the throne (Rev.14); but none of these have the elevated position or rank assigned to the twenty-four elders, which seems to be purposely contrasted with theirs, the elders never being once seen throughout the whole book, in what we are now told is our specific place of blessing – “standing before the throne.”
This is also the position of angels, who never appear on thrones in the presence of God, a position apparently reserved for the most exalted of the redeemed, including saints of both dispensations. The angels in Rev. 7 stand round about the throne, and the living creatures and the elders; and again in Rev. 8, we read of the seven angels which stood before God (cp. Luke 1:19), and still more in Dan. 7, ten thousand times ten thousand stood before Him whilst, if we accept the translation given by Mr. Darby in accordance with the Septuagint and the Vulgate, that the thrones were set or placed, we have the same position given to saints as in the Revelation, thrones associated with the throne of God when the judgment or the kingdom is in view.
Only in this way can we understand how the saints shall judge angels. The general expressions, “the judgment shall sit,” and “the Ancient of days came, and judgment was given to the saints of the Most High” (or high places), confirm this.
The throne, indeed, represents the sovereign place and rights of God, and the responsibility of the creature, as such in reference to those rights. Hence it is that those who only stand in accordance with that responsibility, such as angels in their original righteousness as God created them, or millennial saints are so presented, but not those who are the subjects of purpose or union with Christ, or even Old Testament saints. In the Psalms we have the throne largely prominent, because its subject is God’s government and His earthly people who are in relation to it, but the heavenly saints are not named, except once, and then as in association or reigning with Christ (Psa. 45:7). Hence, where the special privileges belonging to these are in question, the throne scarcely comes in at all.
Mr. Stuart says (Is it the Truth of the Gospel, p. 24)
With all this outcry then, against the word throne, it is admitted that the word is scripturally correct.
Of course it is, who ever questioned it? Mr. Stuart knows very well, that is not the point at issue; that the word throne is not objected to, for every Christian owns it. But it is the relation in which he puts us to it, and to Him who sits on it.
He adds
Has God, as God, two different thrones, one of judgment and another of grace? Would not the mercy seat have been to Aaron a throne of judgment in a most solemn way, had he approached it in an unauthorized way?
Does God vacate His throne?
Is He not always on it . . . where God must only and always sit? (Is it the Truth, &c. p. 33).
God is, and always will be, on the throne, but the throne is not always viewed as the judgment seat.
That is, he admits that there is government as well as judgment connected with it. “There is the throne as well as the bench.” But if he means that God is always presented in that relation to us, it is a very serious mistake. True, God never surrenders His rights as Supreme Governor, for heaven is His throne and earth His footstool; but if we compare the great white throne, before which heaven and earth flee away and the dead stand, and that of the Ancient of Days (Dan. 7)sitting to judge the kingdoms of the earth, whose throne was like the fiery flame, and its wheels as burning fire (which are exclusively judicial), with His throne of government in Israel of old and in the millennium, we see the difference brought out. In the Revelation the ark of the covenant with the mercy-seat is the pledge, when His judgment is executed, of His unfailing connection with His people, for God dwelt between the cherubim (Psa. 89:14; 80:1; 99:1). “Thou that dwellest between the cherubim, shine forth . . . before Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh [whose position was in immediate connection with the ark and the sanctuary], stir up thy strength and come, and save us” (Psa. 80:1, 2).
We shall see how widely “different” is this aspect of the throne in “judgment” and in “grace,” as well as God’s’ action from it. Mr. Stuart’s remark as to Aaron, confounds the difference which existed between the past and the present the type and the antitype, when God had only before Him the blood of bulls and goats, and not that precious blood which adequately meets and measures His majesty and glory.
Doubtless, “judgment would have overtaken” Aaron, had he not attended to the prescribed order of approach, but our failures, whilst drawing near to the mercy-seat or throne of grace, though they have to be judged before God, according to what He is, are met in a very different way. In Rom. 3 –in which Mr. Stuart says, “Man is viewed as a responsible guilty creature, who needs a standing before the throne,” and “is henceforth by God declared righteous, and so can stand before His throne justified” – whilst it is true that man, and indeed the whole world, is looked at as charged and brought in guilty before God, and having come short of His glory the throne is by no means brought into the prominence which Mr. Stuart gives it, but God’s nature and glory, rather than His government, and His attitude in relation to man as a Justifier from the blood-sprinkled mercy-seat. Not to question that the mercy-seat had the character of a throne, but having been sprinkled with blood, not of bulls and goats, but of Christ Himself, it has put on a different aspect, and from it God declares His righteousness towards all.
In Revelation, lightnings and thunderings and voices proceed from it, but here (Rom. 3) it is a blessed and privileged mercy-seat, where God sits in order to display His righteousness in justifying, before He sits on the throne of judgment to arraign and pass sentence on the guilty manifesting then, His righteousness in judgment. The veil also having been rent that the righteousness of God may be revealed, through sin having been dealt with in a manner due to the claims of His divine majesty, we never read of standing before the mercy-seat, as we do of saints, other than ourselves, before the throne. Even of old it was intended to be a place of privileged access. “There will I meet with thee and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the testimony (Ex. 25:22). So in the Hebrews: the way having been opened into the holiest of all, and the blood carried in there, and sprinkled by our great high Priest on the mercy-seat, (Ex. 9:11, 12), this becomes the blessed and constant place of holy intercourse and worship for us. A throne of grace to which we draw near with boldness, and which we are invited to approach with full assurance, for God is acting in sovereign grace and blessing toward us, but there is no such idea in the whole Epistle, as has been imported into it, of this standing before it. The whole of this teaching in fact carries us, only as far as the brass of the tabernacle, of which the elements of worship in the court were composed, signifying God’s requirement of righteousness from man and in man, in contrast with the gold, which was the display of Divine righteousness; and where we, as priests, draw near, in contrast with the people whose place of approach was the door of the tabernacle.
This setting forth of divine righteousness and display of the character God, in relation to His own glory in the work of Christ, and the infinite worth of that work – though it includes the justification of the sinner, is far more than a standing before the throne without judgment overtaking him which is very much what characterized evangelical teaching before the righteousness of God was brought out or the value of Christ’s resurrection known, and still less the believer’s position in righteousness and glory in Christ on high and all connected with it.