(Rev. 2; 3)
We are told in Rom. 2:16 of a coming “day in which God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ,” and that according to the gospel, which teaches the complete condemnation and removal in judgment of the first Adam, or man in responsibility before God, and the substitution of the second Man, “the Lord from heaven.”
From the beginning and down the course of the history of this world, God has passed man in his responsibility to bear fruit for Him through various trials or testing processes; but, although the result has always been manifest and alas! but too manifest failure, yet it was not until the rejection and death of the Lord Jesus that the ground was laid for the arraignment of the roots or sources of action and thought in man, or for our revealed partaking of the life and nature of the new man in whom alone are God's claims met and honored.
We should expect as a necessary result of this that in any subsequent dealing of God on the basis of responsibility, the springs and motives of those in any way under test would be made prominent; and we find that it is so in fact. For while the cross undoubtedly proved that man standing before God solely on the ground of his responsibility is lost, yet it did not abolish responsibility, nor has it deterred rash and foolish man from assuming an ability, which he possesses not, to satisfy the requirements of the new position into which believers are brought through it; so that we find since the cross both responsibility established upon new grounds, and the failure of men who are ostensibly subject, to its claims.
Men have assumed the name and privileges of the Christian and of the church of God without possessing the reality of either; and hence the world has seen, instead of the grace of Christ and the fruits of the Holy Spirit, the sad evidences, in failure amongst those bearing His name, that man has once more undertaken to yield that which he is incapable of yielding. Not that real Christians have always been blameless: no one who truly knows the Lord would say so. But they have known, when the sense of failure and folly and sin has humbled them before Him, what it is to have the spring and source of their ways brought to light, and through grace they have not shrunk from bowing afresh to the judgment passed upon it; while with the others who have profession but no real life in their souls, every solemn appeal or dealing of God has but served to display in detail the absence of every motive which should characterize God's people.
The nominal or professing church has thus been made in a wonderful way the scene of the testing of man's heart, for the church, viewed as the visible assembly of God on the earth, has been responsible as the witness of God to the earth since Pentecost in Acts 2, and the fact that God has been dealing with her on the basis laid by the death of Christ has given terrible fullness and completeness to her trial.
It is in this light that I desire the searching words of these two chapters to reach and exercise our hearts. They are wondrous words—wonderful in their power of searching out the “secrets of men,” but this is good for us, beloved, and if they have their proper effect in us they will set the blessed One more distinctly before us as motive and pattern, and everything needful to enable us to stand joyfully and proudly before God as “overcomers.”
The Lord has often of late years directed our hearts to these seven Epistles, and has made us happily familiar with them and with the thought of the comprehensive view of the church's history which they embrace, while being primarily words addressed to seven assemblies which existed at the day in which John by the Spirit wrote.
Each one deals with a distinct and different condition, whether we look at them in the larger or lesser character, the Lord, always clothed in divine authority, being seen in suited light for each while the reward to the “overcomer” has reference both to the condition in which he is found and to the character in which the Lord declares Himself.
Following out the thought which presents them as giving a historical picture (though leaving aside for the moment the mere literal interpretation of this in earthly historical events) we find that the order in which the Epistles are arranged, whether we look at the various conditions, or rewards, or characters of the Son of man, points plainly to the various stages in the trial of human responsibility in the world. While however there is this analogy on the surface, on looking deeper we see that the actual details of the trials unfolded in these Epistles stand in contrast to similar details in the history of man, in consequence of the change in the relation of God to man, of which I have spoken, and we are thus shown that the secret springs of all these things are brought to light in God's dealings with the church and the true issues of trial are here declared as there is also laid bare the true, because divine, object of the testing. So that we learn that the church has been passed, in her case in this spiritual way, through the whole of the tests applied to man.
Failure, alas, has been invariably the general result and this we know is soon to be closed by final judgment on all that is nominally Christian—one reason why it is such final judgment as 2 Thess. 1; 2, declare being given to us in the character of the trial under which failure has been manifested.
We should notice also that inasmuch as it is responsibility which is in question, the blessings to the overcomers, high though they are, do not reach to the height of those which we have in heavenly places and in union with Christ as members of His body, of which Eph. 1; 3 speak; and this is because these are out of the range of responsibility being “by grace” absolutely. The Lord grant that the sense of possessing these may abide in our hearts.
(1.) Ephesus. The place from which the Lord speaks the message to Ephesus (ver. 1), as well as His blessed promise to the overcomer (in ver. 7), turns our thoughts at once back to Genesis, and to that which was the first step of man's course in the world.
Of old, the garden of Eden was the scene of human trial, and the Lord God was not far from those in whom His heart was interested and whom He had surrounded with the blessings of His goodness. Their obedience was the only thing under test—for there was no evil practice as yet to overcome or resist—and while His goodness was trusted and His will acknowledged as supreme, they had free access to the tree of life, for “out of the ground” had the Lord God “made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, and the tree of life also in the midst of the garden” (Gen. 2:8-9); and also as we read in Gen. 3:8, “they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the midst of the garden in the cool of the day.”
Here the same Lord, whom John saw in all His divinely-given glory (chap. 1:12-18) again walks in the midst of the scene in which the trial of His responsible witness is taking place (see ver. 1). He is there to encourage and reassure, if there also to measure divinely the work being done for Him: but whether for blessing or testing He lets us know that we have to do with Him “who walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks.”
As when man was tried in Eden, there is here no present evil practice noted as a thing to be resisted or overcome, and this appears more remarkable in contrast with almost all the other churches wherein such is manifestly denounced;
The state of the church as at first established, as shown us in the early chapters of Acts, is indeed one of wonderful power and beauty, and also one of magnificent privilege.
I go to Acts 2; 3; 4, instead of to Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, for the antecedent to the Epistle sent by John to the church at Ephesus; because Paul's Epistle unfolds the infinite extent of grace and the height of heavenly blessing which are eternally the portion of every saint and of the church as His body, quite apart from and beyond the reach of any question of responsibility; while Acts shows rather the results of grace in the manifest position of the church, her continuing in which was a matter which her practice would decide, and in fact did.
Nothing can surpass however the completeness of God's work in establishing her in all the integrity of the new order which He thus instituted, and the scene, as we read these chapters in Acts, is filled up with the evidences of divine power which was at the disposal of those brought into this new sphere, and with the manifestations of that “great grace” which “was upon all,” enabling them to enter into all the reality of their position.
Although all this took place in this world, into which sin has entered, and though those then forming the church were in themselves sinful men, yet so thoroughly did God do His work that evil was forcibly quelled and practically banished from the scene by the power and energy and fervor of the new life, whose activities are thus the only exercises we see or with which they were then acquainted.
Would to God, we may well say, it had remained so! but we can see how it was so, and how the church was thus established in all the freedom and purity and energy of divine life; in all the integrity of that life which has nothing to do with evil as founded upon the banishing of sin and breaking the power of Satan in the cross of the blessed Lord. What was left to her was thus just to walk abroad in the activity of this life, and to know nothing but its exercises, the secret of this being, as Rev. 2:4 shows us, that the heart must be kept subject to God.
The Lord shows us plainly therefore in the message to Ephesus that it was simply love which was under test. “I have against thee,” He says to the assembly (and it is the only thing He has against her), “that thou hast left thy first love, Remember, therefore, from whence thou art fallen and repent and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee and will remove thy candlestick out of his place except thou repent.”
We can understand this stress laid upon love only in view of Him by whose light all secrets are to be, and to faith are even now, revealed for He has shown us that in His own blessed person and ways; as the spring is deeper than the stream; so love is the source and the only source of all true obedience. (See for instance John 14:30-31.) Indeed we may rightly go much farther and say, source of all excellence, for “love is of God, and every one that love this born of God and knoweth God.” Thus it is that there is such a striking contrast presented in the reward promised to him who “overcometh” under such a test as compared with that tree of life to which Adam had access. “To him that overcometh,” says the Lord in verse 7, “will I give to eat of the tree of life which is in the midst of the paradise of God,” and well we know, whose hearts have learned of Him, that what He stamps as thus absolutely “of God” can never be removed. The paradise of earth may be effaced, for even the first heaven and the first earth are to pass away; but that “new” scene which will be at once the tabernacle and the throne and the creation of God and the Lamb will remain forever. Blessed be His grace which has given us to have our portion in Him there!
(2.) Smyrna. “Sin entered into the world and death by sin,” and “death reigned from Adam to Moses,” said the Holy Spirit through Paul, “even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come;” and herein we have the key to the condition and the trial set forth in the epistle to Smyrna. That which is in itself the wages of sin the Lord in grace uses for the good of souls, seeking to awaken hearts and consciences by its means when He takes it up for chastening in order to prevent, if possible, farther falling away. Before His own blessed and wondrous death, when the truth as to sin and death, and God and man, was displayed, and in presence of Him the true light and the captain of salvation death stood forth as the “power of darkness” and the terror of him who had the power of death, that is the devil—before this, the full significance of death and tribulation was not known. Now however in Smyrna that which constitutes the trial is plainly seen to be the power of Satan up to and ending in death (see ver. 10), and this because the declension in the: Ephesus trial has given him a hold on those under test. So that we have here a very manifest step in the unfolding of the sources of the church's failure: for the slipping away from love, and so from” His love as motive first of all, leaves the heart exposed to other objects which are not Christ. Satan has power over these other objects and thus over Our hearts when desiring them, and he is the very agency which leads in to the world and on to sin; and we well know that “when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” How gracious of the Lord to turn these very things by His word into servants for the good of His own. to send a word of promise to the overcomer directly to encourage him in such a state of things all around him, and above all to present Himself in the glories which He won in the field of death. “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life,” He says (ver. 10); and again, “He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death” (ver. 11).
Αll this is in contrast to the trial of man from Adam to Moses when he was really exposed to Satan's power and working, but visibly with the testimony of the presence of death as the only standing public witness on God's part to deter him from sin and turn him to God, and this with little real difference whether after or before the flood, which was itself the most solemn form of this testimony. But just as the lake “which burneth with fire and brimstone” is an infinitely more awful flood than those waters of judgment which once overwhelmed the world, so is the “second death,” which that lake typifies (Rev. 21:8), infinitely beyond that physical death which is but its faint shadow, although its portal also; and so we see in the solemnity of the issues which are raised what is now the depth and completeness of the trial.
So too, learning what it really is to be tried with Satan's power, can we estimate in some little measure what is His value who appears for our hearts as “the first and the last, which was dead and is alive.” He has gone through death; He has gone through the terrible waters of judgment; He has fathomed too the awful depths of exclusion from God's blessed presence, aye and fathomed them as the lost in hell will never be able, but He, the same One, thank God, is alive, the first in resurrection. It is our delight through grace to own Him as first of all in His own personal glory and Jehovah in infinite endurance too, but He loves to make us Think of those glories which attach to Him as the consequence of undertaking our cause in death. And thus in view of all that we find death—the death which had a claim on us—to be, we know that He is “the last Adam,” in blessed relation to us, the life-giving Spirit (see 1 Cor. 15); as well as the “first-born from the dead,” the “first-born among many brethren!”
(To be continued.)