One of the main characteristics of mysticism is its distortion of objective and subjective truth. Instead of preserving the scriptural balance between the two, the subjective side is often emphasized to such a degree that the objective side, although admitted, is largely obscured.
God’s Thoughts
Let us look at the distinction between objective and subjective truth, so that we may have God’s thoughts about them. First, we get God’s thoughts in His own Word — they are His; then when we receive them from Him, they are the same in us — we think His thoughts. Objective truth is the way God reveals Himself in Christ, who is the positive expression of God before man. Then we find that subjective truth is that which is produced in us by the Holy Spirit, who does not speak from Himself, but rather glorifies Jesus in taking of His moral graces and in showing them to us as our own. It is thus that He creates in our consciences and affections a response to the objective truth presented, and by this means makes believers the effects of God’s testimony to the work in which He has been perfectly glorified and fully revealed. But observe that this subjective action is only carried on by placing an object for faith before the soul, as the Lord said, “When He, the Spirit of truth, is come . . . He shall glorify Me: for He shall receive of Mine, and shall show it unto you” (John 16:13-1413Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will show you things to come. 14He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall show it unto you. (John 16:13‑14)).
Faith and Peace
In Romans 5:11Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: (Romans 5:1) we read, “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Here we have objective faith producing subjective peace, and these must never be separated nor confounded. The word “therefore” takes us back to the end of chapter 4, where we get the object of this faith, namely, the attestation of God to the work of Christ on our behalf, for whom it was accomplished. In chapter 5:5, we get our subjective state again referred to, namely: “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us,” but we are instantly taken to the objective truth in chapter 5:68, namely, the love that saves, which is greater than the things given, for this is the means by which God the Holy Spirit produces a subjective response which suits the Father’s affections. Thus Christ and His love are not only the source, but the intimate Object of our new and dependent life, by which the subjective state becomes developed and holiness produced, for holiness is the development of love.
Christ in Me
When the truth is received into the heart, Christ is received, and this humbles me, because it has to do with the evil that is in me; then it is not only Christ as an object outside of me, but a living Christ in me. But a mere external knowledge, that has no power over the conscience, only puffs up (1 Cor. 8:1). When, however, the evil within is discovered and judged by the conscience, I possess Christ as part of my own moral being. My senses are exercised to discern between good and evil, between what is Christ and what is “I,” as long as I am in this body with sin in me. When Christ is thus received, it is as if He were saying to me, I have settled all the question for you between the old thing and God, and now you settle the question for me between the new thing versus the world, the flesh and the devil. And this is only practically done in dying daily, by “always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body” (2 Cor. 4:10). This is the only way practically to rise above the evil (self), as God is above it.
His Workmanship
“We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:1010For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)). This passage evidently refers to the newly-created character by which Christ is exhibited in His saints, or subjective truth, for that which is of value to God is not the amount of work we think we do, but the measure of Christ we present to others, in the lowliness, the gentleness and the grace which He exhibited when here. (Compare John 1:1818No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. (John 1:18) and 1 John 4:1212Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle? (John 4:12).) And I need not say, Christ must be in the vessel by occupation with Him outside of the vessel, in order to produce these beauteous graces in the world where He has been rejected, otherwise it would be only improved self, that is, a kind of mystical mixture.
Truth and the Conscience
The conscience should never allow anything to come between itself and God (Heb. 4:1212For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)). It is the truth which commands the conscience and makes it perfect, because the truth is God’s testimony to the efficacy of atonement, of which Christ is now the display. It is the unveiled glory of God in accomplished, eternal redemption — a wonderful truth that there is now, for faith, no veil on the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ and no veil on the eye of faith that sees it. It is this that makes us superior to evil, even to the evil that is in us.
Every saint with an awakened conscience is brought into a spiritual combat between good and evil, the knowledge of which we have acquired through the fall. There are two powerful principles in every believer, one of good and the other of evil. We must either rise above the evil as God is above it, by having Christ instead of self, or we can be mystical and pharisaical in the combat and miserable, if honest with ourselves.
But when the conscience is truly awakened and when we are content to take Christ instead of self, then this Object is set before us and, acting on us, takes us above the evil as God Himself is above it, by impregnating us, in the power of the Holy Spirit, with the meaning of the unveiled glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, which is set before our faith to feed upon, as it says in 2 Corinthians 3:18; 4:4,6.
Christ Viewed in Three Ways
In order to facilitate our spiritual understanding of what this blessed Object conveys, we may look at three distinct ways the Scripture views Christ. First, Scripture shows Him to our faith before incarnation. We read of Him in John 1: “In the beginning was the Word.” Here we get His eternity. The second way Scripture views Him is in the lowliness of incarnation: “The Word [became] flesh.” “God was manifest in the flesh.” But, observe, He is the same Person here as He was before He became a Man. When He had given up “the form of God,” according to Philippians 2, He never ceased to be the One who had given it up. It is thus we find the moral glories of His humiliation far more wonderful than the dazzling brilliancies of those glories which He had with the Father before the world was, but which He had clothed with the humiliation and lowliness of the One who, “though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich.” Finally, Scripture looks at the Lord in a present way — the One who went into death and is now risen out of death, creating a place of acceptance for us. In His present, risen state out of death, He has become the life of every believer, as well as his righteousness before God. Thus, righteousness is not in me, although there is an answer in my conscience to what Christ is now, for me, as righteousness before God, instead of in my sins. Because of all this, I am able to reckon the old thing dead.
Transformation
In 2 Corinthians 3:18 we get another forcible teaching, showing the distinction between objective and subjective truth and the impossibility of separating them. Faith lays hold of the first part of the verse, “We all, looking on the glory of the Lord, with unveiled face, are transformed,” because the communication of the truth, through faith, changes us into the image of that which has been communicated. We “are transformed according to the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Lord the Spirit” (JND).
Such exhibitions of Jesus as He now is create an answer to and make the poor vessel resemble the Object of its delights. We are changed into the same image from glory to glory, our state being formed by the revelation of that into which Christ has entered. There is first the Object, and then there is an answer in the conscience and heart to this “glory that excelleth.”
H. H. McCarthy, adapted