This epistle is full of instruction as to the Christian’s walk and character. It gives us properly Christian experience—the experience of a person who is conscious of redemption, and is living and walking in the power of the Spirit of God, and in nothing under the power of the flesh. We get instruction in it as to Christian life and directions for our walk.
Where faith is at work, no circumstances through which we may have to pass, can dim or cloud the relationship between the soul and God. What we have to learn is so to live with Christ, in Christ, by Christ, that the link with God in Him is never weakened. You cannot bring faith into circumstances in which this cannot be; for faith brings God in; and as long as faith is exercised, this relationship and confidence in Him never can be clouded—but self must be completely set aside practically that this may be so.
We have, in the second and third chapters, two parts of the practical energy of Divine life. In the third chapter, Christ—the glorified man—has gone up on high, and then I get the energy of divine life running after Him; the one thing that filled the apostle’s eye was, that Christ as man had gone up into the glory; and looking on before him, he saw Christ, and pressed on towards that mark, looking for entire conformity to Him. He casts off every hindrance, counting all things but dross and dung, that he may have Christ for gain.
In the second chapter you get another thing, and that which forms our character down here by the way. Here it is not Christ as man gone up to God in glory, but God come down here in grace and lowliness to man. Both together give us the display of the divine life in us. The energy of the third chapter would make a man hard towards others, but the grace and mind of Christ in the second gives divine qualities. It teaches us the way to get rid of self. If the eye is fixed on Christ, there are no difficulties. The only difficulty is first to get the eye fixed on Him—the heart fixed, and the single eye finds no difficulties whatever, because it counts on God. If we want to run the race thus, let Christ be everything, and all is quite easy. When Christ is before us, as the only object which governs the heart, it, is quite easy to follow Him—in our path through the world we should thus have the mind of Christ. When there is not the judgment of self, there is the working of self, and the working of self hides out God: like the mists from the earth which hide the sun when they arise. But when self is judged, and the eye fixed alone on Christ, the effect is complete conformity and likeness to Him: in the presence of God self dies down. Let us remember, that all we have now got is the power of good in the midst of evil—not the reign of good. The instant that power is weakened or slackened in our ways we slip into the evil which is around.
In God’s dealings with man there is never a restoration for failure of the things set up. Something better is brought in. The Paradise of Eden came first, and man lost it. After the fall there was no restoring man to what he had lost, but Christ was promised, and man introduced by redemption to the Paradise of God. This is the secret of all God’s dealings—what is ruined and lost by the first man is made good far more blessedly in the Second. Then came the law, but the golden calf was made even before Moses came down from the Mount: by and bye He will write the Law upon Israel’s hearts. Again, when the priesthood was established, failure came in immediately: Nadab and Abihu offered strange fire before the Lord, and died; and the consequence of this was, that Aaron never went into the holy place in his garments of glory and beauty. He was consecrated in them, but that was all—so that exercise of priesthood in its verity was gone. So the church has failed. It should have taken care of Christ’s glory on high, but it is mixed up with all that is against it below. The evil is never remedied now by reinstating the thing which failed as it was. See the parable of the tares and the wheat. The Lord sows wheat in the field, and the enemy sows tares. The crop is spoiled, and none is restored; the tares and wheat are allowed “to grow together until the harvest.” But if everything is ruined by the first man, everything is brought in far more blessedly in the second man, who sets all up in perfect glory so, instead of a falling priesthood, I get Christ the perfect High Priest. So, with the law, He will write it on Israel’s heart at another day. So, also, when the Church with all its wondrous privileges has failed so totally-attaching the name of Christ to the most abominable evils: by and bye Christ will come to be “glorified in his saints.” (2 Thess. 1.) This failure of the first man in every trial is indeed a humbling and sorrowful thing. God sets up the thing aright: He plants a wholly right seed: then, what He has set up, turns into the degenerate plant of a strange vine to Him. (Jer. 21.) As regards man, the end of all this is judgment: but in Christ we have the fullness of blessing. Still, no failure can break the link of faith of the individual with the power of God—the very place where God’s grace shines out brightest is when things seem darkest. So it was with Christ in that lonely moment when all the disciples forsook Him and fled. Christ in it all glorified God! There are no circumstances in which faith may not reckon upon God. Nothing can separate us from His love. If faith is exercised, it brightens the darkest circumstances. We have the power of good in the midst of evil to surmount it. The days may be darker or brighter, but if you get an Elijah alone, (for though there were 7000 who had not bowed their knee to Baal, he thought he stood alone); the faith that kept him in the midst of evil, will take him up to heaven without death! The secret of all is, “Let the same mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”
(To be continued, D.V.)