I have endeavored, in preceding numbers of this series, to trace our translation from a condition of death in sin to one of life and of nearness to God in Christ. I now desire to examine and set forth the nature of the place and position to which we have been translated, by which terms I mean the material sphere appointed us of God, by which our position is characterized. At one time Canaan was the appointed place for God's people, and their position there was necessarily earthly, the temple in Jerusalem being the center of service and worship. No one would assert that Jerusalem in Palestine or the site of the temple was the center of service and worship now; but many who are forced to acknowledge the fact of the former place being done away with are very inapprehensive as to what has been given instead; in a word, as to where the place of the saints is now. This is a most important -question; for a peculiar position once given to the saints of God being lost, unless I can determine definitely the place appointed for them now, I cannot arrive at the nature and character of their position. To this great question then I reply in a word, that the place of the saints now is not earth, but heaven; and consequently abounding on all sides with contrasts to the former one, or Canaan. Nay, so peculiar and distinct is this new and heavenly place from the former or earthly, that if it be not known in itself and preserved inviolate from intermixture with the other and its arrangements, the power and blessing of it will be lost; and if the principle of it be not established in practice, no conception of it, even if it be a true one, can be abiding. Hence, not only the great importance of a correct apprehension of this subject for our individual blessing, but we shall find that it is because of ignorance of it, that there are such dark and confused notions, as well as such a low order of walk among the saints now.
When there are two places, one earthly and visible, the other heavenly and invisible, the one known and acted before men, and within the grasp of the natural mind, the other spiritual and unintelligible, unless to the spiritual, and only to be grasped by faith, it is easy to understand how even the Christian may descend from the spiritual to the natural, and then be reduced to make out a system owning something of the former, but mainly clinging to the latter. Such an intermixture is a mongrel, each element spoiled and diverted from its true meaning; and once the teachers in the Church had fallen into this error, misapprehension and misappropriation of the earthly for the heavenly standing was systematically established.
Unless we see how the earthly has been superseded, not only as to site and center, but as to the whole system and position, and also the divine purpose in thus setting it aside, we shall never confine ourselves to the heavenly, or retain that apprehension of it which would place us above confusion or misapplication with respect to the other. While to the Old-Testament saints there was revealed a heavenly glory, destined for the earth, their hopes. were never detached from earth. Mount Zion, or the city of God, was to them the climax. The Lord had chosen Zion, and although the hopes of the faithful doubtless stretched beyond the Zion of their own day to the far more perfect and glorious manifestation of it yet to come, still it was so truly the spot chosen of God that until it was set aside, and that only for a time, there could be no disclosure of any new point of centralization for the saints. Thus even the beginning of the New Testament opens no new place to us. The Lord Jesus came unto His own; and, if St. Luke's Gospel be carefully studied, it will be seen that every offer was made to Israel, and that in their own land, before any decided rejection of them was adopted. The Lord's being personally rejected was not even enough in God's mercy to demand their cutting off; for what brought their guilt to the unpardonable point was the citizens " sending a message after him, saying, We will not have this man to reign over us;" and this was done at the death of Stephen. It will be remarked that in all Peter's sermons before that event, he speaks of the Lord's return, and the times of refreshing from His actual presence, intimating that He was ready to return to the land with His heavenly glory, as Enoch foresaw His coming; and Jesus as still " standing" was revealed to Stephen before his death. The rejection of Christ being now consummated openly and avowedly by the Jews in Jerusalem, wrath had come on them to the uttermost, and the Lord forsook His own inheritance and abhorred it. The husbandmen had killed the only Son, and now the vineyard must be taken from them. But is the same vineyard given to the saints now? Certainly not. Hence the revelation to Peter when God would open the door of mercy to the Gentiles. Clean and unclean beasts are presented together in one sphere. The sphere was certainly not earthly, for the sheet came from
heaven and was received again into heaven. I adduce this to show that there must be some sphere where Jew and Gentile could meet on common ground, which could not have been in Palestine, the earthly vineyard, unless through circumcision or keeping of the law. Immediately following the revelation to Peter, Paul is called and introduced at once into heavenly glory, from whence Christ identifies Himself with His people on earth; and of this Paul is sent " to be a minister and a witness." Hence what was committed to him is called the gospel of the glory of Christ.
But Paul, too, lingers over Jerusalem, and all beautiful was this in him in its way, and in keeping with the long-suffering grace of God; therefore he does not distinctly reveal the new place of the saints until he is shut up in the prison at Rome, having appealed to the emperor, the ruling head of the fourth power, for a justice denied him from his own nation-the Jews.
It is in the Epistle to the Ephesians that the apostle first distinctly details the nature and consequences of this new place. He had been introduced to it years before, when caught up, as he says, into the third heaven; (2 Cor. 12;) but he does not unfold the knowledge of the mystery of it until he writes to the Ephesians from the prison in Rome. The epistle opens with spiritual blessings in heavenly places; and then the apostle presents to us bow Christ has been " raised up and made to sit down at God's own right hand in heavenly places, far above all principality and power, and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come." And, mark! it is to us-ward who believe, the self-same power by which Christ has been raised up. Just as the good Samaritan set the recovering sufferer on his own beast, so is each believer now wrought on by the self-same power of the Holy Ghost as that which raised Christ from the dead, and set Him at God's right hand in heavenly places. Consequently, inasmuch as the same power works in us as worked in Christ, the head, so are we brought into experience by faith of the exaltation of the Head, and that in the sphere to which He has been exalted.
It is not so much because we have the life of Christ, as because He is our Head, and in virtue of our peculiar relationship to Him; but of this more another time. The truth is simply this:-Christ our Head is raised to a certain place, and the power which exalted Him to that place has wrought in us, His members, to set us there also. Wherefore it is said, " You hath he quickened and raised up, and made to sit together with Christ in heavenly places." Christ being rejected, and earth-as the place of His home-being for the time given up, He has found a place in the heavens; and that place being His, is ours also. Therefore He said, " 1 go to prepare a place for you." The fact of His being there was the preparation of the place for us. We must bear in mind that Christ, being rejected on earth, was called of the Father to sit down on His throne; and that when subsequently the testimony of the Holy Ghost was rejected, the nation and territory of Israel was given up according to the Lord's words, in Matt. 24; and hence, after the death of Stephen, the door of mercy is opened to the Gentiles, and Antioch (where the disciples are first, by divine direction, called Christians) supersedes Jerusalem.
The rejection of the Lord being now complete, the earthly house " left desolate," (Matt. 23:3838Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. (Matthew 23:38),) and the natural branches of the olive-tree broken off, (Rom. 11:1717And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert graffed in among them, and with them partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree; (Romans 11:17),) He appears in the glory to Paul, and sends him to preach-what? The blessings of the land? Not at all; but " to be a minister and a witness both of those things which thou halt seen, and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee." (Acts 26:1616But rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee; (Acts 26:16).) He was to preach, not the " gospel of the kingdom," but the gospel of glory, that glory in which he had seen the Lord, now rejected from the earth; and the things which were subsequently revealed to him when he was introduced into the third heaven. Thus, all hope for Jerusalem being annulled, Paul, the minister and witness of these things, unfolds in the Epistle to the Ephesians, how that Christ has been raised up and made sit down at God's right hand in heavenly places as head of His body-the Church; and this position of Christ our Head must necessarily, because of our relation to Him, describe our position. Consequently the apostle proceeds with that declaration, " You that were dead in sins hath he quickened and raised up, and made to sit in heavenly places in Christ." This is the place now provided and prepared for the saints. And, as it is clear to any sound mind, that the position which had its center in the Holy Land is annulled, we cannot know that we have any position at all, and shall be liable to all kinds of spiritual vagaries, unless we hear the apostle Paul, and understand the revelation made known unto him, and through him unto us, as to what we (i.e., the saints of the present dispensation) are called to now. It would carry me beyond the limits of this paper to show how the earth as a whole was under judgment, so that no other part of it could be substituted for the land of Israel; but if we once admit that the people of that land, once chosen of God for His peculiar inheritance, had so deliberately rejected the Heir that they had been cast off, and therefore the distinct place with which God had for ages connected His words been superseded, we are forced to come to the conclusion, either that the heavenlies are now our place, or that we have no distinct place at all.
I have dwelt on how the apostle connects the saints with their Head, and, as a necessary consequence, establishes them with Hint where He is. But there is also another side of this question as to our place and position, which it is equally blessed for us to consider. It is how the affections of Christ's heart, apart from any doctrinal outline or precept, ranges and fills the heavenly limits described for us by the apostle. He says, when about to leave His disciples, " In my Father's house are many abodes, if it were not so I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you." Now I cite this passage and expression of our Lord, not to deduce therefrom the doctrine of our place, but to show how His heart reached out to a place in the heavens for us; and that His going there, so far from being a moment of distance, or forgetfulness, was, on the contrary, the very event which assured our occupation of that place also; and in this sense it was a preparation for us. In other words, this affection of His heart thus declared corroborates the doctrine and finds scope for itself fully when we see the doctrine, which it could only {10 in a very limited way if the heavenly places were not revealed. Again, the Lord says, in John 17, " For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified;" now, unless there were some place above and beyond the world where He could associate us with Himself, bow could this intention and desire of His heart possibly be realized? Thus, although these breathings of Christ's heart as to His desires, intentions, and purposes for us, are by no means to be regarded as points of doctrine, still it is most blessed to see how all the doctrine enunciated by the Apostle Paul suits and fits in to them, so to speak, in true consistency. Nay, more; that the one explains and substantiates the other, so that if we do not hear the apostle, the utterances of Christ's heart will be very meaningless to us. Again. St. Paul writes, " Our citizenship is in heaven, from whence we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ," &c. Here it is distinctly stated where our citizenship is, and that not as a future but as a present thing; so positively present that we are to be considered as not merely looking for heaven, or expecting to go there after death, as is too much the limits of the faith of Christians of this day, but as by faith there already; and as there looking for an additional blessing-even that our Lord should come from that region in which we are by faith with Him now, and " change our vile bodies, that they may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, by the power whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself."
If we bear in mind that our Lord, as Head of a new creation, has sat down at God's right hand in the heavenly places, He being the pledge and root according to the mind of the Father, of the full development of all this creation in heaven and earth, that we are attached to Him by the Spirit as members of His body, His flesh, and of His bones; so that all distinction between Jew and Gentile is lost, nay, that the Jew is on as new a ground as the Gentile, so that if the newness has admitted the Gentile with the Jew, it is a gain to the Jew to be received in common with the Gentile; for " through him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father;" if, I repeat, we bear in mind all this, and how we are united to Him by the one Spirit in heaven, we can readily understand that we stand together in the self-same Spirit clown here. If our position is that of being seated together with Christ in heaven, as members through the Holy Ghost with the Head, we are, on account of this, baptized by one Spirit into one body, and continue in this spiritual unity down here. But this spiritual unity can never be understood unless our position with Him in heaven is seen and apprehended. Nothing can have a more practical effect on us than a true knowledge of our position; for if my position as a saint now is a heavenly one, the first deduction from this is, that earth as it now is is not my place; and the fact of heaven being accepted as my place instead of earth will very seriously affect me in all my ways on earth; and my own soul's relation to God must be very distinct and close, in comparison to what it would be if my position were an earthly one. Let us consider for a little more closely, how a heavenly position affects my walk on earth.
The earth, we have seen, and ultimately the land, was the sphere where God purposed to shed His blessings on man, which all the faithful looked for, even after power had passed from Israel to the Gentiles; for when Israel had failed, the power which God had entrusted to them passed over to Nebuchadnezzar. Now Daniel, a faithful one, did not, even though a captive in Babylon, surrender his earthly hopes. Nay, while marking his separation in food from the unclean Gentile, he accepts and uses all the power and honor of the world conferred on him. Was he wrong? Not at all. Why? Because he had nothing but an earthly place. Whereas if his place had been a heavenly one, he would plainly have been inconsistent, for he was expressly connecting himself with the power on earth as one of its citizens, which truly he felt he was, and sighed for the day when he should be restored to Jerusalem. Whatever a man's place may be, the better the man is, the more must he desire to improve it; nay, the more truly elevated and refined he is, the more will he seek to conform all in his place and sphere with which he has to do into the same order of taste and excellence; and on the same principle, the more righteous a man is, the more he will seek the regeneration and improvement of the earth, unless he knows that it is no longer his place or sphere, and that it cannot, until it is purged, be the scene of' divine blessing as it once was. Here it is where so many true Christians and righteous souls of the present day are deceived and misled. They feel the world's ruin, and while tasting in their own souls the joy of God in the beauties of holiness, they think that earth must be their place till their death, and that then they will get heaven: a very subtle delusion of Satan. For if I do not get heaven until I die, I must of course have earth; and if earth be my place, I must act in reference to it. And it is with this feeling that Christians set themselves to improve the earth as much as they can with that class of improvements which suit earth, and are thus so far earthly-minded in their notions and purposes. They would probably adduce Daniel as an example of a godly man accepting and using the power of the world to serve his cause. Now a heavenly man walking on the earth would only offer to earth for its improvement what would suit heaven and lead to it, and his influence would be according to the order of his own elevation. You may tell the intrinsic nature of the mind of anyone by the effect it produces, for the effect will always be in correspondence with its own moral power. Thus the very best man whose place is earthly, even though it be only for the present, cannot in moral influence go beyond what would be the best thing for earth, while the heavenly man influences for heaven, and nothing short of that.
If then the believer's position be in heaven, as I have endeavored to prove, and he has not learned it, how sad and disproportionate to the mind of God must all his best labors and intentions be, and how baulked and hindered must he be in comprehending the responsibilities of a calling of which he is grossly ignorant; for it is not only that he does not follow the right one, but he is pursuing the wrong one as if it were the right. I suppose nothing could be more ludicrous, if not profane, (worse than Israel calling on Baal) than to define in words the anomalous position of many saints now. They must have some place: they cannot have two places at the same time. They do not expect heaven until after death; therefore they have a sort of tenant-at-will position on earth and are without any positive place given to them yet. A very unhappy state this, and one in which they cannot understand the Epistle to the Ephesians, nor the use to themselves of the revelation made to Paul when caught up into the third heaven, which was, I believe, in order that he, as a servant, might introduce us into the place prepared for us by our Lord, who as Host is there to receive us now by faith, as He will hereafter receive us there to Himself personally and forever.
Thus briefly have we seen that if we do not know our position there must be eccentricity in all our course; however good may be our intentions, our strength will be misdirected and our testimony unprofitable. What then is the other side of the question? How will the knowledge of our position affect our souls? I have already observed how the heart of Christ claims to have us by faith with Him in His own place, as the only refuge for the troubled heart, and the only effectual sanctification from this evil world. If then His love and purpose claim this, bow can I respond to the claim or enjoy the fruition of it if my position does not tally with this claim of His heart? Impossible! I can never know it unless I reach the spot where the claim is satisfied; and Christ's love is not satisfied either as to my heart or personal walk, unless I am by faith in the place where He is; and therefore if I am not, I cannot know the blessing of responding to- His love, because I have not reached the spot where it is satisfied, and to which it has extended with regard to me. But there is another thing: If I have no place outside of the world or this earth, which is the theater of Satan's power, for he is the " prince of the power of the air," I must at best-because in the enemy's camp-be always apprehensive of danger, without ever enjoying the blissful serenity of peace. True, I may expect that the God of peace shall bruise Satan under my feet shortly; but still, if I have no place but the sphere in which Satan is dominant, however I may feel acquitted from sin before God, I can never feel in the joy of complete supremacy over Satan. I may expect to get across the Red Sea, and to escape from the hand of Pharaoh, but I cannot in known triumph king the song of Moses; and if not, how can I the song of the Lamb?
But mark the contrast! If I have a place now in heaven with Christ my Head, when I realize my position there, I am above, and not merely preserved from, all the power of Satan; for then, through faith, I am conscious of being raised " far above all principality and power, and every name that is named, not only in this world but in that which is to come." In a word, I range in full supremacy with Christ over everything, entering undisturbedly into the fruition of His love; so completely and entirely have I in spirit escaped from Satan's assaults when I have thus ascertained my true place.
It is true, that all his efforts and energy are brought to bear on my soul, seeking to enter into and to possess this land of rest. The seven nations of Canaan in their opposition to the possession of the land by the children of Israel, were as nothing in comparison to the relentless, violent, and unceasing efforts of the wicked spirits in heavenly places to deprive the saint now of the possession of his place there. And the reason of this opposition is very simple; for there alone can the soul enter into (though still in the body) the extent of the love and service of Christ, and at the same time feel itself in unclouded brightness, above and beyond all the _power and assaults of Satan.
The Lord give us grace earnestly to study our position; for in proportion as we know it by faith shall we " walk worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called."