Ephesians 2
The planting of the soul in grace is the withering of the principle of legality. The principle of blessing for service is really horrible. Am I never to do an action but to one who deserves it? Is the blessing God gives to be measured by what I deserve? What I deserve is condemnation, and the knowledge of this by the Holy Ghost withers up this self-righteousness, and throws me over on grace. Thus I get to know God.
In the first three verses of this chapter we get our whole history, all that we were according to God. "You hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world." This world is Satan's world, and now it is given up to judgment. The condemnation of the world is a settled thing. In 1 Cor. 11, it is said that believers are chastened of the Lord, that they may not be condemned with the world. The world is thus a finally condemned thing; and this too since Christianity began. For until Christ was rejected, God was going on with the world; but the crucifixion of His Son proved, that by nature men were children of wrath. Then again, we were, besides, under the power of Satan, and fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind. Well, it is all this that casts us upon God. And what we want is to be cast upon God. When we are entirely thrown upon God, He takes us out of the whole thing.
This is what we get in the fourth verse. There the apostle turns at once over to the other end, passing over regeneration, &c., and showing another spring of blessing altogether. He turns the eye away from everything in man, and shows us what God is. "But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ." First, we have God rich in mercy; and then the power by which He has quickened us together with Christ; Christ being looked at as dead for our sins. What He has done for me in Christ is the way I come to know what God is, and I delight in it. I delight in what bud is: of course, I must have the nature to understand it—love; this we have, and so we understand that what God is for us is love. The more we are cleared from mere nature, the more we understand Christ's ways, why He did things, and how He did things. What was He in the world? Why? Everybody's servant, no matter what they were. Dear me! I say, Is this God? Yes! He hath declared Him. What a new set of thoughts and feelings this produces in the soul! God's nature becomes worked into it. There is an individual link of the soul with God; and it is life eternal to know God thus. It may be that a person cannot explain it, but he has got it. It is a kind of reasoning for which human reasoning is not a match. Thus the soul comes to know the wondrous blessed harmony of what God is for itself, because, in Christ, He has condescended to every want and weakness.
In the end of the chapter we have the Spirit as the power by which we have access through Christ to the Father, with all this revelation of God, full unhindered intercourse with Him. It is the Spirit of God who reveals God's nature to me and in me, and so makes my heart answer to the love of God, for God is love. And just as the love comes down, my heart goes up. What a divine character of communion It is true worship. It is the divine up-flowing answer to divine down-flowing love.
And besides this individual communion with God, we are indissolubly united to one Head,-"builded together in him for an habitation of God through the Spirit." Thus there is unity and fellowship. Thus every individual is indissolubly bound to every other. You have not one Holy Ghost and I another. So far as I have life in Christ, I have it for myself, and not for another, but it is the same Holy Ghost in all. As there is one soul in the body, so there is one Holy Ghost in the body.
Thus God has wrought in us individually, and, besides, by one Spirit builded us together. He has awakened and created us anew by this glowing and blessed revelation of Himself. What a thing it is to know God in this way!
What is especially important is this individual communion with God; and we grow in this by studying that which produces it, what God is in Christ.