The Jordan
William Kelly
Table of Contents
The Jordan: Part 1
It is evident that the Jordan is a type similar in its character to that of the Red Sea. I need not say that, whether in the type of the Red Sea or the Jordan, it is what grace has given the believer.
But then there is a most sensible difference. At the Jordan there is no such thing as a rod. It is another symbol altogether. The ark of the covenant of Jehovah, borne by the priests, goes right down into the Jordan; and from the moment the priests' feet approach the water, the waters fail on one side and rise up in a heap on the other; and so, while the ark remains in the bed of the river, the children of Israel pass clean over.
And when all is done, we find another remarkable point; that is to say, we have a memorial. It is not Egyptians destroyed. There is no question of judgment. The point is neither the justification of the people of God on the one hand, nor the judgment of enemies on the other. This is the great question of the Red Sea. At the Jordan God was bringing forth His people into His own land. Accordingly it sets forth One, a divine Person, who goes down into the waters of death, and there alone stayed the proud waters till thus the people are brought through.
How does this apply to Christ? I answer, The Jordan finds its counterpart not in Romans but in Ephesians. In Ephesians, accordingly, there is no discussion of justification. Search it through and through, and you will fail to find in it the righteousness of God. If God accomplishes the great work that was before His mind (even before there was a world to be spoiled), if He intended to have a people who should have a nature capable of communion with Himself, a nature that never could be satisfied without being in heaven, that delights in His mind and love; if God intended, I say, to have such a people, and to have them, too, in the nearest possible relation to Himself, to have them as His own children in His own presence, how could justifying come in there? It is evident God does not need to justify such a work as this? I can understand when a person has got wrong, or when we think of the ungodly, that this should be told us. It is an infinite mercy that God has His own blessed way of justifying the ungodly; but there is no notion of justifying that which is perfectly according to God.
Hence in the Epistle to the Ephesians we never have the subject of justification. It is not that the apostle does not look into the state into which those that are the objects of God's mercy had got; for the second chapter is as plain as Romans 3 about the dreadful condition of those that were brought into that relationship. But in Romans we have, in the fullest manner, their sins proved and brought home to the conscience. We have their evil ways all traced fully, and yet God justifies, We have also their evil condition; and yet God takes them out of that condition, and gives them a new place. In Ephesians it is another aspect. The first thought the apostle dwells on is the purpose of God.
It is God's righteousness that justifies, as in Romans; not His mercy. There is not the smallest hint, therefore, of straining a point.
We know a king may, in order to forgive, pardon a person altogether guilty. I do not say the temper of the world would admit it, still less do. I say that man is capable of using such a prerogative as God's grace. But it remains equally true, that it is not merely mercy, but righteousness which justifies, and the believer is the only one that owns his unworthiness and feels his sins according to God.
But in Ephesians another thing appears; God is there purposing from Himself and for Himself; it is God that delights in His own counsel. He means not to be alone in heaven. He means to surround Himself with men thoroughly happy. He means to give them that which would be capable of answering to His own mind and ways, and accordingly in a relationship suitable to it. This is what He does. But what, after all, is their state, when taken up by grace? Dead in trespasses and sins. And this makes it the more remarkable, that there is not a word about justification. But Christ goes down into that death where they lay, goes down underneath their condition, so to speak; and this is the only way in which it is handled in Ephesians. He by grace went down there, and God raised Him up, and set Him at His own right hand in heavenly places. The point in Jordan is, not bringing the people out of slavery, but bringing them into the land, “into heavenly places in Christ.”
Will you say, That is when we die? When Israel crossed the Jordan, they entered on a scene of conflict. I ask, When we die and go to heaven, shall we have to fight there? No. Well then, if so, it is wrong to make it our dying and going to heaven. The passing of the Jordan means, the bringing the believer into “heavenly places” in such a way that he shall fight and win the victory too. This is the meaning of it. How can a Christian be brought into heavenly places while here? This is what the Epistle to the Ephesians tells us.
You will see how different this is from what was found in crossing the Red Sea. Hence the style of doctrine in Ephesians is different from that of Romans; that is the reason why in Ephesians, it is “heavenly places” that are spoken of. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ.”
Yet all this is true to faith now. Of course when we actually go to heaven we shall not lose this place of blessing, but the point that Paul insists on is, that God has already blessed us thus and there in Christ.
The end of the first chapter shows that God raised up Christ from the dead, and set Him in heavenly places; and the beginning of the second chapter shows that in doing this God laid the foundation for our being put in the very same place before God. “God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us even when we were dead in trespasses, quickened us together with Christ,.... and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus.” We have already then crossed the Jordan. It is not that we are to cross it, but that we have crossed it now.
Is Christ “in the heavenly places”? Am I united to Christ now, or am I only going to be united when I die? Am I now in this very place before God, raised up together with Christ, and so “in the heavenly [places] in Christ Jesus?” It is quite evident that the doctrine of the Epistle to the Ephesians is, that we are so; it is notorious that the doctrine of most Christians is, that we cannot be so till we die.
Now, why is it that people do not enter into this truth? The reason is, you cannot be both a prosperous earthly man, entering into that which occupies men here below, and a heavenly man too; but the natural mind would like to make the best of this world, and the best of the next too. The truth is, I must cross the Jordan now as a Christian; nay, I have crossed it in Christ, if I am a Christian. So you will observe I am not going to point out to you what you have to do, but I wish to make plain what God has done for you, if you are Christians. How blessed it is that Christianity does not hold out what I must attain to in order to be saved, but is a revelation of what God has given me in Christ!
God gives me, and you that believe, a salvation so full, that it not only means that we have been brought across the Red Sea (thus made pilgrims and strangers), but that we have been brought across the Jordan into heavenly places, and blessed with all spiritual blessings there. You say, perhaps, it is mysticism. No such thing. It is the very negation of mysticism. For this turns the eye to Christ, and God's work in Christ; whereas mysticis occupies the heart with its feelings about Him. If Christ is my life, and Christ is seated there, it is evident that I have, by the Spirit of God who dwells in me, and who has been sent by that Christ, a divine link with Him who has entered in there. It is thus that God speaks of us according to that which is true of Christ. That is, Christ being there and He being the life of the believer, and the Holy Spirit the power of that life, we are spoken of according to the place that Christ has entered.
The grand point of the Red Sea is what Christ brings us out of, and that of the Jordan is what Christ brings us into. It is quite evident that what God sets forth by this type is the sweet and blessed truth, that Christ having entered into the very place where God means the Christian to be, God would form us according to Him in that which is to be our true home. Our proper home is not this world, nay, not even in the millennial state. Our hope is not any change that will ever take place in this world, but the “Father's house,” where Christ is dwelling. God means that where He is we shall be. It is not merely that Christ will come and bless us where we are (like Israel by and by), but that He will come and take us to where He is; this is what we are waiting for; but meanwhile we are viewed and treated as one with Him to whom we are united there.
(To be continued)
The Jordan: Part 2
I do not mean that we can do without the Epistle to the Romans. The Christian who gets so full of Ephesian truth that he can do without Romans (or, I would add, Hebrews), is on dangerous ground; while he that thinks he can do without Ephesians is flying in the face of God, and the glory of His grace. If He has given us a full cup of blessing in Christ, our wisdom is to—seek to understand what—our portion is; and the great practical business of the, Christian is to live according to the place wherein he is set by God.
If. God has brought me out of the house of bondage, He has also put me in heavenly places in Christ. It is not a question of what I see or feel. It is all very well we should appreciate what we are, but we must believe first; and when we take in the completeness of the deliverance out of Egypt, then we see in type what we are delivered from; and. when we believe our portion in heavenly places, what can we do but bless Him who has so blessed us?
The First Epistle to the Corinthians, though by no means so full of this as that to the Ephesians, brings before us the principle of this truth: “As is the heavenly such are they also that are heavenly; and as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall...also bear the image of the heavenly.” The first thought is, that we are heavenly now; and the second is, that though we are heavenly; we do not yet bear the image of the heavenly, but we shall. What a deliverance from mysticism! Mysticism is merely the craving of the heart to feel within what it would desire to have; but faith avoids this occupation with self, and enters into the truth of God. It may be a mystery; but it is one unveiled, and which God, makes to be most real and intelligible by the power of the Holy Ghost, for God, of His own grace, has counseled, done, and given it all to us in Christ.
Thus you see the passage of the Jordan differs essentially from the crossing of the Red Sea. Even for the children of Israel at the Red Sea there was the rod, the judicial rod of power; which for the Egyptians brought destruction. Besides, there was no lasting memorial set up. When you come to the Jordan, there was a double memorial. Twelve stones were placed in the bed of the river, where the feet of the priests rested; and other twelve were taken out of it and were brought to Gilgal.
This reminds me of another fact that gives us a beautiful link with the Epistle to the Colossians. When Israel passed through the Red Sea, circumcision was not practiced—there was no sign of the mortification of the flesh—but when they passed through the Jordan they submitted to it. Circumcision means the mortification of the flesh. This furnishes another reason why the common doctrine on this point cannot be true; for when we are dead and gone to heaven there is no flesh to be mortified. Alas! it explains also why self-judgment is so feeble in the mass of those who love the Lord. They know the Lamb and His sprinkled blood; they freely realize their deliverance from Egypt into the wilderness, but not at all their position in Him above, nor consequently do they know Gilgal, where the reproach of Egypt was rolled away from the circumcised.
When the children of Israel crossed the Jordan they placed two memorials—one of death and one of resurrection, showing that in every sense death is gone. But more than that, flesh now is mortified. And there is nothing that gives the soul the sense of the end of the flesh, its being judged thoroughly, and the comfort of it, so much as the consciousness of death and resurrection as bringing us into our true place before God.
Hence, in Colossians, the Holy Ghost speaks not only of a baptism, but also says, “in whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands in the putting off of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ” (2:11).
In the next chapter we read “Mortify, therefore, your members which are on the earth.” So there is this double application. According to the book of Joshua they were first circumcised; and, let them move where they might, they come back to Gilgal. This is a call to continual mortification of the flesh, on the ground that we have been once for all circumcised ... Our circumcision was God's dealing with our nature in the death of Christ; but on the ground of this we have to mortify our members. If God has already judged the flesh, what I as a Christian am called to do is to take God's side against my own evil nature. I am called to cherish direct communion with God in condemning any and everything that is unlike Him. This type, you see, is full of direct instruction to the soul, and so far from being a mere theory is eminently practical. I have no doubt this is the reason why people shrink from the types of both the Red Sea and the Jordan. Many would like to know that they shall be protected from judgment, but God would put them in association with His own objects. He gives me a heavenly title that I should have my mind set on things above; for He would have my mind formed by these new and heavenly objects that are where Christ is.
And oh, beloved brethren, what a relief it is that in the common business of this world one can have one's mind and heart set upon what will never perish Let us have our hearts occupied with what is precious in God's eyes. We can take up other things as matters of duty; but the moment we make them objects, we altogether miss the mind of God. It does not matter what the thing may be. Suppose a person at any business; it makes all the difference possible whether he is simply doing it to God as that which He has given him to do, or whether it is what he likes and takes pleasure in, his object being to be great or rich by it. Where this is the case, I am practically making this world to be the scene of my enjoyment. I am not even treating it as a wilderness, still less am I acting as associated with Christ in heavenly places. On the other hand, if I hold firmly, as from God, that even now I am a heavenly man, still, if God has given me anything to do, I do it—no matter what it may be.
Accordingly, in Eph. 5, 6, you find all these earthly ties which may rightly be the relationships of heavenly men and women and children; but the only true power of walking well on earth is to remember that I am a heavenly man. It is not only that I am a delivered man, but I am put in present association with heavenly associations in Christ; and unless I bear this in mind, how can I behave myself suitably to the position I am in?
Suppose you take the case of a member of the royal family that for a time goes incognito to some other country. Though he hides his glory, he carries the sense of it in his heart. The King of England might travel on the continent by the title of the Earl of Chester, yet would he have the secret consciousness that he was Sovereign of an empire on which the sun never sets. So with the Christian: the world does not know his title. The world would think it downright fanaticism to be talking about heavenly persons when here below; but we know not merely this, but that the world is under the judgment of the Lord, and it is only the breath of His mouth that is between it and everlasting judgment. We know that the Lord Jesus Christ is ready to judge the living and the dead.
Oh, on what a hair hangs the judgment of this world l but as to us who believe, judgment has passed forever—I mean judgment as against us on God's part. I do not mean that we shall not have all our ways manifested before the judgment-seat of Christ. We shall all appear, but shall never appear as criminals there. If Christ has brought us now into the favor of God we are not going to lose it when we are risen and glorified.
I beseech of you to hold fast this precious truth. You have passed across the Jordan as truly as you have marched through the Red Sea. You are not only to remember that you are pilgrims, but that you have a living link with heaven; be sure you regard it as your own proper home. The wilderness is merely a place of sojourn, but the heavenly places are our only abiding place. God's purpose to have us in heaven was made before the world was. The world has become sinful, and so has become a wilderness, for there would be no wilderness if there was not sin; but God has delivered us in grace from our sins, and has also brought us in spirit through the wilderness. As a matter of fact, indeed, we have sin, and are passing through the wilderness; but in title, and as united to Christ, we are clear from both. May God in His grace give us to enter more into this truth, and to live in the power of it!
W.K.
(Concluded from page 102.)
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