“Heavenly Places.”
But more. Then comes out all God’s delight, and the purposes of His love. He gives us the same place, and joys, and blessings, and inheritance with His own Son! He had become a Man, and as a Man—the firstborn amongst many brethren—He took His place in glory, and God set us in Him there on high. He has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ (Eph. 1:33Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ: (Ephesians 1:3)). He has quickened us together with Christ; raised us up together, and seated us together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:66And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: (Ephesians 2:6)).
Thus His people have, by sovereign grace, this new and wondrous place, and they should be the exponents of a heavenly Christ, on earth, by the Spirit of God. The Church of God, looked upon in the truth of it, is the reflex on earth, produced by the power of the Spirit of God, to the glory of Christ in heaven.
We will now examine this a little more in detail. Forty years’ endurance brought Israel up to the plains of Moab, and Jordan lay before them. The wilderness is a subject of deep interest to our hearts. In no place do we so learn the sympathies and tenderness of Christ as there, where faith and patience are tried and tested—where God leads and feeds, and trains His people in obedience and brokenness of will, for the heavenly warfare of the land. This is not properly the subject of these papers, though we may enter a little upon it in the next chapter. They had been safe from judgment forty years before in Egypt, on the night of terror. They had come out of it by redemption, never to return by that way again. Still they were not come in to the Canaan to which God had purposed to bring them; and there rolled the barrier to the land. The Jordan is commonly taken as a type of death, and very justly. But it is not death physically—or in other words the death of the body. It is the fact of Christ’s death and resurrection being counted to us in grace, and so used that it is death and resurrection morally to us, leading us “in Christ,” into a new scene altogether; a place where we know no man after the flesh, yea, if we had known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him thus no more (2 Cor. 5:1616Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more. (2 Corinthians 5:16)).
We read in Josh. 3, that the Ark of God—borne by the Levites—was first to pass down into the waters of death, the last token of the enemy’s power. There was to be a space between it and the Host which followed after. Then as the feet of the priests touched the brim of the waters, they stood upright on an heap, and all the Host of the Lord passed over into the land in which the Lord delighted, at the other side of Jordan. God had passed over them when He was judging Egypt. They passed over here, when it was a question of sovereign grace bringing them into the land in which He chose to dwell.
None could pass that way till Christ first was there. He must dry up that mighty stream of death in which God’s judgment was expressed. He must thus end human life, which the enemy could touch, before He introduced us into the life beyond it all. The waters compassed Him about, and flowed over His head. Deep called to deep as they reached His soul. But all was borne, and the bed of the river of death proved, as His people traversed it with dry-shod feet, that all had borne down upon Him; “All thy waves and billows passed over me.”
The priests “stood firm,” bearing the Ark; and “the people passed over right against Jericho.” There was the organized strength of the Enemy in unbroken power—the seven nations of Canaan were also there. Thus has the Lord died and risen; ascended on high He has entered, as Man, into a new sphere for man, and has introduced us into life on the other side of death, and given us all that He possesses as Man.
In Eph. 1 This new place is unfolded according to the counsels of God. It is remarkable that there you have an allusion, not only to the Passover and Red Sea; that is the judgment of sin, and redemption of the people of God; but we have also in it the Ark in and out of the Jordan, and in our Canaan—the heavenlies. Thus, the whole wilderness is dropped; fulfilling most fully in the antitype the statement of God’s purposes to Moses in Ex. 3:88And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey; unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites. (Exodus 3:8), and the full result of those counsels in introducing man into His presence on high.
Thus we read (v. 7), “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace.” The blood of Christ, on the ground of which we have this forgiveness and the redemption which is in Christ, is the way into those counsels of His grace, and purposes in Christ before the world began. Then we read (v. 19) of “The exceeding greatness of his power to usward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in heavenly places.” Thus the true Ark of the Covenant has been in the waters, and in the next chapter (ch. 2:3-6), the people of God have passed through. “Even when we were dead in sins, he hath quickened us together in Christ, and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”
We have thus been introduced into this new land. We might say in the language of Psa. 119:33They also do no iniquity: they walk in his ways. (Psalm 119:3), “The sea saw it and fled: Jordan was driven back.” As the Psalmist links together the deliverance out of Egypt of the Red Sea, and the entrance into the land through the Jordan; so does the breadth of the purposes of that God, “who is rich in mercy,” take in, in Eph. 1; 2, our present introduction into “ heavenly places in Christ Jesus,” as the people whom He has cleansed and redeemed!