The path of the Church of God is a narrow path, such an one that the mere moral sense will continually mistake it. But this should be welcome to us, because it tells us that the Lord looks that His saints be exercised in His truth and ways, unlearning the mere right and wrong of human thoughts, that they may be filled with the mind of Christ.
The case of Elijah judging the captains of the king of Israel, referred to as it is in the course of the Gospels, brings these thoughts to mind. (See Luke 9:52-5652And sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. 53And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem. 54And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? 55But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. 56For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them. And they went to another village. (Luke 9:52‑56).) The Lord had steadily set His face toward Jerusalem, under the sense of this, that “he was to be received up.” Something of the thought of glory and of the kingdom was stirring in His soul. I believe the consciousness of His personal dignity, and of His high destiny, as we speak among men, was filling Him as He began His journey toward Jerusalem. “It came to pass when the time was come that He should be received up, he steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem, and sent messengers before His face.” The expression of conscious dignity breaks forth from this, and gives character to the moment, and the disciples feel it. They appear to catch the tone of His mind, and therefore, when the very first village through which the path of their ascending Lord lay, refused Him entrance, they resent it, and would fain, like Elijah in other days, destroy these insulting captains of Israel.
This was nature, the natural sense also of right and wrong. Why then did the Lord rebuke it? It was not wanting in either righteousness or affection. The day will come when the enemies of Christ, who would not that He should reign over them, shall be slain before Him. There was nothing unrighteous in the demand, “Wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven and consume them, even as Elias did?” if we but think for a moment of the person and rights of Him who was thus wronged and insulted. Nor was there a wrong affection in this motion of the heart. Jealousy for their Divine Master stirred it: this motion may be honored, the moral sense may justify it fully; but Christ rebukes it. “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of,” said the Lord to them.
But why, again I ask, this rebuke? Was it because they were exacting beyond the claims of Him whom they sought to avenge? No, as we have said, for such claims will have their day; but the disciples were not in the spiritual intelligence of the moment through which they were passing. They had not “the mind of Christ;” they did not discern the time so as to know what Israel ought to do (1 Chron. 12); they were not distinguishing things that differ; they were not rightly dividing the word of truth. This was their error: “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of, for the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them.” It was not a wrong principle of moral action which the Lord discovers in their souls, but ignorance of the real or divine character of the moment through which they were passing. They did not perceive, what thousands (disciples of this day, as they were of that day) do not yet perceive, that the path of Christ to glory does not lie through the judgment of the world, but through the surrender of it; not through self-vindication, but through self-renunciation. This was their mistake, and this is what the Lord rebuked. They naturally thought that this indignity must be recognized; that if the prospect of glory was filling the mind of their Master, and if they themselves, in the spirit of such a moment, had gone before His face to prepare His way, whatever stands in the way must surely be set aside. Nature judged thus; and nature thus judging would be justified by the moral sense of man.
But the mind of Christ has its peculiar way, and nothing guides the saint fully but that: analogy will not do, there must be the spiritual mind to try and challenge even analogies. Certain correspondences were remarkable here—Elijah was but a stage or two from the glory, just going onward to be “received up,” when he smote again and again the captains and their fifties. He was on a hill full of great anticipations, we may say, and the chariots and horsemen of Israel and his heavenly journey were lying but a little before him in vision. The soul of their Master appeared to the disciples on this occasion to be much in company with that of Elijah. But analogies will not do, and the use of them here was confounding everything, taking the Lord Jesus out of His day of grace into the time of His judgments; inviting Him or urging Him to act in the spirit of the times of Rev. 11 when He was in the hour of Luke 4 The witnesses of Rev. 11 may go to heaven through the destruction of their enemies, fire going out of their mouth to consume them that hurt them, as after the pattern of Elijah; but analogies are not the rule. They must be challenged by that “mind of Christ” which distinguishes things that differ, and which teaches, in the light of the word, that Jesus goes to heaven through the salvation and not the destruction of men; through His renunciation of the world and not His judgment of it. Elijah avenged himself on the insulting captains and then went to heaven; the witnesses will ascend to heaven, and their enemies shall behold them: but Jesus takes the form of a servant, and is obedient unto death, and then God highly exalts Him. And so the saint, so the Church. “Ye are they which have continued with me in my temptations. I appoint unto you a kingdom as my Father hath appointed me.”
Here was the mistake; here was the not knowing what manner of spirit they were of. Analogy strongly favored the motion of their minds. The moral sense which judges according to man's thoughts, and not in the light of God's mysteries, justified it. But He who divinely distinguishes things that differ, rebuked it. “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of.” The way of the disciples here would have disturbed everything, counteracting all the purpose of God. They remind me of the servants in the parable of the tare-field, The disciples were right according to man, and so were those servants. Is it not fitting to weed the wheat? Are not tares a hindrance, sharing the strength of the soil with the good seed, while they themselves are good for nothing? The common sense of man, the right moral judgment would say all this, but the mind of Christ says the very contrary: “Let both grow together until the harvest.” Christ judged only according to divine mysteries. That is what formed the mind in the Master, perfect as it was; and that is what must form the like mind in the saint. God had purposes respecting the field. A harvest was to come, and angels were to be sent to reap it, and then a fire was to be kindled for the bundled and separated tares; but as yet, in the hour of Matt. 13, there were no angels at their harvest-work in the field, nor fire kindled for the weeds, but all was the patient grace of the Master. The Lord will have the field uncleared for the present. The mysteries of God, the counseled thoughts and purposes of heaven, precious and glorious beyond all measure, demand this; and nothing is right but the path that is taken in the light of the Lord in the knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.
Nor is the Church to go to heaven through a purified or regulated or adorned world, any more than Christ would have gone to heaven through a judged world. This is to be well weighed; for what is Christendom about? Just practically gainsaying all this. Christendom affects to regulate the world, to keep the field clean, to make the path to heaven and glory lie through a well ordered and ornamented world. It has put the sword into the hand of the followers of Christ. It will not wait for the harvest nor will it go into “another village.” It avenges wrongs instead of suffering them. It orders the Church on the principles of a well regulated nation, and not on the pattern of an earth-rejected Jesus. It is full of the falsest thoughts; judging according to the moral sense of man, and not in the light of the mysteries of God. It is wise in its own conceits.
I know full well there beat in the midst of it, a thousand hearts true in their love to Christ; but they know not what manner of spirit they are of. I know that zeal if it be for Christ, though misdirected, is better than a chill at the heart, or indifference as to His rights or His wrongs. But still the only perfect path is that which is taken in the sight of the Lord, in the understanding of the mysteries of God, and the call of God, and the directions of the energy of the Spirit and not merely after the fashion or dictate of the morals and thoughts of men. And the call of God now demands, that the tare-field be left unpurged, that the indignity of the Samaritans be left unavenged, that the resources and strength of the flesh and of the world be refused rather than used, and that the Church should reach the heavens, not through the judgment of the world by her bands, but through the renunciation of it by her heart, and separation from it in company with a rejected Master.
“He that gathereth not with me scattereth” (Luke 11:2323He that is not with me is against me: and he that gathereth not with me scattereth. (Luke 11:23)), i.e. he that does not work according to Christ's purpose is really making bad worse. It is not enough to work with the name of Christ: no saint would consent to work without that; but if he do not work according to the purpose of Christ, he is scattering abroad. Many a saint is now engaged in rectifying and adorning the world, getting Christendom as a swept and garnished house; but, this not being Christ's purpose, it is aiding and furthering the advance of evil. Christ has not expelled the unclean spirit out of the world. He has no such present purpose. The enemy may change his way, but he is as much “the god” and “prince of this world” as ever he was. The house is his still, as in the parable (see Luke 11:24-2624When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. 25And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. 26Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first. (Luke 11:24‑26)). The unclean spirit had gone out: that was all; he had not been sent out by the stronger man; so that his title to it is clear; and he returns and all that he finds there, had only made it more an object with him. He finds it clean and ornamented; so that he returns with many a kindred spirit, and thus makes its last state worse than its first.
Mistakes of this kind are very old mistakes. David was erring this way when he purposed to build a house for the Lord; but it was an error though committed with a right desire of the heart. The time had not come for building the Lord a house, because the Lord had not yet built David a house. The land was still defiled with blood; and till it was cleansed, there was no place for the rest and kingdom of the Lord. David therefore greatly erred, yet not through double mindedness, but through ignorance. David's error was this—that the Lord could take His throne in the earth, before the earth was purged. The servants in the parable erred, on the other hand, in this that the Church was made the instrument of purging the earth or the world. I might say in the language of the Levitical ordinance that David was about to put on a garment of “divers sorts,” but the Lord prevented it. The motion of his heart—as far as it was expressive of himself—was acceptable with the Lord, but still it was hindered and disappointed. Something to tell us, how jealous the Lord is, that His own principles be observed, and the position in which He has set His servants and witnesses be maintained; nay, that even the most affectionate and jealous desire of the saint though it be valued by the Lord, and get its personal reward or acceptance, can never reconcile the mind of the Lord, to an abandonment of His thoughts and purposes. All would be confusion. David's thoughts, however innocent, and in some sense to be approved of God, would have confused everything, bringing about this strange result—the Lord taking His throne in an uncleansed kingdom, and allowing His servant to give Him rest, before He had given His servant rest! What confusion this would have been! What an evil testimony these mixed principles would have produced! Who could have read in the result, had it been allowed, either the grace or the glory of the God of Israel?
The rebuke of Peter at Antioch was more peremptory; for Peter erred, not like David, through ignorance, but through the occasional fear of man, which, as we are taught and as we experience, “bringeth a snare;” and it was something worse than confusion, it was perversion (in Deut. 20:19, 2019When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them: for thou mayest eat of them, and thou shalt not cut them down (for the tree of the field is man's life) to employ them in the siege: 20Only the trees which thou knowest that they be not trees for meat, thou shalt destroy and cut them down; and thou shalt build bulwarks against the city that maketh war with thee, until it be subdued. (Deuteronomy 20:19‑20) we have an ordinance against perversion, or turning things to a wrong use). But still even if it amount only to confusion, and that by the hand of the dearest and most loved servant, it is not to be allowed, as this case of David skews; as also in his other act of bearing the ark from Kirjath-jearim. The confusion there was not made excusable by all the true-heartedness and religious joy that attended it (1 Chron. 13): it could not be. Place by subjection was not to be given to it for an hour, and, however acceptable with God the motion of David's heart was, these ways must be withstood, because the way, and purpose, and counsel, and thoughts of the Lord are precious in His sight and are to stand forever. It is not that either David or Peter were men of mixed principles, as the word is, or were wearing, as the ordinance speaks, garments of woolen and linen; but these instances in their history illustrate a serious truth, which is much to be remembered, that the Lord will vindicate His own principles, in the face of even His dearest servants, that He will and He must withstand the motions of their hearts, if they go to obscure or disturb His purpose and His testimony, even though such motions have much of a personal, moral character in them, which He can accept and delight in.
But beside these cases of David, and of Peter, and of the disciples in Luke 9, who in mistaken, misapplied zeal for the Lord whom they loved, would have avenged His wrongs with a true and righteous affection, there is a generation who are seen apart from the way of God, through double-mindedness. Such a generation may be tracked all through Scripture, a people of mixed principles, as we say, who wear garments of woolen and linen, contrary to the call of God, and the pure ordinances of His house. It may be humbling to oneself more than to most others, to look at such a generation, but it has its profit for the soul, and its seasonableness in this hour. Lot was associated with the call of God. Like Abraham, his uncle, he left Mesopotamia, and then after the death of Terah, his grandfather, he came with Abram into Canaan, and he was a righteous man, and there was no palpable blot upon him. Abraham betrayed the way of nature, again and again recovering himself, with shame too, from the snare of Egypt and of Abimelech. But Lot was not so rebuked all the time he sojourned in Sodom. We only read of him that his righteous soul was vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked. But withal, he was sadly of the generation I am now speaking of. If Abram's garment was soiled now and again, it was not “a garment of divers sorts,” but Lot's garment was “woolen and linen.” He was untrue to the call of God: he became a citizen when he ought to have been only a sojourner, choosing well-watered plains, and taking a house in a city, when God's witness was going over the face of the country, from tent to tent, and from one tabernacle to another. Fewer mistakes are recorded of him; but what then? He was a man of mixed principles all his days, while Abram all his days was true to the call of God. And his life of false principles leads him into sorrows that are his shame, and that is the real misery of sorrow. He was taken captive while he lived in the plains of Sodom, and was nigh unto destruction after he had removed to the city of Sodom, and he is still, and ever has been in the Church, the witness of one, saved it is true, but “so as by fire.” He had no comfort in his soul; his righteous soul was vexed day by day. This is told of him, but no brightness is there: no joy, no strength, no triumph of spirit is told of him. The angels held much reserve towards him, while the Lord of angels was in nearness and intimacy with Abraham. He had to escape with his life as a prey, when Abraham was on high beholding the judgment afar off. And what is full of meaning, we observe, that after he had taken his own course, and become a man of mixed principles, departing from the track where the call of God would have kept him, he and Abraham had no communion. Abraham will run to his help, in the day when his principles were bringing him into jeopardy; but there is no communion between them. They could not meet in spirit. The saint of God will own him as his kinsman, and do him the kinsman's service; but there is no present communion between them. And this is no uncommon case to this day. Such was Lot. Instead of making his calling and election sure, he is one whom the people of God receive, on the extraordinary testimony of the Holy Ghost rather than on the necessary and blessed credit of his assured call of God, or as one of that people of whom Paul could say, “Knowing, brethren beloved, your election of God.”
Nature prevails sadly and variously in all the recorded saints of God, in some more, in some less, just as the fruitfulness of the Spirit is seen in them in affections and services, in some thirty fold, in some sixty, and in some an hundred. But this is a different thing from being men of mixed principles. It was so with David. Nature prevailed in him at times, but he was never a man of mixed principles. He never deliberately sat down in a connection which was untrue to the call of God under which he had to act. His character was formed by that call, and his ways were according to it, but it was not so with his friend Jonathan; his life was not formed by the call of God, and the energy of the Spirit working in the rule of that call. He acted nobly and graciously at times, but still he was not the separated man. He was not true to the pure principles of God made manifest in that day. He was a man of faith, and of many endearing spiritual affections, such as give him, without reserve, a place in the recollections of the saints. But withal he was not where the call of God would have had him. Saul's court was a defiled, even an apostate, place then. God was with David then. The glory was in the wilderness with him; the dens and caves of the earth hid it in that day. The ephod was with David, the priest, the sword of God's strength, the witness of victory. The flower and promise of the land were with him also, those who gain a name in the cave of Adullam, or in the day of vengeance at Ziklag. Such sons of Israel as these, such as shine afterward in the court and camp of the kingdom, are all with David then. The call of God was then to the caves and dens of the earth, with the son of Jesse, and the energy of the Spirit worked there; but Jonathan was not there. That is the sad story. Jonathan was not where the glory was, where the priest with the ephod was, where the rejected man after God's own heart was, where all the promise of the coming kingdom was. That is the sad story. Jonathan was lovely individually, he had done some noble deeds, and was breathing some heavenly affections; and to the end, we may be sure, David lived in his heart; and many misgivings about his own father, we may be equally sure, that same heart was troubled with. He never personally gave David anything but joy; while we know those who companied with him, even in his afflictions, were betimes both a shame and a sorrow to him. But still his position was not true to the call of God in that day. It kept him apart from all that was of God then though he had the Lord with himself personally. Till he falls on Mount Gilboa, he is with the camp and the court that fall with him there, dishonored and defeated as they were, having ere then lost the glory, and all that was of God nationally departed from them. A common case he illustrates. Was it ignorance of the call of God or double-mindedness? We will not say; but still in this our day there is, like Jonathan, many a saint, dear to one's heart and outshining in personal graces the larger number of the day, who is found apart from the place where the energy of the Spirit, according to the rule of the dispensation, works. Noble and generous deeds are done by them individually; but their connection is their dishonor, as it was Jonathan's—linked with a world which is speedily to meet the judgment, and in courts and camps which are to lie in the midst of the uncircumcised, with them that be slain with the sword. “Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon.” Jonathan illustrates this, and this is known abundantly to this hour. But Jonathan cannot sanction the place; Jonathan's presence did not make Saul's camp or court other than it was. The only impression the soul has of Lot in Sodom is that of a tainted Lot, and not of a sanctioned, purified Sodom. According to the word in Haggai, “If one bear holy flesh in the skirt of his garment, and with his skirt do touch bread, or pottage, or wine, or oil, or any meat, shall it be holy? And the priests answered and said, No.” But “If one that is unclean by a dead body touch any of these, shall it be unclean? And the priests answered and said, It shall be unclean.”
There are however “things that differ,” and the soul exercised of God is to distinguish them. There is a soiled garment, which is however, at the same time, not a mixed garment, a garment of “divers sorts,” of “woolen and linen.” Our way under the Spirit is to keep our garments undefiled; and anything other or less than that is not the way of communion with the Lord. But still, a soiled garment is not a mixed garment; nor is a garment with a thread now and again of another sort, to be mistaken for one whose texture is wrought on the very principle of “woolen and linen.” Scripture, ever fruitful and perfect, exhibits characters formed by what has been termed “mixed principles” and characters which occasionally become tainted by such, but are not throughout formed by them. The life, as we have been seeing, of Lot, was formed of mixed principles throughout. There was double-mindedness in Lot; I say not the same with the same clearness of Jonathan; but still the life of each of them, from the outset to the close, when the scene of temptation set in, was tainted by connection with evil. Lot, though associated with the call of God, was a man of the earth; Jonathan, though witnessing the sorrows and the wrongs of David, continued in the interests of the persecutor unto the end. Their life was thus formed by connections, which were untrue to the way of God and the presence of the glory all through. The garment upon each of them was made of divers sorts, of woolen and linen. But look at Jacob in contrast, and in him we find one of another generation: he was a cautious man, who had his worldly fears and schemes, and calculations; and they greatly disfigure several passages of his life. His building of a house at Succoth, his buying of a piece of ground at Shechem, were things untrue to the pilgrim life, the tent life, which a son of Abraham was called to know. But Jacob is not to be put with Lot; his life was not formed by Succoth and Shechem, though we thus see him there, and out of character there, but he was a stranger with God, in the earth. And in the closing days of his pilgrimage, when he was in Egypt, though with many a circumstance around him there, to tempt him to have it otherwise, we have many a beautiful witness of the healthful and recovered state of his soul.
(To be continued.)