"Our
fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in
Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship. Jesus saith
unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when neither in
this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father...
But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall
worship the Father in spirit and truth: for such doth the Father
seek to be his worshippers. God is a Spirit: and they that
worship him must worship in spirit and truth." (John 4:20,21,23,24).
Where does everything begin in
relation to God, and therefore, in relation to the enemy in his
counterfeit? It begins in the realm of worship. The beginning of
everything is worship, in relation to God. That is, God having
the central and supreme place of recognition, acknowledgment, of
government. In our complete obedience, surrender, in every part
and phase of our being, God having supreme right. Worship begins
there. It is a relationship, not only an exercise. It is not
something that we do in specified ways and methods. It is some
attitude of the life, some place which God has in the entire
consciousness. That is worship.
Now if Satan is to counterfeit
and take God’s place, worship is his objective. With the
first Adam that was his objective; to draw man away from giving
God the supreme place, that he might take God’s place. He
supplanted God in the reverence and the acknowledgment and the
obedience of man and captured worship and became “the god of
this age”. When the last Adam, the Second Man, came and
entered officially, publicly upon the great work that He had come
to do, the one thing that the adversary sought to capture was His
worship. “All these will I give thee if thou wilt worship
me.” He has betrayed himself; he has shown his hand. If he
could do the same with the last Adam as he did with the first, he
has defeated the object of a new race.
Now it is just here that we have
got to have light. We have read John 4 from the twentieth verse.
The woman is saying “Our fathers worshipped in this
mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem men ought to worship.”
Jesus said unto her, “Woman, the hour cometh, when neither
in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, will men worship the
Father. Believe Me, the hour cometh and now is, when the true
worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.”
In spirit — a small “s”, not a capital “S”.
Oh, what is this? This represents a new regime, a new order. This
is the crisis of the Cross in the realm of worship, the basic
thing. But what has happened? Jerusalem was definitely, divinely
ordained as the seat of honour and worship. The Samaritans
imitated with temple and mountain the system which was at
Jerusalem and worshipped the same God. But God had brought into
the world that system of worship at Jerusalem; He had projected
that. It was a temple, a building, a piece of elaborate
ecclesiastical architecture with priests, with robes and
vestments, burning incense, offering sacrifices, making prayers,
reading Scriptures, and many other things. Yes, God had brought
that in, and now the Lord Jesus was setting the whole thing
aside, and in so doing, implying as clearly as anything could be
implied, that this is not true worship. It is a comparison which
is almost invidious. “Neither in this mountain, nor at
Jerusalem, will men worship the Father. But true worshippers
shall worship in spirit and in truth.” “God is a
spirit.”
Where
Christendom is Astray
What has happened, then, if this
is not the truth, what is the truth? That is where Christendom
has gone astray. That is the divide between soul and spirit. Not
something which was but a type, an illustration, a set of
symbols. God never intended that to be the final thing, never
intended man to make that a thing in itself, never intended that
that thing should go on indefinitely. It was brought in to
illustrate and represent something else and its time for duration
was until the Lord Jesus came. It all pointed towards Him, led up
to Him, spoke of Him and His Cross in which that which was merely
of the soul would pass, and that which was of the spirit would
come in. What is the spiritual life in the matter of worship? Oh,
it is not ecclesiastical architecture, it is not vestments, it is
not ordinances, it is not rites. They pass out with Calvary. The
perpetuating of anything like that is a contradiction of Calvary.
See where we are today. The maintenance of that sort of thing,
beloved, is because of a failure to perceive what the Lord Jesus
has brought in.
What, then, is spiritual
worship? It is getting back behind all that and seeing the
spiritual meaning. Those sacrifices which were brought and
sacrificed were looked into and most carefully turned over, if
peradventure there might be a flaw, a blemish, a taint, an
inconsistency, a double element, two colours, two kinds. If any
such mark could be found the whole thing was rejected. When,
however, after careful inquiry and investigation not a flaw or a
blemish could be found, and God’s representative with the
keen eyes of an expert could pronounce over them the familiar
“Tetelestai” — “It is perfect”, then
they were offered to God. And the truth embodied in the type was
this, that the only fellowship with God is on the basis of the
spiritual perfections of the Lord Jesus.
Worship is no longer bringing of
animal sacrifices but bringing up from the heart an appreciation
of the perfection of Christ. That is worship. The vestments of
old were only types and figures and illustrations. The priestly
apparel was speaking all the time in type of a righteousness and
beauty and glory which is the nature of the God-Man, the Lord
Jesus. It is given, imputed and imparted to the one who by faith
apprehends Christ. We who are in Christ, in the sight of God, are
wearing garments of beauty and glory and holiness. Why, then,
perpetuate a system? The Lord Jesus put all that away in His
Cross, it is all gone. That is what He means by worshipping in
spirit and in truth.
The temple and the tabernacle
were only types, speaking of that spiritual fellowship of the
saints as joined to an exalted Head, one Body, the Temple of God.
The boards of the tabernacle tied together by the bands only
speak of saints with the imputed righteousness and holiness and
glory of God laid upon them, bound together in one spirit, one
Body, with the “joints and the bands”. The fitting
together of the stones of the temple wrought in the quarry and
brought together without the sound of hammer or axe, silently
fitted in, only speaks in foreshadowing of the living stones
built together for a spiritual habitation. God now indwells not
temples made with hands, but a spiritual body, the members of
Christ joined to Him.
Why, then, perpetuate a thing
which God has dismissed in the Cross, and keep to the lower, fail
to reach the higher, the fact that “we who are many are one
body”? Do you see where things are astray today? I know how
sweeping this is, but all this has to do with worship.
Now note that when there is a
failure to recognise, to know the spiritual meaning of all this
and to enter into it, and a maintaining of the old thing, you are
still on a soul-level and you are open to deception. The whole
thing may be a ghastly deception. And how does that deception
work? In this way, that so many good Christian people are
absolutely in bondage to a traditional system which is cutting
clean across divine revelation for them. It is their traditional
system which is simply barring the way to the spiritual
revelation. The Cross of the Lord Jesus represents the liberty in
the spirit for God to lead into the fullness of His life and
light. That is the whole purpose of the letter to the Hebrews. It
was for that very purpose; that here was a people that had
received light concerning the true nature of fellowship with God
in Christ. The Lord Jesus had taken the place of the temple and
the priesthood and the sacrifices and the ordinances, and even
the sabbath. The sabbath was no longer merely a point of time but
related to a Person. God had reached His rest in Christ. All God’s
works were finished in Christ. God had entered into His rest when
Christ perfected the work of God in redemption on the Cross.
Now that is no longer a matter
of form, ceremony, external rites, buildings, priests,
sacrifices; it is all Christ. They had seen that; He had called
upon them to go outside the religious, formal, historic,
traditional camp, and that brought persecution, ostracism,
isolation, loneliness and all manner of things. The official
religious people made it very hard for them because of that. The
price to be paid for what is truly spiritual and heavenly was and
is great, and they were dangerously in peril of going back to the
old thing. The letter to the Hebrews was just written to save
them from that peril, and to more fully tell them about the great
change that had come about in the Cross, the work of the Lord
Jesus. One system had passed, the earthly representation, and the
other, the heavenly reality, had come in. You know how that
letter speaks about the “pattern of things in the heavenlies”
and “the heavenly things themselves”. The letter comes
to the great conclusion in “We are come to the heavenly
Jerusalem, to the blood of sprinkling, to Jesus the mediator of a
new covenant”, come to that in Him.
Now you see historic
Christianity as such, traditional Christianity as such, may still
keep us on a soul-level of worship where we must have a certain
kind of building with certain kinds of windows, with a certain
kind of music, and certain kinds of prayers, certain kinds of
people and certain kinds of dress, and all this to “aid”
our worship: all this to make real our fellowship with God. It is
living back on pre-Calvary ground and it may be all soulish, and
it may just be obstructing the path to a full personal inward
spiritual life with God.
Free from
Outward Systems
To know the Lord in Life we must
be free from the Grave Clothes of Outward Systems. Beloved, it is
as true as anything I have said, that if you want to know the
Lord livingly in greater fullness you have to be free from every
external control of religion, you have got to be free and open to
the Lord, you have to be free in the spirit. Formalism has got to
go and reality and life have got to come in.
There must be a personal life in
God, and that is not dependent upon place or anything outside and
round us. That is dependent entirely upon our spiritual
fellowship with Him. It can be as real, as blessed in a dingy
rat-infested Bedford jail as it can be in the most gorgeous
ornate cathedral. Oh, yes, some of the most wonderful fellowship
with God has been in the most unlikely places. You need no “helps”
of that kind when you know God. Your life is with God.
Now remember, that letter to the
Hebrews was written in anticipation of something. The Apostle
knew that before very long the whole of that Jewish system would
be in ruins. The Lord Jesus had prophesied it, that there should
not be left one stone upon another. It would be scattered to the
four winds. There would be no temple, no altar, no sacrifice, no
festivals, no priests. The whole thing would cease and be smashed
in fulfilment of the divine prediction. What would happen to
these people if their fellowship with God was bound up with that?
It would go. It would go with the system, and He wanted to save
them from that thing which, being bound to earth, would go, and
to bring them into a new thing which belonged to salvation.
Fellowship with God must be of that kind, that whether
we can go to meetings or not we have still got the Lord. Whether
we have nice soulish music or not, we have still got the Lord. We
are not in that realm. “Woman, believe Me, the hour cometh,
when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem,
worship the Father.”
Bricks and mortar cannot
communicate with spirit. Man’s soul can communicate with God
only through the vehicle of his spirit in union with God. That is
what Calvary has done. Of course, you can understand now why the
message of the Cross is unacceptable, and if you are going to
proclaim and stand for it, you will be outside the camp because
of this strong cleaving to a historic traditional inheritance.
The awful thing is this, that Satan has taken hold of the divine
representation or typical system to appropriate it, when God has
done away with it. That which God has had brought in for a
temporary purpose Satan has captured for himself to obscure the
real nature of fellowship with God.
Now no one will think that I am
saying that there are no spiritual people in that system of
things. I am not saying that, but I am saying that if that
represents for them their spiritual life, and if they must have
that, and if that is the realm in which they live, that they do
not see beyond that and are not free from that as a thing in
itself, then they have missed the meaning of Calvary, and they
are bound to miss all the meaning of Christ crucified, the wisdom
and the power of God. Wrestling with principalities and powers
demands something more than a system of external things.
You see we are up against a
terrific business, we are up against a spiritual position which
is colossal and only a spiritual position is adequate to that,
nothing less. I trust you have received enough light to see that
what has been said is justified. We do not want to be in any
position less than the Lord’s first best for us. I am sure
we are prepared to pay the greatest price to be in God’s
first place for us, by His grace. May He enable us to be willing
to go on with Him, “leaving the things which are behind and
pressing on”, or, to come to the Hebrews again, “Let us
go on unto full growth”. The toys, the picture books, the
illustrations, the symbols, the types are for children who have
little intelligence. They are taken away at a certain time when
God’s intention is not to have children, but to have sons,
and there is all the difference between the two. And so Calvary
dismisses the kindergarten of external things in relation to God
and brings in the fullness of heavenly order to make of us
full-grown sons of God. May we be so.
First published in "A Witness and A Testimony"
magazine, Sep-Oct 1932, Vol. 10-5