Edited and supplied by the Golden Candlestick Trust.
"He hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world"
(Eph. 1:4).
"And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him (that is,
the beast), whose names are not written in the book of life of
the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world" (Rev. 13:8).
It is not my intention to touch upon the context of this passage
in the book of the Revelation - the story of the beast. I am
simply taking this fragment as a statement of a fact - the Lamb
was slain from the foundation of the world - and as briefly,
concisely, and simply as I can, I want to say two or three things
in that connection which I believe the Lord has given me to say.
The Lamb Slain from the Foundation of the World
"The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world". Of course, we
are not taking that as a statement of a literal fact, but outside
of time and outside of the material, so far as God who dwells in
eternity is concerned, the thing was an accomplished fact long,
long before Calvary. Calvary was not something which just sprang
up as a necessity, an emergency or a tragedy in time; it was
something already accomplished where God was concerned, long, long
before the foundation of the world. Yes, accomplished in all its
meaning, in all its value, in all its potency, in all its
universal range - an accomplished fact with God before the
foundation of the world. In His foreknowledge of its necessity,
its requirement, of all that would make it necessary, in His
foreknowledge of everything that would result in Calvary, the
thing was an accomplished fact. With God, the Lamb was already
slain before the foundation of the world.
It is something which, by the very word used, is placed in
association with, or alongside of, the very election of the
church. "Before the foundation of the world". We were chosen in
Him before the foundation of the world. Now, that carries a very
great deal with it, but for the present just one or two things may
be pointed out.
God's Eternal "No"
First of all, in the light of what we now know to be the meaning
of the cross, what God has later disclosed through His servants,
the apostles and the writers of the New Testament, in the light of
what has now come to view it is a tremendous statement that all
that was an accomplished thing before the foundation of the world.
Take one of the various aspects of the meaning of the cross which
we call identification with Christ in death and burial and
resurrection, and we say of that that the cross was God closing
the door upon the old creation, upon man as he now is by nature,
saying by the cross, "That is finished, that is done with, that is
dead and buried; I have no place for that". We understand that as
one of the great aspects of the meaning of the cross, but taking
all that we know, put it into this statement - "before the
foundation of the world" the Lamb was slain. With God we were all
born crucified. "Born Crucified" is the title of a book by Mr.
Maxwell of the Prairie Bible Institute. He used that phrase to
indicate that new birth is upon the basis of the cross. I am
carrying it further than that. I am saying that everyone born of
sinful Adam was born crucified. Every child of Adam, from the
first to now and onward is, in the sight of God, dead at birth,
has no place in the eternal purpose, has no place as a child of
Adam, as a part of that creation, that fallen creation; he is dead
and buried already. That is the negative side.
God foresaw and God foreclosed. God took action that that should
not come within the compass of His holy things, His glory; the
utter impossibility of that kind of man and race being glorified
was a settled thing before the foundation of the world. You and I,
from our birth here, are born crucified. God says "No" to that
race. That is negative, but it is very utter, that God has never
made any provision for us in the flesh, God has never let us have
a breath so far as He and His purposes are concerned; we are dead
from birth by the cross of the Lord Jesus.
The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world bears right down
upon the very first seed of fallen Adam and everyone after - but
only with a positive object. God's "No's" are never annihilations;
God's forbiddings are never intended to result in nothing. When
God closes the door in one direction, it is only to make possible
the opening of a door from the other side. So the Lamb slain from
the foundation of the world was in order to secure unto God all
that upon which His heart had been set, and just at that very
point - whatever the point was, "the foundation of the world" (I
do not think we can fix it) - but whatever that point was, the
Lamb was slain and the church was chosen or secured, and the
church is secured because the Lamb is slain. The church takes its
rise out of Calvary, but not the Calvary of so many centuries ago,
but that spiritual Calvary in the heart of God before the
foundation of the world. God, even as far back as that, made the
cross the basis of the church, made a "No" the ground of the
mightiest "Yes". The marvellous destiny of the church that in the
ages to come the fulness of God's Christ should be displayed and
mediated by the church, to be the fulness of Him that filleth all
in all and the vehicle of glory unto Him by Christ Jesus unto all
ages for ever and ever - that springs out of a mighty "No".
God's Eternal "Yes"
While we must recognise how utter, how complete, the forbidding
of Calvary is to our natural life, to the whole fallen creation,
we must always keep uppermost and foremost the fact that the cross
was intended by God to be a way as well as a closed door; that the
other side of the cross is God's immense positive. And the
immensity of the positive is to be recognised in this, that there
is more secured by the cross than was lost by Adam. God's answer
is in the positive always. So you find that what looked like the
loss of everything, the end of everything, a catastrophe, a
tragedy when He was crucified and the men around Him felt that all
their hopes and expectations and visions were gone, were ashes,
they found that out of the ashes arose something far more glorious
than they ever had expected or imagined. "From the ground there
blossomed red life that shall endless be." The Lord by the cross
seems to produce a lot of ashes. Let us remember that it is not to
leave a desolation.
There is a glorious prospect when the cross does its work. If
only we would adjust ourselves to this, we should cease to be
miserable in contemplating the activity and operation of the
cross. Peter, I suppose, perhaps more than any of the others, felt
that everything had gone when Christ was crucified. He had to have
a special message sent to him by the risen Lord to save him from
the utterness of his despair. "Go, tell his disciples and
Peter..." (Mark 16:7). He who knew in his soul the desolating work
of the cross more than anyone else, could presently cry, "Blessed
be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to
His great mercy begat us again unto a living hope by the
resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto an inheritance
incorruptible..." (1 Pet. 1:3-4). He had lost everything, was
completely bankrupt - "an inheritance incorruptible, and
undefiled, and that fadeth not away" - not stored up here in some
place where the thief, the robber, can break through, but -
"reserved in heaven for you, who by the power of God are guarded
through faith unto a salvation ready to be revealed in the last
time". The cross became the way to the great hope.
God's Anticipating Action
But note - before there ever was any loss, God had secured it
all. This is the wonderful thing about this statement - "the Lamb
slain from the foundation of the world". Man was going to fall; he
was going to capitulate everything into the hands of the enemy. It
looked as though God was going to lose His purpose at the hands of
man, that His creation was going to be taken from Him. In His
foreknowledge, He took that action, that kind of action, that
special action, which frustrated all the counsels of hell,
defeated all the activity of the enemy, and secured His
inheritance by the cross right there.
There are those who have translated this "foundation of the
world", because of a literal meaning which the words hold - "the
casting down of the world". There are two words in the New
Testament translated "foundation". One does mean what we always
mean when we speak of the foundation of a building, the laying of
the foundation. But that is not the word here nor in Ephesians
1:4. It is another word which means casting down or laying down.
Some have translated it literally - "from the casting down of the
world", and they take that to the beginning of things and say
that, because of the sin of Satan in heaven and the casting down
of Satan and his angels from heaven and the resultant complicity
of Adam bringing his trust, his custodianship of the creation into
that complicity with Satan, God cast the whole thing down; cursed
the creation and said, "That can never answer to My thought and
purpose". And at that casting down the Lamb was slain to secure it
according to His mind. Whether that is right or not, we need not
argue, but it may be.
It is perfectly true that there was that ruin, that wreckage,
that disruption, and God at that time, in His own heart and mind
and purpose and intention slew the Lamb to bring out of the ruin a
creation according to His own mind. That is true. But the point is
this - God has secured it so far ahead in anticipation of every
emergency, and the apostle Paul brings the church in there, and
says, "This securing antedates the very fall. God has, in
anticipation and foreknowledge, got behind the very thing that
would speak of loss and ruin, and has met the whole situation",
and the apostle says, "That is the kind of foundation you have
under your feet, not something that is subject to the variations
and contingencies of time. It is something that God has done
before the world was; all the Lord's purpose stands under your
feet as your ground of confidence". We do need to enlarge our
hearts concerning our God!
Chosen in Him Before the Foundation of the World
We have become very scared of this word - predestination. I
confess that I am afraid to talk about it. You can get so
entangled immediately you get on to that word, to try to reconcile
two opposites - God's foreordaining and man's free will, a purely
theological argument. We are afraid of the word for that reason. I
believe that, while remaining sane and sound and not being foolish
and carrying the word or the thing into the wrong realm, keeping
it in its right relationship to purpose and not to salvation,
there is room for a great enlargement of our hearts concerning God
securing His end. We take on too much the burden which is God's.
We need a more simple faith. We need to take this position - "God
determined this before ever I had a being, and the fact that He
has called me by His grace carries with it something eternal. The
fact that I did not choose Him but He chose me carries with it
something eternal. All that is left for me to do is to obey the
light He gives me, to trust Him to see the thing through, and He
will do it because it is done through the Lamb slain before the
foundation of the world. He has secured it all. It is only the
Lord Who can do it; it is a secured thing. I cannot reconcile all
the arguments about it, but there it is, it is done. He chose us
in Him before the foundation of the world." If the interpretation
I have just given you should be true - before the casting down,
the disruption, He secured us in Christ even before the wreckage -
we should take all that we can out of it. That is the positive
side.
We have touched the negative. God, from of old, from eternity,
said "No" to a certain kind of man He knew would arise; but He
said a mighty "Yes", an effective "Yes", with all the
effectiveness of the accomplished work of the cross - death,
burial, resurrection. He said that "Yes" to His purpose which
cannot be frustrated.
The only word that I am going to add to this, which is, after
all, not an exposition, not a discussion, hardly what you would
call a message, it is simply an emphasis or an affirmation of
wonderfully strengthening, assuring facts. The only thing I am
going to add to that is that, if this is true, then all that is
impossible with us as related to Adam is now made possible in
Christ where we are concerned. In order to come into the good of
God's eternal purpose with its many-sided meanings, we have to
have revelation of it; it has to be revealed in us. But then it is
no use presenting things where there is no faculty for
apprehending. If there is no faculty for seeing, it is no use
presenting an object. Something has to be done inside to make
possible the apprehending, the grasping, the seeing. We cannot by
nature see. If we are born crucified, born dead, then we are born
blind: it is hopeless. Calvary has dealt with that, the cross has
made possible a seeing, and it is just there that we come on to
one of those things that we are so often trying to emphasise -
that it is the crucified man or woman who comes into the good of
things. It is by way of the crucified life that we enter into all
God's values and meanings. Try to handle the things of God by your
own natural abilities and capacities of mind and will, and you
know you get nowhere, you fumble in the dark: it is a hopeless
thing. But God has dealt with that hopeless situation in the
cross, and long, long since secured by the cross the very faculty
for apprehending the purpose unto which He has chosen. And in
time, in our time, in our lifetime, a right apprehension of the
cross and our identification with Christ will open the heavens to
us, will result in an open heaven, will result in a new faculty
for apprehending things impossible for the human mind and heart to
grasp.
Now, that is a matter on which one would like to dwell more fully.
There is all the difference of two worlds between talking about
things as things, as subjects, as themes, as Scriptural truths,
though they be these profound things, these deep things of God;
there is all the difference between talking about them as things
and speaking out of a revelation of them. You know the difference
when someone has worked up a subject and given you the results of
their studies, perhaps a very wonderful discourse on the subject,
you know the difference between that and the impact which comes
through God having done something in a man, and therefore, having
done that thing, is pouring His Life through that man. Between
those two worlds lies the cross. The vessel, to give revelation,
must have had the revelation broken in, and broken in by a
crucifixion of the natural life. "The natural man" says Paul,
"cannot..." (1 Cor. 2:14). I have only illustrated what I mean. In
all sorts of directions and matters we naturally are
incapacitated; no matter how greatly and earnestly we want and
desire and mean, and struggle and work, we just cannot. In any
real spiritual way that has fruit and impact, we just cannot,
until the heaven is opened to us and we see as no natural man can
see, and then it is more than a theme, it is Life. But that never
happens except on the ground of a deep inwrought work of the
cross.
But I am saying that the cross opens the door to everything that
was shut out for Adam after his fall. It makes possible that which
was made impossible then. It brings everything in that was lost in
Adam. It is a very positive thing. God took action to see that
eventually and ultimately, nothing would be lost. The Lamb was
slain with Him there and then, and the end and all the
possibilities were secured from the foundation of the world.
It is good and blessed to know that God knew all about it before
the foundation of the world. We stumble up against things, and
find that we just cannot. Oh, how we would like to, but we just
cannot. Moses stumbled up against an inability to speak. God
commissioned him to go and speak, but he said, "I am slow of
speech" (Ex. 4:10). The Lord said, "I know all about that, but who
made man's mouth?" Have you a natural handicap? Are you limited by
nature? Or has something happened to you in the course of your
life which closed a whole world of prospect and possibility? God
knows all about that, He anticipated that long since. "God chose
the foolish things... the weak things" (1 Cor. 1:27). It is the
same word as "He chose us in Him before the foundation of the
world". Moses stood out against God; he failed in his faith in the
all-knowing, anticipating God. He said, "Oh, Lord, send, I pray
thee, by the hand of him whom thou wilt send"; and he had Aaron
attached to him, and Aaron became more or less a nuisance to him
later on. If only Moses had stood in the faith that God knew how
he was made before he was made, he would have made a tremendous
discovery of divine resources for making him capable in a way in
which it was impossible for him to be capable by nature.
Take Jeremiah. God commissioned Jeremiah to a very hard life.
Jeremiah said, "I know not how to speak; for I am a child." The
Lord did not say, "All right, I excuse you; I had forgotten what
sort of a man you are, I have made a mistake, Jeremiah, I will go
and look for someone else!" He said, "To whomsoever I shall send
thee thou shalt go. I have put My words in thy mouth." What had
God said to Jeremiah? "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew
thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified
thee; I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations." Oh, this
sovereign foreknowledge of God! How deep and wonderful it is!
There are no accidents, no mishaps. God knows what He is doing;
He has gone behind everything for His elect. Can we believe that
seeing God has now laid His hand upon us and called us into the
fellowship of His Son, it is a proof that He did choose us in
Christ before the world was? Leave the others if you like, but so
far as we are concerned, this is a fact. We have been apprehended
by Christ Jesus, and not by a pitying God Who saw our plight in
our own lifetime, but by an anticipating God before ever there was
a plight to pity. If this is true, that God has called us into the
fellowship of His Son, proving His foreknowledge and His choosing,
do you think, must we believe, that these natural handicaps, these
accidents, as we call them, these tragedies, are really from God's
side not anticipated? Can we not believe that really, by means of
them, there is going to be some gain for God? Yes, there is
something because of all that which would never have been
otherwise, and in the end - oh, let us anticipate our own
glorifying and justifying of God at the end - in the end we will
say, "Lord, at one time in my life I used to believe that these
handicaps were unfair, that it was not righteous that I should
have that, that I should suffer in that way, but I see now it was
the best thing; You knew what You were doing, it was the way of
spiritual increase". Can we not have a faith like that in God Who
has anticipated everything from eternity in relation to His elect?
"He hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world."
What did He choose? "Behold your calling, brethren, that not many
wise after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called:
but God chose the foolish things of the world, that He might put
to shame them that are wise; and God chose the weak things of the
world, that He might put to shame the things that are strong; and
the base things of the world, and the things that are despised,
did God choose, yea and the things that are not, that He might
bring to nought the things that are: that no flesh should glory
before God" (1 Cor. 1:26-29), but all the glory should be to Him.
"Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all
that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us,
unto Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all
generations for ever and ever" (Eph. 3:20-21), and that is the
glory of His grace, the glory of His sovereign grace, for it is
all of grace. He has chosen things which could never embellish Him
as they were, could never add to His glory as they were: it is the
glory of His grace in vessels of fragile clay.