Reading: Genesis 15:1-6; 17:1-8; Romans
4:16-25; Hebrews 11:8.
In these passages, we
find five things. One, enlargement; two, establishment;
three, life; four, faith; five, consummation. All this is
to be brought into fulness at the end of the
dispensation. The Word of God gives us to understand that
at the end God will have a state of Divine fulness
corresponding to the word 'enlargement': at the end, God
will have things established, fixed: at the end, God will
have things wholly characterized by life: and all this
will be through tried and proved faith. You will recall
how this end is brought into view in the symbolism of the
city - the holy city, new Jerusalem, seen as coming down
from God out of heaven in the last chapters of the Bible.
Here is Divine fulness: everything brought to a state of
finality, establishment, and all characterized by
life - illustrated by the tree of life, the river of water
of life, and other symbols. But leading up to this, all
the way along, is the matter of tried and proved faith.
As we look at the
Christian world in our time, we realize that these are
the great things which are supremely necessary. There is
need for spiritual, Divine, enlargement - things are so
small spiritually; for spiritual establishment - things
are so weak and uncertain, so variable and inconsistent,
without assurance, without certainty; for Divine
life - how great is the need for more life, heavenly life,
a greater fulness of life amongst the Lord's people! But,
while we recognize these things to be the crying needs,
we should probably all be prepared to admit that the only
way to these things is for the Lord's people to be really
tested, really tried. We do not like the idea, but we
realize that everything needs to be put to the test, to
be proved, in order to be established. And we are in fact
already very conscious of a new movement of God amongst
His people really to test their faith, to try their
faith, to bring faith to maturity.
Now this would seem to
have been God's pathway for His people all down the ages:
by tried, tested, proved and established faith to bring
to enlargement, establishment and life more abundant.
These are laws of the ways of God, principles of His
dealings with His people. Let us, then, in the first
place, take a comprehensive view of this matter, before
coming to the practical applications. The Bible has many
angles. If you take it, and look at it from one
standpoint, you may think that that is all that the Bible
is about. You seem to be able to gather up the whole of
the Bible into that one thing. It might be sin, judgment,
death - it is an aspect, an angle. Or it might be
righteousness and life - it is another angle. Give the
Bible another turn, and the same thing seems to be true
again. It has many such angles, and every one of them
seems to be comprehensive. If the Bible is like that, you
can see the whole of it by just turning it a little from
one angle to another.
Faith
The Key To Life And Enlargement
Now, you will see how
true this is in the very clear instance that we have
before us - the matter of enlargement by life through
faith. It would be very easy to gather all the Bible into
that, and to say that is what the whole Bible is about.
Of course, it is not, but it is one very comprehensive
angle. You will at once see how that theme runs right
through. But suppose we change the metaphor, and say that
there is a whole bunch of keys to the Bible - quite a
large bunch of keys - every one of which seems to be a
master key to open the whole of the Bible; and on this
large bunch of keys there seem to be three that are
linked together, so to speak, on their own separate ring.
Those three keys are - faith, life, enlargement.
Faith opens the first
door. That door leads to the next, which is life, and
through life to the next, which is enlargement. Those
three things always go together through the Word of God.
Of course, this is clearly seen by the opposite. Unbelief
is always shown in the Scripture to result in limitation.
Where there is unbelief, you just do not get any
further - you stop short and stop dead: there is no
enlargement, and therefore there is no life, no greater,
fuller life, beyond. You cannot separate these things;
they always hang together - faith, life, enlargement.
All the great crises in
the history of God's people, as recorded in the
Scriptures, had these three features. Beginning right at
the beginning, with Adam, in the first chapters of
Genesis, it is perfectly plain there that the whole
question of establishment, of enlargement and of life
hung upon faith, and that when he refused, or ceased, to
believe God, that was a dead stop, a full stop. There was
no more. At that point death entered in. The possibility
of fellowship with God, and of all that God can mean in
the life, hung entirely upon his faith - or upon his
refusal to believe. If only he had believed God, the way
would have been wide open to enlargement, establishment
and life, continuous and unceasing.
Moving on in the Book of
Genesis to chapters 15 and 17, some passages from which
we have placed at the head of this meditation, we come to
Abraham. The Lord comes in with Abraham on this line of
enlargement, of establishment and of life. Those are the
three great things that sum up Abraham's life with God.
And everything hung upon faith. All that God said about
this multiplying, this tremendous increase and
enlargement; about the finality of things - establishing
him in the covenant for ever; and about this wonderful
principle of life - so apparent in the case of Abraham,
when death would argue that there was no prospect at all
in himself or in Sarah or any situation, yet life is in
view in spite of it all - all those things just hung upon
faith. He believed God. If he had not, there would have
been nothing.
In the Book of Exodus,
we find the great crisis in the national life of
Israel - the deliverance from Egypt. Chapter 12 of Exodus
just rests upon this: 'The whole question here is that of
your release with a view to your enlargement; it is a
question of your being established and brought to
finality, to fullness; and it is a question of your life.'
The central thought of that chapter is perhaps life, is
it not? The slaying of Egypt's firstborn, on the one
side, and the deliverance of Israel into life through
death, on the other. But it all hung upon this matter of
faith - faith in action: whether they would take the lamb,
whether they would sprinkle the blood, whether they would
gird their loins and take their staff in their hand.
Everything depended upon an attitude and spirit of
believing God.
Passing through Numbers
into the Book of Joshua, we find that here it is the land
that is in view--the land of promise, with all that it
meant to them historically and all that it means
typically and spiritually. What a matter of enlargement
that was! From the wilderness, with all its emptiness and
'pent-upness', into the largeness, fullness and liberty of
being established in the land. There was never, in God's
mind, any thought or purpose of permanence in the
wilderness at all. That was only a phase of things to be
got through quickly as the spiritual condition of His
people would allow. His thought for them was - into the
land and established for ever. The promise to Abraham was
that the land was covenanted for ever: finality. And then
through Jordan, running there between Numbers and Joshua,
between the wilderness and the land, and overflowing all
its banks, speaking of death to be overcome in its
fulness, in its depths; and into the land: here is life
triumphant over death. But again, everything hung upon
their faith. Would they move in faith? One generation
could not do that, and perished in the wilderness. It was
left to the next generation to enter the land. These
three things rested upon faith.
Passing over the
terrible four hundred years covered by the Book of
Judges - the most terrible book in the Bible, I
think - into the Books of Samuel, we find a transition
toward a new state of enlargement. This phase will end
with David and Solomon, with the enlargement of the
kingdom beyond anything that had ever been before, with
establishment and life. Again, it is all on the basis of
faith. It was faith in Samuel's mother, for instance,
that brought in Samuel. But we cannot stay with all the
detail. At last, as we know, faith was lost, and unbelief
prevailed. Once again we see a return to limitation, to
bondage, to uncertainty, to spiritual death. It all hangs
upon faith.
As we take up the New
Testament, we find that the issue is still that of
enlargement, of establishment, and of fulness of life,
and the question now is - Believe it! - a question of
faith. These are the things, for instance, governing the
first chapters of the Book of the Revelation, where the
churches are dealt with. It is a matter here of spiritual
enlargement or spiritual limitation: either of being
established, or of having the lampstand moved out of its
place, with nothing established, nothing final. It is a
matter of life, through the Living One Who became dead
and is alive for evermore. The challenge is on whether it
is to be life or death, and it is focused in the one
question of faith. Finally, as we reach the last chapters
of the Revelation, we find these things brought to
fulness, in the great City as a symbolic representation
of the Church. How great it is, how full, how enlarged,
how solid! It is established. How living it is, too!
Abundant life is its most central feature. And it is the
very embodiment of tried, tested and proved faith.
Here, then, is the whole
Bible gathered into this, and our Christian lives are
based upon the Bible, the whole Bible. What does that
mean? It means this, that our lives are concerned with
spiritual fulness, as we shall see as we go on; with our
being established to eternity, and not carried away with
time; and with the great matter of Divine life brought
into complete triumph over the last enemy, death. And the
thing that governs and comprehends the Christian life in
these three aspects is the whole matter of faith: tried
faith, proved faith, established faith, perfected faith.
God's
Reaction Against Emptiness
Let us now look for a
few minutes at these words, these terms, that we have
been employing. We will take for the present just this
matter of enlargement. We can use the alternative word
'fullness' - and we shall do so, quite extensively - but I
have here a special thought in my mind in preferring this
word 'enlargement'. This whole matter of enlargement,
whether the Lord is going to enlarge us, whether we are
going to be enlarged, is a very living question and
issue, for enlargement is a governing thought of God. All
the way through the Bible, as we have seen, God's thought
is enlargement. God is always thinking in terms of
enlargement, of increase, of final fullness. God never
finds any pleasure at all in emptiness and in smallness.
God dislikes emptiness, and always reacts against it.
As we open our Bibles at
the first page of Genesis, what is almost the first thing
that we read? After: "In the beginning
God…", and then a few words more, we read:
"And the earth was without form and void" - that
is 'waste and empty' - "and the Spirit of
God…" The earth was empty, and the Spirit of
God - did what? - reacted against the state of emptiness.
It was as though God said, 'This is not My mind at all;
this is altogether contrary to My thought. I am against
this, and I am going to do something about it.' God would
have everything in Divine fullness - that is, in abundance.
That is His thought for the earth, and for His people.
And so the Spirit of God, brooding over this void, this
emptiness, begins to work, and every stage and phase of
the Divine activity is to fill. He fills the earth with
the vast range of the vegetable kingdom - seeds in
abundance and life within the seeds capable of endless
production and reproduction. He fills the earth with the
immense variety of the animal kingdom. He fills the sea,
and says: "Let the waters swarm with swarms
of living creatures" (Gen. 1:20). And then, creating
man, He says: "Be fruitful, and multiply, and
replenish the earth" (v. 28). 'I am against this
emptiness, this void'. And on He moves on that principle,
governed by that thought. Reaching Abraham, He says:
"I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the
heavens, and as the sand which is upon the
sea-shore" (Gen. 22:17). Comprehend that, if you
can! That is Divine thought. Beyond all comprehension,
God thinks in terms of enlargement.
How much can be gathered
up in the Bible on this matter! The Lord Jesus, for
instance, came to express the thoughts of God in
practical terms, and, amongst many other things, He spoke
of a great feast which was made. The guests were bidden,
but they did not come - they made excuses. And so the man
who gave the feast said to his servant: "Go out into
the highways and hedges, and constrain them to come in,
that my house may be filled" (Luke 14:15-24).
Here we see Christ bringing God's thoughts into this
world - 'That my house may be filled.' But perhaps
in the New Testament the day of Pentecost is the greatest
example and expression of this Divine thought. When the
Spirit came, a mighty, rushing wind "filled
all the house where they were sitting" (Acts 2:2).
And then it is applied to each believer: "Be filled
with the Spirit" (Eph. 5:18).
The
Danger Of Passivity
It is thus clear that
enlargement is a governing thought with God. But the Lord
Jesus has not only pointed out that this is what God
would have, but He has said on the other hand that it is
exceedingly dangerous to be empty. He spoke of a certain
'house', which was a man, possessed of a demon, an
unclean spirit; and He visualized the casting out of the
unclean spirit: but, although the house is 'swept and
garnished', it is left empty; and, because no other
occupant takes possession, the unclean spirit comes back
to his old home, taking seven other more evil than
himself, and fills the empty house (Matt. 12:43-45). It
is a dangerous thing to be empty, to leave a void. If God
does not fill, the Devil will. Beware of negative
conditions, of not being positive and not being definite.
Beware of vacuums in your heart, in your mind, in your
life. David was one day on the house-top in a state of
'vacuum', at a time when kings go out to war (2 Sam.
11:1-2) - and he was a king, and a warring king. But
instead of being occupied in a positive way, he was in a
passive state, and we know the disaster that overtook
him, from which he never recovered all his life. It is a
dangerous thing to be empty. The Devil will see to the
filling up of any space that he can occupy. The Lord
wants to fill to the exclusion of all else.
The
Fulness Of God
The ultimate word in
this matter in the Bible is: "that ye may be filled
unto all the fulness of God" (Eph. 3:19). Think of
that! This is said to believers together in their
corporate, related life - to the Church, which is
"the fulness of Him that filleth all in all"
(Eph. 1:23). Think of it: the fulness of God! - that is,
God coming in such a way that there is no room for
anything else. It was like that at the dedication of
Solomon's temple, in the Old Testament. When the priests
moved out of the sanctuary, the glory of the Lord moved
in and filled the house, and the priests could no longer
stand to minister (1 Kings 8:10-11; 2 Chron. 5:11-14).
When the Lord fills, there is no room for anything or
anyone else. That is the fulness of God.
Emptiness
The Result Of Judgement
Returning to that word
'void' or 'empty' that we find at the beginning of the
Book of Genesis, it seems to me that this represents the
result of a judgment. That, of course, has already been
surmised on other grounds. But the following
considerations are perhaps confirmatory. When the Lord
sent His people Israel into Babylonian captivity for
seventy years, the land became waste. The land fell into
a state that could well be described in the terms used to
describe the state of the earth at the beginning - void,
waste and empty. Now, the Babylonian captivity of Israel
was a judgment upon their unbelief and their idolatry,
and the waste state into which the land fell was surely a
part of that judgment; and it would therefore seem that
"in the beginning", also, the desolation was
the result of a judgment upon a former creation.
But what is the point of
this? The issue must have been this - as it has always
been--that God was not allowed to fill all things. God's
place was either shared with other things, or God was
driven out. The end of this present world, as is shown to
us in the New Testament, is going to be like that. There
will be a point at which God will be finally rejected by
this world, and will have no place. We are moving fast
toward that time. What will be the result? It will be the
burning up of this world - judgment, destruction - and a
longer or shorter period of desolation before there is a
new heaven and a new earth, and all things are created
anew. Judgment is always upon this one thing - as to
whether God is all and in all, or not. Therefore
enlargement - the fullness which is God's thought - rests
upon this matter of God having full place; and that is
the basis of all testing of faith. God presses this point
closer and closer as we go on: whether we will believe
God sufficiently to let Him have His place in an
impossible situation.
The
Fullness Of God As Light
Now, what do we mean by
the fulness of God? It is nothing less than the nature of
God filling all things. "God is light", the
Scripture says (1 John 1:5): then where God is there is
no darkness, there is no room for darkness; and when God
comes in in fulness there is "no darkness at
all." It is all "light in the Lord" (Eph.
5:8). And the Lord is moving on this line with you and
with me. He is seeking to get us completely out of our
darkness into His light; to bring us into the light as He
is in the light. And how great a factor is faith in this
matter of coming into the light of the Lord, coming to
know the Lord, coming into understanding, or whatever
expression you may use for light. It is seeing, it is
knowing, it is understanding.
But you and I never come
into one additional ray of real light - I do not
mean information, I mean spiritual light - except
along the line of tests of faith, faith really tested. A
sister in the Lord, who felt that she was far too
short-tempered, too quickly provoked, said to a dear
servant of God, 'Oh, I do need more patience - do pray for
me that I may have more patience!' The servant of God
said, 'All right, let us get down and pray now', and so
they knelt down and he prayed, 'Lord, do please send more
tribulation into this dear sister's life.' And she
stopped him and said, 'No, I did not say I wanted
tribulation - I want patience.' 'Ah, but', he replied,
'the Word says: "tribulation worketh
patience"!' (Rom. 5:3).
Yes: we want more of the
Lord, but we are not always so ready to go the way that
He would take us in order to have more of Himself. But it
is that way - the way of tribulation; and what is
tribulation if it is not the testing of faith? We are put
into situations where only faith in God will enable us to
live and to go on. Yet it is possible - it is so possible.
Early last year, during my visit to California, a brother
there proposed that we should go to see some dear
friends, living about sixty miles away, who had begged
that we should visit them. These dear children of God
were living in perhaps one of the most worldly,
unpropitious, impossible situations imaginable - the
week-end resort of all the Hollywood stars. I cannot
describe the utter abandonment to the flesh. Our two
friends were living in a large trailer, or caravan, right
at the centre of a great trailer park, surrounded by all
these worldly people in their luxurious trailer homes, in
an atmosphere of the utmost sensuality, fleshliness,
indulgence. We went in, and had a most blessed afternoon
with them on the things of the Lord - a most precious
time, with a real touch of heaven - and when we had spent
the whole afternoon with them, a brother said: 'Perhaps
you will not believe it, but there are sixteen
out-and-out Christians in this trailer park. I am going
to fetch some of them'. He went across to another
trailer, and brought back two dear children of God,
elderly, saintly people; and, without any going round
matters at all or talking on generalities, we were right
on the things of the Lord instantly, and we could have
gone on all night. The brother told us, 'We all meet here
in this trailer, sixteen of us, and have most blessed
times of fellowship.'
Why am I telling you
about this? In the most unlikely place on earth - yes, the
most impossible place for anything of a spiritual
character, for anything really of the Lord - there, right
in that terrible place, are saints walking in white
raiment, in living fellowship with the Lord. Do not say,
'Oh, the place I have to live and work in is impossible
for any spiritual life or spiritual growth - everything
is against me.' Remember that the Lord can enlarge you
anywhere if He calls you to be there. Never use the
argument of the impossible. Just think of Abraham and the
impossible. He came into enlargement, but not because
everything was propitious, not because everything made it
so easy and was so helpful. No, there can be light in the
darkest place if the Lord is there. When I first heard of
that situation, I had expressed the wish that those dear
friends could have been got out of it, but when I left
them I changed my view entirely. I do not know that they
would really be the better for getting out of this. This
is the thing that is enlarging them spiritually: it is
throwing them on the Lord, it is making them prove the
Lord. There is nothing here for them but the Lord;
everything else is against Him.
The fulness of God is in
terms of light, even in darkness; of love - for God is
love - in a realm of hatred; of life in a realm of death;
and of holiness in a realm of unholiness. "That ye
may be filled unto all the fulness of God."
There is much more about
this matter of enlargement. It was the governing thing in
the sovereign gifts of the ascended Lord. "When He
ascended on high, He led captivity captive, and gave
gifts unto men… and He gave some, apostles; and
some, prophets;… and some, pastors and
teachers" - for what? - "for the perfecting of
the saints, unto the work of ministering, unto the
building up of the body of Christ: till we all attain
unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the
Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the
stature of the fulness of Christ" (Eph. 4:8, 11-13).
Every Divine gift in ministry has fulness as its object
and its governing motive.
Let me close with this
for the moment, that the test as to whether a thing is of
God is always spiritual measure. It is not the measure of
our doctrinal knowledge, nor even the measure of our
Bible knowledge as such. It is not the accuracy or
correctness of our technique in form and procedure. It is
the measure of God. We can have all those other things,
without there being really any measure of God. That is
what counts.