by T. Austin-Sparks
Chapter 1 - The Purpose of the Ages
“...No one
knoweth the Son, save the Father...”—Matt.
11:27.
“...it was the good pleasure of God... to reveal His
Son in me...”—Gal. 1:15,16.
“...I count all things to be loss for the excellency
of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord...”—Phil.
3:8.
“...that I may know Him...”—Phil. 3:10.
“Having made known unto us the mystery of His will,
according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Him
unto a dispensation of the fulness of the times, to sum
up all things in Christ...”—Eph. 1:9,10.
That little clause in verse ten is the word which will
govern our meditation—ALL THINGS IN CHRIST.
These scriptures speak for themselves. As we listen to
the inner voice of the Spirit in these fragments of the
Divine Word, surely we shall begin to feel a sense of
tremendous meaning, value and content. We should feel
like people who have come to the doors of a new realm
full of wonders—unknown, unexplored, unexploited.
The Necessity for Revelation
We are met at the very threshold of that realm with a statement which is calculated to check our steps for the moment, and if we approach with a sense of knowing or possessing anything already, with a sense of contentment, of personal satisfaction, or with any sense other than that of needing to know everything, then this word should bring us to a standstill at once: “...no one knoweth the Son, save the Father....” Maybe we thought we knew something about the Lord Jesus, and that we had ability to know; that study, and listening, and various other forms of our own application and activity could bring us to a knowledge, but at the outset we are told that “...no one knoweth the Son, save the Father....” All that the Son is, is locked up with the Father, and He alone knows.
When, therefore, we have faced that fact, and have recognized its implications, we shall see that here is a land which is locked up, into which we cannot enter, and for which we have no equipment. There is nothing in us of faculty to enter into the secrets of that realm of Christ. Then following the discovery of that somewhat startling fact of man’s utter incapacity to know by nature, the next fact that confronts us is this: “...it was the good pleasure of God... to reveal His Son in me....” While God has all that locked up in Himself, in His own possession, and He alone has the knowledge of the Son, it is in His heart, nevertheless, to give revelation. And, given the truth that we are so utterly dependent upon revelation from God, and that all human faculty and facility is ruled out in this respect, since such revelation can only be known by a Divine revealing after an inward kind, we are making it to be very evident that everything is of grace when we renounce all trust in works, when we turn away from self-sufficiency, self-reliance, from all confidence in the flesh, and any pride of advance and approach.Paul’s Revelation of Christ
It is never our desire
to make comparisons between Apostles, and God forbid that
we should ever set a lesser value upon any Apostle than
that which the Lord has set upon him; yet I think that we
are quite right in saying that, more than any other, Paul
was, and is, the interpreter of Christ; and if we take
Paul as our interpreter, as the one who leads us into the
secrets of Christ in a fuller way, we mark how he himself
embodies and represents that of which he speaks. It is
the man himself, after all, and not just what he says
which brings us to Christ in fuller and deeper meaning.
The thing that has been very much pressing upon my own
heart in this connection is Paul’s ever-growing
conception of Christ. There is no doubt that Paul’s
conception of Christ was growing all the time, and by the
time Paul reached the end of his earthly life, full, and
rich, and deep as it had been, Paul’s vision of
Christ was such as to lead him to cry even at that point,
“...that I may know Him....” Yes, at the
beginning it had pleased God to reveal His Son in him,
but at the end it was still as though he had known
nothing of Christ. He had come to discover that his
Christ was immeasurable beyond his thought and
conception, and he was launched into eternity with a cry
on his lips: “...that I may know Him...”
I believe (and not as a matter of sentiment) that will be
our eternal bliss, the nature of our eternity, namely,
discovering Christ. Paul as we have said, had a great
knowledge of Christ. At best here we find ourselves
shriveling into insignificance every time we approach
Him. How many times have we read the Letter to the
Ephesians! I am not exaggerating when I say that if we
have read it for years, read it scores, hundreds, or even
thousands of times, every sentence can hold us afresh
each time we come back to it. Paul knew what he was
talking about. Paul’s conception was a large one,
but even so he is still saying at the end, “...that
I may know Him....” I do not think we shall know
Christ in fulness immediately we pass into His presence.
I believe we are to go on—governed by this word,
“the ages to come”—discovering,
discovering, exploring Christ. That ever-growing
conception of Christ was the thing which maintained Paul
in life, and maintained Paul’s ministry in life.
There was never any stagnation with him. He never came to
any point or place where there was the suggestion that
now he knew. What he seems to say is this: I do not know
anything yet, but I see dimly, yet truly, with the eye of
the spirit, a Christ so great, so vast as to keep me
reaching out, moving on. I press on; I leave the things
which are behind; I count all things as refuse for the
excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, that I may
know Him. In this growing conception of Christ, Paul
moved a long way from the position of the Jewish teacher,
or of the Jew himself at his best.
Paul began with the Jewish conception of the Messiah,
whatever that was. It is quite impossible to say what the
Jewish conception of Christ was. You have indications of
what they expected the Messiah to be and to do, but there
is nothing to indicate exactly what their conception of
the Messiah was in fulness; it was undoubtedly a limited
one. There is a great deal of uncertainty betrayed by the
Jewish thought beyond a certain point about their
long-looked-for Messiah. Their Messiah represented
something earthly and something temporal; an earthly
kingdom and a temporal power, with all the earthly and
temporal advantages which would accrue to them as people
on this earth from His kingdom, from His reign, from His
appearing. That is where we begin in our consideration of
Paul’s conception of Christ. This Jewish conception,
it is true, did not confine the thought of blessing to
Israel alone, but allowed that Messiah’s coming was,
through the Jews, to issue in blessing to all the
nations; yet it was still earthly, temporal, limited to
things here. If you read the Gospels, and especially
Matthew’s Gospel, you will see that the endeavour of
these Gospels, so far as Jewish believers were concerned,
was to show that Christ had done three things.
Firstly, how that He had corrected their ideas about the
Messiah.
Secondly, how that He had fulfilled the highest hopes
that could have been theirs concerning the Messiah.
Thirdly, how that He had far transcended anything that
ever they had thought.
You must remember that these Gospels were never written
merely to convince unbelievers. They were written also to
believers, to help the faith of believers by
interpretations. Matthew’s Gospel, written as it was
at a time of transition, was written in order to
interpret and confirm faith in Christ by showing what
Christ really was, what He really came for, and in that
way to correct and adjust their conceptions of the
Messiah. Their conceptions of Him were inadequate,
distorted, limited, and sometimes wrong. These records
were intended to put them right, to show that Christ had
fulfilled the highest, and best, and truest Messianic
hopes and expectations, and had infinitely transcended
them all. You need Paul to interpret Matthew, and Mark,
and Luke, and John; and he does it. He brings Christ into
view as One in Whom every hope is realized, every
possibility achieved. Were they expecting an earthly
kingdom, and deliverance and blessing in relation
thereto? Christ had done something infinitely better than
that. He had wrought for them a cosmic redemption; not a
mere deliverance from the power of Rome or any other
temporal power, but deliverance from the whole power of
evil in the universe—“Who delivered us out of
the power of darkness, and translated us into the kingdom
of the Son of His love.” Matthew had particularly
stressed the fact of the kingdom, but the Jewish idea of
the kingdom with which he was confronted was so limited,
so earthly, so narrow. With a new emphasis Paul, by the
Spirit, brings into view the nature and immensity of the
kingdom of the Son of God’s love.
Now we can see something of what deliverance from our
enemies means. We shall not follow that through, but pass
on with just that glimpse of it. Such an unveiling as
this was a corrective. It revealed a fulfilment in a
deeper sense than they had expected, but it was a
transcendence of their fullest hope and expectation. Paul
interpreted the Christ for them in His fuller meaning and
value. He himself had begun on their level. Their
conception of Christ had been his own. But after it
pleased God to reveal His Son in him a continuous
enlargement in Paul’s knowledge of Christ began
through an ever-growing unveiling of what He was.
Of course, as Saul of Tarsus, Paul never believed that
Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah. This takes us a step
further back in his conception. He believed that Jesus
was an imposter, and so he sought to blot out all that
was associated with Him in the world.
Paul, then, had to learn at least two things. He had to
learn that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, but he also
had to learn that Jesus of Nazareth far transcended all
Jewish conceptions of the Messiah, all his own ideas, all
his own expectations as bound up with the Messiah. He not
only learned that He was the Messiah, but that as Messiah
He was far, far greater and more wonderful than his
fullest ideas and conceptions and expectations. Into that
revelation he was brought by the grace of God.
The Progressiveness of Revelation as Illustrated in Paul
I do not think the
point needs arguing, for it is hard to dispute that there
are evidences of progress in Paul’s understanding
and knowledge of Christ, and it is clear that progress
and expansion and development in his knowledge of Christ
led to adjustment. Do not misunderstand. They did not
lead to a repudiation of anything that Paul had stated,
nor to a contradiction of any truth that had come through
him, but they led to adjustment. As his knowledge of
Christ grew and expanded Paul saw that he had to adjust
himself to it.
This is a point at which many have stumbled, but it is a
matter about which we should have no fear. There are so
many people who are afraid of the idea that such a man as
the Apostle Paul—or any man in the Bible who was
Divinely inspired—so utterly under the power of the
Holy Spirit should ever adjust himself according to new
revelation. They seem to think that this necessarily
means that the man changes in a way as to leave his
original position and more or less repudiate it. It does
not mean anything of the kind.
Take an illustration. Paul’s letters to the
Thessalonians were his first letters. In those letters
there is no doubt whatever that Paul expected the Lord to
return in his lifetime. Mark his words: “...we that
are alive, that are left unto the coming of the Lord....”
In his letter to the Philippians, Paul has moved from
that position, while in his letters to Timothy that
expectation is no longer with him: “...I am already
being offered, and the time of my departure is come. I
have fought the good fight, I have finished the course....”
He had anticipated Nero’s verdict. He knew now that
it was not by way of the rapture that he himself was to
go to glory. Are we to say that these two things
contradict one another? Not at all! In going on with the
Lord, Paul came into fuller revelation about the Lord’s
coming, and of his personal relationship thereto, but
this did not set aside or change any fact of doctrine
which had been expressed earlier in his letters to the
Thessalonians. All that had been set forth there was
fully inspired, given by the Holy Spirit, but it was
still capable of development in the heart of the Apostle
himself, and as he saw the fuller meaning of the things
that had come to him earlier in his life, so he found
that in practical matters he had to adjust himself. No
fresh revelation, nor advance in understanding, ever
placed him in the position of having to repudiate
anything that had been given him by revelation in earlier
days. It is a matter of recognizing that these
differences are not contradictions but the result of
progressive, supplemental revelation, enlarging
apprehension, clearer conception through going on with
the Lord. Surely these are evidences that progress in
Paul’s understanding and knowledge led to
adjustments.
The Eternal Purpose of God in His Son
Now the great effect of
Paul’s discovery concerning the Lord Jesus on the
Damascus road was not only to reveal to him the fact of
His Sonship (he undoubtedly discovered there that Jesus
of Nazareth was the Son of God, as his words in Galatians
one, verses fifteen and sixteen show), but to lift Christ
right out of time and to place Him with the Father in the
“before times eternal.” That does not perhaps
for the moment appear to be very striking, but it is a
very big step toward what the Lord wants to say to us.
Christ has been lifted out of time. The “time”
Christ, that is, His coming into this world in time,
becomes something like a parenthesis; it is not the main
thing. It is the main thing if we look at the whole in
the light of the fall and need for recovery, but not the
main thing from the Divine standpoint originally. I want
you to grasp this, because it is at this point that we
come into that greatest of all revelations that has been
given to us concerning the Lord Jesus. This effect of his
experience on the Damascus road, this lifting of Christ
right out of time and placing Him in eternity, came in
Paul’s conception to be related to eternal purpose,
and in eternal purpose there was no fall and no
redemption. That is, so to speak, a bend down in the line
of God through the ages. God’s line was to have gone
straight without a bend, without a break, but when it
came to a certain point, because of certain contingencies
which were never in the purpose, that line had
to go down, and then up and on again. The two ends of
that line are on the same eternal level. You may, if you
like, conceive of a bridge across that bend, and of
Christ thus filling the bend, so that what was from
eternity is not interrupted at all in Him; it goes on in
Him. The coming to earth and all the work of the
Cross is something other, the result of a necessity by
reason of these contingencies; but in Christ from
eternity to eternity the purpose is unbroken,
uninterrupted, without a bend. There is no hiatus in
Christ. This came to be related to purpose. That is a
great word of Paul’s: “According to the eternal
purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord...”
(Eph. 3:11); “...called according to His purpose”
(Rom. 8:28). These are eternal conceptions of Christ, and
this purpose, and these Divine counsels were related to
the universe, and to man in particular. Let us get across
that bridge for a moment, leaving the other out; for I
want you to notice the course that the Letter to the
Ephesians takes. The letter begins with eternity. It says
much of things that were before the world was, and it
comes back to that point. Just in between it speaks of
redemption, and it never speaks of redemption until it
has the past eternity in view. Redemption comes in to
fill up that gap and then we go on to eternity again.
Now just leave the gap for a moment. Of course it
concerns us tremendously and we shall have to come back
to it, because everything is bound up with redemption so
far as we are concerned in the eternal purpose; but leave
it for a moment and turn your attention in this other
direction. It is stated definitely and clearly that the
whole plan of God without redemption was completed in
those eternal counsels concerning His Son, Jesus Christ,
and in that plan the ages were created: “...the
fulness of the times...” is the phrase used here in
our translation.
I have heard such phrases in the New Testament as these
interpreted as being the dispensations as we now know
them in the Bible; the dispensation of Abraham, the
dispensation of the Law, the dispensation of Grace. I
wonder if that is right? Mark this expression: “...through
Whom also He made the ages” (Heb. 1:2; R.V.M.). Let
us think again. Are we right in saying that applies to
what we call the dispensations as they are shown to us in
the Bible? Without being dogmatic about it, I have a
question. Are we to say that in those eternal counsels of
God, in relation to the eternal purpose of God concerning
His Son, a dispensation of Law had a place, an age like
the Old Testament age, those periods of time from Adam to
Abraham, Abraham to Moses, Moses to David, David to the
Messiah? Are those the ages referred to? Did God create
those in relation to the eternal purpose? Remember all
this creative work was in, and through, and unto His Son,
according to the eternal purpose.
There are ages upon ages yet to come. There are marks
through eternity which are not “time” marks in
our sense of the word, but represent points of emergence
and development, of progress, increase, enlargement. Had
you and I been born on the Day of Pentecost, and were we
then to have lived through until the return of the Lord
(that is a dispensation according to this world’s
reckoning and order) we should never have discovered all
the meaning of Christ. We should have discovered
something and have reached a certain point in the
knowledge of Christ, but we should then want another age
under different conditions, to discover things which it
would never be possible to discover under the conditions
of this life; and when we had made good that next
possibility, probably beyond that there would be new
possibilities. There will be no stagnation in eternity—“...of
the increase of His government... there shall be no end...”
(Isa. 9:7).
Now leave the sorry picture of this world’s history
from the fall to the restitution of all things aside, and
you have the launching of ages in which all God’s
fulness in Christ could be revealed and apprehended
progressively, on through successive ages, with changing
and enlarging conditions, and facilities, and abilities.
That is the meaning of spiritual growth. Our own short
Christian life here, if it is a right one, moving under
the power of the Holy Spirit, is itself like a series of
ages in brief. We start as children, and acquire what we
can as children. Then we come to a point where we have
increased capacity, where our spiritual senses are
exercised. This again issues in a larger apprehension of
Christ, and then a little later, as we have gone on, we
still find these powers enlarging, under the Holy Spirit,
and as the powers enlarge we realize there is more
country to be occupied than ever we imagined. As children
we thought we had it all! That is, of course, one of the
signs of childhood and of youth. The saving thing in our
old age is that we recognize there is a vast realm ahead
of us to beckon us on and to stop us from settling down.
That is eternal youth!
Thus, leaving the whole of this broken-down state in the
creation, you can see the creating of ages in Christ, by
Christ, through Christ, according to God’s eternal
purpose that all things should be summed up in Him; not
just the “all things” of our little life, of
our little day, of our individual salvation, but the
“all things” of a vast universe as a revelation
of Christ, all being brought by revelation to the
spiritual apprehension of man, and man being brought into
it. What a Christ!
That is what Paul saw; and this may well be summed up in
his own words: “...the excellency of the knowledge
(that knowledge which excels) of Christ Jesus my Lord.”
It is Paul the aged saying, “that I may know Him.”
Christ is lifted right out of time, and time, so far as
Christ was concerned, was only related to eternity by the
necessity of redemption unto the eternal purpose.
We must break off here for the time being, but in so
doing let me say this, that with his ever-growing
conception of Christ, there was a corresponding
enlargement in his conception of believers. Believers
came to assume a tremendous significance. The saving of
men from sin, death, and hell, and getting them to
heaven, was as nothing compared with what Paul saw as to
the significance of a believer now. All that which he has
seen concerning Christ in His eternal purpose—eternal,
universal, vast, infinite—now relates to believers:
“Even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of
the world, that we should be... unto the praise of His
glory” in the ages to come (Eph. 1:4,12). Believers
also are lifted out of time, and are given a significance
altogether beyond anything here. We shall have to speak
further of that.
There was a third thing. He was able rightly to apprize
the range and place of redemption. Redemption could be
seen in its full compass and as being something more than
what is merely of time. It is called “eternal
redemption.” Redemption is something more than the
saving of men and women from sin and their sinful state.
It is getting behind everything to the ultimate ranges of
this universe, and touching all its powers; linking up
with the eternity past and the eternity yet to be, and
embracing all the forces of this universe for man’s
redemption. Paul is able rightly to apprize the meaning,
value, and range of redemption, and also to put it in its
right place, and that is important.
Now these are big things. They all need to be broken up,
and the Lord may enable us to do this, but if you cannot
grasp what has been said you will be able to appreciate
this, that Christ is infinitely bigger than you or I ever
imagined. That is the thing that comes to us so forcibly
through Paul. He started with a comparatively small
Jewish Messiah; he ended with a Christ so far beyond all
that ever he had yet seen or known, that his last cry is,
“...that I may know Him...” and that will take
all eternity. What a Christ! It is Christ Who will lift
us out, Christ Who will set us free; but let me say this,
that it will not be by His coming and putting His hands
under us and lifting us out, but by being revealed in our
hearts. How did Paul come out of his narrow Jewish
conceptions about the Messiah? Simply by the revelation
of Christ in him, and as that revelation grew his
liberation increased. There were some things which he did
not shake off for a long time. He clung to Jerusalem
almost to the last. He still had a longing for his
brethren after the flesh, and made further attempts for
their deliverance on national grounds. But at last he saw
the meaning of the heavenly Christ in such a way as to
make it possible for him to write the Letter to the
Ephesians, and the Letter to the Colossians, and then
Judaism as such, Israel after the flesh, ceased to weigh
with him. It was the revelation of Christ which was
emancipating him, leading him out, freeing him all the
time. In that way Christ is our Deliverer and
Emancipator. It is just the Lord Jesus that we need to
know. Everything small will go as we see Him. Everything
of earth and time will go as we see Him, and in the
background of our lives there will be something adequate
to keep us through difficult and hard times. We shall see
the greatness of Christ and the corresponding greatness
of our salvation “...according to His eternal
purpose....”
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